Mozilla Labs announced today that it has released a new solution called Ubiquity, which will try to bring a disjointed Web together under the auspices of that one solution.

Ubiquity will try to “connect the Web with language to find new user interfaces that could make it possible for everyone to do common Web tasks more quickly and easily.”  More specifically, Ubiquity will try to get users to type what they want to do instead of what they’re trying to find in a search box, enable more mashups to increase the usability of different Web services, and extend browser functionality to make it a hub for online solutions.

As part of its announcement, Mozilla Labs announced Ubiquity 0.1, which will demonstrate some of Ubiquity’s concepts and its potential.  This first release focuses more on the platform itself, which the subsequent release will “explore interfaces that are closer to features that might make it into Firefox.”

Mozilla also said that Ubiquity 0.1 will allow “users to map and insert maps anywhere; translate on-page; search amazon, google, wikipedia, yahoo, youtube, etc.; digg and twitter; look up and insert yelp review; get the weather; syntax highlight any code you find; and a lot more.”

At this point, Ubiquity is obviously a crude version of what could possibly be, but it promises more than it currently offers.  And by performing the kind of functions that are simply impossible today (Mozilla mentions the difficulty with which people can work together on mapping), Ubiquity could be the centerpiece of the Web’s evolution.  At the very least, Mozilla hopes so.

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This is a guest post written by Jackie Peters of Heavybag Media

I am pretty heavily involved in the expanding startup community here in LA and make my way up to the Bay area on a regular basis. I meet a lot of entrepreneurs and see new startups every day. Many of these companies and the entrepreneurs who found them are deeply ensnared in the echo chamber, they’re all drinking each other’s Kool-Aid. We’re talking about people who are not just at the top of the technographic ladder, they’ve gotten to the roof and are looking down on everyone else like they are a bunch of ants.

We forget that there is a whole world out there. Most people have never even heard of Twitter, Brightkite or many of the other services that we have become accustomed to using. It’s a given that eventually these sorts of tools will be adopted by a larger audience, but only when they add real value and only if we present them in a way in which the barriers to entry are minimal.

I believe that if an idea is ever going to make it out of the echo chamber and appeal to a mass market, a company needs to be mindful of the market it’s hoping to serve from the get-go. It’s not enough to have amazing technology. In the end, very few of these companies are technology companies; they are simply built on technology. These companies typically begin with an initial vision that the founder(s)/ CEO use as their road map for success. Having an amazing vision is a requirement for sure, and it’s a great starting point. But rarely is the original vision the best outcome.

The initial vision is basically just one person’s idea of what they think will be cool, successful and profitable. Ultimately, it’s up to the market to determine what meets their criteria. The CEOs that I have admired the most are the ones who use that initial vision as a launch pad, and then listen to their market and iterate on their product, their brand and their marketing strategy to align themselves with their audience.

Photo Credit: 4pizon

It breaks my heart to see so many startups with amazing technology, brilliant minds, and visionary leadership fail due to the fact that they never bothered thinking about the market their product is designed to serve, or worse, they never saw the bigger picture of how their technology could be applied to better serve a larger, or more profitable market.

Good example: Private Beta strategies. It’s typical for most Web-based startups to implement a private Beta strategy, they invite people in who, in exchange for having a sneak peak, will find the bugs in the site, offer their feedback on the experience overall, and in some cases blog about the product or otherwise leverage their social graph to spread some buzz on behalf of the new product. It’s a sound strategy in many ways. Here’s the problem: the typical private Beta invitation list is primarily key influencers within the echo chamber. Is this minute portion of the population really the target audience for most of these companies? If they are, then how do these companies ever plan on monetizing?

An entrepreneur came to me recently with a new online product. It took fantasy football, a very middle-America sort of activity and added components which socialized the process and made it more interesting and captivating for the user. He was concerned that his product might not appeal to his audience and asked me for my advice. He had been describing it to some of his non-tech friends as being like “the Digg of fantasy football.” To which his friends responded, “What’s Digg?” You see, we forget the rest of the country isn’t up here on the roof with us. My advice to him was to explain the product from the point-of-view of the market it was designed to serve. Don’t worry about middle-America grasping on to social media.

Social media in another year or two will be non-existent, it will just be the Web, same as it’s always been, just the next evolution. We don’t need to confuse the masses by getting over their heads with all of the technological mumbo jumbo. We just need to integrate the functionality into our products and services and make sure that there’s a good enough reason for doing so - that it adds value and fulfills the needs and desires of a market, the rest will fall into place. So rather than focusing on the technology, why not focus on how the product makes the user’s experience better.

