Ajax Girl

PAYjr teaches kids how to earn money responsibly while helping parents manage the allocation of household chores.

PAYjr offers an allowance and chore system that allows parents to assign household chores online, designate a money value for those chores, and provide a financial reward when chores are successfully completed. PAYjr supports instant messaging, e-mail and text messaging to notify children when their parents assign new chores or when money has been deposited into their PAYjr account or other savings account. Likewise PAYjr notifies parents when a chore has been completed, building up a record of chores over time.

PAYjr is sort of a CRM billing system for the family. The use of online tracking applied to kid’s chores is a good idea, adding support for TXT and IM makes it better again. Parents with kids looking for a different way of managing the allocation of chores will like PAYjr.

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/~3/123578758/

Remember The Milk is one of the early Web 2.0 entrants that keeps innovating. I think that they were probably the first popular-non-google web applicationto go offline with Gears.

They decided to take an approach similar to Google Reader’s offline model:

What can I do offline?

Just about everything that’s possible online with Remember The Milk now works offline too — not only can you access your lists, but you can add new tasks and notes, edit existing tasks (complete, postpone, prioritise, tag, and change due dates to your heart’s content), use your own personal tasks search engine, create new Smart Lists, and more.

We asked Omar Kilani of the team a couple of questions about the offline release / experience:

Why did you take the step of asking the user to go offline (as reader does) versus just taking the todo list data offline in the background?

The app state is always in sync, and everything is updated in the
background (data is stored as in-memory JS objects, and sqlite is used
as a backing store in a write-through fashion). So you can pull the
plug, lose your Internet connection, etc, and the app will notice and
switch you to offline mode.

Right now, we take a sort of hybrid modal/modeless approach –
regardless of whether the app syncs in the background, we also thought
it was important to allow the user to control the mode they’re in and
request a “sync”.

I think an analogy to this is the ‘Get Mail’ button in email clients –
most mail clients check for new mail in the background, and if you’re
using IMAP, you get notified immediately of new mail, but there’s some
security in seeing that button there, and knowing you can press it.

I think we need to improve the UI aspects of this, and we’re going to
look into doing that very soon.

How was the experience using Gears for offline?

Gears is awesome, and I believe it is the future of offline web
applications.

I personally feel it gives you all the right building blocks to do
whatever needs to be done to take an app offline.

What would you like to see the framework give you?

1. Progress indication from LocalServer! (This would be very helpful in
   communicating with the user for the situation described above with
   initial manifest download
2. A more stable WorkerPool. (It’s currently pretty easy to cause a
   browser crash with it.
3. Off the top of my head, how about bundle support in LocalServer?
   Perhaps it can go download a Zip/JAR with all your files in it, and have
   the manifest entries point into that. That would be pretty sweet.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/remember-the-milk-offline

Personalized desktops are a crowded space. Startups compete for attention against the big three of myYahoo, iGoogle and Live. TechCrunch last covered Yourminis in November 2006 with Michael describing it as a solid product, however it’s not a name many would recall in the space.

Since then Yourminis, a service from Goowy media has taken a different approach to most of its competitors. Today, with the assistance of Adobe’s Apollo platform and some clever thinking Yourminis delivers a triple play of widgets: online personalized desktop widgets, actual desktop widgets and blogs widgets.

The emphasis on widgets delivers a different experience for Yourmini’s personalized desktop. Where as you might be stuck with a 2 or 3 column layout at iGoogle, Yourmini’s layout is as fluid as you want it to be; users can drag, drop and resize widgets on the desktop to their hearts content. It’s also pretty; users have the ability to fully customize colors or upload wallpaper delivering a superior aesthetic appearance.
Yourmini’s newly supported ability to place widgets on the actual computer desktop using Apollo is a nifty step. The extensive range of widgets may not defeat a Mac user’s library, but it would go close to having a superior range to Google Desktop or Windows Vista Sidebar, and as they are the same widgets as used on the online desktop they’re good looking as well.

The ability to export widgets to any blog or website rounds out the widget triple play. There are other sites and services that offer this functionality and the ability to embed widgets is either embraced or disliked depending on the person you’re speaking to. Then again, it’s not a separate widget offering but the same widgets as are available on the personalized desktop with the same level of customization; this has definitely a positive.

One of the most compelling things about the widgets on Yourminis is the depth of customization. Depending on the particular widget, options can include text size, what to include with a feed (headlines/ X text etc..), colors, image background and feed settings. It’s a focus that really helps Yourminis stand out from its competitors. Yourminis have been nominated in the Webware 100 awards and rightly so. It’s a really good offering with a little something for just about everyone.

And yes: they also have a pretty TechCrunch widget as well.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/123472213/

Babelgum has pushed itself public yesterday. On the surface it looks very similar to its more famous competitor, Joost. Both are P2P IPTV applications that let you flip through channels and shows streamed to your computer. Both are backed by deep pockets and big names. In Joost’s corner, Skype and Kazaa veterans Niklas Zenstrom and Janus Friis with $45 million in financing. Babelgum was started by FASTWEB founder Silvio Scaglia with $13.2 million invested.

Yet while the market and pedigree may be similar, the execution in each case differs.

Content

The most noticeable difference between the two has been between the content each is streaming. Joost had the fortune of early hype and pulling together some big content deals from Viacom, CNN, Sony, and the NHL. They also have the benefit of some large media companies, CBS and Viacom, as investors. Similar to when Joost first launched, Babelgum currently streams more generic content from providers like the AP and National Geographic. The latest content deal of note has been Spike Lee screening some of his movie footage on the network.

Interface

Both applications have the same core functionality, allowing you to create your own personalized channel guide. Although, while both applications stream to your desktop, Joost allows you to skip forward and back, while Babelgum plays serially. The larger differences come in the social aspects of the program, of which Babelgum has none as of yet. Joost, however, uses a toolbox of widgets for things like chat rooms and bulletin boards.

The Babelgum interface is similar to Joost, but more complicated. Little things like not being able to double click on a clip to play it are annoying. Play back quality is reasonable; I experienced no buffering or choppiness in playback. Like Joost, playing a clip at full screen on a 22″ monitor doesn’t deliver good picture quality. If content is the driver in TVIP platform adoption, Babelgum won’t be going far. The content selection is nearly as poor as the navigation options; why have tags for videos if you can’t click on them?

Overall

Overall Babelgum feels like a poor man’s Joost. Competition in any field drives innovation and is good for the consumer, yet for Babelgum 2006 is calling and it wants its innovations back; writing on your front page that “Babelgum is a new way of conceiving television” when it is at best following Joost

See our Joost and Babelgum company profiles.

Babelgum:


Joost:

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/123432594/

Paul Preece, the designer of the wildly addictive Desktop Tower Defense has quit his day job and is teaming up with David Litsky; the designer of FlashElementTD to develop online games full time.

Desktop Tower Defense currently ranks at just over 6,000 on Alexa. According to a report at Gigaom the game had 4 million unique visitors on 20 million page views in April.

Michael Arrington has written previously about the addictive nature of the simple yet compelling game. It has spurred competitions, hacks and a large loyal following.

Preece and Litsky have set up a blog to document the new company. At the time of writing the front page included a sneak peak at the new towers to be included in the next version of Desktop Tower Defense.

(via Kottke)

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/123410968/