Ajax Girl

Web chat startup Meebo, still basking in the glow of bringing instant messaging to the iPhone, is releasing a much requested new feature tonight: file sharing.

There are dozens of web based file sharing applications, such as YouSendIt and DropSend (we reviewed four P2P solutions here), but users often want to simply send a file to a friend while chatting with them. This is easy with desktop based chat, which usually allows for drag and drop file transfers. But there was no equivalent with web chat until now.

The back end of the service is hosted at Amazon S3. Meebo is eating the cost of the service, but limits file transfers to 10 MB each, with a 30 MB/month send limit per user. Look for a new “send file” button when chatting with someone on the Meebo website.

Meebo has raised a total of $12.5 million from Sequoia and Draper Fisher Jurvetson. They say 6 million people use the service monthly and spent around 2 hours per day, several times per week, on the site.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/154870423/

Technorati has announced the launch of Technorati Topics, a live river of news stream that delivers a moving list of blog posts.

It replaces the just relaunched Technorati home page.

Technorati’s Dorion Carroll said that the changes were due to user feedback on “how [Technorati] should organize the vastness of the blogosphere and help people find the good stuff and help great bloggers be found….In particular, [there were] a lot of blog posts asking us to build what bloggers want.”

It would be easy to be unkind to Technorati, and some may suggest that the move today is a case of shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic. Technorati has lurched from one crisis to another this year, losing a CEO and downsizing as it attempted to be everything to everybody whilst failing to deliver a killer product any vertical. On the other hand, as a long time Technorati user it’s good to see Technorati going back to its roots as a blogging search engine. There is still some work to do in terms of improving the indexing, but in terms of focus Technorati Topics is at least a step in the right direction.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/154865055/

GotVoice is a great voicemail utility that has so far focused on delivering visual voicemail (phone/web), custom voicemail greetings, and broadcasting voice messages (like Pinger). Through some clever coding, GotVoice links directly into your voicemail to pull messages into the system and send messages back out through it. However, the product has been lacking one of the killer voicemail features of their competitors, speech-to-text.

Today they’re differentiating themselves from GrandCentral and closing the gap with their other competitors by adding speech-to-text transcription. And adding avatars to boot.

Their new avatar system will let you add some personality to your voicemail playback using SitePal’s avatars. It’s sure to come in handy if for some reason you enjoy getting your messages delivered by a bear.

Their speech-to-text offering allows you to transcribe voicemails to text for delivery via email or SMS. You can transcribe all your messages, or filter by contact. Transcription is available on their $9.99/month premium accounts including 40 messages a month with additional charges for each message thereafter, although they have a 14 free trial.

Spinvox and CallWave also offer call transcription. Spinvox is pricey in the U.S. if you take into account exchange rates, costing £9.99/month for 50 messages. CallWave is currently a good deal, transcribing calls for free during their open beta.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/154859257/

Just one week to go until TechCrunch40 conference. Forty new products will launch over two days, with a $50,000 cash prize going to the “best-in-show” product as selected by the panel of experts.

But the entrepreneurial spirit isn’t just alive and kicking in the startups. The big guys have some stuff to show, too. Yahoo and AOL will both launch new products next week at TechCrunch40. And it’s likely we’ll add one more “BigCo” product to the mix as well later this week. The Yahoo and AOL products are being launched outside of the core 40 new launches, and will not be eligible for the $50,000 prize. But they will launch it in front of the main crowd, and audience comments and questions will be part of the show.

More announcements coming this week. The conference is now virtually sold out - there are a handful of tickets remaining. Register here.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/154787370/

Sclipo, a video how-to site similar to SuTree and 5Min, lets you post short recorded educational videos. Recorded video, however, has it’s limits. It’s largely a one-size-fits-all solution that doesn’t let you clarify your instructions or adjust according to the background of your pupils. To confront these short comings, Sclipo has softly launched a new live video feature, “Sclipo Live”. Sclipo Live lets you teach for money one-on-one through live video conferencing. It’s currently available by invite only.

The live video sessions are organized into a directory listing the time of the session, who’s leading it, and what it’s about along with a price. The actual teaching session features live video feeds of the teacher and student along with chat. The whole session is recorded and synced with the chat for easy review later. After the session is concluded, the student can rate their teacher.

The feature set is currently pretty basic. There are now built in testing features or free-form whiteboard. Screen sharing is a noticeably absent feature.

Sclipo joins a host of other companies aiming to monetize user generated content through a consulting marketplace. Ether and Wengo are two services aimed at helping professionals charge for their consulting time. Ether does this through a pay per call model while Wengo does it through a paid a one-on-one video conference.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/154758115/

We just got off the phone with iPhone Unlock salespeople WirelessImports and we have five free unlocks for CrunchGear and TechCrunch readers. How can you win one? Enter our Steve Jobs look-alike contest. Take your - or a friend’s, loved one’s, or sig other’s - picture in a black turtleneck and jeans and send it to contest@crunchgear.com with the subject line “UNLOCK MY IPHONE.” Reality Distortion Field optional.

