Profy

Today at the Future of Web Applications conference in London Yuuguu is announcing that its screen sharing and web conferencing application is officially out of beta now. We first reviewed Yuuguu in detail when the screen sharing and web conferencing application was launched a year ago at DEMOfall. Today Yuuguu reports over 100,000 registered users of the application with the number of those using it without registering much higher since no download and registration is required to join a meeting.

Also in the news for the company today is integration with Gmail address book. Basically when a person who hosts a meeting using Yuuguu application wants to have all the contacts from Gmail and Google Talk to appear as Yuuguu contacts to easily invite them to participate in a web meeting, this person simply lets the service know the Google username and password and the contacts will be imported for use right within Yuuguu client...

We have rarely heard any actually optimistic news recently due to the economic turmoil we are now in so it is refreshing to see some positive piece of news for a change. The news is IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau) and PricewaterhouseCoopers report on the state of online advertising in the US during the first half of 2008.

The results of the industry are very inspiring: internet advertising grew by 15.2% compared to the same period of 2007 and achieved $11.5 billion. Growth in the second quarter of the year slowed down a bit compared to the first quarter but still rather strong: it still increased by 12...

Today we are witnessing launch of ZoomProspector, a very interesting and promising startup targeted at enterprise customers. The idea behind the service is to help companies survive the current economic turmoil by providing them with vital information that can either make or break their businesses. In particular, the focus of the startup is where a business should be located to achieve maximum performance efficiency.

So whenever a company is looking to start, expand or relocate a business, ZoomProspector is here to provide information on the community in this or that place to help make a thoughtful decision and just the right choice...

There is an interesting announcement today for everyone exploring opportunities of using VoIP telephony instead of regular calls on their cell phones to cut costs. Mobivox and Unyk announce partnership today and this partnership is intended to offer quite an interesting combination of services to mobile users.

Mobivox is a Montreal-based company that provides a range of various VoIP services to its customers - some free, others pretty cheap. Unyk is also based in Montreal (which sounds very much like the major connecting factor for the two companies)...

This morning watching some news on TV and having breakfast I heard the words "Russian Orthodox Church" and "internet" mentioned in the same story and could not help but share the piece here. Yesterday one of Russian bishops Diomid was degraded to a usual monk for a number of wrongdoings, including prohibiting churchgoers from using cell phones and internet.

Quite obviously it is not his only fault and I don't think that in Russia it could be viewed as a sin on its own but the aggregate of his errors was enough to justify the decision...

The current economic crisis is already compared quite often to the Great Depression of 1930s. And while similarities are already here and probably we will have more of them to witness if the situation continues to worsen, there is one thing that bothers many of us here in the technology blogosphere - the future of internet. It is a well-known fact that the vast majority of internet businesses (startups and blogs alike) rely heavily on advertising for their income...

I know that for many of my online friends socialmedian has already become THE place to share and discover news and various thought-provoking articles. I can't say that I myself am particularly active on the service yet I like what I see every time I visit. But what I enjoy the most about socialmedian is how they handle product management and development and rolling out updates to the service basically every week (judging by my inbox where I get emails from socialmedian founder Jason Goldberg whenever they have some new features announced)...

Right when the blogosphere is heavily engaged in discussing rumors of eBay trying to sell StumbleUpon and even suggesting Skype may be the next candidate for the online auctioning giant to sell looking to minimize costs, eBay is announcing yet another acquisition - and rather a large one at that. The acquisition object is Bill Me Later, the service that helps online merchants decide if they should provide a transactional credit to any buyer right at the moment of purchase.

eBay is paying $820 million in cash and will also add $125 million in outstanding options. The deal will be completed by the end of the year...

Ask search engine is quite famous for its constant overhauls in continuous attempts to please users and increase its rather small market share when compared to search giants like Google or Yahoo (according to comScore with its 4.8% it is now number 4 in the US after Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft).

The latest attempt of such a redesign was Ask3D back in June 2007 which showed results in three columns instead of a traditional long list of links. One of the columns displayed images and video results for the search terms while other two columns displayed links to the search results as well as various blocks to narrow or expand the search...