DataZilla

It was probably inevitable given what Google did with Gears, but Yahoo said Tuesday it’s releasing BrowserPlus software as open-source software.

BrowserPlus and Gears are aimed at improving browsers’ native abilities so Web applications can better match those running natively on a computer’s operating system, and Gears already is open-source software. Yahoo announced its intent to make BrowserPlus open-source software on its Yahoo Developers Blog on Tuesday.

“Openness is a key initiative and a major theme for Yahoo this year and beyond, and open-sourcing BrowserPlus is part of that commitment,” said team member Lloyd Hilaiel. “This will allow developers to rapidly extend the platform in a distributed fashion. Our hope is that community contributions and review will ensure BrowserPlus stays a secure, robust platform running on all popular operating systems and browsers. I’d like to see BrowserPlus become a valuable piece of Internet infrastructure.”

Hilaiel also pointed to a number of feature ideas people have suggested.

“Folks on the forums are talking about peer-to-peer support. People are suggesting screen capture technology for better bug reporting. Webcam integration! Easy import of calendaring data! Drag-and-drop of Word documents! BitTorrent! There’s no shortage of ideas. Mainly I’m excited to see what the community creates in the coming weeks and months,” he said.

He also drew some distinctions between BrowserPlus and Gears. “Gears is attempting to accelerate the evolution of the Web by enabling features with wide appeal that can be implemented everywhere. BrowserPlus is more interested in fixing the Web plug-in environment, making rapid experimentation possible,” he said.

BrowserPlus is a framework with a variety of plug-ins; a new version released earlier in November debuted a plug-in computer’s motion sensors, for example. The plug-in architecture is designed to let Web site designers add new abilities to Web pages without requiring people to restart their browsers. With the new version, anyone may use BrowserPlus framework, which previously had been confined to some Yahoo Web sites.

Glam Media has launched its application platform, called Glam Apps Atako, to the public. The platform was originally unveiled in July, and has remained in private beta until now.

Each application allows bloggers and site owners to quickly implement new functionality into their sites, with available options for syndicating content, adding rich media, and enhancing posts with comments and polls. At launch available apps include Sphere, BuzzFeed, Meebo, PollDaddy, PicApp, JS-Kit, and Kwanzoo, along with a video delivery widget developed in-house called GlamTV. Glam has also built the platform with monetization in mind, offering an integrated monetization system with built-in support for rev-shares. Built with Google Gadgets, the Glam Platform also supports OpenSocial and OpenID. The platform itself will also be open sourced, says Glam CEO Samir Arora.

These new applications seem to be blog enhancers on the same order as WordPress plugins, without the social functionality seen on application platforms from the likes of Facebook, MySpace, or LinkedIn. That said, the platform could still be a steady source of revenue for the Glam, as the company will take a portion of the proceeds earned by each app.

There are similarities between the platform and the recently launched SproutMixer, which also lets brands and others build Flash apps/ads for publishers.

Glam Media is a diverse company, offering a network of sites primarily geared towards women (though it recently launched its Brash network for men), as well as an ad network that serves advertising to other blogs and affiliates on its network.

As much as we’ve taken shots at Glam over the last year, I have to say this. They’re aggressive and pushing the envelope with monetization. If you’re a Glam publisher, let us know how that’s working out for you.

Here’s one thing that people all over the world will continue to need even in the worst of recessions: food. And while there are many places you can go to if you want to discover great recipes for home cooking, Cookstr is launching a website later tonight at a press event in New York City that takes a different route than all the cluttered and user-generated content sites out there: it’s all about the top chefs and cookbook authors, baby.

Cookstr has managed to sign up over 200 star chefs, cookbook authors and publishers who contribute to a database of high-quality recipes for a wide variety of dishes, with more being added every day (both chefs and recipes). The contributor list is impressive, to say the least, including people like Mark Bittman, Jamie Oliver, Mario Batali, Nigella Lawson, Daniel Boulud, Jacques Pepin, Julia Child, Alice Waters … the list just goes on and on.

