Ajax Girl

Today we have some exciting Basecamp API-related announcements.

Blinksale, a web-based invoicing tool from the creative minds at Firewheel Design, now integrates with Basecamp.

Now it’s super-easy to import client names, addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses directly from Basecamp in your Blinksale account for painless invoicing. Simply add your Basecamp account details to your Blinksale Settings page, and we take care of the rest.

Harvest (a web-based time tracking tool) + Basecamp = easy like Sunday morning.

If your organization currently uses Basecamp in conjunction with Harvest for time tracking, things just got a whole lot easier. Harvest admins can now avoid any form of double-entry when it comes to setting up users, clients, or projects. Simply pick the people or projects you’d like to import from Basecamp and you are ready to go. Imported users will receive an automatically-generated Harvest welcome message along with their temporary password.

Phonified has just released a beta mobile version of Basecamp. Phonified Basecamp currently supports Nokia S60 (Series 60) phones, Blackberries, and Palm Treos running PalmOS.

Phonified Basecamp is an application that allows you to access your Basecamp account from your mobile phone. You can download a copy of your To-do list to your phone and update information without having to use a computer. You can also check milestones and configure an alarm on your phone when a milestone is upcoming. Phonified Basecamp lets you read and edit messages and comments, and even upload and download attachments all from your phone. For Premium and Max account holders, you can track time conveniently from your phone as you start and complete tasks, rather than having to remember and update information later.

Headquarters is the first Basecamp widget for the Yahoo Widget Engine. It’s read-only at this time (you can’t modify your Basecamp data). It looks like this:

And our friends at FreshBooks also recently announced that Basecamp integration is coming soon.

It’s really exciting to see rapid uptake and third-party integrations via the Basecamp API. Check out this list of the most popular Basecamp integrations and add-ons. We’ll continue to add to this list as more integrations and add-ons hit the market.

Thanks to all the developers for spending the time on these integrations!

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/112-basecamp-integration-arrives-in-blinksale-harvest-phonified-and-more

Today we have some exciting Basecamp API-related announcements.

Blinksale, a web-based invoicing tool from the creative minds at Firewheel Design, now integrates with Basecamp.

Now it’s super-easy to import client names, addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses directly from Basecamp in your Blinksale account for painless invoicing. Simply add your Basecamp account details to your Blinksale Settings page, and we take care of the rest.

Harvest (a web-based time tracking tool) + Basecamp = easy like Sunday morning.

If your organization currently uses Basecamp in conjunction with Harvest for time tracking, things just got a whole lot easier. Harvest admins can now avoid any form of double-entry when it comes to setting up users, clients, or projects. Simply pick the people or projects you’d like to import from Basecamp and you are ready to go. Imported users will receive an automatically-generated Harvest welcome message along with their temporary password.

Phonified has just released a beta mobile version of Basecamp. Phonified Basecamp currently supports Nokia S60 (Series 60) phones, Blackberries, and Palm Treos running PalmOS.

Phonified Basecamp is an application that allows you to access your Basecamp account from your mobile phone. You can download a copy of your To-do list to your phone and update information without having to use a computer. You can also check milestones and configure an alarm on your phone when a milestone is upcoming. Phonified Basecamp lets you read and edit messages and comments, and even upload and download attachments all from your phone. For Premium and Max account holders, you can track time conveniently from your phone as you start and complete tasks, rather than having to remember and update information later.

And our friends at FreshBooks also recently announced that Basecamp integration is coming soon.

It’s really exciting to see rapid uptake and third-party integrations via the Basecamp API. Check out this list of the most popular Basecamp integrations and add-ons. We’ll continue to add to this list as more integrations and add-ons hit the market.

Thanks to all the developers for spending the time on these integrations!

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/112-basecamp-integration-arrives-in-blinksale-harvest-and-phonified

In an investors meeting in Australia yesterday, Rupert Murdoch said that MySpace could now be sold for $6 billion — about a 10x return on the original $580 million that News Corp. paid for it.

In other news, one of the many MySpace alternatives, Facebook, is rumored to be in talks with IAC — or at least Zuckerberg (Facebook founder) and Jason Rapp (IAC SVP of M&A) were seen mingling together at the Foursquare conference in NY. Facebook has been in acquisition talks with Yahoo in the past, but either the price was too much or acquisition activity halted due to poor stock performance. A social network is something that the extensive IAC portfolio lacks, but I’m not sure Facebook with their primarily college demographic and steep price tag (rumored $2 billion) are the best fit. If I were IAC, I’d be looking at the well-branded (yet stagnant) Friendster — IAC’s network would breathe new life into Friendster, and the past rumored $50 - $100 million price tag pales in comparison to Facebooks’. Friendster has been up-for-sale in the past and holds actual patents on social networking, which likely will result in News Corp. paying licensing fees for in the future (once Friendster has rallied their legal case together, and once MySpace’s wallet, er, growth, plateaus — allowing Friendster to tap into a business worth much more than the $6 billion Rupert speaks of today).

