PLANET Bastien

Palm as just released their much anticipated - and leaked - Treo Pro, a Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional device with a touchscreen and UMTS/HSDPA GSM networking. The phone also includes G.P.S. and improved WiFi handling for better and easier WiFi hand-off.

The new Treo is thinner than devices like the 800w and is targeted at the mobile professional market and is not an “iPhone-killer.” Instead it is part of a conscious strategy by Palm to release a series of “great” products in order to bring themselves back out of the doldrums.

The answer to that question seems to be a resounding yes going by the title of a new Japanese magazine called Shinkansen&Love. The Shinkansen (bullet train) is apparently now the way to see the big city, go shopping and find love.

Can anything put the wind back in eBay’s sails? The once-iconic auction site is making cosmetic changes to its fee structure and moving away from the auction model to emphasize more fixed-price listings. But it’s hard to get excited these days about eBay. It seems that the Web has moved on and eBay is stuck in still waters.

Don’t get me wrong. eBay is still a massive site and a cash machine. But once you reach 238 million visitors worldwide (comScore) and 26.4 billion pageviews a month, it’s hard to know where to go from there. Maybe that is why pageviews are actually down 15 percent year-over-year, and the stock is down 26 percent.

This is not about fixed price versus auctions. The main challenge eBay faces is that it is becoming easier and easier to find things to buy on the Web simply by searching for what you want on Google. During the early days of the Web, people needed a few big e-commerce sites they could trust and that could organize everything that was for sale online. That need was filled by Amazon and eBay.

Actonomy, a Belgian company, has introduced a new version of it’s ’search and matching’ technology platform xMP along with an enormous knowledge base for HR professionals. HR is the field that Actonomy focuses on primarily, because there is such an obvious need for searching through vast amounts of data in a structured, intelligent way.

So what does it do?

No matter how you feel about FriendFeed, you can't argue with the fact that it has been one of most popular services among the early adopter set this year. For social media enthusiasts, the site fulfills a need to be always sharing, always active, always involved. In some cases, this led to a self-imposed information overload scenario - there was so much good stuff going on at FriendFeed that it was hard to turn away. But then, as people discovered the service's ability to hide items, they were able to better craft the FriendFeed (over)flow to their needs.

Yet the issue of noise still remains one of the service's biggest hurdles. Although built-in filtering and 3rd-party apps like Noiseriver try to address this problem, they still require a lot of tweaking, which equates to time. For some, this issue becomes a deal-breaker - too much noise, not enough signal. Others claim to love the noise and, by the number of likes and comments they leave, it's apparent that they do.

Got that hacking jones, but can’t find anyone to hack with? Head on over to JustHackIt, a site aimed at developers that launched last night. It is a place for developers to find each other, work on projects, and maybe even start a company. Developers can post projects they want to do and search through postings from other hackers.

The site describes itself this way:

The last couple of months, quite a large number of medical/ health start-ups have emerged. These sites are not without controversy. The following conversation about ZocDoc, covered by my co-editor Boris at TechCrunch 40, says it all:

Guy Kawasaki, who was one of the members of the jury, said ‘I just don’t see it. You search this site and you’re like, “Oh look, Dr. Molly Adams, she looks nice, I’ll ask her to operate on my heart.”‘. While the audience laughed ZocDoc founder Massoumi cleared his throat, grabbed the microphone and replied ‘You might ask your friend for an optometrist recommendation, but you might not ask them for someone who could diagnose the rash on your butt.”.

TripAdvisor is in an expansive mood. In July, it acquired two small startups, VirtualTourist (user-gen travel guides) and OneTime (booking price comparison). And today it announced a majority investment in FlipKey, a guest review site for vacation home rentals. The amount of the investment was not disclosed.

FlipKey launched only last March. It covers 50,000 vacation rental properties in the U.S., which CEO TJ Mahoney says represents a $60 billion market. So it is a pretty big niche. FlipKey aims to become the reputation management system for vacation home rentals. Property owners can take review data in the form of a widget and place it on their sites or property listings. (See examples here and here).

Today, Aircell announced that their fleet of Boeing 767-200s will have the Gogo service enabled on flights originating from NYC’s JFK to LA, San Francisco and Miami. CrunchGear will have a seat on a flight to LAX today that leaves JFK at 12 PM EDT. Head on over there now for more details and the full press release. Again, there will be no VoIP enabled on these flights nor will there ever be.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

The local ABC affiliate dropped by YouNoodle’s offices in San Francisco to get an idea of how useful their new startups valuation predictor is. ABC’s Sue Thompson interviewed CEO Bob Goodson on how the service works, and I dropped in for a cameo and a dose of healthy skepticism.

