Microsoft

MischMasch 2009-08-17

~ Georg Portenkirchner ~ Leave a comment

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 2009-08-14

~ Georg Portenkirchner ~ Leave a comment

Twitter started Project Retweet to implement retweeting. It will be a bit different from what is retweeting now. There will be no RT, but the original tweet will show up in the timeline with the line retweeted by @name added to the date/time stamp. I agree with Eric Meyer‘s tweet that Twitter should fix replies above adding retweet features. (Via Twitter Blog)

Google Reader got some new features. It is possible to send blog posts to various sites like Delicious, Twitter, Facebook, Blogger and others. More sites can be added manually. There is the new feature to discover the feeds of people one is following. (Via Official Google Reader Blog)

Creative Commons licensed books can now be distributed on Google Books. More on CC and Google Books can be found on the Inside Google Books blog. (Via Joi Ito on Twitter)

YouTube‘s redesign went live. The site looks now cleaner, the masthead looks different and some functions were moved or eliminated. (Via Mashable)

Facebook is testing Facebook Lite, a simpler design for the site. Currently only a few selected users are able to access the Facebook Lite site. (Via Mashable)

Microsoft announced that they will launch a Zune HD on September 25th 2009. It will be thinner and and not as ugly as it’s predecessor. (Via Mashable)

Google introduced social gadgets for iGoogle, so everyone can share, collaborate and play games on iGoogle. (Via Official Google Blog)

My Opera lets you push updates to Twitter and Facebook. (Via My Opera news)

MischMasch 2009-08-10

~ Georg Portenkirchner ~ 3 Comments

Facebook acquired FriendFeed. For the time being FriendFeed will continue as it is. News about the acquisition have been on Mashable, Current, TechCrunch and everywhere else. Some people think it was a good move, Steve Rubel names it the best news he has heard in awhile, Tara Hunt guesses that it is a talent acquisition and a lot of people are not happy with this news. (Via FriendFeed Blog and Facebook Press Room)

URL shortener tr.im shuts down because of lack of monetization. Links will work until at least December 31st, 2009. (Via Mashable)

There is a new release of the Qype API including JSON support, read/write and no more OAuth for reads. (Via Qype on Twitter)

Microsoft sells it’s online interactive ad agency Razorfish they have been owning since the aQuantive acquisition in 2007. (Via Mashable)

MischMasch 2008-09-10

~ Georg Portenkirchner ~ Leave a comment

During the TechCrunch50 Conference 2008 Marissa Mayer announced Google News Archive Search that makes old newspapers accessible and searchable online. It was already fascinating to read articles in The Times Archive going back to 1785. But now the Google News Archive Search offers an amazing amount of historical newspaper articles. There is more information about the Google News Archive Search in the Official Google Blog.

Google Chrome is already one week old, but there is still a lot of talk about the new kid on the block. It has been the first internet browser that has been the topic in nearly every newspaper and on TV. At the beginning the media coverage was quite positive, but became more and more negative. Now not the speed or how the browser deals with frozen tabs are reported, but that Google Chrome is insecure and that Google is gathering more and more information about the users of Google browser. Even the German nationalwide news programme tagesschau was reporting that the The Federal Office for Information Security warned of Google Chrome. But only a few media have been mentioning the release of Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 althought seems that IE8 is another step foward to standards compliance and security.

MischMasch 2008-05-23

~ Georg Portenkirchner ~ Leave a comment

Webmonkey was a useful resource for web developers. Back in the ninetees it was started as part of HotWired that was acquired by Lycos in 1999. For a long time it was nothing more than an archive. Now Webmonkey is back, relaunched by Wired based on MediaWiki, making Webmonkey a collaborative project. (Via Jeffrey Veen)

Techmeme, the tech web site aggregating blogs and other news sites, has finally added search.

The New York Times released the beta version of Times Reader for the Mac, a programme with the ability to view the paper offline and with less ads than the web version. Times Reader for the Mac demands the installation of Microsoft Silverlight. So far the reactions are not very positive and there is a lot of criticism on the the use of Microsoft Silverlight.

MischMasch 2008-05-06

~ Georg Portenkirchner ~ Leave a comment

At the weekend Microsoft has withdrawn its proposal to acquire Yahoo!. Microsoft now talks about improving search relevance, building an ad platform, about partnerships and innovation. Yesterday Yahoo! stock plunged, but still is higher than before the Microsoft offer happened.

Seems later on this year the iPhone will come to several new countries. Telecom Italia already published a press release today. A very short press release.

A good reason why these sites are down: The majority of Real World, Peter Gabriel and WOMAD web services are currently off-line. Our servers were stolen from our ISP’s data centre on Sunday night – Monday morning. We are working to restore normal service as soon as possible.