Ajax Girl

This new trend of announcing news in Second Life is generally pissing off journalists, who don’t have a lot of time to waste. But Dell is apparently going ahead with plans to host an invite-only press event inside of Second Life on Tuesday morning at 10:15 AM PST to announce that they’ll have an ongoing presence within the virtual world.

The virtual event is under heavy embargo with a select few journalists (we weren’t invited), but one journalist, annoyed that he is being forced to create a Second Life account and log in to see what the announcement is, decided to just pass it on to us to break the news.

There aren’t many details as to exactly what’s being announced, but our guess is that they are launching a virtual, configurable computer store that’s gamer-focused, or something similar.

This isn’t to take away from what Second Life is accomplishing - but Dell should be focused on gaining user trust by building reliable computers (and batteries), not wasting people’s time with this kind of non-news.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/49036421/

Toronto-based photo sharing site BubbleShare, which we’ve followed since its December 2005 launch, has been involved in aquisition talks with News Corp., the parent company to MySpace, according to a source close to the deal. We’ve held off on reporting this as it our understanding that the deal is not yet finalized, but rumors of the possible acquisition popped up on blogs earlier today.

The deal is rumored to be south of $5 million, which is in line with other recent online acquisitions by News Corp., including NewRoo and Ksolo.

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/~3/48954331/

Public interest TV station C-SPAN and online media storage provider StreamLoad have announced that the two companies will collaborate on a new user submitted video site set to launch later this month and called ViewFinder. The ViewFinder site is already online, though it’s clearly not ready for launch (I just guessed the URL correctly after seeing the press release).

Everyone wants in on the user submitted video game. More than seeking extra revenue, it may be a survival strategy. The video wing of the fifth estate is under attack. Will short-form amateur video makers still seek the big audiences and validation of old, mainstream media or are the other options emerging too appealing and numerous to take that for granted anymore?

C-SPAN’s entry demands some comparison with CNN’s user submitted video site, launched in July and called Exchange. Exchange emphasizes fast street level action reports in a section it calls iReports but it also includes mundane questions like “How do you plan to stay sane during holiday travel?” that users can upload videos in response to. CNN’s Exchange is powered by Blip.tv (winners of the Best Video Hosting Vloggies Award) and requires Windows Media Player to view the videos, which must have been the media behemoth’s idea since the videos on Blip.tv are all in Flash. It’s hard to know how much traction Exchange has gained in the 4 months since it launched, but in the blogosphere the site has only seen around 20 inbound links in the last week.

In contrast, C-SPAN is asking for video replies to two questions, with submissions under 2 minutes in length. Right now the site asks for responses to a Question of the Week from the show Washington Journal and thoughts about the “fast approaching” midterm US congressional elections. The links aren’t all correct and some of the pages won’t load, so when they say it won’t be out until the end of the month that’s probably true.

C-SPAN’s Viewfinder will be powered by Streamload, a San Diego based multipurpose media storage service that offers very low costs, large capacity and a wide variety of white labeled services. Our previous coverage of StreamLoad is here. The TV network had discussed a partnership with Google Video this spring. In fact, PaidContent reported at the time, C-SPAN’s demand that the famous Colbert/Bush roast video be pulled from YouTube was a part of that experiment to see how partnering with Google Video could work. The fact that StreamLoad was awarded the ViewFinder partnership is probably something they are very proud of.

Will user submitted video sent to C-SPAN be interesting? Will a large number of people submit video? It’s a fascinating gamble. Could it be more obvious that old media is looking to incorporate new media, instead of battening down the hatches and rambling on about “objectivity?” I hope both of these mainstream news experiments with user submitted video are successful and we get to enjoy the benefits of both old media and new media. Hopefully the people in charge of selecting which videos will be shared and highlighted will exercise broad and fair editorial judgment. Selecting those videos could be a fun job, if people from across the political spectrum embrace the opportunity to submit video to these stations. Whether they will remains a question, when so many other sites are building up a large audience and don’t exercise editorial control over what is shown to viewers. It’s good that the C-SPAN TOS is for non-exclusive licensing.

