Ajax Girl

RocketOn is a San Francisco based startup is making a 2D virtual world you can access across any site through an embeddable widget. They also just raised $5 million from the D. E. Shaw group’s venture capital unit, bringing total investment up to $5.8 million.

In its alpha state, this virtual world is simply a chat widget with some avatars you can walk around the screen with the click of a mouse. You can chat in real time with other people on the network and walk into a variety of themed worlds (chat rooms) with different features. It’s also obviously targeted toward kids, with its fuzzy-looking avatars and chat profanity blocker.

The more complex functionality includes friending, profiles, fame, and items. Each world has an object or character you can interact with (dancing stones, little monster, arcade games). Although, you can unlock more worlds and features by inviting more users.

However, their widget strategy strikes me as odd because it flies in the face of the safety centered walled gardens other kid oriented sites have built to keep kids safe (Club Penguin, Webkinz, and others).

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/~3/233565162/

Still number one social networking destination MySpace has entered the casual flash games market with games.myspace.com.

The new site won’t win any awards for innovation, indeed it looks like a

Games.myspace.com offers a variety of multiplayer and single player games. A link can be found to the service from the front page of MySpace.

(thanks to Daniel for the tip.)

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/233521879/

Venture focused blog VentureBeat has taken a seed round of $320,000. Investors include Georges Harik and Aydin Senkut (both ex-Google); Mike Brown, Philippe Cases, MHS Capital, Amidzad and White Sand Group among others.

VentureBeat was founded in 2006 by ex-San Jose Mercury News writer Matt Marshall and has as its goal “to provide insider news and data about the entrepreneurial and venture community that is useful to decision makers.”

Marshall said that the money would be used to take the site to the next stage, and will also presumably be used to pay Dean Takahashi’s salary, a new high profile signing for VentureBeat announced last week.

(via VentureBeat)

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/~3/233495164/

San Francisco based HotOrNot, founded by James Hong and Jim Young in October 2000, has been acquired, we’ve heard from multiple sources.

The buyers are investors connected with Avid Life Media, and paid somewhere around $20 million for the site. Hong and and Young have been taking money out of the very profitable business all along the way - which we reported was another $20 million or in May 2007. HotOrNot never raised outside funding.

The investors are creating a new company, called HotOrNot Media (new site coming soon), and they may be acquiring more properties as well.

I spoke with Hong a few moments ago, who confirmed the acquisition, which closed on Friday, but not the price. He says he and Jim will not be affiliated with the business on a day to day basis going forward. “We’ve been working on HotOrNot for seven years now,” said Hong, adding “It’s time to break up with this girlfriend.”

HotOrNot makes money from advertising, virtual flowers and a premium fee when users want to connect. They experimented briefly with a free model, but abandoned it last September in the face of overwhelming spam. Their annual revenue is estimated to be around $5 million, with $2 million in profit. According to Comscore, the site has around 5 million monthly unique visitors and 200 million page views.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/233435692/

A forthcoming report by IDC estimates that online advertising in the U.S. reached $25.5 billion in 2007, and $7.3 billion in the fourth quarter.

It also puts Google’s market share of Internet advertising in the U.S. during the fourth quarter of 2007 at 23.7 percent, down half a percentage point from the third quarter. That is Google’s first slip in market share in two years. While Google’s overall U.S. sales (net of traffic acquisition costs that goes to pay partner sites) still went up 40 percent last quarter, it was not enough to keep its market share position compared to the overall industry. Damn those non-performing MySpace ads!

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/233424226/

There are two very different battles going on between Microsoft and Yahoo. The more interesting side is the behind the scenes attempts to influence press and key shareholders. But this is also playing out publicly. Yahoo leaked this weekend that they were going to turn down the Microsoft offer, and today they came through with the formal rejection.

Microsoft responded quickly via a press release:

MICROSOFT RESPONDS TO YAHOO! ANNOUNCEMENT

Reiterates Full and Fair Proposal for Microsoft-Yahoo! Combination

REDMOND, Wash. — Feb. 11, 2008 — Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ:MSFT) today issued the following statement in response to the announcement by Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) that its Board of Directors has rejected Microsoft’s previously announced proposal to acquire Yahoo!:

It is unfortunate that Yahoo! has not embraced our full and fair proposal to combine our companies. Based on conversations with stakeholders of both companies, we are confident that moving forward promptly to consummate a transaction is in the best interests of all parties.

We are offering shareholders superior value and the opportunity to participate in the upside of the combined company. The combination also offers an increasingly exciting set of solutions for consumers, publishers and advertisers while becoming better positioned to compete in the online services market.

A Microsoft-Yahoo! combination will create a more effective company that would provide greater value and service to our customers. Furthermore, the combination will create a more competitive marketplace by establishing a compelling number two competitor for Internet search and online advertising.

