Ajax Girl

Building specialized websites and services for the older crowd has been popular lately. First we had Eons, the social network for people over 50. Founder Jeff Taylor is too young, at 45, to use his own site. Perhaps being out of touch with his target demographic has been what’s led Eons to mediocrity (Alexa, Compete) since launch. Next we had Presto, a combination printer (made by HP) and web service that basically faxes emails to loved ones who don’t have computers. Older people are featured prominently in its marketing materials.

Today the parent company of Eons has announced cRANKy, a search engine for people over 50 that compliments their Eons social network. The site indexes about 5,000 sites that Compete.com says are popular with people over 45, and focuses on less results because “the Eons Generation doesn’t like to wade through millions of search results.”

I frankly don’t think any of these products will be successful. Not because the demographic they’re targeting isn’t large, but rather because these people are quite Internet savvy already and don’t need hand-holding and condescension. In the case of cRANKy, if less results is appealing to older people, the same would be the case for everyone. People like relevant results and lots of them. And if your search engine isn’t very deep, it’s a flaw, not a feature.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/73733467/

Update: Press release is here. It is surprisingly brief, reinforcing the rumor that eBay hastily accelerated the announcement due to the rumors.

It looks like the rumors forced eBay’s hand and they are announcing the deal earlier than expected - they are acquiring San Francisco-based StubHub for $285 million plus the cash on StubHub’s books, which is about $25 million. The deal has been signed and should close in 30 days or so. eBay will be releasing a press release shortly.

The original source of the leak may have been one of the StubHub founders who left the company over a year ago.

StubHub is rumored to be doing $10 million or so in profit on $400 million in gross annual sales, implying just over a 30x multiple to EBITDA. That’s quite a valuation.

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/~3/73621394/

The secondary market for event tickets is a dirty but lucrative place to be. I have first hand knowledge from my time as COO of RazorGator, a Kleiner-backed ticket marketplace based in Los Angeles. There’s a food chain, starting with the guys that hang out at stadiums before games and concerts scalping tickets, up through ticket brokers that actually have a place of business, finally ending with the ticket marketplaces offered by companies like eBay and StubHub.

The entire food chain is closely connected, and the ticket brokers in the aggregate control most of the market. They have elaborate computer systems for trying to obtain the hot concert tickets from Ticketmaster the second they go on sale. Theater is covered with insiders at the box office who hold the best tickets for hot shows for brokers, and receive a cash kickback for their trouble. Brokers also own season tickets for the hottest sports teams, and develop long term relationships with fans who control good season tickets and don’t want to give them up, but rarely attend games. It’s a relationship, mostly cash business, and the best ticket brokers make millions a year. Little of that revenue actually gets reported to the IRS.

Most people would be surprised at how few people control most of the tickets for the really big events like the SuperBowl and March Madness.

Brokers sell tickets any way they can. They hire scalpers to hang out at events, telling them not to hold too many tickets or cash at any one time in the likely event they are arrested or shaken down by the police. They have their own websites. And they list their tickets on marketplaces like eBay, RazorGator and StubHub. Usually they list the same tickets in multiple places, and if they are sold multiple times they try to find comparable replacement tickets, or just bail on the customer.

eBay keeps their hands fairly clean, although they move a lot of event tickets. They never own the tickets directly which keeps them above the ticket scalping laws, and they try to enforce the complicated and varied state laws regulating secondary ticket sales. The many brokers who sell tickets on eBay tend to treat eBay customers pretty well, mostly out of fear that eBay will ban them if they don’t.

Will eBay Acquire StubHub?

StubHub is another ticket marketplace that has done extremely well in the last few years. Rumors suggest they moved more than $400 million in tickets last year, earning $10 million or so in profit. There have been rumors for some time now that eBay is in the process of acquiring StubHub for $300 million or so. Bambi Francisco first reported this last October. The Wall Street Journal (subscription required) is repeating the rumor today, saying a deal may come as early as this week. Our sources at Ebay denied the October rumor, but they are strangely silent today.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/73596372/

Facebook announced a bunch of mobile features today, although all of them have been around for some time. The only new feature is the Facebook mobile page which lists all of the mobile tools in one place. The tools include a mobile optimized website at m.facebook.com, an easy way to upload photos and notes to facebook via SMS and MMS messages, and a tool to receive new Facebook messages on your phone via SMS.

