BooRah searches the web for mentions of restaurants in blogs and websites and analyzes the languages in the post to determine whether the reviewer was giving the restaurant a thumbs down (boo) or a thumbs up (Rah). The amount of Boo's and Rah's a restaurant gets are tallied up on the site and then the restaurant is given an overall score. BooRah users can add their own tags to a particular restaurants page, and can weigh in by giving a particular place a Boo or Rah directly on the site.
Currently the service is limited to just 20 large metro areas, with more expected to be rolled out later on. If you're fortunate enough to live in one of those areas you can search for restaurants by your particular neighborhood, and sign up for an RSS feed for your area so you always know about the latest place in town.
The state of New York is set to begin collecting tax from some online retailers who do business in the state. And by some online retailers, we mean the law is targeted pretty firmly at Amazon, and may also affect some others. Not surprisingly, Amazon is none to thrilled, and the New York Times reports that the company has responded with a lawsuit against the state of New York.
Now, here's the interesting bit. Nobody's disputing that New York residents are supposed to be paying state sales taxes for items purchased from out of state retailers and shipped to New York. Even before the law was passed, people living in New York and many other states were supposed to keep track of such purchases on their own and send a check to the state. Of course, nobody actually does this, but it's the law. No, the issue is whether Amazon should be required to collect taxes
Typically you only need to collect state taxes if you have an office or other presence in the state. For example, if Amazon had a New York warehouse or distribution center. And then you need to collect taxes on everything sold to state residents, whether it went through that office, warehouse, or distribution center or not. But the law claims that because New York residents can sign up to be Amazon "affiliates," which means the post links to Amazon products on their web pages and make a commission, Amazon does maintain a presence in the state. Which sounds kind of weak if you ask us. But that's the crux of the law, and it's also the crux of the lawsuit.
It's been almost a year since Google acquired RSS service Feedburner or $100 million. But in that year, we've seen very little integration of Google services into Feedburner, or vice versa. Sure, it's now easier to redirect your Blogspot feed to Feedburner, but that's about it.
Now, according to the official Feedburner blog, the company is getting ready to roll out the thing we'd all kind of been expecting: Google AdSense integration. What that means is you're probably going to start seeing much more advertising in your RSS reader.
While there are already a few ways to place ads in an RSS feed, a huge number of blogs and web sites use Feedburner to polish and publish their feeds. Being able to place ads in their feeds with just a few clicks of a button almost certainly means that many of those content publishers will be flipping the switch as soon as they can. Up until now, most web publishers viewed RSS feeds as a loss leader. You give away some of your content, ad-free, in the hopes of gaining loyal readers who will tell their friends about the site. But if you can also get a few of them to click on ads even if they rarely visit your actual web page, why wouldn't you do it?
What do you think? Are you a web publisher looking forward to Google AdSense/Feedburner integration? Or are you a loyal blog reader preparing to unsubscribe to any feeds that start displaying ads?
In case you hadn't noticed, there's been a bit of a revolt among eBay power sellers. Basically, eBay increased some fees, which led some buyers to hold a boycott. But the truth of the matter is eBay is a giant, and if you make a decent portion of your income buying and selling goods on eBay, there aren't a ton of good alternatives. Wigix wants to change that, and the site is willing to waive fees on all items sold for less than $25 to do it. For pricier items, WIgix has significantly lower transaction fees than you'll find on eBay.
Wigix isn't exactly an auction like eBay. Rather, it's an "exchange," which lets buyers and sellers connect with one another. Sellers don't have to fill out product descriptions manually. Instead they choose from a database of products which already have product descriptions. This database also makes the search process easy for buyers. When you start to enter a term in the search box, Wigix will provide a list of items to chose from before you even hit enter. When you find the item you're looking for, you can see how many buyers and sellers there are, and you can set a price at which you're wiling to buy an item. As soon as the item is available for that price, Wigix will hook you up with a seller.
You can conduct similar transactions with eBay's Half.com, which lets you "pre-order" an item which will automatically be purchased as soon as someone offers one for sale at your desired price. But Half.com only includes books, movies, music, and video games, while Wigix users can sell pretty much anything.
Yelp lets customers write reviews of restaurants, shops, and all sorts of other businesses in communities throughout the country. And that's the sort of service that makes the site both incredibly useful and incredibly dangerous for business owners.
Now Yelp is giving business owners tools that let them keep a closer eye on the reviews their establishment is receiving. If you sign up for a Business Owner Account, you can track how many people view your business page, update your business profile, and send messages to people who have reviewed your business. In order to get a business owner account, you'll obviously need to verify that you actually run the business in question.
Of course, there's no guaranty that you'll be able to prevent people from writing that your food tastes stale or that your bathrooms are smelly unless you actual improve your food and clean your bathrooms. You know, unless those folks on the internet are lying. But that never happens.
