Kayak.com is a travel search engine site, using AJAX technology and making it easier and more convenient for you to find and organize flights, hotels and rental cars. With Kayak’s Fare Buzz tool, you select where  you are traveling from and you are presented with a list of fares from your location to other locations.

It’s a very oraganized and easy to used tool for finding great deals. Kayak lets you look at a full range of airlines, hotels and car rental agencies quickly and efficiently based on the exact criteria you select. They have put a lot of thought into the design of the site, and it has won accolades from consumers and the press alike (2006 Forbes Best of the Web for example) because of its simple, straightforward design and ease of use.

A few months ago NBC ordered YouTube to remove copyrighted video from it’s site. Now they are together in a deal where YouTube will promote NBC’s fall lineup. There will be an official NBC channel on YouTube where the NBC previews will be for shows such as “The Office.” Alsoover the next year, every week, NBC will up load additional long form promo content to it’s channel on YouTube. Since YouTube’s launch in December 2005, people now watch over 70 million videos on the site per day.

Create an online identity with Naymz. It’s like a social security number for the internet which stores and protects your profile. So whenever anyone searches for your name online, they’ll see a profile created by you and not a third party site. When people search for your name online, Naymz gives you the ability to control what they find about you in all of the major search engines. A basic account is free and you also have the option of the paid premium account for $4.95/month or $47.50/year. You can personalize your page with info about you and links to your web content (blogs, social networks, photos, etc.). Your page will also be free of sponsor ads. Check out the sample profile.

SPENDING ON ONLINE ADVERTISING WILL climb to around $19.96 billion this year–marking a 26 percent increase from last year’s $15.83 billion, according to new research by PQ Media.

National display and search ads will account for the largest single proportion of online ad dollars–$13.57 billion, up 24 percent from last year’s $10.92 billion, according to the report. Local advertising–including display and search ads at newspaper sites and local portals–also will claim a significant chunk of ad dollars–$5.28 billion, up 32 percent from last year’s $4 billion. Via Online Media Daily

Google is released a payments service today called GBuy according to a report on Forbes.com. Merchants who enroll in the program will receive free payment processing during the beta period and 1.5% - 2% after the beta period expires.

GBuy will process orders on Google’s domain, similar to PayPal processing, and hand the user back over to the requesting site once the transaction has completed. The new service would give Google a more complete view of commerce search conversions, ultimately allowing the company to charge higher or lower rates to advertisers based on observed purchase conversions.

The new service is also has a merchant certification program, allowing selected merchants using the GBuy service designation as a trusted GBuy merchant. The special seal of approval would be displayed in Google’s search results and could possibly be used as a new ranking variable for advertising placement.

The Yahoo! IM team just released the 3.0 version of Yahoo! IM for Mac. It’s feature set is interesting, but it appears to lack two of the PC version’s most compelling qualities: VOIP and the growing library of plugins built on the recently released software development kit. It’s hard for me to imagine using any single IM client on my Mac when I can use Adium and connect with all major IM systems at once. Via TechCrunch

The new Cellfire is the first mobile application that delivers coupons right to your cell phone, to use in-store or over the phone. Cellfire launched on December 22, 2005 and offers coupons from a host of big name brands like Hoolywood Video and TGI Fridays. The service and download is free but currently only available for Cingular customers but more carriers will be supported soon. Since the coupons are stored on your phone, you don’t have to connect to the internet to access the coupons. You just show your coupon on your phone to the cashier and save! Also, your phone number is always kept private and is never given out.

Based in Fairfax, Virginia and launched in late March this year, Shoutcentral is a social networking site like MySpace but with AJAX messaging and real time chat built into your page and you are provided with a list of your friends so you can instantly chat with whoever is online, simple and easy. You can link to other popular sites, like YouTube videos, directly to your own profile. The interface is very manageable and easy to use, version 2 is coming soon and i’m sure that will be even greater.

I had a chat with 23 yr. old Shoutcentral founder Brian Hoffman earlier today and he says they “currently have over 800 users and plan to launch version 2 of the site around mid-July this year.” I am looking forward to version 2 and I believe Shoutcentral, out of all the other “new social networking”, will do very well considering thaht it is full of innovation. In comparing Shoutcentral to MySpace, I say that Shoutcentral is much more user friendly and interactive, and it’s not cluttered, it’s fresh.

The idea for Scrapblog was born during the first Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco in October 2004. On Scrapblog they merge the creativity and storytelling capabilities of scrapbooking with the publishing and sharing functionality of a blog. You can get a free membership (limited to creating 1 Scrapblog and uploading a maximum of 20MB of photos each month). Some tools offered on the site are: Scrapblog builder (WYSIWYG tool to create digital scrapbook pages online), Pre-made Themes, Prompt boxes (giving tips and instructions). Additional tools include: backgrounds, stickers, text, frames, shapes, preview, sharing, tags on photos, Email updates and RSS subscriptions, Slideshow. Overall this is a very intersting concept that I sure will win many people over who are into this sort of thing.

NHK, the Japan broadcast company has something ultra cool in the works, Ultra HiDef TV. The current max resolution of HiDef video is 1920×1080 pixels, or 1080p. The Ultra HiDef project NHK Japan is working on is based around a video signal that contains right around sixteen times that resolution. I had the opportunity to experience this in a theater that NHK had setup at the National Association of Broadcasters conference in Las Vegas at the end of April, but I ran out of time. I’m really starting to regret missing that opportunity now that I’m starting to hear more and more about the project. I’ve heard that the video is such high resolution that most viewers will actually try to reach out and touch things on the screen because the brain is tricked into believing it’s real. The current broadcast infrastructure couldn’t possibly handle this type of hires material. The data rates are enormous for the video signal alone, not including the 24 channels of audio NHK wishes to deliver with a channel of Ultra HiDef. Developing a new form of compression to bring the data rates down without drastic loss in image quality will be one of the biggest challenges NHK will have. Imagine trying to take your best looking HD channel and squeezing it down to be viewable in real time, full motion, and full quality on your cell phone, and you’re still no where near how much they would have to compress this Ultra HiDef in order to broadcast it. I think they’re planning on massive bandwidth upgrades in the broadcast infrastructure over the next few decades in order to support this stuff. NHK has actually made an announcement or two admitting that it won’t be anytime soon (as in at least twenty years from now). NHK Japan