Jingle Network has free directory service (uses ad revenue from competitor)

Jingle Network (www.free411.com) has a free directory service. The business model relies on competitor bidding - search for one company and the site serves up a competitor's number - if you select that number then the service bills the competitor.

Oh, and it also raised $26 million in a second round of funding (more). Article indicates that the US market is worth $8b.

Directory service for Mobile Subscriber stalls in US

According to Wired report, the two-year implementation of Wireless 411 service in the US isn't going anywhwere. The service is required to have written consumer opt-in, due to consumer privacy concerns.

This is the very reason that this will fail: patchy sign-up leads to patchy results - a chicken 'n' egg problem.

Facebook raises $25m

Greylock Partners, of San Mateo, led the latest round, and is joined by Palo Alto's Meritech and existing investors Accel Partners and Peter Thiel, an investor and former chief executive of PayPal.

That should keep 'em going for a while... and stave off acquisition for a while (honestly, the founders say they never intended to sell - see previous post).

Mobile Sync for Plaxo

Sync your Contacts over the air with the Plaxo Online Service (from WebIS). Only for Windows Mobile devices though. It claims to work better than ActiveSync...

See link for more info.

Google offers online calendar service

Will integrate with MS Outlook & mobile devices shortly (from Silicon Beat). Contacts next?

Jigsaw raises $12million

Jigsaw allows you to buy other people's contact information, without their permission - clearly designed for salesmen - story from Silicon Beat. If they continue in this business model, they'll need all the money they can get to stave off privacy lawsuits and / or crank out the most amazing PR turnaround coup.

Opera and JAJAH announce partnership

    

See Opera's Press Release.

I don't think this is actually too significant technically - as I guess it is the same as a FireFox Extension. (Commercially, I think it is novel for Opera to announce a 'Widget' for Opera 9.)

However, if the service is truly rendered in each page that you browse - that would nice. Particularly if you think of Opera Mobile - a mobile browser stealing voice minutes from a mobile operator - OUCH!

OpenZoep for open source VoIP (using Jabber)

OpenZoep (pronounced "open soup") from Voipster launched at the end of January. It does:

in/outbound P2P calls

outbound PSTN calls

IM

presence

phonebook

The company's goal is to drive complete interoperability (and hence competition) between VoIP systems, so that there is just one VoIP phone book. Here's a brief review.

Facebook receives offers of $750m

Business Week has the story. They're holding out for $2b - sounds PRETTY greedy to me!

Feedback on Jajah's service

It's SO important to get the user experience right - particularly when there's cash involved!

Plaxo stops update emails ... or doesn't push 'em as aggressively

They have so many users, they don't need 'em any more (10 million members; growing at over 50,000 users a day) - mission accomplished. See Todd Masonis's blog entry.

Jajah - initiate landline / mobile call from a web page

Jajah does Webcall Connect. Setup your telephone call via a webpage (ie FROM number and then TO number) and call: your landlines or mobiles ring. Appears to be international.

I note that Yair Goldfinger, co-founder of ICQ has joined the board too. See story.

Lycos VOIP launches

Lycos VOIP launches.

And cheap too:
"To entice users to stick with Lycos, it's charging less than 1 cent for PC to phone calls made within the continental U.S. The SkypeOut service costs about 2 cents per minute, and Yahoo Messenger with Voice charges between 1 cent and 2 cents per minute."

PLUS free U.S. phone numbers and transmission of voice mail messages to e-mail.

The end of 118 services?

Here's a community, good neighbour recommendation service - Angie's List (Read the interview - there's more meat to it). Does this spell the end of 118-type services??

Google results = Angie's List
Google sponsored ads = 118 services

You can pay for ads, but you can't pay for Google results (at least in theory). Who do you trust??

Beware of who links to your public profile

Detectives used profiles posted on the MySpace social networking website
to identify six suspects in a rape and robbery that began when a party
turned violent.

She [the victim] knew only their first names but their pictures were posted on
MySpace. "Primarily, we pulled up her friends list. It helped us
identify some of the players," said Bartley.

See Police Use MySpace to ID Suspects


It just shows the power of a public profile .... and who links to it ... and a service that easily ties the two together. The negative (or legal / criminal) side of these stories usually comes out soon after the initial whirl of enthusiasm from the early adopters.

Ecademy Toolbar launched

Installs into IE & Firefox. Available at http://ecademy.ourtoolbar.com/

Easy navigation of the Ecademy site - learn it in just 10 minutes!

Instant access to the Ecademy site from any site on the web

Search from anywhere on the Web

Check your email - Hotmail, Yahoo!, Gmail and POP3

Login and access top Ecademy features with one click

Brings you the latest content: Blogs, Club messages, Marketplace Listings and business news

Instant What's New announcements straight to your toolbar

Toolbar whitelabelled from Effective Brand

Podcast interview with CEO of LinkedIn

Profitable on a cash flow for the first time this month

Revenue $10million (I think)

>5million users (it took 18 months for first million users; now 325,000 new member a month ... and accelerating)

50% US; 50% international (mainly English speaking)

Localised versions coming

The public profile was seen as significant

Interestingly, there was mention of InfoCard & some discussion about Sxip.

Also there's a naff description of Social Networking 3.0 at the same page too.

LinkedIn has a new front page

LinkedIn has a new dashboard with Network Updates and also who's hiring within your network. It also analyses the geographical and sector make-up of your contacts too.

It also throws up one-off geographies / sectors - just for interest - just to sort of analysis for Midentity Contact Builder.

Update (12 hours later): ... and it already having a fantastic effect on usage / number of connections that I have.

Merging Profiles on Dating sites

Like the concept: 'Collaboradate does for online dating what Trillian does for instant messaging'. See Best Way to Date: Collaborate?

But the key point is managing multiple profiles from a single source.

Sound familiar by any chance?

Ebay (and others) take 10% in Meetup

Missed this one earlier:

The investment will total just more than 10% equity interest in Meetup.com .... estimates put the investment -- in which eBay is joined by Omidyar Network, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Esther Dyson, Allen Co., and Senator Bill Bradley -- at less than $10 million.

Indeed, Meetup plans to use a portion of the investment to launch six conferences across the country not so dissimilar from the eBay Live conference the company holds annually to bring sellers together. Says Scott Heiferman, "We want to help organizers become great leaders." The first Meetup conference will happen in Houston in May.

Also, Meetup will use its new resources to launch an advertising campaign to draw attention to local groups.

The site had 54,000 Meetup groups listed last May, when it began charging a small subscription fee of up to $19 monthly to sponsor the groups. Since then the number of groups has dropped to just over 10,000, but more members have begun attending meetings. "Members are more active because the quality of the groups has improved," says Heiferman.