The calendar syncing and sharing company Calgoo has decided to release all its products for free. Until today, Calgoo made a free version of its software available and charged $30 a year for its more fully featured pro 'Connect' accounts. User who bought a license for the pro account before today will continue to receive free email support for the duration of their licence.
Google added walking directions to its Google Maps product today. The walking directions ignore one-way streets and Google Maps tries to give pedestrians the most direct and flat route possible. As Google itself acknowledges, the Maps database does not currently have a lot of information about sidewalks, pedestrian bridges, or if a specific street is simply too busy to cross. They are, however, working on improving these aspects of their maps.
Walking directions are available everywhere Google offers driving directions.
MySpace is announcing this morning that it will become an OpenID authenticating party and offer developers a deeper level of access to user data than was previously available.
As Facebook prepares to mark the one year anniversary of its heralded application platform and the new iPhone App Store lures developers with groundbreaking features and customers willing to pay for applications - competition for the attention of the developer community is heating up. Once again, when platforms compete for developers - users win.
Today, eMusic launched a major redesign of its site. The new design not only looks a lot fresher, but eMusic now also draws in information from Wikipedia, videos from YouTube, and photos from Flickr. EMusic is the second-largest online music retailer after iTunes, but it often doesn't quite get the coverage newer music sites like Pandora or Last.fm get.
Do you have an iPhone? Are you a blogger? Then you're going to love this news - there's now a WordPress app for iPhone available for download from the iTunes App Store. The software lets you update your WordPress blog from anywhere. We're not forgiving Apple for that MobileMe nonsense just yet, but we have to admit, this is pretty good stuff.
After a rocky start which involved post-launch outages and subsequent apology letter not to mention the big reveal that MobileMe wasn't exactly the "push" service they advertised, Apple finally has MobileMe up and running. But now, after updating iTunes to the latest version, many Windows users were surprised to find a new MobileMe icon in their Control Panel. Apple is once again sneaking software onto our PCs - the question is, why are we letting them get away with this?
In a brilliant move that's sure to make both newspapers and social networks around the web jealous, the New York Times and LinkedIn, the leading US social network for professionals, are announcing a content partnership tonight that could substantially increase the value for users of both sites. The announcement will be made at the top of the hour, but the integration is live now.
LinkedIn users are now being shown personalized news targeting their industry verticals on the Business and Technology sections of NYTimes.com and will then be prompted to share those stories will professional associates.
There has been a lot of development around Microsoft's Live Mesh platform in the last few days. Just last week, Microsoft opened up Live Mesh to all users and quietly released a mobile version. Today, Microsoft has also announced that is is rolling out a major update of the Live Mesh infrastructure tonight and that it will allow users to sync files directly between different devices without having to sync to the Live Desktop first. This will allow users to bypass the 5GB limit of Live Mesh's online storage.
Yesterday, we told you that Facebook would be launching its new design today and briefly highlighted the coming changes. Today we've received the official word from the Facebook team that the new profile is indeed live. According to the company, access to the new design will be limited at first as it gradually becomes available to all of their more than 80 million users over the coming days. What's most interesting about the new Facebook design, though, is not just the change in the aesthesis. Instead, the new look reflects the changing needs of their core user base.
The live streaming video service Qik just opened up its previously closed beta to the public. Apparently, the public is so interested in the service that the site crashed completely just after the announcement was made (the site is back up now). Once it is back online, users will be able to stream live video from their supported mobile phones directly to the web without having to wait for an invitation from Qik.
