Ajax Girl

Sparter, a stealth startup founded by Bessemer Venture Partners, launched this evening. They are jumping into the middle of the estimated $1 billion market for buying and selling virtual currencies in games like World of Warcraft (WOW), EverQuest, Eve and others. The current spot price of 100 gold on WOW? About $10.

The company is a true person to person trading company. Users can sign up and either buy or sell virtual currencies at market prices. There are already a number of sites that sell these currencies directly to users (IGE is the largest), but they don’t take sellers, just buyers. And the prices are set by the company, not the market.

I spoke to Dan Kelly and Boris Putanec, the two executives Bessemer brought in to start the company, earlier this week. They say that a major supply of WOW gold today comes directly or indirectly from “farmers” in China and India. People are paid a very low wage to play the game and gather small amounts of gold, which are then sold directly to players or to services like IGE. Those models are fine, they say, for people who want to buy currency. But it gives no way for people who want to liquidate their virtual gold into real world money.

eBay is one place where gamers currently try to trade virtual currency for real money, but the company started restricting the sale of virtual goods on the site earlier this year, and proactively removing listings that include virtual money and other items. Sparter is simply filling the void that eBay has voluntarily created, the company says.

Sparter acts as the go-between for the parties, keeping payments in escrow until both sides say the virtual transfer went through properly. Users are also asked to rate each other after a transaction. Users with higher reputational ratings may be able to charge a premium.

The company only supports trading in currency for now. Other digital goods cannot be traded on the platform. They say they have no plans to deviate from that strategy, unless users show strong demand down the road.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/124392508/

Chime.Tv’s video player has got the kind of flash and style Ruby developers would envy, especially since it’s programmed in PHP and AJAX. The player, which dishes out 22 themed channels of viral video content, with a bunch of added utilities.

The full page player is similar to Joost and Babelgum, but in your browser. Like the IPTV guys, you can flip through pre-made channels, roll your own, or search for content by keyword. The player is pretty hands off, and will just run if you give it a channel or a search term to munch on. The player searches through videos on YouTube, Veoh, Metacafe, Google Video, and DailyMotion. You can reorganize the results by title, length, or randomize. They also have a bookmarklet so you can add content to your channels as you surf the web.

So, iIf you want to create the “bikini” channel, all you have to do is search for “bikini” in the search bar and Chime will start playing through all the results. The player also has a friend feature for sharing your channels and vids with someone else.

The player can play in full screen mode, wide screen, or anywhere in between by dragging the corner of the video. It also comes with some color controls for brightness, contrast, and color in case the original quality is less than stellar.

All this thing needs is a mashup with one of the TV show aggregators.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/124383608/

One of the up and coming new Facebook Applications is Honesty Box. When you install it, you can send an anonymous message to any of your facebook friends. Only that friend sees the message, along with whether the sender is male of female. The creators say that they will soon add the ability for people to respond to messages. In the user reviews, some people have asked for the ability to have messages appear to everyone on their profile. I suspect they’ll add that as an option in the future, too.

But for now, if you’re dying to tell someone that you have a crush on them, or perhaps complain about their body odor, Honesty Box may be just the application you were looking for.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/124364241/

Toward the end of last year we covered a veritable cornucopia of question and answer sites. They mostly served as aggregation sites for members to post, answer, and rate questions. Yahoo effectively dominated the space, leveraging their user base and even adding an API. Q&A service Wis.dm has taken a different look at questions and answers, and added a Facebook application today.

Wis.dm is for simple yes/no questions, not about writing long answers to life’s most elusive questions. Within the Facebook application you can answer a stream of questions that appear on Wis.dm. Unfortunately you can’t ask questions through the application right now. As you answer questions, Wis.dm assigns you points and matches you with other users that answer questions similarly to you.

The long-term vision is to match up potential friends and help silo Wis.dm users into interest groups. Matching people based on their answer history is also gives them a clear way to insert contextual advertising into the question stream. Advertisers on Wis.dm will be able to target their ads based on a user’s question profile (i.e people who answer positively to sports questions, get the latest ESPN ad).

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/124360276/

Last November we reported on the launch of DailyStrength, a social network and support group for what ails you. Now another site, OurHealthCircle, with an upbeat name for a downtrodden audience is launching to make talking about tough issues a little easier.

The site is pretty much the same as DailyStrength with a different back story. Users create anonymous or personalized profiles, join over 750 groups around health problems, and start talking. The inspiration for the site came to three UC Berkeley students from the Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology and is backed by Arbor Labs.

The site is currently only open as a preview, with invitations being handed out on a case by case basis. The beta version will be launched the week Michael Moore’s new movie Sicko is released, presumably to ride the wave of attention the movie will bring on the health care system.

The site is part of trend of special needs niche sites, like Prescription4Love.

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/~3/124360277/

TechCrunch turned two yesterday. Like last year, I think its a good time to take a few minutes and give a report on the state of our blog network.

