Ajax Girl

Velocity Investments has continued its roll of putting money into digital media by leading a $6M Series A round for Generate.

Generate is a studio with a focus on developing professional video content for the web that, if successful, could be parlayed into shows broadcasted through more traditional methods, most notably TV. Its target demographic consists of so-called “Millenials” or those belonging to Generation Y.

The studio will produce the next installment of a web-based show called “Pink - The Series” (a clip of which we have embedded below). The series has already experienced four million views since debuting in September. Generate also plans on developing two comedies for the web.

Ross Levinsohn, the co-founding partner of Velocity, is quoted as saying that “Generate represents the wave of the future for production and management companies.” What do you think? Do you hope the clip below is representative of the professional content that will increasingly emerge online?

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/245915130/

Over on the Google Open Source blog I got to post about a new tool by Lindsey Simon that takes your CSS and spits out versions ready for the RTL world (or vice versa if you are a developer elsewhere that wants an English version….. which may be more common?).

CSSJanus is CSS parser utility designed to aid the conversion of a website’s layout from left-to-right (LTR) to right-to-left (RTL). The script was born out of a need to convert CSS for RTL languages when tables are not being used for layout (since tables will automatically reorder TD’s in RTL). CSSJanus will change most of the obvious CSS property names and their values as well as some not-so-obvious ones (cursor, background-position %, etc…). The script is designed to offer flexibility to account for cases when you do not want to change certain rules which exist to account for bidirectional text display bugs, as well as situations where you may or may not want to flip annotations inside of the background url string. CSSJanus itself is not always enough to make a website that works in a LTR language context work in a RTL language all the way, but it is a start.

Here is Lindsey talking about it, and showing how it works.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/245915612/cssjanus-simple-tool-for-rtl

Omniture, which provides tools for marketers to track their online campaigns, is announcing a set of product upgrades today. New versions of its flagship product SiteCatalyst and its search advertising product SearchCenter will be released.

In addition to improved user interfaces (apparently five years of usability testing went into the products’ redesigns), the products in Omniture’s suite of SaaS applications are now connected tightly by a unified wrapper. Basically this means that marketers can move more easily between the products to manage various aspects of their campaigns. The unification is not only on the front end; all the programs now run off the same database as well.

As far as functionality is concerned, the most important addition to SiteCatalyst is support for the tracking of video usage across the web. If you are a marketer who uses videos to spread your message, you can now use Omniture to track metrics like how long people are watching your videos, whether they tend to skip forward in them, the rate at which they drop off, and which particular features in the video players they use.

The same technology that can be used to track video usage can also be applied to Flash and Flex-based applications. Omniture representatives say that only a 2 byte SWF file added to a Flash application is needed to prepare that app for tracking. As with video, marketers can see which application features are being used most.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/245914802/

Once again, Steve Jobs is on the cover of Fortune magazine. He is there because Apple is the most admired company in America. No, wait. He is there because investigative reporter Peter Elkind wrote a 12-page takedown of his Steveness. It turns out both are true. Jobs is steering the most admired company in America and he is a “reckless” CEO whose “behavior put the company and its shareholders at risk.”

I am all for balanced reporting, but which one is it? Not to be completely cynical, but Apple is a big advertiser for many Time Inc. magazines. And I imagine that Jobs would have no compunction about threatening to pull all of Apple’s advertising to kill a story he did not like. And he did not like this story. (He refused to talk to the writer). Pairing the story with another one on the cover that says “Apple is No. 1″ does soften the blow. (Jobs had no problem talking to another Fortune writer for that interview, in which he reveals how great he is).

This isn’t the first business magazine to go negative on Apple. Fast Company laid out what could go wrong with Apple in its December cover story, but at least it focused on strategic and business pitfalls that could take everybody’s favorite company down. (It wasn’t very convincing either). The Fortune story is more personal about Jobs himself. It digs up a lot of dirt we’ve heard before about Jobs’ personal life, temper tantrums, and family history. You learn for instance that Jobs’ 76-year-old biological father, who put him up for adoption, now “works as food and beverage director at the Boomtown Hotel & Casino near Reno.”

The article also spends a lot of time on the options backdating scandals at both Apple and Pixar that came to light a couple years ago. Elkind paints a picture of the Apple board (and Pixar’s before that) letting Jobs get away with pretty much whatever he wants. Of course, we already knew that. (”Can I have a plane, guys?”). After months of investigating, the only important new revelation Elkind can come up with is that Jobs and Apple’s board hid his cancer from shareholders for nine months before disclosing it. Jobs explored special diets and alternative remedies before opting for surgery.

That’s pretty bad, right? The not disclosing part. Except that, if you read the article all the way through, near the end you find out:

When the CEO of a publicly traded corporation is diagnosed with a serious illness, what is his obligation to inform shareholders? There is no clear answer.

