Ajax Girl

Got an idea? Willing to hustle for a summer to see it grow? Y Combinator just announced their summer application drive. Applications are due by April 2nd and by the 10th, a few will be selected to present in Mountain View on April 21-22nd. If selected, your team will relocate to work and learn in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

For those of you unfamiliar with Y Combinator, it’s the seed financing fund guided by Paul Graham’s philosophies that helps young startups launch through mentoring and investing a base $5,000 plus $5,000 per founder. In exchange they take a 1-10% stake in the company. The teams are usually composed of young college grads with some programming skill. It’s not not a program meant for industry veterans. Some have criticized the program for taking too much ownership for such a small investment. Some readers have also called shenanigans on the operation. Here are some of the companies we’ve covered before. Kiko, Reddit, and Loopt are some notable Y Combinator companies. Exits, so far, have been through acquisition. Kiko died, and was then acquired by Elliot Noss. Conde Nast bought Reddit.

Some other programs such as TechStars have adopted the model. TechStars is another well backed program based in Boulder, Colorado also offering experienced mentors and cash to aspiring startups. While not the same ground floor financing as Y Combinator or TechStars, the venerable VC firm Charles River Ventures also adopted a smaller financing program (up to $250K debt) called Quick Start.

Here are the details for applying. Aspiring web entrepreneurs should also check out the Startup School coming to Palo Alto in March. With some work your company may be ready in time to present at TechCrunch 20.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/94116146/

We’ve all seen this before. Passionate users want more or different functionality for a given product, and they build it themselves rather than wait. Sometimes it is done purely for passion, other times there’s a profit motive. But the result is often a kick in the pants to the original startup. How the company responds says a lot about their commitment to their users.

A good example from 2006 was a user-created mashup (a hack really) of Pandora and Last.fm that was quickly embraced and supported by both companies. The product is still alive and doing well.

Two examples we’ve seen this year are LinkedInABox and WootAgent.

WootAgent

WootAgent is still in private beta. It’s a small download (for Windows machines only at the moment) that hardcore Woot junkies will want to use

If you don’t know what Woot is: It’s an ecommerce site that launched in 2004, that has a single thing for sale every day. There is a limited quantity for sale, and when that’s been bought, nothing is for sale until the next day. Shipping is always $5, and occasionally they sell “Random Crap” that can be a useless item or something incredible like a new LCD display for $20. The Random Crap sales often sell out within minutes.

The problem with Woot is that people often forget to check the site, and they miss good deals. WootAgent sits in the system tray and automatically pops up when a new Woot is available, a Woot is running out, and a Woot is sold out (see screen shot). For anyone other than loyal Woot users it will be annoying, but for those that care, it’s awesome.

LinkedInABox

LinkedInABox is a javascript widget that users can place on a website (See TechCrunch France editor Ouriel Ohayon’s personal blog to view the widget, located in the right sidebar). The widget shows the basic information included in your LinkedIn profile, and is a really nice addition to a professional blog or other website. Frankly, this is something LinkedIn should have done themselves, and I hope that they embrace this product.

I’ll be looking for other examples of user generated products and features that enhance a much loved core product, and profiling good examples here.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/94044717/

PBwiki closed $2 million in funding this morning from Mohr Davidow Ventures.  Co-fonder David Weekly confirmed that previous investors Ron Conway and Chris Yeh also put in an additional $100k.

PBwiki advertises itself as the easiest way to quickly create a hosted wiki and the company’s product is particularly well executed.  It recently added a What You See is What You Get editor, which if satisfactory to new users, could help PBwiki overcome one of the primary barriers to wiki adoption.  The recent upgrade also added the ability to include YouTube videos, Flickr photostreams, stock charts and chat functionality to your wikis.  Chat will likely be useful but I question how many of their users will be excited about the rest of the new features.  PBWiki’s basic features are what make it shine.

Weekly told me that there are more than 200,000 PBwikis and a substantial portion of them have been active in the past 60 days.  (My ten sleeping PBwikis notwithstanding, apparently.)  Weekly says the ads on free accounts make less than 5% of the company’s revenue; premium accounts are available for between $10 and $35 per month.  He says the 8 person company brings in enough money to be “profitable some months.”

Weekly says that he expects to make an announcement about interoperability with other wiki providers in the next few weeks.  I like PBwiki but will be curious to see what they have up their sleeve that would give confidence to institutional investors.  The enterprise wiki landscape is widely seen as a mess, bereft of reliable, usable and lightweight solutions - perhaps we’ll see someone scoop up this solid service soon. Please hold the jokes about a possible Yahoo! acquisition.

