VentureBeat

Website content provider Daylife announced today that it will launch a new service called Daylife Select that will let online publishers create their own customizable portals leading to a vast array of web content. For example, publishers can choose to aggregate YouTube videos, Flickr photos, Wikipedia entries, etc. on their own websites.

Daylife compiles a database of millions of constantly-updated websites tagged by keywords. The advantage of DayLife Select is that publishers don’t need any coding or web development skills to serve up content from this database. While they can customize the look and feel of their portals, as well as edit the content that appears, the backend is largely taken care of by Daylife’s own developers for a monthly fee of $4,000 to $5,000 for a small site, and up to $20,000 for a large one.

Despite these costs, some reports are billing Daylife as a money saving device, which could be especially well suited to online news sites. If daily news can be gathered and presented to readers quickly and automatically, then employees and writers can focus on generating original articles, photos, etc. Unsurprisingly, Daylife’s backers (and customers) include the Washington Post, the Huffington Post and Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine.

The New York-based company has raised two rounds of venture capital; the most recent was in 2007 and brought in $8.3 million from Balderton Capital and Arts Alliance. Daylife competes most directly with Inform.com, a similar news aggregator, and indirectly with Gather.com and Google News.

Sim City, the epic series of computer games that let you build your own virtual cities, seems to have ended up in a cul-de-sac. Instead, the series’ visionary creator, Will Wright, switched to create life simulater The Sims years ago. More recently, he’s been working on a forthcoming game called Spore that will let you evolve organisms from amoeba into galaxy-spanning civilizations — but not build beautiful, life-like cities.

However, there’s been a parallel series that I haven’t checked out, built by a French company called Monte Cristo. The first title was called City Life, and I didn’t play it because it was based on designing cities around class conflict (I liked playing Sim City to get my mind off of things like real-world political issues). But, the sequel, slated to launch next year, is called Cities XL, and I’m planning on trying it out. Given that the company has just raised $7 million from Innoven Partenaires, Arts Alliance and 360 Degress Capital Partners, hopefully that will be sooner rather than later.

Check out the screenshots above and below.

The basic idea is similar to Sim City: You zone for homes, commercial services, hotels, factories, and more. You’ll also be able to set things like building type, height, and style.

Anyone who has played a lot of Sim City 4, until now the highest-quality city building game in existence, knows that it was nearly impossible to connect your cities with others’.

But Cities XL will also be a massive multiplayer game. Players will be able to work together within a virtual planet of cities. Each player (or “mayor” if you prefer) can trade with other players’ cities, specializing their own economies into residential, commercial and industrial areas. The game will include ways to visit other cities for virtual events and competitions. More here, including some very nice-looking screenshots of City XL’s fully 3D world.