Rumors have been propagating through several popular Mac blogs that Apple will be releasing a red iPhone 3G model for the holiday season. The release will be well-timed, considering the initial iPhone hype will start to slow, and people will be opening up their wallets more for the holiday season. (Photo via MacBlogz)

The red iPhone will presumably be sold as part of the (PRODUCT) RED campaign, a charitable organization that donates money to the Global Fund to fight AIDS in Africa. Apple has released several products for this campaign previously, including (PRODUCT) RED iTunes gift cards, a red 8GB iPod Nano, and a red 1GB iPod Shuffle.

Read more about (PRODUCT) RED and the iPhone 3G at CrunchGear, including an extensive review of the iPhone 3G .

V-Enable, a voice-enabled mobile 411 system, conducted a study by taking a random sampling of 20,000 searches in major metropolitan areas from customers of several V-Enable partner carriers including Alltel and MetroPCS. The findings clearly represent interesting trends caused by the recession. For one thing, people are eating more pizza! The results for the top restaurant searches for the period between October 2007 and June 2008 are:

1. Pizza Hut
2. McDonald’s
3. Domino’s Pizza
4. Starbucks
5. Papa John’s Pizza
6. Little Caesars Pizza
7. Taco Bell
8. Burger King
9. Wendy’s
10. Denny’s

Sit-down restaurants like Olive Garden, Applebee’s and Red Lobster, have dropped off the list, while recession-proof comfort food like Pizza Hut and Domino’s shoot to the top of the list. 380% more searches for Pizza Hut have been conducted during the period, and searches for Domino’s Pizza have increased 980%. High gas prices are keeping people at home ordering in, and they are opting for cheaper alternatives. Financial analysts have explored this area extensively, and have deemed several of these restaurant chains “recession-proof stocks.”

There are several other search-related economic indicators from V-Enable. U-Haul, a company that was never on any top 50 list, jumped to #23 in general search, possibly because of a rise in foreclosures. Macy’s dropped from #17 to #49 in retail, a direct correlation to the fact that people just don’t have the discretionary income that they used to. Motel 6 has never showed up on a top 50 list, but they are now #37 in general search, quite possibly because travelers can’t afford the costly alternatives. Mobile search happens in real-time and is unaffected by SEO, making these statistics arguably more reflective of consumer sentiment than web search.

V-Enable is a mobile information system, where users can speak the name of a restaurant or residential listing and receive location and contact information. The company also has live operators working behind the scenes so that users can call and get human assistance, if necessary. V-Enable sent us similar retail statistics in December. The company is backed by $10.1 million over 3 rounds from Siemens Mobile Acceleration Corporation, Sorrento Ventures, SoftBank Capital and Palisades Ventures.

The medical industry is one that thrives on innovation and evolution. New procedures, medicines, diseases, and theories are released practically every day. In such an environment, the need for a website to reflect and allow for documentation is apparent.

MedPedia is a new project, currently in development, that will offer an online collaborative medical encyclopedia for use by the general public. In order to keep the content accurate and up-to-date, content editors and creators have to have an MD or a PhD. Several highly-esteemed medical colleges will be contributing content to MedPedia, including Harvard Medical School, Stanford School of Medicine, UC Berkeley School of Public Health, and University of Michigan Medical School. Medpedia is also receiving support from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) and many other government research groups. The content from these organizations will then be edited by MedPedia’s community of medical professionals.

MedPedia is currently in closed beta with a live preview site, where contributors can apply to be included, and users can submit feedback and suggestions. They plan on opening up their beta in late 2008.

The site will feature content about diseases, anatomy, procedures, medications and medical facilities in two ways. The topic front page will be written in easy-to-understand language for the general public, but there will also be a more technical page where medical professionals can discuss more in-depth with a clinical tone. With more than 30,000 known diseases and conditions, more than 10,000 drugs prescribed each year, thousands of medical procedures being performed and millions of medical facilities around the world, they have their work cut out for them.

There is obvious competition with established medical resource sites like WebMD and MayoClinic. Those sites have done really well, but there’s always room for disruptive technology like this. Look at what Wikipedia did to Britannica, a 250-year old encyclopedia publisher. The advantage MedPedia has is its large range of medical professionals who create content based on their specialties, rather than having several in-house doctors creating content on a range of topics they aren’t formally familiar with.

This system is advantageous both to MedPedia and the medical professionals. MedPedia benefits from their knowledge and experience, and the doctors are able to promote themselves in their specific field of expertise. MedPedia contributors will also be able to form committees and boards in specific areas like “Childhood Obesity” and “Skin Cancer.” Each professional that specializes in that field will be able to join the committee (five of whom will make up the board) and will oversee the content generated and edited in that field.

MedPedia was founded by James Currier, a seasoned Silicon Valley entrepreneur. Currier founded Tickle, a quiz and personal test site in 1999, which sold to Monster in 2004 for about $94 million (though it recently lost a hefty portion of its staff and was said to be shutting down). After taking some time off to spend with his family, he started an incubator called Ooga Labs. He is also known for singing in the Here Comes Another Bubble video, from the group The Richter Scales. Currier is one of three co-founders for the group, which was surrounded by some controversy (they also performed the song live at The Crunchies). He got the idea for MedPedia when he found himself constantly searching for medical information online, like if his three-year old son needed to go to the emergency room for a fever.

