KickApps, the leading on demand social media platform, today announced that they have released the newest version, i.e. 3.0. KickApps is a social platform provider that accentuates the virtues of building a rich media experience while the social media publishers remain the controls in their communities’ content and visitors. This newest version 3.0 improved some of the core functionality in the four building blocks of the platform, such as social networking, user generated content, programmable video players and widgets. KickApps are appropriate for the creation of content by a group of people, particularly if the content, involving large media files such as videos. In particular, KickApps has increased the maximum file size for media files that upload by publishers, i.e. 100MB, up from 25MB from the previous version. As profiled in my previous post about KickApps, many established corporate clients are building communities by using their platform, especially in view of the advertisement aspect that pretty appealing to these large-size publishers:

- PayPal buyout of KickApps Ad inventory on a self-service basis for small businesses
- Volume pricing of ad-free and API experiences for larger businesses
- No cost deployment available (includes advertising inventory share with KickApps)

In the meantime, KickApps also released the KickApps API Developer Kit, that enable publishers to have complete control on their application deployment. From the features listed below, it’s pretty clear that KickApps is focusing on creating a right environment for the developers.

- Open standard, powerful, REST-based APIs covering all business components
- Extends existing SOAP single-sign-on (including one-click Drupal, Joomla and WordPress plugins)
- Custom feeds, workflows and display, media ingestion and management
- Tight integration with Affiliate CMS and user experiences
- Usage-based pricing model: cost-efficient and advertising-free

Perhaps the most exciting features an user found on this version 3.0 is the improved control panel of KickApps 3.0 Affiliate Center. There is a video related to this that I found on the Web, as embedded in the below.

Watch and enjoy.

Slashdot has launched a new site called Idle, a site with the business model much look like Digg but only links with non-technology related pictures, video or news bits could appeared on the site. Still in testing status, this site would definitely not repeated the cyber-revolt by readers of the Digg as the submission of all the news will be monitored by the editors working at Slashdot. In other word, you won’t see the true power of web 2.0 community where the users can decide which stories go to the main Slashdot Idle page. However, started a site strategically with a direction where users submitted the stories while another group of editors working at Slashdot decide on the approval or rejection processes, there’s probably the only way to strike a proper balance between delivering value to the community and encouraging community participation.

Though there’s not much liberty in the submission processes, but there is a valid reason why Slashdot Idle doesn’t allow much freedom room left for the users. As reported by New York Times, the founder of Slashdot explained, “A lot of these community news sites are all about Ron Paul,” he said. “Ron Paul may be a valid candidate. But what that is really demonstrating is that you are seeing 1 or 2 percent of a community shaping where the whole community is going. A small dedicated group of people can manipulate these sites very easily.”

via [New York Times]

MySpace is partnering with a job portal CareerOne Australia in creating an Australians’ MySpaceJobs called myspacejobs.careerone.com.au. This partnership will strengthen MySpace’s overall service offerings. Particularly, their users in Australia is expected to search jobs through this site in addition to conduct online social networking activities in MySpace. In most recent, most of the popular social networking platforms or the blogs we came across on the Web are adding the job sites, whether those are existed as a separate entities or through a column located in a sidebar of the blogs. The continued evolving from the current set of social networking capabilities to the site that job searching capabilities have been added not only attain a high level of popularity, but it also mean that the young generation are getting harder and harder in the employment market. As The Age of Australia reported, “Bringing the employment market to them through the MySpace partnership provides Generation Y with easy access to jobs, advice and information - all specifically tailored to their demographic.”

The Australian MySpace Jobs portal includes many of the features valuable to the job seekers, such as the cool jobs available from time to time, MySpaceJobs community, current job opportunities, and the online know-how tools that include cover letter and resume samples, and etc.

Silicon Valley, best known as a region with the highly concentration of high-tech firms, spin-offs, startups, and also an important market for venture capitalists. However, not that many know thoroughly about its history. There is a recent video uploaded to YouTube (as embedded in the below) whereby you can watch it and grasp some basic data about its origin as well as the evolution of this region. If you favor of the text version instead of video format, then there’s a Web page purposely designed for the Silicon Valley history (click here). If you like me, love to read University working paper, here’s another link for working paper entitled, “the Dynamics of high technology firms in Silicon Valley (PDF).”

