Video site Hulu announced on Monday that it will stream President Barack Obama's first formal press conference Monday night at 5 p.m. PST. According to the company, the live stream will run until its conclusion and then it will be made available for streaming on the site thereafter.
Blogger Brandon Kraft says he found a new feature in the Google Apps version of Google Calendar. According to Kraft, users can now attach files from Google Docs and photos from Google's Picasa to any event in the calendar. Google has yet to comment on the find.
OneSpot, a company that offers widgets for Web site owners that contain relevant news articles from across the Web, announced Monday that it has raised $4.2 million in a Series A round of funding that was led by Silver Creek Ventures. According to the company, it plans to use the funding to "expand the reach of its subscription-based Web service" and increase its ad monetization.
7 Billion People, a company that offers Web analytics data to Web publishers, announced Monday that it raised $3 million in a round of funding that was led by SmithCo Investments. According to the company, it will use its funding to bolster its sales and marketing departments and focus on revenue generation.
Desktop blog editor, ScribeFire, has partnered with Zemanta, a content discovery tool, in the latest version of the software, Mashable is reporting. According to the report, Zemanta can be opened from the ScribeFire toolbar and offers recommendations for related articles as the blog post is being created. It also allows registered users to add favorite sources to make it more personalized. The new ScribeFire is available now.
If you don't have content to populate your site, OneSpot has some for you. The Austin-based start-up joins a host of other companies in the business of delivering contextual links for publishers. OneSpot CEO Matt Cohen makes the claim that OneSpot "democratizes vertical or affinity publishing, helping anyone find, select, and deliver links to the best content on the Web."
OneSpot sifts through more than 200,000 RSS feeds to make content selections. Users provide the system with a set of sample sites, and OneSpot identifies related feeds, looking at link overlaps, Cohen told me. The selected content can be delivered via Web pages, widgets or through e-mail newsletters. For example, OneSpot can supply a retailer with relevant content links for a newsletter to customers.
An optional edit interface allows editors to curate the content, blocking or approving different feeds and pieces of content.
In addition, OneSpot offers its customers Digg-style ratings and discussion pages. Fees are based on the number of topics, page views, or e-mails, Cohen said.
OneSpot currently has less than 20 customers. For example,TheRoot, a Washington Post site for African-Americans, uses OneSpot to fill out the site with a relevant content feed.
TheRoot pulls stories from around 9,000 feeds crawled by OneSpot to surface on its news page. Every story has its own detail page and a permanent URL optimized for search engines.
OneSpot has many competitors that offer some form of contextual content aggregation. They include memetrackers, such Techmeme, Reddit, and Blogrunner; keyword-oriented and linguistic analysis-based services that provide related content such as Sphere, Inform, and Smartbrief; and feed aggregators such as NewsGator and Netvibes.
Cohen believes that the link structure approach, similar to what Google does for search, to selecting sources and content provides the best results. But the choice of content aggregation service will depend on what a publisher wants to accomplish. Other services could be better at finding timely content related to a particular article, rather than for a topic area. OneSpot is currently angel funded, and plans to raise an A series round this summer, Cohen said.
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