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News and informations about Web 2.0

Profit Maximization V. Survival Maximization
A lot of criticism has been aimed at venture capitalists the last few days. The VCs are telling their portfolio companies to get ahead of the curve and conserve cash right now, and companies are starting to take their advice. The criticism is coming from people who don't understand that the world has changed in the last week and that companies need to change with it. And so they're asking why VCs waited until now to tell everyone to conserve cash. Others are saying the boom is the VCs fault, and for them to lecture companies on conserving cash is ironic. Fred Wilson wrote about this issue today and says VCs have a responsibility to give their best advice to their portfolio companies: "It's all about acting responsibly and making sure we all survive to fight another day." But he doesn't address the issue head on. I will. What we're talking about is the goal of profit maximization, which is what every for profit business needs to aim for or go out of business. In the good times, that means growing intelligently. In the bad, it means maximizing your chances of survival.
Source : www.techcrunch.com | 12-oct.-2008 02:55

Forget the Front Desk: Hotels Go High Tech
There's nothing like a bit of luxury when staying at a nice hotel. Be it in-room dining or the staff waiting on your every need, feeling like a king for a day is a matter of taking advantage of the hotel's services. Unfortunately, the systems in place for requesting such things are years behind, teetering on the edge of archaic. You can stare at the minuscule writing on the phone handset in hopes that dialing the listed numbers won't throw you into an infinite loop of forwards and "accidental" hang ups or, at some hotels, you can click your way through a sluggish and ancient feeling TV interface. They may as well be using pneumatic tubes. Runtriz, a software firm out of Hollywood, CA, is aiming to bring hotels up to speed. Following a series of quiet test runs at other LA hotels, they've debuted a product called "Hotel Evolution" at the Malibu Beach Inn in Malibu, CA, which puts all of the hotel's offerings in the palm of your hand.
Source : www.techcrunch.com | 12-oct.-2008 00:24

Twitter to IM: Drop Dead
It took a worldwide financial meltdown for Twitter to finally cough up the IM hairball. At BearHug Camp, I spent about 10 of the 30 minute executive visitation trying to pin down Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, and Alex Payne on when exactly Track and IM would be back, and in what order. Turns out the IM part isn't coming back; it's been moved from Broken to Build. Evan Williams delivers the bad news with a refreshing frankness, suggesting the ROI of IM services for a small percentage of Twitter users puts it down the list below other more pressing priorities. And at the bottom of the email, he points at a fledgling third-party service that gives you a way of "tweeting" over the Jabber XMPP gateway. The author is mulling how to provide access to users' follows. No mention is made of Track, of course.
Source : www.techcrunch.com | 11-oct.-2008 20:29

During Tough Times, The Echo Chamber Can Be Your Best Friend
We are witnessing either an epic financial meltdown or a long overdue resetting of existing business practices and the hollow markets they create. Or, perhaps we?re experiencing both of these phenomena. Either way, it has the nation gripped with fear, uncertainty, and an unsettling eruption of questionable advice confusing everyone, everywhere. While the floor is crumbling for many industries much in the same way it did for Silicon Valley during the dotbomb years, the sky isn?t necessarily falling on the startup industry ? at least not for those with marketable technology or products, dedicated and capable teams, an executable business plan, and access to the resources necessary to help it reach users and customers. For those startups that are building and marketing something of value for consumers or businesses, there is much work to do. While there is always a need to attract mainstream users, this isn?t the time to stretch or over-commit resources to hit everyone all at once. Branding is an expensive proposition, one that requires time, capital, diligence, dedicated teams, enthusiastic customers, and patience. As counter intuitive as it may seem, this is exactly the right time to market into the echo chamber to earn the support of influentials who will create significant, concentrated brand visibility and momentum to carry you forward. Your business can grow with the groundswell and doesn?t necessarily require the instant adoption by the masses in order to succeed in the short term.
Source : www.techcrunch.com | 11-oct.-2008 16:40

