Ajax Girl

The second session of the Metanomics Conference was held in Second Life today (see our previous coverage here) and I had the pleasure of attending.

Guest speaker for today’s session was Sandra Kearney, IBM’s head of 3D Development. Kearney spoke from Sage Hall, Cornell in front of live audience, with a live stream being delivered to both Second Life and IBM’s Active Worlds chat platform.

One of the inherent problems with Second Life today is the limitations on attendance; an entire island or sim (Second Life for server) can only handle a maximum of approximately 78 users at one time. Conference attendees could participate at two locations in Second Life, but it was a first in, best dressed affair, so to attend I had to teleport in 45 minutes before the conference session started. 30 minutes prior to start and the main conference facility of Metaversed Island was at capacity, and unlike a TechCrunch 40 conference, you couldn’t sneak into the back of the room and stand against a wall; once full users simply couldn’t teleport into the facility.

The conference location itself mimicked a real life conference: chairs, lectern, stage and video screen.

The discussion itself was interesting to those following the virtual world space as it focused on the evolving role of virtual worlds and covered the move towards open source and interoperable virtual worlds. Metaplace, a TechCrunch 40 presenter has launched a product that is promising to provide interoperability, and Chinese Second Life clone HipiHo is currently attempting to form an industry working group to work on standards to allow this. Linden Lab has also been making noises in this direction for some time.

From a viewing perspective, it was not unlike a regular conference; the video quality on the live stream from Cornell was watchable and participating in the session live provides a superior experience to watching the recorded video of the event later.

The first question from the audience came from me and I asked Kearney what she thought of Paul Twomey’s suggestion that the future of global commerce is in virtual worlds. She didn’t agree, saying that ultimately nothing will replace face to face, however there was scope for virtual worlds to provide an alternative when face to face isn’t an option.

Overall I think the format works. IBM is already holding meetings and doing other staff/ communications activities in Second Life, and others are including Cisco and Amazon are also using Second Life for business meetings. It won’t replace a top end teleconference setup, but it works as a more affordable alternative.

A short video clip below show the layout of the conference. I couldn’t voice over it and run the audio from the presentation at the same time, so there was some one speaking during the clip, even if it’s not recorded.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/159313539/

Mixx is a startup we’ve been watching for the last few weeks. They’ve been extremely quiet about their service until very recently. And since they are located well outside of Silicon Valley, in Virginia, they’ve been able to stay below the radar despite their high profile founder: Chris McGill, formerly the General Manager of Yahoo News and more recently the VP Strategy at USA Today.

McGill’s experience with new media news at Yahoo and old media at USA Today may serve his new startup, which launches into private beta this evening, well. Mixx is a new social news site. To put it into context, it’s a sort of cross between Digg, LinkedIn and MyYahoo. In a nutshell, its a social network that lets you find and share news based on your interests and location.

One aspect of the service - each user has a customized Digg-like experience, effectively creating smaller niche versions of the popular social news site. That means niche publishers get to play, too. Today they are largely shut out of Digg. But popular stories from more obscure topics can get traffic traction through Mixx. Stories, video and photos can all be bookmarked.

And Mixx hopes to partner with those publishing partners to provide easy bookmarking links back to Mixx. That will drive traffic back and forth, with both sides theoretically winning.

Each user gets a customized home page with news items that Mixx thinks you’ll find relevant. There are also links to overall popular stories, as well as categorized stuff like business, sports and health. Users can also create and join topical based groups, which allow them to further refine the news they submit and receive.

Will Mixx win? I think it’s a worthy experiment. Entrepreneurs have been trying to crack the personalized news nut for years, with a string of failures. At some point someone will get the model right. New sites like Thoof are trying their own independent experiments, too. Other services that we’ve covered that have entered this space in one way or another include Searchfox (deadpool, assets acquired by Yahoo), Findory (deadpool), Spotback (change in strategy) and Feeds 2.0.

Mixx launches tonight into private beta. Sign up on their home page to participate - they’ll be letting in users over the next few weeks in preparation for a full launch.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/159278008/

I was dying to announce this at TechCrunch40, but the timing just didn’t work out. Nevertheless, I am extremely proud to announce that TechCrunch now has a co-editor. Erick Schonfeld, most recently an editor-at-large at Business 2.0, will be joining the team starting next Wednesday, September 26. Matt Richtel at The New York Times broke the story.

