Ajax Girl

New startup Infectious wants to satisfy that urge that we all undoubtedly have to spice up our car a little. Make it unique. Express our personality. Etc. Founder Tim Roberts, who was part of the founding Twitter team, says that your car is the most visible social product you own, but it is also the least expressive.

Infectious sells specially designed vinyl stickers that can survive up to two years through car washes, the desert sun and Canadian winters, no problem. And when you want to take the stickers off because your friends won’t go near your car (or you need to sell it), you just blow a hair dryer on it for a few seconds and start peeling - your paint job won’t be affected. This is the same stuff they use to put advertisments on taxies and busses.

You can purchase one small sticker (see TechCrunch writer Mark Hendrickson applying one to his car in the video below) or get stickers that cover the entire car. All of the designs are done by artists, who are paid for their work in exchange for granting exclusive licensing rights to print on vinyl. The artists retains all other rights. Eventually, Roberts says, users will likely have the ability to upload their own art and turn it into a product that they and/or others can buy.

Infectious stickers don’t really compete with bumper stickers. It’s for people who may hire and artist to design art for a car and then get a custom paint job. These projects can easily run into the thousands of dollars, and aren’t reversible, so few people do it. Infectious wants to broaden that market to people who may do this on a whim, and then remove or change it later.

The company raised a small round of funding last year from True Ventures. They are entering private beta today and plan to open up to all some time this summer. If you’d like to get in now, the first 100 people to email techcrunch@infectious.com will be given beta accounts and a 20% discount on all stickers.

Here are two videos. The first is Roberts showing us his car with Infectious stickers. The second is our Mark Hendrickson bravely applying one of these to his own almost new Mazda (thanks to Loren Feldman for doing the video work).

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/~3/296288458/

A lot of entrepreneurs are inspired by Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook and other megacompanies. But let’s face it — these are outliers. They are exceptions. They are the rarest of rarest cases.

That’s not to say they aren’t worth paying attention to, dreaming about, and otherwise admiring, but it’s handy to have success stories that are a bit more common scale. A company doesn’t have to earn billions to be a great inspiration for budding entrepreneurs.

So, ignoring the usual suspects for now, which companies inspire you? Which companies do you respect enough to say “I love what they’re up to. We’d like to achieve their level of success.”

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1043-lets-forget-about-google-apple-microsoft-amazon-and-facebook-for-a-minute

Keeping up with your friends on social networks is hard work (enough so that many of us spend hours at it every week). Wouldn’t you like to make a few bucks for your trouble?

Meet UrTurn, a new startup that hopes to create a unified virtual currency across all major social networks. The site has just launched in a public beta, and is currently available as a Facebook app (with MySpace coming shortly). The first 250 TechCrunch readers who sign up using the code ERAS4 here will receive 500 bonus points.

In some respects UrTurn acts like a virtual pyramid scheme - users can get points by inviting their friends (and even more points if those friends add the application). But users can also get points by performing everyday actions. These earn fewer points, but they add up - if you were to add two friends, five photos, and two status messages on Facebook every day for a year, you’d have enough points for an iPod Touch.

Users spend their points at UrTurn’s virtual store, where they they can buy gift cards or digital gadgets (we can expect the store to grow as the site expands). Alternatively, users can put their points up in a marketplace and sell them for cash. You’re not going to get rich this way, but getting paid to surf Facebook is certainly an appealing prospect. In an effort to reduce gaming of the system, the site requires users to tie their accounts to an active PayPal account

At this point UrTurn is exploring a number of ways to monetize their application. Besides standard advertising, UrTurn is considering placing a tax on every marketplace transaction. The site is also planning to release an API that will let them integrate and have a rev-share with other applications, allowing them to distribute points based on usage of third party apps (the site will launch a pilot program with five appssavvy apps next month).

Virtual currencies have had a long history of failure - in the late 90’s Beenz.com unsuccessfully tried to establish a worldwide currency that could rival the dollar and the pound (that company closed its doors in 2001). UrTurn is going to have to fend off countless users trying to abuse the system, and they may have a tough time monetizing their app when so little effort is required on the user’s part. That said, social networks are craving an effective micropayment system, and virtual currencies may be the answer. Acebucks, which we covered last fall, is another company that is trying to establish itself as a unified currency for social networks.

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/~3/296195657/

Activity stream aggregator FriendFeed launched a new feature called FriendFeed Rooms this afternoon, which are effectively topic-based accounts that anyone can create or join (depending on privacy settings). Users can then add links and messages to relevant content.

The main difference between Rooms and a normal FriendFeed account is the fact that multiple users can author it, and that you can’t pull third party feeds into the service.

FriendFeed usage continues to grow steadily, and has clearly gained from Twitter’s (a competitor of sorts) constant downtime. I still haven’t gone religious on it, though, as some have. That’s mostly because i don’t like having a third party service centralize all this data about me and then not let that data back out again. See my rant on the Centralized Me for more on that.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/296156899/

Feel like sharing? Two ex-Ebay/Skype execs have created Tokoni, a social story sharing site that they hope will become the web’s virtual “front porch”. The site, which quietly launched last December, hopes to foster a warmer and better connected sharing environment than other similar communities on the web.

