Ajax Girl

Let’s say you want to plan a party or some other get together. You have no shortage of options as to how you can get the word out to your guests. Your most reliable solution is probably just to spam your friends via email.

But if you want to create a standing destination for your guests to get more involved with the event ahead of time, you’ll need to set up an website-based invitation. As a pre-2005 college graduate, you’d probably use Evite. Otherwise, you might be more drawn to Facebook’s own event application.

Or, starting Thursday, you might opt to use MadeIt, a new invitation service/social network. The service, which on paper resembles Socializr, aims to eat away at the large market share of Evite, whose 6.7 million unique visitors per month (according to Comscore) consist largely of mid-30 year old females.

MadeIt takes on Evite by providing more customizable invitations and a social network within which guests can interact before and after events take place.

Invitations feature a custom background, an embedded video clip, general information, photos, a guest discussion area (with threaded comments), and RSVP options. Notably, MadeIt lets guests embed whatever objects they want into their discussion comments, so they can contribute images, videos, etc. just like in MySpace (in fact, the entire site seems aesthetically as though it will appeal to the MySpace crowd). Event planners can create their invites from scratch or choose from a variety of user-submitted templates.

More importantly, an event persists on MadeIt even after it transpires. The invitation turns into a page dubbed the “aftermath” where guests can add and comment on photos and videos from the event, friend each other, and check out each others’ profiles. Due to the ability of guests to connect with each other after events, MadeIt bills itself as a friends discovery system, unlike a traditional social network where you mostly interact with people you already know.

MadeIt’s integration of social networking does make it a more compelling option than Evite. However, I wonder whether MadeIt has made it too late to the party. As things stand, it (admittedly) has the greatest chance of capturing Evite users who are in their mid-20s to early-30s…which is all fine and good, but that demographic may be all the company can hope for.

Many users more towards Evite’s median age of 37 will not be inclined to switch over despite MadeIt’s advantages simply because they won’t demand its extra features strongly enough. And crowds younger than, say, 25 years old will increasingly choose to use Facebook, which itself serves as a massive “aftermath” area wherein people can tag each other in party photos and leave notes for each other about how wild the weekend was. As more and more people get sucked into the Facebook ecosphere, fewer and fewer of them will pick social services that exist outside of the network where all of their friends already reside. Of course, this could all change if “open” social networking becomes a reality, but I’m not going to hold my breathe.

For all its competition, MadeIt provides a pretty solid service. I’ll be looking forward to seeing how their mobile invitation system, which will be deployed over the next few months, helps to differentiate themselves even more.

MadeIt has been under development for seven months and will, naturally, debut with a party (check out the invitation here). We’ve embedded the company’s promotional video below.

See our previous coverage of Skobee, Socializr, MyPunchBowl and Renkoo.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/170955690/

Spectrum Equity Investors has led a $300 million investment to acquire a majority interest in Provo Utah-based The Generations Network (the parent company of Ancestry.com, MyFamily.com and other sites) according to a source with knowledge of the deal.

The Generations Network competes with a number of new Internet startups that we’ve recently covered. Its Ancestry.com site competes with Geni and MyHeritage. MyFamily.com competes with Story Of My Life, Our Story and others.

Geni’s last round of financing valued the company at $100 million. But none of those competing sites, or even all of those sites aggregated, have caused any financial pain yet for The Generations Network. The company is pulling in $150 million or so in yearly revenue and is hugely profitable according to our source.

This is a liquidity event for many or most of TGN’s shareholders, although it is apparently not a complete buyout. Employees and possibly some outside shareholders still have equity in the entity, which is almost certainly preparing for an IPO or other larger liquidity event.

The most recent Comscore data says TGN had 8.2 million unique worldwide visitors in August. They’ve raised $95 million to date, although the last round of financing was closed in 2001.

The company is not responding to requests for comment.

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/~3/170884611/

Peer-to-peer lending service CircleLending has been taken under the wings of Richard Branson’s Virgin empire and rebranded as Virgin Money USA.

Virgin’s US investment firm recently bought a majority stake in the Waltham, Massachusetts company, which acts as an online middleman for friends and family who want to loan each other money. The exact amount of money invested by Virgin has not been disclosed.

Virgin Money USA differs from other online lending services, because it focuses on loans between people who are familiar with one another. Prosper, Lending Club, Kiva, and Zopa, on the other hand, facilitate loans between relative strangers.

