Ajax Girl

There’s been a fair bit of talk over the last month in online marketing circles about e-book salesman Joel Comm’s latest venture: The Next Internet Millionaire.

For those not familiar with Comm, his business started from he is best known for selling expensive ebooks advising people how to make money from Adsense, and then later like a lot of people operating in this space, he sold ebooks showing people how to sell ebooks or in their speak: “internet marketing.”

The Next Internet Millionaire Program itself is a straight rip-off of pretty much any Mark Burnett produced show ever made, think Survivor or The Apprentice, and comes complete with a Survivor-esque introduction, an Apprentice style expert panel, and tasks that have to be completed by the contestants. Each week one contestant goes home, until there is one survivor…sorry Internet Millionaire.

I’m not entirely sure which way to side in relation to the program. One the one hand it’s slickly produced and some of the expert advice is worth watching, particularly if you’re in the ebook…sorry Internet Marketing business. Yet on the other hand you just know that the whole show is a front for Joel Comm Inc; a vehicle from which he can further expose himself to a broader audience and ultimately sell more ebooks and related products. If it works, good him I guess, but ultimately you can be the judge. Episode Seven as follows:

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/165504997/

Tailrank founder Kevin Burton notified us that version 2.5 of his news aggregation site has launched, as well as a new version of the engine behind it called Spinn3r. We’ve taken a look at the new site, and in our opinion it still falls short of being a useful application.

We’ve been a bit harsh on Tailrank over the last few months, even suggesting that it may be time to deadpool it. But the site was without any content at all for a few weeks, and when Burton said it was fixed the site was filled with spam (Burton writes about the spam attack here).

So back to the new version…the spam is gone, but the stories are all at least a day old. Burton originally promised this release in early July. It came three months later, which is not unexpected when software is involved. But he knew that we’d be taking a critical look at the site. If his indexing engine can’t keep up with the news, how can he expect people to spend time visiting the site? We just criticized competitor shoutingmat.ch yesterday for the same problem. This is a competitive space (Techmeme is the clear leader, and there are lots of others), and anything short of perfect won’t stand a chance.

We’ll keep giving Tailrank the benefit of the doubt and hope to see it improve soon. But I’m not sure anyone else out there will do the same.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/165481983/

I got to spend a little time with Steve Souders, Chief Performance Yahoo!, and not only is he a really good guy, he has a lot of great experience at getting web sites performing.

I have a full writeup of his talk on Web Performance where he discusses his 14 rules of performing sites, how the frontend web code really matters more than you think, and how the browser cache isn’t helping us out as much as we would like to think.

Steve also just released YSlow 0.8 which has a few new features including one big one:

I discovered that resources (scripts, stylesheets, images) read from the browsers cache (with no HTTP traffic) still show up in Net Panel. This has caused confusion when people thought their cacheable components were not actually being cached by the browser. I talked to Joe Hewitt and settled on a fix that comes with this version of YSlow. The full details are found in the article Bug (fix) in Firebug’s Net Panel.

Steve wrote a detailed report on the bug and you can read and download YSlow here.

I took the opportunity to sit down with Steve and find out more:

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/165455523/yslow-08-fixing-the-firebug-net-panel

Private Equity HUB today uncovered that Mesmo.TV, a social video bookmarking service and provider of a very popular Facebook application, has secured over half of a $900,000 round of Series A financing.

Mesmo.TV’s Davin Miyoshi informed us that Aydin Senkut’s Felicis Ventures, Mike Maples’ Maples Investments, Naval Ravikant’s The Hit Forge, and Georges Harik participated in the round.

We wrote about the launch of Mesmo.TV’s social video bookmarking tool this past July. The tool, which is found on the company’s website, allows users to rate and tag the videos that they enjoy. Mesmo.TV can then recommend videos to you and introduce you to other viewers with similar viewing habits.

This tool, however, has not turned out to be the most successful part of Mesmo.TV’s business. The company’s TV Show Trivia Facebook application, which launched in August, has garnered over 1.3 million users and over 125,000 daily unique visitors. This puts the application amongst the top 45 applications on Facebook, and made Mesmo.TV the largest TV show community on that social network.

Mesmo.TV plans to continue focusing on its social network efforts and looks forward to expanding to other networks, such as MySpace, who might open up in the near future. The company is also talking with TV networks to bring online videos to its users.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/165498606/

In 1995 eBay sold a laser pointer online and kicked off the online marketplace for selling physical goods. As networks improved in the intervening years, the idea of what can be bought and sold online has grown to include digital goods as well. Zipidee wants to be a market for those digital goods, and is expected to launch some time in the next week.

It’s by no means a new concept, there are several sites out there that trade in digital bits: Payloadz, Tradebits, e-Junkie, Edgeio, and more. eBay already sells digital goods, with delivery often handled through these third party sites. iTunes can also sell your content, but requires an approved label if you want to get paid.

However, Zipidee will offer considerably more control over pricing and distribution than these other sites. Merchants on Zipidee will be able to create their own virtual store where they can list their digital wares for sale on the site directly or across Zipidee’s website widgets. It’s an ideal setup for anyone selling an instructional video series or their own audiobook.

