Pages

Google co-founders rank 5th among richest Americans

Watch out Bill!

Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, each worth an estimated $18.5 billion, have joined the ranks of the top 10 richest people in the U.S., according to Forbes magazine's list of the 400 most wealthy Americans.

The 34-year-olds are tied for fifth place, behind Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who is worth $59 million; investment mogul Warren Buffett at $52 billion; casino and hotel magnate Sheldon Adelson at $28 billion; and Oracle Chief Executive Larry Ellison at $26 billion.

Only2Clicks does eye-friendly start pages

Only2Clicks is one of the few Web services I've seen lately whose name tells exactly what it does. The concept is pretty straightforward--set up your favorite Web sites, and the service will load them up in a grid, with photo thumbnails for each. You can add and remove any number of sites, and the thumbnails will be refreshed each time you reload the page. You can also re-organize the links with simple drag and drop. The idea is to set Only2Clicks as your start page, so you'll be able to quickly eyeball each site before figuring out where … Read more

Freewebs' Pagii.com: The return of the personal home page?

Remember when you were in junior high and the ultimate way to express yourself was to line the walls of your locker with photos and notes from friends and magazine clippings of every variety? Well, here's the digital-age version. Web page creation veteran Freewebs (more coverage here) has just launched a new site, Pagii (rhymes with "cagey"), which it's calling a "social publishing network." It's a drag-and-drop service that allows you to put photos, text, shapes, videos, and external widgets into a free-form, JavaScript-based page. The end result is something that's essentially … Read more

Netvibes goes mobile, for real this time

Single-page aggregator Netvibes quietly launched a mobile version of its site in February. It was a bit of a hack: If you created a "mobile" tab, then when you visited Netvibes from your mobile, the feeds you put in that tab would show up.

Today, Netvibes has gone to the next step with two new mobile sites. The lightweight mobile version of the site, m.netvibes.com, doesn't require any special tabs. On your mobile you can select any tab you've created on your desktop or laptop, and it displays almost everything, formatted for the small … Read more

Conduit improves its toolbar

Conduit makes a slick utility for creating browser toolbars. I covered the product back in April, and I had one main beef: Each toolbar you installed took up additional real estate in a browser. Conduit has just fixed that, and has added some other new features as well.

With today's release, when Conduit users add toolbars after the first one they have, each becomes an option on a drop-down item within the toolbar. Conduit is also releasing multitoolbar packs with preloaded combinations of toolbars. There's a Blogs pack (Webware is included in it) as well as Music, Sports, … Read more

PageOne PR hits the Inc 5000 list

I've written about PageOne PR (and its affable yet urbane founder, Lonn Johnston) before. Well, I'm glad to see that I'm not the only one that recognizes the work Lonn and crew have done for open-source companies (like mine - PageOne is the public relations firm for Alfresco, and also does work for SugarCRM, JasperSoft, Funambol, Atlassian, Black Duck, Cleversafe, Groundwork, Krugle, Linux Foundation, Lumen, MuleSource, Open Logic, Open X-change, Open Solutions Alliance, Sourceforge, and Untangle). Inc. Magazine has honored PageOne PR as one of the fastest-growing companies on the planet.

The reason I mention this is PageOne's reason given to Inc. as to why it's growing so fast: open source.… Read more

FreeWebs' Ajaxy site builder launches

FreeWebs has officially launched the WYSIWYG Site Builder tool we blogged about last month. In short, it lets anyone build a site without any knowledge of HTML, or having to refresh the page to see changes. The service soft-launched the tool early last week, and I took it for a spin this morning.

Site Builder emulates a desktop app, with a small floating tool bar, and context-sensitive menus that will serve up different actions depending on what tool you're using. For example, if you've inserted an image, the menu will give you options to align it with text, … Read more

The $500,000 guitar

Every time I read a guitar-porn article like yesterday's piece on Les Paul sunbursts in the L.A. Times, I'm reminded of the scene in Spinal Tap when Marty DiBirgi (Rob Reiner), the "documentary" maker, gets a guided tour of Nigel Tufnel's (Christopher Guest) guitar room. At one point, Marty notices a guitar that has never been played, and Nigel quickly shoos him away from it: "Don't touch it!...Don't point. It can't be played."

I'm sure these original sunbursts sound great, but I'd never know--I've never … Read more

TIBCO gets a little open source religion

TIBCO just released its PageBus publish-and-subscribe message bus as open source. And no wonder: the company is under assault from open source projects/vendors like MuleSource (whose EVP of Sales used to work for TIBCO - funny these Oedipal complexes we have in the open source world :-), Talend, etc.

PageBus goes hand-in-hand with the OpenAjax Alliance work that TIBCO has done. It's a good start for TIBCO, though shows that it's still guarding its crown jewels. Give it time. In the meantime, here's what PageBus does:… Read more