The site, which has just been opened up a couple of minutes ago, features a nice interface and a powerful engine for searching recipes and information about the chefs, with menus and ‘tips & techniques’ coming soon. There are a lot of ways to search for great recipes: by main ingredients, cuisine, occasion, method, etc., and once you start looking there’s an intuitive filter in the left sidebar that helps you narrow down your search to find the right recipe.

(CenterNetworks recorded a demo by CEO Will Schwalbe recently at a NY Tech Meetup you might want to check out)

Other than that, the site is intentionally clean; there’s currently only a print button for recipes and a way for people to send recipes to friends by e-mail. Soon you will be able to create your own MyCookstr, where you’ll be able to save recipes, notes, and shopping lists. More community features are also on the works.

Business model, you asked? Cookstr plans to integrate advertising in the beginning of 2009, and as a recent NY Times article on the startup points out, they’ll also be collecting affiliate revenue when books are sold on e-commerce sites via their website.

Cookstr is completely bootstrapped by its founder and CEO Will Schwalbe, who stepped down as editor in chief of Hyperion Books in January 2008, and was co-developed by New York incubator Tipping Point Partners. The company is actively looking for funding to take the web service to a new level, which I’m pretty sure they’ll find based on what they’ve already accomplished on a shoestring budget.

That said, Cookstr is up against some stiff competition from well-known recipe databases that are less high-end but offer an adequate solution for many home cookers, such as FoodNetwork (owned by Scribbs), AllRecipes (owned by Reader’s Digest), Yahoo Recipes, Epicurious (owned by Conde Nast), Delish.com (owned by Hearst Communications), and so on. It’s not that there’s not an audience: comScore reported earlier that food sites attracted 45.6 million unique visitors in September, more than double the rate of total Internet growth in the United States.

Cookstr is also looking to expand the service internationally.

Where is that friend of mine? Who else likes to go there? Where is that place on the map? It’s simple, useful questions like this that location based social network Shizzow aims to answer and the service just opened up today to users outside of beta location Portland, Oregon to now include users anywhere in California.

There are lots of location based social networks available, but this one is refreshingly simple. Is that enough to effectively differentiate Shizzow? It’s going to have to be, because there’s not much else about the service that’s unique. Most features are easily reproduced, however, and usability may be the key point of competition in this market.

Shizzow let’s you “shout” about where you are, based on the name of the place instead of its address (that’s figured out in the back end), and listen to the shouts of friends’ locations. You can see who hangs out at particular locations and what locations your friends hang out at most often. Ultimately, the service should help your lonely self connect with people in public more often, if that’s something you’re looking for.

Posting can be done through a mobile interface, a Google Gadget or the Shizzow web page. There’s some IM and SMS integration as well.

Is there an API? Not yet. When will it open for general availability? Just before the SXSW conference – that’s pretty cliche, but it could work.

Why would you use this instead of Brightkite, Loopt, something built on top of Yahoo Fire Eagle? If you’re comfortable using any of those services already, you probably have no need to use Shizzow. The company’s attempts to explain how different their service is haven’t been particularly convincing.

The Upside

If you’re looking for a less geeky, attractive, easy to use location based network to use with a wider circle of people than just early adopters – Shizzow will likely play well with that crowd (the rest of the world). If we told you three years ago that a simple service that let you broadcast 140 characters or less about “what you’re doing” was going to take the world by storm, you’d probably have called us crazy. Similarly, comparing location based social networks on features may not be the best criterion.

Usability is key to adoption beyond the relatively small number of people who obsess over every feature and Shizzow is simple, clean looking and usable. Location based social networking sometimes feels so bleeding edge pretentious that you wonder whether these communities even want more users. That’s not the feeling you’ll likely get looking around Shizzow.

Does the the world at large want to find friends and be found via short messages? We’re not sure, but it’s possible. Can Shizzow take its simple, useful tool out into the world successfully? We’ll see, location based social networking is a new paradigm and given privacy concerns (even if they’re not rationally “valid”) it could be a hard sell to mainstream users.

Shizzow is now available for users in California. Drop by, give it a try and let us know what you think. See also WebMonkey’s interview with the Shizzow CEO this morning, it’s an interesting discussion about side projects, simplicity and mobile communication.

