Ajax Girl

The beta release of Google Desktop 5 was just announced on the main Google blog as well as the Desktop blog.

A complete overview of the new and existing Desktop features is here. The most important change is that users now have the ability to preview files in search results directly in the application or browser, which is a time saver. They’ve also upgraded security and redesigned the widget features.

We last covered version 3 of the product, which was released in February 2006. That was the first time Google started (optionally) storing your hard drive index on Google’s servers instead of locally on your own computer.

Yahoo, Microsoft and Copernic have competing products.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/99888692/

If you want to know exactly how many kegs of beer, pounds of ice and number of cups you need to get everyone at your party hammered, give Kegulator a whirl. Tell it how many guests you are having, use their Ajax slider to set how drunk everyone will get, and the site will spit out the supplies necessary to achieve your goal. If you’re Canadian, use Beer Hunter afterwards to figure out where to buy all that stuff. Or use the open source beer recipe and make your own. Kegulator is the creation of Michigan’s Steve Richert.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/99877896/

Yahoo Answers is the undisputed leader in the Q&A space, vanquishing Google Answers to the DeadPool late in 2006.

But now, a number of researchers who previously worked on Google Answers have started their own new service: Uclue. The team has also posted on the TechCrunch Forums looking for people to help out with the project.

Like Google Answers, people asking questions are charged. The model is a little different, though. Google charged 50 cents to post. Uclue will be free to post. Google had answer fees between $2-200 by credit card upon the question’s answer. Uclue will be in the range of $5-250 paid in advance by PayPal. Whereas Google was English only, Uclue will also support question in Spanish and German.

The site is in a rough beta form right now, with PayPal payments temporarily going to an oddly named account “Everything Eiffel”. To get your question answered, you post it to their board along with the bounty you’re willing to pay. Your question will be answered by a Uclue researcher, who receives 75% of your question price (the uclue service receives the remaining 25%). Questions can be canceled and refunded if you find the answer unsatisfactory or if they go unanswered for 30 days.

J Philip asks the question we’re all wondering, “How does Uclue compare with Google Answers?”. Uclue responds by saying the smaller startup will put more effort into the product than Google did with Answers, the tangentially related product of a multi billion dollar conglomerate. There are some differences in the business plan as well.

Apart from Uclue’s highly motivated staff, it doesn’t seem like Uclue will offer anything radically different from Google’s model that failed after 4 years. Uclue seems doomed to follow down GA’s path, while other services like Ether and Bitwine have at least differentiated themselves by enabling pay-per-call consulting. We already saw another paid answers service, Tinbag, launch last month. Tinbag is a distributed answers service, relying on self-promoting researchers to drum up business on their own Tinbag powered sites.

We’ve covered other answers services before. See our coverage of Live QnA, Yedda, Guruza, Answerbag, and Amazon’s Askville.

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/~3/99859073/

In one of the largest private equity financings for an Internet company in recent history, Web publisher GeoSign , located outside of Toronto, has raised US$ 160 million from American Capital. The money will be used primarily for acquisitions, and the founders are taking some money off the table. RBC Capital Markets acted as the private placement agent for the deal.

The company joins Demand Media, which has raised $200 million over two rounds of financing, in the hunt for good content companies.

GeoSign plans to making three to five “sizeable” business acquisitions in the near future, while also continuing to build out their own properties. Their portfolio of sites covers over 20 verticals and reach more than 35 million unique visitors per month.

Geosign was started in 2000 when founder and CEO Tim Nye, frustrated with the results while searching for new home plans, started homeplaninfo.com to capitalize on an underserved niche. Since then Geosign has been building out their publishing network by acquiring/investing in properties and monetizing them through advertising.

The company has 230 employees, with over 100 of them generating content for the sites in the publishing department. Past investments from Geosign include local search engine TrueLocal, mobile search engine go2, outdoors enthusiast site Nomadik, DietNation, ThinkFashion, CosmeticSurguryInsider, and AllSafeTravels. They are also building basic social networks around these sites - see restaurantica for an example.

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/~3/99798392/

Thank you to the current TechCrunch Sponsors (and our readers, who keep the sponsors coming back). If you would like to sponsor or advertise on TechCrunch, details are here.

