Likaholix is a brand new web portal that lets you share your personal and favorite recommendations about virtually anything with the world. The tool lets you build a list of things you like and recommend with the help of a pre-populated database of items (think books, movies, tv shows, products, etc.) readily available and put together from sources from across the web.

For each of those list or categories, Likaholix provides you with list of landing pages with descriptions, various topics centered around the items along with relevant image and video material so you’d have a central point to add information about stuff instead of having to copy and paste from multiple sources.

The service, which is sort of like a Twitter for personal recommendations, is still in private alpha. The company is currently giving away Amazon Kindle devices to 5 lucky beta testers, so be ready when you get an invite.

Likaholix was founded by Bindu Reddy and Arvind Sundararajan, a former Google Product Manager and Senior Staff Engineer, respectively. Both were among the key people behind GMail, Google Base, Google Docs, AdSense and Google Video.

Zoho is the proud maker of an awesome web-based office software suite comprised of document, project and invoicing management tools, has given its online word processing tool Writer a fresh look along with a couple of new features worth checking out. The India based startup, Zoho says that their Zoho Writer 2.0 comes with hundreds of improvements, for the most part on the user interface.

But the makeover isn’t the whole story. Zoho is also implementing a couple of great enhancements and brand features worth highlighting. The menu toolbar, for example, has been completely redesigned and renamed to reflect these changes. Now called the ‘MenuTab’, it categorizes the features as tabs based on functionality and mimics the familiarity of traditional office software by opening a drop-down menu upon clicking. This should make users who are making the switch from the well-known desktop word-processing software programs feel right at home, unless of course they’ve grown accustomed to Office 2007’s ‘ribbon’ menus by now.

The sidebar inside Zoho Writer has also been changed to look more like the sidebar in Zoho Sheet. It now includes a lot of new functionality including the search functionality, multi-selection of documents and support for performing several actions in one go. There were several other enhancements to the application in Header/Footers with support for auto-insertion of fields, Collaborative Editing, inclusion of Word and Character count in status bar, and so on, but maybe it’s best if you just give it a spin yourself. After all, it’s free.

Also worth noting is the fact that the changes will be reflected to all applications using Zoho Writer, including internal applications and third-party ones making use of the Zoho Writer API.

Meebo which is a popular web-based chat service has recently announced that it is going to extend its successful advertising platform to include the growing number of partners that are deploying its Community IM product.

Last year Meebo launched a very cool interactive social ads on its main chat portal at meebo.com, presenting users with small icons at the bottom of their chat windows that would display a popup when clicked. The cool thing about these social ads are, users can also share ads they especially like with their contacts, thus a good ad is likely to go viral in this innovative social ad network. A number of major corporations have run campaigns using the unique advertising platform, and so far Meebo is posting impressive results: the company says that it has seen an average 1% CTR with 10% of chat users sharing ads with their online buddies.

Now Meebo is ready to extend its successful ad platform to its partners that are using Community IM, Meebo’s chat product that allows web publishers to implement persistent browser-based chat clients on their websites. Ads will be displayed in the chat bar at the bottom of the browser (see the screenshot above) and will expand when the user actually clicks on the small icon shown. Community IM sites participate in a rev share agreement with Meebo, and will be able to use ads from Meebo’s inventory or from their own.

One of the concerns often brought up about Meebo is that how they plan on generating residual revenue. The initial results of the new ad platform on meebo.com have been encouraging, and if partner sites continue to see similarly impressive results, Community IM could well turn into a very lucrative product for the company.

Have you ever sent an email to someone and later regreted sending it on the first place? Or you probably realized that you have misspelled the recipients name or simply sent it to the wrong person!

This actually happens to me a lot on Gmail which is why I like this new Gmail’s Undo Button. With this cool new feature coming from the house of Gmail Labs, you will never have to regret after sending an email…You can always undo it!

To turn this future On, simply login to your Gmail account and Go to Settings > Gmail Labs and scroll down until you see the Undo Send. Once you enable this feature you will get a 5 second buffer time after you press the “send” button. Between this 5 seconds you may undo the send command and your email won’t be sent to the recipient.

What I’d love to see in this cool new feature is the option to change the 5 seconds to say maybe 15 seconds or 30 seconds. Because in my opinion, 5 second is just not enough to realize that there is some error in the email.

