Blake Ross, a young software developer known for his efforts in the Mozilla’s Firefox development pointed out in his blog that Google is now starting to give “tips” to users about other Google-owned software. Ross also points out that Ask and Yahoo! have been doing this with their search services too, but Google has a reputation to keep in their TOS to not “be evil.”

If you search for ‘Photo Sharing,’ it tips users to use Google’s Picasa. If you search for ‘Calendar,’ users are tipped to “Try Google Calendar.” And if you search for ‘Blog,’ then Google recommends you to “Try Blogger.”

Ross wrote: “The tips are different—and bad for users—because the services they recommend are not the best in their class.” I couldn’t agree more. I think the best photo-sharing website is not the Picasa software, but Flickr. I believe the best blogging software is Wordpress, and I don’t really use calendar software, I just e-mail myself upcoming important events in ALL CAPS.

But Ross gives a worthy suggestion for a fix. Ross suggested that when searching for stock quotes on Google’s search engine [example: GOOG search], Google Finance, Yahoo! Finance, MSN Money, MarketWatch, CNN Money, and Reuters are all recommended at the top.

“Would Google complain if Microsoft informed users about Live Search when they typed Google.com into Internet Explorer’s address bar? Don’t roll your eyes: it would just be another innocuous tip presented to a user en route to a destination. Google owns one of the Web’s command lines, and Microsoft owns the other” stated Ross. “How much does a result have to look like a Result to cross the line? Google promised not to be the type of company that needs to ask.”

Kakle is a new rapidly growing search engine that is still in Beta and preparing for launch. Looking at Kakle’s interface, it looks to be just as simple and easy to use as Google is. What is Kakle doing to distinguish themselves? Kakle is now offering a FREE 5GB e-mail account. Presently, this beats Google’s GMail by about 2GB.

Kakle also has a social network and also a personalized portal that allows a user to import RSS. Kakle aggregates results from major search engines and also ranks the search engine that provides the best results right below the result listings. Kakle is able to do this somehow when reading META tags from the source code. Kakle’s social network allows users to upload 24 videos and 24 photos.

Another feature Kakle offers is an instant messaging software. Similar to Meebo, Kakle’s IM software is compatible with AIM, MSN, Yahoo! messaging services.
As Kakle is a relatively new service, the company is actively seeking feedback. Signing up is easy and navigating around the personalized interface is also simple. Below is a screen shot of the dashboard page once you log in:

I also checked out the mail system and it looks just as impressive as GMail:

The only drawback to the website right now is that search results are aggregated, but in the press release I read regarding the website, it stated that the company is planning on adding their own natural search listings soon enough. This seems like an exciting company during its evolution.

Pulse 2.0 is a company owned by 3 young guys who are from Michigan, but with all the serious reviewing of web companies that we do, it seems like that we cannot express our more creative/humorous side. Also, sometimes we take vacations that prevent us from updating regularly.

Pulse 2.0 Notebook will be the spot where we will be placing some of the random, stupid things we find on the Internet. It will also be the place where we will write about when we may be out of the office. If I were to compare Pulse 2.0 Notebook to another site out there, I’d compare it to becoming a freelance journal mixed with a  little bit of ValleyWag humor.

Bebo, the UK-based, band-oriented social network just announced that they would be including ads in the profiles of their users. The plus side of this new revenue-making scheme is that users can make ads appear on their website optionally and to a certain extent, the users can even choose what type of ads to include in their profiles. I’ve never heard of an advertising scheme like this. The ads will be in the form of embeddable widgets.

The ads also will predominantly be in the form of interactive games, possibly similar to “Punch the Monkey.” AdWeek states that “Advertiser applications will get a featured spot in the Bebo Widgets gallery.” Jim Scheinman, a VP of Sales and Development for Bebo calls this coined this iniative as “engagement marketing.”

“If it’s great content, it’s going to engage the user so much more,” stated Scheinman. “To the Beboer, they don’t look at it like advertising but great content.”

The first advertiser application for Bebo is a ’stop smoking’ campaign by the American Legacy Foundation. Bebo plans to release many more advertiser applications at the beginning of the year.

Although Bebo does not have as much of a marketshare of social networking compared to MySpace, Bebo has a huge presence in the United Kingdom. In November 2006, Bebo had about 1.4 million unique visitors according to Nielsen/NetRatings. Scheinman hopes to have 30 million users by the end of 2007.

