Almost a year after it was purchased by Google for $100 million, FeedBurner is finally going to roll out Google’s AdSense as an advertising option for blogs and Websites that use its service to publish their feeds. FeedBurner will begin with a few choose publishers next week, and then expand the option to all […]
Almost a year after it was purchased by Google for $100 million, FeedBurner is finally going to roll out Google’s AdSense as an advertising option for blogs and Websites that use its service to publish their feeds. FeedBurner will begin with a few choose publishers next week, and then expand the option to all of its customers soon afterwards.
What took them so long? That seemed to be the whole point of the acquisition.
FeedBurner intersperses ads in blog feeds between each few posts. Integrating with AdSense will grant for publishers to tap into contextual ads for their feeds, in addition to the ads that FeedBurner already sells.
Hopefully, Google also found the time to integrate its automated back-end payment system into all FeedBurner accounts. Until recently, FeedBurner was still sends out paper checks to publishers participating in its ad network. At least, that’s how TechCrunch gets paid.
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By Luke Anderson I don’t like coffee, so I rarely find myself in a situation where I’m attempting to carry several cups of Joe. I have gathered that it can be something of a difficult situation to coordinate all of those hot cups, even with the various carriers out there. This cool design actually looks lie it […]
By Luke Anderson
I don’t like coffee, so I rarely find myself in a situation where I’m attempting to carry several cups of Joe. I have gathered that it can be something of a difficult situation to coordinate all of those hot cups, even with the various carriers out there.
This cool design actually looks lie it would make transporting hot coffee (or any other similarly-sized beverage) fairly easy with a easy device. It appears to be just a flat piece of cardboard with a well-designed shape which allows you to carry two cups and a few extra napkins. I’m sure we’ll see something like this popping up a coffee joints all over.
By Andrew Liszewski After a multi-month renovation my local Sony Store was just reborn as the ‘Sony Style’ store. At the grand re-opening there was the usual hoopla with Sony reps giving demos of various products which gave me my first opportunity to spend some real one-on-one time with the Rolly. I can’t say I was […]
By Andrew Liszewski
After a multi-month renovation my local Sony Store was just reborn as the ‘Sony Style’ store. At the grand re-opening there was the usual hoopla with Sony reps giving demos of various products which gave me my first opportunity to spend some real one-on-one time with the Rolly. I can’t state I was disappointed, because quite frankly I wasn’t anticipating much, but I’m having trouble seeing why someone would pay $400 for one. When you see it rolling it around with the flaps moving about you might think the Rolly was being positioned as a sort of interactive musical companion, but it’s just not. While the Rolly’s dance moves can be synced to whatever music it’s playing (or streaming) or even custom programmed on a PC, that’s about as interactive as it gets. A few store patrons seemed to think it was a robot along the lines of Aibo based on how it was moving about, but that couldn’t be farther from the truth.
So I guess we should just think of the Rolly as a ‘funky’ set of speakers right? Well unfortunately that was the one area where I can say I was disappointed. The Rolly is about the size of a soda can, so when you consider that has to fit a 5 hour battery, the motors to drive the ‘wheels’ and other electronic components, there’s not much room left for the speakers. As a result I was definitely unimpressed with the Rolly’s sound quality, and I don’t think I’d want to spend 5 hours listening to my music through Rolly’s speakers. As a party gimmick it might be cool for a few minutes, but I think there are far better ways to blow $400.
We don’t know much about Grockit. The company is creating a new way to get people to learn online, and has spent the last year working away in stealth mode. Whatever it is, it’s apparently impressing investors: Grockit just raised $8 million in Series B funding from Integral Capital and Benchmark Capital, […]
We don’t know much about Grockit. The company is creating a new way to get people to learn online, and has spent the last year working away in stealth mode. Whatever it is, it’s apparently impressing investors: Grockit just raised $8 million in Series B funding from Integral Capital and Benchmark Capital, bringing its total to $10.7 million - impressive for a product that has yet to see the light of day.
According to the company’s press release, Grockit is “a MMOLG (Massively Multi Player On the web Learning Game) where people can connect to learn from each other”. The company hopes to release the product this fall.
Grockit originally launched in November 2006 as an online exam-prep class that competed with companies like Kaplan and The Princeton Review. In July 2007 Grockit announced that it had scrapped that idea in favor of their current plan, and raised a $2.7 million Series A round led by Benchmark and angel investors.
The company was founded by Farbood Nivi, who taught in the exam-prep business for years, and Michael Buffington, an experienced Rails developer.
