Ajax Girl

The Australian Newspaper (part of the News Corp empire) has outed the strange business practices of Mark Tucker, Google Australia’s only Australian director as part of a piece on Google Street View and privacy.

According to Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC, Australia’s SEC) documents, Tucker maintains six different versions of himself, complete with varying birthdate, for his various corporate investments:

According to data filed with the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, six different Mark Tuckers live at the Mona Vale address. All were born in the Sydney beachside suburb of Manly - but on slightly different dates.

According to ASIC records one Mr Tucker was born on January 21, 1953, one was born on January 13, 1953, another born on January 25, 1953.

Another Mr Tucker - who is both the director and secretary of a company called Bahama Acres Holding Company - is registered as living at the same address but was born on January 12, 1953.

A Mark Tucker living at the Mona Vale address - who is currently the director of the Tucker Family Superannuation Co - was born on January 12, 1963, while another Mr Tucker at the same address was born on March 12, 1953.

Tucker claimed that the varying dates were “typographical errors,” but 6 typographical errors? A company involved in the Bahama’s would automatically raise eyebrows, but six different records is more interesting considering that data matching for tax purposes in Australia usually relies on matching details of directors with a heavy emphasis on a directors date of birth.

There may be nothing untowards here, and we wouldn’t suggest that there is, but someone in Mountain View will be calling Australia shortly, if they haven’t already. There may also be an ASIC or ATO (Australian Tax Office) investigation into Tucker’s business affairs and that’s not going to be a good look for a Google Director.

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/~3/268738679/

Hulu has started offering the above box to international users visiting the site from outside of the United States, the first sign that the service may soon be available in more countries than one.

First spotted by Watch TV Online, the region drop down box preferences Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia above all other countries, suggesting that they might be the first outside of the United States with Hulu access.

I spoke with Eric Feng, the CTO of Hulu briefly when Mark interviewed him back in January and I asked him about international distribution then. Mark wrote the response up as:

Hulu is working on providing its videos internationally but content rights issues will take time to work through. Eric couldn’t provide any time table for when we might see Hulu available internationally

I do recall Eric saying that Hulu was keen on rolling out international access, and the only thing holding them back was the rights holders, but given a chance they’d press the button tomorrow.

In the mean time, read this post on how to access Hulu now from outside of the United States.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/268725229/

Anyone who’s ever played phone tag knows just how tough it can be to schedule a meeting with someone. Jiffle aims to remove the fuss involved with coordinating availability by enabling users to create appointments on other people’s calendars. The program is already fully integrated with Outlook, and beginning next week it will be compatible with Google Calendar as well.

Upon opening a Jiffle calendar, users are presented with a schedule of their associate’s availability. With a few clicks, a new appointment can be created in a manner that will come naturally to anyone who’s used a standard calendar application.

Jiffle believes that its application could be a boon to participants in Google’s Adwords program. After clicking on an appealing ad, consumers will no longer have to call customer support or sales representatives to schedule appointments - they can simply add themselves into an available time slot. Jiffle also thinks that Cisco’s WebEx could be used in conjunction with the service to further expedite meetings.

There are some strong competitors to Jiffle, including TimeBridge, which already supports Google Calendar. TimeBridge also helps facilitate group meetings through use of a point system, which allows users to vote on their preferred times. We expect to see other major developments in this space very soon.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/268707797/

According to co-founder Fabrice Grinda, “OLX is probably the largest classified site no one has ever heard of.” And now it’s also the most funded classified site no one has ever heard of, having secured an additional $13.5M in Series B funding today from General Catalyst, Bessemer Venture Partners, Founders Fund, and DN Capital.

The round brings OLX’s total funding up to $23.5M after raising a previously undisclosed Series A round of $10M in September 2007 with the same VCs and various angels.

Americans are not likely to have heard of OLX because its popularity lies mainly outside of the United States in places like Spain, India, Portugal, Mexico, South America, China, and the Philippines. It has established a presence in a total of 40 countries while supporting 15 languages. Much of its success in the Philippines can be attributed to its white label partnership with Friendster. Its offices are also spread over the globe with 92 employees working out of New York, Buenos Aires, Beijing, and Moscow.

The idea behind OLX, in addition to becoming Craigslist for the rest of the world, is to improve on the technology of first generation classified sites. Grinda prides OLX in its Web 2.0 features which include social network widgets, better search, Ajax-based editors, interactive maps, and mobile versions.

OLX was launched in June 2006 by Grinda with co-founder Alec Oxenford. In addition to taking on Craigslist, OLX faces off against eBay’s Kijiji, which poses the biggest international threat because it has also taken an aggressive global campaign.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/268694614/

Hacker News, a small but influential digg/reddit-like tech news site hosted at Y Combinator, is asking its users if stories from Silicon Valley gossip site Valleywag should be banned from the service.

Y Combinator founder Paul Graham wrote “Several users have suggested we ban Valleywag, not for anything in particular that they write about, but because their articles are always such deliberate linkbait. I personally agree. In 99% of Valleywag articles, the most interesting thing is the title. But I don’t want to be accused of censorship, so I thought I’d ask for opinions first.”

