Ajax Girl

San Francisco based Sugar Publishing, a social network and group of women-focused blogs that we’ve covered since late 2006, is announcing the acquisition of ShopStyle, an ecommerce site, this evening. The price is not being disclosed.

Sugar Publishing is also changing its name to Sugar Inc. The company is backed by Sequoia Capital and NBC Universal.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/161364762/

The Motley Fool is running a story on a rumor that Google is considering a takeover offer for US Satellite Radio provider Sirius.

The merger between Sirius and XM has yet to be approved by Federal Regulators and hence Sirius would become a takeover target if the merger failed. Google is still seeking more inventory for its Adsense for Radio program; hence buying Sirius would provide it with its own radio network from which they could sell advertising.

It would be easy to dismiss the rumor as being fanciful, and many already have, however any serious Google watcher knows that Google’s ambitions seem to have very little or no bounds. The advantages of Google acquiring Sirius from an advertising view point are obvious, and Sirius also streams a portion of its content over the web as well; a service that would bring Google into internet radio broadcasting. However, there is one additional factor that isn’t being discussed much: Sirius’ Loral FS1300 satellites.

Sirius’ current three elliptical orbiting Loral FS1300 satellites are being primarily used for streaming the Sirius Radio service, but are planned to be used for streaming television as well. More importantly: they can push data two ways; the Loral FS1300 satellite being used by may other companies for that very purpose. In buying Sirius, Google would own 3 orbiting satellites (with one spare and one being built) which they could use to provide internet access or a related data service to the United States and Canada. Google + Sirius would equal Google being everywhere over the largest market in the world. Capacity may dictate a non-universal use for the satellites (such as providing an ISP service), but they could work for an in-car internet service or similar mobile function. Bringing highspeed, low cost internet access to the car has long been dreamed about, Google could be planning to do just that.

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/~3/161351891/

The first positive points we’ve awarded to Hulu come for pure honesty with George Kliavkoff, NBC Universal’s chief digital officer telling a crowd at OMMA New York Monday that they should expect failure from Hulu.

To be fair, as much as the headline quote alone is worthy of at least a couple of links demonstrating how the bridesmaid service has failed already, in context Kliavkoff’s quote is good advice for any startup: you have to fail sometimes to succeed:

” you have to fail fast in order to quickly identify your errors and cut your losses. Success involves setting up “processes to fail fast.”

According to Kliavkoff, Hulu will launch in October and NBC will be providing incentives for viewers to spend time at Hulu. What those incentives are were not disclosed, nor was it explained why users would visit Hulu for NBC content when NBC itself is now offering its shows as free ad-supported downloads on NBC Direct.

Kliavkoff also told the audience that he does not believe that viewers will ever prefer consumer-generated content over premium fare, saying that “at the end of the day, premium, produced content wins,” an interesting take given the phenomenal success of services including YouTube and others.

(via Mediapost)

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/161339948/

Three TechCrunch40 demo pit startups got local bay area television coverage last week - Dancejam (note: I’m an investor), Realius and Gizmoz. It looks like the reporter did the easy thing - a swing by the demo pit to film the best looking startups. Congrats to all three.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/161282094/

Our favorite torrent site is no more, at least for today and tomorrow. Demonoid, the previously fully-private torrent catalog and tracker is down, according to reports at TorrentFreak. Trackers have not been responding for over 24 hours, and the site is completely down. Demonoid was the second largest tracker online, after ThePirateBay, and has seen its fair share of legal threats and takedown notices from copyright holders and associated groups. Demonoid shifted operations from The Netherlands to Canada back in June after their previous ISP balked at legal threats, but it appears that Canada is no safer as the likely cause of the downtime now is the Canadian ISP blocking the website.

Demonoid was our favorite torrent site, because membership and ratio tracking meant that it provided both a large catalog and much better speeds than alternate trackers. Recently they opened up the last 14 days worth of torrent listings to public access, making the site a quasi-private tracker. Demonoid accounts are also amongst the most requested in inviteshare, and its popularity has blossomed recently as it overtook other previously more popular public trackers which were beginning to fill up with fakes and spam.

Copyright groups have had recent successes against tracker sites and catalogs, no less than a few days ago TorrentBox was also taken down. But at the same time, the recent MediaDefender leaks showed that their effort to plant fakes in popular torrent sites had no impact on the most popular torrent sites including Demonoid - a credit to the communities at these sites who would flag fakes.

Takedown efforts seem to be in vain, as even the once much-loved Suprnova has recently made a come-back. The most that a takedown can accomplish is the intermediate interruption of service to that particular community, but as most BitTorrent users access and use more than one site, and the release groups continue unimpeded, the end results of these efforts from copyright groups are very under-whelming. Shutting down Demonoid for a few days will have no impact on the volume of BitTorrent traffic, and Demonoid will be back shortly and with more interest and new users than ever before.

