Ajax Girl

Judy’s Book and Insider Pages are two companies that launched at roughly the same time, raise roughly the same amount of venture capital, and had very similar products. They also face fairly intense competition from a number of similar services (Yelp, Zipingo, others). Insider Pages just had significant layoffs and entered the TechCrunch DeadPool. Judy’s Book, in contrast, made some fairly dramatic strategic changes last fall, in the hope of avoiding the same fate. They de-focused on local reviews, and went more towards the shopping angle and local deals.

From a bystander’s point of view, the best part of the Judy’s Book evolution is the play-by-play we’re getting from CEO Andy Sack’s blog. Most of the action took place in October, when Sack first started talking about the decision making process. The executive team decided to stop swimming upstream, and focus on doing things that were easier. They identified what had been hard to do, and what had been easy, and went from there. This is something I hear from a lot of successful entrepreneurs who changed their business plans on the fly. When things stopped working, they poked in a few different directions and then dove headfirst into the path of least resistance.

Next came angry customers, who liked the old Judy’s Book just fine. Sack wrote about that too, even responding directly to a particular customer rant. More recently, Sack has given his thoughts on Insider Pages and how things are going with Judy’s Book.

Whatever happens with Judy’s Book, it’s clear Sack is getting some serious front line experience and his transparency is admirable. I’m glad he’s sharing the ups and downs of his business evolution with us. Munjal Shah, the founder of Riya, has been doing the same thing (and Riya has gone through similar strategic changes). Good stuff for other entrepreneurs.

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/~3/73253339/

Once again, Apple CEO Steve Jobs wowed the crowds like no one else can. In his 9 am keynote at MacWorld in San Francisco this morning, Jobs announced the new iPhone cell phone. From the description in appears to be a game changing device, and the public markets seem to agree. As of the time of this writing, Apple stock is up over 7% for the day. Competitor Research in Motion (Blackberry) is down over 6%, wiping $2 billion dollars in market cap off the table. Palm, maker of the Treo, is also down, nearly 6%.

The iPhone is an impressive, and expensive, device. It comes in 4 GB and 8 GB models and costs $499 and $599, respectively. It includes a 3.5 inch touchscreen with a virtual keyboard, a 2 megapixel camera, is WIFI enabled and runs OSX. Cingular is the carrier. The desktop-like interface and user experience looks to be a killer. This might actually take the mobile email revolution another full step forward from what Blackberry has done. Standard web sites can be viewed via the Safari browser (and soon, I’m sure, Firefox). And there are a number of nice touches as well, including a motion sensor that rotates photos when you turn the phone, and voicemails displayed visually that you can click on and listen to. As we all expect from Apple, this is a seriously buttoned up device.

The iPod functionality is almost a side benefit, and with the limited storage compared to the high end iPods, serious music aficionados will still want to carry their 80 GB iPods as well.

Apple also made other announcements today, including the availability of Apple TV (formerly iTV), a $299 living room device that streams iTunes content to the television. And iTunes appears to be soldiering on, with 2 billion songs and 1.3 million movies sold.

The biggest letdown is the fact that the iPhone won’t be available until June 2007 in the U.S. They have so much horsepower and untested software packed into this tiny device that the first version will almost certainly have problems - overheating, bugs, etc. That won’t stop millions from buying it as soon as it is available. And it won’t stop me, either.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/73045969/

The Steve Jobs KeyNote at MacWorld 2007 in San Francisco is just starting and major new products are expected to be released. We have a team at the keynote reporting live here and at CrunchGear. Stay tuned.

The Apple Store is closed until after the Keynote, which has just begun. Minute by minute updates at CrunchGear.

The first twenty minutes or so was all about iTunes. 2 billion songs and 1.3 million movies have been sold on iTunes. There are over 250 movie titles available now. 350 tv shows. Basically, Jobs is making a statement that iTunes is very strong.

Jobs then turned to the iTV, a new hardware device for the living room that we wrote about last fall. iTV, which was a working name, is now called Apple TV. The device, with a killer remote, may make Apple a serious contender in the living room. The device will cost $299 and will ship in February.

iPhone Announced

The big news…Apple is finally announcing the iPhone (images are actual device) after 2.5 years in development. Name is confirmed. The device has a large, wide touchscreen with a virtual keyboard and runs OSX. The device has a 3.5 inch touchscreen, 8 GB of storage, a 2 megapixel camera and one button. Also wifi enabled. Cingular is the carrier. This thing will run desktop style applications. Get Google maps via the browser. Check email like the desktop. There are two models. The 4 GB is $499. The 5 GB is $599. They won’t be available until June. Oh. Great.

