Meebo.com went live in September 2005 and has received two rounds of funding totalling approx. 12.5 million USD.  In addition to being a medium of exchange itself, it also offers a community and some very cool features, such as meebo.me – a widget that you can add (personalized) to your webpage and then chat with the people that get to your webpage. Their newest thing however is meebo rooms: with meebo.rooms you can create and customize your own “chat channel” complete with videos and other media that you like to add. Others can subscribe to your room. This is an interesting feature for private users as well as for businesses: Meebo already announced a couple of partnerships, blip.tv and NBC among them.

But how is Meebo making money? They are doing some adsales  and they probably charge some of their b2b services / cooperations. Anyway, by continuing to create neat services like meebo.rooms etc. and by promoting their business worldwide they will continue to grow and will certainly be around for a while.

Odeo was founded by Evan Williams the founder of Blogger and so Odeo claims to be what Blogger is for Weblogs. The Podcasting Client Syncr. makes it easy. After subscribing you are able to download the Synchr, a program which operates in the background of your computer. Now you can similarly to your RSS-textfeeds subscribe to all kinds of RSS-feeds for listening.

“Great” you may scream, now I can download it to my iPod! And a  mix of iPod and broadcasting is what? Podcasting! Others may rather talk about “Private On Demand & Categorized Audio Speech Tracks”.

How ever you call it, it’s fun to use and a good way to cope with the exploding masses of media arising every day in the web. No wonder that dozens of services came up with the same idea most of all iTunes the services for the iPod. Here is a list of more services:

• Doppler

• Juice (former iPodder)

• Newzcrawler

• List for more…

But Odeo goes a little further than just downloading all the pods you subscribed to. Odeo contains also real social software features witch make a very interesting web2.0 company. With Odeo Studios you can also upload your mp3 files and share them with others. You can create your own channel and fill it with life.

So Odeo is what Bloglines is for your Text-News. As in the textsphere there is a lot of jibberish on stock but also some very interesting stuff between the lines. I read somewhere that there is more professional content than user generated content. This really makes it worth a glance.

If  “mechanical turk” has a strange connotation for you: it has a history that dates back to the year 1769. Read about it here!

So what’s the whole thing about? Mturk is supposed to solve problems for software developers that need human intelligence. The example given by Amazon is that of identifying objects in photographs – something at which even children easily outperform a computer.

Mturk is truly long tail: it aggregates micro jobs (for micro money) and puts them in front of a huge pool of people, offering solutions for the tiniest niche question at an affordable price.

Amazon offers its logistics: a huge pool of possible “requesters” and “workers”, they collect and distribute the money. And they of course collect a fee for their service, which is 10% of the fee charged, but at least 0.005 $.

One of the tasks placed on mturk involves the search for Steve Fossett: participants are asked to view satellite images for signs of his plane. Marked photographs are then further examined by experts.

The benefit of mturk is clear: it enables companies or developers to have jobs done that would otherwise be too expensive to be performed at all.

"With Farecast, we answer the questions, should I buy now or should I wait”

The user interface is very clear and the usabilty is high. Icons show you if your holiday becomes affordable or your business tripo realy nessessary or not.

Farecast collected not only 175 billion airfare observations since May 2006 but also lots of awards for his innovative approach. It belongs to the TIMEs 50 Coolest Sites as well as to the KiplingersTop 25 Travel Sites and some others. Farecast changed from beta to public in May 2007 and added a hotel prices system in August 2007. I bet Car Rental is coming next.

The Fareguard is truly the most innovative feature Farecast came up with earlier this year. For a 10$ fee you can “lock in” and fix an air fare for one week. If the price drops, Farecast lets you know to buy the cheaper ticket, if the prices rises, Farecast pays you the difference. Good deal you may say and its reminds me to a insurance what itdeffenately not is because the Fare Guard doesn’t protect you from any bad circumstances caused by the airline. Very interessting is that a travel page called GoFox offers a quite similar system also called Fare Guard. I wonder if this is the same system or both forgot the trademark the name.

The system was developed by Oren Etzioni an University of Washington Professor. He also collected more than $7 million in venture funding from Greylock Partners, Madrona Venture Group and WRF Capital. And it seems that they invested again in a company with very good prospects. And expeditious other startups mushroom all over the world to catch a piece of the travel cake for example kayak.com oder sidestep.co.uk. But no one could realy battle the Farecast prediction system or even the Fare Guard protection.

So I m looking forward when it comes to Europe… 

There is a founding story ourt of a storybook. In less than a year the founder set up a plattform with the only purpose: to share selfmade videos. The rest almost everybody knows, it became rapidly popular, some outrage videos gained the public attention, dozens of articles were written and the big companies dissembled interesst in quest for new potential consumer groups. Then quickly and surprisingly Google appeard on the scene spent a rediculous amount of money after realising that small youtube bet the Google Video portal and is know expanding with it all over the world.

So for a brief abstract, but what only the few know is that the two founder Chad Hurley and Steve Chen were not alone. There was a thrid co-founder named Jawed Karim a college mate of Chen. The three work at Paypal later on and left the ebay company to make up an internet startup. The idea came by chance and was born after Janet Jackson exposed her breast during the Superbowl show. Significantly this incident is now inappropiate to show in on Youtube.

Anyway after the portal was designed and coded and a few month later the first details with Google were fixed Jawed withdraw from the managing business to graduate computer studies at Standford. The son of a Bangladeshi father and a german mother is one of the biggest shareholder of 4^th most popular page worldwide.

Jawed never appeared on frontpages when the big deal was announced and he never appeared when it came to around 1,6 Billion dollar but to the USA Today he said once: “I definitely thought that this was a possible outcome, but I didn’t think it was the most likely outcome.” A very bold declaration, lets see what comes next, Jawed plans more startups.