This service is currently available as a browser addon for firefox and chrome. A safari addon is very likely to be released soon. While this solution sounds great, monetization of this solution seems tricky. Would you like to see you rapportive ads along with the information widget?

While this is a innovative solution, I wonder how long will it take to replicate this solution. Rahul, CEO of rapportive is way ahead of others and already has $1M in funding for this venture. With gmail being one of the most widely used email services, Rapportive has a good shot at providing a better experience for gmail web users. Notably, xobni is already on the same line that provides a similar service for outlook.

Better Gmail Inbox

Being a long time apple mail user, this sparks more ideas of integrating plugins for apple mail. Upon a quick search, it turns out there are a lot of plugins for mac OS X mail plugins.

Teraom Quick Watch:

Company : Rapportive

Funding: $1M

Quick Pitch : Adds information about email sender in your gmail inbox.

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Billfloat is backed by seed funding from paypal has also raised $4.5M series A funding. It is interesting to note that paypal also already a similar service billmelater. Billfloat is also said to be in talks with other financial services including debit cards.

Billfloat has a large database of services in the United States, ranging from phone services, internet, cable, insurance and other services which involve a monthly recurring payment. You can pick up a service, schedule your bill and request billfloat to pay your bill. You then have 30 days to settle your micro loan back to Billfloat. This loan does not come free and comes with a price tag of $4.99 or more depending on the amount.

billfloat

Billfloat seems to have done the homework with their analysis of United States users, and their stats show that a lot of them borrow money to cover their monthly bills. Waking up from the recession, a perfect opportunity and the right time to launch the product.

Trivia:
1. The system seems to be still in beta and less intuitive, while they are still shaping up the system.
2. I like the Logo a lot!
3. Also, they are hiring.

Teraom Quick Watch:

Company : BillFLoat

Funding : $4.5 Million Series A funding

Quick Pitch : Billfloat pays your utilities bills, you return billfloat 30 days later.

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Creating a website:
Devhub offers a cutting edge free website builder, and it is one of the best software available today to build a website for vast majority of people. Adding modules like pictures, videos, bookmarks, search boxes, affiliate products etc. is a matter of seconds with this drag and drop editor. Rearranging stuff, changing the size of the columns, adding pages is way easier than it used to be with other services.

Free web hosting Plus Money:
While you have to pay roughly $100 to get a good server with other software, devhub offers free web hosting for all your domains. You can also purchase domain names with devhub, or get free web hosting for your existing domains with devhub. Devhub also offers you unlimited subdomains and you can easily create amazon store for free in a matter of seconds with devhub.

Gamification:
Devhub has changed the process of building websites forever. Capitalizing on the unique and innovative idea of making websites as a game, the fun factor is up by hundred fold. With huge appreciation and responses from the tech community, the website building game is now a sweet playground for internet marketers, designers and small businesses alike. You can collect experience points, coins, devatars and awards which you can use to buy stuff from the market place.

free website builder

Make Money Online:
Devhub has a ton of modules that you can use on your website from amazon ads, text ads, shopping.com, pop shops, and many others that you can simply plug in with in seconds. This is faster than anything that you have seen before!

It is Cutting Edge and FREE!! Looking for a free squarespace alternative? Devhub will be a great find for you.

FYI, I am currently doing an internship with this cool startup and I am totally loving it! Start creating your websites today. I challenge that you can create a website faster with devhub than in any other platform.

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Google storage

Google has long been waiting to enter the file storage niche after several small stepping stones. Individual users can use google storage for an expanded inbox, storing pictures in picassa and the google account storage pricing was very lucrative for individuals.

Google also stepped on Gdrive project where users could upload documents to google docs. Google was not easy going on the space though while offering just 1GB of free space, while competitors Microsoft allowed 25GB of free space through Skydrive and Adrive offers 50GB space.

Google storage is a new venture by google, announced in the google IO conference and is targeted at the business and the developer market. In straight words, a competitor to Amazon S3. Google storage is currently available only by invite and just like any other google product, carries the beta tag. This offers the power of storing your files on google cloud, and utilizing the advanced machine learning techniques by google. The google blogs claims that the service will be capable of handling trillions of rows at good speeds. This will be a pay per use service with no tier levels as of now.

Pricing
Clearly, google did not do a good job in pricing the google account storage with picassa, and users are very happy with flickr while paying $24.99 an year. Also, google did not do a good job in offering just 1GB while competitors provided way more space. Google storage pricing seems to be more logical and along the same lines of amazon S3. Google storage is priced at 17 cents per GB per month [Amazon s3 is priced at 15 cents a month]. The two giants share the same requests pricing – 1 cent per 1000 POST requests and 1 cent per 10000 GET requests.

Key Features
Google has already promised its developers a key based authentication, a web interface and advanced access controls. The trump card though is the advanced algorithm which promises high speed access to database of trillions of records.

Image credit: http://www.techdigest.tv

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Cloud works on the Past

EyeOS Cloud Operating System

While cloud operating systems seems like an idea of the future, google was not the first to bring into reality. Eyeos was the first operating system and they have been working on the cloud for well over three years. The operating system is very simple to install [requires only php5 and apache] and you can use all basic applications like notepad, office docs, games, explorer and a few others. Eyeos is open source software and is free to use. Other notable projects include icloud and GOS.

Google Chrome OS Project

When google launched its own cloud based operating system, more light was shed on the idea of cloud operating system and now there is more competition. Software giants Big blue is all set into the game and is said to be working on cloud based operating system project. IBM has also shown expertise in cloud based applications with LotusLive Cloud based suite and also spiced it up with inotes, which has raised some interesting insights too.

