Ajax Girl

Nick Denton (pictured left) likes to use his blog Valleywag to take shots at competitors - his most recent hit job was on Jason Calacanis (on right), who founded and then cashed out of the blog network Weblogs, Inc. Denton has always played second fiddle to Jason, never quite achieving the same level of success - many say this is because he can’t handle it when his writers get more attention than he does, and he finds subtle ways of undermining them. His recent firing and public trashing of writer Nick Douglas certainly lends credibility to this rumor.

Yesterday Denton used fuzzy math and incorrect statements of fact to suggest that Jason’s most recent project, a relaunch of Netscape, is falling apart. It turns out Denton forgot to factor in the fact that Netscape moved millions of email accounts over to a new domain name, which resulted in the drop in traffic. Denton was wrong, but didn’t correct the post even after Jason left comment corrections. We have certainly taken our own shots at the new Netscape here at TechCrunch, but Denton’s post just reeks of a poorly researched hit job.

Jason fires back today by lobbing a subtle but potentially devasting bomb into Denton’s back yard. He writes a post about one of Denton’s top bloggers, Gina Trapani at Lifehacker. Disguised as a tribute to the blog, Jason notes that revenue must be $400k - $1 million/year and says Gina is the “one blogger I wished we had landed at Weblogs, Inc.” He also says “She’s grown LifeHacker from nothing to 7M pages last month–that’s big time.” He continues:

The one blogger I wished we had landed at Weblogs, Inc. was Gina Trapani from LifeHacker. I tried every two months for a year I think… no offer was good enough. Very, very frustrating.

This post should cost Denton - Gina is clearly going to be getting a flurry of attention and competing offers. At the very least it gives her significant salary negotiating leverage. Whatever the outcome, Jason has made one thing clear - take a shot at him and he’ll try to make it as financially painful for you as possible.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/52459536/

Cerulean Studios has begun to offer some information about the next version of its popular cross-network IM tool, Trillian. The new version, called Trillian Astra, has a preview site and video now available that Jordan Running pointed us to first. Trillian lets users use one application to IM with people on a number of other IM systems.

This new version is going to see some big changes in a program with a large number of loyal users. The following are just a few of the newer things that the company says are coming in the newest version of the software. Trillian is for Windows only. Astra is currently in private alpha, we’re just excited to cover this first preview.

There’s a whole lot of innovation going on in IM right now and we plan on making an overview post on this space over the next few days, but this Astra preview is so hot we thought it deserved its own post.

We’ve embedded the company’s promotional video of the preview at the end of this post.

Features

The application allows users to chat in Yahoo!, ICQ, AIM, Bonjour, Windows Live, Google Talk and now MySpace IM. The company says that MySpace IM integration has been the leading feature request for some time.

The new version allows users to select up to 5 files for simultaneous drag and drop file transfer; Trillian will automatically zip them up and send them as a zip file. Images can be dropped immediately into the window for file transfer as well.

Astra will be more accessible from multiple computers than ever before as well. The program will download your contact list every time you sign in to Astra at any computer.

Web Presence

Each user gets a personal Trillian Astra webpage with an integrated web chat widget that supports off-line messaging. You can also chose to turn off notification of web initiated chat sessions. Your Astra page can be filled with info about you from URLs you provide from social networking sites and widgets displaying your Flickr stream, songs you are listening to, local weather, etc. Those web pages sync will sync with your desktop client and will support personalization on a visitor by visitor basis - in other words, I can select whether I want to view your music, your weather, your blog’s feed, etc. The widgets will also support one click size maximization.

The desktop client will include an RSS news ticker, called the “knowledge bar,” that cycles through contextually relevant news items as determined by a client-side algorithm.
Astra will support TabletPC input so users can send handwritten messages by IM.

The new version will allow users to search through and filter their contact lists and friends’ avatars will be able to be displayed in a tile format. Finally, this new version promises to run faster and eliminate memory leaks.

All in all, a very impressive preview. If Cerulean can pull it all off, and there’s every reason to believe they can, then this is going to be one smoking product.

company tour

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/~3/52414757/

We’ve been getting “just in time for the holidays” pitches for coverage from quite a few shopping sites lately but Seattle based number crunchers Mpire have come out with one of the best new shopping products I’ve seen yet. The company’s site launched in June of this year. It compares prices on items for sale at a list of online retailers and tracks eBay auction prices for items over time. The graph acts (and looks) like Farecast airfare predictions, but for past auction price trends.

