Inform.com, which received mixed reviews when it launched a news aggregation service last year, has raised $10M from the Stephens Group and the Gaylord family. Inform executive Julian Steinberg said a new and improved version of the service will be available in April, which will make it easier to use and offer personalization tools to "create your own newspaper". Inform, he said, has no regrets about rushing its beta to the market because the company needed to demonstrate its technology to potential investors and partners. "I'm not unhappy about it at all," he said. "I am a little worried that we might have alienated some of early adopters for the new spring release when we release a much better, user-friendly, more powerful site. For people who came to [Inform] and said it was too complicated, I'm sorry it will be tough to get them to come back." Inform still plans to generate revenue from advertising but hopes to roll out premium, subscription-based services such as passive personalization.
Tags: Venture Capital

As the wireless data market gains momentum, Rogers is quickly moving to implement HSPDA technology, which offers speeds 1.5 to two times faster than EVDO networks. Rogers has tapped Ericsson as its exclusive supplier - a contract worth as much as $330-million. While Ericsson and Rogers have had a long relationship, the contract illustrates Ericsson's strength in the GSM market. Rogers plans to start deployment of HSDPA technology later this year as it moves to generate more revenue from data. To date, Rogers gets about 10% of total revenue from data services such as Blackberry devices, ringtones, short-text messaging and games. The pot of rainbow at the end of the rainbow - as far as many carriers are concerned - is video based on the belief consumers will purchase video clips of sports, music and news to watch on their wireless devices.
Tags: wireless, HSDPA, Ericsson

I had to laugh when reading Mathew Ingram's dismissal of 3Bubbles.com, which is offering a real-time beta chat service. Mathew think it's cool but doesn't see why anyone should get excited about it. Truth be told, you could say the same thing about a vast majority of these hot Web 2.0 services/applications. Given development and distributing costs have tumbled, an element of the Web 2.0 eco-system is vanity projects/hobbies where the mantra is "If I build it, they may come...or not". If some of these services become popular, it may lead to some short-term frame, some love from Michael Arrington and Emily Chang, and if you're really lucky a deal with GYM. For all those geeks and semi-geeks out there, these new services are pennies from heaven - they're free, easy to use and completely disposable when the next cool thing comes along. Personally, one of the most intriguing parts of the proliferation of new services is how some of the dot-com ideas are being recycled. Look at the revival of online calendars such as 30Boxes or online storage such as xdrive and OmniDrive - ideas that came and went five years ago. Don't get me wrong, I'm loving this Web 2.0 party as much as the next guy. It's like being at an all-you-can-eat buffet where the kitchen keeps bringing out new dishes every five minutes. My only complaint is very few of these services have staying power from a user or financial perspective. Every so often, I look at my ever-growing Roboform menu and decide it's time to cull back many services that not so long ago used to be cool and interesting.
Update: I noticed a lot of clicks on the Roboform link and it struck that perhaps some people thought they were getting my menu. If so, I apologize for that. Here are some of the Web 2.0 services that appear on the Roboform menu: 30Boxes, Blogbeat, Dpolls, Feedster, FeedBurner, Pandora, Pluck, Rollyo, Skype, Slawsome, Tailrank, Wink, Writely, Squidoo, MeasureMap, Mybloglog, Flickr, Blogger, Adgenta, GOffice, Google Analytics, Gmail, Blogware.

The results of my poll on whether Canada was missing out on Web 2.0 show that nearly 60% believe it's not happening in the Great White North while only 30% are confident we're in the game. Check out my latest poll on Vonage's IPO.