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Thursday, August 16, 2007

Most Useful iPhone Site Yet: Meebo

Facebook may have the best looking iPhone site to date, but Meebo for the iPhone is more useful, as it brings instant messaging, finally, to that phone. ICQ, AIM, MSN, Yahoo, and Jabber/Google are supported.

Meebo took its time building the site, which is actually their first mobile application. There is no special URL, just go to meebo.com from an iPhone and the browser will load the correct code.

The application scales either way you hold the phone (I recommend vertically to see contact, horizontally to chat - see pictures). All of your settings from Meebo are retained on the iPhone, including any avatar you’ve created. And people who you’ve had recent conversations with are always listed on the top of your buddy list.

I have a couple of complaints with Meebo. First, you still can’t access Skype text chat - a limitation of Skype, not Meebo. Also, if you leave the browser to take a call, send a text message, whatever, you are auto-logged off of Meebo and IM. This is an iPhone limitation and underscores the need for real IM chat software for the iPhone. Adium is what I use on my desktop Mac. Hopefully we’ll someday see something similar for the phone, too.

We previously covered FlickIM, which has a very nice AIM-only chat app for the iPhone. Mundu and eBuddy also have their own iPhone products as well. Mundu works well, although they may charge for it at some point; eBuddy only connects with MSN, Yahoo, and AIM.

Thursday, August 9, 2007

SF Chronicle Trims Business Section; The Best Are Gone

We all knew big layoffs were coming at the San Francisco Chronicle, but I had hoped that they’d try to keep at least one of the business/tech writers that is responsible for my occasional purchase of a copy of the paper. No luck.

The paper that is losing $1 million per week could fire every journalist it has on staff and still not break even. But that hasn’t stopped them from trying. 80 reporters, photographers and copy editors plus 20 in management will be gone by end of summer.

And the best reporters aren’t waiting around to see who gets laid off. They are walking out the door, into better jobs.

Jessica Guynn and Dan Fost are gone. They the reporters who were regularly attending events, talking to tech execs and developers and generally gunning for the interesting stories. Both resigned. Fost is freelancing. Guynn got a raise and a new job at the L.A. Times covering silicon valley.

Ellen Lee, Ryan Kim, Verne Kopytoff and Tom Abate remain to cover business and technology. They are fine writers, but the loss of Guynn and Fost is a serious blow to the newspaper. I found that when I was reading an interesting story in the Chronicle, it was usually written by one of them.

One bit of good news. David Lazarus, the brilliant strategist who suggested that only newspapers are qualified to do “real” journalism, is among those who’ve left. I’ll miss his occasional rants, but his blog-hate wasn’t helping the newspaper.

Al Saracevic, who’s taken an occasional public shot at TechCrunch, was promoted to Business Editor - he now controls the entire business section of the paper. Al is an incredibly nice guy but, like Lazarus, he’s firmly in the “does’t get new media” camp.

These losses may have made the bottom line look marginally better for this fast sinking ship. But losing the talent isn’t going to make people want to read the paper. They should have done everything they could to have kept Fost and Guynn.

Pickle Purchased For $4.1 Million

Photo and video sharing site Pickle.com has been purchased by Scripps Networks for a reported $4.1 million. Scripps is the company behind many lifestyles brands like DIY, the Food Network, HGTV, and Great American Country. This is their second web purchase after Recipezaar last month. We covered the site’s launch last June.

Pickle is different from a lot of other sharing sites in that it relies heavily on email and mobile phone submissions to personal and shared project pages. It’s essentially a multi-modal service for dumping your content into a bucket of content that you can expose through their widget. The service supports uploads of photos and videos from computers, mobile phones or digital cameras to any Web site. Scripps plans on incorporating the product into supporting content sharing across their existing lifestyle properties. It was created by an Arlington based company called Incando.

You can see an example of their content sharing widget after the jump (auto-plays).
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Monday, March 5, 2007