MischMasch 2009-08-17

Local review site Qype launched Qype Italia. The Hamburg based company is now present in the UK, Ireland, Germany, France, Spain, Austria, Switzerland, Poland, Brazil and Italy. Currently reviews are written in English, French, Spanish, Portuese, Polish and Italian. (Via Blonde 2.0)

The Panel Picker for SXSW 2010 is live. Now you can browse through all the programming proposals and you can vote for your favourties.

Microsoft will continue to support IE6 until 2014. There are a lot of online campaigns aiming to kill the 8 year-old browser, but it seems this will be a very slow death. (Via BBC NEWS | Technology)

URL shortener tr.im, that announced to shut down and then re-opened again, will become public domain, 100% community-owned, operated, and developed. (Via tr.im URLs)

37signals are working on a global namespace that users will have a single username and password for all 37signals products. This will be more userfriendly and will make it easier to implement tighter integration between their products. (Via Signal vs. Noise)

EveryBlock, a hyperlocal news site, has been acquired by MSNBC.com. (Via The Everyblock Blog)

The Los Angeles Times web site was redesigned. But now it is quite hard to distinguish the links from the rest of the text. (Via Jens Meiert on Twitter)

MischMasch 2009-08-05

Google acquired On2 Technologies, creator of high-quality video compression technology, to improve video quality on the web. (Via Official Google Blog)

A big group of startups have started the initiative IE6 No More to support help to kill Microsoft‘s Internet Explorer 6. The web site explains why people should abandon this old browser and provides code samples that can be implemented in every web site. This campaign is supported by Weebly, Posterous, DISQUS, Justin.tv and many more. (Via Mashable)

The new Google Chrome beta is faster, has an improved New Tab page and Omnibox, allows to add themes to the browser and has new HTML 5 capabilities. On time this new version of Google Chrome beta is only available for Windows. (Via Google Chrome Blog)