Ash K. Gilpin

Yahoo! launched a new personal finance website, which brings together the Internet’s most useful tools and information to help consumers manage their personal finances. Yahoo! Personal Finance offers consumers a suite of new financial centers, covering every major area of personal finance, ranging from “Banking & Budgeting” to “Retirement.” The site continues the company’s media strategy of bringing together the best tools and information around a particular topic from the industry’s leading providers, while also expanding advertising inventory in one of the largest advertising categories.”The goal of Yahoo! Finance has always been to help our users make informed financial decisions, and now we’re able to do that across every aspect of their financial lives,” said Peggy White, general manager, Yahoo! Finance. “Not all of our users manage an investment portfolio, but we all manage a checkbook. This presents a huge opportunity for Yahoo! Finance to expand beyond our core investing-focused offerings.”

Yahoo! Finance has already established itself as the Internet’s number one destination for investing tools and information, and aims to expand its audience size and engagement with the addition of a new personal finance home.

Adobe announced the availability of Adobe Flash Player 9 for Linux, the next-generation client runtime for engaging with Flash content and applications on Linux open source operating systems. Adobe Flash Player 9 delivers a consistent cross-platform experience and extends unprecedented performance and advanced features to the broadest set of developers and users to date. Additionally, Linux developers can create, test and deploy rich Internet applications (RIAs) on the Linux platform using the free Adobe Flex 2 Software Developers Kit (SDK), Adobe Flash Player 9 and the free Flex Data Services 2 Express.

At Google, they are all about making all kinds of information accessible to everyone. The more up-to-date the information, the more valuable it is. This is particularly true in the world of finance; information, and timing of that information, is money. Today, real-time quotes are not freely and easily available on the web. Some websites offer one real-time quote at a time, but typically only after you have enrolled in a service and/or signed a complicated legal agreement. Other sites approach the problem differently and show you streaming delayed data, but that doesn’t solve the problem either — it masks it. What’s really important is getting free, easy and fast access to real-time quotes so you know how the market or your company is doing now, not as of twenty minutes ago.

As a result, Google has been working with the SEC, the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and the D.C. trade association, NetCoalition, to find a way to bring stock data to Google users in a way that benefits users and is practical for all parties. They have encouraged the SEC to ensure that this data can be made available to their users at fair and reasonable rates. Since then, the NYSE has moved the issue a great step forward with a proposal to the SEC which if approved, would allow you to see real-time, last-sale prices across all Google properties including Google Finance, Personalized Google, Google Mobile, and of course, Google.com. It won’t matter if you’re on Wall Street or Main Street — you’ll have free, easy and fast access to real-time prices from NYSE on Google.

So stay tuned…

Adobe announced Adobe RoboHelp 6, a complete, flexible and user-friendly system to create, manage and publish software help systems, knowledge bases and documentation for desktop and Web-based applications. As a key element of Adobe’s technical communications product line-up, which includes Adobe FrameMaker, Adobe Captivate and Adobe Acrobat, RoboHelp 6 provides all the desktop functionality that authors need to create advanced Help content, including table of contents, index, glossary, graphics, special effects and context-sensitive Help. Adobe RoboHelp Server 6, also introduced today, provides powerful server features that ensure the delivery of up-to-date online content, with real-time tracking of how end-users engage with the help system that provides valuable feedback to Help publishers.

“Adobe RoboHelp 6 is a major release and a key milestone in the product’s 15-year history,” said Don Walker, senior director of product marketing and business development at Adobe. “RoboHelp 6 strongly reinforces Adobe’s commitment to the technical communications market, giving authors what they need to easily develop, manage and maintain intuitive software help systems and knowledge bases.”

“RoboHelp has consistently led the market for the past decade, providing superior usability and productivity,” said Ron Linyard, President and CEO of Unwired Software and former VP of Engineering for eHelp. “The software is compatible with a host of formats and leverages the benefits of other Adobe products to give users a richer experience than other tools provide.”

