This is just another phase in the Power.com and Facebook drama that actually begun in January when Facebook sued Power.com for “copyright and trademark infringement, unlawful competition and violation of the computer fraud andabuse act”. Power.com removed access to Facebook immediately after the complaint was filed.

In case you aren’t aware, Power.com is a aggregating web service that signs users into their various social networks and messaging clients and delivers the data from those sites and services to one page. Today, the aggregator is countersuing Facebook for unfair competition and data portability.  The Brazilian based startup is claiming that Facebook is illegally preventing access to information that Facebook’s own ToS states users own.

According to Jason Kincaid at Techcrunch, Power.com CEO Steve Vachani believes this is the equivalent of mobile phone carriers preventing number portability in the past, carriers were then eventually forced to make it easy to switch to another phone company if the customer so wished.

Power.com will raise the point that Facebook themselves do their best to convince users to import their contacts from their respective email accounts. While Facebook is likely to emphasise their support for data portability with features like Facebook Connect which lets you access certain pieces of your Facebook profile and contact information from other sites.

Full details of the case can be found below:

20090709_PowerBattlesFacebook_Lawsuit –

More often than not we provide you with some screenshots and a set of links to reflect our excitement. But from time to time we stumble across something so unique and brilliant, that it would probably be best to simply send you over and ask you to sign up!

Please give a very warm welcome to 6rounds!

We’ve managed to get 250 invites to their site, which is currently in private beta. Make sure to grab one now!

The experience 6rounds delivers is somewhat difficult to describe in writing.

Technically 6rounds is a fully video enabled real-time meeting point with social networking capabilities, collaborative browsing, chat, multi-player gaming and built-in social recommendation features that can be expanded through an open API.

In reality 6rounds has taken everything we’ve seen in the Instant Messaging space to the next level and delivers an unprecedented, emotionally engaging and fascinating experience which is so much fun, you have to try it yourself!

I’ve had the pleasure of using it for almost an hour together with 6rounds’ CEO, Dany Fishel, who guided me through the various parts of the site. During the session we went through my Facebook profile, watched YouTube videos together and played a round of Backgammon – all accompanied by live video and audio from Germany to Israel.

State-of-the-art web-video collaboration done right

I’ve never been a heavy user of IM video features and was totally overwhelmed by how it truly bridges a distance if done right, or – so to speak – if done the 6rounds way!

When you sign up for their service, you have to create your profile first. The fine folks at 6rounds have done a great job integrating with MySpace, Facebook and Flickr. If you grand authorization they import your favorite movies, photos, books and hobbies. This helps you getting started in a matter of minutes.

Once set up you’ve got a couple of options: You can either go to the People section and see who else is online, check out profiles and invite other rounders for a 1:1 session.

Or, and this is just one of the intriguing ideas that makes 6rounds so unique, you join what is called an “Activity Round”.  Activity Rounds are sessions based on a common type of activity. One such example is the YouTube Activity Round, where you can watch YouTube videos together with your peers. Other activities include collaboratively exploring Facebook profiles, playing chess, discussing music tastes and even joining a round the system randomly selects for you, which can be very surprising.

When you’ve decided for either a 1:1 People session or an Activity driven one, 6rounds initiates the live audio and video connection along with a beautiful user interface that allows you to collaborate in many ways. You can send gifts to your chat partner, lovely little animations that are superimposed on top of the video feed.

Just one of the many outstanding and unique features is the “chat-tipster”, sort of a built-in ice-breaker that helps you keeping your conversation going. It works as follows: If you’ve decided for an activity based round, chances are you get connected to a total stranger. So how do you start your discussion? Simply click the “Tip” icon and 6rounds comes up with recommendations for your next chat message based on the shared information available in your social network profiles and the ones of your round partner. Mine was: “Dany and you both like Coldplay. Why don’t you ask Dany about the latest Coldplay song?”. One more click and Dany and I started discussing music!

Real-time special effect mania

There’s also a large set of effects which you can apply to your video feed. As you can see in the screen capture Dany has been on fire talking to me, while I switched on snow, to cool things down a bit.

It’ is hilarious to see how the snow flakes actually settle down on your head until you shake it and they all continue to fall down.

Are you in a romantic mood? Feel free to apply themes to your 6rounds window to express yourself.

As an example, when you’re on the move and leverage 6rounds to watch your favorite TV show together with the loved ones at home, you can create a theatre like atmosphere with just a couple of mouse clicks.

Or, if you’re more into gambling, how about enjoying one of the many games that are already available?