The official Gmail Blog writes:

This feature can’t pull back an email that’s already gone; it just holds your message for five seconds so you have a chance to hit the panic button. And don’t worry – if you close Gmail or your browser crashes in those few seconds, we’ll still send your message.

Guess what, Internet Explorer 8 will be available for download today from Microsoft’s site! You’ll be able to download Microsoft’s best web browser ever, Internet Explorer 8, at 12PM Eastern time today.

Microsoft promises that IE8 “is one of the fastest browsers on the market today” and features new goodies like Web Slices, Instant search, and Accelerators – basically right-clicking on highlighted text to bring up a list of routine tasks like mapping, e-mailing, definitions, translation, and more.

The browser has been in beta for over a year now, so it’ll be interesting to see how the final product performs. What would it take for IE8 to lure you away from your current browser (e.g. Google Chrome, Firefox)

In addition to offering improved security and privacy protections, Internet Explorer 8 is one of the fastest browsers on the market today, beating other top browsers in page load time on almost 50 percent of the 25 top comScore Inc. Web sites.* It also helps people save time while using the Web with easy-to-use new features, including the following:

- Accelerators. Accelerators make it faster and easier to perform common tasks online by making Web-based services such as ESPN.com, Live Search and Sina available for use directly from the page people are viewing. Users can simply right-click a word or phrase and instantly map, e-mail, or share it.

- Web Slices. Web Slices in Internet Explorer 8 makes favorite information from sites such as Digg, Yahoo! Mail, OneRiot, and eBay instantly available wherever someone goes on the Web.

- Visual search suggestions. The Instant Search Box in Internet Explorer 8 enables rich, real-time search from sites such as The New York Times, Amazon.com and Wikipedia, as well as sites from people’s own Favorites and History, complete with visuals and detailed information that saves time.

Microsoft writes in a Press Release:

“We are excited about Internet Explorer 8 for several reasons, including its ability to provide our customers with updates to eBay products using Web Slices so they can keep track of their buying activity while surfing the web,” said Matt Ackley, vice president of Internet Marketing and Advertising at eBay.

“The new ESPN Web Slices on Internet Explorer 8 make it easy for sports fans to check on the latest news and sports videos in a new and exciting way,” said Jason Guenther, vice president of technology and product development at ESPN Digital Media. “We have a heritage of leveraging technology to deliver the best sports content to fans, and this is another example of our dedication to that.”

I’ll try to have a full look at the new browser this week.

Yapta.com, is a very cool online travel portal that has the ability to track airline ticket prices for travelers. Recently they have completely revamped their site and has added a hotel price tracking feature that will help travelers to monitor and compare pricing of over 110,000 national and international hotels & other accommodation services. Basically, Yapta lets travelers to choose a hotel that best suits their travel needs and then sign up to be automatically alerted if and when the price drops for a particular stay.

Yapta has included several useful features to help travelers track hotel prices. Firstly the new portal will collect the lowest published rate of a tracked hotel and will create a easy to understand graph that visually demonstrates the price of the hotel over a period of time. Users can also track multiple hotels from one screen and also compare different pricing & features. Alerts can be customized by drop in price or by the frequency of alerts received. And like many travel sites, users can search for hotels by filters, including star rating, price, and amenities.

Yapta previously focused only on airfare flight tracking, where you can track fares from most of the major domestic and international airlines. Similar to the hotel feature, Yapta allows users to select flights to track, and then be alerted when the price fluctuates. If the price declines after you purchase it, Yapta will help you get a refund or credit from airlines that have lowest guaranteed fare policies.

Basically the main functionality for Yapta is the tracking feature which is very useful and easy way to compare travel prices without the hassle of going to a number of different websites and monitoring the changes in price manually. Yapta started their portal last year and is steadily growing in popularity (the site now has 600,000 registered users compared to 350,000 users in June of 2008). This new feature should be appealing to anyone looking for a travel deal, which is basically the entire world right now.

MySpace has recently integrated a brand new Flash-based application of photo editing tools into its site, which gives myspace users the ability to crop, edit, and stylize their photos from directly within their web browser. The tools are powered by Fotoflexer, which a browser-based photo editing startup that also powers Photobucket’s image editing features (Photobucket and MySpace are owned by the same company, so this isn’t too surprising). If you want to try out this cool feature, simply select a photo in one of your MySpace photo albums and press the ‘Customize Photo’ button.

