Ajax Girl

Skinnyr, a weight loss tracking and advice site that competes in the same market as Fatsecret, is on the market.

Owner James Thomas told TechCrunch that he is selling the site so he can focus on JamJunky, his social song writing community.

According to Thomas, Skinnyr has 1700 users. Revenue is 0 as the service has never been monetized. Thomas is asking for a figure of around $65,000 for the site.

Skinnyr takes the ultimate weight loss treatment by joining the TechCrunch Deadpool.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/127959026/

Crunchgear has a picture of an iPhone kiosk in the Seattle Apple store - the first picture of the iPhone display, they say. The display includes a looping video of the user interface and includes docks to charge iPods. If you have pictures of kiosks in your local Apple store, send them to Crunchgear.

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/~3/127946620/

Mitch Kapor likes to solve problems. In the 80’s, he was the guy behind Lotus 1-2-3, the first killer app for computers. More recently he set his sites on a simpler problem - synchronizing Firefox bookmarks across multiple computers. His popular Firefox plugin, Foxmarks, has been downloaded 700,000 times and has 350,000 active users.

All those users create some very well organized bookmark data. Unlike Del.icio.us, where people throw thousands of bookmarks for later reference, users tend to have fewer, but more important, bookmarks linked directly from their browser. And they spend more time properly annotating those bookmarks, Kapor says. So far, Foxmarks is tracking 250 million bookmarks, from 20 million unique URLs.

And now Kapor, along with his partner, Todd Agulnick, are going to use that data to launch a new search engine. Expect it to debut in a few months.

The Foxmarks search engine is based entirely on user bookmarks and the associated metadata. Don’t expect pages and pages of results like you get with Google. But you will get a few results for most queries that are highly relevant and on target. When returning and ranking results, Foxmarks takes into consideration the text in the title of the URL, the names of any folders people have put the bookmarks in, and any descriptions added by users. All of this information is shown in the results. See the very hazy screen shot below for the current user interface, which Kapor says will change before launch.

Kapor demo’d the product for me over the weekend at Foo Camp, and it definitely has a “wow” factor. Searches for most things ended up with incredible results.

Foxmarks also shows if the results appear on Google and Yahoo, and on what page in the results they appear. For many of the queries, the top result on Foxmarks was quite obviously the perfect result - but it appeared, if at all, deep on the result set for Google and Yahoo. Terms that are likely to have a lot of SEO pollution (ecommerce in particular), the results were strikingly better on Foxmarks v. Google.

Compare Foxmarks to recently launched Mahalo, which also provides human powered results. The big difference between the two startups is that Mahalo’s results are created for the explicit purpose of providing a search service, whereas Foxmarks is using the fact that excellent data is being created as a byproduct for its primary service to create a search service on the side. We’ll have to wait until a full launch of Foxmarks to do a side-by-side comparison.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/127896827/

If you’ve even been on a late night Mountain Dew binge only to wake up and forget how many of the “Extreme” beverages you need to restock for your next LAN party, Ikan might have the fix for you.

Ikan is a special bar code scanner you can use to keep your grocery shopping list up to date. As you use items, simply scan them before you trash them to keep a running tally of what you’ve used. It also has a voice recorder you can use to add non-coded items like apples and oranges.

Your list is saved to the internet, where you can review and print out your list or ship it off to an online grocery store to complete your order. Because the list is on the net, you can even review it on the go from a mobile browser.

See more at CrunchGear or their profile.

There are a lot of other startups that are doing intelligent things with bar code scanning, such as MyTago or Delicious Monster. MyTago and services like it use special bar codes for mobile phones called QR codes.

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/~3/127890729/

To celebrate some of the recent TechCrunch press, we’ve just made 100 more tickets to the July 27 TechCrunch Party at August Capital available. The price is $10, all proceeds are being donated to the Kipp Bayview Academy, a public elementary school in southeast San Francisco, for the purchase of computer-related equipment. Attendee identification will be checked at the door.

We’ll make another 100 tickets available in the week before the party. We will also be reserving some spots for TechCrunch20 attendees. If you are attending TechCrunch20 Conference, you will be able to attend the August Capital party.

Details
Date: July 27, 2007
Time: 5:30 - 10 pm
Location: August Capital (Maps: Google / Microsoft / Yahoo)
Register here

Update: Wow. Sold those out in 8 minutes.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/127863733/

Video on the web is a killer app, but it’s also a bandwidth hog. Forbes estimated that content distribution networks like Akami or Limelight can charge distributors around a cent per minute, while larger distributors can get deals at around a half or tenth of a cent. Last year it was estimated that Youtube was spending over $1 million a month to stream more than 100 million videos a day. In response, video distributors looking to give higher quality video on the cheap are pushing the burden of bandwidth to users through peer to peer networking. So far this has widely focused around larger desktop players (Veoh, Joost, Babelgum). Video player startup Slapvid wants to do peer to peer in your browser.

Slapvid runs as a Java applet coupled with a Flash video player. Unfortunately this means users have to authorize the 300Kb applet to run the first time, but that still requires less initiative on the users behalf than a full blown browser plugin. The applet runs in the background, managing the delivery of video chunks to be displayed in the player.

When you first start a video, the player connects directly to their central video server to download enough of the beginning of the video as a buffer while the peer to peer kicks in. During this request, their server also sends you back a list of 3 to 5 peers playing the same video. The applet then seeks out peers further along in the video, getting sent bits of the video in 64KB chunks. If you don’t hear back from the peers, the video just streams from the central server.

To demonstrate the peering technology, they’ve developed their own flash player that shows the top Youtube videos in 5 minutes. The player mashes together short clips of each video. You can see the whole video by clicking the hand. However, because of bandwidth concerns on their central server, the peering technology is only turned on for a small sample of users. All other users will just see videos streamed from Youtube. To guarantee you get the peering applet, you can apply for one of 100 beta accounts for Techcrunch readers. You can see the video player after the jump.