The Advisory Board includes Gilbert S. Omenn, M.D., Ph.D., Professor University of Michigan Medical School; Linda Hawes Clever, M.D., M.A.C.P., Clinical Professor University of California San Francisco (UCSF) Medical School; Joseph B. Martin, M.D., Ph.D., former Dean of the Faculty of Medicine at Harvard University; and Mitch Kapor, philanthropist and founder of Lotus Development Corporation, designer of Lotus 1-2-3, Chair of Board of Directors for Linden Lab (creator of Second Life), Chair of Mozilla Corporation, and a member of the Advisory Board for the Wikimedia Foundation.

Justin.tv, one of the first live video streaming sites, has announced its 1 millionth registered user since its launch in March 2007.

Justin.tv has a number competitors, namely Stickam, Mogulus, and Ustream.tv, but has managed to keep a strong presence in the space (maintaining attention along the way with a number of media stunts). We’ve analyzed the competition several times.

In March we took a look at Justin.tv’s growth through its first year of operation. In that post, we included user and data statistics until that point, and we’ve included a similar set today:

1,721,868 friendships made
90,690 channels created
522,794 favorited channels
95,253 video highlights saved
29,167 playlists generated
24,478 events broadcasted
61,562 video clips uploaded to youtube
62,278 twitter messages sent
16,294 myspace bulletins sent
119 years of video broadcasted & archived

Justin.tv has seen explosive growth since March, gaining 650,000 new users and the equivalent of 62 more years of video to be exact. Below is a chart that represents their growth in weekly new registered users for the past year.

Edopter is a unique concept that attempts to combine crowd-sourcing with internet buzz to predict new trends. It’s called “social trendcasting.”

The way it works, is by allowing users to generate “trends” according to what they think will catch on. Some trends are “cewebrities” (pictured below), “Batman: The Dark Knight,” and “tap water.” The user who makes the trend writes a “pitch” – the reason they think it will catch on. Then the Edopter system scans the web to measure current internet “buzz.” Users can join a trend, and give their pitch, upload photos and videos related to the trend, and discuss the trend with the other users in that trend. The more discussion and content you add, the more likely more people will join, thus increasing the value of the trend.

There is a point system that measures the trends based on the users involved, the internet buzz, and the time it’s been a trend. The points go up with each user, and down as time goes by. To join a trend, a user has to buy in with some of their points (each user starts with 500). The purchase price for a trend is its current worth, so users are encouraged to get in on trends early.

The Edopter “Showcase” is where users can trade in points for exclusive opportunities and other prizes. The showcase is currently under construction, with plans to open it up sometime in the near future.

Edopter recently launched their Facebook application so users can connect with friends already using the service and invite others. Through the application users can track other users’ favorite and recent trends, and or use the VS. feature to compare common trends and statistics.

The potential for a solid business model here is huge. If it were to take off (maybe its users and algorithm could predict if it will or not), they would have access to a very hard to reach demographic – early adopters. The trendsetters who are always on the lookout for the next new thing. There’s opportunities to sell sponsored trends, and promotions where users could earn more points. They could draw some inspiration from popular virtual currency Facebook applications like Friends for Sale. For example, using points as rewards for users that invite their friends, and become more involved in the site.

There are several sites with with similar concepts, but they mainly stay within one vertical. MediaPredict is a site where you buy shares in movies, music and books and predict milestones for each item. Another similar application is PicksPop, where users can predict and bet on celebrity gossip and pop culture. There’s also CoolSpotters, a site where users can “spot” cool clothes on celebrities and share with the community to get reviews and similar trends. What these sites lack in comparison to Edopter, is the proprietary algorithm that Edopter uses to predict the trends’ staying power. Edopter is also lacking a specific vertical, enabling users to predict and measure any trend they want.

The current iPhone App Store revenue share model – a 70/30 split for the sale of apps, generally in the $0.99-$9.99 range – doesn’t exactly reward developers for producing addictive games. Greystripe, an advertising network for mobile games, has stepped in to compensate developers for every time their games are played, not just for when those games are initially sold.

Greystripe has actually been distributing free games and applications for about 1,400 handset models since 2006, mainly through its consumer site GameJump. The site offers mobile gamers a catalog of 800 games from 120 game publishers that can be downloaded directly to phones through mobile browsers. GameJump has experienced 75 million downloads so far, a big jump since last summer when they reached 14 million.

Now the company is turning its attention to the iPhone by providing developers with pre-, interstitial and post-roll ads from advertisers like Best Buy, eBay, Yahoo!, New Line Cinema, the US Army, Wal-Mart and Subway. Greystripe claims it will deliver a 10.1% click-through rate (CTR) when other mobile advertisers are averaging a 1-2% CTR.

