Ajax Girl

Google has hired boutique investment bank Qatalyst Group to provide advice on the ongoing battle between Microsoft and Yahoo.

Qatalyst Group is headed by colorful Silicon Valley investment banker Frank Quattrone, who as we noted in March has returned to the Valley after spending years in the wilderness fighting obstruction of justice charges.

Quattrone was head technology banker for Credit Suisse, and Morgan Stanley before that, during the first internet boom and had a hand in practically every major Internet IPO during the 1990s, from Amazon to Netscape. Notably Quattrone was one of the first investment bankers to show an interest in Google.

Amid daily reports of Microsoft’s attempted takeover of Yahoo, it comes as little surprise that Google has turned to an outside advisor for guidance. That it is Quattrone’s Qatalyst Group shows that Quattrone may climb back to his prime spot in Silicon Valley faster than his detractors would have expected..

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/~3/268128438/

In fine Flickr tradition, users are protesting against the latest change at Flickr, Tuesday’s introduction of video. Over 24,000 members have joined the We Say NO to Videos on Flickr group and NO VIDEO ON FLICKR!!! has 10,000 members.

Complaints against video on Flickr range from slowing Flickr down, lack of community consultation and video diminishing Flickr’s photo focused purpose.

We’re interested in what you think, do you support video on Flickr? Poll below or leave a comment.

(above image credit: (CC) Franzi on Flickr)

(image credits, (CC) Mike Licht

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/~3/268110276/

Earlier today, venture capitalist Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures wrote a post expressing concern that Web startups tend to languish after they are bought by big companies. To help make his point, Wilson reproduced the comScore chart above, which suggests that the number of people visiting the bookmarking service del.icio.us, which is owned by Yahoo, has dropped off considerably over the past nine months. Wilson was an investor in del.icio.us and profited from its sale to Yahoo in December, 2005. Yet he still laments its apparent struggles under Yahoo’s ownership.

But how bad is del.icio.us struggling really? Yahoo execs always point to it as an internal success story. We asked founder Joshua Schachter, who still runs the service as a Yahoo employee. Despite the stats bandied about by his former investor, Schachter responded by e-mail:

We continue to grow normally.

Unique users is not a good measure of our growth, though.

Much of our traffic is through the Firefox and other browser extensions, which is not measured by these systems.

Additionally, we cut off search indexing several months ago, which also hurts the UU [unique user] numbers.

Since our goal here is not to grow traffic but instead provide a way for people to save things, it’s not something I am really worried about.

That certainly is plausible. Whenever I use del.icio.us I simply save Web pages from the plug-in on my browser, and rarely actually go to the site. I’d estimate that my ratio of saving things to going to the site is 10 to 1, maybe even 20 to 1. As long as people keep saving things to del.icio.us it could prove to be a boon to Yahoo in better search results alone—no matter what the traffic situation is.

But del.icio.us has bigger problems. It has not changed much in years and cannot seem to get its 2.0 version out the door. This despite the fact that Schachter’s team of engineers has been working diligently on improvements since last September. The new version looked like it was ready to go in January, but then the launch was mysteriously pulled. There are rumors that scalability issues were plaguing the project. Hell, it’s been so long that Delicious 2.0 is news again (and, oh yeah, the periods are going away).

While I still do find del.icio.us a useful service, I don’t use it as much as I once did. The Web has evolved and del.cio.us, for whatever reason, has been held back. Here’s to hoping it can push out Delicious 2.0 before Yahoo gets acquired. Because, although Wilson probably won’t be shedding a tear for Yahoo, it is not only small companies that get stifled in acquisitions.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/268071456/

The Facebook Beacon controversy may not be making headlines any more, but the privacy concerns it raised still linger. According to this post about MyDataIsMyData, an upcoming privacy-monitoring service sponsored by classifieds site Flugpo, Beacon may still monitor traffic and personal data, even if a user has opted-out of the system. In response, MyDataIsMyData is creating a plugin for Internet Explorer that enables users to eliminate any traces of Beacon from their system.

