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Woot, the popular bargain site that offers one good (sometimes great) deal a day, has just launched a new portal at deals.Woot. The new site is a fairly major departure for Woot, which up until now has been driven by product selections from a team of Woot employees (aside from the main Woot.com site, which is often tech/geek focused, there are special subsites for shirts, wine, and a handful of others). Unlike these sites, Deals.Woot is run by its users — it’s essentially a Digg for bargains.

The new site features a list of top deals, as voted on by the community and chosen by the Deals.Woot algorithm. This will be going head to head against other deal sites like SlickDeals and FatWallet, which have well established communities. Woot already has plenty of fans, but it may take some time to build out a base of deal hunters.

But the very top of the site actually isn’t dictated by users. Instead, it’s dedicated to “Sponsored Deals”. Woot explains that these deals are paid for by advertisers, but that they’re still bargains:

OK, yes, companies pay a little something to be Sponsored Deals. But we don’t allow just any old crap in this section. Sponsored Deals are proposed to us by other retailers, manufacturers, and even other daily deal sites. If we find the deal compelling enough that our members will appreciate us bringing it to their attention, we’ll feature it here. Believe it or not, we have a reputation to uphold.

The site has been available for weeks before now, but was only available until members up until a few hours ago.

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Digg For Bargains: Deals.Woot Is Now Open To The Public

This time they’re reconstructed the Declaration of Independence, complete with edits and comments from the founding fathers. My US History is a bit fuzzy, but there are plenty of obvious jokes nestled in here, and I’m sure the Googlers have included a few more subtle ones as well. Unfortunately, it looks like you’ll have to have a Wave account if you want to witness the creation of one of the United States’ most important documents. But we’ve tried to grab a few of the key moments in the screenshots below.

As a demonstration of what you can do with Wave, the document succeeds in some respects. But frankly it can still be confusing to tell what’s going on. For example, when the founding fathers are casting their votes, the Wave only says something vague like “Thomas Jefferson edited this message” — it’s up to you to figure out what he did.

According to a tweet a few minutes ago from Wave team member Lars Rasmussen, the idea to create famous documents came from Tim O’Reilly. Hopefully we’ll be seeing more of these soon.

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We Hold These Truths To Be Awesome: The Founding Fathers Give Google Wave A Try

At a time when publications targeting small business owners are in decline or dying (R.I.P. Fortune Small Business), the Web is thriving with experimentation.  One effort that is just getting off its feet is Bizmore, a site backed by former junk bond king Michael Milken and executive-coaching firm Vistage International.  Bizmore launched last summer as a Q&A site for business advice.  Today, it unveiled a new design with more magazine-like content, including a network of eight blogs, ranging from the Social Business to Workplace Trends and Creative Finance.

“I’ll have 25 blogs before the end of the year,” says editor in chief Jeffrey Davis, who used to work with me as an editor at Business 2.0 before he went on to help run Bnet. Earlier this year, Davis left Bnet to join Bizmore founder Alice Hill to try to build an online publication for small businesses from scratch. Each blog, he says, tackles “some important facet of running a small business (finance, social media, managing, etc), each written not by name journalists, but true experts who speak and consult professionally on their topic.”

Bizmore already has about 30 or so consultants, business professors and other business experts who answer readers’ questions in Q&A part of the site. The blogs expand that network of experts and give some of them a larger soapbox. They will start giving Webinars and live events as well, which is Vistage’s specialty. The original idea of the site was to have an online gathering place with real content for the tens of thousands of people who attend Vistage executive coaching seminars every year, but then lost touch in between events. It’s reaching way beyond that now, but Bizmore’s core audience still comes from this pre-existing community.

In addition to the blogs, the site has regular features, interviews, and advice on methods and tactics for running a small business. Davis is taking a page from the old Business 2.0 here by sending his journalists to find out what management tactics work in real companies and then package them up into easy steps any entrepreneur can follow. Bizmore spits out features such as “3 Essentials for Landing a Business Loan,” “CEOs: Careful Who ‘Owns’ Your Facebook Business Page,” and “The $100K Referral Bonus.”

Bizmore is not about breaking news or great narratives. Its aspiration is to be filled with tons of practical advice on how to run a business, and a network of experts and readers who help each other as well. Getting the right mix between community and content is tricky. But service journalism makes a lot more sense on the Web than in a print magazine. Features and posts can be whipped up on the fly in response to the immediate needs and questions of readers, who can also give each other advice.

