Ajax Girl

In about an hour, we hear, iLike and TicketMaster will announce a strategic agreement that includes a $13.3 million investment in iLike for 25% of the company.

That puts the value of iLike at a whopping $53.2 million. The company launched less than two months ago, on October 25.

We love the iLike service, which provides an excellent iTunes plugin that constantly analyzes what music you listen to and recommends new stuff. But what I don’t want to see is a “buy tickets” button next to each artist, effectively turning iTunes into a billboard. It’s not clear that’s what the companies intend to do, though. All they are saying now is that the agreement will “enable iLike to extend its reach while enabling Ticketmaster to engage consumers with deeply-integrated music and event discovery services intended to drive ticket sales.”

Previous investors in iLike include Khosla Ventures and Bob Pittman.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/63929389/

Today, ExpoTV, a site focused on user-generated reviews and product demonstrations, announced a $6 million Series A round of funding led by Masthead Venture Partners and Prism VentureWorks, including existing investors. Brady Bohrmann of Masthead and Will Kohler of Prism are joining ExpoTV’s board.

David Beisel, with Masthead, writes on his blog that he feels the ExpoTV investment is a promising investment because of ExpoTV’s focus on the “intersection of online video and social commerce”.

ExpoTV is best described as a YouTube for product reviews. Users can peruse or upload video opinions by category. They also have their own reviews branded as ExpoTV on demand. To reward their users for their content, ExpoTV currently has a “Pay-per-Play” program where you will receive $0.01 each time any of your published Videopinion reviews is played. Payments are made once per month via PayPal. ExpoTV also has several holiday promotions on right now as they focus on collecting holiday gift reviews.

Readers interested in ExpoTV will also be interested in user-generated review site ShopWiki’s $6.2 million round of financing last July.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/63917742/

We previously reported that Toronto based BubbleShare was in acquisition discussion with News Corp., through their Fox Interactive subsidiary. The initial rumors came out of two Toronto-area blogs (here and here), strongly suggesting that a direct or indirect leak occured directly from the company.

One thing we know for certain at this point - the deal with News Corp., rumored to be in the $5 million range, is now dead. A source with knowledge of the deal says the reason is the leak, which angered News Corp. Internal strife among BubbleShare equity holders may have also played a part.

Albert Lai, BubbleShare’s CEO, isn’t saying much on the record. His message comes down to “We’re not commenting on whether or not there was a deal, but if there was one, and it died, it had nothing to do with a leak, which never occured” (this is not a direct quote). Fox declined to comment.

Despite the turmoil, BubbleShare is a service that we continue to applauded for its ease of use and intuitive interface.

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/~3/63889337/

NetSuite, the fraternal twin of SalesForce (both companies CEOs came out of Oracle and have similar business models), is preparing to go public next year based on 2006 revenues of about $70 million. The good news is that this could crack open the IPO window for startups again, which was firmly shut in the wake of GoDaddy’s abrupt withdrawl of its registration statement in August.

Investment bankers are desperate for deals right now as very few companies are going public (and tech IPOs are nonexistent). A source close to the IPO selection process has told us that NetSuite chose Credit Suisse as their banker. And in a surprise move, NetSuite has decided not to syndicate the deal. Usually, IPOs have 2-3 investment banks involved, but NetSuite is going just with Credit Suisse. Our understanding is that the company may have negotiated a lower fee for the IPO than the standard 7%, which is extremey rare.

Oracle’s Larry Ellison owns a majority of the company, and stands to make a significant amount of money in the IPO. But this could also be very good for Silicon Valley, as a number of profitable tech companies grow to the point where an IPO is feasible.

NetSuite has raised over $100 million to date, and is looking to raise another $100 million in the IPO in exchange for 10% of the company.

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/~3/63799648/

Search engine Snap launched an image search feature today. The results are no better than that offered by the big guys, but Snap’s unique two column interface is something that some users find to be really cool. The problem with the lack of available photo meta data to assist with queries continues to plague all search engines, of course, leading to less than great results. It will be interesting to see if some of the new services launching, such as Polar Rose, can help by partnering with them and leveraging user generated descriptive data. More on Snap here.

