Ajax Girl

Bebo has announced a new partnership with Microsoft that will see the introduction of the Windows Live instant messaging service to Bebo’s social network.

The new service will allow Bebo users to chat to people outside of the Bebo network, from within Bebo itself. What makes the deal perhaps more interesting is that Bebo users will also now be recognized over the Windows Live platform; in effect the deal becomes a sort of merging of member databases. It’s also a first for Microsoft, who has remained somewhat distant from the growing social networking market to date.

Bebo continues to trail behind MySpace and Facebook in the United States in terms of traffic, but as confirmed by comScore August 15, is the most popular social networking site in the United Kingdom.

(via Reuters)

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/146344402/

China’s answer to Second Life, HiPiHi, announced at the State of Play V conference in Singapore Monday its intentions to work towards standardized 3D worlds, with an aim of eventually delivering interoperability between various platforms.

HiPiHi said it would cooperate with “global leaders in the Internet and communication industry to establish a set of relevant hardware and software standards for the development of the 3D platform.” The company would then work with other 3D virtual world providers to finalize these standards with the goal of allowing users to interact and transact between different virtual worlds.

HiPiHi current platform is remarkably similar to Second Life in both looks and features, with users creating the world and being able to own land and objects.

Linden Lab, the company behind Second Life has recently taken some steps towards opening its platform, including open sourcing the code for the Second Life client, however the Second Life world has remained closed to 3rd party servers. Linden Lab has previously said that they have “a vision of a globally interconnected grid with clients and servers published and managed by different groups” (indeed, they called it inevitable) so it will be interesting to see whether they join HiPiHi’s initiative.

(via Metaversed)

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/146339371/

Facebook opened up their very closed email platform today by allowing users to add normal email addresses in a message. Previously you could only send messages to Facebook friends. Now you can add in others, too.

This is great news for people who use Facebook for most or all of their emailing. But for those of us that use normal email for our day to day business, getting Facebook messages is more of a problem than a feature. That’s because Facebook makes you log on to the site to read messages/emails from your friends. They’ll send a note to your normal email address when a new message comes in, but they make you log on to Facebook to actually read it.

I rarely do that, and have missed some important messages from people trying to contact me. As a next step, I think Facebook should offer to forward the actual messages to an outside email address (and/or provide a password protected RSS feed). Eventually Facebook should offer full POP or IMAP support for their email. They can still restrict it so that you can only receive messages from friends, but at least you could access it from your desktop or web based mail application.

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/~3/146339241/

Helium is a directory of user generated articles. Anyone can submit an article to any of 24 different categories (arts, autos, politics, etc.). Articles can be submitted directly to channels, entered into contests, or as part of a debate. Since Helium’s launch last October the site has gotten over 69,000 writers and accumulated over 400,000 articles on 60,000 topics.

Over the past couple of months they’ve been running a pilot program for new “Marketplace” service that connects authors and publishers. Today, they’re officially launching the service. Using “Marketplace”, publishers can list bounties for articles they want written. Authors then submit their stories following the publisher’s writing guidelines and compete for the bounty. Publishers can select any of the articles as the winner, although Helium’s peer review ratings help rank the list. Payments per article range from $20 to over $100, with 20% transaction fee going to Helium.

For the pilot they have 14 publishers listing about 10 bounties a piece. In September they expect to have over 1000 publishers on the system.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/146311128/

Viacom and NBC aren’t content with suing YouTube and other video sites for copyright infringement - they are also trying to inject their opinions into other lawsuits that they are not otherwise involved in.

Last week Viacom and NBC petitioned to file a document known as an Amicus Brief in a little known case between Veoh and an online porn site called IO Group. Amicus briefs are a way for people or entities not involved in a given case to let the court know what they think - they are usually filed by those who have some interest in the outcome of a case because it affects their business in some way. Courts often welcome them because they amount to free research and can be used to help them come to a decision.

Does this mean Veoh can soon add Viacom and NBC to the growing list of companies they are fighting in court? Probably not. Veoh is fighting to keep the brief out of the court’s hands, but is also making it clear that they don’t want to end up with new litigation with Viacom and NBC. In fact, the two companies continue to negotiate on a distribution deal. Veoh CEO Steve Mitgang says:

This is a critical juncture for both service providers and content holders and, ultimately, users. We do not see Viacom’s brief as an indication of lack of interest to work with us; in fact, all of our conversations withthem and other studios have become increasingly positive. That said, we do think this move reflects the importance of our case to the studios and the industry.

The cases being litigated now are crucial in determining what level of freedom video sites have in letting their users upload and distribute content. Content owners are not happy with the protections provided under the DMCA - they want video sites to be far more proactive in stopping uploads in the first place. The outcome of these cases will guide how much freedom these video sites have to continue current practices, and ultimately determine the value of these companies down the road.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/146262469/

Associated Press writer Rachel Metz covers InviteShare, the company we acquired last month that lets users get hard-to-find invitations to private betas.

