A new web application has launched called Defensio , this is a security suite for the Web.  It’s main atribute is the ability to protect facebook users as well as any blog or website. With regards to facebook users, they are now capable to make a decision on the content that can appear on their profiles and fan pages.

Particularly to facebook, the software application asks you to give the software access to your profile in order to block malicious content from appearing on your profile. The way the software works is by URL blocking and categorizing it into several sections, such as Security, Legal Liabilities, etc. This approach is based on blog comment spam filters where blog administrators can specify keywords to be filtered out. Additionally, you can use the exe file blocker and the script blocker to prevent exe files and scripts from appearing on your site, blog or facebook.

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Movies will never be the same after Avatar,  a fresh innovation for an entire movie industry.

The best amazing Avatar feature isn’t the story,  as this follows a tale from Pocahontas, with memories of Dances With Wolves. Rather it’s a story played by ten foot tall blue people with tails who fly around on miniature dragons.  However, the special effects is something you have never seen before in any previous movie.

There’s no point in the movie where you can really tell the difference between real imagery and CGI. You become completely lost in the world of Pandora, the setting for Avatar. And if you thought Zoe Saldana was amazing in Star Trek earlier this year, wait until you see Avatar.  An entire generation of teenagers are now going to have a lifelong crush on a huge blue woman with a tail named Neytiri.

Avatar, like Titanic, is one of those movies you’ll want to see over and over. But don’t wait for the DVD. This is a movie that has to be seen in 3D. And for that you have to go to the theater.

You can see the HD trailer here.

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PicScout started as a content copyright enforcer,  looking for unlicensed images on the web with its ImageIRC technology.  Now, PicScout provides image recognition metadata technology for stock photography agencies, professional photographers and others. Lately, the company launched PicApp, a flash-based image provider which produces legally licensed images for free.

PicScout is bringing sensibility to the image sharing economy by bringing the commercial world and open world together to drive awareness around licensing power for images.

When you search Google, Flickr, the web and more, IRC can provide you with image credit information when applicable. Image IRC provides a way to support the efforts of Creative Commons licenses and RDFa by validating, fixing and filling in missing metadata on all images online.

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After Yahoo! announced that they will soon implement Facebook Connect across all their properties, Google announced the integration of Twitter into Google Friend Connect.

Google Friend Connect is going after the long tail, while Facebook is going after the entire graph. To date there has not been a single mainstream media property to implement Google Friend Connect. Instead,millions of smaller sites have each implemented Google Friend Connect widgets, similar to Fan Box that Facebook already offers.

Those big name implementations of Facebook Connect however keeps the company’s identity platform in the press day after day, while Google Friend Connect gets brief spurts of attention. One can understand why Google feels so strongly about competing in the online identity wars. The primary reason is of course that the company doesn’t have an effective system of determining who our friends are.

While it’s difficult to dismiss Google Friend Connect given their wide reach, the service doesn’t appear to be as strong of a competitor given their loosely structured data.

The main reason being that Facebook has the largest representation of the social graph and the more people they have, the greater the incentive is to join. This snowballs at a rapid pace, and right now there’s nobody close to matching Facebook’s image of the social graph.

Rather than ramble on about why Facebook will win the identity war,  this is clearly a last ditch effort by Google despite the millions of people that have implemented the Friend Connect service. While implementing Twitter as another identity service is a useful feature, Google is essentially attempting to piece together a group of widgets to take on Facebook.

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Google now provides its own online dictionary, complete with multilingual support and accompanying photos. The new site was first discovered by the LA Times Tech Blog, and you can access it at Google.com/Dictionary.

It works exactly as you’d expect: type in a word, and Google will give you the definition, part of speech, and maybe a similar phrase or two. If you’re logged in, you can star a word for future reference.

The new dictionary obviously isn’t good news to the many other web dictionaries. Answers.com, in particular as it is currently Google’s default whenever a user clicks the “define” link on a Google results page.

Google has actually offered some dictionary features for a long time. If you Google a query using the format “Define:word“, the search engine will present you with a handful of definitions it finds on sites scattered across the web. Some of these definitions usually come from well known online dictionaries; others, from obscure web sites, which can make the results inconsistent.

Image by ElektraCute

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Every minute, approximately 20 hours of video gets uploaded to YouTube.

The standard of quality of videos that are uploaded to YouTube or other video sharing platforms like Vimeo or Blip.tv is subject to debate, as is the ability for the operators of the websites to put in such good filters that the best videos across a variety of categories get featured rather than the most popular only. With this in mind, VidQue, is applying a social filter to videos shared online.

VidQue functions in large part as a video bookmarking and distribution app, enabling users to save videos to their custom pages with a single click, and easily share them with their friends on Twitter or Facebook.  At the same time, VidQue puts a lot of focus on video discovery, allowing users to watch videos based on their personal “Video Feed”, which is a listing of the latest videos saved by their peers or basically anyone they decide to follow.

