TechAddress

2nd Annual Open Web Awards: NOMINATIONS OPEN!

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 17:33:40 +0000

Mashable is proud to present the 2nd Annual Open Web Awards, a unique opportunity for the most accomplished websites and services to achieve international recognition across scores of influential blogs.

Last year’s Open Web Awards achieved over 250,000 votes combined between Mashable and our 50 international blog partners. This year we’ve doubled in size: nearly 100 blog partners have signed up from 18 countries, providing unprecedented global coverage for the nominees and winners. You can read more about the timeline, categories, rules, sponsors and blog partners at the Open Web Awards site.

Nominations are OPEN!

The 2nd Annual Open Web Awards is now accepting nominations in 26 categories via the widget below. You may nominate a site/company in as many categories as you see fit. However, there is only one nomination per category per e-mail address, so choose wisely.

Nominate NOW!

Mashable Open Web Awards

Nominations close Sunday, November 16th at 11:59 pm PST. Nominate now and start campaigning! And feel free to embed this widget on your own blog or website by clicking the “Grab This” button!

Start Canvassing for YOUR Candidate!

Want others to nominate your favorite site? Of course you do! Why not leave a comment here and on any of our international partner blogs encouraging other readers to add their support? The more you promote your candidate across these blogs, the more likely it is for your site to be nominated!

Visit our International Blog Partners…and Become One!

There are nearly 100 Open Web Awards Blog Partners representing 18 countries and 7 languages. Our selection represents tech blogs of all varieties: some well known, some up-and-coming. We encourage you to visit them and subscribe.

We will also be promoting these partners throughout the contest, and each blog partner receives one vote per category to decide the “Blogger’s Choice” Winners.

What’s more, Mashable is still accepting applications for Blog Partners!

OWA Sponsors Love The Web

The Open Web Awards is made possible by our sponsors. By supporting the Open Web Awards, these companies reward and encourage innovative web technologies. We can’t thank them enough for sharing our passion: building great web companies.

Platinum Partner

“PartnerUp brings small business and social networking together to create a community where entrepreneurs find the people, resources and information to grow their businesses.”

Gold Sponsors

“iStockphoto is the world’s leading image market and a revenue-sharing social network. Browse 3.5 million images and videos starting at $1 or become a contributor.”

“With Quintura’s advanced visual-based search and analytics solution, content publishers can increase site usage while creating new ad revenues”

“Infinite and Instant, Zazzle is the only on-demand retail platform for consumers and major brands, offering billions of retail quality, one-of-a-kind products, most of which are produced within 24 hours.”

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Make Digg Count…With AddToAny

Tue, 04 Nov 2008 19:32:26 +0000

Source:Mashable!

AddToAny, maker of easy-sharing and feed subscription widgets of the ShareThis and AddThis variety, gets a power boost today.

The new version of the utility involves an easily navigable tabbed interface, visible tallies of page promotion made with the social bookmarking services Digg and Delicious, prioritized placement of some services over others, and a so-called “Color Chooser” to customize the look of the device. Better to adapt to certain website stylings, for sure. An official AddToAny WordPress plugin also made its debut recently.

The plugin and customization options are certain to draw the favor of many publishers wishing for a multifunctional gadget that can conform to their own designs. A standard delivery might suit many users, but some editors will surely appreciate what’s now available.

Among the functions involved in the new release, meanwhile, is a more industrious email sharing option, with links to Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, and AOL Mail (along with the standard manual email option that is more or less ubiquitous across the Web); a real-time count of Digg and Delicious activity, if/when applicable; and an elementary guide to bookmarking a page to the user’s preferred browser.

Finally, as a kind of cherry-on-top, AddToAny has chosen to participate in the Open Share Icon collective. Names like Shareaholic, Me.dium, NowPublic, and SmugMug are listed among the support base. In short, the OSI is an attempt to establish a trademark-free alternative to the ShareThis graphic. A bit of visual and philosophical competition, if you will.

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Qoof Goes All-in-One With Video Retail. Outta the Way, QVC.

Sun, 02 Nov 2008 21:32:12 +0000

Source:Mashable!

Qoof, a company specializing in video-enhanced commerce for retailers on the Web, à la HSN or QVC, is expanding on its toolset this week to include what it regards as an “all-in-one” platform showcasing products in detail surpassing that made possible with a smaller application the company introduced earlier this year.

