Many stories focus on what Google Chrome means for Microsoft, Firefox, and the fate of the current on the web world. But what does it mean for up-and-coming Web start-ups? Here are six implications for the start-up world that I can see. These assume that Chrome lives up to its hype. That’s a large if.

1. Chrome is to current browsers what Windows was to DOS. Twenty-three years ago Microsoft started its march from being just another software company to being, well, Microsoft. It did this by offering order in a fragmented world. Back then, you couldn’t just run an app on your computer. There were dozens of OSes, all doing basically the same thing, just a tiny differently. If you wrote an app, you’d have to cater to not just OS, but sometimes to each version of an OS. Sound familiar?

Google, both for monetary and ideological reasons, aims to make Chrome the standardized operating system for Web apps–and to make Web apps indistinguishable from native desktop apps. That means Chrome will let you turn any Web app into something you can reach from your Start Menu, Dock or desktop. It means Chrome is taking on the key jobs of the OS, like partitioning memory and managing application processes. It means if people use Chrome as a platform they’ll get–Google says–huge, noticeable advantages like an end to worrying about the viruses and malware that use the Web as their primary means of infection.

The biggest hindrance to Web apps today are other Web apps that crash the browser. Google means to put a stop to this, and Chrome’s featureset and priorities align toward this objective.

2. Chrome rebuilds JavaScript from the ground up. The key chokepoint of the modern Web app is JavaScript. Originally little more than a way to play adorable little sounds, JavaScript is pushed to the limits via Ajax programming techniques and the host of excellent JavaScript libraries like prototype, script.aculo.us, and extjs.

But after 13 years, the JavaScript interpreters built into browsers are way past their prime. They can’t carry the load and leak memory like sieves. Off in Denmark, Google has been building V8, a new from-the-ground-up JavaScript interpreter that’s built into Chrome and available under its own open-source license.

What does this mean? Take the on the internet video revolution that advertisers are in heat over. It might be helpful if the underlying browser displaying the video, and the main interface language that accesses it, is based on current computer science rather than say of the art in 1992.

3. There’s a new sheriff in town: Google. How many times has some crappy JavaScript function, plug-in or giant image choked your browser to death? Chrome is designed not only to sandbox misbehaving code, but to make it simple for users to see who’s to blame. Chrome comes with its own task manager, and bandwidth malefactors will be called out of hiding. Chrome will be setting a very, very high expectation: if you use Chrome, Google in effect is saying, viruses, spyware, malware, keyloggers, and phishing will be trapped in their sandboxes. Given that the Net is the primary vector of infection this day, Google is taking on the evildoers of the Net. As well as the current police force; Chrome could very swiftly adversely impact the business of each “anti” software vendor very swiftly.

4. Google to closed social networks: Drop dead. How long before Google extends Chrome so as you surf the Web, you can connect with your friends looking at the same sites as you at the same time? How long before Google pulls together the strands of its social network initiatives (everything from Google Share to its growing support of OpenID to Google Talk’s instant-messaging functionality in Gmail) into one unified, Chrome-ified, service that anyone can use?

5. Chrome Extension API is coming. Get ready. Firefox’s big extension “ecosystem” has been important to its adoption. While the beta released this day doesn’t support extensions, that’s definitely on the road map. Best to keep an eye on Chromium, the on the internet home of the open-source project emitting Chrome.

Click here for full coverage of the Google Chrome launch.

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Placefav is a social-bookmarking service for places. It was pitched to me as a cross between the currently defunct Muxtape and Delicious. A better thing to compare it to is the list-making feature on reviews service Yelp.

The ultimate aim is to pass your list along to someone else as a self-contained city guide. Things like this are useful when somebody asks you for a list of places or things to do if they’re visiting your hometown, or a vacation spot you might have a tiny extra local knowledge of. The site also offers the option to favorite other users and explore the lists of people nearby.

Like Muxtape, Placefav limits you to just a dozen spots for your favorite places. You can customize the colors, and if you’ve put in the addresses there are swift links for pop-out Google Maps. If you don’t know the address it will do its best to guess the address of a place based on the name and city it’s in. The entire list is self contained with its own vanity URL and can be accessed fairly swiftly on mobile phones. Creator Kyle Bragger tells me he’s hoping to build an iPhone application that makes use of the device’s GPS to make entry and browsing a little faster.