For how long will video producers feel drawn the the audiences and validation of old media? Check out the startup video aggregation site The Daily Reel to see an example of another vision of the future. The barrier to entry just isn’t what it used to be (an understatement) and as video proliferates, alternatives just might topple the big old media instead of being co-opted. It’ll be a fun contest to watch, one way or the other.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/48947529/

Evan Williams talked about how Ajax interfaces do not have to give up permalinks.

We have seen many examples, and Even uses an an experimental new interface to his Odeo as an example itself.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/experimental-odeo-interface

This afternoon, the 1,000,000th person will be added to Basecamp. The account that registers this 1,000,000th person will be given a $500 credit towards their account. If that person isn’t part of a paying account, we’ll give the credit to the closest paying account over the 1,000,000 mark.

Last year Dion Hinchcliffe predicted that “37signals Will Cross The 1,000,000 User Mark” in 2006. We’re thrilled that Basecamp alone has passed this mark. Add in a few hundred thousand from Backpack, over 100,000 from Campfire, and a few hundred thousand from Ta-da List and we’ve got 2,000,000 in our sights next year.

A few notes about these numbers: 1) They represent all accounts, not just active accounts. We’re just counting raw numbers right now. 2) Some people may be counted twice. One person with logins in multiple Basecamp accounts is counted for each separate account. 3) These numbers group together paying and free accounts. We don’t share the number of paying customers we have. 4) These numbers have not been audited—we’re just running some simple DB queries to pull these numbers out.

All that being said, we’d like to thank everyone that made this possible! Special thanks goes out to our paying customers—thanks for trusting us to provide you with simple, focused tools that help you make your own business or team more profitable and efficient.

We’ve got some great stuff planned in 2007. We’re hard at work on it right now. Stay tuned, we think you’ll like it!

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/106-basecamp-turns-1000000

Confabb is a new service launching today that offers a centralized place to find information about all kinds of conferences. The site offers everything from speaker and event reviews to photos of the events after the fact through integration with Flickr. It’s an impressive full service site that could become the go-to spot for at least tech conference attendees and possibly a wider audience.

Confabb is lead by former PubSub co-founder Salim Ismail, product manager Cameron Barrett (who incidentally built campaign web sites for Wesley Clark and John Kerry) and former AT&T exec and PubSub team member Jon Mandell. Early investors include chronic conference attendee and web innovator Dave Winer.

At launch the site includes details on more than 16,000 conferences and anyone can fill out a form to submit other events for consideration. Confabb calls itself the largest conference database in the world. It’s a very well put together site; there are both standard categories and tags, integration of off-site resources, reputation management, user watch pages to track a number of events, a badge generator to post conference logos on your blog and iCal export of your conference list. Attendees and watchers can list themselves for public display.

Confabb plans on rolling out a number of new features over the next two to three months, including integration with more calendar programs, video and podcast listings, web based chat rooms per conference and per session and both native and integrated RSVP capabilities. It’s an ambitious road map, but most of these features look like tech industry best practices brought together into one place at a time when at least our sector is finally widely familiar with them.

Will Confabb be able to gain traction outside the Web 2.0 world? If attendees of events like the All Asian Food Expo and the Second International Doris Lessing Conference start using Confabb then the events world could really be shaken up. Building use of the system outside the community most prepared for it will take a concerted effort and probably some changes to suit the cultures of other conference communities.

There are a few technical things that Confabb could still use. RSS feeds for events by categories are needed badly. Microformats are being considered, the company says, and would help demonstrate that Confabb is a community participant more than trying to be an exclusive destination site. The integration with off site resources is great, I’d like to see Mary Hodder’s Speakers Wiki, a wiki intended to help diversify conference speaker lists, drawn from as well. Map and attendee tag features as was explored by the service Attendr could be interesting too.

