Ajax Girl

Ray Ozzie first hinted at it during a keynote speech last March. But tonight Microsoft is finally launching a preview beta of Live Mesh, a new Windows Live platform for syncing files and, eventually, applications across different devices. (Of course, for Microsoft, a beta means 10,000 people, so you have a pretty good chance of getting in if you sign up now).

Mesh lets you set up a virtual desktop online, and connect different computers to it. Put any file into a Mesh folder and it automatically syncs between the online desktop and every connected computer. Select a file or folder and you can easily share its contents—photos, videos, music, documents—with any friend or family member. You can also remotely control a connected computer from the Live Mesh desktop. Right now, this works with any computer, as long as it is running Windows XP or Vista. But the longer-term vision is to truly make this work with any device. Mac and mobile versions are coming later this year. And eventually, anything from Xboxes and DVRs to digital picture frames and printers could be connected through Mesh.

A hundred of Ozzie’s engineers have been working on Mesh for the past two years. At launch, it may not seem like much more than a combination of Windows Live SkyDrive and FolderShare, but under the hood it is an ambitious platform play. Mesh is really aimed at developers. Not only does it provide a framework for syncing files between devices, it can also sync applications. The way it does this is by using a two-way RSS developed by Ozzie called FeedSync, formerly called Simple Sharing Extensions.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/275879409/

Google terminates advertising partnerships regularly based on fraud or consumer protection issues, or just because. They never comment publicly on any particular instance, but it’s usually pretty easy to guess.

The most recent example is EcoCho a new search engine that says they donate part of revenue to carbon offsets. I made fun of them last week when they launched, since the exact connection between their revenue and the carbon offsets was rather vague (they say “up to two trees” will be sponsored for every 1,000 searches on the site, which has exactly no meaning whatsoever).

Google has terminated them, the company says. That leaves EcoCho with only Yahoo to provide search and advertising to the site. You may want to go try out the service before it shuts down, because this thing is doing a belly flop into the deadpool.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/275791558/

Too often in the rush of trying to launch something new, entrepreneurs pay too little attention to coming up with a good name for their product or company. It might start off as a part-time project and they just want to get it up and running. So they pick the first name that comes to mind—often something awful—and then they are stuck with it.

That is what happened to SimulScribe, a handy voice-to-text service that turns voicemails into e-mail. When James Siminoff and Mark Dillon started SimulScribe in 2003, both had other full-time businesses. It was a side project that they codenamed “Simultaneous Voicemail Transcription,” which they shortened to SimulScribe. But now five years later, it is a full-time gig that’s growing but the name is holding back the startup. Siminoff admits:

The name SimulScribe totally sucks for our business. People have a real challenge remembering the name and they cannot spell it, which is a real problem considering that new customers need to type in our web address to sign up. When your company offers a consumer product that relies on viral marketing, a difficult name is a really bad thing. In fact, I’m constantly amazed at how well we have been able to do with such a shitty name.

Name recognition is especially important when you are up against better-funded competitors like SpinVox (which could also use a better name, but has raised $200 million to SimulScribe’s $5.7 million). Siminoff has been looking for a new name for two years, one with a domain that wouldn’t cost an arm and a leg. Finally, a few months ago after a red-eye flight from LA to New York, after not returning many phone calls for days, a friend left a message saying he was tired of playing phone tag. Siminoff immediately called his chief marketing officer (at 6:30 in the morning) and told him to buy the domain. But PhoneTag.com was taken.

Four months and $30,000 later, he bought the domain, and today SimulScribe is changing its name to PhoneTag. It is a much better name. SimulScribe was so off-putting somehow, but PhoneTag sounds fun. What do readers think, will it make any difference?

In celebration of its new name. PhoneTag is giving away a free 30-day trial plus a special “F*#@ Voicemail” T-shirt to the first 100 TechCrunch readers who sign up here. The service is also launching a new feature today. You upload your contacts from Outlook, Mac Address Book, Gmail, or Yahoo, and every time you get a voicemail from a contact, you can email them back. That’s the kind of phone tag I could play all day.

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Sony has agreed to acquire Gracenote for about $260M.

Gracenote provides a range of music-related solutions including MusicID, which detects which song is currently being played by an application and loads track information for the user (such as artist and album names). MusicID leverages a database of over 6M CDs and 80M tracks. Its technology has been in development since 1995 (previously under the name CDDB).

Consumer music app services such as Apple iTunes, Yahoo! Music Jukebox, and Winamp use Gracenote for their music detection capabilities.

Gracenote will continue to operate separately from Sony after the deal is closed, which will probably happen in late May. Senior management will stay on.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/275717139/

I’ve been talking about event driven application design in JavaScript in January last year and inspired Caridy Patiño to write his Bubbling Library based on these ideas.

