CrowSpirit

clipped from www.google.com CrowdSpirit CrowdSpirit CrowdSpirit is a crowdsourcing community built around designing electronic products and staying involved throughout their product life cycle. Users submit ideas for innovative electronic products that the community fine tunes and votes on. The best ideas and their product specifications rise to the top where investors provide financing and development partners make prototypes. Once products have been made they are tested by the community and recommended to retailers. Users involved with product creation can earn a share of the product revenue. Typical products will include MP4 players, DVD players, computer peripherals, headphones, etc. A Q&A community consultation service for problems and ideas that may be possible. Deeper than say Yahoo Answers, focus is on products and prototypes.

Salesforce Enters Custom Application Market With Force.com

clipped from www.techcrunch.com Salesforce will enter the custom software market next week with the launch of Force (site will go live Monday morning), a new platform that will allow developers to create database driven applications and deploy them as services. So if Salesforce doesn’t offer what you are looking for, and no one has built it for you on Salesforce’s AppExchange, you can simply build it yourself using the Apex framework. At its core Force competes as a development platform with .NET, Java, etc. But there are also a slew of startups that have focused on allowing people to easily create and deploy database driven applications - DabbleDB, Zoho Creator, LongJump, Coghead and WyaWorks, among others. All will take a hit from Force. In fact, this may be sort of game ending for them. Salesforce has its eyes on much bigger fish than those startups.

Microsoft Officially Launches Silverlight

clipped from www.google.com Microsoft Officially Launches Silverlight Microsoft has officially launched its Flash rival Silverlight . Silverlight 1.0 provides cross browser support under both Windows and OS X, and in a partnership with Novell will also be available for Linux. Silverlight was initially released to rave reviews in late April, with Michael Arrington saying that it would become “the platform of choice for developers who build rich Internet applications.” Microsoft has rolled out a number of Silverlight powered applications since then, including Live Station, Popfly and Tafiti. Microsoft has also announced that a number of content providers will be providing Silverlight enabled content online, including Entertainment Tonight, HSN and World Wrestling Entertainment. For a full explanation of what Silverlight does read here. (via Beet.tv)

ContactOffice, a web office suite

ContactOffice, a web office suite, is announcing that it has upgraded its online office suite to version 2.0 after months of development.
The newly upgraded platform is completely powered by AJAX, giving it a more fluid and seamless integration. It was developed using the open source Google Web Toolkit, and in addition to featuring a higher level speed and usability, it still sports messaging, calendaring, contact management, document sharing, Skype integration, SMS, fax, bookmarking and notes.

ContactOffice, which has 350,000 users, was founded in 1999 and was profitable by 2003. Two subscription packages are available in the form of paid and free versions, and companies are able to brand the online productivity suite with their own logos.

Worlds First I.T. Guy

Jooce

Jooce is a Flash-based web operating system and sharing platform. They are targeting the millions of people who use "cybercafes" to conduct their Internet affairs instead of a regular desktop or laptop. The Jooce product is aiming to provide these virtual vagabonds with a web-based desktop to manage their IM, email, storage, media and widgets in a secure and protected way. They also provide virtual nomads with an online desktop that they can share with friends to swap files like pictures, documents, audio and video.Jooce is currently in beta. Competitors include Goowy, G.ho.st, DesktopTwo and YouOS.
Investors: Mangrove Capital Partners
Blog: http://www.jooce.com/blog/

Zoho Goes Offline

Online office suite Zoho launches offline functionality for Zoho Writer, and other applications in their suite will follow shortly.
The offline functionality was built on Google Gears, an open source project launched by Google in May 2007. Users will need to install a browser plugin to take advantage of the functionality. After that, an option will appear in the navigation bar to “Go Offline.” The feature works with Internet Explorer v.6 and higher, and with Firefox (including Mac) v1.5 and higher.
For now they are offering read-only functionality offline. Read-write functionality will appear in 3-4 weeks, the company says. Zoho will also begin to roll out offline functionality for their spreadsheet, presentation and other applications in the coming weaks.
Zoho, which competes head-on with Google Docs & Spreadsheets, managed to launch offline functionality on their product before Google did. The fact that they are using Google software to do this makes the story somewhat ironic.