MySpace music combines free on-demand streaming music with buyable downloads from Amazon, ringtones and video and other content. Soon the service will offer artist merchandise (tshirts, etc.) and concert tickets.

Users can create public or private playlists and embed music onto their profile pages. A nice touch - 65% of MySpace users add songs to their profile, and MySpace aggregates every song you’ve added to your profile and makes an initial playlist out of it for you. Artist pages, which previously only had a few promotional tracks, now include entire catalogs of their music. Any song can be clicked and added to a playlist.Source:TechCrunch

Do you want a Dash GPS? We are going to give one away to the person who can come up with the best idea for a geo-aware app that would work on the device. (Courtesy of Trulia and Dash).

The Dash is a GPS unit that is connected to the Internet through a cellular data network so it can tell you where is the nearest restaurant, gas station or hospital. You can also download geo-RSS feeds and apps that tell you where is the nearest WiFi network or winery. In May, the startup opened up its API to outside developers. Some apps that have been created for the Dash include Trulia’s real estate search (handy when home hunting in the car), weather updates from WeatherBug, nearby speed traps from Trapster, geo-tagged Wikipedia articles, and you can even Twitter from your Dash (not while driving, please).

While Trulia began as an online resource for home buyers and others interested in the ever-changing real estate market, its recent developments have starte to drill down heavily into personalization capabilities. The latest features continue Trulia’s effort to offer services for the buyers and the professionals in the real estate market, and extend its platform tools in order to provide more value for these two ends of the space. There are three main aspects of Trulia’s latest upgrades: new personalization features, an enhanced mobile offering, and blogs for all users.

Further validating the trend made popular by Facebook, Trulia has adopted the news feed format for additional localized personalization features on its homepages. Visit Trulia’s main home page and you’ll see tailored news feed updates based on your geographic location. Upon launch, this news feed will be localized on a city level, but as Trulia aggregates more information to be included in this news feed and continues to build out this feature, it will move into specific neighborhood and zip code localization levels as well.

The useful aspect of Trulia’s news feed is that it will continually modify according to your search activity on the site. So if you happen to be looking at homes in two different cities, this will be reflected in the news feed updates that Trulia provides. Additionally, there are filtering options for the news feed, so even if you’re searching across eight different cities, you’ll be able to easily narrow down the results accordingly.

Trulia mobile has also been upgraded to include a new iPhone app, which takes advantage of its map and image-viewing capabilities and offers a new way in which to access the news feed features Trulia is also rolling out in this release. In addition to mobile phones, Trulia has also teamed up with Dash Navigation to provide mobile access through its GPS-enabled navigation device, giving you yet another way to both search for and drive to homes in a particular area.

The mobile upgrades, according to Trulia’s VP of Marketing Heather Fernandez, were in direct response to users’ consistent increase in activity and mobile access on the weekends, as they venture out into the real world for a look at homes in the area. To this end, increased mobile support across multiple devices is key to Trulia’s overall growth strategy.

Lastly, Trulia has added blogs, which is a direct appeal to those already using Trulia’s platform for self-promotion purposes. While any user can take advantage of Trulia blogs, I think it’s greatest potential is for real estate professionals that are leveraging Trulia’s network to access its user base and drive more sales. As Trulia blogs become more developed, they will have additional tools for automatic import and distribution from and to other blogging platforms.

And speaking of distribution, Trulia blogs will also be sent throughout Trulia’s new personalized news feed system, bringing all the recent updates to Trulia’s site full circle.

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:Trulia Releases Useful Data on Real Estate Q&A Forum ActivityTrulia Ad Network: Keeping More Cash from Real Estate SearchTrulia Adds Google StreetView to Home ListingsTrulia Raises $15M to Develop Self-Service Real Estate AdsTrulia Offers Private Label Real Estate Listings to Web PublishersTrulia: Niche Search Done Right [podcast]Trulia Launches Self-Service Marketing for Real Estate Professionals

Real estate listing and search engine Trulia is announcing the launch of Trulia Pro tonight. Trulia Pro is a self-service advertising program for real estate agents. The program allows agents to buy sponsored listings and spotlight ads in the locations and ZIP codes you wish. The listings show at the top of the results and the company says they are 4-7x more likely to be clicked.

This news comes a month after Trulia launched their real estate ad network. The pricing plans are $39/month or a yearly plan with 25% off. They are offerin 3 months free if you are advertising anywhere online - more details on their blog. At $39/month, most will signup for it - at least to test it for a few months.

Unlike Google AdWords, this program is flat-rate and ads will rotate and will match the user’s search as closely as possible.

Greg Sterling notes that competitor Zillow has offered self-service ads for 18 months.