Tokoni is essentially a community of connected blogs with a social networking slant. After creating a personal profile, members can write an unlimited number of stories. Each story (which is basically a blog post) can be tagged with keywords and placed in ‘Hubs’, which are essentially groups of related stories. Stories can include embedded images or YouTube videos, and other members are encouraged to leave comments and participate in a discussion at the bottom of each story.

At first glance, Tokoni seems like a pretty half-baked idea. People have been sharing personal stories online since the dawn of Usenet, and allowing members to group stories by topic isn’t exactly a novel feature. Why not use a blog?

Then again, painfully simple ideas have been known to work in the past (YouTube and photobucket come to mind). It’s possible that Tokoni will fill a niche for users that just want to sit down and write without having to deal with blogging software or forums. And the community aspect helps differentiate the site from a blog by allowing writers to quickly find and link to stories posted by others without having to sift through the blogosphere.

Tokoni’s most encouraging assets are its founders. Mary Lou Song was eBay’s third employee, and her husband Alex Kazim has held a laundry list of top positions: Director of Engineering at eBay, President of Skype, SVP of eBay New Ventures, and VP Marketing at PayPal. The site also features a strong list of investors, including eBay Inc and a number of current eBay execs.

Tokoni isn’t the only player in this space. In fact, there are literally thousands (if not more) of sites that are dedicated to story sharing, though many of them revolve around a specific topic or community. Six Apart also offers Vox, a simple blogging service that offers some of the same tagging and group features. Tokoni has an impressive set of credentials, but unless it can find a better way to differentiate itself, its stories will fall on deaf ears.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/296088975/

I’ve been looking for a modest protein drink that doesn’t taste like a protein drink. Something silky smooth, not grainy thick. Something with some legitimate flavor, not sorta flavor. Something all natural, not mostly natural.

I finally found one I like. It’s called Mix 1. All natural, 200 calories, 15 grams of protein, 2.5 grams of fat, 3 grams of fiber. 22 grams of sugar, but that’s not too bad.

I’d been buying them at a local market and at Whole Foods, but I just discovered that Amazon sells them by the case as well. With free shipping and no tax it’s an especially good deal.

So if you’re in the market to add some quick protein to your diet, check out Mix 1. It’s a nice product.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1044-shout-out-mix-1-protein-drink

Quick reminder that tomorrow, Friday, May 23 is the deadline to submit ideas for the TechCrunch “Mobile Connections” forum that will be hosted at the upcoming Supernova Conference on June 16. The forum will discuss important themes to advance innovation in the mobile environment, and we’ve invited the TechCrunch community to submit your ideas to participate.

How to participate
At the forum, we want to talk about important mobile themes to grow the future of wireless– platforms, standards, privacy, monetization, etc. This is not a startup contest — it’s a search for ideas. We’re challenging anyone to make submissions. We want to hear about innovative concepts, prototypes, research lab projects, hacks, and business ideas that can engage the mobile development community. Companies are welcome to submit, but the focus of your proposed presentation should be on themes broader than your own product / service.

If your submission blows us away, we’ll invite you to join us on stage Monday evening at Supernova 2008. There is no charge to submit your ideas or to present as part of the Mobile Communications Forum. Additional details are available here. Email your submission to mobile@supernova2008.com by midnight PST, Friday May 23, 2008. We will notify selected participants by June 2.

Get tickets
Supernova is extending discounted registration to TechCrunch readers. Preferred pricing is $1,495 ($200 discount.)

Thank you Sponsors
Thanks to Nokia for sponsoring the Mobile Connections Forum and making this lively discussion possible. Several other sponsor slots remain open. Please email Supernova for additional sponsorship details.

Supernova will also have a special Technology Showcase for demonstrators during the opening Networking Gala, evening of June 16. Email Jeanne Logozzo to learn more about demonstrator sponsorships.

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/~3/296092621/

Paul Duncan announced today the release of PersistJS, a client-side JavaScript persistent storage library.

Currently the only reliable cross-platform and cross-browser mechanism for storing data on the client side are cookies. Unfortunately, using cookies to store persistent data has several problems:

* Size: Cookies are limited to about 4 kilobytes in size.
* Bandwidth: Cookies are sent along with every HTTP transaction.
* Complexity: Cookies are difficult to manipulate correctly.

Modern web browsers have addressed these issues by adding non-Cookie mechanisms for saving client-side persistent data. Each of these solutions are simpler to use than cookies, can store far more data, and are not transmitted along with HTTP requests. Unfortunately, each browser has addressed the problem in a different and incompatible way.

Trying to address the need for client-side storage sans browser-specific techniques or browser plugins, Paul has created an abstraction layer that allows developers to use most of the most common client-side storage mechanisms via a common interface. It currently supports persistent client-side storage through the following backends:

• flash: Flash 8 persistent storage.
• gears: Google Gears-based persistent storage.
• localstorage: HTML5 draft storage.
• whatwg_db: HTML5 draft database storage.
• globalstorage: HTML5 draft storage (old spec).
• ie: Internet Explorer userdata behaviors.
• cookie: Cookie-based persistent storage.

