When we first heard of Cisco’s plans to create software for companies to build their own interactive social networks, we weren’t exactly sure what that entailed from a product standpoint. While Cisco’s interest in the social networking market was clear, the company’s entrance into new waters was one filled with questions. A new report from CNet via the Wall Street Journal today has shed some more light on Cisco’s plans.

The new software is called Eos, which stands for Entertainment operating system. It will let companies build online communities for niche groups, but more specifically it will help the companies monitor the community members’ interaction with each other as well as the content. It sounds a little bit like spying, but it’s really just market research. It’s the type of tools that software developers are beginning to include in their network-creation services as a standard when larger media companies are a target demographic. These are the companies that will spend money on creating social tools designed for consumer use, with a niche approach that is more able to pull data from a loyal and heavily engaged user.

This approach to social networking is very specific to brands, and incorporates some better potential for advertising as well. Having acquired Five Across as well as the important portions of the company that operated Tribe, Cisco has gone to the experienced pros in order to ensure its infrastructure. Having inherited a client with the social network for the National Hockey League with the acquisition of Five Across, Cisco will be testing its software with the NHL. Given Cisco’s experience on the infrastructure gear end, the company has seen how media has shaped the world of devices.

So I’m wondering if this will be a big enough benefit to help Cisco on its new journey into the world of social networking. I’m also wondering if Cisco will be integrating the two ends of its business spectrum, and will that in fact help ease some of the tension we’re seeing between content providers and service providers given the usage patterns that have developed thanks to media-sharing networks that have grown a significant amount in the past few years.

I’ve been on something of a web app kick lately.  I really like the idea of creating,editing, and sharing documents and computing power “in the cloud”, accessible by whomever you want from wherever you want on whatever system you have handy.

The field of web-based productivity is growing by leaps and bounds, and seems to be on the brink of becoming mainstream and ubiquitous.  That’s good news for mobile workers like me, who can never be completely sure where, or on what kind of computer, we may need to access our files. 2007 has been a good year, with great strides in core productivity apps like word processors and presentation software, and some interesting developments in specialized areas like collaborative brainstorming and todo list management.

Because I love you, lifehack readers, here are 11 of the best web apps released in 2007!

• 
  bubbl.us: Flash-based mindmap creator  bubbl.us allows you to quickly and easily make effective, attractive mindmaps that can be exported as images or as HTML outlines, or shared with others who can add new items or draw new connections between existing ones.
•  
  Buzzword: I’ve raved about Buzzword before, but it bears repeating: this online word processor is both gorgeous and a joy to use. Running in Flash, as you’d expect of an Adobe product, Buzzword works well and has a pretty full set of features already, and promises off-line functionality and PDF export in the near future.
• 
  Empressr: Another Flash-based app, Empressr allows users to create and share slideshows using text, images, videos (including webcam captures created on the fly), and other rich media.  Presentations can be shared on the Empressr site and can also be embedded in users’ own pages.
• 
  Highrise: From the good folks at 37signals comes Highrise, an enterprise-grade contact manager and customer relations manager.  37signals sets the standard for web 2.0 apps, so you know it’s good: clean design, a highly functional interface, and interconnectivity with other 37signals apps.
• 
  Jott: A combination of speech recognition and live workers backs this “note to self” service, allowing Jott to produce remarkably accurate transcriptions of your spoken messages.  Originally Jott simply recorded your message, transcribed it, and sent it to you to someone in your contact list, but their new Jott Links service connects up with various web services allowing you to post to blogs, add appointments to your online calendar, tweet with twitter, and add todos to your todo list.
• 
  Mint: Online money management made almost frighteningly easy, Mint allows users to add all their bank accounts, credit cards, stock trading accounts, and other financial information into a simple, clean view.  Although some have raised concerns about the security of all this sensitive information, Mint’s model was impressive enough to garner the TechCrunch40 Top Company Award (and $50,000 seed money).
• 
  Nozbe:Modeled on David Allan’s “Getting Things Done” approach, Nozbe aims to be the ultimate GTD app. With easy-to-add next actions associated with contexts and projects, Nozbe comes pretty close!
• 
  Sandy: Sandy is a virtual assistant centered on your email.  You email Sandy with (almost) natural language statements, like “Remind me to call John Smith at 8am tomorrow”, and Sandy emails you a reminder at 8am tomorrow to call John Smith. Coupled with Jott, Sandy is a really exciting service!
• 
  Scrybe: The much-anticipated release of Scrybe left some feeling let down, but hype aside, Scrybe could well become the online calendar of choice.  Flash-based Scrybe uses a natural-language parser similar to Sandy’s, allowing new entries to be created quickly and easily.  The developers say they’re hard at work on integrating Scrybe with Outlook, which would make Scrybe a hard one to beat.
• 
  Todoist: Billing itself as “useful, fast and easy to use”, Todoist can be nothing more than a todo list — you start typing into the text box, select a due date, hit enter, and move onto the next.  With a little specialized syntax, though, you can format lists, search for multiple criteria, manage your lists from Gmail, and integrate with external services like Launchy and QuickSilver.
• 
  Vitalist: Another contender for the GTD app, Vitalist also offers next actions, projects, and contexts (unlike Nozbe, you can create your own contexts), as well as a virtual “tickler file” and a mobile-optimized version. GTD apps are a highly personal product — one person’s way of getting things done might be nothing but a series of obstacles for another — so it’s good to see so much competition and innovation in this space.

