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.

A new Canadian image search engine called TinEye has launched. It is a search engine project developed by Idée Inc. Though still in private beta, but is best understood by watching a demo video regarding its technology.

According to the demo video, TinEye has currently indexed more than 487 million images. Users who search the images through this search engine are not search by text, instead they need to upload an image or type an image’s URL link to the search bar. This contrast with the ordinary search engine approach, and TinEye potentially search all the images available on the Web and match the image an user uploaded, whether they’re in the form of photoshoped.

Additionally, TinEye will release its Firefox plugin for the Firefox users in near future.

Xobni, dubbed as the best plugin for Microsoft Outlook is entering the public beta phase. Now Microsoft Outlook users want their email clients to have extra capabilities such as effortless emails organization, better navigation or fast search can consider to install this plugin.

To install this plugin is not difficult, but once installed it will sit as a right-hand pane to one’s Microsoft Outlook client software. It represent the most significant addition to Microsoft’s email environment, in viewed of the features listed in the following.

Xobni can help to displays useful statistics about your email relationships, extracts phone numbers, exposes email’s hidden social network, help to view historical conversations in an easy-to-read manner, find attachments without searching, remind you on to do items, person need to stay in touch, upcoming appointments, bundled with an in-depth email usage analysis and fast search engine.

I also embedded a video clip on the variety of features found on Xobni in the below. Enjoy.

Drupal.org, a popular open source content management system (CMS) provider is officially launching the Drupal version 6.0. For a seven years old CMS startup since its first inception in January 15, 2001, and with the released of six major versions, for them it’s no doubt a remarkable achievement. In launching this version, Drupal reported that there are more than 1,600 issues have been resolved during this release cycle, and it also took them more than one year of development since the previous version 5.0. From this, you probably know how much contribution that Drupal community, comprised of over 700 individuals have submitted to this latest version. As expected, the core idea behind Drupal is to give its users a very good PHP & MySQL framework in building the powerful and robust Websites.

This version 6.0 began by satisfying some immediate and recognizable requirements and needs, such as an improved installer, ease the users in setting up the Drupal sites whether their purposes are for blogging or building the Websites. Language features have also been revamped, so if an user want to translate a post, translation can be done through the built-in interface, without having to install any additional module. Perhaps the most notable change in this version is the OpenID support. The OpenID client module has been added to the core of this version. In other word, users can sign on to a site with their OpenID accounts. To do this, Drupal has moved the long time favorite Drupal.module out of the Drupal package. Additionally, jQuery 1.2.3 is included in this version, a feature that jointly effort between the jQuery and Drupal communities.

Currently, there are over 100 third-party plugin modules already available for this newly Drupal release. With Drupal version 6.0, Drupal.org is poised to further growth, they should expected reaching more than 300,000 users by end of this year (Now they have registered 240,000 users).

via [CenterNetworks]

GigaSpaces, an infrastructure software solutions provider is launching an open source community site that called OpenSpaces today. This community site was founded with the ideas of open source that any developer can contribute to the OpenSpaces Framework, an open source framework built by Spring that run on top of the eXtreme Application Platform (XAP), a middleware platform developed by GigaSpaces. eXtreme Application Platform was aimed to solve the scalability of hardware problems and OpenSpaces Framework is on the other hand, a programming model providing Application Programming Interface (API) that allows developers to write high-performance applications in Plain Old Java Objects (POJOs), .Net, and C++ objects.

GigaSpaces intended to promote OpenSpaces as the dream land of developers by enable them to scale out of their applications in a simple way, and without any doubt, developers will develop the useful extensions, plugins, and etc. to this community. The value proposition of OpenSpaces lies in its:

- Smooth scaling up

- Developer Contest: a contest with $25,000 in total prizes and a $10,000 grand prize for developers that develop the most innovative applications with OpenSpaces Framework

Meanwhile, there are more than a dozen projects available on this OpenSpaces Framework.