Competitors include Wikispaces, Wikia and others.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/94026919/

We have a well placed but single source rumor that Google may make a major announcement tomorrow, possibly a statement of its “official” strategy around their small business focused products. If this is the case, it would likely involve bundling Docs & Spreadsheets with Google Apps for Your Domain into a single hosted offering. An announcment of an online PowerPoint application and/or other new products and features could be involved as well.

Earlier today the product manager for Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Jonathan Rochelle, spoke at the Future of Web Apps conference in London. He made absolutely no mention of any possible announcement. As I said, this is a single source rumor and single source rumors have a tendency to fail to materialize.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/93999574/

Ever since the social video market boomed through 2006, some video services have sought to differentiate themselves by adding online editors. Jumpcut and Motionbox launched their editors last April and Jumpcut was acquired by Yahoo! 5 months later. Eyespot launched its editor a month before Jumpcut, last March. Last December Gotuit launched their SceneMaker video mashup app. Photobucket recently coming launched its own video/audio/photo editor for premium members (full release next month). Today, Cuts is launching its editor into public beta.

If you’re already working with video on the web, an online editor is fast, easy and free. In theory, these services could bring video editing to people who would otherwise never engage in it. People already engaging in video editing can benefit from automatic software updates and the sharing made possible by online communities.

Here’s a look at each of the services, followed by a more in depth chart comparing features.

Cuts
“Simple and easy, when you need edits now”
Cuts is the new kid on the block and is all about remixing viral video. They don’t host content, but instead take videos from other sites (YouTube, Google, Myspace). With Cuts you can trim, loop, add preloaded sound effects, and insert captions to enhance the original. Editing is straightforward, consisting of changes to the sound, caption, and navigation levels for the video. Every edit can be re-cut, embedded, and emailed. In the future, Cuts will be expanding into simple editing for digital movies and TV shows. See also our early look at Cuts a few weeks ago.

Gotuit
“For slicing and dicing scenes”
Gotuit Scenemaker is for slicing out scenes from videos on other networks. After importing a video into the program via URL, you can select a start and end for one or more scenes on the video, title, tag, and email the scenes to friends. Unfortunately I couldn’t use it to slice up Gotuit content.

Eyespot
“Mashups with effects, transitions, and titles”
Eyespot is a solid editor that lets you mix together your own Motionbox content or scenes from their promotional media packs. It has a simple drag and drop interface that lets you manage a wide variety of effects and transitions for both the audio and video layers. Eyespot lets you add your own audio and mix in photos as well. While you can’t grab video from other networks, Eyespot’s white label editor is becoming available on more and more sites. The NBA is one of the most recent additions.

JumpCut
“When desktop software is too expensive”
Jumpcut is the most developed of the editors, allowing you to add a long list of effects, transitions, and captions to the videos. It also incorporates fine grained control of trimming and audio levels (uploaded background audio and voice). The complexity of the interface makes it great for detailed edits and mashups, but borders on being too heavy an application for the internet.

Photobucket
“Cutting edge tools”
Photobucket just released a new video editing product that leverages the most recent Adobe Flash tools. Unlike any of the other services, users can “mash up” video clips with audio files and photos, and add effects and transitions.

Motionbox
“For trimming and joining”
Motionbox is best known for deep tagging videos, but they also have an editor that is ideal for trimming your Motionbox content and joining the videos together.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/93999573/

Documentary film maker Steve O’Hear announced today that his film In Search of the Valley is now available for download using an innovative service called Streamburst - a move he hopes will raise the project’s sales after disappointing initial DVD sales. Streamburst offers a way to discourage and track piracy without limiting the use of files by people who purchase them.

We wrote about O’Hear’s film of interviews with Silicon Valley figures Steve Wozniak, John Warnock, Guy Kawasaki, Craig Newmark, Jef Raskin, Tim O’Reilly, Dan Kottke and many others when the DVD was released in December. The interviews explore the history of the Valley and why it’s been such a center of tech creativity.

Offering full films for download would probably be most independent film makers’ first choice of distribution methods were it not for the problem of piracy. While it’s easy for some people to mock the concerns of media giants, small independent film makers’ careers are obviously directly contingent on their ability to monetize as much of their work as possible. (And they are easier to sympathize with.)

Enter Streamburst, O’Hear’s choice for online distribution. This newly launched UK company takes an interesting approach to copyright. Instead of handcuffing viewers who want to view films they purchase on multiple devices and otherwise use content legitimately in ways DRM blocks - Streamburst takes two steps to prevent movie piracy.

The first is that every film begins with a 5 second display of the name of the person who purchased that copy, as it appears on their credit card. The second step is that Streamburst strips out an undetectable but unique series of bits from each copy of a file downloaded. The company claims that this signature will survive most editing and format transfers. That idea is that the psychological barrier of being named will stop many people from illegally distributing the files and those whom it doesn’t stop can be identified by the unique series of bits stripped from whatever copies make it into illegal file sharing networks.