Caridy now upped the ante a bit by talking about decoupling using the bubbling library over on the YUI blog.

In essence, his solution allows you to have custom events on application modules and listen to them independent of execution order or availability. Simply using custom events can get you in a pickle if you make yourself dependent on their order. With the decoupling solution proposed by Caridy this becomes one less issue to worry about.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/275707937/making-application-modules-communicate-with-each-other-using-decoupling

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Yahoo’s first-quarter earnings are out. The conference call is about to start.

5:03 ET: Boiler plate risks, blah, blah, blah

5:05 ET: Jerry Yang. We are very proud fop our Q1 results. Q1 revenue and cash flow in the upper half of our guidance, and raising guidance for the rest of the year. Results underscore the fact that our strategy is beginning t pay off: attract the most users, serve the most advertisers, and develop the best platform. Investments in innovation beginning to bring results. Will address MSFT bid, Q1 performance, and strategy

After a careful evaluation our board determined that MSFT’s offer undervalued Yahoo. Worldwide audience, strategic position in Asia, mobile, scale, tools, and technology. Our board has continued to be open to offers, exploring a number of strategic alternatives. If you take one thing away from thsi Discussion is that our board and management are committed to maximizing shareholder value and will not enter into any transaction that undervalues the company.

results. acquired Maven networks, previewed Amp advertising program, closed the gap on search relevance. Strategy: increasing volume and yield across both search and display. Focusing on starting points. Yield objective is rooted on serving advertisers so well they will insist on working with us. Working on video and mobile, and ads that span both search and display. We closed the revenue search ad gap between ourselves and the leader. Our largest opportunity is in display. With our leadership in display, starting points, and AMPs program, we have [a lot of opportunity here]

5:14 ET: Sue Decker. longterm objectives, becoming starting point for consumers and must0buy for advertisers. Approach to starting points is 3 changes in startegy, instead of hundreds of propertes, narrowing focus to make these starting points teh best on teh Web. Opening up to third parties. Giving peopel what they want instead of solely directingthem to Yahoo properties. Great contenet good for our users and financed by others. 3rd. linking Yahoo users to friends, family, and community. We are not trying to become another social network.

In March, we made it clear that driving 10% volume growth in search is long-term value driver. We exceeded that in the first quarter. Focused on game-changing features that will differentiate Yahoo from the leader. SearchAssist, which allows searchers to complete searches faster, also integrated with video and other search types. Our next advance is OpenSearch, Later in Q2 we will open the Search interface to developers. Call this Search Monkey. We are also innovating in mobile search. OneSearch is geared towards the mobile user. This quarter released OneSearch 2.0 with voice activated features.

Comscore relevancy score was 72.9 percent versus 69 percent for the next competitor. Mentions Buzz. Use votes to develop popularity indices. Over 120 publishers are in the beta. Yahoo.com has sent tens of millions of referrals in the beta to partners. comscore says 4 million unique visitors in the first month. With our enormous scale this should make us the partner of choice for publishers and bring users back for more as a key starting point.
video on Flickr launched a few weeks ago. Has quadrupled video uploads to Yahoo.

Panama. owned and operated site revenue per search was up 10 percent in the US. Have improved click yield. price per click upside. Can make the marketplace more efficient. Just launched minimum bid changes. eliminating 10 cent minimum bid, rewards advertisers for quality. the site is the most significant since the launch of Panama, in terms of engineering and potential. important in reaching our three-year gal of 15% growth in revenue per search.

test with Google. Premature to speculate what kind of arrangement that may result in. But goal is to improve search monetization. Overall display pricing in 1Q was up slightly as inventory shifted from guaranteed to non-guaranteed inventory.

Compared to search we are buying reach through two large players in display (Blue Lithium and). Simplifying the market can increase display yield. We are redesigning ad managenet. Announced AMP, previewed it with newspaper partners, will roll it out in Q3. should result in increase in display yield. Adding insights into display inventory, and already seeing yield benefits. the upside can be even greater.

5:31 ET: We feel we are on the verge of fundamentally changing the game in the most important advertising category: display.

reaffirming 2008 revenue outlook and increasing cash flow outllook. During Q1 recorded $29M related to workforce realignment. Also recorded $14M in cost for outside advisers related to MSFT’s unsolicited proposal. We will discuss resulst normalized for these items.

increasingly managing our business around GAAP revenue.

free cash flow: $647M

in Q1 $351M payment from AT&T. excluding this one-tiem payment, it was $297M

reinvested $79M in Yahoo stock.

$166M in two acquisitions: Maven Networks and FoxyTunes

Investments in Asian companies such as Alibaba was $13.8B or $10 per share, does not include investments Alibaba holds in Taoboa or other properties. Non-cash gain of $141M related to the Alibaba IPO.