WeAre.Us is (Almost) Like Ning, But With A Heart. Wins First VenCorps Prize.
When you are suffering from a chronic disease, sometimes the only people who can understand what you are going through are other people with the same condition. But when that condition is rare, it can be difficult to find them. WeAre.Us wants to help. It is a platform of 16 social networks that connect people with chronic illnesses. And it just launched a revamped version (which mainly features an improved user interface). The site entered the crowded health 2.0 market last April, but stands out with its focused internal framework and commitment to supporting the patients who use it. In contrast to health platforms like DailyStrength or Revolution Health, which serve as a contact point for health-related topics of any kind, WeAre.Us connects people affected by severe illnesses only. In that sense, it is more like PatientsLikeMe. But rather than create an all-encompassing site, WeAre.Us decided to take more of a niche social network approach.
Source : www.techcrunch.com | 11-oct.-2008 15:13

Yamli Makes It Easy To Use Arabic On The Web
Approximately 60% of Arabic-speaking Internet users dislike using an Arabic keyboard, according to Yamli, a Massachusetts-based startup that launched last year. CEO Habib Haddad explains that many users have to use a Latin keyboard for their jobs or school, which makes the keyboards impractical (and many think they're just hard to type with). When it comes time to type in Arabic, many Internet users have adopted a phonetic web language that spells out Arabic words with these Latin letters. The result, Haddad says, is messy - especially when it comes to making sounds that don't exist in English. Yamli has built a system that solves this problem. Users enter words phonetically into a special text box that displays a list of matching words that are written in Arabic. This allows them to keep using their Latin keyboard, without having the resulting text look like gibberish. Because there are around 22 dialects in the Arab world, Yamli has to deal with multiple different phonetic spellings, which Haddad says it does with around 95% accuracy.
Source : www.techcrunch.com | 11-oct.-2008 05:10

As Rome Burned, Team Cyprus Danced
Yes, the meme is just getting started it seems. 1938Media does his own take of the Team Cyprus video, set to the tune of AC/DC's HighWay To Hell:
Source : www.techcrunch.com | 11-oct.-2008 03:26

Team Cyprus Move To Undo ?The Video?
A group of twenty or so tech elite were partying 1999-style in Cyprusthis last week, and posted a lip sync video of the Journey song ?Don?t Stop Believing? a couple of days ago. Among the group were Brittany Bohnet of Google, Mike Hudack of Blip.tv, Dave Morin and Aaron Sittig of Facebook, Sam Lessin of Drop.io and Jessica Vascellaro, the Wall Street Journal?s Silicon Valley beat reporter. Team Cyprus: Alcohol + Bad Judgement + Poor Timing The video was released just as Silicon Valley really began falling apart and the UnParty began in earnest - eBay?s 10% layoffs, Google's stock nosedive, Yahoo?s self destruction, VC?s bunkering down, etc. And more than a few people thought the ostentatious partying was a little, ahem, tasteless in light of the meltdown back home. Now that video has been taken private, which is what it should have been marked as in the first place. But it?s too late - the video has spread to YouTube and other sites, and won?t be disappearing again. As I said yesterday, fair or not the video video will always be associated with the end of Web 2.0.
Source : www.techcrunch.com | 11-oct.-2008 01:52

Delicious, Upcoming Founders To Show You Political Bias Of News Sites
What has ex-Yahooer and Delicious founder Joshua Schachter been working on since leaving Yahoo last June? At least one project is a GreaseMonkey script that shows readers the political leanings of blogs and news sites on Memeorandum, a news aggregator. Political sites are usually very biased, but the casual reader often doesn't know which way a particular site tends to rant. With the new script, also available as a Firefox plugin, sites are shaded towards blue (whiny cowards) or red (warmongers) depending on their linking behavior. Andy Baio, who's been working with Schachter on the project, describes it:
Source : www.techcrunch.com | 11-oct.-2008 01:27

H-1B Visas Rife with Fraud, Government Finds
Thirteen percent of the H-1B visas granted are based on fraud and another 8% contain so-called technical violations, according to a study just done by the U.S. Citizenship & Immigration Services (USCIS), an arm of the Department of Homeland Security, and forwarded to the Senate Judiciary Committee. The USCIS processes visa petitions and, given the findings, says it's making procedural changes that haven't been disclosed yet.

