If you’re currently a student enrolled in post-secondary education and able to prove the U.S. citizenship, you can now start a blog and win the unprecedented $10,000 scholarship check. This blogging scholarship, now is in its second year, is offered by CollegeScholarships.org and the scholarship amount is the double amount of the monetary reward that awarded to winning student bloggers last year.

Application entries for this contest will be accepted until midnight on October 6 and the blogging scholarship will be awarded at the Blog World and New Media Expo on November 8-9 in Las Vegas.

A Seattle-based startup Widemile has raised $4 million convertible debt financing from existing investors, company management and industry insiders. This announcement was made through its official home page in a press release that published by them today. In fact, the amount $4 million was not raised in today, but over the past year, with a portion of it has already been consumed, according to this news source. However, from an external perspective, this round of financing mean more than the amount of money that raised by them. By using the fund to further expand their staff base and improve their content optimization technologies, Widemile could gain competitive advantage by continually refined the advertisement campaign performance and spending efficiency model and this type of information is not easily available to most of the Website holders. And internally, this round of financing is a testament that the paid search industry is growing, and by investing in these sort of startups, the investors can create more values as the growth of this paid search industry outpaced the development of one firm’s business capabilities.

Widemile’s customers can be classified as group of Websites that want to improve their ROI (Return on Investment), or the conversion rate. In this e-business era, there is no longer a question whether a company should spend money on online advertisement or bid the right keyword to attract the Web surfers, it’s down to how a company should wisely choose the most effective method to drive the browsing customers shoppers into paying customers. Unfortunately, there are different ways of fine-tuning and optimizing a particular Website for a better ROI results. Potential customers must understand which technology meet their needs as each technology offered by these landing page optimizers are varied.

This week the Big Blue IBM has released an open source software, more specifically, an office suite that carry the name of Lotus Symphony. The program file is big, weighs in at approx. 133MB, and registration is required for the users to proceed with this download. This Lotus Symphony is a free software that allowed us to create and share documents, spreadsheets and presentations on Windows and Linux platform. It is built based on the OpenOffice, another well-known open source office suite and Eclipse, an open source development framework and is meant to straddle the fence by keeping not only its existing IBM customers happy, but with a grander ambition to rival the Microsoft Office. Besides, this Lotus Symphony promotes the use of Open Document for XML (ODF), an XML-based standard for documents approved by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). While, it is relatively new in the market since it has just been launched in a week, the response for this free software is too good, and I was told that the Lotus Symphony was downloaded 100,000 times in the first week of release.

No doubt, IBM was busying improve the features of this Lotus Symphony but the ongoing challenges for this software is big on another front. People nowadays see Microsoft Office as a standard in performing office productivity tasks. For Apple lovers, Lotus Symphony currently did not support the Macintosh environment, this product won’t come close to Microsoft Office in this coming one or two years.

Microsoft has released a better Live search engine today, as shown in the image above, with the sexy and simple interface. It is known as a move that attempts to bring the closer gap between the market share of Google and Live.com. According to Microsoft’s press release, this revamped search engine trying to make its existing users fascinating about the search experience that Microsoft did not offered in the first hand; and trying to make these group of users make more search queries on it. However, the main focus of the overhauled Live.com seems to be focused on vertical search, with the substantial research and improvement done on the areas such as entertainment, shopping, local and health. One of the great things that this search engine offered was the increase of the size of its search index by four times, to more than 20 billion in total.

Apparently, Live.com still far lagged behind Google and Yahoo!, but it seems that they’re going to become a “narrow focus search club” in order to get more advantage over the fierce competition in the U.S. market.

It was around last year the online social network industry had reached the frenzy pitch and some industry pundits has predicted the Web 2.0 will be the history in near future. This seemed to trigger a Web 3.0 landscape where richer interaction can be found through the creation of some devices, technologies or Web app. A new startup Jeroo launched in this year is obviously giving some clues to the new Web 3.0 model. It provides a sense that it was in a different class of social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace when these social network players were undisputed market leaders but being individualism while Jeroo is a new startup, still in alpha phase, but concerned of collectivism, a totally Web 3.0 business model. Its main focus is placed on shared environments, or shared spaces and Jeroo users are allowed to share space and collectively conduct some activities on the Web. In other word, their users can upload photos, videos in addition to email, instant messaging their friends all within one shared space environment.

Frankly, I’m not sure this collectively of sharing content or this manner of keep in touch is the solid and proven Web 3.0 way, but, for sure, if Jeroo successfully attract thousands of users, the term “collectivism” will definitely crop up in the industry and become a shorthand way of describing the process of the Web 3.0 business model.

Finetune, a digital music service with 1.2 million listeners has released the Facebook application today. Since its inception in this year, Finetune’s strategy had centered on music discovery and playlist creation. The released of such a custom-built application for Facebook platform has been foreseen as one of their objectives to push Finetune up to another level for further growth. There are variety of features that can be found on this app, i.e. My Soundtracks, The Daily Special and Social Soundtracks allowed Facebook users to enjoy their favorite playlists while building a social one for group purpose or the daily special one for one’s own music preference. The whole point is to create the playlists with the friends on Facebook page since online music listening is usually done alone at home, or at leisure place, the jointly effort in creating a playlist may strong appeal to some Facebook users.

Frankly, after observing numerous app that designed for Facebook platform and the success of iLike, the growth of this Finetune over the next few years may be slow but promising. Also, combined with the prospect of increased competition of all these similar music service players in the market, Finetune really need to good in segment their target market, not just good in bits and bytes in order to attract more users.

I think people might love the social networking sites a little too much. Well, most of my friends, even the business professionals owned profiles on Facebook, MySpace, or Friendster. The recent poll from this bizjournals remind us again why social networking sites are such the great things for the businesses. In the poll, 25 percent of respondents said yes, but that their company doesn’t use them enough. However, if you asking whether a social networking site really a useful business tool in five years ago, funny if you question this and most of us will incredulous if the answer is yes.

I think most of us like to hear that a social networking site will going to make a company more streamline and more efficient, and how any company that didn’t use it was going to be left behind in two-three years later.

It becomes a norm that more and more freebies, or free software programs can be found on the Web nowadays. I’m not too sure whether it’s due to the rising trend, or a proven tactic for an Internet firm to gain notice on the Web. Yet today another well-known player, Yahoo! China has added a free firewall program, prided itself as a company that takes care about the Internet users in China. This product has the features of firewall, anti-virus, virus-scanning, system restore, IE browser default page restore, and etc-all in one. However, the virus delete/quarantine feature can only be done online, with the help of third-party softwares, that are KingSoft or Rising Anti-Virus software, and users are allowed to choose one of them in order to delete the virus. However, these third-party anti-virus softwares are offered for free only on Saturday and Sunday. In addition, this Yahoo! firewall program can reveal your PC’s security holes and delivers critical fixes to the problems found.

Though this firewall program is offered without any monetary charge by Yahoo! China, it will only works in Windows 2000, 2003, XP or Vista. Maybe you’re thinking that this is another me-too product on the Web, but for Yahoo! China, adding a me-too product can make people view its company image more positively.