To begin competing in a competitive mobile ad market, Greystripe is offering iPhone developers 100% of their in-game ad revenue until they reach $10,000. If you’re an iPhone developer, you can register for the network here.

Other iPhone ad networks include: AppLoop, a recently launched location-based iPhone ad network; AdMob, a browser-based ad network with iPhone-specific advertisements that has served almost 250 million ads; and new-comer Medialets.

It used to be that if a user posted a link on FriendFeed, they would get a few comments and likes and that would be it. If someone reposted that link, it would have its own set of comments for the user who reposted it. If that was a popular link, there could be 10 reposts and 10 sets of comments. Then Moopz came along.

Moopz is a site that aggregates comments about the same link, and puts them into one place. The front page displays recent active FriendFeed posts and conversations. Instead of just showing the conversation that occurs on that posted link, it gathers and threads all of the the subsequent activity from FriendFeed. I’ve provided a before-and-after example with a recent active TechCrunch post.

The standard FriendFeed conversation looks like this:

The same post on Moopz (only a section, for the full page click on the image):

The FriendFeed conversation has 24 comments and 51 likes and the Moopz conversation shows 35 comments, 3 FriendFeed reposts, 7 Google Reader shares, a Digg, a Reddit, a Twitter post and more likes than I’d care to count.

Users can find the most popular content in the sidebar or in the Hot section (available by clicking “More” under the popular links section of the sidebar). This makes Moopz a very useful news source, like Twitturly has proven to be.

Moopz comes from developer Mark Carey, the creator of the FriendFeed MovableType plug-in, a bi-directional comment plug-in for FriendFeed and MovableType comments. Moopz is actually powered through MovableType, and largely by that plug-in.

FriendFeed was started so that users could keep track of what their friends were doing online. But like many other sites that were meant to do one thing, they’ve been used for something entirely different. It’s being used for content delivery and discovery and everyone knows it – except FriendFeed. Instead of adapting to be what users want, it’s trying to be something else, leading to excess noise and distributed conversations. But thanks to tools like Moopz and the many others out there, FriendFeed can become a little more usable.

Filtering through the noise to find news on discovery sites can be daunting. Social bookmarking sites like Digg and Reddit have been doing very well, and memetrackers, like Techmeme, are also growing in popularity. The newest trend in discovery tools, it seems, is semantic search engines, like Powerset (recently bought by Microsoft) and Hakia.

LOUD3R offers a network of 30 topic-specific semantic search engines. Some of the topics include venture capital (FOUND3R), fashion (GLITT3R), internet business and technology (BUZZ3R), men’s fashion (DAPP3R), politics (VOT3R), and many more. The network has received 200,000 uniques since their launch last month.

For each site, LOUD3R gathers and publishes content (including photos and videos) from blogs, news, and editorial sites. Each site has a source list and a semantic glossary of terms that teach the engine how to identify the best content. The content is ranked with a point system, pushing the highest ranked to the top. The engine also learns from user behavior, community feedback and human editors.

On the front page of each site, is the highest-ranked content for the site’s central topic. Users can search the content and topic-specific results will be presented. The results are listed with tags and related stories. Users are given the option to comment, share, or flag the results. Users can also narrow down the results by news, photos, and videos on the top of the page, or decide to show the highest ranked, the most popular, or the newest entries.

There is also a topics page, where popular topics are listed by category. For example, on FOUND3R, the venture capital website, the topics page is populated with topics under categories Venture Capitalists, Publication/Blog, Venture Capital Firms, Financial Groups, Finance, and Business Terms.

The sites are very easy to use, and are feature-rich, but there are some drawbacks. There is little to no crossover between the sites, so you may be missing out on some key content. For example, if a user was browsing investments on FOUND3R, the latest news about those recently-funded companies might not be there, because they would be on BUZZ3R, the tech news site. It’s also a tad annoying to have to sign up on each site, so a network-wide login would do wonders.

LOUD3R claims to own 500 domains with the 3R ending, so it’s safe to say that eventually there will be a site for just about everything. They are rolling out six new sites soon: PREGG3R (pregnancy), TODDL3R (parenting), AMPLIFI3R (guitar), SPINNAK3R (sailing), ROOST3R (motocross), SHUTT3R (photography), and SUMM3R (a Bejing Summer Olympics site).

DanceJam, a dance-focused social network that launched in March, has announced several major partnerships and features today. (Disclosure: Michael Arrington is an investor).

The first partnership, with Weezer, is being promoted by Judson Laipply, the guy we’ve all seen dancing in that Evolution of Dance video. Dancers can submit videos that show unique and easy to learn dance routines on DanceJam to be considered for the contest. One winner will win a pair of tickets to the Weezer show of their choice, and $500 cash.

DanceJam has also partnered with Janet Jackson to host online auditions for her upcoming reality show. Janet Jackson and choreographer Gil Duldulao will be looking for singers and dancers to submit their audition videos on the site.

The site also has a new tournament feature, where users can enter and vote on tournament brackets for things like “Best Choreography.” Several more features are in the works, like the ability to search for cities, groups, and events.