While not all of these are necessarily the best in their class, they do compare favorably with more established apps like Basecamp for project management, Remember the Milk for todo lists, and Google Calendar for scheduling.  Some, like Sandy and Jott, essentially create new classes — try explaining to your grandmother just what, exactly, Sandy does!

What excites me is that these represent only the first, or in some cases the second, step for web-based applications.  Any of these apps will help you be more productive, but imagine them integrated and refined 5 years from now — using Jott to call Sandy to schedule a payment in Mint and placing a todo in Todoist telling you to call in three days to make sure the payment is received. Maybe it won’t be these apps or these companies, but if not, the ones that follow will have the creators of the apps above to thank for blazing the trail.

So, what have I missed? What else came out this year that’s exciting you? What rounds out this list to an even dozen? And what have I included that’s old news around your neck of the woods? Let me know in the comments!

Comcast is about to get an expensive lesson, one that Warner Music Group learned last year at the expense of its business: going to war with your customers doesn’t pay.As 2007 came to a close, we learned what we suspected for years: that Comcast has been inhibiting their users’ ability to use popular file sharing protocols, like BitTorrent.  Treading in the waters of non-network neutrality is a major faux pas amongst the geek elite, but it may turn out to be a costly violation by the standards of the FCC.

FCC Chairman Kevin Martin announced today that a coaltion of consumer groups and legal scholars had asked the agency in November to stop Comcast from discriminating against certain types of data.  The two groups also asked the FCC to fine Comcast $195,000 per affected subscriber.

I’ll give you a second to digest that.  I went through the article from the AP wire a couple times, and I somehow absorbed that Comcast was only going to be fined $195,000.  That’s not the case.  Comcast has 9.1 million subscribers to their digital services, according to their most recently issued investor’s report.

Run that through your calculator.  The fine could reach upwards of $1.77 trillion!

As it turns out, violating the trust of your userbase and denying them the ability to use their data plans unfettered can cost a bit more than a few days of bad PR in the technology blogosphere. One thing is for certain, admitting your company is not net neutral won’t be acceptable behavior any longer, and maybe - just maybe - big broadband providers may reconsider their network filtering policies.

Project Opus,the music community that’s been around for well over a year now, has launched a Facebook application. Yep, another music-based Facebook application for you to check out. So what’s different? Project Opus’ new application is called Mixx, and it’s a collaborative tool for the creation of a mix tape, of sorts.It’s easy enough to use, and it begins by organizing content based on the arbitrary attitudes of you, the user. So when you create a mix tape, Mixx will ask you to start out with the type of music you’d like, based on your mood/activity/purpose/whatever. It’s a one-liner approach that Viewpoints has also employed for the purpose of gathering some additional context surrounding the content you’re about to incorporate into this application. From what I can see, this sneaky way of pulling out information from users comes in handy for a variety of reasons, which I’ll get to later on in this post.