Source : web2.sys-con.com | 11-oct.-2008 01:15

Getting The UnParty Started: Seesmic Lays Off 1/3 Of Staff
It's time to start slamming the reality of the Silicon Valley situation home to everyone. Seesmic founder Loic Le Meur lets seven employees go, he says, which is more than a third of the company. This comes on top of three employees let go a couple of weeks ago. "We cut everything that wasn't outsourceable, core or absolutely necessary for the company." Le Meur says the company isn't in dire financial trouble yet, noting he raised a $6 million round just a few months ago. But he's planning for a bleak fundraising future. I am an investor in the company.
Source : www.techcrunch.com | 11-oct.-2008 00:03

Parallel Kingdom Set To Launch One Of First iPhone/Android MMOs
Since the launch of the iPhone App Store, we've seen a wave of geo-aware social networks that make use of the phone's GPS (or in the case of the original iPhone, pseudo-GPS). Each of these apps aims to help facilitate social interaction by locating nearby friends, points of interest, or people you might be interested in meeting (but might not know yet). There's little doubt that some incarnation of one of these apps will help shape the future of social networking, but there's still a huge geo-aware market that has yet to be tapped: Games. Parallel Kingdom, launching at the end of the month, is set to become one of the first massively multiplayer online games (MMO) to hit the iPhone platform and Android platforms (both platforms will share the same in-game network). MMO's have been tremendously popular on personal computers with mega-hits like World of Warcraft, and have proven to be lucrative with subscription models that feed off their addicting gameplay. Parallel Kingdom is hoping to take this success to a mobile platform.
Source : www.techcrunch.com | 10-oct.-2008 23:41

Elevator Pitch Friday: Palo Alto Software Makes Collaborative E-Mail Intelligent
It's Elevator Pitch Friday, which means another startup has created a video that's worth showing you. This week's presentation comes from Palo Alto Software, a software company startup that wants to make it easier for organizations to manage and collaborate using e-mail, to save time and be more productive. Palo Alto Software wants to make organizations more efficient, by taking community wide e-mail boxes, such as info,sales, or admin, and applying logic and analytics against them. For organizations that deal with large quantities of e-mail, managing that e-mail can become a task onto itself. Palo Alto software's E-mail Center Pro automates this task, freeing employees up to focus on the content of the e-mail instead of just managing it. E-mail Center Pro is sold through a Software as a Service model, with pricing based upon e-mail volume.
Source : www.techcrunch.com | 10-oct.-2008 23:30

MacBook Pros Riddled with Faulty Nvidia Graphics Cards?
Apple has released a statement that may affect those of you with newer MacBook Pros with Nvidia GeForce 8600M GT graphics cards. Said graphics cards have been known to be faulty and may cause video to be scrambled or distorted.
Source : www.techcrunch.com | 10-oct.-2008 20:53

Entellium Scandal Gives Ignition Partners a Black Eye
Just because you run a private company that does not have to file quarterly financial statements with the SEC does not make it okay to cook your books. The CEO and CFO of Seattle-based CRM firm Entellium found that out the hard way. They were arrested by the FBI earlier this week for inflating their revenues and then lying to their board about it. The company appears to be toast. It fired two thirds of its staff of 60 people in Seattle, and its Website is down. We are putting it in the deadpool. The CEO, Paul Johnston, and CFO, Parrish Jones, kept two separate set of books. One they showed the board, and the other was the real one. The fake one inflated revenues by $11.7 million over the past three years. For instance, in 2006 they told the board that revenues were $3,950,362, but they were really only $582,079. In 2007, the fake revenue number jumped to $6,291,705, whereas the actual revenues were only $1,446,238. This deception continued until September 26, 2008 when the VP of human resources, Melisah Wojtacha, came across the fake board books while cleaning out the desk of a former sales VP.
Source : www.techcrunch.com | 10-oct.-2008 20:51

JBoss to Present "AJAX in Enterprise Portals" Session
Not only enterprise portals integrators are using AJAX at the portal level but now they can also use it for the development of more user-friendly JSR-168 portlets. With the arrival of new standards, AJAXified JSF Components like IceFaces to RichFaces became a reality that can be portable across the many JSR-168 portlet containers implementations, in the commercial or open source worlds. During this presentation, we will explain how this has been made possible and how one can write such portlets.

