Webware

Launching in public beta on Tuesday is ProofHQ, a new entrant to the world of Web collaboration tools. The service is focused mostly on design work, but has been set up to handle nearly every kind of document and illustration format under the sun.

Like Conceptshare, a tool we've raved about in the past, ProofHQ is entirely Web-based, and designed to make collaborating on projects of all magnitudes something that happens outside of your e-mail in-box.

On Monday co-founder and CEO Mat Atkinson took me through the entire process of proofing something among multiple parties. What makes it a standout among some of the competition is its capability to integrate with other tools or workflows you might be used to. For instance, users of 37signals' Basecamp can link it up with their account to help manage proofing jobs in that environment, simply using ProofHQ's editing, revision, and commenting tools while maintaining some of the dialogue, deadlines, and assignment work in Basecamp.

Likewise you can embed items that need to be proofed into your blog or site and have others leave their feedback. Like Scribd your document lives inside an embedded file viewer that runs in Adobe Flash, but when it comes time to propose edits, users can kick over to the full editor. Atkinson said he's already seen some great success with this in the private beta. It's been designed to make crowd-sourcing edits and suggestions a simpler process.

By default users can upload files one at a time. There's also a Java-based desktop applet you can simply drag files over to akin to Box.net's mass uploader. The only thing missing from ProofHQ is some of the real-time collaboration found on some other tools, most notably Octopz. There's no live video conferencing or text chat, although any changes get pushed out to all the other viewers as they're made.

ProofHQ has four different plans, three of them requiring a monthly fee. Each plan includes a certain number of allotted proofs per month (kind of like minutes on your cell phone plan), along with additional amounts of storage for uploaded files. If you want to give it a spin, the free plan will cap you off at five proofs per month, though your colleagues can make infinite revisions.

Editing documents or photos in ProofHQ runs right in your browser with nothing special to download. (Click to enlarge.)

(Credit: CBS Interactive)

After social news site Reddit went open-source in June, this was a logical next step: letting members take the code and import it to their own sites, creating social-news hubs of their own. That's the company's latest announcement, per a blog post on Tuesday.

"Today is the day Reddit fully becomes a platform for building link sharing sites," a post on the company blog explained. Technically, developers could already do this. But now the site is making it easier for them to do so, and letting them customize the design of the voting system to fit their own sites; more importantly, they can import them off the Reddit domain.

Reddit Bacon.

The site's humor-inclined team referred to the site update as "somewhere between when a caterpillar becomes a butterfly and when six hydrogen nuclei combine to form helium and (eventually) life as we know it." More likely, it'll make the news-voting system proliferate on sites that wouldn't otherwise have it; Reddit's team brought up the example of an entire Reddit voting system devoted to people who love bacon, for example.

Though Reddit, which was acquired by Conde Nast's Wired Digital division in 2006, is much smaller than rival Digg and the fast-growing Yahoo Buzz, this could make some waves. Plenty of sites have tried to build third-party social news systems in-house, and Reddit's open-source alternative could make it easier to integrate this sort of thing.

Plus, the company is hosting a contest to see who can create the best "custom Reddit" from scratch (i.e., fewer than 250 subscribers) in a month. The winner gets a MacBook Air laptop, a $1,500 Apple gift card, and a bucketload of free Reddit gear. Go, bacon guys, go!

There's no more Scrabulous on Facebook. For real. Unless you're in India.

According to the Associated Press, the social network has officially disabled access to the popular online game, which closely resembles classic board game Scrabble, after receiving a complaint from Mattel, the company that publishes it outside the United States and Canada. Access within the U.S. and Canada had already been blocked.

The rights to Scrabble are owned by different companies: Hasbro handles the game in North America, and Mattel internationally. The two takedowns were different: The creators of Scrabulous disabled U.S. and Canadian access on their own, after receiving a takedown notice from Hasbro, but the AP article says Mattel's complaint led Facebook to take action.

Mattel has filed a lawsuit in India, where the developers who created the game are based, over copyright and trademark infringement. A court decision is pending, which is why Scrabulous is still accessible in India while Facebook chose to pull it elsewhere.

Outside of Facebook, the Web site Scrabulous.com is still extant.

The creators of Scrabulous, brothers Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla, are none too pleased with Facebook's intervention. "It surprises us that Mattel chose to direct Facebook to take down Scrabulous without waiting for the (Indian court's) decision," Jayant Agarwalla said in a statement to the AP. "Mattel's action speaks volumes about their business practices and respect for the judiciary."