There will be a separate profile for advertisements for users to select various options. In the first six weeks, over 200,000 members have filled out these ad profiles. The users know how important ads are for the social network to be able to run. “They understand we need to do the advertising to pay for the service,” stated Scheinman.

A few days ago, bloggers were writing about how Microsoft was planning on patenting Really Simple Syndication technology (RSS). Shortly after, Dave Winer, a chief RSS developer wrote on his blog that “Today I received a link to a patent granted to Microsoft, where they claim to have invented all this stuff. Presumably they’re eventually going to charge us to use it. This should be denounced by everyone who has contributed anything to the success of RSS.”

Monkey Bites, a Wired blog, pointed out that Winer was wrong about the fact the documents were applications for patents and not patents themselves. Monkey Bites also mentioned that they believed that Microsoft is not aiming to patent RSS, but RSS within Windows Vista and Internet Explorer 7.0.

Yesterday an RSS program manager lead named Sean Lyndersay spoke to the Associated Press about the accusations. Sean Lyndersay wrote on his blog that Microsoft is seeking patents for the purose of improving RSS “end-user and developer experience” and not the actual RSS technology. Lyndersay also mentioned that applying for patents are common practices. Microsoft’s filing of a patent does not necessarily mean that license fees would be added.

The whole talk of patenting technology that does not belong to Microsoft reminds me of the iPod patenting story of 2005. The Boston Globe reported “Apple took too long to file a patent on part of its blockbuster iPod music players, so Microsoft beat them to it.”

Kevin Rose’s Digg.com, the biggest user-contributed news aggregator website has raised $8.5 million in funding from previous investors of Digg, Greylock Partners and the Omidyar Network. Pierre Omidyar is a founder of eBay and the Omidyar Network.

According to VentureBeat, “Statistics have become a major sticking point for Digg, with the company saying in October that it has 20 million users, while conservative measurement sites like Comscore say Digg has a mere 1.3 million.”

Another interesting point that VentureBeat’s Matt Marshall brings up is that Digg limits the investors to insiders. Digg believes that it is the insiders that truly understand the revenue potential that Digg has. Insiders believe that Digg is worth so much that they do not want other parties involved.

Digg has recently revamped their entire user interface and implemented a new feature for videos users could view external videos directly on a Digg page rather than actually having to leave the website.

Currently Digg is ranked #76 on Alexa and #144 on Compete.com.

Yesterday around 10:18PM, an anonymous friend donated $286,800 to Wikimedia Fundraising C.O.R.E., the arm of fund collection for Jimmy “Jimbo” Wales’ Wikipedia. As of right now Wikimedia Fundraising C.O.R.E. has raised over $709,000. Since Wikipedia is a non-profit open-source website, all donations are appreciated. According to Alexa, Wikipedia is the #12 ranked website, so the server costs are obviously very high for Wikipedia.

According to Wikipedia, Wikipedia “receives over 2000 page requests per second. More than 100 servers have been set up to handle the traffic.” Less than a quarter of Wikipedia’s traffic is accounted for by non-registered users who are not likely to be article contributors. In the 4th quarter of 2005, the cost to keep Wikipedia online was $321,000 with server costs accounting for roughly 60%.

About 5 days ago, I had found a post on StartupSquad about an upcoming search engine called Wikiasari was being developed by Jimmy Wales. StartupSquad and Pulse 2.0 wrote that Amazon was involved with the project development. A comment by Jimmy Wales himself on our post pointed out that this information was inaccurate. Then similar incorrect information was written on TechCrunch and Mashable.

Now that I know that Jimmy Wales reads our blog, I’d like to personally congratulate him on the large donation that was given to the Wikimedia Fundraising C.O.R.E.

A month ago, I profiled 44 of the companies that Yahoo! had acquired in the past 10 years and where they are now. Since Google bought YouTube, Yahoo has been questioned about whether they are truly utilizing their newly acquired companies. Now people are even speculating that AOL and Yahoo! should merge. But according to the San Francisco Chronicle, Yahoo! is preparing to start integrating their newly acquired companies.

Yahoo! has been the #1 website in the world for quite some time, but Google, MySpace, and YouTube are catching up at a rapid pace. An internal “peanut butter” memo from a Yahoo! executive pointed out that it is time for a change and that Yahoo! should not focus on a wide range of businesses, but to focus on core competencies.

Earlier this month, Terry Semel, the CEO of Yahoo!, began shuffling executives around and let a few go. Yahoo! hopes that they regain its popularity in a Web 2.0 world. And Yahoo! believes that they have the assets to do so: Flickr, Del.icio.us, Jumpcut, Upcoming.org, and Bix.

