Filed under: Business, Design, Developer, Blogging

LinkedIn, the professional networking site, has released new features, including a homepage redesign and developer platform. Sure this is going to be a little more useful to business users, but does LinkedIn need to expand and focus outside the business sector to make things stickier?

LinkedIn’s new focus seems like an effort to emulate what Facebook has had with outside web applications. The new LinkedIn beta homepage provides customizable modules that display network updates in a dashboard format. This allows users to potentially be more productive by showing what contacts are up to, what news is most important to colleagues and questions and answers from your specific industry with the use of familiar feeds. But why stop there?

People that do business together and are connected via outside interests could possibly do a lot more on the site if more personal based modules were available. However, this is just the beginning of a component that is part of Google’s OpenSocial developer platform so we will have to wait and see what becomes of it.

Nonetheless it’s great to see that LinkedIn is growing…mind you slowly, and cautiously building upon their platform. Will it manage to pull back business users that slipped away to Facebook for more personal networking with these developments? Could it possibly ever attract younger users?

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Filed under: Business, Design

Designers, what’s the number one thing your customers ask of you when they see your mockups? “Make my logo bigger, please!”

Companies spend large amounts of money on ad runs and web developments and want to stand out. Well, there are now a few things on the market that can help businesses increase the size of logos on the internet and in print materials, fix whitespace, easily create starbursts, make designs stand out with fluorescent colors and create emotional ads.

This suite of six products will ensure customers are happy with their designs, all for just 3 easy payments of $29.99. Check out the infomercial to see if it might work for you! Also makes a great stocking stuffer!

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Filed under: Business, Internet, Open Source

Open source project hosting service SourceForge is launching a marketplace for users to sell their services. No, SourceForge won’t be charging for access to the 160,000 projects hosted on the site. Instead, users will be able to charge for support and advertise other services they provide.

For example, say you’ve got an open source business application hosted on SourceForge. Users can download it and use it for free. But where do they go for tech support? They could rely on the usual tools of the open source community, turning to message boards, email, and IRC channels for support. Or they could pay you a fee and receive priority support.

Or if you’re capable of developing applications, you can advertise your services. It’s free to post a listing, but SoureForge will take a percentage of any resulting transactions, usually around 10%.

Right now there are only about 700 listings in the marketplace, which just emerged from beta testing. But SourceForge has 1.7 million registered users, so that number could grow very swiftly.

[via InfoWorld]

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Filed under: Business, Internet, Microsoft, Beta

Last year Microsoft released Internet Explorer 7, next year (or the year after) the company will launch World wide web Explorer 8. Seriously, how do those creative folks in Redmond keep coming up with these clever names?

We can’t tell you what IE8 will look like, or what improvements it will have over IE7. All we know is that it’s got a name. Apparently the IE developer team has been referring to the next version of Internet Explorer as IE8 for a while, and when Bill Gates recently dropped that name, it kind of sealed the fate.

According to the Internet Explorer blog, some other possible names included IE VIII, IE1000 (eight in binary), IE Desktop On the web Web Browser Live Professional Ultimate Edition for the World wide web. Honestly, we were a bit surprised they didn’t go with the last one, but then we realized that it might have been a joke.

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Filed under: Business, Design, Developer, Internet, Office, Web services, Beta, web 2.0

We covered Live Documents, the new on the internet office documents competition last month, that’s about to make a move to steal some market share aware from Zoho, ThinkFree and Google.

Live Documents has released some screen grabs from its interface, giving a tiny more insight into what they’re all about. The Flash based interfaces do resemble what Microsoft currently has on the market, but add the capability to collaborate. Screenshots include Presentations, Spreadsheets and Documents.

Live Documents does reference Microsoft, and Microsoft’s Office applications quite a bit when speaking about its own suite, and the look and feel closely resembles what MS offers, so we’ve to assume that they’ve relied heavily on Office as a starting point. Is this a bad thing? Not if you’re looking to quickly build and sell the business.

We’ll have to test Live Documents when it becomes readily available to see what its winning points are, and whether or not it will become a major player in the on the internet office space.