Coming in later versions will be the option to make even larger lists and simply e-mail your places and have the service add it to a new or existing list. Bragger also hopes to include SMS support once he’s got the e-mail squared away. You can check out the list I made by clicking the screenshot below.

Compiled here’s a list of food joints I put together in a few minutes. Every one has a map and any related photos pulled from the Web. Like Muxtape you can only put together a dozen places and each list you make has its own vanity URL.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

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Beleaguered online-music pioneer Napster announced to shareholders in a letter Friday that it’s still employing investment bank UBS and may be positioning itself for “strategic alternatives” to keeping the company public–i.e. a sale.

The letter was sent on behalf of Napster’s board in order to urge shareholders to not vote for three activist candidates for the board. “The press release recently filed by the dissident group appears to imply that your board is not willing to take into account a sale of the company,” the letter read. “This isn’t true.”

The board additionally recommended that in place of the dissident candidates, shareholders re-elect existing board members Richard Royko, Philip Holthouse, and Robert Rodin.

Napster was the original name in digital music, and a notorious one at that. The free peer-to-peer service was silenced after a high-profile court battle. Its attempts to resurface as a legitimate subscription-based music service just haven’t gotten it back on top, and the addition of 6 million DRM-free MP3s would’ve been more impressive, if Amazon MP3 weren’t doing the same.

Napster’s letter to shareholders insisted that the proposed new board members would lead the company in a wrong direction. “The dissident group’s nominees have no relevant experience in the digital-music industry, have no public-company board experience, and the dissident group has not put forth any substantive plan for how their nominees will enhance value for our stockholders, if elected to the board,” the letter read.

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My Yahoo Mash profile, soon to get euthanized.

(Credit: Yahoo)

File this one under the “ouch” category. Yahoo is shutting down its social-networking experiment, Yahoo Mash, after only a year in business.

An e-mail to Mash members from Yahoo community manager Matt Warburton read, “Thank you for trying out our Mash Beta service. We hope you had fun with it. Please note that we will shut down Mash on September 29, 2008. As a result, your current profile on Mash will no longer be available.”

Mash didn’t really offer anything new, other than the fact that instead of inviting friends you created profiles for them and then invited them to customize and change them. You could also add “modules,” a sort of rudimentary version of social-network apps. It was designed as a quirky, adorable step up from Yahoo 360, the social network that Yahoo had based off its millions of pre-existing user accounts; if Yahoo 360 was analogous to AOL profiles, Mash was more like Facebook.

But Mash never caught on, and its parent company has now deemed it worth closing.

This isn’t the first time that Yahoo has launched an experimental social network only to yank it. Last year, Yahoo shut down a Dodgeball- or Brightkite-like mobile social site called “Mixd” that had only been in operation for a few months.

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New York based Neighborhoodies has a cool new tool for people who are all about customization called the “hoodie-o-matic.” Like services that let you custom design clothing to sell to others, you can create an entire garment in your browser and see the results in real time as you toggle various options.

The results aren’t actually a new service offering. In fact, the previous system would let you do the same thing, even though it was a series of drop-down menus, the result of which you’d only see once you received the garment. The new system takes away that element of surprise, and also cuts down on some of the manpower needed to transfer over those design orders for printing.

I had great fun creating the one pictured below, even though as you can see from the price tag these designs don’t come cheap. Each additional design element costs a little extra on top of the base price, although you can stack on as many as you want.

For now the tool only works with hooded sweatshirts (hence the name), but considering the large volume of t-shirts the company sells, there could be a version for t-shirts or another articles later on down the line.

The Hoodie-o-matic lets you design hoodies with all sorts of custom touches. They don't come cheap though.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

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Follow that blog!

(Credit: Google)

With blog platforms Movable Type and WordPress adding social-networking features to their software, it was only a matter of time before Google’s Blogger did the same.

A post on the official Blogger blog earlier this week announced that users would soon be able to display their “followers”–other Blogger members who have subscribed to them.

The optional feature–along with a notification on blog owners’ “dashboards” of how many people have subscribed to their blogs through Blogger–will be rolled out in the next few weeks. A new tab on the dashboard, called “Blogs I’m Following,” lets Blogger users keep track of updates to the blogs on their subscription list.

The problem with these sorts of features is that they’re inherently limited to readers whose “following” is directly tied to the Blogger software and its members, so it will reflect only a slice of readers. A follower widget (or gadget, as Google calls them) claiming 21 followers only refers to Blogger members, not to the overall number of people reading the blog, which could make the owners of smaller blogs get a bit image-conscious.