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/49851967/

We discovered 3 impressive new widgets today, from Google, Blinkx and 30 Boxes, and we decided to write about all of them in one post. Widgets are the non-developer’s “small pieces loosely joined,” they are the hottest example right now of data portability on the web. They are fun and useful.

Everyone’s got a “widget strategy.” There are widget marketplaces (see WidgetBox, LabPixies and Wigipedia), widget blogs (see WidgetLab and Widgetoko). There was a whole conference on widgets earlier this month.

Perhaps this post is just us trying to get it out of our system once and for all - but in all likelihood widgets are here to stay. They provide a lot of functionality to website publishers. Widgets are in their infancy, though, and we’re all still learning how to best use them. After this I promise to never embed 3 widgets in one blog post again.

Blinkx Wall

Audio and video search engine Blinkx now lets website publishers place a wall of search result previews on any site using a widget. The Wall below displays search results for the phrase Net Neutrality. Give it a chance to load, it’s way too slow, hopefully that can be improved. The display is fed by RSS - so its contents will change as new search results become available. It could be over the top, but the size and number of nodes in the wall can be changed - this is the “tiny” version. I’ve used Blinkx feeds in the past to create, for example, a page listing the most recent audio and video news about Zimbabwe. This Blinkx Wall is a much more interesting way to display search results. The down side of this is that search results often include video that’s been removed for copyright reasons - video producers certainly wouldn’t want search driving viewers to their work (albeit on other sites). We found out about this widget at Beet.TV, one of the best places to learn about video online.

“Net Neutrality” in the News

Two more widgets, from Google and 30 Boxes, after the fold.

30 Boxed

The always innovative online calendar company 30 Boxes has released a very sharp looking calendar mashup tool that anyone can use to display RSS feeds and iCal data in an embedded calendar. Called 30 Boxed, it displays items organized by date on a calendar. You don’t have to have a 30 Boxes account to use the tool, but this will probably be great promotion for the company’s services.

You can combine multiple RSS feeds, including those for images on sites like Flickr. This could be used to push calendar updates or chronicle events and phenomena. For simplicity’s sake, the example below is displaying a single feed - photos tagged “Facebook” in Flickr.

Searchable Google Map

The Google Maps API team released a new widget this afternoon - a very simple, searchable, embedded map and wizard. In the example below, we started at the location of tomorrow night’s TechCrunch 8 party in NYC. The widget wizard for this one automatically creates a Google Map API Key for your website, but you may want to check the Terms of Service before using this one extensively.

Try some searches in the search box. This took about 2 minutes to add to this post with the help of the Wizard. For a different take on map widgets, see also Platial’s new MapKit.

What’s Close to the TechCrunch Party?

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/49829720/

Maybe my “Microsoft’s Entertainment Domination” theory was a bit premature. Apparently, the Zune MP3 player isn’t flying off shelves and now it turns out that the Zune is incompatible with Microsoft’s latest Windows Vista operating system. Amazing how a disconnect like this can occur within an organization. Software start-ups are taking advantage of the lowered development costs and the speedy development time — and forcing large software organizations to speed up their own development cycles, but in the process, the large organizations are fumbling to communicate effectively amongst their departments.

A disconnect is happening over at Google as well. Their policy of allowing employees to spend 20% of their work time on projects that interest them, mixed with rapid headcount growth, and pressure from Wall Street to keep up their impressive growth, has led to an obvious lack of conversations internally.

Last month, Sergey Brin began leading an initiative at Google focused on “Features, not products,” because the 50+ products in various development stages available at Google.com were beginning to lead to user confusion. One of Google’s top priorities is trying to replace desktop applications with web-based applications and tap into Microsoft’s $12 billion annual revenue stream from Office-related software. That initiative started with Gmail (for email), and has led to Google Docs (formerly Writely), Google Calendar, Google Spreadsheets, and the rumored GDrive (for file storage, code-named “Platypus“). But if I’m pulling reports from Google Analytics, Google AdSense, or Google AdWords, I can only export them to Excel — not save (or open) directly into Google Spreadsheets. If I’m in Gmail, any ‘.doc’ attachments should open in Google Docs — they don’t currently.

Thanks to Eric Nagel for the Google observation.

