Ajax Girl

Last week, we wrote about LinkedIn’s recent issues with its Groups - as part of a new platform rollout, a number of management features were apparently buggy, while others had been removed entirely.

Tonight sees the release of a number of new features on the platform that should quell some of these concerns. Among the new features are a centralized hub page for every group, where group members can come together and converse with each other in one place. The release also introduces enhanced group and user management features, including a searchable roster.

While it’s nice to see LinkedIn enhancing its groups functionality, its surprising to see that the company has taken this long to introduce them - most of them seem to be fairly basic. That said, the added community features should be a boon to the site’s professional user base as they look to enhance their connections with their peers.

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/SKPQ2heRZP8/

Scribd, the popular document sharing hub, has finally rolled out a much-needed redesign. The site has long been hampered by a messy homepage that wasn’t attractive for first-time visitors, displaying a list of its top features in lieu of a YouTube-esque stream of featured documents. The old design made it clear that Scribd worked well as a utility, but didn’t make it attractive as a destination site. Now, the new site highlights a sampling of its top documents and includes a number of UX changes that Scribd hopes will remedy this issue.

One of the major changes in the design is a new emphasis on search. Scribd has seen impressive growth since its launch in Spring 2007, and now claims more than 20 million unique visitors monthly. But more than half of that traffic comes from search engines - something that the site would like to change. The new design is intended to make the search function more prominent, encouraging users to turn to Scribd instead of Google or Yahoo when they’d like to find a document. And CEO Trip Adler says that it’s working: while A/B bucket testing the new design, Scribd has seen the number of searches double (the number of uploads increased by 70% as well).

Finally, in conjunction with the redesign, Scribd has ditched its yellow generic “document” logo in favor of something that reminds me of colored pencils.

Scribd’s biggest competitor is DocStoc, a document sharing portal that offers a similar Flash-based viewer.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/eWtkqZ6ed2o/

Last May, Google announced the first set of winners in its two-part contest called Android Challenge, which is meant to kick-start the creation of 3rd-party applications for its nascent mobile platform by enticing developers with a total of $10 million in awards.

Today, Google is releasing the names of its second set of winners, 10 of which receive $275,000 and 10 of which receive $100,000.

The full list of winners can be found here.

The winners were picked from a pool of 50 finalists and include TuneWiki, a mobile media player we’ve raved about in the past.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/xtGhy0KBfGE/

TechCrunch50 is just a week and a half away. The list of presenting companies is kept strictly confidential until the day of the event to ensure maximum audience attention. But we’re making one exception this year. Ashton Kutcher and Jason Goldberg’s Katalyst Media will be launching Blah Girls, one of his new interactive online video products, at TechCrunch50.

Like all products launching at the event, TechCrunch50 will be the first time the public or press has seen it. We got a look at it a couple of months ago and think it’s going to be a hit. Look for a lot more activity from Katalyst Media over the coming months.

I asked Ashton to do a quick intro video saying how excited he is about TechCrunch50. He sent the video below. You have to read between the lines, but I think he’s pretty jazzed about all of the strict confidentiality requirements and the need to meet with us twice before the event to rehearse his presentation. Warning: There’s some strong language.

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

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

First came 360, launched in 2005 as an early attempt to get Yahoo into social networking, was unceremoniously shut down earlier this year. In 2006 Yahoo was unable to close a transaction with Facebook, despite being willing to pay up to $1.62 billion. Nor could they pull the trigger on a $1 billion Bebo deal (Bebo went to AOL for $850 million). Now Yahoo has shut down Mash, which launched less than a year ago and is best known for sporting a Darth Vader playing guitar and eating a banana image when it was in private beta.

Today, Yahoo emailed users notice that Mash will be shutting down on September 29, 2008.

Fifth time’s a charm they say (right?). Let’s hope the next grand strategy works out better than the first four.

Meanwhile, Yahoo Mash joins the deadpool.

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/MExUpMJ8y5w/

Can traffic to a Presidential Candidate’s homepage be used to gauge who will win this year’s election? Hitwise has published recent data on the traffic both American presidential candidates have seen in the last month (ending 8/23), and while the results may not shed much light on the forthcoming election’s outcome, they reveal a few interesting trends.