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Filed under: Business, Internet, Features, Windows, Macintosh, Web services, Google

While we’re on the topic of ways to access Google’s analytic tools without a web browser, Google Analytics Reporting Suite breathes new life into Google’s already powerful web analytics tools.

Not only does this tool let you access your data without a web browser, but the user interface is much prettier and more responsive than Google’s default UI. Since a video is worth a few thousand words, we figured the ideal way to demonstrate just how easy it is to manage your data was to shoot a short video, which you can see above.

You can run all the same reports using this tool as you would from Google’s site, they just load more swiftly. You can also export reports as PDF, XLS, or XML files.

Analytics Reporting Suite runs on Adobe AIR, so you’ll need to download and install AIR on your Windows or Mac machine before you can use the reporting suite.

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Filed under: Business, Blogging, Google

If you have Google AdSense on your web site in the hopes of making a few bucks, odds are you spend way too much of your day obsessively reading your AdSense reports. But for a company that has a robust web analytics tool, Google’s AdSense reports are a bit thin. You can find out how many people are clicking on ads and how much money you’re making, but there’s no graphs and no good way to view data that’s more than a few months old.

Fortunately, there’s a third celebration solution that gives you a much fuller picture of your AdSense Stats. CSV AdStats can download AdSense CSV files manually or automatically and loads them into a powerful analysis tool. Now you can get a solid picture of your earnings over time. CSV AdStats lets you separate out data from custom channels, or compare one channel with another. And best of all, unlike Google’s web tools, CSV AdStats lets you view day by day data from the time you opened your AdSense account.

The program does have a few rough edges. It appears to have been designed in French, and even if you select English as your default language, some menu items will appear in French anyway. But CSV AdStats is still incredibly useful for a free download, so we’ll let that slide.

[via gHacks]

Related:

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Filed under: Business, Finance, World wide web

There are plenty of ways for small business owners to create and track invoices. You could just fill out a Word template every time you need to bill a client, or you could use free software like Microsoft Bookkeeping Express or QuickBooks Simple Begin. But as with everything these days, there are also online solutions.

Invoice Journal is a easy web site that lets you create and track your invoices. There’s a simple form for entering new clients, and another for sending invoices to those clients. Simple as pie.

Invoice Journal lacks some of the bells and whistles you’d get with a more complex service like FreshBooks. There’s no time tracking feature for example. But sometimes you want a service that does one thing and does it well.

If Invoice Journal doesn’t do it for you, we’ve also looked at Invotrak, another free invoicing startup, that quite frankly, works pretty much the same was as Invoice Journal.

[via makeuseof]

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Filed under: Business, World wide web, Productivity, Google

It’s been about a year since Google acquired Wiki/page creation/collaboration/calendar/etc site JotSpot. And for most of that year, there’s been a message at JotSpot.com saying that you can’t sign up for a new account because Google is still integrating the service.

Blogger Andrew Miller reports that Google may be preparing to launch some new JotSpot-based services starting next year. Miller attended a presentation with Google’s Scott Johnston, where Johnston outlined a bit of Google’s strategy for integrating JotSpot tools with Google Apps.

First up, Google will launch Google Sites, an expanded version of Google Page Creator. The service will let businesses set up intranets, manage packages, and build custom sites.

Google is also beefing up its on the web office suite and has plans to let users edit documents, spreadsheets and presentations while offline using Google Gears. There will also be offline support for Google Calendar and Gmail. Google also plans to integrate GrandCentral, another recent buy, with Google Apps.

[via TechCrunch]

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Filed under: Business, Internet, Google

Not that this should surprise anybody, but Google has officially announced plans to participate in the upcoming FCC wireless spectrum auction.

The 700 MHz auction that’s part of the transition to digital TV begins January 24th, and will be part of a shift for a more efficient wireless world wide web service.

Om Malik has pointed out that Google believes this is a winning situation for consumers no matter who wins out, but for some reason they’re not hard pressed to win. Could it be a move to drive up bidding prices from the likes of AT&T and Verizon? Or is it truly on their wish list to save the world and make a few extra billion while they are at it?

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