As you might be aware of by now, I’m already a huge 6rounds fan.

Backgrounder

The 6rounds site relies heavily on Adobe Flash. For me it’s actually one of the best show cases for a site primarily built in Flash, the UI is simply beautiful, polished and efficient at the same time. It does a fantastic job of engaging the user and creating an environment that’s fun to use and highly addictive.

Extending 6rounds: Creating your own games, activities, themes and gifts

But besides offering the 6rounds site itself, Dany and his team have bigger plans in mind. They are actually working on opening up the GixOO Platform (the self-created technology, 6rounds runs on) for 3rd party developers.

As Dany explains: ”We intend on integrating the platform into 3rd party websites and communities – starting from an application in Facebook or an open-social app in MySpace, continuing with a plugin for WordPress or an embeddable widget in users personal pages, and ending with various extensions to IM, ICQ, Skype and Firefox and even whitelabel solutions for other global markets. 6rounds aims to be a cross-network platform which will allow users from all over the web to interact live and in real-time, no matter what their favorite social network or service are.”

The video experience will be opened gradually to developers and designers, who will be able to enrich the experience of the video platform by developing more activities, unique games, gifts and skins. The API is based on Flash and Action Script 3 and will allow developers to easily create rich, interactive and real-time applications with the two mice capabilities, pulling user data and so on. 6rounds plans to offer the API on their public beta launch.

Mobile is coming, too

6rounds also looks into mobile and is planning on building a mobile application, which will allow them to offer conversations between users from the website to users on mobile, as well as from mobile to mobile.

For latest news start following the 6rounds Twitter account and make sure you subscribe to their blog.

On Tuesday, sports site RootZooannounced legal proceedings to sue Facebook for alleged click fraud.

Rootzoo claims that on June 2 2008, by comparing their own analytics data with the number of clicks Facebook’s reported, clear discrepancies had been spotted.

Rootzoo says they had requested log files and a refund but Facebook had declined to provide either.

In a statement, Facebook said:

“We have developed a series of sophisticated systems to detect suspicious clicks and ensure advertisers are not charged for this activity. In addition, we analyze tremendous amounts of data to discern larger click patterns and, in rare cases where this research or other analysis reveals advertisers have been charged for invalid clicks, we have always, and will continue to, issue credits to impacted advertisers,”

Interestingly, the site’s law firm, Kabatek Brown Kellner, has previously sued Google, IAC and other companies for alleged click fraud.

This isn’t the first time Facebook has been the focus of click fraud allegations. TechCrunch just last month reported masses of complaints at WickedFire, an affiliate marketing forum. As Michael Arringon points out in the post, and similarly here, the notable difference between this and usual click fraud cases is that it isn’t a bot racking up ‘fake’ hits. Customers are complaining (and suing) because Facebook is charging for clicks just never seem to have taken place.

Details of the filing can be found here.

via MediaPost News

In this recently released AP photo Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt was caught using a BlackBerry to snap some pictures of reporters at Allen & Co.’s media summit in Sun Valley. They always say that leadership starts at the top so I will be really interested to see how Schmidt will explain his use of a non Android-based device. I’m sure the PR spin will be fast at work to let us know that Schmidt was merely “testing the BlackBerry for market research.”

This reminds me of a fairly recent story I read about Bill Gates’ wife Melinda Gates. In an interview with Vogue magazine she revealed that in their household iPhones and iPods are strictly banned. She went on to characterize those Apple devices as “forbidden fruit”. It will only be a matter of time I’m sure until the Gates’ children “pull a Schmidt.”

In any event, this photo is quite funny. I can’t wait to hear the spin.

AP Photo – Nati Harnik

A new ‘My Location’ icon has been added to the map controls, between the Pan and Zoom controls. It will only appear if you’re using a browser with the latest version of Google Gears installed. Firefox 3.5 and Chrome 2.0 should work without any extra installations being required. Installing Gears on any other browser will get you up and running with the feature.

It works using the wi-fi points around you to determine your location and when we tried it we were astounded at its accuracy. Results may vary, though – if you have no wi-fi points near you the service will use your IP number to work out a rough estimate.

Still, if you’re out and about with your laptop you may well be grateful to have the feature to hand. Google’s location-based social service Latitude will become more useful when it integrates with this feature. Latitude hasn’t taken off in the mainstream yet. It’s currently limited to users of supported mobile phones – even the iPhone is excluded. Once people can share their browser’s location we may well see a flood of new users (and uses) for Latitude.

