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There’s going to be an Elvis karaoke contest on MySpace. That is not a joke. I can’t seem to figure out whether it’s trying to market Elvis to a younger generation or MySpace to an older one–or if it’s just for kicks.

The News Corp.-owned social network, best known for attracting a demographic for whom the […]

New Yorkers will now officially be able to get Verizon’s Fios TV service.

Verizon employees were at Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan Monday to market the new Fios TV service.
(Credit: Marguerite Reardon/CNET Networks)
The phone company launched the new service Monday in what is the largest launch …
Original post by Marguerite Reardon and software by Elliott Back

New Yorkers will now officially be able to get Verizon’s Fios TV service.

Verizon employees were at Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan Monday to market the new Fios TV service.
(Credit: Marguerite Reardon/CNET Networks)
The phone company launched the new service Monday in what is the largest launch …
Original post by Marguerite Reardon and software by Elliott Back

Flixwagon, which makes live video streaming software for mobile smart phones, said Monday that it has released an application for people using so-called jail-broken Apple iPhones so that they can broadcast video online.
With the launch, the Flixwagon application will be among the first video broadcasting tools for the iPhone, albeit for phones on which people […]

Commuto is a smart swapping community that’s been designed to undermine the in-person swap meet of the past with an online system that finds other people with items you want automatically.
Like Craigslist’s wanted section you can list items you’re looking for, be it electronics, text books, video games, or any other common good. You […]

One thing’s for sure: Glam Media isn’t letting that $85 million funding round sit around and ferment.

The latest of many announcements from the don’t-call-it-an-ad-network media firm is that it has launched a “Wellness” division, opening up its ad services to sites in the health, fitness, and “green” niches.
With hippie food brand SoyJoy as a sponsor, […]

The concept of the “wisdom of crowds” is a fundamental building block of a lot of the Web 2.0 services that we see today. While not all of them are built on this core concept, major sites like Digg, Wikipedia, and Mahalo rely heavily on crowds being wise. There have been several instances […]

The concept of the wisdom of crowds is a fundamental building block of a lot of the Web 2.0 services that we see today. While not all of them are built on this core concept, major sites like Digg, Wikipedia, and Mahalo rely heavily on crowds being wise. There have been several instances […]

News Corp.’s MySpace will relaunch its classifieds-listing section on Monday through a partnership with Oodle, the company is set to announce later in the day.
While it’s no Craigslist, MySpace said that its existing classifieds section pulls in a million visitors per month, and that the improved technology from Oodle–better search and filtering, more extensive ways […]

Google challenger Cuil launched last night in blaze of glory. And it went down in a ball of flames. Immediately after launch, the criticism started to pile on: Results were incomplete, weird, and missing.
I talked with Cuil VP of communications Vince Sollitto this morning about the launch issues. CEO Tom Costello was “busy putting […]

Mac users who use Google Calendar and iCal to manage their on and offline calendaring have had to use a myriad of third party products to keep the two in sync. That’s changed now as part of Google’s inclusion of CalDAV support as part of Google Calendar’s built-in functionality. This means you’ll be able to […]

Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield, who has just left Yahoo, has some less-than-adulatory remarks about his former masters.

Speaking to CNET sister publication ZDnet during an Australian visit, Butterfield said he would have preferred it if Microsoft’s attempt to acquire Yahoo had gone ahead.

“It was not so great,” Butterfield said of the Microsoft acquisition saga. “Once the […]

Yahoo has updated its search results to include recent headlines more quickly.

“Because we’re better able to detect when a query is about a breaking-news topic, we’re able to deliver fresher results when it matters most,” Paul Yiu of Yahoo search product management and Jean-Francois Crespo of Yahoo search research and development said in a Friday […]

Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who has been dogged by investor concerns about his health, does not have recurrent cancer or a life-threatening health issue, according to The New York Times. LOS ANGELES–Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who has been dogged by investor concerns about his health, does not have recurrent…
Original post by Gadgets, gizmos, and […]

Mogulus, a New York-based company that’s part of the crowded pack of live-video streaming sites, has raised a new round of funding from news media conglomerate Gannett, publisher of USA Today and about two dozen other newspapers.

The two companies have had a partnership in place for the past three months, and the new investment is […]

Cuil's homepage.

There’s a big new search engine launching Monday: Cuil. Developed and run by the husband-and-wife team of Stanford professor Tom Costello and former Google search architect Anna Patterson, it’s pitched as bigger, faster, and better than Google’s flagship search engine in pretty much every way. See video interview with Tom Costello, below.
I have […]

Cuil's homepage.

There’s a big new search engine launching Monday: Cuil. Developed and run by the husband-and-wife team of Stanford professor Tom Costello and former Google search architect Anna Patterson, it’s pitched as bigger, faster, and better than Google’s flagship search engine in pretty much every way. See video interview with Tom Costello, below.
I have […]

Of the 20 or so demos set out to bake in the afternoon soon on the August Capital patio for the TechCrunch party Friday, my award for the most interesting goes to Plista, a social recommendation service that follows what you like and don’t across sites.

