Yahoo has confirmed that is has purchased a small start-up located in San Francisco in order to add better photo functionality to their Web Mail. The company which has been bought out is called Xoopit and is an emerging contender in the photo sharing world. The service allows users to share photos easily on a host of different sites such as Flickr and Facebook by taking them from their e-mail inboxes.
On the company blog, Bryan Lamkin, the senior vice-president said:
“ Why is this such a big deal? Yahoo! Mail is actually home to one of the largest online photo repositories in the world. And every day, millions of you use Yahoo! Mail as your primary way to share the photos of important moments in your lives. While social networks and community sites are great for sharing photos with everyone you know, we realize it’s not for everyone or every occasion. For many, email is still best for sharing photos among a more select group of friends or family. And now we’re making it all that much easier for you.”
Xoopit seems over the moon with the new deal. They have updated their homepage screaming Yahoo! everywhere. On their company blog they said that “the Xoopit team today sees this acquisition as an exceptional path for us in achieving our vision. Over the last few months, we have left every conversation with the Yahoo! team thinking that together we can wow the world”
The specific financial deal has not been revealed but it is estimated to be in the region of $20 million. That amount of money is no chump change for a new group of start-up creators who will hopefully go on to create even better websites and services in the future.
Over the last few days there has been a lot of talk and discussion surrounding Ashton Kutcher and CNN. First he manages to get almost as many followers on Twitter as CNN (almost 900K). Then he challenges CNN to a race to get to 1 million followers first. If he wins, he’ll “”ding dong ditch” Ted Turner’s house.
This made me think a bit about Ashton and his original tech startup the Blah Girls. Blah Girls launched with a lot of press and publicity (mainly due to Techcrunch and Michael Arrington), but now it seems to be a very basic gossip blog with a cartoon attached.
Blah Girls produce a weekly vidoe who is pretty much a catoon spoof. The videos are very well develop and quite cool. However, these videos and Blah Girls in general doesnt seem to be getting much traction at all. The Blah Girls Youtube channel has over 3,500 subscribers but each video seems to be lucky to get more than 1000 plays. Plus for some reason YouTube has given Blah Girls a partner page, but they dont seem to meet the requirements of being a YouTube partner (apart from the fact that Ashton is quite well known).
Back to the site itself it seem that is had an initial push at launch but then has been slowly growing at the same pace as a normal gossip blog. The site has a great design, but there seems to be a huge gap of white space between the video section and where the actual blog starts. Ashton I really think you need to take a look at the design and try to piece it all together a bit better. Additionally, Ashton why arent you twittering about Blah Girls on your Twitter stream? Im sure 1m followers will really help you in pushing your site to the next level faster, plus you have a benefit that no other gossip blog has, your already bloody famous!
Are you sick and tired of receiving crappy spam messages in your inbox every single day? Well why only receive spam in your inbox when now you can also receive it on your mobile phone! This all comes from a new startup called SaySoMobile.
SaySoMobile is a new startup in which users can sign up and receive advertisements straight onto their mobile phone and in return the user makes a little money. Its that simple!
The idea is simple. Advertisers want access to people which gets their message across as much as possible for as little as possible. This new startup allows advertisers to target certain people in certain countries with advertisements direct onto their mobile phones via messages. Advertisers know that with this method the high majority of ads will be opened before they can be deleted, thus having a higher possibility of providing them a return on their investment.
Im very interested to hear from people using this service to make a little extra money, mainly to see if the money they are making is worth the intrusiveness of the advertisements.
Lovely Charts is a slick new web-based tool for creating flowcharts and wireframes. Features you’d expect from a similar desktop app come standard: copy-paste, undo up to 20 steps, and pan/zoom all work the way you’re used to. Objects snap into place, and the basic drawing tools are all there. The only drawback? You can only save one chart at a time until you upgrade to the pro version. Depending on your needs, though, the 18 euro for 6 months might be worth it to you.
The advantages of having a web-based wireframe app are obvious if you’re a designer who works from home and an office. You can access your stuff from anywhere, and let collaborators work on it if need be. Lovely Charts also comes pre-stocked with some network diagram symbols and wireframe templates that could save you a lot of time. You might want to wait to buy until they implement a few more export formats. JPG and PNG are currently supported, with more on the way.
Are you an employee looking to keep track of your employees time? Are you trying to work out how to best optimise the time of your employees, because they are your largest overhead? Well introducing Timecamp. Timecamp is a new tracking tool that seems to be very similar to Basecamp but for employee tracking. It’s like history book or google analytics, but works with people’s time. Increase team productivity, eliminate “time killers”, get more done and stay focused.