Today’s new Mpire product is a browser plug-in that pops up when looking at an item on any of several hundreds of 3rd party shopping sites and provides you cross-retailer data, related deals and coupons around the web and a fetching graph of eBay final auction sale prices rising or falling for your item over time. The screen shot following this post is fuzzy and small, click on it to open a full sized version in a new window. The plug-in, which will be available later this afternoon, is for Firefox only right now. Hopefully they will be able to offer an IE version as well.

Mpire says it has analyzed 61 trillion historical online sales so far. A browser plug-in may be the missing ingredient to drive substantial use; a destination site was far more inconvenient to use. Beside the full display on the bottom of your screen, the plug-in also displays new and used prices for an item on supported sites right next to the site’s native price display. Damon Darlin of the New York Times was disappointed in Mpire’s search results in an article last week; good search is part of the challenge but making a comparison shopping tool easy and compelling to use is a huge challenge as well. I think Mpire has done a very nice job of that.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/52322362/

Just five days after adding a new click-to-call function to local map search, Google appears to have removed the feature and replaced it with a much less convenient SMS service. The change was probably due to widespread use of the system for prank calls. Click-to-call let you click a link next to any businesses listing on Google Local, enter your phone number and then contact the business as Google used a VOIP line to call both phones simultaneously. I was excited about the service when I first reviewed it but didn’t even think about using it to make the local Republican party office call the local porn store until reading about the idea on other blogs. Apparently Google and I were both too naive about the anti-social side of social software.

Though there’s little to stop prank callers on standard phones, the click-to-call program was new to people and was too easily gamed. The replacement feature is titled “send to phone” and sends a businesses details to your phone by SMS. That’s not nearly as useful but removes the risk of prank calls. We were first told about the change today by the blog PinkPrankRadio.

It would be good to see the click-to-call function returned with some kind of safeguard, SMS confirmation for first time use of the system wouldn’t be difficult. For now though, there are probably thousands of people at businesses around the US cursing eachother (and in some cases Google) over the phone.

Not to take this too seriously, but it does bring to mind previous conversation we’ve had here about the importance of security if Google is going to convince the world to use its hosted office productivity applications.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/52267012/

Automattic, the business end of blogging software WordPress, and enterprise RSS vendor KnowNow have announced a partnership that’s all the talk of the blogosphere. The two companies will offer a joint product that blogs and reads feeds both public facing and behind the fire wall. This is a good move that could make a big difference in the rate of adoption of social software in the business world as few things go together like blogging and RSS.

KnowNow is a Sunnyvale, California company that’s been around since before RSS was on the stage but has recently relaunched with a new emphasis on syndication technology. In its initial iteration it utilized adapters similar to what it and other companies now use to transform and deliver information via RSS from various sources that don’t publish native feeds. Those types of adapters, pulling information from various databases inside the enterprise and from around the web and making it available for feed readers, are now a common practice in enterprise RSS.

The company is headed by Todd Rulon-Miller, a former Senior VP at Netscape in the 1990’s. KnowNow has a long and impressive customer list, though when I last spoke to them only about 12 of those companies had yet deployed their new enterprise RSS server. Wells Fargo Bank is the company’s flagship RSS customer. They have raised a number of rounds of funding, the most recent was announced at the end of last month and was for $13 million. That round included money from RSS Investors, Presidio Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Levensohn Venture Partners and Palomar Ventures.

The new KnowNow WordPress Enterprise Edition will be sold and supported by KnowNow, who previously offered only a blog-like notes feature for publishing. Customers should be able to use KnowNow’s technology for intake of information from external news feeds to internal database queries and corporate communication. The blogging platform will then be used for either public facing blogs, internal communication behind the firewall or probably in most cases both.

Blogging software was a revolution in and of itself, but it’s always needed RSS to serve as its foundation. RSS feeds are what allow an ecosystem of blogs to flourish by allowing readers to easily consume a large number of blogs. Feeds also nourish publishers by making a steady flow of information easy to consume and then share by posting.