Plista currently uses a Greasemonkey script. Once you install it, […]

Verizon’s Fios TV is coming to New York City starting Monday.
The phone company sent a media advisory on Friday about the launch and will provide more details about the service during a Webcast press conference Monday morning. New York City granted Verizon its TV franchise back in May. …
Original post by Marguerite Reardon and software […]

When questionable economics makes for good business.

Years ago, for my wife’s birthday, I bought her a terrarium for her orchids. You know where I got it? Terrariumsale.com. Because that’s what showed up in Google. Now, Terrariumsale.com is not a business unto itself. It’s one of several front-ends to a catalog of goods sold by FineWebStores. […]

Internet phone company Vonage will name a new chief executive as early as next week, according to a story published in the Wall Street Journal Friday.
The newspaper cited people familiar with the situation. The news comes as Vonage secures funding to buy back some of its debt. On Thursday …
Original post by Marguerite Reardon and […]

It’s a pity the National Security Agency can’t talk about its computational challenges, because it’s leaving a lot of the boasting rights to Google.

(Credit: Paul Ford)

In a blog posting on Friday the company shared some detail about the challenges of one aspect of its search operation, the Web indexing and processing that must take place […]

Randy Pausch, the Carnegie Mellon University computer science professor who inspired millions through his “last lecture”, died at his home in Virginia on Friday of complications from pancreatic cancer. He was 47.
(Credit: Randy Pausch)
Pausch was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in September 2006. And his popular “last lecture” at …
Original post by Marguerite Reardon […]

Randy Pausch, the Carnegie Mellon University computer science professor , who inspired millions through his “last lecture”, died at his home in Virginia Friday of complications from pancreatic cancer. He was 47.
(Credit: Randy Pausch)
Pausch was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in September 2006. And his popular “last lecture” at Carnegie …
Original post by Marguerite […]

I’m an expert on pit bulls! Really.
I just wrote a knol, a Web article akin to an encyclopedia entry, using Google’s new Knol publishing platform launched publicly on Wednesday.
With Knol, Google is encouraging people to create more authoritative content that can be indexed by its search engine and monetized with ads. Unlike blogs, […]

Gmail now can be set to encrypt communications e-mail by default, an option that makes the e-mail service harder to snoop on but also potentially slower.

Users already could encrypt communications with Gmail servers (by going to https://mail.google.com), but on Thursday, the company added an option to use the encrypted version automatically.

Gmail now can be set […]

Update 12:35 p.m. PDT: I clarified this post to reflect the fact that this involves encryption only between a user’s browser and Gmail’s servers.

Gmail now can be set to encrypt communications between a browser and Google’s servers by default, an option that makes the e-mail service harder to snoop on but also potentially slower.

Users already […]

AOL is scrapping some online destinations but will push others harder in an attempt to improve its finances, according to internal memos.

Among those products to be shuttered are Bluestring, a site to share videos, music, and photos; Xdrive, a general-purpose online storage service; and AOL Pictures, where people could store and share photos, according to […]

AOL is scrapping some online destinations but will push others harder in an attempt to improve its finances, according to media reports.

Among those to be shuttered are Bluestring, a site to share videos, music, and photos; Xdrive, a general-purpose online storage service; and AOL Pictures, where people could store and share photos, according to a […]

Hasbro said it has filed suit in the Southern District of New York against Rajat Agarwalla, Jayant Agarwalla, and RJ Softwares, better known as the creators of the popular Facebook application Scrabulous. It was only a matter of time before the Scrabble-Scrabulous feud came to a head, and that…
Original post by Gadgets, gizmos, and […]

Lee Lorenzen, the man behind the Altura Facebook-focused venture fund, was at the F8 conference yesterday pitching a non-Facebook project: Kallout. It’s a software utility and Web service that lets you kick off a Web search from any word in almost any app. Lorenzen calls it, “a new way to search using only your mouse.” […]

Correction, 12:05 p.m. PDT: This blog initially misspelled David Recordon’s last name.
At the OSCON Open Source Convention Thursday morning, David Recordon officially announced the Open Web Foundation, the meta-standards organization mentioned briefly Wednesday during the Facebook F8 conference.

Recordon, Open Platforms Tech Lead at Six Apart, told me that the OWF’s mission is to […]

At the OSCON Open Source Convention this morning, David Recordan officially announced the Open Web Foundation, the meta-standards organization mentioned briefly yesterday during the Facebook F8 conference.

