Once again BusinessWeek has come up with List of Best Entities on Web, with voting started today on BusinessWeek Best of the Web'08 till Sept. 12, this time the ace news portal has come up with some new additions such as Best new comer entry and the famous - The Most Influential People on the Web. While in new comers the entries are - Freindfeed, Summize, GigaPan, Microsoft WorldWide Telescope and WaterCooler and in Blogs categories, the entries are more or less the same, yes you guess right its -TechCrunch, Scobleizer the two same 'old' brand new blogs along with http://gothamist.com, Seth's Blog and http://paul.kedrosky.com. Apart from above categories BusinessWeek do have other 23 categories too namely - Tech News, Business News, Social Networking, Sports, Real Estate and Blogging tools etc. with 5 nominees in each categories where users along with voting their favorites among the nominees can also submit their own choice of website in respective categories with few lines on why they like that website or blog. While browsing th nominees I found the redundancy in th nominees that has been around for quite a long time, the question is why not bring in the new and deserving ones, for e.g. ...

Mikogo is a free online meeting tool that enables the users to host web presentations and even control a remote computer over the Internet. The tool uses 256 bit AES encryption, allowing to share your desktop in real time and in true color quality across the world with up to 10 participants simultaneously. The tools is offshoot of its already screen sharing tool called BeamYourScreen, to instantly share your screen online to anyone. Mikogo can be employed for a range of professional, business, or academic, including online meetings, product demonstrations, online presentations, web conferencing or remote support. Naturally, Mikogo includes many features to empower the users as much as possible during use. During meeting with Mikogo users can able to: • share each others’ screens • switch presenters • access remote keyboard and mouse control • pause transmission • select only certain applications for sharing • and transfer files between PCs To get started with Mikogo just download the app, and start a meeting with 2 mouse clicks from the system tray. Receive the unique meeting ID – participants then use this to join the meeting. Noticeably, there is no installations or registrations on the participants' part. Being free web tool and no time limitations, Mikogo is easily in reach to ...

Lulu, Morrisville, North Carolina based company and world’s largest marketplace for self-published authors offering online printing and order fulfillment has teams up with Bangalore based WeRead.com - a community for book lovers and a social book discovery application where people can recommend books to their friends on social networks. WeRead.com statistics in terms of rapid growth especially in Social networking arena is self explanatory to speak about the benefits of its tie-up with Lulu, as currently weRead have more than 2 million registered members, over 1.5 million book reviews and there are over 40 million books on members' virtual bookshelves through social networking sites Facebook, MySpace, Orkut, Hi5, and Bebo, including individual’s websites/ blogs. Through this tie-up between two Authors/ Books driven duo websites, what weRead.com will do to books published on Lulu.com is similar to what Social bookmarking widgets doing to article/ Post on websites/ blogs respectively. Bangalore operated weRead.com is headed by founders Krishna Motukuri and Harish Abbott and the portal is getting more than famous in Facebook crowd. WeRead's traits such as discovery, independent ratings and reviews, and readership communities on social networks will compliment the Lulu.com's free self-publishing tools and distribution capabilities.

TechCrunch a well known Weblog and now more than a weblog, a network cum organization of people obsessed with technology and start-ups led by Michael Arrington are visualizing a Tablet PC that will cost $200 and run nothing more than just Firefox - people's very own browser which just ended up making world record in number of downloads. The ultra slim Tabloid PC device would totally be based on Open Source i.e. free technologies right from OS (BSD/Linux), Desktop/ OnScreen keywboard (Gnome, again open source) and Google Gears for widgets / plugins. Techcrunch in its blog post says about its idea of the device: The idea is to turn it on, bypass any desktop interface, and go directly to Firefox running in a modified Kiosk mode that effectively turns the browser into the operating system for the device. Add Gears for offline syncing of Google docs, email, etc., and Skype for communication and you have a machine that will be almost as useful as a desktop but cheaper and more portable than any laptop or tablet PC. Though the concept is not very new and in words of one of a comments in TechcrunchIT its like reinventing the wheels. The famous $100 Laptop is ...

