Written by on Friday, January 4th, 2008 in Ajax News.
Google Docs just added some cool new features to its Web-based Presentation software: slide shows that you can embed anywhere on the Web. Check it out below:
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/211436548/
Written by on Friday, January 4th, 2008 in Ajax News.
Over Thanksgiving this past year we published a controversial guest post by Dan Ackerman Greenberg called “The Secret Strategies Behind Many ‘Viral’ Videos” that explained how certain steps can be taken to make amateur videos hosted on YouTube achieve massive amounts of page views.
YouTube comedian Kevin Nalty (you may know him from Farting in Public) has just posted a much lengthier piece called “How to Become Popular on YouTube (Without Any Talent)” that also gives advice on how video producers can get their content to go “viral”. While there are overlaps in their suggestions (make the videos short and sweet), his take on things is less controversial than Dan’s since he doesn’t focus on a set of tricks that can get videos highlighted on YouTube’s “Most Viewed” page. Rather, he explains how individual performers can create attractive content, build a respected following on YouTube, and avoid certain pitfalls.
Not only is the advice different but the intentions are as well. Whereas Greenberg’s strategies come from someone who runs a firm focused on maximizing the ROI of its clients, Nalty warns against getting into viral video production for either fame or immediate profit. One choice quote: “If I divided the revenue Iʹve made from online video by the time Iʹve invested, my payback would be less than minimum wage.”
The differences in intent have largely to do with their sources of revenue. Whereas Greenberg gets paid directly by large corporations, Nalty makes money from most of his videos through YouTube’s Partners Program (although he’s not allowed to state how much he actually makes through it). He does make some decent money from the production of sponsored videos that promote a certain product or brand. But his “hope of entertaining people” seems to be the largest factor motivating him…at least for now as he works on YouTube videos part time and waits for the advertising possibilities for amateur video to improve.
We’ve embedded Nalty’s 34-page “eBook” below, and you can download it here.
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/211413989/
Written by on Friday, January 4th, 2008 in Ajax News.
Technorati made changes this week to the way it counts inbound links for purposes of determining its blog rankings. This had some effect on the Technorati 100 list.
Technorati was previously counting all links made to blogs on a given domain. So links to, for example, chinese.engadget.com were also counting towards engadet.com, even though they are separate blogs. They are no longer counting these links.
Engadget took the biggest hit, losing more than a quarter of their 30,000+ unique links over the last six months. They are still the top blog; however, no. 2 Gizmodo is within striking distance, whereas before they were not even close. TechCrunch was affected, dropping from no. 2 to no. 3 behind Gizmodo (our France, UK and Japan blogs are on subdomains). Even so, the changes seem appropriate.
Technorati VP Engineering Dorion Carroll explains the change here. There is still a massive amount of fraud links counted by Technorati in their Top Blogs list. I’m hoping that their newfound focus will lead to further changes.
cb_widget_report_widget(”cb_widget_1199565778″); cb_widget_report_element(”cb_widget_0_1199565778″,”technorati”);
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/211401146/
Written by on Friday, January 4th, 2008 in Ajax News.
The first set of tickets for the Crunchies, which went on sale last night, sold out this morning. We will put another batch up for sale on Tuesday next week at around 10 AM PST.
If you are a nominated company, you get two tickets alloted to you, and we’ve reserved more for purchase if you want to bring more of the team. We are contacting all of you separately with information.
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/211391618/
Written by on Friday, January 4th, 2008 in Ajax News.
Rob Sanheim sat down with Zed Shaw at RailsConf and had an hour long conversation with him that covered his thoughts on the Rails community, the role of the Enterprise, the state of Ajax, JRuby and Rubinius, documentation, tests, tooling, the role of patents in software, and a whole lot of opinion.
It is very interesting to listen to this after the explosion that happened when Zed lambasted the Rails community. When you listen to this interview, you see some of the seeds of the rant, but it is a lot more toned down, and there is some good stuff in there. It is easy to blog a crazy rant…. but when you are talking to someone you get a different side of the coin. This gives you that side, from a time when he wasn’t as upset as he may have been when he sat at the computer to type up his post.
