Ajax Girl

Stateless Systems (RetailMeNot, BugMeNot) has launched a closed beta test of hosted service CushyCMS.

CushyCMS is a fast, simple and free content management system that aims to make life easier for web designers by simplifying content management. Using CushyCMS, web designers can give content editors (for example a client) access to part, full or many pages at a granular level (headings, images, sidebars, etc), enabling them to update or create standards-compliant content directly from a browser without messing with the sites coding.

I sat down with CEO Guy King Monday (Sunday PST) for a demo of the service. The key for CushyCMS is that it’s not a WordPress or similar CMS replacement, it’s a content management interface in the simplest meaning of the term that can be applied to any sort of site. The video walkthrough above or there’s a demo video on the CushyCMS site.

The service opens to the public April 15, but if you want to try it now we have 150 invites for TechCrunch readers. Visit the CushyCMS site here and enter the code TECHCRUNCH to sign up.

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TV listings discovery service MeeVee has put itself on the market via press release.

The Burlingame based company has taken $25 million in funding over four rounds that included DEFTA Partners, Edmond de Rothschild Venture Capital, FCPR Israel Discovery Fund, Labrador Ventures, The Bay Area Equity Fund and WaldenVC. The first sign of trouble at MeeVee surfaced in July 2007 when the company cut 20% of its workforce.

According to MeeVee:

Due to accelerated development of the online entertainment market, the Board of Directors at MeeVee has determined that combining with an established player will maximize the potential for the community, technology and content relationships the Company has built.

MeeVee claims that it is “engaged in multiple discussions with potential acquirers that provide the greatest long term upside and synergy,” but then adds “Interested parties should contact Steve Hughey (shughey@meevee.com) for more information.” You don’t normally ask for interested parties to contact a company re a sale unless the current talks (if they exist) aren’t going well.

The other sign of trouble and that they’ve just about run out of money: the press release states that MeeVee has 7 full time employees. After the July cut there were 27 employees.

We’re putting MeeVee on Deadpool watch.

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Google isn’t just talking about hosting applications in the cloud any more. Tonight at 9pm PT they’re launching Google App Engine (link dead until launch time) an ambitious new project that offers a full-stack, hosted, automatically scalable web application platform consisting of Python application servers, BigTable database access (anticipated here and here) and GFS data store services.

At first blush this is a full on competitor to the suite of web services offered by Amazon, including S3 (storage), EC2 (virtual servers) and SimpleDB (database).

Unlike Amazon Web Services’ loosely coupled architecture, which consists of several essentially independent services that can optionally be tied together by developers, Google’s architecture is more unified but less flexible. For example, it is possible with Amazon to use their storage service S3 independently of any other services, while with Google using their BigTable service will require writing and deploying a Python script to their app servers, one that creates a web-accessible interface to BigTable.

What this all means: Google App Engine is designed for developers who want to run their entire application stack, soup to nuts, on Google resources. Amazon, by contrast, offers more of an a la carte offering with which developers can pick and choose what resources they want to use.

Google Product Manager Tom Stocky described the new service to me in an interview today. Developers simply upload their Python code to Google, launch the application, and can monitor usage and other metrics via a multi-platform desktop application.

More details from Google:

Today we’re announcing a preview release of Google App Engine, an application-hosting tool that developers can use to build scalable web apps on top of Google’s infrastructure. The goal is to make it easier for web developers to build and scale applications, instead of focusing on system administration and maintenance.

Leveraging Google App Engine, developers can:

• Write code once and deploy. Provisioning and configuring multiple machines for web serving and data storage can be expensive and time consuming. Google App Engine makes it easier to deploy web applications by dynamically providing computing resources as they are needed. Developers write the code, and Google App Engine takes care of the rest.
• Absorb spikes in traffic. When a web app surges in popularity, the sudden increase in traffic can be overwhelming for applications of all sizes, from startups to large companies that find themselves rearchitecting their databases and entire systems several times a year. With automatic replication and load balancing, Google App Engine makes it easier to scale from one user to one million by taking advantage of Bigtable and other components of Google’s scalable infrastructure.
• Easily integrate with other Google services. It’s unnecessary and inefficient for developers to write components like authentication and e-mail from scratch for each new application. Developers using Google App Engine can make use of built-in components and Google’s broader library of APIs that provide plug-and-play functionality for simple but important features.

Google App Engine: The Limitations

The service is launching in beta and has a number of limitations.

First, only the first 10,000 developers to sign up for the beta will be allowed to deploy applications.

The service is completely free during the beta period, but there are ceilings on usage. Applications cannot use more than 500 MB of total storage, 200 million megacycles/day CPU time, and 10 GB bandwidth (both ways) per day. We’re told this equates to about 5M pageviews/mo for the typical web app. After the beta period, those ceilings will be removed, but developers will need to pay for any overage. Google has not yet set pricing for the service.

