ReadWriteWeb

In a quick succession of announcements, Amazon released a set of hosted e-commerce payment services, as well as an update to its Mechanical Turk service. The payment service, Checkout by Amazon, will allow online retailers to use Amazon's one-click checkout system, calculate shipping costs and tax, as well as allow their customers to track shipments. The updates to the Mechanical Turk are mostly meant to streamline the creation of new tasks by guiding businesses through the process more efficiently.

In May, we discussed many different ways that social media could be used for social change. One company that has been using the medium for doing social good is SocialVibe. In the past, we described this company as "an online popularity contest that turns corporate advertising into money for charity." With SocialVibe, you get to choose a brand to endorse, which earns you both brand perks and points. The points are then turned into funds for the charitable cause of your choice. The situation is somewhat of a win-win - companies get valuable social media promotion and individuals get to raise money for charity. The only question was whether or not the idea would work. Apparently, it does: SocialVibe is announcing that they've now raised more than $100,000 for charitable causes.

The selection process for DEMOfall 08 (RWW is a media partner) is coming to a close and Chris Shipley has been blogging her thoughts about it. She's identified a number of trends in the 'class of DEMOfall 2008', one of which is this claim: the Web 2.0 cycle has come to a close. She also makes a case for an end to the 'free' model for web businesses.

I'm not sure that I buy either argument.

Online reputation company Rapleaf has released a new study of 49.3 million people, revealing gender and age data about social network users. On most of the main social networks - including MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, Hi5 - women outnumber men by a considerable amount. On Facebook, the 18-24 age group is largest, with 1,685,029 women in that age group compared to 977,753 men. In MySpace, the same age group dominates, with 7,091,214 women and 5,226,788 men.

I'm a big fan of Japanese writer Haruki Murakami. The genius of Murakami is in his discipline, focus and determination. I see him as a virtual Zen master - an embodiment of wisdom, passion, skills and exceptional will. The elements of his work and life story are inspirational and (here's where ReadWriteWeb comes in) particularly applicable when you're running a startup. Therefore in this post, we take a look at what modern technology startups can learn from this Japanese literary master.

Cuil did it by the start-up text book - stealth mode to big launch and then massive PR. That gets the early adopters buzzing and then its off to the races. That works beautifully when the start-up is actually creating a new market. Twitter is a brilliant example (leaving out tech issues and monetization, Twitter has to be one of the best examples of rapid market adoption). However this does not work well when it is a mature market. It is hard to see why so experienced a team at Cuil would have made such a fundamental strategic error.

Unfortunately for Cuil, this could be a great opportunity for Yahoo BOSS (Build Your Own Search Service) to shine.

Windows Live Mesh, Microsoft's new S+S (software plus services) platform for data synchronization has received a lot of attention this month. First, it opened up its private beta to all of the U.S. (and others who were willing to edit their regional settings), next they released their mobile version, and then the Mac version was unearthed by  LiveSide. However, after LiveSide published their blog post, Microsoft took down the link to the Mac version that they had uncovered. But today, the Mac version has been officially released.

The Google Maps team today rolled out yet another update. This time, they have decided to simplify the layout by putting more focus on the search form and taking away the tabs underneath it. Thanks to this update, the maps on the page get a bit more screen-estate and searching for directions has become a bit easier as well. This update comes just a few weeks after Google Maps added walking directions to its feature set.

Social bookmarking has become a pretty standard activity these days, with the likes of Mento, Delicious, Mister Wong, Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon offering numerous variations on this theme. Browzmi is taking a different approach from these services by focusing on real-time, collaborative web browsing and bookmarking, with chat being one of its main features. What is especially noteworthy is that Browzmi is not an extension, but basically a browser in a browser.

Browzmi was founded by Travis Parsons in 2006 and is currently being developed by a five person team. Browzmi has not taken any venture funding yet. Registration for Browzmi is open.

Microsoft today unveiled video footage of an exercise called the Mojave Experiment, where unwitting Windows users were tricked into watching a Vista demo while told it was something else. The experiment's subjects were all people who had a negative impression of Vista but no personal experience with it. One short demo later almost all of them reported a far more favorable impression of the operating system "Mojave" than they held of Vista.

The videos are reminiscent of the infamous Milgram Experiment, where Stanford researcher Stanley Milgram fooled subjects into believing that a fake situation was actually real. That experiment has been the subject of decades of ethics debates - Microsoft's Mojave was just creepy. Note: Several readers have responded in comments saying that this is not a legitimate comparison to draw. We will take your thoughts into consideration before drawing wild comparisons between tech marketing campaigns and arguably egregious violations of individual rights in the future. :)