Ajax Girl

Mobile social networking company Amp’d Mobile has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Delaware.

Amp’d Mobile competed with VelvetPuffin, Loopt and Helio in an attempt to deliver a compelling mobile based social networking product to a worldwide marketplace of 2.6 billion cell phone users.

According to mocoNews, Amp’d Mobile owes $33 million Verizon Wireless, $16 million to Motorola and $10 million to Vivendi. Smaller creditors include BestBuy at $8 million and MTV Networks: $1.8 million. Total debt is more than $100 million with assets less than that figure.

Amp’d Mobile had previously taken $360 million in funding over 5 rounds. Investors include RedPoint Ventures, Highland Capital Partners and Columbia Capital.

What can you say about a company that blows $360 million in funding other than wow! No doubt that some will see the demise of Amp’d Mobile as the tip of an industry iceberg and certainly it would be one of the biggest, if not the biggest corporate failure of a Web 2.0 related company. However, as much as it would be easy to draw that conclusion, Amp’d Mobile is not a typical Web 2.0 start up. The company is not a web only play; Amp’d Mobile provided EVDO mobile access and handsets in conjunction with their social networking platform. It probably sits more as a telco failure than a strict Web 2.0 one, but we’ve added Amp’d Mobile to the TechCrunch Deadpool none the less.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/121744114/

RSSCalendar, an online calendar application dating back to 2004, is up for sale on eBay.

RSSCalendar joins SynapseLife and Kiko in taking the eBay exit path. Interestingly the sale creates a hat trick in starting prices: all three listed with starting bids of $50,000.

RSSCalendar is a collaborative calendar application that supports the creation of RSS feeds and includes import support for Outlook and ICal. Developer John Pacchetti had previous listed the service for sale of the TechCrunch forums in March. Although Pacchetti is aiming to sell the site as an ongoing concern, RSSCalendar now tentatively enters the TechCrunch Deadpool.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/121739242/

Kevin Rose has announced that Digg will be expanding to cover product and service reviews.

Rose told the audience at The Next Web Conference Friday that Digg is currently working on a “big project” that will deliver significant enhancements to Digg in the next 6 to 12 months. The new Digg will allow users to Digg anything including services, products and images.

Rose said that context was also an issue for Digg; stories are being buried under the weight of noise making it more and more difficult for users to seek out and find niche stories. Digg is developing a smart suggestion system that will consider the type of stories a user has dugg previously then suggest similar stories based on that history.

The move to product and service reviews seems like the logical next field of conquest for Digg. Having popularized social voting for news why not take the wildly popular concept to the offline world. There will be challenges, but as a Digg user I’m looking forward to seeing what they have in store.

(via Read/Write Web)

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/121621749/

I just came across Weewar, an online war game that combines elements of risk and other strategy games. It’s fairly simple pixel art, but they’ve gained an extremely loyal following during their beta period.

Like Kdice (which I am playing right now while writing this), Desktop Tower Defense and other games we’ve covered, Weewar is is a highly addictive game. You’ll quickly get sucked into playing for hours at a time against other human opponents.

This is a turn based game. Any player can start a game, first by choosing from a number of terrains and then inviting other players. You take over factories and set them to produce more armies, tanks, etc., which then move on to take over yet more factories or battle other players. Not everyone has to be around at the same time to play the game. You have your turn, and then the next player is notified by email that it is their turn.

The game is still in private beta - they’re blog indicates that they’ve had multiple server crashes and slowdowns from too many players at once. Sign up here to get into the beta.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/121616290/

Facebook Polls launched Friday night with a fair bit of fanfare. It’s a tool with a wealth of possibilities but be warned: don’t mention the competition in your poll questions!

My first attempt at creating a Facebook poll:

After initial surprise I tried a few related questions. “Is Facebook better?” works indicating that Facebook is not restricted text. Is Facebook better than Yahoo, Google and Microsoft all work.

What about the direct competition?

Is Facebook Better Than Orkut? The poll question contains restricted text.

Is Facebook better than Friendster? The poll question contains restricted text.

Is Facebook better than Communist China? BINGO. works, no error message.

Is Facebook Precious? this one works

So is Facebook better than MySpace? Whereas News Corp blocks widget providers, Facebook blocks free speech. I know which one annoys me more. Let’s just hope it’s not a sign of things to come.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/121607612/

San Francisco-based Keibi Technologies has raised around $6 million in Series B funding from Catamount Ventures and Hunt Ventures, according to a post at Alarm:Clock.

The media discovery and moderation platform aims to help communities and media add visibility to user-generated content. Keibi’s holistic approach uses web semantic and recognition engines to provide robust user generated content categorization that can be leveraged for content discovery, community moderation, and brand protection.

Keibi was founded by Paul Remer, the former general counsel for photo social network Piczo.

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/~3/121576007/

Music has been a killer app on the web ever since Napster met mp3 in 1999, and we’ve seen a lot of startups designing new social applications around it. Some startups are creating communities around discovering new music, others are helping you store and remotely access the music you already have. Atlanta-based Maestro is doing both.

Maestro lets you stream music from your computer across the web, for easy listening anywhere. This is a lot like what music locker services Oboe, MediaMaster, and Orb are doing with a social networking twist. Not only can you stream music from your own computer using Maestro, but you can also stream music from your friends on the network (Oboe lets you share channels with friends, but through email links). They plan on expanding to other types of media in the future.

To start streaming music, you need to download “Maestro Connector” and tell it where you stash your music. Maestro then sucks down all the meta-data (location, artist, album, length) and logs it in your profile online. From there, you can play songs complete with album art and organize your music into playlists. The songs aren’t uploaded to the service like MediaMaster, Orb, or Oboe, but instead streamed directly from your computer. The major drawback, of course, is that you can’t play your music anywhere unless you leave your main computer on.

But if your music server is off, don’t worry, because you can listen to music off your friend’s computers. Their playlists show up along with yours on your playlist page or from within an embeddable player widget like the one on the co-founder’s MySpace page. However, streaming from your friends may put an unnecessary strain on their bandwidth. I imagine some bandwidth rules will be implemented to prevent abuse. If their computer is offline too, you can still see what music they have and what their most recently played tracks were. Since they haven’t implemented any social music recommendation, these recently played lists are all you have to go on for finding new music.

Maestro is looking for funding and is currently testing amongst a small group in private beta. You can apply for an account on their site.

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/~3/121558745/