Ajax Girl

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The display options are fairly broad; users can create standard banner ads or select from a variety of widgets. Websites, blogs and even email is supported, and you can create custom text for inclusion in RSS feeds. Qualified high traffic affiliates also get access to a customized version of this page (complete with logo/ branding) that can be promoted to readers.

Payouts per signup are a minimum of $1.50 per qualified offer with “typical” payouts ranging from $2.00 to $20.00 per action.

Affiliate programs aren’t new, nor are giving away free products, but as we see the rise of widget ad providers, RevResponse fits in as one solution that bloggers may find makes a reasonable compliment to their current inventory. Those interested can sign up here.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/278594873/

Web hosting provider Rackspace filed for an initial public offering with the SEC last night, as we predicted it would. The company will try to raise $400 million, and it intends to set the IPO price through an auction, much like Google did. The underwriters are Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Credit Suisse, and WR Hambrecht & Co. (the leading proponent of such IPO pricing). Pricing through an auction is designed to make sure the company raises the most money possible instead of giving up a first-day pop to investors who are allocated shares by the investment banks doing the deal. Shares will still be allocated to such clients, but anyone who bids beforehand in the auction at or above the eventual IPO price will also get shares. All in all, it is a much more efficient way to price an IPO and more companies should do it.

With the filing we also get a clearer picture of Rackspace’s business and financials. Its revenues grew 62 percent last year to $362 million, but it posted net profits of $17.8 million, which were down 10 percent from the year before. Cash flows from operations, though, remained healthy at $105 million last year, up from $61 million in 2006. (Click on the table below for a bigger image and more data):

The decline in profits was because the company spent a lot more staffing up and spending more on sales and marketing. About half of the $53 million increase in its cost of revenues last year was attributable to the fact that it nearly doubled the number of employees to 2,021 (of that, data center employees went from 576 to 994, and sales and marketing headcount went from 224 to 353). Servers, software licensing costs, bandwidth, power and rent made up most of the rest of the increase.

Another interesting tidbit: that truck accident that took down one of its data centers in Texas last November cost the company $3.4 million in credits to customers.

At the end of the year, it had 29,193 customers, compared to 12,677 the year before. But nearly all of that growth was due to its acquisition of Webmail.us (i.e., they are hosted e-mail customers, not hosted Website customers). Rackspace has 36,692 servers across seven data centers, 114,749 square feet of data center space, with a 61 percent utilization rate. The company makes $3,504 a year per square foot, a number that has been growing nicely, illustrating that Web hosting is a scale business with increasing returns the more servers that can be rented out.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/278440229/

There has been a lot of noise revolving around Ext JS and the open source license decisions. Under the original license (LGPL-ish) many thought that it wasn’t actually an open source license at all. Jack changed to GPL last week when he announced version 2.1, but others have been upset with views on forking the old code-base.

I have publicly tried to stay out of the discussion, but today Jack published his thoughts and timeline, as well as frustrations with personal attacks.

This is all such a shame, as Ext JS is great stuff, and I wish that Jack could be spending him time on building more great functionality, and growing his business. I am sure these debates have taken way too much time and energy.

Here is the history from Jack’s point of view:

• For 7 months I wrote yui-ext full time from my home, gave it away under a BSD license and loved every minute of it. There weren’t many donations and no official support from Yahoo. With my third child due, and savings running low I had to find a way to continue building what was now changing to Ext JS and also find a way to earn a living from it.

  At this time I contemplated switching to a strictly commercial framework. I openly discussed this decision with the community in the Ext forums. If you want to read the discussions, they are here:

  “Official Commercial License Input Thread”
  http://extjs.com/forum/showthread.php?t=2194

  “Official Open Src License Thread (Commercial License Part 2)”
  http://extjs.com/forum/showthread.php?t=2253

  In the end, after much discussion with the community, I decided to go to the LGPL.

• Shortly before 1.0 is released, there numerous Ext “clones” started popping up that were hacking Ext themes, css and other resources from 1.0 - before we had even released 1.0. Here I had 4 new themes for Ext JS 1.0 that I had spent countless hours working on (I am not a great designer) and what could now be considered competitors were already using it before I even have a chance to release Ext 1.0.