Facebook Beacon tracks usage information by monitoring cookies on a client’s computer. As users browse various participating websites, such as Blockbuster and eBay, their activities are relayed back to Facebook, where it can be shared with friends. Many users find such notifications to be intrusive, and much of the original controversy stemmed from the automatic inclusion of all users in the system.

The MyDataIsMyData plug-in notifies users via their browser toolbar when Facebook or one of Beacon’s participating affiliates creates or accesses these cookies. The plug-in can automatically delete these cookies at regular intervals, and also allows for users to individually select which (if any) sites will still function with Beacon. Finally, the toolbar will feature a constantly-updated list of sites that participate in Beacon, allowing users to boycott them, should they choose to do so. MyDataIsMyData will soon be available for Internet Exporer, and plans to expand to offer functionality for both Firefox and Macintosh-based browsers.

It should be noted that while the plugin offers some value in terms of a sense of security, it is fairly easy to monitor cookies with a number of extensions using the Firefox browser. Furthermore, by installing the free toolbar, the users will be placing their trust in MyDataIsMyData—the same type of users who presumably would be put off by installing any sort of monitoring software on their computers.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/268057135/

Unlike dating in the real world where friends and family provide introductions and serve as wingmen, online dating is usually a very solitary experience. Singles browse through profile after profile (perhaps in addition to filling out tedious questionnaires and compatibility tests) in hopes that they’ll stumble upon someone with a mutual attraction.

Engage is a next generation dating site striving to make online dating a more social (and consequently more effective) experience. The service is officially announcing the second major version of its site at our LA party tonight.

Engage differentiates itself from traditional dating sites (Match, eHarmony, PlentyofFish, etc) by getting friends involved in the process of finding you that perfect guy or gal. If you are looking for love (and Engage is certainly geared towards those looking to land serious relationships, not set up transitory encounters), you can invite your real-life friends to become friends on Engage. Once onboard, they sit in a friends list that stays with you on the left-hand side of the site wherever you go.

These friends are there to help you break the ice and determine who’s worth your time. They can suggest people they find on the site for you, they can write recommendations and introductory notes, and they can provide their 2 cents when others have made recommendations. And if they happen to find someone not quite right for you but good for someone else they know, they can suggest that person by providing the other friend’s email address (which helps distribute Engage through viral marketing).

Engage has worked to make it generally very easy and rewarding for friends to get involved. Quick suggestions can be made throughout the site with minimal clicks of the mouse, and users get points every time they behave in a supportive manner. The site is designed much like a social network, which should make it accessible by those familiar with Facebook, et al.

This idea of “social dating” certainly has its merits. People are more likely to respond to inquiries when they see that their pursuers have friends who think highly of them. And friend recommendations could lead a user to discover desirable singles who they wouldn’t have contacted otherwise.

That said, I have my doubts about Engage’s model, such as whether or not there are enough eager matchmakers in the world to make the system work. It’s also unclear to me whether a substantial number of people will feel comfortable getting their friends and family so involved in the courting process, especially when using the still-taboo method of online dating.

This is a site I’d like to see work, especially since the online dating industry needs some kicks of innovation. Whether it catches on will depend primarily on sociology not technology, since the site has certainly been designed well enough.

Engage raised $5M in Series A from Advanced Tech Ventures in 2006. The site will remain free until Q4 2008, at which point it will cost around $20/mo.

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/~3/268014479/

Interesting news coming out of Washington D.C. today around the addition of Google advertisement on Yahoo search result pages. House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, Jr. (D-MI) (pictured) and Judiciary Ranking Member Lamar Smith (R-TX) made a joint statement saying that the deal “further underscore[s] the need for a hearing on the state of competition on the Internet and online advertising.”