It’s high time someone took the best practices from across the web that conference attendees and support sites have been developing. It’s great that Confabb is bringing many different services together and aggregating them. The project should get a lot of support and I expect that at least the web world, if not the larger conference world, will be using Confabb quite a bit.

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/~3/48817932/

Seattle based airfare prediction service Farecast is testing what the company calls its first retail product beyond basic price forecasts; the company is now offering to lock in ticket prices against an increase for one week for $1. When the testing period for the product, called Fare Guard, has ended the price will become $10. See details below to test out this product.

Farecast uses millions of observations of past airfare prices to predict whether a ticket price between two cities for a particular date is expected to decline or increase in price over the next seven days. If the price is expected to go up, then Farecast recommends that you buy your ticket now. If it is expected to go down, then the service recommends that you wait for a lower price. The company currently offers predictions for flights between 55 US cities.

The company says that it is correct in its predictions about 70 to 75% of the time. If Farecast tells you a ticket’s price is going to drop and recommends that you wait, you can pay the Fare Guard fee to lock in access to the lowest price of that day for the next week. If you have purchased Fare Guard and the price instead goes up, Farecast will send you the difference between what you ended up having to pay and the price you locked in with them. If Farecast’s prediction was correct and the price does drop, you can buy the ticket at the lower price and they make $10 from the Fare Guard service.

This is just the first of several value added products the company says it hopes to offer as revenue generation beyond lead generation and contextual advertising. To test out the Fare Guard product, follow this link and login as username “techcrunch” password “fareguardtest.” See also our previous coverage of Farecast.

Will Fare Guard be a success with consumers? It may be a little difficult to explain clearly, particularly given that it’s only one way movement that will be guarded against. If Farecast predicts that a ticket price is going to go up, so I buy at the current price, and in fact the price goes down - Fare Guard does not offer to compensate me for the money I could have saved if I had ignored Farecast’s recommendation. That, according to the company, would be yet another product and this current one needs to be tested first. The current product will probably be much easier for users to understand than it is to explain in the abstract, sometimes you’ll be offered Fair Guard protection and sometimes you won’t. It’s fascinating to see what kinds of value added “products” can be placed on top of data mining.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/48790996/

Andi Kalsch told us about Run (yet another animation framework).

Andi feels that it stands out from the rest due too:

• intelligent CSS support by using Color/Dimension objects and CSS functions.
• Event listeners.
• Easy syntax.
• Well-documented.
• Compatible to all current browsers, means Firefox 1+, Opera 8+, Internet Explorer 5.5+, Safari 2+, Konqueror, Swift

Example

Here is the code for the animation of the sun, earth, and moon:

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/run-universal-javascript-animation-framework

A clever yoga center straw.

This image for Penn & Teller is a nifty representation of the duo. The ampersand, usually a throw away character, becomes the star here with elements that match the performers’ personalities. The fat, curvy, loud part of it evokes Penn perfectly while the quiet little extender fits Teller to a tee.

(Aside: Where does the phrase “fit to a tee” come from? A couple of theories.)

If you dig this sort of witty design, check out the book A Smile in the Mind. It’s a neat resource for playful, creative design.

This book explores witty thinking — the most entertaining area of graphic design. Witty thinking is playfulness with ideas, words playing against images, unexpected connections prompting new insights. It is clever thinking, not funny drawing.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/88-designed-witty

Fancy memcached in your client browsers? Introducing: JSOC (JavaScript Object Cache).

The JSOC framework is a a pluggable, extensible, open source client-side caching framework for JavaScript.

JSOC offers Web developers a straightforward way to perform common caching techniques (add, replace, remove, flush, etc.) inside any JavaScript-enabled browser.

Since JSOC is a standalone JavaScript module, incorporating JSOC into a Web development project is a matter of including a script reference, and working with common caching methods. Low-level methods are contained in the JSOC JavaScript module so that developers can focus on the Web development task at hand.

Example

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/jsoc-javascript-object-cache