Ajax Girl

Online office suite ThinkFree joins the community sharing crowd Tuesday, with the launch of a number of new features.

The new (beta) version of ThinkFree Docs will allow users to search, share, tag and publish Microsoft Office and ThinkFree documents in an online social community, much in the same way that Flickr allows photographers to publish and share photos.

I’m told the thinking from the ThinkFree team was to get these features out to users now, with aesthetics to follow. And yet from what I’ve seen of the new service, I can’t fault the look. The new community tools build on an already pleasant interface, having nearly a YouTube feel to them (minus the videos).

The addition of tagging is immediately evident. Documents viewable by the community now come complete with ratings, embedding code, comment fields, downloading options and the obligatory post this to Digg/ Furl/ del.icio.us buttons. In many ways it’s moving into the territory previously claimed by Scribd, the new features at ThinkFree share a lot of similarity with Scribd, and yet they are not exclusive unto themselves, building upon an already very smart online Microsoft Office alternative.

Thinkfree currently has 275,000 users. Previous TechCrunch coverage here and here.

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/~3/114952440/

Yahoo began publishing the music lyrics on Yahoo Music last week - the first time they appear legally on the Internet. Today they announced a Yahoo search shortcut to find song lyrics very quickly.

Just type an artist name or song name and “+ lyrics” to see lyric results for the artist or song above other search results. See, for example, lyrics for the Beatles, U2 and the Smiths.

Yahoo Lyrics are not perfect - copyright restrictions force them to show lyrics as an image instead of free text, to avoid scraping. This prevents search engine indexing as well, though.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/114894300/

By almost any measure, MySpace got Photobucket for an absolute steal when compared to the Google YouTube deal. The companies are somewhat comparable - both have very large libraries of user-created videos, and both built their business on the back of MySpace. Photobucket also has a huge library of shared photos, a business YouTube never entered.

Google paid $1.65 billion in stock for YouTube. By the time the deal closed, the Google stock was worth nearly $1.8 billion. Photobucket is being acquired for just less than 1/5 of that - $250 million plus an earnout of up to $50 million

At the time of the announcement of their acquisition in October 2006 YouTube had very little revenue. Photobucket, however, is on track to blow through their projection of $25 million this year.

Also, the relative sizes of the two companies aren’t that far off. At the time of the acquisition, Comscore suggested that YouTube had approximately 25 million U.S. monthly visitors. Today, Photobucket has around 20 million U.S. monthly visitors, or 80% of what YouTube had when it was acquired.

Photobucket has 40 million registered users and is gaining another 85,000 or so per day. Their users are highly active, and upload a lot of content to the network. YouTube’s registered users were far below Photobucket’s 40 million at the time of their acquisition. YouTube had (and still has) a lot of traffic coming to the site to view videos, but far fewer users actually creating and posting content.

Leaving revenue aside, the traffic numbers indicate a comparable price of $1.3 billion for Photobucket, 4x the price they actually received from MySpace. To look at this another way, YouTube was paid about $67 per unique visitor. Photobucket got just $13.

Did Google overpay for YouTube? Did MySpace get Photobucket for a steal? Perhaps both. But in the end, being no. 1 in a category means you get a premium on acquisition. In the case of YouTube, that premium seems to be about 4x.

Another factor: Photobucket just didn’t generate the bidding hype that YouTube saw. It looks like the final bidders were IAC and MySpace, with a number of other bidders falling off in the last few weeks (perhaps spooked by the MySpace blockage of Photobucket videos).

In a year or so this deal is likely to look as brilliant for NewsCorp (which owns MySpace) as the MySpace acquisition was. Some would argue that they play dirty poker, but shutting Photobucket down at a crucial point in the acquisition negotiations was a brilliant move, and may have shaved hundreds of millions of dollars off of the purchase price.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/114883463/

Apparently an overzealous Photobucket employee is the source of this rumor, but we’ve confirmed it with more senior people: MySpace is acquiring Photobucket for $250 million in cash.

Photobucket has been looking for a buyer since March, when they hired Lehman Brothers to help sell the company. They were looking for $300 million or more, but may have had few bidders other than MySpace.

The companies have been in serious acquisition discussions for the last couple of weeks - A dispute that involved Photobucket videos being blocked on MySpace led to acquisition discussions, and the block was removed.

Photobucket generated $6.3 million in revenue last year and planned on hitting $25 million or more this year. They have 36 million registered users and add another 85,000 per day.

Our first coverage of Photobucket was a year ago. They’ve raised $15 million over two rounds of financing.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/114857394/

It’s six days until Mother’s Day and you don’t have anything for your mom. How about an iPod Nano and some chocolates, courtesy of Best Buy. Here’s what’s going to happen. I have two iPods lying around here and, in order to ensure they go out in time for Mom to get one, I need entries by 12:00 PM EST Wednesday, May 9 and we’ll vote until 12:00PM EST Thursday, May 10. I’ll ship out the iPods that afternoon in hopes of them arriving by Sunday, May 13. What do you need to do to win?