The iPhone App store is one of the many great features of the Apple iPhone. Hundreds (thousands?) of developers are tinkering away on apps that when launched are sure to bring riches and fame to its inventors. All you have to do is browse the ‘Whats New’ section on your iPhone or iPod Touch on a daily basis and you will be able to choose from a wide variety of innovative new apps. Some useful and some funny.

But there is more. A lot of ‘would-be’ developers are posting their ideas for the perfect app to their blogs and posting mock-ups of next generation interfaces to Flickr. These apps are nothing more than ideas waiting to be implemented and sometimes ideas mainly waiting to be ignored. Either way, here is a selection of inspiring ideas that I found on Flickr:

Ricky Romero presents a screenshot, with a big proud smile, of his upcoming GPS app. What will it offer? We can only guess:

The break-up of behemoth, vertically integrated enterprises commenced in the 1970's, got a boost from junk bond financing in the 1980's, and accelerated in the 1990's with globalization. Now, late in the 2000's, Social Media (aka Web 2.0) is adding another gear that will accelerate the fundamental restructuring of the enterprise.

This is a big story. That is why ReadWriteWeb is dedicating a new "channel" to Enterprise 2.0. I will be editing this channel and we are looking for part time writers to contribute. More on that later.

29 percent of the Internet users have purchased something they were pointed to via spam, according to a study by Marshal. Not surprisingly, the most commonly purchased items include Viagra and porn, but also software, and luxury items such as watches, jewelery and clothing - the counterfeit type.

622 visitors of the Marshal site took a poll, which asked ‘What purchases have you made from spam?’. Quite a tendentious question if you’d ask me. ‘Have you made purchases from spam?’, would have been a more balanced question.

Not too long ago, Proximi gave iPhone users a glimpse of how copy and paste could work on their handsets with the release of MagicPad. Unfortunately, the copy and paste functionality only went as far as the limitations of Apple’s SDK allowed; while you could copy from one MagicPad document to another, you couldn’t copy from a MagicPad document to Safari. It wasn’t exactly what iPhone users were looking for, but it was the start of something awesome.

We just came across Pixelpipe.com, a new service that allows you to easily post your digital pictures, videos, and audio files to a growing number of different services with only a few clicks, similar to what Ping.fm lets you do with text based messages. Pixelpipe supports forwarding to 33 different photo and video sharing sites, as well as most of the larger blogging and micro-blogging services. To upload photos, Pixelpipe has developed clients for Windows, Mac, and Linux, as well as for Nokia N Series phones.

Pixelpipe is being developed by an international team with offices in San Francisco and New Delhi, as well as with contract developers throughout the world. CEO and founder Brett Butterfield was the founding Imaging Architect for Ofoto (which later became Kodak Gallery), so he has a solid background in the media storage business. Pixelpipe's architect Jacob Jay heads the New Delhi office and is the creator of PictureSync, a service that has quite a few similarities with Pixelpipe.

Continuing our coverage of the mainstream web, in this post we look at some of the most popular websites for kids. We've gathered information from a recent report (pdf) from Nielsen Online, via Marketingvox, which studied the online habits of Britons under the age of 23. We also polled friends of RWW via Twitter.

The Nielsen report concluded that entertainment sites have the greatest affinity with under 12s, games sites for 12-17 year-olds, and student and video sites for 18-22 year-olds.

Trilliant, a company that works on the nation’s “Smart Grid“, has closed a $40 million funding round led by MissionPoint Capital Partners and zouk ventures. As part of the deal, Mark J. Lewis of MissionPoint and Anthony Fox of zouk will be joining the company’s Board of Directors.

Last June we got a sneak peek at nrme, a location-based message service for the iPhone. The service behaves like a regional Twitter, but is geared towards sharing information rather than chatting - it’s sort of like a neighborhood bulletin board in the cloud. Instead of using a follow system, nrme makes all messages public to users within a 9 block radius (users can still private message each other if they’d like).

One of the reasons why the guitar has become a staple in pop culture is its immediate accessibility. In lieu of standard notation, guitar players have developed tablature - a more intuitive representation of a song that uses numbers to indicate which fret on a guitar each note is played. Even the most inexperienced musicians can usually learn the system in a matter of minutes.

Security company Marshal reports that their latest survey found 29% of respondents willing to admit that they have purchased something from a spam e-mail.

While that number seems pretty questionable, PCMag's Appscout points to a related survey from Forrester in 2004 that found 20% of people say they have bought from spammers. In other words, if you believe these studies - it's getting worse, not better.