Tupalo.com, the Vienna-based service for what’s cool around your neighborhood, yesterday announced a partnership with Herold, the Austrian service for business listings.

It’s a great move for the little company and I’m really happy for them.

And while I don’t believe in things like good and evil, I do have a bit of a queasy feeling when it comes to Herold. Not so long ago, they were getting a thorough beating when they announced the availability of a CD-ROM that contained the data of more than 4 million private people. While it’s legal, people were and still are up in arms about it. Which I totally understand.

Now, while I do believe Mike from Tupalo when he announces on their blog that they “will still continue as the lightweight, independent company we’ve always been”, I wonder whether people will still feel the same way, now that a company with such a backstory is part of the game.

I’m convinced that from a business perspective, the partnership between Tupalo and Herold was one of the best things that could have happened to them. Whether it’ll put off users concerned about their private data and how it’ll be treated, remains to be seen.

Here’s a service for everyone who’s always wanted their own website but didn’t know how and what to put on it. Chi.mp solves these problems for you.

First of all, you get a free domain name, ending in .mp. Now, it’s not the prettiest top level domain, but apparently the company reached an agreement with the government of the CNMI (Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands) that basically allows them and only them to register domains ending in .mp.

So after signing up, you’re the proud owner of a domain name. In a way. But more about this later.

With your new domain name, you also get a full-fledged personal website complete with a lifestream, the option of creating different versions for different contacts and a contact manager for the services you’ve hooked up to your site, like Flickr, Facebook or Twitter.

It’s fairly customizable, but in the end it’s basically a standalone profile that identifies you on the web. Your .mp domain also doubles an OpenID, which I think is a splendid idea. When you’re done configuring and hooking up your other services to the site, it will look like this.

It’s all very easy to configure, obviously geared toward people who haven’t yet created profiles on every social network there is (someone like me, in case you’ve missed that).

Oh, and a word about the domain name. The whole service is free, for the time being, including that .mp domain name. That is, it’s free if you use the rest of the Chi.mp service, but if you want to use your domain for something else, say a website about your anime collector’s dolls, you need to buy it for 20 USD a year. But considering that the whole idea behind Chi.mp is the creation of a profile and the interaction between all the .mp profiles created, buying that domain-name seems pointless. Especially if you can get ordinary .com domains for much less.

The service is still in private beta, so if you feel you’d like to try it out, drop me a note in the comments and I’ll send you an invitation (make sure to use a valid email-address or the invitation key will never reach you).

Update: All the invites are gone, sorry. But do leave a comment anyway.

As most of you probably know, I’m quite fond of my GMail Inbox.  Due to its popularity there exists an impressive array of add-ons, extensions, scripts and tools to enhance the service even more.

But even though I’m fond of GMail, that doesn’t stop my fickle mind from constantly searching for something that may be better.

A tool that might be is Zenbe. Breaking down the name into its components, it suggests that its users will be in a Zen-like state using their service. I’ve never bought into the whole Zen thing (that’s why I’ve never even attempted to reach what David Allen calls a “mind like water”), but I do have to concede that Zenbe does a few pretty nice things.

Posing as a webmail-service, it actually combines all your communication needs. While you do get a free email-address when you sign up, you might as well keep using any address you’ve had before, provided it offers pop3 support. Fortunately, GMail does, so I was able to simply plug it into Zenbe.

The webmail side of Zenbe offers the usual shenanigans of later services, including the tagging of mails and conversation view of your messages. But that’s where the similarities end and the awesomeness starts.

In addition to the webmail part, Zenbe offers a plethora of tools that are designed to simplify your life. First of all, they offer a “Files”-view, displaying all the attachments you’ve received via mail, with the option of viewing certain filetype directly inside Zenbe.

Next up is a calendar, which is always handy to have right by your mail. The calendar is rather basic and doesn’t offer as much bells and whistles as Google calendar, but it lets you import calendars from wherever you want.

And then there’s Zenpages. Basically, Zenpages provides space for projects. You can add emails, tasks,  links, maps, videos, discussions and even an RSS feed. These pages can then be shared with and edited by whomever you like, regardless of whether they’ve got a Zenbe account or not. It’s a great way of sharing information and collaborating with friends and teams.

And since you’re already pretty overwhelmed by what Zenbe can do, I’ll just quickly fill you in on what the sidebar does. It holds your contacts, which can of course be imported from your other webmail services as well. Another tab holds a task list system. You can create as many lists as you like, lists you create in Zenpages also show up there. And then there’s Twitter, Facebook and GTalk ingetration, meaning you’ll never have to leave your Zenbe Inbox to check on your contacts from all over the web.

Now, the whole thing isn’t just very functional, the GUI is also very beautiful. Which could be where parts of the whole Zen-thing come in.

However, regardless of all its functionality and beauty, Zenbe has one big downside that makes me hesitant from using it as much as I would like to. It’s not a big player. The thing is, communication is the key to everything we do online nowadays. Giving that into the hands of a company that might not be here a year from now is just too risky.

In addition, I read through their blog and encountered this posting in which they are elaborating on future implementations of Zenbe. They disclose that new iterations of Zenbe will be focused on getting businesses on board. As a private user, that sounds just a bit too discouraging from future use, considering that new features will most likely be implemented in the business, rather than the private version.