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Yacrosoft or Michoo – too Icahnish? When America was once prosperous, not too long ago and most U.S. industries had at least a bright near-term economic future, the greedy class of American could enrich themselves privately, away from the media and general public – but, those times have changed. This recent statement in The Washington Post article says it all - “Icahn, who owns a 5 percent stake in Yahoo, emphasized he still believes a sale of all or part of Yahoo may still be the best way for the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company to lift its sagging stock price.” No mention whatsoever has been discussed publicly of what to fix that people don’t like about Yahoo that may be causing the lack of financial windfall that Carl Icahn believes he should benefit from by investing in Yahoo, the well liked consumer based Internet icon stock.

Yet another site moved from Digg to DZone.

Google Earth is turning out to be a great resource for scientists to visualize and communicate the phenomena they study. You can see the migration patterns of endangered and other threatened animals, based on data collected by the Commission for Environmental Cooperation. (The image above shows the range of both the Northern spotted owl and the Mexican spotted owl).

Anybody can take geographical data and turn it into a layer on Google Earth. Scientists are doing this in droves. You can also track storms, the paths of solar eclipses, volcano activity, arctic ice melting, bird flu mutations and biomaps of emotional stress levels in different cities (see this Popular Science article for more info).

Since these are all KML files, they could be made into layers on the regular Google Maps as well. Although they wouldn’t look as cool, more people would see them.

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Tripwolf, the social travel guide that we introduced last month, has launched in public beta. The site allows users to network with friends to create an ideal travel trip, and also has a number of features designed to help research destinations and points of interest. To coincide with the launch, Tripwolf also announced that MairDumont, a travel guide publisher, has invested about $1.2 million into the company, in addition to the backing it has received from Austrian/American incubator i5invest.

One of the most appealing features of the site is the ability to generate a printable pdf travel guide by dragging and dropping the POIs you’ll be visiting. Unfortunately, while the dragging and dropping functionality works well, the guides themselves are very sparse, offering little more than an address, the hours of operation, and a one paragraph description. It would be nice to see a bit more content in these, even if it was only a summarized version of a Wikipedia article.

Tripwolf draws its data from a number of external sources, including Flickr, Wikipedia, and YouTube. And while it features a fairly comprehensive listing of interesting locales, it may have a hard time differentiating itself from countless other travel sites - there doesn’t seem to be anything too unique going on here.

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There has been much talk of Twitter users moving over to FriendFeed since Twitter replies were down for the majority of last week. Twitter announced that they were back on Saturday in their blog, but seeing as the outage may have inspired some users to flock to FriendFeed, I decided to take a look at the 3rd-party applications and scripts that enhance the FriendFeed functionality.

For those of you moving on to FriendFeed’s greener pastures, here are 13 essential tools for an organized, “noise”-free experience.

Gridjit is a new web application, that is currently in private alpha, that organizes your FriendFeed and Twitter timelines into columns. It spreads out your timeline by user and shows that user’s most recent posts in boxes that are distributed across three columns. You can also post to Twitter and FriendFeed from the site. It’s a very new service, so there may be bugs, but if you’d like to try it out, Gridjit has supplied us with 250 invites. Enter the code dde60be to try it out.

Alert Thingy enables you to see your FriendFeed timeline from your desktop and receive updates through notifications (covered here). You can post updates and comment from the application, as well as post to Twitter or Flickr. Alert Thingy runs on Adobe AIR.

Twhirl, a popular desktop application among Twitterers, allows for FriendFeed posting and has a timeline tracker. It also supports posting to Twitter, Pownce and Jaiku, and allows for filtering news by “rooms”. Since Twhirl is a widely-used Twitter client, this should allow for an easier FriendFeed transition. Twhirl runs on Adobe AIR so it is available for Windows and OSX.

bTT by Sobees is a desktop FriendFeed application that is part of Sobees’ desktop suite bSuite. It is currently available for download independently of bSuite. bTT allows FriendFeed updates, comments, comment replies, and likes. It is currently available for Windows.