In order to better manage and share the bookmarks for the users, Xerpi has announced the launched of community views today. Community views feature is designed to enhance their user experience and it’s the first movement of Xerpi in fulfilling its promise in freeing the users on the social bookmarking activities. Despite the popularity of social bookmarking, the use of sharing the links with an user’s friends in an simple yet organized format is rare. In technology settings, Xerpi designed a user interface that an user can drag and drop the link block into a new view in an easy manner. With now the availability of community views, Xerpi has made some of the page views available to the public, whether those who visit the views are registered users or not. Xerpi users can create as many community views as they want, with the customize layout and the page occupied by links. The view can be made as private, or to the public. Collaborative filtering can be achieved on Xerpi, which mean users can add, edit or update the links found on the community views. There are some public views , i.e. community views on Xerpi, some great examples are Everything Flamenco, and All iPhone. Currently, there are top 10 public views listed on Xerpi. Though the idea community views is sounds simple, but all the relevant links found in one page can help anyone who use this page grow her knowledge in the area she interested. If community views properly manage by a group of users, it might facilitate a large-scale collaboration. Imagine you share your favorite links with your friends through a view, and your friends share their favorites with you, all the users can thus benefit from this feature, even in a small scale. If you want to know more about how this works, you can read Xerpi’s blog entry that entitled,”Put it on my tab.”

Currently, Xerpi offered downloadable plugin and Xerpi Mobile to help users to manage their links in a one-click process or through the mobile devices. Each new user will be offered a new “My Xerpi Page” that all the links is categorized under well-designed headings such as Business, Shopping, Sports, Money, Travel, News, and etc., as shown in the below. Xerpi also identified the potential benefits of social bookmarking and social network and hence, they released the link info button in which it allow users see who else on Xerpi has the same favorites and access the like-minded users’ Facebook, MySpace or LinkedIn profiles, and then connecting these group of users across multiple social networking sites.

Xerpi is a New-York based social bookmarking startup and officially launched in last month, i.e. October 2007. It was originally called “Go Do” when it was first launched in the UK in 2004.

The other day I came across a new gaming site that called QQ Games. It is also designed as an official plugin for the AIM users to play games with their buddies online. In order to play the games that offered by QQ Games, one must become an AIM user and download the plugin that weight in at 11.8MB. The platform this QQ Games supports at this moment is Windows. In the meantime, the games available include Treasure Hunter, Robo, Match Master, Black Jack, and Pool. According to the statistical data compiled from Quantcast, QQ Games has attracted more than 160,000 monthly uniques barely in the US.

QQ, a strong domestic brand name in China when people come to using the instant messaging service. On the other hand, AIM is AOL’s instant messenger (IM), both have laid a strong foundation involving the Web startups based on the IM platform. The creation of QQ Games plugin is a great example of how a China company works with an American firm and provides a good case for the Chinese entrepreneur that was pondering how to go on from what has already been achieve in China and replicate the success in the US market.

This week, Adobe has released the first version of Flex Builder for Linux operating system. It was a relatively new product concept, install as a plugin version and developers can use it to build the Flex applications on the Linux platform. Right from the beginning, Flex Builder was positioned as a cross platform and open source framework that helped developers to create Web applications. Realizing the difficulty in create the Flex UI (user interface) and due to the fact that the majority number of designers encountered the issues on designer/developer workflow, Adobe also developed another software, i.e. Thermo. It is still in the Adobe labs, and the main differentiator among the different products that Thermo offered is “the ease of use” feature. There are great examples can be found on this Thermo page, as one can easily convert an artwork into a working component and MXML file will be converted, according to this software and this is particularly useful for those who develop the front-end of a Web application.

Without using it before, I have to admit it is far too early to judge how good or how bad these Adobe Flex Builder and Thermo. However, there is a video clip that I found on YouTube may well explained its future prospect, as embedded in the below.