In February, the House Judiciary Committee announced plans to hold a hearing on the State of Competition on the Internet. Yesterday’s announcement of a two-week trial venture between Yahoo! and Google, as well as reports of a possible Yahoo!/AOL merger, further underscore the need for a hearing on the state of competition on the Internet and online advertising. The Judiciary Committee’s Task Force on Competition Policy and Antitrust Laws will continue to explore these issues.

Microsoft must be happy to see this, which underscores the fact that the government won’t sit on the sidelines as the Internet giants sort out who gets Yahoo’s search assets. It’s time for everyone to open their checkbooks and call their lobbyists. Congress wants a piece of Yahoo, too.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/267999807/

Tonight’s TechCrunch MeetUp in LA co-hosted with PopSugar is sold out. For the 2,000 of you coming (and 500 on the wait list), here are the final details that you need to know.

MySpace will be spinning MySpace Music artists for us all night, they’re bringing in celebrity DJ Perry Ferrell for a special appearance. PopSugar will be making special announcements this evening. And we’re excited that dating site Engage will be launching their new online “social media” product at tonight’s event—be sure to check it out.

For those of you who can’t be with us, please check out official event photos at: www.picapp.com. We will be posting them this evening following the event. If anyone posts photos or videos to Flickr, please tag them techcrunchmeetup12.

Also thank you to Brian Solis and the Bub.blicio.us team for giving us the red-carpet treatment at this evening’s event (check out tomorrow’s post for video highlights.) Before the event, between 2:30 and 5:30 PM, Solis is also helping me out with a project to capture the best elevator pitches on video from attending CEOs and founders. If you want to give us your pitch, it’s still not to late. (Send an email to brian [at] future-works or tips [at] techcrunch).

If you’re attending the event Mo’Jiva is providing some information via your mobile device at: meetup.mojiva.com.

Event Details:

• Date: Thursday, April 10, 2008
• Time: 6:30 pm - midnight
• Venue: Vanguard, 6021 Hollywood Boulevard, Hollywood (maps: Google / Microsoft / Yahoo)
• Photo/Flickr Tag: techcrunchmeetup12
• For additional details, see our dedicated event page.
• Got your tickets? Join the MySpace or Facebook event pages as well.

We’d like to thank the sponsors who made this meetup possible. The following messages are from them:

Partner Level:

MySpace: The largest social network on the internet and favorite community to music and other artists, big and small. MySpace will showcase new apps on the MySpace Developer Platform

Engage: The Internet’s first social dating community, combines contemporary social networking principles with established online dating tools to enable people to make meaningful connections in a way that is more like the real world. Community members can be single or involved in a relationship, and everyone works together to help like-minded individuals find one another in a fun, intuitive and low-pressure environment. Registration is fast and free, and it’s easy to invite your friends along for the good times. And we’re always updating the Engage Blog — check out all the photos, videos and commentary from the Geek Goes Chic Meet-up after the event, all from an Engage perspective. We look forward to meeting you!

Global Grind: The place for you to explore multimedia that matters to you. Discover new content, collect your favorites, share them with the world, and discuss them with the community. Global Grind makes it easy to access what your friends and those who share your tastes are surfing, watching, reading, and talking about. Get all the top news, gossip, humor, entertainment and more from around the web in one place, as voted on by our users.

Velocity Interactive Group: A venture fund organized by Ross Levinsohn, Jon Miller, and comVentures with offices in LA, Palo Alto and New York. Velocity Interactive Group is focused on digital media and communications. As of February 2008, it had $1.5B in assets under management.

Product Level:

CoComment.com: is the leading provider of comment and blog access, aggregation and tracking technology. The company enables better conversations on the web by providing users the ability to centralize, track and share comments anywhere online. Through integration with major media companies and publishing platforms, coComment increases the visibility and exposure of comments to a greater user base of active commenters, bloggers and the public - creating more interesting user experiences, driving users to the commenting sites and linking conversations with a community.