MySocial 24×7 is a Firefox plugin that allows you to access your FriendFeed timeline from your sidebar (covered here). You can filter your timeline by friend, or by feed source (Youtube, Amazon, RSS). MySocial 24×7 has also released an Adobe AIR desktop application (covered here). The desktop application provides the same functionality of the Firefox sidebar in an attractive desktop application.

NoiseRiver is a new web application launched yesterday, from FeedEgo, that uses FriendFeed’s API to filter out some of the noise. You can login through the site, and import your keywords from del.icio.us, or input them manually, and NoiseRiver will color code your feed according to your interests or neighborhood. When you input your keywords, you can rate your them with a slider from “love” to “hate” and from then on your timeline will be color-coded, green or red, to show what you’ll probably like or not. NoiseRiver provides a full FriendFeed user experience, allowing for sharing and comments.

FriendFeedMachine is a web application that allows you to organize your friends list into close friends, and people you just want to follow. It does a lot to clean up the problem of “noise” in FriendFeed, by making sure that what your friends say doesn’t get lost in the mix with heavy posters.

Feedalizr, enables you to post text, links, images and video to FriendFeed from your desktop. You can drag and drop images into your post, or you can take a picture with your webcam. You can also post video through Feedalizr through your webcam. It hosts the video on the Feedalizr site, and includes a link in your post. You can filter your timeline, and just yesterday they added a new feature that allows you to take advantage of tabs. You can open new tabs with specific user’s timelines, separate from your main friend timeline. Feedalizr runs on Adobe AIR.

Filter by Service is a Greasemonkey script that allows you to filter your timeline by service. It displays a box with all of the service icons, and you can filter the public timelime, your friends timeline, or any user’s timeline by service. For example, if you are browsing TechCrunch’s timeline and click on the Twitter service icon, you will see TechCrunch’s tweets. A similar script, Filter Icons, places the service icons in a neat row on the top of the timeline, but it does not display all of the service icons, just the ones that are used on the page.

Remove Visited Links, a Greasemonkey script, removes links that you’ve already visited. A very useful script that really cleans up your timeline by removing content that you’ve already viewed.

Read Later, is a Greasemonkey script that adds a “Later” link under every post, and adds a “Read Later” tab to the top. This enables you to bookmark things, within FriendFeed, that you find interesting and want to save for later.

FriendFeed Comments is a WordPress plugin that can take comments and likes made on FriendFeed, and place them into the related post on WordPress. On your blog, you will see the comment along with the commenter’s FriendFeed image and link. The plugin also allows (as an option) a separate FriendFeed comment entry, so your readers can enter FriendFeed comments from your blog page.

FF To Go is a mobile site that you can access from any mobile phone’s web browser. It has a simple interface that shows the 10 most recent posts from you, your friends, or the public timeline. It adds no special features, but remains consistent with the FriendFeed user interface.

Should the Internet be owned and maintained by the government, just like the highways? Vint Cerf, the “father of the Internet” and Google’s Internet evangelist, made this radical suggestion while he was sitting next to me on a panel yesterday about national tech policy at the Personal Democracy Forum. Maybe he was inspired by the presence of one of the other panelists, Claudio Prado, from Brazil’s Ministry of Culture, who kept on talking about the importance of embracing Internet “peeracy.” (Although, I should note that Mr. Cerf frowned upon that ill-advised coinage). But I think (or hope, rather) that he was really trying to spark a debate about whether the Internet should be treated more like the public resource that it is.

His comment was in the context of a bigger discussion about the threat to Net neutrality posed by the cable and phone companies, who are making moves to control the amount and types of bits that can go through their pipes. It was made almost in passing and the discussion quickly moved to other topics.

Maybe I didn’t fully understand him (I wasn’t taking notes), and he certainly is better versed in the issues at hand than everyone else who was in that auditorium combined. But nationalizing the Internet is bad idea. (I can’t believe I even have to say this). It would set a horrible precedent, would undermine confidence in the American economy, and would be difficult to pull off.

I tried to press Mr. Cerf on how exactly such a scheme would work without making Internet service even less competitive than it is today. He offered that the government could put the actual running of the service out to competitive bidding. It’s still a bad idea.

