Content and publishing

San Francisco-based Blurb, a site that enables users to print as few as one copy of a book on demand, on Wednesday announced plans to expand its business to Europe.

The company plans to begin printing books in the Netherlands in three weeks. Europeans can now order books with a shipping time of 5 to 7 days (instead of 7 to 10 days) at a lower shipping rate.

Prints in Europe are set to maintain U.S. size standards: 7x7 inches, 8x10 inches and 13x11 inches. "We're going live with American sizes and see what the market prefers,&… Read more

Today, during his keynote at WWDC 2007, Steve Jobs may have done the smartest thing in iPhone prehistory.

With two announcements that didn't receive any of the hype normally associated with the iPhone, Apple may have actually made good on its promise that the iPhone will be revolutionary. Much more revolutionary than pretty looks, a touch screen, a wide-screen iPod, or even visual voice mail.

So revolutionary, in fact, that it may have an impact on much more than just the mobile-phone industry. And they seemed so relatively unimportant at first glimpse...

The two smartest announcements in iPhone prehistory

1. A version of Apple's Safari browser has been released for Windows. (Download here.)

2. The "third-party iPhone apps" Steve Jobs alluded to weeks ago would be Web-based applications, not apps that run natively on the iPhone.

The second of these announcements sounded like a cop-out at first. After all, when Jobs mentioned opening the iPhone up to third-party applications, everyone got the impression he meant they'd actually run on the iPhone, not on a browser.

But here's why it looks so smart after a closer look.

… Read more

One of the more interesting takeaways from this morning's keynote at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference was the news that .Mac subscribers running Leopard would be able to enjoy a new remote desktop feature called "Back to my Mac." Users will be able to sort and scavenge through the contents of computers far away from their home network machines using Leopard's new finder and transfer files to and fro freely. The service works with any Mac running Leopard that's been set up with .Mac authorization.

During this morning's demo, Apple's CEO Steve Jobs … Read more

Is your Google Calendar looking lonely? Is it filled with boring things like work, family obligations, or vacation plans that loom far, far away? Worse yet, is it sitting there, empty and useless? To spice things up, Google has launched a fairly extensive listing of calendars you can subscribe to. They range from important schedules--like national holidays and Presidential candidates' 2008 touring dates--to things that are bound to fill up your days, like TV listings and DVD releases.

The service is launching with schedules from several large brands like Netflix, Disney, and the NBA. Alternately, you can search through publicly … Read more

Google has added a new option to Google Docs and Spreadsheets to make files open for others to look at without the need to register or sign in with a Google account. To make any doc or spreadsheet open, users can click option for "invitations may be used by anyone" in the "Share" tab. Once enabled, any invite to view the spreadsheet will take users right to it, bypassing any annoying log-in screens. Users will still need to log in and be on the collaborators list to make any editing changes, but this should open things … Read more

Here's a terrible idea that's a fantastic business: TelID. What the company does is simple. It creates Web pages or redirects for phone numbers. If you register your number with the service, when users go to the Web address telid.com/[yournumber], they'll get redirected to your site, or to a single page that TelID will host for you.

The pitch, which I heard here at Launch Silicon Valley event, is this: you can print "Tel ID:" in front of your phone number on your business cards or in your phone book listing, and then … Read more

This announcement slipped through the cracks yesterday but is one of the more interesting partner dealings with YouTube we've seen in a while (besides that AppleTV bit last week). YouTube is now hosting several channels for Hearst-Argyle, a television company that owns 26 local TV stations in the United States. YouTube will be sharing revenues with Heart-Argyle based on viewership, similar to what's been done with some of the other partnered content providers like the BBC and several sports leagues.

There are already five dedicated YouTube channels that now host a variety of content, ranging from local news … Read more

Social bookmarking can be a tiring ordeal. Submitting links to services one at a time might be a little overwhelming if you're using more than two or three at a time. What if there was a way to post that link to 34 services from one place? Wonder no more--Social Poster gives you a relatively quick way to accomplish that.

Social Poster provides users with a bookmarklet they can click from any site that will grab the link, title, description, and any tags it finds. Users can put a check by any services they want to post to, … Read more

Today blogging-tools company Six Apart is upgrading its business-focused products, TypePad and Movable Type.

In the blog echo chamber, Automattic's WordPress gets a lot of the buzz, since it's open source, free, and led by the charismatic and young Matt Mullenweg (interview part 1 and part 2). WordPress' blogging software is well liked by its users, and there are a lot of people who know how to maintain WordPress installations. Automattic also runs WordPress.com, a hosted blogging service. TechCrunch and GigaOm run on WordPress.

Meanwhile, Six Apart sells Movable Type, a competing product to WordPress. It's … Read more