Ajax Blog

Entrance exam preparation is costly and not exactly what I’d call fun. A company that launched on Monday called Grockit is dropping costs and making the process a bit easier to get through.

Grockit was started by Farbood Nivi, who has been teaching exam preparation since 1998. He worked for Kaplan and was Teacher of the Year for The Princeton Review in 2002. Just a few months ago he decided to start his own prep school where students can attend WebEX classes.

Grockit is significantly cheaper than the major review schools but Nivi says his profit margin is bigger.

“The other guys tend to be enormously bloated as far as companies go,” Nivi said via IM on Thursday. “They have very inefficient operations. They spend $1.5 million to generate $1.4 million. The virtual world is cheaper and more pervasive.”

To start out, Grockit is offering 16 90-minute sessions plus the official GMAT review text books for $399. Kaplan online is $1,249, The Princeton Review is $899, and Manhattan GMAT Prep is $990. Nivi says that the Grockit price may go up a little within the next year but he doesn’t have actual plans to increase it.

“One student has dropped the course with a competitor and decided to buy a laptop with the money he is saving by taking Grockit instead,” Nivi said. “Taking one of the big guys means that just applying to a hand full of MBA programs is a couple of thousand dollars out of your pocket.”

For now, Nivi is satisfied using WebEX where students and teachers can chat and interact. In the future he hopes to develop his own software for interactive classes. He also hopes to branch out from solely GMAT prep and start ACT courses next year because he believes that the ACT “is going to eat the SAT.”

To promote his service, Nivi and his staff of teachers have signed up as experts on BitWine. They are also banking on word-of-mouth marketing, hoping that saving money is a major incentive for hopeful students.

The obvious question here is if Grockit is a get-what-you-paid-for type deal. Having not taken entrance exams in six years, I couldn’t think of appropriate questions to quiz Nivi with but his experience is impressive enough to say his school is worth serious consideration. Especially for anyone considering dropping major ducats on an MBA.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/55903563/

Yahoo! TV has had a face lift. and it has a lot of the usual suspects from YUI:

Nice smooth tabs:

A carousel for picks, and a mini tv listings on the right side:

The full tv listings show up on demand as you scroll down:

Some are not too enthused. Dave Winer commented:

Yahoo says they improved Yahoo TV, but imho, they broke it. The listings page, which until today was the only page I knew or cared about (they just added a bunch of community features) took a few seconds to load, now it’s an Ajax thing, and it loads as you scroll. Great. There’s a delay every time I hit Page Down. Now instead of finding out if there’s anything on in seconds it takes minutes. That’s an improvement?

The listings issue could be solved by a) loading the entire thing again, or by staying ahead of the game a bit, as then you wouldn’t notice (e.g. eagerly load at least one section).

What do you think of the new look?

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/yahoo-tv-ajaxd-up-beta

AOL Video has decided to spread some holiday cheer by giving away over 30 free movie downloads for one day only on Saturday.

Several of the titles are, appropriately, Christmas movies such as National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation and Jack Frost, but there will be some non-spirited ones available such as Spiderman 2 as well. The free offering begins at 6:00 a.m. Eastern Time and customers are limited to one movie per person, but not one per computer.

Normally, movie downloads from AOL Video are priced from $9.99 to $19.99 per title. We reviewed AOL Video in October and found it to be lacking in selection and high in price compared to the other movie downloading services. But on Saturday, we would argue that it will be one of the better ones. After all, who can argue with free?

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/55878528/

Yahoo! redesigned their TV listing
site this week. Certain bloggers have expressed their displeasure with the makeover. I think it looks good but certainly could be more functional.

Most Yahoo! pages are getting Flash-ier so it was time for the TV listing page to go under the knife. Some complaints have been that the Ajax interface slows it down but that wasn’t my experience.

The problem is not the “cool” new color scheme. The problem is the design placement. The most pertinent information is not close enough to the top. I have to scroll down too far from the Scrubs, Ugly Betty, and Grey’s Anatomy promos before I get to the “My TV” grid, which is the reason I would go to this site in the first place. They’ve also placed “TV News,” “Juicy Gossip,” and “Latest Recaps” before the actual listings. I’ll go to the PerezHilton blog if I want that crap.

I don’t think this is another example of Yahoo! spreading its peanut butter. I think this is Yahoo! giving itself the makeover it needs but maybe trying to hard to be cool. Function before fashion, Yahoo! Learn from Meevee.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/55872413/

Jingle’s free 411 service has announced that users have now placed over 100 million 411 calls.

The company, which we profiled in October 2005, has raised over $60 million in capital to date, has taken over 3% of the U.S. 411 market.

We interviewed Jingle Networks CEO George Garrick and investor Josh Kopelman back in October at TalkCrunch. Jingle isn’t creating a new market - they are destroying an entrenched, $6 billion market with a free product.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/55862448/

800 Very Unsquare Feet describes Free City Supershop, an unorthodox Malibu retail space, as “a new shopping experience equal in its fun and sense of surprise to that of Whole Foods or Apple.” Owner Nina Garduno’s mantra is “make things with the simplest elements with the highest of possibilities.” She differentiates the store from larger competitors by emphasizing attention to detail, authenticity, and faith.

