Web 2.0 im

EnterpriseDB has ported its Oracle-compatible PostgreSQL database to a new platform: Amazon.com's hosted compute cloud. The company on Tuesday started taking invitations for a beta program for EnterpriseDB Cloud Edition that will launch in March. The final product should be available this summer, according to EnterpriseDB Chief Technology Officer Bob Zurek, who spearheaded the initiative. Amazon already offers a hosted database, called SimpleDB, but Zurek said that its database is designed for transactions and industrial-strength applications. The service works with clustering software from Elastra, which means that servers and storage are quickly brought online to meet changes in computing demand, he explained. It taps into ***

From left to right: Chris DeWolfe, Rupert Murdoch, John Battelle(Credit: Rafe Needleman/CNET Networks) Recently, rumors have been flying over whether or not MySpace would use this week's Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco as a venue for announcing a developer platform akin to Facebook's. Well, now we have a final answer: sort of. MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe and News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch took the stage at Web 2.0 and confirmed that the company is working on a platform that will launch "within a couple of months. ***

While writing about 100+ ways to make money online, we received lots of requests for more freelance resources. So in a break from our regularly scheduled programming, we bring you 30+ resources for freelance photographers, writers, and programmers, many of them decidedly web 1.0. Feel free to add more resources in the comments. Regular postings will return after this short interlude. For Freelance Photographers iStockPhoto - the leading stock photos site. Fotolia - a “web 2. ***

While the world is buzzing about Google’s acquisition of GrandCentral, there are a variety of other startups creating web-based services for managing different aspects of your telephone experience, and in some cases dramatically lowering the cost of staying in touch. Several are also taking advantage of social networks, creating widgets that connect MySpace profiles, Facebook accounts, and blogs to your various communication devices. With broadband, VoIP, and Web 2.0 goodness, leveraging the Net to improve the antiquated world of telecommunications is an area ripe for new ideas and companies. Here is a look at some of the startups in the space and the problems they are trying to solve: In a nutshell, ***

Google has just announced its acquisition of Zenter, a small company that makes software for creating online slideshows--a much rumored, and fully confirmed product Google"s CEO Eric Schmidt officially announced a few months ago at the Web 2.0 Expo. Zenter joins Tonic Systems, another presentation-creation service Google picked up back in April. Zenter first unveiled its service in mid-March and has since stayed fairly quiet. ***

SAN FRANCISCO--Amazon.com isn't profiting from its foray into Web services yet, but will as the market matures, Amazon Chief Executive Jeff Bezos said Monday at the Web 2.0 Expo. "We certainly intend to make money on this," he said in a keynote session at the conference, which is being held here this week. "We're not making money today. It's an investment." Amazon launched its Web Services business five years ago in an attempt to use its existing data center and computing-intensive infrastructure to offer per-usage services that developers at start-ups and other companies could use to save time and costs in deploying Web applications. "For 12 years we've been building a Web-scale infrastructure called Amazon," Bezos said. ***

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--IBM Labs launched a collaboration initiative on Wednesday designed to help companies speed product development by harnessing social networking. Innovation Factory, which Big Blue is employing in its labs, uses social-networking technologies to help companies quickly conceive and test new products and services, promising to reduce a product's launch process from years to only days. "There is a new openness at IBM about what we are doing in our labs," Irene Greif, IBM fellow and director of the collaborative user experience at IBM Research, said at a press conference. IBM employees, Greif said, have begun using ***

news analysis Adobe Systems' Apollo software is at the vanguard of an emerging set of technologies that seek to improve on Ajax, perhaps the most popular style for writing interactive Web applications. Adobe on Monday released an alpha, or early, version of Apollo, software that can run Web applications both online and offline. Reaction to the release has been enthusiastic among programmers who create so-called rich Internet applications (RIA), cross-operating system applications that combine the interactivity of desktop software with the Web. ***

IBM has introduced a Web 2.0 software client to its back-end content servers, part of its efforts to capitalize on the growing sprawl of digital information. The computing giant on Tuesday hosted a telephone press conference to present the Web-based client software and an update to its FileNet content management server, which it gained through its acquisition of FileNet last year. Steve Mills, senior vice president of IBM Software, said the company is investing in information management technology in response to an "explosion" of content in the form of digital documents, forms and multimedia. According to an IBM study, by 2010, the amount of digital information in the world will double every 11 hours. ***

SAN FRANCISCO--Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos is convinced that the company's nascent hosted computing service will yield dividends for the retail giant, with time. Bezos spoke at the Web 2.0 Summit on Wednesday where the publisher and conference host queried him on Amazon's Web Services business. Financial analysts have voiced some concern about the level of technology spending that Amazon is doing and whether its foray into hosted computing services is a distraction from its online commerce business. Bezos was ***