The new joint product will no doubt go head to head with SixApart’s MovableType, the leading enterprise blogging product on the market. SixApart ’s Anil Dash tells me that MT will not be directly integrating blogging software with its recently acquired technology from Rojo, but rather will focus on integrating the RSS and blogging via its partnership with Newsgator in the Intel backed Suite Two product.

Another leading player in the field, MyST Technolgy has probably integrated inbound RSS and blogging for longer than anyone. MyST emphasizes search engine optimization but has a less social feel to it than the products with consumer facing background.

Enterprise RSS vendor Attensa tells me that their feed reader works well with almost all blogging and wiki platforms but that they have not found a compelling reason to bundle with any particular blogging product. They believe that RSS and blogging software purchases tend to be made by different departments (IT and marketing, respectively) and a unified platform is not what customers are looking for. Attensa’s product emphasizes attention data, or personalization based on use patterns.

It’s a fascinating field and though many bloggers are rightly excited about today’s announcement of a partnership between KnowNow and Automattic’s WordPress - the sector is already a very competitive one. I love RSS and I love blogging, so I’m very excited to watch further developments in integration move forward in the business world.

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/~3/52226548/

Lectric Shave will give you a shave “up to 52% closer.” SBC Yahoo DSL features download speeds of “up to 6 megabits per second.”

Bah. “Up to” is meaningless. “Up to 6” includes 0-5. It could be everything, it could be nothing. It’s marketing code for “we want to sound impressive but we won’t actually promise anything.”

Where else does this fly? The minimum wage isn’t “up to $5.15/hour.” Good luck telling a loan officer you plan on paying back “up to 100%” of your loan. Doctors don’t say, “The operation is risky, but your chances of making a full recovery are up to 90%.”

So it’s nice to see some pushback against the term’s widespread use among internet providers.

With few exceptions, they include language that says consumers will get ‘up to’ a certain speed…In many cases, consumer advocates and industry analysts said, customers do not get the maximum promised speed, or anywhere near it, from their cable and digital subscriber line connections. Instead, the phrase “up to” refers to speeds attainable under ideal conditions, like when a D.S.L. user is near the phone company’s central switching office.”They don’t deliver what’s advertised, and it’s inherently deceptive,” said Dave Burstein, editor of DSL Prime, a newsletter that tracks the broadband industry. ” ‘Up to’ is a weasel term that should be taken out of the companies’ vocabulary.”

A similar movement is afoot in the UK where ‘Up to 8Mbps’ ads were recently ruled misleading.

ISPs advertising an ‘up to 8Mbps’ service without explaining that many people will be unable to receive these speeds are misleading consumers…35 per cent of people who live more than 3.8 km from an exchange, would be unable to get more than a 5 Mbps connection.

Ok, get back to work. After all, you really should get up to eight hours of work done today.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/125-ive-had-it-up-to-here-with-up-to

Recently deceased economist Milton Friedman used the quantity equation of money (MV = PY) as his license plate

“At one time at least, it appeared on the California license plate of Milton Friedman’s personal automobile. That equation is of course the quantity equation, MV = PY, or money times velocity equals the price level times output. This equation can be used to define a link between money growth and inflation that depends on the evolution of the velocity of money.” More on the equation.

People get protective over personal space in virtual worlds too

“Researchers who observed the avatars (digital representations of the humans that control them) of participants in Second Life, a virtual reality universe, found that some of the avatars’ physical behavior was in keeping with studies about how humans protect their personal space. In other words, the digital beings adhered to some unspoken behavioral rules of humans even though they were but pixels on a screen. Humans tend to avert eye gaze if they feel someone is standing too close. They retreat to corners, put distance between themselves and strangers, and sit or stand equidistant from one another like birds on a wire.”

Dupes in Borat movie speak out

“A mix of national and local articles are now telling the stories of the real people in the film. Not all of these people are pleased.” Ya don’t say?

Apple Pro profile of Brian Eno

“The multidisciplinary artist, with the help of a few technical experts, has created a computer program that continually fuses his translucent light paintings to create an ever-evolving artistic display on your computer screen. The piece is accompanied by a randomly assembled ambient track that’s never the same twice. The program is capable of creating about 77 million permutations of Eno’s visual work and is titled, appropriately, ‘77 Million Paintings.’”

[PDF] Uncle Mark 2007 (Mark Hurst’s opinionated shopping guide)

“Plenty of websites and magazines – even
Consumer Reports – can give you 17 different options of digital cameras, but that doesn’t help much. You’re not asking to see all the available choices…A better question is, which ONE product should you buy, and why? The pages ahead will tell you.”

