Microsoft is leaking that they are willing to increase their Yahoo bid to as much as $33 per share, up from the original $31/share offer. That original offer, which included payment in Microsoft stock, has fallen in value to just $29.12/share.

This is a surprise since Microsoft has previously stated they wouldn’t increase their bid. Analysts largely expected them to either walk from the deal or go hostile.

$33 may not be enough to get Yahoo to move the knife away from their nose, however. The WSJ says they want $35 - $37.

The people say that it’s unclear what final approach Microsoft will take, but that discussions between the two companies have been stymied by a stark divide on price. Microsoft has said privately in recent days that it’s willing to offer as much as $32 or $33 a share, well above the $29.12-a-share value of its original cash-and-stock offer as of Tuesday’s market close, these people say. But major Yahoo shareholders have signaled they want in the range of $35 to $37 a share, with Yahoo’s management and board similarly shooting for an offer in the upper $30s, they add.

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/~3/281062086/

Web chat startup Meebo has closed the funding round they’ve been working on with investment bank Montgomery & Co., a source tells us. Expect an announcement shortly.

The best information we’ve been able to gather says the company raised $25 million or so on a $200 million valuation. Earlier this month they abandoned efforts to sell the company, focusing instead on raising money.

Meebo was negotiating with strategic partners to join the funding round as well, including eBay, Fox/MySpace and AOL. From what we’ve heard, none of those companies invested.

To date Meebo has raised $12.5 million from Sequoia Capital and Draper Fisher Jurvetson.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/281045496/

Update to our January post: Super blogger Robert Scoble, who has argued that having advertisements on blogs destroys trust, added advertisements to his blog today along with a redesign. At least it’s clear now who scratches Scoble’s back - Seagate.

One thing I do like - the FriendFeed widget that shows his activity stream and comments from readers.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/281026318/

Meet Watercooler, a startup developing social network applications for all the usual suspects - Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Hi5, and Friendster - that allow fans to rally around their favorite sports teams and TV shows.

The Mountain View-based firm raised a previously undisclosed $4M in Series A funding from Canaan Partners this past September. While it’s been developing Facebook apps since July 2007, it just recently launched a corporate website to provide a more unified front to its efforts.

While you may not associate the name “Watercooler” with the more famous app developers Slide and RockYou, as well as SGN and Zynga, the company has created over 700 community-building apps. Watercooler’s installs and active users earns it the #9 spot on Adonomics top Facebook developer list.

Watercooler’s apps focus on particular shows and teams, and give fans an opportunity to discuss recent events, share photos, and take quizzes. The applications can also communicate with each other, allowing for interaction between rival groups, even across the supported social networks. The company’s platform allows the company to produce these applications very quickly, each tailored to a particular show or team.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/281024831/

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has invested $3 million into user-generated casual gaming site Kongregate through Bezos Expeditions, his personal investment vehicle. Kongregate CEO calls it a “super angel round,” although technically it is a B1 round (the startup raised $5 million in a round led by Greylock). Bezos Expeditions won’t be taking a board seat. Greer says:

If we had done another venture round, we would have had to raise $12 million to $15 million [to satisfy current investors]. We don’t need that to get to profitability. We still have $6 million in the bank of what we’ve raised so far, including Bezos’ money.

He really didn’t need the money, but when Jeff Bezos wants to invest in your a startup on good terms, you’d be crazy to say no. (LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, also an investor in Kongregate, made the introduction to Bezos). Greer says the process was very efficient. He flew up to Seattle and had one meeting with Bezos and his investment team. Greer explains why he thinks Bezos invested:

He looked at it the way he looks at the Amazon seller business. Amazon is a better place to sell your stuff than on your own site, and Kongregate is a better place to host your games. Community is really important. He said you should really consider developers your customers to the same extent that you consider players your customers. That was his big emphasis.

