Ash K. Gilpin

A company called jaxtr, which launches in private beta today, allows users to connect their personal phone to their digital personality.

Jaxr is a widget that users can put into their social networking sites or blogs. When someone has a jaxtr widget, it means you can call them in real-time. Jaxtr members assign a specific number to their widget. 

When a caller sees that widget, they can click it and jaxtr will ask them for their own phone number. The caller’s phone will ring, and when the caller picks up, jaxtr will ring the recipient who originated the widget. If the recipient was not available, jaxtr will notify them that they have a voicemail that they can access by calling into their jaxt service.

Fortunately, jaxtr never discloses the call recipient’s phone number so you can install a widget without ever exposing personal information. Users can also block callers or specify on a per-caller basis which callers can reach them live and which get routed to voice mail. The service is free but local phone rates apply.

With the launch of jaxtr’s beta, the company also announced that LinkedIn co-founder Konstantin Guericke has joined the company as chief executive officer.

“There is nothing less satisfying than creating a social network page or blog and not getting a response,” said Guericke. “Social networks are a catalyst for people to meet, and jaxtr ‘jacks up’ the power of networks to help users make new connections. By putting a widget on their social network page or blog, jaxtr users can hear from callers worldwide on their existing landline or mobile phone.”

To request a beta membership, visit jaxtr’s Web site.

Skype also released Skype 3.0 today, with several new social elements that enable things like virtual game playing and music recommendation through Last.fm.The new features in Skype 3.0 for Windows are called Extras and Public Chats. Extras enables game playing and music recommendation through Last.fm. There will also be something called “mood messages,” which will allow users to “explain how they are feeling and what they are doing with their friends and families, no matter where they happen to be,” according to Skype’s release.

Public Chats are essentially chat rooms, which are nothing new but Skype has not had them before. They have had group chatting capabilities but not theme-based chat rooms.

“Skype is about freeing communication on a global scale. Since the beginning we have enabled free conversations between friends and family – people that know each other,” said Stefan Oberg, GM of Telecoms & Desktop for Skype, in the release. “With Skype 3.0 and features like Public Chats, we are making it easier for people to make new friends and meet others that share a common interest from a global community of more than 136 million Skype users.”

Microsoft Corp. will share a part of its advertising revenues from its search engine with users, the company’s chairman Bill Gates said in a panel discussion on an Indian television channel.

Gates said that search engines like Google Inc. get their revenues from advertising because people use these search engines. “Google’s business model is not based on free software,” Gates said. “Their business model is based on advertisements from which they make a lot of money.”

But they don’t share these advertising revenues with the end users who help them get the revenue, Gates said. “Google keeps all of the money with itself,” he added.

(Through its AdSense program, Google does share advertising revenue with Web site publishers who carry ads that Google sells to advertisers.)

In its bid to share revenues with users, Microsoft may give free software or even cash to users, said Gates, who did not discuss further details.

The founders of new online gaming company Red 5 Studios are celebrating an $18.5 million round of financing today from Benchmark Capital and Sierra Ventures. Bill Gurley from Benchmark Capital is joining the board. The company previously raised working capital from WEBZEN pursuant to a game development deal earlier this year.

Red 5 Studios was founded by some of the key people behind Blizzard’s World of Warcraft, which claims over 6.5 million users. CEO Mark Kern told me that they broke away from Blizzard because they had a difference in opinion over the appropriate strategy for the next generation on online games, and that he’s aiming for Red 5 Studios to be “the Pixar of onling gaming” by creating games that are distributed and promoted by others. Look for their first titles to be launched in a year or so, initially through WEBZEN.

Socialtext, a corporate wiki tool, released Socialtext Unplugged today at the LeWeb3 conference in Paris. It is an unplug icon that lets users work on their wiki even when they are not connected to the Internet.

While still online, users can click the blue Unplug icon, which will then download a selection of wiki pages so that those pages become available offline. Once a user comes back online, the changes will be automatically uploaded.

“The blue Unplugged icon is similar to an RSS icon, which signals to a user there is a different way to use the content outside the browser. In this case, to use the content offline,” wrote Ross Mayfield, CEO of Socialtext, in his blog.

