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Google today announced a new Internet-based communications and collaboration platform: Google Wave. While some of the details are still a bit sketchy, Google Wave looks to be an integrated communications platform that brings together email, chat, photo-sharing, and collaborative editing features. Google describes a 'wave' as "equal parts conversation and document" and the Wave team basically sees it as a replacement for email and other collaboration tools.

It was no secret that Microsoft was getting ready to roll out a new search engine, and today, the company began the official roll-out of Bing - the successor of the company's less than successful Live Search efforts. Formerly known as Kumo, Bing, which should become available worldwide by June 3, is Microsoft's latest attempt to steal market share away from Google. According to Microsoft, Bing, while providing a good general search experience, wants to focus on providing an especially good user experience in four verticals: making a purchase decision, planning a trip, researching a health condition, and finding a local business.

During the Google I/O conference this week, one of the presentations from Day 1 was on the subject of Google Chrome's extension system. The long-awaited feature will finally deliver what Firefox and IE users have had for ages: a way to add more tools, services, and additional features to the browser.

Social web aggregating iPhone app Zensify launched yesterday with a wave of tech blog coverage. Early reviewers were excited not just about the app's ability to display updates from friends on multiple networks in one interface - the big innovation is that Zensify creates a "hot words" tag cloud showing what topics are trending among your friends alone.

Unfortunately Zensify doesn't work as well as we hoped it would. Its problems may be instructive to similar projects elsewhere or they may point to trouble inherent in this kind of social network user experience. Here are three interesting problems we see so far with this new app.

Reportage is a brand-new Twitter client for the iPhone which, according to the company, turns Twitter into a radio tuner. In this case, they're using the phrase "radio tuner" as an analogy to describe how the client operates - it doesn't actually play music. Rather, it lets you "tune in" to the people you follow on Twitter as if they were each their own radio station.

The latest implementation of OpenCalais, the Semantic API by media company Thomson Reuters, has just been announced. It's with 'new media' stalwart CNET, which has signed up to use OpenCalais for semantic analysis of its tech product reviews, news, and blog posts. CNET has also joined Thomson Reuters as one of the first commercial media companies to publish its data to the Linked Data community on the Internet. This basically means that external companies can use that data for their own purposes. While CNET won't be releasing all of its commercial data, it will expose certain sets of product and editorial data.

A couple of weeks ago we launched our first premium report, on the topic of Online Community Management. In an era of the Web where separating signal from noise is difficult, there seems to be a market for in-depth commercial content that goes beyond the daily free news cycle. Our friends at GigaOM launched a new product today that is worth checking out, as it aims to offer premium content for an annual subscription. Could we be seeing a return to 'paid content' in online media? It wasn't so long ago that the Wall St Journal was ridiculed for its refusal to close its paywall. Now it seems it's ok again.

Every now and then, you're alone going through a stranger's Flickr stream, and you see something so laughable, so obnoxious, that you feel the urge to start a new meme but can't be troubled with the effort of registering a domain name and trying to get all your friends on board. Perhaps you're reading a blog and feel the need to comment, but don't want to expose your brilliance to the entire reading world. Or perhaps it's just late and the signup process for comments is ludicrously complicated.

Zingr allows you to spread your insights - and share those links - with your Facebook fandom, all with the click of a button. It's a Firefox add-on, and it's magical.

Zimplit is the "open source web creation tool for dummies," according to Mattias Lepp, the company's executive leader. "Our team doesn't know anything about the web and software. Oliver Pulges is chemist, Silver Sikk is philologist, and I am old music orchestra conductor. This gives us unique advantage to see and make software for normal people, not for programmers."

As commerce, socialization, creativity, and identity become increasingly digitized and uploaded, the number of non-technical, "normal people" who need free, simple web design solutions increases. And for allowing non-techies to create quick, customizable, easily editable pages, Zimplit is a good resource. If you're too skilled for tools like Zimplit, keep it in your back pocket for the next time someone asks you to build a website and you'd really rather not.

We have heard the VC's side of the story in many interviews. In this interview, we get the perspective of an experienced entrepreneur who is highly critical of the current crop of top-tier VCs. He says the emperor is not wearing clothes.

One question we put to many of the VCs we have spoken to is:

"How is the VC model changing, if at all, and how does the global financial crisis impact this change?"