In the beginning of 2008, social networking will be so critical that its formal use in the colleges have been approved and granted. In a press release of West Virginia University, they have received $149,000 grant from Verizon to create a social networking site that promote 21st century career opportunities emphasis on energy sector among the middle and high school students in West Virginia. Partners involved in this social networking project include West Virginia University’s College of Engineering and Mineral Resources, College of Human Resources and Education and The EdVenture Group, a non-profit organization headquartered in Morgantown, West Virginia.

However, this site will remain as an internal project and not open to the public except students throughout the West Virginia state. Nevertheless, it hope to change the way students expect to interact with career information and other data with the built-in features such as discussion groups, chats and blogs on relevant topics and an “Ask the Counselor” section.

Today Israeli news provider Globes online reported that PayPal has acquired an Israeli startup called FraudSciences for $169 million. Fraud Sciences has the emerging technologies that help users in detecting online frauds. In a press release to the public, they also announced that key personnel from FraudSciences, including Yossi Barak, Chief Operating Officer and founders Shvat Shaked and Saar Wilf, will join PayPal’s technology and fraud management teams. In the meantime, Gadi Maier, FraudSciences’ President and CEO, will provide strategic and operational support to PayPal during the integration period.

FraudSciences was founded in 2001 but in fact was officially launched to the market in 2006, previously raised $7 million in Series A and $11 million in round B financing from BRM Capital, Redpoint Ventures and other US and Israeli investors.

It seems that most Web developers, or people involving in new startups like to challenge themselves in preparing and developing new Web 2.0 sites in a supreme short timeframe. Skillbit, still under rapidly development, is a new project that is still underway at the Adobe offices. This project was also sponsor by Adobe, amongst some other sponsors, created as a Web 2.0 targeted at businesses where they can set up a network that employees can use to share their skills, and learn more about their coworkers. It is created as part of the Startup Weekend, despite the fact that not much information can be found on the Skillbit site, at the time of my writing, but we probably know that the people involved in Skiibit are excited and working very hard in delivering this project on time.

According to Startup Weekend, there are 122 were in attendance before decided on Skillbit project. We probably know what are the problems that they are facing when they started this project, such as keyword research, Website architecture, writing content for the Web pages and splash pages, and etc. from one of the their posts in addition to the definition of Skillbit.

Skillbit is planned to be launched at 9pm tonight. Given the short time frame, we can conclude that an exciting project can also be delivered in a couple of hours if we see this site goes live by then.

Morrent, a new torrent tracker that dubbed itself as the fastest and most comprehensive torrent site has launched in earlier this month. At the first glance, I’ve been impressed by the site’s striking dark color. It look like a site that have indexed a lot of torrents that secretly hidden to the public but could only found on that site. To me, it seemed that torrent sites have rapidly switched from a purely technical torrent search site to a comprehensive search engine that comprised of most of the popular torrents from time to time. Though I believe there will be a flurry of new torrent sites coming on the way in this year, but I hardly believe the concept of comprehensive, or “more is more” is what the torrent users are looking at this moment.

There are a lot of torrent search sites that one can find on the Web nowadays, but there are not many torrent sites that offer the torrents in real-time as Morrent. Morrent believed that they’re a better site when compare to some other torrent search sites with their live tracker system and advanced search features. On the Morrent site, you can find the top ten of all the torrents categorized in movies, shows, books, games, music, animation, software, picture, and etc. that are daily added to the site. For torrent users that favor of the latest torrents, it will be a valuable aspect on this site founded in the first glance discovery processes. Having a huge selection of the daily torrents will ensure that this site will attract a crowded of torrent users, particularly those who are focusing on the new torrents, or without having any specific ideas on what torrent they’re looking in their minds. In general, I still can’t see the real business model of many torrent search sites available on the Web at this moment, especially with a site like Morrent that existed without a single advertisement founded on the site.