Citysearch, the popular local restaurant and shopping guide, announced a new beta version of its service tonight. The new version provides a better local search experience, with the ability to search specific neighborhoods instead of just metropolitan areas. Citysearch also announced a retooled mobile site, which lets users read and write reviews on their mobile devices, and gives them access to menus from participating restaurants. Citysearch has also implemented Facebook Connect, which allows users to log in to the site with their Facebook accounts, and the company plans to roll out OpenID support early next year.

You can fine the new beta at beta.citysearch.com.

Obviously, the restaurant review market is quite crowded right now and a lot of the updates to Citysearch were surely prompted by the success of other services like Yelp.

More Local

Besides giving the service a cleaner and more modern look, Citysearch also retooled the back-end to allow users to perform more granular searches. While the old Citysearch was only focused on 140 metropolitan areas, the new version allows you to drill down to the neighborhood level.

Social

The new version of Citysearch puts more emphasis on the social experience by highlighting reviews from your Facebook friends while browsing through reviews. Besides making the sign-in easier for new users, Citysearch now also allows you to publish your updates on the service to your Facebook profile. On the service itself, setting up a profile has now become easier, though you can’t really do too much with these profiles besides adding your profile picture.

Users can now also vote reviews up or down, which is a nice feature, given that some reviews can be blatantly biased.

The update also puts more emphasis on professionally produced videos of local establishments. The new player, which is provided by BrightCove, allows for wide-screen HD playback, which is a nice upgrade from the old version.

Mobile

Early next year, Citysearch will start to allow users to upload their own photos and videos to the service. Citysearch also expects to release a native iPhone application around the same time, though for now, the updated mobile site is already quite useful.

Overall, this is a nice update to Citysearch and puts the service back on par with its competitors. In the mobile market, however, review services like Yelp or discovery services like Whrll have a head-start and it will be interesting to see if Citysearch’s mobile site can compete with these.

by Don Reisinger

Video delivery platform provider GridNetworks on Monday announced that it has launched its GridCast TV service, which allows content distributors to stream online video to a viewer’s TV.

GridCast TV is currently capable of reaching 35 million homes across the United States, thanks to the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Internet-enabled high-definition TVs.

According to GridNetworks, the service doesn’t require the use of a set-top box or any other additional hardware, but it is a CDN overlay technology that requires to two main components: software embedded into set-top boxes, as well as the installation of the Grid Network Control center on a publisher’s hardware to manage videos.

So far, popular IPTV network Revision3 has started working with GridNetworks, along with IndieFlix and HavocTV.

“Our goal is to help video distributors capture more viewers, differentiate themselves from their competitors and, above all, make more money,” GridNetworks CEO Tony Naughtin said in a statement. “What makes this new service different is that it combines the reach of TV with the high CPM rates associated with targeted Internet audiences.”

Streaming online videos to the HDTV is the next major frontier in entertainment, but GridNetworks may be a little late. Apple has already made streaming IPTV shows to HDTVs simple, with the help of the Apple TV. That said, GridNetworks isn’t tied to one product, and it wants to bring its service to other devices to expand its footprint in the market.

GridCast TV is operational now, but pricing is available only after contacting the company with inquiries.

Starting next month, subscribers of Comcast’s cable Internet service in Oregon and southwestern Washington state will be getting their connections switched over to “wideband.” The upgraded service, which was announced late last month doubles the speed of residential and business connections as well as offering two faster, more expensive plans that bring the maximum download speed to 22 and 50 Mbps respectively.

Wideband is currently available in Minneapolis-Saint Paul, and parts of New England, New Jersey, and Philadelphia. According my press contact, Comcast plans to get it in “close to 10 million homes and businesses in the next couple of months,” which is a good percentage given the company’s overall customer base of 14.7 million subscribers.

The technology behind wideband, which is formally known as DOCSIS 3.0 brings with it the capability to hit speeds in excess of 300 Mbps, is six times faster than what Comcast is currently offering (or even capable of handling with its current network infrastructure). As mentioned before, this increase in download speed has not made a difference in Comcast’s bandwidth use restriction, which requires users to stay within 250 GB of downloads per month or face a one-year suspension upon the second offense.