Furthermore, Qoof is able to distribute retailers’ content through ad networks and to sites like Facebook, MySpace, and iGoogle, along with video integration within an existing storefront. A site uniquely designed for a retailer’s video offerings can also be created. The company plans to move into the mobile realm in the early months of 2009.

Having toured a sample implementation of the new system, it definitely becomes clear to what extent a Qoof client can serve a retailer’s needs. Some items may benefit from such exposure. Others less so. But there are really plenty of areas in which the platform could prove useful. Jewelry sales, as was shown when we first featured the company in July, is prime for such a reveal, as you can see in the example here.

Whether the design of the application is fitting for use in numerous places, it’s hard to say. If a seller intends for the device to have a central purpose to the customer’s experience, it’ll likely work quite well. Front page placement might be ideal, too. The inclusion of a product browser and detail panel allows it to serve as a hub of activity.

Again, much depends on what it is a retailer opts to do with its wares insofar as video production. But I imagine there’ll be a place reserved for the application in a good number of interesting settings. So far, Buy.com, Ice.com, Knot, and Gaiam are said to be signed on for the launch. The revenue model for Qoof being employed is one of pay-per-performance.

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Yoono Releases Onslaught of New Features, Finds an Interesting Business Model

Fri, 31 Oct 2008 12:35:26 +0000

Source:Mashable!

Those anti-monopoly laws are serious business. When Microsoft complained that Google selling ads on Yahoo’s ad space was akin to a search monopoly, they obviously consulted their army of lawyers who said that the deal has a big probability of failing.

According to WSJ (link behind a paywall), this probability is very high right now, and the companies might walk away from the deal by the middle of next week. You can’t really go around the fact that Google and Yahoo own over 80 percent of the web search market, and it seems that Google and Yahoo can’t convince the U.S. Department of Justice that it’s not a monopoly.

Yahoo spokesman Tracy Schmaler has given Reuters the usual PR drizzle; Yahoo, as she says, believes strongly “that this agreement will strengthen Yahoo’s competitive position in online advertising and will help to drive a more robust, higher quality Yahoo marketplace for their advertisers, publishers and users.”

Google spokesman Adam Kovacevich said even less: “We are confident that the arrangement is beneficial to competition, but we are not going to discuss the details of the process.”

Therefore, the deal may not yet be completely dead yet, but the Wall Street Journal claims that the talks both companies had with the Department of Justice on Thursday weren’t going too well.

If the deal doesn’t go through, it will only be a minor nuisance for Google. As far as Yahoo goes, the company is still nowhere: they’re looking at the possibility of merging with Time-Warner; this search deal with Google was part of the tactic to scare Microsoft away from trying a hostile takeover, so it’s doubtful that it’s a good idea in the first place, and their stock has been pretty much free falling ever since Microsoft said that the takeover offer is off the table. Things aren’t looking too bright for Yahoo shareholders.

Source:Mashable!

A while ago I laid down a theory that a significant number of users are using YouTube to share data that isn’t videos. Most often, it’s music, and therefore there are a lot of videos on YouTube that consist of a music track and some images slapped together just to make them videos. In a way, it’s untapped potential, because YouTube isn’t doing much to make it easier for users to share music that doesn’t necessarily have an (official) video attached to it.

Enter StreamDrag, a simple music search engine that draws its collection from YouTube’s massive database, although it’s not really transparent - or important - to the end user, who doesn’t see the video at all, he just listens to the song. Titles of songs such as “Tool - Sober (HQ Fullscreen)” can be a bit misleading, but it’s a minor point as long as you’re in it just to hear the music.

A nice option is the playlist; stack a bunch of tracks together and you’ve got yourself a party. This can be done in YouTube and other third party tools, but it’s extremely simple in StreamDrag; click on the “+” icon next to the song and it’s added to the playlist (to return to the search results, just click on “playlist” again). Everything else on the site is very straightforward: you’ve got play/pause, stop, rwd and ffwd buttons, as well as a repeat and sound on/off switches. I like it: by removing everything else and focusing on the music, StreamDrag is actually much more enjoyable (and faster) to use than many other similar services (including YouTube itself).

StreamDrag is a direct competitor to services such as Songza. The developer behind StreamDrag, David Lorenz, claims that the simplicity of his application is the key difference here, as well as some features that enhance the user experience such as looping a single track. I’m not convinced that this is enough to beat the competition, but I do admit that using StreamDrag could not be simpler, which is always a good thing.

Source:Mashable!

Yoono, the browser-based social aggregator, has announced a new release that includes features such as support for Internet Explorer, MySpace and imeem integration, and the biggest news of all, a shopping widget.

