Mercora has Web 2.0 makeover
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The Internet radio-cum-smart phone music streaming service reinvents self with social-media-friendly moniker.
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EnterpriseWizard this week is releasing the 2.0 version of its CRM application, a product built on top of its SaaSWizard Web application development platform and designed to be easily customizable.
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Web media giant offered a preview of its redesigned front page Tuesday and said the new simpler look will replace the old one in a few weeks. -Leslie Walker
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Newsforge has a very brief article posted that talks about PHP 5 and some of the features of its "new look" from the previous version.
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InfoWorld - With an upgrade to its Nexaweb Enterprise Web 2.0 Suite being released Monday, Nexaweb will focus on visual capabilities for building mashups.
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(InfoWorld) - AOL's venerable Netscape.com site, given an extremeÂ Web 2.0 makeoverÂ 15 months ago andÂ transformed into a spiffy social news site, will revert to being a traditional portal again. In an official blog posting Thursday, a Netscape official explained that feedback from Netscape.com visitors prompted AOL's decision to scrap the site's redesign. In short, people want the site to offer a more traditional Web portal experience, with news items chosen by Netscape.com editors instead of visitors, a prominent search engine box and links to AOL and Netscape services and content channels. At press time, Netscape.com still retained the format it moved to in June of last year to compete with the likes of Web 2.0 social news upstarts like Digg.com. However, those interested in checking out how Netscape.com will look like soon can see its forthcoming format at an alternate address. Proving that everything old is new again, the new format looks a lot like Netscape.com before its social news metamorphosis. After Netscape.com adopts its new/old portal format, AOL will move the social news site to another, as of yet undetermined, Web address, according to the blog posting. The decision is not surprising. Jason Calacanis, the blogging entrepreneur who masterminded Netscape.com's transformation into a social news site,Â left AOL in November, shortly after Jonathan Miller was replaced as AOL's CEO. Miller had overseen AOL's acquisition of Calacanis' Weblogs Inc. in October 2005 and become a Calacanis mentor at AOL. Then in June of this year,Â AOL relaunched its AOL News siteÂ with a raft of social news capabilities, such as the ability for people to vote on, rank, and share links to articles, photos, and video clips, as well as comment on them, duplicating many of Netscape.com's features. Interestingly, AOL News apparently relies on the Netscape.com social news site for its section on stories submitted by readers. It's unclear if or how the transformation of Netscape.com will affect AOL News' user-submitted stories section. AOL didn't immediately reply to a request for comment. Â
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Yahoo&#39;s Spartan home page will look even less flashy soon, thanks to an upcoming makeover. The Web media giant offered a preview of its redesigned front page Tuesday (www.
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AOL is blurring the lines of news with a makeover that gives its traditional news sites the look and feel of a blog, a shift that is part of its efforts to change from a subscription-based service to a free, advertising-based Web business.
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A new design and a number of under-the-hood improvements move the site away from the niche blog market and into the wider world of online searching.
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Since we launched at Web2  last week there has been a log of great feedback about Rojo .    First off is this *great* new Austin Power logo from Constantin Basturea   Smashing Baby!  On the subject of eye candy check out the CafePress store  that Chris  put together.  Very hip indeed!  I might get this for my girlfriend:  ... and this for my backpack:  We've been getting a lot of great feedback.  Thanks to everyone  for helping us out during our beta trial!  We even have our first Rojo external plugin :  "My room mate, Dylan Parker, has just released a plugin for FireFox named JustBlogIt. JustBlogIt is a Mozilla / Firefox extension that allows easy right-click posting to a weblog. It a ...
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KickApps has updated its hosted social networking platform to allow non-programmers to add Web 2.0 capabilities to corporate web sites.
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InfoWorld - Alfresco Software is taking cues from the so-called Web 2.0 craze with the release of the latest version of its open-source CMS (content management software).
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Mozilla-based Netscape 7.2 improves printing and integrates instant messaging.
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The future appears rosy for Firefox. Just two years after its start, and even before reaching version 1.0 (now imminent), the little open source browser has already left behind its elder
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A new website provides an innovative tool that expands and contracts images while minimizing  distortion.
