MyLiveSearch has released its public beta version on last August 29. In order to use the service, one must download their search plugin, a small executable file in the browser. The method MyLiveSearch used was unclear to most people as their patent technology still pending as in today. When I entered some search keywords, the query that MyLiveSearch returned was “trawl”, as stated by them by using an user’s computer. On their landing page, they said they’ll use the user’s PC and your computer will in turn become the search engine. If you notice the search results that MyLiveSearch return, the search results will appear in a one-page layout format and it takes some time for this plugin to fetch the results. Moreover, the number of results found as well as the ranking of the top sites will not be the same if you enter the same keyword twice in the search bar. If you scroll down the page, MyLiveSearch has omitted some results, they named those as “poor results” in order to demonstrate the most best results. How they define “poor results” was not clear at this moment, maybe they’re ranking very low in terms of Google’s Page Rank or users never follow the headings and/or subheadings of these “poor” sites to find any other relevant Web pages.

I believed the growth of this search plugin is gaining momentum and it catches most people’s eyes because it is the world’s first live search engine. Being the first live search engine, we count on it and hopefully it will guide us efficiently to the information, and they did provided the ease of interface use by putting the “myResults” and “myGroups” functions on the site. The “myResults” allows an user to take a 360 degree views of how a site use a particular keyword, and why this particular site was included in this search results. On the other hand, “myGroups” provides the grouping method and effect of a particular site. Though these functions seem to be very cool, but I believe many users never bothered to use or test it.

I have mixed feelings each time I write about a new search service. On one hand, I hope it will be well conceived and acceptably by many new users. On the other hand, I were unsure about how a new search plugin, i.e. MyLiveSearch going to create a forward momentum as I do not want to rely on it when conduct searches on the Web.

Bluepulse, dubbing itself as “my place on mobile” has raised $6 million in a round A financing from venture capitalist VantagePoint Venture Partners. Since its establishment in year 2002 in Sydney, Australia, Bluepulse had been focused on developing a unique platform that enabled friends, co-workers, acquaintances and family members to create personal profile, stay connected, share pictures and videos, chat, one-to-one and broadcast messaging as well as access widgets with the mobile phone.

Bluepulse’s stated corporate objective was to “built on an open platform that gives its global users multiple means of communication, content sharing, widgets, and so much more - all under one roof.” This product strategy, built around different types of mobile phones, had led to its software utility downloaded more than two million times across 150 countries since its beta launched in December last year. From then on, Bluepulse has experienced significant growth, with approximately 100 million page views per month and potentially the fastest growing mobile social network in the world.

In addition, they have relocated from Sydney to Silicon Valley, with headquarters in the former YouTube Inc. offices in San Mateo, California. This also marked another major milestone for the company.

If you’re a Twitter user, now you can find out which of your Google mail contacts are on Twitter by follow the steps as listed in this page. This Twitter’s newest feature not only can find your whosoever GMail contacts or invite those who hasn’t sign-up, you can also follow what your GMail contacts are doing at the moment.

Google Australia will run text-based advertising on the Websites of several newspapers that owned by News Digital Media after both reached a significant agreement. According to Google, News Digital Media properties (including NEWS.com.au, dailytelegraph.com.au, theaustralian.com.au, heraldsun.com.au, couriermail.com.au, perthnow.com.au, adelaidenow.com.au, themercury.com.au and regional and community newspaper websites) and FOXSPORTS.com.au will have Web and site search powered by Google. Though the details of this multi-year deal did not released to the public, but with such News Digital Media an important and dominant brand in Australia, we can expect the pay-per-click revenue for up to millions of dollars that could be shared by both parties in the coming years. With this agreement with Google Australia, The News Digital Media has undergone major change after they have replaced Yahoo! with Google as the ads search provider on all of its Websites. Prior to this, in May this year, Google Australia has also partnered with Fairfax Digital and agreed to run ads on their newspaper Websites that include The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.

