Ajax Girl

Orbitz TLC Traveler Update is a new service from well known online travel company Orbitz - it provides quick, P2P generated travel reports. That means travelers can get information on delays, cancellations, weather and other issues way before official announcements are made.

Traveler Update starts with the basics; users have access to TSA wait times, weather information, traffic (pulled from Google Maps), and general information including WiFi access and parking details. Where the service is trying to be different is with the remaining feature: user generated advice.

People using any airport in the United States are encouraged to submit airport advice to the site from the airport itself. Tips can be made anonymously or by registered Orbitz members, and the service also includes a mobile version for easy access via cell phone.

Like any service that relies in user generated content, it’s only ever as good as the number of users contributing to it; the service went live Monday so it’s not extensive yet, but it is already seeing contributions from airport hotspots. Earlier today there were delays at Chicago O’Hare Airport and there were several pages of user advice direct from the airport, including details of flight delays and cancellations, where Taxi’s were readily available, security delays and other information that someone heading for the airport, or at the airport might find useful.

It’s a good idea, and if it builds user numbers it will become an even better service. Worth a look the next time you are flying in the United States.

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/~3/153271420/

Ah, PayPerPost. The controversial Florida-based startup that is leading the effort to tarnish the blogosphere makes another PR blunder. And this one’s a whopper.

The company has been chronicling their startup days on a video blog called RockStartup. There have been some embarrassments before with the video blog - such as when a viewer noticed that the company had purchased $700 chairs for employees with investor capital and then yelled at a painter for standing on one (CEO Ted Murphy, pictured above, later said the chairs were purchased used).

But the most recent episode is where the company really takes the cake. All employees of the company were taken on an all-expenses-paid trip to club med, where as far as I can tell they spent their time getting drunk and dressing up as Native Americans, complete with lots of red face and body paint (something many Native Americans find both racist and offensive). The company also hired something called a “Creative Thinking Coach” to guide them through the whole experience.

The only question I have is…Did Draper Fisher Jurvetson, the main VC behind PayPerPost, really greenlight this debacle?

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/153268716/

Social network Multiply has taken $16.6 million in Series B funding. The round was led by VantagePoint Venture Partners with Point Judith Capital and Transcosmos Investments also participating.

As part of the deal ex-Chairman of Intermix Media (the original owners of MySpace) David Scott Carlick will join Multiply’s board.

Multiply previously took $6million Series A in July 2006.

Multiply is one of the older social networking sites (it launched in 2003) and has flown under the radar while first MySpace, then Facebook soared; we last covered the site in November 06. Whilst getting little attention Multiply has continued to grow, and at least according to Alexa is now more popular than Bebo, although lower than Orkut or Hi5. Like many of its competitors it appears to have carved out a strong presence outside of the United States, ranking in the top 10 sites visited by internet users in the Philippines (5) and Indonesia (9); 39% of the sites traffic comes from the Philippines.

(via Venturebeat)

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/153252317/

I just returned from our party in central London to celebrate Seedcamp Week and the relaunch of TechCrunch UK & Ireland.

Robert Loch, who’s famous for his London parties, generously agreed to have the event at his penthouse London flat in Soho. His parties are so notorious (and I use that word intentionally) that we had to keep the location secret and only email it out to attendees who’d registered. Even so, 50 or so people showed up “off list” and were able to get in.

Total attendance was about 250 people, including most of the venture capitalists in London who invest in the Internet, most of the Seedcamp attendees and a ton of other entrepreneurs. Skype founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis also dropped by for an hour or so.

One thing I need to remember for our next party - Londoners drink a lot more and stay out far later than their Silicon Valley geek counterparts. We actually ran out of alcohol completely at around 10:30 but Heather soon had another shipment brought in. I left at 1:30 am to get back to my day job. As far as I know the party is still going strong.

TechCrunch UK & Ireland Relaunches

The primary reason for the party was to celebrate the relaunch of TechCrunch UK & Ireland, after a nearly year-long hiatus. I am very pleased to announce the return of Mike Butcher as the editor of the site. Mike knows everyone in London - seriously - and he has deep experience writing about startups at The Financial Times, The Industry Standard and The Guardian, among other publications. We are very lucky to have him rejoin the TechCrunch team. Look for his coverage of Seedcamp on Friday morning London time.

See more coverage of the relaunch at The Guardian.

Thank You To Sponsors

Heather put the party together in a week after we nearly canceled due to a lack of an appropriate venue. Still, a number of sponsors stepped up to cover costs of the event and supplied excellent food and drink. Thank you to all. And special thanks to the Seedcamp team for working with us to organize and promote the party.

