Webware

MySpace started off as a hub for indie bands to connect with their fans. Now, with a new partnership with the IAC/InterActiveCorp-owned Citysearch, it's hoping to do the same for the likes of bars, clubs, and restaurants.

Called "MySpace Local," the new section on the News Corp.-owned MySpace will be rooted in existing listings from Citysearch (restricted to major U.S. cities) that are souped up with social features like the ones that you might see on a band or celebrity's MySpace page (photos, videos, comments, and the like). It's launching with just "restaurants," "bars," and "nightlife" categories, but will eventually expand--and it'll only be available to a select number of users this week before rolling out to the rest of MySpace's U.S. users.

"We're using the tools of new media to make the discovery as social and therefore as relevant as possible," said Jeff Berman, president of sales and marketing at MySpace, in a conference call on Tuesday. "The first thing you will see are ratings and reviews from your actual friends. When a reviewer is anonymous or unknown, it's hard to say whether you should care what they think."

Eventually, MySpace Local will highlight reviews from celebrities, "influencers," and power users with "street cred." There will also be new features like menus and possibly an online reservation tool.

This move will put MySpace in competition with fast-growing reviews site Yelp, which has been dealing with image and credibility issues recently but which has nevertheless been catching up to Citysearch in reach.

It'll also present more opportunities for local advertising. The social network has been courting small advertisers with a program called MyAds. But there will be big brand advertisers on MySpace Local, too, with Outback Steakhouse and Coors signing on for the launch.

Citysearch, which recently overhauled its site, also syndicates some of its content to AOL.

Berman said that research showed about 50 percent of active Citysearch users have MySpace profiles that they check at least once a month. "There is healthy overlap, but there is also a healthy new audience to be reached," he said.

This post was expanded at 10:54 a.m. PDT.

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.

A free Web site and hosting from Microsoft? It's true.

(Credit: Microsoft)

The words "free" and "Microsoft" don't often appear in the same sentence, so imagine my surprise at discovering this deal: a free custom domain name, free Web hosting, free e-mail accounts, and more.

As you might expect from the name, Microsoft Office Live Small Business has a decidedly business focus--but that doesn't mean you can't use it for a personal site.

The freebie account includes not only the domain (any available .com, .net, .org, or .info address), but also site-building tools, reporting tools, project and document managers, 100 e-mail addresses, and collaboration-minded online workspaces. You get 500MB of storage, too.

So what's the catch? There really isn't one, though the free domain hosting expires after one year. After that, it'll run you a very reasonable $14.95 annually.

Needless to say, this is a pretty nice offer for anyone looking to start a small business or just carve out a private corner of the Web.

Side deal: Amazon MP3 has Brit-pop star Lily Allen's second album, It's Not Me, It's You, on sale for just $3.99. iTunes price: $9.99.

One True Media, the parent company of an online video ad creator called SpotMixer, has announced a fresh $9 million in Series B venture funding. The round was led by DAG Ventures, with contributions from NTT Finance and existing investor Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

Amid widespread financial difficulties (to say the least) in the media business, SpotMixer and its new investors are pitching it as a cost-cutting option for small companies.

"While the market opportunity for video advertising remains well-defined, smaller businesses are more concerned than ever about how to most cost-effectively spend their limited advertising dollars," said DAG managing director Young Chung, who has joined One True Media's board of directors. "SpotMixer has quickly established itself as one of the most innovative and thoughtful solutions that will enable accelerated growth around this major advertising trend."

In conjunction, SpotMixer announced that it has been appointed the first official "authorized reseller" of Google's AdWords service for videos. This means that SpotMixer clients will be able to directly distribute their ads using Google's ad platform in addition to creating them online.

SpotMixer charges clients a minimum of $49 per month for access to its online tools, which are effectively a souped-up version of the many Web-based video "mixing" services out there. Then they can shoot them out across the Web with video embed codes or ad campaigns on the Web or cable TV.

Making the advertising process cheaper and easier is certainly a good pitch during a recession, but there's a flip side, too: Small companies with tightening budgets could easily opt to nix video ads altogether, sticking with the more familiar territory of text or display advertising. SpotMixer, on the other hand, maintains that video ads are more effective

Microsoft is making a series of changes to its Office Live Small Business service, offering some previously paid-for services free, while adding a new charge for domain name registration after the first year.