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Bizmore Adds A Blog Network To Go After The Small Business Reader

It seems that flight delays could turn into a big business. FlightCaster, the startup that helps predict flight delays long before the airlines themselves usually do, has just landed a $1.3 million funding round led by Tandem Entrepreneurs and Sherpalo Ventures. FlightCaster previously recieved money as part of the Y Combinator program. Today the company is also launching a new API, which developers can learn about here.

FlightCaster’s goal is simple: it wants to let you know when your flight is delayed as early as possible. Using a variety of data sources and complex algorithms, the service will alert you whenever it thinks one of your flights will be delayed, along with an explantation of the factors that contributed to its prediction. And so far, it seems to be working — co-founder Jason Freedman says that four hours below takeoff, Flightcaster manages to predict ten times as many delays as the airlines do. And they manage to stay 90% accurate (which is on par with the airlines).

Back when I first wrote about the startup, I questioned how helpful knowing about a delay in advance really was. After all, FlightCaster’s notifications state that a flight will probably be delayed. But sometimes they’re not, so it isn’t wise to show up at the airport a few hours late. Freedman says the FlightCaster team had the same concerns, but that there are two discrete sets of users who value the service. The first group of users (which is where most people fall) just like having a heads up that their flight is delayed, mostly so that they can warn friends and co-workers that they might be late.

The second group loves FlightCaster for a different reason: they will change their plans if there’s a possibility of a delay. Freedman says these tend to be frequent fliers (likely business travelers) who don’t want to get caught in delay limbo and are willing to pay to swap flights even if a delay isn’t certain.

It’s this second group that will likely prove most valuable to FlightCaster. The company is currently in talks with a number of major travel sites (and even some airlines) to integrate their predictions. Freedman won’t get into specifics yet, but he says some of these partners are interested in helping frequent fliers rebook their flights as soon as there’s a delay alert.

Along with the parters FlightCaster is already talking with, other developers will be able to tap into the Flightcaster API for a fee.

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FlightCaster Takes Off With $1.3 Million In Funding And A New API

Continue reading Samsung Story external HDD now boasts 2TB, eSATA

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Life360, a startup that looks to help families keep their loved ones (and their identities) safe, has closed a $750,000 funding round with investors including Seraph Group, LaunchCapital, Founders Fund (via FF Angel), the Band of Angels, and Mark Goines. The service also recently launched to the public at TechCrunch50’s DemoPit.

Life360 offers a suite of services related to safety and security, which are designed to help prevent everything from losing your phone to losing your personal identity. One example is the site’s Emergency ID service, which provides parents with cards/bracelets for their children that instructs first responders to call a designated phone number in the event of an emergency. Calling that number will activate the service and automatically blast a message to any emergency contacts.

Other services include a Lost & Found product (you put physical tags on your valuables with with instructions on how to return the item to you) and identity protection. Life360 also offers an Android app appropriately called ‘Tracker’ which can be used to keep tabs on children during the day, though founder Chris Hulls acknowledges this isn’t all that practical yet because many children don’t have smart phones.

The company’s goal isn’t necessarily to provide all of these services itself. Rather, it wants to offer a set of core products built in-house, alongside services that are offered by third parties. Life360 works to integrate these services into their dashboard, and makes it easy to sign up for them because it can pre-populate key information. This seems like a smart play given how fragmented/confusing the privacy and security market can be, though I’m wondering if Life360 might have some trouble convincing well established services to play ball (especially if they’re going to be listed alongside competitors).

We’ve briefly covered Life360 a couple times before, when the company won the first Android Developer Challenge (good for a $300,000 award) and then again when it was part of this summer’s fbFund REV.

Life360 Introduction Cartoon from Life360 on Vimeo.

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Life360 Raises $750k To Keep Your Family And Valuables Safe

As anticipated, Google has taken the first step to launch full extension support for its Chrome browser. Starting today, Google is allowing developers to upload the extensions they are making to the new Extensions Gallery. This gallery isn’t yet open for Chrome users to test out, but Google is saying that they will open it to “trusted testers” in the next few days.

If you are a developer working on an extension, you can simply agree to Google’s terms and upload your extension to the gallery right now. One of those terms is that Google has the right to review your extension before it’s published, but they are saying they will only do that if it includes “include an NPAPI component and all content scripts that affect “file://” URLs.” Google goes on to note that “For security reasons, developers of these types of extensions will need to provide some additional information before they can post them in the gallery.” Fair enough.