“When we bought them, the first reaction was, ‘Don’t ruin them.’ People thought we were going to put ads all over them. So we didn’t. Now everyone says, ‘You’re not integrating them.’ Despite appearances, we do know what we’re doing,” stated Eckhart Walther, a vice president of product management for Yahoo! Search. “These are killer brands. We’re going to manage them as independent properties. We want to keep those communities happy and healthy.”

After the acquisition, Stewart Butterfield, a co-founder of Flickr, was hired as a product management director stated that post-acquisition Flickr has been rapidly developing new features a lot quicker than some of the other Yahoo! divisions. “We’re trying to deliver a lot of the innovation that can be more challenging at big companies, and comes more naturally to startups,” stated Butterfield.

The author of the “Peanut Butter” memo, Brad Garlinghouse mentioned that “We end up with competing (or redundant) initiatives and synergistic opportunities living in the different silos of our company.” A couple of companies that Garlinghouse is referring to is Flickr and Yahoo! Photos. Flickr has grown from 400,000 users to 5 million registered. At 41 million users per month, Yahoo! Photos is the most popular photo-sharing website in the world.

The most likely decision for Flickr and Yahoo! Photos is not to kill one off, but let Flickr grow as an independent entity and integrate a taste of Flickr into other Yahoo! divisions just like Yahoo!’s travel website is doing.
What is Yahoo! planning on doing with Del.icio.us? The integration of Del.icio.us into other Yahoo! products was well underway before the “Peanut Butter” memo claims Joshua Schachter, the founder of Del.icio.us. Yahoo! had already owned a social bookmarking website called MyWeb.

Yahoo! is aiming to have MyWeb technology power Del.icio.us and Yahoo! Bookmarks. “MyWeb has different technology that’s superior in a lot of ways,” stated Schachter. “They’re bringing that to Del.icio.us. We’re following two different kinds of users. It’s difficult and you have to be very careful. Users get very passionate about the tools they use. If you change them and alter them radically, they get upset. We want to only make steps that make sense for everybody.” Schachter also mentioned that Yahoo!’s bureaucracy has not slowed down Del.icio.us decisions. “I’ve worked at bigger places,” stated Schachter, who is also a former Morgan Stanley employee.

There you have it. Yahoo! has some big things coming in 2007. Now we know what Yahoo!’s intentions are with Del.icio.us and Flickr. I’m sure 2007 will be an even better year for Yahoo!

This month, a rumor started spreading that Google China and Ceyuan Venture is preparing to invest into P2P software and file sharing network, Xunlei. The investment announcement is expected to take place on January 5. Google China would invest $5 million and Ceyuan Venture would invest $15 million.

Xunlei was created in 2003 and is known for being a download accelerator for videos and software. Fortune China ranked Xunlei as one of the coolest companies of 2005. IDGVC invested $1 million into Xunlei and then a second round $10 million funding was invested into the company by Morningside and IDGVC. Xunlei’s software was downloaded over 110 million times and averages about 1.5 million downloads per day.

Google China is interested in Xunlei because it is the second most popular desktop website in China. If Google China invested into Xunlei and placed Google Toolbar as part of the installation, it would help Google penetrate a larger market share of Internet users in China. And also Xunlei is a video-centric web company and since Google acquired YouTube, it proves Google is ready to believe that Internet video is the way of the future. It would work out perfectly.
[Source: China Web 2.0 Review]

A couple days ago, even though not many people have blogged about it, AOL and TopCoder Inc. announced the AOL Video Mashup Competition. Developers are expected to use AOL Video Search APIs to create and “mash up” AOL’s video search technology into their own websites.

Developers are expected to design a UI or write up a website or paper explaining the concept behind the mashup idea while using the AOL Video Search APIs. The deadline for the mashup contest is on January 5, 2007. The finalists would be selected by January 22, 2007. Winners will be announced on February 8, 2007 and the winner would receive $12,000.

The contest details are [here].

A Chevrolet-sponsored are YouTube New Years event has just been added to the YouTube page. The event includes a competition for people to give a shout-out to cities, state their New Year’s Wishes and Resolutions and there will be featured artists added on the YouTube New Years page as well. The featured artists are listed in the image above.

Here is a direct link to the Chad Vader New Year’s message. As I’m writing this, 15 new videos have been added, 274 members have joined, and 9 discussions are taking place. Here is a direct link to the videos that have been added so far.

