Ajax Girl

Oh, Nokia N97. I wanted to touch you from the first time I Iaid eyes on you. You seemed like everything I wanted in a handset. You’d be the phone that surmounted the shortcomings of every smartphone before it. You were to be the mobile masterpiece. At least, I thought you were.

I’ve had the Nokia N97 for roughly 3 weeks now. Usually, we push out our reviews after just a week or so with the device - but I just couldn’t bring myself to sit down and review this one. Why? Because I thought I was missing something. There just had to be something I was overlooking - some setting, some application, just something that would earn this handset its pre-allotted spot in my pocket.

I wasn’t missing anything.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/OFBY4vmDYM0/

Last Friday, a fire at Fisher Plaza in Seattle knocked out a number of popular websites, including Microsoft Bing’s recently launched Travel portal. The site was back up by Saturday afternoon, but not before Google caught the the site’s placeholder “Bing Temporarily Unavailable” page and added it to its index (you can see the cached page here).

Now, five days later, “Bing Temporarily Unavailable” is the second search result offered when you search Google for “Bing”. It doesn’t take much to picture Google CEO Eric Schmidt cackling with glee over this.

This would be amusing enough on its own — It’s been days since Bing was last unavailable, and while I’m sure Google’s automated bots caught the page while it was actually down, it’s strange that it is taking this long for it to recognize the updated page. Bing may currently see traffic that pales in comparison to Google’s, but it’s no slouch either, and many much smaller sites are indexed by Google on an hourly basis.

But it gets even better: Bing’s Twitter account just sent a message directed towards Google’s, asking if they could take a look at their index and captions.

This might seem like a trivial goof on Google’s part, but it could actually have a fairly significant impact. Given how many people rely on using their browser’s integrated search box (which is often set to Google) rather than their address bar, I suspect there are quite a few queries for “bing” on Google every day.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/Hx1obiAjcS8/

Taking place tonight in Seattle is The Naked Truth 2009, a Redfin-hosted conference to give entrepreneurs advice. Michael is there participating as an expert to discuss industry trends. This year’s topic is revenue models for consumer Internet startups. The four presenting startups, Redfin, UrbanSpoon, Picnik and Animoto have some interesting information to share via their slides, which we’re posting below, pointing out a few of the highlights.

For those who want to follow along live, you can find the video of the event here.

First up, restaurant recommendation service UrbanSpoon, which was recently bought by IAC. Some highlights of their slide:

• Of their visitors on the web, 74% come from Google.
• Of their visitors through mobile devices, 99% come through the iPhone (they have one of the more popular apps).
• They’re seeing more than double the revenue off of those mobile users versus web users.
• When they were featured in an iPhone commercial, they saw 300% growth.

Next up, online imaging editing service, Picnik (which has a partnership with Yahoo to edit Flickr pictures).

• 80% of their revenues come from paid subscriptions, the other 20% from advertising.
• About half of their subscribers do so on the first visit to the site, 75% of those do within 4 visits.
• “Partnerships are not nirvana” — obviously a shot at Yahoo.

Video slideshow maker Animoto (which recently raised a new round of funding):

• They have 700 paid users per 100,000 users, but are already cash-flow positive with that.
• They say their hybrid model (freemium + virtual goods) is working

And finally, online real estate company, Redfin:

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

Microsoft’s competitor to Adobe Flash, Silverlight, has officially rolled out the new version, Silverlight 3, today. Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform, and cross-device plug-in for delivering media experiences and interactive applications for the Web. The first version was launched in 2007 and the second version was launched in September of 2008. In April, Microsoft reported 300 million downloads of Silverlight between September 2007 and April 2009, with an estimated 300,000 developers and engineers working off the Silverlight platform.

SIiverlight 3 launched a day earlier today on Microsoft’s servers, surprising the blogosphere. The new version has improved streaming capabilities, called Smooth Streaming. Here’s what Microsoft said about the new streaming function:

If the Internet bandwidth and video rendering capability on your playback device are sufficiently high, you’ll experience high-definition video playback of the sample content. You will also be able to simulate end user experiences under varying conditions by simulating drops and recoveries in bandwidth. If your actual bandwidth is below 3 Mbps, or your playback device is video-challenged, then you will experience the adaptive nature of Smooth Streaming without needing to simulate a bandwidth cap.

