news aggregator

The mass exodus of both execs and rank and file employees at Yahoo continues. In fact the real defections may just be getting started at a high percentage of employees vest on lucrative restricted stock units this month.

Yahoo’s head of communications Jill Nash continues to try to keep the resignations as quiet as possible, and suggests informally to press that most of the high level departures are really just a cleaning house procedure.

What a housecleaning.

Two more SVPs are bailing out. Previously reported was Todd Teresi (pictured left), SVP of Network Business. Teresi is now the Chief Revenue Officer at Quantcast.

Now we’ve heard that the number 2 exec at Yahoo Mobile, ten year Yahoo’er Steve Boom (pictured right), has resigned as well. Boom started in Yahoo’s London office in a business development role. More recently he oversaw Yahoo’s broadband partnerships with AT&T, Rogers, BT and Verizon.

CrunchBase Information Yahoo! Todd Teresi Steve Boom Information provided by CrunchBase

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

This is a QuickSort for fun in C# 3 for a list with repeated items.

There still seems to be confusion about the relative simplicity or difficulty of deploying a Rails app using JRuby. Many folks still look around for the old tools and the old ways (Mongrel, generally), assuming that "all that app server stuff" is too complicated. I figured I'd post a quick walkthrough to show how easy it actually is, along with links to everything to get you started.

When it comes to the availability of good mapping data, not all parts of the world are created equal. That’s why Google is taking a wiki approach to filling out the white spaces on its maps, particularly in developing nations. Back in June, it launched Map Maker for a small group of island nations where there isn’t great existing cartography data. But now it’s added India to the countries that can be modified on Google Maps. As Google gains more experience with this experiment, more countries may be added in the future. Although it is starting in regions that have poor map data, hopefully it will figure out a way to add this capability for every region of the world. (Even in the U.S., which is not yet editable in this fashion, Google Maps is not perfect).

Map Maker lets anyone add or edit roads, points of interests, and other features on Google Maps. You can mark tourist destinations (like the Taj Mahal), restaurants, factories, helipads, even shrubbery. There is a drop-down list of dozens of feature types to choose from for consistent tagging and easy searchability. Map Maker also lets you define particular regions and neighborhoods by drawing or tracing them using the satellite imagery as your guide. Unlike Google My Maps, any changes to Map Maker are automatically added to Google Maps for everyone to see (although Google reserves the right to moderate contributions).

Here is a video from Google India explaining the service and a list of the 57 countries that can now be edited in Map Maker (image below) .

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

As many of our readers have noticed (and noted) already, we rolled out a new design for TechCrunch yesterday evening.

We’ve been watching as the initial feedback has rolled in through Twitter and in the comments to our other posts. And while we’re still making lots of small changes, we wanted to take a second to write a proper post explaining our intentions and soliciting your feedback.

Our overarching goal was to clean things up, both on the surface and under the hood. TechCrunch had become bloated in many ways, with the homepage taking way too long to load and the scroll bar going on forever and ever.

So the first step entailed switching over to an “excerpt” format with which readers could get a taste of our posts on the homepage before diving in to read them in full. By cutting down on the amount of content on the homepage, we’ve reduced load times and made it easier to skim our headlines for the news and editorial you care about most.

We’ve also taken a minimalist approach to design that uses lots of whitespace and gives priority to our main content with a wider post width and a larger font size (no more squinting on that high resolution monitor).

As far as particular features go, a new “featured posts” box sits adjacent to the second post on the homepage and in the sidebar of every single post page. It’s intended to highlight some of the content you might otherwise overlook, with a tab for the most recent posts and another for those that garnered the most comments in the past few days. We’ve also started to measure the traffic to our individual posts more closely and will add a tab with the most popular posts as well.

So what’s next? We plan to roll this design - with minor customizations - across most of the other blogs within the TechCrunch Network (CrunchGear, MobileCrunch, TechCrunch UK, etc). We’re also going to launch a new search implementation using Yahoo BOSS Custom that lets you search by keyword across our entire network of blogs, plus CrunchBase.

