Ajax Girl

The massive success of Jingle’s 800-Free-411 service, which allows people to get 411 information without the outrageous fees charged by cell phone carriers and other telephone companies (up to $3.50 per call), has finally caught the attention of at least one of the big guys. AT&T acquired InFreeDA, a competitor to Jingle and operator of the 800-411-Metro service, for an undisclosed amount, and announced a free 411 service.

Jingle’s success has been significant. They have raised over $60 million and have quickly taken 3% of the U.S. 411 market. Jingle has taken over 100 million 411 calls to date. We interviewed Jingle Networks CEO George Garrick and investor Josh Kopelman back in October - listen to it here. Our previous coverage on TechCrunch is here.

AT&T’s service, which will be available at 800-Yellowpages, looks to be very similar, although it is currently available only in Bakersfield, CA, Oklahoma City, OK, and Columbus, OH. Instead of the one advertisement that Jingle plays, however, AT&T will be playing up to four ads, from 5-10 seconds each. That’s asking a lot of their customers (up to 40 seconds of ads before the information is given), but AT&T may be able to compete based on quality of information, something that Jingle has been criticized for in the past. The main product page for 800-Yellowpages is here, and the FAQs are here.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/66802118/

The massive success of Jingle’s 800-Free-411 service, which allows people to get 411 information without the outrageous fees charged by cell phone carriers and other telephone companies (up to $3.50 per call), has finally caught the attention of at least one of the big guys. AT&T acquired InFreeDA, a competitor to Jingle and operator of the 800-411-Metro service, for an undisclosed amount, and announced a free 411 service.

Jingle’s success has been significant. They have raised over $60 million and have quickly taken 3% of the U.S. 411 market. Jingle has taken over 100 million 411 calls to date. We interviewed Jingle Networks CEO George Garrick and investor Josh Kopelman back in October - listen to it here. Our previous coverage on TechCrunch is here.

AT&T’s service, which will be available at 800-Yellowpages, looks to be very similar, although it is currently available only in Bakersfield, CA, Oklahoma City, OK, and Columbus, OH. Instead of the one advertisement that Jingle plays, however, AT&T will be playing up to four ads, from 5-10 seconds each. That’s asking a lot of their customers (up to 40 seconds of ads before the information is given), but AT&T may be able to compete based on quality of information, something that Jingle has been criticized for in the past. The main product page for 800-Yellowpages is here, and the FAQs are here.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/66802118/

Weezu is an IE (Firefox coming) plugin that allows you to chat to other users on the same website.

The plugin is 100% JavaScript, and uses the Dojo toolkit as the core platform and widget provider (which is interesting as Me.dium choose Dojo too).

It seems like a lot of companies want to get more social. I wonder if users want that, and if so, how many?

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/weezu-social-web-browsing

Jonathan Schemoul has released Smooth Gallery 1.0, an image gallery system written using mootools v1.0.

The slideshow system allows you to have simple and smooth (cross-fading…) image galleries, slideshows, showcases and other cool stuff on your website.

Check out this SmoothGallery showcase.

Also, take a peak at the Getting Started guide.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/smooth-gallery-10-released

A look back at some selected 2006 SvN posts…

Building to flip is building to flop
“If you’re about to build anything, don’t build it to flip or you’re almost guaranteed to flop. Sure, you could win the Yahoo lottery, but the odds aren’t in your favor.”

Small Biz 101: Tips for Increasing Sales
“I’ve had the privilege of being in both the service industry (working as a web developer) and the product industry (selling web applications), so here are some tips and tricks I’ve picked up along the way.” (More Small Biz 101 lessons)

You still want meetings. Here’s how to make them useful.
“Though meetings are harmful, you sometimes need to get together and work a problem out. Here are some tips to make sure nobody wastes their time.”

Is Getting Real dangerous?
“This idea that it’s ‘dangerous’ to Get Real is silly because Getting Real has a built-in safety net: iterations. It’s unrealistic to expect perfection out of the gate. You can and will get it wrong. The great thing with web-based apps is that you have a built-in mulligan. Everyday you can revise and get it a little bit less wrong.”

A sketch to screen case study
“We’re giving Basecamp some love these days and I’m working on the Files section. The current Files tab has a long, full-page ‘Upload a file’ screen, and it’s just overkill. I thought I’d share the process of redesigning the ‘Upload a file’ screen as a small dialog.”

Essential vs. Non-Essential
“One of the toughest things to figure out when trying to launch a simple product is what to add in and what to leave out. The way we do it is to figure out what’s essential and non-essential. Non-essential stuff stays out of 1.0.”

It’s a great time to start a business
“I say it’s never been a better time to start a business. You know, the kind that develops a product or service and asks money for it.”

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/172-2006-the-year-in-posts-part-1

Business week has a long article about Yahoo’s Panama project and why it may not have the positive financial impact the company is hoping for. Yahoo’s goal for Panama is to make their pay-per-click advertising program more efficient at extracting dollars from advertisers. The details aren’t important, but the basic idea is that the highest bid on a keyword doesn’t guarantee it takes the top ad spot. A combination of highest bid and highest click through rate determines where ads are placed. That change should bump up the average cost-per-click, and have a positive effect on Yahoo’s revenue.