Dimdim: The world’s free, open source web meeting company. Dimdim provides a free, hosted Web conferencing service where anyone can share their desktop, show slides, collaborate, chat, talk and broadcast via webcam with absolutely no download required for attendees. With Dimdim, now the world can meet freely at http://www.dimdim.com

DocStoc: DocStoc wants to do for documents what YouTube did for videos: put them online.

E.Factor: an E2E networking community. The only global social connector made by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs.

Geni: Geni is a social-networking website for families to explore their geneology. Geni aspires to create a family tree of the whole world.

Mahalo: Mahalo is a human powered search engine founded by Silicon Valley veteran entrepreneur Jason Calacanis. Results are generated non-algorithmically by a team of profile builders who create pages for search terms.

Media Temple: TechCrunch’s own hosting provider, headquartered in LA. They keep the lights on at TechCrunch and we really appreciate their support.

Meebo: The Web’s live interaction platform. Founded in September 2005, over 30 million people use Meebo monthly, either at Meebo.com, or through Meebo Rooms on partner sites. Meebo’s investors include Sequoia Capital and Draper Fisher Jurvetson. Visit Meebo.com to connect with friends live on the Web.

PicApp: Enables bloggers to choose from extensive collections of millions of copyrighted images being updated by the thousands each day that have been licensed from Getty Images, Corbis and other prestigious image agencies to visualize the content on their web sites. Each image is accompanied by a non-intrusive ad to drive royalties to the related content partners, instead of the traditional license fees.

Rubicon Project: Rubicon provides a dashboard to manage all of your ad networks It offers a way to organize and optimize your advertising initiatives. It aggregates stats and other data on all of your website’s ad publishers and helps you decide how and when to place ads from each individual network. You can track ad network performance by demographic, geographic location and context.

ThisNext: ThisNext is a social commerce site where people recommend their favorite products so others can discover what’s best to buy online. It blends two powerful elements of real-world shopping otherwise lost for online consumers: word-of-mouth.

Event Level

EventBrite: Thanks to Eventbrite for managing paperless ticketing and reservations for the TechCrunch MeetUp. Many thanks for keeping us organized.

MailChimp: Mailchimp powers email marketing for over 15,000 companies worldwide, from small startups and web-dev agencies to large organizations like American Airlines and Mozilla.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/267976921/

Angie’s List, one of the largest sites for local service provider ratings, has received $35M from Battery Ventures, bringing their total funding to $48M. Battery will now hold a minority stake in the company.

Angie’s List was founded in 1995, and provides users with customer reviews on a variety of services, including plumbers, roofers, and handymen. The site has over 600,000 members in the United States, and it soon plans to expand abroad. Users must pay a fee to access content, but free trials are granted for a year in cities that have been added to the site recently.

Angie’s List had previously received $13 million in funding, largely from Aquent and BV Capital. Battery Ventures manages almost $3 billion in capital.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/267961650/

It was only a matter of time before someone created an online video-shopping marketplace. Mix together eBay and YouTube and you get Shopflick, a Los Angeles-based startup in private beta that wants to bring the art of video selling to the Web. Sellers can set up shop with their own page highlighting their store and the products they have for sale. Most of the information is presented in video format in Shopflick’s own buyer-friendly player that features a big “Buy Now” button. Shoppers can add comments to each item, share them, bookmark them as a favorite, or embed them elsewhere on the Web. We have 2,000 invites for TechCrunch readers (sign up here—the first 500 will be let in immediately and the rest over the next few weeks).

So far the startup has raised $1 million from angel investors in LA. But Shopflick has a heavy-hitter CEO in David Grant, the founder and former president of Fox TV Studios. Says Grant:

I think it can be an enormous business. Video selling is what television is. TV Commercials. People have tried to replicate video selling on television, which is a mistake.