Rolling Stone on “The Baby Billionaires of Silicon Valley”

“What the old guard is missing is that this doesn’t feel like a revolution to us. It feels like common sense.”

Wired on the music industry’s “renewal”

“Dragged down by its own bulk and ripped apart by the rebellious energy of the file-sharing revolution, the recording industry hit rock bottom. That was three years ago. Today, signs of renewal are everywhere: amazing technologies, smart business models, even ringtones as hit singles. The best part? An explosion of creativity from artists and fans alike. Rock on.”

Yahoo! Autos partners with Environmental Defense to launch Green Rating on cars

“The Green Rating measures a vehicle’s environmental friendliness on a scale of 1 to 100. The higher a vehicle’s Green Rating, the ‘greener’ it is and the lower its harm to both human health and the health of the planet.” [tx Kira]

The little book of Flow

“Is it possible to have a life where the ‘flow state’ is the norm? Is there a way to have ‘flow’ all the time regardless of where we are, what we are doing or what seems to happening around us? There is.”

How to concentrate on writing

“When I am up against a deadline and I absolutely, definitely have to get on with my work, I use a few tactics to force myself to concentrate…” [tx MS]

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/123-sunspots-the-mv-py-edition

We have often talked about the holy grail of a usable WYSIWYG CMS system where users build their website by just being on their website and editing layouts and pages.

Kris Zyp is trying to do that with his new Authenteo system.

We have released a beta version of our new development framework and content management system, called Authenteo. This product features several innovative approaches to web development that we believe could really revolutionize the way we develop web applications.

• Client centric domain model through transparent persistence and retrieval from the server database using AJAX and continuations ala Narrative JavaScript. JavaScript can transparently access the data domain model without any knowledge of AJAX, but the domain model is still secured via the server. All pages are dynamically rendering with JavaScript on the browser.
• Immediate and intuitive access to component properties, JavaScript code, and styles by just right clicking on components in the editing interface. Try changing the JavaScript and styles dynamically from the editing interface!
• Structural model inheritance that provides a sophisticated form of that forms the basis of component construction, advanced super-flexible version control, and transactions.
• True in browser WYSIWYG editing, both content and layout can be editing just as page appears, no textboxes with your content, the whole page is there as it normally appears.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/authenteo-ajax-wysiwyg-cms

They keep on coming folks. Mauro Niewolski has created AjaxCore which is “a multi-purpose PHP framework that ease the development of rich Ajax applications, by generating the appropriate JavaScript code. AjaxCore takes all the dirty work of JavaScript code generation and provides a solid foundation. The concept is to extend a Generic AjaxCore class and defining methods that handle the Ajax driven events and binding them to HTML objects. It uses Prototype’s JavaScript standard library for getting DOM (Document Object Model ) elements and handling asynchronous XMLHttpRequest One distinguish point to remark is that, by letting you Bind events on HTML objects that will execute server side code,it let’s you solve any specific requirement without the hassle of coding particular JavaScript code to handle specific events.”

Usage

• bind ( does a bind between a html object and a php function, when a JavaScript event is triggered )
• bindTimer ( does a bind between a html object and a php function, when a JavaScript event is triggered and timer expires)
• bindPeriodicalTimer ( does a bind between a html object and a php function, when a JavaScript event is triggered and keeps repeating each time timer expires).

The key is, just make a class that extends from “AjaxCore” and define a function to handle Ajax requests, and then bind an HTML object to that function upon a JavaScript event ( like onClick and so on..), you can even assign several JavaScript events to the same PHP function with no hassle. Also, If you have to send some HTML elements values to the PHP function, it’s as simple as type the ID of the html element and then retrive it on php with $this->request[’elementName’] method, you can even send static values with no HTML ID by appending a (’ _ ‘) prefix to the element, as _XXX=YYY , whether XXX represents variable name, and YYY value.

Mauro has a combo example that has code such as:

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/ajaxcore-php-ajax-framework

myfabrik has released myfabrik lite, an application to let you “host and deliver content”.

The interface to the storage is clean and ajaxy, and tags are prevalent (as is the law these days).

( via Richard )

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/myfabrik-lite-content-storage