IBM teams up with EyeOS

IBM Teams up with EyeOs

Last week, IBM joined hands with EyeOs and announced plans of incorporating eyeOs in all Z machines. System Z machines are primarily used by large enterprises and this stands as a big market for the cloud based operating system. This eventually places EyeOs in a successful state and promises a lot of potential market and also revenue though IBM.

Will you use an operating system out of a browser? Does it offer full power? How can cloud applications become better?

Trivia: All 25 of the 25 leading banks in the world use IBM Mainframes for some kind of processing.

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Location based social networking

During 2008, a lot of things fell in place for moving social networks to the next level. First of all, mobile Internet continued to evolve with higher data rates and lower prices on data transmission. Secondly, social network services became much more mainstream with Facebook becoming a juggernaut and services like Twitter gaining a lot of notice. And thirdly new mobile devices like the iPhone, the new Blackberrys and several models from Nokia, SonyEricsson, Samsung, LG and others added features such as large screens, improved text input and GPS to bring new powerful devices ideally suited for social networking while mobile. Brightkite have capitalized on all these trends and is set to deliver a quite compelling service.

Brightkite - Social Networking based on location

Brightkite focuses on the concept of checking in to places. You check in to a location, and then you can post text messages or pictures which will become associated with that particular location. As a user, you can view your friend’s activities in your stream, or you can view activities related to a particular location. A very nice view is also the map view that shows your friends locations on a map.

Brightkite on iphone

You can access Brightkite from the web and from mobile devices. It has a very good wap page accessible from all cell phones with a wap browser and you can use SMS both to get notifications and to do checkins and post messages. You can also send emails with pictures and posts and commands the same way as with SMS. But where Brightkite really shines is with the iPhone application. Here the benefit of mobility, GPS and mobile data becomes obvious. Using the GPS to determine your position gives a new dimension to the service and the possibility to send pictures and posts right at the present location gives a whole new experience to social networking. Of course this also opens up entirely new possibilities to interact with your friends and (if you have chosen to share your location with everyone) to meet new people.

Most people are active on several social networks and Brightkite provides possibilities to link your account to other services such as Twitter, Facebook, Fire eagle and Flickr. More services are added  continuously.

A very valid question pops up in conjunction with location base services. “What about security, I don’t want everyone to know where I am.” Brightkite solves this in a very elegant way, you specify your security settings for three different types: Trusted friends, Friends and everyone else. For each category you can specify if you want to show your position exactly, in which city or hidden and you specify this for both check-ins and posts. This gives you a very flexible way to specify how much information you want to share.

Brightkite is part of a new wave of social networking services on the Internet that takes social networking to a new level. The combination of micro blogging, photo posting and location based check ins provide a very compelling package that can be highly addictive.

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At barcamp bangalore, i had a chance to network with Cherian thomas, from support.com. He explains that support.com is a technology solutions company, the focus being on fixing consumer technology problems. Most systems, (read windows) are attacked by virus, affected by spyware or malware. There are also numerous other problems like the system being slow, not able to boot, not able to play music files. The primary service provided is to troubleshoot your system, and fix it if it is a software issue.

Supportsoft, the parent company has been around for 10 years, and is based out of San Fransisco, Redwood city, California. Support.com also has a work location at Bangalore. Supportsoft provides technological solutions that help report error reports, like in talkback in firefox. Their software is installed in most laptops manufactured by Dell. It was amazing to see the level of penetration of the software and technology, support.com claims to be the second most penetrated software, second only to yahoo messenger.

Support.com provides support for individuals, including different solutions that can remotely connect to your system and fix the system. Most of their software and innovations have been patented. The primary focus is in the united states and the European markets, because it proves too costly for the Asian markets. The service might cost around $40 to fix the issue of not able to play music files. To install anti virus and all clean up, you might get it done for $100.They might be able to do a lot of other troubleshooting, find the list here.

Quite costly but, if you want the work done cleanly, or if you can afford it, support.com can provide excellent support to you.

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Thodla was one among the hundreds of entrepreneurs, whom i had a chance to have a talk with in barcamp bangalore, bcb7. The project involves two different branches in terms of geography as well as end products. The Imporh inc is based our of the united states and the other branch handled by thodla himself is the imporh innovation center – Chennai. The project has been bootstrapped. The primary investment involved a  quarter million dollars in first phase. and roughly another quarter in pieces.

When asked about his school of projects, Thodla quotes “We connect people to relevant information.”. He insists that a few search terms or ideas that cannot be derived out of google or other web sites, can be easily obtained from infominder. (examples – barcamp, competitive intelligence, neuro fuzzy logic). Infominder is a cool web 2.0 service, that helps you keep track of webpages, wikis, RSS. This particularly works well with pages, that do not even have RSS, which google reader might find difficult. There is a free trail, and then the service is available on a monthly subscription.

The second product that this indian startup is working on is the topic minder. Topic minder is a custom feed generator that can get you information on any topic say, java swing, symantec, emerging technologies. This service is maintained by a set of experts who add feeds automatically, use the intelligence of a search engine, run queries, remove duplicates, deliver the content – either as email or rss. Worthy, if you need information on a particular topic. This service is also trail free for 30 days, followed by tiered pricing.

Thodla was a very jovial friend, moving around and networking with people in barcamp. Wish you good luck, Sir!

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