Ajax Girl

Social networking site for old people BOOMj.com has been acquired (or merged into: they say both) by Time Lending California, a company that engages in “direct mail marketing for mortgage companies” as well as real estate loan brokering and real estate sales.

Under the deal, the OTCB listed Time Lending will change its name to BOOMj.com Inc. George Pursglove, President and Chief Executive Officer of BOOMj.com/ Time Lending said the deal is a “milestone in the continued creation of shareholder value that will provide BOOMj with access to capital markets which will help our company’s growth and greatly enhance our visibility and market awareness.” To an outsider it sounds like Time Lending is bolting on a web site in an attempt to ride the current boom in net stocks, but that may be just me being too cynical, after all I’m sure a real estate and direct marketing company knows a ton about running a social networking business.

Time Lending California’s previous acquisitions include Nationwide Security Mortgage Corp.

Social networking for baby boomers is a crowded market place that is seeking an audience at a time that older users are embracing sites such as Facebook and MySpace. Competitor Eons slashed staff in September.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

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/~3/174142865/

The folks over at Download Squad have stumbled across persuasive evidence that Google is adding IMAP support to Gmail. While the option to use IMAP has not showed up in my Gmail account yet (or any other bloggers’ for that matter), they point to this Google help center page, which confirms the speculation. We’ve been tracking new Gmail features for some time; IMAP was the final piece of the puzzle.

IMAP support has been the primary reason I have personally held back from using Gmail for my primary email account. If you don’t know about IMAP, it allows you to manage your email account from different computers and clients without having to worry about replication issues. For example, if you delete an email message in Thunderbird, that message will no longer show up when you use a webmail interface. If you were to use POP - the primary alternative to IMAP - then you would have to manually delete the message from both places because a copy of each message would be downloaded to Thunderbird. Therefore, IMAP provides a much more synchronized solution whereas POP fails to realize that you want to deal with your email once for all points of access.

We’ll have to see how Google plans to monetize Gmail with IMAP, since enabling IMAP means that people like me will almost never bother to use the webmail interface, and therefore never see Google advertisements. Maybe they are betting that most people will simply not use IMAP, or maybe they have other advertising tricks up there sleeves. Perhaps it’s too early to speculate until we actually see this feature enabled for everyone.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/174134963/

We don’t often cover enterprise news, but JackBe has built an enterprise-oriented business on top of a very Web 2.0 concept: the mashup. And apparently this strategy has been working out well for them - they just raised $9.5M from Harbert Venture Partners and Core Capital Partners, as well as from existing investors Intel Capital, Darby Technology Ventures and Blue Chip Venture Company

The concept behind JackBe’s software package, Presto, is both simple and bewildering to me. On the one hand, it’s easy to explain: the software sits behind the firewall on the servers of corporate IT departments, channels information from a range of sources (using SOAP, RSS, etc.), and proffers it to the end user through the browser. The user can then mix and match the data (a la Yahoo Pipes) right in the browser to perform analysis. Mashups are created primarily in ten different ways (using graphs, maps, grids, etc.) and can be shared with other users within a corporation or organization.

On the other hand, the sheer number of possibilities with a generic mashup program like Presto makes it hard to come up with even one standard example of what the software can do. If you check out JackBe’s customers page, you’ll see that Citigroup uses Presto for “Tax Collection, Bank Tellers, Credit Workflow, Branch executives, Insurance Quoting/Sales and eBanking”; the Defense Intelligence Agency uses it to “paint a picture of situational awareness across various intelligence data sources, using a paradigm of drag-and-drop and bookmarking of the resulting briefing in a private workspace for future use and sharing”; and Tupperware uses it “to provide real-time price, inventory and product updates to field sales representatives.” I think you get the point.

JackBe - which is based in Washington, DC - began 18 months ago as a creator of Ajax widgets but realized that enterprises wanted more thorough ways to consume data. Competitors include IBM and BEA.

Check out this InfoWorld article for more in-depth coverage of Presto.

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/~3/174092164/

Will Ferrell’s FunnyOrDie video startup is spreading its wings with a new site: ShredOrDie, focused on extreme sports and hosted by pro skateboarder Tony Hawk.