Listen to the recording, or subscribe to the podcast. We will go back to more “standard” Ajax topics in the future.
Zed’s Core Quotes
And here are some of the thoughts that Zed expressed throughout the interview:
Thoughts on the Rails community, and enterprise (as big business)
What could an enterprise company sell?
JRuby
Rubinius
State of Ajax
What is going to come out with all of the work happening on top of Mongrel?
Honest Open Source
What tools do you use?
Testing
Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/211391175/zed-shaw-interview-on-rails-community-enterprise-ajax-patents-and-a-whole-lot-more
Written by on Friday, January 4th, 2008 in Ajax News.
While the future of the music industry may not be in selling albums, there is still hope for the concert side of the business. Danny Socolof and Jeff Henshaw think they can bring concerts onto the Web with their startup DeepRockDrive. Socolof is a veteran music marketer and Henshaw hails from Microsoft, where he was on the Xbox team. With DeepRockDrive, they want to film concerts in their high-tech Las Vegas soundstage, broadcast them live over the Web, and sell tickets for $6.99 each, splitting the proceeds with the musicians.
The startup—which has raised $3 million in angel funding from Socolof, Henshaw, David Goldberg (founder of Launch Media and the first GM of Yahoo Music), Bill Curbishley (manager of The Who and Robert Plant), and the Becker Family (Brian Becker is the former CEO of Live Nation)—has already quietly recorded and broadcast 45 shows since last September. That was its beta period. Now, on Tuesday, it will be launching itself in a more public fashion with a concert coinciding with the Consumer Electronics Show (which is taking place in Las Vegas next week). It plans on filming more than 100 shows in 2008, plus free promotional shows every Friday.
Here is how it works. The band plays in the soundstage (with or without a live audience). The shows are filmed with five Sony HD cameras, and each Web viewer can pick which camera angle he or she wants to watch. The audience can also vote on the order of the songs on the set list or make their own song requests. They can also send in messages during the show that the band sees on large screens surrounding the stage. Prior to shows (DeepRockDrive calls them socialcasts), bands try to drum up support with digital posters on their Websites and MySpace pages that fans can take and put on their own Web pages. On DeepRockDrive, fans can petition for concerts from their favorite bands, like this one for Flight of the Conchords. If the shows get enough votes, it makes it easier for the bands to decide to fly to Las Vegas to record the show.
While the experience of watching a live show on your computer screen will never match actually being at a live concert, DeepRockDrive is offering a distributed fan base an opportunity to watch a show from bands that might never otherwise come to their towns. For instance, Australian rocker Shannon Noll is going to do a DeepRockDrive concert aimed at expat Australian fans in the U.S. Declares Socolof:
The future of the music business will be hundreds of thousands of artists that have fan bases of between 5,000 to 100,000, not 50 artists that have one million or more.
Socolof is also talking to music labels (both indies and the majors) about possible joint ventures. Traditionally, labels did not have much to do with the concert side of the business, but that is changing. Predicts Socolof:
In the old world, yes, concerts were separate from the labels. In the new world, there will be a different approach in the partnership between labels and their artists. Labels will need to contribute more to the success of their artists.
Maybe. I don’t think the artists want to start splitting concert fees with the labels. Socolof is also not opposed to rewarding fans who turn out to be the biggest promoters of shows, although there is no mechanism yet for them to be rewarded. (Free tickets for anyone who generates a certain amount of sales wouldn’t be a bad start. Flying the biggest fans/promoters in for the show would be even better).
DeepRockDive is starting small. Its socialcasts can support only a few thousand simultaneous viewers right now. That will grow to tens of thousands in a few months. “Our goal is a million front row seats,” says Socolof. Hey, the guy is a music promoter.
Here is an archived video of a band called Socratic. It starts off slow, but you get a sense of what the performance space looks like with large screens filled with live messages from the Web audience:
cb_widget_report_widget(”cb_widget_1199561645″); cb_widget_report_element(”cb_widget_0_1199561645″,”deeprockdrive”);
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/~3/211369444/
Written by on Friday, January 4th, 2008 in Ajax News.
