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WebEx WebOffice: It's a Web Office Jim, But Not As We Know It
We cover the trend of Web Office closely here on Read/WriteWeb. Google Apps, Salesforce.com, Zoho, ThinkFree, Zimbra - these are some of the leading vendors of web-based office software. Last week came the big news that Zimbra was acquired by Yahoo! for $350M (read our analysis of why). Another company that has been quietly, but effectively, doing business in this segment has been WebEx. They even managed to snag the perfect name for their product: WebOffice. WebEx WebOffice has 2,000,000 registered users and 27,000 businesses rely on it. The main focus of the product is to enable collaboration amongst its users - although as we'll see in this post, it isn't really competing in the same field as Google Apps or even Zimbra.Last week I spoke to Derek Paplau, senior product manager for WebOffice, to find out more about the product. In particular I wanted to find out how WebEx WebOffice compared to the likes of Google Apps, Zoho and Zimbra. During the demo I discovered that WebEx's...

40 million France Telcom Customers Get OpenID
Orange SA, a subsidiary of France Telcom, announced today at the Digital ID World conference in San Francisco that France Telecom will act as a an OpenID server-agent. That means the company will verify the identities of their 40 million users immediately, without the need for another account to be created, at any other site on the web that supports OpenID. This according to Six Apart's David Recordon who blogged and Twittered excitedly from the event. Recordan, an expert in emerging identity issues, says that the move makes France Telecom the world's first major telco to support OpenID.Recordan reports that the company also discussed allowing access to Orange branded mobile services using external accounts - presumably OpenID. This is a huge move for the federated identity movement and it's no surprise that it's coming from Orange - one of the most daring players in the whole sector. It may be the second biggest swath of OpenID accounts ever created, after AOL's adoption...

Revolution Money to Take on PayPal, the World
A large group of very heavy hitters, chaired by former AOL man Ted Leonsis, has launched a new financial services company called Revolution Money. The company will charge transaction fees it says are as low as 25% of the industry average and will allow those transfers to be carried out through existing Points of Sale, an anonymous PIN protected credit card and a variety of online methods, including social networking sites and AOL's AIM instant messenger.The team at Revolution Money is staggering. The Board includes Lawrence Summers, former U.S. Treasury Secretary; Russell Hogg, former President and CEO of MasterCard International, Inc.; Franklin Raines, former CEO of Fannie Mae and former director of the Office of Management and Budget; David Pottruck, former CEO of Charles Schwab and David Golden, CFO of Revolution LLC and former Vice Chairman of JPMorgan. The company recently announced a $50 million Series B round of funding from Citi, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank and...

Selling OLPC Laptops in USA - Good Idea?
BBC News is reporting that the One Laptop Per Child project is going to sell laptops to people in the developed world afterall. The OLPC announced the "Give 1 Get 1" scheme today in which a $399 investment will allow US residents to purchase two laptops: one for the buyer, and one for a child in the developing world.The Give 1 Get 1 program will launch on November 12, via the XO Giving web site. Americans are known for their financial giving, 89% of US households give to charity and total giving in America totaled $295 billion last year, but I'm not sure that the G1G1 program will resonate with people -- or if it's even a good idea to divert laptops from the countries for which they were made.The cheap subnotebook market is hot all of a sudden, and a lot of companies are getting in on the act. The OLPC hardware specs are not that impressive. For your $399 investment ($200 if you figure half as a donation), you get a 433Mhz computer with 256MB of RAM and 1GB of flash memory....

Report: Microsoft in Talks to Acquire Stake in Facebook
According to the Wall Street Journal Microsoft is in talks to buy up to a 5% stake in Facebook for $300-500 million. That would value the company at up to $10 billion. The WSJ is also reporting that Google is interested in an investment in the social network and could set up a stand off between the two rival tech giants.The Journal reports that the discussions taking place so far are in their early stages and that Facebook could wind up not taking any investment (or could turn to financial investors, from whom they have already raise over $40 million). Spokespeople at both Facebook and Microsoft declined to comment on the matter to the WSJ, while a spokesman at Google could not be reached. I think it's safe to assume Google would be mum on this one too.Facebook has been rumored to be in acquisition talks with Yahoo! twice before, first in September of last year and again this past June. However, Microsoft has been providing display advertising for Facebook for over a year,...