Source : web2.sys-con.com | 10-oct.-2008 20:30

Google Employees Watch In Horror As 60 Percent Of Their Stock Options Drown
The entire stock market is taking another drubbing today, and Google is no exception. Its shares tried to rally in the morning, but are now trading below the $329 they closed at yesterday. That's a key price level Google employees are watching because a huge chunk of their options (1.7 million across the company) were granted with a weighted average exercise price of $329.78. The options are worthless under that price. In addition to that, there are another 5.7 million options that were granted at weighted average exercise prices of $450 and above. (see table below). All told, 61 percent of Google's stock options granted to employees are currently under water. The rest of Google's stock options become worthless at the average exercise prices of $275, $177, and $21 (for pre-IPO employees, who don't have much to worry about). All of these numbers com from Google's second quarter 10-Q and don't reflect any options that may have been granted in the third quarter. (Google's third-quarter earnings announcement is next week). Only eight days ago Google's shares were trading at $411 and three months ago they were above $450. In that time, a lot of paper wealth has disappeared and along with it incentive for many recent hires to stay.
Source : www.techcrunch.com | 10-oct.-2008 17:43

Real World Got You Down? IBM Invites You To A Virtual Forbidden City.
Can't afford a ticket to China to go visit the Forbidden City? Well, now all you need is your computer. IBM, which is a big believer in virtual worlds, and China's Palace Museum have created an exact replica of the 178-acre Forbidden City. After working meticulously for three years to recreate every building and thousands of major artifacts, the virtual Forbidden City is now available for download (for Windows, Mac, or Linux). It's free, although, I warn you the Mac version, at least, is a massive 275MB file. Once inside, you can choose an avatar, dress him or her up in Qing Dynasty-era robes, take virtual tours, play Go with computer-controlled characters, call up maps, explore buildings and objects that allow you to click for deeper information. The virtual world was built on a gaming platform from Garage Games called Torque. ( I guess OpenSim wasn't good enough. No word on whether it will be interoperable with Second Life).
Source : www.techcrunch.com | 10-oct.-2008 15:36

Mahalo Sets Out To Liveblog The World
When Mahalo launched about 16 months ago, we called it a human-powered search engine and began thinking of it as a Google competitor. But it's so-called "guide pages" for topics as diverse as the Boston Marathon and Patriotic Drunk Rednecks provide not only links but quick facts, making Mahalo an editor-driven, Wikipedia competitor as well. And with a new site-wide design launching today, Mahalo sharpens its focus on the news cycle and competes more directly with sites like CNN and a multitude of news aggregators.
Source : www.techcrunch.com | 10-oct.-2008 15:00

Fitbit Raises Healthy $2 Million From True Ventures And SoftTech VC
Fitbit, producer of a sleek little device that clips onto your clothing and tracks your movement throughout the day and night, has raised $2 million from True Ventures, SoftTech VC and several angels in what appears to be the company's first round of institutional funding. The device, set to go on sale in early 2009 for $99 a pop, uses the information it gathers about your movement to help you determine how much exercise you've been getting and how many calories you've burnt. It can also tell you how many steps you have taken and how well you've slept, all based on its internal motion detector.
Source : www.techcrunch.com | 10-oct.-2008 14:00

Dr Michael Carey Headlines SYS-CON's DataServices World 2008 West Speaker Lineup
The second DataServices World, being held November 20 in San Jose, California, at the 14th International SOA World Conference & Expo, has a lineup of speakers headlined by Dr Mike Carey, one of the 50 Most Influential Computer Scientists in the world. The lineup also includes experts from Adobe, Yahoo!, IBM, Oracle, m2mi, and DataDirect Technologies. "DataServices World is about the confluence of databases, data warehousing, business intelligence, enterprise computing and Internet computing," says Ken North, DataServicesWorld 2008 West Conference Chair.

