Ajax Girl

Check out Amazon Fresh - a new invite only service from Amazon that looks eerily similar to the quintessential 90’s Internet flameout, Webvan.

The new service promises speedy at-home delivery of groceries, including fresh produce, at “competitive everyday prices.” It’s available only in Seattle currently, and has not been officially announced. But at least one person caught a glimpse of an Amazon Fresh truck driving around downtown Seattle.

Users select and pay for groceries on the site. They can then choose to pick up the items themselves locally, or, with a minimum order size, have them delivered next day within a one hour time slot. Groceries will also be delivered to doorsteps pre-dawn in a temperature-controlled container.

A year ago Amazon began experimenting with sales of non-perishable food and household items, but did not deliver them directly and perishable goods were not available.

If you are a Seattle reader, keep your cameras handy. We want a picture of the delivery truck.

Webvan, which had a spectacular IPO and quickly expanded to 26 cities, went bankrupt in 2001. Before closing down, Webvan had acquired competior HomeGrocer. Coincidentally, Amazon was an investor in HomeGrocer.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/139739121/

Amidst a falling share price GoFish has dropped its $30 million stock trade for Bolt.com. The deal was also meant to help Bolt pay its settlement with several music labels, including Universal Music.

GoFish had initially celebrated the acquisition in their April 10KSB report as increasing distribution for their “made for internet” (MFI) video shows. The combined sites were expected to draw 7 million monthly unique visitors in the U.S. and roughly 14 million globally (according to Comscore Media Metrix).

The deal was expected to close in May 2007. The stalling deal was most likely responsible for the precipitous drop in their share price in June. The drop saw the company’s market cap shrink from $134 million to about $15 million. The acquisition eventually fell through due to alleged licensing concerns.

GoFish has also experienced other problems. Sources close to the company have reported a major ad network stopped serving ads on the site last month due to the low volume of monetizeable traffic. Over two months, the network saw their total ad spending drop to $20 a day at a $1 cpm. This infers 20,000 unique visitors per day seeing advertisements on GoFish.com. The lack of advertising inventory on the front page was cited as a possible reason for the low numbers.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/139800986/

When he was 14, Malawian inventor William Kamkwamba built his family an electricity-generating windmill from spare parts, working from plans he found in a library book.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/552-how-i-built-my-family-a-windmill

Club Penguin, a social network/virtual world that has been on the market for some time, was acquired by The Walt Disney Company and announced today. An earlier deal with Sony fell apart over valuation and Club Penguin’s policy of donating a substantial portion of profits to charity.

The company, which launched in October 2005, has 700,000 current paid subscribers and 12 million activated users, primarily in the U.S. and Canada.

The WSJ says the purchase price is $350 million in cash. Disney could pay up to another $350 million if certain performance targets are reached over the next couple of years, until 2009.

We mentioned Club Penguin a couple of months ago when a competitor launched from IAC called Zwinktopia. The company is killing it - projected revenues of $65 million in 2007 with $35 million in profit. Having nearly 50% bottom line margin is exceptional.

I recently spoke to an exec of one of the companies that took a long look at Club Penguin before deciding to pass. They said the charitable donations were a big factor in passing. He also mentioned that much of the success of the company was driven by movies such as Happy Feet. How much longer are penguins really going to be the cool thing, he wondered.

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/~3/139711892/

Tel-Aviv based MeeMix launches its beta program today. Like Pandora, MeeMix is a community music/Internet radio service for the 15-35 demographic. The idea being that any user can create a highly personalized, taste-based music channel with minimum fuss. The major differentiation between MeeMix and Pandora or Last.fm is the way it goes about forecasting personal taste.

Typically, there are two ways to perform such predictions:

1. “Nature” (Pandora) – Decision making is based upon on the compatibility between one song and another—personal taste not being part of the equation.
2. “Nurture” (Last.fm) – Decision making is based upon a environmental factors—song compatibility not being part of the equation

Steve Krause wrote a great post about Nature vs. Nurture in the music space.

Like Pandora, MeeMix breaks down each song, artist and user down to an elemental level. Then its recommendation engine analyzes the combination of a user’s profile, music selection and behavior to create a customized radio station. In my personal tests, MeeMix’s music selection was near perfect.

MeeMix has a rich social networking feature set, including reviews, thoughts (public user postings), secrets (private user postings), etc. The most important of these features in my opinion is being able to listen to the same song as other channel subscribers in real time. And for the egomaniacs in our audience, you can even print off a t-shirt with your channel name and number of subscribers (courtesy of the Zazzle API).

MeeMix was founded in mid-2006 by CEO Gilad Shlang, formerly the User Experience Manager at 888.com, and Dr. Ricardo Tarrasch (Chief Scientist), also formerly of 888.com with a doctorate degree in Biopsychology. The two possess in-depth experience in creating and leveraging user experience and communities based upon algorithmic forecasting. The company is funded by angels and currently employs a team of 9, including the former lead developer of ICQ, musicologists, and a community/SEO specialist.

The business model is currently based on album sales and will expand to songs, ringtones, and ads. Seeing as there’s so much algorithmic magic under the hood, I won’t be surprised if in a year or two licensing its engine will become MeeMix’s core business.

In the mean time, the team is focusing on learning its community and expanding its service both in scale and in application range (embeddable web widgets and a Facebook app).