MuseStorm Launches New Widget Creation and Distribution Platform
MuseStorm will be launching the next generation of their widget platform at DEMOfall 2007 this week in San Diego, CA. The company will demonstrate their Content Engagement Platform in a Wednesday session at the conference. The platform is live on their web site today, however. The Content Engagement Platform is a complete widget solution that delivers authoring, distribution, monetization, and analytics. MuseStorm CEO Ori Soen says their platform can help businesses "take syndicated content to the nextlevel."MuseStorm is aiming their end-to-end platform at enterprise-grade deployments. In their press release announcing the platform, they tout a partnership with Simon & Schuster books, which used the Content Engagement Platform to create and deploy widgets on their BookVideos.tv web site. According to MuseStorm, the book publisher is using their advanced analytics module to track individual plays of author video within their widgets. Simon & Schuster is a subsidiary...

Yahoo! Presidential Mashup Gets 1m Viewers in 2 Weeks
Say what you will about their grand business strategy, there are some things Yahoo! does very well. Today the company announced that after less than two weeks more than 1 million people have viewed more than 4 million videos on the Yahoo! Democratic Mashup, the site that "mashes up" interview questions and answers with Democratic Party US Presidential candidates. Viewers select candidates and topics they are interested in and a playlist is assembled for the embedded multi-file Yahoo! Video Player. Because of the huge market penetration of Yahoo! ID, the company was able to extract all kinds of demographic information from site viewers. The company said today that "Thirty-nine percent of the audience represented the 18-35 demographic. That means our debate attracted about 429,000 18- to 35-year-olds. Thats more from this demographic than any debate so far!"Hillary Clinton clips were far and away the most viewed but site visitors preferred Barack Obama. The project is a great...

Blip Lands Deal with Rocketboom and Claims Revolution in Video Advertising
New York based video platform Blip.tv announced today that the company will now host and serve all episodes of the long-running variety show video blog Rocketboom. Rocketboom is famous for distributing its content officially on a large number of platforms and looking the other way when it's distributed illicitly. Basing itself at Blip puts the show in good company and could shore up revenues from in-house high-end ad sales that, despite producer Andrew Baron's remarkable intelligence and savvy, have presumably not gone as well as Baron would like.Rocketboom first made its mark with first host Amanda Congdon, who incidentally was released from her subsequent job hosting video at ABC just last week.The deal was discussed on Rocketboom today, about two thirds of the way through the show. The new embed code, you'll note, is shockingly long.With the announcement Blip has also said that the company is now offering an innovative Flash overlay placed on top of Quicktime video files....

DEMOfall 2007 Preview - Companies to Watch
The DEMOfall 2007 conference will be taking place in San Diego, CA this week, so Marshall Kirkpatrick and I decided to look through the list of companies and highlight the ones that we are most excited about seeing. There are almost 70 companies presenting at DEMOfall this year and information is sparse for many of them. Below is a preview of the companies we think will be highlights of the conference. (Presented in no particular order, links to companies in their logo.)Let us know which companies you are most looking forward to seeing present and what you think of our picks in the comments below.Marshall: Dimdim is an open source web conferencing application that I profiled for TechCrunch last year when the company released its alpha version. Cross platform performance is always my first test, and if it works, then this could be awesome.Josh: I've had my eye on Dimdim since Marshall's preview last year. Anyone who has ever attended a webinar using WebEx knows that the experienc...

FeedHub Launches - Individualized RSS Feed Service
Personalization startup mSpoke is launching a new product to mashup and personalize RSS feeds today at DEMO [disclosure: Read/WriteTalk host Sean Ammirati works for mSpoke]. The product is called FeedHub and it creates an "individualized RSS feed" that aims to filter relevant posts from a set of feed sources. Like similar products we've profiled before on Read/WriteWeb - e.g. FeedBlendr, FeedRinse and BlastFeed - the result of the Feedhub process is a single RSS feed that you then add to your RSS Reader (e.g. Google Reader, Bloglines) or Start Page.The reason behind FeedHub is to help users who can't keep up with all of the feeds they have subscribed to, by filtering for relevancy. Say you've subscribed to 100 feeds in Bloglines; by using FeedHub you can create a single feed that filters those 100 feeds. Ideally the resulting single feed will deliver you only the most relevant posts - and you can continue to 'train' FeedHub to refine this process. My problem...