Domain name registration will continue to be free for the first year. But each subsequent year Microsoft will charge $14.95, though it will add the ability for so-called private registration, where customers can keep their personal information out of the public Whois database. Microsoft said that those who have already signed up for Office Live will continue to have their domain name registered for free "in perpetuity."

The company has about 600,000 subscribers for Office Live, which offers, among other things, free e-mail accounts and Web site creation and hosting. The service is tailored to the smallest of businesses that have neither an IT staff nor an outside technology consultant. Microsoft first announced plans for Office Live in November 2005 as part of its Live services push. The service launched in test form in February 2006 and dropped the beta tag in November 2006.

As part of the changes, Microsoft is consolidating its three separate service plans into one, while making all of the paid services an a la carte option.

Two services that had been paid--contact management and Intranet portal creation--will now be free.

Microsoft is also bulking up the ability to use Office Live sites to sell stuff, adding paid options for creating a storefront, selling items on eBay, and e-mail marketing.

"What we have been providing so far is a lot of basic IT services," said Baris Cetinok, director of product management and marketing for Office Live. "Now we are also making a bigger investment into digital marketing tools."

Microsoft recently renamed the service Office Live Small Business as it looks to use the Office Live brand for other products, including its Office Live Workspaces, an online document-sharing service.

With the new release, Microsoft is adding support for Firefox, specifically version 2.0, on both Macs and PCs.

The move comes as Yahoo made several changes to its small-business offering, including adding unlimited storage and transfer for its Web site hosting service. Of course, those products could become one at some point if Microsoft gets its way.

Per my previous rant on Web start-ups that lack a Big Idea, here's one I appreciate, since it's trying to solve a real problem: NetBooks. This company has built a Web-based suite of interconnected apps designed to run a small business.

It's a noble effort, because the small-business market is murder. It's not that there's a lack of customers, it's just that they are so hard to reach and so different from each other. Building a universal small-biz app is a tricky balancing act.

It looks to me like NetBooks might eventually pull it off, although I'd wait for a Version 2 before I'd recommend the service to my friends who run their own small businesses.

NetBooks: Not exciting, but useful.

In the functions and features department, NetBooks is off to a strong start. If your business fits into the NetBooks target space (product-based businesses, not consultancies), you'll find a rich collection of databases and business logic to manage customers, inventory, shipping, and bookkeeping. For my own demo, I worked a sales order through picking, shipping, and billing. The application correctly moved items from inventory, created shipping labels, an invoice, and so on.

But while CEO Ridgely Evers pitched me on NetBooks as a "complete business operating system," some core functions, such as payroll and e-mail list management, are handled through partnerships (PayCycle and Vertical Response, respectively). Integration with these critical functions seems to be lacking.

And while I'm a big proponent of Web-based applications for workgroups, in NetBooks' case the reliance on the Web doesn't do the application favors. While the architecture guarantees that everyone using it is working on the same data and can get to it from anywhere, the NetBooks UI is archaic: Screens are filled with tiny text and selection boxes, and many rely on drab and uniform tabs for additional info. Navigating from screen to screen is slow. This app needs a UI refresh.

Pretty much everything you need is on the NetBooks screens, but the UI could be more contemporary.

The big difference between NetBooks and QuickBooks Online Edition is that NetBooks is designed to serve all parts of a business, not just bookkeepers. There are lightweight CRM forms in NetBooks, for example.

The suite has only "hundreds" of customers so far, and it is evolving. Evers also told me NetBooks will soon add more features to help its users run a Web-based retail store, and that there will be a cash register (point of sale) module soon, too. However, he's not going to expand the product to serve non-product-based businesses any time soon.

The product costs $200 a month for eight users (you business' CPA, bookkeeper, and marketing professional; plus five others of your choosing). Additional users can be added for a fee. Telephone support from actual company employees is included; Evers says he doesn't appreciate the "deterrent support model" of requiring users to seek other users for support; or for obnoxious hold music that drives customers away.

NetBooks is not yet the killer Web-based office-data suite that Evers wants it to be, but it's a solid app that solves several small-business problems.

See also: NetSuite.

Who says magazines are dead? Not Fortune Small Business Magazine, Hearst Magazines, or Red Herring. And certainly not Olive Software, the Santa Clara, Calif., company responsible for creating the interactive digital twins of their print issues.