According to Ms. Garduno, Free City is profitable. It took her eight days, working with a shoestring budget and a small team in her workshop in Hollywood, to create the store’s interior, which features redwood shelves and blowups of album covers. Like everything else about Free City, the design follows Ms. Garduno’s mantra to “make things with the simplest elements with the highest of possibilities.”...

“The big companies were taking the importance of fashion away, the craft, and making it about price,” she said…For something to be perceived as authentic, that value has to be communicated cleanly through every detail — from the quality of the wash, if it’s a T-shirt, to the integrity of the physical environment. This is the almost visceral sense you get when you enter Free City. Not to sound crunchy, but you feel the love.

“Well, go look at the Gap. They claim to not want to rip you off, but the fact is they do. And it’s not working for them — not even lifting my ideas, and with all of their money and art direction. They still don’t have faith. They don’t have faith in themselves, and it comes out instinctually in the product. I think people know the difference.”

More on tees and details
And speaking of tees and communicating quality through detail: Threadless, dissatisfied with existing options for blank tees, recently decided to start manufacturing its own.

These shirts are based on our experience as a tee shirt company, and the feedback we’ve gotten from our community since the beginning of Threadless. Imagine a tee that is less boxy than a Fruit of the Loom, but not as skinny as an American Apparel. Imagine a tee whose fabric is softer than American Apparel but not as thin.

Great example of paying attention to core detail (people may like the designs but if the shirts don’t fit right, it’s all moot) and knowing what your community wants (Fruit of the Loom = too boxy, American Apparel = too thin). Plus, there’s something Apple-esque here in the way Threadless didn’t just accept the limits of existing manufacturers and decided to find their own (better) solution.

Related:
7 reasons why Threadless rules [SvN]
The man behind Apple’s design magic [SvN]: “Apple’s efforts to discover new materials and production processes enables them to build things no one else can build.”

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/141-free-city-supershop-threadless-and-communicating-value-through-detail

We have one slot open in The Deck for December. Give us a shout if you have a product or service that could benefit from being in front of a huge audience of creative, web and design professionals. We’ll make a special deal for a first-time advertiser.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/142-one-last-deck-slot-open-for-december

We could tell that there was some real excitement over at Yahoo HQ yesterday - four separate Yahoo PR folks emailed to make sure we knew that Google had announced the closing of their Answers product.

While the announcement was the final nail in the Google Answers coffin, in reality, the “Answers” war has been over for months now.

Google Answers launched in 2002, at a time when the desire for cheap user generated content wasn’t valued much because the advertising market was in a slump - monetizing page views was much harder than it is today. They adopted a for-pay model, where experts received a fee for answering questions, and Google took a 25% cut. By Google’s own admission, just 800 people participated in Google Answers over the last 4+ years (note: see the first few comments here regarding the 800 users number - it’s unclear exactly what Google is referring to).

In contrast, Yahoo Answers launched less than a year ago and with a much different model. Asking a question is free, and user responses are rated by the community and ranked. Users clearly like the model. By August 2006, people had written over 30 million answers to questions, and it had become one of Yahoo’s bigger properties. Yesterday, Yahoo said that Yahoo Answers had over 60 million unique worldwide monthly visitors, who have written 160 million answers to questions.

This wasn’t a war, it was a massacre, and a case study in why all this “Web 2.0 stuff” actually has legs when applied properly. Google went for a direct revenue stream, a business model that made sense in 2002. Yahoo, launching much later, launched a free product and used the ideals of community participation to remove friction from the process and get out of the way of users. This incentivized use and has created a massive number of page views that Yahoo is now monetizing. The network effect kicked in big time.

This was a much needed win and morale boost for Yahoo, which is in the midst of executive turmoil and is struggling to remain an independent entity. Their excitement, which I’ve witnessed only indirectly over the last 24 hours, is palpable. The challenge now is whether Yahoo CEO Terry Semel, who seems to have one foot out the door, or some other Yahoo executive, can leverage this win to help turn Yahoo’s business around more generally.

And it is also a great development for Google, which has now signaled a willingness to kill off failed product experiments and deploy resources in a more efficient manner. It seems that the mantra of “features, not products” discussed by CEO Eric Schmidt and Sergey Brin in their most recent public earnings call is being put into practice. This willingness to admit that a project has failed, and kill it off, will allow Google to experiment on a grander scale in the future.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/55846216/

We’re all about the holidays at CrunchGear this week. We have a full DSLR round-up as well as an amazing look at some high-end audio gear for those with a bit of cash to burn.

We also take a look at the Nikon D40, the Helio Drift, and the Expresso S2 Exercise Bike for burning off those Thanksgiving calories. We’re also running a Commenter Appreciation contest for our loyal readers. Care to join them?

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/55850953/

I have watched the eXo platform grow for a few years. Benhamin Mestrallet and his team do great work, and now we are seeing the next boost.

They have revamped their UI with Ajax, and it is looking really good.

Each window is a portlet, and both portlets and portal are fully Ajax enabled.

This means that with eXo you have an Ajax front end talking to a Java backend that supports the Java standards of JSR 168, and 170 for the application/windows and the file system. You will also be able to build widgets.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/exo-platform-goes-from-portal-to-enterprise-webos