Ajax Girl

Docstoc, the professional document repository and community, has raised $3.25 Million in Series B funding. The round was led by Rustic Canyon Partners, and brings their total funding to over $4 Million.

Docstoc serves as a repository for professional documents, featuring forms, templates, and a variety of other material. Its flash-based viewer can be embedded into other pages, allowing documents to be viewed on external sites without needing an outside reader like Acrobat or Word.

The company is also introducing a Content Partnership Program (CPP) that will allow content providers to place their own ads around their documents, and to collect any revenue they accrue. The program is free of charge, but applicants will be screened for quality. Docstock CEO Jason Nazar says that the program is designed to improve the amount of high-quality content on the site while establishing ties with valuable partners.

Docstoc raised $750k in Series A funding last November in a round led by Scott Walchek, Brett Brewer, Matt Coffin, Robin Richards, and Crosscut Ventures. Their primary competitor is Scribd, launched March 2007, which features a similar embeddable document viewer and a large collection of content. Scribd has raised over $4 Million to date.

Docstoc Series B Funding Press Release - Get more documents

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/279841692/

Remember when wireless technology was supposed to help us get out of our offices once in a while? What happened to that? Sure, we might not be constrained to our cubicles all day - instead, we carry them around with us. And let’s be honest… We all know a certain blogger who could stand to lose thirty pounds.

It’s nice to see that sometimes this wireless stuff lives up to the hype.

National Geographic’s TOPO! Explorer gives daring technophiles a chance to create and share their favorite trails using detailed topographic maps provided by Google Maps. These maps support GPS integration, which makes things easy. Just upload a map to a supported device, head off in the general direction of the trail, and you’re on your way. You can also attach geo-tagged photos to your maps, allowing you to show points of interest (or beauty). And when you’re done you can share you experiences through comments or on the site’s forums.

The site has just opened in feature-limited public beta, and hopes to fully launch on May 30th. Unfortunately, GPS integration, which may well be the site’s greatest asset, is not free. Currently National Geographic is charging $25 for the desktop software that enables this feature - a price that, while reasonable, may be the site’s undoing. Hopefully National Geographic will abandon this setup, at least while the site is establishing a user base. Maps are currently pretty sparse, and many people might be turned off by the prospect of paying when there is so little content to be had.

With enough users and some support more from the esteemed National Geographic brand, this site has a decent chance at taking off, or at least getting the hardcore outdoorsy niche audience on board.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/279832099/

BeamMe.info offers a web page to SMS service for sites looking to offer users an alternative to writing information down.

BeamMe.info works by site owners placing a BeamMe button on their website next to relevant information users might want a copy of, for example next to address information. Users click the button and are then prompted to enter their cell phone number (most countries are supported), and the information is sent to their phones (Information in the text message is predetermined by the website owner, not dynamically pulled from the site).

The service comes in two flavors: ad supported or paid. The free ad supported version means end users also get an advertisement with the SMS they receive. The paid version sees website owners paying for every SMS sent by their users; the price ranges from a couple of cents through 20 cents per SMS depending on the country a user is sending the SMS to.

The service has built in spam protection, with limits per IP address and account holders are able to limit the number of SMS messages sent to the same phone per day.

BeamMe.info is pitched as a way of enhancing user experience:

By putting Beams on a website publishers are adding value to their content or service. Allowing visitors to mobilize their website content, saves them the hassle of printing things out or writing them down. This extends the interaction lifecycle long after the visitor has left the website. There are obvious environmental benefits as well.

Pics from the BeamMe.info tour as follows.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/279830120/

Local businesses have a love/hate relationship with review site Yelp: The site sends new customer leads to the businesses reviewed. But businesses can also be reviewed (and trashed) without even knowing Yelp exists.

Businesses like Oakland coffee shop Cafe Rooz felt slighted by the ratings site when a few vocal customers posted poor reviews. They went so far as to declare No Yelpers. But still others have benefited. According to Yelp, Joe Alexander’s San Francisco based mattress store says that 80 percent of his total monthly business is directly attributed to the service.

In either case it’s a sign of the influence the site has over businesses as a lead generation - or degeneration - tool. Now Yelp is releasing a suite of business tools to give business owners tools to participate more directly in the conversation.

The suite is available at biz.yelp.com and lets businesses:

• Message customers who have reviewed their business
• See how many prospective customers viewed their business page
• Update business information instantly (i.e. hours of operation, categories)
• Receive new review email alerts

Yelp, which has raised $31 million in venture capital, continues to grow briskly. Comscore says they have 3.7 million unique monthly visitors; Compete says it’s more like 9 million.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/279824528/

Jessica Mae Stover wants independent funding for her movie project “Artemis Eternal,” so she’s turning to social media for a (her term) “Crowd-Funding” drive.

The idea is simple enough: visitors get to follow the entire process. Contributions for the film range from $1+ with the contributor getting an online credit for the contribution, $25+ gets the contributor a credit in the film, and $100+ gets credit in the film and “Wingman” status that offers name credits on the “silver aurum,” the development map on the front page of the movies website. So far the project has raised $40,000 of the $100,000 required to produce the movie.

The idea is being pitched as cutting out the middleman, and breaking “new ground on a new formula for film finance, production and exhibition.” You can follow the process on the Artemis Eternal website here.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/279812794/

As strange as it might sound, cable company Cox Communications is acquiring Adify, according to the Washington Post (via PaidContent). That would make it a ten-bagger for investors Venrock, US Venture Partners, NBC’s Peacock Equity fund, and Time Warner, who put in a total of $27 million over the past two years. This will be the second Internet advertising startup founders Larry Braitman and Richard Thompson sold for big bucks. The first one was Flycast Communications, which CMGI (remember them?) bought in 1999 for $2.3 billion, after it went public.