SAN FRANCISCO--With Microsoft's Vista and Office 2007 released to manufacturing, the software giant is preparing to adapt the products for the Web-dominated era, Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie said Wednesday. Ozzie spoke at the Web 2.0 Summit here, where he said the company overall is making a transition to designing software that takes advantage of the PC--as it has historically done--as well as online services. "Now we are at an interesting juncture with Vista and Office (2007) done," Ozzie said during an on-stage interview with conference organizer John Battelle. Microsoft on Wednesday said that Vista has been ***

update SAN FRANCISCO--Yahoo is planning to embed instant messaging into its Web-based e-mail program within the next few months so that people can have live chats in Yahoo Mail, even if they don't have an instant-messaging application installed, a Yahoo executive announced on Thursday. Brad Garlinghouse, vice president of communications, communities and front doors at Yahoo, gave a technology preview at the Web 2.0 Summit here of a new feature planned for Yahoo Mail that seamlessly integrates instant messaging. Garlinghouse said the reasoning behind melding instant messaging and email is to improve the overall "user experience," something which can be lacking in many so-called Web 2.0 services. "I would argue that many Web 2.0 applications are already dead," he said. "Web 2. ***

GigaOm blogger Om Malik is asking the people on his panel, "Office 2.0: Where Are We?" where they are on the Office 2.0 scale. Are they old-school Office 1.0 (PC-based apps) users, or all-online, Office 2.0 gurus? Ismael Ghalimi, the conference organizer, says he's at Office 1.95. The Web let him down when he had to print conference badges. Karen Leavitt, of Webex, who says her company is the 800-pound gorilla of Web 2.0, says she's at Office 1.73. Mark Suster, CEO of Koral, a content collaboration company. He's at 1.75. And he points out that people around the world work very differently. The way we do things in California is very different from workers in Europe, Asia, or Wisconsin. That's a really important point. Rajen Sheth, of Google, is trying to bring Google technologies to business. He says he's at 1.9999. ***

Notions of Web 2.0 are creeping inside corporate firewalls, but companies still lag consumers in adoption of those technologies because of system complexity and concerns of control, said speakers at the New New Internet conference here on Wednesday. Technologies such as AJAX-style Web development, RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and blogs are being used within businesses, typically in small-scale or experimental deployments. The social aspects of wikis, tagging and Web-enabled social networking can also improve collaboration among workers, speakers said. ***

Want to get into the Web 2.0 business? Got an extra $50,000 lying around? Web calendaring site Kiko.com has put itself up for sale on eBay. The package includes the domain name, Web hosting account, and all the intellectual property associated with Kiko, including copyrights to all the code. The owners say they're selling the company to "have time to work on other projects as a development team. We had a project in mind we just didn't want to wait on :)" But while Web 2.0 tech makes it easy for companies to launch a new business, it also makes it easy for competitors to jump in. Kiko faced competition in the calendaring field from a host of start-ups, along with ***

It's an ignominious step for any company: Listing your business for sale on eBay. Yet that is exactly what Web calendering site Kiko has done, in what appears to be an abrupt end to its high-flying ambitions of only a few months ago. Kiko had been one of the small companies cited often in fueling the Web 2.0 boom among small businesses with promising technologies. Its precipitous fall has many wondering what happened and whether Kiko is a harbinger for other start-ups. It's too soon, of course, to say whether the second ***

FreshBooks is another online invoicing service for small businesses. Like Blinksale and Simplybill, which also prepare invoices online, itýs a somewhat spare utility that does just one business function. But this oneýs feature set is not quite as spare the other utilities. There are more options for managing clients, projects, and contacts. The product will generate recurring invoices and auto-bill customers. There are several useful reports you can run. Thereýs a rudimentary time-logging function (useful for billing services; see also Tick). ***

BOSTON--Microsoft has spelled out its strategy to make its Live Web services accessible to third-party developers, part of its push to capitalize on online services. At the Microsoft TechEd conference on Tuesday, executives sketched out the technical infrastructure the company is building. They also discussed key elements of the business model, notably advertising, that Microsoft is expecting to fuel its services push. "Windows Live services as a platform allows you as a business to establish relationships with consumers," said George Moore, the general manager of Windows Live Development Platform. ***

Google co-founder Sergey Brin made a guest appearance at the Web 2.0 conference. During his conversation, hosted by John Battelle, someone from the audience asked Brin about whether a Google Web-based productivity suite would appear. Brin responded: "I don't really think that the thing is to take a previous generation of technology and port them directly, and say 'Can we do the minicomputer on the Web on AJAX,' makes sense. I'm not saying that's what (Microsoft) Office is; I'm just saying that I think the Web and Web 2.0, if that's what you want to call it, gives you the opportunity to do new and better things than the Office package and more. We don't have any plans (to do an Office suite)." Brin went on to say that there are good Web-based applications and that Google would do its thing, and that working with documents will become a lot more convenient than it is today. ***

Cerulean Studios' popular Trillian instant-messaging software has released a new patch that should allow its users to regain connectivity with Yahoo Messenger, the latest move in a cat-and-mouse game between the two companies. The patches, released Thursday according to Trillian's Web site, allow users of its free .74 version and its for-pay Pro 1.0 and Pro 2.0 versions to integrate Yahoo buddy lists into Trillian. The software does not communicate directly with other IM services but instead lets people integrate buddy lists from other services--such as AOL Instant Messenger, MSN Messenger and Yahoo Messenger--into its own interface. The patch release is significant because ***