KickApps Launches Drag-and-Drop Advertising Service

KickApps, a company that provides on-demand social media applications that enable web publishers to monetize online audiences announced today that it’s trying to make it easier for website owners to add video advertising to their own videos and websites using the KickApps Widget & Video Player Studio.
Using drag-and-drop, KickApps’ clients can add translucent overlay, interstititial, and pre- and post-roll advertising to any of their videos running on KickApps’ video players with the help of a mouse. The company also announced that along with its drag-and-drop feature, it now supports integration with Google AdSense for Video, Scanscout, Adap.tv, and 24/7 Real Media. So far, it doesn’t support DoubleClick’s DART, but the company promised that it will be made available over the next few weeks.
In order to use the KickApps’ Widget and Video Player Studio, web publishers need to buy out ad inventory based on a set CPM rate. In return, the publishers can then place the KickApps advertising modules onto their sites on-the-fly.
The KickApps Widget & Video Player Studio is available now for any publisher that signs up for the service.

Website: kickapps.com
Location: New York, New York, United States
Founded: March 1, 2004
Funding: $17M
KickApps provides on-demand social media applications that enable web publishers and marketers to grow, engage, and monetize online audiences. Its SaaS platform is powered by the first Social Graph Engine for web publishers. The platform includes…

The T-Mobile G1

The long-awaited for many days now - the operator T-Mobile and Google officially presented the first smartphone on the platform of Android, called G1 (formerly known as the HTC Dream). G1 has a 3-inch touch screen organization submitting an application for QWERTY-keyboard and Internet navigation buttons, and among other technical merit, smartphone supports all applications Google, including search, maps, Gmail, contacts, calendar, Google Talk and You Tube, as well as Android Market - «shop» applications for phones on Android, where any application can be downloaded free of charge. All the details - further. There you will find the first spot, orientation and very detailed work on videotur G1 of three videos Perov, "live" video, and, of course, a lot of live photos.
- Network: GSM / GPRS / EDGE and UMTS / HSDPA (850/900/1700/1800/1900/2100);
- 3.17-inch touch-sensitive display, 65K colors, the resolution HVGA (480 × 320);
- 3-megapixel camera;
- GPS; - WiFi;
- Bluetooth;
- 1 gigabyte of internal memory and microSD-slot (for cards with capacity up to 8 GB);
- 5 hours of talk, 130 hours - in standby-bye.
With a two-year contract, the phone will cost 179 dollars, without him - 399 dollars. Sales start on 22 October.

The G1 event has come and gone and it looks like we’re seeing an epic paradigm shift in the mobile space. iPhone started the ball rolling and Android is about the finish the job. The change? Phones are now officially computers and the expectation for most users is that they behave in the same way a powerful laptop or desktop PC would perform, albeit in a considerably more compact package.
I was struck by something during the G1 presentation today and it took me a quite a while to figure out what it was. Back in 1997-98 while I was at Carnegie Mellon we were at a crossroads in IT. The web was taking off in a general way and email was king for college students. The school was full of computer clusters - some Mac, some PC, and some greenscreen Unix dumb terminals in the library running X Windows. While the Macs and PCs were easy to understand and run, you could just tell that the Unix machines were like an iceberg - 98% of the power is under water, unseen by the average user. Putting the G1 through its paces showed a intense attention to detail on the part of Google and a tacit promise from the phone that it was far more powerful than originally described. This is G1’s blessing and curse.

Go28Days

Ok listen up if you are part of the population that has to deal with monthly fertility cycles. Newly launched Go28Days may be the thing for you if you are really trying hard to get pregnant, or really trying hard not to get pregnant. Like a bunch of other sites, they monitor your cycle days, temperature and other stuff I’m not going to talk about, and let you know the days you are most fertile. But the site also has a number of nice touches, including sharing of information with select friends. And soon they say they’ll have a Facebook app (of course) and a mobile version to for adding data and, presumably, making a last minute fertility check before engaging in behavior you’ll likely regret in the morning.
The service is newly launched, but is a sister site to a Polish version that launched late last year. Users of the Polish service have created 100,000 fertility charts, the company says, and over 2 million comments have been added (users can add information daily about their…bodies I guess).

Do You Know the Richest People In Tech?

Forbes has once again released its list of America’s richest people and, not surprisingly, Bill Gates topped the list with an estimated wealth of about $57 billion. But Gates isn’t alone as the only technology titan on the country’s list of the richest people. On the list again this year is Gates’ old partner Paul Allen, Sergey and Larry from Google, and Steve Jobs. New to the list is Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who sneaked in ahead of EMC’s Richard Egan.

