Ajax Girl

Google showcased HuddleChat, a real-time chat application, as one of many test applications (directory here) to show off their new Google App Engine platform last night.

Some bloggers noted that the application was a rip off of Campfire, a 37Signals product. And 37Signals CEO Jason Fried used HuddleChat as a PR opportunity, telling ReadWriteWeb “We’re flattered Google thinks Campfire is a great product, we’re just disappointed that they stooped so low to basically copy it feature for feature, layout for layout…We thought that would be beneath Google, but maybe its time to reevaluate what they stand for.”

Frankly, the reaction is fairly ridiculous. But this is apparently a fight that Google doesn’t want to be involved in. They pulled the application and replaced it with the above notice.

I wonder if Darren Delaye, Braden Kowitz, and Kyle Consalus, the Google developers who created HuddleChat, had much of a say in the decision. And why, since HuddleChat is not an official Google product, was it Google that made the decision to pull it down and not the developers who created it? Google was very careful to say that they were not affiliated with HuddleChat while it was up - that, apparently, wasn’t the case.

As far as I’m concerned, this is the first case of censorship on the new Google App Engine platform, and a bad precedent.

Our test application for Google App Engine is here.

Update: If you are as outraged as I am over this :-), join this Facebook group demanding that Google bring back HuddleChat.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/266747911/

Network Solutions is hijacking unassigned sub domains and delivering link filled holding pages for hundreds of thousands of sites.

Win Betteridge runs GotGame.com and contacted TechCrunch with the details:

For instance, app.gotgame.com resolves to a Network Solutions page with text links, including “Poker Tournaments” and “Texas Holdem Games.” The same is true of any other unassigned sub-domain. We have spoken to customer service a few times about fixing this problem…

I don’t know if this is standard practice for a hosting company, but this strikes me as another case of Network Solutions unreasonably profiting at the expense of its customers.

According to a search on DomainTools there are 294,438 sites on the same Network Solutions IP address as GotGame.com. I ran a test on the sites listed (for free) by DomainTools and every single one had the same issue: unassigned domain names with link filled Network Solutions holding pages.

Yet another reason to not use Network Solutions.

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/~3/266714287/

Lending Club, a P2P lending service that started off as a Facebook app, has temporarily stopped accepting new loans and lenders.

According to a brief “quiet period” note on its website:

Lending Club has started a process to register, with the appropriate securities authorities, promissory notes that may be offered and sold to lenders through our site in the future. Until we complete the registration process, we will not accept new lender registrations or allow new commitments from existing lenders. We will continue to service all previously funded loans during this period, and lenders will be able to access their accounts, monitor their portfolios, and withdraw available funds without changes.

While the company will not talk to media “until the registration process is completed,” we suspect that Lending Club is looking to obtain a broker-dealer license from the SEC that would legitimize its operations.

Since Lending Club both loans and borrows money from users, instead of connecting them directly, it’s not a pure P2P service. While the legality of its lending practices is not in question, its borrowing practices could be interpreted as the sale of securities, which requires a license Lending Club doesn’t appear to have.

This suspicion has been reinforced by Veronica McGregor, an attorney with the law firm Perkins Coie. She says that “it looks like they are getting themselves a license to buy and sell securities.”

These are issues that other P2P lending sites - such as Prosper, Virgin Money, and Zopa - will have to face if they haven’t already.

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/~3/266662203/

Flickr users can now add video clips alongside their photos, a much requested and much anticipated feature that has been promised for over a year. The puppet version of Shel Israel graciously kicked things off for us by announcing the new feature in the Flickr Video below.

The product is not a YouTube clone by any means. The Flickr team, led by Director of Product Management Kakul Srivastava, spent considerable time debating the feature set and user experience internally before launch.

The goal is not to have people upload long videos, or clips of copyrighted material. To reinforce that, videos can be only 90 seconds in length (a limitation that may be changed later, Srivastava says). In a phone prebriefing I was very critical of this limitation. But the team then brought me in for a demo, and I was sold. The short clips are a perfect compliment to event photos, in my opinion. See this, for example.

Videos are treated the same way as photos, and are placed alongside those photos in albums and the main stream. Videos can also be tagged in the same way as photos.

The video player itself is extremely clean, so videos look like photos on pages that include them. Videos can also be embedded, of course, as we’ve done above.

Another great feature is the ability to play the videos from the thumbnail screens as well as the permanent page for the video.

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/~3/266617237/

Storage giant EMC is buying Iomega for $213 million in cash, a slight premium above its $200 million market cap at the close of trading today. Iomega, which makes portable hard drives and Zip drives, will become the core of EMC’s consumer and small business storage device business. During the 1990s, Iomega was one of the original tech momentum stocks, trading as high as $114. Today, it closed at $3.64.

The hardware game just ain’t what it used to be.

Perhaps EMC could combine Iomega with Mozy, an online storage service it bought last year for $76 million. The trend in consumer storage, as with consumer software, is to offer both online and offline capabilities.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/266595435/

Loren Feldman’s puppet video show, which parodies a video interview show run by Shel Israel called Global Neighborhoods, has landed an official sponsor, Feldman says. Meanwhile, Global Neighborhoods itself remains sponsorless.

In the videos, a naked puppet interviews people (or other puppets) to talk about “social media,” making fun of Israel’s interview style. The puppet is naked as a spoof on Israel’s book, Naked Conversations, about the importance of blogging for companies.

The new sponsor, Zong, a Switzerland-based mobile platform company, is providing “significant funding” to sponsor the parody Shel Israel show created by Feldman.

This will be a serious ego blow to Israel, who has been mocked by Feldman and bloggers around the quality of the show and has publicly attacked Feldman over the parody.

