ThinkFree to Add Flickr Style Community Features

Online office suite ThinkFree joins the community sharing crowd Tuesday, with the launch of a number of new features.

The new (beta) version of ThinkFree Docs will allow users to search, share, tag and publish Microsoft Office and ThinkFree documents in an online social community, much in the same way that Flickr allows photographers to publish and share photos.

I’m told the thinking from the ThinkFree team was to get these features out to users now, with aesthetics to follow. And yet from what I’ve seen of the new service, I can’t fault the look. The new community tools build on an already pleasant interface, having nearly a YouTube feel to them (minus the videos).

The addition of tagging is immediately evident. Documents viewable by the community now come complete with ratings, embedding code, comment fields, downloading options and the obligatory post this to Digg/ Furl/ del.icio.us buttons. In many ways it’s moving into the territory previously claimed by Scribd, the new features at ThinkFree share a lot of similarity with Scribd, and yet they are not exclusive unto themselves, building upon an already very smart online Microsoft Office alternative.

Thinkfree currently has 275,000 users. Previous TechCrunch coverage here and here.

Useful Alt+Tab Replacement Power Toy

For those of you who use the Alt+Tab key combination to switch between open windows on your desktop, I am sure you have encountered times when you cannot distinguish one window from the other due to having more than one instance of the same program open.

Microsoft became aware of this draw-back after releasing the XP operating system and subsequently released a "Power Toy" to resolve this issue. The Power Toy resolves this issue by replacing the program icons with actual screenshots of your open windows. This way you can locate exactly which window you wish to switch to, which is immensely useful when navigating between several SAP windows at one time. Here are pictures of using the Alt+Tab key combination both pre- and post- installation of the Power Toy:

As you can see in the first example above, it is impossible to differentiate between the IE instances and the SAP instances by looking at the icons. In the subsequent example, the screenshot clearly differentiates the windows.

Here are the instructions to install:

-Copy URL to browser: http://download.microsoft.com/download/whistler/Install/2/WXP/EN-US/TaskswitchPowertoySetup.exe

-Choose "Run" from pop-up dialog box

-Choose "Run" a second time, this will kick-off the installation of the Power Toy

-Once you get the "Installation Complete" dialog, the toy is successfully installed. No need to reboot your PC.

SlideAware to Add New Features to Presentation Management Platform

Presentation management platform provider SlideAware will be launching new features Monday that build on what is already a useful tool.

SlideAware launched in March with a feature set that included the ability to create a flash version of a PowerPoint presentation, host it on SlideAware and then share a link to the presentation. Whilst far from being alone in offering this functionality, SlideAware offers additional services that make it a better candidate for business use; fine grain access control, including the ability to make presentation private and password controlled, detailed analytics on viewing of the presentation and support for key PowerPoint features including builds.

On Monday SlideAware adds a number of new features:

1. The ability to add notes to specific areas of slides, similar to comments in ConceptShare 2. Rich presence management (picture in picture like preview of slides that other users are viewing and the ability to sync with a single click) & chat 3. The ability to retrieve all notes directly in PowerPoint so that updates can be made

The new feature set will not go astray in strengthening SlideAware’s pitch as a collaborative tool.

The company offers a free version for basic personal use, and paid versions for professional and workgroup use.

Exclusive screen shots of the new features in action as follows:

Attack of the Advertising Widgets

Widgets are being turned into advertising delivery systems. Their nature - rich media applicatons that are easy to build, customize and add to a site - also make them an attractive way to add advertising to small sites. Google is now testing gadget ads, and we’ve written about services like boobox and AuctionAds (a sponsor) that easily ad affiliate advertising to a site via widgets. Last week eBay also launched “to go” widgets that let publishers embed ebay listings into websites, although for now there are no affiliate payments tied to those widgets.

Two more are coming this week. Tonight Silicon Valley-based Tumri is announcing a new product called Tumri Publisher, and Seattle’s Mpire will announce an advertising widget later this week.

Tumri Publisher, which is described here, allows users to create highly customizable widgets that promote specific products on their websites, in exchange for an affiliate or other fee. Tumri has twenty or so direct relationships with ecommerce sites like Overstock, Walmart, Shop.com and others to promote their products. Most advertising pay on a purchase, although at least one partner pays a on each click to their website.

