I’ve finally got round to organising another podcast, and its another great one. Peter and I interviewed Alex Bard, the CEO of Goowy. They’ve recently released yourminis.com , which they are calling a ‘Personalised Dashboard’. It’s along the lines of other services such as Netvibes, Pageflakes and Google IG, but with a key difference; it’s written in Flash. This has some key advantages, which we discuss in the podcast.

We also discuss the soon to be released API, business models and much more.

Download the episode

Subscribe to the podcast

Enjoy!

PS. for a demo of the product, see the demo to Scoble on LunchMeet. Expect a full review from me in the next couple of days.

Recently, Google unveiled (and in two cases, formally announced) new features for their online email service, Gmail.

The features include easier replying, new message notification, chatting online, forward-to-all, and a native Mobile Gmail. Several of these features are features that are “why didn’t I think of that” type features. They’re all deceptively simple, yet effective and incredibly useful additions to Gmail. Hopefully other webmail providers will follow suit.

After the jump: summaries and screenshots of the new features.

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Only days after the Office 2007 code got finalised, ZDNet is reporting that Vista has been given the RTM treatment and now no changes will be made to the code - at all - until its release.

It’s certainly been a long time coming. If you can remember back that far, Vista (née Longhorn) was meant only to be an small, interim update between XP and the next version (then codenamed Longhorn). It then faced push back after push back and eventually ended up slated for late 2006 or early 2007, not 2003 as it was originally invisioned.

Still, Vista promises to be a good Windows release, and from what I’ve used of it (bearing in mind the last build I used was RC1) I think it’s set to be a good Windows release.

Watch out for Vista coming in retail boxes early next year.

You may have noticed that the excellent post on the Microsoft-Novell deal wasn’t written by Peter or me. It was written by Chris Van Patten, a new blogger at Gizbuzz (you may recognise the name - Chris designed Gizbuzz). We are also pleased to welcome Jacob Peddicord to the Gizbuzz fold. Both are experienced bloggers, and they are a welcome addition to the team.

This is all part of the big news; Gizbuzz is a founding blog of a new blog network, Oratos Media. It has a strong tech focus, with three blogs and two podcasts at the moment:

• YouMakeMedia - learn how to take part in the media revolution, led by Chris.
• FOSSwire - a blog about free and open source software for all abilities. Check out Peter’s tutorial introducing you to Linux, or for the more advanced, look out for the in-depth analysis of the Microsoft-Novell deal.
• PodDev - web development podcast, with interviews from leaders in the industry. Our latest guest was Josh Jones, CEO of hosting giant Dreamhost.
• Gizbuzz - you know about this one!

We have all sorts of exciting ideas for the network in the future. This will not be just another b5media or 9rules; they do what they do very well, and there are plenty of people trying to emulate them. As we gain a bigger audience, adding more blogs, expect to see new ideas in terms of community and user generated content.

This is a great opportunity for Gizbuzz, and marks our transition to the next level. Check out our new sister blogs, and keep reading and contributing!

The Apple rumour mill has been grinding for some time again about this announcement, with UK online retailer Play.com leaking the possibility of new Core 2 MacBooks earlier this week, but now it has officially been confirmed.

Apple’s consumer notebook, the MacBook, has been upgraded with, among other things, an Intel Core 2 Duo processor. The upgrades also include a RAM boost to 1 GB on the higher end models and a slightly bumped up (but still quite mediocre considering the price) hard drive for the higher end models.

Technorati has published its quarterly ‘State of the Blogosphere‘ report on its blog. Given the fact that Technorati gets pinged by many blogs as soon as they are published, and it quickly crawls the others, it is in a unique position to see what is happening in the world of blogs.

It starts with the graph showing just how many blogs there are, and how quickly the number is growing:

The actual number of blogs is not particularly interesting to me in itself: most of them will be posted to once a month if they are lucky, and only about 1% of those posted to more frequently will have any interesting content to anyone other than the blogger’s circle of friends. That’s fine, its just not the type of blogging that is causing a social media revolution. It is just an extension of email.

The ‘important’ type of blogging as far as I am concerned are those blogs which are of interest to greater numbers of people each. What the above statistic shows is a great vote of support in those blogs, because people are reading those blogs and wanting to become bloggers themselves. It is a vote in support of the principle of blogging. A common criticism of blogging is that people don’t trust what they read on blogs. When 57 million people agree with a concept enough to start doing it themselves, the concept has some legs. That’s not even considering the millions more who simply subscribe to blogs. I think we can say blogging is here to stay!

There are all sorts of other juicy statistics in the post, from the proportion of top media sites which are blogs down to what time most posts are published. Well worth a read!

