Think digg or netvibes aimed specifically at one demographic-hip-hop culture. Imagine RSS feeds and widgets geared to meet the needs of consumers, not necessarily the tech savvy. Take CEO and President Navarrow Wright, former web designer, programmer, and chief technology officer for BET, and combine his know-how with the experience, knowledge and ideas of hip-hop entrepreneur Russell Simmons. The end result is Global Grind, a website specifically aimed at the hip-hop demographic and culture in hopes of getting them to gather, collect, share and find data relevant to them in one place-globalgrind.com.

What is Global Grind?

In their own words, Global Grind says that, “it’s the global view of all the content that is relevant in the hip-hop community.” The website, modeled after and pulling components from such social networking sites as Facebook, Netvibes, and digg, is the vision of Navarrow Wright and Russell Simmons. However, unlike websites that are hoping to appeal to the masses, the intended audience for Global Grind is clear. Because they aren’t trying to reach everyone, they have more freedom with their design and features. Wright informed Lindsay Campbell in a recent Wallstrip interview that there isn’t one place online that meets the needs of the hip-hop community, and that he and Simmons feel that Global Grind can be that place. Wright defines himself as part of this demographic, and is working hard to have the site meet his needs, too. His vision is clear.

Spicebird is a new open source organizer mash-up from Synovel that uses Mozilla technologies to combine the e-mail and contact tools of Thunderbird with the calendar and scheduling features in Sunbird to create a slick new integrated communications application.

Spicebird is still in its infancy, currently 0.4 beta, but already the first public release offers an impressive set of features, including e-mail, calendaring, instant messaging and other communication tools.

Synovel first demoed Spicebird a few weeks ago and there’s a video of Spicebird in action on the site which showcases some of the applications finer points, like automatic event detection in e-mails and ability to add those events to your calendar with a single click.

As you can see in the screenshot above, the basic interface for Spicebird is a series of tabs holding each primary element of the app — e-mail and news, contacts, calendar and tasks. The homepage of Spicebird looks a bit like an iGoogle or NetVibes page with little preview widgets for selected e-mail folders, RSS feeds, calendar events and more. All the widgets can be customized to suit your work habits.

Despite subdividing the interface into tabs, working Spicebird remains a seamless process. For instance, if you get an e-mail where Spicebird detects an appointment or meeting, it will offer a link to add that event to your calendar. Clicking the link will automatically switch over to your calendar tab and add the event to your schedule.

Spicebird also offers an integrated Jabber chat client, which means you can connect to GTalk and other Jabber-based services out of the box. The interface itself is pretty barebones at the moment, but it gets the job done.

So far Spicebird probably sounds more or less like Outlook, Evolution or even Gmail since all these info organizers offer similar features and indeed that’s more or less what this first release is — a proof of concept.

But Spicebird has big plans and the next revision (0.7 according to the roadmap) promises some even more interesting features like an integrated blog publishing tool, stored IM transcripts and support for more protocols, as well as a new tabbed e-mail interface (also in the works for Thunderbird 3.0).

The final version of Spicebird hopes to deliver CMS integration (via Drupal), a document manager, Microsoft Exchange support and eventually some variation on the the “inbox as an organizer for social networks” idea that seems to very popular of late.

In the mean time, if you’re interested in checking out Spicebird, you can download a version for Windows or Linux from the website (Mac users, it doesn’t look like Spicebird currently has any plans for Mac OS X).

I tested Spicebird on Windows XP and found it to be quite stable and very usable, even in its current beta form. Although it doesn’t yet have some of what could be its killer features, like the Songbird music player, Spicebird is definitely one to watch.

http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2008/01/spicebird-offer.html

Posted by Amy Tiemann 

I’ve been writing about parenting and technology long enough for themes to begin to emerge. Like Lou Dobbs talking again and again about the “War on the Middle Class,” I am going to keep following the evolving story about kids and online safety, and supporting the idea that “Safe Product Design is Good Product Design.”

Yesterday’s announcement that MySpace has unveiled a new safety plan, working in cooperation with 49 attorneys general, is a step in the right direction. However, it did draw the predictable criticism epitomized by this reader comment on The Social blog:

A Novel Idea…: reader comment from jltnol Posted on: January 14, 2008, 2:24 PM PST Story: MySpace agrees to social-networking safety plan

Why can’t parents just do what the [sic] are supposed to do? Part of parenting is knowing what your kids are up to all the time.

If you can’t do it then hire a baby sitter who can.

You need a license to drive and a license to fish, but anybody can have a child.

Go Figure.

Read More »

A month after it launched a customized Web portal for iPhone users, Google is introducing a new version that further integrates the company’s offerings into Apple’s popular phone. It will be on display at this week’s Macworld Expo in San Francisco, and available to anyone who uses the iPhone.

The services are accessed simply by directing the iPhone’s Safari Web browser to Google’s home page. Previously, iPhone users had access to special versions of google Search, Gmail, Calendar, Reader and other services working from a unified interface on iPhone’s Safari.

On Monday, Google announced that it has further streamlined the interface, tweaking it both for speed and usability. Users can also customize Google applications on tabs in the Google.com menu bar; you can select what Google app you’d like to use by bringing it to the front menu. The tab customization includes Gmail, Calendar, Reader, Docs and Picasa accounts.

Gmail is now faster, and features “auto-complete” that will automatically fill in the contacts field of e-mails. The calendar now features a Month view. Google users can also access “iGoogle” gadgets — mini-applications that show you weather, stock info, news feeds and other content.

Posted by Caroline McCarthy

Photobucket, the massive image-sharing site that was acquired by News Corp. last year, announced Tuesday the debut of its mobile Web site.

On the new site, now live at m.photobucket.com, members of the photo-sharing site can browse their own photos as well as public images, upload photos to the site from their mobile devices, and access a limited home page. In the future, the company has said, Photobucket Mobile will expand to allow video functionality as well as options to embed photos in social-networking profiles.

A statement from Photobucket cited that demand for mobile photo-sharing access is high. According to an internal survey by Fox Interactive Media, the News Corp. division that runs Photobucket, 80 percent of users who responded to the survey own camera phones, 36 percent use the camera every day, and 52 percent access the mobile Web on their handsets.

Not to mention the fact that some other popular image-sharing sites, like the Yahoo-owned Flickr, already run mobile Web sites, as do social-networking sites like Facebook that have photo-sharing features; Photobucket needed to catch up with the competition.

And if cell phones are too small for your taste, Photobucket has a deal with TiVo so that you can access your online albums on your nice big HDTV.

http://www.news.com/8301-13577_3-9850481-36.html