I spoke to Rachel a couple of times while she researched the article. She mentions the fact that some startups might not like the fact that InviteShare allows people to bypass the normal invitation mechanisms they set up. But she also gets the fact that if someone wants into a beta badly enough to go through InviteShare, they are probably the perfect person to test the product. And the days of people paying for beta invitations on eBay should be long gone now.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/146217147/

Congrats to the entire Dojo team on shipping Dojo 0.9. In short, you can now expect great things from this revamp, including a tight, fast core, a unified good looking set of widgets, and an extensible space for all things Dojo.

Now that this new base is out there, the team can continue to build on it, and take it to the next level. Bye bye 0.4, hello 0.9.

Alex says it best:

After a complete re-think about the purpose and value of Dojo, and after
months of grueling ground-up work on the part of the entire Dojo team,
I’m happy, proud, and excited to announce that Dojo 0.9.0 is available and AOL is already hosting 0.9 in their CDN.

For those porting Dojo applications from previous version of the
toolkit, you can refer to the Porting Guide for help on where APIs landed in the shuffle

In may cases, you’ll need less code overall to get the same thing done
(or done better), and Bill Keese (Dijit Project Lead) has put together
a great overview of what’s new and awesome.

The quick rundown of 0.9 features:

Dijit

• unified look and feel for all widgets
• ambitious a11y and i18n features in every Dijit widget
• a mature CSS-driven theme system with multiple, high-quality themes
• huge improvements in system performance
• data-bound widgets
• Declarations for lightweight widget writing
• a new page parser that allows instances of any class, not just widgets
• no magic

Core

• reduced API surface area (easier to remember and use)
• dojo.query() always available, returns real arrays
• from-scratch high-performance DnD system
• Base (dojo.js) is 25K on the wire (gzipped)
• dojo.data APIs finalized
• new build system
• new test harness for both CLI and browser use
• dojo.behavior now marked stable and based on dojo.query
• excellent animation APIs with Color animations in Base (always available)
• all the features you’ve come to count on from Dojo (RPC, JSON-P, JSON, i18n, formatting utilities, etc.)

DojoX

• high quality implementations of previously experimental features: gfx (portable 2D drawing), data wires, offline, storage, cometd, etc.
• dojox.gfx now includes Sliverlight support
• many more features and improvements than there’s room for here.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/146219591/dojo-09-final-version-released

New Paris startup Jooce says they are targeting the “cybercafe generation” with their new Flash-based web operating system and sharing platform.

Jooce is most like Goowy, another Flash based web OS/desktop. But Jooce is different enough to merit a closer look. They says 500 million people a day log on to the Internet from a cybercafe, and they are the target of the Jooce product. They want access to core customized applications like instant messaging, storage, media player, email and widgets. Jooce offers all of that, and is also a private sharing network among friends.

Every user has their own private desktop for IM, email, storage, etc. But they also have another desktop that friends can access and grab shared files, or drop off a file that they want to share.

The company has raised an initial seed round of financing from Mangrove Capital Partners, one of the original investors in Skype. It is currently a closed platform, but they will be releasing an API in the near future.

Jooce enters a crowded space but is targeting a clear audience. Being backed by Mangrove doesn’t hurt either.

Israel-based G.ho.st, another web OS startup that recently launched, is taking a different approach from Jooce. They’ve built some basic applications to show off the platform but are counting on third parties to do most of the heavy lifting via their API.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/146204205/

.Mac

Neat feature of .Mac web mail: Each line item in the inbox has a little reply icon. You can click that to send a quick reply. Just type text and hit Send. No need to bother with the to, from, subject fields…just type the reply and go.

Twitter

Twitter elicits better support queries with specific entry fields for “This is what I DID,” “This is what I EXPECTED to happen,” and “This is what ACTUALLY happened.”

Swerve Festival

This Swerve Festival screens has cool background images in the top, left, lower-left and lower-right corners. Along with the centered content, they give the page a neat, sorta old-fashioned picture-frame quality.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/572-screens-around-town-mac-twitter-swerve-festival

Google has acquired a stake in Chinese social portal Tianya.cn.

Tianya.cn offers a variety of services including user blogs, classifieds, photo hosting, news, sports news and University information. The site is ranked as the 63rd most popular website in China according to Alexa.

As reported August 17, Google stated its intention to acquire 1 or 2 China focused internet companies and invest in 5 over the next 12 months. The investment in Tianya.cn would appear to be the first of those 5 investments. The percentage of Tianya acquired by Google, or the price of the purchase was not disclosed, although it is believed the stake could be as high as 60%

(via Reuters)

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/146127713/