Ajax Girl

UK startup WeeWorld is offering a avatar focused social networking service that is doing some great numbers.

WeeWorld is pitched as the “world’s first multiplatform visual identity” and offers a personalized Web experience that can be used across IM, blogs and social networking sites. WeeWorld users design a WeeMee, a customizable avatar that gets its own space, and embeding is fully built in for users. The site offers a social network platform in its own right, described as “a community offering of entertainment and exploration to enrich their online and mobile experience.”

Where WeeWorld gets more interesting is the link ins with big business. This from their email pitch to us:

On WeeWorld, users actually ask us for brands to help them express themselves. And the more we give them, the more they ask for … I think it works because it’s content, not ads. Plus it’s visual, fun, and helps our users express their mood and personality.

Brand advertisers and agencies are starting to get it and to get what WeeWorld is about. We’re in the midst of a big P&G PROM promotion for example. Girls are snapping up everything from make-up and hairstyles to beauty tips, while embracing brands like Herbal Essences, Crest Whitestrips, CoverGirl and more. They are even participating in brand-sponsored, surveys, contests and forums. Check it out at: weeworld.com/prom/.

comScore reports that the site did 100 million page views in March 2008 on 1 million uniques, and WeeWorld reports more than 21 million sign ups. The company took $15.5 million in their second round from Accel Partners and Benchmark Capital in 2006.

comScore notes the majority of users are female, and although many might presume that it’s a service targeted at kids, comScore notes broad usage among many age groups. Some screenshots of my avatar in action as follows.

Wow, I’m going to the prom!

Barack Obama, a LOLCat, myself and a Yeti in my apartment

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/273317196/

Awhile back I heard a rumour that Yahoo! had a “Gears-like” project that was cancelled. I thought this was a shame, as having Yahoo! pushing the browser would be a great thing, and I wished that we could all join forces and push together.

It turns out the rumour is true, and even better, the project has survived. Skylar Woodward of Brickhouse talks a little about it on his blog:

After 3 years of hiding out in the campuses of Yahoo! it’s good to finally have something external to show for it. Most exciting is the release of BrowserPlus, a software and software distribution framework that allows device developers (desktop, mobile, etc.) to seamlessly bridge the browser programming environment (DHTML, JS) to any component they can dream up (VoIP, image manipulation, data caching, etc.). Some time ago we created a platform team to focus on device software at Yahoo! and this is what has emerged amidst the quickly shifting strategy of the mothership. The 1.0 release of BrowserPlus is intended only for use by Yahoo! sites to enhance customer experiences; however, in the coming months, developers might expect the ability to use components on their own sites.

In the meantime, you can hack the framework on your own system after you’ve installed it to start experimenting. You can experience BrowserPlus currently through the PhotoDropper module on Mash, though direct installs are available for mac or pc

There isn’t a lot of information out there, but hopefully we will here more soon. It currently doesn’t seem to be open source, but I would love to reach out to the team, and Yahoo! in general. I consider Yahoo! a proponent of the Open Web, and would love to see us work together in a way that pushes the browser platform forward from the point of view of Web developers (as compared to browser vendors).

It would be great to take the PhotoDropper, and make the generic kick arse file uploader (input type="file" multiple="true") that I have wanted for a long time.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/273281233/yahoo-browserplus-the-rumour-is-true

eBay has gone on the record saying that they will sell Skype if they fail to find ways of using Skype to support its core ecommerce business.

Richard Waters at the Financial Times got the scoop directly from eBay’s CEO John Donahoe:

“What we’re testing this year are the synergies,” Mr Donahoe told the Financial Times this week after Ebay reported its latest earnings. “If the synergies are strong, we’ll keep it in our portfolio. If not, we’ll reassess it.” That could lead to the disposal of the business, he indicated.

eBay purchased Skype 3 years ago and has failed to find ways of using Skype across its other products in this time, so it is unlikely that miracles will start happening for Skype in the next 8 months. A sale is likely late this year or in the first half of next year.

The news comes despite strong Q1 figures for Skype and others reports suggesting a Google buyout or alliance may be in the works.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/273257446/

HP’s new online storage service Upline has been having quite the growing pains over the past few days.

We’ve heard that the service’s web interface went down several days ago, although the backups continued to function. But as of yesterday, everything appears to have gone down except for the telephone support, which doesn’t provide any information beyond an assurance that the engineering team is working on the problem (with no ETA for when it will be resolved).

This isn’t the greatest start for a service that absolutely needs reliability to survive.

Are you an HP Upline user? Please share your experience in the comments.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/273245711/

Social network platform Ning joined Slide in the Half Billion Dollar Club by raising $60 million (after banker fees) on a $500 million pre-money valuation. Like Slide, Ning used influential investment bank Allen & Co. to represent them in the deal.

Venturebeat broke the story based on a perusal of SEC filings, and we’ve confirmed it with Ning co-founder Marc Andreessen. “We have raised about $60M net at $500M pre from a set of institutional investors (who we’re not naming, since they said they’d prefer privacy, which we’d like to respect),” he said in an email.