RoamAbout is a plugin that delivers information on the web contextually. Users would not need to leave the site they are browsing in order to search for videos, music, pictures or share the things they come across with. This Firefox & IE plugin bring all these to the user by just highlighting the text any user want without leaving the web page they are viewing. One can get related information by selecting text and clicking the RoamAbout Icon in status bar also users can post to their twitter account, the selected text of a web page and post it directly their, without even leaving the web page actually. Similarly users can browse flickr photos, Google news, info from Wikipedia, maps from MapQuest and videos from YouTube and by just selecting the text in web page you are viewing and hitting the plugin's icons bar. User can customize the the plugin bar so as to limit the no. of Icons for different Web services or websites such as stock quotes, weather or games. Moreover, the company behind RoamAround Vysr do have the open platform that provides developers with any easy way to add and integrate services and networks that users can tap into as ...

Finally, Google has launched its product for this category as well, where till now SecondLife has its major stake, google through its service Lively.com now offering people to build their virtual life by creating 'Avatars' as their very own clone, play with them and roam around in 3D virtual world, make friends and interact in real time with your friends' avatars. Be who you want on the web pages you visit, says Google official blog post, where user with google's Lively.com's service can create their own virtual world just like what SecondLife.com has done earlier. Through Lively users can create avatars, change its looks or wardrobe, be it your surroundings, environment such as furniture, nearby objects, rooms where your avatar put up and decorate your places etc. Lively is a outcome of Arizona State University social networking project where Google wanted to create SecondLife's rival. Eventhough in beta and asking for feedback, Lively.com is ready for all actions to download and give it a try against SecondLife

SneakCast, an Indian Video Search service that we have reviewed last year as - SneakCast: India’s First Video Search Engine is down for past 6 months or so. Now the company behind it has overhauled the search portal along with new revamped logo and new concept has drawn to make it more versatile. SneakCast, this time wants to be semantic video search engine in contrast to other generic search engines today. The company talk about bring about changes in video search globally in contrast to other search engines including google who just does textual based search along with tags, back-links relevance factors. On the other hand SneakCast bet on being most relevant search engine when it comes to video, so much so that company has apparently said: SneakCast has semantics, syntactics and video analysis to increase the relevance level to as high as 63 per cent (the highest ever attained in the video search industry). The company at present is based in UK working to finally launch the service and will relocate to Mumbai, India before getting close to final rounds of fundings. The video search service also have plans to run video advertising with approx. 30 sec. of ad clips in their videos ...

Posterous is a new service through which users can post just anything by sending email, its a kind of twitter like microblogging, but unlike microblog here one can put any content using smart auto embedding services of Posterous. The service lets post content from email and content could be audio, video, image, pdf, doc or mp3 and you would get 1GB of space for all this. One can use any email service such as GMail, Windows Live (Hotmail), Yahoo or any other to do blogging via email and for that you just have to send an email to post @ posterous.com unlike to other blogging services with WYSIWYG editors or so. The interesting and USP part in this is Posterous intelligently embed the files in different user interfaces like when you post a YouTube video link via email, it automatically embed the video player as such and when you post any audio files it will put a nice Posterous interface for that (see image below) and audio player when you post an mp3 file. Apart from this, when you send URLs, it will automatically create a link and when an image is send as an attachment it resize it to web friendly size, ...

AppApeal.com has created web 2.0 Mosaic i.e. an art in form of world map filled with small pieces of images, which in this case are logos of leading web 2.0 websites. This World Web 2.0 Mosaic is created from 1001 web 2.0 company logos which when clicked take you to the related website. The logos will appear in full-size when you hover over the mosaic. This art of AppApeal has reminded me of Million Dollar Page that had created a lot of buzz, couple of years back but here in this case its free but no inclusion request or so. One things I found annoyed in AppApeal's Mosaic art is that not even a single website or blog from India has been included in the web 2.0 logos art, though there are worth full websites from India that are much popular than many of the websites present in mosaic art. Nevertheless, a great art work. Thanks, Jelle de Bruin.

