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BuildorPro has staked a claim that it’s the first in-browser cloud based web design and development tool with baked in support for HTML and CSS. Many traditional box based applications have been making transitions to the cloud – popular examples include Piknik and Google Apps; even the mighty Adobe Photoshop have taken flight. Web design was bound to follow as the output of web design is generally displayed in the browser anyway.

Buildor, the London based start-up, has recently released more beta invites for its site but at the time of writing all invites has been taken up. Features not only include HTML and CSS editing but there’s also a prototyping function. This allows BuildorPro to be able to make quick mock-ups but in a web page format. Layouts and designs on web pages can be pulled from external sites making it easy to import existing projects. As its all browser based, the fonts are properly rendered and layouts are what they would be in the real world. But it’s not quite the same as the other WYSIWYG editors out there.

Professional web designers will be right at home with the ability to write and manage web pages using HTML and CSS editing. Any changes to code are reflected immediately as the whole thing runs in the browser. Gone is the constant pane switching and previewing (a la Dreamweaver) and is replaced with near real time results.

Founders, Bart Milner and James Law, started the company in 2008 but it’s only just opened its doors (slightly). When the ball gets rolling, BuildorPro will become subscription based and probably offer a freemium version to entice users.

The Q&A site Stack Overflow which received $6 Million funding in May has crossed the 10 million unique monthly visit mark – certainly an amazing achievement. The site differs from other Q&A sites by not only offering a 1 stop question shop but by segregating questions into communities. There are 34 different sites with topics from cooking to IT security with more in the pipeline. This is something which the competitors such as Quora lack.

Starting with 3 full-time developers, the company now has 24 new recruits and founders Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood even hired one of the power users, Marc Gravell! The new talent has encouraged the sites development and the Stack Exchange has been built. This gives users the ability to suggest new communities and crowd sources the directions that Stack Overflow goes in. By developing popular topics the Stack Exchange also guarantees the necessary critical mass needed for such communities.

Traffic is soaring and Spolsky attributes this to the band of programmer following the site. Problems are often queried in Google and results from Stack Overflow are returned. This has also spawned a viral movement not only amongst the tech-savvy but from other demographics around the web. This can only be a good thing as diversity results in more content and more traffic. As page views increase, more diverse and perhaps niche communities can develop leading to even more useful crowd sourced content. Other new features have included an interactive chat applet but next steps might be more social interaction.

comScore is reporting that U.S. retail e-commerce sales on Black Friday (Friday, November 26th) were up 9% over last year’s Black Friday sales figures.  For the season-to-date, online sales are up 13%, totaling $11.64 billion so far.

According to comScore’s numbers, Black Friday sales this year were at $648 million, up from $595 million last year and sales in the season as a whole are up $1.322 billion over last year at this time.  Sales on Thanksgiving Day were way up, 28% higher than last year at $407 million.

Retailers have been wary this year after being heavily disappointed last year when holiday sales failed to bring them out of the serious slump the economy had thrown them in during 2008-09.  Despite politicians claiming that the “recession is over.”

The National Retail Federation reports a bigger shopping weekend this past Thanksgiving weekend than last year, with about 6% more money being spent for the weekend.  So the gains aren’t just for the online markets.

Back to comScore, the numbers show that search patterns and user behavior was heavily influenced by Friday-only deals offered by several online merchants.  Black Friday-specific sites, like Black-Friday.net, lead the pack in huge, one-day traffic bursts and sales.  Three sites analyzed (all with “Black Friday” in their names) netted more than 6 million visitors in total – all in one day.

Amazon, of all the retail sites analyzed by comScore, however, came out on top.  As it did last year.  The other three top sites were all brick-and-mortar online branches: Walmart, Target, and Best Buy.

Great news for the retail market and hopefully good news for the economy as well.

A Washington, D.C. law firm called Dunlap, Grubb & Weaver has issued more than 10,000 lawsuits against “John Does” in 9 different lawsuits alleging copyright infringement.  These nameless persons are said to have broken copyright law by sharing movies over BitTorrent sites.

In turn, the law firm has requested the names and contact information of all of those 10,000 people.  That, of course, means the ISPs and email providers for them are tasked with offering up the information.  Many of those alleged infringers were using Time Warner network addresses.

Time Warner’s lawyers have intervened, citing the costs associated with doing this and the manpower required.  Their limited subpoena compliance division is only set up to deal with the few law enforcement requests they receive every year.  Time Warner’s argument is that complying with the subpoena from Dunlap, Grubb & Weaver would cause delays in the IP lookups law enforcement needs to solve cases.

Time Warner averages about 567 IP lookups per month, nearly all for law enforcement.  The judge in this case ruled that they should not be required to do more than 28 more per month (a 5% increase) to comply.  Because of this massive delay (it would take Time almost 3 years to complete the lookups at this rate), the lawyers from Dunlap, Grubb & Weaver have asked for extensions on the cases, since they can’t notify defendants they don’t yet know the contact information for.

A lawyer for several of the defendants – many unnamed – has countered that this would put already-named defendants in legal limbo as they wait for others to be named.

Meanwhile, the entertainment industry’s continued push to sue, sue, and sue again as their (obviously failed) efforts to stem illegal file sharing keep going.

Facebook has risen to become the third-largest Internet business, passing by venerable giant eBay.  Their current value, according to Bloomberg, is now at $41 billion, a couple of bills ahead of eBay’s $39.3B.  At least, that’s the latest guess.

Google and Amazon still reign supreme in the number 1 and 2 spots with a huge gap between them and Facebook.  Google, Inc. is valued at $192.9 billion while Amazon is worth $74.4 billion.

This Facebook valuation, of course, is based on secondary market trading since Facebook has not yet done an IPO.  As Business Insider points out, this secondary valuation is despite the social media giant’s expected revenues of only $1.5-$2 billion this year.

Not long ago, the Wall Street Journal was tossing around numbers for a Facebook IPO offering anticipated for 2011.  They valued the company at $35-$40 billion (in market capitalization).  At that time, Facebook had only taken in about a billion dollars in venture capital and small secondary market stock sales.

Eventually, of course, the social media powerhouse will go live on Wall Street.  It will most likely be one of the most-anticipated initial offerings to have ever hit the public market.  Until then, all of this valuation guessing is just fun mind games.

So, eBay, you can stay in the number three spot.  For now..

These days, thanks to the web, public figures are becoming even more accessible. Blogs, Facebook pages, websites and more recently Twitter are giving adoring fans the instant and sometimes very personal access that they crave. Taking advantage of the new Twitter revolution is Kommons, a new online Q&A platform.

Q&A platforms have been becoming more popular with sites like Quora used by a wide variety of audiences even on the enterprise level and including legal firms. Recently, Facebook is getting in on the act with Facebook questions but this space is not without pitfalls (anyone remember Ask Jeeves?). However Kommons has a bit of a unique take to online Q&A and is focused on getting responses from public figures using Twitter.

This new platform is overlaid on Twitter as you sing in using the Twitter Oauth system. You can choose to ask or follow questions which are tweeted out and tracked through the site. The twist is that Kommons tries to create enough public pressure to get the subject in question to answer. Recent answers have come from Clay Shirky, Jay Rosen and even Jeff Jarvis but no twitter big hitters as of yet (think @Stephenfry or @ladygaga).

Some say it’s a bit of a bully tactic but you could look at it as another crowd sourcing tool. How anyone makes money out of this is yet to be finalised but as with most web 2.0 startups – success comes with a critical mass of users and that can take a while to get going