Webware

SynthaSite, a San Francisco-based company that lets users build Web sites with minimal technical expertise required, has changed its name: it has ditched the corporate-sounding moniker for the more Web 2.0-ish Yola.

"The name SynthaSite has brought us to where we are today, but it won't take us where we want to go," CEO Vinny Lingham said in a release. "We're reaching a global market and need a name that is easy to say, resonates in any language, and captures the creativity and excitement that our users bring to their Web sites."

Yola, which targets individuals and small businesses, comes from the Hindi word for "hatch." It launched early last year and now says it has more than 1.5 million registered users. The name change won't affect any of them, the company said, and if their sites are hosted on SynthaSite subdomains, the URLs will not change.

While still SynthaSite, Yola launched a new user interface last summer and more recently raised a $20 million series B venture round from Reinet Fund.

After banning YouTube and other social Web sites on all overseas computers in May, citing bandwidth and security issues, the U.S. military on Tuesday launched an alternative video-sharing Web site for troops, their families, and supporters.

The new site is called TroopTube and has a look and function very much like YouTube, with one major difference: a Pentagon employee screens each video upload for taste, copyright violations, and national security issues.

Technically, you need to be a member of the U.S. Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force, Coast Guard, or National Guard to register with the site for uploading. However, there's no enforcing mechanism to make sure that's the case. There are also options to register as a family member or civilian friend.

TroopTube limits videos to 5 minutes in length and 20MB in size, as opposed to 10 minutes and 1024MB of YouTube. Unlike YouTube, you can't rate a video but just leave comments.

According to the Associated Press, TroopTube was built with the help of Delve Networks, a four-month-old start-up that builds advanced tools for approving, sorting, and managing videos.

Delve's technology automatically generates the video content into different file sizes to feed the viewer best depending on his or her Internet connection. This makes the site more bandwidth-friendly than YouTube and other movie sites. The company also creates a text transcript from the uploaded videos' sound tracks for better and more relevant search results.

If my eyes serve me right, you are gone.

If the news about bank collapses hasn't devastated you enough, I have another depressing one. This time it comes from the Internet, but is no less devastating for a good number of people, hopefully not including you.

As of Wednesday, if you go to the Web site of Digital Railroad you will be greeted with this:

To our valued Members and Partners:

We deeply regret to inform you that Digital Railroad (DRR) has shut down.

On October 15th we reported that the company had reduced its staff and was aggressively pursuing additional financing and/or a strategic partner. Unfortunately, those efforts were unsuccessful. Therefore Digital Railroad has been forced to close all operations.

Digital Railroad has attracted a loyal set of customers and partners, and we regret this unfortunate outcome. Without sufficient long-term financial support, the business had become unsustainable.

Thank you for allowing us to serve the photographic community these past few years.

The once popular Web site, where professional photographers archived and sold their photos, is now gone, completely. As it turned out, at about 5 p.m. EDT on Monday, the Web site alerted existing customers about the shutdown and gave them a 24-hour window to download their photo archive. However, just about 10 hours after the alert, the site was shut down completely.

It's unclear now if customers can still somehow retrieve their photo archive or will get money back for the undelivered services.

In the meantime, PhotoShelter is offering Digital Railroad customers a special offer--three month's credit for their Digital Railroad account. The offer is set to expire November 4.

Take the offer or not, but definitely take this as lesson that you can't rely 100 percent on online archiving services. It's best to keep a copy of your data offline as well.

No-brainer Web site creator Wix announced on Monday that it has raised $3.5 million in venture funding from Bessemer Venture Partners and Mangrove Venture Capital, and has also launched a "premium" version of the service geared toward businesses.

Wix's paid service, which costs $9.90 per month, follows a similar model to other Web publishing and productivity services that target small businesses: hosting and no ads. Allon Bloch, the company's co-CEO, said in a release that Wix's premium service will allow participating companies to cut down on the high costs of hiring a professional to design and build a site. "For the average small business, making a professional Web site is as complex and costly as it was in 1998," Bloch said. "I can't think of any other fundamental Internet technology that has changed so little in the last decade."

Wix, which focuses on easy creation of Flash-based sites, exited private beta in June. It's not the only company doing this--Synthasite and Weebly are two of its competitors.

The venture funding, which puts Wix's total capital at $8.5 million, will be used for further product development--as well as marketing, crucial for getting those paying users on board.

KBB's new Web site optimized for iPhone and iPod Touch.

