Ajax Girl

Two sources have confirmed that the rapidly growing StumbleUpon recently approached at least one large Internet company to be acquired. The asking price was $50 million.

The deal doesn’t appear to have been widely shopped - one potential acquiror said that they met with the company recently, but only to explore possible business development deals, and that an acquisition was not discussed. I spoke briefly with StumbleUpon CEO Garret Camp this afternoon but he refused to comment, saying “we do not comment on rumors.” Fair enough.

The real story may be a disconnect between the company’s executives and investors. StumbleUpon has only raised a single seed round of financing - $1.5 million - and angel investors often informally shop a company, with or without the company’s permission, in the hope of an early cash out.

Whatever is going on, StumbleUpon certainly isn’t stumbling in its growth. It is now a significant source of traffic for many startups (an entrepreneur recently told me that 15% of his traffic last week came from StumbleUpon). Garret told me today that the company has 1.5 million registered users and an average of 3.5 million page views per day. They expect to be cash flow positive within the next few months.

Our previous StumbleUpon coverage is here.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/49386849/

Portland, Oregon based AboutUs announced this week that it has closed a Series A round of funding and raised $1 million. The site is a wiki directory of web sites, mostly populated automatically but with a healthy amount of traffic and a growing number of edits being made daily. If you look up your website on AboutUs, you’ll probably find an entry there. I expect most people who aren’t wiki lovers to think this is a strange business and to some degree I think it is too. It’s also very interesting and has some good people behind it.

Sixteen investors total participated in the round, with Capybara Ventures and Northwest Technology Venture providing institutional backing. AboutUs founder Ray King was co-founder and CEO of SnapNames. The Board of Advisors for AboutUs includes wiki forefather Ward Cunningham, Stephen Babson of Endeavour Capital and Keith Teare of Edgeio. The AboutUs site went live in August and has seen healthy traffic growth. The site’s traffic after only a few months is one of its primary selling points.

AboutUs is built on MediaWiki, the same platform that Wikipedia runs on. It’s not the prettiest thing in the world to look at, but it’s functional. There are entries for about 3 million websites in the wiki. The vast majority are populated from Whois records, with related links and a Google Map added for each page.. The 5 person company personally checks all edits each night, now between one and two thousand on average. (Founder Ray King says that adding the words “can I really change this?” is the most common edit people make to the site.) There isn’t a neutral point of view requirement, but review type text is encouraged to be placed in a special section for reviews.

There is something that bothers me about having 3 million pages about websites, populated automatically and by any random editor who stops by, titled “AboutUs.” The phrase implies an autobiographical text. It’s also very good for SEO. The AboutUs page on TechCrunch wasn’t written by anyone associated with TechCrunch and there’s something about the name AboutUs that makes me uncomfortable about that. I could certainly go in and change the entry, but it feels more like something I’m obligated to do unless I ignore it.

The company has partnerships with a number of domain registrars in the works to put links to each site’s AboutUs page at the top of WhoIs info, in exchange for a badge linked back to that registrar. King hopes that a growing number of websites will put links to their AboutUs.org pages on their sites, as he intends to add wiki functionality and a community edited About page to every site on the web that he can.

The site hasn’t been monetized yet; Ray King says they will explore premium features like paid job listings on company pages. I probed ruthlessly for some indication of an antisocial profit drive in King, as it took me a while to believe that a business based on content scraped from the WhoIs records of other sites could be legitimate. In the end, though, I was convinced that King really is a true believer in “the wiki way,” as he calls it, a collaborative culture based on presumptions of good faith.

Presumptions of good faith aside, I’d like at the very least an RSS feed to subscribe to changes being made to sites I’m connected to. King says that’s a high priority and will soon be one of a number of extensions he’s made to his MediaWiki implementation.

Can AboutUs succeed? If it does, it will be part of a general transition of the culture of the web. I like the idea of having wiki guides to websites, though calling it AboutUs makes me uncomfortable and I hope a wave of nasty edits doesn’t make me regret pointing to it. If a happy medium of wiki purity and some control over edits can be maintained, AboutUs could be well positioned in a world still deciding how it feels about “the wiki way.”

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/49342056/

Borland looked like they were selling off their tooling business, but today we learn that Borland spins off its tool unit to supply developers with the tools of the trade.

Borland Software announced Nov. 14 the formation of CodeGear, a company with the goal of advancing the Borland integrated development environment tools. The CodeGear development team says the new company retains the technology’s roots.

