Yahoo to Google: We Have an Answer to Universal Search

Yahoo Glue, currently being beta tested in India, is a new search concept that brings together text, images and video into search results, much like what Google is already doing. Glue pages currently work across several different keyword categories such as sports, health and travel.

Why did Yahoo choose India?

India is an important market for Yahoo. They have a lot of content and a large number of developers to be dedicated to the project and who can develop applications around Yahoo’s technology.

Yahoo is showing the world that it’s alive and well, having recently shrugged off Microsoft’s takeover bid

Create Your Own Fonts with Fontstruct

Fontstruct has developed a simple editor that allows you to build, share and download fonts free of charge. The fonts are constructed out of geometric shapes that are arranged in a grid pattern. Users can share their “FontStructions” in the gallery to allow other people to download them or copy them to make their own variations.

Zenbe: Organize All of Your Email Accounts in One Place

Zenbe is a new service (in private beta) that organizes all of your email accounts in one place. Your calendar, task lists, address book and Facebook friends are all accessible in the same window. Best of all, it doesn’t have any ads. For those of you who are discouraged by Gmail’s contextual ad delivery next to your email content, this would be a great alternative. Many of us have multiple email addresses, further complicating things. Zenbe aims to help you better manage it all.

 

I’m back!

Apologies to the two people that probably read this blog, but I’m back to writing again. I was on a brief hiatus due to a new arrival to the family. My baby girl was born in March and it’s taken me a while to get back in the groove. I promise to keep the blog updated daily! Thanks for your support.

Google Calendar Releases Outlook Sync

Google Calendar has just released the much-requested tool that will allow you to sync with Microsoft Outlook. You decide the information flow: 2-way (sync back and forth with each other) or 1-way.  You can also set how often the sync occurs. The program runs in your system tray, so you can check the icon to see when it’s syncing up. Google Calendar Sync is available via a free download here.

Simple Property Management with Streetfolio

 

Managing property can be a complicated process filled with high management fees, paperwork and bad service. Streetfolio is trying to streamline the process by providing simple tools that allow you to manage your own properties. The interface allows you to manage your mortgage, insurance, contacts and cashflow and track your lease history and rent increases. Here is an example of the cash flow analytics view:

Streetfolio has pricing plans that start at free and go up to $10 for 5 properties, plus $1 for each additional.

WaveMaker’s Visual Ajax Studio: Drag and Drop Ajax Development

 

A few weeks ago, I wrote about Tersus, a service that allows you to build quick ajax web apps visually by using flow diagrams. But what if you want to make the process even simpler? WaveMaker’s Visual Ajax Studio allows you drag and drop widgets onto a form for dead simple ajax development. WaveMaker’s Studio reduces the time and cost of delivering new business applications. Customers have accelerated the development of applications by as much as 67% and cut the lines of code written by 98%.  Here are the key features:

• Drag & Drop Assembly
• LiveLayout™
• Push to Deploy™: One-touch application deployment
• Visual Data Binding
• SOAP, REST and RSS web services
• Leverage existing CSS, HTML and Java
• Deploys a standard Java .war file
• Free

Web Analytics Goes Open Source with Piwik

Piwik is an open-source web analytics platform that aims to be a direct competitor to Google Analytics, although as it exists, it’s not exactly a good replacement. The cool thing is anyone can develop plug-ins under the GPL license. You can customize your analytics interface based on your needs, by adding or removing plug-ins - this is where they are differentiating from Google Analytics. Another differentiator is that you “own your own data,” meaning that Piwik is installed on your server and not hosted somewhere else. You can retrieve your statistics from using the open API, which publishes the data in all popular formats including JSON, XML and PHP.

Piwik is available via a free download. Or, you can try out the online demo.

RareShare.org: A Social Hub for Rare Disorders

Boulder, Colorado based RareShare.org is a new initiative that aims to connect those who share the same rare disorders. Each community will offer tools for people to share experiences, explore treatment options and find support among others affected by the same, or similar, disorders. This is an underserved market because a relative small number of people suffer from these disorders.  The site claims that a combined 30 million people suffer from these rare disorders in the U.S. and Europe, with some 1,500 orphan diseases in the U.S. alone.

RareShare is currently in a closed alpha (invite only). It is privately held and self-funded.

Google Health to Pilot Service with Cleveland Clinic

 

Google is ready to test out it’s Health portal with the Cleveland Clinic, according to CNN. The pilot is said to involve 1,500 to 10,000 patients who have volunteered to make their health records available through Google’s service. The Clinic already stores patients’ medical records online through a proprietary system called MyCharts, so the transfer is supposed to be pretty seamless. There are many concerns about the new service, including the fact that the stored medical records aren’t protected by HIPAA.

 A screenshot from Google Blogoscoped shows what the interface could look like:

Google hasn’t yet made an announcement on the planned pilot launch. Google’s announcement is here.