The best part is clearly…”Word.”

via CrunchGear via CNet via Office 2010 The Movie

Whatever your viewpoint, getting your website to the top of search engine results is hugely important and there’s little chance of SEOs disappearing any time soon. The question is, what does that ‘mysterious art form’ involve?

Well, one part of it would appear to be asking for help on public forums. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that… unless you get caught by your client.

A thread on the Google Webmaster Help forum has raised a few laughs today. It begins with an SEO named ‘Gary’ asking for help with DIY Doctor, a site he is working on which has dropped in Page Rank recently. Quite a few helpful suggestions are posted in reply… and then the clanger:

“Gary, this is Mike Edwards, the MD of DIY Doctor. Your company have just given me a price of £2500 – £5000 to give me a report which you have obtained from a forum which we use anyway. Not only that but you have asked for that kind of money to look at a problem you do not think you can solve.

From where I stand this is pretty despicable behavior and not what I would expect from a “professional” SEO company.”

Ouch.

To be fair to people working in SEO, the mysterious, ever-changing inner-workings of Google are difficult to navigate and sharing information is often the best way to tackle a problem. Still, the moral of this story is this: if you’re charging for work and need help it pays to use a little discretion!

Techcrunch has also reported that some users had spotted the Firefox message above their streams. According to Twitter co-founder Biz Stone however:

“This is not an advertisement and it’s not just for one browser—it’s customized based on which browser you’re currently using.”

The ads/reminders are however appearing on multiple browsers from IE through to Safari, and not only that – but are reappearing a few refreshes later. It might very well be that the message is merely that, a reminder, and as Chris Sacca has reportedly indicated, its merely a matter of Twitter not being able to detect what browser the visitor is actually using.

We’re more likely to believe Marketing Pilgrim’s Andy Beal:

give it 6 months before ads start showing up in the exact same place–maybe even linked to the #hashtags you’ve clicked on. Oh wait, you didn’t realize that Twitter made #hashtags clickable, so it could track your interests?”

These are most likely a way to test engagement levels before deciding whether or not to fully integrate the ads. What I don’t understand is why, just as they were earlier with the sidebar ads, Twitter (and many other web companies) are so coy about potential new ad placements. The company has to start earning at some point and whether its through ads or confirmed reports of analytics tools being made available to business users…lets just hope that Twitter does what it needs to do to stick around without destroying it core selling point, its simplicity.

A blog post has come to light purporting to be written by someone working for a company that supplies parts for Acer laptops. They claim to have been sitting in on a demonstration of Google’s forthcoming OS. Read on for some of the juicy details…

• The OS can install quickly on laptops from late 2007 to early 2008. The install from Vista to Google Chrome OS Dev Beta was only 10 minutes and was very elegant. Only one restart required.
• A wizard asks you for basic info on the first boot up.
• It’s fast. The OS rebooted from Desktop to Desktop in about 25 seconds.
• As far as navigation goes, a button on the ‘Chrome Bar’ pulls up a menu similar to Windows’ Start Menu. The Reboot, Programs, and Main Directory options are located here.
• There are two navigation modes: “Exploration” and “Browser”. Exploration is like Windows Explorer, while Browser uses search options. In Browser Mode, the Google Chrome Browser comes up and you can search and also use the “Most Visited” features for your files.

The post’s author claims he/she took the photos using a small camera when the Google rep’s guard was down.

We are pretty skeptical about this. The screenshots could have been faked in Photoshop in five minutes and the details could very easily be a total work of fiction. Still, given that Google is keen to drum up as much interest as possible in its OS before the rumoured launch of Microsoft’s cloud-based Office next week, this could be a ’semi-official’ leak.

You can read more details on the original post here.

UPDATE: Look closely and you’ll notice that the colours for the word ‘Google’ are totally wrong. Don’t you just love these fakes?

UPDATE 2:

In a short FAQ on the Google Chrome blog, the search giant shared a little about the upcoming Google Chrome OS.

Here are the important points:

• It’s open source and therefore will be free.
• Developers can’t get involved just yet but later this year, the company will look forward to “working with the open source community”
• Google is partnering with a number of companies, among them: Acer, Adobe, ASUS, Freescale, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments.
• A number of engineering positions are available, presumably to work specifically on the new OS. Full details here.

Looking forward to Monday, and what Microsoft could have up their sleeves. As I mentioned earlier however, I think there’ll only be two companies left standing.

The potential for this is enormous. Anyone wanting to make their podcasts available as blog posts will love this feature as the entire process will be automatic. Then there’s the extra ‘Google Juice’ it will give your recordings. Search engines don’t (yet) index audio to make it searchable. Having a text version of a recording online will mean many more people are likely to find it. Also, journalists will love the fact they won’t have to transcribe their AudioBoo interviews for print any more.

