Ajax Girl

…What are you waiting for?? Go watch this short screencast (direct link to the mov file) of the 1.0 beta to see some of the power, and then get it.

One of my coworkers today had firebug installed but didn’t seem to be really using it to its full potential. I think Dion almost fired him on the spot. Its so far ahead of any other web dev tool that its not even funny.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/if-you-arent-already-using-firebug

The founders of new online gaming company Red 5 Studios are celebrating an $18.5 million round of financing today from Benchmark Capital and Sierra Ventures. Bill Gurley from Benchmark Capital is joining the board. The company previously raised working capital from WEBZEN pursuant to a game development deal earlier this year.

Red 5 Studios was founded by some of the key people behind Blizzard’s World of Warcraft, which claims over 6.5 million users. CEO Mark Kern told me that they broke away from Blizzard because they had a difference in opinion over the appropriate strategy for the next generation on online games, and that he’s aiming for Red 5 Studios to be “the Pixar of onling gaming” by creating games that are distributed and promoted by others. Look for their first titles to be launched in a year or so, initially through WEBZEN.

If you are a top gaming talent, Kern tells me, they are hiring. The company also sent us conceptual artwork, which we’ve included below because it looks absolutely awesome. No idea if and when this might be incorporated into a game.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/60050443/

Wikio, a user-contributed news company, launched Wikio.com, Wikio.de, and Wikio.es at the LeWeb3 conference in Paris today. The three new sites are aimed at the US, Germany, and Spain, respectively.

Wikio has been live in France and Italy for a few months. They have 600,000 French users and 100,000 Italian users.

In April, TechCrunch France writer Ouriel Ohayon reviewed Wikio and found it to be a very comprehensive news generating site. Ohayon became a shareholder in the company after reviewing the site. TechCrunch U.S., however, has no financial affiliation with Wikio.

Wikio is a hybrid between user-added and editorial-added news and blogs. They have an editorial staff that ranks and contributes stories but they also allow users to add and rank stories, much like Digg. User voting is balanced with editorial voting and stories are ranked accordingly. Pierre Chappaz, founder of Wikio, developed the site based on his belief that Europe needed a Digg of its own.

“Wikio is the first service of its kind in Europe,” Chappaz said. “Europe is very different than the U.S. In the U.S., you have a large diversity of information services but in Europe, we only have Google News and to a certain extent, Yahoo News. If you look at Technorati, their index is far from being comprehensive. So Wikio is to establish new information in Europe coming from blogs as well as traditional media because we don’t see any reason to put a wall between blogs and traditional media.”

Chappaz said that Wikio.com was developed for the “English-speaking” population, although a UK-version of the site is Wikio’s next project, which will index British media.

“Obviously Wikio.com’s largest market is the U.S. and I would be delighted if Wikio takes a large market share in the U.S. but our main focus is still Europe,” Chappaz said.

One of the main barriers to Wikio becoming a true pan-European service is that there is little interoperability between the countries. You can link to stories from other countries’ Wikio sites, but there is no translation service. Each country has a different ranking algorithm for its stories based on the most popular news sources within that country. So you can search each country individually for news, but you can’t search for global activity.

“It’s difficult because there is a language issue. What we will offer in Wikio in the future is a possibility to search Wikio in all countries but you still have to understand the local language,” Chappaz said.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/60011747/

Omniture released an integration analytics tool called Genesis at a two-hour event today at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Genesis was created with over 30 marquee online advertising partners such as Ask.com, Google, Yahoo Search Marketing, and Salesforce.

Omniture is an online marketing analytics company. Genesis is a measurement, performance, and integration tool. Integration being the key buzzword of the event. In this case, integration refers to the ability to understand how various online campaigns perform both together and separate, and making marketing purchases accordingly.

Are marketers not doing that? Forrester analyst Char VanBoskirk presented data showing that they don’t. Instead, she said that most marketers subscribe to the more-is-more theory.

“Users know how to filter out messages with spam filters and pop-up blockers. So how are most marketers responding to this challenge? They just send more messages,” VanBoskirk said. “Advertising on network TV has increased. Radio stations are airing more commercials per hour of programming than ever before. So in case you’re wondering, this is bad!”

VanBoskirk said that the smarter marketer will develop a data store, subscribe to a reporting and analysis tool, and then find a dashboard to manage activities. That’s what Genesis is.

Genesis allows users to develop about a billion “what if” scenarios based on various marketing campaigns. They can choose a campaign, and then drag and drop distribution tools such as DoubleClick for banner ads, or CheetahMail for email campaigns. All 30 Genesis partners have their product there for marketers to choose as a possibility. Once all distribution scenarios have been chosen, marketers can order up a channel summary that shows revenue by channel, top performing campaigns, etc. It’s a ton of information.