The essence of the service is based on the premise that popularity rarely equals quality, and VidQue instead algorithmically analyzes trends and peer reviews in order to showcase the best videos on its main category listings. Thus, the startup claims, each user gets treated as a unique individual which in turns makes for a more “successful and rewarding video discovery experience” over time.

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Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz is starting a new startup called Asana to solve enterprise collaboration.

Moskovitz, who was Facebook’s first CTO, founded Asana with another former Facebook  engineer, Justin Rosenstein. Matt Cohler, also a former Facebook executive who is now a partner at Benchmark, will be taking a seat on Asana’s board. And two of its investors, Marc Andreesen and Peter Thiel, currently sit on Facebook’s board.

The company is keeping its enterprise collaboration product close to its vest.  All Rosenstein will say is that it is time to replace “desktop-centric data models” with Web-based tools. “This is not social networking,” it was stated that instead these are productivity tools.

Sounds like Google Wave or Yammer or something completely new but in the same vein.

Asana is hiring. In fact, the new money will go primarily towards recruiting world-class engineers and product designers. Some of the perks, besides awesome investors and going after big markets, include:

• In-house yoga. Every week we do yoga as a group, including +1s, with a private instructor. (Optional, but pretty awesome.)
• Organic homecooked meals twice a day.
• Three 30″ monitors. Actually, we let you spend up to $10K on your setup, however you think best.

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Google Calendar is making scheduling events  easier by allowing you to see if an event will conflict with the schedules of friends or invited participants. Dubbed “Sneak Preview”, the feature’s name is perhaps more exciting than its actual function, but it should prove to be quite useful. The feature is apparently in a limited rollout right now, so don’t be surprised if you don’t have access to it.

Once you’ve activated Sneak Preview, whenever you create a new event you’ll see a new viewing mode that displays a calendar alongside your event details. This calendar will show the schedules of each of the people you’ve invited to the event, and the proposed time for your event will appear as a semi-transparent blue box so you can quickly see where you might have conflicts. You can click each guest’s name to show/hide them on the calendar if some are more important than others.

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Media on the Web is going from a solo affair to a shared experience. We are seeing this in everything from CNN live news videos enabled with Facebook chat to Meebo Rooms and Tiny Chat.  A new startup from Los Angeles called Qlipso is launching its own virtual rooms where friends can share videos and play Flash games with each other.

The service is in private beta and requires a Windows-only download for now.

You sign in with Facebook Connect and can invite up to eight friends to share any Flash-based media. Once inside the virtual room, you can interact via text chat, video chat, voice-chat, or videogame-quality avatars. The integration with Facebook Connect makes it easy to invite friends via a message in your news feed. It also supports MySpace, AIM, and MSN Messenger.

The Qlipso download adds a plug-in to your browser which identifies Flash media whenever you are surfing the Web and places a share button next to it. When you click teh share button, it launches the app and lets you see which of your contacts are online so you can invite them in.

Qlipso is aiming the service at media sites which might want to incorporate the experience to make the consumption of their videos and games more social and interactive. When a group of people are watching a video, Qlipso can recommend other videos in the left-hand column to keep the group of friends in the room longer. The service brings in elements of virtual worlds with the avatars which can move realistically and perform tricks.

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The new startup Recurly, is starting as private beta today. The core idea is to make it simple for web startups to be able to offer subscription-based services as an option. They provide an easy-to-use system with a user interace and good analytics that lays on top of the dealings that must be done between a payment gateway and the startup.

There are a number of other services that offer such functionality but Recurly believes it can differentiate itself in two key ways. First, they do not get paid until you get paid. There are no hidden or monthly fees here. Recurly takes a percentage of each transaction. These total anywhere from 1 to 3 percent depending on volume. But it also doesn’t take the money each time you make a sale, instead it collects the money at the end of each month when the sales are done.

Recurly’s other big selling point is the ability to offer customers a way to easily upgrade or downgrade service plans. What this means is that if an end user decides they want to switch to a lower-tier pricing structure for a service, Recurly can handle that seamlessly.

If you’re a very young startup and don’t even want to deal with APIs, you can come to the site and set up a payment form widget in a few steps, for example. Or maybe your site requires a bit more customization. There are APIs available to you that still hook into Recurly’s system and give you the same kind of data and analytics that you would get with the simple widget.

One of the big players is Zuora. But for many young startups, they’re offering is too complex. And more importantly, it’s also expensive. A closer competitor may be CheddarGetter, a startup that launchedfrom SproutBox

Up until now, Recurly has been in a very small closed alpha test with a handful of customers. Today marks the launch of their slightly more open, but still closed beta.

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