The Internet is essentially a series of agreements between owners of different networks about how data gets passed from one to the other. It is not clear what property exactly would be nationalized. AT&T’s backbone fiber network, for instance, sometimes carries Internet traffic, and sometimes carries telephone voice traffic. So if the government were to confiscate all the data pipes, they would nationalize the phone industry as well.

While nationalizing the Internet is the wrong solution, the problem it would address is very real. The ground rules for how the Internet is used need to be clarified. And that was the bigger point that Mr. Cerf was trying to make. But the government does not need to own the underlying assets that make up the Internet in order to set up ground rules that American companies need to abide by. That is what laws are for.

I have some ideas on how the government can actually do something useful here. More on that in a future post.

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SproutCore is an "open source, platform-independent, Cocoa-inspired JavaScript framework for creating web applications that look and feel like Desktop applications". Apple also contributed to performance updates and added new functionality to the SproutCore framework, which serves as the basis for their new MobileMe web-applications. Apple's interest in SproutCore is, in part, to reduce their dependence on Adobe's Flash player, which traditionally is used for more interactive content on the web. Being based entirely in JavaScript, any modern web browser can run these SproutCore based applications without any additional plugins.

About noon Friday here in California, I happened to click on a Summize tab substituting for Twitter’s Track functionality and monitoring the use of my Twitter screen name. Someone named Scrabo had tweeted “Rumor here at NBC is that Tim Russert passed away”. A minute later another: “@stevegillmor Brokaw getting ready to go on air.”

Turning on NBC, then MSNBC, then CNN, I found nothing: reports on flooding in the Midwest, breaking news about a bomb attack in an Afghan prison, a strange obliviousness on the NBC outlets. Something about the first tweet resonated - “here at NBC” - and I went back to the computer and Summize, finding another tweet directed at me that said Wikipedia was already updated with the news. Jumping to the New York Times, a single line at the top of the home page. Finally, at 12:33 Tom Brokaw broke into programming with the news.

Today Summize has “Tim Russert” at the top of the Trending Topics list, with “Russert” third. The tweets continue to roll in 20 hours after the fact, even now at 9am Pacific at some 200 per hour. Twitter’s international audience lets the story follow the sun, but Russert’s fame is largely U.S. centric. Clearly we have lost what many consider the soul or conscience of our political process at the head of the stretch leading to November.

That same presidential race is the likely culprit in Twitter’s recent collapse and partitioning into minimal services. As the company scrambled to get some coherent strategy in place to keep users from tipping into a stampede away from the service, Twitter’s API was gated, the Web UI was dynamically stripped of pagination, @replies, and sometimes even the array of follow icons as event swarms stressed the servers. Most significantly, IM services over XMPP were the first to disappear and not yet fully restored, and with that the service known as Track that I was emulating with the third party Summize client when Russert collapsed.

We may look back at Monday’s Steve Jobs keynote at the WWDC as the point where Twitter stabilized enough to survive. Because of the intense developer interest in creating applications for the iPhone 3G product, the conference was sold out and, like Twitter services, the media gated to only a certain number from each outlet, whether blogger or mainstream. Missing the cut, I went to Plan B as I’ve often done when trips took me away to New York or CES during Apple rollouts.

As the event began, I followed Qik reports from Mike Arrington, page refreshes of photos and text from EnGadget, Techcrunch, Gizmodo, and Cnet, and a live video aggregation of various Ustreams and commentary from Leo Laporte’s TwiT Live. As Jobs took the stage, a video stream captured a murky view of the stage from too many rows back, but the audio proved unmanageable. Laporte’s chat stream produced a URL to a more stable audio feed that held up throughout the rest of the keynote. Arrington produced two short Qik videos of key sections that surfaced as Qik servers restabilized.

The net effect was exhilarating; a bootstrapped symphony of virtualized Steve Reality Distortion Field funneled through the MacBook AIR that I route every bit of my real time digital life through. Throughout, Twitter remained up except for a ten minute period when Jobs announced the 3G device’s price, and as the event retreated into the past Twitter services unseen for weeks began to reemerge.