“This is really what we were looking for,” said Michael Swindell, vice president of product strategy at CodeGear, based in Scotts Valley, Calif. “We wanted to be a separate company, an independent unit to focus on our strengths in [Windows] Vista and Eclipse, but also in PHP, Ruby and other technologies.”

Ben Smith, the newly appointed chief executive of CodeGear, said that perhaps the most exciting road map the company has is for its plans for tools in the AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) and dynamic languages space.

“We’ll be doing some things in the new development areas such as AJAX, Python, Ruby, PHP and other things,” Smith said

It is impressive how much Eclipse is dominating out there too. JBuilder 2007 will be on Eclipse. Maybe we will go back to my roots of having every application running in Emacs, but this time inside Eclipse.

I am glad they are doing this. They have traditionally been great with technology, but poor with marketing. Hopefully the new entity gets it right, and adds great new Ajax tools to the mix. We all know that we need it.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/borland-spins-out-codegear-new-tools-include-ajax-support

SyncVUE is a product that enables users to sync up media files like video or audio with their Skype contacts for collaborative annotation in real time. It’s an impressive use of the Skype network, an approach that’s likely to become increasingly common. There’s a long list of plug-ins available on the Skype Extras page, but that’s far from an exhaustive list.

SyncVUE is a product that uses your Skype contacts list as a user list. It lets you switch control over the synced file between participants in a media sharing session or turn off syncing at any time and play the file independently. Any user can put time flags and notes throughout the file. There’s a good demonstration video here. It’s Quicktime based and supports basic commands from Final Cut Pro. The product costs almost $200 for the first license, so it’s not for the casual user. Anyone working on video with a distributed team might find it very interesting, though.

We’ve covered shared workspaces, open source web conferencing and products that ride on top of VOIP here in recent weeks. SnycVUE is related to of all of those and it’s a great way to leverage the power and market dominance of Skype. Why hasn’t eBay done something like this?

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/49283733/

Dallas, Texas based social media consultancy Big in Japan has announced that it’s open sourcing the code to several of its very handy little web tools. The company says the tools have proven impractical to keep up to date by themselves and a diversion from paid client work. Fair enough. I hope other people will make use of the newly accessible code and make these tools even cooler. I’ve enjoyed using several of them for quite some time. If you’ve been using them too, don’t worry, the company says they’ll remain in operation as hosted services.

These are the same people who open sourced SimpleTicket, the open source trouble ticketing tool. The company’s award winning Podserve podcasting system will remain proprietary. It’s great that Big in Japan is going to continue supporting these free, hosted tools - the RSS to IM tool alone quickly grew to 30,000 users and that can be quite a burden for a non revenue generating service.

Here’s a list of the tools that are being offered to the community. Many non-developers will find these useful too. These are the kinds of tools that make RSS so great, it makes information very pliable.

ElfURL - A URL shortcut creator like TinyURL, but if you like you can tag your shortcuts for search engine indexing and get an RSS feed tracking the number of click-throughs for each ElfURL. I use ElfURL several times a day.

FrankenFeed - An RSS feed splicer. You provide multiple RSS feeds and this service combines them into one. Add tags and descriptions for sharing and indexing. I prefer FeedRinse (to add filters at any time) or Lazy Tom’s FeedJumbler because I’m more familiar with it, but making this open source could lead to some interesting developments. It could also be nice for many reasons to have on your own domain. When it comes to using 3rd party feed splicing apps, it’s also fun to run the new feed through FeedBurner so you can tell how many subscribers the feed has. I did that some time ago with the NPTech Tag metafeed for nonprofit technologists.

Instantfeed- An RSS to IM alert system. Very basic and there are better tools available, but three cheers for this one being open sourced.

SocialMail - Email to RSS conversion tool. Very nice for getting Email newsletters and other old school communication delivered by RSS. There are a number of other options available around the web, but they tend to be fly by night and this is a lightweight service you don’t want collapsing mid-use. I’d love to see filtering added to this, as it is though you can easily combine it with FeedRinse.

FeedVault - An OPML file backup system, to store the list of feeds you are subscribed to in case your computer crashes, your online feed reader melts, etc. A very nice idea, not as much fun as ShareYourOPML or OPMLSearch.com, but does include tags and descriptions. I’m still convinced that OPML is loads of fun and is going to take off someday.

QwikPing - This one is boring, but maybe someone will be able to do something interesting with it. Good luck dealing with spammers if it’s anything public, of course.

