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Nurph , which just launched its public beta, combines a URL shortener and chat rooms. You simply create a shortened link by going to Nurph.com and share it with your friends. That link will then take your friends over to the URL you shortened, which now features a Nurph chat room that pops up on the bottom right side of your browser window. Nurph is the successor of Nurphy.com , which will shut down at the end of April. Sponsor Give it a Try and Chat with Us If you want to give Nurph a try, just click here and join your fellow ReadWriteWeb readers in a Nurph chat room attached to this post. Twitter Integration: Leaving A Digital Trail As Nurph’s co-founder Neil Cauldwell noted when we talked to him and his fellow co-founder Paul Horsfall earlier this week, adding the Twitter feature was a request from some of Nurph’s early beta testers. One interesting way to look at this feature is as a way of broadcasting your digital location. Whenever you enter a room – or “channel,” as the Nurph team calls it – a message is pushed out to all of your Twitter friends who can then join you on this site. One nice feature of the service is that whenever somebody posts a link to the chat room, clicking on that link will simply open up a new Nurph channel and won’t take you out of the Nurph experience. From within the chat room, you can also share your link on Twitter, Facebook and by email. Like all good URL shorteners, Nurph also offers a boookmarklet that will work with any browser. Links will also work on mobile browsers, though you will only see that chat room and not the site behind it. Still in Beta Given that the service just opened up its public beta, there are still some missing features – though they don’t take away from the overall experience. Right now, for example, you can’t see if any of your friends are currently typing in the chat room, which makes sticking to good chat etiquette hard. As of now, there are also no moderation features, though the team is thinking about this and you can report any vandalism here . As you have to sign in with Twitter, though, the Nurph team decided to keep spammers out by only allowing Twitter users with at least 25 followers to use the service. There is also no API for third-party developers to hook into and integrate the URL shortener into their apps yet. Publishers, who often like to see detailed statistics about how their shortened URLs were used will also have to miss this feature if they use Nurph (unless, of course, they decide to shorten the Nurph link with another URL shortener). Verdict Overall, though, this is a very interesting concept and it will be interesting to see if any larger publishers will adopt it for sharing their links and bringing their communities together. The team plans to regularly release new features during the public beta phase and it will be interesting to watch if and how users will adopt this service. Discuss

Many will not notice if your blog or Twitter profile page has a nice background, but they will notice for sure if it is a heinous one. I think that happens because one lands on a page expecting to see something which is marginally appealing, in the same way that one walks into a restaurant expecting things to be up to scratch. We assume they will be like that, we take it for granted. Read more Learn more about Bgrepeat.com in Dataopedia.com Find out how much Bgrepeat.com is worth with Stimator.com

I started doing my free Online Strategy Roundtables for entrepreneurs in the fall of 2008. Based on this work, I’ve been able to draw a few conclusions. First, a good percentage of entrepreneurs don’t bother validating their ideas. Another percentage are immediately interested in raising money. Raising money without validating the business is pretty much impossible. If we can address some of these patterns we have a chance at significantly reducing infant entrepreneur mortality. At this morning’s roundtable I worked with four new entrepreneurs, and this is what I learned. Sponsor Sramana Mitra is a technology entrepreneur and strategy consultant in Silicon Valley. She has founded three companies and writes a business blog, Sramana Mitra on Strategy . She has a masters degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her three books, Entrepreneur Journeys , Bootstrapping, Weapon Of Mass Reconstruction , and Positioning: How To Test, Validate, and Bring Your Idea To Market are all available from Amazon. Her new book Vision India 2020 was recently released. Mitra is also a columnist for Forbes and runs the 1M/1M initiative. Mel Marten presented ClaroConnect , described as being like a match.com for financial advisors and clients.  There was a discussion about the best way to monetize the business, whether charging an annual fee is preferred to monetizing every lead. Then the conversation turned to affiliate marketing. Albert Santalo with CareCloud was next.  This Internet-based service simplifies the many tasks of the modern medical office. While this business has been validated by a growing list of clients, the positioning of their service needs to be more sharply defined in order to scale the business.  Through much give and take, the importance of segmentation and focusing on the strongest segment of their market was emphasized.  Martin Linkov presented Favit , a product aiming to personally curate and simply present online content.  As a blogger and potential customer, I said I am looking for a service to curate and prioritize what other bloggers are saying about a topic I am blogging about to give my readers a fuller perspective.  But Martin is not looking to answer that need.  He demonstrates how difficult it can be to explain a complex service, while being pressed to succinctly define who the user is for this service, and what is the value proposition for the bloggers who are the stated channel.  The most valuable selling proposition for this service still needs to be defined and validated.  Mark Hernandez pitched his business, After COOL Fitness .  I liked this business idea, there is clearly a need to fill in as physical education and recreation programs are being cut from school budgets.  Currently they are paid by grants and parents.  When I learned of the lopsided ownership structure of the business, I felt Mark’s main priority should be to rework the capital structure of the business while continuing to organically grow the business regionally. The roundtables are the cornerstone programming of a global initiative that I have started called One Million by One Million ( 1M/1M ). Its mission is to help a million entrepreneurs globally to reach $1 million in revenue and beyond, build $1 trillion in sustainable global GDP, and create 10 million jobs. In 1M/1M, I teach the EJ Methodology which is based on my Entrepreneur Journeys research, and emphasize bootstrapping, idea validation, and crisp positioning as some of the core principles of building strong fundamentals in early stage ventures. You can find the recording of this roundtable session here . Recordings of previous roundtables are all available here . You can register for the next roundtable here . Photo by Laurent Cottier . Discuss

Springwise: Shortomatic is a California-based company that invites consumers to upload their own art for a truly customised swim. All they need do is indicate their waist size and then upload the graphics they have in mind. They then position and size the art, choose their colours and add text for use on the waistband. Next, voilà! A unique pair of California-made boardshorts that’s customised for them. Design your own swim shorts, earn up to $1,000 [Springwise]

What is the effect of the Oracle acquisition of Sun Microsystems on cloud computing? Well, there have been quite a few if you look at where Sun’s best and brightest have moved on to in the past few months. Tim Bray is the latest Sun star to move on. You may know Bray as the co-founder of XML. Eve Maler is also a co-founder of XML. She had worked with Bray for many years until her departure from Sun last Spring to join PayPal. Eve as many of you many know, is one of the leaders in developing identity standards and initiatives. Sponsor Perhaps the clearest example is evident at Rackspace where five developers from Sun were recently hired to work on Drizzle, a heavy duty system for high scaling applications in the cloud: When it’s ready, Drizzle will be a modular system that’s aware of the infrastructure around it. It does, and will run well in hardware rich multi-core environments with design focused on maximum concurrency and performance. No attempt will be made to support 32-bit systems, obscure data types, language encodings or collations. The full power of C++ will be leveraged, and the system internals will be simple and easy to maintain. The system and its protocol are designed to be both scalable and high performance. According to Rackspace, the service will “keep the good and remove the bad,” from MySQL. And here is where we see the power of open-source. We interviewed Bray today. He pointed out that open-source is developed outside the walls of the company. So, in the midst of corporate upheaval, developers can move onto new places and not face any interruption in their work. That’s exactly what we see with the Drizzle team: It feels like Oracle has lost a huge opportunity in the open-source community. The lucky ones are the companies that are picking up these talented people with faith that the open-source way represents the future of cloud computing. Discuss