Omniture calls this a Plug and Play approach, which they say is the next generation in marketing. They call it the perfect example of Marketing 2.0.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/60006946/

Yahoo and Google have personalized versions of the new Internet Explorer 7 browser. Yahoo’s is available for download here, and Google’s version is here.

The page layout and content for the two sites is nearly identical, although this may be a simple cut and paste from recommended Microsoft promotional information What’s more interesting is that the screen shots in both images showing IE7 are also identical. The Yahoo version clearly displays the Yahoo toolbar with a large red Y! in the left corner. The Google shot contains the same image, with the red Y! somewhat blurred out. The Google screen shot shows IE7 with the Yahoo toolbar. Screen shots and an enlargement of the Google blurred Y! are below.

This could easily be a situation where Microsoft was sloppy and sent out Yahoo-copied materials to Google. Or Google just copied the materials on Yahoo’s site. Either way, look for an update to the Google site in the very near future.

Update: Yahoo’er Jeremy Zawodny has a similar post. Perhaps we had the same anonymous tipster.

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/~3/59990904/

Wikia founder Jimmy Wales believes in “free content for all.” That is why the company launched OpenServing today, a service that is giving away complete Web hosting support to any wiki developer - for free!

OpenServing allows anyone to setup and maintain their own collaborative site. Wales told TechCrunch in a phone call today that OpenServing is also intended to go beyond wiki hosting to include free software, free applications, etc. “Basically, anything goes into the model of free culture,” he said.

Wikia will provide free software, bandwidth, storage, computing power, and content over the Internet. What’s more, Wikia will give away 100 percent of the ad inventory and revenue to any blogger/Web site owner who wants to sign-up for this. The only stipulation is that developers link to Wikia’s home site in order to drive ad revenue.

“The main thing we’re looking for is that they drive traffic back to Wikia but we’re not just thinking of any link back to the home page, but a content-relevant link,” Wales said. “We’re not just asking for an advertisement but a link for articles and things that are relevant on our wikis.”

If sites that use OpenService sell ads on their wiki, they are not responsible to share that revenue with Wikia.

“Basically they’re free to sell ads on their own site,” Wales explained. “We may at one point offer a service to broker those ads but that’s not our model right now. Our model is basically to say ‘You keep the ad revenue, we’re not really worried about that.’”

This announcement solves at least some of the mystery behind Wikia’s purchase of ArmchairGM earlier this month. ArmchairGM is the first freely-licensed software package that OpenServing will offer up. It is also noteworthy that Wikia received an undisclosed amount of funding from Amazon just weeks ago, which is likely an important contributing factor to Wikia’s ability to do this.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/59930767/

Andrew of the calc5 team has announced Calc 5, an online calculator that plots graphs.

The tool uses canvas (or canvas emulation), and you can travel around the graphs a la Google Maps.

With calc5 you can plot 2d and 3d graphs, make symbolic calculations such as derivation, browse 2d graphs same way as you browse map in your favorite mapping service with zooming and panning.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/calc-5-online-3d-calculator

Feeling a bit low on Monday morning? Go grab a picture of someone you know and plug it into PikiPimp an Ajax image doctoring tool.

Drag the items onto the image, and then manage them with widgets and sliders below.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/pikipimp-image-editing-that-is-fun

Socialtext, a corporate wiki tool, released Socialtext Unplugged today at the LeWeb3 conference in Paris. It is
an unplug icon that lets users work on their wiki even when they are not connected to the Internet.

While still online, users can click the blue Unplug icon, which will then download a selection of wiki pages so that those pages become available offline. Once a user comes back online, the changes will be automatically uploaded.

“The blue Unplugged icon is similar to an RSS icon, which signals to a user there is a different way to use the content outside the browser. In this case, to use the content offline,” wrote Ross Mayfield, CEO of Socialtext, in his blog.

Socialtext Unplugged is an application within a single HTML file. When the Unplug icon is activated, it downloads pages as a Zip file, although re-synching occurs through Socialtext’s Wiki Web Services.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/59868300/

We just launched a revised version of our home page. The redesign took about 2 days from paper to screen to launch.

New on the left, old on the right.

The goal was to tighten up the design, say more with less words, and hone our overall message. We wanted to shine the spotlight on our current three paying apps (Basecamp, Backpack, and Campfire). The redesign also gave us an opportunity to commit to a new typeface we’ve been itching to use for a while now. I see we’re not the only ones who like that type.

There was one other goal: begin to unify the design, layout, and HTML/CSS of our corporate and product sites. This new design will serve as a template for our redesigned product sites which we’ll begin to roll out in 2007.

It feels good to start with a clean CSS slate. New sheet, no legacy. New foundations are fun to build.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/154-a-little-37signals-redesign