Ajax Girl

Over the years we’ve received hundreds (thousands?) of emails asking us our opinion on this, how we’d do that, what we think of this idea or that idea. People ask about Getting Real, entrepreneurship, business models, hiring, collaboration, design decisions, tech-related stuff, questions about our products, etc.

We also really enjoy the Q&A sessions at the end of our talks whenever we present at a conference or workshop. We always try to leave ample time to answer as many questions as we can. We’ve always believed live Q&A is the best part of any talk (and unfortunately there never seems to be enough time left over at the end to get to everyone’s questions).

So we’ve been thinking: How can we make Q&A more a part of our business? We enjoy it, people seem to get a lot of value from it, so we should do it more often.

We could certainly write more “Ask 37signals” blog entries, but it’s hard to find the time to write ‘em all up. We also seem to give better answers when we talk them through rather than when we write them down.

So we’ve decided to take a page out of Gary Vaynerchuck’s book and do a 37signals Live Q&A session on the web. We don’t know how well it’s going to work, but we’re going to give it a shot.

The first session will be tomorrow (August 5th) at 3pm CDT (what’s that in my time zone?). We’ll plan for an hour but we’ll see how it goes. We’ll have a live video feed and people can ask us questions via a live text chat that’ll run alongside the video.

We’re excited to see what happens. If it works out we’d love to do them on a regular basis. If not, we’ll chalk it up to experience.

So, ask us anything tomorrow at 3! We’ll see you there!

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1178-37signals-live-debuting-tomorrow-tues-at-3pm-cdt

Over the years we’ve received hundreds (thousands?) of emails asking us our opinion on this, how we’d do that, what we think of this idea or that idea. People ask about Getting Real, entrepreneurship, business models, hiring, collaboration, design decisions, tech-related stuff, questions about our products, etc.

We also really enjoy the Q&A sessions at the end of our talks whenever we present at a conference or workshop. We always try to leave ample time to answer as many questions as we can. We’ve always believed live Q&A is the best part of any talk (and unfortunately there never seems to be enough time left over at the end to get to everyone’s questions).

So we’ve been thinking: How can we make Q&A more a part of our business? We enjoy it, people seem to get a lot of value from it, so we should do it more often.

We could certainly write more “Ask 37signals” blog entries, but it’s hard to find the time to write ‘em all up. We also seem to give better answers when we talk them through rather than when we write them down.

So we’ve decided to take a page out of Gary Vaynerchuck’s book and do a 37signals Live Q&A session on the web. We don’t know how well it’s going to work, but we’re going to give it a shot.

The first session will be tomorrow August 5th at 3pm CDT (what’s that in my time zone?). We’ll plan for an hour but we’ll see how it goes. We’ll have a live video feed and people can ask us questions via a live text chat that’ll run alongside the video.

We’re excited to see what happens. If it works out we’d love to do them on a regular basis. If not, we’ll chalk it up to experience.

So, ask us anything tomorrow at 3! We’ll see you there!

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1178-37signals-live-debuting-tomorrow-at-3pm-cdt

Over the years we’ve received hundreds (thousands?) of emails asking us our opinion on this, how we’d do that, what we think of this idea or that idea. People ask about Getting Real, entrepreneurship, business models, hiring, collaboration, design decisions, tech-related stuff, questions about our products, etc.

We also really enjoy the Q&A sessions at the end of our talks whenever we present at a conference or workshop. We always try to leave ample time to answer as many questions as we can. We’ve always believed live Q&A is the best part of any talk (and unfortunately there never seems to be enough time left over at the end to get to everyone’s questions).

So we’ve been thinking: How can we make Q&A more a part of our business? We enjoy it, people seem to get a lot of value from it, so we should do it more often.

We could certainly write more “Ask 37signals” blog entries, but it’s hard to find the time to write ‘em all up. We also seem to give better answers when we talk them through rather than when we write them down.

So we’ve decided to take a page out of Gary Veynerchuck’s book and do a 37signals Live Q&A session on the web. We don’t know how well it’s going to work, but we’re going to give it a shot.

The first session will be tomorrow August 5th at 3pm CST (what’s that in my time zone?). We’ll plan for an hour but we’ll see how it goes. We’ll have a live video feed and people can ask us questions via a live text chat that’ll run alongside the video.

We’re excited to see what happens. If it works out we’d love to do them on a regular basis. If not, we’ll chalk it up to experience.

So, ask us anything tomorrow at 3! We’ll see you there!

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1178-37signals-live-debuting-tomorrow-at-3pm-cst

One of the most irritating obstacles encountered by growing startups is the hunt for affordable office space. Startups with a dozen employees generally aren’t interested in leasing vast tracts of space, which makes them unattractive clients for business realtors, so they’re typically left to fend for themselves.

Rofo, a new startup founded by two former commercial real estate brokers, is trying to offer small companies a solution. The site recently launched in public beta, and specializes in offering real estate listings for offices up to 5,000 sq feet. For the time being listings are restricted to the Bay Area, but the company hopes to expand to other regions in the near future.