One current limitation is a requirement that applications be written in Python, a popular scripting language for building modern web apps (Ruby and PHP are among others widely used). Google says that Python is just the first supported language, and that the entire infrastructure is designed to be language neutral. Google’s initial focus on Python makes sense because they use Python internally as their scripting language (and they hired Python creator Guido van Rossum in 2005).

Update: Here is Guido van Rossum at the launch event talking about App Engine:

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Michael Arrington, Robert Scoble, and Steve Gillmor are on scene at Google Campfire One, the second developer event of its kind (the first was focused on OpenSocial).

No official word yet about what will be announced, but we’ve already published our speculations.

Below is Scoble’s live Qik stream from the event (Note: The embed will show a recent archive when he’s not currently recording).

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IZEA (formerly PayPerPost) has soft launched their new social network for “posties” Social Spark.

Social Spark brings the PayPerPost scheme into a candy colored social network. There’s little need to describe all the features as there’s nothing really innovative: think MySpace or Facebook but in bright colors. The key difference is the focus on shilling; center stage is offers for paid posting, including most popular offers and most recent. Each offer includes which members of PayPerPost/ SocialSpark recently visited it and posties can leave props for each offer.

One thing that did surprise me is that SocialSpark is also offering “sponsorship opportunities.” These would appear to be as they suggest, simple place a box on your site and get paid sponsorships that would be entirely legitimate and without moral qualms to most people.

The service is currently in closed alpha testing and running behind schedule (it was originally scheduled for a January launch) so perhaps this explains the complete lack of offers available on the site. Most of the paid opportunities come from IZEA itself and not third party advertisers.

SocialSpark isn’t my thing (nor Michael’s), but others may disagree. Screen shots as follows:

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Facebook is said to be finalizing a settlement with founders of ConnectU, according to sources quoted by the NY Times.

For those unfamiliar with the case, a lawsuit before the US Federal Court alleged that Facebook CEO and Founder Mark Zuckerberg stole the original code for Facebook. Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra (ConnectU) accused Zuckerberg of stealing the source code, design, and business plan for Facebook in 2003 when he worked in the Harvard dorms as a programmer for their own tertiary education focused social-networking site HarvardConnect.com, now known as ConnectU.

News of a settlement comes as a surprise given the case to date hadn’t been going well for ConnectU. The press conference ConnectU held in July 2007 was farcical, and the company was given two weeks to revise their complaint or have it thrown out. The next court appearance for the company was at Facebook’s counter case that claimed that ConnectU illegally hacked into Facebook in 2004, stole email addresses then used those addresses to attempt to entice Facebook users to sign up to ConnectU.

According to the NY Times, terms of the settlement have not been disclosed but in the meantime all motions in the case against ConnectU have been terminated.

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Chinese search engine Baidu worked an image of presidential candidate Barack Obama into their home page logo today, as well as a tribute page about the candidate.

From what we can tell it’s very rare for Baidu to dedicate its home page to an individual, and no other U.S. presidential candidate has been so honored. In short, this is an endorsement of the candidate.

Given the tepid relations between the two countries and general U.S. mistrust of China in general, I suspect that the Obama campaign won’t be reaching out to press to let everyone know about the endorsement.

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Salesforce will be making a whole bunch of partner announcements at an event in San Francisco next Monday. We’ve been informed that the on-demand enterprise software company will begin reselling Google’s Web-based applications such as Google Docs to its customers. These Web apps will be available within Salesforce.com and tightly integrated into its service.

Such a deal makes a lot of sense. Salesforce customers can already manage their AdWords campaigns from within Salesforce.com, a deal that was announced last summer. Salesforce wants to get as close to Google as it can. And Google wants to sell its apps to enterprise customers (Salesforce has 41,000 of them).

While Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff might be happy to sell Salesforce to Oracle for $75 a share, he might be even happier to sell it to Google. Buying Salesforce would certainly turbocharge Google’s efforts to sell into enterprise accounts.

This integration news doesn’t come entirely out of the blue. Last March, Google Operating System noticed some signs of the coming integration within certain CSS files used by Google Apps. References to Google Apps were also found in Salesforce services.

Salesforce refused to comment on the announcement and we’re still waiting to hear back from Google.

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If you want to see in stark colors exactly how the mortgage credit crisis is spreading across the country, go to real estate search site HotPads and look at the foreclosure heat maps in your area. These are map mashups that take foreclosure data from RealityTrac and overlay them on a color-coded map. Red indicates a high rate of property foreclosures per capita, and blue indicates a low level. Since foreclosures are now hitting record rates, there is a lot of red on these maps. In Silicon Valley, for instance, only a few pockets like Palo Alto and Sunnyvale remain in the blue. A view of New York City shows the foreclosures beginning to close in on Manhattan from the outer boroughs.

In addition to the 500,000 foreclosures you can find on HotPads, the site also lists 1.2 million homes for sale and 130,000 active rentals (which co-founder Doublas Pope claims is the second-largest rental listings after Craigslist). These are culled from real estate broker sites and submitted directly by property owners.