Danish startup Zendesk is a SaaS delivered help desk solution that provides a backend service for small to medium sized help desks. It's been designed from the ground up as a pure play help desk solution and so it has features specifically for this use.
Like other SaaS offerings, Zendesk offers significant cost savings when compared to its more traditional installed competitors.
The arrival of the App Store has brought a number of rivaling news applications to the iPhone and iPod touch as well. The most prominent entrants into the market are the New York Times, the Associated Press, and Bloomberg. While all of the applications are worthwhile for a certain subset of users, we can't help but feel that often the mobile websites of these organizations are actually more useful and fully featured than the native applications.
Web instant messaging platform Meebo is announcing tonight that the company is working on a huge plan to power instant messaging on second tier social networks all around the web. While MySpace and Facebook have their own IM already, nine other social networks with respectable traffic are scheduled to add Meebo IM to their services this fall.
It's standards based, it will bring real-time "presence" to social networks unable to invest the resources to build out the feature for themselves and it sounds like a very good idea. None the less, we do have some concerns about how much social graph, user activity and advertising data Meebo is about to get its hands on.
Gmail, Google's powerful web based email service, announced some changes to its contact management features today. Contact management has for some time been a contentious matter among Google Account holders - the company does strange and mysterious things with your email contacts, including tying them in to some other applications without anyone's permission.
Today's new changes failed to alleviate those concerns, perhaps making the situation even less clear than it was before.
Strands, the recommendation and lifestreaming service we've written about here before, announced a much anticipated deal this morning that will put it in the driver's seat for financial recommendations served up to millions of online banking customers around the world. The company's recommendation test-case in music is no longer all they will be known for around the world.
Customers of Spanish bank BBVA will now be offered recommended products and services, individual and anonymized aggregate analytics and personalized goal setting and alert services, all based on their banking activities.
According to the latest data from mobile advertising marketplace AdMob, the mobile web has grown by over 100% in the last 12 months. AdMob's data also shows a 20% increase since May alone. Ad impressions on Apple's iPhone and iPod touch grew by 32% in June, making it the 9th most popular mobile device for online browsing in terms of ad impressions.
The online video streaming company Stickam.com today introduced a beta version of a paid service, PayPerLive, which will allow users to charge for access to their live streams. Basically, Stickam's new service allows anybody to set up a pay-per-view service, while Stickam handles the business back-end. With this new service, Stickam is specifically targeting consultants, bands, teachers, and fundraisers. As for costs, Stickam will implement a tiered revenue-sharing program, starting with Stickam getting at 25 percent cut of the profits.
Windows Live Mesh is Microsoft's software+services data synchronization platform. Because of its complex nature, most people assume that file synchronization is all there is to Live Mesh, but in reality, that's just the tip of the iceberg. Microsoft has big plans for the service and syncing files between computers and the cloud is just the start. When Live Mesh launched, it was currently a closed "technical preview" (that's Microsoft for "beta"). But now it appears that the Live Mesh guys have quietly opened up the platform for all of the U.S.
A new OpenID provider called LiquidID has just launched a service which offers email aliasing and redirection in addition to providing you with an OpenID. The aliasing service sits on top of OpenID and generates email aliases for you which can then be passed on to any OpenID-enabled web services. LiquidID will receive the emails sent from the services on your behalf and redirect them to you. However, if a particular email alias ever becomes compromised and starts receiving spam, LiquidID will block it.
You know what little startup companies need these days? They need to hire more people! It may be a frightening thought, but in an increasingly social world - being social is becoming an important full time job.
"Community Manager" is a position being hired for at a good number of large corporations (see Jeremiah Owyang's growing list of people with that kind of job) but what about smaller companies? We asked a number of people what they thought and the following discussion offers some great things to think about, pro and con.
