Blog.Lejer.Ro – Bloggers Heaven

One of the best ads servers that are on the market, and still free, got a load of cash for enhancements. That ammount means a lot: $5 Millions.

Openads, the developer of a popular seven year old opensource ad server, have spun out of London based ad network Unanimis and raised $5 million in capital to fund their business. The round was led by Index Ventures, with participation from First Round Capital, Mangrove Capital Partners, and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. Index Ventures’ Saul Klein joined the company’s board of directors. Josh Kopelman of First Round Capital also mentioned their investment it on his personal blog.

Openads, formerly called phpadsnew, is the most popular adserver solution when measured by number of publishers using it. They have 25,000 publishers using the sofware on 100,000 sites in 140 different countries and in 20 languages. Awesome, it’s not so?

The software is opensource under a GPL license, and so free to use. Openads will make money by layering services on top of the core software, something MySQL, WordPress, Zimbra and others have done successfully. More information on Openads here.

Google has started the roll out its presentation platform with the integration of a slideshow viewing feature in Gmail.

The slideshow viewer shows Powerpoint presentations within the browser and is accessed via a “view as slideshow” option next to attached ppt files.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt formally announced in April that Google was developing an online presentation creation tool to compete directly with Microsoft. The new presentation viewer is the first released feature of the fuller Powerpoint like package.

ppt files are viewed via following the text link

Read full article here: http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/06/12/google-integrates-powerpoint-viewer-into-gmail/

Babelgum, an Internet TV competitor to Joost, is in limited beta and has started to send out invites. You may’ve seen them already on other sites, but if you haven’t got an invite yet then click here to go to the Babelgum signup page or , download the client and subscribe straight from it:)

Note: the app is Windows only.

last100 has covered both Joost and BabelGum recently. The last100 review of Babelgum explained that it is a new peer-to-peer online video service founded by Italian billionaire Silvio Scaglia. Like Joost, it aims to combine the “lean-back experience” of television with the interactivity of the web. Check it out and let us know what you think.

If you still need Joost Invites, post right here. There’s also a lot of them free for you:)

The momment has come, more and more webs (and hot ones) starts to enable multilanguage content for them.
For now, it’s flickr. Yesterday, Google partnership with Sina for China interaction..
But now…

Today Flickr is launching in seven additional languages, including French, German, and the Hong Kong dialect of Chinese. I spoke with Flickr CEO and co-founder, Stewart Butterfield, about the news – and also found out the meaning behind the “loves you” label currently on Flickr’s logo! More on that below.

Flickr now has 525 million photos and Stewart told me that about 55% of Flickr users already reside in non-US countries. They’re hoping to increase that with the internationalization being announced today. Currently 45% of Flickr users are from the US. UK is next, followed by Canada, then Germany – and others such as Australia and Spain make up the top 10. Curiously, this is a very similar country breakdown to Read/WriteWeb’s user base – where 50% come from the US, around 7% from the UK and so on. It could be that this is the ‘early adopter’ spread for web technology!

Read the full article, Written by Richard MacManus

Twenty-eight-year-old Canadian Markus Frind, owner and the only employee of PlentyOfFish.com, has a winner on his hands with his self-designed, simple free online dating site. With 1.2 million active members, the site is one of the busiest dating sites on the Internet

This week The Wall Street Journal featured an article on his site. “A few months back, he posted on his blog a picture of a check from Google for nearly $1 million for a two-month period. Google confirmed the check was for real.” (worth noting that was in CAD.) Markus now reports PlentyofFish is bringing in between $5-$10 million per year.

Perhaps some will doubt the new claims. For those with both feet in the online dating industry right now, these numbers might not only be reasonable but sound a little low.

Markus currently blogs “The Paradigm Shift.” If you missed it the first time, there is an interview from last year right here.