Tumri splits revenue from the advertising 50/50 with advertising, and they say they’ll pay up to 70% of proceeds to larger publishers.

The widgets are javascript powered; the company says Flash versions are coming soon.

Tumri was founded in 2004 and has raised $6.5 million in a Series A round of financing from Shasta Ventures and Accel. They are currently closing a second round. They have 31 employees (16 in India, 15 in Silicon Valley).

Windows Live Hotmail Debuts

Hotmail, perhaps the first major success of Web 1.0, has evolved.

Microsoft has announced the launch of Windows Live Hotmail globally in 36 languages, complete with AJAX goodness.

The new service has been built to be a vast improvement over the previous Hotmail offering, incorporating input from more than 20 million beta testers. However todays offering is only the move from beta to roll out.

We’ve covered Windows Live Hotmail previously: back in February Michael Arrington took a look at the then beta service and the results weren’t positive, the new Hotmail ranking third behind Gmail and Yahoo! Mail.

Windows Live Hotmail launches with an initial 30 million users, with over 250 million additional users to be bought across in the coming months.

The new Hotmail is built on completely new code and marks the continued consolidation around the Windows Live brand.

In the coming weeks, Microsoft will be releasing a new free mail client meant to replace Outlook Express, Windows Mail, and Windows Live desktop. The new client is called Windows Live Mail and will be a desktop client that provides Hotmail’s feature set locally on a users desktop. It will also support management of non Hotmail accounts.

There is some added benefits of logging into the new Hotmail; support is built in to allow Instant Messaging of contacts, or VOIP call contacts, with one click, which will also tie in with the Microsofts desktop IM platform.

My only question is why didn’t Microsoft build on the wonderful foundation that is Silverlight. Instead of promoting a platform that has such wonderful potential, Microsoft has seemingly ignored it with Hotmail. I’m sure in the coming months that others will be more willing to utilize the potential of Silverlight than Microsoft is.

HubPages Debuts New Look, Ad Yield Technology

San Francisco based HubPages, a revenue sharing community content destination, debuts a new look and ad yield technology today, building on a portal that is now attracting 2.4 million unique visitors a month.

We’ve previously covered HubPages here and here: the company took $2 million in funding from Hummer Winblad in August 2006 and on its initial launch in February 06 Michael Arrington asked the question as to whether HubPages was a better Squidoo.

The team behind the service has a particularly strong heritage: CEO Paul Edmondson was previously the Group Product Manager for MSN Entertainment, Jay Reitz was the Development Manager, and Paul Deeds was a developer in Windows Media Internet Services.

The new look follows extensive community consultation with over 14,000 authors across 20,000 hubs. On top of the visible changes that will be evident to the casual visitor, HubPages has included support for slide shows and multiple pictures, forums, and hub grouping tools that allow for easier navigation.

On the advertising side, HubPages officially launches what it’s calling “Behavioral Formatting Yield Optimization” technology. In layman’s terms it works out where advertising works best on each hub and places the ad unit to suit.

I spoke to Paul Edmondson ahead of the announcement. He told me that they currently have a handful of publishers making in excess of $1000 a month from their hub pages, with the top publisher currently making $1800/ month. Although by no means full time incomes, for the average writer these are good figures, decent pocket money for those looking to make money online from writing as a part time pursuit.

The newly announced “Behavioral Formatting Yield Optimization” technology has already resulted in an increase in advertising returns of up to 43% averaged across the board in testing to date.

HubPages currently utilizes advertising from Google Adsense, Commission Junction, Amazon and the beta of eBay’s Contextual Advertising units, with plans to roll out direct sponsorships of hubs in the foreseeable future.

There’s a lot to like about this service. The revenue sharing model is generous compared to others; a straight 50/50 split compared to Squidoo’s 50% of profits only, and publishers are paid direct by the advertiser: advertisements are rotated 1:1 with each publisher’s code and HubPages’ code. The question of Intellectual Property Rights is straight forward: publishers own the content and can do with it as they please.

Having worked in the blogging industry, both as a blogger and blog network owner, I can’t help but think that this is a better model than many blog networks out there currently offer. The flexibility and open nature of content creation at HubPages is a solid idea, the need to deal with payments is gone, and the positive word of mouth from those users making money from the service is bound to drive future growth.