Friday, November 30, 2007

IRSeek The most comprehensive chat search engine

What Company Is Offering:
IRSeek utilizies the power of the people on IRC and brings it to the rest of the community to enjoy and learn from.

IRC (Internet Relay Chat) remains one of the most active platforms for sharing knowledge and collaborating on the Internet.

How it Works:

www.IRSeek.com strives to make this hidden gem available to the entire Internet community. By constantly archiving thousands of active, highly-focused, public chat-rooms in a wide variety of topics (e.g. Linux, soccer, Christianity, poker, business and others) then indexing, processing and publishing the content on the web using advanced Web 2.0 technologies while maintaining the privacy of the users, we are creating a knowledge base different from any other.
Who Is Backing Them:
Eran Cohen, Chief Executive Officer
Eran cohen has over 13 years of experience in the computing industry. Prior to co-founding B&C Advanced Solutions LTD, Mr. Cohen skillfully lead several large-scale client-server projects which are extensively used throughout the world today. During his time in iWeb LTD, Mr. Cohen served as a senior web-application developer. He then served as a consultant and project leader for Computest LTD. Mr. Cohen then served as the head of the e-payment backoffice system at Random-Logic LTD. Mr. Cohen completed his military service at the Israeli Air-Force as a computer-systems expert.
Ariel Berkman, Chief Technical Officer
Ariel Berkman has over 15 years of experience in the computing industry. Prior to co-founding B&C Advanced Solutions LTD, Mr. Berkman had extensive experience consulting and implementing complex systems with emphasis on reliability, availability, and security. During his time in Contact- NOW LTD, Ariel served as a senior Unix system-administrator. At Envara LTD (acquired by Intel), Ariel served as a the head of the IT department. He then served as a technology consultant for Metacafe LTD and the Computer- Science IT department at the University of Illinois in Chicago.
More at:http://www.irseek.com/

Shopit is a marriage of e-commerce and social networking

What Company Is Offering:
Shopit is designed to be a faster, easier and more cost effective selling and trading environment than any other available today. It is the world′s first and largest peer-to-peer social commerce network that enables users to buy, sell and trade anything, anywhere on the Internet.
How It Works:
Shopit is a marriage of e-commerce and social networking. This website is the only e-commerce exchange that allows users to build personalized Mini-Stores™, quickly upload items and list them for sale or trade. These Mini-Stores™ can be displayed millions of places on the Web, including social networks, blogs and e-mails.

Best of all, doing business on Shopit is absolutely FREE! You can buy, sell, trade, and list items without any fees. Shopit also allows users to promote products with photos and video on their own profiles.
Who Is Backing Them:
The Shopit team is a group of Internet users who decided that buyers and sellers needed better tools for Web commerce. The site is backed and managed by a team of Internet visionaries with expertise spanning e-commerce, social networking, advertising, online marketing and affiliate marketing. Together, they realized that the next evolution in e-commerce involves empowering every Internet user to be a merchant. You are able to browse for free without registering but in order to purchase or sell an item you must register.

More at:http://www.shopit.com/

PeekYou Is People Search Engine

What Company Is Offering:
A PeekYou profile helps other people find your websites, social-networking pages, photos or anything else about you online. You can also create a profile for friends or relatives to ensure that they may also be easily found online.

You can also register to become a full Contributor which allows you to track your edits to PeekYou and gives you other benefits as well.
How it Works:

Everyone can browse through PeekYou or create new profiles. However, in order to edit or submit information on existing profiles you need to be a registered user. PeekYou will prompt you to log in to your account when you attempt to make changes to a profile. After you have logged in, you can easily edit the "info", "tags", "bio", "photo", and "weblinks" fields by clicking on the appropriate edit buttons. Submitting links into the correct categories ensures easy navigation on the profile. Please note that there can be up to 25 tags on every category, so choose only the most relevant descriptions for the person whose profile you are editing.
PeekYou contributors can link more than one location to a profile. The key is for each added location to be relevant to the person on the profile, and not merely a transient locality. Good examples of relevant locations include birthplace, college town, and any place where that person has lived for a few years. Location therefore does not need to be limited to current locality. When in doubt whether a specific location should be added, consider whether someone who knows that person could plausibly relate him/her principally to the location under consideration. If yes, then that location is a good candidate for being added to the profile.
Why Is It In News Again:
PeekYou.com, the “people search” engine, announced a new way to search Google. This application improves Google’s results by displaying the people who own the websites or those who are referenced within them. The service is available at http://google.peekyou.com/
More at:http://www.peekyou.com/

Fotolog Acquired By French Internet company Hi-Media At $90 million

What Company is Offering:
Fotolog is the world's leading photo-blogging site, one of the world's largest social networking sites and a global cultural phenomenon. More than 10 million members in more than 200 countries use Fotolog as a simple and fun way to express themselves through online photo diaries or photo blogs.

