Ajax Girl

Yahoo has acquired college sports site Rivals.com, says the Associated Press in a story that may have been accidentally published early. The price is not being disclosed. Rumors of talks first surfaced in April.

We previously reported on Terry’s involvement in securities fraud and were subsequently threatened with a lawsuit based on that post (the threats were later dropped). Yahoo obviously got comfortable with Terry’s questionable past and his hardball tactics towards anyone writing about that past.

Rivals competitor Scout.com was acquired by Fox Interactive Media in August 2005 for around $60 million.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/126578871/

Lending Club, the Facebook exclusive person-to-person lending service has passed the $100,000 mark in loans to Facebook users.

Lending Club was an original Facebook Platform/ F8 partner having launched with F8 on May 24. The company closed its first loan on June 6, and has since closed 27 more loans for a total of $101,250. An additional $212,650 in loans will close in the next 12 days. More than $180,000 is currently available from 271 lenders with around 10-15 new lenders transferring money to Lending Club every day.

The social networking angle of Facebook allows Lending Club to leverage trust by enabling lenders to find borrowers within shared networks. Lending Club uses technology to pair the two parties based on shared connections without giving lenders direct access to the borrowers Facebook profile.

P2P lending is a rapidly growing market. Lending Club faces stiff competition from companies such as Zopa, CircleLending and Prosper. Although it may not be the market leader in terms of volume, Lending Club’s growing success demonstrates the potential of Facebook as a sales and finance platform.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/126574616/

We’ve been playing around with Wiffiti all afternoon. The service has been around for a while, but if you haven’t heard of it you may want to give it a look.

Anyone can post a message - just text “@crunch [message]” to 25622 and it will appear on the screen.

The real use for something like this is projecting the widget up on a big screen at a party, or as a permanent source of entertainment at a cafe or bar.

Spam away.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/126559328/

More good news about the upcoming TechCrunch20 Conference in September: Ryan Block, the Editor in Chief of Engadget, has joined our advisory board and will help us review the many gadget startups that have applied to launch at the event. See Ryan’s post about joining the panel on Engadget, here.

The current list of experts is here. We will continue to announce new experts in the coming weeks.

The panel will participate in reviewing startup applications and will attend the conference to discuss, on stage, the various demos.

About Ryan Block

Ryan Block is editor-in-chief of Engadget a web magazine covering consumer electronics and technology. In addition to appearing to speak at Engadget events and co-hosting a weekly podcast, he is also a contributor and a founding editor of Joystiq, and a technology critic and commentator who has been quoted in Business Week, the New York Times, the Wall St. Journal. Ryan also maintains an active personal blog.

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/~3/126527314/

We’re working on an iPhone-optimized version of Ta-da List.

As I was working on some UI ideas, Ryan and I were talking about some of really cool things about designing for the iPhone.

I remarked that I loved the constraints. For example, we know the exact screen size/resolution, we know the exact typeface, we know how the face renders on the screen, we know the colors, we know the browser, etc.

Then Ryan nailed it: Designing for the iPhone is like a hybrid of print and web design.

The web we all know is rife with uncertainty. We don’t know the viewer’s screen size or resolution, we don’t know the gamma of someone’s screen, we don’t know if they’ve got a certain typeface and/or exactly how that face renders on in their browser, we don’t know the browser they’re going to use, etc.

But paper, on the other hand, is full of controls. Fixed size, fixed faces, fixed colors. What you print is exactly what someone sees (assuming you’ve done your homework on color and paper, etc).

So the iPhone is a weird mix. It’s the web, and things can scroll, and the data is pulled from remote servers, but it’s also a fixed width, a fixed browser, fixed typefaces, etc. It’s pretty cool and a really refreshing design exercise.

In other ways it’s also like going back to the early days of the web when people’s connections were a lot slower. The EDGE network and mobile phone latency emphasizes the need to keep page size down, images sparse, etc. It’s a return to the power of text, shape, color, and basic HTML.

I love it.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/475-designing-for-the-iphone-is-a-refreshing-experience

Chris Ware’s cover for “Candide” by Francois Voltaire (larger version).

