Ajax Girl

When Slacker initially launched their three prong web, desktop, and portable music service, we felt they needed a lot of cash in the bank to take on incumbents like Last.fm and iTunes. It looks like they got that start, with the addition of a whopping $40 million on top of the original $13.5 million series A, according to PEHub. Centennial Ventures and Rho Ventures were new investors, with Austin Ventures, Mission Ventures, and Sevin Rosen Funds returning.

So far Slacker has released two of their three pieces, a web player, and a desktop player. Last.fm, which focused on a web and desktop player, sold for $280 million to CBS after raising $5 million. This additional cash will most likely be going toward product development and manufacturing for the TBA WiFi portable music player and satellite car kit.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/121561603/

Demofuse allows users to create website tours that are embedded in a site as opposed to traditional flash based site tours.

Demofuse is a one man labour of love. Toronto based Greg Thomson created and coded the site in 8 months without outside assistance, an impressive feat in a competitive industry.

The service works by using Ajax overlays that allow users to create slides from websites. Users simply click on the page they want included in the slide show and Demofuse creates a slide with that page.

Slides can include highlights, arrows and cursor clicks. There is also the ability to add script to a slide.

We covered web based screencast maker Screencast-O-Matic May 29 and Demofuse fits into a similar category. Like Screencast-O-Matic this isn’t a tool for professionals, yet for casual users looking at creating website focused interactive tours and presentations Demofuse would be ideal.

For a sample TechCrunch tour click the button.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/121545696/

Facebook just launched a new product tonight called Facebook Polls - look for a link in the bottom navigation area next to “Advertising.”

This is an advertising product that is designed to generate revenue. Users can able to create a poll question and up to five answer choices, and then target the poll based on gender, age, location or profile keyword.

The polls are not free - Facebook charges you a variable amount based on how quickly you want results. You tell Facebook how many results you want and how much you are wiling to pay per result. The more you offer, the more quickly results are returned to you. Prices currently range from $.10 to $1.00 per data point, plus an initial $5 insertion fee. Facebook will estimate the completion time for the poll based on how much you bid.

Polls appear in Facebook users’ news feed.

I imagine brand advertisers and other market researchers will love this product. It will give them quick and targeted insights into the tastes and preferences of Facebook’s 20+ million users in near real-time.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/121536890/

When you confirm a friend on facebook, you are asked to state how you know the person. But the options are simply too narrow. “We hooked up” is rarely an appropriate way to describe someone you know through blogging, networking, etc. In fact, most of the options are not really useful for the millions of non-college student adults flooding into the service. It’s time to add more options.

There are fourteen options to choose from (see image above), but I’ve never found a single one that describes any of my friendships appropriately. Dave Winer suggests a number of new choices, including “delighted by” and “fantasizes about”.

I think there should be a box where free text can be added. And choices should include adult-friendly options like “met at conference” or “investor.”

What do you think? What options would you choose?

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/121524566/

If you haven’t heard, our fellow Chicagoans at Feedburner are now part of Google. The official announcement was made today.

Congrats to the Feedburner crew and Google. Everyone I know at Feedburner is quality. Feedburner’s man in charge, Dick Costolo, is one the sharpest (and funniest) people I’ve been fortunate enough to meet in the past few years.

Great companies are made of great people and Google definitely gets greater with this acquisition.

Well done on both sides.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/442-feedburner-to-google

Google announced the acquisition of Feedburner today on their corporate blog. Feedburner CEO Dick Costolo confirms it as well on the Feedburner blog. The are not disclosing the price, but our source said it was around $100 million when we wrote about the deal last week, and we still believe that figure is accurate.

Google doesn’t go into a lot of detail on why they bought the company, but they do say they are constantly looking for ways to “identify and offer new tools for content creators and website publishers” and “give AdWords advertisers broader distribution to an even wider audience of users.”

That tells me one thing: look for the option to include Adwords in your feed sometime very soon. Feedburner already sells adds into feeds on a CPM basis. Google’s going to crank this up.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/121471994/

Christophe Coenraets always brings the goods when you need a quick demo. He created the SQLAdmin tool for Google Gears that Kevin Lynch demonstrated yesterday.

This app does have the side effect of showing me that I am not a mousey person. I kept clicking on “CREATE DATABASE” when I was meant to drag and drop it onto the SQL query box. Darn drag and drop on the web

It is cool that Christophe has given us a prettier UI for playing with the local database (there is a dbquery tool in the Google Gears SDK too), and I am sure we will see more great work from Adobe (and their work always looks nice doesn’t it!).

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/flex-based-sqladmin-for-google-gears

IDEO designer Jane Fulton Suri figures out unmet consumer needs by watching ordinary people doing ordinary things.

As the leader of the “human factors” group at IDEO, the international design consultancy, she and her colleagues will watch kids brushing their teeth, parents pushing strollers, or patients checking in at the emergency room, trying to find opportunities for design to improve the experience. Yet often that means looking for something less obvious: the ways in which the experience can improve the design.

Their observations have brought rubber grips to Oral-B’s toothbrushes, raised the height of Even-Flo’s strollers, and streamlined DePaul Health Center’s check-in processes. For Fulton Suri it’s as if the world is one big beta test, in which every feature is begging for improvement.

“Thoughtless Acts” is her book that shows random acts of design witnessed in everyday life. Some shots from the book below.

Creative Generalist has an interview with Suri:

In your experience, what type of personality typically makes the best observer? I find that curiosity, open-mindedness, and imagination are important. It helps to be non-judgmental, able to move easily from noticing detail to thinking about patterns and the big picture, perceptive about (their own and other) people’s behavior, motivations, and personally genuinely interested in other people’s points of reference.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/440-ideos-jane-fulton-suri-observes-thoughtless-acts

Dan Yoder has recently developed a small (2.5k) JavaScript library for creating top-down recursive descent LLk parsers, Cruiser.

Dan uses it himself to parse stylesheets, to support CSS3 selectors.

Here is the parser:

Parse away.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/the-cruiser-parser-library

Asking how many ways you can make a search engine is like asking how many ways you can scramble an egg, there are a number of different ways and although it’s not rocket science you can still end up with something inedible.

People powered search is the trendiest of egg scrambling search engine recipes at the moment. Service such as ChaCha have contractual employees answering search queries in real time. The Jason Calacanis vehicle Mahalo launched in alpha this week with a Wikipedia meets Google model which aims to provide pre-written results for 10,000 search queries.

Danville, CA based Sproose marries human powered search to Digg.

Sproose is a personalized search engine that combines social networking with peer-moderated rankings giving users the ability to prioritize, customize and fine-tune searches to produce relevant web search results.

Sproose users can effectively categorize and index relevant sites and tailor those for personal or group use. Through collective moderation and scoring users can sort through existing sites to assemble only the most appropriate results.

The results aren’t bad. It isn’t clear where the search results are originally pulled from (I’d guess Google) and the social voting feature on link priority creates a different search experience. Video results come from Blinkx and Sproose indexes over 25,000 sources for news. Whether it will take is another matter; everyone wants to be the next Google and there is no shortage of competitors. I can honestly say though that I’ve seen many worse than Sproose.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/121371248/