But before we get too far ahead of ourselves, let us know what you think in the comments below.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

In this post, you will find a little reminder of Mootools base functions (Basic Learning) + 5 very cool tips and examples to do more things with less code.

The Active Network, a network of sites focused on getting people involved in sports and other activities, has raised an additional $80 million in a Series F round led by ESPN and joined by Canaan Partners, North Bridge Venture Partners, and Performance Equity Partners.

The round brings San Diego-based company’s total to over $275 million since its founding in 1998 as a registration site for endurance races (we’re still tracking down all the rounds for CrunchBase).

While its main property, Active.com, delivers the bulk of its traffic with 17 million registered users and almost 1.3 million uniques per month (according to internal stats), network properties also include Eteamz, LaxPower, and CoolRunning.

We’re told that The Active Network’s total revenue in 2007 exceeded $102 million. Since the beginning of 2007, the company has made 11 acquisitions intended to help it branch out into new markets such as camping and education.

This is not the first time ESPN has invested in The Active Network, which focuses on the participatory side of sports rather than the spectator side. In 2006, ESPN invested more than $20 million in an attempt to diversify its business away from news and editorial. As part of its relationship with The Active Network, ESPN runs advertising campaigns and places its logo on the network’s sites.

The Active Network makes most of its money through transaction fees for event registrations. The network facilitated over 10 million transactions in 2007 alone.

CrunchBase Information The Active Network ESPN Information provided by CrunchBase

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

The .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 (SP1) delivers more controls, a streamlined setup, improved start-up performance, and powerful new graphics features for client development and rich data scaffolding, improved AJAX support, and other improvements for Web development.

The PHP Presentation System hosts over three hundred presentations, covering a slew of different topics including performance, testing, debugging, XML, and security. The presentations are from speakers at a variety of conferences. You will see (and hear if interested) presentations from speakers like Derick Rethans, Tobias Schlitt, Rasmus Lerdorf and many many more. These presentations have been at conferences all around the world and contain a great deal of information.

Do you want to help develop build patterns and identify? We have patterns-a-plenty for writing code. How about patterns for building it?

Tutorial on how to distribute AIR Applications to people that never heard of it. How to avoid to force user to install two things (AIR Runtime and the application itself) and join it on a single, easy process.

So we return to the Palm Treo Pro, a $549 unlocked Windows Mobile Treo aimed squarely at the business set. It’s been about a week and I’ve used this guy off and on. It kept a nice charge - two days, for the most part, without much data use - and fit nicely in the pocket. But is it the Treo of which we all incessantly dream? Is it the Treo that will bring us closer to world peace and better burritos on the East Coast? Is this the Treo for you?

Yes, it is the Treo for you if you are a business professional forced to use Windows Mobile and you travel quite a bit and hardware price is no object. This is also the Treo for you if you’re buying a few cellphones for the CEO and the CFO and you want them to be productive without having to change your Windows-based IT and communications infrastructure. If you are neither of those people, think of the Treo Pro as a vision of Palm’s future.

The Treo Pro is one of Palm’s most attractive Treos to date. Gone is the lumpen plastic of the Centro and the low-gloss ho-hummery of the 800w. Whereas the Centro and the 800w took design cues from the lower end of the market, Treo tapped HTC to design this new looker and for good reason. The RIM, in a general, sense, was eating their enterprise lunch and the Centro was doing just fine.

So we have the Treo Pro. As its name implies, this isn’t for amateurs. Because it’s unlocked and unsubsidized you’d better have a damn good reason for going Windows Mobile. This could mean IT departments buying in bulk for their executives or a mobile professional who wants a messaging phone but still likes ActiveSync. Europe loves them some Windows Mobile, so their unlocked model is a good move. The US market, sadly, looks at expensive phones and then looks elsewhere. The Blackberry Curve didn’t get where it is on its good looks.

