Ajax Girl

eBay is increasing affiliate payouts substantially on June 1, 2007. For smaller affiliates, the gains will be over 2x on new customer signups and a 25% increase in revenue share. Both the current and new affiliate fees are listed here, and I’ve pasted them below.

This is good news for startups that directly or indirectly earn revenue from eBay affiliate fees, and it may encourage other ecommerce sites to increase their own payouts as well.

eBay has not made any statement on why they are increasing the rates. Their revenues have been growing nicely year over year, although Comscore shows flat uniques and downward page views over the last twelve months. Their stock price has also been trending down. Getting new users into the service is a priority, and their affiliate network is far more efficient than standard advertising.

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/~3/117025347/

MySpace will acquire Flektor, a just-launched service that allows users to create widgets from photos, video and text, according to two sources with knowledge of the deal. This comes right after the news of MySpace’s pending acquisition of Photobucket last week for $250-$300 million. This will be a much smaller deal, in the $10-$20 million range, possibly with an earnout.

Flektor competes with more established startups like Slide and RockYou, and launched only a few weeks ago. Still, insiders say that the company has developed a killer set of tools to create slide shows as well as much more elaborate widgets that include audio, video, photos, text, effects and transitions. In our testing v. Slide and RockYou, Flektor came out way ahead in usability and features.

It’s an odd acquisition, though, since Photobucket also has a slide creation product that competes with Flektor.

But Flektor has a killer team of founders, Jason Rubin and Andy Gavin, who previously co-founded game developer Naughty Dog (Crash Bandicoot and Jak Daxter) and were acquired by Sony Computer Entertainment in 2000. Rubin and Gavin have leveraged their experience with gaming to create an awesome user experience at Flektor. Also, Flektor is custom code built on Flex, whereas Photobucket’s competing offering is build with Adobe’s tools. If Adobe decided to compete directly in this space, MySpace will be in a better position owning their own code.

The acquisition also makes sense from a strategic standpoint. MySpace has massive distribution as the largest site on the Internet. Photobucket brings storage to the table, and the Flektor team looks to be able to create awesome tools for users to create content. The three services actually fit together nicely.

We’ve emailed MySpace and Flektor for comment, nothing from them yet.

See our previous coverage of Slide, RockYou and Photobucket.

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/~3/116966381/

Bringo solves one of the most frustrating problems that we encounter daily: phone trees. Call a customer service phone number and end up in automated operator hell.

I’ve memorized the keys you have to hit for United Airlines to get to an operator as fast as possible. With other companies I just keep saying “operator” while hitting # over and over again. Sometimes it works. With Bringo, none of that matters any more. You don’t even need to dial your phone. Just find the company you want to talk to in their directory, type in your phone number, and a couple of minutes later Bringo calls you and connects you to an operator at that company. I tried it with Air Canada and it worked absolutely perfectly.

They need to create a stripped down mobile version of this as quickly as possible.

Thanks for the tip Narendra (Biz Stone also mentioned them recently).

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/116949397/

Truemors, Guy Kawasaki’s new startup, opened to the public about an hour ago.

We covered them last week when we were able to get into the beta. Truemors is a rumor reporting site. Users text, email or call in a rumor and other users vote on it. Popular rumors make it to the home page.

Top “truemors” right now: NBC to launch Heroes spinoff, a public scandal involving an Indian cricket star, and a story about a “hot chick” robbing an Austin bank.

I like the idea of truemors but they are launching very broadly. Digg became popular based on focusing on a tech niche to start (and it may be stuck there as it tries to expand). Truemors launches with ten different categories. The content may be too varied to appeal to any distinct audience.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/116943751/

I was set to speak tonight in NYC at an AIGA Small Talk event, but I had to cancel due to illness. You don’t want what I’ve got unless you have a coughing fetish.

The event has been rescheduled for May 31. Sorry I wasn’t able to make it tonight. I’m glad the AIGA was so cool about it and they were able to reschedule. Special thanks to Khoi for being so accommodating.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/418-aiga-small-talk-in-nyc-event-rescheduled

We’ve just launched the new 37signals product blog at productblog.37signals.com (subscribe to the RSS feed). Here you’ll find everything you want to know about our products:

• Tips and tricks
• Feature updates
• Extras, widgets, API integrations, etc.
• Case studies
• Press clips
• Coupons
• And more…

We created this new blog because we want customers to have one place to check for news and information regarding all 37signals products.