Source : web2.sys-con.com | 10-oct.-2008 13:15

An Ignoble But Much Needed End To Web 2.0, Marked By A Party In Cyprus
In May 2007 I wrote "Times are good, money is flowing, and Silicon Valley sucks" in a post about how, in my opinion, Silicon Valley was ripe for a downturn. This week, without any doubt, we got that downturn. It was different from the last downturn in that it wasn't driven by the crazy bullishness of Silicon Valley venture capitalists and investment banks. This time, Wall Street and our government screwed everything up all on their own while we minded our own business and acquired our own instead of going public at crazy valuations. So what exactly just ended? Easy capital to start. And that means already funded companies are going to tighten their belts in a big way, per the request/demand of venture capitalists like Sequoia Capital, Benchmark Capital and Ron Conway.
Source : www.techcrunch.com | 10-oct.-2008 11:42

Sequoia Capital?s 56 Slide Presentation Of Doom
We were able to track down the presentation that Sequoia Capital gave to its portfolio company CEO's earlier this week (and so did VentureBeat). It's a long, 56 slide Powerpoint message of doom and gloom in Silicon Valley that we covered yesterday along with an email that angel investor Ron Conway sent to his 130 active portfolio companies. The final text slide reads "Get Real or Go Home." Benchmark Capital jumped on the band wagon today with their own email to portfolio companies. The messages are all similar - companies need to stay ahead of the curve as much as possible. Cut costs now, and raise capital if you can. If there's someone out there willing to buy you, do it. Etc. Of course all this negativity helps create the very downturn that venture capitalists are warning their companies to defend themselves against, perpetuating a sort of vicious cycle downward. But that's ok, sometimes the hedge needs to be pruned. And this is what makes Silicon Valley its ugly, beautiful self.
Source : www.techcrunch.com | 10-oct.-2008 10:52

Benchmark Capital Advises Startups To Conserve Capital, Look For Opportunities
Yesterday Sequoia Capital and Ron Conway communicated with their portfolio companies to guide them through troubled times. Today Benchmark Capital joins the fray, with what a source says is an email from General Partner Bill Gurley to their portfolio companies (See our interview with Gurley and new partner Matt Cohler from earlier this year). Like the advice being given by Conway and Sequoia Capital, Gurley is urging his companies to remain calm, but get tight control of their finances, starting now. Gurley also says for companies to expect "across-the-board reductions" in valuations, and a tough market for raising money - "Basically, the cost of capital is going way up." Hedge funds are probably out of the picture for startup financings, he says, and corporate, strategic and angel money will decline. Gurley also notes that major opportunities will become available to those who "play the game frugally." He says "The real key is to have a keen understanding of the game on the field and to be the one that adjests swiftly, rather than the one that moves after it's become blatantly obvious to everyone else it's time to move." The full memo is below.
Source : www.techcrunch.com | 10-oct.-2008 07:01

Wallet Feeling A Little Light? Check Out The Expense Tracker
With the economy slipping closer to rock bottom every day now, many of us are going to have to start cutting back on our day-to-day expenditures. Cue Voice2Insight's The Expense Tracker, an online expense tracking system that makes entering every transaction as easy as calling a phone number and saying a few words. Most expense trackers require users to input their daily transactions from their computers, which is time consuming and requires an impressive memory (or very organized receipts). Voice2Insight's system allows users to call a designated number, where they're prompted by an automated system to state the amount they've just spent and what category the transaction would fall under (for example, I might say "Groceries, $50"). And if you forget to leave one of the voice messages, you can manage your account from the computer as you would with a traditional system.
Source : www.techcrunch.com | 10-oct.-2008 05:26

Yahoo Shareholder Asks Microsoft To Re-Bid At $22. Good Luck With That.
Private equity fund Mithras Capital, which holds 1.9 million shares of Yahoo (about 0.14%), will propose to Microsoft that they buy Yahoo at $22 per share, Reuters reports. Microsoft would then unload Yahoo's Asian assets adn non-search businesses, take $3 billion worth of cost savings and some tax benefits, and end up with Yahoo's search business for $10.3 billion. Microsoft is obviously thrilled to see this kind of corporate chaos at Yahoo, although they are unlikely to even respond to the proposal. Yahoo, as usual, looks like amateur hour as their shareholders conduct (or try to conduct) negotiations behind their back. Mithras Capital partner Mark Nelson said he will send a letter proposing the deal to Microsoft and Yahoo this evening. Meanwhile, Yahoo was down another 8.1% today, to $12.65, from yesterday's close of $13.76.
Source : www.techcrunch.com | 10-oct.-2008 05:10

HP to Present at SYS-CON's Virtualization Conference & Expo
Is your IT Infrastructure holding your business back? Do you need to regain control of the virtual and physical server sprawl that can dominate today?s datacenters? See how you can develop a virtualization strategy that will enable you to transform your datacenter into a cost-effective, energy efficient and responsive IT environment that can dynamically adapt to the changing requirements in your business.

