Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
US company Fatdoor is exploiting the power of Microsoft's Virtual Earth and Web 2.0 technologies to facilitate contact between people living in the same neighbourhood, initially the Bay Area of San Francisco.
Fatdoor brings together familiar social networking elements such as personal profiles, intra-personal connections, group networking and information sharing. It uses the Microsoft Virtual Earth online mapping platform to enable users to identify their area of interest and the location of other users.
The company says an alpha site is initially available (www.fatdoor.com) as an invitation-only trial and will be rolled-out in additional cities throughout the US over the coming months.
It promises to kick off with rich maps and pre-populated data for more than 100 million households in the US. People will be able to "get to know their neighbours by exploring local profiles and interests, and discover new friends in the neighbourhood." Using the Fatdoor mail service, they will be able to contact their neighbours "in a non-invasive, non-threatening way."
The Palo Alto based company is led by a number of technology industry veterans. Co-founder and CEO is Raj Abhyanker, a patent attorney, electrical engineer and former CEO of numerous Internet startups in the mid 1990s. These included AOL Classifieds.com (sold to AOL), MacInsider, Clay Pixel Studios, and Raj Abhyanker LLP (a patent law firm).
Co-founder and CTO Chandu Thota previously worked at Microsoft where he was a central figure in building the Microsoft Virtual Earth online mapping platform and Live Search Maps. He has recently authored "Programming MapPoint" and "Virtual Earth in .Net" by O'Reilly publishing. He is listed as an inventor on more than 14 patent applications for Microsoft related to geo-spatial mapping and technology.
Jan Jannink, the Community Architect of Fatdoor, was a founder of imeem, a popular social network with more than one million members. He invented the database architecture and the data model for imeem. Chairman Bill Harris was formerly CEO of Intuit and PayPal.
Fatdoor also has technology relationships with Amazon.com, Google Inc., and Yahoo! but has not revealed details of these. And while its service may be only in its infancy, its merchandising is well developed with an extensive range of Fatdoor branded merchandise on offer at http://www.cafepress.com/Fatdoor
David Bass
| ComOps, a leading Australian provider of business software products and services, has won a competitive tender to deploy its Salvus safety, r…
How to Make Business Discovery Work for Your Business
Business Discovery takes its cues from consumer apps. Like Google, it encourages us- ers to hunt for and explore data without worrying about or even noticing the underly- ing technology. Their entire experience is working within an intuitive interface to get real-time, self-service results with only minimal training. ...more
Try an easy-to-use set of web-enabled
tools for business-class productivity services. Office 365 provides
anywhere-access to email, important documents, contacts, and calendars
on almost any device.
LATEST HEADLINES FROM YOUR IT
