Ajax Girl

stickK is designed to promote a healthier lifestyle by allowing users to create “Commitment Contracts” that oblige them to follow through with commitments such as exercise and quitting smoking.

stickK was developed by Yale University economists Dean Karlan and Ian Ayres who tested the effectiveness of Commitment Contracts through extensive field research. Economic and behavioral research before Karlan and Ayres considered the effectiveness of the model, and their own testing found that people who put stakes (money or reputation) on the table are far more likely to achieve any goal they set for themselves.

Taking out a commitment contract though doesn’t mean a thing unless there is a penalty for breaking the contract, and stickK covers that as well. Users can set up a contract to include payments to charities if they fail to meet their contracts, and friends can be used to make the final call on the result as well, reducing the chance that users will lie about the result of a contract.

Steven D Levitt of Freakonomics fame wrote about stickK in January (Ayres is an occasional Freakonomics Blog guest blogger) and approved of the concept, a strong endorsement for the site.

stickK has raised $1.2 million in angel funding and had over 1,000 commitment contracts as of early February.

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/~3/235863725/

A new startup called Lingtastic is coming out of stealth today that wants to lower the cost of professional translation services. Using a distributed team of freelance translators around the world, customers will be able to call in, and the translator with the lowest bid will take the call. Instead of $100 an hour or more, CEO Chas Watkins expects the hourly rate to be as low as $18. (Lingtastic will take 20 percent as its cut).

The service launched in closed beta today for Spanish-English translations. Other languages will be available when the site launches publicly in March. If you want to try it out, send an e-mail to TC [at] Lingtastic [dot] com saying why you want to use the service. TC readers will get preference in being accepted to the beta.

Lingtastic will provide both live interpreters and translate text messages from one language to another. Watkins imagines many scenarios for his services. Any hotel or care rental agency across the world can have a live interpreter by simply calling. Sales people trying to reach potential customers in foreign countries could use the service. Or simply someone trying to flirt with someone they meet on a social network who lives in another country. Text translations can be sent via e-mail, SMS, or posted to Websites. There is a developer API as well. Here is how Watkins describes the service:

In the live release next month a customer with an account will be able to request a live interpreter from our website and they will receive a call from that person in seconds. They can specify language, specialty, max price and skill level and the interpreters compete for their business. That call can come on a normal phone, cell phone, skype, Yahoo, Google talk, or MSN. We can even conference in a third party on any of those applications too!

The most important aspect of our service though is the interface we have built to this system. That allows developers to quickly add our service (or resell it) from their own software or social site. This will allow people to quickly develop applications that can translate text, or have live interpreters call them to chat with friends from within any website or service.

Watch this slide show for more info.

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/~3/235839020/

With the death of California Representative Tom Lantos on Monday, a special election will be held in April to fill his seat in Congress. Will Stanford Law professor Lawrence Lessig run? Already on Facebook, a “Draft Lessig for Congress” group has formed (with 554 members as of this posting). Lessig, who has long been a champion of Free Culture as a lecturer, intellectual property lawyer, and CEO of Creative Commons, has recently turned his attention to corruption. (He has a wiki about corruption here). In fact, his last lecture on Free Culture, which he has been giving for ten years, was on January 31.

What Lessig means by corruption is corruption of the political process:

That our government can’t understand basic facts when strong interests have an interest in its misunderstanding.

I don’t mean corruption in the simple sense of bribery. I mean “corruption” in the sense that the system is so queered by the influence of money . . .. Politicians are starved for the resources concentrated interests can provide. In the US, listening to money is the only way to secure reelection. And so an economy of influence bends public policy away from sense, always to dollars.

Lessig recently just registered Change-Congress.com. If he does decide to run, it should be interesting to see how he goes about raising his campaign funds. Tip jar, anyone?

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/~3/235800708/

Art on a matchbox. Beautifully balanced, hand-drawn, great colors, cool type, simple imagery, appealing propaganda and advertising.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/857-beautiful-matchbox-labels-from-the-50s-and-60s

At Yahoo, they don’t have golden parachutes, they have purple ones. Yahoo’s vice president of social search, Jeff Bonforte, is among the thousand or so employees being laid off. (The picture at left is of him skydiving with the parachute Yahoo gave him as a signing bonus when he joined the company a few years ago). His last day is today. But Yahoo’s loss is startup Xobni’s gain. On Monday, he plans on accepting an offer to become CEO of Xobni, a startup that makes Outlook e-mail smarter. (Disclosure: I’ve known Bonforte for a long time. We once lived in the same house).