Much has been made of the fanaticism spurred by social media events and seminal products such as the iPhone - the swarming of the early adopters, the trivialization of Twitter as a toy, you know the drill and the comments on this post will likely personalize the pushback. But an event such as Russert’s death and the emotional shock wave it produced put the lie to the notion that this stuff is echo chamber or A-List or whatever. 30 minutes before the world knew about this tragedy, someone I don’t know reached out and established a connection based on mutual affinity.

The magic of Twitter, and Ustream, and Qik, and all the social tools just now emerging, is this incredible, subtle, hacked, user-controlled information network, that in a million ways and micro-communities, performs as efficiently and professionally as the greatest media empires on Earth. In fact, the two have merged as we gain access to the tools of the trade while the trade gains access to our hearts and minds. Track will return, and with it a flowering of this new media revolution where the new boss is the same as the old boss: Us. And you’ll see Tim there in the front row, if you look closely.

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It’s a Wii without the $250 console. It’s virtual Pong and so much more. Any object is now an input device, even your fingers. Bang, bang! But there’s no better way to introduce you to CamSpace than by letting you watch the demo video below:

CamTrax’s core technology is a pure software solution that allows nearly any ordinary PC webcam (95% are supported) to track up to four objects—even as small as 5mm—in real-time and with very high accuracy and reliability. (It works only on Windows). Locking and tracking (X, Y, and Z axes and angle) are all automatic. Yaron Tanne, founder & CEO of CamTrax Technologies, the company behind CamSpace, has been developing the technology practically single-handedly for three years in his apartment in Tel-Aviv.

Tanne claims that most of the algorithms used are in the public domain but have been enhanced. There are also completely new algorithms developed from scratch.

CamSpace requires an agent application to run locally in order to emulate a mouse, a keyboard, joystick, or other input device. Users can then program the emulation based on the game they want to control and the object(s) they want to control the game with. For example, one user could program a steering wheel for a racing game, where moving the wheel on the Z axis shifts the gears up and down. A different user can use two objects for the same game, programming the second object, say a coke bottle, to shift the gears.

Once a good portion of most popular games are emulated, the company will provide a portal where these emulations will be rated based on popularity and then offered for download.

Assuming there are no patent infringement issues, CamTrax could be a hit in several sectors, the most obvious one being gaming. While certainly the big game studios could take advantage of the technology, I can see a wider and quicker adoption among casual gaming entities such as Zynga and SGN. Cam-Trax could also find success in providing solutions for handicap individuals that cannot use standard input devices. Another application would be to emulate multi-touch control over media-centers. Some more ideas:

—Fitness programs using body movements
—Virtual instruments (air drums, xylophone, etc.)
—Drawing “in the air” applications for kids

These are just the tip of the iceberg… Remember, all you need is a standard webcam—that’s a VERY low barrier to entry these days.

I’ve had the chance to play with CamTrax’s technology on several occasions and it works like a charm. This is true even in low and changing light conditions—based on first-hand experience. It really is hard not to be impressed with the technology, especially seeing as it still has Alpha status.

The four-man team recently raised $200,000 in seed financing from angel investors and plans on raising a Series A round in the coming months.

In the meantime, the company is working on a developer platform which will allow the integration of CamTrax technology into casual games and mini-applications. Expect a follow-up post when this happens in the coming weeks.

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People-powered search engine Mahalo will soon have some competition from a stealth startup called YouBundle. If you go to YouBundle’s site now, there is nothing other than a landing page. But we got our hands on a couple screen shots from the private beta (click above for a larger image and see topic page below) and the guidelines sent to beta testers (reproduced after the break).

Like Mahalo, YouBundle is more of a Web guide than an actual search engine. Bundles of Web links, YouTube videos, Flickr images, Amazon product descriptions, and uploaded photos and documents are created around different topics. These can be anything from “VC Funding Resources” to “Tibetan Buddhism” to “Apple Rumors Sites.” Bundlers add titles, tags, and descriptions to each bundle. The company explains to beta testers in its guidelines:

A bundle is a collection of your expertise on any given subject. A bundle should NOT BE a completely exhaustive list of links to cover every possible point of the subject. It should rather be a finely tuned and specialized list of links to relevant information on the subject. The idea is NOT to replicate the 1st page of Google or a link farm. We want every single link in the bundle to be tested, relevant and offering quality information. Just because a link comes from an authority site such as Wikipedia, does not mean that you have to include the link – we want flavor and variety – not sterility.

