Ajax Girl

Fox announced tonight that Fox Interactive Media President Ross Levinsohn will be replaced effective November 27th. Peter Levinsohn, who is Ross Levinsohn’s cousin, has served as President of Digital Media for the Fox Entertainment Group.

Ross launched Fox Interactive Media in July of last year, nearly simultaneously with the Fox acquisition of Intermix, MySpace’s parent company. He is arguably the most high profile player there is in the consumer web acquisition scene. In tonight’s press release the company wrote:

Peter Levinsohn has negotiated innovative deals that have made Fox content ubiquitous across all available digital platforms. He was a key architect in the groundbreaking digital revenue sharing agreement with Fox affiliates and also led the FOX on Demand effort, which brought primetime series to the Internet on an ad supported basis through MySpace.com and the MyFoxLocal web sites. Additionally, he’s headed Fox’s development of the VOD business and electronic sell-through for film and television product, including recent deals with iTunes, Amazon, AOL, MSN, MovieLink, and CinemaNow.

Ross Levinsohn, in a conversation with Michael Arrington at an Under the Radar event in March, said that Fox had earmarked a further $2 billion for future acquisitions. (Grainy pic on right from Ross Levinsohn’s MySpace page, if you’ll forgive us the indulgence.) He said at that event that he expected to acquire another five companies in the near future. In April the company announced two small acquisitions, unlaunched news aggregator Newroo and web karaoke service kSolo.

It’s been a big day for executive shake-ups. Jason Calacanis’s resignation from AOL represents the departure of a dynamic and controversial entrepreneur from an unsettled old media conglomerate; Ross Levinsohn leaving his position at FIM marks the departure of one of the key players in bringing innovators into the fold of one of the world’s largest media companies. These may be isolated moves that signify no grand themes; or they may signal a change in the always ambivalent relationship between the agile, entrepreneurial nature of the Web 2.0 world and large, established corporate players. Two of the biggest players in facilitating the connection between entrepreneurs and big companies are leaving their jobs. It’s probably too early to tell what it means if anything, but it’s interesting to think about. We’ll have more on this in the future.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/50409852/

GWT 1.2 has been officially released.

The last important bugs have been squashed from the RC that was out there recently.

Features

• Dynamic, reusable UI components
  Create a Widget by compositing other Widgets. Lay out Widgets automatically in Panels. Send your Widget to other developers in a JAR file.
• Really simple RPC
  To communicate from your web application to your web server, you just need to define serializable Java classes for your request and response. In production, GWT automatically serializes the request and deserializes the response from the server. GWT’s RPC mechanism can even handle polymorphic class hierarchies, and you can throw exceptions across the wire.
• Browser history management
  No, AJAX applications don’t need to break the browser’s back button. GWT lets you make your site more usable by easily adding state to the browser’s back button history.
• Real debugging
  In production, your code is compiled to JavaScript, but at development time it runs in the Java virtual machine. That means when your code performs an action like handling a mouse event, you get full-featured Java debugging, with exceptions and the advanced debugging features of IDEs like Eclipse.
• Browser compatible
  Your GWT applications automatically support IE, Firefox, Mozilla, Safari, and Opera with no browser detection or special-casing within your code in most cases.
• JUnit integration
  GWT’s direct integration with JUnit lets you unit test both in a debugger and in a browser…and you can even unit test asynchronous RPCs.
• Internationalization
  Easily create efficient internationalized applications and libraries.
• Interoperability and fine-grained control
  If GWT’s class library doesn’t meet your needs, you can mix handwritten JavaScript in your Java source code using our JavaScript Native Interface (JSNI).

As we mentioned when we released the 1.2 Release Candidate, you can now develop and debug with GWT on Mac OS X in addition to Linux and Windows. We are pretty proud of this particular feature because GWT is now about as “platform independent” as you can get: develop on Windows, Linux or Mac OS X and deploy to IE, Firefox, Safari and Opera on any platform, without any special cases in your code. (If you want a bit more detail about our implementation of Mac OS X support, our release nomenclature and other tidbits, this recent InfoQ interview may interest you.)