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/~3/63770485/

Pablo Picasso quotes

“[Work] below your means. If you can handle three elements, handle only two. If you can handle ten, then handle only five. In that way the ones you do handle, you handle with more ease, more mastery, and you create a feeling of strength in reserve.” [tx Elia]

Hippie capitalism

“Entrepreneurs using capitalism to do good and help others. Here are some cases where capitalism isn’t totally evil and destroying innocent lives while creating vast wealth discrepancies.”

“Church of the Customer” authors on the importance of democratized data

On why YouTube beat Google: “YouTube won because of a vitally important theme: It democratized data. YouTube made user data transparent while Google Video did not. YouTube exposed data like numbers of views, comments, referrers, as well as most popular referrers, most popular videos, most popular channels, etc. That data helps YouTubers gauge their own popularity and allows the larger community to measure relative popularity, too. Google did none of that out the gate. It democratized data using a piecemeal approach, and it didn’t set any standards along the way. YouTube set all of the standards.”

Pinsetter from Coudal

“Spell with buttons. There’s not a whole lot more to explain after that…The 1-inch letter buttons are jet black and every order includes a red heart button too, so you can write I HEART YODA or something.”

Look for more profit sharing deals at sites with user generated content in 2007

“If consumers produce the content, if they are the content, and that content brings in money for aggregating brands, then revenue and profit-sharing is going to be one of 2007’s main themes in the online space. It’s not like brands will have a choice: talented consumers are going to be too sought after to remain satisfied with thank you notes. Get ready for an avalanche of revenue sharing deals, reward schemes and sumptuous gifts aimed at luring creative consumers.”

Every feature is an opportunity to do something wrong

“Apple likely does not pursue minimalist designs for their own sake. Every time a company adds a feature to a product, it adds the opportunity to do it wrong. Zune was an opportunity for Microsoft to look at the subscription model that has bedeviled its PlaysForSure partners and exercise restraint. Instead, it must now deal with the complexity of accounts that it has further complicated with an abstract points system.” [tx DD]

The dawning of the age of iPod

“When one of the designers said that obviously the device should have a power button to turn the unit on and off, [Steve Jobs] simply said no. And that was it. It was a harsh aesthetic edict on a parallel with his famous refusal to include cursor keys on the original Macintosh keyboard. From Jobs’ point of view, all that was needed was forward, back, and pause buttons, arranged around the circumference of the wheel. (After much effort, his team eventually convinced him of the necessity of a fourth button, called Menu, that would move you through the various lists of options.)” [tx Dan]

Iranian typography

“In comparison to Europe and North America calligraphy is a far more popular and practiced form of art in Iran and in most other countries around this area. You can spot at least one piece of calligraphy hung on the walls of most Iranian households. Perhaps these are all reasons why it is not so easy to draw the line where calligraphy ends and typography starts. Some of the masterpieces of Iranian design are often the results of a collaboration between a designer and a calligrapher.”

Book: “Machine Beauty: Elegance and the Heart of Technology”

“Gelernter suggests that the dichotomy between art/beauty and science/technology has led to inadequate academic training of computer-science students. He points out that the greatest minds in science and industry have always pursued beauty. ‘Machine beauty is the driving force behind technology and science,’ he says, and yet ‘beauty bothers us.’ Somehow it’s perceived to be softer and less rigorous to train computer scientists in art, music, architecture, and design. However, Gelernter sees these disciplines as closely aligned with the mathematics and science that are the foundation of technology. Because of this lack of aesthetic education, much user interface has been poorly designed.” [tx Andrew]

Video: Charlie Rose interviews American Apparel founder Dov Charney

The company is able to take a brainstorm for an item and have it in stores a week later.

10 Rules for Building Wealth

“Start early: More than any one stock or mutual fund pick, the age you start investing will determine how much wealth you build…Go heavy on stocks: Subtract your age from 120: That’s the percentage you should have in stocks; the rest should be in bonds.”

