Web 2.0

Don't want to pay the freight for Webex, Breeze, or another remote presentation tool? Try Vyew, a browser-based conferencing system.

Vyew makes short work of sharing images or PowerPoint files. It's also easy to snap a screenshot and share that, or even set up live screen sharing, although the screen updates are a lot choppier than with a software-based presentation tool. Users can chat during a presentation or mark up the screens they're viewing, in real time.

You can also share a Yahoo map in realtime (as you pan and zoom around it), and create a photo … Read more

Two guys with some time on their hands have created a tool that might just become a Visio-killer. Gliffy is a free diagramming tool that works entirely in your browser.

Like other online applications, it has inherent advantages over traditional software. Collaboration is easier, for one. Although Gliffy doesn't offer real-time group editing like Writely, Google Spreadsheets, or SynchroEdit, it makes it easy for multiple users to work on a diagram in turns. Gliffy does track all changes made to a document. It's kind of like a wiki in that way.

Gliffy also makes it easy to … Read more

Dabble DB said that its namesake hosted database and spreadsheet is available to the public on Tuesday. It also said that Ventures West has financed its first round for an undisclosed sum.

According to the four-person, Vancouver-based company, Dabble DB is designed for quickly building intranet applications by combining a Web database and group spreadsheet.

Calling itself an "enterprise 2.0" company, Dabble DB is designed to be easy to use for end users, but suitable to be deployed at large and small businesses, according to the company.

The company has set up a tiered monthly pricing program … Read more

If you ever fly from Seattle or Boston, definitely check out Farecast, which went into public beta today (see previous blog post). The service tells you when to buy your airline tickets based on analysis of prices over time. For example, if you want to go from Seattle to San Francisco on July 12, buy today -- prices are only going up.

Hopefully the service will add more cities soon. My big hope, of course, is that the airlines will adopt less Byzantine pricing structures. But until they do, Farecast's algorithms can at least give you a fighting chance … Read more

There are several companies now with interesting twists on saving and using location data. From the Where 2.0 conference two weeks ago, I covered a few of them. Shortly afterwards, I talked to the founders of Flagr, another location tagging site.

Flagr is a platform for building communities using location data. Like Dodgeball (acquired by Google) and Socialight, it's targeted at young people, and it has a mobile component.

Currently, the site is oriented around tagging locations (e.g., "pizza"), and making it easy to find the tags. The next release, which will hopefully hit the … Read more

Hey, buddy, wanna buy a cheap wireless router? Head over to Fon and nab the Linksys WRT54GLs they're selling for just $5.00. Is there a catch? Sure, there's a catch. But it's not a bad deal all the same.

Fon is a growing network of people who use WiFi to share their broadband connections. If you join the network and put your connection on the network, then any other Fon member can use your WiFi, and you can use theirs too, free of charge. And that's where the cheapo routers come in: You need special … Read more

Go to any tech company today and you'll hear the same complaint: it's impossible to find good talent. Whenever a Fortune 500 company needs a new CEO, some analyst will invariably suggest that they need "a Lou Gerstner type."

But guys like Gerstner, a humble blacksmith's assistant who pulled the sword from a stone to become IBM's CEO, are pretty rare. And so are half-way decent directors of biz dev for that matter.

ZoomInfo has devised a search engine to ferret out job candidate, even if they aren't looking for a job. Subscribers … Read more

Curse you, Flickr! You and your silly e-less name became cool, and now evry othr Web 2.0 startup has lopped the e-before-r out of their names. Here are 37 examples, courtesy Coolzor.

See also La Disparition, Georges Perec's e-less French novel, which was staggeringly translated into English while maintaining the lipogram. Still not enough? Try Ernest Vincent Wright's 1939 Gadsby.

Bruce Spector was part of the team that wrote WebCal, which Yahoo acquired in 1998 and re-made into Yahoo Calendar. Now, eight years later, he's working on another Web-based calendar.

The upcoming service, LifeIO seems to be get it that real humans don't always want to segregate their data into "calendar," "to-do," and other items -- we mix and mashup our own life data on the fly, as it suits us. Bruce's company, the modestly named ATTAP (All Things To All People), is focused on collecting users' interests, and then putting that data … Read more