Ajax Girl

As Ruby on Rails devotees converge upon RailsConf 2008 (and the simultaneously held un-conference CabooseConf), performance startup FiveRuns is launching TuneUp, a “social” debugging tool for Rails applications.

The TuneUp plugin tells you specifically where a RoR app is running slowly. If you’ve coded a few ridiculously inefficient database queries, it’ll point out just which ones.

But debugging is not always so simple, so TuneUp does something sorely needed in a world dominated by Google searches for programming answers. A reporting mechanism sends your reports to TuneUp’s site for review by others. Each report, or “run”, contains your complete Rails configuration, the entire execution path of a request, and the overall execution time. When you publish these runs, other programmers and team members can diagnose your problems and offer potential fixes.

TuneUp has the potential to get rid of long posts on Ruby forums detailing programmers’ configurations, exact SQL queries, etc. Over time (if FiveRuns structures it correctly), TuneUp may form a great pool of knowledge with common programming issues and bugs - and their answers.

FiveRuns belongs in the quickly growing category of Rails applications supporting other Rails applications. New Relic, Heroku, and Engine Yard are others in the category that have recently raised big venture rounds. FiveRuns itself has raised $9 million total from Austin Ventures.

See the video below for a screencast of TuneUp.

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/~3/300993047/

When serial entrepreneur Naveen Jain left the company he founded, InfoSpace, in disgrace in late 2002, a lot of people thought he would never be trusted by the financial markets again (see this three part series from the Seattle Times that talks extensively about the rise and fall of Jain at Infospace and details his violations of insider trading laws). At its height Infospace was worth $31 billion. Today it’s worth less than 1% of that.

But memories are short, it seems. After leaving InfoSpace Jain started a new company, Intelius, across the street from his old offices in Bellevue, Washington. The company sells background information on people - they describe themselves as an “information commerce company.” They’ve grown rapidly and now claim that over four million people have purchased products from them. Revenue has grown from $18.1 million in 2004 to $88.5 million in 2007. In their most recent fiscal quarter, ending March 31, 2008 the company had $31.8 million in revenue, a nearly $130 million run rate. They are also very profitable, with $22.5 million in EBITDA in 2007.

It’s no surprise that the company’s revenue growth and profitability have led them to pursue an IPO. Well known investment banks Deutsche Bank and UBS are underwriting the deal, which was first filed with the SEC on January 10. The most recent version of their registration statement, filed on May 19, is here.

Given Jain’s history, you’d think he’d go out of his way to be squeaky clean at his most recent startup, particularly as the company is going public and under significant scrutiny. But that may not be the case.

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/~3/300885460/

Fake Shel interviews Zivity Cofounder Cyan Banister and, as usual, there’s a surprise at the end (although regular TechCrunch readers may not be so surprised). I’ve managed to stop laughing long enough to get this post up.

Note: Not fully safe for work. And in fact a lot of you may be flat out offended.

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/~3/300951594/

Here’s a list of upcoming conferences that may be of interest:

OReilly’s Graphing Social Patterns, June 9-10 in Washington, DC. Use “gspe08tech” for a 15% registration discount. Thanks, OReilly, for giving away two free tickets to the conference to TechCrunch readers.

Supernova, June 16-18 in San Francisco, CA. TechCrunch readers automatically receive a $200 discount here. Come join TechCrunch as we co-host the Mobile Connections forum with Kevin Werbach Monday night at the conference.

OReilly’s Velocity Conference, June 23-24 in Burlingame, CA. Use “vel08tech” for a 15% registration discount.

Thanks also to our great group of sponsors who make reading TechCrunch possible.

ScribeFire, Firefox extension for integrated blogging in your broswer

eBuddy, web-services meta instant messenger

Levelwing, Internet advertising agency

BoonEx, community software

Rackspace, hosting services

RaiseCapital, connecting entrepreneurs and investors online

MediaTemple, TechCrunch’s own hosting provider

Check out the new advertising sponsorship packages available through the TechCrunch Network:

• 50% sponsorship rotations on TechCrunch, an affordable new way to gain visibility with TechCrunch readers.
• RSS feed sponsorships. Reach over 940,000 TechCrunch RSS subscribers daily– some of our most rabid readers.
• New sponsorship units on our fast-growing CrunchBase directory.
• Bundled pricing options for participation across multiple TechCrunch Network websites, including CrunchGear, MobileCrunch, TechCrunch UK and TechCrunch FR.

