Ajax Girl

After we thought the bizarre story of Stage6 was over, Brad Greenspan’s LiveUniverse has gotten involved, and the plot gets even thicker.

According to a release from LiveUniverse, the company offered to acquire Stage6 prior to the site being shut by DivX 25 February. The offer was $11 million in cash & carriage plus an equity Stake in Stage6 and Promotion of DivX Software. LiveUniverse then claims that the DivX Board “refused to engage in any direct dialogue with LiveUniverse for over 5 days, and during this time, DivX shuts down Stage6.”

Despite the site being shut for nearly 2 weeks, LiveUniverse still wants to buy it and is appealing to DivX shareholders to pressure the company into selling. DivX shareholders can visit www.livevideo.com/SaveStage6” to take initiative and proactively push the Board to do the right thing for shareholders.”

LiveUniverse is claiming that “despite daily outbound calls and emails, LiveUniverse was and is unable to reach any of the DivX executives including General Counsel David Richter who LiveUniverse was originally referred to for the purposes of buying Stage6.” The go on to say that “Directors of public companies have a fiduciary duty to shareholders to try to get the best deal and represent their interests, first and foremost” and “DivX Board’s decision to destroy website and its community when there was and is a firm superior offer on table from LiveUniverse raises questions of whether proper sales process was followed.”

The one part missing from LiveUniverse’s statement is why? why do they want to buy Stage6? Sure, it was a great site with a ton of traffic, but it was only great because it offered a BitTorrent style smorgasbord of pirated content without the need to download it. Without the pirated movies, the traffic on Stage6 means nothing. Either LiveUniverse knows something we don’t about the site, or they’re taking a big risk.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/247702903/

Jason Calacanis wants you to save money for your startup, so he has come up with 17 tips on how. The intention is good. Working lean is great and means you probably won’t need outside money and there’s some good stuff like don’t buy Microsoft Office and skip the phone system, but also some depressing bullshit like:

Fire people who are not workaholics…. come on folks, this is startup life, it’s not a game. go work at the post office or stabucks if you want balance in your life. For realz

Here’s another take on that: Fire the people who are workaholics! Here’s five reasons why:

1. Workaholics may well say that they enjoy those 14 hour days week after week, but despite their claims, working like that all month, all the time is not going to be sustainable. When the burnout crash comes, and it will, it’ll hit all the harder and according to Murphy at the least convenient time.
2. People who are workaholics are likely to attempt to fix problems by throwing sheer hours at the problem. If you’re dealing with people working with anything creatively that’s a deadbeat way to get great work done.
3. People who always work late makes the people who don’t feel inadequate for merely working reasonable hours. That’ll lead to guilt, misery, and poor morale. Worse, it’ll lead to ass-in-seat mentality where people will “stay late” out of obligation, but not really be productive.
4. If all you do is work, your value judgements are unlikely to be sound. Making good calls on “is it worth it?” is absolutely critical to great work. Missing out on life in general to put more hours in at the office screams “misguided values”.
5. Working with interesting people is more interesting than just working. If all you got going for your life is work, work, work, the good team-gelling lunches are going to be some pretty boring straight shop talk. Yawn. I’d much rather hear more about your whittling project, your last trek, how your garden is doing, or when you’ll get your flight certificate.

If your start-up can only succeed by being a sweatshop, your idea is simply not good enough. Go back to the drawing board and come up with something better that can be implemented by whole people, not cogs.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/902-fire-the-workaholics

Crowdsourcing sites need to make room for yet another entrant: crowdSPRING. The site is in private beta right now and is starting off with a $5,000 prize for the best design for its homepage. The first 500 TechCrunch readers to sign up here will get into the beta. (The public launch will be in April).

CrowdSPRING is very similar to other crowdsourcing sites like Kluster, Cambrian House, and FellowForce. It offers an online environment for people to collaborate and contribute new design ideas. Companies can set up challenges with prizes to see what the crowd comes up with. CrowdSPRING is focused primarily on creating logos, Website designs, and marketing materials.

“What we believe is that there is a huge pool of talent out there that is untapped and cannot compete effectively in a traditional model,” says co-founder Mike Samson. To choose the crowdSPRING logo, for instance, Samson and his co-founder Ross Kimbarovsky created a contest. After they selected the winning design, they found out it was created by a 28-year-old janitor in Ottawa who taught himself graphic design.