All in all, that’s a pretty good list of tools. It only makes sense that they never proved viable for one company to maintain, none of them were revenue generating. They could, though, prove very useful in a suite of services that other companies and consultants offer their clients. I’d love to see some of them continue being developed.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/49245601/

Jangl formally announced the opening of their beta service this morning. Jangl provides an ID that users can give out to other people to create a VOIP number unique to a single relationship between two people. VOIP is used as the connection between any two phones, be they land lines, cell phones or VOIP calls. The service has been in use at Match.com for several weeks but it’s now available to anyone through the Jangl site.

When you sign up for a Jangl account, you provide your phone number, a PIN and a Jangl ID. You can then give people the Jangl phone number and your Jangl ID. The first time they try to make a connection, the caller has to record a greeting requesting permission to connect. A Jangl ID holder can remove that permission later and no longer be reached through the number. The service is free at launch but Jangl says they expect to charge a fee in early 2007.

Jangl has raised a total of $9 million in two rounds of funding over two years, the second round closed in July. Funders include Storm Ventures, Labrador Ventures and Cardinal.

It’s a little awkward to ask someone to call this company and put in your ID, maybe you’ll accept their call and maybe you won’t. Once a connection has been made, then the individual connection gets a regular ten digit phone number that can be called. I’m sure this will work for situations like online dating, but I can’t imagine off the top of my head how I’d use it in a professional context. I give out my direct line fairly frequently and even the occasional cold call by PR people doesn’t bother me enough that I would want to initiate those relationships with a phone number everyone knows I could cut off at any time. Give me time though and perhaps my cynicism will grow.

I can see a lot of possible applications of Jangl but regular individual use isn’t one of them.

One way or the other, this is another interesting and innovative use of VOIP. While Skype celebrated its first instance of 8 million simultaneous users last week, its huge price tag is widely seen as a loss to the eBay community that has failed to use Skype in conjunction with auctions. Instead, services like Jangl, JaJah, Grand Central and now the newly released TalkPlus are all leveraging VOIP to connect the mobile and land line phones we’re already using. Will this be the real market viable application of VOIP technology? It could be, or it could be proof that the best use of this technology is still yet to come.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/49232946/

There have been requests for smooth scrolling widgets in Dojo, and Heng Liu stood up tot he plate by implementing dojo.lfx.smoothScroll.

Along with this new dojo.lfx resource, other improvements include:

• dojo.html.getAbsolutePosition is extended to be compatible with dojo.withGlobal
• a new function, dojo.html.getAbsolutePositionExt is introduced in resource dojo.html.util to include support for getting abosolute postion of a node in iframes with regards to a given window. The reason why this is not merged into dojo.html.getAbsolutePosition is that, this new feature depends on APIs defined in dojo.html.util. In order to avoid introducing it as a dependency in dojo.html.layout, this design decision is made.

To see it in action check out this test page and click on the buttons on the top left to see the items scroll.

Example Usage

The entire thing is pretty small, take a peek for yourself

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/dojo-smooth-scrolling

In the final part of this chat, our guests discuss business models, companies they admire, influences, and businesses that don’t exist but should. (See part 1 or part 2).

Choice quotes
Hedlund: “I just want to have a really clear and likely story for how money will show up. Step two can’t be "and then some magic happens"

Fletcher: “If you don’t have an audience, it doesn’t really matter what your biz model is.”

Hedlund: “I do think that the #1 thing that has helped me most is having and keeping friends who are talented.”

Hedlund: “Trust your gut more. When you read everyone in the newspaper saying one thing and your gut says something else, burn the newspaper.”