Just a day after video-sharing site Veoh added a TV tab with shows from Hulu and CBS, Microsoft did the same thing with the launch of a new MSN Video Guide. (This is really just a new user interface to showcase this content). It too has a TV tab with full-length episodes from Hulu (Fox and NBC Universal shows), as well as CBS. Similar to Veoh, the shows range from Battlestar Galactica, CSI, 24, The Office, and The Simpsons to classics like the A-Team and Miami Vice. All the shows can be watched in an embeddable player on MSN Video.
It looks like becoming a hyper-aggregator of video is becoming hyper-popular, and won’t necessarily be a point of differentiation. Meanwhile, Hulu’s focus on getting hyper-distribution of its videos on other Websites first, and launching its own public Website second looks to be paying off already. Everyone wants to distribute those NBC and Fox videos.
cb_widget_report_widget(”cb_widget_1199554131″); cb_widget_report_element(”cb_widget_0_1199554131″,”veoh”); cb_widget_report_element(”cb_widget_1_1199554131″,”hulu”);
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/211315574/
Written by on Friday, January 4th, 2008 in Ajax News.
Job listings site Monster announced today that it has paid $61M for a young startup called Affinity Labs, which runs a set of websites for niche audiences such as police officers and nurses.
These sites, while only a few months old and attracting a total of only 500,000 unique visitors per month, are attractive to Monster because it can use them to target professionals who are in high demand by employers. The sites are essentially cookie-cutter information portals with social networking features that seek to attract members of particular demographics. Monster has already established a presence on each of the sites by deploying career search badges, like the one below, on their homepages.
A couple things are peculiar about this deal. First, Monster has paid a handsome sum of money for a company that offers neither a large user base nor coveted technological capabilities (as far as I can tell, these are simple CRUD websites built on Ruby on Rails). Second, Monster is retreading very familiar ground by purchasing several informational portals from the same guy, Christopher Michel, who sold them Military.com, an information portal for servicemen, in 2004 for $40M.
In fact, we’ve heard that this was not a coincidence but rather a repeat performance of sorts that has been planned all along. Affinity Labs was reportedly started in 2006 as a way for Michel to replicate and enhance his success with Military.com by selling a handful of similar sites to Monster within a relatively short period of time (an exit of one to two years). Monster even planned to invest in Affinity Labs before CEO Andrew J. McKelvey stepped down from his post during the company’s options backdating scandal in late 2006. Once McKelvey was gone, Monster shied away from investing and Affinity Labs raised its Series A with Mayfield instead. However, Affinity Labs continued to collaborate with the Military.com team within Monster to develop its handful of portals.
With today’s announcement, Michel’s plan of building a company with a specific Monster exit in mind has come to fruition. Whether Michel stays with the company will probably determine whether or not Monster has paid too much for the sprouting company, as he will be instrumental to their blossoming into established sites that can drive quality traffic to Monster.
The announcement highlights the fact you don’t need to build a revolutionary product if you have a well-defined buyer in mind from the start (and it doesn’t hurt have a little bit of history with that buyer as well). Affinity Labs didn’t build anything worth mention in the tech press, but it quickly executed on a project that it knew would be attractive for Monster given that company’s need for reaching professionals in demand. The deal also highlights the weaknesses and needs of a company like Monster, which has a harder time developing internally and will therefore gladly pay for several small startups rather than trying to deploy online destinations itself.
cb_widget_report_widget(”cb_widget_1199547365″); cb_widget_report_element(”cb_widget_0_1199547365″,”monster.com”);
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/211290657/
Written by on Friday, January 4th, 2008 in Ajax News.
Okay, I know, I’m late with these, but coming up with New Year’s resolutions is tough. And isn’t there a one-week grace period anyway? Rather than do predictions, I thought I’d offer up some resolutions—things I’d like to see happen this year. These aren’t my resolutions. These are resolutions that tech companies like Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook should adopt, IMHO. (And, no, they are not capable of coming up with their own resolutions. Someone has to do this for them). If you have better resolutions to suggest for these or any other company, please add them to comments.
