If you’re looking to stream your iTunes collection to up to 30 friends, a new app called SimplifyMedia from a company of the same name will let you do just that.

According to the company, SimplifyMedia will let Mac, Linux, and Microsoft users take all their songs and playlists from their iPhone or iPod Touch and stream it over a broadband connection to 30 preset friends.  Even better, it’ll work over WiFi, 2G and 3G.

SimplifyMedia claims its new software is legal because songs are only streamed and not sent out to the entire population, but just a group of 30 friends.  To further cover itself, it claims the app will not stream DRM-protected iTunes purchases.

But just because SimplifyMedia thinks it won’t need to worry about Apple or any other App Store headache, is that necessarily true?

There has been a glaring gray area so far with the App Store and developers and consumers alike have wondered how Apple decides which apps will stay and those that will not.  The company has already removed NullRiver’s NetShare without giving any reason and BoxOffice was mysteriously removed, then replaced on the App Store with nary a mention from the Apple camp.

And although SimplifyMedia looks to be one of those apps that a slew of people will want to use, it doesn’t strike me as one that Apple will allow.  Sure, it only streams songs that aren’t copy-protected, but it does so to 30 friends, and chances are, the music industry and even Apple won’t be too happy about that if there isn’t a limit to the number of times a song can be streamed.

Regardless, we’ve once again hit a wall in the face of the App Store.  What will Apple allow and what will it not?  What is fine and what is not?  We just don’t know.

And that needs to change.  Immediately.

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:World’s Simplest iPhone AppiPhone to Launch in Germany on T-Mobile3G iPhone Confirmed for 2008Mundu Optimizes Multi-Client Chat Tool for the iPhoneApple Making a Directory for iPhone Apps?European iPhone to be Offered on Multiple CarriersiPhone. Europe. September.

Source:Mashable!

With the summer nearing its end and the school year almost upon us, teachers, tutors and students have a lot to prepare for. As with just about any profession nowadays, there all kinds of tools that can help you do most of your planning from your computer keyboard. We’ve put together a list of 35 tools to help you get your school year started right.

Here you’ll find resources for learning management systems, social networking communities for students and teachers, tutoring services and more. 

Grading Tools

Engrade.com - Allows teachers of any subject, for any grade, anywhere to keep a free grade book, attendance chart and more that can be accessed by students, parents and administrators.

GradeNetwork.com - Another online grade book that really emphasizes the ability for parents and teachers to stay in touch with each other by allowing parents to see grades at a glance and message teachers.

MyGradeBook.com - Features grade books, attendance records, ability for parents and students to log in to check progress and more.  Offers a free 30-day trial and then changes over to a cost per-license that gets discounted with the more licenses you purchase.

OnlineSchoolReports.com - OnlineSchoolReports allows parents to log in each day and see how their child/children are doing in school. They can use the internal messaging system to talk about any concerns they may have with the teacher.  Currently the service is free of charge.

SnapGrades.net - Offers free and premium versions of a grade book that can include things like parent and student access, generating reports, Spanish translation and more.  Also features scalability from a single teacher up to an entire school district.

Miscellaneous Tools

4Teachers.org - Offers multiple free tools for the use of teachers and students alike, such as online quiz generators, grading guidelines, educational video games and much more.

Blackboard.com - Pretty much a complete educational system that allows you to stay in touch with students, run tests, leave voicemails for students and much, much more.

TheClassConnection.com - Allows high school and college students to set up communities based around their classes to create flash cards, share information, message one another and more.

Digication.com - Teachers, students and administrators can set up e-portfolios to display work, assignments, resumes and more.

Haikuls.com - An online learning management system that allows you to create lessons for your class or eclass. Also allows embedding of major services such as YouTube and Zoho.

KEEP Toolkit - Teachers and students can set up visual representations of their work to share with others, entice new students, put them up for peer review, and more.

Moodle.org - An open source solution for a course management system that can be scaled from a single instructor to an entire institution.

Studeous.com - Allows you to set up extended learning with notes, messages, podcasts and more that lets the learning continue well beyond the classroom.

TeacherTube.com - An educationally focused alternative to YouTube for teachers and students to post videos and share them worldwide with other classes and instructors.

WiZiQ.com - A white board system that allows you to teach long distance with video and voice support that can be recorded for later playback.

Social Networks

Classroom20.com - A social network for teachers interested in using collaborative tools in their profession.

