Ajax Girl

Equilink is a vertical search engine targeting the horse loving community.

Users can click through discipline and category menus or do a traditional keyword search. Geographical targeting is also supported.

According to the folks behind the company, Equilink results are “hand groomed to give horse enthusiasts detailed, nuanced choices rather than the robotic, overly generalized and often off-topic results returned by most search engines”.

Horses for courses: if you’re in to horses than you’ll probably like this site. It’s well laid out and graphically pleasing; the mouse overlay animation appearing in the categories is pretty cool. Equilink is probably not alone in this space, yet it provides something more than the usual cookie-cutter directories and search engines that are now a dime-a-dozen in vertical spaces across the web.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/123838959/

Adobe moved its new Apollo Platform forward this evening by releasing the beta version (the previous Apollo release was a developer preview). They’ve also renamed the platform to Adobe Integrated Runtime. They’re referring to it as “Adobe AIR” (meaning Adobe is in the name twice, but who’s counting).

The new version fully supports HTML and Ajax, meaning Apollo applications can be created without using any Flash at all. They are also releasing an extension to Dreamweaver web development software.

Adobe is also now saying that AIR will be fully launched by end of year. Our previous coverage of Adobe AIR is here.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/123812740/

For any Zoho fans living in Boston: the company is hosting a yacht party on June 18 at 6:30 pm. There will be food, drinks, music and (I assume) Zoho announcements to be made. This is invite only, but they’ve given us the last forty spots to give away to TechCrunch readers. The event is free. More details here.

Please only register if you intend to go. The signup page is here. Use registration code 7890.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/123810051/

Team and Concepts Limited, the Hong Kong based company behind online spreadsheet service EditGrid, has announced a $1.25million Series A investment from the WI Harper Group.

WI Harper’s previous investments include Laszlo Systems and Maxthon.

The company recently signed a deal with ThinkFree that sees EditGrid now offered as the primary spreadsheet tool within ThinkFree Office. Other deals include partnerships with Central Desktop, Salesforce.com, ShareMethods and StartForce, with EditGrid being offered within each service.

EditGrid features include the ability for users to collaborate on spreadsheets simultaneously and see changes happen in real-time. A remote data feature provides access within the spreadsheet to external data, allowing those sources to be updated in real time. Aesthetically EditGrid looks and feels like Microsoft Excel, delivering a familiar platform for those looking to make the switch to online office applications.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/123809783/

Active Athlete Media is an online advertising firm focused on bringing what they call “Active Athletes” en masse to advertisers.

The company brings brands and advertisers to sport related websites through an advertising network and a set of publisher tools that includes sport specific search engines, social book-marking, and weather widgets.

Sport is said to be a highly desirable demographic with an estimated 150 Million active consumers in the United States.

Active Athlete Media aggregates sport and fitness related sites in one place and uses proprietary technology to garner user data, offering marketers targeted access to users.

Current advertisers include Nike, Gatorade, Ford, AT&T, American Express and others with advertisements currently being shown to over 85 publishing partners.

It’s brave for any advertising company to launch and try to compete with the likes of the Google, yet firms such as Active Athlete Media can find a place by targeting niche online communities. Overall Active Athlete Media is a good offering that is bound to find support from the sport and fitness publishing community.

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/~3/123805781/

A study from Privacy International has ranked Google at the bottom of a list of major internet destinations for privacy.

The study found that while a number of other Internet companies have issues with privacy, none comes as close to Google in “achieving the status of being an endemic threat to privacy”

Issue with Google included:

• Failure to provide an expungement option for retained data
• Failure to follow generally accepted privacy practices such as the OECD Privacy Guidelines and elements of EU data protection law
• unstated or indefinite length of time for data retention, without clear limitation on use or disclosure

Nicole Wong, Google’s deputy general counsel said in a response to the report that Google aggressively protects its users’ privacy and stands behind its track record.

Privacy can be a touchy subject; generally people want their privacy maintained and yet the delivery of many services from Web 2.0 companies is dependent on personal data to deliver personalized content. It has long been known that Google gathers more personal data than any other company, yet Google’s growing marketshare would seem to indicate that people are willing to ignore these privacy concerns. From an industry perspective, personalization is a defining quality of Web 2.0, without this data we would be winding the clocks back to 1999.

Do you care about Google gathering your data? Or do you welcome our Google overlords? Share your thoughts in the comments.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/123791021/

Wyzo is a new company with two products. The Wyzo browser is built on the Firefox core and comes with a BitTorrent plug-in called FireTorrent built in. For those not interested in a separate browser, a standalone version of FireTorrent is available for Firefox.

The primary target audience for Wyzo is people who don’t already use BitTorrent. The Wyzo team don’t anticipate that the product will be appealing to heavy BitTorrent users. Instead the company is focused on reaching out to those users that don’t know what BitTorrent is or how to install a Firefox extension by offering them a standalone browser where everything is already set up and working for them.

Downloading content with FireTorrent (both from Wyzo and Firefox) is remarkable only for its simplicity; visually it looks identical to downloading any regular file in Firefox.

The module itself is built upon technology provided by P2P Innovative and supports features such as uTorrent compatible fast peer exchange, STUNT and uPnP connection integration.

There’s a number of existing BitTorrent add-ons for Firefox including FoxTorrent which we covered in April. In downloading legal content I found nothing particularly different with FireTorrent, it’s simple to use, fairly quick with downloads and perhaps surprisingly for an Alpha release, it was stable under Vista.

The offering of an actual branded web browser though is different. There will be many people reading this thinking that building a standalone browser is a stupid idea. To those people I say: you’re not the target audience. This is a package my mother would like. It’s for an audience who doesn’t read TechCrunch and who wouldn’t know BitTyrant or Firefox add-ons to save them. It should be remembered that there is a real and actual market for standalone browsers: there’s very little in Flock that can’t be done with Firefox add-ons and yet today Flock has in excess of 250,000 users. Simplicity can be a strong selling point.

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/~3/123618804/

There is a new website, ecmascript-lang.org, created by the ECMAScript group to share information about ES Edition 4, and the first milestone release, which is implemented in ML.

You can download the reference interpreter as well as checking out the documentation.

Brendan Eich blogged about the release:

As Dave notes, this is a “pre-release” in the Open Source, “release early and often” sense. We are not done yet, but the Reference Implementation passes over 90% of the ES3 tests that we host in cvs.mozilla.org. I should note here that the Reference Implementation already handles a great deal of ES4 in addition to most of ES3, so for example the self-hosted built-in classes are mostly there.

…

This is just the beginning. Our plan is to finish the Reference Implementation over the summer and then work on specification language to surround pretty-printed excerpts of the SML and self-hosted ES4 code. At the same time, Mozilla, Adobe, and anyone who wants to help will bring up the new language on Tamarin in the new Mercurial repository. I’ll have more to say about that in a bit.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/ecmascript-edition-4-reference-implementation