Ajax Girl

Buried in the news yesterday that former Harvard student Aaron Greenspan is claiming to be the founder of Facebook was mention of Greenspan’s own startup: CommonRoom.

Perhaps I’m being a little cynical, as I’m sure in truth that it’s a complete coincidence that Greenspan is publicly claiming founder status for Facebook in the NY Times whilst promoting a Facebook competitor. As for CommonRoom, the wow didn’t quite happen for me, but you can be the judge:

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/151111649/

As if to demonstrate how powerful internet syndication technologies like RSS can be for the discovery of new media, Phoenix startup Genwi has been quietly developing an entire social network centered on RSS-syndicated content.

The site, which looks very similar to Facebook, provides all the basic social networking features: profiles, friending, messaging, etc. However, it also incorporates media from across the internet that users can discover and share with one another.

Content feeds - whether for videos, blogs, podcasts, or news - are pulled in as “channels” and each has its own page. These pages display most recent items, suggest related channels, and solicit consumer opinions.

Genwi’s wide-ranging selection of channels can be either searched by term or browsed by category. When you find a channel that you like, you can subscribe to it. Recent items from all of your subscribed feeds will show up on a personalized mashup page. If you can’t find a particular feed, you can manually add it to the site’s collection.

So far, this sounds very much like any other feed reader (although the browse, search, and discovery capabilities of Genwi are arguably better than even Google Reader’s). Genwi distinguishes itself primarily by its attempt to build a social network around the sharing and discussion of feed items. When you come across a feed or item you particularly like, you can opt to share it with all of your friends through your profile page.

It will be interesting to see whether Genwi can pull off an entirely autonomous social network centered around the concept of content sharing. RSS sharing is already possible within Facebook so Genwi will have to come up with ways to really enhance the media discovery experience. My hunch is that users will not be drawn in large numbers to the site until the company beefs up Genwi’s feature set to match Facebook’s non-RSS offerings.

Genwi may sustain an edge over other social networks by rolling out premium content integration, which it plans to do first with music sales. The co-founders Killian McKiernan and PJ Gurumohan were involved in the development of the MediaRSS standard, and they plan to use what they learned from that experience to turn Genwi into a distribution channel for a variety of ad-supported and paid content.

Genwi has been under development since early 2006 but only respectable since early 2007. It claims 100,000 uniques per month and about 4,000 registered users. The founders have operated without external funding so far.

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/~3/151098155/

Anyone who’s applied to college has dealt with the frustration of standardize testing. With the cost of failure so high, parents and grads continue to spend a lot of cash on test preparation to ensure the best results. However, there’s a crop of web startups popping up to ease the pain and we’re all benefiting from the competition.

Prepme is one online test prep company coming out of the University of Chicago’s business incubator. Founded in 2001, the company offers test preparation for the SAT, PSAT, and ACT, using an adaptive algorithm to customize the preparation course for each student.

Unlike Kaplan’s online offering, Prepme doesn’t calculate the best lesson plan once, but continuously as you work your way through the material. Their system keeps track of what questions you get right and wrong, working you harder on the types of questions you miss.

Additionally, customers can connect electronically, using real time chat, with high scoring college students who serve as tutors.

With test prep for the SAT alone being a $130 million dollar-a-year industry, using web 2.0 technology to help students seems like a logical move. Seeing the threat, some of the major players in the industry, like Kaplan or Princeton Review, have been attempting to develop online test prep products to compete with new online offering like Prepme. Prepme charges around $300 to $500 for their lessons compared with Kaplan’s lowest offering costing $400.

At the same time, Prepme is expanding the tests which they provide preparation for to include the GMAT, MCAT, and LSAT and partnering with brick and mortar companies to provide comprehensive test-preparation services. Additionally, the company signed a contract earlier this year to provide their services to every high school junior in the state of Maine.

See also our coverage of Grockit, a Silicon Valley startup focusing on helping students study for the GMAT via P2P ideas evolved through MMOGs..

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/151105415/

My guess is that you have notice an uptake of news this week. That is for a couple of reasons:

1. It is the end of the summer, and people are probably working again. As such, we have seen a huge increase in submissions and interesting news out there
2. Rey Bango has joined the ranks as an Ajaxian. He has been adding a lot to the Ajax community for quite some time, so it is fantastic to have him contributing directly to Ajaxian through his own insightful posts.

Welcome Rey. Here is his bio:

Rey Bango



Rey Bango is Vice President of Business Development for Ext JS and member of the jQuery JavaScript library’s Core Project Team. With over 18 years of experience, Rey brings a unique perspective to RIA development having built true desktop applications for 8 years prior to moving into web programming and being keenly aware of the challenges involved in building desktop-like web applications.

He has developed a wealth of knowledge stemming from his work with such technologies as client/server, OOP, PowerBuilder, Sybase, ASP, ColdFusion, DHTML, & Ajax. His blog can be found at reybango.com.

On a side note, the rotating snippets at the top of the site are getting a little stale aren’t they. Since you as a community are all more witty than the few of us, I thought that you may have some ideas for new bylines. Take a shot in the comments!

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/150947744/introducing-the-latest-ajaxan-rey-bango

NBC Dumps iTunes! Apple Dumps NBC! What ever the headline, one thing is sure: by making it even more difficult to obtain affordable, legal downloads of TV shows, more and more people will be turning to Bit Torrent. In Apple’s case, it’s not really their problem, but with NBC you really have to question the business sense of a company that states it is concerned about piracy, then makes the legal alternative more difficult to come by.

As demonstrated in the image below, NBC shows are in plentiful supply on BitTorrent. I’m sure users will welcome the flood of additional downloaders. NBC shows available via BitTorrent include Scrubs, ER, My Name Is Earl, Heroes and just about everything else.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/150827188/