Yesterday Mobile Voip service provider Yeigo announced their new software release (Yeigo 2.1) in style by revealing their brand spanking new website. The website has a fresh new design sporting a nifty flash slider featuring Yeigo’s highlited functionality and offerings.
Also announced, Yeigo lite, a slimmed down version of Yeigo 2.1 with features like staying in touch with your contacts and portability to various instant messengers like MSN, Gtalk, ICQ and AIM.
Here’s some words from their blog -
At 00:33 this morning, we brought the new Yeigo.com international site online. Codenamed Lina, the site was built to be the launch vehicle of the Yeigo 2.1 Edition application.
Yeigo 2.1 Edition – Featured Highlights:
Improved efficiency to make your data & your battery go further.
Best voice quality, ever.
Improved interface design.
An assortment of new and unique features, which we will unveil in the days to come.
New access point management makes switching simple.
Microsoft has won the fight to be Facebook’s new investor and advertising partner, beating Google in some heated negotiations and getting a stake in the company. Microsoft has not bought Facebook, but it now owns 1.6%-2% of the fastest rising social network, paying $240 million for the stake and setting Facebook’s value at $15 billion.
Under the $15 billion valuation, other investors in Facebook now have some idea how much their stakes are worth. The New York Times explains:
The Microsoft investment throws the value of the holdings of Facebook investors into the stratosphere. Mark Zuckerberg, the 23-year-old Facebook founder who dropped out of Harvard to build the company, owns a 20 percent share which is now valued at $3 billion. Accel Partners, the venture capital firm that invested $12.7 million in May 2005 and owns 11 percent of Facebook, now holds stock worth $1.65 billion.
The two companies will work together on new forms of advertising, including data from Facebook.
Among things this money will be spent on: Facebook expects to hire a lot more engineers, doubling the number of employees to over 700 next year. Microsoft on the other hand gets a piece of what is going to be essentially the biggest people search engine on the planet.
So what does this all mean to me? Well as a facebook app developer, it means there will be much better monetization options coming, more robust infrastructure, and a lot more money flowing into the facebook eco-system. The Facebook economy has just had a major booster shot.
Bandwidth blog has been tipped off from an internal source that South Africa’s internet giant, 24.com, has stepped into the social networking realm with their latest offering, Laaik.it. By recreating a popular US web 2.0 concept with South African flavour, Laaik.it has followed in the footsteps of the popular US based Digg.com just like another local social news startup Muti. Laaik.it allows you to submit, rate and discuss news submitted by you or other members of the community. This has proved to be a popular concept in one of the world’s biggest internet markets – the states – invented by American web entrepreneur Kevin Rose from Digg.com. Social news sites have handed the homepage editing capabilities to the members of its community compared to older more traditional news portals that have a hand full of editors that control what content is shown on the homepage. With sites like Muti and Laaik the users can decide what news hits the homepage by voting stories up or down. This concept is based on the wisdom of crowds theory which believes that eventually the masses will decide what news is good and whats not. Read the rest of this entry »
For those of you who couldn’t pay $4000 to get into Web 2.0 Summit – or couldn’t make the trip – the organizers have started to release videos of the main sessions on blip.tv. Below is the founder of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg’s video session and quite a few other. Mark was in is usual flip flops and t-shirt – I’m surprized he didn’t have a bowl of corn flakes handy.. Look at the thumbnails down the right and select the Facebook interview – “Conversation with Mark Zuckerberg”
YouTube is headed to Australia. With its obvious efforts to expand globally, Australia is its next stop. The video-sharing network is also expected to launch a local YouTube site tomorrow for New Zealand. Australia’s new YouTube Site can be found at au.youtube.com.
The local site will be featuring relevant video content from Australia, from Australian users. Along with this launch is the revealing of several new local media channels from Southern Cross View, SKY News, ABC, Network, TEN, Seven Network and Fairfax Media. The launching of YouTube’s local Australian site comes shortly after the video-network made moves in a handful of other countries, including Brazil, France, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Poland, Spain and the UK. Surely South Africa should be next?