Thanks to the recent BitTorrent debacle, Comcast has been far from Comcastic for many of its customers. Throttling customers for using technologies they deem too data intensive is pretty nasty, and the company has had to acquiesce and change its practices, but what happens when they disconnect your service (and threaten to keep you shut-down for 12-months) for "excessive usage" -- yet refuse to issue that threat in writing or tell you what "excessive usage" really means?
Well, that is exactly the situation Dave Winer, tech analyst, pioneer and RSS God, has found himself in. Comcast has restored his service, but still says they will shut him down for up to 12 months if he doesn't alter his usage patterns. The kicker? They won't tell him what level he needs to adjust his usage patterns to in order to stay compliant.
Can they do this? Especially without issuing the warning in writing? And what exactly defines, "excessive" in Comcast's terms? Many of us here at Download Squad use Comcast and we DO love to download, so this issue bothers us both on principle and for practicality. Although Comcast has been more receptive via their @Comcastcares Twitter account than they were via phone, this whole situation makes us very, very uncomfortable.
We spoke to Dave earlier today (the podcast of our conversation is here) and this is what he had to say:
"I thought it was an outage and they said I had to call a special number and that I had been disconnected as a matter of policy."
Always dreamed of running a sweatshop, but were worried about the legal ramifications? Sick of paying American workers boatloads of money just because the government says it's fair? Really, it's a free country, so you should be able to pay people whatever you feel like, no? Who cares if they need a certain wage to live, no one forced them to take the job. You're the victim here. But like Superman flying over the horizon in his confusingly bright colored outfit, a hero is coming to save you.
Behold, Offshoring.com, where you can hire cheap, skilled labour for as little as $4 an hour. How is this possible? Because the workers are in the Philippines. You can hire everything from programmers to graphic designers for a fraction of what they cost in the US. According to their website they are an American company with a headquarters in Atlanta who send people to the Philippines to run offices staffed with skilled Filipino workers. These workers will work whenever you work, Monday-Friday, and speak English. No word in the FAQ as to whether the workers are chained to their computers or not.
And, as an added bonus, you can fire any worker you want for whatever reason AND you don't even have to do it yourself. You just tell the office and they fire the worker for you. Which, one would assume, involves a large trap door and some sort of flesh eating monster. God bless capitalism.
As much as Amazon mp3 would like to be a thorn in the side of iTunes, the data indicates that the service has had little effect on iTunes' dominance in digital music sales.
According to a new study by The NPD Group, only 10 percent of all purchasers at Amazon mp3 are converts from Apple's service, while the rest are switching from other services or new to the whole direct-download music scene.
While 10 percent may sound like a lot to us ordinary folks, it wasn't worth the eyebrow raise of a single analyst.
The bottom line is, if Amazon mp3 sees itself as the David to iTunes' Goliath, then their work is definitely cut out for them. Amazon currently sits in fourth place in US music sales, with iTunes and Wal-Mart fighting it out for the top spot, and Best Buy in third.
The troubling statistic for Amazon is that only a tenth of their music sales come from Amazon mp3. The rest come from those archaic compact discs; if you don't know what we're talking about, check out your parent's music collection-maybe they have some laying around.
The question is, my friends, what is keeping Amazon mp3 from biting into sales on iTunes? Is it the poor browsing experience? Is it because Amazon is seen as outside of the iTunes-iPod ecosystem? Are people willing to part with 10 cents more, and put up with DRM, for the sake of iTunes simplicity?
Tired of sending emails back and forth trying to decide when to hold your next team meeting, video game night, or birthday party? Well, while we generally recommend having your birthday celebrations as close to the actual date of your birth as possible, Jiffle can help with the rest.
Jiffle is an online scheduling service that lets users pick the times they're free and then share their calendar with other users. In other words, it's a lot like When is Good, but with a desktop client that works with Outlook to let you share your existing calendar online. A new version will add Google Calendar compatibility.
You can sign up for Jiffle for free, but we found that when we tried to download the client today we were instead greeted with a message letting us know that a new version would be available next week and we'd be notified when it was available. Jiffle is a commercial application, but there's a free version that will let users schedule up to 10 meetings per month. For $9.99 per month or $99.99 per year, you can schedule unlimited meetings. A few bucks more gets you a version with your company branding, and for $99.99 per month you can get the corporate edition with licenses for five users and no advertising.
Salesforce for Google Apps goes live today, which basically means that Salesforce.com users can integrate Google Docs, Spreadsheets, Calendar, Gmail, Google Talk and other Google services with their Salesforce account.
Why exactly does this matter? Basically, it gives small business owners a one-stop shop for managing their workforce, customer, and marketing information. Saleforce has its own email application, for example, allowing you to keep track of business related emails from the same interface you use to manage contracts. But now that there's Gmail integration, you can send an email from Salesforce.com, Gmail, or a desktop application like Outlook linked to your account. All of your information will be viewable from the Salesforce web interface.