ShredOrDie will seek to mix extreme-sports and celebrity culture in a manner similar to FunnyOrDie’s blending of comedy and celebrity, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Initial site content include Hawk interviewing Lance Armstrong, snowboarder Shaun White, Christian Slater and skateboarder Ryan Sheckler, along with a range of action videos from sports including skateboarding and snowboarding. ShredOrDie also will feature user-generated video.

FunnyOrDie has had a mixed reception to date, starting with a bang as Will Ferrell’s initial clips gained widespread viral views, to only give way to lower traffic. More recently FunnyOrDie saw another surge after hosting the spoof Eva Longoria sex tape. It will be interesting to see whether Ferrell’s model will successfully work in a different vertical.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/174080882/

When Twitter-clone Yappd launched two months ago, we wrote “Here’s a me-too service that won’t last long” and “yet another hopeful young gun enters the space with little to differentiate itself except the addition of a photo to your status messages.” We may not always be right, but this time it was sort of obvious - the world doesn’t need yet another me-too service like Twitter.

Today Yappd announced that it was being acquired and the service will be shut down on November 5. Welcome to the TechCrunch Deadpool, Yappd. We hardly knew you.

That leaves Twitter, Pownce and the recently acquired (by Google) Jaiku left in the ring.

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/~3/174061432/

We just got word from Judy’s Book founder and CEO Andy Sacks that the Seattle startup will be shutting down operations, and most of the staff of twelve was let go today. The company had raised a total of $10.5 million over two rounds of financing.

Judy’s Book started off as a community driven review site for local businesses, but changed it’s focus in 2006 when the original model looked to be failing. The company de-focused on local reviews, and went more towards the shopping angle and local deals.

The assets of the company are being sold, and Sacks says the company is in discussions with a few interested parties.

Other players in the local review space have fallen in the last year, too. Intuit shut down Zipingo last summer, and Insider Pages sold for little more than the capital it originally raised to CitySearch.

Yelp is still standing and reportedly doing well, although fierce competition from Yahoo and Google as well as younger startups is looming. We sadly put Judy’s Book into the TechCrunch Deadpool.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/174054780/

The Mozilla Foundation (which shepherds the development of the Firefox browser) released its financial statements today for its 2006 fiscal year. It’s revenues were $67 million, and 85 percent of that (or $57 million) came from the Google search box that comes as a default on every browser. Firefox is used by 120 million people worldwide. Larry Dignan has the details.

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/~3/174009668/

Okay, we admit it. We’ve been busy here at TechCrunch, and totally missed this announcement last week that Yahoo is finally going to pull the plug on its stillborn social network, Yahoo 360. Jerry Yang even mentioned it in a blog post on October 16: “Our new decision-making framework also informed what we’d no longer invest in. . . ., we intend to transition Yahoo! 360 to a more integrated Yahoo! “profile” experience.” But it wasn’t just us. I could find hardly a mention of it anywhere.

That’s what happens when nobody uses a service. Nobody notices or protests when it shuts down. (Although, to be fair, the Yahoo 360 blog post announcing the shut-down did receive 1,521 comments, most of them from users wanting more details about what is going to happen to all of their data. The actual transition won’t happen until some time in the first quarter of next year, and Yahoo is promising to help move blog posts and friends lists over to a more general Yahoo profile). Yahoo 360 was always a weird amalgam of social search and a social network. The original idea was to create a community around search, so that sites your friends had bookmarked would be highlighted in general search results, and you could use it as a blog platform as well. But few people ever figured out what it was good for (and being a social application it required more than just a few people for it to be much good at all).

Other services like Yahoo’s own delicious or eBay’s StumbleUpon do a much better job with social search and discovery. And in terms of social networking, Yahoo has decided to start from square one with Yahoo Mash. My sense from speaking with Yahoo execs is that they want to incorporate social features throughout Yahoo so that it just becomes part of the overall experience. Locking those features away in a sandbox where no one could play with them never made any sense.

Yahoo 360 hits the DeadPool.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/174005609/

Contract-management startup EchoSign has just closed a $6 million round of financing, led by Emergence Capital. Previously, the company had raised $2.5 million from Storm Ventures.

EchoSign is a Web-based service that lets you append digital signatures to contracts and other business documents, store them in digital form, and manage those documents without printing them out and faxing them. The service has attracted 144,000 users (the vast, vast majority are not paying). The basic service is free, but things like extra document storage, encryption, and integration with Salesforce.com require subscription upgrades that start at $12.95 a month. Paying customers (there are more than 2,000) include British Telecom (with over 2,700 sales reps using the service), GE, PayPal, Rite-Aid, Johnson & Johnson, and even bail bondsmen (you can fill out that bond application online next time your bad-seed cousin ends up in the slammer).