So, to get you started with this one-liner, Mixx gives you a leading sentence starter: “I want music that…” You fill in the blank. Here are some examples based on personal use for music:

I want music that I can clean the house to
I want music that will get me through a 4 hour road trip from Indianapolis to Ann Arbor
I want music that I can listen to while drinking white wine
I want music that will get me hyped for a girls night out

Once you’ve gotten your one-liner out the way, you can add music to your mix tape. The music, however, will need to come from your computer. That’s right, you’ll need to upload it. There are a couple of reasons for this, besides the obvious legal issues. Project Opus has this idea that the music you’re most likely to add to your mix tape will also be most likely to be already sitting on your hardrive. I’ll beg to differ due to the overwhelming presence of iTunes, which doesn’t really let you take music across applications very easily.

What’s more, I’m sure you’re all wondering why Project Opus wants to host all these mp3s you and your friends will be uploading, right? Well, I don’t have an answer for you, but I do have a reason to return to the aforementioned usefulness of Mixx gathering contextual data around the playlists you create. Given that Project Opus may have a lot of server costs to cover should Mixx gain in popularity, the company will also need to generate some positive cash flow, to its own pocketbook and those of content owners.

That means that the whole of Mixx as an application will be used to promote the legal purchasing of music for artists. And if Project Opus can give some additional information on how its music is being associated for end users (i.e. Bohemian Rhapsody is being used for house parties, drunken tequila night’s at Johnny’s, and Richard Simmons work outs), then music companies and even Project Opus can provide better recommendations and employ improved marketing tactics to consumers and users alike. All of this makes it more likely that a music company will appreciate (as opposed to resent) Project Opus’ Mixx application. Hopefully that will eventually lead to the legal use of searchable music libraries for adding music to your mix tapes, like Mixaloo.

Onto the collaborative aspect of Mixx. Once you’ve gotten the ball rolling with your theme and your songs from your computer, you can select Facebook friends to help you build out your mix tape even further. While you don’t have to allow your friends to add their contributions to your mix tape, it’s more fun this way. Similar to Kaltura’s collaborative photo album, Mixx is leveraging Facebook’s existing social graph to enable a combined effort for the creation of a mix tape that everyone can enjoy. From the Mixx application, you can access your own mixes as well as those of your friends. The buck stops here: you can’t see any mixes of users outside of your networks.

I’m actually interested to see how participation and uptake is occurring around music-based Facebook applications, especially for the purpose of self-promotion, so if you have any thoughts on this, feel fee to leave some comments below.

Bang Ventures isn’t a way to get funding for your startup, but it is the latest to launch a resource for entrepreneurs hoping to make it big in the web 2.0 game. Its differentiating factor? Go after the ideas, not the programmers, according to VentureBeat. So in admitting that programmers are somewhat commoditized at this point, Bang Ventures is taking a new approach to the early support of conceptual businesses. This focus on execution sounds good in theory, and speaks to the necessity of resources one way or another that need to be provided in order for a business succeed. It incorporates some people-powered tools for choosing the best companies as well, and has some pretty big name sponsors, like Deloitte, supporting its idea.

When it comes to web 2.0, most of this focus has been on the programming end, so that begs the question: what are VCs looking for now? Does the creation of Bang Ventures indicate that programmers are not as much of a necessity for funding and eventual acquisitions? Often times the lead programmer is kept on after an acquisition for a variety of reasons, but a shifting focus on the conceptual end is somewhat (very somewhat) reminiscent of web 1.0 and worrisome as well. Just as Y Combinator needs to provide the business savvy resources necessary for a programmer to succeed with his product, a business idea needs good programmers to make it work in today’s Internet culture.

