Theres a whole new gaggle of start-ups that are designed to leverage the power (and stickyness) of personal networks; Plaxo, Midentity, LinkedIn, Friendster etc. They work by connecting you to your friends, their friends and their friends friends friends (or contacts). They all attempt to harness the theory behind the six degress of seperation. Now a few years ago, some clever people came up with the idea of instant messaging and MSN, Yahoo, AOL (ICQ) all quickly pushed different IM clients at the internet community. The hassle has always been that everyone has different clients, and some people have ended up having multiple clients to talk to different groups of friends. Wouldnt it be nice if these new personal network start-ups could all sit around a table and agree NOW on a standard for interoperability. Im sure that this suggestion would blow their business models - but come on, spare a thought for the user!

P.S Have just flicked over from a plain HTML "blog" to Blogger - it's making my life sooo mcuh easier! Do it!

Fizzy Fruit

These guys have patented a rather clever way of making fruit fizzy...coming to a vending maching near you soon.

Metronaps

OK - so youve been staring at the PC for a 8 hours, its only 2pm, and you know youve got another 4 hours of meetings in half an hours time. you were in the office until midnight last night and you're now physically exhausted. Time for a powernap me thinks....and where better than in a Metronap pod?

"Founded in 2003 and researched and tested at Carnegie Mellon University.

Blinkx

Blinkx (http://www.blinkx.com/) is the new "google", claimed the Sunday Times yesterday. Blinkx connects the information you need from the web, from online news sources and files on your own PC to create your own personal web to search from. The concept is smart, but the barriers to entry for someone like google are minimal. The business model has not been communicated but is likely to center around targted ads and content suggestion.

The idea, team and execution appear to be smart, but the name and logo are appaling. Ive already mistyped the word several times this morning! and the logo looks like the by-product of an office party fumble between Ebay and Mr Potato Head I've got a domain on hold that I think is right up their street so might give them a bell ;-)

Om Malik on Blinkx

Yahoo eats Oddpost

Well - it s quite a momentus day today - Oddpost (my email provider) has been acquired by Yahoo. Yahoo is the second largest provider of personal email accounts behind Hotmail. This particular space has gotten a little hot under the collar recently following Google's announcement that it would provide 1Gb storage for free to Gmail users. The oddpost acquisition comes as no surpise as these companies are looking for differentiation. Both Yahoo and Hotmail have increased storage space, but whats needed is a radical shift, something that will cut through Googles noise and get users chattering about yahoo again. So Yahoo have done it through Oddpost. Oddpost renders what appears to be something similar to Outlook express in Dynamic HTML - so its effectively outlook in a web browser. Its a fantastic customer experience which will create a lot waves when the Yahoo product relaunches soon. I wont be surprised if they create an entire application suite (calendar, to-do, address-book, groups etc) in a similar way. press release here