If you’re a Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 user, you should take a look at ClearContext. ClearContext is a Microsoft Office Outlook plugin that currently supports version 2007, and help users to organize their emails in a better way. There are two versions of ClearContext, one is the personal version which is available for free download, albeit that it is in private beta, and another one is the Pro (professional version).

For everyone who use Microsoft Office Outlook 2007, they have this personal version to help them to organize their emails in various ways through the availability of buttons. After you installed this plugin, you’ll get to learn to use the buttons to group of your contacts to a single email message, or set up a meeting request. There is also an attachment tab, which allowed you to organize all your attachments found on your email messages, and preview one of them in a larger size than the actual one. But the most important feature I found on this plugin is how ClearContext adept at the art of customer relationship management, by analyze all of your email messages and ranking your contacts in terms of importance accordingly. Besides, you can also group some of your email messages in a folder you assigned to. To learn more about ClearContext features, there is a 3mins video I’ve embedded in the below.

Since this ClearContext Personal is in private beta, but you can sign-up on the waiting list provided by them. However, ClearContext said that they’ll work hard in order to send all of its invites who signed-up on the waiting list. For those who can’t wait for the beta invites, you can try Xobni, another great tool that built atop of Microsoft Office Outlook, that I profiled it just a couple of weeks ago. As both of them are still in its infancy (beta version), but hold considerable different appeals (Xobni provides a fast search), it is particularly a wise decision to use both of these plugins concurrently in your Microsoft Office Outlook.

Twingly is a new Swedish-based blog search engine. I was as well got a private beta access for a glimpse into the future of blogs search provided by Twingly. Frankly, blog search has been a daily habit for me in order to look for the new startups to be profiled on TagEdge. As a Chinese educated and a third-generation of Chinese immigrant to South-East Asian countries, I tend to use Baidu Blog Search most for of the time; otherwise Google Blog Search. In response to this Twingly, a new blog search engine in private beta phase, my first thought is that I am oblige myself to examine it whether it will become one of blogging tools to be used in the future.

Two questions while I evaluate Twingly are how it trying to differentiate itself among all the big players such as Google Blog Search, Baidu Blog Search, Technorati, etc. in the blog search sector and will this competition drive a better blog search engine for the end-users as well as the next-generation of blog search.

If you’re giving access to Twingly, you’ll notice that below the search bar, there are few search queries entered by beta users under the topic of “Hot right now.” which they claimed these are the placeholder links on Twingly. It seem that Twingly is focused on the U.S. market right now as all the search queries such as Election, Obama, Iphone are mostly related to the American. As I type few queries to Twingly, the search results showed on Twingly can be sorted out based on Twingly Rank (their internal ranking system of blog posts), date or inlinks (this might mean the inbound links from other sites). From the search results, you can further sort the results based on your preference, by time (from anytime, last hour till last month), and languages as well.

Apparently, Twingly was trying to differentiate itself not from the aspect of frequency, since beta users will not come across the blog posts they indexed at 5mins, or 10mins ago, but from the quality of all the blogs they selected to index. The posts they indexed are reasonably reliable, from wordpress.com to CNN, Blogger.com. On the Twingly search engine, any search result pages, you can sort the result page by “Any source” or “Spam-free blogs,” and either of them, the search results will be the same appeared on your computer screen. As such, I believe spam-free search will be their most important appeal to the end-users, and their vision is to surf safe while users connected to Twingly at anytime, anywhere.

The ranking of blog posts on Twingly is very straight-forward. The post that comprised of the top number of keyword you’ve entered to Twingly or with the most “Links/likes” will always go to the top, as shown in the picture below. The offering of their blog search engine want to bring values to the end-users in a dual way, i.e. the algorithm “keyword” manner and the other user-determine manner, which mean beta users can vote their favorite blog posts and these posts will eventually rise to the top of the search result pages. In designing a complete user experience, a most thoroughly discussed and commented post should stay on the top for this reason.

I think Twingly is trying to be very open, and I like their way in operating their startup in this mode. They’ve a Tech Plan, which allowed beta users to submit suggestions on what they perceived Twingly as a startup in the future. The most wanted feature at this moment is blog claiming feature, which I think some beta users desperately want to claim the ownership of their blogs on Twingly. Others are a blog profile page, a Mac version of Twingly screensaver, a real-time visualization of the blogosphere in a map.

In overall, Twingly is not very convincing in term of fast indexing, frequency when compared to Google Blog Search, or even Technorati. I think the time is still not right for them in seeking for an architectural change, i.e. spam-free blog search instead of fast indexed blog search. Safe is not fast, and either one will require the other. However, Twingly will be included in one of blogging tools in my daily life.

Twine is one of the startups that is in my waiting list to be reviewed on TagEdge and I recently got a private beta access to it. It is a new Web application that applied the common semantic model, based on the fact that human experts are expensive, and users on Twine can provide valuable search and data information.