Microsoft is also extending Silverlight’s technologies beyond the browser by allowing developers to design and create apps that can run on the desktop. Microsoft will be announcing further details about Silverlight at its official launch of Silverlight 3 and Expression Studio 3 tomorrow morning. We’ll have all the details. And Microsoft will also be demoing some of the real-time capabilities of Silverlight 3 at TechCrunch’s Real-Time Stream CrunchUp tomorrow.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/eE7VELcdSV8/

So, as you may have seen yesterday, Yammer founder David Sacks is still alive in the World Series of Poker. In fact, he has to miss our events tomorrow because of it.

But you know, there’s something that we’re missing today — Yammer. The service has been down for a few hours now, with no signs of coming back up. Twitter is abuzz with the failure.

So while Sacks is busy playing Poker (okay, he’s actually working today, but still), leaving comments on our blog posts, and Twittering, his startup (which we love and use everyday, by the way) is suffering. Hope you win that gold bracelet, David!

Update: It’s definitely a hardware and not a software issue, we’re told. They’re still looking into the issue.

Here’s a video Sacks and Calacanis talking poker and their bet:

Watch Internet CEOs Play Poker at the 2009 WSOP on RawVegas.tv

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/MvrGyTD4R14/

A new URL shortening service LinksPreadeR (spelled like that because the URL is l.pr) has just launched in beta with an interesting twist on the shortening craze. It allows you to tack comments onto the end of the short URL, to send messages via the hyperlink. That’s kind of cool, but it also obviously makes the short URL a lot longer.

The idea is that with the messages in the URL, you won’t need to have a separate comment in your tweet or Facebook message. The problem with that is that people the people who like to retweet comments with comments of their own will have much less space to do so.

Here’s an example of what the shortened URL with a message will look like: http://l.pr/a43v/hey,_it’s_mah_blog and here’s a slightly more ridiculous one: http://l.pr/a43w/hey,_look_it’s_my_Twitter_profile._go_take_a_look._if_you_dare.
Yeah, not sure how useful that is.

But, you can use it as a regular shortening service too. Below each message-encoded URL is an actual short URL you can use too. For example, the latter one above can also be: http://l.pr/a43w. Yes, much shorter, and nice thanks to the three letter domain.

Like most other URL shortening services. LinksPreadR also has a bookmarklet for easier use.

Update: And I just realized something, for URLs with really long messages, Twitter will re-shorten it, using bit.ly. Yeah, that totally defeats the point. For shorter messages it still works though.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/L61S0icYO8Y/

The Web is speeding up and Gnip wants to help push it along. Today, the API aggregation platform is releasing its own Push API which lets any site patch together its own version of Friendfeed or Twitter-like data stream. Gnip will be speaking at TechCrunch’s Real-Time Stream CrunchUp tomorrow on the Real-Time Business panel.

Gnip lets data-consuming services like Plaxo that take data from other services (like Twitter, Facebook Friendfeed, Digg, Delicious, etc.) collect data from requested users pushed to them. Data consumers using Gnip’s platform can get public data streams for over 30 social media networks and sites, including Twitter, Digg, Delicious, YouTube, WordPress, Flickr, Six Apart and others without ever visiting those sites or accessing their individual APIs.

The new push service lets companies filter and white-label the stream so the technology is fully integrated into the business’ infrastructure. Companies list out the most common data requests that are made on their APIs and websites and Gnip will collect the relevant data and deliver it in real-time to any approved third-party. For example, a travel website like Expedia or Kayak may use Gnip’s service to track and deliver real-time information on how customers are interacting with airline deals to the vendors that are listing flights on their site, like American Airlines or Delta. The real-time capabilities would let a travel site analyze real-time data and syndicate changes in fare sales immediately.

