Ajax Girl

Tired of not making a dime off your human beatbox video on YouTube that’s been watched five million times? Well, YouTube wants to give you some of that crazy Google money. If you make the cut, that is. After half a year of testing out its Partners program with 100 lucky YouTube contributors, YouTube is now accepting applications from all comers. Tell them why they should give you the money and they might enroll you in their revenue-sharing program. If they feel like it.

YouTube is expanding its program to share a cut of the AdSense advertising revenue associated with your videos on the site (even though most videos are watched elsewhere in embedded players that typically don’t carry ads). I guess Metacafe and Revver, which have been sharing their video ad revenues with their contributors for a while, had the right idea after all. The criteria for membership are:

—You create original videos suitable for online streaming.
—You own the copyrights and distribution rights for all audio and video content that you upload — no exceptions.
—You regularly upload videos that are viewed by thousands of YouTube users.
—You live in the United States or Canada.

And if accepted, what percentage of those revenues are you entitled to? They don’t say. But you can trust them. You’ll get paid something. If you qualify. Better apply now before everybody else does.

YouTube

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MetaCafe

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Revver

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/198433947/

Social communications startup Jaxtr has been experiencing some pretty amazing growth. They’ve attracted over 5 million users in under 5 months (140 days). It’s a ten fold increase in users since they reported 500,000 users in July. Jaxtr attributes a lot of the growth to the utility of the product and virality of calling links placed in emails.

In August, Jaxtr reported 1 million users and $10 million in financing. In response to the growth, they’ve brought on Taneli Otala as VP of engineering, the former CTO of MySQL.

It’s hard to compare these new numbers with Jaxtr’s main competition, newly partnered Jangl and Jajah, because Jangl has only reported numbers about their potential reach. These numbers highlight deals with websites such as Match.com or Tagged (which reaches 40 million profiles). Jajah recently crossed over 2 million users.

Jaxtr offers a really comprehensive calling system. It lets people call you anonymously online through a widget or unique Jaxtr phone number that connects to your real number. Similar to Jangl, Jaxtr adds a host of advanced features such as call screening and voicemail, all without giving away your original phone number. They’ve also built out more functionality similar to GrandCentral. Users can link multiple phones to their account, and forward certain phone numbers directly to voicemail.

Jaxtr CEO Konstantin Guericke says about 85% of their users are international, with the other 15% based in North America. This makes sense because one of most direct benefits of VOIP systems like Jaxtr is the long distance cost savings to over 220 countries. VOIP calls save money on long distance calling by connecting calls over internet lines instead of more expensive standard phone lines.

Jaxtr users have 100 free minutes to use per month, however calls to other Jaxtr users don’t use these minutes. Jaxtr plans on monetizing by letting users buy more minutes and running advertising on the web pages of free accounts in the future.

Jajah

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Jangl

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Jaxtr

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/198426191/

AOL’s data leak. Project Beacon’s fallout. There are plenty of reasons to be concerned about your privacy online, so it’s understandable why Ask would be proactive in letting users control their data with a new program called “AskEraser”. When enabled by the user, AskEraser completely deletes all future search queries and associated cookie information from Ask.com servers, including IP address, User ID, Session ID, and the complete text of their queries. It’s good news and gives you immediate gratification for your privacy concerns. That’s all good, if you use Ask.com for you searching.

The problem is most people don’t. A September Comscore report showed Ask was responsible for about 4.7% of all search traffic in July, which declined to 4.5% in August.

The move to privacy is simply not going to make a difference to their business. Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo have existing privacy plans in place since March, deleting personal information within at most 18 months (13 for Yahoo). Ask announced an 18 month policy in July. For years these companies succeeded with lackluster privacy promises.

The press loves to run stories about the hidden privacy concerns causes by data collected online, but consumers have taken an “out of sight out of mind” approach. DoubleClick has logged user data based on IPs and cookies for years, with only an obscure opt-out option that makes Beacon look pro-privacy (BTW, you can opt out here). It’s only going to be worse when Google’s search and analytics data is married with DoubleClick’s on site advertising information. Only when Facebook was upfront about what they were doing with user data, did people revolt. However, none of these invasions are affecting market share, nor have caused anyone I know to leave Google or Facebook.

We’re finding that people are willing to pay for the best free products, with their privacy.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/198406488/

Canadian social networking and entertainment site Capazoo wants to pay users for the time they spend interacting on the site, sort of.

Capazoo comes with the usual variety of social networking functions, including blogging, photo and video uploads, profile pages etc etc. Where Capazoo differs is its offer to compensate its users for the time spent on the site and the activities they undertake. Members can tip other members using “Zoops,” Capzoo’s points program that can be redeemed for cash. Members also receive Zoops for inviting friends and posting content. It sounds good, but there is a catch: to redeem Zoops users must join one of Capazoo’s two premium membership programs which cost $24.95 or $34.95 per year. Users can also buy additional Zoops to give to others at the rate of $10 for 10,000 Zoops.

Capazoo currently has “over 100 employees” and has taken $25 million in private funding to date.