Our previous Facebook coverage is here.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/73577515/

about a year ago I did some drawings based on the phrase “in the future”

I have been invited to do more drawings. I will do the drawings based on titles that you submit, but I do not have a theme this time, so feel free to suggest one. or just suggest a title.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/189-hi-my-name-is-sam

Brad Neuberg created some examples of offline projects in order to find a common UI or offline web applications for the Dojo Offline Toolkit.

He has put together examples for Gmail, Blogger, and a corporate portal.

Gmail Example

The first thing to notice is the addition of a new widget on the left-hand side of the page, the Offline Info widget. This widget encapsulates all of our offline functionality for Gmail.

If the Dojo Offline Toolkit is installed and you sign into Gmail, Gmail will automatically download your 100 newest emails into the offline cache. Now you can access Gmail offline to read your newest emails or compose new ones. When you sign back on your emails will be automatically synced and uploaded.

Blogger

On page load, Blogger would automatically download the last 10 blog posts, including images used in those posts. Individual blog posts indicate next to them if they have been locally modified (”modified offline”). If a blog post is not downloaded offline yet, the link “Download offline” appears, which when clicked causes the Offline Info widget to show download progress information, just like a sync. If you have local items that have not been synced, and have elected to sync manually, a small ‘(recommended)’ label will appear next to the Synchronize button.

The rest of the offline UI is pretty much the same, including the DOT download page, the syncing UI, and the configuration UI. The configuration UI might possibly have a small number of application-specific configuration, such as “[10] Newest Posts Synced,” where [] is a text field that can take a number.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/offline-gmail-blogger-and-portal-mocked

Nokia has had a phone that supports Safari for awhile. A Nokia chap was at the first Ajax Experience in San Francisco last May showing off the phone. It had the same features that Safari on the iPhone has (zooming around web pages).

Opera Mobile is also very popular on various makes of phones. With the huge market that mobile represents, and the fact that we are still growing up wrt high speed access on these devices, it will be interesting to see the mobile browser war progress (and how it may differ: IE vs. FF on desktops, Safari vs. Opera on mobile).

We can’t simply develop Ajax apps and expect them to work great on the mobile form factor, and we have talked in the past about how Ajax could be a pain here (updating an area of the application that the mobile user can’t even see).

Joel Webber pinged the GWT google group about how GWT could help out in building applications that work across boundaries:

It’s great that these browsers are modern and fully functional, but the devices aren’t just like desktop PC’s. They have different (smaller) form factors, input methods, and (probably) use patterns. And the two browsers involved are the two that usually get supported *last* (if every) by most web developers, but that you get pretty much for free with GWT.

Perhaps what we need here is the concept of ‘device profiles’ in hosted mode, that will help you try out your applications in different scenarios, to see how different users will see and interact with your app. Let’s say the Wii has no good keyboard support (just by way of example, I have no idea whether it does or not) — if you want Wii users to use your app, it would be a really good thing to put yourself in their shoes. This would also be helpful for automatically trying out different screen sizes (a lot of people are still on 800×600 or 1024×768 screens).

One of the great things about GWT (IMHO) is that it makes it easy to switch out implementations of classes using deferred binding. I know this feature is not as fully documented as it should be (yet), but suffice it to say for the moment that it would make it really easy to precompile different versions of your app for different browsers. Imagine that you want to support the iPhone, but its 480×320 screen size really needs a different UI than the one you display to normal web users. Well, why not define two EntryPoints that use different subsets of your application’s UI, and let them be selected depending on the device running it? The beauty of this is
that, if you’ve divided your app nicely into Composites, it’s really only small amount of different code, and each device pays only for the code needed to run its UI. Formalizing the concept of device profiles and automatically integrating it with deferred binding could make this process relatively pain-free.

