Ajax Girl

AOL Co-founder Steve Case, who left Time Warner (AOL’s parent company) in 2005, has effectively launched his next startup - Revolution Health. The domain name still shows a landing page, but the preview site is wide open to all comers.

Revolution Health is not a health search engine, and is clearly different than Healthline, the vertical health-related search engine that launched in late 2005, or recent health search startup Medstory.

Revolution Health is a health-related portal site and social network. Users are urged to ask questions and answer other users’ questions, rate their doctors, participate in online discussions and otherwise contribute content. The site also has a number of tools to help people become more healthy, such as a calculatSor that shows how long you need to do a given activity to lose a pound of weight, and a tool for showing you how much money you’ll save if you quit smoking.

Every user has a profile page where they can link up to other users, set personal goals and aggregate content they’ve contributed to the site.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/70529915/

John Gotts, the entrepreneur who agreed to pay $3 million for the domain name Wiki.com and reportedly told people he was “going to kill Wikipedia” may have thrown in the towel after just a few months. Instead of launching the promised Wiki site with MindTouch software, the Wiki.com site now simply redirects to Wikia, another wiki service affiliated with Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales.

When asked for a comment, Wikia CEO Gil Penchina said only that Wikia does not currently own the domain name, and wouldn’t speculate on whether or not a deal was closed with Gotts. The original deal that Gotts did to acquire the domain required $10,000 monthly payments to the original owner, with the bulk of the payment to be made down the road. Perhaps Wikia is just covering those monthly payments for Gotts, while his lawyer tries to find a way out of the original contract. We’ll see.

Update: The Whois information for the domain name is still showing Dynamo, the entity that supposedly sold it to Gotts.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/70506776/

I was going through CEO Gil Penchina’s Wikia presentation slides at the Le Web conference in Paris last month and noticed something that made me realize they could be a huge site some day. According to the company, Wikia is producing 2.5 million page views per day and growing steadily, and their new article growth rate tracks the early days of Wikipedia, nearly identically. The key slide from Penchina’s presentation is below, comparing growth in unique articles between the two sites, but over different time periods.

So Wikia, the for-profit sister site to Wikipedia, is closely tracking the early growth of Wikipedia in terms of new article generation. The obvious conclusion is that what worked for Wikipedia may work for Wikia, too. Certainly the same forces of user generated content and community are in play.

It’s harder to compare page views as Wikipedia has apparently not tracked their own page views for years, but Wikia is certainly holding their own at 2.5 million/day.

Wikia confirms that they currently have nothing more than a “default” deal with Google for text ads on their site. The big ad networks (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft) are all trying lock up long term deals with big partners, usually by offering some sort of revenue guarantee (see Google’s nearly $1 billion deal with MySpace and Microsoft’s deal with Facebook). I wouldn’t be surprised to see each of them begin to pursue Wikia as well, simply as a hedge in the event the site someday grows to even a fraction of Wikipedia’s size. Whichever company locks up Wika over the long term may have a very nice asset down the road.

Our earlier coverage of Wikia is here.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/70466956/

We were debating a Backpack feature in our Campfire room today and the word “can’t” came up a few times.

Seeing that word describing different competing solutions reminded me that there are different degrees of can’t. The problem is that can’t is an absolute that’s actually relative when it comes to software design.

You have to ask yourself which can’t wins. Is it “We can’t launch it like that because it’s not quite right” or is it “We can’t spend any more time on this because if we do we can’t launch” ? The outcomes of those two scenarios are night and day, yet they both sound like there are no alternatives. In this context, can’t kills priority which is why it’s an especially dangerous word.

And that’s the problem with using absolutes in debates. They can be healthy when a decision absolutely needs to be made, but they can also box you into corner by pitting two opposite absolutes against each other. That’s head-butting, face-saving time. Can’t squeezes out middle ground when there is usually middle ground to be reached.

Moral of the story: Be careful when attaching absolutes to your position. Attaching absolutes is like throwing a Hail Mary pass—it’s an all or nothing play.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/182-degrees-of-cant

German Facebook clone Studivz has been sold to one of its investors, Georg von Holtzbrinck GmbH, a German publishing group, for €100 million (about $132 million). Other investors of Studivz include the Samwer brothers, founders of ringtone company Jamba (sold for €270M) and Alando (sold to eBay for €43M in 1999).

The story broke on German news site Spiegel. See here for a beautifully useless translation of the article.

We’ve gotten confirmation on the transaction, but not specifically on the price, from a contact within Holtzbrinck. More from GigaOm and CenterNetworks.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/70418970/

Carlo Zottmann, a Yahoo! engineer in Munich, is a fan of GreaseMonkey and wanted to use YUI in his user scripts.