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By Luke Anderson Remember those cool Shuriken LED Lamps that we showed you last month? Well those lights might be a tiny hard to find a good place for, since you likely already have lighting in most places that you need. However, you can use a few extra thumb tacks just about anywhere, right? I wouldn’t exactly […]
By Luke Anderson
Remember those cool Shuriken LED Lamps that we showed you last month? Well those lights might be a tiny hard to find a good place for, since you likely already have lighting in most places that you need. However, you can use a few extra thumb tacks just about anywhere, right?
I wouldn’t exactly call these thumb tacks per se, but you get the idea. Unfortunately, these awesome creations still appear to be nothing more than concepts items. I’m really bummed out because I already whipped out my card and was prepared to order these things by the dozen.
If you look at YouTube’s numbers, one thing is clear: It completely dominates on the internet video. YouTube accounts for 37 percent of all videos watched on the Internet and attracts about half of the audience, according to comScore. (And if you add in Google Video, that brings the total to 38 percent of videos […]
If you look at YouTube’s numbers, one thing is clear: It totally dominates on the web video. YouTube accounts for 37 percent of all videos watched on the World wide web and attracts about half of the audience, according to comScore. (And if you add in Google Video, that brings the total to 38 percent of videos watched). The No. 2 player, Fox Interactive Media (i.e., MySpace), accounts for only 4.2 percent of videos watched. And as the Forbes chart above shows, YouTube is still growing at a faster pace in terms of traffic than Google overall.
Yet when it comes to turning that market dominance into dollars, YouTube is holding back. Forbes estimates that YouTube will make $200 million in revenues this year, and $350 million next year. Even though it never explains how it gets to those numbers, and they are higher than some Wall Street estimates, they are not unreasonable. (The home page alone is $175,000 a day, plus a commitment to buy $50,000 in Google ads elsewhere—that’s about $80 million a year right there. Plus each branded YouTube channel goes for $200,000. If someone from Forbes can lay out the math in comments, though, that would be helpful). Google does not break out YouTube’s revenues because, even at $200 million, it would be less than one percent of the company’s total.
A $200 million business going to $350 million is nothing to sneeze at. But if you believe eMarketer’s estimate that online video advertising will reach $1.35 billion this year, that would mean that YouTube’s share of video advertising dollars will only be 15 percent (less than half of its share of videos watched).
This gap could mean one of two things. Either YouTube is unable to make money from a large portion of its user-generated video inventory (advertisers want to stick to the home page and the safety of their own channels). Or YouTube just hasn’t turned on the money-gushing hose yet. It has built an increasingly unassailable market dominance under the shelter of Google’s wing without the need to maximize revenues. That attitude, though, is obviously changing, with YouTube now pushing AdSense for video and spreading that wealth with more content partners.
Which one is it?
Crunch Network: CrunchGeardrool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
By Evan Ackerman If you can’t afford a Panasonic Toughbook or a General Dynamics GoBook but you find yourself trying to be productive in wet and dirty environments, you might want to consider dropping 20 bucks on this glorified Ziploc bag from Thanko. The bag, which looks to be generally laptop-shaped (thereby differentiating from the far […]
By Evan Ackerman
If you can’t afford a Panasonic Toughbook or a General Dynamics GoBook but you find yourself trying to be productive in wet and dirty environments, you might want to consider dropping 20 bucks on this glorified Ziploc bag from Thanko. The bag, which looks to be generally laptop-shaped (thereby differentiating from the far cheaper and most likely heavily patented Ziploc), slips over your entire computer and seals at the bottom, protecting most of your computer from inclement weather, rogue sandstorms, wayward bird droppings, or angry children throwing ice cream cake.
The cover isn’t absolutely waterproof, as there are vent holes at the back to keep your personal from baking itself, so it will most likely not respond well to submergence. But for you klutzy or adventurous laptop users, it could be $20 well spent.
Soundflavor has relaunched as a consumer-friendly database of song information that will provide users with a one-stop-shop for song information, videos, and suggestions. The site sports a clean interface and offers a slew of search options that make it simple to find a particular song or artist. Users can browse and filter their searches by […]
Soundflavor has relaunched as a consumer-friendly database of song information that will provide users with a one-stop-shop for song information, videos, and recommendations.
The site sports a clean interface and offers a slew of search options that make it easy to find a particular song or artist. Users can browse and filter their searches by genre, decade, or even by the subject of the lyrics. After choosing a song, the user is presented with a mashup of related information, including artist bios from Wikipedia, current news headlines, store links to buy the song, and flickr pics. Some independent songs are available for free, while the rest can be bought on iTunes or Amazon.
