Ajax Girl

IZEA (PayPerPost) have suspended Zookoda, the blog to email service they acquired in April.

According to CEO Ted Murphy, the service has been suspended due to “elevated levels of abuse on Zookoda.com” and goes on to explain that the service is being used by spammers. For those that think that PayPerPost pollutes the blogosphere with spam content, the following from Murphy is rich with irony:

We hate spam. Honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone that really enjoys spam. Some people hate spam even more than we hate spam and those people complained to our network hosting service. Our network hosting service REALLY hate spam….We’re not spammers, we don’t support spammers and we do support everybody’s freedom of choice when it comes to opting in and out email lists.

Murphy suggests that the service will return in January, but we’re putting it on deadpool watch; Zookoda has been failing for months. Most Searched reports that the service started deteriorating when IZEA took over and had gotten to the stage where it simply stopped sending out email distributions in early December. Erno H on LinkedIn reports similar problems. An email distribution service that doesn’t provide email distribution is a business with nothing going for it.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/204395123/

The nomination process for the Crunchies, a joint effort between us, Read/Write Web, VentureBeat and GigaOm, is now complete.

82,000 nominations were made for thousands of individual startups. The top startups in each of twenty categories have made it to the final vote. Starting now, you can vote for the startups you think are most worthy in each of twenty categories - from “best technology achievement” to “best overall startup.”

Each category has five finalists to choose from. A few startups made it to the finals of multiple categories, but there are still nearly 100 to choose from for the various awards. Voting goes until January 10. The Awards Ceremony will take place on Friday, January 18 at the 1,000 seat Herbst Theater across the street from City Hall in San Francisco, followed by one hell of a party.

Thanks to sponsors Adobe, Charles River Ventures, Mayfield Fund, Microsoft, OurStage and Sun for assisting us with the event - we could not do it without them. Thanks as well to WeBreakStuff for building the site (they also did our Tech President site), and Media Temple for hosting.Contact us if you’re interested to sponsor an award or other part of the evening festivities. It’s sure to be a great evening.

Go vote now! If you are a finalist, you can also grab a badge to let your users know and vote for you to win.

And finally - tickets to the event will be going on sale in the next week or so. Stay tuned.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/204357638/

Rich asks:

Without revealing any financials or numbers from which financials could be derived, could you satisfy the geek curiosity in me and share a few details from 37 Signals apps? Number of customers, contacts, projects, milestones, files on S3, number of servers, logical infrastructure topology, etc.

Here are some rough numbers we can share:

Basecamp

• 2,000,000 people with accounts
• 1,340,000 projects
• 13,200,000 to-do items
• 9,200,000 messages
• 12,200,000 comments
• 5,500,000 time tracking entries
• 4,000,000 milestones

Highrise

• 3,500,000 contacts
• 1,200,000 notes/comments
• 575,000 tasks

Backpack

• Just under 1,000,000 pages
• 6,800,000 to-do items
• 1,500,000 notes
• 829,000 photos
• 370,000 files

Campfire

• 130,000 rooms
• 46,000,000 chat messages
• 200,000 files shared

Overall storage stats (Nov 2007)

• 5.9 terabytes of files
• 888 GB files uploaded (900,000 requests)
• 2 TB files downloadd (8,500,000 requests)

Servers

We’re currently upgrading our server infrastructure to use significantly faster hardware along with the Xen virtualization software, so we’ll have fewer servers to manage. Our current server cluster contains around 30 machines, ranging from single processor file servers to 8 CPU application servers, for a total of around 100 CPUs and 200GB of RAM. Over the next couple of months, we plan to reduce the number of servers to 16 with around 92 CPU cores (each significantly faster than what we use today) and around 230 GB of combined RAM. Not only will our applications run faster, but our cluster will be much simpler to manage when we’re done.

Got a question for us?

Email svn at 37signals dot com and title the email “Ask 37signals”. Thanks!

