Ajax Girl

MyYearBook, founded in 2005, just announced a $4.1 million round venture financing led by U.S. Venture Partners and First Round Capital.

The site has a look and feel suspiciously similar to Facebook (with a little MySpace chaos thrown in). Growth has been strong, with MyYearBook claiming 1.7 million registered users (mostly in the U.S.), and over 5 million unique visitors per month. The rumor is that MyYearBook has more highschool users than Facebook.

Mainstream press has given the site a lot of attention (see video below as well). Facebook was a year old by the time MyYearBook launched, however. And Facebook’s overall size puts MyYearBook to shame. If MyYearBook can keep its lead in the high school market, though, perhaps Facebook or someone else will acquire it before the next, much higher valuation, round.

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/~3/81660050/

TechStars is a new startup fund/incubator that’s generated a good discussion in the TechCrunch Forums. Like YCombinator, TechStars is looking for flat broke entrepreneurs with just a seed of a good startup idea.

They are taking applications now, out of which ten winners will be selected. The thirty of so winning entrepreneurs (TechStars anticipates an average of three founders per idea) will travel to Colorado on May 21, 2007, and spend the summer in Boulder building out their ideas. TechStars will also give each founding group $15,000 in seed funding, and help them locating housing at the nearly University of Colorado, Boulder. TechStars will take 5% of the equity in each startup.

This is comparable to YCombinator’s model, where they give $6,000 per founder and take 6-8% of the startups equity. And the model has worked so far, with a number of promising startups launching, and YCombinator-funded Reddit being acquired by Condé Nast last Halloween.

TechStars is solidly backed, with investments from David Cohen, Brad Feld, Jared Polis (founder of Blue Mountain and ProFlowers) and David Brown. There’s a long list of mentors as well who’ve promised to help guide startups over the summer.

We are seeing a dramatic shift as (some) investors are lurching away from providing big capital to over funded web startups to these structured, mentor-driven angel investments. YCombinator and TechStars fill a definite niche, as does Charles River Ventures recent foray into small (and quick) investments as well.

I’m definitely going to take at least one trip to TechStars this summer and do some interviews and meet this new crop of startups. TechStars will repeat the program each summer.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/81624137/

According to Matthieu Stefani, Co-Founder of ScoopLive, “Every event has its witnesses.” And with camera phones being so prevalent, every witness now has a chance to make some real money on what they’ve captured.

The Web has exploded with amateur videos of everything from the Saddam Hussein hanging to Michael Richards hanging himself - all filmed by “citizen journalists.” Up until now, though, cashing in on these stories has been hard to do.

A Marketplace for Monetizing Scoops

ScoopLive just announced that it was out of beta in the Tech Crunch forums as one of a handful of entrants into the on-line marketplace for monetizing scoops, whose competitors already include Scoopt.com and SpyMedia.com.

The solution doesn’t make as much sense for professional photojournalists that use well-established photo and press agencies. It makes far more sense for the amateur market that may only sell one photo or video, but it could be the one picture of Paris Hilton that nets them $50,000.

ScoopLive was initially launched in the European market with approximately 150 buyers in 15 countries. The site has attracted 2,500 reporters in 60 countries and has already been successful in brokering sales including a cover image for Voici, the French equivalent of People Magazine in the U.S. (it’s the photo of two famous French actors kissing each other at a night club, but the real story is above that photo).

Join, Upload, Sell

Users of ScoopLive can create a free account and begin to upload their media, tagging it so that it can be found by buyers (my camera phone video of fans rushing the field after OSU stomped Michigan may not make me rich).

If it’s a scoop, the media will be auctioned off to buyers and sold with a 30-day exclusivity clause. If it’s just an interesting item, it will go into ScoopLive’s image bank and be sold at a fixed rate. Sellers retain the copyrights to their media and can earn up to 85% of the final sale to a buyer.

Popular and Profitable

Today the average citizen journalist may think uploading a video to YouTube is a big deal. But in the near future sites like ScoopLive will allow authors to not only make their content popular, but profitable as well.

Wil Schroter is a contributor to TechCrunch as well as the founder and CEO of GoBigNetwork.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/81569284/

From The Fairest Fowl: Portraits of Championship Chickens by photographer Tamara Staples (Flash).

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/220-chicken-portraits

Peter Svensson liked what he saw in MAYA Design Inc.’s JDA implementation, but wanted an open source alternative.

He created a free LGPL implementation of Javascript Dataflow Acrhitecture (JDA) called the JDA Emulator.

What is JDA?

JDA is basically a javascipt microkernel along the same lines as Spring or Hivemind for Java. The wiring of the js components are done in the HTML page, inside div’s (or whatever) with special attributes, that’s all! So yuo don’t need any stinking XML anymore.

• HTML-based black box composition specification
• Javascript black box packaging specification
• An asynchronous message-passing microkernel written in Javascript
• An attempt to promote evolutionary design and to bring about seamless interoperability to the Web
• An attempt to once again give rise to the spirit of tinkerers on the Web!

You can check out the test page.

Update from MAYA

After talking to MAYA Design: they do allow use of their upcoming 0.95 implementation of the JDA, even commercially. They are also discussing whether to publish it under some kind of GPL license.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/jda-emulator-spring-for-javascript

Ben Nolan (Behaviour.js) has whipped up some Ajax Fu to create a simple Moon Lander using Prototype and the Canvas tag.

Take a peak at the game code to see how elegantly Ben did this.

Who said JavaScript is hard?

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/moon-lander

Notes from a talk by Alan Kay

“Turn up your nose at good ideas. You must work on great ideas, not good ones.”…”Better is the enemy of best.”…”Point of view is worth 80 IQ points.”…”People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.”