What makes Fotolog special is not just the ability to post photos, but the ability to connect with others — whether simply staying in touch with friends and family or exploring the diverse Fotolog universe, discovering photos of new people from different cultures, participating in the site's fascinating special-interest communities and, perhaps most important, receiving personal feedback on their photos from around the world.
How It Works:
Just click the "create your own free Fotolog photo-blog" link that you'll see all over the place and fill out the short registration form. It should take less than a minute and you'll be on your way. After that, you'll be able to upload a photo any time you want in less than a minute.Once you've created your free Fotolog photo-blog, go to your page, and click on the upload link that you see in the navigation bar. Then click on the browse button to find the photo you'd like to upload from your computer's hard drive. Remember: photos must be JPGs or GIFs, and they need to be 2,000 KB or less. Most digital cameras out there today create photo files that are less than 2,000 K, so you should be good to go. But, for you folks with super-duper gazillion mega-pixel cameras, any basic image-editing software (check out this list at CNET) will allow you to resize your photos to the proper size to upload. Fotolog will ultimately convert your photo to a JPG, no larger than 500x500 pixels.

How Much They Got From VCs:

French Internet company Hi-Media,operator of one of Europe’s largest ad networks and micro-payment services, completed its acquisition today of Fotolog.

The $90 million deal was first announced last August. Since then, Fotolog has added two million more members for a total of 13 million, and claims 3.9 billion page views a month.

Fotolog trails behind MySpace’s PhotoBucket and Yahoo’s Flickr. CEO John Borthwick is moving on to his incubator/investment fund Betaworks.
More at:http://www.fotolog.com/
http://www.hi-media.com/

VerticalSearch.com---For B2B Community

What Company Is Offering:

VerticalSearch.com's mission is to provide the B2B community with the best search experience on the web. They accomplish this first by focusing their search engine on the most relevant web sites for the B2B user.
How It Works:

To begin with, They have indexed over 4,000 of the B2B trade press sites, including many online -only publishers of B2B information. These sites offer a wealth of content and editorial expertise in the whole range of B2B verticals, from Agriculture to Mining, Construction to Transportation. Soon they will be adding tens of thousands of B2B company sites to augment the B2B trade press sites. And, as VerticalSearch.com evolves, watch for useful community tools and features that will allow each vertical B2B community to share domain expertise, product offerings, and business and job opportunities by sector.

Who Is Backing Them:

VerticalSearch.com LLC is a privately held company founded by Jeffrey Dearth, one of the pioneers of the commercial Internet. Partners in the venture include Planet Discover, a customized search engine provider, and DeSilva & Phillips, LLC, a media investment bank. But VerticalSearch.com is also YOU, the B2B user. With your help, VerticalSearch.com can become one of your major partners in developing new leads, delivering relevant content, and putting you in touch with your industry colleagues worldwide. Click here to find out how to submit your web site to VerticalSearch.com.
More at:http://www.verticalsearch.com/

FreeTVonline.com-- Watch More Than 1000 Channels Free

What Company Is Offering:
This site is made for enjoying TV and videos online in a variety of different formats. They believe that their directory has indexed more video links than any other website, and they strive to deliver the best interactive video-watching experience online. They do not host any of the video files.
FreeTVonline.com is a young startup with a passion for creating a thriving internet video community. They are currently in public beta, and they plan to release many new and exciting site features in the near future.

How It Works;

Their goal is to provide users with a highly interactive and engaging video finding and viewing experience. They believe that the emerging worldwide interest in online video and web 2.0 communities, coupled with the changing nature of traditional video and TV viewing habits, requires fresh ideas. They hope to be part of an industry solution that respects content creators while providing a fun, interactive online platform for users to experience video content.All the videos are hosted by third party video hosting websites (ie YouTube). You may need to download and install the appropriate video player (see below). Otherwise, some video hosting websites take a long time to load videos. Please be patient. If the video hasn't started loading after 1 minute, then the video has most likely been removed from the host website, and you can report it as a dead link (must be logged in to the members area).


FreeTVonline.com is wholly owned and operated by FreeTVonline.com Inc, a registered corporation in the Republic of Panama. They are a small company, currently funded by individual investors.
More at:http://www.freetvonline.com/

Find your CD or DVD cover fast with this searchengine

Find your CD or DVD cover fast with this searchengine. Searches through millions of covers instantly.

Type the name of a CD/DVD or artist in the searchfield and Albumart.org will find lots of high quality CD and DVD covers within seconds!

More at:http://albumart.org/

Martinair-- Mobile Travel Guide Talk In Your Language

What Company is Offering:
Martinair's mobile travel guides combine several elements to create a helpful tool for their holiday-bound customers. The Dutch charter company is the first airline to offer its passengers a travel guide they can install on their web-enabled mobile phones.