His article provides a reusable model for how to make use of YUI in the GM script without stomping on any YUI use already on the page:

In this brief article, I’ll share with you my own effort to reach that goal — a Greasemonkey script that adds calls to external JavaScript libraries and CSS files to a given page and, once they are loaded, passes the YAHOO global object to the code inside the Greasemonkey script. (All YUI components reside within this single single global variable, YAHOO — so, for example, you access the YUI Event Utility by referencing YAHOO.util.Event.) I’m sure that this approach is neither the perfect nor the only solution to achieving YUI/Greasemonkey integration, so suggestions and ideas are welcome! Please sound off in the comments and let me know what approaches you’ve taken to this problem in your own projects.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/using-yui-in-greasemonkey-scripts

eCirkit.com is a new social networking platform that has it’s fair share of Ajax sprinkled in.

• On your profile page you can mouse over your user interests and a tooltip popup appears showing the full text of your interests, like favorite TV shows. You can then click the tooltip popup to go into edit mode, edit your data right in place, mouse out and your changes are sent to the server via Ajax.
• On your manager page, you can view your emails, then click an individual one to see full view in the main content window. From there you can reply and delete.
• You can use drag and drop to delete users from your contact list into a trash can. The contact is deleted from the backend server.
• You can use drag and drop to drag 2 of your contacts into the eCirkit connect panel, then type and introduction email. This will introduce the 2 users to each other, and they can then add each other to their contacts list.

The backend is a full Java J2EE web server. I use JSP pages and servlets in the web tier, EJBs in the middle business layer tier, and hibernate persistence layer for the database access.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/ecirkit-more-social-networking

Jamie Pittock has launched a new ExpressionEngine site and has a couple of articles covering the building of Ajax applications using the PHP framework.

In ExpressionEngine and Ajax Jamie covers adding some simple features to an ExpressionEngine application using the Prototype framework and Behaviour.

Jamie also put together a proof of concept for the good ole To Do List application, all within the time it took his girlfriend to get ready for a night on the town.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/expressionengine-ajax-resources

Stockpickr, an investing site founded by two New York City hedge fund managers, is giving a boost to all companies in the “investing 2.0″ sector today with their announcement of a partnership with a leader from the first generation of the web investment sector, TheStreet.com.

Stockpickr took an equity investment from TheStreet pursuant to the deal, although the size of the investment is not being disclosed. The deal also includes extensive advertising on the stockpickr site and featuring of the stockpickr service on the Street.com web properties. This partnership with TheStreet, one of the first web companies to essentially monetize blogging, is quite obviously a big deal for stockpickr. Anyone in this space who can somehow tie itself to the ubiquitous Jim Cramer (The Street’s largest stockholder) is bound to benefit.

The site bills itself as “the stock idea network” and the tag line is accurate. It does idea generation very well by offering the community portfolios from publicly available investing information of experts like Warren Buffett, George Soros and Mark Cuban, among others. Since there is enough data to suggest most of us can’t pick stocks, a one stop shop for tracking guys who can beat the market is pretty cool.

There are also a number of portfolios from the community and all the usual current community features are available to users. You can rate portfolios, be directed to similar portfolios and get recommendations of stocks within similar portfolios to help you assemble your own. There’s a cool voyeuristic element to the site, so it doesn’t take long to get lost on it and before long you’ve got a watch list of stocks. While you can’t trade or manage a real portfolio here, it does what it claims to do very well, and the service would fit well as another research tool on any brokerage site.

What makes the deal really interesting is there just hasn’t been much to write about in the financial services community with respect to web 2.0. Perhaps the crater was too deep, the wounds too great from the drop in the NASDAQ, but there’s been almost no noise out of this sector. Now, in the last few months, we’re had news from Zecco, Motley Fool and now Stockpickr. We’ve heard rumblings about other startups and new products in the space as well. The big brokerages have far bigger war chests than does TheStreet. This space could get hot in a hurry.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/70181952/

Sugarcodes is a new site that has extremely basic functionality but, like old-timer YubNub, is an awesome productivity tool for many users. It’s basically nothing more than a command line, where a search of just about any web service can be conducted using a simple dedicated command. “g books” does a search on Google for books. “yt U2″ does a search on YouTube for U2. The convenience is that, once you know the commands, you can do just about anything from that single command line and save the step of going to the site.

We’ve written about YubNub previously, including it mobile features on MobileCrunch. YubNub has the extra functionality to make it really useful - including a browser plugin that saves users even the step of going to the YubNub site. Users can create their own commands as well. Sugarcodes does not yet appear to have a plugin.

These aren’t businesses, but YubNub and Sugarcodes are very handy tools for people who do a lot of web surfing. And the browser real estate cost for the YubNub plugin is minimal.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/70172386/