This new shopping widget for social aggregation will generate product recommendations and pricing comparisons based on the products displayed during a browsing session. The widget will work with some of the largest ecommerce sites such as eBay, Buy.com, Amazon.com and Shopping.com. While you search for products, Yoono will make recommendations for similar items with better pricing. These products can be bookmarked and shared with friends and purchased. The widget is scheduled to be released around Thanksgiving, just in time for the holiday season.

“This is a major change in the way the industry thinks about social aggregation,” said Pascal Josselin, CEO of Yoono. “We listened to our users and they want to do more than just watch and occasionally contribute to social networks. They want to have two-way interaction in a way that matches the things they are doing on the Web. With this launch we achieve more than watching the stream. We give users a way to get what they want, whether that is a conversation, a video, music or a new product.”

Yoono’s 1.8 millon users will now be able to connect to their friends on imeem and MySpace, in addition to those on Facebook, Flickr, FriendFeed, Twitter, Gmail, Piczo and several IM clients, all through a single sidebar. Yoono has also enhanced their User Interface to improve functionality.

The social aggregation space is extremely crowded with players like Friendfeed, Plaxo Pulse, Profilactic, socialthing and many more. By incorporating shopping cart technology and an intelligent recommendation system, Yoono might start a new trend. We might see others following suit if they are successful in their efforts to monetize social aggregation. In the long run, it wouldn’t be such a bad thing because everyone wins if this experiment works. We the users benefit from improved shopping experience, the vendors selling merchandise benefit from the sales as does the mediator, the social aggregator, in this case, Yoono. We shall soon find out.

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Gigya to Integrate MySpace and Facebook Friends

Tue, 09 Sep 2008 14:30:49 +0000

Source:Mashable!

Remember Bebo’s open media platform initiative? In short, it means that Bebo users can include premium music and video content in their profiles. At launch, Bebo had a long list of media partners, including BBC, Yahoo, Last.fm, MTV Networks, and ESPN.

Now, the partnership with ESPN is actually visible to users, who can access ESPN’s short videos, including highlights from sport events and short clips from ESPN original programming, through Bebo’s open media platform. The simplest way to find it is to go to this address: www.bebo.com/ESPNVideoSC; unfortunately it all works only if you’re located in the US.

Specifically, this content includes “SportsCenter Right Now, a twice-daily capsule of top sports stories, highlights and breaking news; clips from ESPN programs such as Mike and Mike in the Morning, Pardon the Interruption and Around the Horn; and breaking news and game clips from major professional and college teams and sporting events.”

It’s all nice and dandy, but I always have the feeling that users are being given scraps instead of the real thing: full shows, entire sporting events. This deal certainly won’t hurt Bebo’s Open Media Platform, but from the user’s perspective, it’s really not all that big of a deal.

Source:Mashable!

Gigya Socialize is a widget based connections service for your Web site. It turns any Web site into a social network just by installing the application. Gigya received a major infusion of funding earlier this year, and it seems they have been putting it to good use expanding the capabilities of their service.

Gigya Socialize has been said to be in direct competition with Google’s Friend Connect. That’s true, but it also goes up against MySpace Data Availability and Facebook Connect. Before this round of improvements to the service, it was fighting with one hand tied behind its back.

Now Gigya Socialize can come out swinging and let us know how it will stand up to the competition. It now calls to the API of both MySpace and Facebook. This means that not only can you add social sharing and social networking to your own Web site with the widget, you can integrate your friends lists from the two heavy hitters of the social networking sphere, MySpace and Facebook.

From Gigya regarding the new feature: “Users of sites that incorporate Gigya Socialize will be able to easily enjoy the social features of those sites in conjunction with their MySpace and Facebook friends, by explicitly approving the websites for third party access to their MySpace and Facebook friend lists.”

Being able to have more complete ways to share social graph data on your website, from more social networks, is a step in the right direction for distributed social data. Will Gigya take the place of my preferred OpenSocial? I’m not sure. A lot will depend on how the application affects load times for Web sites.

I like the idea of Gigya Socialize as a way to include your social networks in your site as a full experience. As with anything that involves a component where content is shared, I’m leery of ways it could be abused. In reading the Gigya Socialize EULA I found that while they do not specifically address the concerns of data ownership once data is socially shared by your network, they also don’t stake a claim on it, which is encouraging.