Hitwise has ranked each state by two criteria: its contribution to each site’s total traffic, and the the overall likelihood that a user in the state will visit the candidate’s site (called the Representation index). If either metric is applicable to the election, it will be Representation Index, which indicates the candidate’s popularity on a per-state basis and isn’t affected by the state’s population.

Unsurprisingly, California represents the most traffic share for both candidates, accounting for 13% of Obama’s total traffic and 12% of McCain’s. But both candidates have also seen a similar Representation Index from the state, which means that a similar number of Californians have visited each site. Given the state’s Democratic history, this is surprising - apparently Californians are interested in learning about the opposition. Conversely, in left-leaning New York, McCain’s site has only seen about half as much traffic as Obama’s.

Hitwise also notes that the highest Representation Index for Obama came from Maryland, Colorado, New Mexico, Georgia, and DC, while McCain’s come from Montana, Wyoming, Nevada, Colorado, and Louisiana. More of McCain’s states are “battlegrounds”, but there’s no way of knowing if people are visiting these sites because they like him or hate him - perhaps the traffic stats from McCainSpace would be a better indicator.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/VZabFvl6RP8/

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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/WF8bo8ikVQs/

Things have been quiet over at Jaiku since its acquisition by Google last Fall. People worried that Google may have ruined Twitter’s most formidable competitor by requiring the Finnish startup to labor away for months integrating its service into Google’s technology stack instead of rolling out new features. All the while, new signups have been disabled and invitations limited, which has cut the service off from a healthy stream of new users.

But now we’re seeing some signs of life. Jaiku has moved its software over to a Google data center and has given its existing users an unlimited number of invites to send their friends.

The new data center isn’t Jaiku’s final resting place, merely a step towards running things on Google App Engine. However, it’s an important one for a company that appears to be preparing itself first and foremost for scalability (a problem that notoriously has plagued Twitter).

As VentureBeat points out, Jaiku has also introduced a new terms of service and privacy policy, so it’s getting its legal house in order as well.

Are you a Jaiku member? Share some of your unlimited invitations with outsiders over at InviteShare.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/fzg8O6r19G0/

The Android Blog is reporting that Google has officially announced the Android Market, an App Store like solution that allows publishers to upload programs and sell them online.

Developers will be able to make their content available on an open service hosted by Google that features a feedback and rating system similar to YouTube. We chose the term “market” rather than “store” because we feel that developers should have an open and unobstructed environment to make their content available. Similar to YouTube, content can debut in the marketplace after only three simple steps: register as a merchant, upload and describe your content and publish it. We also intend to provide developers with a useful dashboard and analytics to help drive their business and ultimately improve their offerings.

More information on CrunchGear as we get it.

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/kBL7fKm74Nc/

You’ll notice very few ad units while surfing YouTube, and none at all while watching videos contributed by ordinary folk like you or me. The reason? Google fears the legal repercussions of monetizing user generated content that may infringe on somebody else’s copyright.

But YouTube’s homepage is different since it merely displays thumbnails that may lead to infringing content. And it has capitalized on that page by selling a video ad unit in the upper right-hand corner for $175,000 per day (plus a commitment to buy $50,000 more in advertising elsewhere on YouTube or Google).

According to Silicon Alley Insider, YouTube is about to focus even more intently on leveraging its homepage for profit by selling large format ads that expand to fill the whole page. The ad unit, expected to come in the following weeks, will start at a price of about $200,000 per day with rates increasing in the Fall.

YouTube recently experimented with these expandable ads for Pineapple Express. When clicked on, a video ad for that movie expanded to fill the whole homepage instead of playing back inline. The video was also in high definition rather than YouTube’s normal, crummy quality, and it could be viewed in true fullscreen mode as well.

YouTube is still trying to figure out how to make more than a trickle of money for Google. The industry is watching to see how effectively the company can monetize in-video advertisements, but these currently are run only in a very small fraction of the site’s videos. Overall, YouTube is expected to make about $200 million for Google in 2008 (a tiny 1% of its total sales), mainly from these homepage ads and branded channels, which go for $200,000 a pop.

Image courtesy of NewTeeVee

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

Source: TechCrunch
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