Kongregate lets anyone create their own Flash video games and splits revenues with game creators, starting at 25 percent of any associated advertising, up to 50 percent. ComScore shows 1.7 million global unique visitors in March (see chart below), with the average user spending 82 minutes per month on the site. (The company claims 3 million worldwide uniques and 349,000 registered hardcore users). The video above is one we shot of Greer at the Crunchies awards earlier this year, explaining what Kongregate does. (The figures he cites at the end of video of 2800 games and 1.5 million visitors are outdated, and now would be 4,200 and 3 million respectively, on an apples-to-apples basis. And only 63 million games have been played in total, not the half a billion he states in the video).

Greer also has a Facebook strategy up his sleeve which he plans to unveil next month. Kongregate will start launching the most popular games as standalone Facebook apps, starting with Dolphin Olympics, Jump Cat, Super Crazy Guitar Maniac, Ragdoll Avalanche, M.A.D, and Filler. (See exclusive screen shots below).

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/280997277/

Some recent posts at the 37signals Product Blog:

Case studies
Baltimore Sun uses Basecamp to manage “a million moving parts”
“My Department operates as a mini creative agency within the greater organization of The Baltimore Sun Media Group. We do design and development work for clients both internally and externally. This work spans most media and includes: web sites (big and small), banner ads, e-mail newsletters, admail, video production, logos, illustrations, print ads, tradeshow signage, etc. This keeps us pretty busy and we use Basecamp to manage all of our projects from start to finish.”

Entrepreneur Mom uses Basecamp to manage all her client “schtuff”
“I’m training all my clients to use Basecamp instead of sending me multiple emails so rather than sifting through Gmail to find the latest correspondence or searching my computer to resend a file that they don’t remember receiving, we can communicate through Basecamp and upload all the files related to a given project.”

Trucking company uses Highrise to improve communication between office staff and customers
“After looking at many of the major players I stumbled upon Highrise and I’m glad I did. It so easy to use and is very straightforward with what it does. If you need the pipeline stuff or graphs that make you feel warm and fuzzy then look elsewhere…If you want a product that will improve communication between your office staff and customers with a KISS interface, then look to Highrise. I can’t give enough props to the Dashboard idea.”

Shaw Builders creates multimillion dollar homes with Basecamp
“The biggest problem we have is communication and avoiding the he said/she said syndrome. It seems that everyone has selective memory and most homeowners are overwhelmed with the number of decisions that have to be made when building a custom home of this caliber. Basecamp has saved the day numerous times by simply providing a document trail. I can easily use Basecamp’s search capability to isolate documents or massages that relate to a particular task. This has saved us a tremendous amount of aggravation and money. On a past project I had a homeowner who insisted that the railing of his 2nd floor deck wasn’t built correctly. When I pulled up the meeting notes and the AutoCAD drawing through Basecamp within 2 minutes of his ‘brain fade’ I was able to quickly put his argument to bed. That helped to enforce our credibility and saved us from having to rip the railing out at our cost.”

Author and conflict resolution consultant uses Backpack as “business home-base and sanity tool”
“Backpack is my business home-base and my sanity tool to manage it all. It’s set to load when I open my browser each day because I do almost all my administrative work from Backpack. I love that I can access my project files from any Internet-connected computer and from my iPhone. And I love that everything I need for a client or business project is in one place. When I’m busy or on the road, that helps keep me organized so I can give my full attention and energy to my clients.”Chi-Town Daily News uses Highrise to manage newsroom
“Highrise has turned out to be unexpectedly well-suited to managing a newsroom…Highrise enables us to collect contact details on our volunteers in one location, assign the volunteer to an editor, track stories to completion and send automated reminders when deadlines are missed.”

Basecamp helps “green team” save $2,000 a year and keep a zero carbon footprint
“Before Basecamp, we used to open a jacket folder for each project and put all the material inside of that folder, which basically means print everything, all the way from the initial job request, all versions, reviews, to the final invoice. I ran some numbers and I realized that we will save an estimated $2000 a year just in paper, folders and print related costs; but even more important than the savings is that we’re adopting green practices.”