The brothers subsequently modified Scrabulous' design and points system, and relaunched it as Wordscraper in the United States and Canada within days of its initial demise. Mattel and Hasbro, meanwhile, have both created official versions of Scrabble on the platform.

The biggest social networks, like Facebook and MySpace, have operated mobile sites long before anyone ever held an iPhone. Midsize social networks are still warming up to the concept: Hi5, a San Francisco-based company that counts its biggest following in Latin America, formally launched Hi5 Mobile on Tuesday.

The social site has launched its mobile edition in 26 different languages, a testament to its multicultural image, and has optimized it for the iPhone, BlackBerry, and select handsets from manufacturers like Nokia and Samsung. Those translations, Hi5 says, are done on the part of locals rather than the company to make the site more "culturally relevant."

But more importantly, Hi5's mobile site is a marketing effort to reach its most loyal customers. MySpace and Facebook's current mobile sites are intended as supplements to the browser-based editions, but Hi5 openly targets the "millions of international users who primarily use mobile devices, instead of a personal computer, to stay connected with friends, family and colleagues." After all, access to PCs is less common in many Latin American countries than in Hi5's home country.

Recent statistics from ComScore indicate that Hi5 has doubled its visitor count over the past year and that much of its foothold is in Latin America; the social-networking industry in that region of the world has grown by a third since mid-2007, according to the same statistics.

While other social networks like MySpace are working hard to make headway in the Latin American market (and MySpace says its market share there is growing), launching a mobile site is a savvy move on Hi5's part.

There's a rich market for Web sites and services on automotive topics. There are general content and community sites (for example, Edmunds, Autoblog, and CNET's Car Tech), marque-specific sites (AudiWorld), sites for car show-offs (Car Domain), and utility services (RepairPal; review).

And now there's DriverSide, whose CEO wants to take them all on with a single site.

DriverSide founder Trevor Traina ran down the things that car owners have to worry about: "repairs, insurance, recalls, resale..." He maintains that there is no good site that actually makes car ownership easy in all of the categories where it matters. DriverSide is his attempt to rectify that--and pick up a piece of the massive automotive advertising economy in the process.

Take this to your mechanic. Good luck.

DriverSide has been out for about two months, and the current beta shows the ambition, but not yet the realization, of Traina's vision. Like RepairPal, it's a good helper when you need service. It will show you the cost of a repair or maintenance item, based on a database of repair jobs and information about repair rates in your town. Unlike RepairPal, it doesn't give you a range, but rather a precise dollar amount, and it lets you print out your own repair order to take to your shop. Whether this will help you get a fair rate from your mechanic I don't know, but I think it's a good way to begin the conversation about a repair task.

On Tuesday, the company is announcing that it's acquiring FairBenjamin, an online service that anonymously shops repair tasks out to local mechanics and connects them with car owners. It should add to DriverSide's service offerings. Of course, if your car requires diagnosis of an odd or intermittent symptom, neither DriverSide nor any other online tool can reliably deliver it (yet), but for common jobs like oil changes or simple part swaps, it's a big help.

If you put cars in your "garage" on DriverSide, the system can alert you when scheduled service is due, and when recalls are issued for your car. Other features are getting layered in to DriverSide over time. There's a resale value estimator that, Traina asserts, is more accurate and fair than the Kelly Blue Book. (DriverSide uses the competing Black Book service.) DriverSide's estimator will show you the price curve of your car over time; if you're leasing and want to wiggle out of your contract, it can help you identify the best time to do so.

Currently, DriverSide displays classified ads from partner sites, but it may launch its own ad network. Other services to round out DriverSide include professional and community content: reviews, advice, message boards, Q&A, and so on. You can also buy Terrapass carbon credits through the site.

I would also expect to see insurance shopping layered into the mix, and perhaps a deeper integration into the auto repair market. Given Traina's ambitions, an OpenTable of car repair may come along at some point.

Traina wanted me (and you) to know that the current version of the site is being reviewed and redesigned. That's a good thing. I found the navigation confusing, and some of the data incomplete. I hope, for DriverSide's sake, that the team can make the service easier to use before it layers in too many of the new features. But even though the service is not yet a serious threat to other auto sites, Traina's vision of what an auto site should be is the most comprehensive I have heard, and I do believe that users and the advertising market will reward him if his company can deliver on it.

The site has a ton of resources for car owners, including the most depressing one: your depreciation curve.

Gratuitous car link:
Trevor Traina covered his participation in the 2008 Gumball rally on his company blog.

Discount retailer Target has signed a deal with photo-sharing service Photobucket, adding it to the small collection of online partners for its in-store photo-printing service.