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Omnidrive - It’s not only storage, it’s also file synchronization. Files stored on your Omnidrive account reflect the changes you make using online editors or offline, letting you easily update photos you serve on your blog from your desktop. They also have a new API ideal for web applications looking for a home for their data. Go here to sign up.

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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/~3/99810265/

Scribd, a site for sharing documents, is coming out of private beta this morning with a fresh Angel investment of $300K on top of their original Y Combinator nest egg of $12,000. Scribd is most easily described as a text version of YouTube. It is a social network that lets you tag, share, and comment on uploaded documents (.doc, .pdf, .txt, .ppt, .xls, .ps, .lit).

Scribd is not just a carbon copy of YouTube. They borrowed a lot of the basic design principles, but also took advantage of the written format by including flexible file formats for download and upload along with some interesting analytics tracking. Documents can be displayed and embedded as html or the under-utilized, and faster-than-a-pdf, Flash paper format. They can be downloaded as .pdf’s, .docs, .txt, and even .mp3 files. The mp3 version is created by Scribd’s text-to-speech package (powered by Nuance) that lets you listen to the text of your document in a quivering British accent (downloadable example here). People have uploaded all sorts of documents for the private beta, like this guide to dating and seduction for dummies, or this less than legal copy of Visual C++ in 21 days. Scribd also lets you “geek out” on all the analytics generated by documents you post, such as how many votes and views your piece gets, as well as geographic location and http referrer that brought the reader there.

We’ve seen a lot of different social networks pop up around different mediums, photos, video, and even audio, but dominating a medium is no guarantee of an easy business model, as the “For Sale” sign on audio-focussed Odeo reminds us. So far social sites around the written word have dealt with books, rather than user generated, or at least user-uploaded content. Scribd lets people do something new, we just need to wait and see how far people go with it.

See our coverage of SlideShare as well.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/99787226/

When shopping meta-search engine Mpire launched their Firefox shopping plugin last year we felt it was one of the best shopping tools to come out in a while. Today, Mpire is offering the plugin for IE7, upgraded their site and launched the newly established Mpire Lab’s first product, a visual shopping site called Shopwave. Mpire is also working with Electric Sheep and Linden Lab to integrate their shopping experience into SecondLife and on an Apollo version that will carry out automated shopping searches.

The revamped site features a cleaner layout along with the same Farecast-style price tracking of the old one, but now includes Amazon and Epinion reviews along with coupons and deals embedded in the search results. The new Shopwave site is a work in progress that tackles the lack of innovation going on in online shopping visualization. We’ve talked about a couple new visualization ideas before. Mpire’s Shopwave doesn’t have as extreme a layout as BrowseGood’s treemap visualization, or as customizable as Like.com’s color and shape driven engine. It instead takes a window shopping approach, where you know what category you want, but maybe not the exact product. If you don’t know exactly how to describe what you’re looking for, Mpire’s new image previews may be worth the thousand words you can’t find.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/99789949/

Bill Orcutt has been working on Lily, a graphical data-flow programming environment that runs in a web browser:

Programs are built graphically by connecting modules to add functionality, fetch and direct
the flow of data, play sound or video, add interactivity or display results. Lily programs can be shared with other Lily users, installed as Firefox add-ons, run as standalone apps using XULrunner, or (with some limitations) be embedded in a web page.

Or, as Bill told us:

It’s sort of a client-side version of Yahoo’s Pipes written in Javascript. I’ve been working on it since July and it’s fairly far along- there’s over 150 modules available wrapping web apis, various UI widgets (both browser native and from the various JS libraries- YUI, Scriptaculous, JQuery, etc), privileged access to Storage, the file system & sockets, SVG graphics & Multimedia. There’s also an SDK available and its very simple and straightforward to develop new modules in JS. Programs developed in Lily can be shared with other users (the programs
themselves are saved as .json files) or exported as FF add-ons, standalone Xulrunner apps or simply as js/html that can be displayed in a web page.

Check out the demo screencasts to get a feel for it. There is some pretty amazing stuff here. I liked Pipes, but wanted to be able to create my own modules. With Lily you can create your own modules in simple JavaScript!

• Simple addition
• A beatbox
• Circle Animation Fun
• Animation Following
• A HTTPD server. Really
• NYTimes via Flickr
• Flickr YUI Lightbox
• Working with Text

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/lily-graphical-data-flow-programming-environment

MyPunchbowl, the event planner that may kill evite, has pushed a new version, now with 150% more Ajax.