Erick has been covering startups and technology news for 14 years. At Business 2.0 he writes feature stories and runs their main blog, Next Net, which has nearly 50,000 RSS subscribers. He also does a lot of video work and hosts regular panels of industry luminaries called Disruptor Round Tables. Prior to Business 2.0, Erick was an editor-at-large for eCompany and a contributing editor for Fortune. In 1999, Schonfeld won the prize for best information technology submission at London’s Business Journalist of the Year Awards, and in 2001 he won the prize for best space submission at the Aerospace Journalist of the Year Awards in Paris. In 1996 and 1997, Schonfeld was recognized in the TJFR Business News Reporter’s list of the “best and brightest financial journalists under the age of 30.” He appears regularly on CNBC, CNN, and NY1, and is a frequent speaker at industry conferences. Schonfeld graduated magna cum laude from Cornell University in 1993.

What impresses me most about Erick is that he comes from a traditional big media background but has embraced new media so completely. Next Net is one of a handful of blogs that I read religiously, and his expertise in video is much needed around here, where we are behind the curve.

The timing was also perfect. I was able to hire Heather, our CEO, after her boss Ross Levinsohn left Fox. Similarly, talking Erick into joining was much easier since Business 2.0 is closing down next week. He had many job offers to choose from, but our persistence won in the end.

I honestly think my greatest strength is my willingness to hire people who are, simply, better than me. Erick fits nicely into this category, and I can’t wait for him to start. Look for him starting next week. You can email him at erick at techcrunch.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/159224152/

Gaming downloads can be a pain. When the hottest new demos are released, such as the upcoming Halo 3 from Microsoft, the official servers can be brought to their knees. Some users go to BitTorrent to get the files, and others scour the message boards for alternative download sites.

It’s also hard to know what the best games out there are. Gamers can rely on review sites and other sources for news. But just as Digg has created a more efficient way to distribute news by removing the middle-men, new site FileRadar is doing the same for gaming files.

Users submit links to gaming files (demos, mods, patches, etc.) that they think are hot, and other users vote up those submissions in exactly the same way Digg works. If the official servers are down, users link to alternate sites to keep the bits flowing.

The new site was created by the guys at FutureUS, a well known distributor of gaming magazines.

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/~3/159192573/

CrunchGear is reporting that users of the yet to be released Slacker MP3 player will be able to transfer their ‘personalized stations’ to the player with a single click and refresh them via Wi-Fi or USB.

Slacker’s basic music service is similar to Pandora, providing based music player that customizes stations based on whether you like or dislike specific tracks that are free to use and ad-supported. Their iTunes-like software organizes the music on your computer, plays the same radio stations as the web based version, and will sync to the MP3 device.

Slacker has also announced agreements with major labels EMI Music, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group to make the labels’ content available to listeners on the Slacker Personal Radio service. Slacker, which had previously announced a similar agreement with SONY BMG now has agreements with all four major labels that enable listeners to choose from a vast catalog of artists to play on their personal radio stations wherever they are.

The one-click announcement and the record deals are important as it delivers free legal music to Slacker MP3 players, via a one-click Wi-Fi interface; a big marketing advantage over Apple’s iPod.

Slack has taken $53.5 million in funding over two rounds, the last round of $40 million closed 1 June.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/159183135/

TV listings discovery service MeeVee has taken $3.5 Million Series D in a round that included original backers Bay Area Equity Fund, Defta Partners, FCPR Israel Discovery Fund, Labrador Ventures, Rothschild Ventures and WaldenVC.

The investment takes MeeVee’s total funding to $18 million.

MeeVee’s basic service allows users to input their favorite actors, genres and keywords to be cross referenced with their local TV providers listings for a personalized viewing schedule. The company also provides a widget that can be placed off-site to display what you’re watching on television.

Burlingame based MeeVee reduced staff numbers by 20% in July.

(via PE Hub)

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/~3/159170422/

Multi-person SMS startup 3jam has launched a new tie-in with Virgin Mobile USA: 3jam SMS 2.0.

The new service provides an improved level of text messaging by allowing friends and family to connect by multi-party text-message conversations. The 3jam application is free and requires no subscription, however standard text messaging rates apply.

The launch marks the first time a U.S. mobile operator has launched a multi-party text messaging product. Virgin Mobile USA currently has 4.8 million subscribers.

For 3jam the deal is a competitive advantage in a crowded vertical; having a tie up with a telco is a definite positive that will see many, many more people exposed to their product. See our previous coverage of the space here.