To understand what Twine does, and how it differentiate itself from any other web applications on the Web, you need to understand what semantic is. Semantic is refers to the computers’ ways to process the language or code, and understandable, experts usually correlate semantic to information management. But to understand semantic Web, the founder of Twine, has explained it, in a post, entitled, “On the Difference Between “Semantic” and “Semantic Web.” On Twine, what they do is to provide a semantic Wen Web environment whereby an user is given a profile page, and the ability to social bookmark any link or URL address as she like, and Twine will do the rest with the new approach or concept of semantic analysis. Semantic analysis exists in helping you to interpret the information you put on your profile page, categorize, tag, summarize, abstract, and even extract similar link to the data information you like.

Perhaps this semantic technology is highly automated, and apparently not been easily understand by users who never came across this technology. However, the semantic technologies in existence is for the sake of the public. Perhaps you can consider it as a technology to help users create a data information library, discover all the bookmarks that you want to find out, but couldn’t achieve it by one’s own effort. With this technologies, it will grouping all the interest things, stuff in an organized way, and thus, we’ll realize the real relationships of these things with our lives. But expect there is a huge volume of data information out there on the Web, it’s always impossible for us to expect Twine will perform well barely in categorization, classification and tagging automatically on all the data users enter to the site, but more advance this technology evolve, the more it will understand human language, the perception on human towards language or computer code. In short, Twine was trying to make their system “smart” about the environment, but in practice, there’s still a lot of improvement that Twine will need to do, in viewed of many positive feedback, and some are negative out there.

To use Twine, upon you’ve been granted a private access, you’ll be given a profile page. Simple Simply put, it’s like a social network, meet friends with similar interests, access to the data information collected from other Twine users, and join groups, etc. On the profile page, you’ve the options to talk about your latest status, what you’re doing right now, introduce yourself as well as list your own Website on the page. You also provided with a notification page when there’s somebody would like to “connect” with you, and a Twine Digest for you to read as your everyday meal of information.

I like the fact Twine has provided a “Twine This” bookmarklet (drag it to the browser’s toolbar) that provide users to directly add a Web page they like onto their “My Items” of their profile pages. The another way is to email your favorite Web pages through with your own personal email address. All the Web pages you bookmarked are private, only if you purposely create your own public Twine, and add the Web pages you like to the public Twine, the bookmarks will be appeared as public in both “My Items” and public Twine. To illustrate this example, I’ve created a public Twine called “Startup to Watch.” To encourage users to share knowledge or information they came across on the Web, users are welcome to create as many Twines as they like, but manage those strategically. And be cautious you can’t change the URL address of your Twine as it’s impossible for an user to do it at this moment.

The core of semantic technologies is to find and expose content. To achieve this aim, Twine also allowed users to explore “Top 100 Twines”, “New Twines”, and “Top 100 Members.” From the Twines you discovered, you can find the articles, news you’re looking for a long period of time, but couldn’t find it other than Twine provided here. You also will meet some like-minded people in this platform. Meanwhile, there are several public twines that interested me, including the one created by Nova Spivack, Twine’s founder, Ruby on Rails, and Facebook research.

Twine is a project of Radar Networks, a startup based in San Francisco.

There are far too many applications in the private beta phase are worth to be profiled in this blog, including this one, i.e. SmallWorlds. I’ll briefly explain its specific features, but I think you’ll be realized the full features of SmallWorlds when it opens its public access in June 2 next month.

SmallWorlds was developed by an Adobe partner based in New Zealand called Outsmart. They have several projects in their labs, and all of them are focus efforts on creating Flash or Flex related applications that can be leveraged in a Web-based technology. SmallWorlds considered as a grand vision for Outsmart, carried a motto which is “build your own world.” Since its unveiling, SmallWorlds has been full of surprise, including the praise of a Rich Internet Application Evangelist from Adobe, in an article entitled, “Smallworld: The coolest Flex application I’ve ever seen.”

Since SmallWorlds venture into the field of 3-D, it is inevitably be compared with another strong player Second Life or HiPiHi. Although there are no mature standards to determine what’s a 3-D player should act or behave in, but SmallWorlds has emerged itself as a strong contender in this field, particularly in view of its differentiation strategy, in terms of usefulness, and in the form of convenient.

1) SmallWorlds is available in any Web browser. In other word, an user will not need to download and install a SmallWorlds software to run it.

2) With a distinct URL address of a 3-D space, you can instantly share your discovery on SmallWorlds with your friends.

3) You can customize the avatar you created, and this should be critical for a 3-D lover.

4) You should expect the 3-D virtual space to evolve rapidly as the interaction of 3-D users evolve, and SmallWorlds set to capitalize on this direction. As SmallWorlds said, “Users can share experiences like playing games, watching YouTube videos, listening to their favorite band, browsing through photo galleries, and a whole lot more.”

5) The availability of full 3-D chat environment. A standard 2D Flex User Interface components projected into a 3D world, as mentioned in a 2007 post.

