Ajax Girl

Panedia is a content creation and licensing company, specializing in high quality georeferenced photography using immersive panoramic technologies.

Panedia offers three core services. Panedia panoramas offer 360 degree immersive images of “amazing places.” The service is completely web based, so users choose a location and can move around each position. Panedia’s Map service offers over 3500 panoramic tours cross referenced by Google Map. Panedia’s Wallpaper service is offered for $25/ year and provides (as the name suggests) panoramic wallpapers.

All Panedia work is shot individually by company selected professional photographers, with content focused on providing superior quality over mass produced quantity.

The Gold Coast, Australia based company currently only offers panoramic imagery from Australia and some parts of San Francisco, but will be expanding into Europe later this year, with the rest of North America to follow some time after that. The business model relies on licensing access to the content: all but the wallpapers are offered on the site for free, but the company is already in negotiations to license the content for use on third party sites, including tourism sites.

Immersive panoramic imagery isn’t new, however Panedia’s emphasis on quality is evident on the site, and some of the imagery is amazing. We’ve got 100 free memberships (worth $25 each) to Panedia’s wallpaper service. Visit the Wallpaper signup page here, and enter the code TECHCRUNCH for a free membership.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/280547664/

EA-Land, the service previously known as The Sims Online will shut August 1, despite a much hyped revamp announced late February.

The Sims Online was generally regarded to be a failure for EA, with the company unable to turn the success of The Sims franchise into an online hit. The service wasn’t helped by a complete lack of customizable features (outside of the usual Sims customization tools) and EA charged for access.

The new (but now never to be launched) EA-Land was to be EA’s second shot of success, and promised Second Life style customization and land ownership, with a free client and free to use service.

EA didn’t provide a full explanation for the shutdown, only saying that “The lifetime of the game has drawn to an end, and now we will be focusing on new ideas and other innovative concepts in the games arena.”

Paying users of the Sims Online are being offered a $15 gift voucher and three months premium access to Pogo.

The Sims Online/ EA-Land joins the TechCrunch Deadpool.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/280484970/

Weplug is a new social networking site out of France that aims to combine the best parts of Twitter, Facebook, and geo-location. The site has just entered public beta, and is available on the iPhone at the same URL.

Weplug has a clean interface and full featured (if somewhat generic) social networking functionality. Users can add their current status and location to a “lifestream” (basically a list of recent activity), which is syndicated to others through “friendstreams”. It’s all pretty familiar stuff for anyone that’s used Facebook for any length of time, but there are a few key differences.

For one, Weplug promises to release an API that will make its micro-blogging platform accessible to outside programs and devices (think Twitter). Weplug also plans to include auto-location features on its iPhone version of the site. Auto-location doesn’t work yet, but Weplug’s developers intend to use the iPhone’s triangulation feature (and eventually GPS, when it becomes available).

The site is still very much a work in progress. The basic social networking functionality works well enough, but the promised autolocation feature and Twitter-esque API are still a ways off. It’s hard to gauge how well Weplug will do abroad, but to stand a chance stateside its going to need to implement these features soon. As it stands now, Weplug is a nice looking site that few people have a reason to use.

Weplug sprawls a number of well-established spaces. Their competition includes Loopt in the social GPS market, Twitter in micro-blogging, and a plethora of social networking sites.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/280482378/

Insoshi wants to be WordPress for social networks, except built on top of Ruby on Rails instead of PHP.

We covered them in March when they presented at the Spring Y Combinator demo day. Now they’ve officially released their software for public download so anyone can install it on-premise to run their own social networks.

Insoshi is not the first company to release its social networking code. Broadband Mechanics has always emphasized the openness of its PeopleAggregator platform, and even Ning, the most publicized DIY social networking company, will give you the underlying code if you request it.

It’s not even the first Ruby on Rails project to go open source. Lovd By Less appears to have claimed this honor, although Insoshi founder Michael Hartl insists that the code he released under an MIT License in July 2007 should be considered the first RoR social networking open source code. Quibbles about who was first aside, Insoshi certainly has the advantage of having in Hartl a very prominent founder: he wrote RailsSpace, which is considered the book for writing social networks in RoR.

I look forward to seeing whether Insoshi is really able to build the type of developer community that’s associated with names like Mozilla and MySQL. If it manages to pull it off, it will become a very attractive option for organizations that want to run social networks independently.

Check out a test social network built on Insoshi here.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/280472566/

Social shopping site Wishpot has taken $1 million Series A in a round led by Monster Venture Partner that included H-Farm and Adrian Hanauer.

Wishpot is a social shopping service that lets you collect and and share information about items you find online and in stores. By creating a common space in which users can browse, recommend products, get advice, and find new items they’re interested in, Wishpot seeks to simplify shopping.

The company said it would use the funding to further enhance its vertical offerings, improve the Wishpot platform, increase business development activities and introduce business analytics for enterprise customers.

Wishpot competes in the same space as Kaboodle, Stylehive, Yahoo Shoposphere, Zlio and MyPickList.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/280459887/

Those of you who remember MeasureMap are long time readers of this blog. It was a blog-centered analytics service that first surfaced in August 2005. The service was created by San Francisco based Adaptive Path. The first details emerged in October 2005.

It was Google Analytics but just for blogs. It told you stats based on posts and other key blog features. By November 2005 Google had copied some of the features. And a couple of months later, before MeasureMap had even officially launched, they just bought it outright.

