Ajax Girl

CBS SportsLine founder Mike Levy is preparing to announce his newest venture, OPEN Sports Network.

The company’s website is still being built out but based on their description, it aspires to be a sports-oriented social network featuring betting-enabled fantasy sports games, rich news content, and perhaps most importantly, a game platform with open APIs.

Fantasy sports leagues are incredibly popular but many of them are still locked in archaic walled gardens. If OPEN Sports Network makes good on their promise of open APIs, the network could easily overtake competitors such as ESPN and Yahoo Sports.

OPEN Sports Network, located in Deerfield Beach, Florida, was founded in 2007 and the company says that it will launch in August 2008.

Levy founded SportsLine, his former project, in 1994. It was acquired by Viacom (then the parent company of CBS) in 2004 and is now the flagship sports site of the CBS network.

This news comes only a day after AOL’s acquisition of fantasy sports site Fleaflicker - clearly this market is poised for a shakeup.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/278007130/

Silicon Alley Insider reports that Twitter is looking to raise a Series C round.

They’re hearing that the company wants $15M at a $60M valuation, probably from former investors Union Square Ventures and Charles River Ventures, and perhaps from Spark Capital as well.

Twitter raised over $5M in funding last July. Digital Garage also invested in the company this past January as part of Twitter’s expansion into Japan (the only market where Twitter is actually making money).

The news of this Series C comes on the heels of a couple significant departures.

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/~3/277930583/

Cluttered and candy-coated are two ways to describe Wix, a new Flash-based website and widget creation tool that we’ve been anticipating for months. It’s also feature-rich, very well-designed, and - sorry - still in private beta.

Wix joins a multitude of browser-based website creators such as Weebly, Synthasite, and Google Pages. But it reminds me the most of Sprout, a widget-creation tool that can also be used to make websites, since both provide fluid Flash interfaces that appeal to your inner designer.

Both of these companies are blurring the line between content that’s meant to stand alone as distinct websites, and content that’s meant for syndication over blogs, social networks, and other destinations. It’s because of this obfuscation that they’ve opted to use the unspecific, yet self-referential, names “sprout” and “wix” when referring to their creations.

Whereas Sprout is mainly marketed as a tool for spreading media content, Wix most certainly appeals to a younger population that’s obsessed with expressing themselves online (call them MySpacers, if you will). Wix does have a collection of tasteful business themes, but the vast majority of its templates are for fun and fall into categories like “street art”, “emo”, “playground”, and “sexy”.

Once you pick a theme for your new website (or widget, just depending on your dimensions), you are taken to a popup Wix Editor that provides you with an overwhelming number of ways to spice up your creation. You can add shapes, clipart, photos, videos, songs and animations; you can tweak colors and set visual effects for user behavior; and you can add text paragraphs and headlines. Photos can be uploaded manually or pulled in from either Flickr or a royalty-free stock collection; videos can be embedded from YouTube; and there’s also a collection of free song clips that can be used in a range of skinnable music players.

Each wix supports multiple pages with links between them. When you want to edit a particular object on a page, you click on it and options for rotating, resizing, and positioning are revealed. A Mac OS-looking doc at the bottom of the screen also provides icons for setting effects, behaviors, animations, and more. You really need to play around with Wix to fully appreciate how much flair and how many customization options it affords.

As you work on your wix, you can hit a preview button to see what it will look like. And once you’re done with it, you can publish it either as a website hosted on the wix.com domain or as a widget to be embedded or sent to friends via email.

One of the major complaints many have about Flash is that it doesn’t allow for indexing by search engines. Wix gets around this by producing content that’s a hybrid of HTML and Flash, despite the fact that it’s editor is entirely Flash-based. This will be a huge benefit to anyone who uses Wix to set up a serious website, but it probably won’t make any difference to widget creators.

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/~3/277891464/

The big three gadget blogs (Engadget, Gizmodo and CrunchGear) (ok, kidding about CrunchGear, but it is doing very well) have a little more competition starting today: a new gadget blog called End User. The site is published by Amazon.

The blog authors are all Amazon employees and write for EndUserBlog as well. This is the same model for a few other blogs that Amazon publishes (Omnivoracious, ChordStrike, etc.).

Most posts have links into Amazon to purchase whatever is being discussed, which helps Amazon directly and indirectly sell more stuff.

So far the Amazon blogs don’t have much in the way of a community - most posts have no comments, for example. My recommendation is for them to follow, interact with and link to lots of other blogs in their respective categories, and actually join into the conversation directly.

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/~3/277890733/

I want you to stop what you are doing right now and go try Presdo. It is a deceptively simple online scheduling assistant that is a prime example of what a modern Web app should be. It only shows you what you need to see at the moment that you need to see it. And it understands what you want to do based on normal (and not-so-normal) English that you type in.