And what about the marketing strategies these companies employ to let the world know about their product? It’s understandable that a company that’s based on technology would want some presence within the tech world. In the fund raising process it’s essential to be visible and generate buzz within the community so that the investors know you’re there. But beyond that, these companies need to look at themselves and decide: Are we really a technology company? In most cases the answer is no. The answer might be: “We are a social shopping company” or “We are a search and discovery company” or “We are a music company” or “We are a dating company” or “We are a travel company” and so on. I see it over and over again, these companies and their agencies are so mired in the tech world, so caught up in the echo chamber, that they never break out, they stay inside and slowly whither away.

Who cares about the echo chamber? Who cares if they like your product or not? What every startup should be thinking about above all else is their market. How are you going to make money? Where is that money going to come from? And do everything in your power to make your product, your marketing communications, your brand, everything about your company, about one thing: Appealing to and serving the market that is going to make you profitable.

[Canyon image credit: James Marvin Phelps (Attribution)]

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SocialU claims not to be just another social network aggregator. Instead, they call themselves a social networking portal that runs as a desktop application via Adobe Air. The application is like a Web browser that displays all of your social networks in their own tabs. You can undock networks and tabs if you want.

You can choose which networks to load at startup in tabs. There’s a decent amount of social networking sites you can choose from. Just as in FriendFeed and other services, you will be able to keep up with your friends and their activity on all of the social networks that they belong to.

It Pays to Be Social!

Socialu rewards members for being active in the community by giving social dollars (SD) whenever someone makes comments, adds friends, and so on. These social dollars can then be used to purchase virtual versions of real products from well-known brands in the Marketplace. You can purchase these items for yourself or give them as gifts to others. The social dollars and merchandise that you accumulate contribute to your social net worth and lifestyle in the community. Yes, it’s like Linden Dollars on SecondLife and Karma on Plurk (ugg, don’t get me started on that one!).

DIGG + Delicious Features

One of unique features is the ability to leave comments on any website, which other SocialU members can read whenever they visit that website. It’s like leaving post-it notes for the next person that views that page.

You can add any website to your favorites list just as you can on other social bookmarking sites. They can be saved privately just for yourself or publicly so everyone in the SocialU community can see them. Unfortunately there’s no way to create a group to share things with at this time but it’s early Beta so that might come some day.

There’s also a digg-like rating system for any website you visit. The totals are displayed for any Socialu members that visits that site (green up arrow and red down arrow). There’s a navigational bar at the top of the screen that provides access to all of the SocialU areas. My Place is your home page, Community shows the most popular items on SocialU, Market is where you spend your Social Dollars, Faves is where you store your favorite websites, Scene shows what your friends are up to, Socializers shows what all members are doing and Networks provides access to other social networks.

…But WAIT there’s more!

If the Social Dollars don’t keep members motivated enough to be active and keep coming back for more, SocialU also offers a monthly contest where they’ll give-away things like laptops, playstations, giftcards, etc. How successful that will be and how long they will keep that up is anybody’s guess.

Monetization Plan

Right away you will notice a large area on the right side of the SocialU interface that’s dedicated to Advertisements. There’s nothing wrong with that, just a little unusual that’s all. Obviously they are thinking ahead and planning to generate some revenue with these ads.

Conclusion

SocialU makes Flock look like an underachiever with all the things it’s trying to accomplish within one interface. Will people like this shotgun approach to social networks and surfing the Web? Judging from the vastly mixed reactions that the aforementioned Flock continues to receive, one must believe that SocialU will suffer the same resistance to mass acceptance. The next question is will they attract sufficient membership and activity to remain in operation and ultimately thrive and succeed? As always, the people, namely YOU, will be the judge of that.

Here’s a special page for Mashable readers to gain access to the private beta of Socialu. Download the Adobe Air application and check it out. Invite your friends as well and leave your thoughts of the experience in the comments section.

It isn’t difficult to imagine that we need to take a lot of screenshots during the course of a day here at Mashable.  Sure you can do the old “Print Screen” trick, but that’s a lot more hassle than it’s worth when there are so many great options out there, especially if you are using Firefox as your browser. Here are eight Firefox 3 screenshot tools that are worth trying.

These tools will do everything from save just a section of a page to entire pages, as well as give you the ability to upload images automatically to specified image hosting services.  In case you were wondering, I use FireShot for all of the images in the lists I create.

Abduction! - Directed more at showing people errors in webpages or helping with development, Abduction will save all or a portion of a page, or just a frame, as a GIF, JPG or PNG.

FireShot - An extremely handy screenshot extension that can shoot just the visible area of a page or capture the entire thing, no matter how long it is.  Can be updated to a pro version that adds even more features such as an editor.  Allows you to save to BMP, GIF, JPG or PNG.

Grab Them All - A bit different type of a screenshot program in that you enter multiple URLs, specify the type of image to shoot, and where it will be saved.  When you activate the extension it goes through the list of URLs you specified and takes the shots atomatically for you.  You can tell it to do either the viewable area or the entire entry page.  A bit different, but a big time saver for large projects.

iimmgg.com Tools - Will allow you to take screenshots of the full page or just selected areas and upload them directly to iimmgg.com.

