ReadWriteWeb

Much like competitor LaunchSet, startup support system Prefinery offers beta management software, allowing time-pressed entrepreneurs to buy rather than build these critical systems without reinventing the wheel.

A company rep contacted us to tout the service's "feature set that lets entrepreneurs and technologists focus on building a great product, especially, as we all know, because these kinds of capabilities are always a last-minute thing, and messily handled."

For the earliest of early adopters, the concept of a service like LaunchSet sounds like being buddies with the biggest, coolest club promoter in town: Get a first look at pre-launch sites for testing and feedback before anyone else on the block.

For already stressed startups, LaunchSet provides a valuable service: Management of registrations and analytics during the packed-to-the-gills months, weeks, and days between launching private and public versions of a site or app.

Here's a survey question for you: Do we really need another Web-based survey tool? There are any number of respectable and useful survey products out there today, all of which do a fine job of soliciting responses from a constituency. So when we started to review Survs, the latest entrant to dip a toe into the online survey pool, we were cynical, to say the least. But as we dug into Survs, we found some thoughtful features that had us revising our answers, changing the radio button from "No" to "Maybe."

If you're as addicted to RSS feeds as we here at ReadWriteWeb, then you've no doubt tried Snackr, an Adobe Air based RSS ticker that provides a scrolling readout of all the latest information from your favorite feeds. It's as riveting as it is useful.

Now, you could have the chance to help influence where Snackr goes in the future by joining the Snackr beta program.

Citysearch, the popular local restaurant and shopping guide, announced a new beta version of its service tonight. The new version provides a better local search experience, with the ability to search specific neighborhoods instead of just metropolitan areas. Citysearch also announced a retooled mobile site, which lets users read and write reviews on their mobile devices, and gives them access to menus from participating restaurants. Citysearch has also implemented Facebook Connect, which allows users to log in to the site with their Facebook accounts, and the company plans to roll out OpenID support early next year.

You can fine the new beta at beta.citysearch.com.

The latest beta build of Firefox - Firefox 3.1 beta 1 - is now available for download. With it, comes a whole new set of features designed with developers and designers in mind. The beta includes native support for the Geolocation API, CSS @font-face support, and audio and video tag support.

Mozilla details the new features in their post, but we'll hit the high points on what the new build includes.

In his former occupation as a programmer at Microsoft, Daniel Oran developed the "start" button for the Windows 95 taskbar. As an author about to publish his second novel, Oran continues to innovate, this time by using the recently released Amazon Kindle e-book reader to let early readers help him refine a draft of his latest book. Oran's use of the Kindle is one of the more interesting we've seen, and really demonstrates the device's read/write potential.