Gnip is also launching a early-stage startup partner program that will let startups access to all of Gnip’s service features and data services. The program is aimed towards software development startups that have been in business for less than 3 years and generating less than $200,000 in revenue. Of course, Gnip requires that partners pay a fee of $1000 but says the services that they will receive are valued at $10,000 per month. Dipity, Toobla and Klout are all pilot partners of the new program.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/FfLKJyKn6sk/

It was only seven months ago that video chat startup TokBox sent a taco truck to meet newly laid-off Yahoo employees in an effort to cheer up and recruit a few of them (the startup was kind enough to send the truck over to our office afterwards to let us in on the action). Now, it sounds like someone should be sending the taco truck in TokBox’s direction. We’ve gotten word that the company just fired six of its twelve engineers, or around 30% of the company’s total staff, and that all of the company’s founders are now gone.

TokBox offers a great product that allows for multi-user video chat from the browser, but it hasn’t really managed to take off, much to the chagrin of the company’s investors who include Sequoia and Bain Capital (TokBox has raised $14 million to date). That’s a lot of money for a video and chat startup, especially when there are a number of similar sites that have begun offering some of the same functionality.

So the company is beginning to make some major changes. TokBox recently got a new CEO — the third in the company’s brief history. Founder Serge Faguet was replaced by Nick Triantos last July, who in turn was replaced in May by former Mark Logic exec Ian Small.

TokBox VP Marketing Micky O’Brien says that this week’s firings were part of Small’s plans to restructure the company, and that as of this morning the vacant positions are being shown on the company’s Jobs page. She also says that TokBox’s last remaining co-founder, CTO Ron Hose, left the company on his own accord around four weeks ago.

Disclosure: TokBox is a sponsor for tomorrow’s Real-Time CrunchUp.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/oo6FF8qDFkA/

DoubleTwist, a universal media management desktop application for Macs and PCs, not only has a clever marketing team behind it but also seems to be something a lot of people have been waiting for. The free software, which works like a multi-platform version of iTunes with a social networking component, has been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times since it launched in February (exact number aren’t disclosed for the time being).

Users can share music files, photos or videos across (almost) any device via drag and drop and share the files with others. DoubleTwist’s main selling point: It supports hundreds of devices, from cell phones or mobile gaming devices to portable music players. For example, the software can sync all music files you bought on iTunes with your Blackberry, Nokia phone, Kindle or Sony PSP without you having to worry about file format compatibility. Media files can then be uploaded to sites like Flickr, Facebook or YouTube from within doubleTwist.

Watch this video to see how the app works:

It’s safe to say Apple isn’t probably a big fan of the software. But doubleTwist co-founders Monique Frantzos and Jon Lech Johansen (better known as DVD Jon) silently enhanced the app in the last few weeks and told me today they have more plans for the future.

doubleTwist added support for video downloads from YouTube and now works with Android phones and the Palm Pre, too. Drag and drop any YouTube video you want to watch on the go on your Android G1, for example, into the doubleTwist window and copy it onto your device in seconds. iPhone 3.0 compatibility, bundling deals with several cell phone makers and a more sophisticated podcast engine are to be expected in the near future, too.

Entry into gadget-crazy Japanese market
Things are going very well for doubleTwist in the English-speaking world, and starting today, the application is available as a localized version in mobile phone-crazy Japan (Windows-only for the time being/demo video). According to Johansen and Frantzos, the main reasons for choosing Japan as the first Non-English market are:

• a myriad of super-advanced cell phones from different makers (about 100 a year) delivering a mediocre software experience
• world’s highest penetration of iTunes (1 out of 4 broadband users or about 13.6 million Japanese use iTunes to manage their music)
• high online video consumption (21 million Japanese users watch YouTube videos for 187 minutes per month as opposed to Americans who are on YouTube for 134 minutes monthly)
• strong demand for high-quality online video (mobile YouTube delivers low quality but doubleTwist can show YouTube videos in high-res)

doubleTwist’s entry into Japan makes sense, as the country is one of the world’s biggest markets for music and movies (for example, Japanese users downloaded music worth $10.2 billion to cell phones in 2007). Nearly 170 Japan-only cell phones from local carriers NTT Docomo, KDDI au and SoftBank are supported from the start. DoubleTwist has set up a Wiki page for each one of them, an exclusive pilot service for the Japanese market that might be expanded to all doubleTwist-compatible devices in the future.

The company has so far raised $7.5 million in series A and B from several major venture capital companies in the US, Europe and Asia, including Index Ventures (investors in Skype) and Hong Kong-based Horizons Ventures.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/3loR2o_vEXs/