ReadWriteWeb

There's a reason why vanity URLs, personalized profile pages and recommendation systems are so popular. To a customer or site visitor, there's nothing more interesting than themselves. As the CEO of web tracking and sales conversion site Genius.com, former CMO of online meeting tool WebEx and author of Sales 2.0 for Dummies, David Thompson knows a thing or two about the customer psyche. Thompson spoke to ReadWriteWeb and explained why today's landscape makes it the toughest in history to make a sale. And for once, it's got nothing to do with the down economy.

As is the trend with every Apple-related announcement, Apple stock rises during the hype of initial rumors and drops shortly after the keynote simply fails to live up to expectations. Apple could've put a man on the moon this morning and fanboys would've still expected a monkey on Venus. Although users were not blessed with the announcement of a Beatles' release, the company did offer Genius Mixes and the iTunes' LP. ReadWriteWeb covered the news earlier this morning, now we take an in-depth look at Apple's latest music-related releases.

At ETech today members of the InSTEDD team spoke about how they have been building SMS and mapping applications, in the Mekong Delta in the jungles of South East Asia. InSTEDD (Innovative Support to Emergencies Diseases and Disasters) was organized in 2006-2007 and aims to harness technology to help with early warning, prevention and response to disasters and public health threats. Some of the issues InSTEDD came across in the Mekong Delta were figuring out multilingual issues, human interaction design for 140 characters, ad-hoc team creation, and data integration of disconnected systems. After the jump is a summary of their presentation at ETech.

We just heard from DropPlay about their new beta social-enabled music site that calls itself the perfect streaming music service. Leveraging the power of the cloud-based applications Facebook Connect and the YouTube API, DropPlay weaves together a site that both organizes and lets you share your favorite YouTube music and playlists that you create. Unlike similar service Muziic (previously covered here) the entire experience is web-based, using Facebook Connect to store your profile and sharing data.

Tekarma, a new user-generated product support site, launched its private beta today. Tekarma wants to provide users with a central place to find and share tips and trick about products. Currently, the site focuses mostly on electronics, cars, and sporting goods. Maybe the best way to describe Tekarma is as a mix between a wiki, forum, and a tech support call center. If you want to try it out yourself, you can find a link to the private beta at the end of this post.