Ajax Girl

Almost a month ago to the day, social network Bebo announced its developer platform. Or rather, a clone of Facebook’s developer platform. The idea was to copy Facebook’s platform so that developers wouldn’t have to relearn a new one and rebuild their applications (Bebo’s platform still requires tweaks to port an application over from Facebook, however).

Bebo chose to launch its platform with only 40 partners, leaving the rest of Facebook developer community baying at the gates. Today, the company announces the availability of its platform for all developers.

Go here to browse a list of existing Bebo applications. And visit developer.bebo.com for more information on the platform.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/214741788/

If you can’t beat ‘em, turn into a widget and join ‘em.

Condé Nast is changing strategies on Flip, its young-teen women social network that launched last February. They announced today that Flip will be “reshaped as a flexible web application designed to live on social networking platform, starting with Facebook.”

Translation: “We give up.” Comscore says Flip has dropped to around 100,000 monthly visitors from a high of half a million in May (see chart). Facebook has, by comparison, 100 million worldwide users, or about 1,000 times the audience.

Condé Nast says that they’ll continue to operate the Flip.com website, but development and marketing efforts will shift to distributed applications.

So Flip turns, essentially, into one of thousands of Facebook applications. To date, the Flip application on Facebook has nine active users. Flip smells like deadpool to me.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/214735340/

Network Solutions used to be the only place you could go to buy a .com or other domain name. Years ago they lost their monopoly rights and a flood of low priced competitors entered the market. Today Network Solutions is a distant third in market share behind giants like GoDaddy and eNom. The main reason is price. Network Solutions continues to charge $35/year for a domain name, while others charge as little as $8 per year.

Network Solutions continues to make good money on renewals for all the domain names already registered to them (transferring to a new registrar is a pain), but few new customers come their way. Recently, though, they implemented a new “feature” that is designed to force some users to register domains with them.

As of Tuesday, if a user does a search on the site for a domain name, Network Solution immediately registers the domain in their own name. If the user then goes to a discount registrar to register the domain, it shows as unavailable. The user must then either not buy the domain, or go back to Network Solutions and pay their $35/year fee.

So far they’ve registered over 72,000 domain names based on user searches. They are all temporarily assigned a name server of “reserveddomainname” - the number of registrations pointing to this server is public data and can be seen here.

This isn’t costing the company anything, either. Registrars are permitted to register domains for five days without paying any fees to the domain name registry (in this case, Verisign). If they delete the domains after 5 days, which they will almost certainly do, they do not pay for the registration.

The five day grace period is designed to let registrars off the hook for credit card fraud, which is a big problem in the domain name industry. A lot of fraud is discovered very quickly - giving the grace period lets registrars reverse these transactions without getting hit with a fee. The fact that Network Solution is using the grace period to stop users from going to competitors is well outside of the original reasons for the rule. Users are already screaming (we’re getting emails). Expect competitors to scream next, and of course to copy the behavior.

We last covered Network Solutions in October 2007.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/214683232/

It is becoming more and more difficult for the music industry to ignore the basic economics of the their industry: unenforceable property rights (you can’t sue everyone) and zero marginal production costs (file sharing is ridiculously easy). All the big labels have now given up on DRM. They haven’t yet given up on trying to charge for their music, but it’s becoming more and more clear that as long as there is a free alternative (file sharing), the price of music will have to fall towards free.

You can disagree as to whether it’s “fair” that the price of recorded music will be zero or near zero, but you can’t disagree that it’s going to happen. I presented my arguments here last October. Subsequently, we noted that even offering the new RadioHead album for free didn’t stop massive file sharing on BitTorrent. More recently, NIN’s Trent Reznor was disheartened to see that, when offered a choice between downloading a new album for free and paying $5 (and, thereby “feel good about supporting the artist directly”), only 18.3%, or less than 1 in 5, chose to pay the $5.

Personally, I think a new era of free recorded music and paid live performances is a very good thing. Recorded music will become a marketing tool to get people to pay for concerts and merchandise. Overall the music industry will be smaller in terms of revenue. But the artists who are driven to create their art will continue to do so, and many will make a very good living from it.

But before that happens, the music industry is going to make one last stand to preserve their “bloated bureaucracies.” And that is going to be a call for a music tax to create guaranteed revenues.

Reznor called for it today, saying “I think if there was an ISP tax of some sort, we can say to the consumer, ‘All music is now available and able to be downloaded and put in your car and put in your iPod and put up your a– if you want and it’s $5 on your cable bill.’”