Learn more here or contact Heather Harde.

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/~3/300945731/

Revver co-founder Oliver Luckett (on right in picture) and CTO Rob Maigret left Revver in a management shakeup in late 2006. By June 2007 they had founded their new venture, Digisynd, based in Burbank, California. In May 2008 they raised a seed round of financing from Greycroft Ventures and Villiage Ventures.

Digisynd has been deep in stealth mode, although we’ve been able to gather some basic details about them based on information from Greycroft’s site and a job listing from late 2007:

DigiSynd is an outsourced packaging, syndication, and marketing solution that enables digital studios and other content creators to get the most value out of their content online.

The company uses time-honored storytelling techniques and valuable lessons from traditional media, but applies them in a medium of online communities, virtual experiences, interactivity and user-generated content.

That’s not much to go on. But rumor is the company has sold to Disney, months before the actual launch of the product. We have this from multiple sources, although the company will not comment. Literally, in fact. When I cornered Luckett at the D6 conference yesterday and asked him about the deal he literally walked away from me. His VC, Dana Settle from Greycroft, pretended she didn’t hear my question the three times I asked her, and then also walked away. Sounds like a confirmation to me.

From what we can tell, the deal is not being done through the strike team Disney set up last year to do Internet based acquisitions, but is being led by someone else in the organization. More details as they emerge.

Credit to CNET for the picture above.

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/~3/300810768/

BrandDoozie has launched a Flash-based tool for SMBs that want to create marketing materials without hiring a designer.

The tool’s 3-step process leads to branded sales sheets, postcards, business cards, and letterheads that can be downloaded in PDF format, and soon, ordered from professional printers as well.

You start by picking a general design from a gallery that’s divided into style categories like Professional Services, Healthcare, and Travel. Basic header fonts and colors can be tweaked, after which you move on to creating a two-lined logo with its own customized fonts, letter spacing, and sizes.

The final step takes your customizations and generates the aforementioned business materials with them. Default photos can swapped in and out (from either the site’s stock collection or up to 25mb of uploads), and the copy can be changed to suit your needs (add your phone number and other details to the business card, for example).

I used BrandDoozie to create a postcard for TechCrunch. See the three screenshots below for an illustration of the process.

All in all, this is a straightforward and useful publishing tool for small organizations that don’t demand much in terms of uniqueness and creativity. Anyone who’s remotely serious about creating a real brand, however, will need to look beyond BrandDoozie’s cookie-cutter approach.

Also see HP’s LogoMaker, which is a specialized DIY tool for creating logos.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/300803724/

WorldNow, a leading CMS provider for local television news sites that total over 19 million visitors monthly, has partnered with JS-Kit to provide them with a number of community based widgets that will be embedded across their sites. JS-Kit, founded in 2006, creates simple widgets that can be implemented with only a few lines of code (you can see our introductory review of them here).

Besides JS-Kit’s flagship commenting widget, WorldNow will be adding Ratings, Score, Reviews, Navigator, and Polls to their sites. WorldNow has 320 television customers, including a number of ABC and NBC affiliates (example). Advertising revues from the JS-Kit widgets will be split 50/50 between the two companies.

JS-Kit CEO Khris Loux sees the partnership as a huge step for the company, which will be significantly increasing its reach. While he concedes that many of WorldNow’s 19 million readers probably won’t use the commenting system (at least at first), he says there will still be very sizable growth in the company’s user base.

This may be the case, but it’s hard to gauge just how much they stand to gain from WorldNow’s expansive readership - few people are used to the idea of participting in a community on a news site. Loux also believes that with the charging atmosphere of the economy, companies will be more likely to turn to companies like JS-Kit for commenting systems rather than build their own in-house.

JS-Kit is obviously maturing as a company, having grown from a basic commenting system to a full-featured suite that includes APIs, security, and OpenID integration. The partnership should put them in a good position to take on the other players in this space, which include Disqus, SezWho, and IntenseDebate.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/300761069/

Blogging infrastructure company Six Apart is launching a new free open source product this morning into beta called TypePad AntiSpam. While the product is new, the technology behind it has been used by Six Apart since May 2007 on millions of hosted TypePad blogs. Now they are offering it as a web service for other blogging platforms, too.