As we bid AGLOCO to the deadpool earlier today, it’s natural that another variation on a Web 1.0 theme that’s got a multi-level marketing referral scheme rings alarm bells. Capazoo is trying to be at least slightly different through content deals and original content, but in an age where social networking sites are free, a model that only pays out when you pay up won’t find millions of fans. With $25 million in the bank the site certainly won’t be heading to the Deadpool anytime soon but it will struggle to succeed; who knows, it might work, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

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/~3/198357589/

Smilebox, a site where you can create a variety of media presentations (such slideshows, ecards, scrapbooks, photobooks, and postcards) by loading your own amateur photos and videos into designer templates, has raised $7M in Series B financing. The round was led by Bessemer Venture Partners and joined by Frazier Technology Ventures.

The company says that it has garnered 1.8M users since its launch in June 2006, and that it experiences over 1.3M unique users monthly. Smilebox has recently been improved to allow for integration of music from media players like iTunes and automatic posting of creations to Facebook. The company has also partnered with several companies for distribution including Six Apart (creator of Vox) and Corel.

In unrelated news, European social network for young students Bahu has raised $1M in its first round of funding, led by theLightspeed-Gemini Internet Lab (LGiLab). The company says that Bahu differentiates itself from other social networks by focusing on users’ talents and helping to showcase them.

In addition to raising some money, Bahu has also appointed Ouriel Ohayon (editor of TechCrunch France) to its board of directors. Bahu was launched in July and claims to already have over 300,000 international users and to have experienced 15M page views in November.

Smilebox

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Bahu

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/198333544/

In December 2006, we reviewed a product called Competitious that helps businesses keep track of competitors by aggregating website traffic data and blog posts about them. Today, the same company behind Competitious has released a new on-demand service called RivalMap that means to take the tracking and management of competitors to the next level.

RivalMap reminds me of BaseCamp in part because both products are based on Ruby on Rails and contain many user interface similarities. More importantly, they are both collaboration tools, with BaseCamp meant for virtually any type of collaboration and RivalMap intended for a particular use: the keeping tabs on one’s competitors.

Every company registered with RivalMap receives a project area with a subdomain (e.g. http://techcrunch.rivalmap.com/). Registered employees can sign into these project areas to share information and thoughts about their rivals in a variety of forms: wiki-fied company profiles, website clippings, general notes, customer profiles, and comparison charts to name a few. Other employees can then respond to these contributions by leaving comments, “starring” notable content (which then causes that content to rise a la Digg), and simply editing existing content (say, to update a comparison chart). Contributions are categorized in a variety of ways (under particular competitors or “workspaces”, for example) and all activity on the site can be tracked from a Dashboard page.

All in all, the service is very well-designed with tagging, search, and Ajax used effectively to create a more efficient experience. It seems to me as though the success of the product will now rely on the demand for such a particular type of collaboration tool, given that the idea has been executed very well. The only thing I found lacking is “preloaded” information about competitors. Whereas Competitious pulls in traffic and blog data, RivalMap does not do so…at least yet: the company assures me that it will have “robust” traffic data either from Compete or Quantcast eventually. And rather than pulling in blog headlines from Google, as done by Competitious, a “collaborative RSS dashboard” will also be available before long.

If you want to give RivalMap a spin - or use it with 3 or fewer people - you can do so for free. However, you’ll have to pay a premium of $50/month for 5 user accounts, $100/month for 10, and $200/month for 25. Companies with a desire for more than 25 user accounts will need to contact RivalMap’s sales department.

For a social network’s effort to help employees stay abreast of competitors, read about LinkedIn’s recent news aggregation feature.

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/~3/198310984/

One of the most addictive features of Facebook is its “News Feed” that keeps you up to date on every inane action any one of your friends has taken on the social network (and some partner sites via Beacon). But what if you want to keep track of what all your friends are doing on other parts of the Web, whether they just added a photo to Flickr, a bookmark to Digg, a product to their Amazon wish list, or sent out a new Twitter?

There are so many social sites out there that it is hard to keep track of them all. Harrison Tang, the founder of Spokeo, just made it easier with the relaunch of his site today.

Spokeo 2.0 is like a blog reader for all of your friends’ activities across more than 30 social Websites, including Bebo, Digg, Facebook, Flickr, Hi5, imeem, Last.fm, LinkedIn, MySpace, Pandora, Slide, StumbleUpon, Twitter, Windows Live Spaces, Yelp, and YouTube. (Delicious is conspicuously absent). Similar to FriendFeed, it presents the latest actions on the Web from your friends as a continually updating stream. It is like a blog reader for what your friends are up to. (It also happens to be regular RSS reader).

What makes Spokeo compelling, at least initially, is that it is dead-simple to set up. In one fell swoop Spokeo can ingest all of your contacts from Gmail, Yahoo, or Hotmail, and then go out to the 30+ sites it monitors and bring back any new content from people in your address book. I tried this with my Gmail account, and it built up a friend reader with more than 500 contacts in less than three minutes. Before, this was a laborious process on Spokeo. You had to add each friend’s blog or feed one by one. (In comparison, FriendFeed lets you suck in your Facebook friends, but only the ones who are also FriendFeed users—plus each member must specify which sites he wants to expose to others.

