This past weekend we asked for your help in predicting whether eBay would sell StumbleUpon. We hope that the rumors aren't true. If they are, StumbleUpon isn't rolling over and playing dead. It seems StumbleUpon may give eBay a reason to hold that thought. The service is looking to expand their offerings beyond their toolbar with two big new services today.
Seen the headlines recently? These are scary times. Entrepreneurs are far too busy to focus on the mayhem in the markets - and they know that they cannot do anything about it. So the standard response is just to deal with it as a background worry. But some re-assessing of the external market reality can be useful at times like this. I have had lots of calls along the lines of "what the heck is going on and how does this impact the business we are working on?" This is my condensed, hopefully practical, advice to entrepreneurs.
The much-awaited Application Programming Interface (API) for movie site Netflix will launch tomorrow, according to an email from the company. As HackingNetflix found out last week, the launch event will occur at the AJAX Experience conference. Details are listed below. It looks pretty good, but there are some major limitations, too.
Millions of people love movies via Netflix, making this API an opportunity for all kinds of developers to add well-known value to any other application.
YouTube announced today an interesting addition to its Insights analytics dashboard. Called "Hot Spots," the feature displays the "bounce rate" of viewers in any publisher's video on a second-by-second scale. Wondering if that joke you told went over well or not? YouTube will now tell you if a substantial number of viewers clicked away from your content at the moment your wisecrack went live.
The Insights analytics tool launched in May and offers free demographic data about viewers. We'd love to see these two features combined. Worried something you said might come across as sexist? If a whole lot of women stopped watching right after you said it - there might be some truth to that! (Who are we kidding? This is YouTube we're talking about.)
If you're familiar with Zoho, the online office suite for small and medium sized businesses, you probably know that they offer a whole lot of different applications. The 16 different apps the company has had for some time seems like a small selection now - today the Zoho Marketplace launched with hundreds of new apps built on the company's platform Zoho Creator.
Developers can build their own apps for free or for sale and Zoho allows them to keep 100% of the revenue from app sales. Are these apps for real? It's hard to say. We really like the idea, but Zoho is a complicated company.
Coldwell Banker isn't letting the nation's financial crisis get them down. Instead, they're debuting some innovative technology in the form of a customized online platform optimized for iPhone users. With their new iPhone-ready site available from iphone.coldwellbanker.com, you can perform real-time searches for homes or home values right from the palm of your hand. This launch makes Coldwell Banker the first full-service national real estate brand to launch a customized online platform just for the iPhone.
Yahoo's Exceptional Performance Team just released an interesting tool that optimizes images for publishing on the web. Smush.it is completely cloud-based and you can choose to upload your images directly to the service, provide Smush.it with a URL, or use a Firefox plugin that analyzes a whole page at once. Smush.it provides a one-stop shop for compressing images and works with JPGs, PNGs, GIFs, and animated GIF files.
Widget creation platform Clearspring today announced that it acquired AddThis, the popular bookmarking and sharing button. According to Clearspring, this acquisition will allow it to reach a total of 200 million users and 300,000 publishers. AddThis is currently the most popular bookmarking and sharing service on the Internet, while Clearspring provides widgets and analytics for every conceivable social network and publishing platform. With this acquisition, Clearspring aims to become the standard content sharing platform for both publishers and users.
Kyte's Mobile Producer for Nokia S60 phones has just come out of beta and is now publically available. The Mobile Producer allows you to stream video directly from your camera phone, or to upload video later, which is especially useful if you want to edit the content or your connection is not fast enough to support live streaming. While the Mobile Producer is now freely available, Kyte is mostly targeting larger brands and content producers. The private beta of Kyte only worked on Nokia N95 phones, but the public version now supports a wide range of S60 3rd Edition camera phones.
GroupSwim is a company whose SaaS collaboration solution uses semantic technology to automatically tag and rate content including discussions, emails, documents, wikis, and more. As an Enterprise 2.0 Launch Pad finalist, the company was honored for making enterprise team collaboration fun to use thanks to features like thumbs up/thumbs down voting and its ability to monitor your favorite topics. Recently, GroupSwim released version 5.0 of their collaboration software which includes even more features like wikis, hidden groups, and new system APIs.