TypePad AntiSpam is clearly aimed at Akismet, a similar spam fighting tool offered by arch-rival Automattic. Like Akismet, TypePad AntiSpam takes a multi-headed heuristic approach to detecting and blocking comment spam on blogs. But TypePad’s product is free - Akismet charges $5/month for commercial blogs making more than $500/month in revenue, and has performance limitations on the free version.

TypePad AntiSpam is also open source, and anyone can download the source code and create their own spam tool based on it. Akismet isn’t open source, although they have an API that allows developers to, among other things, develop additional integration tools for blogging platforms.

We are long time users of Akismet on the TechCrunch blogs, and I’ve included it in my last two yearly lists of products I can’t live without (2007, 2008) along with Wordpress, Automattic’s blogging software. Akismet blocks over 15,000 spam comments per day on TechCrunch.

But last week we switched to TypePad AntiSpam as a test, crossed our fingers and hoped for the best. After a week I’m pleased to say that as good as Akismet is, the TypePad product has performed as good or better for us.

The product classifies comments as “ham” (good), “spam” (bad) or unknown (moderation). So far I’ve seen no good comments hit the spam folder (false positives), something that happens regularly with Akismet. Only a handful of spam comments made it to the site (false negatives). It seems like the rate of false negatives is lower than Akismet, but the team reviews the site for these regularly and so it’s impossible to compare them statistically, I’m just making a guestimate.

Twice now a large group of spam comments hit the moderation queue, but Six Apart says it was their system thinking we were under a denial of service attack from the sheer flow of spam attempts and triggering everything to moderation. They’ve now adjusted for that, and we haven’t seen it again.

TypePad AntiSpam is available now via plugins for Wordpress and Movable Type. Akismet has a much longer list of supported platforms - Six Apart says they will add more over time and, like Akismet, will rely on the developer community to pitch in as well.

If you are a blogger and don’t use a service to manage spam, you’ll want to use Akismet or TypePad AntiSpam. I recommend either. For now, we’ll stick with TypePad, and continue to report on how its doing.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/300666856/

A small and very new startup out of New York called Pinch Media is building tools for iPhone and iPod touch developers.

The first of these tools is an analytics offering called Pinch Analytics, released just today for free, that will track an application’s number of unique visitors and active users, as well as how much time those users spend on the app and where they are located geographically. Fred Wilson is calling it the “FeedBurner for iPhone apps”.

Pinch Media is debuting with some formidable backing. Both First Round Capital and Union Square Ventures have provided an undisclosed amount of seed money in conjunction with several angels. Chris Fralic, a partner at First Round, says the firm is a big believer in “the power of the iPhone platform and how it’s driving usage beyond its market share and functionality beyond the desktop.”

Expect Pinch Media to roll out additional tools for promoting and monetizing apps built on the iPhone SDK. The startup’s already signing up advertisers for its platform.

Founders include Jesse Rohland and Greg Yardley, who left Yahoo in March.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/300672336/

Trulia, the real estate search engine and community, has released Snapshot, a new interactive housing map that is a bit more fun than it should be.

Snapshot overlays a Microsoft Virtual Earth map with thumbnails of houses on the market. Each image hovers over its proper location on the map, and users can drag them around to get a better look at the terrain if some houses are too close together. After releasing the image, it snaps back into place - complete with a nice jiggle.

Users can move a sliding bar to set the price range of houses that appear on the map. As each house appears, it enthusiastically pushes nearby pictures out of the way, leading to lots of totally useless (but fun) bouncing. There’s also a slideshow function that lets you sit back and watch as this odd combination of real estate and Jello does its own thing.

Snapshot does have some more practical functions. Clicking on a photo will present more detailed information, including the price and a link to the realtor. And the sliding price limits are handy for getting a feel for what’s available in a neighborhood. That said, there doesn’t seem to be much in Snapshot that wasn’t already on Trulia already, it just presents it in a more visually appealing way.

Trulia was founded in 2004 and has raised nearly $18 million in funding, with investors including Sequoia Capital and Accel Partners. Other competitors in this space include Redfin, Zillow, and Roost.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/300667072/