Ajax Girl

Yeah, we’ve seen a ton of online application builders before - DabbleDB, Zoho Creator, LongJump, Coghead and WyaWorks, among others. And Salesforce weighed in with their own Force.com in late 2007.

Bungee Connect , which leaves private beta today, competes with all of these. But the company, based in Utah, thinks they have the advanced features to attract a much different audience than most of those startups. They’re targeting hard core developers, not non-developers who want a way to create simple software programs to solve problems at the office.

Bungee Connect is a single online environment for developers to write, test, deploy and host applications. Like Force.com, it is a platform-as-a-service. The service is free until end users actually start using the products built and deployed on the service.

Dana Gardner wrote an excellent overview of the service a year ago when Bungee Connect was first introduced.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/237363619/

At a talk tomorrow at Stanford University, Bill Gates will announce that they are making much of their developer software free to college and university students. The program, called Microsoft DreamSpark, will be run by Joe Wilson, Senior Director of Academic Initiatives.

Covered software includes Visual Studio Professional Edition, XNA Game Studio, Expression Studio, SQL Server and Windows Server. Students were previously able to license this software at greatly reduced prices, or got access via their CS department at school (or through other, less legal, means). Now they’ll be able to get the software for free.

Only students in Belgium, China, Finland, France, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the U.K. and the U.S. will have access for now, other countries, and pre-college students, will be added later this year. Microsoft requires verification that you are an actual student - in the U.S. they are partnering with Journeyed, who maintains a database of students.

This is a smart (and obvious) move for Microsoft, who needs to get as many students as possible comfortable working on their platforms. It also signals that they recognize they have real competition (including open source alternatives) when it comes to IDEs and other developer tools.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/237359033/

New startup YouNoodle debuted to some first class press coverage this morning - a headline in the NYTimes that reads “A Start-Up Says It Can Predict Others’ Fate.” The really choice quote from the article from CEO/co-founder Bob Goodson is this:

“Give us some information, and we’ll give you some idea of what the company will be worth in five years.”

The best part about the article is that the prediction feature hasn’t launched, so no one can see if it’s for real. For now, the site is a database of startups with very light information. Hardly what I would consider NYTimes material. If not for the investors, which include Founders Fund, Peter Thiel and Max Levchin, there’s no way we would have covered this.

The NYT did cover themselves somewhat by bringing in some venture capitalist quotes calling bullshit on the whole thing. “If their tool did such a good job, they’d raise a fund themselves and beat the tar out of us,” said Paul Kedrosky, who didn’t bother to write about the company on his blog.

And he’s exactly right. Just like the people who say they can sell you a book and a seminar to help you get rich quick off of distressed real estate - if these guys found some sort of magic formula that actually predicted the value of a startup down the road, they’d keep the information to themselves and make, well, unlimited amounts of money.

It’s hype and nonsense, and it won’t work. The NYTimes bit on it hard, but our readers are smarter. In a poll that Duncan ran earlier the vast majority say there’s no way YouNoodle can pick winners based on some algorithm.

I propose this as a test - If and when YouNoodle launches this magic predictor thingy, they should run their own founding team through it. If it predicts failure, then it’s spot on and we know it will work.

So far, Goodson says, they haven’t run themselves through the model. Smart move.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/237333984/

The United States has joined China and Thailand in attempting to censor Wikileaks, however the site itself goes on.

A Californian judge ruled that Dynadot, the name registrar for Wikileaks.org, should remove all traces of Wikileaks from its servers and further should “prevent the domain name from resolving to the wikileaks.org website or any other website or server other than a blank park page, until further order of this Court.” The ruling followed an application from Bank Julius Baer, a Swiss bank named by Wikileaks as being involved in money laundering, to have documents relating to the company removed from the site.

Although Wikileaks has lost its URL, the site is hosted in Sweden, and is still up at 88.80.13.160/wiki/Wikileaks. Unfortunately for Bank Julius Baer, the legal action will probably result in more people reading the documents in question.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/237324074/

A team of five former Apple software engineers, led by former Apple Exec Jean-Marie Hullot, have been working on a new stealth desktop/web photography focused startup called Fotonauts since late 2006. Sometime in the next couple of months, they’ll launch publicly. The company is based in Paris, France.

Hullot, who worked with Steve Jobs at Apple in the 1980’s, left with him to serve as CTO of NeXT Software. Hullot returned to Apple when it acquired NeXT in late 2006 for $400 million, and served as the CTO of the software devision, reporting to SVP Sina Tamaddon. He was a key part of the early thinking on the iPhone - a recent French television program actually says he came up with the idea in the first place.

Hullot and much of the Paris engineering office was let go from Apple in 2006 after Hullot reportedly lost an internal political battle over the direction of the iPhone. But under French law, laid off workers can receive 80% pay for up to 18 months after losing their jobs, directly from the government. Hullot kept five of his top engineers to work on fotonauts, while the French government paid their wages.

I don’t know much yet about the product, other than that it is photography related and includes both desktop software and a website component. A private beta should be available in the next month or two.

Keith Teare, who formerly co-founded Edgeio with me, has recently joined the Fotonauts team.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/237275430/

“In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is.” -Jan L.A. van de Snepscheut

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/860-theory-and-practice

A source close to Microsoft says the company will launch new desktop software called WorldWide Telescope on February 27 at the TED Conference in Monterey, California. Our guess is that this is what Robert Scoble was talking about last week when he said he saw a new Microsoft project that brought him to tears.

