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While not a new idea, AirBed & Breakfast is a fun approach to couch surfing–a time honored tradition that encourages resource sharing between travelers who need a place to stay for a night or two, and people with open couches or a spare room.

The tool is set up like a hotel booking service, allowing people in need of a place to stay an easy way to browse open accommodations by city. As a host you can have people in your house as long as you’d like and set a fee per night or for a specific amount of time. The site also lets you post pictures, list amenities, and note all the little important things like pets, smoking, and whether you’ll have a meal ready in the morning (part of the “breakfast” in the moniker).

The service is making its cash by charging a $5 booking fee per night. Otherwise, the rest of the money goes straight to the host and goes through an online payment system so there’s no need to deal with cash or check transactions in person. The site was started by a couple of San Francisco locals who took advantage of so many conferences taking place in the area and the need of local conference goers for one or two days’ lodging.

[via eHub]

Related: Rent your stuff to strangers with Zilok

Through AirBed & Breakfast, users can see what’s available in a certain area and rent a place for a few days.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

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Rent your house or couch by the day with AirBed & Breakfast

Facebook has made a number of changes to the behind-the-scenes workings of its developer platform, according to a blog post on Monday by engineer Pete Bratach. For the most part, the updates are geared toward two things: letting users keep tabs on spammy apps, and giving developers and application creators more insight into the people who are using their products.

This is a much bigger deal for the people creating and operating Facebook applications than average users, but members will notice a few differences. Rather than “adding” applications, Facebook users will “log in” to them, and will have an option to “remain logged in.” It’s the social network’s answer to users who wanted a “try before you buy” option. Once they’ve logged in, they can opt to put the applications in their profiles. They’ll also be able to choose from the get-go whether they want the application to send them e-mail notifications.

Even though Facebook says it will likely make users less hesitant to play with applications they aren’t sure they’ll want to keep around, it’s bound to irritate a few developers who will say it makes it tougher for them to “go viral” and get the word out about their applications. Users, however, will likely appreciate the fact that they’ll have fewer unwanted e-mails and undesirable applications cluttering their online lives.

On the flip side, developers get a few new perks. Bratach’s post also announced that Facebook will be releasing new analytics for application owners so that they can know more about who’s installing and using their code: how many people have used it in the past week, how many people have “bookmarked” the app or subscribed to e-mail notifications, and how many times the home (or “canvas”) page for the application has been viewed.

Also on the road for Facebook: open-source code on the platform, and redesigned profile pages. The social network, which started the developer platform craze shortly over a year ago, has to keep both users and developers pleased: its team has a tough rival in OpenSocial, which is backed by bigger tech names like Google, MySpace, and Yahoo.

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New metrics, user controls for Facebook’s platform

Pageonce, which bills itself as a personal Internet assistant, has entered its public beta phase (we covered its February debut here).

The service lets users aggregate all of their Web accounts from a single dashboard. Users submit their user names and passwords for services, including finance, shopping, utilities, social networks, travel and email, into a Pageonce master account. After the accounts are activated, Pageonce can let users know how many minutes they have left on their cell phone account, and send notifications about flight itinerary changes, credit limits, friend request, bill payments and other account activities.
Pageonce also provides a proactive function, making it easy for users to monitor their accounts for fraudulent activity. A version of the Pageonce for the iPhone is also in development.

Pageonce provides a dashboard and notifications of changes in accounts.

The utility of Pageonce is obvious, but it requires a level of trust for users to give up their access information to a single Internet service. Pageonce applies military-level security, Pageonce CEO Guy Goldstein told me, with multiple security layers, including 256-bit data encryption, SSL systems and multiple firewalls. “All the data is encrypted, and we have hired hackers to try to break into our systems,” Goldstein said. Financial accounts are read-only, so from the Pageonce site a user’s accounts cannot be changed. Goldstein said Pageonce is also looking into token-based security solutions to provide great security assurance to users. Even with all the assurances of security, Pageonce must overcome a trust perception hurdle to gain acceptance.

Prior to the public beta, Pageonce had 20,000 users and 60,000 accounts. The majority of the accounts cover email, financial services and social networks so far. The company plans to generate revenue from advertising, primarily via customer retention promotions, which represents about half the marketing spend at most consumer companies. Anonymized benchmarking data could also provide another revenue source.

Pageonce was founded by ex-Mercury (sold to HP for $4.5 billion) executives and is planning a Series A investment round. The company was private funded with $1.5 million in May 2007.

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Pageonce personal assistant opens for business

Two Microsoft research groups, Microsoft Research Asia and Microsoft Office Labs, have launched Task Market, an online marketplace for jobs that can be done on Office applications.

Like Elance, oDesk, and other piecework job sites, Task Market is a marketplace for people with skills and time–and those that need them.