The partnership between Google and News Digital Media will further ensure the wider reach of Google especially in the Down Under. According to an article, five of the top eight news Websites of New Digital Media has attracted more than 7.2 million unique visitors in June last month.

MySpace China has announced that they’re going to migrate their existing users’ accounts to a new database. By migrate their accounts from myspace.cn to MySpace.cn, users can view, blog, and comment in Chinese, besides the promise of faster speed by the management of MySpace China. This move is not done by a coincidence, as Yahoo! and Microsoft have both agreed to adhere to the strict blogging rules in China. The agreement that allows MySpace China to migrate users’ data required the disclosure of data so that the registered users using their real names are allowed to post blogs. However, for those who don’t response to this announcement after August 29, their accounts will be deleted and the users concerned need to re-set up their accounts one more time in MySpace China.

Yahoo! has confirmed that they’ve acquired a German mobile marketing technologies firm, Actionality for an undisclosed sum. Meanwhile, no official press release can be found on Yahoo! or Actionality Website regarding the deal. Actionality was well-known for its technologies for inserting the mobile advertisement content into the mobile device. Actionality’s AdFlex platform has also eased the programming tasks in mobile advertising by offering a one-click process for the users on the platform. This acquisition indicated the ambition of Yahoo! on mobile advertisement market, as some other strong players such as Google and Microsoft have also penetrated this market respectively with their own market expansion strategies. Most recently, Google has tested its beta version of its AdSense for Mobile while Microsoft is pursuing the acquisition strategy and acquired a French mobile advertising company Screen Tonic in May this year.

Actionality is based in Munich, Germany and has sales office in Berlin, Germany and its Asia office is in Hong Kong.

Microsoft has unveiled their new search engine that called Tafiti few days ago. It is a search engine that required Microsoft’s Silverlight plug-in in order to run in your browser. Though it was developed under the umbrella of Microsoft, the huge following that Microsoft had today doesn’t sufficiently large enough to make Tafiti a top-choice when we want to conduct searches on the Web. No doubt it is cool, unique, fully integrated with Microsoft’s Live search engine and built with a lot of colorful data when Tafiti returns a search query. That visualization of data, of course, is their major appeal. However, the cool user interface (UI) is attractive but hardly any people believe it will help Microsoft capture more market share in the search engine field. Will the clever name, i.e. Tafiti, stands for “do research” in Swahili, and the sexy UI increase the switching cost for the users from using Google to Live or this Tafiti?

As I use it for my very first time, I nearly can’t understand why Microsoft has chosen this UI design interface, at least now I know what a developer should do about the Silverlight plug-in. When you use Tafiti to search for some keywords, you’ll notice that a popup is stated that “Tafiti is trying to show the site you chose. Please disable your popup blocker to see your selection” will appear in front of your desktop or laptop screen. Though somewhat annoying, my preference browser, Firefox is keeping up with the increased number of popup windows. Moreover, you can’t back to the previous page as you click the back button in your browser, and there’s no navigation controls such as “Next page” being found on this search engine. In my observations, Tafiti will stands out a mile in a crowded field of look-alike search engines when we look for good looking search engine, but will struggle to find a loyal following when comes into feature usefulness.

For Microsoft, it’s OK when Tafiti still a test version of their new search engine. They have a great excuse when they still experimenting this new search engine. However, they tend to forget that Web searches had a commercial value and this type of search engine doesn’t create any value for the “Advertisers.”

This Wednesday Google has launched Sky in Google Earth. It is available as an added new feature in Google Earth, and offered the users to access to a hundred million stars and two hundred million galaxies with just a mouse click. The Google Sky feature can only found on the newest version of Google Earth, with the new Sky buton appeared on the toolbar at the top of the screen. Images from Google Sky came from six research institutions that include the Digital Sky Survey Consortium, the Palomar Observatory in California and the United Kingdom Astronomy Technology Centre. According to Google, Google Sky is now available in 13 languages.

You can watch a Google Sky’s introduction video clip, as embedded in below.