Ajax Girl

A few bits of other news caught my eye in the last week amid the flurry of activity here in San Francisco around the Web 2.0 Summit.

Power to the People

Creative Commons is hacking the ad system to fundraise. CC put their new video on Revver, the online video site with revenue-sharing. Every time someone watches the video through to the ad, CC gets paid. As Lawrence Lessig writes in his blog post, “So if you’d like a simple (and cheap) way to help CC, please use the email form to send the videos page to your 10,000 best friends. Ask them to send it to their 10,000 best friends. And them, to their 15,000 best friends. And soon we’ll be finished with the fundraising for the year…”

» Watch all of the CC videos here.

CC is also running a photo contest on Flickr starting now and going until December 6th. At the FlickrBlog, Stewart Butterfield mentions that there are over 22,000,000 CC photos on Flickr. All of my photos on Flickr are CC.

Creative Commons launched the first CC Swag Photo Contest on Flickr to promote our Annual Fundraising Campaign. The photo must be of CC Swag (t-shirts, buttons, stickers, etc. - all available from the Support the Commons store) and the winners will have their photos used on Creative Commons’ informational postcards, which will be distributed internationally to promote CC and the winning photographers. Winners will receive 100 copies of the postcard with their photo. The winners will also be able to choose a Creative Commons board member to record a personalized outgoing voicemail announcement - that’s right, your friends can be greeted by Lawrence Lessig every time they call you!

» Visit the contest page for details.

Hacking the Conference

The other bit of news is just a great example of guerilla marketing. In Dan Fost’s post at the SF Chronicle, Hacking the Web 2.0 Conference, he describes one company’s smart marketing move. Mashery makes software to manage APIs for applications and rather than demo at the Summit or pay to attend, they came up with their own approach that proved just as (more?) effective…

…CEO Oren Michels and investor Josh Kopelman cleverly booked the Palace’s Sonoma conference room as soon as the conference dates were announced. “This is a guerilla launch,” Michels said. “We’re not part of the conference.” Instead, he had a room right at the center of the action, for “a fraction of the cost of a sponsorship.” The room became a de facto party spot…

Great thinking!

Source: Emily Chang
Original Article: http://www.emilychang.com/go/weblog/comments/hacking-the-system/

There have been a lot of discussions on JavaScript on the server side, which naturally comes up as an idea when you consider:

• Some argue that JavaScript is becoming the platform, more-so than the JVM or the CLR. With Ajax, Flash, and Apollo, this could become even MORE true.
• Many developers (have to) know JavaScript
• Many developers are learning JavaScript
• Include the Flash guys too

Instead of programming in Java, PHP, or Ruby, and having mechanisms to generate JavaScript (GWT, rails helpers, etc), maybe we will end up developing end to end in JavaScript?

Wouldn’t it be nice to be in one language (that is very flexible, and allows you to code functionally, procedurally, OO-ally, etc)?

JavaScript doesn’t have everything it needs. But, there is glue to help it out. With Rhino, the under pinnings could be written in Java, but the developer wouldn’t have to write Java. This always happens of course. My Rails applications rely on a LOT of C code, but I am not spending my time in that area.

What if the next BEA is a company that comes up with the killer JavaScript Application Server?

This is where Phobos comes in:

Project Phobos is a lightweight, scripting-friendly, web application environment running on the Java platform, aimed at addressing emerging developer requirements. Scripting and dynamic languages are growing in popularity among developers, especially for building Web applications. These developers place special value on rapid application development and deployment.
The goal of Project Phobos is to show that Java is an excellent platform for server-side scripting, allowing dynamic-language developers to leverage the power of Java SE and EE. The initial focus for Project Phobos is JavaScript, but the design supports the use of other dynamic languages as well.

Sun may already have this. Will they be able to market it? Unfortunately, the track record isn’t there, so it will probably languish. Buy maybe not.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/phobos-does-sun-have-a-good-thing-under-its-nose

Sam Ruby knew that document.write doesn’t work well with XHTML so he went to find the best solution.

His context:

Because Google AdSense depends on document.write, the net result is that I only serve ads to users of browsers that don’t support XHTML, which increasingly means that only IE users see ads.

His solution:

The solution is to use createElementNS instead. So far, so good. The only piece left to the puzzle is where to append the child that you created. If you simply do a document.appendChild, the new element ends up at the end of the document. There doesn’t seem to be a property which indicates the current node in the tree at the time of the parse. But in cases like adsense, you generally want the widget put in place.

The code:

Could document.write be redefined if in an xhtml document to parse into a tree and append?