  That’s why the proprietary license on the “Assets” (CSS and images) was introduced in Ext 1.0.

• Ext JS 1.0 is released under the LGPL, minus the Assets license as mentioned above. Shortly thereafter 2 major publicly traded corporations (names withheld) embedded Ext JS into their development frameworks. With no mention of Ext JS except in credits files that no one ever saw. No support for all the work that had been put into the framework. Neither one of them even contacted us. How can that be possible? Can they do that? How can we compete with them taking such a large chunk of our potential customers? These are the questions I was faced with and so began my “Intro to Business 101″.

  The next release of Ext JS was released under the Ext License, to serve as proxy to the LGPL and add the additional “no framework/toolkit” restriction that was present until 2.1.

Then things got public:

• This blog post comes out on CNET out of nowhere:

  http://www.cnet.com/8301-13505_1-9878693-16.html

• Alex Russell publicly bashes the Ext License on Ajaxian (sorry no link, I could’t find it) and then continues his attack on the license with me personally over email. He then follows with this blog post:

  http://alex.dojotoolkit.org/?p=654

• Matthew Garrett decides in his infinite wisdom to completely disregard our Ext License or Assets license:

  http://mjg59.livejournal.com/84586.html

• Dion Almaer of Ajaxian privately informs us of concerns he has about the Ext License. His points are very clear and sincere and he is only interested in the open source community as a whole.
• Several private conversations were held with customers regarding the license, spurred by the links and discussions above.

Then Jack talks about some personal attacks, which I won’t go into here.

I really hope that this can be worked out, and we can move on. The last thing that Jack, the Ext community, and even the open source JavaScript community needs is for this to go forward. It needs a quick solution, and I think that a message about the past code base can take care of this.

This reminds me of my old days running TheServerSide. These kind of situations happened pretty regularly. Controversy was the norm, especially with characters like JBoss around… oh and CocoBase brought a lot of hilarity too with their fake legal stupidity.

Anyway, I have been very happy to see that Ajaxian hasn’t had the same level of controversy in the Ajax community as I saw in the Enterprise Java one. Controversy is great for page views, but life is too short. I hope that our community stays strong and united around the simple goal:

Let’s grow the Open Web. The bigger we grow it. The bigger the pie. And, then we all succeed.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/278435425/ext-js-and-the-fun-with-open-source-licenses

Belgium-based Twistory launched into private beta today at MobileWebCamp.

It’s a very simple tool, built by Tijs Vrolix to show off his coding and design skills: Subscribe to messages from any Twitter user in any popular desktop or online calendaring application (iCal, Google Calendar, etc.). Those messages are then automatically added to the calendar, at the appropriate day and time.

Useful? I don’t know. It’s certainly useful to closely monitor/stalk people (or yourself). If you want to add my daily words of wisdom to your calendar, my page is here (which also includes a graph of total twitter usage by day.

Thanks to Robin Wauters for the tip.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/278192138/

This guest post about the widget economy was written by Michael Jones, an angel investor, the CEO of Userplane and a Senior Vice President of AOL.

Mike Jones’ personal blog is here.

Companies facing a slowing economy are looking for more cost-effective ways to reach customers. Forrester’s recent post on the role of social media during economic recessions supports the idea that social media can help companies survive and thrive in tough economic times. And Josh Bernoff’s full report on the subject calls for an end to “toe-dipping” by interactive marketers and advises a more serious look at cost-effective and measurable social marketing programs. A key take away:

…since interactive marketing programs are now fueled by measurable results, not dot-com madness, we believe that they can thrive in a recession. Social applications in particular, such as communities and social networking sites, are cost-effective and have a measurable impact on prospects’ decisions in the consideration stage, which will be important to companies under recessionary pressures. Interactive marketers should stop toe-dipping and invest only in programs that can deliver on measurable metrics.

Additionally, Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang points out that social marketing costs far less than traditional marketing. So when purse strings are tightened, marketing execs will become more excited about social media’s potential of reaching exponentially more people with fewer dollars.

While the recession-proofness of social media is a case study in the making, the idea that social applications can thrive in tight economic times because they are a cost-effective, precise way for companies to interact with customers and prospective customers, is right on the money – quite literally.

(more…)

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/278162935/