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Over the weekend, The web was abuzz with discussion about Microsoft considering the acquisition of natural language search company Powerset. Some time ago I had heard a rumor that someone was looking at Powerset, but was relatively uninterested. Hearing that the potential acquirer is Microsoft certainly makes it more interesting, but I have to say the concept leaves me more than a bit incredulous.

From skeptic to user

I became familiar with Powerset’s only competitor, Hakia initially because they are a New York company. I became intrigued with Hakia because several months ago I tried their search engine, and it worked – really well. This was a surprising result for me since I have always been a skeptic regarding all things relating to artificial intelligence, speech recognition, natural language processing, and other such fuzzy technologies.

At least in the area of natural language processing Hakia that has changed my mind. In fact, it has become common for me to use the Hakia search engine when Google does not deliver sufficient results.

Hakia and Powerset are part of the same general area of natural language search. The idea with both services is that you can actually ask specific questions and get answers. But there are critical differences between Hakia and Powerset. And those differences bring me back to my incredulity at the idea that Microsoft is taking a serious look at Powerset.

Powerset indexes 750 times slower than Hakia!

I have no expertise in natural language processing or semantic search, or any type of full text search for that matter. But as far as I can tell, Hakia’s technology is *far* superior to that of Powerset’s. Why would I say that?

Well first, as I have already said, it works. It is a real live search engine. I use it. I can’t say the same for Powerset. Powerset has yet to show anything but a search engine for Wikipedia. A big part of the reason Powerset doesn’t seem able to offer a real search engine is the fact that according to their own reports, it takes them about 25 seconds to index a page, based on an average of 25 sentences per page. According to Hakia it takes them 1/30th of a second to index a page. Essentially this means that Powerset cannot scale. It is seven hundred fifty times slower than Hakia!

Now you might assume that Powerset is slower because it’s applying some serious, and superior indexing mojo, and therefore what it is doing is much more valuable than what Hakia is doing. But alas that is also not true.

Hakia really knows how to read

Hakia is doing something called “ontological semantics”. What this means is that over the last four years, Hakia has developed an “ontology” for human expression. In layman terms, what this means is that what Hakia does when it indexes a page is to look at each sentence and figure out what the *questions* are that each sentence answers. Any given sentence usually answers 3 or 4 questions. These questions are coded and go into what Hakia calls their Qdex, or question index.

In order to be able to figure out what the relevant questions are for a given sentence, Hakia’s indexer has to literally read the sentence. By “read” I mean it has to understand the actual meaning of the sentence semantically. This is a big deal.

Powerset uses statistics + syntax but can’t actually read

So, while Hakia is actually reading, Powerset, does not actually attempt to understand what sentences mean. It uses a system that parses the syntax of the sentence and guesses matches based on statistics. But this approach means that for questions that do not match previously encountered syntactical patterns, the system will not be able to find answers, even if there are in fact answers in the database.

Powerset benefits from the Silicon Valley echo chamber

Now, if, for a moment, you presume that it is true, or even *possibly* true that Hakia is the superior service and technology, or if you even assume that Hakia is just equivalent to Powerset, why would Powerset be so continuously celebrated while Hakia is overshadowed?

The only answer I can come up with is that the west coast is such an echo chamber that very little sound gets in or out. And so it must be shocking when a New York company develops a technology that seems to beat the pants off something that should be pure Silicon Valley. Just a thought.

In any case, it seems, for the record, worth noting that we have the clear leader in natural language processing and search technology right here. And, as an admitted New York partisan, after a while it does get a little annoying to hear such continued fawning over a west coast company that is very likely, at the end of the day, just another Silicon Valley also-ran.

This article was authored by Hank Williams who is a New York-based entrepreneur who recently launched a new blog: Why Does Everything Suck? exploring the tech marketplace from 10,000 feet.

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Real estate search engine Trulia is announcing the launch of the Trulia real estate vertical ad network today. Trulia notes that this new ad network will give advertisers access to over 10 million unique visitors per month in their publisher network.

The Trulia Ad Network is launching with a collection of premium online real estate publishers, including Oodle, Homes & Land and The Savvy Source. Existing Trulia advertisers include a diverse group of consumer brands, including Wachovia, Lennar Homes, The Carrier Corp., DirectBuy, Prudential Real Estate, Windermere Real Estate, and ZipRealty.

Trulia provided the following stat from Borrell Associates, "We forecast that real estate ads in newspapers will drop more than one-third by 2011 while online housing ads will rise 60 percent and overtake print for the first time."

Trulia.com self-reports monthly figures of 4.5 million unique visitors with 30 million pageviews and 48.1 million ad impressions per month.