Jajah, a small Silicon Valley VOIP company, is being bought by Telefonica Europe for $207 million in an all-cash deal. Jajah's technology is designed to enable consumers and businesses to communicate over the Internet on any device and from any network. The company's voice-over-IP platform has made inroads into social networks, such as Twitter.
- After more than a week of speculation about its future including reports of interest from Cisco Systems and Microsoft VOIP vendor Jajah is being bought by Telefonica Europe. Telefonica, known better by the name O2, announced Dec. 23 that it is buying the smaller Silicon Valley company for $207 m...

There's a big party being held in Brooklyn tonight for Boxee, the Internet video service I wrote about in this story in May. One bit of news is the unveiling of Boxee Beta -- it has to date been available only in a Alpha version -- that has been rebuilt from the ground up.

Engadget has a look at Boxee Beta.

For those unfamiliar, Boxee is an elegant and free media center application for the Mac and Windows that in many ways represents what people imagine when they think of TV moving to the Internet. From within Boxee you can watch Web video in all its various forms: Video podcasts, YouTube clips, downloaded movies, and with some limitations TV shows on from Hulu on your computer.

But it doesn't stop there. It's so good, that I've heard numerous cases of people actually dropping their cable or satellite TV service, in favor of connecting a Mac running Boxee to their favorite TV set. Others have been known to hack their AppleTV devices and install Boxee on them.

That fact in particular suggested opportunity. One of the things founder Avner Ronen told me at the time was that he hoped to get the Boxee service built into consumer hardware, and that he hoped to have some news on this front in time for the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, which is now less than a month away.

Ronen and his team have delivered, and that is I think the bigger news. I just heard that the first so-called Boxee Box (pictured) will be made by D-Link, the company behind scores of home networking products.

In addition to video, Boxee plays music from your personal music collection, streams music from your favorite Pandora Radio stations, organizes your photos. It's also social: You can share what you're watching with your friends on Twitter and Facebook, and also discover things you might like from your Boxee-using friends.

D-Link says the Boxee Box has already won a "Best of Innovations" award from the Consumer Electronics Association. No price has yet been announced, but they're promising to deliver the product to stores during the second half of 2010. More about the Boxee Box is here.

Conceding to the ubiquity of Facebook as the default form of identity on the Web while helping further it, Yahoo announced a partnership with the social network on Wednesday that will enable users of Yahoo's home page, mail, and other sites to share content with friends using their Facebook accounts. The five-year agreement, which includes no financial compensation, will begin to take effect in the first half of 2010.

Soon, visitors to Yahoo's home page will be able to see a full "news feed" of the activity of their Facebook friends, as well as use their Facebook name and password to leave comments on news stories at sites like Yahoo! Sports and Yahoo! Finance. The planned changes will also allow content created on Yahoo sites, such as Flickr photos, to be sent to Facebook with the click of a button.

Yahoo hopes to achieve two goals with the partnership, says Cody Simms, senior director of product management: "Making Yahoo stickier and helping syndicate content." More than half (52%) of U.S. visitors to Yahoo sites also use Facebook, according to comScore, and the hours they spend flirting and fraternizing with buddies on the social network is time they could be perusing Yahoo's pages, which are supported by ads. Subsequently, Yahoo hopes each time users send photos, comments, and other content back to their Facebook feed, it will entice onlookers to click through to Yahoo sites.

It's a win for Facebook and a setback for Google, Microsoft, Twitter, and other companies with ambitions on becoming the standard identity manager for users all over the Web. "You’re seeing the beginning of a move toward that consolidation," says Josh Bernoff, who follows social media in his role as senior vice president of idea development at Forrester Research. "Strategically, Yahoo understands that allying itself with the most powerful social network is going to be more successful than trying to win with an ID of its own," he says.

The Yahoo-Facebook tie-up may deal the strongest blow to OpenID, a movement to create a non-proprietary standard for identity and authentication on the Web. Some advocates for OpenID contend that the use of Facebook as an ID by millions of Internet users consolidates too much power in the hands of one company.

After 21 years at BusinessWeek, I'm leaving today, the day Bloomberg's purchase of the 80-year-old magazine closes.

It has been one heck of a ride. I've had the opportunity to track technology and the people creating it all the way from the silicon (covering Intel and semiconductors) to computers (following Sun, Silicon Graphics and others during their ups and downs) to the Internet, including Netscape, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Twitter, countless startups, and virtual worlds (that's me and my Second Life doppelganger in the photo). I've also written about many other things, from politics to retail to earthquakes.

