Tatango, the ad-supported group SMS service previously known as networkText, spent the last few months in a private beta following a functional and visual overhaul and a round of funding by Bellingham Angel Organization. Now everyone is free to get in on the group texting good times; they’ve opened the doors to the public.

The service is dead simple to use, as it should be. I made the jump from accountless bum to en masse messaging mogul in all of about 2 minutes.

Source:TechCrunch

On the heels of a major upgrade earlier this week that added facial recognition features to its Picasa photo management service, Google added a new Explore page today that shows off the most popular public photos uploaded by members. In addition to the featured photos, shown in a 3 X 4 grid, the Explore page also shows the most recent photos uploaded in a slide-show widget. Below, it offers a list of the most popular tags. For instance, here are pictures tagged “New York.”

The Picasa Explore page also has a Where In The World? game that is mashup opf geotagged photos and Google Maps. It shows you a photo and you have to guess where it was taken. If you guess wrong, it tells you how far off you are in kilometers. This is fun for outdoor photos, but when people upload geotagged photos of a generic apartment of a plate of food, it can become tricky.

Our friend Duncan Riley (you know, the Inquisitr guy) has received a limited edition Google Chrome comic book. Being the altruistic fellow that he is, he decided to put it up on an eBay auction and give the proceeds to charity.

You can check out the auction here, current bid is $127.50 (that’s Aussie dollars), and it ships to North America, Europe, or Australia/ New Zealand.

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Google Chrome has been grabbing the tech world’s attention for a few days now, and its impact on the market is showing to be significant. Massively significant. Permanently significant. That goes for everything from conceptual execution to the download count. According to Hitslink Market Share, it’s already grabbed north of 1% of the browser market. And Hitwise shows Google’s Chrome page to be nearing the top 10 of sites offering software downloads of any kind.

Big news? Yes indeed. And the reason for this is entirely evident. The blog world has been frenzied for the last 72 hours over this, and it’s been channeled through all the big media outlets, including print, television, Web. That’s on a global scale. So of course the number of downloads will be high. And the barrel of fodder is far from empty, so I imagine this boomer of a browser is going to climb a good bit higher still. The trend says so.

The question to ask, though, is just how high will it go? Is it going grow so large as to eat others’ shares of the market? Is it going to be a Red Alert phase at Mozilla for the foreseeable future? Will IE decline further? What about the bottom feeders, Opera, Safari, et al.?

In short, the answers are: pretty high; yes; yes; yes; those’ll budge a little. Indeed, Chrome is that big. It will be, anyway.

Let’s look sensibly at the situation here. Chrome was released to a resounding applause. Everyone’s voiced pros and cons, more the first than the second. And it hasn’t even had time to make itself feel briefly at home on the Mac OS X. Not to say that Mac adoption will draw enormous oohs and aahs, but OS X users tend to be a more tech savvy bunch. More in tune with the ways of this progressive chaos we show such love for. I count myself part of that club. And they’ll download in great numbers as well, and you can bet that those numbers to come will bump Chrome up even further. The biggest loser in that case will presumably be Safari, which, despite its conveniences, is hardly the force that Firefox has become.

Now, in Firefox’s case, it’s a far more complex picture. I dare say Mozilla isn’t very happy with Chrome’s release, because it can only slow the rate of Firefox 3 downloads. And Mozilla is very much about growth at this point. It has been for some time. It saw that, given the right amount of noise at the grassroots, it could yoink some pie from MSFT. And more and more. The record set for browser downloads in June only furthered its advantage. And now Google comes along, promising something open source as well, with some core aspects that surely make folks at the Foundation envious, if not a bit sour. Mozilla will continue, no doubt. But it sees that it isn’t the only slick magician in town, and having to compete while watching its own tail isn’t something it’s really very used to. Sure, Mozilla thinks the IE team has moved forward a bit with its feature set, but it can’t seriously think that what Microsoft offers is really so cool. Mozilla is the bad-ass benchmark. Now Google has stolen some of that hard-earned thunder. Even though Google has done so completely legitimately.

It’s true, Google says it’s not out to conquer. It’s lending a helping hand. So everyone is better off. But as with anything it’s done as good or better than other big-name Internet companies, once it tastes success, it cannot help but add fuel to the fire. And add fuel it will. Enough Web users will be happy to try something “better,” “more convenient,” “more reliable,” “safer,” even though the gauges for such metrics are hugely subjective and vary case-by-case, that the company will see that 1% climb to 2%. And well beyond, I think. No, not to the point of surpassing IE. But a low double-digit it will be. Give it 12-24 months, and see how the field looks then.

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Clicky continues to track Chrome usage in the 2-3% range across its 45,000 sites. Use of Chrome among TechCrunch readers is much higher: 6.23% since Tuesday, making it the fourth most popular browser among TechCrunch readers after Firefox, IE and Safari.