During the mid-1990s, for instance, Intel CEO Andy Grove did not disclose his own cancer for a year and nobody ever complained about that. Oh well, perhaps the trouble is not with Steve Jobs. It’s with the story.

(Full disclosure: I once worked at Fortune).

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/245894186/

At our company-wide get together last December we decided that 2008 was going to be a year of workplace experiments. Among other things, we discussed how we could make 37signals one of the best places in the world to work, learn, and generally be happy.

Here’s are a few of the things we’ve implemented so far:

Shorter work weeks

Last summer we experimented with 4-day work weeks. People should enjoy the weather in the summer. We found that just about the same amount of work gets done in four days vs. five days.

So if that’s the case we could either push everyone to work harder during those five days or we could just skip one of those days. We decided to skip one of those days.

So recently we’ve instituted a four-day work week as standard. We take Fridays off. We’re around for emergencies, and we still do customer service/support on Fridays, and but other than that work is not required on Fridays.

Three-day weekends mean people come back extra refreshed on Monday. Three-day weekends mean people come back happier on Monday. Three-day weekends mean people actually work harder and more efficiently during the four-day work week.

Funding people’s passions

We decided that 37signals would help people pay for their passions, interests, or other curiosities. We want our people to experience new things, discover new hobbies, and generally be interesting people.

For example, Mark has recently taken up flight lessons. 37signals is helping him pay for those. If someone wants to take cooking lessons, we’ll help pay for those. If someone wants to take a woodworking class, we’ll help pay for that.

Part of the deal is that if 37signals helps you pay, you have to share what you’ve learned with everyone. Not just everyone at 37signals, but everyone who reads our blog. So expect to see some blog posts about these experiences.

Discretionary spending accounts

We’re in the process of giving everyone at 37signals a credit card. If you want a book or some software or you want to go to a conference, it’s on us. We just ask people to be reasonable with their spending.

If there’s a problem, we’ll let the person know. We’d rather trust people to make reasonable spending decisions than assume people will abuse the privilege by default.

We’ll post updates if we have them

The ideas above are active experiments. We’ll report back if we learn anything – good or bad – about what we’re doing and how it’s working.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/893-workplace-experiments

Too often it is still easier to search the entire Web than a single site. In-site search leaves much to be desired in its ability to provide users with accurate search results, let alone assistance in performing more accurate searches. Israeli PredictAd is attacking this challenge head-on by offering auto-complete functionality for search boxes with an added twist: monetizable real-estate.

Already deployed across 6,000 websites and generating millions of monthly impressions, PredictAd is announcing the launch of PredictAdPlus+. Targeted at media networks and high-traffic websites/blogs, the offering provides greater control of the look and feel, customization, dedicated databases, and advanced display options. Most importantly, it allows a number of sister sites to be integrated into a single search box. As an example, the TechCrunch search box at the bottom of this post incorporates CrunchGear, MobileCrunch and CrunchBoard. The auto-complete needs time to learn, but you’ll get the general drift.

PredictAd is making 250 invites available to TechCrunch readers. Sign-up here.

PredictAd’s twist on search monetization begins by helping users refine their in-site search queries by way of real-time search suggestions—think Google Toolbar’s auto-suggest feature. PredictAd continuously optimizes its suggestions based on the community search patterns for any given site. Beyond collaborative filtering PredictAd also takes into account historical searches, geo-location, time of day, common misspellings, connections between words, and more.

Not only should users benefit from more accurate searches, site-owners should benefit from increased page views as a result of user exposure to additional site content. Site-owners can also benefit from SEO insights drawn from the service’s analytics backend.

This is where ad monetization comes into play. PredictAd injects contextual advertising into the search box. The ads—text or image—change dynamically as users type out their search queries. In practice, PredictAd creates its own ad real-estate and then monetizes it. An important element in PredictAd’s offering is the fact that the ads are displayed directly in the user’s focal zone, unlike traditional ads which are susceptible to “banner blindness”. Rev-share is 50%/50% on run of network ads, and 80%/20% (for the publisher) when the advertiser selects specific publisher sites. PredictAd is claiming click-through rates in range of 0.5%-4%.

PredictAd might appeal particularly to blog owners who would welcome any spare cash they can get from their sites, along with additional upsides such as higher page counts and increased user engagement. Blog integration is a piece of cake, especially for bloggers using WordPress, TypePad or Blogger, who can hit the ground running with ready-to-go plugins. A pure JavaScript version is also available that just requires cutting and pasting.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/245805611/

Google has started offering search boxes within their search results. In the example above, a search box is offered for Amazon. The new service seems to be restricted to larger sites with a slant towards retails sites. Borders, BestBuy and OfficeMax offer the secondary box, as does a search for Wikipedia and The NY Times.