Two superstars of the casual gaming world–David Scott, the author of Flash Element TD, and Paul Preece, who wrote Desktop Tower Defense–are collaborating to create a new games company, Casual Collective.

Updated versions of Flash Element and Desktop Tower Defense are among the games offered at the new service, as well as new marquee titles Minions and Desktop Armada. These are multi-player games, and Scott and Preece hope they will bring users back to the games to hang out with (or conquer) their buddies. The games are monetized through in-game ads served by Mochi Media.

I lost a lot of hours to this stupid game (Desktop Tower Defense).

While an important key to success in casual games is distribution–getting the game embedded in as many games portals as possible–Casual Collective will also have special features for fans who come to the Casual Collective site itself. Upgrades and other extra features will be available for sale on the main site. But the grail, the founders realize, is distribution; Flash Element TD was embedded on more than 12,000 sites, I was told. Desktop Tower Defense, while still successful, did not get the same number of embeds as Flash Element since it redirected users to its hosting site.

The two hit tower defense games that Scott and Preece developed were both the freshman efforts of their creators–Scott’s game was the first game he developed for himself (not on contract), and Preece’s version was the very first Flash game he wrote. It remains to be seen if this team can bring the same magic to their new games. I’ve played them, and while none have yet hooked me the way the tower games did when they appeared in 2007, I believe Scott and Preece are off to a good start.

Watch more than 100 live streaming video sites right on your desktop with StreamDesk.

If you’ve ever wanted to watch streaming video right on your desktop, and organize all your favorite streams in a single bucket, it’s worth checking out StreamDesk. This cross-platform desktop application plays video streams from a variety of sources in a simple player that cuts out the browser completely and turns each show into a small, floating window.

Included are more than 100 various streaming video shows from a small handful of providers. If you come across one that isn’t live, you’re out of luck, otherwise live shows begin to stream in almost instantly. Shows you like can be bookmarked into a favorites list, and each has its own button that takes you right to its source page.

There’s currently no way to add your own shows via URL, however the catalog is updated frequently and you can make suggestions for new streams by e-mailing the developer. Also, on StreamDesk, you’re missing out on the integrated live chat on videos that are coming from UStream.tv.

If you’re a Mac user you’ll need to be running OS X 10.5 (Leopard) along with the latest version of Flash 10. Windows users need Flash 10 as well, along with .Net Framework 3.5.

German startup Cellity has unveiled its enhanced address book (called Addressbook 2.0) for mobile phones, now available in a private beta. The J2ME application allows users to aggregate data from across their Email boxes, social networks, and standard address books into a single intuitive application, bringing the functionality of a smartphone to the hundreds of more basic phones that support the Java platform. The company is offering 1000 invites to TechCrunch readers, which you can request here.

Beyond offering a complete database for contact information, the app allows users to place inexpensive phone calls over the company’s own PSTN network (which is similar to Jajah’s), and send free text messages. However, Cellity will also make a whitelabel version available in the future, which would allow cellular carriers to implement Addressbook 2.0 using their own native networks. The application also allows users to update status messages across multiple social networks.

Addressbook 2.0’s design is very polished, and is significantly more intuitive than most address books that come standard on cell phones. To get started, users import their friend lists from social networks including Xing, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, as well as from Email clients like Outlook. The service will automatically detect when a friend is found on multiple social networks and aggregate their data under a single profile without creating duplicates.

And because address books generated using social networks can grow very large very quickly, the site offers an online control panel to manage contacts. Users can create a database consisting of thousands of entries to be stored in the cloud, picking out the few dozen that they use most regularly to be stored on the phone (they can access the full list from their phones if they ever need it). The online panel also allows includes the same features of the mobile app, allowing users to place calls, send text messages, and update social network statuses.

The company estimates that the application will run on around 650 available phones, which are less sexy than the iPhone and Android but account for a much larger mobile install base worldwide. The company will see no shortage of competition, as there have been a number of other efforts to integrate social networks with mobile phones, including Yahoo’s OneConnect (though Cellity seems to be highlighting on more traditional address book functionality rather than social networking).