Fun stuff to think about.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/iphone-could-change-mobile-browsing

Pioneer Theatre

Rich Corbridge writes, “The Pioneer Theatre in Salt Lake City provides not only a seating chart of the theater but an interactive ‘here’s what the view would be like from the seat you’ve chosen’ feature — very useful to a customer who has never been there before (follow the ‘Seating Chart’ link in the body of the page).”Current time at MailBuild
Brandon Silverstein writes, “I love how the MailBuild support page tells you what time it is locally right underneath the office hours. You can tell right away if the office is open or closed…This especially helps MailBuild customers in the United States that are not aware that MailBuild is based in Australia.”

Under suspicion at Firefox

Daniel Scrivner writes, “This came up in my Firefox brower earlier today. And I was immediately impressed that it recognized the forgery and alerted me so well. Just another reason I love Firefox!”

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/166-screens-around-town-pioneer-theatre-mailbuild-and-firefox

TIBCO has announced that they are doing to sponsor work by the DWR lead (Joe Walker) to integrate DWR and TIBCO GI.

This is good news for both parties:

• TIBCO GI users will have a new way to integrate with Java web applications
• DWR: The integration work between DWR and TIBCO GI will probably help integrate with other frameworks. Changes made to DWR to work with GI will be exposed for other work. For example, the DWR team will look at automating the currently-hand written server-side version of Scriptaculous Effects.

JBI users may get some tighter integration too, making your life easier. We are excited to see what comes of this.

More details (from the Press Releases)

TIBCO will work with DWR founder, Joe Walker, to provide ready-made integration points between DWR and TIBCO General Interface™, TIBCO’s Ajax Rich Internet Application toolkit for creating rich graphical GUIs in a browser. Additionally, the collaboration will seek to extend DWR so that it can function as a Java Business Integration (JBI) standard service engine and be deployed on TIBCO ActiveMatrix™, the industry’s first service virtualization platform. The complementary components of DWR and General Interface™ will ultimately enable businesses to expand their uses of message and event-based service-oriented architectures.

“We are excited to be working with TIBCO to push adoption of DWR further into the enterprise,” said Joe Walker, DWR founder. “DWR has been a leading Ajax framework for some time but working with TIBCO will help take DWR further into the realm of full Ajax Rich Internet Applications being deployed alongside message and event-driven service platforms.”

With substantial application modernization efforts underway and a continued trend towards SOA in business, the combined Ajax libraries of General Interface and DWR will provide capabilities that deliver rich user features such as editable grids, real-time events and notifications, and streaming data. By running on Internet technology rather than operating or runtime environment dependent technologies, businesses will experience much lower costs of ownership.

“DWR is a rapid way for Java developers to expose Java objects as simple Ajax services without the need for additional configuration or transformation. We have many customers already using DWR with the General Interface Ajax library,” said Kevin Hakman, director product marketing, TIBCO General Interface. “With DWR’s reverse Ajax capability, messages and events can be pushed from the server to the browser so that Web applications can also have real-time notification and streaming data features.”

Read Joe Walker’s thoughts

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/tibco-to-sponsor-dwr-development

There’s an interesting tradeoff presented by the iPhone. While the phone can do more, and it’s interface is fluid, in some ways it widens the gulf between human and computer.

When you touch it it doesn’t touch you back.

That may prove to be a good thing. It may prove that what we think we need we don’t really need. The tradeoffs may payoff. But we’ve certainly lost the tactile feedback humans are used to when dealing with things that are right in front of us. Now the connection is simulated. Rich textures have been replaced with androgynous glass.

How can you dial the iPhone without looking at it? How can you reach in your pocket and press “1” for voicemail? How can you orient yourself with the interface without seeing it? With a traditional phone or device with buttons you can feel your way around it. You can find the bumps, the humps, the cut lines, the shapes, the sizes. You can find your way around in the dark. Not with the iPhone.

I don’t know if this is better or worse. We won’t know until we try it (and oh man I can’t wait to try it). I just think its really interesting. It’s a pretty big deal. The implications are far reaching. The iPhone demands your attention, it forces you to look at it. We’re lucky it’s beautiful.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/188-iphone-not-touchy-feely