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/~3/49777650/

The founders of Israeli Ajax spreadsheet iRows have confirmed what we wrote yesterday, they have been hired by Google and iRows will be shut down. The service is no longer accepting new accounts and will shut down completely at the end of this year. The company is providing instructions for its users to move their data to Google Documents. Financial details haven’t been disclosed.

iRows was founded by Yoah Bar-David and Itai Raz. Though Google acquired an advanced text search algorithm invented by Israeli student Ori Allon earlier this year, iRows is believed to be the first company in Israel to have been acquired by Google. There is no shortage of innovation coming from that country so iRows will probably not be the last.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/49704710/

Death metal band logos

Scary logos from Zyklon (Norway), Extreme Noise Terror (England), Vomitory (Sweden), Dead Infection (Poland), Regurgitate (Sweden), etc.

Netflix and fast iterations

“We make a lot of this stuff up as we go along. I’m serious. We don’t assume anything works and we don’t like to make predictions without real-world tests. Predictions color our thinking. So, we continually make this up as we go along, keeping what works and throwing away what doesn’t. We’ve found that about 90% of it doesn’t work.”

Kathy Sierra on how she makes her graphics

“People pay attention to graphics. They respond to graphics. They learn from graphics. If you want your readers/learners/audience to ‘get’ something as quickly and clearly as possible, use visuals. And you don’t have to be a graphic artist, designer, or information architect to put pictures in your presentation, post, or book. This post is my first attempt to categorize the kinds of graphics I do here, and offer tips for creating visuals that tell the story better and faster than words.” Related: The power of rough edges.

SmugMug saving big using S3

“Total amount NOT spent over the last 7 months: $423,686. Total amount spent on S3: $84,255.25. Total savings: $339,430.75. That works out to $48,490 / month, which is $581,881 per year…These are real, hard numbers after using S3 for 7 months, not our projections.”

LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy creates jogging-friendly track for Nike

“The DFA cofounder has just teamed up with Nike to release 45:33: Nike+ Original Run, a 45-plus-minute track designed to accompany joggers on their workouts. Displaying Murphy’s inimitable production style, the track has the dynamics and temporal ebb and flow of an eclectic DJ set, beginning with a long, warm-up segment, moving into a rousing Afrobeat crescendo, peaking with double-time disco, and finally coming back to earth on a parachute of cool, ambient synthesizers.”

Steven Wright’s paintings

The comedian is also a painter. He was recently interviewed by The Onion.

Daring Fireball: 'Beta' Is Not an Excuse

“What Disco smells like to me is released. And released software — particularly released software that is available for sale — is open for criticism. In what way does Disco, or any other app that is labeled ‘beta’ but is available for sale to the public, deserve to be cut any critical slack?”

Kottke: “For podcasts, there’s no need to fill airtime with anything but content”

“The playing of music before segments and as transitions between segments makes some sense on the radio, where it’s used in some cases to fill airtime. But for podcasts, there’s no need to fill airtime with anything but content. 30 seconds of music before the actual podcast begins is the audio equivalent of Flash splash pages on web sites.” Hmm, long intros can certainly be annoying but transitions that help bridge disparate parts can provide some nice breathing room and ease segueways.

Honda, individual enjoyment, and flow

“Many business thinkers write about managing innovation, as if innovation were a thing. But innovation is ultimately the expression of a set of behaviors originating in the individual. So rather than focusing our energy on understanding the output of those individuals (innovation), we should think instead about how to lead those individuals so that they can be as innovative as possible. Could creating a culture of innovation be as simple as cultivating a culture of enjoyment?”

How to get on TechCrunch

“Don’t use descriptions such as ‘revolutionary,’ ‘Web 2.0,’ ‘huge,’ ‘change the way you’ll use the Internet,’ and ‘disruptive.’ This is what Mike calls ‘cheap adjectives,’ and they are kisses of death in Michael’s eyes.”

RetailMeNot.com offers coupon and promotion codes for online stores

“Many online stores allow for a ‘coupon’ or ‘promotion’ code when you order to automatically assign discounts, deals and freebies (kinda like money for nothing). RetailMeNot.com is a place for finding and sharing these coupon codes. So… when you buy online, check here for discounts first (unless you’re frikkin crazy).” [via GE]

Minimalist breadmaking technique

“A truly minimalist breadmaking technique that allows people to make excellent bread at home with very little effort. The method is surprisingly simple — I think a 4-year-old could master it — and the results are fantastic.”

Apple ditches 'Mac Guy' in new ads

“Apple’s ‘I’m a Mac’ campaign is almost perfect: It’s funny, memorable, and efficiently lays out the advantages of Macs over PCs. It’s only defect: Virtually everyone who watches it comes away liking the ‘PC guy’ while wanting to push the ‘Mac guy’ under a bus.”

