Ajax Girl

Forget the advertising campaign debacle: There is some real news about Ask.com tonight.

The search engine, which is currently the fourth most used search service, is publicly re-launching tonight around 9 PM PST. You won’t see this when visiting the site: The home page and all results pages have been significantly overhauled and a ton of new features and resources have been added. The company has been testing the changes with a small sample group since late last year.

At the core of the changes is a move towards simplicity, though, which may count for more than the other changes. There is a significantly less cluttered home page with lots of white space. Users can skin that page with a number of options by clicking on “skins” below the search box (my favorite is “azul” if you have a wide enough screen - this is the image at the top of this post). Ask says that users will also be able to upload their own images within a month or so. Google recently started offering users the ability to personalize the home page as well.

The search results themselves are highly customized depending on what type of search is being conducted. Search for a music artist and see images of the artist along with clips from tracks via iLike in the right sidebar (Ask’s sister company, TicketMaster, recently invested in iLike). Search for a city and get different results in the sidebar - a map, weather information, the current time, photos and wikipedia information.

Ask also has a preview feature for search results - click on the binoculars next to a result and a window pops up to view the page. Ask will also tell you the weight of the page, whether it uses Flash or other plugins, and other data.

There are literally dozens of other features as well. Results can be bookmarked by clicking on the “+” icon to the right of each result, for example. Click on advanced search options and it bring it right into the page instead of redirecting like other search engines. And my personal favorite: the Ask logo and header is off to the left, meaning far more results are loaded onto each results page.

The left sidebar contains options to narrow or expand the search, which Ask CEO Jim Lanzone says are clicked on very often to help people find the right query.

Overall this is an excellent upgrade, and it may help Ask grab a market share point or two against the competition. If every 1% of the search market is worth $1 billion or more, then this investment will certainly pay off.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/122234731/

Every time I pass a store I wonder “How do they stay in business? How do they make money?” With so many businesses so empty so often you just have to wonder how it all works out. How do they make rent? How do they pay their people? How do they cover their bills? How do the owners take something home at the end of the day?

With the help of Edward Glaeser, a pioneering urban economist at Harvard, New York Magazine profiles a diverse range of New York businesses including a private school, a yoga studio, a drug dealer, a sex shop, a cab driver, a copy shop, a 4-star restaurant, and Goldman Sachs.

It’s enlightening. [via kottke]

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/447-how-do-they-make-money

As we mentioned before, CD swapping service Lala was planning on streaming any music on demand to members for free. Tonight, they’ve launched the service with Warner Music as their first official licensing partner.

Lala will now function as a hub for you music discovery and purchasing. Anyone can listen to free music on Lala, adding full songs to their playlists to listen to as they surf (64-128 kbps). But members who download a plugin can turn Lala into an online music locker that syncs their desktop music libraries to their Lala account. Long uploads aren’t necessary. If Lala already has the song in their library, they simply unlock the file to you online.

Once your music is stored online, You’ll be able to stream your library from anywhere you can access Lala. You’ll be able to purchase individual songs as well as full physical CDs (new/used). All this music will be stored to your account and able to sync directly o your iPod (and only your iPod). Downloading back to your desktop won’t be possible. Future versions will allow users to burn songs directly to CD.

The digital tracks will be watermarked .aac files. They won’t stop you from transferring the songs to friends iPods, but the service will only allow one licensed copy of that watermarked file to work on Lala at a time.

The service launch is part of huge bet Lala is making on the future of online music. Licensing fees alone are expected to cost the company $140 million over the next two years. They’ll need an average revenue of $65 per user per year to cover the cost. But Lala sees the new service as an essential update to the way we experience and purchase music.

Lala’s bet is based on two beliefs: people want to own their music, and they want to sample it in the most interactive way possible. They saw the radio’s passive sampling experience evolving into Napster’s on demand experience. But Napster was illegal, and didn’t let you easily sync music where you wanted it. Lala’s new service promises a higher quality and more comprehensive service than has ever come before.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/122202338/

I had lunch with journalist Steve Gillmor yesterday. I wanted his input on the Google/Salesforce story I was working on and so we met at our favorite hangout near San Francisco airport. But he jokingly answered all of my questions with “Yes, but what does that have to do with the iPhone?” His point was that the iPhone will change everything this year, and it was all he wanted to talk about. In particular, it changes how we will think of the integration between a computer and a device.

As of June 29, the launch date for the iPhone, the two devices will really be a single integrated computing device - you just take part of it with you when you leave home. If you can watch the new iPhone television ads that were published today and still not believe that, then I’d like to hear why.

The real hype around the iPhone hasn’t even started yet. And I can’t wait to get one of these things in my hand. I expect light posting here on June 29, as I and the rest of the team will most likely be standing in a very long line waiting to get one of these very expensive little gadgets.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/122196506/

I had lunch with journalist Steve Gillmor yesterday. I wanted his input on the Google/Salesforce story I was working on and so we met at our favorite hangout near San Francisco airport. But he jokingly answered all of my questions with “Yes, but what does that have to do with the iPhone?” His point was that the iPhone will change everything this year, and it was all he wanted to talk about. In particular, it changes how we will think of the integration between a computer and a device.

As of June 29, the launch date for the iPhone, the two devices will really be a single integrated computing device - you just take part of it with you when you leave home. If you can watch the new iPhone television ads that were published today and still not believe that, then I’d like to hear why.

