| Zimbra: 6 million Paid Mailboxes |
| Zimbra is an Ajax Microsoft exchange competitor with a webmail service that thousands of businesses and organizations use to handle email, contacts and calendaring. They also offer a great mobile solution. The core product is open source, and Zimbra has a higher end version that sells for $25 per person per year (with various discounts). Since their launch they’ve grown. And grown. They had 4 million “paid mailboxes” in October 2006. Next Monday they will announce that they now have more than 6 million paid mailboxes over 1,300 customers, a growth of 50% in three months. Sixty percent of their customers are being serviced through resellers. They have lots of help with the product, too. They’ll be announcing version 4.5 of their Collaboration Suite (which is already available). 6,300 developers and administrators have contributed to Zimbra. The open source version of Zimbra has been downloaded “hundreds of thousands” of times. The company has raised $16 million in funding from Benchmark Partners, Redpoint Ventures and Accel Capital. Source: TechCrunch |
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| Google Starts Selling Domains For $10 Per Year |
| Google has entered the domain business with partners GoDaddy and eNom. An already crowded industry, Google has begun allowing people to register ‘.com’, ‘.net’, ‘.biz’, and ‘.info’ Web site addresses. Web sites that register their domains directly with Google for $10/year will automatically be setup to use Google Apps for Your Domain, which includes Google’s Page Creator (for easily making a Web site), Calendar, Email, and IM.With this move, look for Google to tap more into the domain parking business using their Google AdSense for Domains product a bit more. |
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| Adobe Device Central CS3 Mobilizes Creative Pros |
| Adobe today announced Adobe Device Central CS3, an integrated component across the all-new Adobe Creative Suite® 3 family. Adobe Device Central CS3 is designed to radically boost the efficiency and productivity of creative professionals who develop dynamic and engaging interfaces, mobile assets, applications and video content for mobile phones and hand-held consumer electronic devices. This new software component is integrated in Adobe Creative Suite 3 Design, Web and Production Premium editions, as well as individual products, including flagship franchises such as Adobe Flash CS3 Professional, Adobe Photoshop CS3, and Adobe Premiere Pro CS3 software. Adobe Device Central CS3 makes it easier to create mobile content by helping creative professionals better deal with a complex mobile-device landscape. Operators, in return, benefit from the creativity of millions of designers who will help deliver new content-rich data services to mobile customers. For the first time, creative professionals are able to preview their work and test mobile content instantly within familiar authoring environments through a periodically updated library of detailed phone and device profiles. With tight integration across the Adobe Creative Suite 3 family, Adobe Device Central CS3 dramatically simplifies the mobile authoring process. |
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| Bolt Sells to GoFish to Pay Universal Music |
| Video sharing site Bolt.com is being acquired by GoFish - a smaller but richer rival, in order to pay the settlement the company has agreed to with Universal Music Group for copyright infringement. The New York Times broke the story. Bolt will go for an estimated $30 million in GoFish stock; the three year old GoFish was the first video sharing site to go public last October. Though it has just begun to bring in revenue from licensing deals, GoFish stock closed Friday just under $6 per share with a market value of $134 million. The settlement was for “several millions of dollars” in cash, stock and advertising credits - presumably much less than the original demand from Universal of $150,000 per infraction. The acquiring company GoFish, not to be confused with the wildly successful singles’ site PlentyofFish, has recently seen a huge spike in traffic. It was at 1.4 million monthly unique visitors as of December but reports more than 6 million uniques last month. Bolt sees more than 5 million unique visitors monthly (according to Comscore) and turned that traffic into $7 million in revenue last year. GoFish has reported no revenue but has deeper pockets. It was given birth to by Palo Alto investment firm Global Asset Capital. Source: TechCrunch |
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| AskCity Up and Running |
| The new AskCity product, which combines Ask.com’s existing maps product (overhauled last February) with deep local content (information, reviews, etc.) and very good search, might just be my new go to source for maps and local business information.The reason that AskCity has such good content is that they’ve taken it from CitySearch, another service owned by parent company IAC. CitySearch has ten years of local content, and that is now deeply integrated with Ask’s maps product. Key categories are Businesses and Services, Events, Movies, and Maps & Directions. The three pane interface allows users to conduct multiple searches, revise itineraries, create multi-point driving or walking directions (only Yahoo and Ask offer multi-point directions). Restaurant reservations are linked via OpenTable, event tickets can be purchased through Ticketmaster (another IAC property) and soon they will integrate movie ticket purchases through Fandango. Searches can be refined by neighborhood, cuisine or movie genre. Ask Users can also pin items (events, places) onto a map, draw their own notes on the map, and send a permalink to the customized map to friends for printing or for their comments. |