Gigya Socialize offers a few main components: Newsfeed, Invitations, Notifications and a Friend Selector. They also offer a generic Friend Graph API module that more advanced user can customize somewhat more to their needs. The most useful aspect aside from friend integration from multiple networks is the content sharing and being able to track friends.

Pulling in your friend data from MySpace and Facebook using the companies’ own API is a great step toward true social distribution. Gigya Socialize already worked within sites like Facebook as a type of application for sharing content, this is just the next logical step.

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Budding Social Shopper TurnTo Wants to Personalize the Web

Mon, 08 Sep 2008 16:37:53 +0000

Source:Mashable!

People often speak of old and new media as a dichotomy, with stodgy network television channels and traditional newspapers on the one hand, and hip, technologically sophisticated youth on the other. But recently, old media –- in particular, large television outlets -– have been catching on. A recent post on Mashable noted that CNN is using Twitter to interact with viewers. I commented that Fox News Channel is also using Twitter and Facebook. Many traditional newspapers, national and local, are also using Twitter and other social software to various degrees.

Because I use my Comcast Cable DVR to watch shows on delay about 75% of the time, I found myself this morning viewing a national news show and realizing that I couldn’t interact with the hosts via Twitter, because I was an hour too late. Show hosts asking viewers to “Twitter your comments” is clearly the modern version of “calling in with your questions for our guest.” The key question I asked myself was, as more television media master their new media brands, will we find ourselves more likely to tune into their shows in real time?

The financial consequence of not using DVRs, or downloading the shows from a third-party website, or other new options, is that more people watching the real-time version means more viewer share, which in turn means more advertising revenue. People are more likely to engage the show in real time and therefore more likely to see traditional commercials. I don’t know if the gurus at television networks or advertising firms they work with are thinking about it this way yet, but it seems like a truism to me.

So what might be a strategy going forward? As an avid watcher of television, particularly political news, complex dramas, and reality shows, I could imagine many scenarios in which incentives are created to watch shows in real time – viewers pose questions for the guest, guide alternative dramatic scenes, or decide what challenge the players have to perform. How cool would it be to watch Donald Trump, Sr. using Twitter on a BlackBerry in the middle of the live Apprentice finale? And the advertising underbelly is that you are statistically more likely to purchase paper towels, basketball sneakers, or a dream vacation cruise.

With the increasingly “long tail” of niche television channels, magazines, and similar outlets only becoming more prevalent, it might behoove the “blockbuster” organizations like NBC to become the leaders in “old new media” to win some of that viewer share back. This summer, the startup social network and search site Searchles inked a deal with the venerable Washington Post to create social networks among people with common reading interests. Why not similarly network all the people who voted for Clay Aiken, are fans of Gossip Girl, or hate The View?

Mark Drapeau is an Associate Research Fellow at the Center for Technology and National Security Policy in Washington, DC. These views are his own and not the official policy or position of any part of the U.S. Federal Government.

(Image via Flickr/ dailyinvention)

Source:Mashable!

One of many companies launching at DEMO this week is Say Where from DialDirections. Say Where hopes to make its mark by offering voice input locations and directions generated by speaking an address or city into an iPhone 3G. By doing this Say Where brings basic pre-programmed GPS destination functionality to the iPhone 3G.

If you have used any basic GPS system, you know that pre-programmed destinations are par for the course. There is a selection included in any GPS worth its salt of nearby gas stations, movie theaters, restaurants and other points of interest. The drawback to these is that they don’t change dynamically as businesses succeed or fail. They could be outdated at any moment without real time data feedback.

If you have an iPhone, you already have all of the real time Web-based destination information you could want. Coupled with the ability to get directions and mark your place with drop pin and bookmark, iPhone users already have more flexibility than this program appears to offer at first blush. If I had to choose between getting more reliable and up to date information from the iPhone Web interface, or possibly outdated pre-programmed information from Say Where, I’m going to have to choose the Internet until Say Where includes real data.

One of Say Where’s pitch points is voice capability. It’s nice to speak into the iPhone and get results, especially if you have trouble with the touch screen keyboarding. in the end, what good is convenience or cool software if it gives you potentially useless data? This is a good idea, but it needs more.

Perhaps I am judging this application too quickly and should be more excited about having access to data like nearby destinations, points of interest, recommendations and reviews with simple voice commands. Unfortunately, I just can’t seem to get excited about it. If it offered a way to get real time data and merge it with true GPS functionality, I’d be more excited. however, with the availability of the DASH GPS, I’m not seeing a need for Say Where right now, since DASH already does pretty much everything that I want in a real time, Internet connected GPS interface.