Today, the most revolutionary device that we could say have changed our lives is - Mobile Phones, with more and more technical up gradations, innovations coming up, right from camera phones which has got too obvious for all to PDAs, iPhones or latest one iPhone 3G. Among all the camera phones have become nominal part of our daily life along with clothing accessories. The latest Mobile buzz today we could play with and thats to with much ease is Mobile Codes and QR Codes (Quick Response Code) and both of these technologies require just one thing - a camera phone along with a reader. Let me put it this way - to read PDF files or .rtf files you need Acrobat Reader and MS Word respectively, in same way you need to have QR/ Mobile code reader to encode information in QR codes, which can be installed very easily (if I could do this, anyone can and yes, I am in India :)). The mobile/ QR codes are 2 dimensional codes different from 1 dimensional Bar-codes that we could see on products we purchase from shops/ malls and billing counter person encode it with their Bar-code reader devices. Though Bar codes can ...

MSNBC one of most reputed digital news channel from Microsoft has lately launched a stunning visual RSS reader called Spectra News Reader, that picks news from MSNBC News channels and put in front of user to get a nice visual experience. The App has ability to make it customizable and adding some human interactivity as well. The App Spectra let users to add news channels which in turn carry topics and all this in color combinations and designs to let users distinguish the pallets flying orbitally with headlines on it. The app as apparent is to promote the news website and to compete with the other online news websites which are way ahead than MSNBC.com. If we talk about the channels/ topics that MSNBC have are good enough and vast quality content as well, even though sites like Digg.com, NYTimes, Del.icio.us and even reddit are way ahead than MSNBC. Digg too have similar fashioned Visual web tools or apps to lure its users such as Digg Spy, Arc or Big Spy but it would get its part of traffic anyway. MSNBC in a similar manner does have number of tools, apps and widgets to make its content go viral, one can see all ...

PicLens is a powerful application that turn your browser into full screen 3D experience to view images and videos. Piclens transform your browser into cinematic visual presentation with images and videos put on wall and make you assume like you are seeing them on wall of a dark room. The application indeed a rich experiencing tool with media player like controls where you can fast forward, rewind, view full screen or scroll thumbnails to view images and videos. Piclens has recently make the application compatible to view YouTube videos along previous compatibility to view Google image search results into 3D visualization as well as that of Yahoo, AOL, Ask.com and Live image searches, thats too with just one single click. Moreover, PicLens allow to view photos on Flickr, Photobucket, Picasa and Smugmug into same 3D visualization along with social networking sites like Facebook, Bebo, MySpace and Friendster. For other sites/ blogs to be compatible with PicLens application, one has to create a media RSS along with its auto-discovery link for same and other addition in HTML to match those tags in media RSS with images and videos under webpage. However, WordPress users can use the plugin to create a mini slide ...

YouTube has finally launched its Indian version - YouTube.co.in, displaying whole lot of Indian videos, as goes by Official YouTube India Blog, the site is just a lens of its global version i.e. youtube.com, and its Indian counterpart contains all the videos that the global site has, its just that YouTube.co.in is localized version reflecting what Indians, Indian diaspora or people who just love India is watching on youtube. YouTube.co.in has provided an ease to Indian audience who otherwise would have filtered out the results for themselves waisting some more time out of their "Orkutism", let put it this way, what Google.co.in is for web search is YouTube.co.in for YuTube videos. Users can also access the YouTube India through their mobile devices at - http://in.youtube.com/mobile

Facebook, world's most popular social networking site has been under scanner as BBC has reported security flaws that could seriously harm the website users having profiles in it and the weak link through which it could be done is facebook's own asset which made it popular - "Facebook Apps" and number of third party applications residing in it. BBC has made a data mining application - 'Miner' and add it to facebook application to poke into facebook security fences and finally, steal the personal data, indentity of fictious profile (made by BBC team itself) on facebook and accomplish the task of exposing facebook flaw. The reason behind all this is - facebook allows application to run on third party servers which made facebook and apps opaque to each other when it comes to that, what these application are doing with these facebook profiles data. BBC team on other side reported that just launched MySpace Apps are dissimilar to facebook as they won't able create similar threat to MySpace system as that created for facebook. As Mysapce treats its applications differently by putting all apps on its own server, so it can see what they are upto with user data and manually ...

Analytics does matters a lot in business and investing perspective as well. A new approach in this way has brought by Bizak, its a business network tool which computes the profitability and valuation of internet startups by creating industry benchmarks for comparative analysis. The business tool has launched by TOKiBiz services Inc, who also provide an internet startup creation services.