Ajax Girl

Congrats to Digg, which announced that they’ve had a million accounts registered at at the site (at least ten of which are mine). In March 2006 they had just 200,000 registered users. In March 2005, less than 50,000.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/100151774/

There’s a ton of interesting data included in a new MergerMarket interview with Federated Media Publishing COO Jason Weisberger. The report itself is proprietary research, although a copy was forwarded to us.

The company, which sells advertising for a number of blogs and other websites (including TechCrunch), had revenues of $4.5 million in 2006, its first year in operation. Projections for 2007 were $30 million in sales and “several million dollars” in profit.

Weisberger said “If Federated Media keeps performing the way we’ve predicted in 2007, it would be a really ripe time for a media player who understands this space to buy us now rather than having to buy us for a whole lot more later.” The article also said “While he was unsure how much Federated might sell for, Weisberger said similar companies have gotten 8x to 10x gross revenue…Another possible valuation for a sale of the company is a multiple of 25x EBITDA.”

There was a laundry list of possible acquirers mentioned by Weisberger, including media companies (AOL, CBS, Google, IAC/Interactive, Fox, Yahoo were mentioned) and advertising agencies (Universal McCann, Ogilvy & Mathers, aQuantive, Saatchi & Saatchi, and TBWA/Chiat/Day).

The company is also considering a number of acquisitions, and raising a new round of financing of $3 - 8 million to pay for them. The company previously raised $2.2 million.

Update: I spoke to John Battelle, who says that this interview was done under the impression that it would be used as background material only, and that they have no intention of selling the company in the near future. He also said that the company is not actively fundraising at this time.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/100143896/

AllPeers launched with a bang but then struggled along with a whimper. That’s why today’s news that they are taking their source code open source is both a surrender as well as a glimmer of hope for the struggling startup.

AllPeers is a great idea in theory. Users can create private P2P file sharing networks, away from the prying eyes of the RIAA and MPAA fascists. But a number of other startups that also allow private file sharing have launched in the last year as well, and all are fighting for user attention.

AllPeers does have many passionate users, and some of them will now contribute to the open source project. The first few comments to the announcement are very positive - hopefully this will help AllPeers gain momentum.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/100089220/

The W3C has publicly invited browser vendors, application developers, and content designers to help design the next version of HTML by participating in the new W3C HTML Working Group.

Ian Hickson commented over at the WHATWG:

Surprisingly, the W3C never actually contacted the WHATWG during the chartering process. However, the WHATWG model has clearly had some influence on the creation of this group, and the charter says that the W3C will try to “actively pursue convergence with WHATWG”. Hopefully they will get in contact soon.

Want to be part of the effort? Join up.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/w3c-relaunches-html-activity

The big social networks continue to side with Advertising networks to help monetize their sites. MySpace signed a $900 million deal with Google in August 2006, and Facebook countered by choosing Microsoft a couple of weeks later. This morning, Friendster announced a mult-year exclusive deal to work with Google on both search and keyword-targeted advertising.

The financial terms are not being disclosed. Friendster is not in the same league as MySpace and Facebook, but this is still a win for Google. Friendster generates 6 billion or so page views per month, about 1/6 of MySpace.

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/~3/100072356/

This is the site that appears when residents of Turkey attempt to go to YouTube, the popular video sharing site owned by Google. The text, translated to English, reads “Access to www.youtube.com site has been suspended in accordance with decision no: 2007/384 dated 06.03.2007 of Istanbul First Criminal Peace Court.”

The reason for the ban: a video, which has now been taken down, showing Greeks criticizing Turkey and insulting Turkey’s national flag and founding father, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. A good background story is here, and the news broke on this site (in Turkish only).

All public internet access in Turkey is provided by Turk Telecom via adsl, so the takedown is relatively simple.

A group of Turkish bloggers has said that they will try to fight this in Turkey, and get YouTube reinstated. See the Times for more information.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/100068536/

We blogged before about Desktop Matters, the conference on Java desktop development we’re holding this week in San Jose. We’ve decided to open up the party on Thursday night to everyone, and we’re very keen to get the Ajaxian and Desktop communities together to get to know each other better and have a good time.

We’ll have some catered food there, not sure how long it will last ;-). Hope to see you there.

The party is at 8:00 pm and located at the Wyndham San Jose Hotel

if (GBrowserIsCompatible()) {
var map = new GMap2(document.getElementById(”map”));
var point = new GLatLng(37.360964, -121.908886);
var html = ”

Ajaxian Party Thursday Night

Come join us at the Wyndham San Jose Hotel
at 8pm on 1350 N 1st St, San Jose, CA 95112

“;

map.addControl(new GMapTypeControl());
map.addControl(new GLargeMapControl());
map.addControl(new GScaleControl());

map.setCenter(point, 16);

var marker = new GMarker(point);
GEvent.addListener(marker, “click”, function() {
marker.openInfoWindowHtml(html);
});

map.addOverlay(marker);
marker.openInfoWindowHtml(html);
}
//]]>

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/ajaxian-party-this-thursday-in-san-jose

A new release of Visual Studio “Orcas” shows off the intellisense features nicely, including:

• Proactive Completion List: No more waiting for ‘.’
• Keywords in Completion List: fun your way to function
• ASP.NET AJAX Concepts in Completion List: Direct support for Atlas
• IntelliSense from Script Libraries for ASPX Pages: Now you can see objects that exist in other external script files

This comes along with the release of an updated Ajax Control Toolkit.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/aspnet-ajax-aware-javascript-intellisense

Even with our team scattered to the four winds, CrunchGear is still pumping out the hits. Have a busted iPod? Matt Hickey has the cure. Want OS X Leopard? It’s on its way. Want to know what happens when you’re Tasered? Our Seth Porges offers a fascinating look at the litigious — and dangerous — world of stun guns.

Finally, want to make yourself sound like Mickey Mouse or Sauron? Enter our Scramby contest.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/99994935/

Alari Aho has created Toggl, an Ajax based timetracker tool written in Ruby on Rails that uses several Ajax tehniques, including pre-fetch and
asynchronous postings.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/toggl-ajax-based-timetracker-tool