DanceJam was founded by M.C. Hammer and Flock’s Geoffrey Arone and Anthony Young. They have raised to date $4.5 million through two rounds from Softbank Capital, Rustic Canyon Partners, and several angel investors.

BlogHer, an online network of female bloggers, has announced a partnership with iVillage and Women@NBCU, a new content and marketing intiative by NBC Universal.

The partnership includes a $5 million Series B round led by Peacock Equity (a fund run by NBC Universal and GE) along with previous investor Venrock Capital. iVillage, Oxygen.com, and BravoTV.com will also obtain access to BlogHer’s network of 2,200 women’s blogs for syndication purposes.

iVillage is an online network geared toward women that was bought by NBC Universal for $600 million in March 2006. It’s also the leading women’s content network with over 16 million unique visitors monthly and 4 billion page views per year.

BlogHer co-founders Elisa Camahort Page, Lisa Stone, and Jory Des Jardins claim that this partnership will bring a much higher level of exposure to its network of bloggers. BlogHer was founded in February 2005 as a way to popularize and monetize blogs written by women and meant for women. The network includes a community portal, an index of blogs, and a series of conferences.

The partnership was announced today by Lauren Zalaznick, President of Women and Lifestyle Entertainment networks for NBC Universal. Zalaznick also announced her plans to form a female-targeted digital ad network as part of the Women@NBCU initiative. The network will include BravoTV.com, Oxygen.com, iVillage, and Sugar Inc., making it the largest agglomeration of women’s media brands online.

BlogHer had previously raised $3.5 million from Venrock Capital in June 2007.

Alex Albrecht, co-host of DiggNation and The Totally Rad Show, has launched his new project Project Lore. The core of the project is a web series, featuring Albrecht and his friends playing World of Warcraft. In typical Albrecht fashion, they will be sitting around drinking beer, while playing and World of Warcraft and simultaneously trash talking their digital counterparts. The show will be distributed across ZAM Network’s WoW sites; a network that attracts 17 million users per month.

Project Lore is produced by DECA, a digital entertainment studio that has produced some major web-specific programs like Boing Boing TV, Dog & Pony, BushLeague.TV and CoolMom. DECA is a direct competitor to Revision3, the company that produces Albrecht’s other shows DiggNation and Totally Rad Show.

Each weekly episode of Project Lore will feature a new level of gameplay (or instance, in WoW-talk), and will be broken up into sub-episodes for each boss (bad guy) in that level. In addition to the show, there will be accompanying game guides, blogs, and news. The game guides feature boss lists, maps, lore and secret tactics from user submissions.

Alex Albrecht (Dr. Dark) is joined by three friends, Joshua Brentano (LyleLovett), Jerry Trainor (Goggins), and Zand Broumand (Dorkins), in the studio. They are accompanied by another friend Brandon Sato (Juggynaut) through a speaker box they call the “JuggyBox.” You may know Joshua Brentano from G4, where he is the supervising producer of Attack of the Show, or Jerry Trainor from the Nickelodeon show iCarly, where he plays the main character’s older brother Spencer.

The show obviously appeals to hardcore gamers, but its humor and tactical breakdowns may appeal to a much wider audience of freshman WoW players.

When traveling to a new city, what do you usually do first to find cool places to go to? Usually, you ask your friends.

Mobissimo, a travel search engine, launches their social network MobiFriends today as an on-site widget. Mobissimo searches 180 travel sites in over 30 countries, to offer users the lowest fare possible. Through MobiFriends, Mobissimo hopes to offer users a comprehensive travel network where users can connect and maximize on their travel experience.

Users can access MobiFriends from the widget on their personal dashboard, or on the search results page. The widget shows users their friends’ upcoming travel plans, recently reviewed locations, and their friends’ suggestions for favorite hotels, restaurants and activities in the location. Users are also able to share cheap fares, travel plans and favorite places with their friends through Twitter or Facebook.

Mobissimo offers several travel-related on-site modules while searching, kind of like a personalized homepage. It has modules with travel blog headlines, popular fares, alternate locations, and now MobiFriends. Users can add or remove these modules and drag and drop them where they wish.

Mobissimo has several competitors in the travel search space, like Kayak and UpTake. While both sites offer reviews for locations, they lack the personal social network feature of MobiFriends. Reviews are extremely helpful, but they don’t compare to friends’ opinions. There has been heavy competition between the travel search sites, but maybe this is the kind of feature that will set Mobissimo apart. We’ve recently reviewed Mobissimo and how it stacks up against Kayak.

YouSendIt has raised an additional $14 million in a Series C round led by Emergence Capital and all existing investors, including Alloy Ventures, Sevin Rosen Funds, Cambrian Ventures and Sigma Partners. The round brings YouSendIt’s total to $34 million.

YouSendIt is a file delivery service with over 7 million registered users. The funding will be used to grow subscriptions, and to develop content delivery and management services.

The service enables users to send large files to any email address. Users can send files from the website or through plug-ins for popular applications such as Photoshop and Outlook.

