Melanie’s Round Up

We’re still catching up – AdTech plus travel means a very backed up week. Here’s Melanie’s second edition:

Yahoo and AT&T cozy up together in a co-branded Messenger with Voice, adding high speed internet to Y! Messenger and making AT&T Yahoo’s preferred global network provider.



Google Earth & SketchUp

“Visionaries, utopians, virtual world builders: your time has come.” Can’t you just feel the warm-fuzzies?

Today Google announces a free version of SketchUp in Earth, paired it with a 3D Warehouse wherein amateurs and aficionados can share their virtual monuments and collaborate on new creations. Earth brought the flying experience. The SketchUp synch lets the users fly about and build their world–flagging favorite spots, localizing friends, errecting their childhood home.

ACEnews Editor-in-Chief, Randall Newton imagines using Google SketchUp to track migration and environmental change, adding he might like to “identify Arctic Ocean waterfront property, then use SketchUp to model my dream beachfront home. I wonder what five acres on a good harbor in arctic Canada will be worth in 20 years?”

More Yahoo: Yahoo integrates Babel Fish—allowing users to translate blocks or text or whole pages into 38 language pair choices by preference . Especially timely, Yahoo says, citing research that finds “less then 30 percent of people online speak English as a native language (Byte Level Research, Nov. 2005).”

Gnarles Barkely’s new song “Crazy” is hitting the charts before it even hits the stores. Fred Wilson, over at A VC, notes that charts from Wiredset—the company that tracks the popularity of entertainment at MySpace—shows it going viral. It’s actually become #1 in the UK purely through MP3 sharing, again before the cd release, updates Fred.



Brightcove opens its service to the public. Watch this space…



John Jantsch at DuctTape Marketing has a new product, called Duct Tape Marketing Local Search Engine, that generates profiles for clients and feeds them to directories of note. As a bonus, clients’ profiles are also listed in Jantsch’s directory. (Caveat – John is an FM author…but still, this is a cool idea).