“We actually threw a lot away,” says founder Eric Ly, who previously was a co-founder of LinkedIn and its first chief technology officer. He wrote most of the code himself and bootsrapped the entire site with only $35,000 of his own money. “I left LinkedIn on a Friday, and started Presdo on Saturday,” he tells me. That was back in April, 2006. He had to develop his own natural-language algorithm to deal with events, times, and scheduling, and the words people use to describe those things. The whole site is built with Ruby on Rails, Ajax, and the LAMP stack.

The home page is a plain, Google-inspired box. But instead of typing in what you are looking for, you type in what you want to do and with who: “Coffee with Eric in SF,” “Movie with Nadia Fri night,” “Meeting with Henry at 2:30 pm.”

It then takes you to a page with pre-populated fields based on what you typed in: when, who, where, what. You can refine the details further on this page. If you typed in the person’s email in the first box, it appears in the “who” field. If you didn’t, you can enter it at this point.

Presdo lets you pick a location by searching through local listings on a Google map. You can pick one near you, near the person you are meeting, or in between. (It helps if you first register with your own email and location.)

Or you can look at a list view of nearby places instead.

Presdo guesses what day and time you meant and puts those in as well. But you can offer up alternative times and allow the other party to pick the best one or suggest their own.

When you are satisfied with what you have, you hit “Send Invite.” The other person gets an e-mail with the details and a link back to Presdo, where they can change the time or place. You can also add a message. All the messages back-and-forth are recorded on the event page.

Once everything is set, you can export the meeting to your calendar (Presdo supports Outlook, iCal, Google Calendar, and Yahoo Calendar).

Every time you schedule an event with a new person, Presdo remembers who they are for the next time. You can also use Presdo as a to-do list. There are some obvious features Ly needs to add, such as support for other forms of messaging beyond email including mobile text messaging and Twitter. But he is off to a good start. The service is free, and he hopes to eventually charge for premium subscriptions. You can try it out now, and tell us what you think in comments.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/277832231/

It’s almost painful to write about a social news aggregator these days. We’ve covered well over a dozen of them, most of which do nearly the exact same thing. It’s getting ridiculous. With so many on the market, it goes without saying that most of these are going to fade into obscurity in the next six months.

Which is why I hope Minggl was telling the truth when they told us they weren’t just another event aggregator.

Because right now, that’s basically what Minggl is. They currently offer a browser-based plugin for both Firefox and Internet Explorer that integrates a newsfeed, among other things. After filling out requisite information for MySpace, Facebook, and most of the other major social networking sites, users are also given one-click access to each of their profile pages from their Minggl toolbar. Other features include the ability to mass-send a status message to each network (provided they support one), and the ability to send the same message to friends across multiple networks.

To be honest, I was surprised by how well the sidebar feature worked. I generally detest browser plugins, but the Minggl toolbars did their job without being too intrusive. There are, however, a few annoying quirks that got on my nerves after a while. Whenever you visit a friend’s profile while logged into Minggl, a floating box appears asking if you’d like to add them as a Minggl friend. I’m sure there is (or will be) a setting to turn this off, but it shouldn’t be the default. Minggl also needs to get away from banner ads, which are integrated into their newsfeed sidebar - it just looks tacky.

Besides Minggl’s unique plugin approach to the social aggregator, the company says they have a few more things up their sleeves. First, they plan to offer a set of filters that will allow users to prune their newsfeeds down to the stories that they find most important. If they do it right, this could be a big stepping stone for them, as many of these aggregators often devolve into chaos. Minggl says that they’ve also established a robust infrastructure, and hope to become a social networking platform in the future.

Minggl’s going to have a tough time in the social news aggregator space. If they want to do well, they’re going to have to quickly establish what makes them different, or they will sink with the others.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/277815768/

Steve Souders has released a nice little tool called Cuzillion which has the tag line of ‘cuz there are zillion pages to check, although it could also be that there are a zillion ways to do Web development!

The tool lets you test out different techniques for optimizing performance in browsers, and these tests can be saved and shared by the community.

Steve explains how the tool came about:

I’m constantly thinking of or being asked about how browsers handle different sets of resources loaded in various ways. Before I would open an editor and build some test pages. Firing up a packet sniffer I would load these pages in different browsers to diagnose what was going on. I was starting my research on advanced techniques for loading scripts without blocking and realized the number of test pages needed to cover all the permutations was in the hundreds. That was the birth of Cuzillion.

Here Steve talks about some examples:

A great example of how Cuzillion is useful is looking at the impact inline scripts have when they follow a stylesheet in Internet Explorer. Typically, a stylesheet followed by any other resource results in both resources being downloaded in parallel in Internet Explorer. (In Firefox stylesheets block parallel downloads, so this performance optimization is only applicable to IE.) Here’s a Cuzillion page that shows this: stylesheet and image downloading in parallel. Both the stylesheet and image are configured to take 2 seconds to download. Since they download in parallel the page takes about 2 seconds to load as shown by the “page load time”.