We also have already talked about how much faster the 1.2 hosted mode debugging environment is. And it is. If you’ve ever found yourself dropping to the command line using only the GWT compiler because hosted mode was too slow, you really should check out 1.2. Refreshes in hosted mode are almost instantaneous, and hosted mode lets you actually debug your code.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/google-web-toolkit-12-released-2

Collaborative annotation of web pages is something many people are working on. The newest entrant in the field, Fleck, is launching tonight at the TechCrunch party in New York. The Fleck team hails from Amsterdam.

The service is clearly in its infancy but could be just what some people are looking for. The basic idea is that one person can place notes on top of a web page and other people can view, change and add to those notes at any time. It’s got standard features like movable notes and bullet points, page histories and the ability to email a unique URL to an annotated page. The URLs are Fleck URLs, not the URL of the page you are annotating. The system is remarkably easy to use and relatively easy on the eyes.

Here’s a sample of Techcrunch.com with some notes I’ve added with Fleck. You should be able to make your own changes, save them and get a unique URL to share. That functionality is reminiscent of Instacalc, the wiki-like calculator I reviewed earlier this month.

This is a relatively crowded space, the two services I’m most familiar with for collaborative annotation are TrailFire and Diigo. Stickis is just around the corner too. Fleck’s primary point of differentiation so far is that anyone can use it without creating an account or installing a browser plug-in. That could make all the difference. Other annotation services generally have a higher barrier to adoption by casual users. The primary barrier to using Fleck is that it only supports Firefox - hopefully that will change soon, because accessibility is what the service really has to offer so far.

I can imagine myself quickly adding questions to pages on a site I’m reviewing and emailing those annotated pages back to a company. They could respond immediately on the page, with no need to download anything or start an account with the annotation service. I like that. I also like that those collaborators would have a list of all the pages we’ve collaborated on created for them automatically. Fleck is even easier annotation than the similar service AmberJack is easy site tour creation.

There’s a long list of features that Fleck aims to roll out in time, including photo integration, arrows, multi-language support and Pro accounts with premium features. If they can make this a more fleshed out service while retaining the incredible simplicity it offers now, Fleck could grow into a particularly solid contender in the web page annotation space.

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/~3/50371170/

Nat Torkington on the O’Reilly Radar recently commented on the rise of “floats” (AKA “divdows”, “Ajax dialogs”).

One of the really big issues facing us, IMHO, is the new Javascript-driven ad technology called “floats”. They’re not separate windows popped up, they’re in-window divs that move up to obscure the web page and force the user to click to dismiss them. They can’t trivially be blocked because they’re generated by Javascript code within the page, and identifying such code is a similar problem to identifying viruses. They ruin the user’s experience by being unavoidable and maximally intrusive.

At the moment they’re rare (e.g., TVNZ and MSN only show them once per user per day) but if we learned anything from 2001 it’s that greed will ruin user experience if it can get an extra buck in ad revenue. We got popup blockers as a result of the 2001 popup orgy. What’s going to save us from the 2007 float invasion?

It’s really not as scary as it sounds, as these new popups can only live inside the tab/window of the app that launched them - sites that run annoying Ajax popups are only doing themselves a disservice, the web equivalent of nagware. Christian Flury has outlined the counter-arguments.

• Javascript pop-up windows left a trace in your working environment: Even after leaving the page that had triggered them, you still had those few additional browser windows open – and those were the days before tabbed-browsing became popular, so it was already difficult enough to stay on top of your zillions of open browser windows
• Psychologically, from a site owner’s perspective, a pop-up window is not as closely associated with your page as an ad that occupies your own real estate, so to speak.
• More importantly, back in the olden days, it was far from obvious, especially to the not so tech-savvy, which page had actually triggered the pop-up window.

That said, there are still security implications - with richer graphics and browser scripting, it’s easier to pretend you’re a native OS dialog box.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/popup-nightmare-20

Phil Greenspun bemoans the difficulty of running modern web apps from his sidekick.