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| Google AdSense Alternative - IntelliTXT |
| Been looking for an alternative to Google AdSense? Try Vibrant Media’s IntelliTXT. IntelliTXT enables every word to be an opportunity for advertisers to communicate with their customers. By drawing a connection between your advertising message and words relevant to your products, IntelliTXT will capture a user’s attention and engage them with your brands. See live examples of IntelliTXT formats. It’s been my experience that many other bloggers use this service; however, you must first be considered to participate in their program. From my understanding, to participate - you need a site that already generates plenty of traffic. Anyways, Google AdSense is still my preference but this is definitely worth a try if you’re looking to increase revenue from your web site. |
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| Google Acquires Endoxon - Euro Mapping Company |
| Google announced the acquisition of part of a business called Endoxon, an Internet mapping company located in Switzerland. This deal looks like it’s part technology and part team. The Google blog says Endoxon has developed “compelling technology that will enhance our Google geo products worldwide,” as well as “we’re also excited about having a dedicated team in Europe.” Nothing is being said about acquisition price, or what will happen to the three Endoxon business units that Google didn’t acquire. |
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| Yahoo To Launch New Search Marketing Ranking Model |
| Yahoo! Inc., a leading global Internet brand and one of the most trafficked Internet destinations worldwide, announced that it will launch its new search marketing ranking model in the U.S. on Monday, February 5. With the new ranking model, all Yahoo! search marketing ads in the U.S. will be ranked by quality in addition to keyword bid price. As a result, Yahoo! will be able to provide a more relevant search experience to users, more valuable customer leads to advertisers, and additional opportunities to its distribution partners. "Yahoo! is very excited to introduce our new, more quality-focused ranking model because it has the power to significantly enhance the experience we deliver to our users and unlock the full potential of Yahoo!'s search marketing network," said Terry Semel, chief executive officer, Yahoo! Inc. "With this important piece in place our new search marketing system will allow Yahoo! to more effectively connect people with the businesses, products, services and information they are passionate about." To date, search ads on Yahoo! and its distribution partner sites have been ranked solely by bid price - the higher the bid, the higher an ad appears within the search results. When the new ranking model goes into effect, both bid and the ad's quality together will determine where an ad appears in the search results. The quality of an ad will be determined by its historical performance in the new system and its expected performance relative to other ads displayed at the same time. Ads of higher quality will generally receive better placement on the results page. |
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| Midomi Names That Tune |
| New startup Midomi, a voice-based music search engine with a social network bolted on, recently launched. If you have a microphone connected to your computer, just sing or hum a few seconds of any song. In theory, Midomi will return a link to the original song for partial playback or purchase, and will also return results from other users who’ve recorded themselves singing that song. The social network aspect to this is what will make it popular, and the search engine will help people group songs that they all sing and compare. Users have a profile page and can add friends, fans, etc. Others rate their recordings. kSolo (acquired by Fox) and SingShot have dabbled in this space successfully. |
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| Adobe Releases Major Upgrade to RoboHelp |
| Adobe announced Adobe RoboHelp 6, a complete, flexible and user-friendly system to create, manage and publish software help systems, knowledge bases and documentation for desktop and Web-based applications. As a key element of Adobe’s technical communications product line-up, which includes Adobe FrameMaker, Adobe Captivate and Adobe Acrobat, RoboHelp 6 provides all the desktop functionality that authors need to create advanced Help content, including table of contents, index, glossary, graphics, special effects and context-sensitive Help. Adobe RoboHelp Server 6, also introduced today, provides powerful server features that ensure the delivery of up-to-date online content, with real-time tracking of how end-users engage with the help system that provides valuable feedback to Help publishers. “Adobe RoboHelp 6 is a major release and a key milestone in the product’s 15-year history,” said Don Walker, senior director of product marketing and business development at Adobe. “RoboHelp 6 strongly reinforces Adobe’s commitment to the technical communications market, giving authors what they need to easily develop, manage and maintain intuitive software help systems and knowledge bases.” “RoboHelp has consistently led the market for the past decade, providing superior usability and productivity,” said Ron Linyard, President and CEO of Unwired Software and former VP of Engineering for eHelp. “The software is compatible with a host of formats and leverages the benefits of other Adobe products to give users a richer experience than other tools provide.” |
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