A startup that I tracking for a while that called infiLearn has released its beta site. From what I learned abut the purpose, business concept, etc of infiLearn, it seems infiLearn is currently targeting at early childhood education in addition to offer some educational programs for young people or adult. In technology settings, you can say this site is an educational marketplace which enabling students to find courses they’re seeking to improve. On the other hand, it provides the tutors a marketplace for them to sell their tutoring services, whether the services are available online or offline. Subjects listed on the site is very wide, in the range of the common subjects, such as Maths, English, Arts, Writing Skills, and many more.

For each registered students or instructors, an infiLearn page will be provided so that they both can learn about which courses they’re going to attend or teach. In addition, a brief report will be showed so as to let them check their progress on the courses. It’s not that easy to maintain an infiLearn profile on the Web, an instructor that have many students is the one who hold the most effective biography and a bunch of positive reviews. In matter of fact, infiLearn has set up some criteria in qualifying an instructor such as short test, proven teaching and tutoring skills, and the effective use of the Web classroom tools available at infiLearn. After an application for the instructor at infiLearn has been approved, the instructor must create a provider organization, and this is the policy of infiLearn so that they can process the payment. Basically, infiLearn developed an online learning community comprised of students, parents and instructors, and the business model is based on the revenue generated from the courses provided.

The team that made up of infiLearn has vast experience especially in the Web arena. They have all worked at companies such as Drugstore.com, Expedia, Microsoft and Amazon. The CEO of infiLearn is Kal Raman, previously assumed the position of CEO, COO and CIO of drugstore.com. Another key person sits on the board is Peter Neupert, currently also the Corporate Vice President for Health Strategy at Microsoft. He has also built the Windows operating system into a powerhouse in Japan.

Currently, infiLearn is based in Bellevue, Washington.

Yahoo! has released a new service called myM. It is an invite-only private beta service, but when Yahoo! released a new product to the market, it will bring some amount of stir. It might acted as an IM interoperability service that allowed users to social network with their friends. A vexed question, how robust the business model is this product, as there are countless social networking services available in the market? However, one thing for sure, Yahoo! is aimed to become the king of Web 2.0 since they’re the one who owned few successful social networking sites, such as Yahoo! 360, Yahoo! Groups, Flickr, Rivals.com, and etc.

This new service is first came courtesy of ValleyWag, as they claimed that it works similar to Meebo, which allows users to aggregate multiple IM clients into one, and proposed to usher the next-generation of IM and social networking aggregator, and this allows users to communicate among Yahoo! IM, MSN, AIM, and Meebo. Moreover, cross communication across social networking sites such as Friendster, MySpace, and blogging service which is LiveJournal is also available.

Though the features proposed sounds very good, the general thinking is that too many similar services available in the market will likely pose a significant impediment to the future reception of myM. For all the new products (in private beta) developed by Yahoo!, I always remain worry that the buzz is running far ahead of the products.

Last month, I did posted a post on the Friendster’s developer program, and now the Friendster widget directory is available for its users to integrate to their profiles. I can’t tell how easy the widget could be embedded onto the profile since I do not own a Friendster account. However, the widget concept has recently been understood that its presence is “good for the users.”

As of present, there are eight (8) widget categories for one to chose from, namely Slideshows & Photos, Just For Fun, Entertainment, Games, News & Information, Sports, Video and Music. Each category has listed the widgets for users to add onto their profiles, and the widget selected will then apply to a hidden box underneath the “More About User.” Currently, companies that developed the widgets are Slide, RockYou, Jangl, imeem, and etc. Though the Friendster widget directory hasn’t been officially announced, but there are few Friendster rabid users have embedded Slide’s Slide Shows onto their profiles.

Would the presence of widgets be most valuable as part of a larger social networking site? However, in my own viewpoint, there wasn’t a perceived need for such the widgets by the South-East Asian people, because it was unlikely that the users would customized their own profile and try to make their profiles stand out from that of others. Most of my male friends that owned Friendster accounts are those who want to look for friends online from there, or spend time in browsing other girls’ profile pages. Unfortunately, I am not this type of people, and I can’t imagine myself login to my Friendster’s profile once in every day and do these, and basically these are the reasons that stopping me from opening a Friendster account.

InstaColl has released an office suite that was probably developed by them for more than one year. It is called Live Documents since the name they chosen reflected this office software, the documents can be worked “lively” in both environments, the desktop and on the Web. Though InstaColl has reiterated that this software they developed is not competing with Microsoft Office or Google docs, but this powerful office application can offer functionality equivalent to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint would definitely make their users unconsciously compare them hand-in-hand. On top of that, Live Documents is built using RIA (Rich Internet Application) technologies such as Flash and Flex, the effect of Flash-based user interface could generate the same kind of experience that is comparable to the experiment of using BuzzWord.

One of the most powerful features in this Live Document is the dual use of online and offline. Any changes on either side of the desktop version or Web version are automatically synchronized and hence, the value of a document can be magnified as multiple users can edit a specific document and the document is always in sync. Meanwhile, they’ve planned to release the software into two different versions, one is free and the other one is the commercial version. Though Live Documents is still in beta, this software has caught the eyes of some corporations. As stated on the InstaColl site, the first commercial version will be deployed at Aricent, the world’s leading independent communications software company with over 6,700 employees globally.