As head of social search, Bonforte oversaw Yahoo Answers and Delicious before those businesses were recently absorbed by other groups. His real accomplishment at Yahoo, though, was prior to that, as the VP in charge of Yahoo Messenger!, working for Brad Garlinghouse. Under Bonforte, Yahoo Messenger! surpassed AIM in number of users for the first time, revenues went up sixfold, and he also introduced all those funky avatars to the product. Before Yahoo, he did a stint as president of Michael Robertson’s SipPhone, where he developed the Skype-like Gizmo Project on the sly. And during the go-go 1990s, he founded i-drive, one of the first online storage services (it went belly up—a good idea that was too early). At Xobni, his experience with both Yahoo! Messenger and search should serve him well.

Xobni launched at TechCrunch40 (read our review). It is a 14-person YCombinator startup that raised a $4.2 million Series A last year from Atomico Investments, First Round Capital, Khosla Ventures, and Ron Conway’s Baseline Ventures. The VP of engineering, Gabor Cselle, worked on Gmail and did his Masters thesis on inbox organization (I’m not joking). Xobni offers a plug-in for Outlook that helps you sort through your inbox. Click on a person, and you can see all your threaded conversations with them, as well as any attachments they may have sent in the past. “It makes email, in general, work the way your brain does,” says Bonforte. Bill Gates is also a fan.

When Bonforte first met the Xobni founders a few months ago, he brought them into Yahoo to talk to other executives there. They made a lasting impression on him at least. “We weren’t looking for a CEO,” says co-founder Matt Brezina, “but any time we find good people we ask, How can we get them?” Co-founder Adam Smith will relinquish the CEO title, but both he and Brezina will remain very much involved in running the company.

Although Bonforte has only good things to say about Yahoo, I haven’t heard him sound so excited in years. “Just fixing Outlook is a huge opportunity,” he says. “The inbox is still fatally flawed. It is hard to find stuff, hard to find people, hard to understand the network of relationships in your inbox.” Xobni addresses all of those issues.

And what about Xobni’s business model? It is still up in the air, but there are many avenues to explore: selling premium services on top of Outlook such as file transfers, adding people search, adding voice, integration with enterprise apps like Salesforce, Oracle, and PeopleSoft. Bonforte is a creative guy. He’ll figure something out.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/235734991/

The prospect of founding a successful generic social network these days might be bleak given the dominance of players like MySpace and Facebook. However, there’s still plenty of room for niche social networks to rise and generate lots of participation.

UGAME, which enters closed private beta this week, wants eventually to be the leading social network for gamers. The site will start off as a place where competitive PC gamers in particular can socialize, share their gaming feats, and organize themselves into teams and other associations. While UGAME will initially cater to the World of Warcraft, Counterstrike, and Quake obsessive, its motto points to a more ambitious future with “All Games. All Platforms. All People.”

A key to starting a successful niche social network probably lies in the creators’ ability to balance familiar features with ones that capitalize on the niche’s unique qualities. If this is true then the team behind UGAME is off to a good start. They’ve built in lots of functionality that will be immediately familiar: news feeds, profiles, friends, blogs, photo galleries, status updates, etc.

But they’ve also added gaming twists to these features and built out new features that don’t exist elsewhere. To name a few: members can post their gaming achievements from both tournament and non-tournament events; they can list their favorite games and computer hardware specs; and they can join teams that are allotted their own public-facing profiles.

UGAME grants users an unusual amount of control over privacy settings. While all sections of the site are accessible to non-registered users, only elements designated as “public” will show up to everyone. Privately designated elements such as photo galleries and profiles will remain accessible only to friends and other permitted users. Founder Sam Mathews describes UGAME in regards to privacy settings as a cross between Facebook and MySpace.

If the premise behind UGAME sounds familiar, you’ve probably heard of Shawn Fanning’s social networking project Rupture, which has been in closed beta for over a year. Or it may remind you of WeGame, a YouTube for gaming videos that we wrote about last month (and which shares a startlingly similar name and color scheme).