Online file storage and sharing service Box.net is helping to put the “cloud” in Dell’s first netbook, the Inspiron Mini 9.

With only 4GB of built-in hard drive space, Dell needed some way to boost capacity. So it placed a default Box icon on the desktop that leads to 2GB of free internet storage (twice the normal 1GB that Box provides for free).Source:TechCrunch

280 North, the Y Combinator-backed startup that brought you slideshow maker 280 Slides, has released a programming language and set of frameworks collectively known as Cappuccino that can be used to create rich web applications in the same way you’d create desktop applications for MacOS X.

Like SproutCore, which powers Apple’s MobileMe, Cappuccino seeks to replicate the functionality of Cocoa, a native application programming environment for MacOS X. But unlike SproutCore, Cappuccino doesn’t expect its developers to know any HTML, CSS, and JavaScript - the languages used traditionally for standards-based web development.Source:TechCrunch

As online advertising spending continues its meteoric rise — the Wall Street Journal is reporting a healthy gain of 20 percent in the second quarter alone — not every form of advertising is enjoying such success. In fact, as economic troubles continue, more and more advertisers are only willing to spend money on search ads and are increasingly ignoring other forms of advertising.

According to eMarketer, search ad spending will reach $10.4 billion this year, more than twice as much as advertisers will spend on display ads. More importantly for Google, search ads will represent 42 percent of all advertising spending, while display ads will account for just 21 percent of all online advertising.

Today marks DreamIt Ventures’ first Funding Day, during which the new startup incubator will introduce a dozen new companies to a collection of founders and venture capitalists. DreamIt is a program in the same vein as Y Combinator and TechStars, offering startups seed funding, guidance, and connections in exchange for equity. We’ve written brief introductions to each of the startups, which you can view below:
Source:TechCrunch
socialmedian, which has come under fire as of late for trying to use Twitter as means of raising $500,000 in venture funding, announced Thursday that it has launched its first major upgrade since the company started and its improvements will finally address some of the concerns its users have had since its inception.
First off, the […]Source:TechCrunch

Zoho on Thursday announced the availability of Zoho Docs, which will help Zoho users manage their documents centrally so they won’t need to skip from Writer, Sheet, and Show to get work done.

Zoho Docs is a bit overdue, but it’s good to see the company finally moving towards improving an offering that’s still a bit all over the place.

There have been a number of timed and anecdotal speed tests performed on Google Chrome over the last couple of days.

My personal testing: Chrome is the fastest browser I have ever used. More structured TechCrunch testing showed similar results: It’s fast. Here are what others came up with:

CNET agrees, but their approach was biased towards Google. Chrome came out way ahead in a suite of Javascript benchmark tests. The only problem is that Google hosts the tests and flat out says they tuned their V8 Javascript engine around them. The test does show Chrome coming out way ahead of other browsers (for me, Chrome had a score of 403 v. IE7’s 18). Try it out for yourself.

Raptr is a new video game community launching this evening that aggregates user’s activities across desktop, Web, and console platforms. The end-result is a Friendfeed-like community of activity streams letting you know what games your friends are playing and how they’re performing on everything from Xbox Live to Facebook. Beyond that, social networking features and recommendation tools provide an interesting way to discover new games based on what your friends and other gamers around the world are playing.

It’s the type of application that makes me yearn for the days when I could play video games for the better part of every waking hour. But, I digress. Here are the features that make Raptr a pretty cool new site for highly active gamers:

Aggregation

At the core of Raptr is aggregating activities across gaming platforms: PC, Mac, Xbox 360/Xbox Live, Wii, Playstation 3, and even Facebook. Playing Madden ’09 on Xbox Live? That is broadcast to your Raptr feed. Hit a note streak in Guitar Hero? That’ll show up too. Essentially, Raptr is looking to take just about every activity they can from the games you play and broadcast it in Friendfeed style, both on the site and to external services like Twitter and your Facebook status. To get started, you simply add your various accounts for the games you play and Raptr will automatically crawl them automatically, much in the way that Friendfeed does.

Social Networking

Once you’ve signed up for Raptr and make some friends, the experience is much like that of Friendfeed with a few extras thrown in. You can login and see what games your friends are playing, or view the latest activities of the Raptr community on the whole. Additionally, there is a very Facebook-like chat feature where you can see who is currently logged in and send them messages and check out what games they own. There is a client version of this chat too that offers some bonus features, including the very handy automatic updates it will download for your PC games.

Discovery

While there is inherently a lot of new game discovery on Raptr by seeing what your friends and others are playing, a few additional features make the site a portal for finding new games – and even provide Raptr with a bit of a business model. Raptr analyzes what your friends are playing and makes recommendations, so, for example, if the site noticed that 10 of your friends have recently played World of Warcraft, it will recommend that game to you.

