Like a bolt from the blue Yahoo has bought up the social bookmarking site, Del.icio.us. Much like the Flickr acquisition back in March, Yahoo has snapped up another emerging site and technology that has redefined the way we surf. Del.icio.us is the number 1 social bookmarking site with a community thought to be around 300,000 and growing.
Well it didn’t take them long, just 11 days after the rumours started flying (see my earlier post), Skype have made their beta release version 2 available for download to the public.
A little buggy, well it is beta after all, this is the long awaited addition to Skype that we have all been waiting for. With a few cosmetic touches, skype is really looking slick and impressive. Additional features include contact grouping and an expandable “My Panel” (mood, events, services integrated) and most importantly Video calls!
With the dust yet to settle with the announcement of GoogleBase, Microsoft has at least been a little more honest with its crack at the classified / small ads market place. Earlier this month a thinly based attempt at Craigslist was launched called Base;
“Google Base is a place where you can easily submit all types of online and offline content that we’ll host and make searchable online …….. may be included in the main Google search index and other Google products like Froogle, Google Base and Google Local.”
Rumours are beginning to circle the web regarding Skype offering an integrated video call option in a new release soon.
Festoon, which recently changed its name from Vskype, offers a current alternative but the name change must be taken as a signal that Skype are going their own route.
Further according to Skype Journal, an independent Skype blog commentary, last September they posted extracts from Skype’s Product Development Road map illustrating the planned video release in October.
Now with the unforeseen introduction of the Sony’s IVE, ‘Instant Video Everywhere’, application (a collaboration with Glowpoint) it must surely force Skype’s hand.
With some 200,000,000 downloads, Skype has grown exponentially and has developed to a point where Ebay purchased them last month for an estimated $2.6 billion. Skype is the no.1 name in Voip and video is a natural progression, for Sony to beat them to release must be seen as a major coup.
The concern would be that Skype’s product is rushed to the market place and the application not impress in the same way it did when first released!
Ok I probably aint the first but definitely wont be the last to comment on this but Riya the photo search people that uses face andtext recognition, are supposedly being lined up as the next Google acquisition.
Firstly, this seems like a pretty sensible move on Google’s part and great business sense. Yahoo clearly got a major step up on the big G with Flickr and is in danger of completely loosing out in the photographic market. Secondly this software is hot, from the stuff of science fiction novels little more than a decade ago this can completely revolutionize the waywe store and retrieve photo’s. The fact is Flickr is damn good and theproof is in the massive community but if we could automatically tag photo’s when uploading them with peoples names and places then it would take the only headache out of the equation.
Don’t get me wrong, there is an awful lot of crap floating around again in this Web 2.0, dot com part 2 or whatever you wanna call it but this is a good example of what all the fuss is about. The figure quoted at the moment is along the lines of $40m which for a fresh, venture capitalist, start up is good business all round.