GAAP Rev: $1.18B, up 9 percent
GAAP rev ex-TAC, up 14 percent.
O-and-O search up 15 percent
O-and-O display up 16 percent

Advertisers budgets may fall, but we believe the compelling ROI of online ads will cushion the impact.

Strategic relationships with AT&T and Rogers now reflect ad revenue shares, declining portal revenues fees will impact us. Expect fee line to be flat in 2008., woith y-o-y declines in teh back half. But we believe thee part

US revenues ex tac, up 17 peercent
Inter
14,800 employees

Business outlook for FY08. changing to GAAP (excludes workforce, AT&T payment, MSFT related expenses):

GAAP revenue of $7.2B to $8B
Operating cash flow: $1.1775B to $2.025B
free cash flow $900M to $1.050B
CapEx: $675M to $775M

Q: You are guiding 20 percent revenue growth, outstrips estimates for online ad growth.

A: We believe

Sanford Bernstein: We noticed TAC is coming down as percentage of gross reveneus. Are you doing better deals, or is there a slowdown in network business?

A: Overall TAC rates decreased around 4%. Average TAC still 78% globally. We believe still upward pressure on TAC rates. As we build out our network display business, competitors are also building out a network display business, we will have to compete for that business.

Q: Right Media and weakness in travel and other segments?

Sue: We refer tpo remnant inventory as non0gauranteed. Last fall we talked about moving that in Right Media (remnant ads). We are seeing significant growth in class 2 (remnant), very strong growth in revenues and CPMs, with revenues close to doubling in that category.

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Update: Erick is live blogging the earnings call.

Yahoo released Q1 financials moments ago, and blew through expectations. Total revenue for the quarter was $1.8 billion, net revenues were $1.35 billion. Net Income was $542 million, or $0.37 per share. That includes a one time non-cash gain related to Alibaba’s IPO. Net of that, EPS are $0.11.

Analysts were expecting Q1 net revenues of around $1.33 billion, ebitda of $435 million and EPS of $0.09/share. Citigroup had revised estimates of $1.34 billion, just under the reported results.

Other interesting tidbits:

• Revenues were up 19% for the quarter compared to Q12007 in the U.S., and 11% internationally.
• Net revenues of $1,352 million were a 14 percent increase compared to $1,183 million for the same period of 2007.
• Operating income for the first quarter of 2008 was $121 million, a 28 percent decrease compared to $169 million for the same period of 2007.
• Yahoo has spent $14 million to date on outside advisors on the Microsoft deal
• They took a $29 million charge for severance arrangements.

What does this mean for Yahoo? Probably not much relative to other things going on, although it is certainly good news for them. A very high percentage of Yahoo’s stock is in the hands of arbitrageurs, however, who are focused only on whether or not the deal with Microsoft will happen or not, as opposed to the fundamental financial health of the company. They’ll be listening closely to the earnings call at 2 pm PST for messages about the Yahoo search deal with Google. All indications suggest that Yahoo is getting a roughly 100% revenue increase from search queries outsourced to Google.

In the meantime, Microsoft is saying the results are irrelevant to their offer. But if Yahoo signals that they think a long term Google deal is a real possibility, they may fold, and quickly.

We’ll be live blogging the earnings announcement at 2 pm.

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Source: TechCrunch
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Widgetbox is jumping on the iPhone bandwagon by releasing a special gallery of widgets tailored to the popular device’s screen.

There are 16 widgets available to start, including an RSS output of The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs and a BART QuickPlanner tool for finding mass transport rides around the Bay Area. A tutorial is being provided for developers to create their own iPhone-ready widgets, which will then go into the gallery.

Despite Jobs’ insistence that all regular websites work well on the iPhone, it’s always nice to see websites tailored for the device because when it comes down to it, pinching to zoom in and out gets tiresome. This new gallery is especially nice because mobile users generally want access to quick information while on the go, and widgets are inherently designed for small bits of consumption. If you find a few widgets you like, you can add them to your home screen for easy access.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/275655501/

Automatic spell check has been built into many browsers for years, but typos continue to plague even the most reputable websites (and print media, for that matter). Recognizing this fact, a number of services have emerged that will continuously monitor your site for spelling errors.

Spellr.us, currently in a registration-required beta, plans to offer hourly, daily, and weekly sweeps of your site, and will provide a visual snapshot of a page with errors clearly marked with strikethroughs. Their main competitor at this point is NetMechanic, which has been available for years but lacks any of the visualizations promised by Spellr.us.

This space is still in its infancy, but the demand for these services is strong. Keep a look out for Spellr.us in the near future.

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In this edition of Designing Details, I want to share with you a technique we use to go the extra mile on interface design. We believe little touches like these really improve the overall experience when using our products. The best way to show you is with a video:

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/988-designing-details-autoscrolling-the-edit-state