Through the partnership, members of Photobucket can directly order photos for pickup at most Target stores (presumably any Targets that don't have photo-printing stations would be the exception). Typically, the photos will be ready within an hour.

Photobucket, a unit of News Corp.'s Fox Interactive Media, is the third current partner for the retailer; Target already has partnerships in place with Shutterfly's and Kodak's online photo services.

Last week, Photobucket announced a partnership with start-up Scrapblog to make it easier for members to put their photos into online (and eventually print) scrapbooks.

Facebook has hit 100 million active users. No formal press release has been issued, so you're going to have to believe the guy who built the site.

The news came straight from the source: Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and several of his fellow executives put it in their status messages on the social network, and platform manager Dave Morin broadcast it in his Twitter feed. At least one of them referred to the number being "active users," the statistic that Facebook prefers to use, rather than registered accounts overall.

While Facebook got its start at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass. in 2004, most of this recent growth is coming from outside the U.S. Recently released statistics for July from traffic firm ComScore say that out of the approximately 145 million unique visitors coming to Facebook's domain, under 40 million of them were from its home country.

In talking to Mark Law, the new VP of product development for AOL's MapQuest, I was surprised to learn how powerful the service still is. To my mind the formerly leading mapping system is a trailing contender against Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Ask.com, but apparently MapQuest is still in the game as a leading Web site, with 48 million monthly visitors to the site, not to mention the users of the service who see it embedded on partner sites.

The new MapQuest puts a map on the destination page, as well as a better address entry box.

Law walked me through updates to the service that will be rolling out as an optional beta test to the site's users on Tuesday. In a nutshell, the changes are evolutionary and to my mind required if the app to stay relevant. But the MapQuest team has to be careful with its updates, since so many general users of the service are accustomed to its somewhat old-fashioned interface and market-trailing features. Of his users, Law says simply, "They don't want to see a lot of change."

The service is still moving forward, just not at the blistering Web 2.0 pace of the other start-ups we cover here. The biggest change, according to Law, is this: "The major thing we're doing is actually adding a map. A novel concept, but we're putting it on the home page."

So when you go to MapQuest.com, instead of just seeing an address entry box, now you'll see an actual map on the start page. You know, like on every other mapping site. But this is a necessary change for the service, so let's give the team credit for the update.

Also in the no-longer-new-for-2008 category: The service now makes it easy for you to recall your recently-used destinations and routes. And it can send directions to e-mail and to mobiles, via SMS.

Other improvements in the user interface include and entry box that does a better job of letting the user enter just a single address to map, or a start and end point to create a route. The system can now also parse long address strings instead of requiring the user to enter in address, city, and ZIP code separately.

I'm more impressed by the new location-based content getting layered into the service, such as weather, traffic incident reports, and gas prices. All these relevant data chunks pop up over the MapQuest maps, where they are actually useful. "We're transforming from just a maps utility to giving you what's around you," Law said.

Data blocks on items like gas prices and traffic now pop up over the map when you need them.

While the mobile "Navigator" version of the service ($49 a year) will give you walking directions in addition to the driving directions that are standard on the Web version, I was surprised that there's no public transit routing available yet. (To be fair, though, Google Maps on the iPhone doesn't offer either walking or transit directions.) Law said that, "We are evaluating what users are asking us for," but that some features--like transit--are difficult to launch while maintaining MapQuest's consistent quality across the country. "People trust us for our accuracy," he said. A quick survey at the CNET office reinforced this: Users here feel MapQuest is more reliable than Google, but Google is a lot easier and faster to work with.

As far as other, more Web 2.0 features, like support for community-edited maps, 3D views, street-level photography and the like, the advice I have for MapQuest fans is to not hold your breath. This service is squarely aimed at mainstream users and its 1,100 business partners (Law twice mentioned Dunkin Donuts as a user of the API).

I'm trying to find a positive lesson in MapQuest's story, but to be honest it's a reach. I can understand a company's goal to iterate its interface and features at a measured pace, to not alienate a large and profitable user base. But old-fashioned is rarely a winning characteristic of a Web business. In MapQuest's case I can't help but wonder where the company would be if it had been more aggressive in adopting new technology and distribution methods, as Microsoft and Google did in the vacuum it left. I'll take Law at his word that MapQuest is big. But it could have been much bigger.

Look out multinational employers, Glassdoor.com is also going multinational.

Glassdoor, a site that gives insider reports on salaries and the zeitgeists of more than 11,000 companies, plans to announce Tuesday that has added multi-currency information for more than 100 countries. Basically, that means a Google employee in the search company's terribly cool offices in Zurich, Switzerland, can see salaries in the local Swiss franc--probably more useful than seeing it in the American dollar.