Event Sponsors:

Olswang is a leading law firm renowned for its work in media, communications, technology, real estate and more recently, biosciences. Founded in 1981, the firm has grown to a staff of more than 500 and has offices in London, the Thames Valley and Brussels. Olswang is organised with both a sector and service line focus, enabling it to deliver specialist legal advice backed by a strong business perspective.

WorldTV is an exciting, second generation video site offering a slick and user-friendly interface for online aggregation, personal archiving, search and viewing of multi-definition video content in Flash, including access to more than 25 million video clips from a range of popular, well known sites. The service lets users create their own full-screen online TV channel, complete with MTV style logo and all at a cool and easy-to-remember URL. Based in London and Limerick, Ireland, WorldTV will launch out of private beta in November, and is an idea from Smashing Concepts! - the UK ideas and incubation company.

Food & Drink Sponsors:

Thanks to Mucho Mas Burrittos (seven days old, founded by former Skype guys, better than Chipotle) and Hummus Brothers for feeding us, and Stormhoek for supplying the excellent wine for the event. The food and wine was awesome and you kept everyone appropriately fed and watered.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/153244612/

Social bookmarking site Del.icio.us launched a limited, invite-only preview of version 2.0 of the service this afternoon. The new site can be accessed at preview.delicious.com, although only invited users can actually get in.

The Delicious service (no longer to be del.icio.us and now residing at delicious.com) boasts 3 million registered users and 100 million unique URLs bookmarked.

If you are invited, all of your existing bookmarks are imported to the preview, although any changes you make will be lost when the new service launches - so it’s just for trying out and giving feedback. Del.icio.us is saying that there is no guarantee that the final product will look exactly like the preview, since they are taking user feedback very seriously.

The preview shows a substantially different interface than the current Del.icio.us site, and a number of new features.

Founder Joshua Schachter says this is a complete code-rewrite of Del.icio.us. More details below.

(more…)

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/153153687/

Alex Russell isn’t known for holding back his opinions. He continues his tradition of calling issues to our attention in his piece on Where are we now?.

This article takes a look back to his posting, 1.5 years ago, on the state of things at that point…. and what he would like to see. He isn’t happy with the progress made in the year and a half since.

He hits out at Microsoft’s secretive behaviour:

The “worst case scenario” that I’ve described to folks in private for a long time is that IE 7 is the end of the line. The last hurrah. The final gasp of life in Trident’s creaking limbs. IE 7 could either signal the beginning of a renewed commitment to the web by Microsoft, or it could be the minimum MSFT can get away with to prevent customer mutiny. To assuage the latter scenario, I’ve directly and firmly asked every member of the IE team I’ve talked to since then to outline in public Microsoft’s commitment to new versions of IE. We need to see timelines, feature targets, and distribution plans for those releases as well. This might seem like putting the cart before the horse but I think it’s not too much to ask. In fact, it might even be the minimum the web development community should expect.

and he compares it to the other browser vendors:

Brendan Eich has an entire blog dedicated to communicating outward about the features that we can expect from the web as delivered by Firefox (and the platform behind it). The IE Team’s blog is eerily silent on the future of what is still the most important browser on the internet. We’re reduced to getting information from third parties and conference talks. The features planned for Firefox 3 are impressive and the work is being done in the open, meaning it’s easy to have confidence that not only will Mozilla ship what they say they will, it’ll be here when they say it will. Same goes for the excellent work the Safari team has been doing. Even Opera keeps its community on fire by shipping regular updates, showing tech previews at conferences, and blogging about the progress being made on many fronts. If the IE team is holed up working on something stonkingly good, they certainly aren’t doing themselves any favors by not telling us about it. The result of their radio silence isn’t mystery, it’s distrust. Deep, divisive, troubling distrust of the kind you can only get when folks who break up stop talking altogether.

Then, the future:

I’m pretty sure the IE team isn’t sitting still. Chris Wilson is heading up the HTML 5 working group and there’s reports of some real progress there. HTML 5 is the most important web spec under consideration anywhere so this is truly good news. But it hasn’t yet been accompanied by the kinds of communication that allow us to trust MSFT as a custodian of the web’s future.

Getting IE 7 and watching it ramp up among IE’s installed base has been good, but it’s only half the answer. The web needs to know, unequivocally, when we can expect more information about IE.Next, what OSes it will target, and what standards, improvements, and major fixes are on the roadmap even if they slip. Without that much honesty, this relationship probably won’t get off the ground again.

Are you as worried about the future as Alex?

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/153004988/web-developers-where-are-we-now

Google Books released a useful new tool this morning - the ability to embed parts of public domain books directly into other websites and/or Google Notebook.