My Motorola/Windows XP phone began to die after two years. Wanting something that would let me keep in touch with friends over AOL Instant Messenger, I got a T-Mobile Sidekick. I was reluctant to get a non-flip phone, but so far I have only managed to make one unintended phone call per day. The Web browser is excruciatingly slow. I’ve found that most of the Web sites developed in the early 1990s work just fine. It is possible to log in, fill out forms, get results. What doesn’t work? The latest and greatest Web sites. They are too script-heavy. Programmers seem to have forgotten that although the average desktop has ever-greater capabilities, the average user is increasingly connecting from a handheld device. I tried using one of my students’ sites from last semester. They lifted some username/password code from a Ruby on Rails toolkit. It relies on JavaScript. The site is 100 percent useless from the Sidekick.

Have we proven that “the better the tools the worse the application?”

Seems unfair to blame Rails for this … Rails makes it just as easy to build accessible websites as it does to build pure-Ajax websites. Can you blame Ajax for this? Yes, a bit … it’s true that most web developers are more focused on delivering rich, interactive, experiences than making sites accessible from the mobile. In this example, it is indeed quite ridiculous that someone created a login page requiring Javascript. For more dynamic applications, though, it’s just not practical or worthwhile to make the site mobile-compatible.

Greenspun mentions that many early ’90s websites work quite well on the phone, but it must be said that many sites created in the late ’90s or early ’00s would work really poorly on the phone, because those were the times when many developers used Flash or Javascript for the sake of it (mmmm…cascading menus) and were oblivious to web standards. A major theme in many Ajax apps is to use well-known web conventions where possible, and augment them with dynamic behaviour where necessary. For that reason, many modern Ajax apps are actually more accessible than their equivalents from a few years back.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/mobile-unfriendly-websites

We just heard from a source that Jason Calacanis has resigned from AOL. Jason joined AOL just over a year ago when his startup, Weblogs, Inc., was acquired. Most recently, he took over management of Netscape, which relaunched earlier this year as a Digg-like news portal.

I just spoke to Jason briefly on IM - his response as of now is “no comment”. He also spoke to me off the record but that’s, well, off the record.

Calacanis wrote a long post on his personal blog today mourning the departure of AOL CEO Jon Miller. He called Miller “one of the few mentors I’ve had in my life.”

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/50272042/

The TechCrunch New York Party kicks off in three hours, 7 PM EST, at BED in Manhattan.

The final guest list is here, although it doesn’t include sponsor attendees and press. All attendees should have received an email confirmation of the party as well. If you have an email confirmation but do not see your name on the list, just bring a printout of the email to the event. We have some good news - the entire wait list will be admitted to the rooftop area, and we’ll let as many of these people into the main area as BED allows.

Sponsor Information

For TechCrunch Meetup 8 attendees — be ready to draw your mobile at the sight of partyStrands, the latest in interactive music entertainment projected on BED’s state-of-the-art-screens. With a simple text message (alias + artist) you will be able to influence the music and request a favorite artist from our music library. You can also interact with other partygoers via text messages sent to the screen, or email your pictures to the display, or even participate in votings. All the info about partyStrands is here.

If you cannot make TechCrunch Meetup 8, don’t despair! You can also follow the party online or through your mobile. Just connect to partystrands.com/tc8, or mobile.partystrands.com/tc8 to follow what music is being played real time, and what pictures and text messages are being sent by partygoers from inside the party. Be sure to join us and check out what people are doing and what people are saying!

Thanks again to our great list of sponsors, which keeps these events free to attendees:

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/50285776/

PhoneZoo is a new service that allows you to upload any audio file, clip out a part of that file for a cell phone ring tone and share that with other users. The company’s early investors include Tim Draper.

There are two things that are notable about the service; the first is that unlike some other lightweight services like this PhoneZoo actually works, the second is how the company handles use of copyrighted music.

PhoneZoo scores high on ease of use, users set the duration of the tone and drag a marker over the segment of an audio file they want to excerpt. Metadata for sharing can be provided, copyright status of the file is asked and with one click a link to download the ring tone is sent to your phone.

On the copyright question, PhoneZoo lists two types of ring tones available for sharing. Public domain files can be downloaded by anyone. Ringtones from copyrighted music can be listened to, discussed, searched for - but not downloaded until you upload a copy of the whole song yourself. It’s an interesting way to get around having PhoneZoo held responsible for copyright violations.