Source : web2.sys-con.com | 10-oct.-2008 04:00

Use JavaScript 2 Today with OpenLaszlo
JavaScript 2 is becoming increasingly important. Learn how to take advantage of JavaScript 2 while still running in today's browsers. Leverage your current JavaScript and HTML skills to build applications that run in Flash 7-9, DHTML and more with no code changes! OpenLaszlo 4.2 includes a new JavaScript 2-based compiler that translates JS2 syntax to a variety of formats, including JS 1.5, Actionscript 1 & 2 and Actionscript 3. When Firefox 4 is out, we'll be ready with native JavaScript 2.0 support! Come learn about this exciting new development, and about the new features designed to make developing complex apps easy, including cross-browser history and vector graphics support.

Source : web2.sys-con.com | 10-oct.-2008 04:00

Web 2.0, Enterprise Mashups and Social Computing are No Longer Viable Business Models
What is a mashup? Nothing. What are you mashing up with what? If you take Google Earth from under your feet what is left to mash with what and where is the business model to make money? Nowhere. Who will you sell your mashup software after the election is over and how many companies does CNN need to mash them with Mr. King's election maps mashup magic show? None.

Source : web2.sys-con.com | 10-oct.-2008 03:30

Data Services: Bridging the SOA and Metadata Management Gap
In today's difficult economic times, maximizing return on assets is a strategic imperative. Information assets are no exception. Service-oriented architecture (SOA), with its focus on agility and reuse, plays a critical role by accelerating development of new high-business-value applications from existing information assets.

Source : web2.sys-con.com | 10-oct.-2008 02:45

SonicSwap Puts Your iTunes Library On The Web For Streaming And Sharing
Since the launch of YouTube's API and the release of Seeqpod, we've seen many sites emerge that allow users to create playlists of their favorite songs that can be streamed free of charge. Unfortunately, this can be a tedious task - oftentimes users are forced to recreate the playlists they already have in iTunes because the sites lack an upload function. SonicSwap, a startup that launched this week, has addressed this issue by creating a free streaming music site that can monitor a user's iTunes music library, adjusting playlists in real time and effectively giving users access to their entire iTunes library from any computer. The site features an interface that is nearly identical to iTunes (CEO Dan Skilken says that his artists redrew the familiar icons, but it's tough to tell). Users can access their playlists on the left side of the screen and the main panel on right has a list of songs, with the video/music player controls at the top. The site pulls audio and video through the YouTube API, and while it comes up with a few false matches (playing back bad cover versions or karaoke), in general it is speedy and accurate.
Source : www.techcrunch.com | 10-oct.-2008 01:03

What?s For Breakfast At Your House: Obama O?s or Cap?n McCain?s?
This week's award for best marketing promotion related to the election goes to AirBed & Breakfast, the peer-to-peer pad crashing site for travelers. (You list how much per night you want for travelers to stay on your floor, and they book through the site). Today, I received a package from AirBed & Breakfast containing the two boxes of cereal pictured above: Obama O's and Cap'n McCain's. In addition to the physical boxes of cereal, there are two catchy jingles for each cereal (embedded below), and a Webpage where you can vote for the cereal you prefer. I just really like the design. The front of the Obama O's box is stamped with "Hope In Every bowl" and on the back it calls itself the "Breakfast of Change." The McCain character on the Cap'n McCain's box is appropriately wearing a naval officer's uniform, and the side of the box sings the praise of eating squares (inside the box are repackaged Quaker Puffs; the Obama O's are really Honey O's). The copy on the side of the Cap'n McCain's box could have been written by his campaign:
Source : www.techcrunch.com | 09-oct.-2008 23:58

FOWA rocks London, Euro startups pitch TechCrunch
The Future of Web Apps conference kicked off in London today and almost 2,000 startups and developers hit the East of London for the event. Highlights from the day included Kevin Rose from Digg, and a bunch of great speakers. Every year the event changes and there is an interesting pivot point going on as the European scene develops.
Source : www.techcrunch.com | 09-oct.-2008 21:27

