Scribd, the popular document sharing hub, has finally rolled out a much-needed redesign. The site has long been hampered by a messy homepage that wasn’t attractive for first-time visitors, displaying a list of its top features in lieu of a YouTube-esque stream of featured documents. The old design made it clear that Scribd worked well as a utility, but didn’t make it attractive as a destination site. Now, the new site highlights a sampling of its top documents and includes a number of UX changes that Scribd hopes will remedy this issue.
Scribd, the popular document sharing hub, has finally rolled out a much-needed redesign. The site has long been hampered by a messy homepage that wasn’t attractive for first-time visitors, displaying a list of its top features in lieu of a YouTube-esque stream of featured documents. The old design made it clear that Scribd worked well as a utility, but didn’t make it attractive as a destination site. Now, the new site highlights a sampling of its top documents and includes a number of UX changes that Scribd hopes will remedy this issue.
One of the major changes in the design is a new emphasis on search. Scribd has seen impressive growth since its launch in Spring 2007, and now claims more than 20 million very special visitors monthly. But more than half of that traffic comes from search engines - something that the site would like to change. The new design is intended to make the search function more prominent, encouraging users to turn to Scribd instead of Google or Yahoo when they’d like to find a document. And CEO Trip Adler states that it’s working: while A/B bucket testing the new design, Scribd has seen the number of searches double (the number of uploads increased by 70% as well).
Finally, in conjunction with the redesign, Scribd has ditched its yellow generic “document” logo in favor of something that reminds me of colored pencils.
Scribd’s biggest competitor is DocStoc, a document sharing portal that offers a similar Flash-based viewer.
Update: McCain has chosen someone from outside Silicon Valley: Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. As John McCain prepares to unveil his selection for a running mate today, Mitt Romney seems to be a favorite. But two former Silicon Valley CEOs are also on the short list, and they’re both women: Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman. Picking Romney would help McCain solidify his position with the Republican base, but it would also be predictable and boring. Picking a woman with executive experience would show that McCain is as open to change as Barack Obama.
Update: McCain has chosen someone from outside Silicon Valley: Alaska Governor Sarah Palin.
As John McCain prepares to unveil his selection for a running mate this day, Mitt Romney seems to be a favorite. But two former Silicon Valley CEOs are also on the short list, and they’re both women: Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman. Picking Romney would help McCain solidify his position with the Republican base, but it would also be predictable and boring. Picking a woman with executive experience would show that McCain is as open to change as Barack Obama.
Other women also have a shot at the VP slot, including Texas Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison and Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. But if it came down to Fiorina and Whitman, who would make the better Vice President? Both are whip-smart and have managed huge organizations. Fiorina, of course, was the CEO of Hewlett-Packard and Whitman was the CEO of eBay.
Both, however, left their CEO posts during troubled times for each company (although Fiorina was forced out, while Whitman stepped down voluntarily after a decade at the helm). Looking at each one’s performance at each company, you’d have to give Whitman the upper hand. The vast majority of her years at Bay were spent overseeing its meteoric rise. (She is also co-chair of McCain’s campaign). But Fiorina (who is the “Victory Chairman” of the RNC) is perhaps more adept at the political arts, and has proven she feels comfortable on the world stage. (Listen to our current interview with Fiorina—she certainly has a good grasp of the issues that matter to Silicon Valley).
Who would make the ideal VP—Whitman, Fiorina, or someone else? Who would give McCain the biggest boost at the polls?
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It’s no burning man, but CrunchGear is live at the Penny Arcade Expo where we’re playing RPGs, engaging in cosplay, and decreasing our chances of perhaps, one day, losing our virginity. Pop by CrunchGear for more news and pics.
They weren’t around to bring their real swords.
It’s no burning man, but CrunchGear is live at the Penny Arcade Expo where we’re playing RPGs, engaging in cosplay, and decreasing our chances of perhaps, one day, losing our virginity. Pop by CrunchGear for more news and pics.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoardbecause it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
One of the most promising startups to come out of the LaunchBox incubator is JamLegend, a music site with mass appeal. JamLegend takes the familiar anyone-can-be-a-rockstar model made popular by videogames like Guitar Hero and Rock Band and puts it on the Web. The site is in private beta, but we have 1,000 invites for the first people to sign up at the site with the invite code “TechCrunch.” Once you sign up, you pick a song from a variety of genres (although right now there are only songs in rock, alternative, and acoustic) and a difficulty level. Once the song starts playing, notes come down as dots on a guitar fret, and you’ve to press the right buttons on your keyboard and “enter” as they pass by. You can play “Jam Style,” holding your keyboard like an air guitar, or “chill style” (see illustration.). I’d recommend chill style—you never know who might walk into the room and catch you geek rocking with your keyboard. The game will will also support game guitars plugged into our computer for serious faux fretters.