How CrowdSPRING differs from most other crowdsourcing sites is that contributors must put up completed works, not just concepts. It is not so much about people working together to improve a single design, but rather to put up their own work in competition with everyone else’s. (See my recent write-up of Kluster, for a comparison of how a more collaborative approach can work). Since everyone can see everyone else’s project, they are still informed by each other’s work. “A funneling effect takes place,” says Kimbarovsky. This avoids design by committee, while still allowing one design to inform another. But it may also discourage the most talented contributors who might value their time too much to whip up an entire design for free before knowing whether there will be any takers.

Intellectual property protections are built into the system. (Samson is a former trial attorney). Your design belongs to you until the company that set up the challenge decides to buy it. CrowdSPRING takes a 15 percent fee. The company is based in Chicago and has raised $3 million in angel funding.

Come up with a better Website design than the ones below and you can win $5,000.

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/~3/247646106/

Man, I was wrong in my post on what about us? and the iPhone SDK. All I knew about was the VP of Phone Software saying “we have stuff coming”, but there is a lot more that that, it is just not mentioned in many places.

If you head over to the iPhone DevCenter (registration required) you will find a video titled “iPhone SDK for Web Developers” that goes into detail.

When you watch it you will see a ton of great stuff:

• Gestures: ongesturestart, ongesturechange, on gestureend
• Other actions: pinching, rotating, swiping
• Full screen mode (no more chrome)
• A lot of the cool stuff from WebKit nightlies (HTML 5 goodness)

Fantastic news. For a minute I worried that Apple would try to lure in us Web folk to learn Objective-C and Cocoa to grow that platform, but it looks like they are giving the mobile Web love as well as the native APIs. You just have to fork up $99.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/247623147/iphone-sdk-for-web-developers

Yesterday was Geek-Out Night on The Charlie Rose Show. Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson and our own Michael Arrington appeared on back-to-back interviews (30 minutes each, separate interviews). Anderson explains why everything on the Internet is free.

Michael talks with Rose about the Microsoft-Yahoo deal, Facebook, blogs, privacy, and tech policy. He even manages to plug CrunchBase. Nice haircut, Mike.

Something most people don’t know - almost every Charlie Rose interview (over 3,000 of them) is available on their website.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/247566675/

Mahalo founder and serial entrepreneur Jason Calacanis has some interesting tips up today about how to squeeze every single last thing from your startup employees.

Helpful advice includes (our interpretation of his more reasonable statements):

• If you do meetings, have them over lunch, because you shouldn’t let your employees eat alone
• Don’t provide people with phones, they can always use their own cellphones, and this saves money
• Buy a decent espresso machine and provide food in the office, because you don’t want your staff to ever stop working, this way you keep them in the office every minute of every day
• Buy people who work hard a computer for home, so they can work after hours, on weekends and public holidays
• Urinary catheters are cheap, hook each employee up to one so they don’t waste minutes going to the restroom

OK, so I made the last point up. Here’s my favorite one though:

• “Fire people who are not workaholics…. come on folks, this is startup life, it’s not a game. go work at the post office or stabucks if you want balance in your life. For realz.”

Apparently having a life isn’t “for realz” in Calacanis’ playbook so a note to possible Mahalo employees: expect to check your family at the door if you want to go work for JCal. Up to 18 hours a day for $30-35,000 (what I’ve heard is the going rate for base Mahalo employees) , you’re never allowed to go outside during this time or have a proper break…. sounds like a great place to work.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/247565927/

We have seen a barrage of performance and compliance information this week haven’t we. Wow. We got a little more yesterday too.

The WebKit team talked about the Acid 3 test and how they are up to 90/100:

Support for CSS3 Selectors

We added support for all of the remaining CSS3 selectors. These include selectors like nth-child, nth-of-type, last-child, last-of-type, etc. These selectors were already implemented in KHTML, and the KHTML developers had even kindly provided patches for us in the relevant WebKit bugs. Therefore it was a simple matter of taking those patches, updating them to the WebKit codebase, and then merging them in. A big thanks to the KHTML developers for their hard work in this area.