Google Turns On Text Ads In Google Maps
With Google's stock down $100 in the past two weeks, the company all of a sudden isn't so shy about pulling every advertising lever it can reach. So far this week, we've seen new click-to-buy buttons on YouTube (YouTubevertorials), AdSense for Flash games, and now text ads are appearing at the bottom of Google Maps. This may be bucket testing, but when I enter "New York City hotels" on Google Maps, I get a single line below with text ads for the Crowne Plaze Times Square and the Ramada New York. (An arrow lets you cycle through the ads). Other bloggers around the world have noticed the same thing, including Amit Agarwal in India and David Shaw in the UK. The ads are local business ads, but seem to be triggered by the search terms.
Source : www.techcrunch.com | 09-oct.-2008 20:48

Amazon S3 Customers Now Benefit From Economies of Scale
Amazon has introduced a tiered pricing scheme for S3, its cloud storage service, that will take advantage of increasing economies of scale and go into effect November 1st. Currently, American customers pay $0.15 for each gigabyte of data they store each month. With the new scheme, this will remain the price only for users who require less than 50 terabytes of storage. Once demands exceed that level, pricing drops to $0.14 and then $0.13 per gigabyte-month, and then settles at $0.12 for customers who need to storage over 500 terabytes of data.
Source : www.techcrunch.com | 09-oct.-2008 20:22

Wakoopa Begins Tracking Web Apps Alongside Their Desktop Counterparts
The team behind Wakoopa, a social network that tracks and shares information about the desktop applications used by its members, noticed that Firefox and Safari were consistently ranked as the network's top two applications by usage. So they took this as a cue to start measuring web apps in addition to desktop apps, since their data confirm (at least among the developer types drawn to its service) what we already know anecdotally: that web apps are slowly replacing desktop apps.
Source : www.techcrunch.com | 09-oct.-2008 19:24

QikCom Adds Its Own Twist To Enterprise Twitter: The TabStore (Invites)
We now have a horse race for who will become the enterprise version of Twitter. Today marks the beta launch of QikCom, which is aimed at companies that want their employees to communicate with each other privately in a Twitter-like fashion. QikCom joins Yammer (winner of this year's TechCrunch50), and Present.ly. We have exclusive invites for TechCrunch readers (sign up here with a company email address). All three are micro-messaging services that ask: "What are you working on?" Employees update each other in 140-character bursts. (You can read our writeups of Yammer here, and Present.ly here). But QikCom out of Austin, Texas, has a few twists of its own. For instance, it lets you delete a message after you've sent it and you can set up an org chart. But the biggest twist is QikCom's TabStore. It is modeled on Apple's App Store for the iPhone. QikCom will keep adding features as new tabs, and allow other developers to do the same. At launch there are three free tabs in the TabStore that anyone can add: a To-Do list manager, a place to keep frequent numbers used across a company, and, my favorite, a competition tab.
Source : www.techcrunch.com | 09-oct.-2008 19:21

Apple Announcing New Notebooks on October 14th and CrunchGear will be there
The invites are out and the rumors can be laid to rest. Will it be new "Brick" aluminum-cased MacBooks/Pro? Or just plain old plastic ones with Nvidia chipsets? Will they be under $1,000? Be sure to tune in for CrunchGear's live blog of the event on October 14th at 10AM PDT.
Source : www.techcrunch.com | 09-oct.-2008 18:50

Brutal
Here is a one-month stock chart comparing Apple (down 40 percent), Google (down 20 percent), Yahoo (ditto), and Microsoft (down about 10 percent). Microsoft is holding up best. If Yahoo keeps diving, what next? Discuss among yourselves.
Source : www.techcrunch.com | 09-oct.-2008 17:54