This new tool allow myspace users to edit their photos in a number of ways, including many advanced editing options like red-eye removal, blemish removal, and cropping, as well as a number of image filters like ‘pop art’ and ‘neon colors’. Users can also drag and drop speech bubbles and virtual stickers to embellish their pictures – a feature that I’m pretty sure any hard core MySpace users will just love.

Now if we compare MySpace’s photo tools with Facebook’s existing photo editing features then I must say that Facebook is still far behind in their game. Facebook only allows you to rotate images, and that’ pretty much all they have thought about.

I hope that Facebook will start to take Myspace more seriously and consider adding some rather useful features in their current system.

If you want to make a office Presentation on the road, now your life would be a lot simpler because of the mobile website SlideShare. To access the mobile slideshare simply point your mobile phone browser to m.slideshare.com and you’re good to go.

Note that the mobile version is in beta at this point and was hacked together at Open Hack Day India last month (using Yahoo’s Blueprint platform), so there may still be some technical issues, warns the company.

At the slide share mobile site, you can take a look at the latest, featured and popular presentations if you’re using any smart phone and/or on all phones that have Opera Mini installed, and you can also search for slidedecks pretty easily. Users of Mobile shideshare doesn’t need to download or install software on your phone, and it lets you log in to your account to view your favorite slidedecks and messages from your contacts. Comments are currently not displayed yet, and it doesn’t support upload from mobile phones, but other than that it works like it should. I have tried the mobile slideshare in iphone and its pretty rock solid.

Below is a slideshare presentation, regarding their new launch of a Mobile site:

If you are a big music fan and live by your ipod then you will definitely love Echodio. This cool service lets you back up your iTunes music library on the Web and then stream it directly from the cloud. At launch it only supports streaming through Boxee, the media browser. But soon its going to start their own web player, which will allows users to stream your iTunes songs from any computer with a Web browser.

TechCrunch has recently posted a promo code that you can use to sign up today (max limit 300 invites), good for 5 GB worth of music storage each (up from the normal 1 GB). Simply use the promotional code TC/DC when prompted during set-up. The download currently works only on Macs.

Launching with Boxee seems a bit odd. Most people will want to wait for the Web player to become available. But the idea of backing up your iTunes playlists to the Web and literally turning it into a jukebox in the sky is appealing. Lala does something similar. And it seems like a feature Apple should build into iTunes as well.

How to use Echdio

Just download the app, and it will automatically install a small plugin in your iTunes. Once the installation is done, you will need to create a new Echdio playlist and put in all of the songs you want to back up. Then you can stream it through Boxee or eventually Echodio’s own Web player, which will have two-way sync so that when you play a song via the Web it will count as a play in iTunes. Ratings and other tags get synced as well. But the most useful part of the syncing feature is that you can sync iTunes between two or more different machines.

Isn’t that cool?

SocialCalendar a newly developed Facebook application is increasingly becoming popular as a go-to calendar for users to manage their social lives on the network. With over 11 million total app install counts and about 2 million monthly active users, SocialCalendar is one of the only widely used, general purpose calendars on Facebook as of today.

What is Social Calendar?

SocialCalendar lets facebook users plan events among their FB friends, get movie showtimes and integrate different events into a public calendar. Users can also import and get email reminders about events, birthdays and anniversaries. The app also lets you use virtual good icons to mark events and allows you to give virtual goods, like a birthday cake, to friends for special occasions. The price of virtual goods on the site ranges from $0.50 to $1.00 (some are free as well). The calendar app also allows users to make gift wish lists through Amazon and distribute the lists to friends and family.

What is Social Calendar Up to?

SocialCalendar is making some other interesting moves to monetize the app as well. First, the app has integrated, contextual advertisements from TV and movie studios and gifts and flower companies. SocialCalendar has already made a deal with NBC to advertise the new late night comedy show, “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon” and integrate the show’s times into users’ calendars. SocialCalendar has a movie calendar, which allows users to see weekly movie openings and movies that have made the top box office list. Users can add movies to their SocialCalendars, and can see show times and buy tickets to local shows in their areas directly.

SocialCalendar has also teamed up with 1-800 Flowers.com to offer users the ability to easily send flowers & gifts for a friend’s birthday or special event.