The integration between AudioBoo and Spinvox will soon be available to third party developers too, using both companies’ APIs. Quoted by Spinvox, AudioBoo CEO Mark Rock says:

“With the Audioboo API, any developer will be able to build their own mobile and web applications to record to Audioboo and SpinVox integration will be an important addition to that which we can deliver simply and quickly through the SpinVox API.”

As exciting as this news is, it’s worth noting a word of caution. Spinvox, while reliable at speech-to-text conversion most of the time, does occasionally offer up some inaccurate conversions. If you use the service it will be worth checking over any text it creates for you. Otherwise that “interview with Stephen Fry” might become an “inner view of Stephen Fry”, something that surely no-one would want.

For more on AudioBoo, see our Guide to Mobile Podcasting.

THE BiG HONKIN’, a trio comprised of Austin Bragg, Meredith Bragg, and Hunter Christy offer quite a funny take on this idea. They created a web video series called “Roommates”. The series examines what life would be like if Google manifested itself as a person and was your roommate. The first episode was released about a year ago and the second was just recently released.

Episode 1

Also make sure to check out the recently released Episode 2…

Episode 2

Thanks @Jenny2229 for the heads up on this video series.

Brand Search

Aimed at marketers wanting an insight into what people are saying about their brands, this is actually useful for anyone wanting more information about the online community’s opinions. Search for any keyword and you receive results highlighting positive and negative sentiments related to it. The results can be targeted to a local area and you can export your results as a .csv file complete with a pie chart, bar chart and word cloud to give you a better understanding of what people really think.

PeopleBrowsr for News Rooms

For anyone wanting to see the hot topics on Twitter right now, this tool shows trending data over time. The screen comprises nine columns and you can use them to view how keywords have changed in popularity over hourly intervals, every ten minutes and even on a minute-by-minute basis. Hovering over a keyword highlights it on all nine columns, allowing you to view how it has moved up and down the trending charts.

Conference

This claims to be “The Ultimate Conference Vizualizer”. Those are brave words, especially when there are rivals like Rezpondr doing strong work in this area already. At present PeopleBrowsr’s solution falls far short of monitoring all the online talk around conferences. Although the service may well improve in the future, right now it just displays Twitter search results with no real optimisation for conferences at all.

A couple of other features do not work yet. One, the curiously named Industry Billaboard, is described as a solution to help businesses find and engage with customers via Twitter. The other, Live Search (obviously not to be confused with Microsoft’s forerunner to Bing, which had the same name), promises to be a realtime search solution for Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook. This is due to launch at Techcrunch’s Realtime Stream Crunchup event on Friday.

PeopleBrowsr’s core product, the web-based client supporting many different social media services, continues to operate and is well worth trying. If you like Tweetdeck but aren’t too keen on Adobe Air-based apps, this could be just the service for you.

The move by Google is sure to leave Apple and Microsoft shaking in their boots, and quite frankly, I’m certain this is the beginning of the end for Ubuntu & co. What I’d like to focus on here however is Apple, a company which just weeks ago I couldn’t see myself ever abandoning, and who had convinced me that beauty, elegance and reliability were my top priorities when it came to an operating system.

Since the increasing development and improvement of Google Apps (and web apps as a whole), the increased speed of Chrome, the release of Android and now, the Google OS. I’m left torn. Nearly everything I currently do is online, and I’d say approximately 80% involves Google Apps. I realise, your average non-geek Joe is a long long way from this, but I’ve never been more convinced that in time – everyone will use the web, an online word processor/spreadsheet etc.. (probably Google Docs) to work just as many have used windows and office for so long.

Commitment to Google Apps

My current commitment to Google Apps (until something better comes along of course) has left me frequently day-dreaming. Entertaining ideas of what it  would be like to truly incorporate all my primary web services into an operating system designed to really make sure they work as best as they possibly can. An operating system so reliable, smooth, fast and secure that using the web would feel local.

My day-dreams came true today, and it means I’m left wondering what Apple can bring to the table between now and Google’s OS release, aside from a gorgeous UI and decent hardware that will pumped about Apple again. After two years with the iPhone I’m already considering abandoning the device for an Android phone, primarily because of its integration with Google’s applications. Android has a local Gmail client, maps is fully featured, everything is pushed, email, contacts and calendar events…its all slick and its all built in.