Fortune Small Business e-zine for November 2007

Like the best discoveries, I stepped into Olive Software's work by accident, while flipping through the digital leaves of Fortune Small Business Magazine. As a champion of downloadable and Web apps for consumers, I wouldn't normally seek out this kind of story, but the experience was too gratifying not to share. After all, would I hold back from you?

Click once and the magazine blooms in its self-contained online reader. Click again, this time on the right arrow, and the cover unfurls to reveal a faithful representation of the magazine's glossy, full-page interior, down to the shadowed hollow where the pages meet the binding. Flip through to read articles horizontally across multiple pages, each one adhering to the original layout, rather than dive-bombing into a vertical scroll that makes do with the Web's predilection for linear storytelling.... Read more

The midrange Web site design and hosting service SiteKreator (previous review) got an update recently. A new design theme called Aurora (available only to SiteKreator Power users for $39.95 a month), gives the Web manager a lot of design freedom while protecting him or her from egregious design errors.

Everything in the Aurora designs is integrated and color-matched, including art options: if you change your color scheme you get different choices for the image on your home page, as well as your typography selections. (Users of other plans, including the free version of SiteKreator, can still use SiteKreator templates, just not the new Aurora scheme.)

SiteKreator's interface is very capable, but its myriad tiny text buttons and pop-up entry fields may put off some people.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Other features include the au courant navigation elements that can slide down or fade in the forums and the blogs. There's also the capability to create tabbed or collapsible navigation in a subpage on the site.

SiteKreator is a solid Web design product, and these new features keep it current. But I find the editing scheme fiddly. It relies on tiny, floating, single letters to pull up editing menus, and creating or modifying many elements is done in text-based pop-up menus with minimal preview. For a visual site editor, it uses an awful lot of words. But if you can devote a bit of time to learning the site's single-letter menu anchors, you'll probably find you can build almost any type of business-focused site you could imagine. This is not a bad solution for small-business owners looking to set up an attractive, contemporary, and very functional Web site.

Outlook can do a lot, but you've got to do a lot to get it there. Very small businesses that aren't willing to invest the time or money in setting up a slick Outlook/Exchange installation can now get decent communication suites online. Previously I've covered Joyent (see also their limerick), and most recently I got pitched on HyperOffice, another online suite with email, a calendar, a contact manager, and collaboration features.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

I took the suite for a quick spin. It's got solid workgroup functionality and a lot of the collaboration features that small businesses will need. But it does not feel like a contemporary online product due to its old-school interface. (HyperOffice also has its own hosted replacement for Exchange, which is worth looking into for small business already comfortable with Outlook.)

At its core, HyperOffice is a communication suite, with a simple Web-based email application, a calendar, a contact list, and so on. It has a lot of workgroup features, like the capability to let users also overlay other calendars (such as the company event calendar) into their own.

There's more it can do for groups: It has a simple polling application (a very good feature, I think, for use in any company), a discussion forum, and a rudimentary Web site publishing tool for intranet sites. Also, everything that can be done in user accounts can be shared: Calendars, contacts, files, tasks, and links all exist in single-user and shared folders. There's no CRM application, though.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

When you drill into the suite you realize that some of its nice features are at odds with its bare-bones Web interface. For example, the file manager (and a similar bookmark manager) has the necessary group functions: Users can save files to their own personal directories or move them to group folders. Optional virtual hard drive software makes file access from Windows PC a snap. On the other hand, from the Web interface, there's no drag-and-drop file moving: you have to laboriously click through menus to do file operations.

In fact, in testing HyperOffice I quickly grew tired of its Web 1.0 interface. Annoyances popped up all over the site: The e-mail editor is text-only (although the intranet site creator has a WYSIWYG text editor). To create an appointment you have to click "add event," instead of just clicking on the day or time. In the bookmark manager, to add an image to a saved link, you have to point to a JPG -- an up-to-date app would make its own screenshot. If you want to move columns around on your start page, you have to go into a text menu, instead of just dragging them, as you can do on almost any modern start page. And so on.

On the other hand, HyperOffice does have a solid mobile device interface. Just log into it from a small-screen device (like a Treo), and you get a special, lightweight UI well-suited to a tiny device.

I'm trying not to become a slave to Web fashion, but HyperOffice's old-school interface slows down use of its basically strong feature set. Other Web-based collaboration tools, like Joyent and Microsoft's Office Live, have much better interfaces. The service is reasonably priced, though, at $6 to $9 a month per user.