But with its Google ownership, Blogger is tying the new following feature into some of its other properties, like Google Reader and the forthcoming Google Friend Connect. The “Blogs I’m Following” tab, for example, can be imported into Google Reader.

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The stock tracking and community site Cake Financial is getting some interesting new features, including its first branded financial instrument, an exchange-traded fund (ETF) that rolls up the ideal stock ideas from the Cake communuty.

Cake CEO Steve Carpenter believes that of the approximately $100 billion that consumers pay for stock management services, “a lot is wasted.” He’s built a service that identifies the stock picks from the best performing members in his community, and lets other users take advantage of their investing skills. Importantly, Cake doesn’t show you just which stocks have done well among its users. That’s old information. Rather, Cake identifies the users that are doing well in their portfolios and highlights their transactions, as they happen, for other users. One of the byproducts of that is the Cake Take, a rating service “akin to Morningstar,” Carpenter states. But it’s more predictive, more timely, and a lot less high-priced to run, since it’s algorithmic and not based on the thought of paid analysts. Fair warning: I don’t know if the Cake Take’s predictions are actually better than MorningStar’s. I just think the idea is sound, and more contemporary.

Cake suggestions I'm supposed to be comfortable with.

If you’re a Cake member and you link it to your stock trading accounts, it combines information about other members’ activities with your own, and in the new “Scout” feature, identifies stocks that are performing superior than yours, in users’ accounts with similar asset allocation to yours, but that also evidence lower risk. In other words, stocks you’d be comfortable owning and that should make you more money.

Which brings us to Cake’s ETF, the Cakedex, which should be available via ETF resellers like iShares in 2009 (Carpenter gave iShares as an example only; he’s not revealing the outlets for the Cakedex yet). The Cakedex ETF will be an index fund made up of the top 100 holdings of the top-performing investors on Cake Financial. Details of the fund, such as how the holdings will be apportioned and how often the fund will rebalance, are still forthcoming. But this is a very interesting, efficient, and social financial product.

It’s a timely idea, not just for consumers, who could always use better stock advice, but for brokerages. The price of stock trading is moving towards zero (see Zecco, among other trading houses). On the internet brokerages are now trying to make money by holding customers’ assets (offering banking services) and by layering in social networking features that make it harder for customers to leave.

See also: Marketocracy.

Previous coverage: The Financial Wisdom Of The Crowds: Spendview, Cake, Mint.

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The stock tracking and community site Cake Financial is getting some interesting new features, including its first branded financial instrument, an exchange-traded fund (ETF) that rolls up the ideal stock ideas from the Cake communuty.

Cake CEO Steve Carpenter believes that of the approximately $100 billion that consumers pay for stock management services, “a lot is wasted.” He’s built a service that identifies the stock picks from the best performing members in his community, and lets other users take advantage of their investing skills. Importantly, Cake doesn’t show you just which stocks have done well among its users. That’s old information. Rather, Cake identifies the users that are doing well in their portfolios and highlights their transactions, as they happen, for other users. One of the byproducts of that’s the Cake Take, a rating service “akin to Morningstar,” Carpenter states. But it’s more predictive, more timely, and a lot less expensive to run, since it’s algorithmic and not based on the thought of paid analysts. Fair warning: I don’t know if the Cake Take’s predictions are actually better than MorningStar’s. I just think the idea is sound, and more contemporary.

Cake suggestions I'm supposed to be comfortable with.

If you’re a Cake member and you link it to your stock trading accounts, it combines information about other members’ activities with your own, and in the new “Scout” feature, identifies stocks that are performing better than yours, in users’ accounts with similar asset allocation to yours, but that also evidence lower risk. In other words, stocks you’d be comfortable owning and that should make you more money.

Which brings us to Cake’s ETF, the Cakedex, which should be available via ETF resellers like iShares in 2009 (Carpenter gave iShares as an example only; he’s not revealing the outlets for the Cakedex yet). The Cakedex ETF will be an index fund made up of the top 100 holdings of the top-performing investors on Cake Financial. Details of the fund, such as how the holdings will be apportioned and how often the fund will rebalance, are still forthcoming. But this is a very interesting, efficient, and social financial product.