Most of all, I've had the chance to work with really smart, dedicated people--including the many sources and readers who took so much time to help educate me. I'm hopeful that BusinessWeek's new owners, who are clearly an energetic bunch steeped in the same journalistic ethics that kept me at BW, will maintain those standards and also help the colleagues they hired build a new magazine for these new times.

This isn't really a farewell, because I expect to be writing on many of the same topics and companies in a variety of other venues. I've got a number of ideas I'll be pursuing, but meantime, I'd love to keep in touch on
Twitter, as well as LinkedIn and my new email address: robert.hof@gmail.com. I've also set up a bare-bones blog at robhof.wordpress.com. Yeah, it's bare-bones all right, and I hope to upgrade to better digs soon. But for now, this will serve as my home on the Web and the place I'll be blogging on a wide variety of topics as I get settled into new roles.

Salesforce.com Chief Executive Marc Benioff has never been shy about borrowing a bit of other companies’ mojo. On Nov, 18, he introduced the software company’s latest product, a business collaboration tool that takes pages from the playbooks of Facebook and Twitter.

Salesforce will begin selling the new software, called Chatter, next year at a price of $50 per user each month. The software works with Salesforce’s core customer management software to display “profiles” of employees and posts about projects they’re working on or customers they’ve visited. “I know more about these strangers on Facebook than I do about my own employees and what they’re working on,” Benioff said during a speech at the company’s Dreamforce conference in San Francisco. “I know when my friends went to the movies, but not when my VP of sales visited our top customer.”

Chatter pushes Salesforce, expected to reach $1.3 billion in revenues this year, into the crowded field for collaboration software. Salesforce is trying to expand beyond the customer management software that’s been its bread and butter. Microsoft’s SharePoint Server, an IBM product called Atlas that works with its Lotus e-mail software, and Google’s recently introduced Wave all offer business users the ability to share information and hold conversations on the Web.

Software developers will be able to use Chatter to build their own applications, Salesforce said. The move comes as some of the tech industry’s largest vendors are releasing tools that let programmers create cloud computing applications delivered over the Internet. Microsoft on Nov. 17 launched Windows Azure, software for letting Windows developers build cloud computing applications using familiar Microsoft technologies. Google and Amazon.com also offer tools for developers to build cloud applications.

Look for updated coverage on BusinessWeek.com, including excepts from an interview I’ll conduct with Benioff later today.

These days, it seems that everyone wants to be pals with Twitter, the microblogging phenom. On the morning of Oct. 21, Microsoft announced a deal for its Bing search engine to search for Twitter updates known as tweets. Just hours later, Google announced a similar deal.

Not to be left out, the professional online networking service LinkedIn on Nov. 10 is announcing its own integration with Twitter. Users of both services will be able to sync some or all of their tweets on Twitter and "network updates" on LinkedIn.

Specifically, users in LinkedIn will be able to check a "tweet this" box near their network update post to Twitter. And while on Twitter, they can add the hashtags "#in" or "#li" to their posts to appear on LinkedIn. Finally, a new app called Tweets will let users put their Twitter streams on their LinkedIn profiles.

Here's a video with LinkedIn Executive Chairman Reid Hoffman and Twitter cofounder Biz Stone:

And here are the details in a blog post from Allen Blue, a LinkedIn cofounder and vice-president of product strategy:

UPDATE: Big news below: Microsoft has signed deals to get full feeds from Twitter and Facebook. Shortly, a dedicated beta site, bing.com/twitter, will have the ability to search full Twitter feeds. Search of Facebook public data will come later. (UPDATE 2: As I figured, Google just announced its own deal with Twitter--though not Facebook.)

Here's the information Microsoft just sent out, with more details below:

Qi Lu, President of Microsoft’s Online Services Division is announcing a new beta feature that enables people to easily search Twitter’s real-time information feed directly in Bing. This new feature helps people make better decisions and more fully understand Twitter conversations by collecting, analyzing and uniquely presenting real-time Twitter content.
 
More specifically, the new Twitter developments in Bing include:

* A real-time index of the Tweets that match your search queries in results. This feature makes it easier to follow what’s going on by reducing the amount of duplicates, spam, and adult content.
 
* Giving you the option to rank tweets either by most recent or by “best match,” where we consider a Tweeter’s popularity, interestingness of the tweet, and other indicators of quality and trustworthiness.

* Providing the top links shared on Twitter around your specific search query by showcasing a few of the most relevant tweets.

Additionally, Bing automatically expands those small URLs (like bit.ly) to enable you to understand what people are tweeting about. Instead of showing standard search result captions, we select 2 top tweets to give users a glimpse of the sentiment around the shared link. 
 