As the Markets Melt, Wikinvest Wire Launches To Offer Advice From Financial Blogs
The current market gyrations have investors running everywhere seeking advice. What better time to launch a newswire culled from the latest posts of financial bloggers? That's the idea behind Wikinvest Wire, which has just been launched by the user-edited investment site Wikinvest. Except that it is not really a newswire in the traditional sense. It is more like a contextual recommendation system for the blogs invited to participate. Wikinvest Wire is starting off with 100 financial blogs, including Confused Capitalist, Money Morning, College Analysts, The Mess That Greenspan Made, Financial Armageddon, and Old School Value. All told the blogs attract about one million unique visitors a month. Wikinvest is also in the process of syndicating the Wikinvest Wire to mainstream media sites, where links will appear on their stock pages. Wikinvest Wire is invite-only, but interested bloggers can apply. The Wire will exist primarily on the participating blogs themselves, on Wikinvest topic pages, and on the yet-to-be-named media sites. For each of the 100 financial blogs, at the end of each post three links will appear to posts from other blogs in the network discussing the same stock or financial topic (such as "Google (GOOG)," "bailout," or "credit default swaps"). The contextual links will also appear on relevant pages on Wikinvest and other stock and financial sites. (See screenshot). In this sense, it is similar to contextual recommendation systems like Sphere, OutBrain, or BlogRovr, which all append recommended links at the end of blog posts or news articles using a variety of methods.
Source : www.techcrunch.com | 09-oct.-2008 17:26

Building Great AJAX Applications from Scratch Using ASP.NET 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008
Come see a no-slides, code-only presentation that starts with a blank directory and builds a data-driven, AJAX enabled, ASP.NET web application from scratch that implements common AJAX patterns with the rich set of AJAX Control Toolkit, accesses data with LINQ, and implements standards-based styling and layout using CSS and clean HTML. Learn the new features of ASP.NET 3.5 and Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 and how they integrate together to provide the world's most productive web development experience. This session uses the 100% free .NET Framework and Visual Studio tools, and the resulting application will work with all browsers, Safari, Firefox and, of course, IE.

Source : web2.sys-con.com | 09-oct.-2008 15:00

JanRain Promotes OpenID Adoption Through The Long Tail
JanRain, creator of some of the most popular OpenID software libraries and a forum-like communications tool called Pibb, has released a new SaaS offering for websites that want to become relying parties for OpenID. We're told that the service, simply called RPX, makes it possible to start accepting users with OpenID accounts within one day. This is actually the second SaaS solution provided by JanRain, the first being the similarly named OPX, which lets websites do the opposite: provide OpenID accounts to users, who can then sign into any other websites that accept them. JanRain also provides OpenID accounts to users directly through its myOpenID service.
Source : www.techcrunch.com | 09-oct.-2008 14:00

Some Big Sites Are Using Google Trends To Direct Editorial
Google Trends, which shows you the hot search queries on Google at any given time, is more than two years old now (this year they added website/domain tracking as well). PR professionals and brand managers use it regularly to track how hot their assets are, and there are countless other uses for the service. One use though, which is becoming increasingly popular we hear, is for blogs, mainstream media sites and others to monitor Google Trends regularly and write stories based on hot terms. Google displays a daily summary for easier data gathering. The goal isn't to tap into what Internet users think is interesting and write about that. Instead, it's all about getting more hits from Google. Here's how it works:
Source : www.techcrunch.com | 09-oct.-2008 13:16

Bull Moves to Advance Its HPC Ambitions
Bull wants to be king of the HPC hill in Europe and so it's buying science + computing AG (s+c), an HPC solutions and services house in Germany, which happens to be the largest HPC market in Europe. What it's paying is a secret but the acquisition is supposed to turn Bull into a HPC powerhouse.

Source : web2.sys-con.com | 09-oct.-2008 11:00

This Week on CrunchBoard
Is your boss like Lumbergh? Maybe you should start looking for new opportunities. Check out the latest job listings on CrunchBoard. Click for some of the postings from the past week.
Source : www.techcrunch.com | 09-oct.-2008 06:53

AJAX World RIA Conference - How Linked Data and AJAR Changes Everything
The web has evolved into a structured data space of loosely connected databases, enabling granular data access-by-reference to web-accessible entities, courtesy of HTTP. This evolution and the emergence of AJAX-based RIA technologies lay the foundation for a new generation of libraries, widgets, and frameworks, that together embrace and extend enterprise data access practices of yore.

Source : web2.sys-con.com | 09-oct.-2008 05:45

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