Try MeeMix

We have 1000 invitations available to the MeeMix private beta here.

This guest post is written by Roi Carthy, an Israeli-based startup consultant. Roi will be covering the Israeli startup scene for TechCrunch.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/139691550/

Discovery Communications has announced the acquisition of TreeHugger.com for what is believed to be $10 million.

TreeHugger.com started as an environmentally focused blog in 2004 and grew to include forums, green guides and other related features. The site sits in the Top 20 blogs worldwide according to Technorati and is said to have 1.4 million unique visitors a month. Alexa ranks the site at 5,395.

TreeHugger.com’s Graham Hill said in a post that the acquisition “will allow TreeHugger to go much further and faster than it would have been able to alone or with another partner… by teaming up with Discovery, we believe we can more effectively play a critical role in [our environmental] mission”

TreeHugger.com will become part of Discovery’s Planet Green initiative.

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/~3/139677602/

I’m working on a new Permissions screen for Basecamp. All the hard stuff is done. The layout, the reorganizing of actions and flows, the templates, and most of the Rails side of things. With 90% of the work done, the last 10% is where I pull out the magnifier and tweezers to finesse the details, check my assumptions, gild the lillies and ready the “DONE” stamp.

You’re definitely in the 10% when you keep flip-flopping designs. I went back and forth on this one three times before moving on:

On this screen, companies appear with people whose access can be toggled (“candidates”) underneath. My first inclination was to cycle the shading on candidate TRs to make it easy to know who’s permissions you are affecting. But two things bothered me about this design.

The first factor is noise. I found a black border was necessary beneath the company headline in order to overpower the candidate rows and group them. The combination of black border and shading all over is just a bit much for me.

The second factor is conceptual. It’s important for people to understand that you add and remove companies from this screen in order to give or modify access for people in those companies. You can’t just add one person without regard for the company they belong in. I won’t get into the legacy and practical reasons behind this, we’ll just accept it as Fact for now. This noisey design doesn’t emphasize the company groups enough, and puts more weight on candidate tables.

Those factors in mind, here’s the subtle redesign:

Now the emphasis is on the companies. The border is removed and the page feels less noisey without the row shading. The redesign feels smarter, cleaner, and more modular. So after three rounds of flipflop, I’ll give it the champion belt.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/551-design-decisions-permissions-in-basecamp

Online multimedia player SplashCast has announced some new partners and has released a new branded multimedia player on Facebook .

Launch partners include Justin Timberlake, Pink, and Chris Brown, who are offering official branded players.

The SplashCast Facebook application allows users to add a player to their profile that includes a customized skin and comes preloaded with RSS feeds of the creator’s latest videos and images.

With the player, users can stream content organized into distinct channels (e.g albums, videos, music).

The new player is a big investment in Facebook by SplashCast. They specifically crafted a new administration panel for the application just for Facebook. Through the admin panel, owners can skin the player, manage their channels, and can even control the newsfeed update messaging. In exchange for the effort, they will be charging a base development cost that covers the first 1,000 users, increasing incrementally thereafter.

There have already been a lot of “fan applications” that let you follow a particular show on Facebook, but these have been custom jobs. The SplashCast player makes it easy for companies to create a multimedia fan application of their own.

I continually hear stories of Facebook application developers getting offers for work from companies looking to get on Facebook. White label applications like this may be a way to automate that process.

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/~3/139668846/

CAMfess is a new video hosting site that is billed as “the world’s first website that allows users to confess secrets through video blogs.”

The idea is simple enough: confess your secrets, fears or admit mistakes to anyone who would care to listen, or to friends.

Users can confess to the world and remain anonymous. CAMfess features “the patent-pending Camfess Anonymizer(TM)”, which allows users to automatically disguise their voice or face on a submitted video (see video below for an example).

This is where is becomes perhaps more amusing, because the folks at CAMfess site religion as a marketing angle

“The act of confession - widely encouraged by religion and psychology alike — makes people better. Admitting to mistakes, expressing a regret, and giving apology to people they may have hurt, is now available through the web.”

I’m not sure whether to be amused or disturbed by CAMfess. It’s like a poor man’s Post Secret with a touch of Jerry Springer. In the age of reality television, an age where voyeurism has reached a height never seen before, there will undoubtedly be a place in the market for CAMfess.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/139644068/

YUI 2.3 has been released with six new components, as well as a skinning architecture and a new look for the components.

Features

• Rich Text Editor: Cross-browser support has always been a major challenge for RTEs, and we think you’ll be impressed with how well this editor works across the various environments. You can instantiate it with just a few lines of code for simple implementations
• Base CSS: Nate Koechley continues to extend and refine the YUI CSS foundation. Base CSS itself applies consistent and common style treatments for the foundation
• YUILoader: A mechanism for loading YUI components (and/or your own custom components) on the page via client-side script.
• ImageLoader: Allows you to defer the loading of some images to speed initial rendering time on your pages.
• ColorPicker: The Color Picker provides a powerful UI widget for color selection, featuring HSV, RGB, and Hex input/output and a web-safe color-selection swatch.
• YUI Test Utility: YUI Test introduces a flexible unit-testing framework for the YUI ecosystem and serves as the foundation for our own unit-test battery.
• Skins

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/139621363/yui-23-released-rich-text-editor-components-and-themes