Adobe Systems Incorporated announced the immediate commercial availability of Adobe Acrobat Connect, the first hosted web conferencing service to offer “always-on” personal meeting rooms. Acrobat Connect enables knowledge workers to instantly meet and conduct business online through real-time, interactive web conferencing that is simple to access and easy to use.

Unlike other web conferencing solutions, Acrobat Connect enables users to choose an easy-to-remember web address for their online personal meeting room that is unique to them, much like a phone number or e-mail address. Accessing a personal meeting room is easy and instant, requiring little more than a web browser and the ubiquitous Adobe Flash Player software, installed on more than 97 percent of Internet-connected computers worldwide. Because there is no cumbersome software to download, knowledge workers can easily hold spontaneous, ad-hoc meetings that are virtually hassle-free to join.

Apple has a history of using lawyers against bloggers. There was the now infamous Think Secret lawsuit, which may have had merit. But they also engage in clearly superfluous, bullying tactics as well. In August we received a letter from Apple’s lawyers demanding that we remove an embedded YouTube video showing features from OSX 10.5. We felt this was an extreme position to take - Apple could have simply requested YouTube to remove the video. And this wasn’t a trade secrets issue - they also had a very similar video up on their own website.

Today Apple is engaging in similar tactics against a number of bloggers who simply reported on the fact that someone created a skin for Windows Mobile phones that looks exactly like the new iPhone user interface.

The offending download page is here (the software has now been removed). Blogger Paul O’Brien simply linked to this download page and included a screenshot of the user interface and also received a cease & desist letter from Apple’s lawyers.

I think this is all complete nonsense. If Apple wants to go after the guy that made the Windows Mobile skin that looks like the iPhone, fine. But to bully bloggers who are simply reporting on this is another matter.

More on this story at TechMeme. As far as I can tell, the software is no longer available anywhere for download. If that is incorrect, please let us know.

Source: TechCrunch

David Sacks, former executive at PayPal, apparently has something left to prove. After PayPal’s $1.5 billion acquisition by eBay in 2002, Sacks went on to create Room 9 Entertainment, a production company that produced and financed the (really excellent) movie Thank You For Smoking. He purchased the Uma Thurman overdose house from the movie Pulp Fiction a while back. And now he has a new startup called Geni, with the audacious goal of “creating a family tree of the whole world.”

Adobe Systems Incorporated announced the delivery of Adobe® Flex™ Builder™ 2 for Macintosh, an extension of its powerful toolset for designing and deploying a new class of rich Internet applications. The release of Flex Builder 2 for the Macintosh helps developers and designers build engaging Web applications that combine the benefits of desktop software with the reach of the Web.

The Adobe Flex 2 product line provides developers with a comprehensive, integrated set of tools and technology for fast, end-to-end development of rich and innovative Web applications. With the free license version of the Flex 2 SDK, developers have everything they need to build and deploy complete rich Internet applications with no software licensing costs. Flex Builder 2, a powerful Eclipse® based integrated development environment (IDE), combines powerful ActionScript and MXML editors, a visual UI designer, and integrated debugging, to help developers build applications faster.

This is an update to my posting about AGLOCO.  In a few more weeks, AGLOCO viewbar should be up and ready for download.  Once you download, you will be able to start making money for just surfing the web, as you normally do, and from your friends doing the same that I have signed up under you in your network.

The hardest part about AGLOCO is getting people to sign up for it.  Most people are reluctant because they think there is some catch to it.  It really couldn’t be more harmless.  If you want to make money for simply surfing the web give AGLOCO a try, you can sign up here - it’s completely FREE.

Yahoo has officially bought MyBlogLog.  The size of deal has not yet been confirmed, but is rumored to be around $10 - $12 million.  MyBlogLog will be part of the Yahoo Developer Network and because of such - will probably allow users to log in via their Yahoo IDs which should help expand its user base, significantly.