One of the most promising startups to come out of the LaunchBox incubator is JamLegend, a music site with mass appeal. JamLegend takes the familiar anyone-can-be-a-rockstar model made popular by videogames like Guitar Hero and Rock Band and puts it on the Web. The site is in private beta, but we’ve 1,000 invites for the first people to sign up at the site with the invite code “TechCrunch.”
Once you sign up, you pick a song from a variety of genres (although right now there are only songs in rock, substitute, and acoustic) and a difficulty level. Once the song starts playing, notes come down as dots on a guitar fret, and you’ve to press the right buttons on your keyboard and “enter” as they pass by. You can play “Jam Style,” holding your keyboard like an air guitar, or “chill style” (see illustration.). I’d suggest chill style—you never know who might walk into the room and catch you geek rocking with your keyboard. The game will will also support game guitars plugged into our computer for serious faux fretters.
JamLegend isn’t connected to any video console, it’s free on the Web, and you can play against any of your friends in turn-based duels or simultaneously in showdowns (which can support thousands of simultaneous players). A small green dot at the top right of the screen alerts you when your friends are on the web and what they are playing. The startup is working on Facebook and MySpace apps as well.
Music artists are invited to upload their songs to the site. The biggest drawback right now is the absence of a full catalog. There are only 20 songs from three indie artists (Blue Judy, Double Stamp, and the Stolen cars), but that should grow to about 30 artists within the next few weeks. That’s about how many songs you get with Guitar Hero, and these are free. The company is still figuring out how to make money in the future, but options include some combination of charging for major-label songs just like Guitar Hero and Rock Band do, affiliate MP3 sales, advertising on the site, or a freemium subscription service to gain access to all the songs on the service.
The Android Blog is reporting that Google has officially announced the Android Market, an App Store like solution that allows publishers to upload programs and sell them on the internet.
Developers will be able to make their content available on an open service hosted by Google that features a feedback and rating system similar to YouTube. We selected the term “market” rather than “store” because we feel that developers should have an open and unobstructed environment to make their content available. Similar to YouTube, content can debut in the marketplace after only three simple steps: register as a merchant, upload and describe your content and publish it. We also intend to provide developers with a useful dashboard and analytics to help drive their business and ultimately improve their offerings.
The Android Blog is reporting that Google has officially announced the Android Market, an App Store like solution that allows publishers to upload programs and sell them on the web.
Developers will be able to make their content available on an open service hosted by Google that features a feedback and rating system similar to YouTube. We chose the term “market” rather than “store” because we feel that developers should have an open and unobstructed environment to make their content available. Similar to YouTube, content can debut in the marketplace after only three easy steps: register as a merchant, upload and describe your content and publish it. We also intend to provide developers with a useful dashboard and analytics to help drive their business and ultimately improve their offerings.
It’s no longer an issue of whether enterprise services should be 2.0′d via widgets, RSS, and the like. CIOs & CSOs grasp the undeniability of this paradigm. But there’s still a gap between the desire and reality of getting these enterprise services out the door. It’s one thing to design a Facebook application, it’s another getting it to interact with the backend systems commonly deployed in enterprise IT setups. Enter WorkLight, an Israeli startup with $17M in its war chest whose mission is to assist enterprises to get their services working in places where their users and customers are actually frequenting online.
It’s no longer an issue of whether enterprise services should be 2.0′d via widgets, RSS, and the like. CIOs & CSOs grasp the undeniability of this paradigm. But there is still a gap between the desire and reality of getting these enterprise services out the door. It’s one thing to design a Facebook application, it’s another getting it to interact with the backend systems commonly deployed in enterprise IT setups. Enter WorkLight, an Israeli startup with $17M in its war chest whose mission is to aid enterprises to get their services working in places where their users and customers are actually frequenting online.
WorkLight discovered that big companies in sectors such as financial services, retail, telcos and travel, are looking for better ways to connect with customers and partners residing outside their firewall. If the “internal portal” was ever effective in the first place, it has become an increasingly uphill battle getting outside partners to log-in these days (not to mention employees).
The company also discovered that so called “Enterprise 2.0″ projects that were developed internally fell short in living up to enterprise-grade levels of security, scalability and backend integration.