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/~3/161280757/

Teresa Phillips, founder and CEO of Graspr and one-time Yahoo VP, says that “Graspr is not just another video site or social networking community.” I’m not so sure.

The company has granted me access to Graspr prior to its presentation at Demo this afternoon and its public unveiling later this evening. I’ve kicked the tires, and while Graspr explicitly claims to be “the social media and learning company with the Internet’s largest user-generated video showcase for instructional content,” the site could probably be rebranded for any other purpose involving video and members.

This would be totally fine if there didn’t already exist a good video social network for instructional content. But several good ones do exist, including 5min, eHow, Sclipo, SuTree, Expert Village, Instructables, and VideoJug.

To be sure, Graspr works well enough. Everything revolves around instructional videos, so in many ways its like YouTube, et al. In addition to simply browsing and viewing videos, users can jump to particular scenes within videos, add notes to video segments, view related videos, open supplementary files attached to videos, and participate in discussion threads and chat rooms attached to the videos.

On the social networking side of things, users can create profiles and make friends. Their profile pages show all of the videos they have contributed, any of which can be grouped into series.

I’m tempted label Graspr YASN, but to be fair they will provide an online video editing tool, which helps to differentiate them (well, maybe not from YouTube itself). They also have an ad-revenue sharing scheme in place to incentivise the production of content. I only wish their were more innovative aspects to Graspr that could get me more excited about it.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/161299741/

We posted about the Amazon Music Selection Ajax experience, and people seemed to like it apart from: a) Real player, b) The code.

Today Amazon launched their MP3 service, so this interface is going to get a lot more usage as you can grab 256kbs non-DRM songs for 89 cents a pop.

There is a downloadable client for transferring the songs. I wonder how the user experience will compare to iTunes and having the entire experience in a web browser shell, as apposed to be able to do most of the work on Amazon.com itself.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/161255341/amazon-mp3-service

It seems like every time you turn around there’s another site out there trying to help you rate this, that, or the other thing. There’s Rapleaf (people), StreetAdvisor (neighborhood), YourStreet (neighborhood), SodaRatings (soda), and the list goes on. Now there’s a new one in private beta, GarageSeek, for rating mechanic’s garages in your area.

With GarageSeek users will be able to share their experiences with mechanics and rate them on several different metrics. When live, the site will provide a potentially very useful service, the ability to check reviews and avoid hiring a shoddy mechanic. However, while a complete database of real reviews is useful, a lot of review verticals don’t offer a real reason to contribute when they start and fragment reviews across multiple domain names users may not care to remember.

Yelp largely solved the chicken and egg problem that comes with user review services, even if they allegedly paid users for reviews to start. They raised over $16 million and generated traction on the service through having a system seeded with content, rewarding top users with over-the-top parties, and focusing on a service that a wide variety of people use frequently, restaurants. The other large people-driven review site, Insiderpages, had the advantage of $9 million in financing and starting back in 2004. Despite this, Insiderpages went through a slew of layoff and eventually sold off to CitySearch for $13 million.

Yelp is already in the auto repair category, and is poised to expose their audience to other review verticals as well. They’ve already moved into non-geographical service reviews such as media outlets. The one question these review verticals need to ask themselves is “Can niche vertical review sites survive up against one general review site, Yelp or otherwise”? My feeling is no.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/161242138/

It may have taken Amazon a few years, but they got it right: their new music store is DRM free and songs, starting at $0.89/track, are cheaper than at Apple’s iTunes. The top 100 best-selling albums are priced no higher than $8.99.

Songs are delivered in MP3 format, meaning they’ll work on any music player, including the iPod. The store opens with 2 million songs from 80,000 artists represented by 20,000 labels. EMI is on board. The other major labels have no real choice at this point but to follow, and soon.

A software download is required to actually get songs to your hard drive, but it’s available for both Windows and Mac (with Linux coming). That’s good news - DRM requirements forced Amazon to make their movie download service work only with Windows machines.

Average quality is very high - 256 kbps, which is what iTunes uses for non-DRM songs as well.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/161211441/

I’ve been listening to Bloomberg Radio a lot lately (it’s 130 on Sirius if you’ve got it). I’m really impressed.

I’ve always been a bit of a stock market/finance junky. An inordinate number of my dreams contained scrolling tickers (and I swear they were in color). That stopped a few years ago, thankfully.

I’ve seen my share of CNBC, I’ve read my share of the WSJ, and I’ve picked up financial news in a lot of other places too.

But I’ve never been as impressed with the depth, approachability, accuracy, clarity, and overall presentation of the financial news as I have been with Bloomberg Radio. They explain things clearly, they make sense of detailed and confusing topics, and the voices have a careful, pleasent calm that belies the chaos of the markets themselves.

This is good radio. If you can pull in Bloomberg Radio you should give it a listen. Even if you’re not a finance junky, you stand to learn a lot and experience real quality programming.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/613-a-great-experience-on-radio