Fletcher	Too many people to name. All you guys, of course.
Fried	I’m inspired by dentists and contractors who build things
Fried	they have a ton of different tools for the job
Fried	their success depends on great tools that do a few things well. Sometimes even just one thing well.
Fried	Instead of a swiss army knife
Fried	I’m also currently inspired by Ricardo Semler and James Dyson
Fletcher	Jason: Dyson the vaccuum cleaner guy?
Fried	MF, yeah
Fried	http://www.amazon.com/Against-Odds-Autobio…
Fried	HIGHLY recommended book
Hedlund	I do think that the #1 thing that has helped me most is having and keeping friends who are talented
Hedlund	not b/c they are talented but it seems to work out that way
Fletcher	That guy’s cool. I have one of those vaccuums. Works really well.
Hedlund	JF, you recommended that a while ago, I need to read it
Fried	absolutely fascinating book about business, ideas, design, patents, stealing, lawyers, and, most of all, incredible persistence.
Fried	Such a fascinating journey. It’s amazing he didn’t give up.
Fletcher	Jason: thanks, ordering now.
Hedlund	"incredible persistence"—that matters a huge amount
Linderman	I think there’s a big misnomer with the whole "overnight success" thing—the press (or whomever) never seems to factor in the years of not succeeding.
Hedlund	ML: agree. I also think people believe that entrepreneurial ideas come to you in a flash. I don’t—I like what Paul Hawken says, "Work on the idea that won’t leave you alone."
Linderman	related: we still get labelled as a "startup" all the time even though we’ve been around since 1999.
Fletcher	So here’s a question: Which startup (not your own) from the past couple of years, do you wish you had started?
Hedlund	MF: Hmm. I don’t know if I can answer that
Hedlund	I love particular products, but I don’t think I want to do them myself
Hedlund	I absolutely love Flickr and I’m absolutely the wrong person to build it
Fletcher	I’ll start: Feedburner. I think those guys are doing a really good job and filling a need.
Fried	SurveyMonkey.com
Hedlund	I think what you do should be an expression of you and your interests, and the way you work. The one I wanted to start was Wesabe, and I hope there’s none other just like it
Hedlund	that said I agree on Feedburner. Great business.
Hedlund	I have a big ole crush on Etsy— I love a lot of their ideas and the way they make their business
Fletcher	I’ve never used Etsy, but anything that eats into eBay’s business is good.
Fried	Etsy is really well done
Hedlund	I’m not a big fan of flash, but their flash ninja is unbelievable
Fried	IMHO, the best business out there today is Threadless
Fried	Their execution is STELLAR
Fried	They’re set to do over $20MM in revenues this year
Fried	they sell t-shirts that other people design
Fried	they sell t-shirts that other people have voted as the best designs. that helps reduce their risk.
Fletcher	Wow. I love all the services that enable people to create physical things from their designs.
Fried	And Threadless understands community better than anyone on the web.
Hedlund	I’m a big fan of a business that hasn’t launched yet: daylife. My friend Upendra started it and I think he, and the business, are amazing
Hedlund	I hope that they make it very big—upendra would be a great person to really change the way people learn about news
Hedlund	Upe was one of the people who started Firefly
Fried	Looks like daylife is trying to hire a few too many people for a company without a product: http://www.daylife.com/html/jobs.php
Hedlund	JF: heh. Well, like I say, I think the way people do things depends on them
Fried	5 people isn’t too many eventually
Fried	I think it’s too many at launch
Fried	just my opinion
Hedlund	I wouldn’t tell you to change 37signals, and I wish more people did what you do, but I also think that the process should suit the people, not the other way around
Fried	but if it’s a web app, you don’t need 5+ people to build it
Fried	especially for v1
Fried	and you don’t need a "QA/Release Engineer"
Fried	“Core Engineer / Research You will be a key member of our software development team, and will design and implement new data analysis components critical to our product, and optimize efficiency and effectiveness of existing algorithms. You will work primarily in Python, using both MySQL and PostgreSQL.”
Fried	Seems like overkill for a v1 too
Fried	but who knows
Hedlund	what I care about is what works for them and the result
Fried	everyone does things differently, of course.
Hedlund	if the result is good, great
Fletcher	Web crawling, machine learning, nlp. hmmm
Hedlund	so what are the businesses that don’t exist but should?
Hedlund	I was psyched about seeing http://www.GetHuman.com. not a business, but a great service
Fletcher	I’d like to see hosting services get better. Move more into database management, stuff like that. So small startups could outsource even more.
Hedlund	MF: what do you think about S3/EC2?
Fletcher	Marc: I’ve been scratching my head over those, actually. The main thing is, why is Amazon doing those?
Hedlund	I suggested that they preload the Alexa web crawl data on the EC2 machines to make the base install more useful
Fried	MF…
Fried	Amazon is doing it because they are sharing their technology
Fried	it’s a great move
Fried	they’ve built it, they have a lot of excess capacity
Fried	This is tech they’ve been developing for 10 yeawrs
Fried	for themselves
Fried	and they know it can help other businesses too
Fried	so they’re making it available. I think this is the sign of a very progressive business.
Fried	And I think you’re going to see more great companies doing this,
Hedlund	I agree in general that having more into hosting would be great.
Hedlund	it’s amazing how well some of the hosting services work now
Hedlund	having a DB host or other services would be fantastic for some apps
Fried	Amazon is basically saving: Infrastructure should be open
Fletcher	I do think that EC2 is a move in the right direction. Being able to easily scale up quickly would be fantastic. The devil’s in the details, tho.
Fried	Their data storage stuff isn’t a competitive advantage
Hedlund	A lot of people are trying to build "The great <foo> in the sky"
Linderman	Last question: If you could give you-but-10-years-ago one piece of advice (business/personal/whatever), what would it be?
Hedlund	trust your gut more. when you read everyone in the newspaper saying one thing and your gut says something else, burn the newspaper.
Fletcher	Matt: I’d tell myself to believe more strongly in my ideas and take a few more risks.
Fried	My advice: Do what you are passionate about.