Task Market is focused on very specific, and nontechnical jobs. At the moment, the only job categories allowed on the site are writing, editing, translation, and basic design. Why not programming or scripting or multimedia editing? Because, as the FAQ says, “By focusing on tasks accomplished using applications such as Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Access, Task Market makes it quicker and easier for small businesses to get their job done.”

Of course, Webware recommends Web-based productivity suites (like Google Docs) for team editing and collaboration, but there’s as yet no marketplace service for Google like Task Market. Anybody want to build one?

Each job in Task Market has its own discussion thread, in which bidders for the job can communicate with the person who wants it done. There doesn’t appear to be a way to contact individuals privately, though, which is odd. Users (both contractors and customers) get ratings–just like on eBay–once a task is complete.

Task Market is a simple and clear service for finding document-based tasks for hire.

Task Market lets employers specify the fee they’re willing to pay for a job, and all payments go through eBay’s PayPal.

Task Market’s big benefit right now is that it is very simple to get into. It’s easy to post a job, and it’s easy to scan the available tasks. More mature services, such as oDesk, provide better job-tracking services, as well as more options for users to promote themselves and set up teams.

The site, still in “tech preview,” and has few jobs on it.

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Microsoft launches Task Market for Office jocks

Adobe unveiled an online community Monday with a word processor; file storage and sharing; and deep tie-ins to a newly Flash-enabled Acrobat 9.

The online push for Acrobat is a bold move for a brand perhaps best associated with the free and nearly ubiquitous Acrobat Reader, which opens print-ready Portable Document Format, or PDF, files. Now, PDFs will play movies.

The announcement comes in advance of the release of Acrobat 9 document-creation software, which adds dynamic features such as integration of animation, dynamic maps, 256-bit encryption, and improved forms.

The free Acrobat.com beta includes the Buzzword word processor. Its ConnectNow Web conferencing and desktop sharing tool enables chatting via text, video, and voice. The hosted services invite file storage and sharing with the capability to convert up to five documents to PDF.

Buzzword and companion tools would provide interactivity lacking in leading online word processors such as Google Docs.

The free Acrobat.com launched in beta mode on Monday.

(Credit: Adobe Systems)

Users can store files on Acrobat.com and join each other in virtual meeting rooms to share identical document views in real time. The site also can host data from forms created in Acrobat software.

Acrobat 9 document-creation software will arrive with a slew of support for creating interactive, secure documents and integration with Acrobat.com.

Acrobat users can convert MOV and WMV files to Flash content that can be embedded within PDFs alongside audio content and even 3D models. The free Acrobat Reader 9 will play the movies, eliminating the need to open other media players.

The new PDF Portfolios feature in Acrobat 9 lets users drag and drop content into a portfolio, then choose from myriad layout and presentation options.

Mapping features only in Acrobat Pro Extended 9 preserve geospatial coordinates and enable users to mark locations and measure distances.

The next Acrobat will take snapshots of Web pages and convert entire pages or chunks of them to a PDF that preserves links and animation.

Developers can tweak layouts with Flex Builder 3 or Flash CS3.

The new Acrobat.com will enable users to stash their work, edit documents, and collaborate with each other.

(Credit: Adobe Systems)

Adobe also tried to make it easier to for companies to make pages match visually with themes and custom logos, and it improved tools for comparing documents.

For creating online forms, Acrobat 9 adds intelligence to recognize content for conversion to fillable fields. And a forms tracking dashboard will show, for instance, the status of responses to a mass party invitation e-mail and let a user send reminders to guests. Responses can be sorted, filtered, and exported to spreadsheets.

Acrobat 9’s security enhancements enable users to add 256-bit encryption, used by banks online, to PDFs.

Redaction tools, a key selling point of Acrobat 8, will offer searches for numeric patterns in addition to multiple words and phrases. A company could, for example, find every accidental mention of a social security number or top-secret product being developed and black out the potential leaks from a PDF with one blow.

Business users could opt to access documents at Acrobat online or via SharePoint workspaces, network folders or WebDAV.

Acrobat Pro Extended 9 will enable maps to be marked up, preserving latitude and longitude.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Acrobat 9 comes in three flavors, set for stores in the coming weeks: Standard at $299 or $99 to upgrade, Pro for $449 or $159 to upgrade, and Pro Extended for $699 or $229 to upgrade. Pro Extended also comes with Adobe Presenter, which plugs into Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 for adding interactivity to presentations.

We’ll have a review of Acrobat 9 software once we receive final code, and we’ll share our experiences soon with Acrobat.com beta.

I still groan when I have to open a PDF file from the Web (my PCs make loud grinding noises), so I’m curious to see how the new tools might make PDFs faster to open as well as more dynamic to explore.

PDF Portfolios in Acrobat 9 will package FLV and SWF content with the usual word processing files and more.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

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Adobe Acrobat takes big online leap