Google has partnered with Radiohead to promote the band’s music video for the song “House of Cards” from the album In Rainbows.

It’s definitely not your average video considering that there were no cameras or lights used: it’s all data. The video uses real time 3D recording, utilizing structured light and laser-enhanced scanners. Google is hosting the interactive video application at code.google.com and providing an iGoogle gadget for the video and application.

The video was created by music video director James Frost, and the technology was handled by Aaron Koblin, who has done several other visualizations including the well-known flight pattern visualization.

To capture the 3D images, they used a structured light scanner from Geometric Informatics for the close proximity shots of the singers and a Velodyne LIDAR scanner for the landscapes. The LIDAR scanner uses 64 lasers to scan an environment and create an XYZ point cloud of data, which is then rendered and read by 3D software.

Radiohead got a lot of attention when it released its album In Rainbows for free online. This led to a lot of speculation about the future of the music industry and the way people will purchase music.

Since Radiohead identifies itself with the open-source ethos, it’s releasing the video’s data so that developers can remix it and make their own variations of the music video. You can download the viewers and data from the Google Code project page.

That page also has an in-browser data viewer for viewing and interacting with the video. The player is Flash-based, so you can zoom with the mouse wheel, or click-and-drag to move it around. The page also has links to the YouTube video, the YouTube group (for user-remixed videos) and the behind-the-scenes video.

This project may have interested Google because the LIDAR technology used in the landscape and large environment shots is similar to the system Google uses for their Google Maps Street View project. It’s just a very different application of the same technology.

Also see Aniboom’s contest where cartoonists are encouraged to create music videos for Radiohead songs.

As of yesterday afternoon, AOL has implemented Vidoop’s visual authentication system as part of its OpenID initiative, which was formally launched in February 2007.

Vidoop, a startup that replaces usernames and passwords with image grids, partnered with AOL to provide its OpenID users with an extra layer of security. This delivers Vidoop a potential user base of about 100 million users.

Unfortunately, AOL is still just an issuer of OpenID accounts – not a relying party. So users can’t actually use the same Vidoop-protected OpenID accounts that AOL has given them to actually sign into AOL services. AOL and other big internet players have yet to step up and become relying parties, a move that will be necessary to push OpenID into the mainstream.

Vidoop offers an alternative to the traditional username/password login system by displaying images in a grid with associated letters. Upon initial registration, users define 3-5 image categories (cars, dogs, flowers, houses, etc). When they sign into a site, a variety of images appear in a randomly-generated grid, and users enter the corresponding letters to their pre-defined categories. Because this visual system requires a higher level of intelligence, it’s harder to steal someone’s login information and use it to access all OpenID-enabled sites with it.

The implementation of authentication security can be cost-prohibitive, but Vidoop actually tries to help its partners make money. Advertisements are randomly dispersed throughout the image grid, and revenue from them is split in two ways.

Vidoop has also partnered with Charles Schwab Retirement and hopes more financial organizations will follow suit. Clickpass, a popular OpenID initiative covered here, partnered with Vidoop this past March. The startup brought Scott Kveton, the Chairman of the OpenID foundation, onboard in February.

Odeo, a podcast directory founded in 2005 by Evan Williams of Blogger and Twitter fame that was acquired by SonicMountain over a year ago, has relaunched with a completely new design and slew of features.

The biggest addition to the site is video. Odeo now features millions of syndicated audio and video episodes aggregated from over 500,000 channels. Odeo has partnered with major content publishers like Revision3 and NextNewNetworks, and Blip.tv to fill its catalog.

Odeo has also improved its social side by enabling users to create profile pages, subscribe to preferred channels, and create playlists. Users can browse by keyword or category to get recommendations, leading to better content discovery. Users can also share content via email or embed it into blogs and social networks.

In addition to the content partnerships, Odeo has joined up with a startup called MatchMine to use its MatchKey service. MatchKey is a partner network that takes users’ preferences and distributes them across a network of sites to enable better personalized recommendations.

Odeo is currently working to bring back an upgraded version Odeo’s Studio, its free in-browser podcast recording service (we weren’t impressed with the old version). Its new development team will also add features like the ability to sync with portable devices and comment on videos and audio files. FireAnt, another podcast directory that competed with Odeo before getting acquired by it, was best-known for its desktop media player. Odeo has plans to bring back this player as well and distribute it as a white-labeled media player for enterprises.

We first covered Odeo in June 2005 when it was still in private beta. After about a year of struggling with competitors (most notably Apple’s iTunes), Williams launched a now-well-known startup, then called Twttr, in July 2006.

In September 2006, Williams bought Odeo back from its investors and started a new company called Obvious. Under Obvious, Williams held both Odeo and Twitter as wholly-owned subsidiaries. Odeo was then put up for sale in February 2007 and sold at a loss to Sonic Mountain a few months later. SonicMountain proceeded to acquire FireAnt and Blogdigger, a blog search engine. Odeo has since raised $2.5 million from private investors, and this is the first improvement we’ve seen since SonicMountain has taken over.

