Today, the web office company Zoho, whose line of products competes with other web applications like Google Docs and Gmail as well as desktop-based suites like Microsoft Office, has launched a new product: Zoho Gadgets. With these gadgets, data from Zoho applications can be integrated into Facebook, Gmail, iGoogle, Orkut and other online networks. Because the gadgets are built using the OpenSocial standard, they can be supported by any OpenSocial compatible network.
In March search giant Google grew yet again, taking the top position in U.S. searches with 63.7 percent of the search share. But this time, Google didn't steal market share from all its competitors - it only stole from Yahoo, Ask.com, and AOL. Microsoft's share actually grew last month. Of course, they didn't grow by that much, but when you're fighting Google, every step counts.
Meanwhile, Google continues to experiment with search technology in an effort to make searches faster because they know faster searches means more of them.
Personalized web platform service Netvibes announced their new Netvibes Labs section today. Labs will give users an early peek at new features being developed for the Netvibes platform, along with the widget wishlist: an area to make widget suggestions and vote on the best ideas. At launch, Netvibes Labs will have three projects available for testing, a theme designer, a tag cloud app, and a tool for 'spring cleaning' old or unread feeds.
The University of Washington has announced two new research projects that will utilize cloud computing platforms from Internet companies such as Google, Microsoft, Amazon and IBM. According to the press release published on Genetic Engineering News, the University of Washington has won grants from the National Science Foundation to fund projects examining ocean climate simulations and analyzing astronomical images. Both of these projects will utilize cloud computing to examine and interact with "the massive datasets that are becoming more and more common in science."
The day we all knew was coming has arrived. Twitter just added a subtle phrase to the right-hand side of every user's home page. That text? Sponsored definition. What that tells us is that Twitter has decided to start charging for companies to promote in the definition area that they added just a few weeks ago. The change was first noticed by Nimish Adani (Twitter) of workosaur.com.
iPhone musical application developer Smule made a name for itself when it released its Zelda-inspired Ocarina software last year to great fanfare. Boasting a simple (yet surprisingly difficult to master) interface consisting of 4 note pads (simulated finger holes), the software combined multi-touch and breath detection to make the iPhone into a very playable instrument similar to a real ocarina.
Today, Smule announced the latest and most ambitious of their iPhone/iPod Touch-based instrument apps, Leaf Trombone: World Stage. Leaf Trombone improves upon the shortcomings of Ocarina in a number of areas (like adding tutorials), and throws in a very ambitious online judgment area called World Stage.
Ten years ago the ClueTrain manifesto said that "markets are conversations" but today a more pertinent statement could be that conversations are becoming markets - or that there's a market for monitoring conversations. A whole class of technologies are emerging to help companies keep track of the conversations exploding online.
The web moves fast enough that we may as well start looking at what comes next. Easy to use and affordable tools like Radian6 and ScoutLabs that track blog and twitter mentions are a given - but what kinds of crazy innovations can we hope for in the future?
While we liked Digg's new DiggBar for its features, its release also created quite an uproar in the SEO community. Now, Digg has announced that it will change the way the DiggBar works, which should pacify a lot of Digg's critics. Among other things, the DiggBar will now only appear when users are logged in to Digg, so that content providers will continue to receive full credit from search engines, without Digg's iframe getting in the way. Digg will roll these changes out over the next week or so.
After holding auditions in December and announcing the finalists last month, the YouTube Symphony Orchestra has now released the first product of its efforts. Tonight, the 90 members of the orchestra will perform live at New York's Carnegie Hall, but this morning, the project released a mash-up video that features all the finalists, who perform the world premiere of a specially commissioned piece by Tan Dun.
WikiHow, a Wikipedia-like project that aims to build the world's largest repository of how-to articles, released an interesting iPhone application this morning. The application (iTunes link) gives you access to wikiHow's vast collection of how-to articles about topics ranging from how to be a twitter celebrity to how to build your own picnic table. Most interestingly, the application also contains a "Survival Kit," which is cached on the phone (or iPod touch) for offline reading, and which includes articles about topics like the Heimlich Maneuver or how to survive a plane crash.