When you upload a copyrighted song, the ring tone creation tool opens with the same tone duration, title fields and excerpted section of your file as the ring tone you wanted to receive from some one else. You can then make any changes you want, for example you might like the section of a song someone has excerpted but want to extend it by 2 seconds to capture another couple of beats. I can imagine people enjoying that.

It’s all opt-in of course, there’s nothing enforcing any kind of copyright protection - no rights detection software apparently, for example. It’s an intriguing system. Best of all it’s relatively simple and it works.

The social element may or may not prove compelling. The company is working on a widget that would let you display your most recent or favorite ring tones on a social networking site. That could appeal to many people.

PhoneZoo received a variety of coverage when it launched yesterday. Oliver at MobileCrunch says there are many questions about the service’s viability that remain unanswered. Emily Turrettini at Textually thinks PhoneZoo is “fabulous.” Carlo at TechDirt says PhoneZoo is headed for an uphill battle in the legal department.

Time will tell whether ring tone sharing is something people want and whether the song upload requirement on copyrighted works will hold water.

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/~3/50257787/

The official Google Blog just announced the availability of a click-to-call feature in Google Local. This has been expected for some time, but it’s now official and it works well. Businesses you find in Google Local now have a call link included in search results. That link opens a javascript form to enter your phone number and calls both you and the business. I’ve been pestering businesses around my neighborhood this morning and though they don’t find it as fascinating as I do, I imagine this new feature will prove quite useful. I could call the listing on the right, for example and tell the business that its name is misspelled in Google Local.

The calls are powered by Google Talk and Skype, more VOIP under the covers, via an agreement made this summer. They are free on both ends. That agreement also included discussion of interoperability between Skype and Google Talk, something we’re still waiting for.

You might remember that this program was the subject of one of the bizarre hacked messages posted on the official Google blog. Persons unknown wrote on the Google Blog in October that “We finally consider click-to-call agreement with e-Bay a monopolistic aproach [sic] that would damage small companies in the CRM area.”

Windows Live Local has offered click to call for some time. Local search is a potentially lucrative space that’s seeing a lot of innovation right now. Note also that the Google Local logo includes the outline of Africa, ironic given how awful that and other map search programs’ coverage of that continent is.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/50219842/

It’s easy to focus exclusively on gas mileage when making an environmentally conscious car choice. But there’s more to the story.

CNW Marketing Research Inc., an Oregon-based auto research spent two years collecting data on the energy necessary to plan, build, sell, drive and dispose of a vehicle from initial concept to scrappage. They call it a dust-to-dust analysis of the environmental impact of a car.

You may be surprised if you thought hybrids were the obvious winners.

The Honda Accord Hybrid has an Energy Cost per Mile of $3.29 while the conventional Honda Accord is $2.18. Put simply, over the “Dust to Dust” lifetime of the Accord Hybrid, it will require about 50 percent more energy than the non-hybrid version, CNW claims.

And you may do a doubletake after reading this:

For example, while the industry average of all vehicles sold in the U.S. in 2005 was $2.28 cents per mile, the Hummer H3 (among most SUVs) was only $1.949 cents per mile. That figure is also lower than all currently offered hybrids and Honda Civics at $2.42 per mile.

Basically, when considering all relevant variables such as materials, fabrication, plastics, carpets, chemicals, shipping, and transportation, gas mileage turns out to be significantly less relevant than many people assume.What I like about this study – and of course it’s just one study – is that it looks at the total cost/impact of creation, ownership, and disposal. It’s easy for the media, the public, car dealers, and car manufactures to focus almost exclusively on miles per gallon. However, as is usually the case, reality points in a different direction than what’s convenient.

There’s nothing wrong with buying a hybrid to save on fuel costs, but maybe it’s time to put down the “I’m doing it for the environment” flag and put up the “I’m doing it to save money on gas” one. And there’s nothing wrong with that, of course.

If you’re interested in the details, check out the full 450-page report.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/115-look-beyond-gas-mileage-when-making-an-environmental-choice