InstaColl is well-structured and created with the hype of being co-founded by the co-founder of Hotmail, Sabeer Bhatia. Mr. Bhatia, a native of Bangalore, India, also a graduate of Caltech and Stanford University, went back to Bangalore from US to create this new startup. Now InstaColl hoping to do something special, and entrepreneurial about software development. It seem they’re well in progress developing the first “Made by India” product brand and the first product released likely to be used by users throughout the world. For those who want to receive the beta invites, you can visit the sign-up page here.

23andMe, a company co-founded by Anne Wojcicki, who married to Google co-founder Sergey Brin has offered a Web service that help the user read and understand DNA. 23andMe founded in this April and launched a DNA test cost $999 for individual this Monday. Users that pay for this DNA saliva tests and spit back to the pre-addressed shipping envelops to 23andMe, and wait for four to six weeks, the genetic results will be showed on their accounts on 23andMe. As stated by 23andMe, the genetic data of user will store in their secure database and user may learn her origin, inherited trait, genetic history indicated whether she is going to suffer from a specific disease, and even allowed her to connect genetically with other users around the world. The DNA analysis was done through the DNA chips produced by the partner of 23andMe, i.e. illumina and the chip used in 23andMe’s process is the Illumina HumanHap550+ BeadChip, a DNA Analysis solution, as illumina recently also introduced its fourth multi-sample DNA Analysis tool, i.e. Infinium HumanHap550-Duo BeadChip.

Many might considered 23andMe a Web service provider, but I saw it differently. The concept surrounding this DNA test is the intelligent use of the DNA information, as the key to an ultimate approach to health care is information. By analyzing the DNA of every individual and understand how they are working, 23andMe can improve the quality of live, but it definitely a big challenge for a few months old company.

I’ve found the following video clips, as embedded in the below, these videos allowed me to know more information on this new genetic company.

Video 1: 23andMe’s Anne Wojcicki and Linda Avey Speak, Part 1

Video 2: 23andMe’s Anne Wojcicki and Linda Avey Speak, Part 2

Short message service (SMS) is ubiquitous. Now SMS not only can be used by some companies as the marketing services, or for the notification purposes, it also can be acted as a valuable service for a search engine company in delivering search results. Last month, Google India launched the SMS services to its Indian users, now it’s Google China’s turn. On a new Google China’s mobile SMS site, you’ll notice that there are variety of information requests can be done through SMS at this moment. Users can enter queries to their mobile phones and send the request to 999333, Google will reply the users with the search results in SMS format, as shown in the below picture. This service is being offered by Google China as free of charge, however users have to pay the SMS fee imposed by the carriers.

With this new offering, SMS can be used as a way to request information from Google China. Simple request such as finding the location of China’s Wal-Mart, stock price, weather, train details, etc to some complex request such as word translation, i.e. translate a sentence from Mandarin to English, or currency rate are now available. This type of service is not new in the market and I believed users have a certain level of expectation toward this SMS service, thus Google China must ensure their messages must arrive to the users in a fast manner as well as at a sensible time (for example, not until the users forgot when she sent the SMS request).

Today TagEdge.com is one year old. I moved all my content from kennylee.wordpress.com to TagEdge on November 20, 2006. Over the last year, many things happened to me. This technology blog has seen me through unemployed times, working as a freelance Web designer, and then a shift to Web programming as well as worked with a team provide IT consultation. When I started it last year (few days after my birthday, I am very sure of this), I thought of writing the reviews of some good startups from South-East Asian countries, but now the startups that I covered in this blog almost all the regions except Latin America. Sorry about the shift of the focus.

In fact, I really enjoyed writing about the Internet startups that I came across everyday. There are many startups, new things happened everyday, and one thing that I know is I don’t have enough time to post all the reviews of such startups, as TagEdge still considered as my part-time gig. From now on, I hope to increase the volume of my postings and am looking forward to another year or more of technology postings.

Anyway, thanks for reading, whether you are with me for exactly one year, or just a couple of days.

Amazon has released its new wireless reading device called Kindle. Enthusiasm over this device promises that all the technology blogs will write a review on it. It is costs $399 per device and guarantees that more than 90,000 books are available, including 100 of 112 current New York Times best sellers, all will be offered at $9.99. Other than this, magazines, newspapers, and more than 250 top blogs will also be accessed through this device. The only common thing that Kindle with the iPhone is that they will initially launch in the US, not Europe, Asia-Pacific, or even Latin America. For a guy like me that based in Asia, I’m trying to figure out what this device really look like in a conceptual way. However, my sense is that if Amazon managed to sell it like a hot cake, I mean more than 1 million of this Kindle in a year, its success had nothing to do with the quality or product specifics, it was all about concept and how it fitted to the reading habits of people in the US. Basically, it was all based on the concept that book readers do not want to compromise on their reading habits. They want to read the books anytime, anywhere, preferably in a wireless environment, and this device appeared to cater to this needs and wants.

Apparently, first-generation device typically have pricing issues waiting to be discovered, and hopefully people that are book lovers willing to pay $399 for a device like this. For those who want to watch the demo of this device, you can check out from this Amazon site.