Classroomn.com - Use it to connect with other teachers, create a network for your class or even their parents.

HotChalk.com - A mixture of a learning management system and a social network where teachers can share lesson plans with one another and interact with parents and students.  Be sure to check out HotChalk on an episode of Mashable Conversations.

TeachAde.com - Besides giving teachers a social network, you can also set up a blog and site about yourself to share with others.

TeacherEvents.com - A social network for teachers that also focuses on allowing teachers to discover who is going to be at upcoming teacher conferences so that they can connect while there.

Teachers.Yahoo.com - Not yet completed, Teachers.Yahoo.com will allow teachers from all over the world to save lesson plans and share them with other teachers, saving all those involved a lot of preliminary legwork.

Teaching & Tutoring Jobs

AtoZTutoring.com - An in-home tutoring referral service which focuses exclusively on bringing tutors into students homes.

Jobs4Tutors.com - As the name implies, it is a service for tutors to find work and for parents to find tutors that suit their childrens’ needs.

SeriousTeachers.com - Locates jobs around the world for teachers who specialize in ESL (English as a Second Language).

TeachStreet.com - A way for local teachers and students to connect to find tutors and tutoring jobs, as well as things like musical lessons and more.

TutorLinker.com - A place for tutors and students to locate each other, available in multiple countries such as the USA, UK, New Zeland and more.

TutorNation.com - A tutor referral service that also provides training and certification for their tutors.

Tutorz.com - A site with the goal of building a national network of tutors in the United States. It currently allows tutors to register for free.

Teaching & Tutoring Jobs - Online

Aim4a.com - A company that provides online tutoring opportunities. It uses services such as Skype to allow you to tutor anyone, anywhere from the comfort of your home.

BuddySchool.com - Set your own payment level, methods of payment, form of teaching and more with this online tutoring platform.

Educate-Online.com - The popular service has gone online with tutoring options at their Educate-Online site.

GlobalScholar.com - Students can ask questions or take full classes. Tutors’ level of involvement is flexible as well.

OnlineLearning.net - Allows you to teach full online courses in a variety of subjects.

Tutor.com - Provides 24/7 online tutoring that even records the session so you can review what you went over with the tutor while engaged with them.  Offers things such as proof reading of papers, help with math and more at all hours of the day or night.

TutorVista.com - Allows you to work four hours a day. Students can request sessions with you as they build a relationship with you.

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:WizIQ Is Guru for TutorsTalkBean Launches Language Tutor Site without a CommunityLookabee’s Facebook Apps for TeachersSclipoLive Uses Webcam for Online Tutoring NetworkPageflakes Targets the Education Market TooYahoo Teachers: Social Network for TeachersTutorom is a Free E-learning Community

Source:Mashable!

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—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:Mashable’s Sponsors Are the BestestOpen Web Awards Voting Has Ended - Final Winners Announced TomorrowMeebo’s Custom Chat Rooms for New Advertising OptionsAdam Ostrow, Mashable’s New EditorHappy New Year!Meebo Hyping Kanye West Listening Party TonightSponsors

Widgets, or shortcut links downloaded to computer desktops, are gaining so much popularity that corporations are using them as a marketing tool.

"The user’s desktop is extremely valuable, it’s prime real estate," said Paul Brody, Yahoo vice president of desktop products, in Sunnyvale, California.

Desktop widgets, also known as gadgets or modules, serve as short cuts to other Web sites. They are becoming very diverse, represented by pictures, logos and or even interactive games. Yahoo recently launched Widgets 4 and has more than 4,300 widgets, many written by third parties but that include company-branded ones. "If you have that application running there (on the desktop) all the time, from an advertiser and a brand’s perspective, that’s obviously an opportunity to connect with their key audiences," said Brody.

Wigets allow the user to access information by desktop without opening a web browser. "It’s the slicker, richer version of bookmarks on your web browser," said Dave Carnoy, executive editor for CNET.com, in New York. "There seems to be a widget for just about everything."

Popular widgets include weather trackers and UV indexes, news feeds, train, bus and flight schedules, currencies and even lunar phases. Women can track their menstrual cycles or count down to their due date if pregnant. A widget coffee alarm will sound when it is time for a break and an alcohol calculator widget allows brewers to determine the alcohol content. "You really can only have so many of them before it starts either cluttering up your desktop or slowing down the load-time," Carnoy said. "It’s a little bit of a fad."