OSNews is reporting that Microsoft have apparently finished finalising the code for Office 2007 and are now at the stage of release to manufacturing (RTM), where the code gets shipped out to be pressed onto nice, new, shiny discs.

Unlike Windows Vista, the development cycle of Office 2007 has been fairly away from the public eye, considering how important a release it will be for Microsoft, and how popular a software product Microsoft Office is.

Office 2007 is apparently going to be released to businesses on the 30th of November, that’s the same date that Vista will be available.

Now, a lot has changed in Office 2007 since we last looked at it here on Gizbuzz, and unfortunately we can’t get our hands on the RTM, but Paul Thurrott’s SuperSite for Windows has screenshots of the RTM build that you can take a look at.

As yet, Windows Vista has not been RTM’ed, so presumably they are still fixing the final reported bugs and optimising everything before they ship.

Mashable is reporting that IM service Meebo has come out of alpha status and is now, apparently, a stable service.

Unlike other IM services, Meebo is a web-based tool that allows you to connect to other popular IM networks, it doesn’t have it’s own. It supports AIM, Yahoo, Google Talk and MSN/Windows Live Messenger.

What’s interesting about Meebo is that the interface is almost like a virtual ‘desktop’ where the screens within the Meebo interface are placed inside fake windows which can be moved around. It certainly is a much richer experience than a lot of other web-based IM services.

New in this version is internationalisation, a new interface style and a new ‘pop-out’ option on the Meebo’s fake windows which makes them expand into real popup windows so you can use Meebo a bit more like a desktop IM client. There are also a few other minor new features, and of course, the 1.0 milestone means that Meebo should now be stable!

There still are a few concerns however with using web-based IM. At the moment, hardly any of the major IM networks allow you to run clients which aren’t approved. That means that for a long time, multi-network IM clients have been breaking this rule, and occasionally stop working if the IM network chooses to block them. This concern still exists when you’re using web-based services like Meebo that aren’t approved by the IM network, which is worth remembering.
Nevertheless, web-based IM has come a long way. Thanks to technologies like Ajax, web-based IM clients can rival the rich experiences that desktop clients provide, and of course, a benefit of a web-based client is that you can go to another location and not have to install desktop software. And Meebo certainly looks one of the more promising web-based IM clients at the moment.

Last week Skype launched a new campaign in Britain, called  Talk for Britain. Under the deal, UK users get free SkypeOut calls to UK landlines for six months when they buy £10 Skype credit.

Skype needs to work hard to promote itself in the UK: I’m just not aware of any major use of it outside the tech community, and the fact that we don’t have free SkypeOut for everyone over here doesn’t help. When people are unhappy with BT (the telecoms giant) for whatever reason, they tend to switch to other traditional providers, such as TalkTalk, rather than looking at the rather more radical VoIP solution. This is despite a good take up of high speed broadband and the potential for massive cost savings.

To be honest, I’m not sure this campaign will have much effect. The biggest stumbling block for Skype reaching the mainstream is that it requires you to have your computer switched on to make and recieve calls. Another issue is the fact that, as far as I know, you are forced to prepay for your calls. I would expect mainstream consumers to be happy to embrace Skype when they are able to use it like a normal phone service, but cheaper and with more features. At the moment it requires too much of a break with traditional phone usage habits. 

I think we will be seeing many more devices which allow you talk without having your computer on, and through promotions and slow word of mouth critical mass will build up. Once this has happened, Skype will ‘do a YouTube’ and start to experience exponential growth, as people other than the techie neighbour persuade their friends to switch over to save them money.

On a lighter note, in order to promote their deal, Skype also did some research on UK phone use, with some rather interesting results. Apparently, three quarters of us chat to people on the phone from the toilet, and nearly a quarter have fallen asleep while talking on the phone. It’s good to be armed with the facts when working out what the future for VoIP is!

[Press release]

Redmond-based Microsoft and Utah’s Novell are entering a new partnership based around Novell’s SuSE Linux.

As part of the deal, all future litigation against Novell will be halted, including patent infringement disputes. Microsoft will begin offering sales support and technical support for Novell SuSE Linux, an open source operating system available in several versions, including OpenSuSE (community developed) and SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (Novell developed, includes proprietary applications).

The deal is not final, and may be changed at any time. This appears, however, to dent the plans that business software giant Oracle has had to begin support for Novell competitor Red Hat. Both Oracle and Red Hat stock was down at the time of this writing.

A press conference is slated for 5:00pm EST (now) and more details may be announced. As always, GizBuzz will keep you updated.

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The press conference has begun. Updates follow:

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