Read more at CG…

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/~3/114830279/

The web can bring out the worst in people. Some idiots have been DOS attacking jquery.com, and their hosts offered such good service that instead of protecting them, they shut off their service and told them to move.

I have had to deal with DOS attacks at various companies, and have been very thankful that Contegix has worked with us to fix the issues and protect us.

Learning jQuery kindly stepped up to the plate.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/jquerycom-dos-attacks

Funky pinhole panoramic camera


Casado Pinhole is a panoramic camera reduced to its simplest elements. [tx CH]

“His paintbrush is his Macintosh”

Profile of Takagi Masakatsu, visual artist and musician. He transforms video footage into “paintings in motion.”

Moleskine popups

Moleskine popups: “Done on the run with pocket tools and available light…uses two spreads, edges glued together.” (more) [via drawn]Narrative Footwear

Narrative Footwear: “Oxfords influenced by Nikes.”

Fertility chart

Sympto-thermal chart at fertilityuk.org: Could this be more complicated?

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/382-designed-casado-pinhole-takagi-masakatsu-moleskine-popups-narrative-footwear-and-fertility-chart

Highrise has always been able to import contacts from vCards or Basecamp, but now Highrise can also import your contacts from Outlook and ACT!. It feels great to check “Importing from Outlook and ACT” off the “top requests” to-do list.

Supported formats include Outlook 2003, 2007, and Outlook Express. The ACT! import works with ACT! 9.

You can import by clicking the “Import” link in the sidebar on the Contacts tab. The help section provides further guidance for importing and exporting.

We hope this helps making the move to Highrise easier!

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/407-highrise-now-imports-contacts-from-outlook-and-act

We have talked about the big debate on backwards compatibility vs. fixing things.

Chris Wilson chatted to a large crowd at MIX about the future of IE, in which he talked a little about IE 8:

However, Wilson did tell attendees that Microsoft is planning to require Web site authors to “opt-in” to standards mode when developing IE 8.0 sites.

“Five years ago, no one in the top 200 Web sites was using standards,” Wilson said. “Today it is half of the top 200 Web pages.”

Wilson acknowledged that he wasn’t sure exactly what form this kind of opt-in would take. But asking authors to opt in will “give us freedom to do some great things,” he said. By giving Microsoft permission to make IE 8.0 more standards-complaint, authors will take responsibility for breaking pages.

Wilson said to expect Microsoft to be investing across layout, object model and Ajax development fronts in IE 8.0. Specificially, Wilson said Microsoft is investing in making IE 8.0 more compliant with CSS 2.1 layout standards. Microsoft also is working to make the IE 8.0 object model more interoperable with that used by other browsers, and is looking to provide more client-side application programming interfaces (APIs) to support local storage for mash-ups, Wilson said.

Microsoft is planning to make tweaks to IE that will allow developers to more easily add extensions to its browser, Wilson said. He said Microsoft acknowledged that extensions are powerful but potentially “scary.”

Some are asking about DOCTYPE switching.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/ie-8-opt-in-for-standards-compliance

SharedBook has built a collaborative on-demand Reverse Publishing Platform. The platform automatically flows multiple streams of data (such as archived materials, user-generated content, and photographs) into a structured book product that can be purchased as is, or personalized further. The content can be retrieved from a feed or pushed via SharedBook’s open API.

This is what the SharedBook team said when asked about their choice of JavaScript libraries:

SharedBook started development before JavaScript achieved its current popularity, when there were no mature JS libraries or frameworks to build sites with. Therefore, SharedBook’s site is based on home-grown, proprietary JavaScript libraries. This is especially impressive when visiting the site: SharedBook used its proprietary libraries to create the book building process, collaboration, Web annotations, public and private book making spaces, and more.

When Web 2.0 technologies became widely available, JavaScript libraries and frameworks started appearing around the Internet. SharedBook became one of the first Web applications to integrate an open source, newly-released JS library into a live, for-profit Web site, by adopting the Dojo Toolkit (http://dojotoolkit.org/).

Dojo, together with JavaScript Object Notation (JSON), enabled SharedBook to introduce advanced features including Ajax server calls, enhanced GUI widgets, a mashup (you can embed a flash book in your blog), data integration with content sites, and client side software engineering enhancements. The decision to integrate Dojo proved a success: Dojo is now a fundamental part of SharedBook’s site, and time has proven it the leading JS library in the industry.

Here is an example of a book in action. Flip the pages

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/sharedbook-collaborative-on-demand-reverse-publishing-platform