Each page also features a “One-Click Playlist” that generates a list of 25 songs based on a song’s “flavors” (which are basically pre-defined tags). The system seemed to work well - a quick test didn’t give me any songs that seemed obviously out of place. The site also allows users to compile playlists of music videos that can be embedded on social media sites or blogs (see below). One neat feature of these widgets is the “Any Requests?” button which lets users generate their own playlist while they’re browsing your site.
Unfortunately, there do seem to be a few hiccups. The site uses YouTube for its music videos, and some songs don’t appear to be correctly matched with their corresponding videos. For example, after entering AC/DC’s “You Shook Me All Night Long”, I was treated to a man playing the song… with his hands. Update:Soundflavor has pushed a database update and the song works properly now.
Over the last five years Soundflavor has compiled a comprehensive database of metadata on over one million songs, but up until this point the information was primarily used by other companies that license music. The company brought on Dave Pell, who was previously just an investor, as its VP of Product Design to make the site more accessible to the consumer audience. Pell is known for his past work on sites including Rollyo and Addictomatic. Soundflavor has raised a total of $5.8 million since it was founded in 2003.
There are a number of other players in the music space, including Last.fm, allmusic, and PluggedIn.
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The next-gen web is starting to gather pace, as this week MySpace integrated Google Gears, Yahoo! announced their new BrowserPlus product and Google launched a browser-based edition of their 3D Earth product. Technologies and formats such as AIR, Silverlight, JavaFX, Gears, XUL, Web Applications 1.0 (DOM5, HTML5 etc.) grant developers to accelerate beyond AJAX […]
The next-gen web is starting to gather pace, as this week MySpace integrated Google Gears, Yahoo! announced their new BrowserPlus product and Google launched a browser-based edition of their 3D Earth product. Technologies and formats such as AIR, Silverlight, JavaFX, Gears, XUL, Web Applications 1.0 (DOM5, HTML5 etc.) grant developers to accelerate beyond AJAX and towards a new generation of web applications with better performance, more functionality and tighter desktop integration.
Developers and users are now presented with more web technology choice then ever before; “DLL hell” has been superseded by “plug-in hell”, as a variety of companies present their versions of what the next-gen web will look like. But on the internet, such choice can come at a cost to both users and developers. More than a decade has passed since the first battle over web formats, back then it was Microsoft, Netscape, Apple, AOL and others laying different foundations in the form of browsers, scripting languages, web servers and more. The legacy of that battle is still being felt this day, as Javascript developers rely on wholelibraries to assist them in developing cross-browser code and CSS developers depend on a catalog of hacks so that their sites can look consistent across different browsers.
With the new rich web application technologies still in the development phase, there is an chance to not repeat the mistakes of the past and instead take a standards-based approach. Thankfully during the course of the previous decade companies such as Microsoft became more receptive to open standards, data portability and cross-platform support. Having broad support for open standards simplifies technology for both users and developers, but it is obvious that not all of the currently announced technologies, such as those listed above, will
During the course of a series of posts here on Techcrunch we will look at various elements that make up the next-gen web and evaluate the options available, current support as well as how well standards are being adopted. In light of the current announcement from MySpace that they are using Google Gears in their application, in this first post we’ll evaluate browser-based local storage cache’s.
Browser-based Local Storage
As web applications became more popular there was a general demand for an capability to run web-based applications offline. The first such solutions that could work without requiring a browser plugin or separate application were those that relied on the caching headers within HTTP to store objects within the browsers cache. Javascript libraries such as Dojo implemented support for offline web applications using the same principals, but applications were very limited in scope as there was no simple way to store structured data on the browser (Dojo now also abstracts a variety of other storage engines including Gears - tip: Dylan) .
In Might of 2007, Google launched Google Gears, a browser plugin that allows web applications to synchronize data into a local data store and then allow web applications to function offline. At the launch of Gears, Google Reader was adapted to support it, and the emphasis of the pitch for Gears was about offline application access. What was less known is that Gears is a lot more than just offline access, as it provides three primary functions:
Caching of resources (HTML pages, images etc.)
Structured data storage in a database
Asynchronous background worker threads
The part of this we’ll focus on here is the local object and structured data storage. Gears provides these functions via a Javascript API, which can be accessed by any web application. The structured storage is provided by Sqlite, a popular lightweight RDBMS. With the local database, the developer can not only perform queries and inserts to record new data, but also more complex SQL like joining between tables etc. Even though you can have multiple applications using Gears, each app runs in a sanboxed environment with a domain-based security model (similar to cookies and Ajax requests). Sqlite has been built into Firefox since version 2.0, but its API is only accessible from an add-on or a core Firefox component. The Gears plugin bridges that gap and makes it available within the client scripting environment.
