slideshare

Virtual Worlds Management, a company that provides research on the growth of online virtual worlds, said $594 million was invested in 63 virtual worlds during 2008. Gaia Online and PlayFish were two of the most prominent recipients of venture funding during the year. That said, investments in virtual worlds declined as the year wore on. In the first quarter of 2008, virtual worlds received $184 million in funding. By the fourth quarter of that year, investments dropped to $101 million. Virtual Worlds Management expects a further decline in funding in virtual worlds during 2009.

Fuzz.com, a social-networking site for … Read more

Last.fm has released its list of the top 10 albums, artists, and tracks for 2008 based on number of listeners. Coldplay was the big winner this year, taking the top spot for album of the year. It also had a whopping six tracks (including the top two) featured in the year's top tracks listing. MGMT was the most popular artist of 2008.

Popular social service Friendfeed announced Monday that it has gone global with support for six more languages aside from English. The service now accommodates those who speak French, German, Spanish, Russian, Japanese, and simplified Chinese.

The … Read more

My final Under the Radar session today focuses on tools for business collaboration. In the past year, Webware.com has covered each of these four applications, but now they're each back with something new to bring to the virtual table.

Blist, an easy, engaging online database, will be releasing a premium version for small and midsized businesses. The easy, rich database environment can be used for business needs such as data storage and applicant-tracking, and features 3D graphs, drag-and-drop query-building, and document storage inside a database.

Next week Blist will add the capability to use others' data structures as … Read more

The bookmarking and reference service I use most is adding a show-and-tell slideshow feature. Diigo lets you mark up Web pages, then share and export your notes. Its new WebSlides, in closed beta testing, will enable you to create narrated presentations of Web pages that you've saved and annotated.

Diigo is meant to be more practical than something like StumbleUpon, a fun way to discover new sites. Diigo Vice President Maggie Tsai touted Diigo WebSlides at the Office 2.0 conference today as an ideal tool for teachers. Her demo showed off handy-looking recording and playback controls for making … Read more

SlideShare, which lets you share PowerPoint presentations with the world, today added the capability to match audio tracks to slide shows. This is a cool feature that podcasters could exploit to show and tell a story at the same time. Professors, marketers, and other storytellers might give this free tool a whirl to provide remote access to their work instead of using software such as Adobe Captivate or TechSmith Camtasia. You could even use Slideshare to narrate a PowerPoint-based photo gallery of your vacation. Come to think of it, why don't more photo-sharing sites follow Zooomr's lead (more here) … Read more