I’m clearly switching to Cingular. In June.

Updates coming…

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/~3/72992969/

Pete Forde isn’t a huge fan of the practical but not pure use of class="noncssmarker" and has written about Attributes > Classes: Custom DOM Attributes for Fun and Profit.

In this article Pete discusses the high level value of attributes, but then goes a lot further and he patches Prototype to make it just as easy to work with as CSS classes:

How does this work?

Custom attributes work in all browsers that support XHTML. You do not have to define a custom DTD or sacrifice any children to use them.

We do have to make some changes to the way Prototype works, though. With the addition of a few functions to our application.js, we suddenly have the same flexibility that we had with Element.classNames.

Of course, if you go this route expect XML nazi’s to moan about validation.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/custom-dom-attributes-vs-class-css-styles

Francesco Sullo’s day job is to work on PassPack an online password manager.

PassPack is based on the Host-Proof Hosting Ajax Pattern.

How it works

PassPack uses a double access technique: User ID and Pass give a user access to her Account, while the Packing Key is needed to access the actual passwords. The “Pack” in PassPack comes from the bundle of locked up passwords inside the Account. PassPack checks the User ID and Pass at sign-in without exposing the passwords in the encrypted Pack.

Only the user can encrypt and decrypt the passwords in the browser with her Packing Key. The Packing Key never travels over the Internet. The encrypted Pack gets sent over SSL to the server for storage.

aSSL

Francesco works on aSSL in his spare time, and just released another new version with Javascript/ASP server-side component (PHP and others pending).

aSSL now works with the following process:

• The browser calls the server to start the process.
• The server returns its RSA modulus (e.g. the public key) and the public exponent (3 or 10001).
• The browser generates a random exchange 128-bit key, encrypts it using the server public key and passes the encrypted exchange key to the server.
• The server receives this encrypted 128-bit exchange key, decrypts it with its private key and, if the result is ok, returns the session duration time.
• The browser receives the session duration time and sets a timeout to maintain alive the connection.

All subsequent client-server exchanges via aSSL are encrypted and decrypted using the AES Rijndael algorithm.

aSSL 1.2 uses Tom Wu’s BigIntegers and RSA in JavaScript to negotiate the secret 128-bit key and Chriss Veness’s AES Javascript implementation for the next exchanges.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/passpack-and-assl

The consensus is that today Apple is going to announce a phone.

Some are calling it a personal communicator or a convergent device or a pocket computer or a “4th screen.” I’m no so sure.

Apple makes history not by leapfrogging everyone in terms of functionality and bells and whistles, they do it through elegance, simplification, clarity, and practicality.

I see no reason why they won’t follow that strategy with their phone. It will change the game, but not because it does more than everyone else’s phone. It will change the game because it does less, but it does it significantly better.

Apple will execute on the basics beautifully. Just like they did with the iPod.

The mobile phone world is littered with absolute crap. The interfaces are tragic. The materials are cheap. The build quality is marginal. And of course the sound sucks.

These are the things people complain about. They don’t complain that they can’t video conference with their friends. They don’t complain that they don’t have advanced voice recognition. They don’t complain that their phone doesn’t open an Excel spreadsheet and sync with Quickbooks. They complain because the sound sucks, the interface is miserable, and the phone is falling apart.

Apple can change this because that’s what Apple does. They can look at the crisis points of a typical experience and erase them one by one. Not by adding a lot of new things things, but by removing the crap and paying attention to the basics.

The basics are the secrets of business. Execute on the basics beautifully and you’ll have a lot of customers knocking at your door. Cool wears off, usefulness never does.

Most people just want things that work well and, unfortunately, the mobile phone business is littered with things that don’t work. That’s Apple’s opportunity. Build something small, light, beautiful, and useful that works and they’ll win.

I’m so looking forward to 9am PST.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/187-apple-phone-my-prediction

Leafletter is a new service that enables users to create miniature web sites (”Leaflets”) and embed them into social networks, blogs, and other web sites.