This isn’t the first time its popped up. Over a year ago, Peter Jenner (he was Pink Floyd’s first manager, as well as managing The Clash and other great artists) called for a mandatory monthly tax in the European Union on broadband Internet and mobile phones of around €4/month that allows consumers to download and consume all the music they want without DRM. I attacked his plan, and he responded here.

Mathew Ingram notes that similar efforts are being made in Canada. Last month the Songwriters Association of Canada called for a mandatory $5/month ISP music tax.

So far they’re just testing the water. The big push will come when the labels put lobbying dollars behind the effort, sometime in the next few years.

Music Taxes Will Kill Music Innovation

Forcing people to buy music whether they want to or not is not a solution to this problem. The incentives created by such a system are perverse - guaranteed revenue and guaranteed profits will remove any incentive to innovate and serve niche markets. It will be the death of music.

Music industry revenues will be a set size, regardless of the quality or type of music they release. Incentives to innovate will evaporate. There will only be competition for market share, with no attempt to build the size of market or serve less-popular niches. Forget labels building new brands and encouraging early artists to succeed - they’ll bleed existing big names for all they are worth and work hard to keep anything new - labels, artists, and songwriters - out of the market. New entrants just means more competition for a static amount of money. Collusion by existing players will run rampant.

Soon labels will complain that revenues aren’t high enough to sustain their businesses, and demand a higher tax. It will go up, but it will never go down.

As I said before, Asking the government to prop up a dying industry is always (always) a bad idea. In this case, it is a monumentally stupid, dangerous, and bad idea.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/214660223/

Last night, Yahoo signaled that it is serious about competing in the travel price-comparison search market in the wake of Kayak’s recent $200 million acquisition of Sidestep. Yahoo Travel put its FareChase property, formerly a tab, front and center on the travel homepage. FareChase is now the default search engine for pricing flights, hotels, cars, and vacations.

Yen Lee, the CEO of travel search startup Kango and a former general manager of Yahoo Travel, noticed the change and offered this analysis on Kango’s blog:

It seems like just yesterday that the travel sector crowned Kayak the undisputed heavyweight champion of price comparison search following their acquisition of SideStep. But wait! It looks like Yahoo has (finally!) unveiled FareChase, the price search engine they acquired back in 2004. On the Yahoo Travel homepage, the Travelocity booking engine is no longer the default search option, it has been re-labeled ‘classic search’ and FareChase is the default search.

. . . Presumably this brings a new competitive element that Kayak might not have expected (let’s be serious, four years after the acquisition, did ANYONE expect Yahoo to finally launch FareChase?).

Sounds like the move surprised him. That Travelocity deal must have been pretty lucrative, even if it was from another era. Could Yahoo be sacrificing short-term profits for the bigger game of maintaining and capturing market share?

Lee also notes that Yahoo searches more travel sites than Kayak, which could help it ferret out better prices. Of course, as a tangential competitor to Kayak (although Kango is more about travel planning than pricing), it is in his interest to point out new threats to its business.

Regardless, it may now be Yahoo that is facing the threat. According to comScore, the combined traffic to the Kayak and Sidestep networks in December in the U.S. was 6.3 million individuals, which is within striking distance of Yahoo Travel’s 7.3 million. Price shopping is perhaps the main draw to any travel site, so Yahoo has to step up its game to maintain its lead position.

Kayak

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SideStep

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Kango

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cb_widget_report_widget(”cb_widget_1200074210″); cb_widget_report_element(”cb_widget_0_1200074210″,”kayak”); cb_widget_report_element(”cb_widget_1_1200074210″,”sidestep”); cb_widget_report_element(”cb_widget_2_1200074210″,”kango”);

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/214662074/

For anyone who was bummed about the hoops they were going to have to jump through to get DRM-free songs from Sony-BMG artists, by the end of the month you will be able to download those songs at Amazon’s MP3 store. A couple days after announcing a weird plan with physical retailers to distribute DRM-free music that will require people to buy a plastic stored value card first and then download it afterwards , Amazon looks to be the first online music distributor to strike a deal with Sony-BMG. It will also be the first online music store to offer DRM-free songs from all four major labels, having previously struck deals with Warner, EMI, and Universal Music.

Sony has uploaded around 200,000 tracks to Amazon, which constitutes their entire “active” catalog (the stuff that actually sells). Our understanding is that their entire catalog will be uploaded over time.

We expect Steve Jobs to announce the addition of Sony-BMG music without DRM to iTunes at MacWorld next week. But for now, Amazon has them all to themselves. Amazon now has 3.25 million DRM-free tracks in their library, compared to just 2 million at iTunes. ITunes has a far larger DRM catalog, but, really, do those tracks even count any more?