Audio and video can be uploaded to the site to be rented or bought at whatever price the creator wishes and consumed via downloads or streams. Other services often only allow downloads.

You will be able to track the sale of their good in real time and adjust the price accordingly using their analytics dashboard. Creators will also have the option of protecting their product with Zipidee’s own DRM system. DRMed goods come with a license to play the media through their web or downloadable player on any computer with your Zipidee credentials.

Zipidee will make money through a $1 listing fee (waived to start) and roughly 80/20 split of the purchase price (Zipidee takes a smaller cut for higher priced goods).

To start, Zipidee will focus on digitizing the kind of media now sold at conferences and trade shows as DVDs or Books. For launch, they’re digitizing materials from a series of consultants and speakers such as DreamUniversity and MightyVentures who currently sell millions of dollars in physical merchandise directly to their customers.

Yet, there’s still a big question over whether and where people will buy “long-tail” digital content. Zipidee is fighting the trend toward free digital content (wikipedia, 5 min) and people are reluctant enough to even pay for big-media’s content (most songs on iPods do not come from iTunes). There is also a question as to whether the best way to sell this content is horizontally in a single marketplace, or vertically by topic. There are a great number of digital content verticals out there already that could serve as points of sale for independently produced content (DocStoc, Scribd, Amie Street, 5 Min, Snocap). We’ll have to see how it all pans out when Zipidee launches.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/165436880/

A new site that just launched today called CrowdChess aims to answer that question. You log on and sign up for a game. Each side is made up of teams of dozens, hundreds or even thousands of people. Anyone on a team can suggest the next move, and the move that gets the most votes is the one that is played out. (Here are the rules. If anyone reading this ends up playing, please report back your experience in comments).

I am all for tapping into crowd intelligence, and the Web is letting us do that in very interesting ways (see Digg, Wikipedia, Threadless, Freebase, Wikinvest, Kaltura, LingoZ, ZiiTrend, etc.). But does everything need to be crowdsourced? I wonder if a group of amateurs playing CrowdChess will ever be able to beat a grandmaster (or the modern-day version of Deep Blue, for that matter)?

Or will technology, in this case, take something beautiful and destroy it. Can’t two people just sit in a room and play chess?

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/165386499/

This just went live from JibJab. There are now two new movies in their Starring You line of animations where you can upload your head to star in the movie. Here’s one with Arrington and me called Unnecessary Force, which jibjab kindly made for us. I tried to stop him folks.

Also check out Math Camp Massacres. (For more on Starring You, check out this video).

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/165325970/

It’s not often that Microsoft gets the drop on Google. But today it launched HealthVault in beta, a free online repository where anyone can keep their personal health records.   Meanwhile, Google Health has yet to launch, having recently lost its leader Adam Bosworth.

With HealthVault, you can import your health records from your doctors, hospitals, labs, prescription drug plans, and other healthcare providers.  You can also type them in yourself, or upload data from personal health monitoring devices such as glucose or blood-pressure monitors.  The site also incorporates a health-specific search engine like Healthline’s (here is the results page for “glucose“), and lets you save your searches.  Microsoft plans to make money through health-related search ads, but says it won’t target those ads to any personal data in someone’s stored medical record. Access to the site will require a Windows Live ID and a password that you can share with healthcare providers.  Patient privacy will obviously be a major concern here, and fears of compromising it will likely be the biggest hurdle to adoption among both consumers and their doctors.

But it is worth trying to overcome that hurdle.  Getting people to embrace digital personal health records is a Holy Grail for both the healthcare and technology industries.  By making health records accessible on the Web to both patients and their doctors, better tracking of medical conditions and quicker responses to changes in those conditions could yield vast improvements in healthcare outcomes.  Dangerous symptoms could be spotted earlier by doctors, while at the same time patients would have the information necessary to better take care of themselves.  A shift to widespread use of online personal health records is the first step needed to change the focus of the healthcare system from one of constantly treating full-blown ailments to preventing them in the first place.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/165312493/

Click for larger version.

Richard Kostelanetz calls the image above, from László Moholy-Nagy’s “Vision in Motion,” “a masterpiece of graphic literary criticism.”

Not only did he understand Joyce’s extraordinary work better than anyone else writing at that time, but Moholy also provided a chart that, as it uses his favorite visual forms of the rectangular grid and circles, remains to this day the most succinct (and inspired) presentation of the Joycean technique of multiple references.

More on Moholy-Nagy: A few photos of his “Vision in Motion” book at Flickr. “The fiery stimulator” is a Guardian profile of Moholy-Nagy which calls him “the most inventive and engaging of all the Bauhaus artists.”

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/633-lszl-moholy-nagys-visual-representation-of-finnegans-wake

EMC Corporation announced the acquisition of Utah-based startup Mozy this morning, confirming our story of September 23. The price is not being disclosed, but our sources indicate that Mozy was acquired for $76 million.

This was an excellent liquidity event for the Mozy team, which had raised just $1.9 million back in 2005. The company claims 300,000 business and consumer customers for their online backup storage solution.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/165281021/