It’s become more and more common for Internet users to download softwares, ebooks, or movies through the torrent clients. Now a new Web application called Torrent2exe provides an alternative way for users to download any torrent files without the requirement of a torrent client installed.

To illustrate how to use this Torrent2exe, I use it to download an ebook. Just copy the URL of the torrent file, and then tick “Normal size, no additional download will be required.” You’re going to download the torrent file you want to your computer in an exe file format. After downloaded the exe file, click on it will then go through another downloading process, this will output the file whether it is the ebook in pdf or software in zip format that you want in the first place.

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Microsoft has just introduced Live Mesh, to many people it is an ambitious initiative, from what we saw from the concept behind Live Mesh. In technological setting, Live Mesh is a cloud computing platform, that enable synchronization and storage “to the cloud.” In other word, it allowed users to connect with all sorts of their devices, in a so-called Mesh. This Mesh is being appeared as a folder and thus, users are able to use, share, sync in their preferred computer desktops remotely. Underneath this technology lies Microsoft’s evolving strategy, they seemed to be interested to build something really big, and all other operating systems can embrace this Live Mesh. An intuitive question will be how many operating systems that Live Mesh can offer beyond the existing Windows platform and how quickly they can implement this great idea?

At this moment, Live Mesh is in the invite-only phase (I’m still in the waiting list), and I read Microsoft has set a maximum 5G of cloud storage limit on this Live Mesh. To know all the details on this release, you can visit this blog post, entitled, “Introducing Live Mesh.” Of course, keep your eyes on the Live Mesh blog as well.

Twitter, my favorite micro blogging platform is now available in Japanese. Why Japanese? According to AFP, about one quarter of its existing users are from Japan, albeit that Twitter is not likely to report its actual number of users cumulated until today. In matter of fact, Twitter is doing really well there. Visit the Twitter Public Timeline will tell the frequency of Japanese Twitter messages appeared on the page.

According to Twitter blog, Twitter Japan was a project jointly created with a partner called Digital Garage. Users will find the advertisement on this Twitter Japan from day one, and Japan market will be the first testing ground for Twitter’s money making business plan.

CityIN, a new social network launched in last month that targeting the Hong Kong and China people is joining Google’s OpenSocial. As you know, OpenSocial is Google’s first plan to take on Facebook, with a goal to release application programming interfaces (API) that allowed developers to build variety of applications for a range of social networking sites. And the most notable high-profile partner was MySpace.

With the participation of CityIn in OpenSocial, it probably the first Chinese social network that opens its platform to the developers mainly China Web developers. Strengths of the participation in OpenSocial will help to increase the worldwide profile of CityIN, this can be viewed from all the reporting from the top blogs in the blogosphere. As a new startup, it’s probably the best way for them that draw attention to it. CityIn’s challenge will be to build a different social network as there are many among them in China, or throughout the world. As a new startup, that co-founded by young talents, it is currently undertaking the differentiation strategy and was nearly very brave to try out all the new things and developed a lot of new features on their site.

CityIN, co-founded by Simon Chan and Alex Tam, was first incorporated in Hong Kong, and later setup the main operation office in Guangzhou, China in 2007. Simon Chan, 26 and Alex Tam, 25, seemed to be the Internet enthusiasts. With their passion on the Web, and work experience (Simon Chan is a former E-Trade software engineer, reported by VentureBeat), they planned to make CityIN the best ever social network in China. The site is easy-to-navigate, vividly presented content such as latest users, latest events happening in Guangzhou, and a second-edition of recommendation engine, which they’ve planned to apply for the patent in the US, Japan, and Hong Kong in the later stage. Recommendation engine is broad in scope, but it is enough to build a strong bridge from its users of the site that belong to a same group of leisure interest to some friends reside in local areas they might interested to interact with. If they continually improve its recommendation approaches, it might make a lot of potential users to have that compel feeling to join.

Additional interesting feature found on CityIN is the automatic face detection for photo tagging. As one of the hyperlinks they’ve sent to me, as shown in the below picture, it showed how a hassle less feature for CityIN user to play around with. At present, CityIN wasn’t comprehensive yet, with the English proficiently level of its co-founders, it’s no surprise that they’ll launch a brand new English site to cater to the US, Europe, or some countries whereby Friendster is strong at, such as Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia.

Also, in pertaining to its participation on OpenSocial, CityIN still does not have the resources to build proprietary add-on yet. In other word, CityIN will going to be 100% OpenSocial at the beginning stage. However, they’ve received some favorably response from the industry players in casual game sector.