Recordan told me that the OWF’s mission is to bring a legal framework, consistency, and communication to the various existing Web standards efforts now underway. As he notes, projects […]

Personal organizer PageOnce has a great iPhone application that I think many will find to be incredibly useful. Like its desktop sibling, PageOnce for iPhone is a feed aggregator the likes of Netvibes or MyYahoo, the only difference is that you’re feeding it account information for utilities and services to get a quick overall view […]

Nothing could have caused more uproar about Twitter, in the blogosphere, than followers suddenly disappearing. We have all complained about and tolerated Twitter’s downtime issues, but seemingly losing your hard earned followers is something that users might not stand for.
In an update on the issue on Twitter’s status blog, the company said that they […]

Pixily is a cool scan-by-mail service that launched in early June. Like Shoeboxed, which I checked out last month, Pixily is all about taking paper clutter out of your life by scanning it in for you and making it both searchable, and able to be organized into buckets. The big difference between the two services […]

“But the shortest works are always the best,” wrote the French poet, and video sharing startup 12seconds is counting on that being true. The simple site, which launches an invitation-only alpha today (500 invites for Webware readers at the end of this post), places a 12-second limit on the videos its users can share.

Twelve seconds. […]

Any of the 263 million Yahoo Mail users who were antsy for change now have something they can sink their teeth into.

The first real fruits of Yahoo’s $350 million acquisition of Zimbra are becoming apparent with the release Thursday of the Yahoo Zimbra Desktop. The e-mail software, available as a free download, works when […]

In a direct challenge to the popular Wikipedia, Google opened Knol, an encyclopedia-like wiki site that requires writers to post their names and expertise. SAN FRANCISCO–Google opened its website Knol to the public on Wednesday, allowing people to write about their areas of expertise under their bylines in a…
Original post by Gadgets, gizmos, and […]

The German Federal Patent Court ruled on Wednesday that a Qualcomm GSM patent asserted in a case against the world’s top cell phone maker Nokia was invalid. HELSINKI–The German Federal Patent Court ruled on Wednesday that a Qualcomm GSM patent asserted in a case against the world’s top cell…
Original post by Gadgets, gizmos, and […]

Qualcomm and Nokia late on Wednesday settled a 3-year, three-continent legal battle over patent licenses and royalties for the next 15 years. NEW YORK–Qualcomm and Nokia late on Wednesday settled a 3-year, three-continent legal battle over patent licenses and royalties for the next 15 years. …
Original post by Gadgets, gizmos, and […]

Opposing Views is a new site for debate that’s launching today. The content on it is great reading. And as CEO Russell Fine said, “I get a lot of people angry. Which is mission accomplished.”
I love that.
The site poses questions to people known for representing strong positions on them. The questions are precisely those […]

My favorite app concept from the Facebook F8 Developers’ Conference was Connected Weddings. Based on the fact that planning a wedding is a social affair (duh), it lets you connect with two different groups: the people coming to your event, and other people who are getting married. With the former, you can share stories and […]

Fluther, my favorite Q&A site has launched a new feature Wednesday called “Your Fluther.” It lets you follow other people’s activity on the site in one centralized, easy to parse feed. It’s a companion to the built-in recommendation engine “just for you” that will feed you with questions based on topics listed in your profile […]

Google programmers are adding support for the Perl programming language to its App Engine service for hosting Web applications, but so far it’s not really an official project.

The work is the project of Google employee Brad Fitzpatrick, who disclosed the project on his blog Tuesday. But he’s not a member of the App Engine team, […]

Mark Zuckerberg today officially rolled out Facebook Connect, a way that apps not on the Facebook Platform can leverage the Facebook social network. It’s an extremely powerful idea, and the demos we saw at the F8 conference were much more impressive than the MySpace Data Availability project that rolled out yesterday.

Facebook Connect allows other Web […]

If you’re not the type of person to carry around a notepad or voice recorder with you, there are a handful of Web services raring to help you out if you’ve got a mobile phone. ReQall, a service that launched back at Demo 07 has a great new iPhone application that does just that. I […]

If you’re not the type of person to carry around a notepad or voice recorder with you there are a handful of Web services raring to help you out if you’ve got a mobile phone. Reqall, a service that launched back at Demo 07 has a great new iPhone application that does just that. I […]

Social-networking savant Flock has announced a re-branded version of its browser aimed at fashionistas. At the very least, it’s aimed at people who like the color pink and lipstick marks on their advertising. Called Gloss, it’s a pink-and-purple themed edition of Flock 1.2 that comes with fashion-related feeds and bookmarks pre-loaded.

The Gloss rebuild of Flock […]

PALO ALTO, Calif.–There are nearly 30 start-ups promoting their wares today as part of AlwaysOn’s Stanford Summit–and that’s just before lunch. Many have been profiled by Webware in the past, but I wanted to take some time to dig into two of my personal favorites from this morning’s CEO presentations.

MyTrybe. This is a behind-the-scenes service […]