You should consider a bundle your work of art. . . . Remember the purpose is not to get AS many links as possible. The purpose is to create a well balanced bundle with many different types of links of only the highest quality.

Unlike Mahalo, YouBundle does not rely on a paid staff of editors to create its topic guides. It is all done by the community. While Mahalo does incorporate some social feedback as well, it is more controlled. Each submission is reviewed before being included on a Mahalo page. This policy is one way to control spam from clogging up the system.

On YouBundle, the community does all the work. So in this sense it is more akin to Topicle or Wikia Search. The latter is a slightly different beast, since it truly is an algorithmic search engine whose results are re-ordered and modified by the community. But like Wikia Search, YouBundle relies on its community to flag spam and inappropriate content. Any bundles tagged “SPAM,” “PORN,” or “TOS,” are reviewed and moderated. (The TOS tag refers to bundles that violate the site’s Terms of Service).

The YouBundle community is also be able to vote the best topic pages up by “bumping” them, or vote them down by “dumping” them. Dumps are “anonymous in order to prevent retribution dumps,” says the guideines. Members can also “bag and tag” other people’s bundles. Bagging a bundle is like bookmarking it as one of your favorites, and once you do that you can up to three tags to improve the categorization of the site.

I was not able to test the site out myself, so I can’t say if it is producing better results than Mahalo, Topicle or Wikia Search. But the steep rise in Mahalo’s traffic, much of it driven by the SEO juice its pages have, is no doubt a motivating factor here. According to comScore, Mahalo attracted 2.6 million unique visitors worldwide in April, up from zero when it launched last summer. Total pageviews were 5.6 million.

Disclosure: Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis is a partner of ours who helps us put on the TechCrunch50 conference. Neither TechCrunch, its employees, nor Michael Arrington owns any stake in Mahalo.

Here is the full text of the guidelines sent to YouBundle beta testers:

Bundling Guidelines

A bundle is a collection of your expertise on any given subject. A bundle should NOT BE a completely exhaustive list of links to cover every possible point of the subject. It should rather be a finely tuned and specialized list of links to relevant information on the subject. The idea is NOT to replicate the 1st page of Google or a link farm. We want every single link in the bundle to be tested, relevant and offering quality information. Just because a link comes from an authority site such as Wikipedia, does not mean that you have to include the link – we want flavor and variety – not sterility.

You should consider a bundle your work of art. In order to assist you in creating this work of art, we are able to Parse and display thumbnails and unique information for the following types of links

* Web Page links- We will call and display a thumbnail of the site screen shot
* YouTube Videos – Just enter the address URL and we will call and display a Thumbnail of the video and relevant video information
* Photos – If you enter a link of a photo extension (.jpg, png, gif etc…) We will call and display the thumbnail of this.
* Flickr Photos – All you have to do is enter the Flickr page of the photo and we will automatically grab and display the thumbnail.
* Documents- PDF’s, .DOCs ad Excel will be displayed in their own section.
* Links to Other Bundles. These will also be in their own section with a preview of the other bundle. Good when you need to refer to another bundle with more specific or generalized information on the subject in questions
* Amazon Links- Consider to include a link or two to a relevant Amazon product. We will automatically grab the photo thumbnail for display

Remember the purpose is not to get AS many links as possible. The purpose is to create a well balanced bundle with many different types of links of only the highest quality.

Describing your bundle.