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/749-ask-37signals-numbers

Would you drive a beta? That’s not the name of a new car. It’s how Elon Musk characterizes the first version of the Tesla electric sports car that is due to come out in the next few months. Musk is Tesla Motors’ chairman and biggest investor. He tells Earth2Web that a transmission snag is going to cost another $40 million, on top of the $100 million already poured into the company. He and other existing investors are putting up the extra cash in an internal round. Excerpt from Earth2Web’s Q&A:

Q. So you guys are on schedule with the car, first quarter of 2008?

Elon: The primary schedule driver is the transmission. We had two suppliers in a row fail to deliver and so we are on our third now, actually we are running multiple paths, so that is driving our schedule. We will have limited production of cars in the first half of next year, but it will be quite limited, a very small trickle of cars, and then full production in the later half of the year.

Q. What is limited vs. full production?

Elon: It is a little too early to say, but it will not be a large number. Those cars will have a transmission which is not the final transmission. It will have an interim transmission. It will still be safe, but it won’t have the performance characteristics that we promised. And there may be some durability issues, not something that is made to last 10 years, but it should be fine for several months.

We’ll have to swap that out, and we don’t want to make a whole bunch of cars with that transmission. But it will give us some good feedback for real-world driving conditions. All the crash tests and safety tests are done. One might think of this as a public beta, if it were software.

Q. Will that swapping out those transmissions take a significant amount of investment that wasn’t planned on?

Elon: It will require more investment than expected, yes. And so myself and other current investors are doing a substantial internal round right now. It will be $40 million dollars. It will close next month.

Tesla is also on its third CEO. If it weren’t for Musk’s deep pockets, Tesla might already be in the deadpool. But nobody ever said trying to make an electric car would be easy. Sometimes ambitious startups need a billionaire with conviction to see them through the rough spots. Tesla’s other investors (which include Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Jeff Skoll, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and VantagePoint) better hope that these rough spots don’t make Tesla’s wheels fly off.

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/~3/204234830/

Hell hath no fury like a celebrity gossip scorned. Celeb-blogger Perez Hilton is through with YouTube. “Fuck you, YouTube. Fuck you,” he says in a farewell video posted—where else?— on YouTube.

Hilton, who was one of the original partners selected to share ad revenues with the site (a program that was recently opened up) found his account temporarily shut down on Monday for purported copyright violations. YouTube had received a takedown notice related to Liza Minnelli concert footage he had included in a video. It was the third takedown notice that Hilton’s videos had received. However, Hilton says he had permission to post the video from the person who shot it. YouTube quickly reinstated his account.

Nevertheless, Hilton expressed anger at YouTube for sending him a standard, generic e-mail informing him of his account’s violation and temporary shutdown. Don’t they know who he is? They should, his YouTube videos generate millions of views, according to him. Doesn’t he rate at least a phone call? In his farewell video, Hilton tells his fans he probably won’t be posting any more videos to YouTube and that neither should they. Dis.

But here’s the funny part. The other two takedown notices had come from Viacom, which produces Hilton’s TV show on VH1. He had to get his lawyer to contact Viacom’s lawyers to rescind the notices, which sound like they were automatically generated. These automated takedown notices are just going to keep backfiring on Viacom and other media companies that use them too liberally.

The fact is that Hilton got caught up in the middle of a war between YouTube and Viacom, one in which the weapons are software-generated takedown notices, software-generated e-mails, and software-generated account closures. He is not the only casualty. He is just the most vocal. But he should be just as angry at Viacom, who arguably started this war with its $1 billion lawsuit against YouTube in the first place.

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/~3/204313001/

The auction of Edgeio’s assets is complete, and Looksmart is the winning bidder. They’ve acquired most of the assets of the company for $280,000.

I spoke to Patrick Chapman, LookSmart’s director of corporate development, briefly after the auction closed this morning. He says its too early to say what they’ll do with the assets, but they’ll likely issue a press release sometime soon. Chapman says he’ll be talking to Edgeio’s former employees and will hopefully offer some or all of them jobs with LookSmart.

LookSmart is a small public company with a market cap of around $68 million. They’ve made some recent moves to build the business back to what it was in the 90’s, including a recent share repurchase announcement.

This marks the end of this stage of Edgeio, a company I co-founded with Keith Teare in 2005 and which we put into the deadpool earlier this month. But I am happy to see the assets move to a company with the resources to move the ideas forward.

