Kevin Krejci's Scrapbook

Jul 21

“In an ominous sign for Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurial machine, venture capital firms are cutting back on their investments in companies at their earliest stage of development and being forced to provide extra financing for later-stage companies that can’t leave the nest and go public.” Venture Financing Drops for Youngest Companies As Older Ones Suck Up More Cash - Bits - Technology - New York Times Blog

Jul 17

Cloud computing is a disruptive technology that threatens the existing software distribution and consumption model. It enables software to be sold as a service (SaaS). As a result many new services have spawned that use this distributed computing approach to offer everying from hosted applications, remote processing, tools, plug-ins, widgets, APIs and databases. This pay-as-you-go model eliminates big cash outlays for software, making it faster to deploy services, easier to integrate functionality and increase the speed to market. (via Cloud Computing & SaaS Strategy | WebGuild Event)

Corporate intranets are going social according to a report published by IBF. Many are incorporating social networking tools, blogs, favorites, presence information and network of friends features. (via Next Generation Corporate Intranets)

Jul 11

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. (via Odeo Giving It Another Go)

Jul 9

Planted on Earth Day 2008, EcoFlip.org is a local classifieds community for eco-friendly people. Our mission is to make online classifieds cleaner, greener and more fun for everyone. First time user? By providing a community-driven platform for the buying and recycling of green products and sustainable services, we continue to play a leading role in the evolution of a cleaner eco-system worldwide. (via EcoFlip: Local Green Classifieds for Green Products, Eco-Friendly Services, Fuel-Efficient Vehicles, Green Travel, Events, Green Living, Sustainable Community, Eco Personals, Eco Forums, Eco-Friendly Blogs and more)

Jul 8

“These days, social networks seem to be the place where people can track a person’s whereabouts, their latest accomplishments, or what they’re working on, to who they last engaged with. To that end, applying social network features inside a company may be a more effective and transparent way for employees to innovate. That’s the idea behind BrightIdea’s social network platform for the enterprise. “Large companies deploy our platform to stimulate innovation amongst their rank and file employees,” said Matt Greeley, CEO of BrightIdea, a white-label software company that brings social networking features inside the corporation.” BrightIdea - Socializing Innovation | AlwaysOn

Jul 7

Google Labs will soon become “more transparent in its interaction with end users,” R.J. Pittman, who heads Google’s consumer search operations, told Beet.TV earlier this week in this video interview. He also said the company is making a major commitment to expand and accelerate the rate of innovation of the Labs. (via Google Labs Set to Expand | AlwaysOn)

My Yahoo, the leading customized homepage provider, has finally rolled out its redesigned interface to all of its users. (via My Yahoo Rolls Out New Interface, Tries To Fend Off iGoogle)

Jul 6

Twitter is still far larger than its much younger competitor Friendfeed in aggregate terms. But an interesting trend is developing - many longtime Twitter users are noticing that the number of followers they have on Friendfeed is growing far more rapidly than on Twitter. And the conversations at Friendfeed are better, too. (via Friendfeed v. Twitter: Half The Followers In Five Months)

Jun 26

“Powerset never quite managed to launch with their natural language parsing search product. But they did give everyone a glimpse with a preview of search for Wikipedia. Not quite game-changing enough for Yahoo to buy or Amazon’s Jeff Bezos to invest in, but just enough to get Microsoft to pay $100 million. Which is considerably less what Team Redmond would have paid for Yahoo’s search business. Not bad for a company running on borrowed hopes and dreams. (By Intern Alaska, photo from Powerset)” Acquisitions: Microsoft buys Powerset search for 90 percent off Yahoo search list price

Xobni, the email startup that we’ve described as “The Superplugin for Outlook”, has partnered with LinkedIn to automatically pull contact information from the popular professional network. Xobni will now draw from public profiles on the LinkedIn network, displaying information about contacts’ employers, job titles, and pictures as part of the plugin’s sidebar. (via Xobni Gets Even Better With LinkedIn Data For Your Contacts)

Jun 25

Sun Microsystems CTO Greg Papadopoulos predicted that by the beginning of 2010 the majority of systems sold would be for Web, high performance computing and software-as-a-service applications. “We are going through this phase change in computing in a big way,” he said. Papadopoulos also advocated a free market in which all interfaces and formats are based on open standards; customers own their data, relationships, and metadata; and customers can extract, synchronize or purge their data unilaterally. This echoes recent efforts to promote openness and data portability. (via Cloud computing on the horizon | Outside the Lines - CNET News.com)

# When you watch a video on TV, you can’t do much with it… # But when you watch a video on Omnisio… the possibilities are endless (via Learn More | Omnisio)

Jun 24

“Animoto, the web application that allows users to quickly and easily create personalized, professional-quality videos from their own photos and music, is announcing their first commercial-use service called Animoto for Business.” Animoto Now Available For Commercial Use

$Jaxtr, the online VoIP service that also offers a social network, has launched out-of-network calling that will allow users to call phone lines around the world. The new service will allow users to call family and friends (even non-members) from their own phones for a fraction of the costs associated with traditional long distance calling. The company has also raised a $10 million Series B funding round led by Lehman Brothers Venture Partners. (via Jaxtr Finally Enables Out-of-Network Calling, Raises $10 Million)$ Jaxtr, the online VoIP service that also offers a social network, has launched out-of-network calling that will allow users to call phone lines around the world. The new service will allow users to call family and friends (even non-members) from their own phones for a fraction of the costs associated with traditional long distance calling. The company has also raised a $10 million Series B funding round led by Lehman Brothers Venture Partners. (via Jaxtr Finally Enables Out-of-Network Calling, Raises $10 Million)

Kevin Krejci's Scrapbook

A collection of artifacts I've found on the Web, about the Web.