Ajax Girl

Google’s ambitious foray into radio advertisements may be significantly delayed, says RBC Capital Markets analyst Jordan Rohan. The problem? Google may not have access to enough radio airtime for advertisers to test the product.

We first wrote about Google Audio ads a week ago when competitor Voices.com was saying flat out that Google copied part of their product. Google plans to handle audio ads for customers from soup to nuts: assistance with ad creation, the ability to bid on radio spots, and target ads by geography, station type, listener demographics and time of day.

But none of this is useful if Google isn’t able to get access to advertising inventory. “We believe a critical mass of advertisers is interested in testing the platform,” Rohan said. “However, there is simply not enough radio inventory in the Google Audio system (yet) to enable buyers to run campaigns.”

Google may be working on a deal with CBS Radio to get access to more ad 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/~3/63507671/

Google announced the acquisition of part of a business called Endoxon, an Internet mapping company located in Switzerland. This deal looks like it’s part technology and part team. The Google blog says Endoxon has developed “compelling technology that will enhance our Google geo products worldwide,” as well as “we’re also excited about having a dedicated team in Europe.” Nothing is being said about acquisition price, or what will happen to the three Endoxon business units that Google didn’t acquire.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/63452067/

Ookles, which we noted as a “Flickr Gunner” back in April, is preparing to launch early next year. The company has been quietly developing their new personal media destination site for about a year now, and has only made a few public comments about the service. I had a chance to see an early demo of Ookles late last week, though, and there are at least a couple of really outstanding features.

Founder Scott Johnson has called it “Flickr+Riya+YouTube” and I think that is an apt description based on what I’ve seen so far. Ookles is a destination site, not an add-on feature for users of Flickr and other services.

Ookles will be a place for users to store personal media (photos, videos and podcasts). Photos will launch first, and will have two key features I’ve not seen on other services: facial recognition and auto albums.

Facial Recognition

It is impossible to talk about facial recognition without mentioning the work Riya has done in this area. But Riya, which has recently focused on a different business, was always torn between becoming a destination site and partnering with competitors like Flickr. Ookles is making no fuss about it - they want you to permanently store your photos on their site.

They are handling facial recognition differently from Riya. See the screen shot below for an idea of how it will work. Like Riya, Ookles will find and show thumbnails of faces from photos, and then analyze that face against other faces in your photos. You tell Ookles which ones are a match. Ookles repeats the process a couple of times until it has a good idea of who the person is. It will then tag all photos with the name, and future photos containing that person will also be auto-tagged. The demo worked perfectly - it took a few steps to train it and then all photos were properly tagged.

Auto Albums

Ookles will take uploaded photos and create auto-albums based on photos taken during a single window in time. It’s a relatively simple feature, but I haven’t seen it anywhere else and I like it. If you take burst photos - a bunch of photos in a second or two hoping one will be good - Ookles will also automatically group these burst photos into a single thumbnail.

It will be hard for Ookles to get real traction against Flickr and the bevy of other photo destination sites around. But I think they may have a chance at success - generating semantic data around images is a huge problem, and people are usually the primary subjects to amateur photos. Any automated process to auto-tag these photos with people’s names will be welcome, and I like the way Ookles is approaching the problem. Flickr is certainly going to have to deal with this at some point, too.

I also like that they will support video and podcast files, too, something Flickr should have implemented long ago. For more on Ookles, listen to Gregory Galants podcast interview with Johnson from April 2006.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/63405020/

Microsoft Visual Studio

Reader Chris Vickio spotted this Microsoft Visual Studio ad and writes, “Saw this and thought of you guys. Yes, the difference is obvious. Painfully obvious.”

Lussumo

On the other hand, John McLennan writes, “Found this great little intro to the Lussumo Software landing page: ’…back with fewer features than ever.’”

Got an interesting screenshot for Signal vs. Noise? Send the image and/or URL to svn [at] 37signals [dot] com.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/163-screens-around-town-the-difference-is-obvious

There has been a fair amount of talk on the new site design of digg.com.

Digg was an early adopter of Ajax technology (the polling, the digging itself, etc), and what is interesting about this new design is that they haven’t gone crazy with new Ajax features.

That being said, there is a lot of JavaScript being used here:

Lightboxes are the most obvious new addition, seem mainly in the video section, but also in other places.

I wonder if the main site itself will let you turn on auto-polling, so changes can come to you. As we use more and more apps like Gmail, Google Reader, etc that update themselves so we stop hitting the refresh button, I wish I could have digg do the same.

In general I like the new design, especially the improved width.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/diggcom-updated-now-with-lightboxes

Ryan S.	random design tidbit…
Ryan S.	i’ve been delving in my typo/design books lately, and i learned a concept i didn’t know before
Ryan S.	the idea of type being “in phase”
Ryan S.	the idea is that for a column of type, you choose a line-height
Ryan S.	and if every line locks into that grid, the lines are “in phase”
Ryan S.	for example.. here’s a regular set of lines…
Ryan S.	12 pixels for the type and then 7 pixels between lines of type:
Ryan S.
Ryan S.
Jason F.	I’m not sure I understand. Wouldn’t setting the type size and line-height always put the column in phase?
Ryan S.	here are some different blocks that are in phase together:
Ryan S.