First, the stats. This is the 2,869th post on TechCrunch (a year ago we had just 884 posts, so the pace has quickened). 115,608 comments and trackbacks have been written by readers - an average of about 40 comments per post. A year ago we had 65,000 RSS readers; today we have 435,000. Page views over the last 30 days are right at 4.5 million, a little more than 2x last year’s rate. Technorati ranks TechCrunch as the 4th most linked to blog.

In the last year we’ve also had many full time contributing editors - Marshall Kirkpatrick, Natalie Del Conte and Duncan Riley. Analyst Nick Gonzalez has also taken a heavy writing load over the last few months, and a number of people have contributed articles as well.

Our sister blogs continue to grow. TechCrunch France is by far the largest French blog, with nearly 100,000 RSS readers. CrunchGear has 50,000 RSS readers and is generating about 1 million monthly page views. They should become a top 100 blog in the next 6-8 months given their current growth rates. MobileCrunch and TechCrunch Japan continue to grow, and we will hopefully have TechCrunch UK back online soon.

Hiring Heather Harde as CEO was the best decision I’ve made so far. I was simply not able to leverage myself any further - writing full time, managing the other editors, selling ads and running the back office was killing me. Heather has stepped in and has brought calm to the chaos.

Heather suggested that we have a party to mark the occasion. I said it was a bad idea because we have so many other balls in the air: filling writing jobs, raising money, having a party next month and the TechCrunch20 conference in September. Heather said “ok,” planned a surprise party anyway and invited about 30 people over to the TechCrunch house last night. Pictures are up on Flickr under the tag “techcrunchbirthday2.” Many of my blogging mentors and friends were there to celebrate with us. Thank you all for coming.

The most important part of TechCrunch is the community that has built up around it. I have a dream job (for the most part) because of all of you. Thank you for stopping by, and leaving a little user generated content along the way.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/124342975/

Since last November, ClearSpring’s widget syndication platform has served up analytics on over 4.2 billion widget views for clients like Time, NBC, Universal, and Maxim. Tonight, ClearSpring is opening up their platform to any developer, letting you write, track, and distribute web widgets across a multitude of websites and platforms. They will also feature a forum to support their developers. The announcement puts them into competition with WidgetBox’s analytics and distribution platform, and Widgipedia’s knowledge base.

ClearSpring’s platform lets developers code a widget once and dynamically serve it an embed on any websites, Google Gadgets, Netvibes, Pageflakes, and Live.com within their wrapper. All a developer needs to do is point ClearSpring to their widget’s source code.

ClearSpring’s wrapper tracks analytics for your widget and dynamically sets parameters for your widget. It also includes a customizable “grab it” button that lets you get the embed code or import it into a variety of social sites. All the analytics data is available through a dashboard. The dashboard breaks the data down by type (visits/uniques), source domain, and geography of the visitor. Within the dashboard you can also analyze how your widget is spreading and identify the “viral hubs” helping your widget take off the ground.

Since ClearSpring can set your widget’s parameters, it not only means users can edit the widgets settings, but that you can create widgets on the fly through their API. One example of a dynamic widget is the NBA player card below, which can generate a card for any NBA player based on the parameters fed to ClearSpring.

ClearSpring is funded by $8 million from Novak Biddle, ZG Ventures, along with various angels. Check out more in ClearSpring’s profile.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/124323813/

About four months since launch, web video editor Cuts.com has been acquired by Rifftrax, a site featuring DVD commentary by Michael J. Nelson of MST3K. No word on the price.

The online video editing space has become increasingly competitive. Click.tv recently joined the deadpool, with plans to reorganize.

On their blog post about the acquisition, CEO Evan Kraus says that since launch Rifftrax “has all but taken over our site”. The acquisition may play into the long term plans for full length movie remixing Kraus has alluded to before. Cuts differs from other movie editing projects that angered Hollywood by not changing the underlying movie, instead Cuts stores meta data that directs how to play through the movie and overlay effects. Post acquisition, Rifftrax will run Cuts.com, with plans to add features and the ability to remix Nelson’s commentary.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/124317200/

My son loves toy catalogs. He’ll turn the pages and just imagine. He drinks the koolaid, and loves every minute of it. I love to watch him.

I hope he never gets to the point where he thumbs through a catalog and scoffs. Where he reads the descriptions and cynically dares them to be true. I want him to always retain his sense of wonder, his desire to believe the best.

What has happened to our optimism? I’m sure all of us can recall many a childhood hour spent thumbing through dog-eared toy catalogs, dreaming. How many of us still do? Why are we now so quick to shout “hype” at every new development? Why are we so afraid to believe? “Meh, it’s just another X.” “So-and-so did that years ago.” “I’ll believe it when I see it.“

I’ve found myself slipping down that poisonous slope recently. I’ve started to reevaluate, and I think I’d rather follow my son. Perhaps it’s not too late to recapture some of that childhood optimism.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/462-i-wonder

Flickr is launching in seven new languages this morning. In addition to English, the site now supports French, German, Korean, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Traditional Chinese. This comes in response to user demand, says the company - over half of Flickr users are live outside of the United States.

Still no word on when Flickr will support video uploads, something Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield said would be coming “soon” in early May.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/124243401/