Why watches are set to 10:08 in ads

“The form of the hands has a positive effect on the viewer: the short hand pointing at 10 o’clock and the long hand pointing at 8 minutes is reminiscent of a check mark, which commonly means ‘ok’ or ‘fine.’ Some observers further identify this appearance with a smiling face.”

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/167-sunspots-the-1008-edition

Ryan Breen has written up a detailed post on Circumventing browser connection limits for fun and profit in which he discusses the old-fashion limits of 2 connections per HTTP/1.1 per host, and the benefit you get from a simple CNAME hack.

The average load time when using 2 connections is 7.919 seconds. The average load time when using 6 connections is 4.629 seconds. That’s a greater than 40% drop in page load time. This technique will work anywhere that you have a large block of object requests currently served by one host.

There is plenty of precedent for this approach in real world Ajax apps. To exploit connection parallelism, the image tiles at Google Maps are served from mt0.google.com through mt3.google.com. Virtual Earth also uses this technique.

You can also use this connection management approach to sandbox the performance of different parts of your application. If you have page elements that require database access and may be more latent than static objects, keep them from clogging up the 2 connections for image content by putting them on a subdomain. This trick won’t cause a huge improvement in the total load time of your page, but it can significantly improve the perceived performance by allowing static content to load unfettered.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/using-cnames-to-get-around-browser-connection-limits

You have to hand it to the jQuery guys, they work really hard with their community.

There have been a few posts recently that relate to the jQuery world:

jQuery 1.0.4 Release

A new 1.0.4 release focused on updates to the Ajax functionality:

• Extensions to $.ajax()
  • Add extra headers to an Ajax request using beforeSend
  • Perform a synchronous Ajax request
  • Sending a JavaScript object using processData
  • Aborting an Ajax request after a specific delay in time
• AJAX module: The public $.ajax API is now used internally
• New global Ajax handler: ajaxSend - called before an Ajax request is sent.
• Extensions to global Ajax handlers: ajaxSend, ajaxSuccess, ajaxError and ajaxComplete get XMLHttpRequest and settings passed as arguments.
• Extensions to event handling: pageX and pageY are available in all browsers now. (IE does not provide native pageX/Y).
• Improved docs: $(String) method has now two separate descriptions, one for selecting elements, one for creating html on-the-fly.
• FX module: Most inline styles added by animations are now removed when the animation is complete, eg. height style when animating height (exception: display styles).

Documentation

The community is trying to help you understand jQuery.

Meet the team

John tries to get the names out, so you feel like the team is really part of the community. To promote this he just posted about the team behind jQuery.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/jquery-updates-104-documentation-and-people

Paco Avila and his team have announced OpenKM, a document management / knowledge management system that looks like a desktop application.

OpenKM is based on:

• JBoss 4.0.3SP1 ( version basis for the development )
• Java J2EE ( JDK 1.5 )
• Jackrabbit
• GWT ( Google Web Toolkit - Ajax )

It is interesting to see a GWT application that looks like a YUI based component set.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/openkm-ajax-document-management-system

Zudeo, the new “100% legal” content sharing site launched by popular BitTorrent company Azureus two weeks ago, just nailed a distribution deal with the BBC. That just took them from a theoretically cool product to a player in the online video space.

Under the agreement, BBC will license a number of television shows to U.S. users, including Red Dwarf, Strange and Invasion Earth, Little Britain, Doctor Who, Fawlty Towers, Coupling, Keeping Up Appearances, League of Gentlemen and Ideal.

It is a tragedy that they didn’t include the only BBC show worth watching, The Office. Of course, that show is readily available on Azureus’ BitTorent client.

The benefits of Zudeo are pretty clear to publishers, who can leverage P2P networks to substantially decrease bandwidth costs and speed downloads for users.

This spells trouble for Pando and Red Swoosh, which offer competing products to publishers. Zudeo probably isn’t focused on those companies, though. There is a multi-party war brewing for IPTV eyeballs between iTunes, Venice Project, Zudeo and YouTube. Watch this space.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/63626795/