Other notables features include:

• Small (9.3k minified, 3k gzipped)
• Standalone: Does not need any additional browser plugins or
  JavaScript libraries to work on the vast majority of current
  browsers.
• Consistent: Provides a consistent, opaque API, regardless of
  the browser.
• Extensible: Custom backends can be added easily.
• Backwards Compatible: Can fall back to flash or cookies if no
  client-side storage solution for the given browser is available.
• Forwards Compatible: Supports the upcoming versions of Internet
  Explorer, Firefox, and Safari (Opera too, if you have Flash).
• Unobtrusive: Capability testing rather than browser detection, so
  newer standards-compliant browsers will automatically be supported.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/296050533/persistjs-cross-browser-client-side-persistent-storage

Only two days ago the contact messaging application Twitter suffered another bout of downtime, leaving some users frustrated and others asking why the platform continues to suffer problems. Twitter started as a side project which

I have recently spoken to an individual who is familiar with the technical problems at Twitter as well as the challenges that lay ahead for the startup. He re-iterated his belief that the problems lay not with Blain Cook (the former head of engineering who was shown the door), nor with Joyent (their hosting company) but with the early lack of understanding of how complex their problems would be.

The issue is that group messaging is very difficult to achieve at a grand scale. Other large sites such as Wordpress and Digg are mostly dealing with known problems, such as how to serve a large number of pages or a large number of images. Twitter is unique in that it needs to parse a large number of messages and deliver them to multiple recipients, with each user having unique connections to other users.

Social networks have similar complexity issues, but they only usually need to route a message to a single user (or at the most to a defined group). Even so, social networks like Friendster struggled for years with technical and scaling issues. Twitter is specifically dealing with text messages, and in most cases with active users those messages are very frequent and go out to hundreds of contacts (or followers, as they are referred to in Twitter). Every new Twitter user and every new connection results in an exponentially greater computational requirement.

Some of the best web applications are able to efficiently solve very complex problems to produce simple results for users (Eg. Google). The success of these applications is due to the innovative efforts by developers to solve large technical challenges, where they have often had to break new ground for solutions. For Twitter to reach a similar point of reliability they too will need a very comprehensive, ground-breaking solution.

The source that I spoke to also commented on how ill-prepared the Twitter team were and are for their current and future challenges. The small team contains a handful of engineers, with only a person or two committed to infrastructure and architecture. He goes on to point out that at Digg the team for network and systems alone is bigger than the total engineering team at Twitter, and that at Digg they are lead by well-known “A-list rockstars”.

The problems at Twitter are often attributed to their use of RubyOnRails, a web development framework. Twitter is almost certainly the largest site running on Rails, so fans of the framework and its developers have been quick to deflect the criticism and point it back at the engineers at Twitter. Utilizting a framework that has never conquered large-scale territory must certainly add to the risk and work required to find a solution. As an out-of-the box framework, Rails certainly doesn’t lend itself to large-scale application development.

Rails enabled Twitter to be developed quickly, to get to launch quickly and then to improve with new features relatively rapidly also. But the old adage of “Good, Fast, Cheap - pick two” certainly applies and Rails would do itself no harm by conceding that it isn’t a platform that can compete with Java or C when it comes to intensive tasks. Twitter is at a cross-roads as an application and Rails has served its purpose very well to date, but you are unlikely to see a computational cluster built with Ruby at Apache any time soon.

What we see at Twitter today is a very useful and popular service, but one with very complex underlying technical challenges to overcome. Twitter will require not only a new architecture approach and a big injection of the best minds they can find ($20 million certainly helps), but will also need a little patience from users and those of us observing.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/295995078/

After unsuccessfully trying to sell his startup Sxip Identity to Google or Microsoft, CEO Dick Hardt is now facing a lawsuit over the insolvency of his startup. Hardt is perhaps best known for his amusing slide show explaining his company’s Identity 2.0 system. It typically started with the slide at right asking, “Who is the Dick on your site?” Investors are now asking a similar question.

Hardt is not making funny slide presentations these days. According to a complaint from investors in Vancouver, where Sxip Identity is based, Hardt raised $370,000 as a bridge loan until he could sell the company. According to TechVibes, which covered this last week:

When Hardt’s attempts to sell Sxip Identity failed, he told the plaintiffs that Sxip Identity was insolvent and that their notes has [sic] little or no value. This is where things get messy. The plaintiffs allege that Hardt failed to disclose that there were two separate Sxip entities (Sxip Identity and Sxip Network - he is CEO and President of both) and that only Sxip Identity would be a party to the notes.

Sxip Identity is indeed insolvent with a March 2008 balance sheet indicating that they owed Sxip Networks $4.7 Million and Hardt personally $275K. Sxip Identity’s total assets at the time were just under $1 Million.

That’s a pretty slick move, Dick.

Identity is still a problem that needs to be solved. Unfortunately, Sxip won’t be solving it.

Just because someone can give a good pitch, does not mean they can build a real company. Below is Hardt giving his slide show pitch at eTech in 2006.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/295967542/