* Your Bundle Title is going to be the First and only thing that many people will see. Therefore make it unique, focused and interesting as possible.
* Your Description can be any length and should give a concise summary of your bundle subject and maybe even a little history and unique content.
* Your Bundle Tags are how you would subcategorize your bundle and can be used in a number of ways. For example, lets say that you made a bundle on 67 Ford Mustang’s. The category of choice for that bundle could either be under Transportation. However the category choice is a very general thing. To further sub-catagorize your bundle you will want to add tags. Tags can be both specific to the bundle and used in other fashions. First lets talk about the obvious method. You could for example tag this bundle
o Ford
o Mustang
o 1967
o Fastbacks
o Hot Cars
* Having these tags will make it show up in searches used for these and also cross reference with other bundles sharing the same tag. You can add up to 10 tags when you create a bundle
* The other way to use tags is not to directly describe the contents of your bundle, but maybe to identify it as part of some bundle association or group. For example maybe I am part of an internet forum on mustangs called ‘Mustang Talk.’ I can also tag my bundle ‘Mustang Talk’ (or whatever tag we agree on) and then on the forum I just have to refer the other users to come to youbundle and search for that unique tag – which will return everything returned as such. The functionality is open to be used as your creativity dictates

Browsing and Tagging other peoples bundles

A Unique and fun feature of YouBundle that can keep you occupied forever is our Bag and Tag feature. This allows you to do 2 different things

* BAG – Essentially like saving the bundle to your favorites. Meaning that it will be there in your ‘Favorite Bag’ to go back to and reference any time you like. This is a great way to bookmark your favorite bundle for easy access
* TAG – Just like when you make a bundle – you are allowed to add tags, when you browse other peoples bundles you can add up to 3 tags to those bundles as well. When you tag another persons bundle – a number of things will happen
o That tag gets added to the bundle Tag Cloud – so it will cause the tag to grow in weight.
o That tag gets added to your personal tag cloud on your homepage and associated with that bundle. This being another way for you to categorize and easily access the bundle
* By tagging you can help to categorize other peoples bundles into the correct place and at the same time increase your collection. Another very useful feature of being able to Tag other peoples bundles is to really put them in their place.
* Meaning that you can start clubs and tag the bundles according to the club. Something like ‘Best Bundle’ or the likes. You can also help the community with quality control. Instead of reporting spam via a link, we are asking community members to tag bundles containing spam links as ‘SPAM’ and our Moderators will routinely check this tag and delete the offending bundles and accounts. Even if another user has already given the tag to the offending bundle, please tag it yourself as well as the more people that tag it – the faster it will be brought to our attention. A full list of moderation tags you can use are as follows (Please use all CAPS)
o SPAM - We will review and take action on bundles marked as SPAM
o PORN - We will immediately delete bundles with links to PORN
o TOS - Bundles that link to pages that violate our TOS, such as pages that.
o BOTD - Bundle of the Day. If you want to recommend a Bundle for Bundle of the Day. Please tag it BOTD and we will review and consider.

Bundle Rating

You can also show your approval or distaste for a bundle by bumping or dumping it. When you Bump a bundle, your username will show up on the bundle to show that you approve. However when you Dump a bundle, it will be anonymous in order to prevent retribution dumps.

FeedBack

As we are currently in Beta Testing – this is a work in Progress and we are constantly changing things and listening to your feedback. If you find a bug, have suggestion, or just want to chat a bit about the industry, please use email us at

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One of the big announcements yesterday from Apple was that it is replacing its .Mac service with MobileMe, a new service that will sync your email, contacts, calendar, photos, and files between your iPhone, Mac desktop, and a Windows PC. It will cost $99 per year. But if you want most of the functionality of MobileMe without the cost, you will be able to download an app from Funambol at the official iPhone App Store on July 11 that does many of the same things.

Funambol offers open-source mobile syncing software for email, contacts and calendars. It works with Exchange, Domino, POP, or IMAP email servers, and already supports hundreds of different phone models. It even works on current (jailbroken) models of the iPhone. Funambol’s jailbroken iPhone app has been downloaded more than 100,000 times. The company hosts its own synchronization servers a beta site, myFunambol, which support Outlook, Gmail, and Yahoo Mail. Says CEO Fabrizio Capobianco:

Now, with the SDK on July 11 when the new iPhone comes out, we will have our synchronization product ready. It will be a free, open-source competitor to MobielMe, which is $99 a year and completely closed.

The software won’t sync your files or photos, but since it is open-source there is nothing stopping other developers from building such services on its underlying synchronization engine.

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