Rofo (which stands for “Right of First Offer“) sports a basic but intuitive interface that allows users to specify the size of their desired office using sliders. Users can tag suitable candidates with the “shortlist” option, and each listing is plotted and pictured using integration with Google Maps and Microsoft Virtual Earth.

To generate its listings, the site crawls a number of partner commercial real estate sites for open office inventory, and also monitors XML feed from brokerage firms and larger landlords. Users can also create a traditional direct listing, similar to those seen on Craigslist (but hopefully with less spam).

CEO Alan Bernier acknowledges that there are some strong competitors in this space, including Loopnet, but points out that many of these require a fee to post or view listings. Conversely, Rofo is free for both brokers and browsers. As with other realty sites, Rofo’s success will lie in its ability to collect useful and current listings. Bernier says that the site currently has about 80% of the Bay Area market covered, but that number will be hard to maintain as the site expands to new areas.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/BF1Fpd7Pv5E/

Google does a decent job translating Web pages from other languages, but machine-based translation is still not good enough for when you need a truly accurate translation. A new service called the Google Translation Center looks like Google is making its machine-translation technologies available to human translators. If you have a document that needs translating, you can upload it and request a translator to work on it, according to the marketing information on the site. (I was unable to actually sign in with my Google account, so this may not have fully launched). The service can accommodate both professional and volunteer translators, and will let them use Google’s automatic translation tools and dictionaries to do their work. This could make translations a lot easier to do because the machine translation tools could take a first pass at the documents, meaning the translator would just have to correct any mistakes instead of starting with a blank screen.

The Translation Center is set up as a marketplace for matching translators with people who need texts translated. It supports both paid translations and volunteer ones. In a sense, the system is like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, in that it finds humans to do work that computers are not yet proficient at.

The system also keeps track of previous translations, and matches new ones against its “global Translation Memory.” That makes this project sound like a way for Google to collect a good set of translations to help improve its core translating algorithm, more than as a standalone business. Google Blogoscoped has more details.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/kBsIqUJGrgA/

Update: The first batch of tickets has sold out. We will add more in the coming weeks.

TechCrunch is heading South for a Meet-Up in Austin, Texas with the team from Austin Ventures. We are landing in town on Thursday, September 25 just in time for the Austin City Limits music festival.

We’ll be holding a 500 person event on Thursday, similar in format to our other events around the world (see recent wrap up posts on Silicon Valley and Los Angeles events). As always, ticket proceeds will be donated to charity.

We have a handful of three day ACL passes to give away to sponsors and attendees, and will be announcing details of music festival give aways in the coming weeks. Register now to join us in Austin.

The TechCrunch Austin Ventures Meet-Up will be held at Pangaea, one of the hottest new venues in Austin. At Pangaea we will feature local start-ups and other sponsors, starting at 5:30 p.m. (central time) and running to 10:00 p.m.

We will also be holding a mini conference before the meetup - a roundtable discussion with Erick Schonfeld (details will be announced soon), just as we did at August Capital.

All of the proceeds from the TechCrunch Austin Ventures Meet-Up will benefit the Lance Armstrong Foundation, an organization uniting people to fight cancer – believing that unity is strength, knowledge is power and attitude is everything.

In addition to releasing tickets for the Austin Meet-Up, sponsorship opportunities and demo tables are now available for companies to show off their products. If you are interested in supporting the event, please contact Jeanne Logozzo or Heather Harde. If you are a member of the press wanting to cover the event, please contact Sarah Ross.

Attendee identification will be checked at the door. Tickets are not transferable and not refundable. If you use your name to purchase multiple tickets, your guests must arrive with you to check in at the door.

We look forward to seeing you in Austin!!

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/H_aAi2uRKGE/

Feedburner hacked! from Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten on Vimeo.

It is hardly surprising that FeedBurner’s subscriber numbers can be faked. What is surprising is how easy it is to do so. As the video above shows, all you need is a Netvibes account. The folks at the Next Web in Amsterdam took a blog with 43 subscribers and turned that into 2,500 overnight simply by creating an OPML file with the same feed copied 2,500 times and pasting it into their Netvibes page. The result was 2,500 widgets of the blog feed, which FeedBurner counts as separate subscribers.

Why does this matter? Blogs like to tout how many RSS subscribers they have because, even if it is a smaller number than direct visitors to their site, it represents their most loyal readers. That’s why we display how many RSS readers we have in the Feedburner chicklet at the top of TechCrunch (currently 850,000). For these numbers to have any meaning, though, they cannot be as easy to game as the video shows. (And, no, we don’t game our numbers).