(Credit: Dong Ngo/CNET Networks)

Kelley Blue Book (KBB), the popular Web site that rates and provides information on motor vehicles, launched on Wednesday its new version that's optimized for iPhone's display (both the original and the iPhone 3G). The new site also works with iPod Touch.

iPhone users now can easily access KBB's new and used vehicle information on their device anywhere they go. The site appears as a Web application that looks and feels very much like an independent application that you buy from Apple's Apps Store. In addition, iPhone users also have the ability to view the Web site's videos, images, new car reviews and can submit free dealer price quotes.

I tried out the site with my iPhone 3G and really liked the way it's organized. In many ways I thought it was even better than the regular full version KBB site that you access from a computer: very straight forward and there was no clutter. The new site responded fast with the 3G connection, when I turned off the 3G, it was slower, as expected, but still acceptable.

To access the new site, all you have to do is type www.kbb.com on the phone's Safari browser, and you will be directed to the optimized Web site automatically. You will also have the option of accessing the full version of the site on the phone.

This post was updated at 9 a.m. PDT with clarifying details on GasBuddy.com's data source and the correct spelling on Milt Krantz' name.

Perhaps you heard Wednesday's news about the price of crude oil once again reaching all-time highs, and, like me, you're wondering how that's going to affect gas prices at the pump as you fill up for your Memorial Day weekend trip.

Rest assured, you've got the likes of Milt Krantz on your side.

Krantz, 71, a retired social worker from San Jose, Calif., is also a designated gas price spotter for GasBuddy.com, one of a handful of increasingly busy sites for finding cheap gas in your vicinity.

"It's a little something I can do about the price of gas," said Krantz, adding that the payoff for his efforts is the feeling that consumers are working together to make a difference. "We're in it together."

And what a difference such information can make: In San Francisco on Tuesday, for example, the price of a gallon of regular gasoline ranged from $3.86 to $4.53, depending upon location, according to Gas.Buddy.com's regional site SanFranGasPrices.com. That's a 67-cent difference, or $10.05, when filling a 15-gallon tank.

That potential savings, combined with the scary sound of $4-a-gallon gas, has been driving up traffic to such sites.

"For about the last 60 days, we've seen a nice steady ramp up," said Brad Proctor, founder of GasPriceWatch.com, which offers price data from about 130,000 gas stations.

The results of a search on MapQuest Gas Prices using CNET's San Francisco ZIP code.

(Credit: MapQuest)

GasBuddy.com, which serves as an umbrella site for 180 regionalized sites covering some 170,000 gas stations in the U.S. and Canada, has seen more of a steady climb in traffic, said co-founder Jason Toews. When we last talked to Toews in 2005--as gas prices were hitting a then-shocking $3 per gallon--GasBuddy was averaging about 700,000 to 800,000 unique visitors a day. Now it gets about 2 million visitors a day, he said.

Of course, gas price sites vary greatly in terms of format, functionality, and info-gathering methodology. GasBuddy.com and GasPriceWatch.com, both 8-year-old sites, rely on their networks of registered members/spotters, but also factor in information from retailers and other sources. GasBuddy has some 1.4 million member/spotters and GasPriceWatch has about 166,000. And both have arrangements to share their data with other media outlets

Spotters are community members who are usually offered incentive points or a chance to win a "thank you" prize such as a discount on gas. But for Krantz, who uploads prices at least once a week, the motivation is more the idea of exposing the stations that are gouging consumers and rewarding the ones that are not.

"People still want to think they have a little power with their dollar," added Proctor.

AAA's Gas Price Finder, unlike the other two sites, uses data derived primarily from credit card transactions. And MapQuest Gas Prices and MSN Gas Prices rely on data supplied by the Oil Price Information Service, a pricing database that collects information from 125,000 North American retail outlets.

It should be noted that new technologies have changed the way consumers are accessing information from the gas price sites. Some, like me, are still looking at the sites on their PCs. But other gadgeteers are getting such information through in-car GPS systems, text messaging, and smartphone applications.

As far as tools go, GasBuddy.com has one of the coolest in what it calls its Gas Temperature Map, an interactive display of gas prices around the country, with areas color-coded according to their average price for regular unleaded gasoline. Through the map, and with a little guidance from Toews, I learned Tuesday the lowest gas price in the country was found in Rapid City, S.D., at $3.38 per gallon, and the highest was in Beaver Island, Mich., at $5.19 per gallon.

"In 2000, I never would have thought gas prices would be this high. It doesn't surprise me anymore," Toews said. "We've gotten desensitized to the high prices." Nonetheless, he does expect activity on his site to be brisk before the three-day weekend.

