With the new live social chat application, site owners can offer users on site to chat using their favorite social networks, such as Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and Yahoo. Wibiya will be adding new networks to the web toolbar from time to time and they will be updated automatically.

The new chat widget can be moderated from within the Wibiya dashboard. Site owners can remove the comments or ban the user all together. Users can invite each other to a private and public chat with a click. Hovering over the user’s image will display his or her information, taken directly from the social network.

The toolbar, which is used to integrate social media, language translation, site search and content sharing tools into any website, is currently used by over 70,0000 active sites. Since going live in June 2009, Wibiya has been regularly adding new applications for users to include on their custom, embeddable toolbars.

You can see the new social chat feature working on TheWadi.com right below.

Wibiya is not the first social toolbar to offer this functionality. A stripped-down Meebo Toolbar has featured live chats for some time, however, Wibiya now offer more than that.

Earlier this year Wibiya launched a monetization program that enables publishers to make money out of affiliate links in the toolbar.

Website: http://www.wibiya.com
Abstract: Wibiya toolbar platform enables blogs to integrate services, applications and widgets of their choice into their blog through customized web-based toolbars. Wibiya offers fixed set of tools such as...  
Read more about wibiya in The Wadi Index.

Reminder: The three posts with the biggest amount of comments, facebook “likes” and retweets will earn their companies a free booth and tickets to the event.

The post was delivered by Amir Wald, Founder of Colnect.

Collectors connect on Colnect. Winner of the Startup2.0 competition, Colnect offers unique services to collectors worldwide. Colnect is available in 50 languages and offers extensive collectibles catalogs which provide the base for personal collection management and easy Auto-Matching for swaps. The enormous help of its devoted collectors community managed to bring Colnect, a bootstrapped start-up, impressive achievements. Why do collectors flock to Colnect and spend their time helping it grow? The set of unique services has started the enthusiasm and it’s best explained with a short example.

A beginner coin collector, Pamela, has a few dozens of coins she can offer other collectors and perhaps a few hundreds of other coins which would interest her. Before Colnect, she would find other collectors on Internet forums and send them her swap list.

It was usually a simple text file or spreadsheet with some information about the coins she had. She would then receive such similar files from other collectors and would breeze through them trying to find herself appropriate matches. This would take A LOT of time and many times yielded no results as it was never easy to find enough matches for a good swap. There was also the problem of trustworthiness. Occasionally, she would also check online marketplaces in hope of finding some good catches.

Colnect makes a huge difference. Pamela now looks at Colnect’s huge coin catalog and simply marks, with a single click, each coin she’s interested in. She also marks what she can offer. Since the catalog is centralized she can now automatically make the matches between what she wants and other collectors offer and vice versa. Now she can organize trades much more easily. Colnect’s strict ratings system greatly improves the chances of a fraud.

As of May 2010, Colnect collectors have more than 20 million collectible items listed on their lists. The community has created and is constantly improving the catalogs for the different categories on Colnect: stamps, banknotes, coins, phone cards, bottle caps and many more. The collectors have translated Colnect to 50 languages to make it easier to communicate with other collectors from around the world. Now you know why collector collector and connect on Colnect.

Happy collecting

More about Colnect on TheWadi’s company index.

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Introducing Sortfix: improving Google search

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High Tech Industry Association Conference 2010: neatcall

Two years of engineering efforts at Adobe have ended with a big announcement of new releases:  Flash Builder 4, Flex 4 and ColdFusion Builder. The final releases include many improvements: more expressive user interfaces, easy access to databases and web services, better debugging and refactoring options and a better IDE for developers.

Flash developers may find interest in these new features, but to the public, they may seem unexciting. The new Flash Platform Services Social Service is the real highlight for developers and non-developers as well. The ability to connect via a single Application Programming Interface (API) to 14 social media sites will make Flash applications more social – the coding hurdles are much lower now.

Gigya, that specializes in optimizing social networks, handles the licensing plans. The plans are made on an annual basis, and the pricing depends on the type and size of the application that uses the service.