Andreessen on how they’ll use the money: “We raised the money to enable us to keep scaling given our accelerating growth (over 230,000 networks on Ning now, growing at over 1,000 per day) and to make sure we have plenty of firepower to survive the oncoming nuclear winter. At current growth rates, we don’t need it to get to cash flow positive, but having lived through the last crunch, it’s good to be conservative with these things.”

The timing of this is great for Ning - they’re also the subject of a beautifully uncritical fluff piece in this month’s Fast Company that talks about “viral expansion loops.”

Ning has now raised over $100 million.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/273217023/

Dial Plus is a new service in public alpha looking to provide cellphone users with instant access to data relevant to the phone numbers they call.

Upon dialing or receiving calls from businesses, users are presented with directions, business hours, and/or menus. During personal calls, the service fetches contact profiles from social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn.

At first glance, the concept seems a little useless. I’ve never really had an urge to read through a friend’s Facebook profile while I was chatting on the phone, and unless you have a headset, it’s going to be tough to browse anything while chatting. The company’s demo video isn’t too convincing, either (it’s also painfully similar to the ubiquitous iPhone ads).

But after seeing Dial Plus in person, I think that the platform has some potential - it felt nice having the phone look things up for me automatically in the background, and made me question why smartphones don’t do this already. If Dial Plus can get enough developer support for the planned widget platform, the service has a chance to do well for itself.

The company has high hopes but a long way to go. Currently available are alpha versions of the software running on Windows Mobile phones, with support for platforms including the iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry on the way. Users must download a thin client, but all information is provided through the phone’s native browser.

Dial Plus is going to need to provide a complete product very quickly if they want to succeed. A number of other companies including Korean startup Callgate are already well-established and offer some of the same features. And with the release of the iPhone SDK and Android, we’re going to see this space fill up pretty quickly.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/273218797/

Journalist Steve Gillmor was a podcasting pioneer - In 2004 he began recording conversations with leading tech pundits about the issues of the day and posting them on IT Conversations. The show, which he called the Gillmor Gang, was picked up by Podshow in 2005, but a legal dispute led to a breakup in 2006 and the shutting down of the show, despite its huge popularity.

Last year Steve brought the show back and simply uploaded the files to Facebook. Today, though, the ‘Gang is back for real. It now has it’s own website here at TechCrunch - See and listen to the Gillmor Gang here. In a couple of weeks we’ll also be adding transcripts for all shows.

Jason Calacanis announced the news early, and Hugh Macleod made a cartoon to celebrate the moment. We were going to announce this on today’s show, but at about the 45 minute mark, when the conversation turned to vendor sports, I bailed out. Instead, Steve writes his thoughts about the announcement here.

To be clear - we didn’t acquire the show. But we are hosting it and managing the advertising (please contact us if you’d like to sponsor the Gillmor Gang). We’ll be announcing more partners like this in the future as well.

So please head on over to the show and let us know what you think. If you’d like to subscribe via a feed reader you’ll find the feed here.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/273180987/

You haven’t arrived until your web application has a German clone, it seems. Web innovation in that country too often distills down to “copy/paste innovation.”

And now, Freundfeed, which doesn’t appear to be a joke. Not only is it a ripoff of the FriendFeed name, they also use the same logo. The service hasn’t launched yet, but I’m willing to make an educated guess and say that it will likely rip off the rest of FriendFeed, too.

This guy is either the founder or an investor. Thanks for the tip, Jodi.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/273133920/

I am sorry, but making search better does not entail making me do more work. That seems to be the philosophy behind ChunkIt, a browser-plug-in that enhances your searches on Google, Yahoo, and other engines. It opens up a new pane that takes up half your screen and gives you a preview of the page behind each link, with a text summary (AKA “chunk”) and your keyword and similar concepts highlighted. It takes the idea of the visual preview that you see on Snap, SearchMe, or ManagedQ and replaces it with a text-heavy preview that forces you to skim through the chunk to see if the link is relevant. For my money, an actual image of what the page looks like usually conveys more information at a glance than a summary of the text.

ChunkIt debuts today in private beta as the latest product from TigerLogic,previously known as Raining Data Corporation, a money-losing enterprise data management software company. Check out the beta of ChunkIt and let us know what you think, but don’t expect it to redefine search as we know it.

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/~3/273067019/

These days everyone is a curator. If you talk to any social media entrepreneurs, chances are they will go on and on about how their Website is all about letting people “curate” the Web, whether that’s photos, videos, or news stories. It is usually code for:”Most people are too lazy to actually produce anything, but we let them organize and remix what other people have produced.” Who doesn’t love to remix?

Well, now you can actually do some real curating over the Web. The Brooklyn Museum is putting together a photography exhibit called Click, based on how people evaluate the submissions online. There was an open call for photographs of Brooklyn through March, and now through May 23 anyone can register and vote on the entries. The photos that get the most votes will be shown in an actual exhibit this summer—when the actual curators are at the beach.

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/~3/273048540/