Apple—Learn to Let Go. Don’t repeat the mistakes of history. Open up a little bit. You are helping to bring the phone and other mobile devices into the digital age. Other people and companies want to be a part of that too. Make it easy for them to build apps on top of the iPhone and your other products. (You’ve indicated that you are working on this, but we are still waiting to see the results). Command and control got you this far, but in a world where every device is connected, a bunker mentality will limit your growth.
Facebook—Stop Being a Party Hog. Release my friends and leave Scobie alone. You want everyone to create applications for Facebook, but when it comes to letting people take data out of Facebook you are not so generous. Find a way to let members take their social graph (their list of friends and social connections) with them to other Websites. If you are serious about becoming the social operating system of the Web, you need to let people party the way they want to, and where they want to (even if that is not on Facebook). Embrace this change. You’ll still be popular. The alternative is to battle a growing user backlash (and startups looking for workarounds).
Google—Go Beyond PageRank. The main way you sort search results, PageRank, is more than a decade old. It is the basis of the entire search economy. But it is also starting to be gamed in ways that threaten to dilute the value of your search results. People are buying and selling links on Web pages with the express intent of manipulating search results. You can fight this, and you are, but maybe it is time to start shifting to other ways to rank search results. There are other sources of authority on the Web besides links, aren’t there? (Don’t ask me what they are—you are the one with all the genius employees).
Amazon—Open Up The Kindle. Your Kindle Reader is a big step forward in terms of gaining mainstream acceptance for electronic books. But what is great about the Kindle is the service, not the device. It is your 90,000-and-growing titles in e-book format, seamless wireless downloading, and back-end billing linked to existing Amazon accounts that makes the Kindle worth replicating. Put out a reference design and let other companies make sleeker electronic readers that tie into the Amazon store. The design of the device itself is clunky. Stick to what you know, and let other companies build the hardware.
Microsoft—Get Serious About Webtop Apps. Productivity apps are moving to the Web, and while that threatens your Office franchise, you need to get in front of this trend now before it gains much traction. You are inching towards this with your recent Office Live Workspace beta, but you still need to get past your Barbarians at the Gate mindset. While Google, Adobe, and others try to figure out how to bring their Web-based word processors, spreadsheets, and presentation software offline, you are already did that a long time ago with Office. Now you are integrating Office apps with Office Live, but you are trying to force people to use the offline apps as their default environment. Keep that as an option, but let people create documents and spreadsheets online as well without the need to ever launch Office on their desktop.
Yahoo— Use The Traffic, Luke. I don’t know what to tell you guys (and gals). You are losing more executives than Google, Jerry Yang’s first 100 days were uneventful, and still nobody knows what your strategy is supposed to be. Your biggest asset is that you still attract more traffic than any other site in the U.S. (although Google is gaining on you). For the most part, you like to slosh that traffic around Yahoo, but you’ve shown signs that you are willing to turn that hose towards other worthy Websites, even if they have no pre-existing deals with you. Find more ways to spread that traffic and to get other Websites to return the love. Then use that natural traffic network to lure other Websites into your advertising network. Focus on dominating the growing behavioral ad-targeting market instead of trying to beat Google head-to-head on contextual and search ads.
eBay—Sell Skype. Come on, you know you want to. It was a bad fit from the start.
(Photo via Crystl).
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/211281876/
Written by on Friday, January 4th, 2008 in Ajax News.
Today we learn of two more Googlers leaving the search giant: Kevin Fox, a UI designer who worked on Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Reader, and Nathan Stoll, a product manager at Google News. Fox is going to an unnamed startup. Stoll is vague about his plans.
Remember, these are two employees out of 16,000 and the end of the year is a natural time to leave a job for something else. But Fox and Stoll join a growing trickle of Google veterans who no longer find Google as alluring a place to work as they once did.
Anyone know what Google’s employee churn rate was in 2007? Anyone want to guess what it will be in 2008?
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/211219899/
