Ajax Girl

This is officially the week of John. If he delivers top notch posts for the rest of the week he wins an Ajaxian award or something. Maybe we need to bring back the “pack of cards” where each card is an Ajax personality and John gets to be Ace of Hearts or something.

I remember talking with some of the V8 team about how poor the world of timing is. Chrome is a lot more accurate in its timing, which can do it a disservice in browser performance tests. Some browsers would respond with “0″ when Chrome would return “0.001″ and it would hence suffer.

Add that to the flawed “just add up the total time for all tests” mentality of some tests and you end up with very skewed results (you could do amazingly bad on one test that in practice never matters and really well on the others, but it all evens out).

Here comes John with a post on the accuracy of JavaScript timing which came out of a bad situation:

I was running some performance tests, on Internet Explorer, in the SlickSpeed selector test suite and noticed the result times drastically fluctuating. When trying to figure out if changes that you’ve made are beneficial, or not, it’s incredibly difficult to have the times constantly shifting by 15 - 60ms every page reload.

This lead him to tests life on various browsers and operating systems and he put up the raw data for you to check out.

He concludes:

Testing JavaScript performance on Windows XP and Vista is a crapshoot, at best. With the system times constantly being rounded down to the last queried time (each about 15ms apart) the quality of performance results is seriously compromised. Dramatically improved performance test suites are going to be needed in order to filter out these impurities, going forward.

Source: Ajaxian » Front Page
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/451488258/timing-in-javascript-and-browsers-cant-be-trusted

A year ago, one of the surprise holiday breakout hits on the Web was ElfYourself.com. It was a promotional viral video site created by OfficeMax that let people upload their pictures and create dancing elves that they could then send as e-cards to family and friends. ElfYourself turned out to be the fastest growing site last December, peaking at 39 million unique visitors in the U.S. (and attracting a total of 100 million unique visitors worldwide throughout the campaign).

When Greg Spiridellis, CEO of JibJab Media, saw ElfYourself, it resonated with him because JbJab is organized around a similar series of “Starring You” videos that allow people to upload their photos so that they can star in the videos, and send them as digital cards. The JibJab videos also often involve dancing characters.

Spiridellis decided to look up ElfYourself’s traffic numbers on Quantcast, and this is what he saw:

For that one month, it rivaled Facebook in traffic. But Spiridellis thought JibJab could bring the site up a notch. In February, he cold-called the chief marketing officer of OfficeMax and proposed a partnership: JibJab would create new dancing elves around its Starring You platform. There would be not one dance, but three: Disco Elves, Jazz Elves, and Country Elves. There would also be the opportunity to sell digital downloads of the videos and personalized images printed out on cards, mugs, and mousepads.

It could turn ElfYourself from an expensive marketing cost into something that might actually make money. OfficeMax agreed and this year JibJab will run the site, which is scheduled to relaunch later this week. That’s a teaser shot above that JibJab sent us featuring some of the TechCrunch crew (Michael, Mark, Heather, and me).

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/DhSImf2astE/

Transpera will later today announce it has secured a second round of funding to the tune of $8.25 million on top of an undisclosed amount in Series A financing it received in July 2007.

The capital injection comes from initial investors Flybridge Capital Partners (formerly IDG Ventures), Intel Capital and First Round Capital, who also brought in Labrador Ventures for this second round. The round also includes some debt financing from Silicon Valley Bank, a member company of SVB Financial Group.

Transpera has developed a platform that enables the distribution and monetization of Web videos on mobile phones. With the so-called Transpera Ad Platform (TAP), the company offers mobile video publishers and carriers a suite of promotional and distribution building tools to enhance the end user experience, and advertisers a way to market their wares by serving targeted ads in the form of interactive display banners, pre-roll videos, overlay ads, post-roll experiences and mini sites. There’s even a spin-off platform tailored specifically to the iPhone (screenshot of the model below), which makes sense given the fact that web browsing and entertainment is quite popular on the device.

The platform is in use by a number of noteworthy information and entertainment brands, including Associated Press, CBS News, Discovery Communications, Fox Reality Channel, MTV Networks, Break.com and Revision3 (sample video).