Can Bang Ventures bring about the long-term advice and resources necessary to do this? I feel that providing such resources would be the best way for Bang Ventures to work. With Curt Schilling on Bang Ventures’ panel of judges, however, is the new company merely hoping to gain traction based on the new glamorous appeal of being a tech entrepreneur, and would this approach make it seem like becoming a tech CEO is just too easy? As most of you Mashable readers are launching your own startups as well, let me know what you think in the comments. Will you be applying for a spot with Bang Ventures?

5min has appropriately raised $5 million in a Series A financing round from Spark Capital. The how-to video site has been quietly growing in a sector we haven’t seen much activity in lately, outside of some niche developments particularly geared for educational purposes. Aside from the funding, 5min will also be moving its offices to New York City some time this month, making the move from Tel-Aviv, Israel to become an U.S.-based company.Having already created connections in Israel and the U.S., the company’s global reach is already extending across multiple countries. No word on exactly how 5min plans on using the funds, but I imagine some moves to gain more users and the development of more tools for searching, viewing and promoting videos would be some of the priorities for growth and the gaining of more market share.

Another major player in this sector is of course VideoJug, which also offers several features for the promotion and ingestion of videos, along with other necessities like transcripts, etc. The other recent trend we’ve seen with DIY video sites like NowPlayIt has been the creation of a marketplace, with a direct appeal to content creators in hopes that they’ll want to earn additional revenue from the promotion and purchase of their content/lessons. 5min and VideoJug, which are free to use, have managed to provide better tools than most of these other video sites.

While this can be partly due to funding, it’s also clear that free information is generally better and gets a better response from the consumer. Will this model eventually need to become a marketplace, similar to Revver or perhaps the “tip” system that Radiohead utilized? As more video moves to online distribution, there will be more than just these niche sites trying to monetize DIY content. I think larger entities like Scripps will be looking to increase advertising supplements while independent networks may indeed adopt a rev-share model of some sort in order to incentivize the submission of quality content.

Everyone is looking to the longtail these days, including the government. You remember GoldCorp, Inc right? The Canada-based gold mine that turned to the world in order to find their next mine site in exchange for a cash prize. GoldCorp released some of its internal data and turned it over to the public in order to leverage a larger group of people. Now, in what looks to be a web 2.0 version of America’s Most Wanted, the FBI wants you to help them find D.B. Cooper.Remember him? He hijacked an airplane back in 1971, told the pilot to head to Mexico, and parachuted out of the plane with $200,000 in stolen cash. The case has been reopened, and certain details have been released in order to give you some leads in order to help you help the FBI.

I’m all for crowd-sourcing, and the concept for use with crime cases isn’t new by any stretch of the imagination, but the D.B. Cooper case is a classic in American crime history. It’s one of the greatest crime mysteries from the 20th century. The good thing about this is that the notability of this crime may be exactly what the FBI needs to get the rest of the world involved.

So while we’re getting the entire world involved with the D.B. Cooper case, I thought I’d offer up my two cents on what would make things really interesting.

Turn it into a reality show. With the writers’ strike still going strong and no end in sight, what would be better than another reality show that requires no writing talent–just a handful of psychologists willing to put the participants in compromising situations and a producer willing to promote it? The crowd-sourcing task for finding D.B. Cooper would be a great reality show, right?

Start a social network for Cold Cases. Why not reopen loads of closed case files and turn them over to the public? Photo galleries and videos could populate portions of the site, along with discussion boards and forums for a collaborative effort to facilitate the solving of crime around the world. Maybe CBS would even sponsor the network, and finally find a decent entrant into the current world of the web. That’s like, free ideas for CBS Cold Case.

Set up a replica in Second Life. Whether the FBI sets up fake cases for Second Life users to solve, or replicates cases that have already been solved, the virtual realm could garner even more support for the branch of the government that remains the most attractive by mysterious merit and a slew of really good movies alone. Then the FBI could team up with CNN for some crowd-sourcing news coverage of the ongoing and solved cases. It would be so like real life.

Any more ideas on how to really get web 2.0 involved with the FBI’s new crowd-sourcing efforts? Leave them in the comments below.

[via Suitably Flip]