Odeo committed a number of mistakes the first time around, several of them openly admitted by Williams himself. Will Odeo’s new development team learn from these mistakes and guide Odeo to a brighter future? They are entering the video space, which is very competitive and is not as forgiving of mistakes. Best of luck, Odeo.

While we’ve waited with bated breath for the release of Delicious 2.0 (Yahoo’s been teasing us for months), Ryan Sit, the creator of Swurl, a recently launched startup that offers a lifecasting aggregator for web activity, has been toying around with the Del.icio.us API to bring us FavThumbs. FavThumbs offers a visually-pleasing web application to view screen shots of your bookmarks.

Through the site, users can input their Del.icio.us ID, and then browse their bookmarks in a grid or a coverflow-like display. Sit hopes that the site will offer a much better alternative to the out-dated Del.icio.us list. A similar app that was we covered last year is Fichey. Fichey acts like a microfiche for headlines from social bookmarking sites. Users can flip through the pages like a magazine, but they are only the headlines, not user-specific.

Another similar service is SearchMe, a visual search engine we covered in June. SearchMe offers the ability to drag and drop sites to bookmark into “stacks.” The bookmark stacks are shown in a coverflow-style display, similar to FavThumbs. A similar Del.icio.us coverflow display is seen with the Fluid Del.icio.us Site Specific Browser plug-in (mentioned here).

Sit says that he was inspired by the desktop client Delish, a graphical bookmark desktop client. Another app created by Sit is ListPic, an application to browse local classified pages through a calendar-like display. Both ListPic and FavThumbs are both experimental applications from his company Freestyle Labs.

UGame, a social network for gamers, has opened in public beta. The site, which entered private beta in February, offers gamers a place to share their scores, meet other gamers, form teams and guilds, and post blogs and pictures.

The site was founded by Sam Mathews, the creator of Fnatic, a well-known gaming team. His goal with UGame was to connect gamers with likeminded people and to unite the gaming community. With a community that is currently 364 million strong (with an estimated 80 million moderate to hardcore gamers), there is clearly a sizable market.

Since the launch of their private beta, UGame has added several new features, including a “Games” section, where pages are made for different games. Each page includes general information about the game, forums, messageboards, and reviews. It has plans to expand the features of this section, and aims to be “the IMDB of games.”

Another new feature is the “Guilds” section. In this section, users can create pages for their guild or team and post standings, galleries, and statistics. Users can follow their favorite teams, receive updates, and join discussions about them. This is similar to band pages on Myspace, except for gamers.

UGame is attempting to bring together a previously segmented community of gamers, and give them a place to interact. There is a large audience for this kind of site, and they accommodate it well. UGame isn’t trying to be the next Myspace or Facebook – it just wants to be a niche site where people can go and meet likeminded people. The site is easy to navigate, and very conducive to finding interesting content and people.

Other major players (pun intended) in this space include Shawn Fanning’s Rupture (acquired by EA Games in May), Raptr (social network with a client-side app for online games), Curse (includes portals for World of WarCraft, StarCraft and Age of Conan), and GamerDNA.

The most recent victim of the Facebook vs. annoying application war is SpeedDate. SpeedDate, an application from the company of the same name, has disappeared from the application list, and the link to the application leads back to the Facebook homepage. SpeedDate is a web-based speed dating service that also offers a Meebo application, and until recently, a Facebook application.

Recent victims include Slide’s Top Friends (was gone for 7 days, restored this weekend), Socialhi’s SocialMe (suspended since July 1, not available yet), RockYou’s Super Wall (moratorium on viral channels), and now SpeedDate.

A recent Google search came up with a Yahoo! Answers post that asked the question “has anyone had the speed date application appear on their profile without adding the application?” There was another response that had someone saying that the same thing had happened to them. This might have something to do with the suspension, but we won’t know until tomorrow (seems to be a trend, the Top Friends application disappeared in the middle of the night as well).

Other speed dating applications (from Desidate.tv and Randomate) on Facebook have remained untouched.

Mobile streaming service provider Flixwagon has added an array of new features in coincidence with its launch into public availability.

Among the new features, users can now register and download the client software through Nokia Symbian Series 60 mobile browsers. Before broadcasting, users can specify whether to increase video quality or decrease delay. With new two-way text chat, broadcasters can write back messages to the comments area that appears during a broadcast from their mobile device. They can also change title videos during broadcasts and enjoy digital zoom-in and zoom-out.

Post-broadcast features include a group-sharing option, where broadcasters can specify which groups they want to share videos with (friends, family, coworkers, etc.). They can also post to Twitter and YouTube with personalized messages.

Changes made to the Flixwagon site include the addition of RSS to users’ broadcast feeds, as well as an option to import contacts from Gmail, Yahoo, Plaxo, etc.

Flixwagon was the first streaming service to announce support for the iPhone (albeit, only by a few hours). It competes most directly with Qik and Kyte.tv (see Robert Scoble’s analysis of the mobile video broadcasting space here).