After 20 hours of voting, 60% of the 400+ people who voted said yes to the ban. One commenter writes “Don’t rely on the tyranny of the democracy. Use this as an opportunity to build a framework based on principle and apply it across the board. When you build constitutions, you have to do it in private, with great minds and based on timeless principles… and weight in fact the true nature of man.”

Based on the voting, Hacker News then banned them from the site.

Hacker News is still in the honeymoon period - it hasn’t yet attracted such a large readership that the trolls have taken up permanent residence. After mentioning them a couple of times and seeing comments asking me to please stop writing about them, I asked the community if they’d prefer I didn’t mention them. The responses were mixed.

It’s clear that the site is aiming for intelligent and thoughtful discussion, so it’s no surprise that they are thinking of banning the toxic wasteland known as Valleywag. The question is, will larger sites, hoping to avoid the Valleywag trolls, begin to ban them, too?

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/268693721/

EchoStar (now known as DISH Network Corporation) was dealt yet another blow in its ongoing patent battle with Tivo as the U.S. Appeals Court ruled against them. The dispute involves EchoStar’s alleged infringement of Tivo’s TimeWarp patent, which allows users to record one program while watching another. Tivo applied for the patent in 1998, and it was granted in 2001.

In 2004 Tivo successfully sued EchoStar for its Dish Network DVR, which provided very similar functionality to Tivo’s product. EchoStar was ordered to pay Tivo $73.9M in damages. The company has subsequently appealed the ruling a number of times, but has not been successful in getting it overturned.

The Dish Network has advised customers that the latest rulings will have no effect on their DVR service, stating that they have deployed “next-generation DVR software” that will not infringe on Tivo’s patent. The company has also declared that it intends to appeal the latest ruling all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Dish has a lot more lawyer money than TiVo, and it is going to drag this thing out as long as it can.

Thomas Hawk’s Digital Connection was the first site to report the news.

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/~3/268646168/

Following Michael’s post the other day about the future of social networking, we have heard of several more ways the mobile, location-aware nut is being cracked already.

One of these is an “experiment” by MyBlogLog started at eTech and SXSW that leverages Bluetooth technology to discover the people around you. The Java-based service, previously named “Meetspace” but now known as MBL Mobile, works on both Bluetooth-enabled laptops and Blackberrys.

Once you’ve installed the Java applet and bound your Bluetooth ID to your MyBlogLog ID, you will be able to see other MyBlogLog members within a range of about 30 feet who have also opted into the special service. Their avatars show up on a page that breaks people down into “People Around You” and “People Encountered Most”, the former being those currently detected near you and the latter being those you’ve found yourself near the most. You can click on users to see their activity streams and commonly shared groups.

This service obviously works best when you have a group of geeks huddling around the same areas, such as conference halls. As Marshall Kirkpatrick pointed out on RRW, it also has privacy implications that should give MyBlogLog users pause before they sign up.

For other companies working on location-aware social networking technologies, check out Imity, Mobiluck, Aka Aki, and Loopt. The first three, like MyBlogLog, use Bluetooth-based detection whereas Loopt depends on GPS. LimeJuice and MeetMoi are two similarly intended startups that only require SMS. In the long run, GPS is probably the best technology for this sort of thing (provides much greater range and detail than Bluetooth), but unfortunately lots of phones don’t have GPS capabilities yet.

Also see our posts on an iPhone-only social network and the holy grail for mobile social networks.

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/~3/268628050/

Google’s data infrastructure is massive and spread across the world. All that Web crawling, indexing, and searching takes enormous amounts of computing power, not to mention everyone pounding away at Gmail, Google Apps, Blogger, Google Reader, and every other project dreamed up at the Googleplex. But where are all of these data centers and how many are there? Google doesn’t really say. But that doesn’t keep peopel from trying to figure it out. Royal Pingdom has out together this map of all known Google data centers, including spaces it leases and that are under construction. The maps are based on this list compiled by Data Center Knowledge. (And, no, Royal Pingdom didn’t put these on Google Maps).

There are 36 data centers in all—19 in the U.S., 12 in Europe, 3 in Asia, and one each in Russia and South America. Future data center sites may include Taiwan, Malaysia, Lithuania, and Blythewood, South Carolina, where Google has reportedly bought 466 acres of land.

Anyone know how many data centers Microsoft keeps, or Yahoo, or IBM, for that matter?

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/268597508/

John Resig has put out Dromaeo maybe a touch before he wanted to due to people finding it The site hosts a subset of the WebKit Sun Spider JavaScript engine tests right now, with the desire to push on and do a lot more.

You can run tests and then compare your own results. What is particularly cool about all of this, is how we can harvest performance data. If enough people start running this bad boy from different parts of the world, and different devices (especially mobile devices) we will get a nice picture of performance of JavaScript engines.

The Mozilla Wiki has more information which covers the methodology, changes the other browsers would like to see, how to download and run locally, and a lot more.

Cool stuff. I hope to see this expand beyond JavaScript too and get even more “real world”.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/268589077/dromaeo-javascript-engine-testing

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/963-zrich-chamber-orchestra-on-a-roll