Last night Amazon announced the limited beta launch of the newest in its growing family of web services, SimpleDB.
Amazon's latest service brings the cloud computing power of EC2 to the database storage of S3. Where S3 only allows you to write, read or delete files, SimpleDB lets you run some calculations on your data.
Microsoft launched two new contests today at its UltimateSteal site (the ultimate steal is getting Office for $60 as a student).
The UltimateSteal Sweepstakes, both The Ultimate College Idol and the Ultimate College All Nighter, are (ultimately) all about people singing or talking behind avatars they design using the Voki avatar generation experience.
YouTube has begun experimenting with a visualization of related videos that's a poor knock-off of the Digg Swarm visualization tool.
NewTeeVee says it's more fun than Digg Swarm but I think it's less useful and actually a bit nauseating to watch. (Update: By the end of the day, it's actually much improved.)
The official Google blog has a post tonight about a new project that's in closed, private beta.
The program is called Knols, or "units of knowledge." Knols participants will write reference pages on any topic, using a Google content creation tool apparently in the works, and those pages will be highlighted in Google search results. Authors will choose whether they want ads to appear and will receive a "substantial revenue share."
A tipster informed us today that online storage solution Omnidrive has been having technical difficulties; and that the CTO has just left the company.
Omnidrive's forums, both the official one and the Tangler one, are filled with messages complaining that the service is up and down - messages which the company doesn't appear to be responding to.
Earlier this week we announced our Best BigCo of 2007, Facebook. In this post we're announcing our pick for Best LittleCo. We're also asking for your nominations for Most Promising Web Company for 2008.
These picks are something we do every year, this being the 4th year. Last year's Best LittleCo was YouTube, with Sharpcast selected as Most Promising. In 2005 37Signals was Best LittleCo and Memeorandum (now Techmeme) and Digg were joint Most Promising. In 2004 Ludicorp, creators of Flickr, was Best LittleCo and Feedburner was named Most Promising.
Users with a pro account at Flickr are now able to view a variety of interesting statistics about the viewers of their photos. Heather Champ said in a post on the Flickr blog this morning that the stats are intended to "give you all sorts of insight into how people arrive at your photos."
Fox Interactive announced today that it has a deal with Sprint to offer one-click access to the new MySpace Mobile portal when it launches early next year. Sprint and Fox have had a mobile relationship since before mobile meant much, in fact. This could be a sneeze turned into a press release, but it's also a good opportunity to examine carrier-based mobile content deals vs. open social networking on mobile.
Yahoo! has released a new plugin for Wordpress that adds its "Shortcuts" search popups to blog content. Shortcuts are informational popups that operate similarly to Snap's SnapShots and AdaptiveBlue's SmartLinks. The key difference is that Yahoo!'s implementation is seeded with Yahoo! content.
I'm getting this feeling of deja vu... haven't we been through all this before? Today Opera filed an antitrust complaint with the European Union against Microsoft. According to Opera, the makers of an alternative web browser, Microsoft is using its dominant position to unfairly influence the web browser market by bundling Internet Explorer with Windows and by "not following accepted Web standards," which Opera says causes developers to create web pages specifically for IE that break in other browsers -- and thus lowers the incentive for users to switch.
The solution? Opera wants the EU to force Microsoft to stop bundling IE, or to bundle other browsers with the OS (i.e., Opera). They also request that the EU make Microsoft follow "fundamental and open Web standards accepted by the Web-authoring communities."