JS-Kit, a provider of Javascript comments, ratings, and poll widgets for blogs, has announced their acquisition of HaloScan, one of the largest hosted comments service providers. This announcement is also coordinated with the launch of several major features. Financial terms were not disclosed.

HaloScan had previously partnered with JS-Kit in January to provide the users of their comment system with “one-click” deployment of JS-Kit’s ratings widget (providing ratings for articles, not ratings for comments). This acquisition will result in an exponential increase of JS-Kit’s customer base, providing new access to over 520,000 participating sites, bringing its total reach to about 550,000 sites. JS-Kit also claims that with this new acquisition, it will be registering 300+ new sites per day. HaloScan’s comment systems will integrate with JS-Kit’s Ratings, Polls, Reviews, Navigator, and Advisor widgets. JS-Kit’s comments also comes with full Akismet spam protection and profanity filters.

Blogger’s original comment system only allowed for comments from other Blogger users, so HaloScan gained popularity early on as an alternative to their innate system. Blogger also recommended it as the system to use for providing Trackback links. It’s seen a drop in usage recently because of temperamental server issues (possibly related to the transition), so hopefully JS-Kit can solve these issues when the transition is complete in 30 days or so.

JS-Kit will leverage its newly acquired users to launch important new features. One of which is the implementation of an open standards-based, portable, user profile. Users will have access to all of the comments made on any JS-Kit participating site through an OpenID login system (pictured below). The portable profile is accessible through a pop-up on the hosting site. This does lend itself to easier discovery, which could possibly help with adoption for new publishers.

Another feature will be easier synchronization with Wordpress and Blogger. This could allow for easier adoption by existing blogs, with the automatic import of older comments from either site. In addition to the easier import, JS-Kit will also update a participating blog’s Wordpress or Blogger comments when new comments are made in the widget.

This also goes hand-in-hand with another new feature that JS-Kit is implementing, SEO support. JS-Kit now sets up a static page for indexing comment content, which you can host on your server as a sub-domain, so search engines see the content on your site, and not JS-Kit’s.

There is no back end network to JS-Kit like competing comment providers Disqus and Sezwho. Disqus and Sezwho offer social networks based on the comments left in participating blogs, leading to better content discovery. The competition has significantly less users than JS-Kit (reportedly 550,000 participating sites, 8 million users, 80 million comments left), so JS-Kit adding a social network functionality to Haloscan’s already massive user base potentially puts them on top of the market. But Disqus has been gaining a lot of momentum (reporting 20,000 participating blogs), and could give JS-Kit some very real competition.

One major difference is that Disqus uses a proprietary login system, while JS-Kit uses OpenID, which is what the social web is trending towards. To get involved in the Disqus community for a blog, users are directed to the Disqus site, instead of remaining on the blog, like with JS-Kit, which may explain why the Compete graph below shows Disqus gaining so fast on Haloscan. The graph does not count widget users.

Sazell, launched in private beta today, is a social media site that lets you take a snapshot of any website and puts it in a Flash widget that you can embed on any site. A snapshot consists of the image chosen for the page, and highlighted or inputted text.

When “snapping” a page, the user first highlights the text they want to include in their snapshot, and then clicks the Sazell bookmarklet. The user is then taken to a page where they can add tags to their snapshot. After submitting, users are taken to a page for their snapshot where other users can rate, comment, share or favorite your snapshot. Users can browse other users’ pages and subscribe to them via RSS. All snapshots are indexed and the ones with the most views are listed on the Popular page and recent “snapped” pages are listed on the Upcoming page. Snapshots can be embedded individually on a website with their Flash widget, or a user can embed their recent snapshots, or the most popular snapshots from the entire site.

Update: Below is an image of what the widget looks like (we had to disable it because it was messing up the TechCrunch site on IE browsers, but you can play with it here):

Essentially a social bookmarking site, Sazell is entering a very competitive marketplace. Digg and Reddit are direct competition, seeing as how they both offer very similar widgets. Although, it’s more like Youtube for websites than it is a social bookmarking site. It measures popularity by views, not by votes or ranking. And the snapshots themselves are simply clips of images and text without any additional commentary by the person who creates them. Once embedded on a page, they are pretty static. The text is not clickable, and you need to select “view more details” to get the link of the original Website being excerpted.

Instant messaging, a technology that actually predates the Internet, hasn’t seen too many changes over the years. The AOL Instant Messenger of today is not that different from the AOL Instant Messenger from 1997. There has been some new technology with the integration of instant messaging, VoIP, and webcam capabilities with services such as Skype, but two things have remained the same. Voice chat has been real-time, and text chat has been near-real-time.

Say2GO, a new near-real-time voice messaging system, is attempting to change this. The new technology, they refer to as “voicing” is closer to voicemail than IM. The product, currently in limited beta, provides users the ability to send and receive voice messages that are transcribed using voice recognition and sent as both audio and text. The desktop client uses the Microsoft Speech API for the voice recognition element, so it is only available on Windows and XP users are required to download and install the client libraries from Microsoft. Without the voice recognition library, the client reverts to being a standard IM client with a neat clean interface such as the contact list being displayed in cover-flow style.