The article doesn’t mention Microsoft’s Adcenter product, which is a full generation beyond both Panama and Google’s existing product because it factors in demographic information about the person viewing the advertisement. While Microsoft hasn’t ramped up on advertisers yet, it’s clear that this is a three way race. An example of how much Microsoft means business is the fact that they probably bought their way into handling ads for Facebook. Without a revenue guarantee, Facebook would have gone with Google or Yahoo.

Frankly I don’t know who’s going to win the contextual advertising war over the long run, but it’s still important that the war is happening. Google has long hidden its revenue share details with partners, although the rumors suggest that they keep 50%ish of the gross revenue. This is way too much, and in a properly competitive market that percentage will tend towards zero as Google, Yahoo and Microsoft all compete for the same page views. Profit will need to be generated based on new product features and efficiency gains, which is the way it should be. Of course, they’ll always own their own internal page views as well, and it will be an important factor. To get the participation of the big advertisers there needs to be enough inventory to make it worth their attention. And without a robust network of advertisers the auction prices won’t go high enough. Still, all three of these companies have massive internal page views to lure these big advertisers.

So while I don’t know how much of a difference Panama will make to Yahoo’s bottom line next year, I know that the fact that they are catching up to Google is good for all of us.

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/~3/66552051/

There’s an odd story developing that involves Pageflakes, a customizable Ajax home page product, and FeedBurner. BoingBoing was first to report this after noticing that their RSS feed count went up substantially from Pageflakes. Over 2 million RSS readers were counted from that service alone. It appears that someone may have set up some sort of bot to create Pageflakes pages with multiple RSS feed modules on each page for a few blogs, including BoingBoing.

But a second source of Boing Boing RSS readers has skyrocketed lately - from a company called Pageflakes. We frankly don’t believe that nearly two million folks have decided to subscribe to Boing Boing via this relatively new service, and we suspect someone (or more specifically, somebot) is taking advantage of the service for some kind of spammy reasons.

The net effect of this would be grossly exaggerated RSS feed counts, which could affect the advertising rates that a blog or other site using RSS feeds could charge. It seems pretty clear BoingBoing has absolutely nothing to do with this, and is working to fix the problem. But other sites are affected, too. Whether one of them is behind this or not is unclear. In an update to the BoingBoing post, a reader said that it may have been nothing more than a bug. That seems unlikely, however, since a bug of this scale would likely have been flagged and fixed.

Either way, this isn’t good publicity for Pageflakes, which struggles behind Netvibes in the customized home page market. And it may be worse news for FeedBurner. If their RSS stats become meaningless, one of the main reasons for using them goes away.

We’ve checked our own Pageflakes stats and nothing seems to be out of the ordinary. Let us know if you are seeing an issue on your blog or site. You don’t want to be caught in the middle of this if it turns out to be fraud.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/66545333/

A couple of days ago I posted a screenshot of what I believed to be an early version of the new Wikiasari search engine that Jimmy Wales has been talking about. Our source was good, and I went with it.

But Wales is saying that the screenshot has nothing to do with the project, in a comment to that post and also on the Wikiasari page on Wikia (since taken down, but screenshot is here).

The Wikiasari page also now gives a bit about the background of the project, and Wikisearch is not mentioned. The project was originally called 3apes.

So that leaves us with the Wikisearch screenshot, and I’m trying to figure out what it is. One of the commenters to the original post pointed out that it looks like its part of this project, which includes the Wikia logo on the bottom right. Unless it’s a fake site, that means it’s a Wikia search project, just as Wikiasari is.

So if Wikisearch isn’t Wikiasari, what the heck is it?

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/66521953/

In Search of the Valley is a documentary about Silicon Valley that was released last month, and I highly recommend anyone interested in valley culture get a copy. It tracks three Brits (Steve O’Hear, Fleeta Siegel and Selwyn George) on their visit to Silicon Valley in September 2004, where they visited historical startup sites and interviewed a ton of people (Steve Wozniak, John Warnock, Guy Kawasaki, Craig Newmark, Jef Raskin, Tim O’Reilly, Dan Kottke and many others) about how and why the unique mix of culture, weather and Stanford University came together to create something so special. The fact that these guys are all outsiders gives the documentary a unique perspective. If you liked Triumph of the Nerds, this is for you.

Frankly, I think Marc Canter stole the show, and he certainly doesn’t pull any punches. See the trailer below, and get the DVD here. It’s $18.

Whatever makes Silicon Valley special, it has very little to do with the people who were born here. When I speak to groups here in the valley, I often break the ice by asking how many people in the audience live here. Most raise their hand. Then I ask how many of those people were born here. Usually, all but just a handful put their hands down. What makes the valley great, in my opinion, is the fact that smart, creative, driven people from all over the world are able to come here and pursue their dream, whatever it is.

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/~3/66504187/