The point is this…

As long as Google and web applications continue to improve at the rate they are, Apple is the only company I can see with potential to retain its current user base, but to do it, they’re going to have to start thinking far more Google-like. Apple’s propriety strategy, I believe, is an advantage, but Google’s offerings are increasingly more attractive a proposition and unless Apple rethink their local OS strategy (as I’m sure they will by the way), this is the beginning of an era of Google dominance, the likes of which we’ve never seen before.

The company is slowly but surely taking over every aspect of our lives from email (a backbone to nearly all our lives), to how we work, video and photosharing, how we maintain voice communication, the operating system our phone runs on…for some its scary, for me… I’m excited. And for now at least, the one company I want to see step up to Google’s surge in dominance is Apple, and I predict they will, but its not going to be easy.

Although, I am writing Microsoft’s long term consumer market off now, and saying loud and clear that the future is Google vs. Apple. Robert Scoble has just posted on Friendfeed: “Why did Google announce Chrome OS this week? Well, of course, Microsoft has a big announcement coming on Monday (I’m embargoed).” So you never know, I could of course be very very wrong and Microsoft might just have a few tricks up its sleeve, one might work..I doubt it.

The focus of the OS will be on “speed, simplicity and security” as Google points out. Like all Google properties, the new OS will sport a clean UI and be extremely lightweight.

Google’s goal is to target the OS at users who spend the majority of their time on the web and are looking for a better user experience. If I were Microsoft I would be a little worried. Although Bing has generated some buzz lately and perhaps made Google pay a little attention to their dominating search business, this announcement will certainly raise the stakes of the Microsoft vs. Google battle.

It’s going to be really interesting to see how the introduction of the Google Chrome OS effects future Microsoft OS releases. For the average user who simply uses Facebook, checks email and shares photos they will likely be able to get everything they need from the Chrome OS. In addition, they won’t be hampered by the hardships that are associated with backing up files, upgrading software and dealing with hardware compatibility issues.

All in all, competition is a great thing and Google’s Chrome OS will certainly drive innovation and force Microsoft and Apple to evaluate their operating systems and make sure that they continue to innovate and deliver a great product to businesses and consumers.

Today will see Gmail, Calendar, Docs and Gtalk all shed their beta label.

The Google Apps suite launched two years ago and has grown from strength to strength with both consumer usage and enterprise. According to Google, more than 1.75 million companies around the world run the business on Google Apps.

While many of you may wonder what took so long, Google’s official response is likely to keep you unsatisfied. Matt Glotzbach, a director of product management at Google told the NYTimes:

“Obviously we haven’t had a consistent set of policies or definitions around beta, it was time to address the issue and bring the products out of beta. For business customers, it is an important sign in terms of the maturity of our product offering and commitment to this business,” Mr. Glotzbach said. “I’ve had C.I.O.s tell me that they would not consider a product labeled ‘beta.”

From the sounds of it, it appears the move is primarily to drive enterprise business into using Google Apps. For those of you concerned this will be the end of beta features, Google assures us that it has “much more in store…”

But in practice things work differently.

Yahoo started as a page with links to websites. Can you imagine that someone said “Yeah that is nice. But it is just a feature. You can’t build a company on a page with links”.

Or take Google. All they had when they started out was a better technology to index pages called “BackRub‘. They tried to sell this ‘feature’ to a few established search engine companies. These companies weren’t interested so they started their own search engine to show the world that their technology provided superior results.

I think it is dangerous to dismiss ideas as only ‘features’ and have decided to stop saying this to people. Great companies are built on simple features. Lets not forget that.

via Craiglist

How it works? Well, applicants apply initially for a place on Seedcamp Week. This year, that takes place between the 21st and 25th September at UCL in Central London. During the week, entrepreneurs are handed a diverse mentor network of serial entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, marketing specialists and lawyers that help the selected teams put together the foundations of a viable business.

At the end of the week, SeedCamp and its board members (listed below) will make the funding decision to invest up to €50K each in 5 teams for a small equity stake (5%-10%).

• Fred Destin, partner at Atlas Ventures
• Charles Grimsdale, co-founder of Eden Ventures
• Alex Hoye, co-founder of GoIndustry plc
• Christoph Maire, Head of Maps & Explore Unit, Nokia Services
• Dave McClure, Founders Fund
• Richard Moross, founder and CEO, Moo.com

This amount, intentionally small to ensure you are left with the majority of your startup, is enough to entice you over to London for a few months to further develop your product and further establish connections.

Previous winners include the likes of Soup.io, uberVU, Zemanta and Toksta.