The folks at Common Craft put together a simple explanatory video which you can see above. We kind of like it better than the official video from Salesforce, but you can check that one out after the jump.
You know how if you live in most states in the US you don't have to pay sales tax on items purchased online? Yeah, that's about to change for about 19 million residents of New York State. Legislators have approved a bill that requires large online stores to collect sales tax for anything shipped to New York.
Technically, the tax isn't new. Consumers were supposed to be reporting these purchases on their tax returns all along, but nobody really does. The law just passes the burden from consumers to retailers.
While the bill doesn't become a law until Governor David Paterson signs it, he's expected to do so soon, as the measure is expected to raise $50 million and help balance the state budget.
Companies that collect less than $10,000 per year from sales to New Yorkers will be exempt. But something tells us that means you'll be paying taxes on purchase from large stores like Amazon.
Update: As we've reported in the past, this law wouldn't require all online stores to charge tax, but only online stores that do some form of business in New York State. And that business can include something as simple as operating an affiliate link program that lets New York residents make a few bucks by linking to Amazon products on their web pages. Former governor Eliot Spitzer had proposed the law late last year, but we had thought it was dead -- until yesterday. While it's possible that one outcome of this law could be businesses pulling out of New York altogether, a much more likely outcome would that Amazon and other companies with affiliate programs could refuse to let New York citizens sign up for affiliate accounts.
Yahoo! seems to have come up with the ultimate response to Microsoft's heavy-handed attempts to purchase the internet portal. The Wall Street Journal reports that Yahoo! is in talks with Download Squad's parent company AOL over plans to merge the two companies' internet operations.
If the deal goes through, the two companies would combine their web and internet based services. AOL's old school ISP services would not be part of the deal, which would value AOL at $10 billion. Yahoo! would reportedly use some of the revenue from a merger with Time Warner/AOL to buy back a whole bunch of stock which woudl help the company fend off any further unwanted advances from Microsoft.
The upshot of a possible partnership or merger is that people will stop picking on AOL for copying Yahoo!'s homepage design. The downside is that a merged company could conceivably be called AOwho? OK, probably not. We for one welcome our new Yahoo! overlords anyway.
Yahoo! will integrate IndexTools with its current analytic tools to help build the company's advertising network. The services will first be available to members of the Yahoo! ad network, but eventually the company plans to build a system that will let third party developers "monitor and optimize the traffic performance" of web applications.
The deal is expected to close in the first half of the year. The terms of the acquisition were not released.
Triggit is a service for bloggers that lets you add YouTube videos, Flickr images, and text-link advertisements to your page without editing HTML or even launching your blog post editor. The system takes just a few minutes to set up, and once you've done so, you can add content to your blog in seconds.
We've put together a little video showing how it works. But in a nutshell, you add a bit of JavaScript to your site, and drag a bookmarklet to your browser toolbar. When you click on the bookmarklet, a toolbar will pop up that lets you add content to your site including videos, images, and affiliate ads from sites like Amazon and Wine Zap. You can do everything right from your browser toolbar. No need to launch WordPress, Blogger, TypePad, or any other blogging client.
Content you add using Triggit might load more slowly than other material on your site. That's because your site is basically sending a request to Triggit's servers asking which content to display.
Triggit supports Firefox and Flock. While there's no love for Opera, Safari, and Internet Explorer users, at least Triggit picked a browser that works on all the major operating systems.
If it feels like the online storage and file sharing market is getting a little crowded, that's because it is. Just in the past few weeks, we've seen services such as Dropbox, AOL's Xdrive Desktop, Windows SkyDrive, and more, come into the market.
Now HP is dropping its hat into the ring, with HP Upline. HP Upline offers unlimited storage for as low as $59 per year. Features of Upline include:
Automatic Backup
1-click restore
Access from anywhere
Ability to share files with friends
HP Upline also offers upgraded packages for family and professional use. If you want to try HP Upline, you can sign up for a limited account with one measly GB of storage. The limited account expires in one year; after that, you'll need to upgrade to the paid service to access your files, or kiss them goodbye.
One other note: The Upline software requires Windows. Mac users, you're out of luck. Well, out of Upline, anyway.
It's nice to see that two formerly disparate services, online backup and file sharing, are slowly merging into one complete service, with the choice of several offerings from big players.
BooRah searches the web for mentions of restaurants in blogs and websites and analyzes the languages in the post to determine whether the reviewer was giving the restaurant a thumbs down (boo) or a thumbs up (Rah). The amount of Boo's and Rah's a restaurant gets are tallied up on the site and then the restaurant is given an overall score. BooRah users can add their own tags to a particular restaurants page, and can weigh in by giving a particular place a Boo or Rah directly on the site.
Yelp
Thanks to the 