Yeigo was founded by three UCT students from Cape Town, South Africa. Yeigo is an innovative mobile voip application for your phone which you can use to make cheap voice calls and send text messages. In fact calls to other users with Yeigo is FREE and you can save up to 80% to non yeigo users. Incorporating some Mxit functionality you can chat to other Yeigo users for free, as well as connect to users of Google Talk, MSN, Yahoo!, AIM, ICQ and Jabber – right from your mobile phone. You can check if your hand set is compatible here, although most are.
A reliable source informs me that they will be launching the new Yeigo website sometime this week. But the latest software release is out. I don’t have all the details of the latest version but got some rather tasty info from a internal source – Yeigo Lite is the slimmed down version of the app with some decent limited functionality with all the bells and whistles listed above together with two new functions “Holler” and call back. Read the rest of this entry »
The launch of the Facebook Platform led to a massive increase in Facebook’s user base, not to mention a slew of applications that developers are hoping will manage to generate some kind of revenue.
As expected, Rupert Murdoch and Chris DeWolfe announced the upcoming MySpace platform at the Web 2.0 Conference tonight, with the new platform being a competitor to the Facebook platform. Check out Mashable’s coverage here.
From the looks of it, MySpace will be firstly offering up a directory of third-party widgets that have already been created for use of MySpace, helping users find content for their profiles more easily. This is a move that Apple has done a couple of days ago as well, acknowledging the benefits of supporting the developers that support their platforms. The open platform is schedule for release in the next couple of months, which will provide a set of APIs for developers to create apps that incorporate MySpace data, such as friends lists.
An interesting twist to the rumor of other social networks also readying their open developer platform is that, Tagged, the 7th largest social networking service on the web, (according to comScore) are building an almost exact replica of the Facebook API, to make it as easy as possible for developers to add their creations to the social network. This is a clever move for Tagged which will allow a stream of already created Facebook apps be launched on their network.
Google has just announced standard Gmail accounts will get a storage increase as part of the Infinity+1 plan. Standard users will get a rough increase of about 1GB of space, plus creeping increases over time. While businesses and schools that are part of the Google Apps program will see storage increase to an unspecified amount (likely a few extra GB). Premier Edition users will notice a change from 10GB to 25GB, for the same fees they currently pay. ($50/user, per year)
Jaiku announced on their homepage today that the big G has acquired them -
“While it’s too soon to comment on specific plans, we look forward to working with our new friends at Google over the coming months to expand in ways we hope you’ll find interesting and useful. Our engineers are excited to be working together and enthusiastic developers lead to great innovation. We look forward to accomplishing great things together. In order to focus on innovation instead of scaling, we have decided to close new user sign-ups for now. But fear not, all our Jaiku services will stay running the way you are used to and you will be able to invite your friends to Jaiku.”
There will be inevitable comparison’s with Google’s acquisition of Dodgeball, which largely came to nothing, but it would appear that the time for social networking and blogging via mobile has come. Google’s ability to add scale and marketing muscle to Jaiku should be putting Twitter on the back-foot right now.
Is Facebook planning on launching an MP3 store? Mashable this morning linked to a post on All Facebook that notes an “extremely reliable anonymous source” tipped off blogger Nick O’Neill that Facebook is prepping to launch an in-house competitor to iTunes.One of the things that has driven Facebook’s popularity since it opened to the general public was its clean interface. MySpace had gotten so over run with ads that you could barely navigate the site any more. Now Facebook wants to follow what could possibly be the same route, and not only that, but branch in to a market that doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense for a social network.
Facebook has reportedly “been searching for a CEO to head up this new subdivision” and has “been pursuing agreements with a number of record labels.” O’Neill writes that his most recent unnamed informant actually knows one of the people being interviewed for the job. We put in a call to Facebook to inquire further into the matter, but haven’t heard back yet.
While “rumor” seems to have become Facebook’s second name lately, maybe this lead has some substance. Facebook’s roughly 40 million users are clearly music fans — iLike, the third-party music discovery app, is the eighth most popular application on the site which means it could be a good fit.
Microsoft has won the fight to be 
Yeigo