As we noted a few days ago, there are already some Google-made extensions that are working in Chrome now, such as a Gmail Checker, which is handy. These were mainly made to be examples in helping walk developers through the extension creation process. You can find their documentation on that here. Google promises the whole process (both creating and updating extensions) is simple.

Extensions are important to the growth of Chrome as they are one of the most popular features of Firefox, the browser that has been able to best combat Microsoft’s Internet Explorer over the past several years. Of course, Google is the biggest backer of Firefox-maker Mozilla, so the growing rivalry between the two is interesting.

Last Thursday, Google also showed off Chrome OS, it’s operating system based on the Chrome browser, for the first time. And in the next few weeks, a beta version of Chrome for Mac is slated to launch. It’s worth noting that the test extensions already work in the dev builds of Chrome for Mac.

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Google Opens Chrome Extensions To Developers, Will Only Review Certain Ones

You’ll recall that Microsoft recently banned a bunch of people from Xbox Live because they had modded their 360s. Modding is against the rules, don’t you know? Microsoft told VentureBeat not to believe the numbers being thrown around—the number most relayed is 1 million banned 360s—because it never releases numbers to anyone.

Again, the larger debate is: should you be allowed to mod your console? I think so, but that’s probably because my opinion on every single issue is, “So long as you don’t bother me in any direct way, do what you want.” You bought the hardware (the 360 itself) so if you want to whip out a soldering iron or flash its DVD drive with a custom firmware, be my guest.

At the same time, Microsoft has the right to say, “Look, Xbox Live is a service that we’re trying to keep as clean as possible. If you’re playing a game on a modded console, it’s much harder for us to ensure that the service is as clean as possible.” (Where “clean” means free from cheating, hacks, etc.) Plus, why should someone be able to play a pirated copy of Modern Warfare 2 on Xbox Live when everyone else paid for it? It’s not “fair,” if you will.

That a law firm is possibly looking to start a class-action lawsuit over the bans is sorta silly. The law firm may have something when it comes to Microsoft owing some of these people money for the remainder of their Xbox Live contract, but I don’t know what the EULA or TOS for Xbox Live says about service termination. If you’re banned for being a jerk, are you entitled to any money left over on the contract?

The moral of this particular story is, no, Microsoft didn’t ban “1 million” Xbox 360s.

A surefire way to avoid being banned? Don’t use your modded Xbox 360 on Xbox Live.

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Microsoft defends decision to ban modded Xbox 360s (but says it didn’t ban 1 million of them)

Google’s on a bit of a shopping spree this holiday season. The search giant just acquired AdMob for $750 million a few weeks ago. Today, Google has acquired display advertising company Teracent for an undisclosed amount of money. The deal is expected to close this quarter.

Teracent’s Intelligent Display Advertising technology creates display ads entirely customized to the specific consumer and site. The startup’s proprietary alogirthims automatically pick the creative parts of a display ad (images, colors, text) in real-time determined by like geographic location, language, the content of the website, the time of day or the past performance of different ads.

To date, Teracent has only raised $5.8 million in funding. Google says that Teracent’s technology will now be offered to its display advertising clients who run campaigns in Google’s Content Network and to DoubleClick clients. Google had been rumored to be in talks with Teracent about a possible acquisition a few weeks ago. Earlier this year, Yahoo announced a partnership with Teracent as part of its “Smart Ads” program for PC and mobile advertisers. With Teracent’s acquisition by Google, I’m assuming this partnership is nullified.

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Google Acquires Teracent To Apply Machine Smarts To Display Ads

As AOL prepares to spin off from Time Warner early next month, it is going through a slight rebranding. The AOL logo is changing to lowercase with a period (Aol.). The new branding campaign that is about to launch features the logo revealed as white space inside different images and pictures (see below).

The video above is a sneak peak of AOL’s brand advertising campaign, which again reveals the new AOL logo over different images that the company wants to associate the brand with. The attempt here is to try to portray AOL as trendy, vibrant, and interesting—as far as artsy splashes, a headbanger and an acrobatic trio doing flips off one of their own manages to do that. The point is that AOL wants to reveal itself in unexpected ways.

It does need to reboot its image, I’ll give it that much.

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Sneak Peek: AOL’s New Branding Video Appeals to Artsy Headbangers And Acrobats