How it Works:
Customers can buy a destination guide for EUR 6.50, and they're free for anyone booking in December. A link is sent to the user's phone by text message, and they can download the entire guide—approximately 400 KB—within minutes. Since all of the information is copied to their phone's memory, travellers are able to avoid expensive roaming charges when they want to look up a local hotspot.

The travel guides are based on content provided by Leads2Travel's travel editors and include local tips from Martinair crew members. Current destinations on offer are Curaçao, Miami and Havana, with two dozen other cities to follow over the next few months. While Dutch people won't have much trouble getting by on the primarily Dutch speaking island of Curaçao, the guides for Miami and Havana offer an extra tool—a talking vocabulary. This service, built by Steape and accessible from within the travel guide, offers a host of useful phrases shown in Dutch and English or Spanish. Users who have trouble communicating with the locals can let their phones do the talking. Click on a button, and a friendly voice speaks the selected phrase.

On the mobile front, British travel business lastminute.com offers a Talking Translator—a free service that provides text and audio translations of holiday phrases from English into French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and German.

Still—we like Martinair's integrated approach, bundling tailor-made travel information with a talking translator, and offering it to customers when they book their tickets. Other airlines to follow?
More at: www.martinair.com

Satisfaction lets consumers participate in conversations about customer service issues specific to particular companies or products

What Company Is Offering:
Satisfaction is people-powered customer service for absolutely everything. More specifically, though, it's a place where communities of customers come together to answer each others questions, share ideas with each other or with an organization, report and solve problems and generally talk about about what matters to them around these products or services.

When the organization or company is involved too it gives them a way to engage with their customers around the issues that matter to their customers most. Satisfaction provides a neutral playing ground where companies and customers can interact to everybody's benefit.
How It Works:
Satisfaction lets consumers participate in conversations about customer service issues specific to particular companies or products. A recent post in the Twitter section, for example, describes a problem one consumer had getting a Twitter application to update in Facebook. In the Timbuk2 section, another contributor asks for advice about laptop messenger bags. Participants in the conversations can include both customers and company employees (clearly labelled as such), and the posts ranked as most useful get propelled to the top of the list. Discussions are controlled by the community, free of impersonal contact forms or company censorship. Marketers who choose to join in, meanwhile, are freed from repetitive support tasks and able to engage their customers in a more collaborative way. The service is currently free for those on both sides of the equation.

Find the company that makes the product you want to talk about and click it.
Ask a question or start a topic in the Hey Satisfaction Unlimited! box above. If there's a similar topic already, you can join the conversation in progress. They'll notify you via email whenever people reply to the topic you posted.
More at:http://getsatisfaction.com/

Cutcaster is the first dynamic marketplace - a creative exchange

What Company Is Offering:
Cutcaster is a marketplace where all forms of video, short films, stock footage, b-roll, motion graphics, animation, audio clips and photos can be securely bought, sold or requested from the Cutcaster community.
Cutcaster is the first dynamic marketplace - a creative exchange - that allows buyers and sellers to have an impact on licensing conditions, market pricing, and community sourcing for content like digital video, motion graphics, audio, and photos. Upload content and choose your own price or use the Cutcaster Algorithm to find the right price based on current market conditions.
How It Works:
Creators of video footage, photos, short films, stock footage, b-roll, motion graphics, animation, or audio clips can upload their work to the Cutcaster site and sell them at a price determined by them or by using the powerful Cutcaster Algorithm to determine the correct market price. All footage must be up to standard broadcast quality formats e.g. super 16mm, 16mm, DigiBeta, HD, HDV and even NTSC and PAL; trademarks, logos, brands and entities with trademarks/copyright should be removed. CutCaster pays 40% of the collected royalty payment to the producer for non-exclusive rights and 60% of the collected royalty for exclusive rights to sell your content. On the other hand, buyers can search for works via category and topic; they can also specify what kind of royalty/rights agreements they want.
More at:http://www.cutcaster.com/

I Love Rewards , a Web-based reward program provider, has completed a $3.3 million Series A financing

What Company Is Offering:
I Love Rewards is one of North America's leading incentive marketing companies. They develop, design and implement innovative incentive solutions for small and medium-sized companies as well as Fortune 1000 businesses. Their solutions focus on driving employee motivation, increasing customer loyalty, and rewarding valued behaviors.
How It Works:
I Love Rewards has developed an online points-based platform suitable for all business sizes.
Give points to your employees and empower them to choose the rewards they want. After all, that is what makes a great rewards program.
I Love Rewards' solutions are delivered via a web-based points engine that allows clients to achieve their unique business goals in a variety of ways. I Love Rewards' success is based on building both standard and customized programs to support our clients' business objectives. Users are able to redeem their points for brand name rewards from our industry-leading product catalog.With a solutions-driven approach and a focus on client service, I Love Rewards has demonstrated unprecedented success in helping other organizations improve their employee recognition and sales programs.