The clip from the image above is embedded below. You can choose an image or text embed (both are below). It’s useful for bloggers who want to discuss a certain passage of a book, although taking a screen shot and uploading it does exactly the same thing. The image embed lacks a link back to the original source material for some reason. The text embed has a link but the formatting isn’t so wonderful.

The Adventures of Oliver Twist By Charles Dickens OLIVER TWIST CHAPTER I TREATS OP THE PLACE WHERE OLIVER TWIST WAS BORN AND OF THE CIRCUMSTANCES ATTENDING HIS BIRTH AMOXG other public buildings in a certain town which for many reasons it will be prudent to refrain from mentioning and to which I will assign no fictitious name there is one anciently common to most towns great or small to wit a workhouse and in this workhouse was born on a day and date which I need not trouble myself to repeat inasmuch as it can be of no possible consequence to the reader in this stage of the business at all events the item of mortality whose name is prefixed to the head of this chapter For a long time after it was ushered into this world of sorrow and trouble by the parish surgeon it remained a matter of considerable doubt whether the child would survive to bear name at all in which case it is somewhat more

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/152982303/

Back when it was YUI-EXT the framework was immediately impressive because of the level of detail on the UI and look & feel. You could see that Jack wasn’t just thowing out code willy nilly. He was architecting a good looking overarching framework. It was consistent. It had nice touches. It just looked good!

Now we are moving towards Ext 2.0, and the team has announced new features in a preview that continue the tradition:

A common theme for the Ext framework is building rich web applications that can barely be distinguished from true desktop applications. Everything from the look and feel of a control to smooth transitions in DnD are considered when building out the controls. The Web desktop is a culmination of this effort and demonstrates how the use of standards based technologies such as JavaScript, CSS & DOM can be leveraged to build a desktop like experience within the context of a browser. Notice in the screenshot that modeless windows are being used within an MDI (Multiple Document Interface) paradigm to display data to the user.

Go ahead and play a little with the web desktop experience:

There are a slew of new features too, such as:

• Grouping & Group Summary: Ext 2.0 will introduce highly configurable single-level column grouping capabilities as well as summary rollups at the group level.
• Scrolling Tabs: By extending the Ext.TabPanel control with a new “autoScroll” directive, all tabs added to the panel instantly fall into the scrollable behavior of the tab panel
• Anchor Layout: The team extended the FormPanel component to allow form controls to be anchored to a specific position within a specific container.
• Column Tree: One of the requests that we’ve frequently received, and now implemented, is the ability to define additional display columns with the tree control.

You can see all of this in action. Let the guys know what you think. They are listening!

We also put together a very quick walk through of the features:

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/152975424/ext-20-scrolling-tabs-anchor-layout-the-web-desktop-and-more

The New York Times is reporting that both Amazon and Google are entering the eBook business this year, joining Sony and others who already have products (image is Sony’s Reader).

The new Amazon product and service will be called The Kindle and will compete directly with Sony. Google will begin charging users to read the full text of some of the books they have indexed.

Amazon: The Kindle

The Kindle will be a device to read books - black and white screen, internet connectivity via EVDO and a keyboard to take notes and surf the web. The device, which will cost $400-$500, will interact with an ebook service run by Amazon.

The fact that the device can access books without being separately connected to a computer will be a big selling point over Sony Reader, which sells for $300. The Kindle will also be able to surf the web and users will also be able to read newspapers, magazines, etc.

I’ve had a chance to test the Sony Reader on a number of occasions and found it to be a great way to read books, although the content selection wasn’t great. The Kindle will also use E Ink technology for displaying content. It’s great for reading text in all light conditions but does not display video or other animation.

Amazon isn’t supporting the industry’s open standard around eBooks. Instead they are using their own proprietary format from Mobipocket, a company they acquired in 2005

Like the iPod, the key driver of sales of the device won’t be the depth of content available on the associated service, but the availability of pirated, free content on BitTorrent and other P2P networks. eBooks are coming, but they’re not here yet.

Google

Google isn’t getting into the device business. Instead, they will start charging users to view some full text books that they’ve indexed, although this is separate from the Google Book Search Library Project. No word on whether Google is sharing revenue with publishers.

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/~3/152928961/

At first I thought it was just another Twitter outage, and then (after a couple of hours of Twitterrific not working) I tried connecting to Twitter directly:

There isn’t a page on Twitter (including their blog) that can be accessed as I write this (3:30am PST Thursday). It may just be sugar coating on yet another period of downtime; an alternative to the Twitter downtime bird that replaced the Twitter cat some time ago, but if it is, it’s the first time I’ve seen it. On the other hand, something might be going on at Twitter: more stable servers perhaps? or even a new feature launch? Watch this space.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/152906198/