Ajax Girl

Microsoft has gathered a team of twenty or more “rock star” developers who’ve been tasked at building Microsoft’s next generation search engine, a source has told us. The team, which supposedly came together recently, is based at Microsoft’s Silicon Valley headquarters in Mountain View.

We have few details on their approach to the product, other than hearing that it is definitely a “horizontal” engine (so, it’s not limited to a specific vertical like images), and is “very cool.”

Microsoft moved Sanaz Ahari down to Silicon Valley to lead the project. Ahari was previously on the Live.com team, and was reportedly the youngest lead product manager in Microsoft history at 23. She was part of the core team that developed the start.com product (later renamed live.com) and the gadgets what are part of it and are being married to the Vista desktop. Fast Company recently wrote an article on her.

Ahari has not responded to an email; I also have an email into Microsoft PR.

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/~3/121956641/

WhosOff is an online workplace leave management service that makes organizing time off easy.

The service is directed at administrators, company owners and managers who deal directly with managing time off, from keeping a record of leave taken to balancing the demands of future leave requests.

WhosOff is not simply an administrator controlled database where information is gathered. WhosOff supports full employee access; employees can submit requests for leave or even log sick days. Appointed administrators can then accept or decline requests no matter where they are; being a web based platform decentralizes user access.

WhosOff encourages staff to be more considerate in booking and planning their holidays by encouraging them to book in advance. Last minute requests are minimized by sharing cross business or departmental leave information so all employees can see the impact of any holiday request.

Providing a leave management package as a standalone product may seem a little strange. Many large businesses would already have similar functionality built into professional human resources software and wouldn’t need something like this, however for SMEs WhosOff is a smart, free way to manage staff time off.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/121932445/

The Next Web Conference was held in Amsterdam last Friday (June 1). The organizers had a last minute speaker back-out: Plazes CEO Felix Petersen emailed them the day before the conference to say that he couldn’t make it because they were dealing with bugs on their new product, and that his “9 month old daughter has become sick.”

The problem, though, is that Peterson didn’t stay home to work on their product and take care of his daughter. He was actually attending a competing conference, Reboot, in Copenhagen.

How was this discovered? The Next Web guys used Petersen’s own Plazes, a service which shows where users are at any given time. Peterson’s Plazes account clearly showed him in Copenhagen at Reboot on June 1, drinking wine and beer, listening to music, and enjoying “incredible conversations.” “Reboot just rocks,” he writes.

Needless to say the Next Web guys were somewhat offended. And they outed Peterson in a big way today. Next Web co-founder Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten wrote about the whole incident on his personal blog. He writes:

Ok, Reboot seems to rock after some dinner, beer and wine. Great. The amazing thing is not that Felix would rather go to Reboot. I respect that. The amazing thing is that someone would lie about the health of his children to be able to drink beer at another conference and then assume that no one would find out.

I have an email in to Peterson for his side of the story. No word back yet.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/121892765/