The service seems very straight forward and also seems to be a relatively new startup. Im not so keen on it being so closely based to Basecamp, but it is a simply idea with a simple solution. Currently the have a free pricing for individual users, but also a $8 per month pricing for any other additional users you want to add to the system.
If you have used Timecamp it would be great to hear your feedback.
Several hundred thousand palates can’t be wrong. With this, Tsavo Media announced that it has acquired Open Source Food (OSF) from Egg & Co., a venture of Tokyo-based web producer Jon Anthony Yongfook Cockle.
With the acquisition, OSF has been renamed NibbleDish and will join Tsavo’s new network of content sites for consumers, currently in development.
Yongfook will remain with the company. A serial web-app builder, Yongfook is also responsible for the popular lifestreaming software Sweetcron and analytics tool Gumtrail. From his base in Tokyo, he works with various Japanese companies as an outside consultant, building web apps and overseeing production.
Financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed.
Stimator is a real-time website value estimator that aims to deliver the most accurate economical value that a website could worth by collecting important data from different sources as well as market places.
There are six major factors involved in the calculation:
Top Level Domain – Stimator take in account the strength of a TLD.
Financial - It uses Yahoo Finance to get all data needed to perform the variations of the financial market.
Real Sells – The service was built to delivery real results (at least the most possible ones). The math used to determinate a website value was study using real website sells such as: Sedo, Sitepoint Marketplace etc.
Web Factors – Stimator collects information from the website itself and from several major sources during the calculation stages before presenting the final estimated result.
Estimation - The calculations are made to give what is called the “economic value”.
Observations - The main mission is to avaliate domains and sub-domains. After each calculation, Stimator presents a report with the main relevant factors that it can extract from the examination. This factors will give the users an idea of how the site is performing.
Using Stimator Crenk is worth $17,351 which is kind of a realistic valuation. Anyone interested in offering me that much for the site?
Accomedion is a new musical instrument application that combines a keyboard harmonica and an accordion.
Sound sources from keyboard harmonica are used, and chord buttons similar to the ones on accordion are attached. The wide range of tunes will be played as accompaniment.
Main functions
- Capable to shift between major chord and minor chord
- Capable to record and replay up to three tunes
- Five demonstration tunes are stored. Capable to play in accordance with the tutorial guide.
- You can play it like a real keyboard harmonica by blowing the microphone. (iPhone only)
You can download this application from the iTunes store here.
US music site Jango announced the launch of Jango Music Network (JMN), dubbing it as the world’s largest and most targeted cost-effective ad network for the music vertical.
The current JMN inventory of music sites reach a collective total of 30 million unique monthly visitors in the US alone. JMN also features a unique methodology that maps brand preference to musical taste and uses it to help advertisers target audiences that will be particularly receptive to their brand.
Not too long ago the guys over at Killerstartups launched a new service called Dataopedia. Dataopedia is a basic solution that allows users to type in any url and find quickly key metrics from various sources.
Metrics that are measured include Google PR, Alexa Numbers, Compete and Quantcast analysis, Social media breakdowns, Twitter news, Technorati links, Friendfeed and url registration information. Currently, Dataopedia pulls in all this information from various partners including Crunchbase, Compete, Digg, Getsatisfaction and more.
There’s also something interesting buried at the bottom of the site profiles: an ability to comment on the site using Disqus. While that’s not likely to have the reach of a Google Search Wiki, it provides yet another way to gather details about the site and its reputation.
Dataopedia does a great job of pulling all the key quantitative and qualitative site measures required in todays world of web 2.0. There is still a lot of improvements that can be made with the user interface, but over it is probably already leading in this specific market, even thought market is very small.
I received a very interesting email today about a new iPhone / iPod Touch application that will be launching in the App store very shortly. Take a look at the video below and let me know what you think about Chordica.
WordPress.tv is your visual resource for all things WordPress. To make it easy for you to find up-to-date, WordPress-themed video content within a couple of clicks. Without having to wade through spammy promotional videos, out-of-date content, and missing chunks of presentations. WordPress.tv is there waiting for you, you can learn anything related to WordPress by watching the videos there.
Additional to basic Wordpress tutorials they have a section specifically for WordCamp videos in which is Wordpress related sessions in which professions talk about Wordpress and how to use it affectively and efficiently.
Are you sick and tired of receiving crappy spam messages in your inbox every single day? Well why only receive spam in your inbox when now you can also receive it on your mobile phone! This all comes from a new startup called 
Not too long ago the guys over at 