Gigya tapped into the social networking in a relatively early stage, and continues to keep up with the latest developments.

Read more about Gigya in The Wadi Index.

In our opinion it is not a question of “if” the Internet represents the future of TV it is a question of “when” (answer below). Here is why Internet on TV is inevitable:

• Everything is connected – We consume video and entertainment in general on multiple devices (mobile, computer, tablet, etc.). We will want to access Internet content, apps and games on our TVs as well. It does not make sense that our biggest screen should remain disconnected.
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• We are all passionate about something – One of the greatest things about the Internet is that you can dive as deep as you like into almost any subject whether it is cricket,anime, or music videos. Each one of us has a different set of interests and passions and for the first time we have a medium that’s personalized. The existing approach (and architecture) of a curated list of channels designed by a sole provider doesn’t address this basic human need.
• Less control = more innovation – There is a reason TV is lagging behind so many computers and mobile devices. TV is an oligopolistic environment with tight controls. Developers and entrepreneurs are attracted to open platforms with critical mass.  We’re not there, yet, but when you read that 27.5% of TVs sold in the US in January were connected to the Internet you know this day is getting closer.
• CE manufactures are already on it – They are watching consumer demand rise and are building Internet connectivity into their entire product line. TVs, BluRay players, and game consoles are now all being connected to the Internet. Even if the set-top box is not connected the users will use some other way to get their TVs connected.
• Content owners follow the audience – If you are a content owner you have two main concerns… a) getting your content in front of as many consumers as possible and b) getting paid for it. There is already a critical mass of users who are online and want to watch premium content (26% of online users watch TV shows online more than once a week), yet most mainstream TV content is still not available online. It is a huge missed opportunity.
• Broadband is the #1 priority for many – Younger generations see broadband as vital and PayTV as an accessory.  This generation is willing to pay for content, but likely to do so online. Making them pay for traditional TV, just so they can watch their shows online does not make sense.

People want Internet on their TVs, the CE companies want to address that need, the content owners see the opportunity and now the FCC’s plan indicates that the government also would like to see it happen. It is safe to assume that within the next 3-5 years Internet connected TVs will be a mainstream phenomenon and we will have more and better entertainment options on our TVs.

TV as we know it today offers a reliable and familiar experience for consumers, and a proven business model for content owners and distributors. There is great concern about the what TV content delivered over the Internet will mean for the industry (the fear of analog dollars turning into digital cents). There are the examples of the music industry (resisted the move towards digital and is now in search of a business model) and the newspapers industry (embraced the Internet and is now in search of a business model), which point to a damned if you do and damned if you don’t scenario.

But the talk and fear of cord-cutting is overzealous by both the media and the industry. Not only are their fears unnecessary, the focus on the negative impacts takes away the attention from the great opportunities that are opening up.  We believe the time for content owners to embrace the Internet is now, and that the parallels to the music and newspapers industries are not entriely appropriate, here is why:

• Unlike newspapers, video content is not easily commoditized –  You can read about last night’s political scandal from hundreds of sources, but there is only one company making American Idol, Lost, or Heroes.  When you have a unique product, it’s more likely people will pay for it.
• Unlike music, pirating video is still a hassle – Downloading a pirated version of a newly released movie is still a cumbersome experience. It can take a long time, the quality is sometimes terrible, it could be hard to find, you may catch a virus, etc.  However, this is not a long-term advantage because piracy will become much easier.  Right now, the industry has the time to make a pre-emptive strike by making content available online and making it easy to find and enjoy.
• Freemium is easier to offer for video than for news or music – Once a music album is out it is hard to create a premium offering around it.  In the case of video however, content owners can create premium value in multiple ways: HD quality, access to additional content, live broadcast, windowing of releases and more.
• Unlike music and newspapers there is a clear path for subscription revenues – There are already examples of successful online subscription services like Netflix and MLB, so it is not farfetched to imagine people subscribing to shows, channels or bundles based on their personal interests.

The users and the technology are ready, it is time for the industry to step up.

This post was first published on Boxee blog.

Read more about Boxee on TheWadi’s Israeli tech companies index.