Toews offered a closing hint for bargain shoppers. Look for Arco service stations, which don't accept credit cards and therefore can offer cheaper prices.

GasBuddy.com's Gas Temperature Map is an interactive display of gas prices around the country, with areas color-coded according to their average price for regular unleaded gasoline.

(Credit: GasBuddy.com)

In September I reviewed Zinadoo, a free service for creating mobile Web sites with a ".mobi" domain. Zinadoo, and now MoFuse, which joined the mobile Web site creation space last week, give individuals and companies a chance to put their wares in a format that will render well from the mobile phone each and every time, from any browser.

So the question is: which service serves you better? The bird's-eye answer is that they both purpose WYSIWYG editors to make site creation painless. They've both worked well, every time. Zinadoo is much more bubbly, graphics-rich, and a touch more gratifying to use.

Zinadoo's bright WYSIWYG site design page is also well-designed

(Credit: CNET Networks)

MoFuse differentiates itself by emphasizing content through feeds; it wants to be the ".mobi" location of your ".com" site, particularly your blog. MoFuse populates the bulk of your mofuse.mobi site with that feed, though you can create static content and more capability is in the works. In many ways MoFuse caters more elaborately to users, who can add quickly widgets and redirect codes where serviceable to promote their mobile site. Customized ".mobi" domain names are also free with MoFuse, in contrast with Zinadoo, which charges 18 euros a year to drop the ".zinadoo" suffix from the URL. Zinadoo also sells text messaging credits. For the time being, MoFuse has shunned all premium services.

That's not to say it's shunned a business plan. Users can place ads from either the AdMob or Google AdSense with MoFuse's revenue sharing program; gains split straight down the middle. Zinadoo also places ads, but doesn't announce a revenue-sharing program.

While there are limitations to both sites in terms of interaction and universal click-to-call capability, MoFuse strikes me as a more practical and user-friendly site for the current clime, particularly for individual bloggers. Zinadoo, however, is better suited to create original content that's exclusively mobile.

A blog feed rendered through MoFuse

(Credit: CNET Networks)

My Zinadoo mobile app

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Zinadoo promises to create a home for you on the Web; a site of your own devising that will be accessible to your friends and jealous frenemies from any device. I'd yawn if not for the fact that Zinadoo, like so many other Webutainment or social networking sites, offers an engaging activity with good usability that really delivers.

Zinadoo.com's WYSIWYG authoring interface

Register a site name and it's smooth sailing to a four-part WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) site creator that's built with Adobe Flash Player. File controls that add another Web page, upload an image, and so on live on the left sidebar. It's also one point for publishing. You type your Web content directly into a large rectangular authoring field, and play with text formatting and hyperlinks from the nearby options menu. Click a button to preview the fledgling site on an emulator, and another to generate your site's URL (here's mine.)

Editing is as easy as logging in and typing over what you wrote, then republishing. The hardest part of the process is supplying the content.

Then you name your site, give it a description and tags, and start sharing by way of e-mail, text message, or publishing to MySpace.... Read more

Josh and I just spent the better part of two days finding e-mail contacts for the products that were nominated for the Webware 100 awards. Many nominations came from people not affiliated with the companies that made these products. Fans, in other words.

To these fans, I say, thanks for taking the time to nominate the products you like. But to nearly all companies that have the fans, I blow loud and wet raspberries in your general direction. Do you have any idea how freaking hard it was to find contact information for you?

In far too many cases, there was no e-mail address on company Web sites. Several companies did offer e-mail forms, which is a half-measure. But what's so bad about listing an e-mail address for a CEO? Spam stopped being a problem about two years ago. And, Mr. or Ms. CEO, if you can't figure out how to use one of the good off-the-shelf antispam products out there, at least make sure one of your PR lackeys has their e-mail address (a real address, not an "info@company.com" cop-out) posted on the site. You're paying them to be in touch, right?

Of the companies that I checked, only one (Fotki) actually had a linked e-mail for the CEO on the site. A few others--I could count them on my fingers--had e-mails, but unlinked, in the old-school antispam way: "My e-mail is Joe-the-CEO at companyname dot com."

Dear people who want to strike it rich on the Internets: get a clue. Business is personal. And if you actually want to do some business, maybe you should make it just a little bit easier for your customers (and journalists) to communicate with you.

Yours sincerely,
- rafe@cnet.com

P.S.: I know Webware's "about" page doesn't have e-mails listed on it. That will change.

Voting on the Webware 100 will start at noon Pacific Time on Wednesday, May 23.