Ajax Girl

Jaxtr has raised a $10 million A round led by August Capital with Mayfield Fund, Draper Richards, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Luxemburg-based Mangrove Capital participating. They’ve also doubled their registered user base over last month, totalling 1 million users. They plan on getting to a break even point on the investment and to total 20 million users by the end of next year.

Jaxtr, like GrandCentral, uses VOIP as a utility to add features to your existing phone, as contrasted to other VOIP startups focused primarily on cost savings (We have a roundup of VOIP services here). It’s service lets you anonymously post your phone number on the web and get cheap long distance calling rates. It works by connecting calls to your existing phone service through a Jaxtr number on VOIP. Calls are anonymous because they are made to a new Jaxtr number instead of your existing number. This lets you push all calls to voicemail and choose who can and can’t call through directly. Calls are cheaper because long distance calls are made over VOIP lines instead of standard phone networks. Jangl is another player in the category, also enabling you to control access to who calls your phone.

Although you can access the service easily through an embeddable widget, Jaxtr has found a lot of it’s growth coming from direct call links placed in emails or on non-social networking websites. Jangl has been expanding through a series of business deals, most notably with Various, Inc, Justin.tv, Fubar, and Revision3, bringing their online profile presence to over 20 million.

As part of taking the company to a break even point, they will be releasing a paid service, incorporating advertising, and pursuing new services on social networks. The paid service is expected to be their lead revenue generator and will simply allow people to buy more Jax, the virtual currency that converts into local phone minutes. Currently users get 100 free Jax each month, which convert into 100 minutes in the US, with conversion rates depending on local telco costs (sometimes as low as 15 minutes in Europe). Longer term plans include tiered monthly minute plans, like cell phones.

Their second revenue stream will be through on-site advertising within user’s Jaxtr accounts. A look at their Alexa traffic shows traffic growing noticeably upward in fits and spurts, mostly due to users checking their Jaxtr voicemail. Although the company currently isn’t disclosing traffic numbers, Konstantine doesn’t dispute the Alexa numbers. He explains the dips as periods during which they had trouble keeping up with the growth.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/149057789/

IT software maker SpiceWorks just closed an $8 million in series B financing. The funding round was led by Shasta Ventures with participation from Spiceworks series A investor, Austin Ventures. Their series A was $5 million. Shasta Ventures co-founder and managing director, Ravi Mohan, and former Dell senior executive, John Hamlin, have joined the Spiceworks board of directors. The money will be used to support over 120,000 users as well as software development and sales and marketing.

SpiceWorks’ software is an IT Desktop suite, consisting of a Network Inventory, Help Desk, Reporting, Monitoring and Troubleshooting applications. Taking a page from a lot of the consumer applications we profile on TechCrunch, their software is completely free and ad supported. Ravi Mohan of Shasta calls the shift toward ad supported systems the “consumerization of the enterprise”.

The ads are served via Google AdSense along a sidebar as you use the application. The idea is that IT professionals get a free suite of the basic tools they need and advertisers get access to a targeted audience that spends a lot of time in front of those ads (lots of page views).

Are we going to see the ad-supported model spreading across enterprise applications? Not likely, considering the great support and set up costs associated with most enterprise installations. However, SpiceWorks’ free bundle of basic IT programs helps differentiate themselves in the highly competitive category of SMB IT tools.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/149056983/

Social bookmarking service turned Q&A style site Wis.dm was taken $5 Million in a round led by North Bridge Venture Partners.

Wis.dm was founded by uDate founder Martin Clifford. North Bridge’s Michael Skok will join the Wis.dm board as part of the deal.

Wis.dm provides a simple yes/no question service which aims to avoid long answers to life’s most elusive questions. Wis.dm also offers a Facebook application that gives users the ability to answer questions that appear on Wis.dm.

See our previous coverage of Wis.dm here.
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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/149048474/

Today at the An Event Apart Chicago conference, Liz Danzico wondered aloud what “seamless” means. You hear it bandied about often—especially in the form of a “seamless user experience.”

So, in 10 words or less, explain what “seamless” means in the context of the often-promised “seamless user experience.”

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/582-an-excercise-in-clarity-seamless

If you are into the social music scene, bookmark ContraStream, a new music discovery engine, and go back to it on September 3 when they launch.

The site promises to help users find good music quickly. Artists upload indie music and others vote on it Digg-fashion to push the good stuff to the top of the site. It is at least somewhat similar to iJigg, which also lets users vote, Digg-like, on music.

ContraStream will leverage the user-generated voting data to create let users search/browse popular music. Each artist and album also gets its own dedicated page on the site.