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/214625537/

Investor’s Business Daily has always been one of my favorite business papers, but I stopped getting it years ago. I just didn’t want to deal with the leftovers—the stacks of paper full of yesterday’s news.

However, when I got the Kindle I was excited to see that Investor’s Business Daily was one of the available newspaper subscriptions. $5.99 a month for the electronic version was a done deal.

This morning I read an article that made me smile. I love stories about people who’ve achieved huge things against all odds. I’m a sucker for that sort of thing.

The piece was on Sidney Weinberg, the former Chairman of Goldman Sachs. He was Chairman for four decades in the early to mid 1900s.

Sidney wasn’t formally educated. He didn’t have an MBA. He didn’t go to college. He didn’t even graduate from high school. He was just a determined, ambitious mail room clerk who wanted to do big things.

Read the rest of his story — it’s pretty incredible.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/779-the-sidney-weinberg-success-story

In a concession to increased competition from the blogosphere and other newspapers throwing in the towel on paid-subscription walls for online content, the Wall Street Journal is making its opinion pages and commentary free. Does that mean the rest of the paper will soon be free online as well? It is certainly in keeping with new owner Rupert Murdoch’s previous public statements to that effect.

But the resistance within the Journal to completely opening up is still strong. Even as part of this announcement, the editors caution, “It’s as close as we’ll get to conceding there is such a thing as a free lunch.” You can read that to mean, don’t expect the rest of the paper to go free anytime soon. And a couple days ago, Henry Blodget made a strong case for why the Journal’s Website might end up keeping its paid wall: it makes money now ($75 million), it keeps print subscribers paying, and it generates higher online ad rates by attracting a more affluent audience.

All good points that have been trotted out by the defenders of print media in the past (i.e., the print media executives who don’t want to give up the lucrative model that they understand for a nebulous one that they don’t). Even so, it is not clear that Murdoch is convinced of these arguments. And his opinion is the only when that counts in this debate.

By opening the door a little bit with the opinion pages, the Wall Street Journal will be operating two different business models side by side. You can be sure that if the free portion outperforms the paid portion, there will be a lot of pressure to open up the news sections as well. Interestingly, when the New York Times tried the same bifurcated model it chose to make its news free and its opinion columnists were supposed to be the big draw for the online subscription service. So are people more willing to pay for opinion or for news? The answer is neither. We all know how the Times‘ experiment worked out. It is now completely free.

As more and more readers move online, they will expect their news to be free and ad-supported, as it is today on 99 percent of the Web. Even the Wall Street Journal cannot fight market forces and consumer preference forever.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/214591365/

While online music startups and most labels are trying to figure new rules for their business models, a small UK based startup has found a smart way to answer that question. Nearly all music services are based on providing access to a catalogue of recorded music whether it is on demand (eg: iTunes or Deezer) or on discovery mode (Pandora/Last.fm). But a big chunk of the quality music is not recorded and is played live is in clubs, fashion hotels, restaurants, shops, DJ festivals and other cool places (i leave aside radio music). This music usually ends up in CD collections because of its quality and uniqueness (think of the Buddha Bar collection, the Cafe del Mar and many more). And this is the music Awdio wants to provide you in real time wherever you are, 24/7, as long as you have an internet connection.

Awdio™ revolutionizes the way you listen to music! Real Time Music! What everyone can get now in one weekend is what music addicts would get in a year, touring around world’s best Live music sources… Straight from the sound systems of the most respected clubs, venues, hotels, shops, studios & festivals… from Electronic Music to Hip Hop, from new Jazz scenes to alternative Rock, from Lounge sessions to the most underground Dj sets, wherever you are, whatever you like, Awdio™ provides pure Live music. From San Francisco to Melbourne, New York to Paris, Sao Paulo to Hong Kong, Awdio™ is streaming 24/7 real time music content, from and on worldwide time zones.

Awdio spots the coolest places around the globe where live music is played and makes exclusive agreement to distribute and stream it live in real time. They gathered so far 50 hotspots like the super trendy Colette Shop in Paris, the 1015 in San Francisco or the Favela in London. They have created a technology that enables any live music source to be streamed over the internet with high quality sound. The Awdio Listener simply has to register and browse the selection of audio channels by time zone or by name. A Station on air can be easily noticed with a small ticker. Once you chose your startion the music is played directly via a desktop player (for now only iTunes and WMP). But in future versions you will be able to choose alternative players created by Awdio (web based i guess).