Edgeio

Loading information about Edgeio…

cb_widget_report_widget(”cb_widget_1198335086″); cb_widget_report_element(”cb_widget_0_1198335086″,”edgeio”);

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/204219630/

If you are going to insist on still making client-only software, at least put up a Flash demo on the Web. That is what startup Enoetic just did, with this
slick demo of its Photology software for organizing and searching through your digital photos. The downloadable software, which costs $29, only works on Windows, but the demo is set up to show how the software works using about 9,000 photos from Flickr. You can auto-magically sort through photos, searching by color, date, time of day, photo orientation, photo quality, location (inside or outside), or even for specific common motifs (such as faces, sky, snow, water, plants). I don’t know if the demo is canned, but if it is not, the technology is quite impressive. I played around with it and only got a few false positives. The screen shot below shows a search for red photos in focus.

I want this for my Mac. Or at least for my Flickr photos. Too bad this is just a demo, and you cannot apply it to your own Flickr account. But what is notable about this is that there is no tagging involved. Photology in effect auto-tags your photos for you. If the company could combine that with the human-generated tagging on Flickr that would be a killer combo.

When it comes to indexing your entire digital photo collection, I agree that you still need a client-based piece of software. Most people don’t have the time to upload all their photos online. But what Photology needs is a Web component. If it can already indexed your entire photo collection, why not create low-res Flash versions that can be uploaded in bulk to Flickr or some other Web repository where they can be further enhanced, tagged, and shared? I guess you can’t have everything.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/204192538/

There are a fair number of our readers who admit to being addicts of Duels.com, a World of Warcraft-like game that lets users create characters, add weapons and spells, and duel each other. It’s asynchronous, meaning one player can fight another without both having to be online.

And in the few months since it launched, the site has grown to the point that nearly a million duels per day are fought on the site.

Today the company launched version 2 of the site and changed their corporate name from Oxygen Games to Challenge Games. Most of the new features in v 2.0 are geeky and only interesting to hard core players (lots of new ways to kill your opponent). But the site is also starting to launch tournaments, where a large number of players gather to fight all at once, and “ladders,” a way of ranking players based on Elo chess ranking systems.

But the most important feature: female avatars. This was quite simply overlooked by the team when they launched the site - they assumed the vast majority of players would be men. But players have been yelling for female avatars in the Duels.com forums since the game launched. Now, women can play the game with an avatar that has at least some basic biological similarities to their real life body.

Duels.com has the look of a winner. Traffic is steadily increasing after the launch spike, and a lot of players are spending real money to upgrade their characters. CEO Andrew Busey says that more than a few people have spent more than $1,000 to buy some super awesome sword or armor for their character.

The company will launched more games next year, including a sports-themed title that will have more general appeal than Duels.com. “People are embarrassed to say they are addicted to a fantasy dueling game” said Busey. “They’re more willing to tell their friends about a sports game.”

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/~3/204171066/

The last few years has seen a proliferation of web-app development. Lots of productivity tools, to-do lists, online word processors and spreadsheets, presentation tools, groupware, calendars, etc. Lots of business software.

Noticeably absent are dedicated intranet tools. Software to help businesses get their shit together internally. A place to post common information, to have discussions, to share files, and possibly to share a calendar or important dates. There are definitely products out there, but this market doesn’t seem to have seen the same level of development as other business software.

When we were still doing client work back in the early 2000s we got a lot of calls about designing intranets. Everyone wanted an intranet. The employees we talked to loved their intranets too—their jobs depended on having access to bits of information, files, forms, etc. that were only available on their company intranet.

But since then I haven’t heard much noise from the intranet camp. Have people given up because the options were too complicated? Or have they built their own? Or are they piecing together blogs and wikis and file storage services and online calendars to get the job done?

What does your company or group use to keep your information together, centralized, and accessible to people you work with? Are you using something home grown? Something off the shelf? Something old? Something new? We’re curious.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/747-where-did-the-intranets-go

If Leno and Letterman can do it, so can Stewart and Colbert. The late-night comedy shows are the bread and butter of the networks and, writer’s strike be damned, they are going to air no matter how lame the jokes may become. Comedy Central’s The Daily Show and Colbert Report will be returning on January 7 in an all ad-lib format. I guess now we’ll see how funny those two guys really are.

This should be entertaining.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/204144647/