The Richest People in Tech

1. Bill Gates (Microsoft), $57 billion
3. Larry Ellison (Oracle), $27 billion
11. Michael Dell (Dell), $17.3 billion
12. Paul Allen (Microsoft), $16 billion
13. Sergey Brin (Google), $15.9 billion
14. Larry Page (Google), $15.8 billion
15. Steve Ballmer (Microsoft), $15 billion
33. Jeff Bezos (Amazon), $8.7 billion
47. Rupert Murdoch (News Corp.), $6.8 billion
54. Pierre Omidyar (eBay), $6.3 billion
59. Eric Schmidt (Google), $5.9 billion
61. Steve Jobs (Apple), $5.7 billion
84. Gordon Moore (Intel), $4.4 billion
84. John Sall (SAS Institute), $4.4 billion
91. David Sun (Kingston Technology), $4 billion
91. John Tu, (Kingston Technology), $4 billion
105. Richard Shulze (Best Buy), $3.5 billion
144. Ray Dolby (Dolby), $2.9 billion
161. Mark Cuban (Broadcast.com), $2.6 billion
246. Irwin Jacobs (Qualcomm), $1.9 billion
246. Omid Kordestani (Google), $1.9 billion
262. Henry Samueli (Broadcom), $1.8 billion
281. David Filo (Yahoo), $1.7 billion
321. Amar Bose (Bose), $1.5 billion
321. Todd Wagner (Broadcast.com), $1.5 billion
321. Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), $1.5 billion
355. Richard Egan (EMC), $1.4 billion
355. Vinod Khosla (Sun Microsystems), $1.4 billion
355. Theodore Waitt (Gateway), $1.4 billion

WEbook

Website: webook.com
Location: Bethesda, Maryland, United States
Founded: January 1, 2007
Funding: $5M

WEbook is an online platform where the site’s users — authors, writers, and even readers — collaborate to write books. Since its April 2008 launch, WEbook has added thousands of writers, editors, illustrators, and readers to its service and the site is currently hosting 15,000 book projects in genres ranging from short stories to non-fiction. Once a book is completed, it goes through a community vetting process where the users vote on books. Those that perform best during the process will be published by WEbook. WEbook shares 50 percent of the profit on sales with the author and the book’s major contributors as a fee for publishing the title.
So far, it looks like WEbook’s efforts are working. The site’s unique visitor count is on the rise, according to Compete data, and it witnessed 17 percent growth over the past month.

Ajax Framework Ext GWT 1.1 Released

Darrell Meyer has announced the release of Ext GWT 1.1 which is said to “shortens the feature set gap between Ext JS.”
New Features
The Grid component wraps the Ext JS grid, and it includes support for grid plugins which fit into component lifecycles. You can also use a subclass, EditableGrid which…. allows you to edit content on the fly.
Auto complete has been added to the combo boxes a la Google Suggest.
Portal is a custom layout container that uses a multi-column layout on contains Portlets. Each Porlet can be drag and dropped to change order or move to another column. Each Portlet can contain any content and supports icons to expand / collapse, close, etc.
The desktop mimics the behavior of the operating system look at feel. It is now possible to create multi-window applications with support for a task bar and start menu. Windows support normal, maximize, and minimize states. The start menu is a custom menu that allows new menu items. In addition, there is support for a “task” area for adding additional items.

There are also new examples:
Forum search is an example of a combo box, using a custom XTemplate, and remote data. The data can be paged with built-in support for a paging toolbar.
Image Chooser shows loading a ListView in a Window. Each item has a linked details view, and the ListView supports custom sorting and filtering.
This example shows a Dialog using an AnchorLayout to “anchor” the form fields to the dialog dimensions. When resized, the fields will adjust their size to match the dimensions of the dialog.

Voice Stick: portable scanner text for visually impaired users

Modern technologies developed in geometric progression, each day, referring to all new and new categories of consumers. A huge number of innovations focuses on people with disabilities. A striking example of this development is a device Voice Stick, designed to enable people with low vision to read independently usual printed text. Ongoing this opportunity as it is realized in the scanners, but the functionality of this devaysa also expanded module converts text information into the voice. Simply put, the device recognizes the printed text directly from his paper and read out aloud, in essence providing invaluable assistance to people with low vision. So this product can be safely prichislyat considered innovative and, at the same time, very practical. So in the case as ordinary printed letters and e-mail device Voice Stick has all chances to become an indispensable solution for people whose eyesight is poor.

Sony Ericsson with the full support USB

Modern mobile phones are easily supported play music, video, work with e-mail, and, perhaps, already difficult to imagine what more could appear in these devices, which can not become a purely marketing move, but bring real benefit to humans. Conceived phone series Walkman, developed by a designer named Vincent Paliki (Vincent Palicki), represents the idea of equipping mobile gadget full-port USB, which is not done at the expense of his fine form. This undoubtedly will increase significantly the volume of phone memory and technically simplify the solution of many issues, but on the other hand, may add some very tangible and inconvenience. It is not difficult to imagine how will look clumsy phone with flash, lying in a pocket or even with the direct conversation on it. However, a final decision on nuzhnosti irrelevance or any function always remains with the consumer.

Sony prepares alarm clock-radio to iPhone / iPod

Who would have thought that Sony will produce accessories for the iPod, players direct competitor Sony Walkman! Nevertheless, the marketing of Japanese corporations still decided to wait for clients Apple: in October is expected to issue a multifunctional docking station Sony ICF-CD3iP for iPod / iPhone.

