Ajax Girl

It looks like there’s a good chance today’s SpaceX launch will be successful - Founder Elon Musk just wrote that they made it into space. The maiden launch attempt one year ago didn’t go so well, and today’s launch was almost aborted.

Congratulations to the SpaceX team. This is an awesome private sector accomplishment. There’s much more about this story on CruchGear.

Update 6:56 PM: They lost contact with the rocket before it reached the intended orbit. “The rolling motion caused the second stage engine to shut down early” and it may have re-entered the atmosphere. Still, they made it into Space.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/103201548/

New York based call recording company 2ReCall just recently launched their initial call recording product last week. The new service lets you record any US domestic outgoing call by first dialing into an 800 number and then number you want to call. The old fashioned way of recording calls consisted of Spy-vs-Spy type tape recorders and suction mics. VOIP changed that a bit, making it dead simple to grab the conversation as it passes through your phone client, although it leaves you chained to the desk. 2ReCall’s 800 number means you can record an outgoing call on any phone. Over the coming year the service will be able to record inbound calls as well, with the ultimate goal being a completely seamless solution that records all calls on the number.

When calls are recorded, they are stored on your online 2ReCall account in .wav or .mp3 format where you can download, review, and annotate them. Although the service works by 800 number, you must first by a 500MB storage account for $4.95/month and pay 20 cents a minute or a 1GB account for $9.95/month and pay 15 cents a minute to use it.

Currently call recording is a rats nest of legal issues, with 38 states only needing one party’s permission and the other twelve needing both parties’ consent before recording a call. It gets complicated when calling between states. They cover the legal issues deeper in their FAQ.

While the service is geared to anyone needing to frequently record their calls (journalists, professionals, conference calls), the founders have already used the service to catch one stonewalling architect. The architect, who was reviewing plans for one of the founder’s developments, said he wouldn’t let him build a house on their property regardless of whether they met the development guidelines or not. Armed with the tape of their conversation, the reviewing architect backed down and settled the matter out of court.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/103184070/

37Signals has added an online contact manager to their online productivity suite. The new product, Highrise, to keep track of all the contacts you’ve inevitably made while drumming up clients for your Basecamp projects. The customer resource management (CRM) space is packed with a lot of big players, Salesforce and NetSuite being two of the largest.

37Signals is taking a more streamlined approach from the big guys, opting for a laser focus on only online contact management, serving as a good companion to Outlook. Contacts can be added manually or imported from Basecamp and vCards. Each of the contacts you add to Highrise gets a bio complete with photo and can be assigned task to-do lists and labeled with notes (including images and files). Each of these contacts can be locked down through user permissions, and dropped into project groups that keep your contacts, notes and files all together. If logging on is too much, you can also CC email notes to Highrise, which it will attach to the right contact.

Their basic business accounts start at $24/month for 6 users and 5,000 contacts, and work their way up to $149/month for unlimited users and 50,000 contacts.

Zoho has a similar CRM application that’s free with all features for 3 users and $12/month for each additional user. However, Zoho CRM is better suited for the sales pipeline, tracking leads from potentials to completed sales and forecasts. Zoho CRM also integrates with your web forms so leads can go right from your site to the form your database, and back out again as a .csv export.

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/~3/103177897/

There’s a post on the Facebook blog today announcing a new group called “Facebook Sneak Preview” where they will show upcoming feature additions and changes before they are made live.

My bet is that this is their response to the user backlash and protests last year after after Facebook made some fairly dramatic changes to the site. With the new group, Facebook can ease users into the new stuff, and also get their feedback before it goes live. It’s an easy way to build consensus and dissolve criticism before it gains any steam.

The first batch of upcoming changes suggest Facebook is regrouping a bit, and redesigning things to help organize all of the new features they’ve added over the last year.

A simplified design. For those of the Facebook old guard, you’ve watched the number of features on the site grow. The new design will bring the focus back to the core elements, so the links you use the most often are easiest to find, while the others have new sensible homes. This will also help beginners understand how to get started. The Profile page will be a little sleeker, with your status rearranged, quick links under the profile picture and a mini-er Mini-Feed.

We’ve added a screenshot of how the new profile pages may look below. They are also simplifying message inboxes and networks.

Facebook’s drive to keep things neat and clean on the site is in stark contrast to MySpace’s chaos ridden widget hell. MySpace obviously does ok regardless. But I keep thinking that Facebook’s focus on order is very much in line with Google’s thinking on the matter. It may be time to start some new rumors about those two getting together, since Yahoo is obviously not going to pull the trigger on an acquisition. If Facebook does get acquired, it will be a larger deal than YouTube’s $1.65 billion.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/103168739/

We wrote about Jaxtr in December when it launched its private beta. Like many of the consumer facing VOIP startups that popped up last year, they are helping people make calls from one normal phone to another, with their service in between.

Now, normal phones are perfectly capable of calling normal phones already. What Jaxtr and others do is allow the call to be initiated from a website. Also, both parties are called from Jaxtr, so there are no call tolls. And phone numbers are not communicated to either party.

Jaxtr users place a widget on their website (ours is above). Others can then call the user by entering their own phone number. The caller’s phone rings, and then the other party’s phone rings. Then you have a phone conversation. Jaxtr also allows people to send the publisher a text message or just send them a voicemail directly (text messages and voicemails are administered on the Jaxtr site, not on your phone). Jaxtr never discloses the call recipient’s phone number so you can install a widget without ever exposing personal information. Users can also block callers or specify on a per-caller basis which callers can reach them live and which get routed to voice mail.

Jaxtr is a free service but has some limitations. Currently, users can receive 100 minutes of calls per month. After the limit is reached, calls are routed to the voicemail service instead.