The front page of Shopflick features a big video player that scrolls through featured items and could also become a prime advertising spot. Just like on TV, Shopflick plans on using its front page to promote items based on limited quantities or time. Shoppers can also browse by category, keyword, or tag. Most of the sellers—there are about 50 of them in the beta right now—are boutique shopkeepers, jewelery makers, or furniture designers from Brooklyn or LA.

Here is an example of a video by Uhuru, a Brooklyn furniture design company that uses sustainable materials:

Shopflick: Buy this product | Get your own Store Player

The site feels a little bit like what Etsy would be if it had video, except its sellers don’t focus on handmade goods. There is definitely an independent vibe. The site is geared towards women. It is heavy on hand creams, lingerie and kid’s clothes. But not the 50-year-old women in middle America who tend to watch the Home Shopping Network or QVC. Shopflick is going more for the hip 18-to-34-year-olds who live in big cities. Founder and president Patrick Yee says:

It is an $8 billion business on cable, but we are moving it from a linear model to an on-demand model, from a warehouse-QVC model to an on-demand user-generated model.

Shopflick does not hold any inventory. Like eBay, it just matches buyers and sellers, and collects listing and transaction fees. The first six months it will waive listing fees, but it plans to charge $10 to $20 a month, depending on the size of the store. Its transaction fees are a steep 12.5 percent, which is much higher than Amazon’s 7 percent or eBay’s 10 percent, but Amazon and eBay both charge a lot more in monthly fees. eBay charges as much as $300 a month for power sellers. Says Yee:

Ebay’s model is they are trying to take two thirds of the lifetime value up front,” says Yee. “We are flipping that. We lower the barriers to listing because we believe video will convert. We know video sells because it has been happening for 30 years.

On Shopflick, the sellers deal with inventory and shipping, and hope that the viral nature of video will help market their products. Shoppers are encouraged to recommend their favorite products, create collections of their favorite products, and even create their own videos. It is what Yee calls “user-generated merchandising.” To help sellers create the best videos, there is also a marketplace for videographers on Shopflick to help match sellers with video professionals. In this regard, it competes with TurnHere, but it doesn’t mark up the videographers’ fees.

Could this be where e-commerce is headed? Barry Diller, watch out.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/267929725/

During his work in redesigning the Pathfinder web site, Brian Dillard came across the infamous IE6 transparent PNGs issue and used two methods to tackle the issues. He decided to do a nice write-up explaining how he worked around the fact that IE6, while it would render PNGs, would not retain their alpha-channel transparency and produce unexpected colors in place of the transparency.

IE6’s lack of transparent PNG support is appalling, but Microsoft does offer a proprietary fix for the same problem: CSS behaviors, which are a non-standard extension to the CSS spec. By applying a special behavior to your PNG images, you can force IE6 to display them with their alpha transparency intact.

Coding this CSS behavior on an image-by-image basis would be tedious. Luckily, developer Angus Turnbull has released an open-source script that can be used to apply the behavior globally: IE PNG Fix. The current production release is v1.0 RC4, but a preview of v1.0 RC5 is also available.

While the IE PNG Fix script to dealt with the majority of the PNG transparency issue, there was still one problem that the script could not correct:

There is, however, one drawback to Turnbull’s script: It can’t account for PNG background images with a background-position other than top left. It will restore the alpha-channel transparency to such images, but it will reposition them to top left, potentially making your designs look even worse than they would have with an ugly gray halo where the transparency should be.

Brian turned to jQuery to help him resolve this by allowing him to re-insert the background images previously removed from IE6 as foreground images.

Full details, including code, of his solution can be found in his two part series linked below:

Hacking transparent PNG support into IE6 with IE PNG Fix, CSS and jQuery (part 1 of 2)

Hacking transparent PNG support into IE6 with IE PNG Fix, CSS and jQuery (part 2 of 2)

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/267895790/ajaxian-featured-tutorial-hacking-transparent-png-support-into-ie6-with-ie-png-fix-css-and-jquery