You can try out the new Bing Twitter search beta here momentarily or learn more about it at the Bing blog. Please note that this is a U.S. only feature at this time.

Facebook Partnership
As part of his on-stage discussion at the summit, Dr. Lu is also announcing a global partnership with Facebook that will bring public Facebook status updates to Bing search results. The experience will be available at a later date.

Qi Lu, president of Microsoft's Online Services Division, is onstage at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, in an interview with conference co-host Tim O'Reilly. Since joining Microsoft from Yahoo, he has been responsible for trying to turn Microsoft from an also-ran in search to at least a No. 2 to Google--something that likely will happen if Microsoft's search deal with Yahoo passes regulatory muster early next year.

I'll liveblog the highlights as they develop. Here's what he has to say:

Miley Cyrus' full music video for "Party in the USA"http://twitter.com/MileyCyrushttp://twitter.com/TheDoctorLukehttp://twitter.com/ClaudeKellyAdd ... ZackTaylor.ca | Your #1 Source for Celebrity Gossip ... found this 5 hours ago on youtube.com Find more top entertainment news, videos, and blogs on ShowHype: Celebrities , Miley Cyrus

VOIP provider Jajah launches an application that lets users make free 2-minute Web phone calls via Twitter. While this beta application is aimed at consumers, Jajah@Call could open the door for business users as well. Twitter is proving to be as much an effective marketing tool for businesses as it is an efficient, real-time messaging platform for consumers.
- VOIP provider Jajah Sept. 17 launched a new application that lets users make free 2-minute Web phone calls from Twitter. Jajah@Call, a beta for Jajah users in the United States, lets users call others in the Jajah@Call program from anywhere they access Twitter, including mobile phones or PCs via...

BusinessWeek is excited to announce a new editorial project to showcase the most intriguing new businesses on the planet.

To identify these new businesses, we want to tap the brains of our readers and the public at large. So we invite you to send us your ideas.

What defines most intriguing? To us, that means new enterprises that generate the most interest or fascination; the businesses that are working hard to solve the world's most important problems. The game-changers that make you say, "Wow, that's really interesting." They don't necessarily have to be the fastest growing or the most well-known or the most financially successful businesses, though those are desirable qualities.

These businesses could be for-profit ventures or they could be non-profit. They could come from any industry. However, they should not be more than three years old.

Twitter is a perfect example of an intriguing business. The Internet communications tool is having a huge impact on business and politics but it is not yet profitable. Kiva, a Web service that enables individuals to make small loans to one another, is example of an intriguing enterprise in the non-profit arena.

We will place a premium on those companies that readers may not know. We think that will make the list more interesting, useful and surprising.

Over the next month we invite you to send us your best ideas and examples. The deadline for your submissions is Thursday Sep. 24. Your entry should contain no more than 200 words and describe the name of the company, contact info, a description of the business and what makes it most intriguing. Please post your entry on the following Web page:
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/polls/intriguing_new_businesses/

Thanks in advance for your interest and help. We look forward to hearing from you.

Spencer Ante
Associate Editor
BusinessWeek

Twitter and Washington, D.C.'s Metro transit system would seem to be made for each other. Metro customers need real-time status information, especially given the system's recent bout of large and small service outages. And for anyone with a smartphone, Twitter is simpler and cheaper than the text message alert system Metro has offered from some time.

Unfortunately, Metro's has turned its Twitter status reports into a joke. The information Metro is sending out through the Twitter API is more often than not gibberish. Consider this sadly typical Tweet, sent out twice, 23 minutes apart: "No Line: Due to a power outage, all of the station's entrance escalators are out of service. The elevator is operational. The station remain" Not knowing which of Metro's 86 stations was affected, or even what line it was on, rendered the the "information" useless.

Message to any business of government service considering automated tweets:
It's a great way to disseminate information quickly and broadly, but take the time to do it right or you will end up a laughingstock.

UPDATE: A reader pointed out that I neglected to link to Metro;s Twitter account. It's @metroopensdoors.

Anybody who was still wondering if Facebook had noticed the rapid rise of Twitter need wonder no more. Today, Facebook announced it's buying FriendFeed, the news- and information-sharing service founded by four ex-Google engineers. The move is a blatant acknowledgment by the huge social networking service that Twitter, with at least 45.5 million unique visitors a month, has stolen a significant chunk of mindshare from Facebook lately.