Slapvid is a Y Combinator startup from 4 Carnegie Mellon grads.

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/~3/127850238/

Chris Oliver (Mr. JavaFX Script) has posted a preview of a JavaFX to SVG translator:

It’ll take a few more days before we post the code to OpenJFX, but in the meantime here’s a preview of the latest version of our SVG to FX translator. The translator converts an SVG document into a single JavaFX class. Each definition id in the SVG is converted into a method of the class that returns the JavaFX equivalent of that element. The generated class itself is an instance of the JavaFX class Node, which means it can be used anywhere in a JavaFX Canvas.

Having this translator makes it straightforward to incorporate graphics created in vector drawing tools into JavaFX programs.

The below demo program consists of an SVG browser that uses the translator to convert SVG into JavaFX source code and then compiles and executes the result. In addition, the browser lets you view the original SVG source as well as the translated JavaFX source.

What if we had some code that did “if browser.supports(SVG) run the SVG app else run the JavaFX Script version”.

You can launch it via Java Web Start.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/127815541/javafx-svg-translator

Leland Scott has detailed how well Safari 3 has done with respect to CSS support:

Safari 3 / WebKit has implemented 18 of the 19 CSS 3.0 styles so far tackled by any of the major browsers. Firefox is next with 9 of 19. Some of these styles are incredibly cool and powerful, and they’ll change the way designers (both graphic designers and UI designers) put web content together for years to come. I wanted to raise the profile for this work, since it doesn’t seem to be getting enough attention. Even though IE 7.0 hasn’t implemented any of these yet, I hope Web 2.0 programmer/designers will feel empowered to start trying these out.

He is particularly excited about:

1. Box-shadow: Yes! Add drop shadows through CSS!
2. Multi-column layout: Can we really do this now? With HTML?
3. Resize: Give JavaScript hacks a rest and let users relax when typing input on web pages.
4. Rounded corners: Any
   can be made round.
5. Colors with transparency: There goes another ugly hack from way back!
6. Background image controls: Remember how great it was when you could add images as well as colors to an element’s background CSS style? Well, it’s about to get a whole lot better!

Considering the call out for a CSS 5-like effort, can we get the ball moving again?

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/127768381/safari-3-and-css-3

Highrise was our first foray into accepting OpenID as a sign-in option. OpenID is a web-wide single sign-on service. You can find out more at the official OpenID site.

We then added OpenID sign-in to the Basecamp and Highrise forums. We also have OpenID running on an internal app. It’s easier to remember one OpenID than remember multiple usernames and passwords for multiple sites.

And now OpenID comes to Basecamp

Today we announce that you can use your OpenID login with Basecamp as well. This means you can use the same login for Highrise, the Highrise Forums, the Basecamp Forums, and Basecamp. Plus you can use that same login at any OpenID-enabled site on the web. Here’s how to use your OpenID with Basecamp.

OpenID enables single sign-on

Many people have multiple Basecamp accounts: One for work, one for personal, one for a volunteer organization they’re part of, etc. We’ve heard lots of requests for a single sign-on option: Log in to one Basecamp account and be logged into all your Basecamp accounts. OpenID and “Open Bar” makes this possible.

Open Bar

If you have multiple Basecamp accounts, and you use your OpenID to log into each account, you’ll see a thin black bar at the top of the screen. We’re calling this the “Open Bar.” In the example below I have four OpenID-enabled Basecamp accounts. I’m currently looking at the “37signals Extranet.”

The black Open Bar lists all your OpenID-enabled Basecamp accounts. The one you’re currently looking at is white and bold, the others are grey. Just click an account to switch to that account without having to log in. If we click on “400 North May” we’ll switch to that Basecamp account.

Open Bar will expand

Currently the Open Bar will only list your Basecamp accounts, but we have plans to add your Highrise accounts up there too. And once we move OpenID to Backpack and our other products you’ll have one-click pre-signed-in access to all the 37signals products you use.

Once you go OpenID you won’t go back

I was a skeptic at first, but once I switched to OpenID I can’t imagine going back. Find out more about OpenID on our site or the official OpenID site. We hope you give it a shot. We think you’ll find it useful.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/479-basecamp-gets-openid-and-open-bar

Soundpedia is a legal Singapore based music sharing community offering a music streaming service that provides a decent Pandora substitute to users outside of the United States who can no longer use Pandora, along with the United States itself.

Soundpedia comes with the usual array of Web 2.0 music sharing functions. The site helps users discover new tunes and share them with friends. Soundpedia supports user playlists both interactively or by uploading existing playlist settings from music players. Users can chat with friends, post testimonials, make a comment on an artist, or make their own audio/ video blog.

In a different time it would be easy to dismiss Soundpedia as being yet another music sharing site entering a crowded marketplace. Yet Soundpedia meets an unmet need; it’s more Pandora than Last.fm and the world outside of the United States has been blocked from Pandora for a couple of months. Soundpedia is different to Last.fm. Sure, Last.fm music recommendations can be enjoyable but at other times you just want to listen to a particular artist or album. Soundpedia delivers with a thorough offering that may not be the most aesthetically pleasing service to use, but delivers with music. Music can be played by genre, artist or album and Soundpedia’s library is extensive. I did find the odd album that wasn’t fully included but instead songs were listed in 30 second clips. Co-Founder and NY native Gregory Gumo tells me that Soundpedia is increasing its playlist regularly; most users won’t notice any deficiency.

As non-American I’m missing Pandora’s functionality; Soundpedia just hit my Google Bookmarks list.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/127754109/