The fact that the parody, but not the official show, is now receiving financial support from third parties is a reflection of the entertainment value of the two shows. Not only do some people find the parody very funny, Feldman has also landed fairly well known entrepreneurs in his interviews. Now that Feldman is making money from the show, it’s probably here to stay, much to the real Israel’s chagrin.

As I’ve disclosed before, Feldman and Israel are both friends of mine. I hosted the launch party for Shel’s book, Naked Conversations at my house in February 2006, and Feldman is staying at my house this week.

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/~3/266592841/

Mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs) have been having one hell of a time over the past year. The biggest burnout among them was Amp’d Mobile, which lost $360M before realizing its customers couldn’t pay their bills.

While Helio rode high for quite some time, that company has also lost Earthlink as an investor, seen CEO Sky Dayton depart, and accumulated a deficit of $560M.

Now Sonopia, an MVNO that enabled communities and organizations to set up their own branded mobile services (so-called “mini-MVNOs”), has also shut down after failing to gain traction.

According to a former business development consultant, Sonopia’s “approach was too ‘involving’ and too ambitious, offering targeted services and campaigns for segmented groups…which often lacked skills in running even a marketing program, let alone a mobile service.” Apparently the inflexibility of Verizon, its parent carrier, and the over-zealous optimism of founder Juha Christensen also led the company to ruin.

Sonopia is now in the TechCrunch DeadPool.

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/~3/266580787/

People caught between e-mail and text messaging are going to like this service. With SMSOfficer, which is a plug-in for Outlook, you can send and receive text messages from your desktop e-mail to cell phones. The service works with any cell phone carrier (but only with Outlook e-mail). The first 10 texts are free, and then it costs $20 for the next 250.

It takes advantage of the Outlook Mobile Service that was baked into Outlook 2007. Your SMS message gets sent to SMSOfficer’s servers, where they are turned into SMS messages and sent over the mobile carrier networks. Up until now, few other services in the U.S. took advantage of the capability. I have not tried this out because I do not use Outlook. (You can read a review here). But there is definitely a big need for unified messaging across devices.

Ultimately, though, SMS is a compromise solution. What you really want is your e-mail on your phone. For the growing number of people buying smart phones (or simply using the mobile versions of Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and others), that day is already here. Pretty soon, paying $20 on top of your data plan so you can send an abbreviated e-mail to someone’s mobile phone is not going to look like such a great deal.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/266526903/

Last night, Google announced App Engine, a hosted web application platform. We’ve now tested the service directly by writing and deploying a test application called appengine.crunchbase.com—a HotorNot popularity contest for startups. Our experience with building and launching an app is below.

Google promises developers two things with App Engine: to reduce the time from writing code to deploying it on a web server, and to leverage Google’s massive infrastructure. We decided write a simple app on the platform, deploy it, and get some traffic to really see how easy App Engine is.

Getting Started

Looking at the developer documentation, App Engine boasts a powerful API. The platform comes with a Python scripting runtime, static file serving capabilities, easy and tight integration with Google user accounts and email services (obviously a big play), simple access to a powerful persistence engine with queries and transaction support (aka a really good database), near real-time site monitoring and statistics, and the promise of consistent high performance and essentially linear scalability.

Despite its potential power and underlying sophistication, App Engine was surprisingly easy to get started with. Now, being Ruby on Rails guys, the fact that the only currently supported language is Python was a bit humbling. Still, the SDK provided by Google proved dead simple. Our first application was contained within a single Python script, making the path the code was taking to produce responses very clear. We incrementally added features: first accepting input from the users through forms, then storing and retrieving that data using the provided persistence API, and finally breaking out the user-facing web page code into a proper Django template.

The App

The web app we came up with is super-simple, shamelessly self-promoting, and easily game-able. It’s a one-page voting site using company logos slurped in from CrunchBase, our main project. The app has only two requests: one for rendering the page, the other for recording a vote (one GET, one POST request). The first real issue was getting our initial data, some URLs and names, into the database. While we later found that Google provides a slick bulk-update tool, we got going with a simple action that manually parsed our comma-separated values into the database. Another thing we wanted from the service was it to be served from our own domain. By default, Google hosts all App Engine projects on your-project.appspot.com (think blogspot), but they do offer domain services through Google Apps, which was pretty painless to setup if you just want App Engine functionality.

Deployment

The SDK provides a server that emulates the App Engine platform, making it possible to easily develop applications locally that will later deploy to Google’s cloud. Once we had a presentable first app coded up and tested locally, we deployed the app to Google’s server awfully simply from the command line. This was particularly compelling; we’ve spent hours or even days deploying web apps to comparatively trivial servers.

Overall, the process from sign-up to deployment took about 4 hours, with the vast majority of that figuring out what we wanted to do and remembering how to do things like sort arrays in Python (we also spent a particularly embarrassing 15 minutes on some poorly formatted hidden HTML fields). The rapid prototyping of the app and the ease of deployment is clearly the real power of App Engine right now. The scalability of App Engine is exciting but elusive; most apps won’t need it for a while. The redundancy and ease of deployment should be the immediate attraction for developers.

Try our app out: appengine.crunchbase.com.

Mark McGranaghan took the lead on coding for the site and contributed heavily to this article.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/266520341/

Here’s the coolest thing you’ll see this morning. It’s a robotic snake created by Carnegie Mellon. It can climb through small holes, up pipes, and even twirl itself around poles to climb. It comes in a waterproof, wireless version as well for those times when you want to scare everyone out of the pool. CrunchGear is at RoboBusiness 2008 in Pittsburgh today so drop in and see what’s new in commercial robotics.

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/~3/266476016/