The Yahoo! response does not change our belief in the strategic and financial merits of our proposal. As we have said previously, Microsoft reserves the right to pursue all necessary steps to ensure that Yahoo!’s shareholders are provided with the opportunity to realize the value inherent in our proposal.

On February 1, 2008, Microsoft announced a proposal to acquire all the outstanding shares of Yahoo! common stock for per share consideration of $31 representing a total equity value of approximately $44.6 billion and a 62 percent premium above the closing price of Yahoo! common stock based on the closing prices of the stocks of both companies on Jan. 31, 2008, the last day of trading prior to Microsoft’s announcement. Microsoft’s proposal would allow the Yahoo! shareholders to elect to receive cash or a fixed number of shares of Microsoft common stock, with the total consideration payable to Yahoo! shareholders consisting of one-half cash and one-half Microsoft common stock.

About Microsoft

Founded in 1975, Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.

Yahoo says the offer is “massively undervalued.” Microsoft counters that it is a “full and fair proposal.” Who wins? I still think Microsoft. But I love that Yahoo’s putting up a fight.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/233400090/

If you thought clean energy financings were hot last year, 2008 promises to be scorching. Case in point: Infinia today raised a $50 million series B, led by British hedge fund GLG partners. Existing investors Equus, Khosla Ventures, Bill Gross’ Idealab, and Paul Allen’s Vulcan Capital also participated in the round (after putting in $9.5million just June).

Infinia has developed utility-scale renewable energy technology that combines a Stirling engine with a large solar collector. The Stirling engine, a technology that’s been around since the 19th century, converts the heat into electricity. Infinia used to be called Stirling Cycles, and has been around for more than two decades. It has designed Stirling engines as power sources for NASA missions, implantable artificial hearts, and cooling devices that the army uses in Iraq. Now, it is focussed exclusively on using the technology to create 14-foot diameter solar collectors that can generate 3.5 kilowatts of energy apiece. Gang together 50 or 100 (at about $20,000 a pop) and you have the energy producing capacity of a small power plant.

Infinia’s Stirling engine is powered by a free-moving piston that requires no lubricants, and thus no maintenance. “What makes this unique is the no-maintenance profile,” says chief financial officer, Gregg Clevenger, “the ability to deploy a Stirling engine out in the desert and it is engineered to run for 20 years without you having to do anything.” It is also designed to be assembled with common mass-produced parts that an auto-parts supplier could manufacture. Getting the cost down is the key to creating a technology that is competitive with other forms of energy.

Using its Stirling engine technology, Inifnia thinks it can eventually produce electricity 20 to 30 percent cheaper than today’s existing solar panels. And in times of peak energy demand—on a hot summer day, for instance—it could even be competitive with electricity from gas-powered or coal-fired plants. Renewable energy isn’t going to replace fossil-fuel technologies off the bat, but if they make economic sense for utilities to deploy in a hybrid grid, they will become more cost-competitive over time. With this round, there is $50 million on the table that says Infinia will be one of the companies that makes renewable energy more affordable.

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/~3/233353365/

Over the weekend we relaunched Crunchbase, our online database of startup, investor and entrepreneur information. We first launched the site last year as a simple place to dump all the structured data about startups that we get our hands on. Our interns work to add all the data that flows into our inboxes every day to keep it updated, and the site now tracks 1,515 companies, 4,499 people and 762 financial investors.

The new version of Crunchbase has a new design, but that is the least of the changes. The old PHP code has been thrown out, version 2 is a Ruby on Rails application. And while there are a ton of new features, the main change is that any reader can now edit any part of the site, or add new companies, people or investors entirely. We’ve also added RSS feeds for all new stuff, like recently funded, recently launched, etc. Those feeds can be found on the home page (we’ve switching them to Feedburner shortly, so you’ll be able to get these by email as well.

It’s not a wiki yet (that will be added next March), but it shares some wiki-like features like public editing. Our goal is to create a fully wiki based on structured data - something PoliticalBase has done in the political space (The PoliticalBase Crunchbase entry is here). For now, all changes are moderated, but we’ll be adding features that build authority to allow for real time, unmoderated editing of Crunchbase.

This is a work in progress, and we’ll be defining more about it in the near future. For example, there is currently no copyright policy, although we’ll be making this freely usable by others (like Wikipedia) when the Wiki launches. We’ll also be working to get our data into Freebase and other appropriate web services.

We’ve created a simple widget to pull key data about the companies, people and investors in Crunchbase into any other website (example below). If you add the widget to your site a link is automatically created back to your site on the relevant Crunchbase pages.