It’s not an unbeatable plans by any means, but Streamburst could help make content distributors more comfortable offering their work for download. That’s been the case with the makers of In Search of the Valley, which is now available in high quality, portable and mobile formats all for $8 through Streamburst.

It’s an interesting model and an interesting film. See below for a series of short teasers from the In Search of the Valley account at YouTube.

Marshall Kirkpatrick is the Director of Content at SplashCast and will be assisting with TechCrunch while Michael Arrington travels.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/93962407/

Some of the recent activity at our internal 37signals Campfire chat room:

Nice modals

Jeremy K.	check out the demo at http://okonet.ru/projects/modalbox/
Jeremy K.	pretty nice modals built with prototype + scriptaculous
Ryan S.	that modal demo is cool
Ryan S.	i like how it slides down from the top, OS X-style
Jeremy K.	yeah, feels more like an interstitial
Jeremy K.	but maybe that’s just the mac culture burned into me

Web apps game changer?

Jason F.	Firefox3: Web Apps Game changer
Sam S.	JF: that basically amounts to cookies that can store more data
Sam S.	I really don’t think it’ll be a “game changer”
Sam S.	but we’ll see
Ryan S.	BUT THE WEB IS THE NEW PLATFORM
Ryan S.
Mark I.	If you want to give up Rails and write all your apps in Javascript maybe.
Mark I.	I don’t like Javascript that much.
Jamis B.	just need a new framework
Jamis B.	“Javascript on Jails”
Sam S.	jails is right
Sam S.	that’s what writing a web app in js would feel like
Ryan S.	aren’t google apps written in JS?
Ryan S.	do they generate the JS with magic or something?
Sam S.	from what I understand, the client-side stuff is written in a Java framework that generates JS code
Jamis B.	guh, that’s even worse
Sam S.	at least for gmail

Popular Science

Mark I.
Mark I.	I was flipping through the February 2007 Popular Science when I saw the Backpack Calendar in the corner of the page.
Ryan S.	oh how cool
Jason F.	Woah on the BP Cal!
Ryan S.
Mark I.	I enjoy Popular Science and Popular Mechanics.
Jason F.	MI agree—great pubs

Squid Gates

Ryan S.	wow really bizarre marketing from microsoft in asia
Ryan S.	http://whatswrongwithu.com/
Ryan S.	also gates is looking more and more like a squid monster
Ryan S.
Jason F.	LOLOL

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/279-fly-on-the-wall-nice-modals-web-apps-game-changer-popular-science-squid-gates

The fragmentation of widget platforms presents a problem for developers, who need to develop and then maintain different versions of widgets for the various desktop widget platforms (Vista, Mac, Google, Yahoo) as well as online platforms like Pageflakes and Netvibes (and lots of others).

The W3C has a working draft of a 1.0 Widget specification, which if adopted would make life easier for developers by requiring some standardization. However, the best solution for everyone would be a world where a widget works on every platform, no matter where it was originally created.

Today at the Future of Web Apps conference in London, Netvibes founder Tariq Krim announced that their upcoming “Coriander” release will do just that. The new product will be called the Universal Widget API and will be available at eco.netvibes.com/uwa (this site is live now with a landing page, more information will be available next week). Once launched, any widget created for Netvibes, Krim says, will work on the Vista, Google, Mac and Opera platforms as well. Support for Yahoo Widgets and other platforms will follow soon after.

A single javascript embed code will add the widget to any of the supported platforms. The code will recognize the platform and run the appropriate code for that platform within the widget. Once Coriander has launched, sites will be able to create and promote a single widget embed code for most platforms.

Krim showed me Netvibes widgets running on a Mac as well as Google. Screenshots below. For people familiar with the look and feel of Netvibes modules/widgets, they will be immediately apparent.

Krim also announced that Netvibes will be open sourcing the runtime at the same time as the platform launches, allowing anyone to expand the number of widget platforms supported. Expect smaller widget platforms to jump on this.

Netvibes now claims 10 million active users. Krim says 1/3 of those users spend at least an hour per day on Netvibes, and 10% have Netvibes open “virtually the entire day.” Krim also announced that Netvibes will be supporting OpenID this year.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/93854372/

Ara Pehlivanian has created a simple reflect.js script that allows you to add reflection to your images using simple JS that adds just one DOM element.

Using Ara’s API you can get as simple as:

or more advanced:

There are a set of examples for you to play with too.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/automated-javascript-vertical-flip-image-reflection

From the bathroom chalkboard wall at the 37signals/Coudal Partners office (click image for larger view).

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/277-great-chalk-album-covers