Kwout - Built with the idea of adding sections of a Web page to your blog entries as a form of quoting, but of course you can just save whatever sections you may need.

Screengrab - Screengrab only allows you to save your files as JPG or PNGs, but it does have a nice option in that not only can you choose the viewable area or full page for screenshots, but you can do just a section or frame if you choose.  Can save you a lot of editing time by just not even bothering to save parts you won’t ever need.

Screengrab with Upload - A variation of the Screengrab extension in that you can automatically upload your screen captures to an online server to share them immediately.

Snapper - Specifically focused on letting you just select a portion of a page to take a snapshot to save yourself the effort of having to crop out unwanted portions later on.

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Coming out of a suburb of Sydney, Australia, SportsPassion is a networking service designed to provide sports teams of all sorts with tools to stay organized in season and out.

Eminently free to use, SportsPassion is built upon an athletic-minded platform by the name of 3eep, which lists sites such as Freemyteam, Sportsplay, and Sportexx. Sportsplay, interestingly enough, appears to operate in all but parallel fashion to SportsPassion. The most outstanding differences are a slightly altered presentation and more generic dot-com domain for SportsPassion. The latter is naturally intended to attract a broader, more international audience.

Leaving aside the matter of structural duplication, SportsPassion seems reasonably well equipped to serve its intended audience. It is unlikely that sport teams and groups of the extracurricular sort will require extensive features. The basics will presumably do for most users. Someplace to keep track of scheduling, changes, hasty and impromptu gatherings, celebrations and so forth. The usual stuff, really. Share documents, photos, and videos. Converse in a group forum. Etcetera, etcetera. Completing its list of uses, the service offers teams a unique RSS subscription for simple tracking when logged off.

As for formatting, SportsPassion can be thought to be appropriately elementary. On the one hand, if a team page is barren, it’s noticeably so. The busier the better it seems. Which is pretty much how it usually goes in the networking world. It’s about what you do with the tools you’re given. In that sense, SportsPassion seems up to the task.

ProofHQ launches today as a Web-based solution for sharing, managing, and approving creative documents amongst team members and clients. In a few words, ProofHQ offers a way to get creatives approved more efficiently. How does a service set out to do this?

For starters, ProofHQ offers a robust uploading tool that allows you to send large files to whomever you need. The ProofHQ Uploadr tool even lets you drag’n'drop files up to 75 MB directly from your desktop. From here, you can manage the files you’ve uploaded and determine who gets to see what. Other team members can review creatives from here, add their mark-ups and notes, participate in a real time discussion taking others’ feedback into consideration, and compare the many versions of that creative document that have been uploaded to your ProofHQ account.

Similar in concept to services like cozimo, ProofHQ allows for visual markups of documents within its application, minimizing the need for every team member to have the correct software on the computer they’re currently using, and eliminating the need for constant file transfers. As far as accessibility goes, ProofHQ offers a number of ways in which you can share your uploaded documents, including integration with other professional project management tools like Basecamp. ProofHQ also has a Miniproof, which is a widget that can be embeded into blogs and websites.

This could be used on third party sites that you and your team members often use (i.e. a private network that’s not included in ProofHQ’s existing integration options), or for a public voting option of sorts, where members of the community at large can voice their opinions on a given design. There are even branded options for a company or freelancer to use ProofHQ for their own purposes, with billing management options included. So far I like the fact that ProofHQ has set out to provide a set of tools that work with a group’s existing structure, and the fact that it’s leveraging the Web’s capabilities for automating much of the sharing, revision and communication necessities of any group project revolving around visual material.

Is the future of social news distributed? That certainly seems to be the thinking at a number of leading names in the space, with Reddit today announcing that their feature for creating your own version of the site is being extended to let you host it under your own domain and fully customize the look and feel. The move follows news last week that Ma.gnolia was going open source, and word earlier this summer that Digg is working on their own offering to let users create their own custom social news sites.

While Reddit has offered an installable open source version (akin to Ma.gnolia’s offering) of its software since June, the create-your-own Reddit offering - originally launched in January - is a hosted solution. You setup your site by simply filling out a form and determining if your Reddit will be public, private, or restricted. Mashable’s Mark Hopkins and Steven Hodson are active participants in a custom Reddit that you can find here.

With today’s additions, you can now use CSS to edit the stylesheet for your site, and setup a custom CNAME through your domain registrar to host your Reddit at a URL of your choice. Essentially, this gives you some of the flexibility of the open source solution, but without the complexity or technical know-how required to set it up.