You have to have an iPhone to enter and presumably not like/not have Cingular service or be ready to buy one when we pick you. We’ll pick five entrants at random on Friday, September 14 at 12PM EDT. Visit CG for full details.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/154733913/

On the heels of Bazaarvoice raising an $8.8 million series B, competitor PowerReviews has just raised $15 million, adding to the $6.25 million they raised in late 2005. The round was led by Lehman Brothers Venture Partners along with current investors Menlo Ventures and Draper Richards.

Since its launch in April 2007, the number of reviews and products offered on Buzzilions.com has tripled. Today, the site offers more than 400,000 reviews on 125,000 products from over 1,000 ecommerce sites. PowerReviews says that the traffic driven through Buzillions also converts at nearly twice the rate of other shopping portals. In April we compared PowerReviews to Bazaarvoice and other competitors - PowerRevies main advantage is easy integration, and a free version of the product.

User generated reviews help sales at ecommerce sites, but few startups have the technical and product resources to build this internally. PowerReviews, Bazaarvoice and others have stepped in to fill this need. Aggregate Knowledge and Loomia address different needs in the ecommerce space - helping these companies merchandise and recommend products to users based on behavior.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/154730717/

After spending the last two years as eHub, obsessively profiling and trying out almost every web application that’s come out, I’ve decided to try something different from a new perspective. I just launched PicoCool, a site that’s dedicated to bringing you tiny and obscure content from the world of peer media, social networks and subcultures.

Source: Emily Chang
Original Article: http://www.emilychang.com/go/weblog/comments/picocool-cool-content-from-real-people/

My patience is wearing thin on this one. There’s a new image editor called Acorn, and it looks pretty cool. So I click on one of the screenshot thumbnails in the lower-right of the home page. And then it happened. The sky turned black, the lights went out, and a giant gleaming polaroid slammed me in the face. That’s right, I got lightboxed.

Here’s a time lapse of my experience on the Acorn site:

You know what that looks like? A strobe light. And it felt like one too.

There’s more than the headache. Lightboxing kills context, and worse, it kills personality. Every image in every lightbox is the same, floating in the same generic universe, cut off and disconnected from your site, your style, and your design.

So next time, save us the eye strain and think twice before you start playing with the lightswitch.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/592-been-lightboxed-lately

A new class of startups is emerging that is part blogging, part genealogy and part something unique. They are focused on the very long term - getting and then keeping customers for decades, and encouraging friends and especially family members to join, too. Once they’re hooked, they’ve spent so much time building content that they are very unlikely to ever leave.

The four startups we’re tracking in this space are Our Story, Story Of My Life, dandelife and My Family. And while these sites are not purely genealogy/family tree focused, they overlap extensively with other startups we cover regularly such as Geni and My Heritage which focus first on building out the family tree first and adding content second.

If you are thinking of building out a family site, any of the four will be a suitable choice. Our Story, led by CEO Andy Halliday, has raised $6 million in venture capital. They are focused on your life’s timeline - you add simple (or elaborate) stories and pictures and place them on a timeline, which can then be embedded into another website via a widget, printed in a book or turned into a DVD. Timeline stories can be milestone based (such as when you graduated from college or got married), or question based. An easy way to get started is by answering some of the hundreds of questions the site presents to you. The important thing is to date everything properly so it appears on your life timeline in the right place.

Story Of My Life is a relative newcomer and is still in beta. The company is self funded and has done a lot with very little capital. Of the four it’s my favorite because it defocuses on your life’s timeline and instead encourages you to just create a profile and then write stories about yourself, either in journal (blogging) format or around chapters such as “my college years.” There’s less of a feeling that you aren’t “done” until the entire timeline is filled out. SOML also allows you to upload audio and video files in addition to photos.

Two feature about SOML that are useful - the “vault” is where your media is stored, which can the be pulled into individual stories. They also have top ten lists about each user, which is a quick way to get to know a person. SOML actually has more of a social network feel than the others, too.

SOML still has a few bugs to work through, though, as it moves towards full launch.

My Family is the largest and oldest of the four and affiliated with genealogy giant Ancestry.com. The site had an extensive redesign in 2006. It’s focused on the family before the individual. Even though it’s the largest, it lacks the timeline feature of Our Story and the usability of SOML (no video or audio files, for example). It also lacks the blogging/journal features of SOML. If you’re looking for a quick and easy family site to keep everyone up to date on what’s going on, it may be for you, but the family tree approach of Geni and My Heritage is a better way, in my opinion, to keep things organized.

If you are aware of other emerging startups focusing on this space, let us know. We’re keeping an eye on this space.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/154641962/