Read more…

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Since I have gotten lots of love/hate mail on the Singletons are Pathological Liars and Where Have All the Singletons Gone I feel obliged to to do some root cause analysis.

XAML, Microsoft's eXtensible Application Markup Language, was released with the .NET 3.0 framework and works with the new technologies available in the framework, such as WPF, WCF, Windows CardSpace, and WF.

JSF, especially 1.1, got criticized by some Java developers. For JSF 2.0 this critique was taken seriously and a much improved spec is currently being developed. However, even though its supposed to be a major improvement, some people have already found major flaws in it.

Today Acquia has announced the beta launch of a commercially supported distribution of Drupal. The first 100 visitors to register here will receive beta accounts, and those after will be atop the list for the next round of invites.

The release is essentially a hardened distribution of Drupal, complemented with technical support and network service offerings. Code named Carbon for now, the package includes a select set of community contributed modules alongside the Drupal core. Acquia has taken the task of pre-testing, reviewing, and comparing all community contributed modules to offer a set of the most relevant and reliable contributions. Site administrators are notified of updates to Carbon modules through the network, code named Spokes. The system differentiates between feature, bug fix, and security updates, and informs users of compatibility issues or other dependencies amongst different modules.

Drupal is an open source content management system comprised of the Drupal core and about 2000 contributed modules. Each module is a separate open source project, specialized for certain features and functionality within a web site. However with so many contributions from the community it becomes difficult to discern the most useful, reliable, compatible, and recent modules from the rest. Acquia looks manage this complexity by releasing the first commercial version of Drupal, taking a position similar to RedHat in the Linux community.

The Drupal platform was created in 2001 by Acquia CTO Dries Buytaert. It was built on PHP and MySQL, with the purpose of giving those with minimal programming skills the ability to create interactive websites. It is currently currently used by over a quarter million people, but until now there has been no commercial entity to centralize open source development efforts. Acquia hopes to fill this void. The final version is set for commercial release in mid September.

CrunchBase Information Acquia Information provided by CrunchBase

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

An effective strategy for handling exceptions is to catch them at the boundary of a coarsely-grained "unit of work". Once you've caught an exception, you need to repair application state, notify affected people and ultimately abort the program, retry the operation, or ignore the error. This article provides guidelines for making that decision.

Find out how to use Chain.js (a JQuery plugin) as client-side Javascript template engine -- the best one I've ever seen.

This is Part Three of a series of articles on Java.next. In Part Three, I will explore how the Java.next languages (JRuby, Groovy, Clojure, and Scala) support dispatch. For my purposes here, dispatch is a broad term covering various methods of dynamically choosing behavior: single dispatch, switch/case, pattern matching and multiple dispatch. These concepts are not generally grouped together, but they should be. They are used to solve similar problems, albeit in very different ways.

Cisco is getting into the Web e-mail game with a $215 million purchase of five-year-old PostPath. PostWho? The company sells a Linux-based e-mail service to enterprises somewhat like Zimbra (which Yahoo bought for $350 million last year). PostPath is a fully functional in-browser Ajax client, and on the back-end it is trying to take on Microsoft Exchange.
The software also works on mobile phones, including the iPhone. Cisco will add PostPath’s functionality to its WebEx collaboration service (it bought WebEx for $3.2 billion last year).

Not a bad outcome for a company whose software development team is based in Bulgaria. PostPath previously raised a total of $30 million. Its most recent round was a $15 million series C in January, 2007. Investors included JAFCO Ventures, Matrix Partners and Worldview Technology Partners.

As software moves to the cloud, Cisco wants to capture some of the higher margins that go along with that, as opossed to simply pushing boxes that quickly decline in value. Many of us already rely exclusively on Web-based email, but corporations are only now making the shift.

CrunchBase Information PostPath Cisco Zimbra Information provided by CrunchBase

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.