We asked Matt Douglas (Punchbowl team) to tell us what is new, and he replied:

• All Sign in and Sign up windows are done in a modal dialog. Note the cool Ajax zoom effect we chose to use.
• We’ve implemented a “User Feedback” form in much the same way. Note that this dialog can be accessed from the footer links as well.
• We now offer the ability to try MyPunchbowl.com without the requirement to create a user account (”Try it Out”). We think we’ve done this very elegantly using Ajax. We let guests use the product until they actually try to send out emails. At that point, we throw up a dialog that asks them to register. The really cool thing we are doing here is saving all of the user data– so if you’ve created a guest list (for example), you won’t have to redo your work if you do decide to create an account.
• Take a look at our YouTube integration in the After Party. Some nice Ajax as we retrieve the video from YouTube and display it on our page.

Those are a few of the highlights– there are lots of other smaller examples as well. Our philosophy is to use Ajax where it makes sense for the best possible user experience. Hope you like the new version of MyPunchbowl.

It is definitely a dynamic WYSIWYG experience as you create your event. There is a lot of good Prototype/Script.aculo.us/Rico

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/mypunchbowl-upgrades-event-system

So far we’ve talked about the big picture, permissions and groups, the welcome and workspace tabs, and adding people to Highrise. Next we’re going to talk about Tasks.

Now/Next
Tasks are a huge part of Highrise. Highrise follows the now/next idea—log the notes of what just happened now and set up your next action. For example: [A NOTE NOW] “Just got off the phone with Walt. We discussed the new product, who it’s for, the ideas behind it, use-cases, etc.” [A TASK NEXT] “9am tomorrow: Send full press kit”

I don’t know exactly when, but sometime
Sometimes things happen right on time. Sometimes you do have a call at 9am sharp tomorrow. But often times you have “stuff” you need to get done sometime tomorrow or sometime this week or next week. And often times you just have stuff you need to get done later. Highrise lets you gracefully deal with tasks with hard and fast dates/times and tasks with suggested time “buckets.” 9am tomorrow is hard and fast, “this week” is a bucket.

The conveyor belt
Most buckets are on a conveyor belt. Later always stays later unless you have dated/timed items in there. Dated/timed items will move based on today’s date. Next week becomes this week. This week becomes tomorrow. Tomorrow becomes today. Today becomes overdue.

Movie: Watch a task being added. You’ll see you can specify a time for near-time items (today or tomorrow), leave the time off entirely so the task is due “sometime today,” specify a future bucket “next week” or “later,” or specify a specific date/time in the future via a calendar.Two views in one
Another thing we realized is that looking at a long list of tasks usually involves a lot of reading. Most tasks have an action and a subject. An action might be “Call” or “Fax” or “Thank” or “Demo” or “Meet.” A subject might be “With Jim tomorrow” or “Form 1040-EZ” or “Final t-shirt design” etc.

We’ve added categories to Highrise tasks so you can optionally label a task with an action. These actions stand out with black background and white text. This makes it easy to scan a list of tasks and see the actions without having to read the subject. It’s a great way to see the actions on your plate today at a glance.

How it all comes together
Tasks are listed and created in a few different places in Highrise. There’s a Task tab accessible from anywhere. There are tasks in the sidebar on specific pages depending on who you’re looking at and where you are, and there are tasks on the Dashboard. You can also add a task directly after adding a note. Tasks can be attached to people (“this task is about John Doe”), attached to notes/emails (“this task is about this note”), or just general (“This is just something I need to do on its own”).

Here’s what the Tasks tab looks like (click to see it bigger):

Task assignments and notifications
When you create a task you can assign it to yourself or to anyone else who’s part of your Highrise account. You can see a list of all your tasks on the Tasks tab or all the tasks you’ve assigned other people behind the Assigned link. Notifications are sent via email and reminders are sent via email or SMS to your cell phone.

Sign up to have a chance at a Golden Ticket
We’ve begun issuing “golden tickets.” Golden ticket holders will have access to sign-up for Highrise prior to the public launch. To sign up for a chance at a golden ticket, be sure to sign up for the Highrise announcement list.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/302-preview-5-highrise-tasks