UGAME will open its private beta in a few weeks; you can email this address with a mention of your favorite game to put yourself down on a preferred TC readers list for when that happens.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/235670694/

Amazon Web Services suffered a major outage this morning, affecting the thousands of Websites that rely on its storage (S3) and cloud computing (EC2) services. Startups including Twitter, SmugMug, 37Signals, and AdaptiveBlue, for instance, use Amazon’s S3 storage service to store all the data for their Websites. Reports started coming in across the Web, email, and Twitter about the outage (Twitter only uses S3 for file hosting, not its main messaging application). The major difficulties seem to have been fixed, but some issues persist. The outage started at around 4:30 AM PT.

This could just be growing pains for Amazon Web Services, as more startups and other companies come to rely on it for their Web-scale computing infrastructure. But even if the outage only lasted a couple hours, it is unacceptable. Nobody is going to trust their business to cloud computing unless it is more reliable than the data-center computing that is the current norm. So many Websites now rely on Amazon’s S3 storage service and, increasingly, on its EC2 compute cloud as well, that an outage takes down a lot of sites, or at least takes down some of their functionality. Cloud computing needs to be 99.999 percent reliable if Amazon and others want it to become more widely adopted.

Update: A response from Amazon PR:

For one of our services, the Amazon Simple Storage Service, one of our three geographic locations was unreachable for approximately two hours and was back to operating at over 99% of normal performance before 7 a.m. pst. We’ve been operating this service for two years and we’re proud of our uptime track record. Any amount of downtime is unacceptable and we won’t be satisfied until it’s perfect. We’ve been communicating with our customers all morning via our support forums and will be providing additional information as soon as we have it.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/235648257/

Backpack has had a great calendar for a while now. But we’re about to make it better. If you have multiple users on your Backpack account you’ll be able to use the calendar together.

Many calendars, one grid

The new Backpack Calendar’s color coding lets you plot different people’s schedules on the same grid. Plus, you can toggle calendars on and off by just checking the box in front of a calendar:

Privacy too

The new Backpack Calendar allows allows you to specify who can see which calendars. When you create a new calendar, or edit an existing calendar, you can check off the names of users on your account. If they’re unchecked they can’t see the calendar.

The new Backpack is around the corner

Stay tuned for launch. It’s coming soon!

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/855-preview-4-group-calendar

If you used Facebook on a regularly basis, you’ve probably come across their cool autocomplete method of adding multiple recipients to messages. For those that haven’t seen it, here’s a pic:

Guillermo Rauch set out to build something similar and he did a very good job of mimicking this behavior using MooTools v1.2:

While working on my big and exciting new project, I decided to include an input that resembles the famous Apple Mail to: textfield. I’d seen it in Facebook before, which has a really decent implementation of this concept (it work well, but it doesn’t respect any modern programming principles; basically, it’s a big tag soup with lots of inline Javascript)

I created my own, MooTools 1.2 compatible, in just 5kb. It’s not only small, but also really frexible! Here are some notes of the creation process and how to implement it in your own projects.

Well, the folks at InteRiders wanted to get in on this Facebook goodness so they created a Prototype version of this control.

This is the Prototype version of the extended script by Guillermo Rauch. As with the previous script, this script has been converted and operates like the original. An extended and upgraded version will be posted later on this week, if you have any comments or requests, please post them and I will try to include all the requested features in the upcoming Proto release.

This is a very nice variation of the autocomplete metaphor and MooTools and Prototype developers can now leverage this enhanced functionality.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/235575762/facebook-style-input-box

Stuart Colville was reading the following info on setTimeout() from JavaScript the Definitive Guide:

“In practice, setTimeout() tells the browser to invoke the function when it has finished running the event handlers for any currently pending events and has finished updated the current state of the document”

He then thought, does setTimeout solve the DOMContentLoaded problem?.

He tested this hypothesis with a simple function that uses DOMContentLoaded for Mozilla and Opera, else uses setTimeout:

Jonathan Snook ran with this and found that it works until gzip gets into the picture:

If you could guarantee that the file would be sent via gzip compression every time then yes, using setTimeout could potentially be a viable way to mimic DOMContentLoaded. In fact, you could forego using DOMContentLoaded at all and simply rely on setTimeout for all browsers. window.setTimeout could be the new window.onload.

In a related note, I recently saw some benchmarks showing that setTimeout(…, 0) may take longer than you think to run.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/235547878/using-settimeout-to-solve-domcontentloaded