How Much They Got From VCs:
I Love Rewards Inc., a Web-based reward program provider, has completed a $3.3 million Series A financing round with JLA Ventures, Laurence Capital and other angel investors
More at:http://www.iloverewards.com/

Snooth , a wine review site, today announced $1 million in angel funding

What Company Is Offering:
Snooth is a revolutionary web-based social shopping experience that is simplifying how people select, interact with and purchase their favorite wines.

Snooth is the world's most comprehensive wine database, featuring millions of reviews and hundreds of thousands of wines. It offers both casual and aspiring wine drinkers personalized wine recommendations, ratings & reviews, as well as a wine information search tool that seamlessly connects users to the websites of top online merchants and wineries worldwide.
How Much They Got From VCs:
Snooth Inc., a wine review site, today announced $1 million in angel funding from the company's initial backers, as well as a new group of international investors. This is the company's second round, following an initial $300,000 raised in December 2006. The new funds will be used to scale the development team, integrate the current backlog of merchants that have already partnered with Snooth, and add new retailers worldwide.

How Is It Different:
Unlike sites that make recommendations strictly by selecting wines of similar price, region, or varietals as wines you have purchased in the past, Snooth strives to understand your personal taste in great detail so that it can recommend the wines that are best-suited to you. In order to understand your preferences, Snooth needs a sample of at least 5 wines that you like or dislike. Although 5 wines is the minimum, the more wines that you rate, the more accurate your recommendations will become.Snooth does not sell wine, however, you can buy wine that you find on Snooth's site through our merchant partners. Once you have found a wine you'd like to purchase, you can click on the "buy now" link which will redirect you to the site of Snooth's partners.

More at:http://www.snooth.com/

By spending five minutes filling in some basic details about yourself, your pay and status, you can find out if you are entitled to any gov.benefits

What Company Is Offering:
Entitledto has unique experience in helping people find out about entitlements online. They have provided a free web-based calculator to help people work out their entitlement to benefits and tax credits. Their public calculator www.entitledto.co.uk currently performs over 1 million calculations a year.


Entitledto has been Sunday Times website of the week and was featured on BBC Radio 4's Moneybox programme and has also been mentioned many times on National Radio, TV and in the press.

How It Works:
By spending five minutes filling in some basic details about yourself, your pay and status, you can find out if you are entitled to any government benefits. The site, which is free and funded by the sales of software to local authorities and other organisations, will list all the tax credits and benefits you should be claiming. Well worth a look considering the amount going unclaimed.

Their products include:

E2Adviser Web based benefit calculator designed for use by benefit advisers. It provides sophisticated 'what if' calculations and case management functions.
E2Mobile Smartphone based add-on to the E2Adviser product for mobile workers and home visitors.
E2Calc A benefits calculator designed for local authorities and other organisations which can seamless integrate into their own websites.
E2Claim A complete claims solution allowing a Claim Form to be generated as a PDF or electronically transfered to an organisations back office systems.

More at:http://www.entitledto.co.uk/

Search And Compare Shopping Sites

What Company Is Offering:
Their goal is to make shopping easier starting from product research to price comparison to coupon search and helping making final purchase. Their goal is to give you a shortcut to online retailers, you get information direct and realtime, unlike delayed or scraped information you get from shopping NextTag, Shopping.com and shopping engines.

How It Works:

You can compare shopping sites.Its for your complete shopping soultions from product research ,price comparison to coupan search and at last helping final purchase.
More at:http://shoppingvale.com/

Pulse is a web-based cash flow management tool that allows you to easily monitor the heartbeat of your small business

What Company Is Offering:
Pulse is a web-based cash flow management tool that allows you to easily monitor the heartbeat of your small business - your cash. Say goodbye to unmanageable spreadsheets, and hello to an intuitive interface with the power to quickly manage and evaluate your income and expenses. Pulse makes tracking the health of your business simple, accurate and efficient.
How It Works:
Pulse lets you categorize your income and expenses, your cash flow has never been so organized. Quickly pull in all your companies and projects from the popular project management web software Basecamp and Pulse will automatically organize your projects based upon company.The main cash flow page lets you view your income and expenses over an 8 month time period. Scroll through past and future months with just a click of a button.From the "Add income" page instead of entering a title, click on the "Select a project" link. The drop-down box that appears will list out all of your projects organized by company. If you want to delete ,Click on the "Edit" link next to an item on the main Cash Flow page. On the edit page you will find a delete link in the top right hand corner.Pulse is 100% free. There is a good chance that a paid subscription plan (including more features) will become available in the future. However, a base set of features will always be provided for free.
More at:http://pulseapp.com/