The service will be accessed through a downloadable application - Windows only for now is what we hear. Users will be able to pan around the nighttime sky and zoom as far in to any one area as the data will allow. Microsoft is said to be tapping the Hubble telescope as well as ten or so earth bound telescopes around the world for data. When you find an area you like, you can switch to a number of different views, such as infrared and non-visible light.

Dan Farber posted his own educated guess that the project might be WorldWide Telescope, based on the fact that Curtis Wong and Jonathan Fay were involved, and he’s right. Last year Fay gave a presentation called “”The WorldWide Telescope, bringing the Universe to a PC near you.” In 1993, Wong started a project called “John Dobson’s Universe,” a virtual sky tour on a CD-ROM, narrated by John Dobson. The two began working together at Microsoft in 2005.

From what we hear, WorldWide Telescope will be significantly better than Google Sky, which launched last August as part of Google Earth, and the open source Stellarium (which is hugely better than Google Sky already). The key is the user interface, which is seamless as you move around the sky and zoom in and out. Much of the Photosynth technology is said to have been used for the project. And the sheer amount of data Microsoft is accessing, said to be measured in the terabits, gives that great user interface something to show off.

Look for an announcement at TED, and more at Microsoft’s upcoming TechFest in early March.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/237241567/

High-definition video is creeping into our browsers. Today, Dailymotion began offering a smattering of videos in HD. There is nothing you’d actually want to watch—mostly a bunch of trailers for video games—other than to see what HD looks like on your computer screen. But be warned: you need two megabits-per-second download speeds to watch the streaming HD video without jitters. (I’ve got a T1 line, and I had problems).

Nevertheless, this is an important technical milestone. We are going to be seeing a lot more HD video on the Web, largely thanks to the H.264 codec in the latest Flash player. Dailymotion now joins Hulu, Veoh, and others in demonstrating what’s technically possible. But for most people, if they want to watch HD video, they still are going to have to buy a Blu-Ray DVD player.

Here is a Dailymotion clip in HD (if you don’t have the bandwidth to handle it, you will be prompted to watch a lower-quality stream, or just hit menu):

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/237222571/

A search for “pirate bay” on Yahoo no longer turns up a link to the controversial BitTorrent search engine. It appears that Yahoo has decided to filter the site from its search results. Clear references to the site appear in Yahoo’s drop-down search assistant, but when you click on those, you still don’t get the right result.

Is Yahoo complying with a legal request from the media companies trying to shut down the Pirate Bay, or is its search engine just getting worse?

Google, Ask, and Windows Live Search had no trouble finding the Pirate Bay as their first result for the same term. But maybe their lawyers are taking the day off.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/237187881/

There is something fishy going on at Adonomics, the site that keeps statistics on the most popular Facebook applications. On its home page it lists the “Top 40 App Companies” as measured by how many times each company’s applications have been installed on Facebook. This is a useful list because it provides a snapshot of which Facebook app developers are doing the best by adding up all of their apps and comparing them in one place. For instance, Slide has 82 million installs across eight apps, and RockYou has 73 million installs across ten apps. But at the very top of the list is a mystery company nobody has ever heard of called the UADA with 97 million installs.

Forget for a moment that active users would be a better metric by which to rank the list (Slide would top that list with 4.9 million active users, followed by RockYou’s 3.4 million, and then the UADA’s 3.2 million). If you click through to the UADA’s profile page, none of its individual apps are broken out. Instead, there is a link to this placemarker Website indicating that the UADA, whatever it is, will launch on February 29.

The site belongs to Altura Ventures, the Facebook VC firm that is behind Adonomics. Conveniently, Adonomics calculates the UADA’s valuation at $223 million. (Nobody in the Facebook app industry believes Adonomics’ valuations, but that is a different story)

I called Lee Lorenzen, the CEO of Altura Ventures, who was coy about his stealth project. However, he did tell me:

The entity that controls all of those applications is a private company. The cooperative that represents all of those installs and has that valuation, that is essentially what is defined by the UADA. It is not an ad network. I am the interim CEO.

So the UADA, which I am guessing probably stands for something like the United Application Developers Association, is a cooperative of smaller application developers who collectively have about the same market muscle as Slide and RockYou. At least, that is what Lorenzen would like people to believe.

But there is a big difference between a startup that is rolling up Facebook developers (i.e., actually buying them) and a “cooperative” that brings them loosely together. From what I can gather, the UADA is the latter. That means that it is not the biggest Facebook app company. It is a marketing association. And for Altura to use Adonomics to imply that the UADA is more than it actually is seems a bit too self-serving for a site that is trying to positions itself as a neutral provider of market data.

With 16,000 apps on Facebook, it is getting increasingly difficult to get users to try out a new app. They are beginning to suffer from app fatigue. There are obvious benefits for smaller Facebook developers to gang together into larger networks where they can cross-promote each other’s apps. This is already happening in the social gaming category with Zynga and the Social Gaming Network. If the UADA gives smaller Facebook developers a leg up against the Slides and RockYous of the world, it might very well be worth joining. But unless the UADA actually owns all of the apps that it will be representing, it definitely won’t be in the same league as them. And it certainly won’t be worth the same, no matter what valuation methodology you are using. If anyone has any more concrete info on the UADA, please share in comments.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/237129142/