Socialtext Unplugged is an application within a single HTML file. When the Unplug icon is activated, it downloads pages as a Zip file, although re-synching occurs through Socialtext’s Wiki Web Services.

A friend of mine told me about this site, www.stockmarketblog.com.  I really likes the publisher’s overall objective of blogging about his daily stock investing habits and his goal of turning $20,000 into $1,000,000.  Going through some of his archived postings, I see he is currently up.  I find that his approach is not really all that aggressive.  He buys a stock and waits for it to go up 15-20 cents and then sells.  This isn’t his approach on every stock; however, I have seen a consistency.  Anyways, he’s up and his method apparently seems to be working for him; however, a little slower than I’d like to see.  I, myself, am quite the beginner at stock trading.  I started investing heavily in Movie Gallery (MOVI) months back while the stock was gaining ground only to see it slip out from under my fingers from the reportings of a poor quarter.  However, the stock is back on the rise.  Let’s hope I can recoup what I’ve put into it.  And maybe, just maybe I’ll come out on top with some profit.

Anyways, I plan on keeping my eye on Stock Market Blog to see if I can repeat a steady consistency of stock market earnings like I have seen exhibited on that blog.

Google has added some new layers to Google Earth. The new layers are part of what is now called the “Geographic Web.”

The Geographic Web is a mashup of content from Wikipedia, the Google Earth Community, and Panoramio, a geographical photo sharing site. As you zoom into a specific location, you can see place marks of points of interest, user-generated photos, and selected Wikipedia articles. Hopefully it will remain uncluttered as content fills in but it appears that Google is only using select information in the Geographic Web from the three user-generated feeds.

There has been some mention on the internet about how AGLOCO’s upcoming Viewbar is spyware. AGLOCO’s chief internet privacy officer recently discussed at length about these comments, a couple of which we want to reiterate here:

Spyware entails the following characteristics: 1) It’s installed without your permission; 2) It surreptitiously tracks you; 3) it is difficult if not impossible to turn off or remove; and, 4) it sends your information to an unknown and untrustworthy entity where you have no control over what happens to it.

Simply put, AGLOCO’s Viewbar does none of the above. Why?

1) You have to actively install the Viewbar; 2) You have to turn it on in order for it to track your surfing habits and earn your hours; 3) You can easily turn it off and uninstall it at will; and, 4) your info is backed up by perhaps the best Privacy Policy out on the net, which gives you explicit information about what happens with your data and how you can delete it from our system if you desire.

There are a lot of questions about when the Viewbar will be released. The Viewbar is currently in closed beta testing to make absolutely sure that it is fully functioning before its release to all Members. However, it will be released to people in the order they have signed up, so the earlier your referrals sign up the earlier you will start earning when the Viewbar is released. So best to have your friends sign up early

Give AGLOCO a try, you can sign up here - it’s completely FREE.

This is a follow up to my previous posting. Alex Tew, the 21-year-old student from a small town in England who created the Million Dollar Homepage, has launched Pixelotto. The site started on Tuesday, December 5th and has already sold $124,300 of pixel advertising. The big selling point about Pixelotto is you get a chance to win $1 million. Will you be the lucky one to win?

Traineo is a health and fitness support site where users report their weight, diet, and exercise daily to a group of friends who help monitor and support one another. Traineo is not what I would consider a social networking site because, unlike MySpace, the goal is not to have as many friends as possible. The goal is to have a select group who you trust to help you through the drudgery of staying in shape.

The workout logs are also quite simple. You select from the types of workouts available, tell it how long you did it for, and how intense you felt it was. For example, I told Traineo that I wanted to lose five pounds and the weigh-in lets me give regular updates to track my progress.

Users that are a bit less shy about their progress can join larger support groups, either the sponsored ones, or ones that revolve around different demographics like mothers or tech enthusiasts.

Traineo was written by some pretty fit software developers. A number of athletes work for the company, including McLean-Foreman who has represented Great Britain in track and was the Harvard track captain in 2004.