After a first call is successfully initiated, Jaxtr provides the caller with a unique, permanent number, which they can use to call the same person in the future. Local toll rates apply, of course.

This isn’t a useful way for larger sites to communicate with users (I place the widget above with some trepidation), but it is a fantastic way for MySpace users with a small group of friends to stay in touch, and have phone conversations without giving out any personal information. It’s also a brilliant way for small businesses with a website to let their customers contact them.

Go crazy with the widget above.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/103133860/

CBS announced the acquisition of MaxPreps, the largest high school sports site, earlier today.

The acquisition price was not disclosed, but we’re digging. We’re hearing that the company was asking for $20+ million.

Comscore says MaxPreps has about 674,000 unique monthly visitors and 14 million month page views. Traffic is way down from a year ago - March 2006 showed 26 million page views.

MaxPreps raised $8.5 million in capital from DFJ Frontier, BEV Capital and Dolphin Equity. The Company is located near Sacramento, California.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/103120984/

I’ve been doing 98% of our customer/tech support for about 3 years now and it’s time to pass the torch to someone who’s better at it than I am

We’re looking for someone (Chicago based or remote—it doesn’t matter) who can head up customer support.

All email
We get about 125-150 emails a day from customers across our entire range of products. About half of them are really quick answers (under a minute with a standard response or FAQ link), another quarter are a touch more involved, and the remaining quarter can take a 5-10+ minutes each depending on the issue.

We’d also like this person to browse the forums for our products and pop in and offer a hand when people are stuck.

Passion wanted
We’re looking for someone who is passionate about 37signals, passionate about simple solutions to common problems, and passionate about helping people get back on track quickly. Strong writing skills and the ability to get to the point quick are a big plus.

Think you’re the one?
If you think you’re the guy or gal, please drop me a line at jason at 37signals dot com. Do me a favor and include “Customer Support Position” in the subject so I can easily corral these into the proper folder.

I can’t promise I’ll respond to each one, but I will review them and get in touch if we think you may be the right person.

Thanks.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/330-help-wanted-customertech-support-and-community-manager

37 Signals has released Highrise, a “shared contact manager and task list”. Basecamp is about projects. Highrise is about people.

There is a healthy amount of Ajax used, but not in a flashy way. You will find a lot of inline editing, and sections expanding and contracting allowing you to get a lot of work done in a small area (as apposed to bouncing between pages).

All in all it looks very much like other 37 Signals products, and there are some subtle differences. I noticed that they are getting CSS/JavaScript from different subdomains now.

In the past you would see “/javascript/application.js” whereas now you see “http://asset1.highrisehq.com/stylesheets/print/application.css?1174401102″ so I wonder if the architecture is slightly changed, and what their reason was for making this explicit.

You will see an “Add Person” button all over. Clicking on that has the page getting taken over with a form to add your buddy (and doesn’t take you to the /person/create page). It doesn’t appear that the back button has been hacked here, so if you hit back expecting to go to the page before you clicked on add person, you will go back a page.

The only slightly disappointment was how the free account is really bare bones. You don’t get any of the cool features such as cases, and 25 contacts is pretty meaningless. I also noticed that when you signup the order of accounts had flipped. Subtle. Of course, I do not blame them for trying to sell accounts and make money. All power to them.

They are creating a nice portfolio of products. I am interested to see if they will integrate more (they do a good job with integrating writeboard / basecamp / chats) both within their own product line, and even more so with email (they do a good job at letting you email the system).

Finally, I see a large whole out there. I want a contacts/address book service that lives up in the cloud, that I can use an API to talk too. I don’t want to type in my contacts more than once. On the Mac my apps share the address book, and I want the same on the web.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/37-signals-highrise-released

T.J. VanSlyke is working on an application using XUL Runner “to deploy a large-scale application platform which requires a hefty Javascript class hierarchy.”

T.J. took Dean Edwards Base.js and added Base.exportDotGraph() allowing GraphViz to show the class hierarchy.

However, there is one caveat with this. Since Javascript cannot guess at the identifiers you use to declare each class, we must explicitly define the identifier we would like to use in our diagrams. To maintain backward compatibility, I have simply implemented this as a property of the prototype of the class. The Kale class

thus becomes:

We can then feed our example.dot file into dot and generate a PNG image:

dot -Tpng example.dot -o example.png

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/javascript-inheritance-diagrams-with-graphviz-and-basejs

Ring. It’s for you.

Ping. You’ve got mail.

It’s a new contact, a lead, a customer, a journalist. It’s someone saying something important you need to remember.

What do you do now? Where do you log notes from the conversation? Where do you put the contact information? Where do you set up your next action?

In Highrise.

The answer to the avalanche
So many people. So many phone calls, emails, notes, follow-ups, and tasks. Who’s this person again? When did we last speak? What did we talk about? Has anyone else in my company talked to this person? What’s supposed to happen next? Highrise is here to keep track of it all.

A personal assistant for everyone in your company
When you use Highrise, contacts and communication history can be shared across your entire company. No more “Jim has the client’s number and he’s out of the office today.” No more “I don’t know what Jane told the printer last week.” No more “Oops, I didn’t know you already called her back — I just did too.” With Highrise, everyone’s on the same page.

One history, many interactions
Highrise is your homebase for everyone that’s important to your business. It puts together all those little points of contact so you can see the bigger picture. It makes one history out of many interactions. Highrise helps you make sense of it all.

Not too little, not too much
Your address book doesn’t do enough. Traditional CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software tries to do too much. That’s why we built Highrise. It’s the just-right, more thoughtful way to keep track of the people, conversations, and tasks that are the lifelines of your business.

Highrise. Good business is about people. Keep in touch.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/329-launch-highrise