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/documentwrite-and-xhtml

Google seems to be pretty serious about their little PayPal killer, and is releasing a steady stream of new features that appear to be addressing merchant needs. This is a product that we’ve been using steadily since launch to bill event sponsors. It’s had some hiccups, particuarly around some overly aggressive fraud controls that cancelled a bunch of transactions, but overall we’ve been pleased with the product, and it presents a less intrusive checkout experience for the person paying than PayPal (which we use for our CrunchBoard job board).

The two most recent new features - a coupon creator and an email invoice product - are almost certainly the result of customer feedback. We tested the email invoice product this evening - it allows a quick invoice for any amount to be sent out to an email address. The payor does not need to have a Gmail account to pay the invoice. It also allows for quick, one time charges to customers. Previously, checkout buttons had to be created for set amounts which made it easy to charge the same price over and over to multiple buyers, but difficult to use for one-off charges. This solves that issue.

Google is also waiving all transaction fees (2.0% plus $.20 per transaction) through the end of the year in a marketing move to get new merchants for the holiday season.

We have first hand and ongoing experience dealing with both PayPal and Google Checkout. When we’ve had to contact Google about issues (such as the suspected fraud), we’ve received intelligent customer service and the problems were quickly resolved. Contacting PayPal customer support, on the other hand, has been a complete nightmare. Automated response hell, followed by canned responses that didn’t address our issue, followed by silence.

If you are a merchant shipping physical goods and don’t want to deal with the hassle of setting up a merchant account and integrating checkout software, Google Checkout is a very good product, and certainly better than what PayPal offers. Google’s fees are also significantly lower than PayPal’s (and they also refund most of the fee when returns are processed, whereas PayPal charges their processing fee twice).

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/47901340/

YourMinis is a Flash-based customizable homepage product that will compete for users with a number of similar products that use Ajax - Netvibes, Pageflakes, Google, Live.com and more. This was launched by a startup called Goowy, which created a flash-based productivity suite (email, calendar, IM, etc.) last year - see here for our Goowy coverage.

Goowy CEO Alex Bard gave me a demo of the product at the Web 2.0 Summit this week. YourMinis is a solid product, offering completely customizable modules like RSS feeds, Flickr photos, YouTube videos, POP Email, etc. Users can create multiple tabs to better organize information, and any tab can be turned into a public URL and shared with friends. They have also published an API and allow third parties to create modules which will be available to all users.

YourMinis also has a browser extension that makes it easier to add information to the site. Videos, photos and RSS feeds can added to a user’s YourMinis page by simply clicking on a button added to the browser. This is particularly useful for subscribing to RSS feeds - a module is automatically added to YourMinis based on the auto-discovered feed.

There are other interesting features on the site as well that are worth exploring, and YourMinis is certainly a showcase for what can be done with Flash.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/47893164/

Thank you to all of our readers and sponsors!

We have a quick favor to ask everyone - if you have a second, please fill out this survey by one of our advertisers, Symantec.

This month’s sponsors include:

TheFind - They are a new shopping search engine. They search and rank over 150 million products based on relevance and price. Their grid search layout allows you to peruse your results and get product details with a simple mouse-over.

DoubleClick - They are a worldwide advertising company with over 150,000 clients. They have a variety of advertising solutions from rich media ads (Flash and video) to a variety of SEO and consulting services. Check out any of the various programming jobs they have on Crunchboard too.

Text Link Ads - TLA is a great advertising service. They suppord text link advertisements, rss ads, and even give starting advertisers a $100 credit. If you’re curious, try their ad calculator to see how much your site’s real estate may be worth. Also see our coverage of their acquisition by MediaWhiz.

Edgeio - Edgeio tracks millions of classified listings on the web. They recently closed $5 million in series A financing. Just today, they added another 400,000 listings in over 15,000 cities and 142 countries. You can add your listings to the site by inputing your listing URL, or creating a whole new listing.

Wild Apricot - Wild Apricot automates a lot of the administrative tasks for member-based not-for-profits. With Wild Apricot, you can manage your website, email, databases, donations, and event registrations, all from your home or office. Check out their pricing or free trials here.

Yoono - Yoono released a new version of their site suggestion toolbar on Halloween. The toolbar lets you share bookmarks with your friends or the whole community as well as syncronizing your favorites between computers. I use it and enjoy the smooth integration with Firefox (and soon IE). You can download the toolbar here.

Fonpods - Pick up a smart phone, and head over to Fonopods for a wide selection of podcasts on your phone. You can catch the latest interview with the Reddit founders here.

oDesk - If you need a web developer, oDesk is just the service. oDesk provides an online marketplace for finding talented programming contractors. Hourly rates range from $14 to $62. They were recently selected as a Launchpad company at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco.

We’d also like to thank those companies who posted jobs on CrunchBoard. Please keep sending us your success stories!

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/47873336/