Meanwhile, if Raptr knows you play NCAA Football ’09, they’ll shoot you a trailer for NCAA Football ’10 as soon as it’s available, with EA paying for the privilege. Each video game on the site also has its own page, where you can see the recent users who have played it and even see an analysis of what time of day people typically play so you can best schedule your gaming (assuming you have absolutely no other priorities in life).

The Holy Grail of Gaming?

I’m a few years removed from being an active gamer, but Raptr has really done a fantastic job of incorporating some of the current de facto social networking features in an environment that makes sense for its demographic. Additionally, the company has a strong pedigree; Raptr is founded by gaming legend Dennis Fong who also co-founded Xfire and sold it to Viacom in 2006, while other top execs hail from a variety of gaming startups that have had lucrative exits. The company has raised $12 million from Accel Partners and Founders Fund.

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Source:Mashable!

After I read Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins’ post on Mashable last night about how Google’s Chrome is not a Windows killer something about the post starting to get my thoughts going but I couldn’t really put them into words at that point. Then I read a post today by Jackson West on Valleywag where he said

Mainframe terminals, or keyboards and monitors attached to a big piece of iron in a subbasement somewhere, probably built by IBM or DEC. While proponents of what until recently was called server-side computing have now opted for the friendly-sounding “cloud computing” moniker

At this point a couple things solidified for me and regardless of how much the Web 2.0 bunch might like to think that they have invented something new with this whole cloud computing thing the fact is that this isn’t anything new at all. While most of the javascript jockeys might like to think that this cloud computing is so cool and a product of the Social Media Web 2.0 generation the reality is, that in one form or another we have had something like this since before the time of Bill Gates’ speech pointed to by Mark yesterday.

From the first time that someone dialed into a mainframe hidden in some clean room somewhere to when the first web application connected to Amazon’s S3 service we have been using remote dump sites for storing our data or running software. I still remember when Sun proclaimed that the thick client was dead and everyone would be moving to a thin client architecture and run all their software from a central server.

It wasn’t long though before that whole thin client idea went the way of the dodo bird. Except it really didn’t because we see the same idea now with everyone pumping out the PR swill about the great benefits of cloud computing.

Funnily enough I am writing this post out using Google Docs and will then copy it over to the back end online editor at Mashable’s blog site; which is actually hosted nowhere near any place that might be called their office. Google Docs of course is that company’s interpretation of what software from the cloud will be like; just as Microsoft has their own interpretation with Office Online.

Everyone is wanting to get us all excited about data portability and global access to their data (which in and of itself is a great idea). It was also a great idea when some programmer remotely compiled a program on some gigantic DEC or IBM server; they were at that point were leased from the big computer manufactures and the company paid for their time using it. It was also a great idea when a worker in a cubicle could access a document on a co-worker’s machine a floor or half a world away.

The value of the idea has never changed in all these years - only the delivery method has. Now, as we float through the haze of the warm and fuzzy goodness of cloud computing the reasons for doing this aren’t the same. At one time; especially during the height of the client/server ideology, it was about making it easier for the workers to access their data. Now, it is all about companies like Google, Microsoft, Amazon and other cloud computing platform providers find new ways to lock their customers in and make a fortune doing so.

Sure, much of the cloud computing service available at this point is free for us to use after all free makes it so much easier to get people willing to use the services. It is like the drug dealer though, with their “the first hit is free” cloud computing providers know that once they have you locked in and have your data there aren’t any other alternatives.

Companies the size of Google, Microsoft and Amazon don’t do anything out of the goodness of their hearts - everything boils down at some time to a profitable bottom line. They might be willing to give up short term profits but you can be guaranteed that at some point someone is going going to have to start paying for these services. Advertising is simply not going to be able to cover the immense costs of these clouds.

As it is, Microsoft and Google are forking out hundreds of millions of dollars per data center with more and more coming online all the time - someone is going to have to start paying for all of this. Where once companies like IBM and DEC held companies ransom over just the plain access to giant mainframes we now have equally huge companies holding open the gates to their clouds.

The simple fact is that at this point they are the one’s with the keys to our data not us which makes them; or cloud computing, no different than what we had some twenty plus years ago.

It’s the same greedy pigs just with a new coat of make up - there is no real difference when you come to the basic principals of the whole idea. One generation’s client/server is another generation’s cloud computing.

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The dust hasn’t even settled on Chrome’s release and already Mozilla is feeling the pressure. The company today released a series of benchmarks showing Firefox 3.1 will be faster than anything Google can muster with Chrome.

Chrome is running V8, an open source Javascript engine, which Google claims, is faster than anything currently offered on the Web. And based on our tests of Chrome, we tend to agree.