Since then, nothing. Founder Jeffrey Veen became the User Experience Manager and has been associated with a number of projects. Measure Map simple faded and was forgotten.

Except, not completely. Today Google emailed early MeasureMap users and said:

About your Measure Map account

Remember Measure Map? A couple of years ago, we gave you an account on an
early alpha test of our blog analytics software. Since then, a lot has
happened. We got acquired by Google, we redesigned their Analytics app, and
we’ve since rebuilt Measure Map from the ground up.

I’m writing you because we need to move everyone over from their Measure Map
accounts to the new version at Google. If you’re no longer interested, no
problem. You can stop reading this now. But if you’d like to try out the new
service, here’s how: [instructions followed]

I went through the signup process, which requires a Google Analytics account and tracking pixel. They then said “Great! You’re all set. We’ve got a few things to set up on our end. We’ll send you an email when we’re ready (soon!) and explain how to log in.”

I’m emailing Google now to see if they’ll give more details on the planned launch and how it will be different from Google Analytics.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/280444993/

Apple and AT&T will cut $200 off the price of the iPhone 3G when it arrives this summer. The phones should hit at $399 and $499 for 8 and 16-gigabyte versions and the subsidy should drop the price to as low as $199.

Fortune has also pseudo-confirmed a GPS chip inside the new phone.

Read more iPhone coverage here

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/280443569/

Canadian online retailer IndoChino offers a traditionally offline product, tailor-made suits.

In 2006, founder and then university student All Heikal Gani wanted a suit that looked good at a reasonable price but couldn’t find anything he liked. “Designer suits were way too expensive, but the polyester suits he could afford were of poor quality and just didn’t fit” is the official line, and as anyone who has purchased a suit knows, it’s also 100% right. Gani wrote a business plan for tailor-made men’s suits sold over the internet, then teamed up with fellow student Kyle Vucko to bring the idea to market.

The suits are sourced from China, with company maintaining an office in Shanghai to oversee production in addition to their head office in Victoria, British Columbia.

The site closed its second round last week from Burda Digital Ventures. Canadian investor Boris Wertz (W Media Ventures) led the original seed round.

Suits start at $199 (USD) and they would appear to ship outside of North America as well. There is advice on the site on how to obtain your measurements and each suit comes with a perfect fit guarantee.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/280441062/

We’re not canceling the Iron Man event yet, stay posted until we hear more.

Just to be clear, we paid the full ticket price for every seat and are fully authorized to do this. This is unbelievable and stupid in so many ways, and goes right to the top of the list of moronic legal moves against us. And he even ends the note with a “please don’t print” message.

Update: Just spoke to Althoff. He’s serious. And threatening lots of further action. He mentioned “public safety.”

Update2: Just for the record, we began the whole process by calling the group sales phone number on the official Iron Man movie site.

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Source: TechCrunch
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Microsoft does not like to be rushed. Everyone is waiting for its next move, now that the deadline it set for Yahoo to accept its takeover bid expired last Saturday. And everyone can keep waiting. Nevertheless, preparations are being made for an announcement this week from Microsoft on what it will do next.

Out of its various options, the two most likely are either to go hostile with the bid or to walk away. Chief financial officer Chris Liddell signaled as much during last weeks’ earnings conference call, where he also discounted the possibility of a higher bid:

The strongest argument that we should increase our bid because we can afford to is not one I favor. We have yet to see tangible evidence that our bid substantially undervalues the company. In fact we see the opposite.

That might have been posturing, but I don’t think so. Last week, Citi analyst Mark Mahaney put the odds of Microsoft going hostile at 40 percent, and of walking away at 10 percent. In the event of a hostile offer, Microsoft could either try to go directly to shareholders and ask them to tender their shares or engage in a proxy battle to replace Yahoo’s board of directors. A tender offer would trigger Yahoo’s poison pill and get really messy and expensive. (For an excellent discussion on how all of this would work, read Marc Andreessen’s post on the subject).

All signs point to a coming proxy battle. Microsoft has picked its alternate slate to replace Yahoo’s board of directors. And it has gathered around itself a group of advisers known for their bare-knuckle M&A tactics. Who is this group of reservoir dogs that Microsoft would bring to a fight to take over Yahoo’s board? They include:

—Morgan Stanley. Investment bankers Paul Taubman, Drew Guevara, Thomas Whayne, Chuck Cory, and Rob Kindler are on the crew assigned to Microsoft. Taubman heads up Morgan Stanley’s entire global mergers and acquisitions group (but he also had the dubious distinction of advising Time Warner on the AOL deal).
—The Blackstone Group. Jill Greenthal is advising from this high-powered investment bank that specializes in M&A, among other things.
—Joele Frank. She is the person you call when you are doing a hostile takeover and you need special public relations for the occasion. That is what she does: hostile PR. She is good and she is fierce.
—Innisfree M&A. A proxy solicitation firm that handles the logistics of a proxy battle.

These are all veteran fighters who don’t mind getting a little blood on their hands.

They’ll be up against Yahoo’s investment bankers, led by Goldman Sachs (Lehman and Moelis are also advisers). We’ve also heard a rumor that low-key M&A consulting firm MacKenzie Partners is helping Yahoo. (But judging from all the dead links on their Website, maybe it is Yahoo who should be helping them)

Watching from the sidelines will be Google, with their back-up man Frank Quattrone at Qatalyst and his old partner George Boutros at Credit Suisse.

Should Microsoft walk away or unleash its reservoir dogs?

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/280389624/