Launched in June, Glassdoor says it has received more than 60,000 salary reports and company reviews. It was founded by veterans of Microsoft and Expedia (Rich Barton, the CEO of real estate site Zillow, is non-executive chairman). The idea was to make salary and workplace-quality information as public as possible. The service is free, but in order to get information, users have to provide information.

Glassdoor has added two other features: The first allows users to more finely filter the information they're looking for. The second is an "employer" feature that allows a representative for one of the many companies being reviewed to have the ability to comment on reviews (fair's fair, after all) and talk with Glassdoor employees to make sure their information is accurate.

Adobe Systems on Monday let loose its plan to reinvent its image-editing software: the convergence of desktop, Webware, and mobile photo applications.

In late September, Adobe will update both Adobe's Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements with version 7, rebrand Photoshop Express as Photoshop.com, and debut a mobile Photoshop (of sorts) for Windows Mobile.

Syncing with the new Photoshop.com

Whereas Photoshop Express (review) began life as an experimental, Web-based offshoot of the Photoshop brand, Adobe's new strategy to automatically sync photos from desktop to Web to phone and back again now gives Photoshop Express a starring role on the Photoshop playbill, albeit using a different alias. Don't let that fool you--although the product will now be Photoshop.com, it will retain its editing features and the ability to post photos to Facebook, Flickr, Photobucket, and Picasa. The bigger difference is that the new Photoshop.com will sync with the two Photoshop Elements applications and the new mobile software.

A sneak peek at Adobe Premiere Elements 7.

(Credit: Adobe)

To sweeten the deal for existing users, and perhaps to lure new ones, Adobe is bumping up the free, basic membership plan from 2GB to 5GB of storage. However, Adobe is no doubt hoping that users will get hooked on online storage and go with the Plus membership, which will dish out templates and tips in addition to serving up 20GB in locker space for photos and videos. The 'Plus' plan is sold on its own for $50 per year or bundled with the desktop software for $140.

New Photoshop Elements

Phase two of Adobe's photo-syncing project is to update the desktop-bound Elements applications to make them compatible with the new Photoshop.com. They'll get a few additional features and enhancements along the way. For instance, Photoshop Elements 7--which is expected to sell for about $100 or $80 if you're upgrading--will automatically back up photos online, deliver new templates, and will contain new image-enhancement tools. CNET Senior Editor Lori Grunin has an in-depth preview and her own take on Adobe's efforts to stay relevant.

Premiere Elements 7 will see the bonus features in Elements 7 and raise them with new movie-making tools, support for AVCHD, and automatic video upload to YouTube. Grunin weighs in on that update, too.

You'll be able to upload, share, and view photos, but not title or caption them from Adobe's beta mobile app.

(Credit: Adobe)

Photoshop on the phone

Adobe's mobile presence has so far been restricted to utilities--a mobile PDF-reader and Flash Lite for playing Flash videos on the mobile stage. To that end, Photoshop.com Mobile beta is Adobe's first attempt at creating a mobile version of one of its consumer offerings, although the app will primarily remain a vehicle for simple uploading and downloading to and from the revamped Photoshop.com.

Based on the Flash Lite Player, Photoshop.com Mobile beta will let you upload all the photos on your mobile phone to Photoshop.com, which will then automatically sync to either Element 7 app, if you have one. The preview build we saw is divided into three rudimentary actions. The first is to upload select phone photos to Photoshop.com for sharing with friends or for using as a backup. The second has you viewing thumbnails of all the photos in your online gallery, and the third lets you peruse any albums you've created on Photoshop.com and Elements 7. There will be no photo-tagging, titling, or captioning in the initial release, and we admit that's a letdown, especially when competing photo apps can already do this on multiple mobile operating systems.

That's a competition to which Adobe can't help but be attentive. Traditionally a publisher of desktop software, Adobe has been slow to adapt for the two fastest-growing software platforms--mobile and the Web. While we expect a bare bones Photoshop.com Mobile beta, the app's ability to connect with the Photoshop.com hub gives Adobe more relevance for existing users. We're skeptical that folks using Picasa, Photobucket, and Flickr will abandon them for Photoshop.com, but the ability to quickly post from the phone to those sites, from the Web to the desktop, and from the phone to the desktop via Adobe's servers, may keep users of the Elements desktop apps from bailing in favor of a competitor.

Like Adobe's other releases, Photoshop.com Mobile beta will be available in late September, first for Samsung Blackjack I and II, Moto Q 9h and 9m, and Palm Treo 700 w/wx and 750, with support for other Windows Mobile phones expected to follow.