CityIN currently has 11 employees and they’ve been angel invested for a undisclosed sum by Dr. Samson Tam in early 2007. Dr. Tam, who invented the first electronic Dictionary Device (Chinese-English), is the chairman of a listed company in Hong Kong.

Well done, Simon.

Picture: Automatic face detection for photo tagging

Source: available at http://static.cityin.com/images/screenshots/facedetect/steps123.png, accessed at March 22, 2008.

Ning, a platform that helped users to create their own social networks has raised a whopping $60 million in Series D of funding from unspecified institutional investors. This news was confirmed by co-founder Marc Andreessen in his blog and first came courtesy of VentureBeat. Marc Andreessen said this round of funding was based on Ning’s $500 million pre-money valuation. The company raised $44 million in round C last year, which at that time its pre-money valuation was just $170 million. Well, I don’t know the current Ning’s valuation at $500 million is overinflated, but it definitely provides an early proving ground of a far too much money chasing the Web 2.0 deals.

Marc Andreessen said, “We raised the money to enable us to keep scaling given our accelerating growth (over 230,000 networks on Ning now, growing at over 1,000 per day) and to make sure we have plenty of firepower to survive the oncoming nuclear winter.”

via [washington post]

I like to read the secret recipes of founding a new startup, or how those founders managed their ways to make their Web startups successful. Here’s a blog post of Mahalo’s CEO on how he manage his stress, entitled The ultimate cure for startup stress. It’s a nice write-up and well worth reading.

via [Blog Herald]

Second Life is a hot thing among the 3-D Internet users, but in China, there is another great startup that showed to the world that there’s another virtual world beside Second Life, i.e. HiPiHi. Frankly, I’m not logged-into it yet, my friend told me it’s not easy to sign-up successfully during the first day it offered the public access. In particular, it attracted huge traffic in the first day of their officially launched on the Web. According to HiPiHi (in Mandarin), they’re the creator of China’s first 3-D virtual world, and after they took a considerable amount of private beta, approx. one year, they’ve decided to launched their 3-D virtual environment on April 18th this month.

At present, they’ve 43 thousand users, most notably change for this public launch is the redesign of their username ID system. A new ID support numerical symbols, from 6 to 16 digits, as well as the Chinese character, minimum digit is 3. In other word, as a Chinese resides in South-East countries, I can sign-up by using my real Chinese name. In order to attract more potential users turn to this HiPiHi for experiment, they’ve a new interface design, with most of images are at dark grey color. For the non-Chinese users, a lot of 3-D images have been created to supplement the Chinese words, so that they’ll get to know more deeper about what happening during their experiment with HiPiHi. Of course, an user will get the overall look and feel of this HiPiHi as she explore this China’s first 3-D virtual world. Until today, HiPiHi community has been created 12084 homes, 572476 creations, and 510 groups, at the time of my writing.

Additionally, an user is entitled to search for the un-sold land to build her own house there. In near future, I expect users can also create and sell items online to the other HiPiHi users, and eventually make some profit in that environment, similarly to Second Life, where an user can earn Linden dollars and convert them to real money.

3-D virtual world is nothing new to the social networking arena, as HiPiHi users can get so much fun to be in that environment. An existing HiPiHi user called blackhumor is planned to get his darling to have a virtual marriage ceremony on HiPiHi. Understandably, users can take their HiPiHi social networking activities to the next level, in spite of all these activities will likely push HiPiHi to the edge, but when consider the partnership of HiPiHi and IBM, both agreed to continually improve HiPiHi’s platform, many beautiful things can happen.

Update: Below is the picture of HiPiHi’s virtual environment, with two of the motional avatars standing on the ground. While playing around with the avatar created with my friend, I hardly find members or houses on HiPiHi. A huge number of the users seemed to be not familiar on how to manipulate the avatars, in viewed of the avatars are jumping from one location to another.

Below is another picture on how a member interact with each other through the instant messaging service. An user can choose to communicate with the other by typing English or Simplified Chinese. A chat dialog box appeared on the left bottom side will include all of the messages.

Microsoft is on shopping spree again. This time they are acquiring Farecast, and this news has been confirmed by Farecast’s blog. Farecast, is a Web 2.0 travel portal that enabled their users to predict whether prices of flights or hotels will go up and down, so users are much aware of when to buy through the output of predicted data.

From this buy, Microsoft is signaling its intention to build an all-round Internet capabilities as part of a larger Internet empire. Features available in Farecast has also been built into Microsoft’s existing MSN Travel, at this moment not sure Microsoft will merge these two into one, as either one of them did not bridge the gap of the other.

Although the sum of acquisition has not been disclosed by either party of them, but the price tag might go up to $115 million, as reported by Seattle P-I.

via [search engine land]