On the surface it would appear to be yet another dilution of Google’s famed simple interface, the very interface that helped put Google where it is today. And yet, some my find it useful.

(via: SEL)

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/245800730/

Can WordPress become the basis of a social network? Automattic founder and WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg hinted today on his blog that WordPress might go in a more social direction. He announced a new hire, Andy Peatling, the developer behind BuddyPress, a social network built on top of WordPress. BuddyPress will now become an official WordPress project.

Peatling describes an earlier version of BuddyPress, ChickSpeak (a social network for college women). He built ChickSpeak (and BuddyPress) on top of a multi-user version of WordPress. He moved all the blog posts off to the side and made most of the real estate a profile page with messaging functionality. Finally, he took advantage of all the open-source plugins available for WordPress:

Wordpress also has an excellent plugin API, as well as a whole host of quality pre-built plugins ready to download and activate. The key here is that I didn’t have to hack the core - I could just achieve the additional functionality needed by building dedicated plugins.

Plugins were built and used for private messaging, advanced profile management, online polls, photo management, multi-blog search and user credential management.

It is easy to dismiss this as completely unnecessary given the abundance of social networks already out there, as well as application development platforms like OpenSocial. But an open-source social network does present some intriguing possibilities. New apps and features could be added simply by creating new plugins. And there would be no lock-in to any proprietary code or development environment. Mullenweg writes:

Someday, perhaps, the world will have a truly Free and Open Source alternative to the walled gardens and open-only-in-API platforms that currently dominate our social landscape.

I asked Mullenweg if the world really needs another social network. His response:

The world doesn’t need another social network, it needs a thousand networks that let you own your data and interconnect using open standards. We invest countless hours giving our data to networks like MySpace, essentially sharecropping on their land for the privilege of being able to connect to our friends. It’s our friends, our time, our connections, our data — it should be our software.

I think only an Open Source solution can do that.

Automattic already hosts nearly 2.6 million blogs on Wordpress.com that generate more than 100,000 posts a day. That is a vibrant and big community. Could that be used to seed a social network? Even if BuddyPress remains a completely separate project, it will be interesting to see if it can out-innovate Facebook or MySpace or Bebo as a social networking platform. Does anyone think it has a chance?

Update: Strangely the GNU Public Licensed BuddyPress has had its page taken down by Automattic and replaced with default “coming soon” message with links to the code removed (cache of the original page here). Same with the project page on Google Code, the main page having only just been pulled as the original page is still available to be viewed via Google cache. A subsidiary page with access to the plugin hasn’t been deleted by Automattic yet and is available here. Update 2: The code is back up now. It was taken down temporarily in anticipation of a move to a new URL buddypress.org (not live yet).

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/245764729/

Rumors last week that Ask, the IAC-owned search engine, was about to cut 100 jobs overestimated the body count. In fact, Ask is trimming 40 jobs, or about 8 percent of its workforce. Newly appointed CEO Jim Safka, who replaced Jim Lanzone, is also going to refocus the brand to go after women in their late 30s and older, who already make up a disproportionate amount of Ask’s users (65 percent).

No word on what will happen to Ask’s Teoma search technology (the rumor was that Google would be replacing it, since it already handles Ask’s search advertising). Safka is obviously taking more of a marketing than a technology approach. But without improving actual search results (with technology), Ask is going to have a tough time maintaining its 4.5 percent market share. Ask’s search sites collectively brought in 41 million unique U.S. visitors in January, which was up from December and November, but still below October’s 44 million, according to comScore.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/245745609/

Demand Media, a big buyer and operator of Internet domain name companies, completed negotiations to acquire Austin-based Pluck last night after about two months of negotiations. The price is not being disclosed but is rumored to be in the $50 million range. Update: We’ve confirmed the number from an inside source - $75 million, all cash. Pluck revenues are around $10 million/year.

Pluck raised $10 million in two rounds of funding, the most recent in late 2004.

Pluck never really lived up to expectations and the price paid is certainly less than investors had hoped for when writing their checks. The team certainly is scrappy, though, and quick to adapt. They had a promising RSS reader in the early days but eventually discontinued that product. They also released a Delicious-like social bookmarking site called Shadows that was also discontinued. Their most recent strategy is a suite of products that brings social networking features and blog content into big publishing sites. USAToday is a high profile customer.

Los Angeles based Demand Media was founded by former MySpace CEO Richard Rosenblatt. The company has been buying content sites and is said to be preparing for a 2009 IPO, economy permitting. Their last round, $100 million, was announced in September 2007. They’ve raised a total of $320 million to date.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/245681898/