Webware

Cooliris picture viewer going socio-local with Liveshare

Cooliris, which originally made a whizzy plug-in for displaying images from the Web, is finally expanding beyond just making software that leeches on the install of other products (browsers) and is delivering an actual unique business. It feels like a small play to me, but it's focused and addresses a real opportunity.

The company is re-releasing Liveshare, a mobile, social, photo-sharing app designed for venues and events. The idea is that people at an event, like a concert, will use the app to snap pictures on their smartphones. Since the phones know their location and time, it's easy … Read more

Gravity knows what you like; soon advertisers will, too

Start-up Gravity is rolling out its ambitious advertising concepts at this week's Web 2.0 Summit.

The foundation of the company's pitch is quite simple: CEO Amit Kapur says Gravity knows what you like and what you want better than any search engine. That information, of course, is gold to advertisers.

How Gravity gets that data and the theories behind it are a bit more complex than the simple pitch. Gravity has created an ontology of interests. Underneath all the company's data-mining technology is a database of about 4,000 concepts that are connected to 7.5 … Read more

RockMelt browser is social, but not obnoxiously so

Is it worth switching to a new browser? Marc Andreessen never had to force users to ask that question when he built Mosaic in 1993. For most early adopters, it was their first browser.

But now he's backing the development of another browser, RockMelt. This browser is not perfect, but it does show that there's room yet in the market. If Facebook built a browser, it would probably look a lot like this.

This has been tried before. The other social Web browser, Flock, integrates Facebook features. Also, like Flock (at least the new 3.0 version), RockMelt is built from Chromium, the same Google-developed open toolkit underneath the Chrome browser.

RockMelt is solid effort and is worth trying. Here are some reasons you will probably like it; and, to be fair, some things that may turn you off:

Why you'll like it

It's a real social browser RockMelt shows which of your friends are online on Facebook, right in your browser. If you want to share something from the Web, you'll know who's going to see it right away. It makes sharing links and pages more engaging than using Twitter or even Facebook's site. (Downside: you can't scroll the left-hand "Facebar," which is sorted alphabetically, so unless you filter your friends by your RockMelt favorites, you'll always see your "A" friends on your list but you may never see your "Zs.")

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Intellitar avatars a poor substitute for afterlife

Of the products I've seen recently, Intellitar's Virtual Eternity is the most likely to make children cry.

It is a service, which recently released its beta, in which you create an AI-based animated avatar from a picture of yourself and the answers to a questionnaire. Why? So you can bequeath this cloud-based avatar to your descendants. They can then ask your avatar questions about your life, which it will answer by animating virtual lips on a picture of your real face, with a generic voice (unless you pay extra to have the service create a custom voice library … Read more

Backup service MiMedia leverages U.S. mail

Why would anyone want to be in the consumer data backup business? Even if you have a great, useful, cheap product, most people simply won't bother to use it. You might as well be selling dental floss. It's got to be depressing.

Erik Zamkoff runs a relative newcomer in this space, MiMedia. He likes selling dental floss. And he has two clever tricks to get more people to use his cloud backup service.

First, he takes the data and media his service's users upload and gives it back to them online in a nice, organized Web viewer … Read more

Bizzy has custom restaurant recommendations

Looking for a restaurant tonight? Start-up Bizzy says you cannot trust your friends, who have different tastes than you. Nor Google or Yelp, which are far too generic. Bizzy's better recommendation engine, CEO Gadi Shamia says, does a Netflix on your tastes, You tell it what you like, and it finds other places you're also likely to appreciate based on hidden signals in your data.

For example, if you like loud restaurants over quiet ones, or if your top criteria for a dining establishment is the attractiveness of the waitstaff, the Bizzy engine will return results that work … Read more

Blekko launches the biased search engine

You know how you always slow down to rubberneck when you pass a car wreck on the freeway? I'm that way with new search engines. I slow down, I look for the pool of blood, and then I resume my normal Google speed and forget the twisted metal in the rear-view. Previous wrecks include Cuil, Hakia, Powerset (wrapped into Bing), Clusty, and RedZ--each had a special trick, but they've all faded from memory, some after crashing in flames, some after making their founders rich. And some still plod along in the breakdown lane, while the real traffic … Read more

Xmarks CEO: Knight-in-shining-armor rescue likely

The public announcement last month that browser bookmark sync company Xmarks was out of money and options and preparing to shut down may be the thing that saves the service, even while the company itself ceases to exist.

CEO James Joaquin has been uncommonly forthright in his blog about the events, miscalculations, and market changes that led to the failure of the Xmarks business. He also told me he's been gratified and surprised by the serious interest he's been getting from potential acquirers now that the company has stated it has no independent future. Joaquin said in a … Read more

Tynt breaks copy and paste, but only if you let it

In late May, a John Gruber blog post on Daring Fireball titled, Tynt, the Copy/Paste Jerks, finally explained to me why pasting headlines into the spreadsheet of stories I want to talk about on Buzz Out Loud each morning had become a pain in the neck. Tynt makes a utility that lets publishers modify what's put onto a computer's clipboard when the user performs a copy action, breaking usual computer behavior and upending user expectations.

As an example of how Tynt "breaks" copy and paste, go to Wired.com and copy headline text from the site, for example, "Deep-Sea Vent Discovery Sets Hydrothermal Life's New Depth Record," what you'll get when you paste it is instead, this:

It's the extra two lines, a blank line and the "Read More" text, that annoys users like me who are trying to fill out spreadsheets or forms with headlines, and who want the source links elsewhere (off to the side, in my case). I know it sounds like a minor complaint, but as Gruber points out, "It's a bunch of user-hostile SEO BS...Everyone knows how copy and paste works. You select text. You copy. When you paste, what you get is exactly what you selected. The core product of the "copy/paste company" is a service that breaks copy and paste."

I agreed, and I put up a Twitter rant myself: "How to screw up cut-and-paste: http://bit.ly/cC34ok Daring Fireball on Tynt. Bonus: How to disable it."

My retweet of Gruber's post lead to a call from the Tynt marketing team, a meeting, and the eventual realization that the people at Tynt are not jerks, that they haven't broken the Internet, and that, in fact, they're sitting on a killer business model.

… Read more