We decided that we should start a series of Firefox Extentions articles on BandwidthBlog and will start today. The first one to be reviewed is Search Status by Quirk.

The best thing about the Firefox Search Status add-on is that it won’t interfere with the pages you load, won’t eat memory or slow down your connection. It stays in your browser bar and shows you the PageRank, Alexa Rank and Compete Rank of the website you’re visiting. It also features a keyword density analyzer, highlights no-follow links, makes link report, meta-tags, whois for the domain, shows you the robots.txt file, shows indexed pages and backward links. You can view all of these by a simple right mouse button click.

For a search engine marketer these are incredible powerful tools, and if you plan to do SEO on your own it’s a must. It looks like this:

So far I haven’t heard any complaints about Search Status by Quirk. Let us know if you used it, if it was useful or if you had trouble with it. Download it from their website.

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Located in California, Smaato the company that wants to be the Google Adsense of mobile phones has managed to raise $3.5 million in a Series A funding and will use the money to develop their Smaato Open Mobile Advertising (SOMA) platform. The product will be delivered to phones that run on JAVA, Symbian, Windows Mobile, and Palm’s OS.

The company managed to secure advertisers like Allianz, Toyota, Microsoft, Mercedes-Benz, Martini or Weekly in Touch to trial out their service.

“Since founding Smaato we are experiencing a growing interest in targeted mobile advertising. With Smaato we are at the forefront for developing innovative advertising solutions to reach the mobile consumer. With the support of our international investors and our advisory board of experienced and globally connected individuals, we will continue to expand our reach within the industry on a global scale,” stated Ragnar Kruse, the Co-Founder and CEO of Smaato.

I still think Google has an advantage, but if Smaato plays the cards right, this could turn out great for them. Meanwhile, they’re near the pool.

SmaatoBlog

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The London-based company that revolutionized advertising, allowing small and medium websites to sell advertising on their own, OpenAds, managed to get a second round $15.5 million funding led by Accel Partners, PaidContent said. The money will be used for hiring more staff and product development but I can only ask, how will they make money from an open source product?

The answer could be simple,  because OpenAds just announced they will offer a hosted version of their software. No need to upload the files and host it yourself. But still is this a good business plan? Probably so, because they may think of a commercial version.

Take Wordpress for example with their free blog hosting until you need more features and you give them some money. Wish you luck OpenAds and we shall see what the $15.5M funding can do for them.

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Introducing our latest blogging editor to BandwidthBlog, uber Tech Geek, Johan du Toit

Great developments in the ICT market this year (2007) opened up great new opportunities to save some hard earned cash. Vodacom dropped data rates, by as much as 61%, while also expanding 3G networks. MTN followed. Smartphones took off in a big way and clever developers seized the opportunity to get compatible software to market.

Fring is such an application. This great piece of software is easy to use, while also being feature rich. Registration and software installation is quick and easy. Just visit http://www.fring.com. It is compatible with most smartphones. It enables you to make calls to your Skype®, MSN® Messenger, ICQ, Google Talk™, SIP and Twitter contacts. The best part is that it is all free. You only pay for your data, but at 10MB per hour it is hardly worth mentioning. The only obstacle to all voice communication to become totally free is that everyone has not installed it yet. It will happen. The drive is huge from the likes of Skype, Google, Fring and Yeigo to become the dominant player in the mobile VoIP arena.

I thought a comparison between Fring and Telkom would be of great interest to us South Africans, since our call and data rates are amongst the highest in the world. If you drop your landline and use this information, you could save good money. You also get to go totally mobile for good.

Just the fact that you have read this far, must mean that you probably already subscribe to some data deal. In my research I used the most expensive rate at R2.00/MB, so you should save even more. To simplify matters, only peak minutes was considered. This makes the table below relevant for small businesses. A thumb suck total, of 300 minutes per month, was divided into different call types. Voipcheap (http://www.voipcheap.com) has the lowest VoIP rates in the world. All calls to the USA are free! All UK landline calls is also free. In this example the saving was 46%. I say it is well worth it. Go for it.