We’ll still post occasional product news here at Signal vs. Noise like we always have, but the new product blog is the place to get the scoop on Basecamp, Highrise, Campfire, Ta-Da List, and Writeboard.

We’ll be tweaking some details and design elements over the next few weeks, but we wanted to get it out there now since 95% of the value exists already.

(Note: The launch of this universal 37signals product blog means the end of the line for Everything Basecamp and Everything Backpack. the individual blogs we had for those products.)

If there’s anything you’d like to see there, if you’ve got a tip that other customers might enjoy, or if you think you’d make for an interesting case study, let us know. We’re really looking to build up the site with good, customer-driven content so don’t be bashful.

Also, we’ll be adding a Getting Real section to the site shortly and we’re on the lookout for success stories. If you’ve found Getting Real helpful, tell us about it.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/417-launch-the-37signals-product-blog

John Rice gave a presentation at JavaOne on using Dtrace to instrument Firefox.

The JavaScript VM has long been a black box. We long for monitoring tools that give us access to the runtime as we are used to on the JVM or CLR. We may get there with Silverlight in the future.

Adding Dtrace to Mozilla is far from new, and although it isn’t an easy tweak, enables you to look deep into the innards of the JavaScript engine.

___ OVERLAP TIMES: ___ ______ ELAPSED _____
FILE FUNCTION COUNT AVG(us) SUM(us)
clock.html getSeconds 12 8 104
clock.html padZero 36 7 275
clock.html getMinutes 12 45 548
clock.html getElementById 12 53 640
clock.html getHours 12 59 714
clock.html setTimeout 12 67 807
clock.html startTime 12 1219 14637

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/dtrace-firefox-to-get-inside-the-black-box

Velocity is a popular templating system for Java developers. Velocity2JS takes the engine and has it output JavaScript functions.

Example Velocity Template

JS Output

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/velocity2js-templating-within

Google may be environmentally conscious, but they certainly not helping the rest of us get around any greener. Currently, Google’s public transit mapper, Google Transit, only deals with bastions of public transit like Orange County and Duluth Minnesota, leaving those of us in San Francisco, New York and just about everywhere else squinting at bus maps.

Transit planner HopStop, however, takes on these larger metros, providing coverage for Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, New York, Washington D.C., and several cities in New Jersey. For each city, HopStop will plot directions and estimate travel time by foot and public transit (bus / subway) between two or more addresses. It also comes with some other really useful features. You can choose which travel method you would prefer more, walking, busing, subway, or a combination of the three. Also, since you don’t always know the street address of your destination you can pick it from a map.

Aside from directions, HopStop has some nascent local guides and a business directory. And if you don’t like the interface, there’s also a developer API.

NY and London based TechCrunch readers should also check out Greg Brail’s Transit Maps.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/116798423/

MySpace have announced the launch of a new premium content section for MySpace Video in a direct challenge to YouTube.

In the coming months, MySpace Video will launch branded channels with content from National Geographic, The New York Times, Reuters, The Daily Reel, Expert Village, Flow, IGN Entertainment, Octane TV, Kush TV, Ripe TV, VBS TV, and Young Hollywood.

Jeff Berman, General Manager of Video for MySpace said in a statement that the upcoming branded channel launch continues the growing momentum of MySpace Video, “empowering [MySpace] partners to customize their own video channels and use it as a hub to create niche experience for users”. He also went on to say that the announcement was a sign of things to come for MySpace Video.

The new branded channels are provided from within MySpace Video and will contain varying video content from each provider.

It’s an interesting move by the News Corp owned MySpace. Most observers have been waiting for the launch of a new Fox driven multi-network YouTube competitor which we wrote about in December. Whether the drive to use MySpace as the conduit to take on YouTube is the long awaited move from News Corp or we are yet to see a new stand alone YouTube competitor is still unkown. Certainly you’d question News Corps strategy if they were to build MySpace in to a YouTube competitor in the premium content marketplace only to later launch a new stand alone site that would compete against both.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/116794927/