New features
New Highrise Feature: File view
We launched a new Highrise feature called File view. Here’s a video showing you what it does and how it works.

Improved Backpack Calendar Reminders
“We pushed an update which allows you to notify everyone, select people, or just you via email/sms of an event on the Backpack Calendar. Prior to this update, everyone in your account was notified on every event. That lead to a lot of unnecessary notification.”

New project switcher in Basecamp, bigger file upload limit, and more
A new feature that makes it easier to switch between frequently accessed projects…Also: 1. People using Basecamp file storage can now upload files up to 100 MB each. Before the limit was 30 MB. 2. When you’re inside a project you’ll see a printer icon in the right corner of the screen next to the Search tab. Clicking that icon will give you a print-friendly version of the page you’re currently on. 3. We’ve made some of the text links at the top of the screen bigger so they’re easier to see/click.

Buzz/press
Derek Newman: Backpack calendar makes family planning “a lot easier”
“The other tool I use daily is 37signals Backpack application…I use it to take notes on books, digital reading, and anything else that I want. We also use the calendar feature to coordinate our family. Having one central calendar the entire family can access and change makes our lives a lot easier.

Basecamp is a Webware 100 Award Winner (again)
Basecamp is a Webware 100 Award Winner (again) in the “Productivity” category. The Webware 100 is made up of the 100 best Web 2.0 applications, chosen by Webware readers and Internet users across the globe. Over 1.9 million votes were cast to select the winners.

Computerworld: Don’t miss out on Highrise
Computerworld.com published a list of 11 sites not to miss. On the list: Highrise. “Highrise keeps track of your relationship with your customers, providing a place to track and share their contact information, background notes and records of interactions.”

Backpack is “killer” according to Business II Business
“Backpack now comes in a multi-user version that really makes this tool more like a powerful, on-demand, simple to use, Intranet for small business. You can create as many users as you like (price varies with number of users) and each user can have their own calendars, effectively creating an online sharable calendaring system. The newsroom feature is a like an activity dashboard that also keeps group messaging tidy…”

Tips and tricks
Going from “hi” to Highrise
“I know it’s kind of silly but I just like my little story. See, my Highrise dropbox is under the name “Highrise”. So every time I forward an email to my account I just type hi ! Mail completes the rest… It just feels great, I can manage the biggest part of my work with an application as simple as ‘hi’. :)”

Tips for getting the most out of Backpack on the iPhone
Just Another iPhone Blog recently posted “Tips and Tweaks Make 37signals’ Backpack A ‘Must Have’ iPhone Application.” It discusses using iBackpack to make your Backpack pages look nice on your iPhone and also links to a Forum post that shows how to add a custom Backpack icon to your iPhone home screen.

Example Basecamp welcome messages from R.BIRD and Koke Creative
Here are a couple of Basecamp welcome messages used by two different design firms. Each welcomes clients to Basecamp and encourages them to use it as their first point of contact.

Extras
How to use an Access Database and VBA to work with Highrise (or other apps)
“In this article, I am going to describe how you can use an Access Database and VBA to manipulate a Web 2 application called Highrise, a customer relationship management (CRM) tool from the highly successful Web2 company, 37Signals. Why pick this online product? The main reason is that I love using it, it has a well-written Application Programming Interface (API) and it is free for your first two hundred contacts. Why might this be relevant and interesting to you, the reader? Because you will be performing these tasks on a database that is hidden behind the security of a website, something that has always been beyond the abilities of Access.”

ProjectLocker, a hosted Subversion and Trac system, adds Basecamp integration
“ProjectLocker has just added Basecamp integration to its product suite. Subversion users who host at ProjectLocker can now: 1) Send commit messages from Subversion to Basecamp as Basecamp messages. 2) Create new ProjectLocker projects from existing Basecamp projects. 3) Associate users in ProjectLocker with users in Basecamp, so that messages actually come from the committing user where possible.”