You’d think that Google would be smart enough not to double-count these things, or at least ask Netvibes and other widget start pages to de-duplicate the numbers for them by user. What appears to be happening here is that FeedBurner counts each widget for a particular feed on Netvibes as a separate subscriber, regardless of whether that widget is on ten thousand different user pages or repeated ten thousand times on the same page. The same thing happened a couple years ago with Pageflakes.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/Cu6PCx0IbeI/

Teenage entrepreneurs aren’t a new phenomenon in the valley - 17 year old Kristopher Tate founded Zooomr back in 2006, and Jessica Mah could call herself a serial entrepreneur by age 17. But it’s still pretty rare to see a startup founder get dropped off for work by his mother.

At our August Capital event last week, I met 15 year old Daniel Brusilovsky for the first time. While I had come across a few videos on the web detailing this young man’s enthusiasm and eagerness to succeed in the tech space, I was still taken aback by just how bright the kid is. He seems to know everyone, and a quick glance at his Twitter account shows he gets around too, with recent visits to Twitter, Apple, and the TechCrunch ranch - all without a drivers’ license.

Today Daniel is launching his first startup. The site is Teens In Tech, a community for teenagers interested in producing and sharing new media content in a safe environment. The site launches today in a very limited private alpha, with plans to expand to a public beta by the end of the year.

Brusilovsky says that while there are a number of sites that allow teens to post their content, they don’t make it easy for users to get started. To try to remedy this, Teens In Tech has a simple 3-step signup process, after which users will be given their own subdomain, WordPress blog, and 100MB of storage (the last figure can be easily changed depending on user needs). Users are also given access to a Teens in Tech forum, where they can go to ask questions about new media, or anything else they may have on their mind.

From a technical standpoint Teens In Tech will be fighting an uphill battle. The site is using Dreamhost, a cheap service that most companies wouldn’t go near with a ten foot stick, as its storage provider. And to be perfectly honest, it doesn’t seem like there’s much new code behind Teens in Tech - the backend is a mostly standard Wordpress multi-user install, similar to what runs on the commercial Wordpress.com site. Brusilovsky says that his team has made some adjustments and that the front page will display dynamic member updates, but for the most part, it seems like a few experienced developers could replicate the site in a week or less.

That said, Teens In Tech may appeal to a niche community of tweens and teens who aren’t satisfied by the plethora of other blogging services already available. Brusilovsky has amassed an impressive list of supporters, with a board of advisers that includes Robert Scoble and Loic Le Meur. And the site is still relatively early in development - given enough resources, I wouldn’t be surprised if Daniel manages to pull this thing off.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/ZE-kPI9j67Y/

Are you an ExtJS and Django user? If so, you will want to check out this article by Matt of Tangible Worldwide on Using ExtJS’s Grid Filtering with Django.

He goes into detail on how to tweak the grid filtering system that is aimed at PHP, and getting it to work in a way that allows you to write this Django code:

ExtJS 2.1 saw inclusion of the popular (at least in my world) user extension for AJAX filtering of data by grid columns. As useful as this is (provided you can abide by the GPL or paid licensing options), the filter parameters serialized as a PHP array, which is not particularly useful for other languages. With a quick modification to the grid filtering serialization method and a helper function for Django, we can rewire the system to send a JSON string that Django can use to directly apply filtering to a QuerySet. I’ve found that most clients love having this sort of command and flexibility over their data — especially the kind that don’t necessarily realize that this visualization and control exists. I like that. Additionally, the amount of work and code required is minimal, and the code both reusable and straight-forward. I like that, too.

There are 4 steps to this process:

1. Modify the serialization method in GridFilters.js
2. Set up the helper function that will process the QuerySet with the grid filter parameters
3. Slightly customize your models (see below)
4. Add (simple) helper code to your Ajax view

Source: Ajaxian » Front Page
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/355428306/django-and-extjs-grids-with-filters

When you’re looking for reliable information about human medical conditions, you can always turn to health portals like WebMD, RightHealth, OrganizedWisdom or iMedix. But what if your cat has stopped eating or your dog has started losing its hair? You’d probably resort to Googling the symptoms in hope that you could save yourself a trip to the vet.

WebVet is a content site launching today that aims to provide a comprehensive collection of articles regarding pet health so you don’t have to scratch around the net for this information. It begins by focusing on dogs, cats, bird and other small animals, but founders Hope Schultz and Bill Zaccheo plan to expand coverage to include exotics, fish and farm animals.

The two main components of the site are medical abstracts and featured articles. The medical extracts cover topics like Cushing’s disease, Lyme disease, rabies and tickets. They include the common symptoms of each condition and, while written by former editors of consumer pet manuals, show the names of the last veterinarians to review them for accuracy.

The featured articles are intended to draw visitors back to the site even when their pets aren’t sniffling or exhibiting other worrisome behavior. They cover not only health issues but also topics like gifts, fashion, holistic care, counseling, hotels, and travel tips for pets. Most of the articles will be written exclusively for WebVet by a team of 25 freelance writers.

Competitors include sites like Petside, Petplace, and PetEducation. We first covered WebVet in May when the company discussed its business plan at a Women 2.0 pitch event.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/s5JrWoUjegc/