But look what happens if we put an innocent inline script between the stylesheet and image: stylesheet, inline script, and image. Now, in Internet Explorer the stylesheet and image are downloaded sequentially, which means the page load time goes from 2 seconds to 4 seconds. If the inline script is simply moved above the stylesheet the two resources are downloaded in parallel again, and the page load goes back down to 2 seconds: inline script, stylesheet, and image.

This was a great discovery. But immediately my officemate asked if inline style blocks had the same effect. No problem. With Cuzillion I just do some clicks and drag-and-drop, and can test it out: stylesheet, inline style block, image. It turns out inline style blocks don’t cause stylesheets to block downloads.

The findings from a tool like Cuzillion are really valuable. The lessons learned from poking at inline scripts and stylesheets can save hundreds of milliseconds on page load times. And it’s a common problem. eBay, MSN.com, MySpace, and Wikipedia all suffer from this problem.

Much thanks to Google for letting me release this code under Open Source. It’s not currently on Google Code but if you want to contribute let me know and I’ll do that. Try it out and send me your feedback. And share your insights with others. We all want the Internet to be faster!

Steve is talking at Web 2.0 Expo today at 1:30pm in room 2002. If you are in town, check it out and see Cuzillion in action!

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/277782579/cuzillion-performance-best-practices-tool

Portishead is back on the scene with their Third album. Due out in stores on April 29, but you can stream the album now at Last.fm.

The first video off the new album:

Spotted via BuzzFeed.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/999-portishead-returns-with-third

One good quarter does not make a trend, but there is a glimmer of hope in the fight against click fraud (fake clicks that can nevertheless cost advertisers money). Click Forensics is reporting that the overall click fraud rate was down half a percentage point in the first quarter to 16.3 percent. Although that is still higher than the rate was a year ago, it could be an indication that Google’s and Yahoo’s efforts to filter out bad clicks on search and contextual ads and improve the overall quality of those ads is starting to have an effect.

When you look at the click fraud rate on their respective content networks where the worst offenses occur, AdSense and the Yahoo Publisher Network, the click fraud rate there also dipped slightly to 27.8 percent from 28.3 percent in the fourth quarter. That is still nearly a third of all clicks and needs to seriously go down further.

Perhaps this year the overall click fraud rate can be held steady instead of rising 15 percent, as it did in 2007.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/277741911/

Less than a year ago Alex Le and Siqi Chen were working at one of the web’s most ambitious startups, semantic search engine PowerSet (Due out soon). But last December they made the tough choice to quit it all and go full time for their own side project, a quickly growing little Facebook application called “Friends For Sale”. That project has grown into a full blown venture backed startup ironically named “Serious Business“, which just raised $4 million from Lightspeed Venture Partners (double digit pre) and currently draws over 600,000 daily active users on Facebook. Steve Newcomb, formerly of PowerSet, will be taking a seat on their board.

True to its name, “Friends for Sale” is an application that lets you virtually buy and sell your friends. The game is an ego driven form of “poking” (virtual nudges) that makes it abundantly clear who the most desirable players are, by listing a leader board of your most expensive friends. Every one of your friends, whether they have the app or not, can be purchased as a “pet”. Everyone starts at a base price that rises with every resale. You get more cash when you log in, are sold, or have one of your pets bought away from you. Users can spend that cash on kicking their pets, give them funny tag lines, or even virtual gifts.

That one game has also been supporting the growing company’s resources (20 Ruby on Rails servers and growing) through a mix of banner advertisements and sponsorships. While the company declined to state their earnings, they estimated the company could grow to 12 engineers without raising any financing. The financing allows the company to significantly ramp up their expansion plans.

But Lightspeed didn’t invest in Serious Business just for a single game. Founder Alex Le cites “Friends for Sale” as the first in a series of of games built directly around your relationships with friends. The idea is to create games for all social networks (Facebook, OpenSocial) that rely on leveraging social skills to win, instead of your twitch reflex or poker proficiency. While they’ll have some games to announce in the next 30 days, the founders briefly threw out the example of a battle game where your friends are the soldiers and success depended on your social skills.

Serious Business is not without competition. Zynga and SGN are well funded social gaming startups. However, Serious Business has a much larger hit than either, so far. “Friends for Sale” has also already been cloned as “Owned”, which draws about the same level of traffic some days. “Friends for Sale” itself is a variation on an earlier game “Human Gifts”. These startups are also in competition with the cycle that most applications follow on Facebook, amongst other potential difficulties. Applications tend to explode for a brief period (if at all) before settling at a lower activity level or completely dying.

Serious business indeed.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/277717668/