Before Gears was launched, the Web Hypertext Application Technology Workgroup (WHATWG) had begun work on its Web Applications 1.0 draft spec, which included structured data storage as part of HTML5. The current draft spec from the working group includes definitions for a Database object for accessing and querying a local data store. The details of the implementation are left up to the vendor, but the API is detailed in the spec. Firefox will be implementing parts of the same storage API from the WHATW spec in version 3.0 of the browser, which is currently available as a preview release. The key components of the WHATWG spec are:
ApplicationCache- for storing objects in the local browser cache (and checking them)
navigator.onLine - check if the browser is online or not (and use cache plus local data store if required)
Storage interface and events - used for storing name and value pairs via the sessionStorage DOM attribute.
Databaseinterface - used for connecting to the local database. Supports SQL (or a subset thereof, depending on the server used), versioning, error events via callback
Threading and Callbacks - so that multiple requests can be sent to the local data store asynchronously.
Implementing local storage, caching and offline access are relatively easy. The application can first check to see if these functions are supported, and then setup the local cache by synchronizing the users data in background processes. While a thread is running, either uploading or downloading, you can query it to check on its status to provide the user with feedback (eg. a progress bar). Once the data is local, by running database queries on the local machine developers are able to drastically improve performance. Currently many web applications use the browser as only a presentation layer, for eg. a spreadsheet application might do a round-trip back to the server to work out even elementary calculations such as =1+1. By utilizing the local data store and client-side code, the developer is able to offload processing and storage to the client and provide a much smoother, desktop-like experience at the same time.
Current And Future Support
The issue is that the majority of the WHATW specification was written after Gears was released, so the Database and LocalServer objects used in Gears are not compatible with WHATW - for now. The good news is that Google have come out and fully backed the storage portions of the WHATWG HTML5 spec, so developers with apps running on Firefox 3 with Gears installed will have a choice to use either the native implementation, or the Google implementation. Google go on to state that they will likely offer extra features as an incentive for developers to continue to target Gears over-and-above the HTML5 implementation (features such as desktop shortcuts, etc.).
Other alternatives for local data storage, such as Flash local storage, are completely incompatible with the WHATW specification. The developers at WebKit were very quick to announce that they have started implementing the storage portions of the HTML5 spec also. It is currently available in nightly builds, so in the near future we’ll see support in both Konquror and Safari. Opera have also announced similar plans and they’re actually leading everybody when it comes to implementing HTML5 and Web Forms. Yahoo! BrowserPlus was only announced yesterday, and it is currently unclear wether their local storage support is compatible with the specification as laid out by the working group.
Local storage is a major new feature of the new web API, and developers will not only have consistent support across browsers but will also have the option of Google Gears (which is already available) as well as Yahoo! BrowserPlus (depending on how it works). There is just one browser maker missing in this discussion so far and that is Microsoft. Microsoft have released an early preview of IE8 and announced a raft of new features, a lot of which are based on open standards such as better CSS and Javascript support (with a more standardized object model). The big question is wether we will see consistent local storage support from IE8 following the same spec as the other browser vendors. The IE team have announced that IE8 will support DOM Storage, but that is only part of the overall local storage spec (ie the Storage object described above only).
By Andrew Liszewski While iTunes has made the process of legally acquiring MP3s a lot easier than it used to be, there are still plenty of people who have no idea how to even boot up a personal, let alone load music onto an MP3 player. And that’s pretty much the target market for the REDI. […]
By Andrew Liszewski
While iTunes has made the process of legally acquiring MP3s a lot easier than it used to be, there are still plenty of people who have no idea how to even boot up a personal, let alone load music onto an MP3 player. And that’s pretty much the target market for the REDI. It’s a basic 1GB MP3 player that comes preloaded with about 250 tracks, which is equal to about 6 hours of music. Since everyone has different tastes, the REDI comes in a variety of different ‘themes’ depending on what you like. If you intend to use it for running or jogging you can go for the ‘Ultimate Workout Mix’ but if you’d prefer to relax you can choose the ‘Golden Classics’ version instead.
At the moment there appear to be about 8 different versions of the REDI, but it also features a USB mini jack allowing you to upload your own MP3 (or WMA) files at a later time. Other features include an FM radio tuner, a simple LCD display and playback controls and of course a pair of earbud headphones that you’ll probably want to immediately replace. Best Buy currently has 4 versions of the REDI for sale, including the Ultimate Workout Mix, the Ultimate Rock N’ Roll Collection, the R&B Soul Collection and Golden Classics for $39.99 each.
The next-gen web is starting to gather pace, as this week 
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