[Fireside Chats are group chats conducted using Campfire.]

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/64-fireside-chat-mark-fletcher-and-marc-hedlund-part-3-of-3

It is amazing how many great frameworks are coming out into the open source model. ICEsoft Technologies, Inc. has announced that they are open sourcing their ICEfaces product under the Mozilla Public License.

A new home for the open source project has been created at ICEfaces.org.

Quotes from the Press Release

ICEfaces is the only integrated Ajax application framework for Java EE. ICEfaces extends JavaServer™ Faces, enabling Java developers to more easily create and deploy thin-client rich Web applications in pure Java. “Since the announcement of ICEfaces Community Edition in June of this year, ICEfaces has seen incredible momentum,” explained Maryka. “ICEfaces is now being used by tens of thousands of enterprise Java developers around the world. Through the open source model, ICEfaces now has the ability to become a de facto standard for rich Ajax application development within the Java community.”

ICEfaces applications are Java applications, not JavaScript applications. “ICEfaces was developed from the ground up as a standards-compliant solution for developing interactive and collaborative multi-user applications using Ajax Push technology,” noted Maryka. “ICEsoft has been proud to pioneer this technology, which allows presentation changes to be asynchronously pushed from the application server to the browser client. ICEfaces’ Ajax Push technology enables a new breed of rich enterprise applications that provide instant feedback to application users when server-side application events occur.”

“ICEsoft was in the dynamic Web business for years before any of the hype around Ajax and Web 2.0 first hit the blogosphere,” said Ed Burns, a senior staff engineer at Sun Microsystems. “ICEfaces is a clear demonstration of the power of combining solid Web expertise with the flexibility of the JavaServer Faces specification. With the ICEfaces product being released into open source, and ICEsoft’s membership in the Java Community Process, JSF 2.0 will only stand to benefit. I welcome the release of ICEfaces into open source. I’m very hopeful that many of the great ideas in ICEfaces will positively influence and accelerate the development of JSF 2.0.”

This release of ICEfaces also includes much tighter integration with industry leading IDEs. Extensions have also been in the software release to facilitate integration with JBoss SEAM technology and to simplify integration with third party component libraries.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/icesoft-open-sources-icefaces

The waiting is the hardest part /
Every day you see one more card /
You take it on faith, you take it to the heart /
The waiting is the hardest part (Tom Petty, The Waiting)

On a daily basis Comcast reminded me that the waiting is the hardest part.

I have a Comcast DVR. It recorded on time, the menus and interface were decent (I prefer TiVo’s UI, but Comcast’s is fine), and it was reliable.

But it was slow. Click fast forward and it felt like there was a 1-2 second delay. Hit stop and wait another 1-2 seconds. Sometimes more. The waiting killed the convenience. It was a frustration machine.

However, I just noticed that Comcast updated the software. Thankfully this happened behind the scenes so I didn’t have to do anything. Now menus selections are sharp, button clicking is crisp, and things happen when you ask them to happen. The experience is finally satisfying. The experience is what I’d expect.

Speed may have more to do with experience than anything else. Google knows this and thankfully Comcast finally gets it too. I applaud Comcast for spending time refining their existing product to make it faster instead of spending those resources on adding more functionality.

It’s rare that software gets faster with each release. Photoshop, Office, Quickbooks—these products seem to slow down with every new release. It’s nice to see Comcast bucking that trend.

So take a look at your own product or service. How can you make it faster? How can you reduce steps to the final outcome? How can you refine the experience to make it less frustrating? How can you make speed your newest feature?

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/107-the-waiting-is-the-hardest-part