The Chart:

Other South Africa alternatives - Yeigo

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Facebook users can now check Gmail from their Facebook account with a new Facebook application called Fmail. Fmail is built on Gmail Lite, and displays gmail in an Inframe inside the Facebook account. Users have multiple tabs for mailbox actions like inbox access, spam folder and are also provided with a separate compose button.

Fmail application is a nice utility and in the days to come new features are bound to be added. The Fmail application has been developed by two MIT college students, Courtland Allen and Aaron Rosado.

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eBay today announced that Niklas Zennstrom (co-founder of Skype, Kazaa and Joost) has stepped down as CEO of Skype. Zennstrom, who co-founded Skype in 2003, will become non-executive chairman of the Skype Board of Directors. Michael van Swaaij, eBay’s Chief Strategy Officer, will become acting CEO until a permanent successor is found.

eBay also announced that it has paid $530 million to settle all of its future obligations under the earn-out agreement signed with certain Skype shareholders when eBay acquired Skype in 2005. The earn-out agreement provided for payments of up to approximately $1,700 based upon specific active user, revenue and gross profit targets that were to be achieved in 2008 and the first half of 2009.

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Joost, the impeccably pedigreed, funded, and hyped Internet TV platform is releasing its software to the general public on Monday.

Joost is seeing 50,000 beta downloads per week, and with open access hopes to receive between two million and three million users by the end of the year (for this figure the company counts unique user IDs, not downloads of every upgrade of its player), CEO Mike Volpi said in an interview last week (see the video below).

So, is it going to kill off TV as we know it? Probably not yet, is the short answer. The problem is, although it’s video - and very good quality video at that - it currently has to live on your PC, which means the office or spare room rather than living room.

“Today marks the beginning of an exciting phase for Joost – we are officially open for business,” said David Clark, executive vice president of global advertising for Joost. “We’re enabling our viewers to share Joost with their friends and family, and we’re working collaboratively with the world’s leading advertisers and agencies to design a new ad model for the next generation of television.”

Last week, Joost announced that it had signed more than 30 blue-chip brands, including The Coca-Cola Company, HP, Intel and Nike, as advertising launch partners. Beginning today, advertisements from some of the ad launch partners will begin to play on the platform. Advertisements from all ad launch partners will be on Joost later this month.

Previously available in an expanded beta, Joost now is available to an unlimited number of friends, family and colleagues of existing beta testers. Starting today, when beta testers visit the “Invite Friends” widget in the “My Joost” area of Joost, they will be able to invite anyone they know to the Joost community. Both new and existing users can download a new version of Joost today.

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We heard last week that Wordpress would be launching a new release today. Well, it’s here. Tagging and tag clouds are now available for Wordpress bloggers. There’s also the new update notification feature that lets you know when there’s a new release for WordPress, or when any other plug-ins you have get an update as well.

There’s also the cleaning up of URLs, which redirects post with changed slugs so links won’t go bad, redirects URLs that get cut off in emails, and more. This particular feature should help you with SEO as well. Be sure to check it out. See here for more WordPress resources and tools. Download the new version..

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Another bout of complications has plagued Skype. A worm has been detected, and it’s only affecting Windows Skype users.

The virus is being spread by a link that appears in a chat message, asking you to click on a web link. This directs to a page that asks you to run an application that will infect your computer. Three antivirus companies are aware of the malware, and have updated their software to stop the virus from taking effect. These companies include F-Secure, Kaspersky Lab, and Symantec, and they will all detect and remove the worm.

Related skype news

Skype comes out of the dark

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Wordpress has released version 2.2.3. This is a security and bug fix for the 2.2.x branch not the new (to be released later this month) 2.3

If you are looking for whats changed or was effected you can see the bug reports this addresses here. They also provide what files are being changed incase you have h4×0red your wordpress (i dont recommend that).

You can download it here

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