The company’s answer to this plight is the WorkLight Server, which retrieves information from enterprise applications such as SAP, Oracle, and SharePoint, as well as corporate and marketing databases and directories. These adapters can retrieve any type of data required to complete business tasks, by accessing specific enterprise application modules. Types of data retrieved include customer transaction histories, product inventory availability, employee reported working hours, etc. The WorkLight server resides behind the company’s firewall and employs technologies to ensure that customer information and corporate data are secured. None of the information visible on any of the Web 2.0 services resides on external servers.
Such information is then displayed via any of the 15 Web 2.0 platforms and services supported by WorkLight: RSS, iGoogle, Netvibes, Microsoft Live, Generic HTML Gadgets, Google Desktop, Apple Dashboard, Windows Vista Sidebar, Yahoo Widgets, Facebook apps, MySpace apps, Del.icio.us, Google Gears, Adobe AIR and iPhone.
The WorkLight Server extracts only that information that is relevant to the specific logged-in user. For example, an iGoogle gadget can access a book publisher’s sales data and display book performance relative to a reseller’s location. Another example is a bank customer using an iPhone app to access his entire family’s credit card transactions, while his college student daughter accesses her personal credit card’s transactions through a Facebook app.
The company won’t discuss specific customer projects, but says that it has working implementations with customers across a range of industries including financial services, retail banking, manufacturing, book publishing, technology and IT services and utilities.
In July, after Hasbro and Electronic Arts launched the official version of Scrabble on Facebook, they asked Facebook to take down Scrabulous, the competing app that started it all (and borrowed heavily from the trademarked game). Facebook complied, but left Scrabulous up in other parts of the world, where the international rights belong to […]
In July, after Hasbro and Electronic Arts launched the official version of Scrabble on Facebook, they asked Facebook to take down Scrabulous, the competing app that started it all (and borrowed heavily from the trademarked game). Facebook complied, but left Scrabulous up in other parts of the world, where the international rights belong to Mattel. Now, in response to a request from Mattel, Facebook has taken down the game worldwide, reports the San Jose Mercury News .
The only place you can play it now is in India, the home country of the Agarwalla brothers who created Scrabulous. Although, a pending court case there may finally wipe the beloved game off the face of the earth (or, at least, the Facebook version of Earth—you can still play the game on Scrabulous.com).
After Scrabulous was taken down in the U.S. and Canada, the Agarwalla brothers encouraged fans to sign up for Wordscraper, their other Facebook word game. Currently, Wordscraper has ben able to attract 249,000 monthly active users, but it trails the 371,000 monthly active users who have switched over to EA’s official version of Scrabble. Before it was shut down, Scrabulous had about 500,000 active users a day. The bulk of those users may never be claimed by either of the remaining games.
In the last year, we’ve covered well over a dozen activity aggregators, almost all of which share a single goal: helping you keep track of your friends’ exploits across the web. This day, we see the launch of Fwix, an aggregator that is taking a (thankfully) different approach. Fwix isn’t concerned with your friends - instead, […]
In the last year, we’ve covered well over a dozen activity aggregators, almost all of which share a single goal: helping you keep track of your friends’ exploits across the internet.
This day, we see the launch of Fwix, an aggregator that is taking a (thankfully) different approach. Fwix isn’t concerned with your friends - instead, it keeps track of what’s going on in your physical region. The site pulls data from over 30 APIs including Yelp, Twitter, and Eventful, with more on the way. Each 15 minutes it combs through thousands of potential stories, using a series of algorithms to determine what the hottest items are in your city - it’s sort of like a regional News Feed.
But Fwix doesn’t just bear a resemblance to Facebook’s News Feed in function - a quick tour around the site reveals that it’s nearly visually identical as well. This isn’t a coincidence: Darian Shirazi, one of the site’s co-founders, was an early Facebook employee who was involved with the News Feed project.
The site is laid out well and is very intuitive. Users can browse through stories by their category (News, media, etc.), and can also choose to look at a regional or universal stream. And because there’s no login, the site could easily serve as a Digg alternative for users looking for a constant stream of new content to read (though I quickly began to wish it refreshed more often than once every 15 minutes).
Fwix has potential, but it still lacks a number of key features. For one, there’s really no way to figure out why a given story is being displayed in the feed. This morning I was presented with a series of pics of a Renaissance fair, with no indication as to why this stream was considered popular. To remedy this, Fwix needs to include a descriptive measure of each item’s popularity (something along the lines of “there have been 3 blog posts and 5 tweets about this photo”). There’s also currently no way to select which APIs you’d like to draw data from, though the team says this is on the way.