The real hype around the iPhone hasn’t even started yet. And I can’t wait to get one of these things in my hand. I expect light posting here on June 29, as I and the rest of the team will most likely be standing in a very long line waiting to get one of these very expensive little gadgets.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/122196506/

Scribd, dubbed the “YouTube for Documents,” was the dark horse of their Y Combinator class, but the social document site now gives its critics pause to think.

Since launching, traffic to the site scaled quickly to 75-100,000 uniques per day with a little help from popular link aggregation sites like Digg. This past month they logged 1.73 million unique visitors.

The site gets about 1,000 new documents each day and recently launched a Facebook application, which has been added by nearly 11,000 users.

The company cites an early $40,000 convertible note from Kinsey Hills Group as getting them off the ground. Today Kinsey Hills is back, investing another $210,000 alongside $3.5 million from Redpoint, with Geoffrey Yang joining the company’s board. Sources close to the deal peg the post money valuation at $17.5 million under competitive bidding, counter to earlier financing rumors.

Scribd’s most immediate plan for the money is to expand their programming team.

See the Scribd fact sheet for more.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/122170445/

June 03, 2007 - Amman – Visual JPG is proud to announce that it has officially launched and is now running on a VPS Server that allows you to upload more photos quicker. In the short time since the site was launched, there have been nearly 3000 pictures uploaded.

Uploading a picture to the site is very easy. Not only can users simply select the photo on their computer by using the website’s browse feature, they can also transfer images from any other website by using the “URL Upload” function. These photos are now hosted online, at vjpg.com, and can then be linked to or embedded in blogs, forums, and more.

“Experience the Next Generation of Image hosting! Sign up now with Visual JPG.”

The web site is completely free to use and supports the .jpg, .bmp, .jpeg, and .gif image extensions. Users also have the ability to make the photo private so that it won’t be listed on the web site’s New, Top Rated, or Most Popular lists. In addition, Visual JPG offers Free Galleries for members of the website. The advantages of Visual JPG make it a must-use website for photo fanatics and beginners, alike.

You can visit the web site and upload your photos at http://www.vjpg.com/

Event based social network Going.com has partnered with BuyYourFriendADrink.com in a deal that will allow New York area Going.com members to buy drinks for their friends directly from their profile page.

Going.com is a rapidly growing social service with 200,000 + members covering New York, Boston and San Francisco and competes in the same space as LateNightShots.

The ability to buy some one a drink will be integrated directly below their profile picture from within Going.com. Gift recipients can then redeem their drinks at more than 60 bars and restaurants in the New York City area. To celebrate this deal, Going.com and BuyYourFriendADrink.com are offering a Buy One, Get One Free drink special for a limited time. Qualifying participants can buy someone a Drink and get a free drink of equal value of up to $20.

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/~3/122235769/

Yahoo today announced the Yahoo Search Marketing Commercial API Program that will provide businesses and developers free and open access to the Panama search marketing application program interfaces (APIs).

The program will give advertisers, developers, ad agencies and technology providers the ability to build upon Yahoo’s core search marketing technologies to enhance their existing business offerings or create brand new search marketing tools and applications.

Susan Decker, head of Yahoo!’s Advertiser & Publisher Group said that opening up Panama was all about gaining market share: “By providing open access to our technology, we are making a clear investment in our advertising partners, creating new opportunities for developers, and taking a key step toward achieving our vision to build the industry’s leading advertising and publishing ecosystem.”

Opening up Panama to free API access can be either of two things: inspired thinking or desperation. Given the huge lead time it took to deliver Panama in the first place this feels like a decision that is the former, after all nothing at Yahoo moves quickly enough to act from a position of desperation. Developers will likely pull apart the new program in the coming days and strictly from that viewpoint the offer will definitely be welcomed in the industry and could potentially throw down a stronger challenge in the quest to topple Google’s dominant Adwords platform.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/122083003/

In Google Keeps Tweaking Its Search Engine, Amit Singhal, master of Google’s ranking algorithm, and other engineers reveal more than they ever have before in the news media about how their search system works.

Here’s a story of how a new formula gets added and why Singhal ignores complaints at first…

In 2005, Bill Brougher, a Google product manager, complained that typing the phrase “teak patio Palo Alto” didn’t return a local store called the Teak Patio.

So Mr. Singhal fired up one of Google’s prized and closely guarded internal programs, called Debug, which shows how its computers evaluate each query and each Web page. He discovered that Theteakpatio.com did not show up because Google’s formulas were not giving enough importance to links from other sites about Palo Alto.

It was also a clue to a bigger problem. Finding local businesses is important to users, but Google often has to rely on only a handful of sites for clues about which businesses are best. Within two months of Mr. Brougher’s complaint, Mr. Singhal’s group had written a new mathematical formula to handle queries for hometown shops.

But Mr. Singhal often doesn’t rush to fix everything he hears about, because each change can affect the rankings of many sites. “You can’t just react on the first complaint,” he says. “You let things simmer.”

Each search match is assigned a numerical score based on more than 200 variables. But Google considers 10 diverse results better than the 10 highest scoring results…

The sites with the 10 highest scores win the coveted spots on the first search page, unless a final check shows that there is not enough “diversity” in the results. “If you have a lot of different perspectives on one page, often that is more helpful than if the page is dominated by one perspective,” Mr. Cutts says. “If someone types a product, for example, maybe you want a blog review of it, a manufacturer’s page, a place to buy it or a comparison shopping site.”

Google’s secret formula? No secret really — they just constantly grind away at it from all different angles…

“People still think that Google is the gold standard of search,” [John] Battelle says. “Their secret sauce is how these guys are doing it all in aggregate. There are 1,000 little tunings they do.”

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/444-amit-singhal-and-googles-secret-search-sauce