Parsing Bugs

WebKit had a number of minor parsing bugs that Acid 3 targeted. The boxes did not render properly because of an obscure parsing bug that the test exploited (thanks, Hixie). In addition a number of other parsing bugs kept us from completely passing individual tests. We have updated our parser to be much closer to the HTML5-specified parsing rules.

WebKit has also never parsed DOCTYPEs before. I re-wrote WebKit’s DOCTYPE parsing to match the HTML5 specification, and so now if you put a DOCTYPE into your page it will be present in the DOM. In addition many bugs centered around proper mode resolution (quirks vs. strict) have now been fixed. You can document.write a DOCTYPE for example in a new document and have the correct mode be selected.

SVG

Acid3 has many SVG tests. We’ve been hard at work making these tests pass. In particular SVG font support and other aspects of the SVG DOM have been tested. Many of the remaining 10 points are SVG failures. We’ll be working on SVG animation in order to pass the last few SVG tests.

DOM

Acid3 tests a lot of DOM level 2 features, like traversal and ranges. It particularly focuses on the “liveness” of objects, e.g., making sure everything updates properly when you dynamically change a document by adding/removing nodes. Most of our failures in this area had to do with not behaving properly in the presence of these dynamic changes (even though we tended to pass the more static tests).

The JScript team also blogged about JScript improvements including fixing String concatenation.

Prior to this optimization of string concatenation, most developers used Array join operations to achieve the same result. We were aware of this tradeoff and made sure that the Array operations are also optimized. In either scenario, developers will experience significant performance gains.

I would love to see a benchmark of + vs. join() and hopefully see that join isn’t needed anymore. This feels like some of the moments in Java where the verbose code that you wrote to make things faster started to back fire (e.g. String concat too, and object pooling as creating an object became so cheap).

Ralph Nader of Browsers

This is a very random thought. Watching the WebKit and Firefox teams grinding away makes me wonder if one of them is like the Ralph Nader of browsers. Does WebKit take away share from Firefox? I have seen many developers prefer it recently, and a lot use both (myself for one). Having said that, the bulk of users are probably the folk who buy a Mac and click on the browser icon and don’t really care.

Is having the third candidate in the race a good thing? Does competition between WK and FF itself help both projects and spur them on to greater heights, or would it be even better to have a meeting of the minds and merge the WebKit and Gecko teams, at least in a way where they both aren’t optimizing the JavaScript engine etc. Hmm.

NOTE: There is still a lot of room to innovate in the browser itself, but share the low level engines. Maybe it is most to do with personalities. If the teams could work together that would be one thing (and remember Dave H used to work on Firefox), but it not…. then it is obviously silly. What do you think?

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/247501246/ie-and-webkit-performance-is-webkit-the-ralph-nader-of-browsers

Bigger isn't always better for business

“Americans think big. This has helped make them the most powerful nation on Earth, but bigger is not always better, either for our bodies or, I suggest, for our organizations. If I were to visit a symphony orchestra and ask them about their growth plans for the future, how would they respond? They would talk about their plans to extend their repertoire and to bring their work to new audiences, not about increasing the number of violinists…Why does almost every business that I know seek to grow in size, year after year, in fact, as if there were no limit? Why can’t they be content with doing more with less?”

Tech support “greatest hits” CD leaks

“When they say, ‘Your call may be recorded for quality assurance purposes,’ that’s only partly true. They also record your calls so they can pass around recordings of the funniest ones. They actually gave me one of those “Best Of” disks at the end of my day in the call center. Herewith: a few actual calls from that disk or that I heard about from the agents themselves.”

Site shows you the $0.99 “Movie of the Week” on iTunes

“Every Tuesday iTunes offers a special rental price of 99 cents on a movie selection. This special price is available through the following Monday. We’ll keep you updated on what that movie is every week.”

droidMAKER: The inside story of George Lucas

“The inside story of George Lucas, his intensely private company, and their work to revolutionize filmmaking. In the process, they made computer history. Discover the birth of Pixar, digital video editing, videogame avatars, THX sound, and a host of other icons of the media age. Lucas played a central role in the universe of entertainment technologies we see everyday.”