Paint.NET, a FREE photo editing software the competes directly with Photoshop, one of Adobe’s best-selling software products, has recently unleashed a new version of the software. The new version is called v3.0, is in Beta 3, and is now available for download.

Paint.NET was created using the C# and a small amount of C++ programming languages. Paint.NET has a simple to use interface and is similar to Photoshop. The source code behind Paint.NET is open and is available for download. At the beginning of the software development life cycle for the original Paint.NET, an undergraduate college senior initialized the design of the software and Microsoft served as a mentor with the idea of using Paint.NET to replace Microsoft Paint.

Before downloading the new version of Paint.NET, please note that the software no longer supports Windows 2000 and it will not install unless you are running Windows XP SP2 or newest. If you have Windows 2000, then you must install v2.72.

So what’s new in 3.0? Translations are more complete, especially German. Toolbar layout issues have been fixed. A clouds effect was added. Some extra hot keys were added. One of the best new features added is a Multiple Document Interface (MDI) that have tabs that show thumbnails for all opened images. The previous version of Paint.NET did not have this feature, so this is why I’m sure many people still stuck around with Photoshop. Now that this feature has been integrated, I could imagine more people to make the switch.

From a strategic standpoint, how worried should Adobe be over Paint.NET? I believe that so many people have been accustomed with Photoshop at this point and it is installed on every computer for major universities (from what I’ve noticed at University of Michigan and Michigan State University). I believe Paint.NET will capture more of a web-savvy audience that have limited budgets for graphic development. Photoshop is definitely an expensive software. However, since Adobe has acquired Macromedia, creator of Flash software, and Flash was one the biggest things of 2006, I doubt that Paint.NET would be their biggest concern right now… but I’m sure it will be soon enough.

The Seattle Times has a list of some free downloads that are available for Christmas today. eMusic.com is offering 25 free movie downloads and iLike is also offering a similar service. eMusic requires a credit card number to be entered, but iLike does not according to The Seattle Times.

The only drawback is that you are asked personal information when registering for these services and there are some advertisements. The companies may also encourage you to pay for premium services as well. Earlier this month, Ticketmaster had invested for partial ownership in iLike.

Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) is also offering 25 free e-mail addresses when registering for OfficeLive. Users are able to choose a domain name and Microsoft pays for the registration cost and offers the web building tools for the service.

On October 5, I had reviewed MedBillManager for the first time and recently I have had the opportunity to check out a public alpha version of the company. MedBillManager allows you to stay organized by acting as an online medical bill file manager. You can easily add records, compare bills (with other users that input insurance cost information), and also reminds you of upcoming bills that are owed to you or that you owe.

MedBillManager’s free services of medical cost comparisons are capturing so much attention that Intuit Inc. has been visiting MedBillManager quite a bit and are “validating our approach by their intense scrutiny of how we are helping people deal with medical expenses via a free” according to the MedBillManager blog. Currently Intuit offers Medical Expense Manager software for $49 and SimoHealth for $39. Intuit is also known for some of their Quicken software and TurboTax.

When users log in to MedBillManager, a Dashboard reminds the user what bills they owe and the bills that are owed to them and also allows the user to view previous transactions by the 5’s, 10’s, 15’s, or 20’s. Also on the Dashboard homepage, there is a balance sheet displayed of transactions inputted into the website so that you know who you paid or who has paid you.

There is also a ‘My Bills’ section that allows you to look at your current/past medical bills. You can view competitive providers through this feature as well.

In the ‘Compare Bills’ section, users can browse through other bills anonymously which can even be filtered by each state in the U.S., insurance grouping, and actual health issue.

The million dollar question is ‘how will MedBillManager make money?’ The first two family members would be free to monitor on MedBillManager, 3-5 members after that would cost $2 per month (flat $24 annual fee), and 6-10 family members would cost $3 per month (flat $36 annual fee). Looking at the cost of the site, it appears that you really get a bang for your buck considering the fact that MedBillManager stays up-to-date as the user-base grows and you do not have to wait a year for newly updated information like other software.

One of the newest features of MedBillManager is a community-driven wiki. The community wiki describes in detail how to use each feature.

MedBillManager was created for the simple purpose of ensuring that you are not ripped off by medical insurance providers. I have chatted regularly with one of the founders of MedBillManager, Christopher Parks, and he is known for valuing any feedback that is given. I’d highly suggest tracking some of the changes that are made with MedBillManager and to try it out and also suggesting any improvements that you feel may be added in the MedBillManager blog posts.

[Previous MedBillManager coverage]