Thanks for the tip Ryan.

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/~3/170902816/

Starting in November, MySpace’s 110 million active users will be able to make free phone calls using Skype-enabled version of MySpace’s instant messaging client, MySpaceIM.

This marks the first time that Skype has allowed its technology to be integrated into a 3rd-party application, thereby disassociating the Skype service from the Skype client.

Skype has provided a developer program through which others could build applications that make calls to the Skype client, but the company never before allowed for seamless integration with its VoIP network.

MySpace users will be able to make calls using MySpaceIM without needing to download any additional Skype software or even to sign up for a Skype account. They will also be able to initiate calls through MySpaceIM by clicking a link that will be displayed under the portraits on MySpace profile pages.

In addition, the integration of MySpace and Skype will allow MySpace users to transfer information, such as portraits, from their profiles to their Skype accounts.

MySpace claims that MySpaceIM currently has over 25 million installed users. MySpaceIM with Skype will be launched in 20 countries.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/170877458/

Sam Stephenson has announced Prototype 1.6.0 RC1 which has “fixed a handful of bugs and made some changes to the Class and Event APIs in response to your feedback. We’ve also addressed a long-standing issue with the Hash class.”

For example, they show how they changed from:

to:

Other changes are:

• Completely rewriten of the Hash class
• Changes to the Event API
• Element#wrap now returns the newly created wrapper element instead of the element being wrapped.
• document.getElementsByClassName and Element#getElementsByClassName are now deprecated, since native implementations of these methods return a live NodeList, while we can only return a static Array. Please use $$ or Element#select instead.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/170860468/prototype-160-rc1-changes-to-the-class-and-event-apis-hash-rewrite-and-bug-fixes

“The hole and the patch should be commensurate.”

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/653-thomas-jeffersons-best-advice

Over the past few months we’ve been getting requests from professors around the country inviting us to speak to their business, design, or engineering students about Getting Real.

So we’ve been thinking about putting together a 37signals Getting Real College Tour. We’d pick a dozen or so schools and put together a speaking tour over a couple months.

If you think you can pull together 100+ design, business, or engineering students to attend a one or two hour talk (including Q&A) on your campus, and you can offer up the venue, please drop us an email at svn@37signals.com.

We look forward to hearing from you.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/652-37signals-college-tour

Yahoo’s third quarter earnings came in this afternoon above Wall Street’s estimates ($0.11 per share versus the expected $0.08), but its net income of $151.3 million (on revenues of $1.8 billion) was still down five percent from last year. The biggest sign of life, though, is that its Panama ad-serving technology is finally starting to kick in, with revenues per search up an impressive 20%. That’s the first uptick in that crucial metric in six quarters. Yahoo still has its work cut out for it, however. As one former Yahoo exec put it to me recently: “Panama is really good, but not quite there yet.” This former exec, who is now the CEO of a startup that plans to make its money from search ads, will be using Google AdSense instead.

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/~3/170846397/

Blurb, a self-publishing startup which specialises in illustrated books, is launching a new service to enable people to collaboratively create books. The new service is called Community Books and will initially launch in beta with photo sharing, which is Blurb’s most requested community-bookmaking feature. We last covered Blurb after their launch in May last year.

Using Blurb’s free desktop BookSmart bookmaking software for Mac or PC, you invite contributors and the content is assembled into one of several suggested book layouts. The software allows you to announce the book to contributors as well. As with other Blurb books, they can be shared, marketed and sold at cost or for profit in Blurb’s online bookstore. Blurb authors get to keep 100% of the book’s mark-up. There could be various uses for Community Books. For example a corporate retreat book featuring photos and funny anecdotes from the team; a ‘wrap party’ book made by people on a play or film production; or a wedding book with pictures and stories from hundreds of attending guests (the most likely use I think).

Eileen Gittins, Blurb’s founder and CEO reckons Community Book will appeal to “the connected creative class”. And I have to say the books themselves - which are full colour - really do look professional. And with a print and fulfilment operation now in the Netherlands, Blurb can also easily serve European markets as well as in the U.S.

I guess it might be possible to do something vaguely similar using Flickr and the various print services around it now, but I seriously doubt you would end up with as finished a product. Print is hard to get right.

