St. Patrick's Day is a popular day for "celebrations" and realizing that, Boost Mobile has those who want to party covered. According to the company, it will offer the #TAXI feature on all Boost Mobile phones free of charge on St. Patrick's Day. Upon dialing #-8-2-9-4, Boost Mobile users will be connected automatically to the first available cab company in their area. The feature will work in over 2,000 Boost Mobile network coverage areas. The service will only be free Tuesday.
Mint.com, an online personal finance service, announced Monday that it added its 1 millionth user Sunday. According to the company, it was able to add 1 million users in just 18 months, making it the first personal finance service to add that many users in the period. Mint is now tracking over $50 billion in transactions and $15 billion in assets.
Visual search company, Quintura, announced Monday that it has secured context-based search visualization patents to ensure it has the most "interactive" search service on the Web. The company hopes that it will be the competitive advantage it needs going forward.
TweetDeck, a desktop Twitter app, has launched version 0.24, which includes "the first elements of Facebook integration." According to the company, users will be able to see friend status updates, which are updated automatically each month and they will also be able to post messages to Twitter or Facebook within the Tweet window. The release isn't available for everyone, but it will be rolled out once it's tested. So far, there is no timetable for that release.
People search site, 123people, has expanded into new markets, including Switzerland, France, and Spain. It's now also available in six languages, including, English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, and Catalan. The new versions of the site are available now.
Yasni, a people search site that was originally only available to European visitors, announced Thursday that it's launched a U.S. version of the site. The move is in step with competitor, 123people, which recently brought its service to the U.S.
According to the Yasni, the U.S. version of its site will allow visitors to search for people across the globe, provided information exists on the Web, and will scrape links, images, social networking profiles, blogs, news results, and videos to find the desired person. Yasni believes that information is what users covet most.
"We run an extensive global people search resource, and have gathered a lot of public data about what people look for and how they act on that information," Yasni founder and CEO, Steffen Ruehl said in a statement.
In an attempt to be more than a search site, Yasni also features a VIP Rank, which ranks each registered user based on the amount of search data available on them. And for those who search for a person and Yasni fails to deliver any results, the company has added a "missing person" ad tool to enlist the help of others to find those people who couldn't be located through the service.
Whether or not Yasni can be a success in the U.S. remains in doubt. The site doesn't deliver the sheer number of results that can be found through 123people, but suffers from the same issues as its competitor: searching for someone with a common name like "John Smith" makes the site practically useless. And when examining the viability of a people search site, it's impossible to lose sight of privacy concerns and the company's ability to attract advertisers.
Yasni's U.S. site is now live. Registration is not required to search, but creating an account is required for users who want access to the additional features.
123people, a service that collects information available on the Web about people from sources like Flickr, Google, and Facebook, announced that it has started operating in the United States. Previous to the announcement, 123people was only available in Europe as it was working the kinks out in its beta.
"After months of private beta, tweaking, and adding new features to improve the high-powered people search, 123people launches to the U.S. public," a company representative wrote in a blog post. "Now anyone can search for everyone they want to know."
123people, which competes with other people-finding services like Wink and Spock, features a relatively simple start page--a single search box that asks you to input a person's first and last name--but a results page that offers a slew of information that it gathers from sources across the Web.
The service gathers phone numbers, e-mail addresses, Google search results, pictures from Google images and Flickr, Facebook profiles, videos, news results, and even blogs to give the person searching a glimpse into all the information that can be collected about a particular person on the Internet. Along with the ability to find phone numbers, 123people includes a link next to each number allowing visitors to call the person using the online telephony service JaJah.
123people hopes to become a valuable resource for people trying to find individuals, but it suffers from a major drawback: finding people isn't so easy. The site will work extremely well for uncommon names, but searching for "John Smith" will yield too many results to make it useful unless the user knows who they're looking for. And chances are, if they already know the person, they probably won't find any reason to use the site.
Regardless, 123people has enjoyed some success in Europe and now that it's in the U.S., it hopes for similar results. The site is now open to all visitors and doesn't require registration.
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