Whether widgets are time-wasters or have the potential to be exploited by advertisers, one analyst says people like them for their cool factor. "It allows you to keep your fingers in all the digital pies that make up your life," said Dr. Curtis Gittens, senior research analyst for Info-Tech Research Group, a Canadian IT market research company based in London, Ontario. "But it won’t help you solve the whole information overload problem," Gittens said. "It could become as messy as your bookmarks." Gittens said users should download widgets from established sites. "Play safe, stick to the main players and you will have lots of fun with your widgets," he said.

Starting around 3 p.m. Pacific time on Monday, a group of Yahoo executives will begin shuttling among three “war rooms” at the company’s search marketing unit here.

They will be scrutinizing an array of moving charts and graphs projected on walls and checking with a team of 30 to 40 engineers for any signs of trouble as Yahoo flips the switch on a new search advertising system. “It’ll be a good event if it is a nonevent,” said Brian Acton, senior director of engineering at Yahoo Search Marketing. Yahoo’s investors and advertisers, on the other hand, will be looking for something eventful to start happening, if not on Monday, then in the weeks and months after.

The much-delayed ad system, known as Project Panama, is Yahoo’s effort to close the wide gap with Google in the race for search advertising dollars, a fast-growing and incredibly lucrative business that Google dominates. As such, Panama is the most important new product for Yahoo in years. “You are talking about something that could potentially affect the single largest and most profitable business segment that Yahoo has,” said Mark Mahaney, an analyst at Citigroup. Among those who will be keeping close tabs on Panama is Yahoo’s chief executive, Terry S. Semel. “I think we will be watching this closely for many Mondays,” he said. “It has been and continues to be our No. 1 company priority.”

That is no surprise. Some analysts who follow Yahoo say the delay of Panama is the biggest reason Yahoo shares dropped from a high of more than $35 early last year to just over $22 in October. They have since regained some ground, closing Friday at $28.77. In its simplest terms, Panama is Yahoo’s attempt to place ads in front of users that are more likely to be clicked on. Until now, Yahoo gave top billing to the advertisers who were willing to bid the most to have their ads listed alongside a particular search result. Google has a different formula, which Yahoo is trying to emulate. It ranks ads on a mix of bid prices and relevancy to the user. That leads users to click on ads more frequently, and since advertisers pay only when a user clicks on their ad, Google, on average, makes more money on every search than Yahoo does.

And since Google is better at matching ads with users, the system is more efficient for advertisers, too, creating a sort of virtuous circle that gives Google a powerful edge. “I spend a majority of my dollars on Google,” said Amy Wong, global online marketing manager for the software security firm Trend Micro. “I’m glad to see that Yahoo is trying to get their act together.” Ms. Wong said she would like to distribute her ad dollars more evenly among Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, the third major player in search advertising. Mr. Mahaney estimated that in 2006, Google made 4.5 cents to 5 cents on every search, while Yahoo generated only 2.5 cents to 3 cents a search. The difference adds up to billions every year.

As critical as the success of Panama is for Yahoo, it is not the only challenge facing the company. As Google’s share of all searches has grown steadily over the last year, Yahoo’s has remained largely flat. The company also faces increasing competition in its display advertising business. In addition, while Yahoo is going through a reorganization aimed at making it more nimble and more accountable, crucial posts remain unfilled, and some investors are waiting for the company to lay out a clear strategy. “Panama is very important to Yahoo, but it is not the only thing they need to focus on,” said Ellen Siminoff, a former Yahoo executive who is now chief executive at Efficient Frontier, a search marketing firm. For now, however, all eyes are on Panama.

Mr. Semel acknowledges that Yahoo was late in starting the project. He said that happened partly because Yahoo’s search advertising system, which the company acquired through its takeover of Overture Services for $1.6 billion in 2003, was performing well, and it took time for executives to realize just how much better Google’s system was. But once Yahoo assembled the Panama team in mid-2005, “things did come together quite quickly,” Mr. Semel said. Those who worked on the project described the effort as a huge undertaking. They compared it to rebuilding an airplane in midflight, as engineers had to keep the old advertising system running while they put the new one together.