Overall, Blurb’s business model is benefiting from the trend for content to become more and more structured online, making it easier to spit it out into a linear form like a book. There is even an emerging mark-up language standard for cookbooks, RecipeML. Founded by Gittins in 2004, funded by Canaan Partners and Anthem Venture Partners, and live since May 2006, Blurb initially came out with a tool to turn your blog into a book. Competitors like Lulu and iUniverse tend to focus on creating books out of manuscripts, rather that photo-oriented books.

Community Book is yet another shot across the bow of traditional publishers, to whom ‘crowd-sourcing’ a book would no doubt be yet another sign that the barbarians are at the gates.

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/~3/170855759/

Ever since HotorNot abandoned it’s experiment with going totally free last month, the traffic to its destination site, HotorNot.com, has predictably leveled off. Meanwhile, its application on Facebook is doing pretty well, already accounting for about a third of its daily logins, and 40 percent of it total unique visitors (although the two remain separate services at this point). On Facebook, HotorNot is one of the top 50 apps (No. 45 last time I checked—not a blockbuster app, but respectable), as measured by its 130,461 active daily users (out of nearly 2 million total registered users) on the social network. That compares to millions of casual visitors a month to HotorNot.com itself, where voting is still free and 500,000 people a month login to use its subscription dating service. HotorNot founder James Hong says “the potential of the facebook app for us is on the same order of magnitude as our .com service.”

If ever there was a Website designed as a social application, it is HotorNot. It’s the original voting app, applied to ranking people’s looks. HotorNot took off because it’s simple, voyeuristic, somewhat addictive, and a great time-waster. And for a meaningful percentage of users, it can actually lead to a date (although that feature, which people pay for on HotorNot.com, is not as fully developed yet on Facebook). So with this in mind, I recently asked Hong why it needs to remain a destination site at all. His response:

The same could be said for practically any destination site. The concept of drawing traffic to a central Web destination is blowing up for all but the largest sites. A site today needs to be able to live everywhere on the Web (and not just on Facebook).

But Facebook remains a special case since it is becoming an uber-destination for many different services on the Web. That is why Hong compares Facebook to a mall. If everyone is going to the Facebook mall, then Hong is better off sticking HotorNot in the mall than trying to get people to come to his standalone site. Even if Facebook starts charging rent, Hong is fine with that as long as the rent is reasonable (like any mall landlord, Facebook should know that its stores have to make money too). The same goes for MySpace, which Hong is eager to develop a HotorNot app for once MySpace opens up its platform.

The mall analogy breaks down a bit, though, because the social network landlord could one day create its own HotorNot app and promote that to its members—which would be like a mall owner opening his own clothing store to compete with the Gap, greeting people at the door with flyers as they enter the mall, and charging his store below-market rent. But that’s a risk any Facebook (and, soon, MySpace) developer has to take. Then, of course, there’s the fact that malls tend to lose their foot traffic as soon as a newer one opens up down the road.

Still, why not just ditch the destination site altogether if HotorNot is more powerful as a social-networking application? (On Facebook, for instance, it’s easier to vote on how attractive all your friends are and their friends, rather than be presented with total strangers). It is not hard to imagine one day soon when more people will access HotorNot through Facebook, MySpace, and other social networks than through the site itself. HotorNot should just become a widget company or sell itself to Slide, right? After all, Slide (which Hong happens to be an investor in) is in a better position to serve ads across widgets and Facebook apps since it owns a network of the most popular ones.

It all sounds good, except for a few things. First, HotorNot makes its money from subscriptions, not ads. When Hong tried to make his dating service ad-supported, the spam level became unacceptable. Second, it not yet clear what kind of landlords Facebook or MySpace will become (see above). Third, the question remains whether or not a social-networking app is more useful inside the context of that social network, or if there is power in bridging together different people from different sites. A single app spread across many sites could benefit from greater network effects than many apps that are each stuck in a separate social-networking silo. Right now, the HotorNot Facebook app is built on a separate system than the main site because that was the fastest way to get the app up and running. But that won’t always be the case. Once you cycle through everyone in your social circle, then what?

These are issues that any startup developing a Facebook app must grapple with. In the end, the most successful social-networking apps will find clever ways to both bring in data from similar apps living elsewhere, while at the same time still hooking into the various social networks so that they seem like they were customized just for you and your friends.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/170822590/