It’s a timely idea, not just for consumers, who could always use superior stock advice, but for brokerages. The price of stock trading is moving towards zero (see Zecco, among other trading houses). Online brokerages are now trying to make money by holding customers’ assets (offering banking services) and by layering in social networking features that make it harder for customers to leave.

See also: Marketocracy.

Previous coverage: The Financial Wisdom Of The Crowds: Spendview, Cake, Mint.

Fore more visit Source: [webware]

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My Yahoo Mash profile, soon to get euthanized.

(Credit: Yahoo)

File this one under the “ouch” category. Yahoo is shutting down its social-networking experiment, Yahoo Mash, after only a year in business.

An e-mail to Mash members from Yahoo community manager Matt Warburton read, “Thank you for trying out our Mash Beta service. We hope you had fun with it. Please note that we’ll shut down Mash on September 29, 2008. As a result, your current profile on Mash will no longer be available.”

Mash didn’t really offer anything new, other than the fact that instead of inviting friends you created profiles for them and then invited them to customize and change them. You could also add “modules,” a sort of rudimentary version of social-network apps. It was designed as a quirky, adorable step up from Yahoo 360, the social network that Yahoo had based off its millions of pre-existing user accounts; if Yahoo 360 was analogous to AOL profiles, Mash was more like Facebook.

But Mash never caught on, and its parent company has now deemed it worth closing.

This isn’t the first time that Yahoo has launched an experimental social network only to yank it. Last year, Yahoo shut down a Dodgeball- or Brightkite-like mobile social site called “Mixd” that had only been in operation for a few months.

Fore more visit Source: [webware]

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Latest: Adobe’s John Dowdell has a thoughtful critique of this post that also expands on the nature of the bug.

An annoying and long-lived bug is preventing some users from viewing Web videos. There’s a workaround, but for many, the cure is as bad as the disease.

The bug is that Flash videos don’t play for certain Firefox 3 users on Windows XP or Vista, when using the current Flash player version 9. On YouTube, CNET Television, and other sites, embedded videos will begin, but they halt after two seconds. Both Mozilla and Adobe have been aware of the issue since late May, but as yet no solution has been found. For some people suffering from this bug, it’s intermittent. For others, it’s a consistent block to viewing on the web videos.

One workaround solution is to install the Flash 10 player, which is still in beta. Unfortunately, many Flash video sites don’t recognize that Flash 10 is a valid and current player. CNN, for example, thinks Flash 10 beta is older than Flash 8, asks users to upgrade to Flash 9, and thus won’t play at all.

The cure is worse than the disease.

Since the bug is serious and has been known for some time, I called both Mozilla and Adobe to see what’s going on. I spoke first with Mike Beltzner, Mozilla’s “phenomenologist,” aka head of user experience. He pointed me to the record in Bugzilla where they’re tracking the issue and gave me some of the issues they think are responsible for this one. In a nutshell, Mozilla thinks there’s a miscommunication between plug-in and browser but doesn’t know which product is the culprit.

He also took a minute to trumpet Mozilla’s open-source philosophy. Since Firefox’s code is open, Adobe can look at it to try to determine what’s going on. But Mozilla’s team can’t look into Flash. Beltzner didn’t blame Adobe for the bug itself, but he did say that Adobe’s traditional closed software architecture is slowing down their investigation. “We hit a wall when it’s a closed-source solution,” he stated.

An Adobe spokesperson, who asked not to be named, stated Adobe is looking into the issue but isn’t yet sure if the problem is isolated to Firefox 3 and Flash 9, or if there is a third culprit–another plug-in, perhaps–that is throwing things off for the Flash player.

Finger pointing is common in software troubleshooting, and I give both Mozilla and Adobe credit for only generally waving, not pointing, their fingers at each other. Unfortunately, neither team seems to have developers who can reproduce this issue, which just keeps the ping-pong game going.

What I find most interesting is the way the differing philosophies of Mozilla and Adobe are slowing down resolution of this issue. If both companies were open then any developer–at Mozilla, Adobe, or elsewhere–could get into things and start experimenting to find a fix. If both companies had closed philosophies then their engineers could swear each other to the secrecy, swap source code, and together fix the issue. But right now I get the sense that the two very different companies simply are not meshing well. And because of that, I can’t play my videos.

Flash 9 works just fine in World wide web Explorer.

See also: Two quick fixes for Firefox 3.

Fore more visit Source: [webware]

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