Adify is an ad network for niche publishers that lets advertisers and publishers contact each other and negotiate directly for ad space. It also lets Websites reject advertisers, and lets large publishers such as the Washington Post create their own ad networks. Comscore doesn’t even rank it among the top 50 ad networks.

So what would Cox, a cable company, want with it? Well, ad networks are still kinda hot, and there is always the greater fool theory. Or maybe they like the technology, and want to apply it to targeted TV ads through Project Canoe. No official word yet from either company.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/279758037/

MySpace Karaoke launched today. I had actually forgotten about this, but the site is powered by kSolo, an online karaoke service that MySpace parent company Fox Interactive Media acquired back in April 2006. Yep, it took them two years to rebrand and relaunch it.

kSolo joins Newroo as the other startup Fox acquired in 2006 that has sort of languished. After acquiring Newroo (March 2006), MySpace sat on the asset for a year and then beta launched MySpace News. It was and remains a bit of a ghost town, with little integration with the main MySpace service.

MySpace Karaoke may not do much better. kSolo, which has remained live during the 2 year development cycle, has little traffic (nor does its competitor, SingShot, which shut down).

It’s U.S. only for now, with international rollout in the coming months.

Will this be a popular addition to the MySpace world? Here’s an example video, you decide.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/279786316/

MTV has partnered with Oddcast to provide avatar-centric Voki Playgrounds for some of their most popular shows.

Visitors to these so-called playgrounds (really just a fancy word for sub-sites) can create customizable avatars that mouth your recorded voice online. The avatars can be viewed on the sub-sites, emailed to friends, or embedded elsewhere like MySpace. Users are encouraged to create vokis for the shows Pimp My Ride, The Hills, and perennial favorite The Real World.

The avatars come from Oddcast’s Voki platform, which can analyze voice messages left by users and animate their avatars’ lips accordingly. It’s not very convincing, but it’s not meant to be perfect. If you want to respond to someone’s voki, you can do so by clicking on a button from within the voki widget.

While Oddcast already has a number of big-name clients, the MTV demographic is especially valuable in the avatar market - it won’t be long before we see these tricked-out avatars flooding MySpace. MTV hopes to eventually monetize the playgrounds by selling digital goods that will allow users to further accesorize their avatars, though a pricing model has yet to be defined.

This space is growing increasingly crowded with newcomers like Gizmoz and Fix8 competing with Oddcast, which has been around for nearly a decade. And while the new 3D animations we’ve been seeing lately are impressive, the likely victor will be the one that can target and monetize their avatars most effectively - a fact that makes this deal especially important for Oddcast.

We were going to embed one of these avatars but they annoyingly auto-play everytime the page loads, so we’ll have to settle for a link.

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/~3/279612488/

Aptana have announced their cloud platform initiative, Aptana Cloud.

Aptana Cloud plugs right into your IDE to provide instant deployment, smart synchronization, and seamless migration as you scale. Aptana Cloud is ideal for developers who use scripting languages to create Ajax, Facebook, mySpace and all other sorts of Web applications.

The key is that this isn’t a infrastructure play, which they clearly point out:

Aptana Cloud is architected to complement Cloud infrastructure providers like Amazon, Google, Joyent and others. To get started we’ve selected Joyent who serves up some of the largest of all Facebook apps.

This shows that their platform is designed to go meta, allowing you to deploy to various clouds in the future.

I think that the number one meme from Web 2.0 Expo last week was the “cloud”, coming off of the excitement of Google App Engine. With Aptana Cloud we will see sophisticated tools to make us productive in the cloud. I am very excited to see that it won’t be too long until developers will be able to build an application, hit DEPLOY, and be done. This is a huge win.

For developers:

• IDE plug-in integrates Cloud development, deployment and management life-cycles right into Aptana Studio in either its standalone or Eclipse based editions
• Instant deployment of projects to Cloud
• One click sync your project to the Cloud, or provide fine grained sync control too
• Integrated service management consoles
• Configure desired memory size and disk size
• Develop and instantly preview remote files right inside your Studio desktop environment
• Subversion source control.

As Ajax developers, the vision of Jaxer in the cloud is very interesting too. The entire application using JavaScript, and deployed up into the cloud, all through the nice IDE.

I was also pleased to read that not only Ruby on Rails, but Python is on the docket. After developing Django applications and playing with Google App Engine, I would love to be able to use Studio for Python code too. Not that Emacs (X or GNU) isn’t great, Steve!

Darryl Taft wrote:

Aptana adds extra value via IDE integration, deployment automation and active monitoring and notification services, Hakman said. “It’s like the ease and simplicity between iTunes on your desktop and its connectivity to services on the Web,” he said.

For developers, the IDE plug-in integrates cloud development, deployment and management lifecycles right into Aptana Studio in either its standalone or Eclipse-based editions, Hakman said. “The ability to deploy stuff to the cloud from Eclipse is part of this as well.”

Other developer features include instant deployment of projects to the cloud; one click can sync your project to the cloud or provide fine-grained sync control; the technology features integrated cloud services management, enables users to provision their cloud right from Aptana Studio, configure desired memory size and disk size, develop and instantly preview remote files right inside the Studio desktop environment, and includes Subversion Source Control.

Can’t wait go get an invite!

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/279602022/aptana-cloud-develop-on-your-desktop-sync-out-to-the-cloud

We’ve got even more to give away today. Wix has set aside 1,000 spots for TechCrunch readers who want to give its website/widget creation tool a spin.

When I reviewed Wix last week, I called it cluttered and candy-coated. The promotional video below shows a tamer, yet still very colorful, side of the service.

Get your account here.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/279584685/