However, if the most you can say about your new iPhone App is that it uses voice commands and won’t cost users a phone call when retrieving the data they request, I’d recommend adding more features to really make it noteworthy. As it stands, when I want unbiased data on the iPhone 3G from voice commands I’ll just dial 1-800-GOOG-411 and either get the answer on the phone or have them SMS me. If I want similar functionality I can use programs like Nearby or Infospace. Meanwhile, if Say Where were to introduce real data instead of canned data, it would become ten times more useful.

Source:Mashable!

The objective for TurnTo, a New York-based startup introduced at DEMOfall 08 this week, is to enable your personalized Web browsing experience to supersede website borders. TurnTo’s intention is to spread itself to an ever-expanding set of partner sites. And that’s important to emphasize. Because anything short of something of popular or viral design will sweep TurnTo into irrelevance.

The concept is interesting. It’s been done before in various other forms; social shopping is something that has been around for many months already. Yet, Turnto’s implementation is light. Very light. The widget is quite nondescript. Nothing to install whatsoever. You just sign up, connect with your friends, and start browsing.

That second step, though, is a major one. The biggest hurdle of all. This goes as much for end users as for websites, too. Users need to engage people they know through invitations, which is rarely a fun process to trudge though. (The company lists LinkedIn, AOL Mail, Gmail, MSN/Hotmail, Yahoo Mail/Rocketmail, and .Mac as import options.) Oppositely, TurnTo lists sites such as Angara, Compsource, Teavana, and EarthWatch as participants in the launch. As you will immediately recognize, the starter group is infinitesimally small when sized up against the full spectrum of destinations it might inhabit in widget form. It will have to grow. A lot. (TurnTo tells Mashable that four more are under implementation, including three Internet retail 500 sites.)

Leaving aside the obstacles for adoption for a moment, once you do establish connections, it’s very simple to operate. Say you’re really into tea. Maybe you’re an artisan with herbs and leaves and spices and things. And your friends are, too. In that case, if you were to trek over to Teavana, you could share recommendations or learn from others about things they found appealing. This at once gives you a social element to your shopping experience in a particular spot on the Web. And it allows websites to provide that service without having to expend much effort in shaping their pages to cater to such demand, if it indeed exists amongst friends.

Again, TurnTo has a phenomenal task ahead if it is to make any sort of lasting impact - aside from very particular shoppers who aren’t eager to browse dozens, or even hundreds of websites in a given period of time. There’s no downplaying the significance of the scale of what TurnTo must achieve. Sure, if you’re a fan of Teavana, for instance, there you have it. You’re set. Mission complete. Realistically though, in order that TurnTo make its business a viable one (revenue is dependent on a purchase performance model), its grand dream needs to be substantiated to at least partial degree. It couldn’t sensibly have it all, of course. But it might gather enough steam. It’s a possibility.

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coComment’s Google Desktop Widget Makes Comments More Portable

Mon, 28 Jul 2008 14:30:04 +0000

Source:Mashable!

The world of commenting has seen a number of developments lately, from JS-Kit’s acquisition to socialbrowse’s latest expansion on its own commenting capabilities, all enabling comment creators to have greater control over comments. coComment, a prominent comment-tracking service, is adding a few upgrades to its own site for improved control as well.

Site owners can now automatically delete any unwanted comments based on words or phrases they don’t think are appropriate for their sites. The automation capabilities allow for a more effective management of user-generated site content, as managing comments on your own websites can become quite time consuming depending on volume. Coupling this with coComment’s new option of assigning multiple moderators gives yet another opportunity for the management of site comments to become more streamlined, depending on your needs as the site owner.

Perhaps an even more interesting aspect of coComment’s upgrades is a new Google Desktop widget that displays a user’s last active conversation, which includes a pop-up for comments. This gives users a remote way in which to interact with comments, and makes them a bit more mobile in terms of accessibility across the Web, as that user’s latest activity from any site in which they’ve got a participating comment will display on this widget. As users begin to expect more control and portability for their own data, any expansion on this widget will likely be greatly appreciated, especially as such widgets and remote accessibility could easily tie into the indirect marketing capabilities that we’re seeing within the comment-tracking space.

Combined with the rest of the coComment upgrades, including auto crawl of new posts and comments for Technorati top 100, RSS feeds and email notification of updated conversations, coComment users will be able to better keep track of their own activity as well as the activity of any content that may be of interest to them.

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