Fwix will see competition from a number of other activity streams (FriendFeed) and news aggregators (SocialMedian and Regator), but most of these don’t think about location in their algorithms.
I’m willing to stand up and state it. C-SPAN, which is dedicated to airing non-stop coverage of government proceedings and public affairs programming, is the one channel that we all skip past as fast as possible on those rare occasions that we actually flip the channels on un-Tivo’d television. If not for The Onion making […]
I’m willing to stand up and state it. C-SPAN, which is dedicated to airing non-stop coverage of government proceedings and public affairs programming, is the one channel that we all skip past as fast as possible on those rare occasions that we actually flip the channels on un-Tivo’d television. If not for The Onion making fun of it all the time, I’d forget it existed. If CSPAN has a demographic, no one I know is part of it. I bet that even the people who work at C-SPAN never watch C-SPAN voluntarily.
But today C-SPAN gets fairly cool with the launch of two new sites dedicated to the upcoming Democratic Convention in Denver and Republican Convention in Minneapolis. C-Span is still workingout some technical issues, but TechCrunch readers can get an early preview by clicking on these links for DNC08 and RNC08. Both are similarly formatted sites that incorporate citizen journalism via blogs, Twitter, YouTube and Qik into portals to cover convention and related news. They will complement the existing C-SPAN Politics site.
The sites also incorporate normal C-SPAN video content. But unlike the unwieldy content on the main C-SPAN site the new sites will show video in Flash format and allow embedding on other sites. Third celebration blog content from sites like Huffington Post, Instapundit, Gateway Pundit, RedState, etc. will be incorporated into the site and Twitter messages marked with hash marks #RNC08 or #DNC08 will also appear on the site (with moderation). C-SPAN employees will be given Qik cameras to record the action when not on main camera.
All in all, it’s a great effort to spice up coverage with user-generated, up-to-the-minute content. This might not make the cable channel more watchable, but political nuts will definitely want to bookmark the sites. It might have the most up to date news on the conventions.
Screen shots below:
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With just the weekend between now and the start of the major party conventions, the extraordinary thing about the New Media is just how tiny it has impacted so far on the story. No major leaks about the vice presidential nominations, no blogger unmaskings of damaging revelations about the candidates at the top of the […]
With just the weekend between now and the start of the major party conventions, the astounding thing about the New Media is just how little it has impacted so far on the story. No major leaks about the vice presidential nominations, no blogger unmaskings of damaging revelations about the candidates at the top of the ticket, no shaky video of loose talk or surrogates jockeying for position.
Is is possible that the campaigns have learned how to contain the new viral media, or is something else going on? With Twitter, Qik, FriendFeed, and other social media platforms now in place and largely battle-tested for the coming storm of pre-baked circuses, why is the news so tightly controlled by the traditional networks?
Perhaps the nature of the underlying story of this election undercuts the technology equation. With a disruptive candidate like Barack Obama, people are looking to the media for less, rather than more drama. The shiny object fascination with radical technology change has given way to a more pragmatic mood, where iPhones have become commonplace and the rapid spread of information throughout the day and on the move has let the mainstream media play more to its traditional strengths as not just aggregators but synthesists of the news.
Real time bursts of information over Twitter and IM have changed how we react to events; the edge professionals have with insider notification is being smoothed out and delivered as a service to consumers via intermediaries who give away the data for the ongoing relationship. We use Facebook and other social hubs as early warning systems, insurance against being out of the loop when breaking information makes a difference in how you do your job or finding one.
Scribd, the popular document sharing hub, has finally rolled out a much-needed redesign. The site has long been hampered by a messy homepage that wasn’t attractive for first-time visitors, displaying a list of its top features in lieu of a YouTube-esque stream of featured documents. The old design made it clear that Scribd worked well as a utility, but didn’t make it attractive as a destination site. Now, the new site highlights a sampling of its top documents and includes a number of UX changes that Scribd hopes will remedy this issue.
Update: McCain 
As John McCain prepares to unveil his selection for a running mate this day, Mitt Romney seems to be a favorite. But two former Silicon Valley CEOs are also on the short list, and they’re both women: Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman. Picking Romney would help McCain solidify his position with the Republican base, but it would also be predictable and boring. Picking a woman with executive experience would show that McCain is as open to change as Barack Obama.
It’s no burning man, but CrunchGear is live at 
In July, after Hasbro and Electronic Arts launched the official version of Scrabble on Facebook, they 
I’m willing to stand up and state it. 
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