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/474-ware-voltaire

In Mobile Ajax new, more details on the iPhone were made available, and Opera released a beta of its Opera Mini 4 browser.

Opera Mini 4

Opera has given us 10 reasons to love Opera Mini 4 which includes:

• Surf the Web in style
• “X marks the spot” — start at the right place
• Stay at the right place
• A virtual mouse
• Power scrolling
• Fast and cheap browsing
• Good old Small Screen Rendering
• Quick access to key functionality with the context menu
• Web designers go wild

They have tried to be funny with an obligatory iPhone movie.

iPhone Browser Capabilities and Guidelines

Speaking of th iPhone, information on the browser capabilities has been released and includes restrictions:

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/126445899/mobile-ajax-news-iphone-and-opera-mini

This guest post is written by Susan Wu, a Principal with Charles River Ventures,where she focuses on digital media, software, and infrastructure. Susan is coproducing the Virtual Goods Summit this Friday at Stanford University - most of the companies mentioned below will be presenting.

People spend over $1.5 billion on virtual items every year. Pets, coins, avatars, and bling: these virtual objects are nothing more than a series of digital 1s and 0s stored on a remote database somewhere in the ether. What could possibly possess people to spend real, hard earned cash on ‘objects’ that have no tangible substance?

The virtual worlds space has received tremendous press attention in the last year, fueled in no small part by Wild West stories of fortune and anarchy in worlds like Second Life and the plight of the Chinese gold farmer in World of Warcraft. But people aren’t paying attention to the bigger story. While people preoccupy themselves with mocking the absurdities of some of these virtual worlds, the reality is that there are many businesses out there making meaningful amounts of money in virtual goods:

• Tencent is one of the largest Internet portals in China with over 250 million active user accounts. They generated $100 million+ in Q1 of 2007 and over 65% of their revenue comes from virtual goods.
• Habbo Hotel has over 75 million registered avatars in 29 countries and 90% of their $60 million+ yearly revenue comes from virtual goods.
• Gaia Online does over 50,000 person to person auctions and 1 million message board posts a day- making them the 3rd largest auction site and the 2nd largest message board on the Internet. Their average user consumes 1200 page views a month. They employ 3 people whose sole job it is to open snail mail envelopes full of cash that people send in for virtual goods.
• There’s a commonly held misperception that virtual goods are only for online gamers. Both Dogster and HotorNot are succeeding with a hybrid ad/virtual goods business model. Currently, over 40% of HotorNot’s revenue comes from virtual goods.
• Major mainstream brands are now buying advertising in the form of virtual goods in social networks. Gaians can now purchase and pimp their virtual Scion xBs. Coca Cola and Tencent partnered to allow Tencent’s users to trade codes taken from real Coke cans for virtual objects in the Tencent network. Wangyou, a Chinese based social network, has also been extremely aggressive in experimenting with branded virtual goods.

(more…)

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/126436624/

P2P lending site Prosper is doing well enough to swallow another $20 million in venture capital, the company is announcing today. The company has now raised $40 million in capital.

The round was led by DAG Ventures and Meritech Capital Partners. Existing investors Accel Partners, Benchmark Capital, Fidelity Ventures and Omidyar Network also participated.

Prosper allows members to request loans of up to $25,000 (the average funded loan is $5,000), and then other members offer to fund the loan at various interest rates. Prosper breaks the loan up into multiple pieces to distribute risk, and then funds from the lenders offering the most attractive interest rates.

Prosper says they hav 330,000 users and have funded $70 million in loans. Zopa, a similar company, is headquartered in London.

Previous coverage here.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/126444320/

Spket IDE, an Eclipse plugin, has added rich support for Ext JS.

The powerful editor for JavaScript, XUL/XBL and Yahoo! Widget development. It provides features like code completion, syntax highlighting and content outline that helps developers productively create efficient JavaScript code.

You can click around code to jump in and out of the codebase, which is something that you hugely miss if you don’t have it.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/126437150/spket-ide-ext-support