Last week, Google released a beta version of Google Gears for Windows Mobile devices. Gears is an “open source browser extension that enables web applications to provide offline functionality using the following JavaScript APIs:”

• Store and serve application resources locally
• Store data locally in a fully-searchable relational database
• Run asynchronous Javascript to improve application responsiveness

Gears is supported on Windows Mobile 5+ devices running Internet Explorer Mobile 4.01+. The software is also available for Mac and Linux users running Firefox 1.5+. Developers are working on a version for Safari/WebKit which will hopefully provide service for the iPhone when the iPhone SDK is available for the phone.

Related: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/03/google-gears-goes-mobile/
http://mashable.com/2008/03/03/google-gears-mobile/

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AOL Executive Vice President of Programming, Bill Wilson, announced this week that AOL plans on launching twelve new sites over the next six months and up to 30 sites by the end of the year. Plain and simple, AOL has moved in to the online advertising market and to win in that market you new impressions… lots of impressions. Wilson told Bloomberg.com, “We want to be sure we are appealing to as many consumers as we can.”

AOL sites had a combined total of 109.4 million visitors in January putting the company in fourth place behind Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft. Microsoft published their own web strategy back in November with some lofty ambitions themselves.

It will be interesting to see if AOL comes up with any innovation in this move. To get traffic and maintain traffic, AOL will have to either offer a service that no one else does, or execute an existing idea better than the competition. But can that deliver innovation, quality, and quantity with great speed. We can only wait and see.

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I saw the news today that Google Calendar Sync was released this week and with much excitement I downloaded the utility to give it a try. I have three calendars that I maintain: a professional calendar in Outlook hooked up to corporate Exchange, a professional calendar in iCal on my Mac, and a personal calendar also in iCal. Synchronizing all three calendars with my iPhone has become a challenge which left me to decide which calendar is most important for easy access… I chose my Outlook calendar. But, with Google Calendar Sync I should get the ability to synchronize my Outlook calendar with Google and then automatically download my Google Calendar in to iCal. Problem solved… or so I thought.

After setting up Calendar Sync the first thing I noticed on Google Calendar is that not all of my events showed up. Upon further investigation, 99% of my events didn’t show up. It turns out that Calendar Sync only sent the events that I had created and only the events that didn’t have any other invitees. Oh well, excitement averted. Back to choosing which calendar is most important.

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Perhaps in response to the new Google Sites offering, Microsoft has decided to open up its hosted version of SharePoint to smaller businesses. The hosted SharePoint offering was previously only available to large enterprises, but the beta has now been opened to businesses with 5,000 or fewer users.

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Communiversity provides a place for prospective students to find genuine, trustworthy information about schools. It gives existing students a place to take pride in their school and share their experiences with prospective students. Students publish information about their school by using the site’s wiki format. Users can register as a prosective student, a current student, an alumni, or a visitor.

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Orgoo jumped in to the video chat market with their public beta this week. The site was announced at TechCrunch40 last year. The rest of Orgoo’s features (IM, email, and SMS) are all still in private beta.

Orgoo is one of the first in the market to provide video chat all within the web browser. Typically companies in this market require a download of a plugin and mostly Windows only. At launch there was a cap of 1,000 broadcasters site-wide, but that cap is being raised daily (good idea to keep the site from grinding to a halt). I tried to check out the service myself, but there was no one online and I have no friends to chat with… I know, it’s sad.

TechCrunch has good coverage…

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You know, if there was any company I would invest money in, it would be one founded by M.C. Hammer: a man who was $13 million in debt and had to file bankruptcy. Ok, perhaps that is some what unfair… he has been relatively successful financially since then. But I digress…

DanceJam, founded by M.C. Hammer, and Geofrrey Arone and Anthony Young from Flock, launched in to public beta on March 3rd. The company has closed $4.5 million in funding, with a some portion coming from TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington. The company intends to bring dance battles to the Internet where users have a “dance off” against each other with viewers voting for the best. The site also offers general dance videos uploaded by users and from external sites (YouTube).

Some of the videos are pretty amusing and make me feel a lot better about my dance skills. Casual observation: not a lot of white guys showing up there.

An example of a battle can be see here: http://dancejam.com/battles/990294947

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