Matthew Hicks

Preparing for more competition in the enterprise social software field, startup Socialtext Inc. has raised more than $500,000. CEO Ross Mayfield said the investment will largely fuel product development for the company, which sells software for building wikis and Weblogs for enterprise collaboration. Socialtext announced the Series A funding on Monday on its own blog. […]

While Google may be getting most of the search-engine attention with its stock debut, two smaller players are expanding their search options. Ask Jeeves Inc. is intensifying the international search wars by joining search leaders Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. in the Japanese market, while Lycos Inc. in a seperate move is homing in on […]

In an effort to attract paying business users early, Yahoo Inc. on Tuesday is expanding its domain name and Web hosting plans for small businesses. Yahoo, of Sunnyvale, Calif., will introduce a $9.95 option for registering a Web domain name, pitting it more directly against low-cost registrars such as Go Daddy Group Inc. The option […]

America Online Inc. on Tuesday opened the curtain on its update to the Netscape Web browser. Netscape 7.2 became available for download from the Netscape site. As previously reported, AOL had planned to unveil its first browser update in a year by the middle of this month. The update counters speculation that AOL was stopping […]

Macromedia wants to make the creation of video easier for Web developers while expanding the use of Flash. On Tuesday, it announced a new toolkit for adding Flash-based video to Web sites. The kit builds a wizardlike tool into Dreamweaver MX 2004 and provides software for converting video from other media formats such as Windows […]

Feedster Inc. is embracing RSS advertising with plans to add sponsored links into its feeds of search results. The search engine for Weblogs and syndication feeds on Monday will announce an expansion of its advertising program that will include the use of contextual advertising from Kanoodle Inc. in its feeds. When users conduct a search […]

Yahoo Inc. has issued a security update to its popular instant messaging service to fix broader vulnerabilities in an advanced graphics format. Late on Tuesday, Yahoo posted a security update for its Windows version of Yahoo Messenger to fix a series of vulnerabilities in the PNG (portable network graphics) library, or libpng. The library provides […]

eBay Inc. has acquired a minority investment in venerable online bulletin board Craigslist, a move that both companies said would let them share each others expertise in building online communities. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the investment came from an existing equity stake in Craigslist of about 25 percent, the companies announced […]

Instant messaging meets workgroup collaboration in a new enterprise IM service launched this week. In unveiling its InterComm service Monday, startup Five Across Inc. is betting that a set of innovative features such as workgroup-level presence control and centralized file sharing will persuade business users to join another IM service. Only time will tell, but […]

Microsoft Corp. has expanded the licensing options for its Office Live Meeting Web conferencing service, bringing it more in line with the way it prices other applications in the Office product group. The Redmond, Wash., software maker on Wednesday announced three new subscription options for Live Meeting and began including the online meeting service in […]