Jason F.	Ahh, phasing together. I see now.
Ryan S.	if the space between paragraphs was different, you’d get something like this:
Ryan S.
Ryan S.	here’s the type correctly in phase without gridlines:
Ryan S.
Ryan S.	super clean
Ryan S.	The Elements of Typographic Style explained phase like the beat in music
Ryan S.	setting a rhythm up and down the page
Ryan S.	anyway, just sharing something i thought was neat
Jason F.	I got it now. Nice thing to know about.

Related
Add and delete vertical space in measured intervals [The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web]
Compose to a Vertical Rhythm [24ways]: “The basic unit of vertical space is line height. Establishing a suitable line height that can be applied to all text on the page, be it heading, body copy or sidenote, is the key to a solid dependable vertical rhythm, which will engage and guide the reader down the page.”

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/159-type-that-keeps-the-beat

Jack Slocum is back with an example for creating a reusable Ajax driven dialog with YUI.

The example is an Image Chooser, and Jack goes through explaining how he build the application:

• Creating the Dialog
• Adding the Toolbar
• Working with Layouts
• DomHelper Templates
• JSON with JSON View

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/creating-a-reusable-ajax-driven-dialog-with-yui

Later today, Digg, which just celebrated its second birthday, will release a number of new features.

The primary release is the first content area of the site that isn’t news-focused. Users can now Digg their favorite podcasts (feeds and individual episodes). The podcasting homepage will list the most popular podcasts by category (comedy, gaming, health, etc.). Their aim is for Digg to become the first stop for people looking for good podcasts, which will have standard Digg voting, discussion, etc. The Digg team isn’t putting it this way, but it’s clear that this is an experiment to see if users will adopt the Digg model of voting on things to non-breaking news. If this is successful, look for Digg to launch new types of content areas on the site. Technorati has a similar feature ranking blogs.

The other big new feature will be the relese of “Top 10 Stories,” and area of the site where users can see the hottest stories at any given time, including stories that have fallen off the home page but are still seeing lots of votes and discussion. A separate Top 10 area is designated for each category

Other changes today include:

• Digg is now Widescreen: They’ve moved from a fixed width page to a flexible layout allowing users to make use of bigger screen real estate. Navigation links have been moved to the top of the screen.
• Video Enhancements: The main change here is a way to view videos directly on Digg in a lightbox. See screenshot for visual.

I recorded a podcast with the Digg team to discuss the new features. We also discuss current user stats, the SpikeTheVote story (Digg now owns the domain name), and updates on financings and acquisition (”no comment”). Listen to the podcast over on TalkCrunch.

Screen shots below.

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/~3/63224768/

Chris Chabot has recently announced a new chat prototype based on a comet iframe connections for real time messaging, ajax for posting messages and sending commands, prototype.js and script.aculo.us as javascript framework, and bases of the newly written dhtml components.

As a side effect of this project, the library & socket daemon framework used by the chat application is released as open-source at http://www.chabotc.nl/phpsocketdaemon

Check out the demo

We talked to Chris about his project, and asked him if he could share with us the biggest challenges. He kindly came up with:

The greatest challenge writing this was to make it scale up, and keep IO in check. The orignal plan was to layer out the http, irc and comet components, but the overhead of sending all the event trafic over local loops/connections when dealing with hundreds to thousands of connections, is just to much. All the memory bandwidth used would then be multiplied 3x, which was just a to high of a strain on the system.

Second challenge was that there were no decent comet implementations available (except for dojo’s which i used as a reference), and there was definitely a challenge that there were no PHP (my preferred language) libraries or tools available which could deal with a large amount of always-on connections, even fast-cgi with something like lighttp just wouldn’t scale to hundreds of live connections, and the memory needed would be horrendous, hence the new php socket daemon library was born, its a riskier model, if the program has a fatal crash (great care was taken to avoid this) the service has to be restarted again (happens automaticly), loosing the client connections in the process, however it now only takes 15Mb of memory under moderate load, and guarantees responses in under 0.15ms, something that would be unfeasible with a clasic apache/php situation.

Also most of the heavy lifting (such as link and color parsing, etc) has been lifted to the client, it would be way to heavy for the server to do all of this, and still be able to scale up

Likewise the javascript side of things took a bit of trial and error too, some channels can have thousands of messages, and hundreds of members, so browser speed has defiantly been an thing to optimize too.

Lastly the back-end uses a plain old IRC server, which is almost infinitely scalable, just add a server, link the IRC servers together, and run another web chat back-end on it, repeat ad infintum.. (irc networks are known to have many hundreds of thousands of people connected, using this as the backbone of the messaging provides guaranteed scalability)

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/new-chat-prototype-using-comet-and-prototype

Francesco Sullo has created aSSL: Ajax Secure Service Layer an open source library built to substitute the need for SSL in Ajax applications.

First a random 128-bit key is negotiated with the server, then, once the connection is established, data is exchanged using BlockTEA. The most recent version of aSSL (v1.1) implements what Francesco calls Double Key Quadruple DES. Future developments will see aSSL move away from DES and towards AES encryption.

aSSL is composed from a file .js and a server component. Currently, the ASP and PHP components are ready. I’m developing Ruby and Java components and in the near future I will add components in all the principal web languages (Perl, Python, TKL, etc.).

Downloads

• aSSL 1.1 (JS and ASP)
• aSSL 1.0 (JS, ASP and PHP)
• Examples: ASP, PHP
• Demo: using jQuery, or Prototype

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/assl-ajax-secure-service-layer