Apart from the attractive design, novelty attracts rich functionality: Naturally, docking station for iPhone / iPod - charging your gadget or use the dynamics of docking station for listening to music electronic watches alarm clock - as a melody you can put any track c iPhone or favorite radio station AM / FM radio with memory at 30 stations On the D player - supports CD-RW and MP3 remote e-hand.

A nice set of features for $ 100 (at least, is the expected price of Sony ICF-CD3iP)

IAMNEWS

Website:iamnews.com
iamnews is a global open newsroom powered by you. With iamnews anyone can assign news tasks. Everyone can participate.
It is for independent reporters, photographers, media moguls and anyone who wants to connect with reporters from the world and … Learn More

The last company to present yesterday at TechCrunch50 was picked by the audience from the more than 100 additional companies vying for attention in our DemoPit. Every attendee got three TC50 poker chips that they could give to a DemoPit company each day, and the one with the most chips at the end of the conference became our 52nd finalist. This year’s winner was Iamnews, a crowdsourced newsroom with ambitions to one day take on AP and Reuters.
Iamnews is a news assignment hub for blogs and news Websites. It is a tool for crowdsourcing news. A blog or any Web publisher can use it to solicit submissions from citizen journalists—videos, photos, links, Twitters, notes, or full articles The Web publisher then takes all the submissions and pulls together the best ones to create a post or article..
Israeli founder Nir Ofir, who is also the founder of Blog.tv, explained:
The problem is most small to medium publishers do not have the resources to tap copyrighted news and photos. We allow publishers to create news assignments, invite reporters to come in and collaborate in the creation of news. You can invite your own reporters, or we can match you with reporters.
So a blog that wants to cover an event like next year’s TC50, for instance, could put out an assignment and solicit reports, photos, and videos from other bloggers at the conference and attendees themselves. Crowdsourced journalism just took a step forward. The site is still in private alpha, but we will have invites soon.

TrueCar, Car Dealers Must be More Honest

TrueCar joins GoodGuide in helping consumers obtain more information about the products they buy - information that sellers don’t necessarily want them to have. In TrueCar’s case, that information is simple yet elusive: just how much you should pay for a new car.
TrueCar aggregates data from a variety of (mostly unnamed) sources to determine how much money other people have paid for new cars around the country. It then places its findings at your disposal so you can determine whether or not that dealership down the street is offering you a good deal. The outcome, hopefully, is that you save not only hundreds and possibly thousands on your new car but the time it would have taken to comparison shop as well.
To use TrueCar, you just have to enter your zip code and the model you’re interested in buying. The price data is offered to you in a variety of visual formats such as bar graphs and charts. And it can be narrowed down to a local, regional, or national level. You can also view the history of how a car’s price has changed over time.
The site currently accounts for only about 25% of all relevant transactions. The founders want to hold off from launching it publicly until they’ve reached at least 50% and they are confident that one day they will hit 75%.
The expert panelists were concerned in particular about the sources of TrueCar’s information and its uniqueness. Jeff Weiner asked where the company got its information and why the pricing information offered by other sites like Edmunds didn’t stack up. The founders insisted that all of the data was out there and publicly available; it was just hard to tie it all together and make sense of it. And since they had built a sophisticated system to synthesize it all, their pricing insights were deeper and more informative.
Don Dodge and Sean Parker were also skeptical that the provision of this pricing knowledge would actually change consumer behavior, since people are lazy and subject to price discrimination, even when it comes to commodities.

Ra-ajax, New Ajax Library By The Creator Of Gaia

Thomas Hansen the creator of Gaia Ajax Widgets have recently announced that he is no longer with Gaiaware and already started a new ASP.NET Ajax library Ra-Ajax and a new company Ra Software AS. Thomas have quit Gaiaware due to disagreeing on the future of the company with the others, you can read his very long blog post on the current situation.
Ra-Ajax his new Ajax library is under LGPL 3 license is an ultra lightweight, slick and small Ajax library for ASP.NET and Mono which tries to completely abstract away JavaScript from the developer. It's true that the library is new, but its size zip-compressed already exceed the 7Mo ! The website provide some good samples including Event system, Effects, Dynamic Controls, Button, Checkbox, DropDownList, Image, Labels, Panel, TextBox, Accordion, Calendar, InPlaceEdit, RichEdit, Timer ... and more. More information and download at http://ra-ajax.org/.

Google Chrome, the new Browser by Google

Google have just announced their entrance to the browsers war to join Microsoft IE, Mozilla FF, Safari, Opera and others. Chrome the new google browser, is very simple and very fast ! Chrome uses components from Apple's WebKit and Mozilla's Firefox, among others - and that's not everything because Google is willing to make it Open Source.

All of us at Google spend much of our time working inside a browser. We search, chat, email and collaborate in a browser. And in our spare time, we shop, bank, read news and keep in touch with friends -- all using a browser. Because we spend so much time online, we began seriously thinking about what kind of browser could exist if we started from scratch and built on the best elements out there.
For more information and download : http://www.google.com/chrome