Getting Real
How Doodlekit’s two-person team was inspired by Getting Real
“The next day we started Doodlekit. We scrounged up $300 each, grabbed an old refurbished PC from Ben’s basement, slapped in some extra memory from my old computer, and we were off ‘getting real’! A year and a half later (just 4 months ago) we had our first major release of Doodlekit. Since that time our membership base has increased to over 15,000 and our revenues have gone up 10 fold. We have zero debt.”

Subscribe to the Product Blog RSS feed.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1004-product-blog-update-baltimore-sun-case-study-basecamp-wins-webware-100-award-backpack-and-the-iphone-etc

Drama over. The CrunchGear/TechCrunch Iron Man screening, which Marvel tried to shut down yesterday for no good reason whatsoever (more on that below), is back on.

We are adding another 30 spots on the wait list. At least most of the people on the wait list will get in, so if you’re willing to risk being turned away at the last minute, sign up there. Showing is at 7:15 tonight at the AMC Metreon in San Francisco.

We’re still trying to figure out exactly what happened, but Marvel is now saying that Oracle, which is promoting the movie, complained about the event. From our attorney: “He said this all arose from a misunderstanding. Paramount had not informed Marvel about your deal. Oracle had booked the theatre for a different screening at the same time. People at Oracle were upset thinking that their event was turning into a TechCrunch event and that there would be too many people, conflicts over who would get in, etc.”

I was already slightly annoyed at Oracle for spamming comments on our original post (see comment 50 here). But to try to derail the event is just…villainous.

Marvel also apologized, and we accept. I’m not annoyed at all that we incurred an extra $2,000 in legal expense on top of the ticket price.

See you tonight!

Update: Just got a call from Ira Rubenstein apologizing. He also confirms that he left this comment. All is forgiven at Marvel, even the legal fees. It’s Oracle I’m aiming at now.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/280959530/

A little NSFW near the middle. Be warned.

It’s business time, TC readers. Tomorrow we welcome those with emailed invites to Red Sky at 47 E. 29th Street between Park and Madison.

We’d like to thank our sponsors again. If you got an email for the wait list spots, congratulations. If you didn’t, there’s always next time. See you tomorrow! Hopefully Marvel doesn’t shut us down. After all, Matt Hickey is coming dressed as No-Pants Spiderman.

Gold Sponsors

(more…)

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/280950531/

AOL may have the widest-reaching advertising network in Platform A, but it is not seeing the financial rewards of that reach. In fact, Time Warner today announced that during the first quarter, AOL’s overall advertising revenues grew just 1 percent. Total revenues at AOL slid 23 percent because the access business continues to go away, but everybody knows that and the focus now is on whether AOL can reinvent itself as a pure Internet advertising company.

AOL spent about $1 billion over the past year on companies like Tacoda and Quigo to buy its ad network market share. Those businesses aren’t quite kicking in yet partly because of delays in integrating their sales forces But the bigger problem was that gains in third-party ads sold on other sites were almost completely offset last quarter by an 18 percent drop in display ads on AOL-owned properties. AOL makes a lot more margin on ads it sells on its own sites than on ads it sells on other sites. That is why it is trying to boost its own pageviews by upgrading its sites and is the reason why it bought Bebo for $850 million earlier this year. The more ad inventory AOL can sell on its own sites, the better its margins will be.

AOL’s deal with Google on paid search advertising, like IAC’s. is also helping to shore up its overall advertising sales. Although, it is not clear what the exact impact was because the company did not break out the numbers.

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/~3/280916582/

PPK has published new event compatibility tables that test the event registration models (traditional, W3C and Microsoft) as well as event bubbling and capturing.

There is a lot of data here on the quirks of the various browsers.

In some fun news, it was interesting to see that PPK developed the interactive Dutch royal family tree!

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/280869205/events-compatibility-tables-powering-the-dutch-royals