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MySpace plans to integrate Google Gears with its platform, according to co-founder Chris DeWolfe. Users will be able to access their profiles offline using the Google Gears APIs, but the feature won’t be available for a few months.

DeWolfe was fielding a few questions in an interview at the TechCrunch50 event with co-host Mike Arrington, who started off the interrogation by asking DeWolfe if he was dating Paris Hilton. The gentlemanly DeWolfe declined to answer the question.

He did talk about the new music service launching this month that will partner with the major labels, offer free streaming and include some original content from its audience of 120 million members. DeWolfe said that MySpace is very focused on making the new service a success, with more than 70 people, including top MySpace management, working on the project. He was asked if Amazon was providing the downloading capabilities, but declined to answer. MySpace has a strong music foundation, and may be able to make a some inroads into the Apple/iTunes territory.

Michael Arrington talk with MySpace's Chris DeWolfe

(Credit: Dan Farber / CNET)

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MySpace to engage Google Gears

SAN DIEGO–Who needs a computer to access the many social networks people are members of these days?

While thousands, or even millions, of people regularly switch between services like Facebook, imeem, MySpace, and others, it can be cumbersome to do all that switching.

That’s what Xumii, which presented at DemoFall Monday afternoon, has set out to obviate.

The idea is that users will be able to access their various social networks through their mobile phones on a single application, rather than having to rely on computers and full browsers.

Xumii allows anyone to access friends and information from multiple social networks on their mobile phones.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET Networks)

In the demonstration, the company showed how users can access a list of friends from any social network they’re part of, a list that will show each friend, the service they’re part of, and whether they’re online or not.

That’s pretty cool, and another nice feature is the ability to share photos or other files with people on that all-encompassing friends list. So, for example, a user could access their Flickr photos, select a picture, and then have it sent to any friends on their list.

Ultimately, what’s nice about Xumii is that it will allow people to take their social networks in their pocket, and not worry–as I’m sure many do–that while they’re on the go they are out of touch. This way, they can stay in touch no matter where they are, and they can continually update their friends with the latest things they’re doing, or the most recent photos they’ve taken.

Whether this is a good thing for us and our ability to detach ourselves from our computers is a question for someone else to answer.

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Xumii puts all of people’s social networks in their pockets

(Credit: Yammer)

I recently covered Socialcast, a “Friendfeed for business,” and liked it a lot. It takes emerging social interaction models that people are just now getting accustomed to and adapts them for business.

Here at TechCrunch50, the idea is also in evidence on Yammer, more of a “Twitter for business” that Socialcast, since it doesn’t seem to be able to pull in external feeds the same way.

However, users can have threaded discussions, as they can on FriendFeed. Users can also use “hashtags” for tagging topics, and users can follow just those tags. Useful if you want to follow a project, but not necessarily all the people working on it.

Yammer will launch with a desktop AIR app, as well as iPhone and Blackberry apps, and an SMS interface.

The base product is free. Enterprise versions with admin tools and security features will cost you.

I really like this concept, but my fear is that this kind of product is too easy to build (especially on workgroup scale, as compared to the consumer scale Twitter has struggled with). What I don’t see is a blocking business strategy. But I still like it.

The service is now live.

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Yammer launches; it’s ‘Twitter for the enterprise’

G.ho.st allows a virtual computer to be accessible via mobile devices like the iPhone.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET Networks)

SAN DIEGO–Why carry a computer laden down with data and applications with you everywhere when you could access all that information from any browser?

That’s the proposition behind an Israeli company known as G.ho.st, which presented at DemoFall here Monday afternoon.

Already, the company, whose name is also their URL, has a browser-based version that allows anyone to access all this data from anywhere. The idea is that by doing it this way instead of through traditional virtual computer software, which requires a lot of configuration, you can access your data from any computer.

Now, G.ho.st is offering their service through mobile devices like the iPhone.

This means that it will be possible, with the iPhone and other mobile phones, to access much of what is available on your computer. It may not make it possible to do everything that you can do on a full browser, but at the very least, it would be possible to find, examine and modify data without having to be on a full computer.

Further, the service will allow you run productivity applications that can access Word documents, email messages and even PowerPoint presentations.

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G.ho.st gives users way to access their virtual computer on iPhone

Photrade is built around the notion of a democratic stock photo site that lets photographers control ownership of their images, even as they earn ad revenue if others use them for commercial purposes.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)

SAN DIEGO–These days, I hear about new photo sharing sites just about every day.

That’s especially true when you go to a conference like DemoFall or its winter version, Demo, where over the years, I’ve seen more photo sharing sites than I could ever care to count.

At the same time, the stock photography business has been turned on its ear by the emergence of Web 2.0 and phenomenons like crowdsourcing.

On Monday here, a startup called Photrade took the stage to show off their new service, which combines both photo sharing and stock photography in a bid to give people a way to earn some money with the digital cameras that are ubiquitous these days.

In effect, the service is about connecting photographers, publishers and advertisers in a single marketplace, Photrade CEO Andew Paradise told me in an interview recently, that lets the photographers get paid when publishers use their pictures.

The idea for the site, Paradise explained, is that there are more and more talented photographers taking pictures and posting them online. The days in which only traditional professional photographers can take the kinds of pictures advertisers would want are over, in other words.

But until now, Photrade argues, talented amateurs haven’t had a way to get paid for their work. And at the same time, it has been difficult for photographers to maintain control over the pictures when they’re posted online.

So Photrade aims to solve those problems.

On the one hand, Photrade helps protect photographers by embedding custom watermarks in users’ pictures with a system that also allows for updating and changing the watermarks any time they want.

In addition, the system allows photographers to track usage of their photos, so that they can determine who is using them. And, if they decide they’re not happy with someone specific using a photo, they can block access to that picture. But if that happens, the user gets a note allowing them to ask the photographer for permission. This, of course, is a path to asking for payment for use of the picture.

And in a further bid to protect photographers’ intellectual property, Photrade uses tools to make it difficult to steal photos without permission.

The financial aspect of Photrade is an embedded advertising system in which advertisers can link to contextually relevant photos. And in that case, a small text ad is embedded in the frame of the photo in a place that viewers can easily see but which doesn’t interfere directly with the photo itself.

Photrade gives photographers a way to share their pictures and make some money from ad revenue in the process.

(Credit: Photrade)

This, of course, is the revenue model. And while most photographers will never earn a penny with their work, those whose work attracts attention and advertisers could make out well on this service.

In that regard, Photrade is much like other stock photography sites, except that anyone can add any photos they want to the site, and the revenue comes from advertising, not just from publishers using their pictures.

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Demo: Photrade lets photographers control their pictures, get paid for them