It is pretty surprising to find out what people (who you think you know) are listening to on Pandora or Twittering about. It feels a lot like spying on your friends. The best part is that they don’t ever have to know you are keeping track of them. Spokeo is not trying to build another social network. It is trying to help you keep track of the zillion social sites you already belong to. In fact, notes Tang with pride:

We’ve ripped out any sharing, commenting, or messaging feature that would make us resemble another social network. Spokeo is strictly positioned as a reader for your friends’ updates.

When you join Spokeo, you see all your friends’ updates from different services right away. There is no network for you to build, even if you want to. There is no friend request to send; in fact, your friends don’t even know you are following them.

If this rings privacy alarms, Tang notes:

We only access publicly available information on the Internet, so we don’t know anything that you don’t have access to. For example, Flickr has a feature that allows users to search for their friends by email. Spokeo simply calls that Flickr API. Blogger does not support that feature, so Spokeo cannot find your friends on Blogger.

The contact ingestion feature alone is going to be enough to get lots of people to try this out. Whether they keep coming back, though, is another issue. At least with my Spokeo home page, the friend stream tends to be dominated by Twitters. Those can get annoying. Also, I don’t want to keep track of every single person who has emailed me on Gmail, which automatically adds everyone as a contact. Spokeo lets you delete names and group people together, but that creates another management problem in and of itself. (I know, I’m lazy).

Spokeo’s appeal depends entirely upon how interesting your friends and contacts are, and whether they are so prolific across the Web that it is not possible to keep track of them on one major site like Facebook or Twitter alone. But then, everyone has different interests and will gravitate towards different Web services. Spokeo extends the feed reader metaphor to your friends activities—something I expect we will be seeing a lot more of in the near future. (Spokeo has only raised a small seed round from friends and family. Guy Kawasaki is an adviser to the startup).

Here is what my Spokeo home page looks like:

If you click on someone’s name, like Michael Arrington, you see just their stream:

FriendFeed

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/198210695/

All you search-engine marketing consultants watch out. Sequoia Capital just invested in Kenshoo, an Israeli startup that automates the whole process of creating and managing search-engine marketing campaigns. It is a labor-intensive activity that has given rise to an entire cottage industry. Kenshoo competes with bid-management software from all the giants in online advertising (DoubleClick, aQuantive’s Atlas Solutions, and Omniture), but it goes a step beyond that to look at the quality of the campagns. It finds relevant keywords across search engines, and changes the campaigns to maximize their returns. The company’s press release quotes Sequoia partner Michael Moritz (who invested in Google):

Mastery of search engine marketing is the biggest single challenge facing any marketer or advertiser. Sequoia Capital invested in Kenshoo because of its fresh approach to this task and because the company’s battle-hardened software has already paid off in thousands of different search campaigns.

Although Moritz sat on the evaluating committee, he is not the investing partner. Yuval Baharav, a partner in Sequoia’s Israeli office, is the one who invested and will take a board seat. This is Kenshoo’s first venture round. Terms were not disclosed, although one report in an Israeli paper puts it at a few million dollars. Previously, the startup raised about one million dollars from angel investors, and has been funding itself from operations. The new money will be used to make a marketing push into the UK and parts of Europe in the first quarter of 2008, and the U.S. in the second quarter.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/198158250/

This is the fourth in a series of posts showing how we use Campfire as our virtual office. All screenshots shown are from real usage and were taken during one week in September.

This time we’ll take a look at how we use Campfire to help us write copy for our apps, marketing sites, blogs, etc.

Collect ideas for copy
Jason asks for suggestions about a blog post he’s writing. Ryan, Mark, and Sam offer up some ideas.

Suggest a copy change
Jason suggests adding a message to an app that says, “Upload photo, one moment…”
Kickstart a blog post
Ryan points to a link at a site. His comments lead to a blog post on the subject.

Highlight smart copywriting by showing it in context
Campfire is also great for pointing out smart copy elsewhere. Here, Ryan shares a thoughtful phrase spotted inside an iPhone app.

Related
Behind the scenes at 37signals: Design
Behind the scenes at 37signals: Coding
Behind the scenes at 37signals: Sysadmin and development

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/735-behind-the-scenes-at-37signals-copywriting

Ext.CFC isn’t about the greenhouse gasses, but instead abstracts out Ext components into the land of CFML:

“The Ext library is packed with tons of cool features, but like most CF programmers, I was initially interested in the Grid Panel. The Grid panel is implemented in ColdFusion 8 using the <cfgrid>, <cfgridcolumn>, and <cfgridrow> tags. Since I started this long before <cfgrid> was a thought, this code will obviously work in CF7.”

Currently the only abstraction is the Grid component, which allows you to do the following in CFML to create a rich grid:

which creates:

Ah, now I can feel a little less guilty about how little we post on Coldfusion…. at least until Rey joined the fun!

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/198141321/extcfc-easing-integration-with-ext-and-adobe-coldfusion