6) SmallWorlds is going to open its platform for the third-part application developers. This approach is proven popular, as more casual games are being rendered in this 3-D platform.

To know more about SmallWorlds, check out their latest post entitled, “A virtual world for the masses.” Stay tuned.

Most recently, Lycos has launched a new Web page creator tool called Webon. At first glance, I see this new tool a sort of user-friendly service like Google Sites. It help an user to create Web page without any prerequisite of HTML, or programming language skills. Upon visiting the site, you can go to the “create new site” page and create your own Web page.

Currently, Webon offers five (5) different kits for you to design a site that suite your Web site proposition. They are blog, photo album, personal site, travelogue, as well as wedding site. To create your own personal site, Webon has provided a rich-text editor, and a template for your site. However, in order to publish your site, you’ll need to register with them, and you’ll have an option to add an username on the site you’ve created, but notice that there’ll be a sub-domain webonsites.com as your site’s URL address. Example will be the test site that I’ve created just now, i.e. tagedge.webonsites.com.

Webon is operating on a versioning plan in which it allowed users to upgrade their free sites to a so-called “Webon Personal Plan.” Webon Personal Plan comprised of a $8.95/monthly charge that help an user to publish her Webon site with her own preferred domain and the availability of upload an unlimited number of images.

Webon was founded on the concept that there’s a lot of Website building applications that are either too specialized, too much hassle, or too little control on the Web. To overcome all these problems, they’ve created Webon for the sake of novice users and help them to understand indeed Web designing really that simple.

Meanwhile, I’m a bit confuse when come across another open-source project called Webon. It is served as a Website managing project, developed by Shintaro Fujiwara. But definitely this one you’ll need to configure it on your Web server in order to create a simple Web site.

Microsoft has relaunched Farecast a couple of hours ago. Yesterday while I tried to access to this site, it was down. With the new logo, Farecast is apparently being built into part of the Microsoft Live Search platform.

In April this year, I did profiled a news pertaining to the purchase of Farecast by Microsoft, and even wondering whether Microsoft will going to merge the MSN Travel and Farecast, but with this relaunch site, Farecast will still remain as the same old Farecast that we know, and virtually nothing changes can be found on the landing page, not to mention the change of Farecast’s corporate logo. The only small change I find right now is from MSN Travel, where users will find airfares prediction and deals by Farecast in a small column located in the left hand side of MSN Travel.

There is a newly launched Hong Kong based startup Ziddu that introduced free file hosting service which is increasingly popular among Chinese. Ziddu has been available in English, Chinese Simplified, and Chinese Traditional. Since it offer unlimited storage space for users, and supports a variety of file formats such as audio, video, document, software, image, etc., it is becoming an attractive alternative to store files and share those among friends. Unlike other file hosting service providers that restrict users on certain areas, such as, hidden charge, or persuade users to upgrade their accounts to premium accounts, the only limitation you can find on Ziddu is that they limit maximum per file size upload is 200MB.

There are few very good features you can find on Ziddu’s offering. Put an example, if you upload several photos to this site, you can share with your friends, and your friends can view all your photos in an album or slide show through a Ziddu URL link. Additionally, Ziddu allowed users to download multiple file simultaneously, without any restriction on waiting time.

The market for free file hosting service has been thriving, albeit that the overall market size is small and storage vendors are pervasive on the Web. To attract users to use Ziddu, Ziddu is operating a business model which reward each unique download from the files you share on Ziddu and the provision of referral commission scheme. An user can earn from the unique downloads from a low of US100 to a high of US1,000. To know more how it works, you can visit the earning chart provided by Ziddu.

The other day I came across a new peer-to-peer renting platform namely Zilok that just publicly launched. This is a platform that you simply can rent anything. In first glance, based on its founding concept, it’s could be a totally constructive or devastating idea. On a constructive side, an user can save money on the things she want or need, by just renting instead of buying those kind of things. On the other side, who going to buy all new things if they have the choice of renting those online, and this might not help to boost the economy.

However, the co-founder and CEO of Zilok, Gary Cige has a different perspective, “Inspired by conservation and green movements in Europe, Zilok is the fun way to tackle over-consumption while expanding everyone’s access to the things they want and need—whether that is a scooter or Wii, a ratchet set or a tuxedo”. He said Zilok was about a movement, a green movement, where this platform provides opportunities for users to make money in a green way.

To rent a product on Zilok, an user can enter the query on the products she was looking for, and where she stay. And from the search results, select one of the items showed with confirmation of the request. Next pickup the item locally and pay the owner directly, it’s done. Since the search result will also built-in with the Google Maps service, an user can roughly know how far she can get the items through the renting system from the place she resides in.

Zilok is a San-Francisco startup, went live in public beta in November 2007 in the US, France and Belgium, and in Spring 2008 in the Netherlands and in the UK. Below is the brief introduction of Zilok in a video format. Enjoy.