NanoNuno Umbrella uses lotus leaf for inspiration

“In nature, a fascinating effect is produced by the microscopic, rough nanostructure on the leaves of the lotus plant: Dirt and moisture simply roll off. This is because there is a much smaller surface area to which things can stick than on a smooth surface. The design of your NanoNuno® umbrella is based on this natural principle, with the result that moisture does not penetrate the fabric and so there is no tedious drying.”

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/110-sunspots-the-disruptive-edition

We have heard that a major part of Web 2.0 is the ’social’ side of things. That being said, most of the time we are working on the web in solitary mode. There are the odd sharing applications such as sitting with a buddy in front of Google Spreadsheet, but in the most part you feel like being in an empty library.

Me.dium is a startup that is trying to change that. They are trying to add context to the online web browsing world. As they put it: If you in front of three restaurants in the real world; the fact that one is full, another is empty, and the last has three friends means something. It gives you valuable context.

Me.dium is a Firefox extension (soon to be IE7 Add-on and even more in the future) that let’s you visualize the world a little more. You can see your friends browsing, all with relevance letting you know who is doing similar things, and letting you chat with those people. Some get concerned that the tool is collecting your entire clickstream, but privacy is a major concern for me.dium so they make sure you know that:

• Anonymity can be turned on at any time. It is so important that they add a button next to the URL that allows you to toggle screens up or down.
• Secure side: https is automatically taken out of the loop
• A quick email to deleteme@medium.com will remove the data that they have associated with your account
• Their algorithm does not track every URL that you visit. It only captures data it needs to make smart recommendations, and a lot of data is stripped out.

We asked their tech team a few questions about the extension, as it is an interesting piece of work:

Can you tell us a little about the implementation?

The Firefox extension is as minimal as possible. It is an empty shell that includes the Ajax application from the web. This is different than a lot of Firefox extensions, that you see upgrading all the time. Since the shell will not have to change often, you will not see an update, yet the application will be constantly updating due to the fact that it is basically a web page. A smart pattern.

The core work is done with the Dojo Toolkit (recently upgraded to the 0.4 release). The main packages of use are the language helpers, widget structure, animation, and math. The remote communication is actually done through the Firefox extension mechanism for security.

Why Dojo?

It had the most advanced structure for building widgets, and we connected with the development philosophy and style. We have been nothing less than impressed. The application is really pushing the boundaries, and so far Dojo is coping very well indeed. It really is more than the sum of its parts.

Once you use me.dium, you see a lot of animation. How is that implemented?

We do not use the latest dojo.lfx package yet (as it is so new, and we don’t quite need the vector drawing yet). We do use the traditional dojo animation libraries for effects such as sliding and fading. We also have a particle physics engine that uses the math package.

Does the chat client use polling or comet?

We use a comet based approach for pushing all events to the client. This is currently implemented via the Jetty Asynchronous services available in the server.

What was one of the tough challenges?

Getting complex hierarchical widgets working. When we started Dojo didn’t allow sub widgets, so we had to hack it to work. The client itself is a root widget that has a large set of subwidgets below it. Getting the custom scrollbar that we have working with the layout container was also challenging.

The me.dium project is currently in an early stage. Although it is a private beta right now, Ajaxian has an exclusive signup code that will work for the first 500 people to signup (others will be put on the waiting list). The signup code is: AJX14N06

Be sure to watch out for future interesting updates, including a lot of Ajax functionality on the website as well as the extension.

And if you like what you see, me.dium is hiring ajax developers for their Boulder office.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/medium-bringing-social-to-the-web

Big Zune doings over at CG this week. We invited two Seattle readers to hang out with Matt Hickey as well as Bill Gates and his army of winged Zune Monkeys where they ate breakfast, saw a show, and got free Zunes. One CG reader got their own Zune to play with and then we got OUR Zune and proceeded to wait for ten hours while the Marketplace appeared on screen — we still haven’t been able to transfer music to the device. Fancy!

We’ve got someone standing by at the Wii and PS3 launches this week and we’re giving away a T-Mobile Dash to the most creative reader. We also have a new feed which gives you only the posts we deem as “hot,” thereby allowing you, dear readers, to read CrunchGear in a considerably abridged form. Think of it as Readers Digest for blogs. CrunchGear - Making things better… for you!

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/49606244/

One of the keys to mashing up maps is the fact that our species gets to annotate the web. GeoJoey is an application that is trying to make this happening by mashing up places with experiences.

Find experiences and places, and vote on them. The front page looks like Digg, Delicious, and Google Maps combined.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/geojoey-mashing-up-maps-and-experiences