Transpera relies on a very experienced team (nice touch with the animated pics, guys) and an impressive advisory board that includes people like Tom Rogers (CEO TiVo), Todd Warner (Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Windows Mobile) and former President of ZD Interactive Media Division Jeff Ballowe. They also managed to snatch Brian Monnin, who will be joining as Chief Product Officer, away from his executive position at Brightcove.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/0rVcV5mqqfQ/

Microsoft’s Live.com portal will change significantly this evening. No longer will it be a simple search engine with a few other services bolted on. It’s now a social network, too, pulling in activity information and content from around the web. They’re also launching Windows Live Photos and Windows Live People, and other services. Check it out at Home.Live.com.

A lot of what they’ve done is exactly what Yahoo has been talking about for over a year now - leveraging social connections that already exist (Yahoo is using email, Microsoft is using Messenger) and doing a lot more with it.

Users are automatically connected with any friends they have on MySpace messenger, which is by far the most popular instant messaging service worldwide (Comscore: Microsoft Messenger has 268 million worldwide users, compared to 116 million for Yahoo and 6 million for Google Talk).

Users are asked to build out their profile, and can also bring in content they create on blogs (or any RSS feeds, Flickr, LinkedIn, Pandora, Photobucket, iLike, Twitter, Wordpress and Yelp. When you do something new on those sites, the information flows into Live.com for your friends to see (in a very similar way as FriendFeed, Plaxo and others do today). Eventually, says Microsoft, more than 50 partners will be supported. When users add photos, write reviews, and update their profiles directly on Live.com, that content will be put into the activity stream as well.

The hope, of course, is to get people to hang out a lot more at Live.com. At least those people who use Messenger, since they already have their contacts established. Like Yahoo, Microsoft is going with its strengths, which in their case is instant messaging.

Microsoft’s software plus services strategy has clearly infiltrated Live.com as well as their approach with Office. Live.com users can now access a variety of online services like mail, calendar, photos, online storage, etc., as well as downloaded services that include a mail client, instant messaging, Movie Maker, Photo Gallery, the Toolbar and other services. And now it’s also one big social network.

The result is an impressive personal productivity suite that makes me almost wish I wasn’t solely a Mac user.

Overview video and reviewers guide are below:

Windows Live Reviewers Guide - Get more Information Technology

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/5InDr7Zcfn4/

Prolific iPhone development studio Tapulous has launched a trio of new applications, including an impressive Twitter client that could well become the most-used app on my phone. They’re also releasing a new online multiplayer version of mega-hit Tap Tap Revenge that will likely see the game surge in popularity (again), and have announced that they have hit a total of 3 million users across all of their applications.

The company’s new Twitter client is called Tweetsville (grab it here for $3.99), and was developed by veteran engineer Ed Voas. CEO Bart Decrem says that Voas initially started building the app for himself after becoming dissatisfied with existing Twitter clients, and incorporated a number of key features that make Tweetsville an ideal app for Twitter power-users. The application includes an integrated listing of top trends, advanced search functions, and a streamlined interface that feels much speedier than its competitors. In short, it’s great, and I won’t be surprised if it displaces favorites like Twitterific and Tapulous’s own Twinkle as the premier Twitter client on the iPhone. Decrem says that Twinkle will now focus on connecting people who are close to each other while still functioning as a Twitter client, while Tweetsville will be for hardcore users.

This evening an update to Tap Tap Revenge (an addictive game similar to Guitar Hero) also went live, incorporating online multiplayer that allows players on multiple iPhones to compete over Wi-Fi or 3G. Tapulous’ servers are totally overwhelmed at the moment so I’ve been unable to get into a game, but it’s sure to be a success (though I doubt it will be as fun as in-person multiplayer games). Earlier this month Tapulous also released Nine Inch Nails Revenge, a version of the game that features licensed NIN music and new artwork. Decrem says that the company has been pleased with the results, selling “tens of thousands” of copies at $5 apiece.

Earlier this week the company also released a simple application called Photo Collage that displays pictures taken around the world to a community album (you can also view photos taken by friends and people in your proximity). While fairly basic in terms of features, it is slick and makes for a great diversion.

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

Forget those YouTubevertorials. Google is no longer joking around when it comes to turning YouTube into real business that, you know, makes money. YouTube on its own would rank as the second largest search engine after Google. And you know what? Google has already figured out how to make money from search. You sell the top results to the highest bidder.

YouTube has long resisted selling search results, but it has now caved in. Now anyone can promote their YouTube videos for specific search keywords on a pay-per-click basis. This should generate substantial new revenues for Google. YouTube has a lot of search inventory. (Viewers search on the site more than 2.5 billion times per month). This should also generate a lot more spam results.