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(InfoWorld) - Call it the second Internet bubble, a Web 2.0 revolution, or just a resurgence in really useful tools for busy end-users -- Web applications are catching on quickly. The advantages are clear for applications that work well on the Web: Anytime and anywhere access to your data, good application speed over a broadband connection, automated backups, and streamlined user interfaces that are far easier to use than the bloatware of yesteryear. Well-known services, such as Plaxo.com and Basecamp.com, offer to mobile users the added benefit of being able to tap into their contacts or projects from a smartphone. One of the most compelling reasons to use applications on the Web is that they are almost all free -- at least for now. Here are a few new -- or at least lesser-known -- Web sites that can serve as good replacements for equivalent desktop software. In this roundup, I'll cover the features that make each one noteworthy and offer a few ideas for other candidates worth exploring. Gliffy Gliffy is a flow chart and diagram application that works exactly like Microsoft Visio. To create a flow chart, you just drag icons onto the document area. You can then use arrows and other pointers to create the chart. Like many full-blown Web apps, Gliffy allows you to collaborate with other users by sharing your flow chart in a public workspace. Brainstorming sessions, marketing demos, or just a clear plan on how to implement a hardware or software rollout in a large company become quick and easy -- there's no desktop client to install or site registration to think about. Although Gliffy lacks the pizzazz of a commercial application -- some of the icons for creating a networking flow chart, for example, look too simplistic -- the Web application ran without any problems in both IE7 and Firefox. It does lack a way to quickly align objects or rotate them in set increments using a modifier key. As with most Web apps, Gliffy stores your diagrams automatically and introduces new features without requiring an upgrade. Priscila Melendez, a senior consultant at Booz Allen Hamilton, is a Gliffy user. "I used Gliffy when working on a marketing effort to share network security diagrams with other team members who were off-site," Melendez said. "The ability to share the images created and then to be able to save and use them in publications and documents makes this a great collaboration tool. I believe the way diagrams can be generated and shared is the greatest asset, especially as more companies are starting to open up to telecommuting." ThinkFree Anyone who relies heavily on a word processor for business communication, project documentation, or even just quick cover letters probably already knows the features they like best. For me, one feature that is obviously missing from Web word processors -- including ZoHo Writer and Google Documents -- is the inline spell checker. ThinkFree, billed as "the best online office on earth," distinguishes itself by offering a spell checker -- and it even has custom dictionaries. When you misspell a word, ThinkFree adds a red underline that you can click on to select the correct spelling. It might seem trivial, but because this feature is missing from many other online word processors, it's a definite plus. Of course, ThinkFree Office offers a bevy of additional features: 1GB of storage for documents, Microsoft Office read-and-write support, a global search for both public and private documents and two options for word processing -- a quick edit function with a limited (but more intuitive) feature set, and a power edit mode with more advanced functions. ThinkFree supports word processing, spreadsheets, and online presentations. It uses Java, which means it should support multiple browsers, but at press time, it didn't work with the latest version of Firefox 2. In Internet Explorer 7, all three beta apps worked without any crashes. YouSendIt One of the nagging problems of Web e-mail is that there is no progress indicator that shows you when a large attachment is transferring to the recipient. In Microsoft Live Mail and Gmail, you just wait until you return to the inbox. Even in Microsoft Outlook, the progress bar isn't terribly accurate about how long it will take to send a large attachment. And it's also a guessing game as to whether the recipient can receive a large file or not. One solution to this problem is YouSendIt. The free version allows you to send a 100MB file to any recipient -- neither the sender nor receiver has to register for an account. What I like about YouSendIt more than other options like DropSend.com and MailBigFile.com is that it actually works. I tested about 10 files, each one to a different recipient, and they all worked flawlessly. Other services tend to stall or lose track of the upload. YouSendIt offers scaled membership levels for different transfer capabilities. The $4.99-per-month Plus version, for example, can send attachments up to 2GB in size. There's also an enterprise-level version with extremely high bandwidth so that once you transmit the file, it will become available as a fast download for other corporate users. GrandCentral Think of GrandCentral as a more intuitive and Web-enabled alternative to fixed mobile convergence, allowing you to use one unified phone number for work, home, and cell phone. Granted, it's not an enterprise application with an application programming interface that you can tie into corporate networks, and there are no security features for corporate compliance. But for sales agents or other mobile workers who want more control of their voice communications, GrandCentral works perfectly. Once you understand the benefits of unified messaging -- that people trying to contact you call one number, but all of your phones ring at the same time -- you can go well beyond this core functionality to personalized greetings by phone, call recording, call screening and blocking, and a unique feature called RingShare that plays something different than the traditional "ring ring" sound for callers while they wait for you to pick up. You can even program it so different groups of people hear different sounds. Xdrive Some laptop users have learned the harsh reality of magnetic-media storage: Your local disk can fail, and if you don't have a recent backup for Outlook, your business documents and even seemingly trivial settings like Internet Explorer bookmarks, there's no way to retrieve lost data. Some external storage drives, such as the Western Digital MyBook, provide an Internet storage option, but they're hard to configure and use. Xdrive.com has a new beta service called Web Backup that offers more control over online backups. Just register at xdrive.com (AOL users, just log in with your AOL account) and click on the Beta button and then click Web Backup. You can configure Xdrive to archive documents, photos, and even IE favorites with just a few clicks. Unlike competitors like Mozy.com, it runs entirely on the Web, so you can use it on any computer to archive the contents of that PC. Xdrive is entirely free and comes with 5GB of storage. You can also upload a large file and then share the link with a co-worker so he can download it. An ancillary service called Xdrive Shows is an online presentation system for photos of business slides. Web apps or Web 2.0? You might wonder: what's the difference between a Web application and Web 2.0? Some would say "not much." But Web 2.0 is a broad term that implies usefulness and social engineering. Twitter.com is a good example of a Web 2.0 site because it doesn't look like a desktop application running on the Web, yet it's useful and has a distinct social aspect. Meanwhile, a Web application is less about connecting with friends or even connecting to other Web services and more about being productive. Some people believe that sites like Twitter.com could be part of a short-lived fad and that they don't appeal as much to the business user. John Brandon is a freelance writer and book author who worked as an IT manager for 10 years.
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Mercora Inc., which distributes software for webcasting music, is making a bid for the bourgeoning mobile music market with a new application that enables users of select wireless devices to listen to tracks stored on PCs or other users' computers.