So why are all of the social news sites moving in this direction? In case you missed it, Muhammad Saleem had an excellent post yesterday arguing that bookmarking is dying. While that may or may not be the case – yet – it would certainly seem there may be a limit as to how much these sites can grow on their own as destination sites, especially with Yahoo Buzz now vying for mainstream users. Expanding into the business of powering other social bookmarking sites offers a new way for sites like Digg, Reddit, and Ma.gnolia to grow – even if it’s likely the same power users who ultimately create the niche communities.

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Editor’s Note: This post is part of an ongoing series at Mashable - The Startup Review, Sponsored by Sun Microsystems Startup Essentials. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

STARTUP DETAILS:

Company Name: SlideBoom

20-word Description: SlideBoom is a free service for sharing PowerPoint presentations that include animations, transitions, audio, video and Flash.

CEO’s Pitch: SlideBoom offers unique technology for PowerPoint presentations sharing on the Web. Almost all advanced features of PowerPoint are supported and your presentation at SlideBoom will look exactly the same as in your PowerPoint. No worries about fonts, sounds or animations! The second big plus of SlideBoom is a free PowerPoint add-in that allows you to upload presentations with audio, video and Flash to SlideBoom quickly and easily right from your PowerPoint.

If you are going to a meeting or a conference, you can leave your laptop and present your slides directly from SlideBoom and enjoy an ability to view slides full screen with excellent quality that SlideBoom offers to you.

Mashable’s Take: There are lots of ways to create and share slideshow presentations online. Google Docs is half decent for simple stuff. Zoho Show is another. In the last year we’ve brought together a list or two naming north of two dozen more for your consideration. And you might say SlideBoom is but one addition to the mix. Still, it’s worth a look.

Easy to use and PowerPoint ‘07-savvy, as it so describes in the pitch posted above, SlideBoom supports virtually everything one might need from such a service. For starters, PowerPoint devotees will like its implementation of the iSpring add-in, enabling direct uploads from within Microsoft’s own user environment. And pretty much anything created within PowerPoint translates to a SlideBoom page.

If you find the need to add anything extra to a presentation, SlideBoom allows for graphic annotations. These can help direct viewers more easily through the process. Whether you’re simply running your draft by co-workers or clients before heading out on stage, or doing the official roundabout, SlideBoom promises an elementary control panel to get you from A to B to Z without wasting time.

Again, SlideBoom is free, so there’s really nothing to lose. We’d certainly advise hedging safely and keeping a backup option on-hand in case of a disruption in Web access or whathaveyou, but it is otherwise a very palatable option to keep in your arsenal of utilities.

Just to note, the iSpring connection - a piece of software that comes in four flavors, including Free, Pro, Ultra, and SDK - appears downloadable only to Windows users. The release version 3.5.1 was introduced roughly one month ago.

Sponsored By: Sun Startup Essentials

Apple is at it again. According to reports, the company has pulled a free Tetris app from its App Store, called Tris after Apple contacted the developer, Noah Witherspoon, on behalf of The Tetris Company.

Apple said that The Tetris Company considered Tris in violation of trademark and copyright laws and that he would be forced to remove it from the App store.  For his part, Witherspoon said that he might be able to win in a lawsuit with The Tetris Company, but lacked the financial backing to do it.

“To clarify: if Apple had not told me they’d “take action” of their own if I didn’t resolve the “dispute,” Tris would be staying up,” Witherspoon said in a blog posting on his site. “I don’t think this will be permanent; when I have the time and can find a good copyright lawyer, I’ll be figuring out exactly what my position is and how I can make Tris available again.”

Until then, Tris will be available until Wednesday, at which time Witherspoon will be removing it from the App Store.

Is this the new face of the App Store: a place where companies that have the resources to bully developers can get whatever they want?  Unfortunately, it looks that way.

The App Store promised to be a haven for high-quality apps that could be used on the iPhone and iPod touch.  It promised to offer the array of applications we’ve wanted out of the iPhone and promote the availability of free apps that small, independent developers would create.

Instead, it has become the haven for bullying on the part of major organizations under the guise of “copyright infringement” and trademark law.  It has become a place where developers simply aren’t free to follow their hearts and create what they want for fear of facing a lawsuit from a company that can afford it.

Granted, companies don’t have a choice and must protect their copyrights.  But when does that practice end and bullying begin?  In the case of Tris, where the game looks startlingly similar to Tetris, I can understand.

But when it comes to something like BoxOffice or NetShare or countless other apps that have quietly been removed from the App Store, I can’t understand the problem.  The App Store is a place where developers can offer applications that improve your experience and can do so regardless of bankroll.

But as it becomes more popular and more companies are starting to realize that their own offerings can be beaten by small developers, the App Store is becoming a place where bankroll really does matter and being a small developer means moving aside and getting less-than preferential treatment.

It’s a shame.

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iPhone. Europe. September.