The business model is simple and smart. Listeners will pay a subscription for an unlimited access (9 euros/month or 54 euros a year). They become then “Awdio Addict Members” and will also have a personal space with relevant information according to their tastes (will include an electronic program guide) integrated in a social network. There will be a free ad-supported alternative and Awdio has built around their service an advertising platform that will enable brands to easily (geo)target users and offer them free “AwdioTime”. Right Now the music is streamed via your desktop player so i am not sure what kind of ad formats we are talking about. In their agreement with the music sources, Awdio takes in charges all the fixed and variable costs and pays sources 20% of the total income (based on the prorata time of each station) and an additional 10% for the performance of any guest artist. In addition partners will have access to a full dashboard soon available in order to get reporting and better knowledge of their “fans”.

I like the idea and the execution is good. I think this will be a nice additional revenue source for live music sources but also a cool experience for those who enjoy those places right from their living room. I wish one day they will extend the experience to video so you can fully enjoy the moment. I also wonder whether one day they give access to archives which would be great.

Although the project is based in the UK, most of the team is French and has extensive experience both in the music industry and the content delivery business. Awdio is financed by the designer Ora-Ito, you can feel his influence in the slick design of the website. I have tried the service and i must say it is of pretty good quality although this is a very early release. A new version with lots of new features (for streaming, browsing and interacting) will be up by the end of the month.

Special Invitations: TechCrunch readers can already enjoy the service using the registration key TechCrunch (respect the case). You will have free unlimited access until the new version comes up. So hurry up

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/214538666/

People like to moan about IE, and often don’t have anything to back it up. “IE sucks” doesn’t count.

Alex Russell, on the other hand, has written about how IE mangles the design of JavaScript libraries such as Dojo. His list both shows us the methods to the madness, informs us on the issues, and hopefully wakes up the powers that be to make sure that this items are fixed in IE 8

Array’s Can’t Be Usefully Subclassed (test case)

Arrays without a working length property are nearly useless, and JScript mangles the design of toolkits as a result.

I think it’s safe to say that both Dojo and jQuery would subclass Array directly to save code, were it a reasonable thing to do.

Where Art Thou Getters/Setters?

Instead of providing the natural property-oriented behavior, it forces class authors to write getSomeProperty/setSomeProperty method pairs on their classes should they want to do anything when values are gotten or set. The resulting code feels a lot more like Java than JavaScript, which is usually a sign that something is horribly wrong in a browser.

I have some hope that we could see getters and setters for JScript in the near future. It won’t matter much, though, unless the JScript team ships their new engine to all IE versions when they release IE 8. Not bloody likely.

Performance

Kudos are in order to the JScript team for fixing their long-b0rken GC heuristic and pushing it out to everyone…but it’s the tip of the iceberg.

Performance is one of those areas where differences in implementations can tightly circumscribe what’s possible despite exacting spec conformance. On this front, JScript’s raw VM-level execution time leaves a lot to be desired, but the true travesties really show up when you hit the DOM for computed style information or try to do anything reasonably complicated that involves string operations.

Across the board, from DOM performance to raw JScript execution speed, IE is a dog, and the odds are good that whatever toolkit you’re using spends a lot of time working around that reality.

Doctype Switching

Instead of giving devs fine-grained layout system control, IE makes it all-or-nothing. The global flag approach backs toolkit developers into doing script-based layout calculations or “just throw it in another div” solutions where we’d really rather not. Both are slow and both may be required since it’s completely impractical to dictate to users which doctype they’ll be using. While any app may be able to be disciplined enough to not care, toolkit developers must work everywhere. Hilarity ensues.

I fear this is going to get even worse with IE8 as the IE team looks to implement some of HTML 5 and hopefully many of CSS 2.1’s clarifications. The sooner they abandon the global switch, the better…but I’ll wager it’s pain they just don’t feel. Building a browser is a very different pursuit from building portable apps to run inside it.

HTC’s Can’t Be Inlined (Even With Hacks)

Modern browsers have built-in widget systems. On IE, it’s HTCs + Viewlink and on Firefox it’s XBL. Even a cursory reading through the docks for both is enough to illuminate the gigantic overlap. Alas, no one is yelling at them to standardize and the result is a terrible mess in which both sub-optimal formats limp along with nearly zero Open Web usage.

So why do I single out IE for whipping here when XBL is just as lame and similarly b0rken with regards to single-file embedding? Well, on Mozilla, you have a lot more “outs”. I strongly suspect that you can use “data:” urls to generate and evaluate component definitions for FF, which would enable compiling down from a single (more sane) format in the running page environment. IE prevents any such useful code-loading approaches.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/214536081/how-ie-mangles-the-design-of-javascript-libraries