FriendFeed, which despite rapid growth has fewer than 1 million unique monthly visitors by various estimates, hasn't managed to catch on much beyond social maniacs like uberblogger Robert Scoble. That's despite a fairly slick service that aggregates people's posts and comments from many sites, including Twitter and Facebook. In a post today, FriendFeed cofounder Bret Taylor made it clear that the smaller service would benefit from being under the wing of the largest U.S. social network, where its services can spread to some 250 million users worldwide.

For all its huge presence, however, Facebook faces a big challenge in unseating Twitter--which it tried to buy last year--as the premier water cooler of the digital age. Twitter's unique combination of fast and easy posting, publicly by default, has struck a nerve with a lot of people. Twitter is a different animal than Facebook, despite similarities between Twitter "tweets" with the Facebook's status updates. But like a lot of other people, I've found myself increasingly posting on Twitter and less so on Facebook lately, so there's obviously a battle for people's time that will only increase.

In particular, they're battling to become the leaders in what some believe is the next generation of Web innovation, commonly called the real-time Web. As I indicated in a recent slide show on leaders and up-and-comers on the real-time Web, Facebook and Twitter are in a class by themselves.

Some smart folks, like uberblogger Robert Scoble and Om Malik, contend that this deal is more about Facebook vs. Google--in particular the battle for the high ground in real-time search. I'm not yet convinced that's something that Google is fundamentally challenged by real-time search, but I do think the acquisition of FriendFeed will help Facebook cement its hold on the social Web, which Google has not come close to mastering.

There's no word on how much Facebook is paying for FriendFeed, which had raised $5 million from Benchmark Capital and other investors early last year. It's likely that ultimately FriendFeed will disappear into Facebook rather than continue as a distinct service.

With the addition of FriendFeed--in particular its talent, including cofounders Paul Buchheit, Bret Taylor, Jim Norris, and Sanjeev Singh--Facebook just gave itself a chance to slow Twitter's momentum. After all, for all its popularity, Twitter doesn't appeal to everyone, in particular young people. And early adopters of Web technologies, in fact, such as Scoble, are finding themselves less enchanted with Twitter of late. Not least, periodic blackouts of Twitter service--even if the latest one, a hacking incident, wasn't exactly its fault, and affected Facebook and others too--have some people wary about how much to depend on it.

If Facebook can tap into that nascent discontent with Twitter with the acquisition of FriendFeed, and if it can integrate the startup and its considerable talent into Facebook quickly--two huge ifs--it may be able to recapture some sizzle it has lost to Twitter, and perhaps stay ahead of Google on Facebook's home turf.

In a nod to the increasing importance of real-time search, Microsoft has started adding Twitter updates to its Bing search engine. For now, the Twitter-related results are limited only to searches on prominent Twitterers themselves, not nearly all tweets, according to a blog post by Sean Suchter, general manager of Microsoft's Silicon Valley Search Technology Center:

There has been much discussion of real-time search and the premium on immediacy of data that has been created primarily by Twitter. We’ve been watching this phenomenon with great interest, and listening carefully to what consumers really want in this space. Today we’re unveiling an initial foray into integrating more real time data into our search results, starting with some of the more prominent and prolific Twitterers from a variety of spheres. This includes Tweets from folks from our own search technology and business sphere like Danny Sullivan or Kara Swisher as well as those from spheres of more general consumer appeal like Al Gore or Ryan Seacrest.

Starting later today, when you search for these folks names in association with Twitter, you’ll see their latest Tweets come up in real time on Bing’s search results. ... (Note this feature will be rolling out gradually over the course of the next few hours so you may not see it right away.)

The answer will include that person’s latest Tweets, along with an easy link to “See more tweets” from that individual.

We’re not indexing all of Twitter at this time… just a small set of prominent and prolific Twitterers to start. We picked a few thousand people to start, based primarily on their follower count and volume of tweets. We think this is an interesting first step toward using Twitter’s public API to surface Tweets in people search. We’d love to hear your feedback as we think through future possibilities in real time search.

If you're a bit of a geek, and use the Firefox browser, you can already add Twitter search results to both Bing and Google via a software add-on called Greasemonkey. But it's pretty rudimentary, just a list of the five most recent Twitter search results for that particular query pasted atop the regular results.

A plethora of other real-time search engines is vying to become the one place to go for results on what people are talking about and sharing right now. And I suspect Google, which does offer near-real-time results for some news-oriented queries, won't wait long to add some kind of Twitter-related results in some way or another. But for now, Bing's Twitter results are one thing Google doesn't offer, and that's likely to help maintain the recent positive buzz about Bing.

Top executives at this week’s Cisco Partner Summit said they’re all over Twitter, but are they more popular than movie stars?