3jam took $4 million in funding from Norwest Venture Partners and New Enterprise Associates in July 2007.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/159069453/

We’re ramping up our emailing efforts and decided to start sending out HTML newsletters to customers. (We’ve always sent out plain-text emails but figured some minimal styling would help liven things up a bit.) So we designed a nice, simple email using clean code. The first one is this brief Basecamp Newsletter.

It took a while to get to this version though. First, we ran our simply styled email through Mailchimp Inbox Inspector (demo), a useful tool you can use to view HTML newsletters in a variety of email apps.

It came up perfect everywhere except Outlook 2007, Windows Live Mail, and Lotus Notes. Strangely, it looked fine in Outlook 2006 but busted in Outlook 2007.

The reason? As Campaign Monitor put it, Microsoft decided to take email design back 5 years.

As I type this post I still can’t believe it. I’m literally stunned. If you haven’t already heard, I’m talking about the recent news that Outlook 2007, released next month, will stop using Internet Explorer to render HTML emails and instead use the crippled Microsoft Word rendering engine.

First things first, you need to realize that Outlook enjoys a 75-80% share of the corporate email market, which is similar to Internet Explorer’s share of the browser market – they make the rules…The reality is that many of us are going to have to scale back our email templates to years past and stick with tables and inline CSS if we want consistent looking emails in Outlook and Windows Live Mail.

No background images, no float or position (tables only), really poor support for padding/margin, etc. For real!? It’s like a time warp to making web pages in 1999. But what can ya do when Outlook’s got a 75-80% share for corporate email?

So we dove into the world of bulletproof, “work anywhere” templates. You can find them at Campaign Monitor, MailChimp, or elsewhere.

But the code is real gobbledygook. Lots of this sorta thing:

span style="font-size:20px;font-weight:bold;color:#CC6600;font-family:arial;line-height:110%;"

Totally drops the “beautiful code” limbo bar to the floor. Bummer.

What can be done to make this situation better? Check out these posts from Campaign Monitor that seek to improve the situation: Why we need standards support in HTML email and Help us form a baseline for standards support.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/604-navigating-the-html-email-jungle

Google has entered the social bookmarking market with a new product called Shared Stuff.

Shared Stuff is simple enough; users drag a “email/ share” button into their browser, and click it when they want to add pages to their Shared Stuff profile. Links can include an image, text extract, and/ or a user comment. The results can then be viewed directly, via iGoogle or RSS. An interesting addition is the option to use Shared Stuff to post links to other social booking sites as well, including Facebook Furl, Delicious, Reddit and Digg.

Friend can be invited by email, and bookmarks made by Gmail contacts using the service can be viewed as well.

Google Blogscoped suggests that bookmarks can be searched as well, via tag or url, although the feature wasn’t immediately evident on the site when I visited it.

Google already has a bookmarking service (Google Bookmarks) so it’s not clear whether this is an experiment that may later be rolled into that product, or is planned as a long term stand alone site. Overall it’s not the most amazing service; after all social bookmarking sites have been around for a long time and mostly one service appears the same as another, however with Google running the site it always has the opportunity to go well.

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/~3/159046827/

I am pretty excited about this one. We have long been able to use a JavaScript API to do read only work on GData feeds from Google. That is all well and good, but sometimes you want to be able to access feeds that require authentication, or be able to write and update data in feeds.

Well, now you can. The GData team has released a GData JavaScript Client Library. The first service available is Google Calendar, and we can hope for more to come.

This cross-domain, secure, access seems similar to Subspace, but it is actually live right now. Having a service such as Google Calendar using this is a great step forward, as you know it has been through a thorough security review.

Authentication happens via AuthSub, and you end up using new APIs such as:

When google.accounts.user.login(..) occurs, it will send you to Google to authenticate. A best practice is to provide a login button or other user input mechanism to prompt the user to start the login process manually. If, instead, you call google.accounts.user.login() immediately after loading, without waiting for user interaction, then the first thing the user sees on arrival at your page is a Google login page. If the user decides not to log in, then Google does not direct them back to your page; so from the user’s point of view, they tried to visit your page but were sent away and never sent back. This scenario may be confusing and frustrating to users. Note that the example code above does call google.accounts.user.login() immediately after loading, to keep the example simple, but we don’t recommend this approach for real-world client applications.

I am excited about this, as it means that you can write a rich Ajax client that doesn’t need server-side proxies to do these things, which traditional was the only solution. Now the server-less model can grow even more.

I got to sit down with Jun Yang, who worked on this code, and got his take:

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/159017157/google-launches-javascript-api-that-allows-you-to-write-back