The first phase of the project, which went into operation in mid-October, two months later than planned, includes a completely new system for advertisers. It provides them with a digital dashboard where they can manage their marketing campaigns, aim ads geographically and test their effectiveness. It includes interactive tools that suggest to advertisers what to bid based on their budget and the number of users they want to attract. Most of those features are already available from Google and Microsoft.

Yahoo engineers say Panama has some unique features, like a “quality index” that gives advertisers a sense of how the system will rank an ad, and sophisticated analytical tools that give advertisers insights on why certain campaigns are effective. Yahoo says the system can be upgraded without disrupting it. It is intended to be flexible enough eventually to handle video and audio ads and to distribute ads to mobile devices. And while Yahoo gives few specifics, it says Panama will some day play a role beyond search advertising. “Panama is a foundation for us to start sewing together all our advertising assets,” said Tim Cadogan, vice president of Yahoo Search Marketing.

Yahoo has been moving advertisers to the new system gradually and expects to complete the task in the United States in March. And while some advertisers have run into problems, the new system has generally been well received. “In terms of ease of use, Google is still the leader, but Yahoo and Microsoft have made great strides in coming up to par,” said Matthew Greitzer, director of search marketing at Avenue A Razorfish, an online ad agency. But the part that matters most to Yahoo’s bottom line will come Monday, when the new ad-ranking algorithm begins its work.

Last Thursday, the company ran a test in which searches originating on the West Coast ran the new ad ranking system. The team started at 3 a.m., and by lunchtime, the engineers gathered in the war rooms, many with bags under their eyes, and appeared satisfied things were running smoothly. “Our tests today went beautifully,” said Mark Morrissey, vice president for product at Yahoo Search Marketing. Just about everyone inside and outside Yahoo expects the system to generate more revenue for the company, but no one knows exactly how much more. Last month, Yahoo cautioned investors not to expect the financial impact of Panama to show up until the second half of the year.

That is in part because as the system is introduced, some advertisers will end up paying less and some more for each click, as ads vary in how likely they are to attract a click from a searcher. Search marketing experts say that in general, the well-known brands will get better placement for their ads at lower bids, because people are more likely to click on them. The reverse will be true for lesser-known brands. But those dynamics may vary depending on keywords and how carefully advertisers aim their pitches. Yahoo says a customer service team has been working with advertisers to help them understand how to make ads more relevant. Regardless, it will take time for the marketplace to adapt to the new system and for Yahoo to fine-tune it. Whatever Yahoo’s gains turn out to be, they will not necessarily come at the expense of Google. “If this is successful, advertisers will not shift from Google or MSN, but rather from other mediums, such as e-mail, display advertising and offline budgets,” said Stuart Larkins, vice president for search at Performics, a division of online advertising firm Doubleclick.

No matter how good Panama may be, it is unlikely to catch up with Google’s system in the near term. Google has been perfecting its ad-ranking software for years. And on Wednesday, Google’s chief executive, Eric E. Schmidt, said the company was placing fewer ads in front of users, yet receiving more clicks. That means not only that the ads are more relevant, but also that the experience of users is better. Even Yahoo executives acknowledged that the version of Panama they are introducing on Monday is only a first step. “I don’t think it gets us ahead,” Mr. Cadogan said. “It gets us to a place where we can compete more effectively.”

Right Media (www.rightmedia.com), creator of the Right Media Exchange, today launched RMX Direct, a simple solution for managing advertising that allows web publishers to make more money from their sites. During the system’s successful private beta period, 750 publishers set up accounts, and over 11 billion ad impressions were served.

RMX Direct is geared towards publishers who sell their advertising inventory primarily through ad networks. It allows those networks, as well as select ad networks in the Right Media Exchange, to compete for website inventory on a level playing field in real-time. The system allocates each impression to the highest-paying advertiser automatically, regardless of network affiliation.

“We’ve doubled our effective CPM and revenue within a month,” said Steve Jenkins, president of CheatCodes.com. “It was drastic. We also manage Casale Media, Google Adsense, Tribal Fusion, ValueClick, and Advertising.com through this interface. It’s less work and helps us make much more money.”

“Having a system that can find the best fit for a given ad impression is great for us,” said Mehul Patel, president of Swirve.com. “We’ve noticed great results in our eCPM. Now, we have far less wasted inventory as it all gets allocated to its best fit.”

RMX Direct also includes Media Guard^TM, the Right Media Exchange’s ad classification system that protects web publishers and their users from potentially harmful ads.