Google likes to pretend that paid search ads can be just as relevant as organic search results. And in the text world that is sometimes true. But when it comes to video, the sex factor gets magnified, and what you end up with half the time are sex videos no matter what the search term happens to be.

For instance, when I did a search for “sports”, the second top sponsored result was for “WWE Divas, Sexy Sports Girls.” (See screen shot above). I don’t think the girl in the video it links to (titled “Sexy Webcam Girl Hot Babe Big Boobs Huge Tits Nude Ass Gorgeous Butt Glamour Model “) is really a wrestler. YouTube prohibits ads for actual pornography, but videos with girls simulating sex in bikinis is okay.

It doesn’t really matter what the search term is, videos like that are going to get a lot of clicks. There are already plenty of videos like that on YouTube. Now they are going to become even esier to find.

Here’s a video of YouTube founder Chad Hurley with his clothes on explaining why he’s so excited about this new promotional opportunity for YouTubers:

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/5kGGGjWlN_I/

Craigslist is great (I use it all the time), but there are few things more unnerving than inviting a total stranger billing himself as a “HANDY MAN, AT YOUR SERVICE!” to your house to make a few repairs. The vast majority of transactions on the site go smoothly and without incident, but there’s a reason Cragislist advises you to meet up in a public place and let a friend know what you’re doing, just in case. And even if the guy you hired isn’t a creep, there’s still a chance he won’t be any good at his job.

Workstir is looking to take some of the guesswork out of hiring for services like home repair, cleaning, and child care. The site, which we’ve described as a Craigslist/Yelp hybrid, allows you to post service requests to a forum frequented by these service providers, much as you would in the Craigslist ‘Looking for’ section. These service providers then contact you through Email. But instead of making you verify their credentials independently, each service provider will have a Workstir profile that features photos, their interests, and reviews from other Workstir users who have dealt with them in the past.

Service providers also benefit from this setup, as they’ll be able to view a daily digest of available jobs in their area, and can also elect to receive mobile alerts so that they can be among the first to respond to a request. And as the best service providers build up their ratings, they can potentially charge more than their less-able competitors.

The site will face competition from Angie’s List, which offers local service reviews for a fee, but its biggest obstacle will lie in establishing a large enough user base (both from customers and service providers) to make its reviews credible and worthwhile. That said, there’s definitely a market for trustworthy classifieds, so Workstir may have no trouble finding an audience.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/V3_x_ZQJ5po/

At a recent presentation at Harvard Business School, Adeo Ressi argued that the VC model is broken. That is nothing new for Ressi, who is the founder of the VC-rating site theFunded. He is kind of like the Nick Denton of the VC world, always saying that the sky is falling. It’s just that at this moment he happens to be right.

The slides from his presentation are embedded below, but really all you need to look at is the one above. It shows that the money going into VC funds is now more than the money coming out of VC funds. That line was crossed last June and there is no going back anytime soon.

The big institutional investors who tend to put the most money into venture funds as limited partners are hurting right now. They’re other investments have gone south, they are over-leveraged, and there is buzz that some are pulling back from their commitments to venture funds. They certainly aren’t eager to pour in more money, especially when the net returns just aren’t there any more.

When the lines cross over again, we can all relax. But until then, it won’t be just startups that need to tighten their belts. VCs are on notice too. Their once-flush investors are now squeezing every penny. And some VC funds just won’t make it.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/86oJigZE-KY/

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/uChM1C4kWxM/

Multiply, a social network largely geared towards adults, has launched a new set of printing features that allow members to order professional prints of their photos directly from their online albums and those of their friends.

Available photo products include photo books, calendars, cards, and standard prints. The site uses an intuitive drag-and-drop interface to place photos, allowing users to cull shots from both their own online albums and those of their friends. Users can collaboratively put together a photo book, but are also free to copy and manipulate each album to their liking (for example, parents could work together to create a photo book of their little league team, customizing the cover of each printed book to feature a photo of their own child).

Multiply has a leg up on some of the major social networks because it has long positioned itself as a media-centric site - the site’s 10 million users have uploaded twice as many photos per capita as Facebook’s. And unlike Facebook, which only offers photo printing at the low resolutions visible on the site, all Multiply photos are stored at their original resolution. To help facilitate getting photos
onto the site, Multiply released an application earlier this year based on Adobe’s AIR platfrom that automatically uploads new photos to the social network.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/PP4SoeMCP4c/