A Leaflet is a miniature Flash® based web site that can be displayed anywhere HTML is welcome. For instance, a Leaflet could be distributed to the About Me section of a MySpace Profile, the body of a Blog Entry, and in the Portfolio section of a photographer’s Personal Website, all simultaneously.

Leafletter is geared toward professional content creators - creative artists, media professionals, online sellers - users who seek broader exposure for their content, who probably already have a web site and/or online portfolio, and who want to begin showing their content, in a specific way, on social networks and blogs.

Leafletter is unique in that it gives the user complete control over how his media is laid out, embellished and displayed. It is created using an intuitive browser based (WYSIWYG) design tool, and features such helpful tools as Real Time Layout Changing, whereby a completed page can be viewed in 36 different configurations, Build By Blocks, whereby a user need only fill in Blocks to create a page within a Leaflet, and smooth Flickr integration for users wishing to share photos and maintain control of their presentation.

Once a Leaflet has been created it can be distributed using the familiar process of Copying and Pasting an Embed Code or URL to any location where HTML is accepted.

Take a look at the demo to see the building of a leaflet, block by block.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/leafletter-building-mini-embedable-apps

Shane O’Sullivan of IBM has released a GUI build tool for Dojo that is built on Eclipse RCP.

He talked about this new tool earlier:

There has been a lot of talk currently about making the build system for Dojo simpler. The web based method (customise a build on the Dojo website and download it from there) definitely shows promise, and will be attractive to many users. However, I think that many developers would like to have more control over the build process, while still having the possibility of all of it being automated for them. For this reason I’ve decided to look in to the possibility of using an Eclipse based build system that can operate as a standalone Rich Client application or be a new perspective in Eclipse.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/gui-dojo-build-tool

Israel and California based Conduit is announcing a deal today with Google to provide search for their customizable toolbar product. The news itself isn’t all that interesting, although it will help Conduit with revenue. But the Conduit service itself is really taking off.

Conduit is a white-label, customizable toolbar for other web services. Like the Google and Yahoo, Conduit’s partners can offer users a branded toolbar with customizable functionality, such as a company logo, live chat, broadcasts to all users, etc. The problem, of course, is that most companies don’t have the resources or knowledge to create their own toolbar, and they are completely focused on their core business. Conduit is a good option for those companies.

The company now has 125,000 partners and 5,000,000 toolbar installs. Users can actually create a customized toolbar in a few steps (we’ve done it), for free, and offer it to users for download at a customized domain name ([example].ourtoolbar.com). If you register you can also qualify for revenue sharing from searches conducted on the toolbar.

We created a conduit toolbar for our New York party last November, and used it to update people on the details of the event. We had a few hundred downloads (most people still have it installed), and based on our experience we’re considering creating a permanent one that will include the most recent TechCrunch headlines and other functionality. If you have a community, this is a tool you may want to offer.

The company has raised $2 million in funding from Yozma, an Israeli venture firm.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/72919908/

After JotSpot sold to Google for $50+ million, it didn’t take a rocket scientist to realize venture capitalists would be dabbling a bit more in this space. So I am not at all surprised to report that Wetpaint, the Seattle based wiki company that we’ve raved about in the past, is announcing a $9.5 million Series B round of financing today, with investments from Accel Partners as well as previous investors Trinity Ventures and Frazier Technology Ventures. Their Series A round, in October 2005, was $5.25 million.

Wetpaint’s key competitor, Wikia, has had more traction with users according to Alexa and Compete statistics, and claims 2.5 million page views per day. Wetpaint doesn’t disclose page views, but CEO Ben Elowitz told me they are “doubling quicker than every 2 months.” Wetpaint has a much more newbie-friendly user interface than Wikia, and is targeting a different audience. Frankly, it’s just a lot more pleasant to look at a typical Wetpaint site than a Wikia one, although the content on Wikia is often much deeper than the equivalent on Wetpaint. Wetpaint says they now have 150,000 unique wikis and over 2.5 million pieces of content contributed by users since launching last June.

Wetpaint has the smell of a company that’s built solid software and is seeing good user uptake. If they can keep expenses under control they will be a likely takeover candidate in the near future. Everyone except Google is taking a hard look at the wiki space right now.

For a good overview of wikis by feature, see WikiMatrix.

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/~3/72830646/