In defense of "purposeless acts of design whimsy"

“One of the functions of design is to delight and amuse the audience. There’s something to be gained from indulging ourselves, once in a while, in purposeless acts of design whimsy, even if we spend our days building minutely optimized interfaces that give no quarter to artistic idiosyncrasies.”

Infographic: ‘Hope’ ‘Iraq’ ‘Economy’ ‘Oil’

President Bush’s speeches have included over 34,000 words. This interactive graphic visually displays which ones pop up most frequently and when they appeared.

Curing Blackberry thumbs and tech necks

“Therapies to treat workplace woes such as a sore thumb from tapping on a hand-held computer, the aches of ‘tech neck’ from typing on a laptop or even skin irritation from chatting on a cell phone are the latest rage to hit high-end spas.”

iPhone tester: Keyboard is “a huge improvement” over thumbpads on Treo and other smart phones

“The buttons are significantly larger, you don’t have to hit them dead-center, you lightly tap them instead of punching them down, and the software is smart enough to know that you meant to type ‘Tuesday’ instead of ‘Tudsday.’ After 30 seconds, I was already typing faster with the iPhone than I ever have with any other phone. I suspect that true e-mail demons will need to adapt to the lack of tactile feedback, though.”

What do Tiffany’s and Glock have in common?

“One of the many reasons Apple, Tiffany’s, Mercedes, and others can charge a premium for their less feature laden products is quality. It’s important to point out that quality can be either actual or perceived. Did you know that Ferraris have few parts than most cars, but that the parts are of much higher quality? The same can be said for Glock. I was once told by a sportsman that Glock had done test burying their handguns in the mud, left them for 10 years, then dug them up, cocked and fired them without incident. Now that’s quality control.”

Microsoft "purging bloat to fashion sleek software"

“The chief sales point of Office 2007 (for Windows XP or Vista), which arrives on Jan. 30, is that it’s simpler, it’s more streamlined and its documents take up far less disk space…Evidently, even Microsoft saw the need for a major feature purge. ‘We had some options in there that literally did nothing,’ said Paul Coleman, a product manager.”

Why Ideo hires t-shaped people

“We look for people who are so inquisitive about the world that they’re willing to try to do what you do. We call them ‘T-shaped people.’ They have a principal skill that describes the vertical leg of the T — they’re mechanical engineers or industrial designers. But they are so empathetic that they can branch out into other skills, such as anthropology, and do them as well. They are able to explore insights from many different perspectives and recognize patterns of behavior that point to a universal human need.”

Meet the Real Sacha Baron Cohen

NPR interview with Baron Cohen (rare recent interview where he’s not in character).

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/225-sunspots-the-tech-neck-edition

A few weeks ago our pal Andrew Huff from Chicago’s Gapers Block brought a few guys over to our office to give us a demo of some software they were working on. Andrew is handling their PR.

The guys were Atul Varma and Aza Raskin of Humanized — a small Chicago start-up focused on making desktop software simpler and less frustrating. They are sharp. Their philosophy is much like ours. We’re fans.

The demo we got was for a new product called Enso. It’s Windows only so they brought their laptops.

Enso is a launcher — much like Launchbar or Quicksilver on the Mac. Although Enso has some more tricks up its sleeve. Enso has a nice style about it too. It’s tastefully executed.

Hold down the caps lock key, type, and stuff happens. You can add up numbers, spell check a sentence, open a document, look something up with Google, get a word count of any block of text, define any word anytime, etc. They even demoed how it could work with Basecamp, although I don’t know if that feature made it into their final release.

Once you get the hang of it it’s probably something you can’t imagine being without. That’s how Launchbar is for me — when I use a Mac that doesn’t have Launchbar of Quicksilver I feel like I’m stuck in the past.

To start Enso comes in two parts: Launcher and Words. You can use them together or separately. Walt Mossberg wrote it up today in The Wall Street Journal. Not a bad way to launch.

If you have a PC, and you value your time and like to avoid frustrating common tasks, you should definitely check out Enso over at the Humanized site.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/228-humanized-enso

Grzegorz Daniluk of Refwell has coined Full Duplex Ajax (FdAjax).

It smells very similar to Comet in that it allows the server to talk to the client (instead of polling).

FdAjax is implemented as a module to the great Lighttpd web server. No additional components are needed. Therefore the configuration is easy and unified. E.g. you have to configure the SSL communication and the access control in the configuration file only once, it will also apply to the communication with the FdAjax module.

To see it in action, you can check out the screencast of Anslive that shows a user getting a question answered in real-time.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/2052

Avvenu has a new product that allows you to listen to your iTunes music connection from any web browser on a Windows PC, Mac, or Windows Mobile 5 smartphone. MobileCrunch covered an early version of the product that only worked on Windows Mobile phones here.

The base computer storing the music must be a Windows PC. As long as that base PC is powered on and online, your entire iTunes music library will stream to the browser on the remote computer, and playlists will also be available. Avvenu also allows users to store up to 250 songs on their servers, allowing you to play those songs remotely without your base PC online (this is getting into a legal gray area).

Avvenue plays only unrestricted MP3, AAC and WMA files, no iTunes DRM’d songs will work. Users can also share some music with others - but only the 250 songs stored on the Avvenu servers. An email is sent to the recipient, which as a link to open a browser window with a Flash player that plays the song. Here’s an example that was sent to me by Go2Web2, which also wrote about Avvenu this evening.

The ability to listen to this on a phone is what really intrigues me. Hopefully Avvenu will come out with a version that works with Macs and the new iPhone as well.

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/~3/81307739/