In an effort to “keep the music indie,” users are encouraged to flag music that is “too mainstream.”

See more at Scopetech.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/149034788/

YouTube is in a spot of bother in Germany for hosting Nazi related material uploaded by users.

Clips include scenes from the 1940 Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda film Jud Suess and music videos German far-right rock band Landser.

A German parliamentarian was quoted as saying that YouTube hosting these films “amounts to aiding and abetting incitement of these people.” The display of Nazi imagery or logos, or supporting Nazi ideals is illegal in Germany and punishable by jail time as well as severe fines.

According to a ZDNet report Germany’s Central Council of Jews Vice President Salomon Korn was considering pressing charges against Google Germany over the matter.

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/~3/149028420/

I’ve been beating up on MyLiveSearch for months now. The startup promises to create the first real time search engine, where results are indexed literally as the search is conducted.

It all started back in May when the unknown startup got big press in Australia as a search startup that “Google is keeping a close eye on” (with no supporting evidence whatsoever). WebProNews called the service “revolutionary” based on a phone conversation with one of the founders and without actually testing it. The company, which sports a 1995ish design, also missed its much touted June launch date. All of this hype provided lots of ammunition for some easy trashing.

But now the startup is set to launch this Wednesday, and we’ve had a chance to test it over the weekend. While I don’t think the company has much of a chance of displacing Google as the king of search, they are innovating in the area of real time searches. And their approach to search is unique in that all the work is placed on the user’s computer.

First, MyLiveSearch is not actually indexing the web. Users must install a browser plugin (Windows/IE only) and then select a base search engine to start every search (Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft). Users can also select a different starting point, such as Wikipedia.

The first ten results for a query are pulled from the selected search engine or other starting point and displayed. Then MyLiveSearch begins to spider out from those sites and index other results, which are displayed as they are generated. All of the spidering is done from the user’s computer, though, not MyLiveSearch’s servers. This is the reason for the plugin requirement, of course. And it has the side benefit of putting basically zero resource strain on MyLiveSearch itself.

Overall the results are not super impressive. Google is indexing many websites nearly constantly now, so real time results are less important than they were a couple of years ago. As an aside, Google’s faster indexing time has also affected the blog search engines, which are really only useful today to show chronological or reverse chronological results - Google is indexing many blogs as fast or faster than they are.

But MyLiveSearch is attacking the search problem in a new way by pushing all of the work to the user’s computer. Users still get Google or Yahoo (or whatever they like) data for the top ten results, and then see real time stuff spidered from there.

There are still a number of bugs and annoyances with the service that need to be ironed out. Only one search can be conducted at a time and you can’t have multiple windows open using the service. You also can’t refresh a results page, forcing you to re-enter the query.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/148988713/

Bloglines, the first popular RSS feed reader, is revamped (finally!) with a new beta version that is using Dojo, and their new Dijit widgeting system.

The new look and feel has some new features, wrapped up by the ReadWriteWeb as:

Bloglines Beta is the first stage of “a complete redesign of the Bloglines service”. The new features include a new personalizeable Start Page (featuring drag and drop functionality to add feeds); 3 feed reading views (Quick View with headlines only, 3-Pane View for an email-like interface, and Full View for “the classic Bloglines page layout, updated”); Drag-and-drop feed management using Ajax; and a new Unread System to manage what to keep and what to ignore. Also upgraded are the ‘Add Feeds’ process and the ‘Full View’ option.

I opened up iShowU, and luckily remembered my old Bloglines account information as I took a quick look around:

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/148965571/bloglines-beta-with-dojo

If you felt a little green with envy when Disney bought juvenile virtual world Club Penguin for $700 million in cash and earn out, this could be your chance to grab a piece of the virtual pie.

WhuddleWorld, Inc., creator of eponymous online hangout for kids WhuddleWorld, was forced to shut down in April after running out of money. The team of five that built WhuddleWorld over the last year and a half is soliciting acquisition and partnership offers to get the immersive world back online.

Co-founder Dee Hardrath claims that at the time of shutdown WhuddleWorld had grown to 76,000 registered members and a monthly page view count of 20M. She also says the company still receives emails four months later from loyal followers pleading them to get the world back into operation.

Interested in investing? Drop them a line. Perhaps you will be the one to pull them out of the TechCrunch DeadPool.

Check out our recent roundup of virtual worlds for information about the competitors in this space.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/148931546/

Crain’s Chicago Business recently posted a video interview with Jason where he discusses avoiding structure, how interruption is the enemy of productivity, why it’s a good idea to emulate drug dealers, the secret to competing with free stuff, and more. Check it out.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/581-crains-chicago-business-interviews-jason