As we’ve said in the past, there are a number of for-pay services out there that track this exact data and try to charge thousands of dollars per month for access. We can’t see any reason why this data should not be free. So we’re helping to make it that way.

The new site was created by Henry Work and Mark McGranaghan, who’ve been working with us full time for a couple of months to build this. The overall project is being led by our Mark Hendrickson.

If we’ve missed your startup, or something in Crunchbase is wrong, please correct it by clicking “edit” on the appropriate page.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/233347040/

Phillip Merrick thinks it is time to update your resume. The co-founder of webMethods has a new startup that just launched today, VisualCV, that wants to replace the paper or e-mailed resume with a profile page that lives on the Web. He’s raised $5 million from headunting firm Heidrick & Struggles and Valhalla Partners.

You can think of VisualCV as the serious profile page you want to present to potential employers. (Don’t think they won’t look up your Facebook page as well, though). The VisualCV is very much like a regular resume in that it is one page with a summary of your achievements, work history, education, and interests.

You can literally highlight parts of the text, add links, upload a video to express your personality, as well as career charts showing how you’ve progressed in the workplace. You can keep the VisualCV private, share it with a select group, or make it public on the Internet. Here is Merrick’s VisualCV. Companies can also create their own interactive page to communicate to potential employees why they might want to apply for a job. Through partnerships with CapitalIQ/Standard & Poor’s and VentureSource, hovering over a company name in someone’s VisualCV will trigger a pop-up revealing revenues, number of employees, investors, and a short description.

The service is free for individuals and the basic functionality is free for corporations. Merrick plans to sell premium services to corporations and white-label the site as well to consultants, recruiters, and the like. He explains:

After our commercial launch in the spring, we will begin charging employers for enhanced capabilities. These will include the ability to create “binders” of VisualCVs who are shortlisted for open positions, then route them around their company to the hiring managers who can make their own annotations on the VisualCVs. We will also charge for premium placement of company VisualCVs (e.g. above the fold positioning when a candidate searches for, say, software companies). Additionally, we will also make a “white label” private version of the service available to large companies for talent management.

There is a social networking aspect as well in that both job-seekers and companies can see who has checked out their VisualCV pages. VisualCV isn’t alone in trying to reinvent the resume, or the job site in general. Recently we’ve written about NotchUp’s pay-per-interview approach and StandoutJobs, which also tries to humanize corporate HR pages with videos and social elements. I have a feeling we are going to see a lot more efforts along these lines.

The single-spaced, typed resume is already an artifact of another age. I don’t think I’ve updated mine since 1993. But I am not sure that what will replace it is a sanitized profile page. Any smart manager will at least Google an applicant before calling him or her in for an interview. Increasingly, our professional and personal lives are becoming transparent for all to see online. Whether or not you decide to link to your blog or Flickr photos or Facebook page, the person you present on your VisualCV better not be too different from the person you really are on the easily searchable Web.

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/~3/233336597/

We’ve been working on something. Backpack is going multiuser.

Multiuser makes Backpack crazy delicious

So here’s the story. At our first full-day full-team get together with Jeff Bezos last year we were tossing around some ideas on how we could make Backpack even better. Some of those ideas made it into a major release last year. The second big idea was to make Backpack multiuser.

Why multiuser?

You’ve always been able to share Backpack pages via email. And while that works, and while you’ll still be able to do that, we felt that we could go further and make it much easier for people to use Backpack together. So instead of having to share pages by email and deal with multiple Backpack accounts and URLs, soon you’ll be able to just add multiple users to your account:

Backpack matures into a great business tool

There’s a clear advantage to a multiuser Backpack account: Backpack becomes a wonderful small business/group tool.

While Basecamp is great for managing client and internal projects, Backpack multiuser becomes a great tool for sharing information across your organization, centralizing knowledge, and a home base for all those little bits that everyone needs but no one can find. Since anyone with access to a page can add content, Backpack pages turn into collaborative blank slates.

For example, you could make a page where your team could brainstorm ideas for the next version of a product or project…

…or you could gather and store research for an upcoming project or white paper you’re going to publish…

…or you could create a page of standardized procedures or answers…

…or you could centralize notes, slides, and to-dos for an upcoming client meeting…

…or you could make a page of frequently needed forms (NDA, fax cover sheet, timesheet, health insurance application, expense report, etc)…

…or a page where everyone can post press mentions for your products or your competitor’s…

…or people could use Backpack pages to store receipts and track expenses…

Privacy too

When you create a page with the new Backpack you can decide who should see it. It could be just for you, just for you and a few others, or everyone in your account.

More soon

Over the next week or so we’ll be unveiling some of the other new features coming soon to Backpack. Stay tuned.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/847-preview-backpack-multiuser