EchoSign is one of the top-rated applications on Salesforce.com’s AppExchange. (Emergence was a venture investor in Salesforce.com as well). Bigger sales teams tend to sign up on Salesforce..com because EchoSign offers a way to track how the entire team is doing in actually closing signed deals. EchoSign also works with Zoho and is a partner on WebEx Connect (WebEx’s answer to AppExchange), which just launched in private beta this week. Competitors to EchoSign include DocuSign and Negonation.

TechCrunch first wrote about EchoSign back in January, 2006.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/173980021/

Rory asks:

Is there any hope for designers in the online entrepreneur world? As in, people who can for concepts sketches and design layouts, but who can’t program themselves? Or would you say that the ability to program is an absolute must?

I’m a designer who can’t program worth a shit. But I’ve always loved designing interfaces and I’ve always loved building a business. With passion, curiosity, and ambition, there is always hope.

Getting started

I got started by designing text-only interfaces for BBS’s way back before the web. Then I moved to graphical BBS’s when NovaLink Pro was introduced. Then I moved to making music, book, and video organizers in FileMaker Pro. FileMaker Pro allowed a designer to make a product with barely any understanding of programming. Just pop in some fields, set up a few buttons, add a few conditions, and wrap it in a nice UI.

Audiofile in FileMaker

My first foray into product-based entrepreneurship was a shareware product I built in FileMaker Pro called Audiofile. Audiofile was $20 and I uploaded it to AOL. This was the early 90s. A few weeks later my parents gave me an envelope with my name on it that came in the mail from Germany. I didn’t know anyone in Germany. I didn’t know what to do with it. But when I opened it there was a crisp US $20 bill wrapped in a printout of my Audiofile order form. That was my first customer and the moment I realized I can do this.

So over the next few years I released a few other products. BookBin for organizing your books, Videofile for organizing your music. The $20 bills came flooding in. It was really exciting. It bought a lot of beer (and other stuff, ahem) in college.

I met a lot of folks and made some great lasting business contacts through my FileMaker Pro products. Richard Bird, now a great friend and colleague, was one of my first customers. Richard even hired me to design an experimental (and vaporware) project management tool called Sightrope. This was probably around 1999.

Every once in a while I hear from Basecamp customers who connected the dots all the way back to Audiofile. They were Audiofile customers back in the day.

Singlefile on the Web

Eventually I wanted to move these products to the web. I had tired of using FileMaker Pro and tired of building software people had to download. I wanted to build web-based software. I decided the first product I’d take to the web was BookBin, the book organizer. I decided to rename it Singlefile (wayback machine archive).

So I started learning PHP. I never took any programming classes or went to school for any of this. I just got a book on PHP, followed the examples, and wrote some code. It was shitty code, but it mostly worked. But I was stumped. I couldn’t figure out pagination.

Enter David

So I wrote a post on SvN asking for some help. I got a lot of responses, but the best one was from this guy named David Heinemeier Hansson. He was friendly, helpful, and patient. We traded some emails and then I decided to hire him to help me with Singlefile. This was when David was a PHP programmer, a few years before he even discovered Ruby. Remember that?

David and I got along well, our working styles meshed, we both enjoyed swearing, and our general outlook on simple software was the same. So we did a few client projects together. And then we started on Basecamp. The rest is history.

You can do it

Yes, there is plenty of hope for a designer who wants to build a product business. Having business sense will help. Being able to spot and attract other talented people will help. Having a knack for spotting the right opportunities will help. But being curious enough to just figure things out on your own will help the most. If you can’t program today it’s because you haven’t tried to learn yet. Just a little effort may pay serious dividends down the road.

Who knows where things will lead. My story started with designing text-based interfaces for BBS systems.

So, yes, you can definitely build something great if you’re “only a designer.”

Got a question for us?

We’re looking for interesting questions to answer here at Signal vs. Noise. Got one? Then send it to us at svn@37signals.com (make sure the subject line reads “Ask 37signals”). We’ll cherry pick the most interesting ones and answer them here. Fire away!

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/668-ask-37signals-can-i-build-a-product-business-if-im-just-a-designer