Skype to offer real-time voice translationsÂ? - Earlier,Â? we posted about eBay needing to be more innovative,Â? and their ability to use Skype to broaden their revenue stream with recently releasedÂ? features like Skypecasts. Techcrunch has a post about another new feature for Skype: real-time voice translations. AsÂ? we mentioned in my “Internet Darwinism” post, innovation is definitely key to any business, especially the Internet. The recent purchase ofÂ? SkypeÂ? hasn’t seen the return that may have been originally expected, eBay can look to these new features to help improve their ROI. Sony’s release of their MouseTalkÂ? optical mouse/Internet phone that is Skype certified may be another big boost for the service. Click here for the article on TechCrunch.

Others less than impressed with Google -Â? We mentioned that the last few releases from Google haven’t really delivered at the level thatÂ? we expect from the company. Paul Kedrosky posted on his blog complaining about the inability of Google to ever leave the “Beta” status on many of its products, and even rips the latest releases from Google Press day. When Steve Ballmer was interviewed by Matt Marshall, Ballmer went as far as to call Google’s Desktop “more embarassing than anything else.” For the full Ballmer interview, see this link. (Google Notebook is supposed to be released soon, should we expect another disappointing Beta?)

AIM Pages update - The “MySpace Killer” we posted about earlierÂ? has finally been released, and there are a couple reasons MySpace should be worried. AIM Pages has at least included a few Web 2.0 aspects, allowing users to customize different modules on the site inÂ? a drag-and-drop format. Although the overall customization is supposed to be more strict than MySpace, I found the MySpace customization to be incredibly difficult anyway, almost requiring the templates that have become so popular - and if I have to use a template, it’s not really customized, is it? AIM has a large enough userbase that if it was difficult to customize your AIM Page, these sites would spring up. And one of the aspects that AOL was trying to work was the abilityÂ? to turn [their]Â? users into programmers, as mentioned by Tina Sharkey. There’s a great post on Mashable that goes more into the release.

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