The idea and technology is still fairly new, and it shows. After spending 10 minutes to train both of our speech recognition libraries, Nik and I tested Say2GO and we saw very poor results. Nik said “Another test of the speech recognition software,” and it translated into “man another said the phone is the victim mission the way you read into.” I saw fairly better results but they were still off. I had said “Why did I spend ten minutes training this software,” and it translated into “why didn’t spend ten minutes training in software for.” Nik has a thick Australian accent and an absurdly loud fan on his computer, so that may have affected the transcription.

MSN Messenger has a similar capability called MS Voice Clips, that they added in 2005, which enables users to send 15 second or less voice notes to friends through MSN Messenger. Unlike Voice Clips, Say2GO enables you to playback your recording, cancel, or schedule it to be sent later.

Microsoft seems especially interested in this technology seeing as how Say2GO recently won the First Prize in ISV/Software Solutions in Microsoft’s 2008 Partner Contest, out of 47,000 member companies. They are heavily promoting the new speech recognition libraries, as once you train your profile in one application it can also be used in other apps that use the same library.

With voice recognition where it is at at the moment the feature on its own probably will not be a strong incentive for users to switch to a whole new IM client – but Say2Go intend to support existing IM networks rather than building out their own. Voice recognition is only the first part of planned ‘added’ services that can be used on top of these networks. Currently Say2Go supports the ICQ network, with support for other networks expected in the near future.

Will we ever bury voice recognition? Read more at Techcrunch IT >>

Webaroo Technology has raised a $10 million round of funding for their product SMSGupShup, an SMS-based community site in India, according to Pluggd.in. The round, the third for the company, was co-led by Helion Venture Partners and Charles River Ventures.

SMSGupShup is a community site that enables users to join groups according to their interests and receive updates through their mobile phones via SMS. Very similar to Twitter, in that you can send and receive mobile updates to your friends, family and other group members (without the downtime). SMSGupShup has over 7 million subscribers and 300,000 publishers. They see a much lower proportion of web visitors as mobile phones in India outnumber computers almost 7 to 1.

While Twitter is mostly used for casual communications and notifications, SMSGupShup is used for services that are critical to a lot people. For example, fishermen can receive tide and weather information, and people can pass along emergency information to locals who don’t have televisions or computers. The site has seen a huge rise in growth, with the SMSGupShup community having grown from 1 million subscribers in January to the current 7 million.

Webaroo, originally launched as a service that allowed users to see cached web content when they are offline. Founders Rakesh Mathur (founder of Armedia, Junglee, Stratify) and Beerud Sheth (founder of Elance) presented their startup in July 2006 at the TechCrunch-sponsored Connected Innovators program at the Supernova conference. Two years later, they have changed their approach, focusing on their core offering, SMSGupShup. Webaroo also offers their original product Webaroo for Notebooks, a mobile client, a search utility called Search Radar, and a Wikipedia browsing tool called WikiSlice.

Helion Venture Partners and Charles River Ventures join previous investors Hummer Winblad Venture Partners ($1.5 million Series A), and Cambrian Ventures, Lloyd George Asian Plus Fund, and HTSG ($10 million Series B), bringing their total funding to $21.5 million.

Update: We’ve tracked down a source that says this is a premature announcement, and that the funding hasn’t closed yet.

Massively Me, a stealth gaming company, has announced the upcoming launch of it’s MMOG for kids and young teenagers, Kiwi Heroes.

Scheduled for release later this year, Kiwi Heroes will be a Flash-based game that attempts to strike a balance between a virtual world and a traditional MMOG (like WOW). Massively Me claims that the intention behind Kiwi Heroes is to promote social awareness and responsibility to children by addressing environmental issues and global concerns in the game. It also plans on establishing the “Every Kid’s A Hero Foundation,” to support charitable global causes.

Kids’ virtual worlds and online games have a proven track record of major success. TechCrunch analyzed several of the most popular virtual worlds last August. Club Penguin sold to Disney for $350 million and Neopets sold to Viacom for $160 million. The space is potentially very profitable, with a lot of user attention ripe for the right kind of monetization.

With so many potential users and advertising attention, the space is heavily competitive with many competitors, and even some major media corporations. Mattel has their Barbie Girls site, Disney has Club Penguin, and Ganz has Webkinz. Webkinz is the current leader with almost 7 million monthly U.S. uniques, up 148% from last year (via Compete).

Another challenge that children’s online gaming networks run into is finding an effective way to advertise. Neopets used immersive advertising by selling advertising on various aspects of gameplay. For example, players could earn “Neopoints” by playing advergames and taking part in marketing surveys. Similar businesses have monetized through providing offline goods like toys, DVDs, video game partnerships, TV programs, and clothing.

Massively Me has been completely self-funded so far, and claims to be currently pursuing several partnerships and offline tie-ins. If these offline attempts prove successful, Kiwi Heroes may have what it takes to be a contender.