Elaine St. James on the importance of imagination

“Einstein said, ‘Imagination is more important than information.’ I experienced this first hand after I canceled my magazine and newspaper subscriptions. I’ve never been much of a TV watcher, but I just kind of unplugged from everything. I found out that I could take the time at the end of the day to just sit and daydream, opening myself up to really thinking rather than constantly reacting. We all fall into that habit. We react to the things that are going on around us and feel there is a certain response or a certain expectation that we have to live up to—usually somebody else’s expectation. If we let go of that, we can really get the feel of how important imagination is in our life. It’s not that information is not important, but imagination is what we do with that information. We have to learn to take the time to tap into our own intuitive knowing.”

The secular Sabbath is a digital day of rest

“Thus began my ‘secular Sabbath’ — a term I found floating around on blogs — a day a week where I would be free of screens, bells and beeps. An old-fashioned day not only of rest but of relief.”

Behind the scenes of the old school HBO intro

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/901-sunspots-the-droid-edition

Kyte CEO Daniel Graf is taking another big step towards turning the cell phone into a video distribution platform. “This is a big day for Kyte,” he tells me, “our biggest release since we launched our beta last April.” Up till now, Kyte allowed people to create their own personal TV channels on the Web by uploading videos from their cell phones to various widgets and to Kyte.tv. Today, Kyte is adding live video streaming from both mobile phones and Webcams, which is broadcast through your personal Kyte channel and archived for later viewing. (Sign up here for the private beta. Watch out, Justin.tv and Ustream). It also raised an additional $6.1 million from Steamboat Ventures and Swedish mobile operator TeliaSonera to close out its Series B round for a total of $21.1 million.

But most importantly, Graf is zeroing in on making Kyte a platform for musicians, media companies, and mobile carriers. He sees Kyte being used more by established personalities and media companies to produce the initial content, and then being shared and distributed by the audience via the Kyte player. To that end, he just launched Kyte.com as a site for branded partners (including bloggers) to tap into the Kyte platform. All four major music labels are using Kyte to create branded players that can be widgetized and distributed all over the Web. (See ours below, which shows an interview with Graf that I filmed using his cell phone).

“It doesn’t say “Kyte” anywhere,” says Graf (except that it does, on the bottom left). “This is like a micro Website. It can be virally distributed. Fans feel really connected to it.” They can also contribute. The Kyte player has a “produce” button that lets fans upload their own videos right into the channel. Graf created the one above for TechCrunch (it is the second one ever made after 50 Cent’s). For the next few hours you can add your own video commentary using a Webcam (we will be monitoring this, so please keep it clean).

50 Cent has been testing Kyte for about three months, and already has more than four million views on his Kyte channel across 10,000 Websites. The Kyte player is front and center on his Website ThisIs50. He regularly puts up video snippets of himself and his crew shot on a cell phone. Last night, he premiered his video “The Mechanic” through the Kyte player, which fans can embed on their own pages. It is his way of keeping control of his brand online even if people grab the video and put on other sites. Kyte plans on turning on advertising inside its players in April and sharing those revenues with producers of Kyte channels.

Kyte is also giving its partners the ability to turn their Kyte player into a Facebook app in about fiveminutes. Here is 50 Cent’s and here is TechCrunch’s. It offers an API as well for partner Websites to create deeper integration with the Kyte player and service. It even has Twitter integration. Finally, Kyte is working on one-click mobile apps to mak eit even easier to upload video from your cellphone. One such app is already in private beta for Nokia Series 60 phones.

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/~3/247523907/

There is nothing that screams “frugal startup” more than cardboard furniture. Aza Raskin, the founder of Songza and Humanized who was recently hired by Mozilla, designed his own system of cardboard building blocks that can be assembled into desks, wall dividers, and cubicles for his own Chicago offices. It is based on an art project that his father Jef Raskin, of Mac interface fame, once did. Today, he is turning the side project into a business and launching it as Bloxes. What are they exactly? He explains:

They are called Bloxes — essentially 3D cardboard legos that ship flat, and fold up in modular building blocks that are strong enough to stand on. While they aren’t tech per se, we use them for building tables, walls, cubicles, and desks. Both Google and Mozilla have expressed interest in using them in their offices. So, this may well be the new thing in terms of agile office-space deployment. Don’t like where a wall is? Just move it! Don’t like the way it looks? Just rebuild it! They are cheaper than cubicles, and much more fun.

It’s interface design applied to cardboard. (TC readers get a 10 percent discount until March 12 with this coupon code: TCBLXAR). See more pictures here and below:

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/247425475/