Ajax Girl

New startup Midomi, a voice-based music search engine with a social network bolted on, launched earlier today. If you have a microphone connected to your computer, just sing or hum a few seconds of any song. In theory, Midomi will return a link to the original song for partial playback or purchase, and will also return results from other users who’ve recorded themselves singing that song.

I’ve been testing this all morning. And I cannot come up with a single match. Not one. I think that my voice is to blame, though, as others testing it seem to have good results. In my last attempt I tried to sing part of Amazing Grace since it’s fairly slow and they use it in the demo video to explain how the site works. My top match came back as a user clip rapping part of a Notorious B.I.G. song. I swear I am not making this up.

The social network aspect to this is what will make it popular, and the search engine will help people group songs that they all sing and compare. Users have a profile page and can add friends, fans, etc. Others rate their recordings. kSolo (acquired by Fox) and SingShot have dabbled in this space successfully.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/82147629/

We’re very excited to welcome Jeremy Kemper to the 37signals team. He starts next week.

Jeremy is the #2 contributor to Ruby on Rails and has been around since the dawn of the framework.

Jeremy comes to us from CD Baby where he was responsible for rebuilding much of their infrastructure and assembling their Rails team.

We’ve had our eye on Jeremy for some time. Since the early days of Rails, he’s always stood out as an obvious hire. So it’s fantastic that we’ve finally been able to make it happen.

We’ve got some great stuff planned. It’s going to be a blast to be able to work with Jeremy to get these things into your hands (well, on to your screens).

Welcome aboard Jeremy!

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/231-please-welcome-jeremy-kemper-to-37signals

We get this a lot: “How do you guys get so much done with such a small team? 5 products, a book, Rails, and a popular blog. We have a lot more money, people, hardware, and technology than you do, but we can’t seem to get anything done. What’s the secret?”

There are two prisoners. Each have their own cell and no cellmates.

Both want to break out. One has a jackhammer and the other a spoon.

The jackhammer is clearly the better tool to break though concrete, block, brick. But it’s loud, big, requires a power source, it’s expensive and hard to hide. You can’t be subtle with a jackhammer. Small mistakes become huge mistakes with a jackhammer. It’s all or nothing with a jackhammer. It’s handy if you are breaking up a concrete sidewalk, but breaking out of a concrete prison is another story.

The spoon is for eating soup. But it’s subtle, quiet, utilitarian, maneuverable, human powered, easy to conceal, easier to repair or replace. It may take a lot longer, but you stand a much better chance.

Brute force (jackhammer) may get things done, but a whole lot more can go wrong—loudly. Subtlety (spoon) gives you more room to work. More opportunities to say no, to slow down, to make better decisions along the way, to change direction.

Pouring tons of money, tons of resources, and tons of people at a problem is like using a jackhammer to break out of jail. Putting a few smart people on the problem, embracing constraints, not trying to solve the wrong problems, focusing on precision, not using seven words when four will do, and taking the time to get it done right is like using the spoon.

We use the spoon.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/230-a-spoon-or-a-jackhammer

Today, the reputation network Rapleaf is releasing a new service called Upscoop, which joins a number of startups (see ProfileLinker and Wink, for example) trying to add a meta layer above social networks. There are a lot of these networks, and a lot of people belong to more than one. Keeping track of your own networks, and those of your friends, is complicated.

Upscoop is designed to help you figure out which networks your friends belong to, based on their email address. You give Upscoop your email credentials (including the password) for your AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, or Yahoo email account. Upscoop grabs your contact list, and then searches across a number of social networks and tries to find profile pages of people that you know among the 10 million profiles they’ve indexed across the major social networks. The process of searching is not instantaneous - it actually takes a few hours.

Clicking on any result will (sometimes) bring you to the profile page for that person. You can then add them as a friend or otherwise interact with them.

Asking people to give Upscoop their full email credentials to complete the search is going to be a tough sell. But this is a lot easier than searching for friends one-by-one on Wink. For people serious about connecting with friends, Upscoop may be for them.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/82012313/

Vitaliy Shevchuk has proposed SJAX: AJAX option for automated in-browser testing which makes testing of Ajax apps simpler with Selenium that having to waitForAjax and friends.

The Problem

However, things are getting more complicated with AJAX. No page is loaded, but the content has changed. And it hasn’t changed instantly; AJAX is asynchronous by its definition. Setting a bug interval is a bad solution: it makes build cycle very slow without really solving the problem.

Some guys suggest using a “waitForCondition” command. In other word, every time AJAX is in action you need to manually add a waiting condition. This is much better then nothing; at least it is a real working solution. However, test creating is much longer and less fun.

Another option would be to extend Selenium to make it aware the underlying AJAX framework, so that the test case would pause until XMLHttpRequest is satisfied. Well, it requires extending Selenium, which is not very simple task neither. And there is a multitude of AJAX frameworks available, it would be impossible to adapt Selenium to every of them. And there are other in-browser testing solutions, not only selenium: both open source and commercial ones.

Solutions?

And the ideal scenario would be the following:

• Test, application itself or the in-browser testing framework raises a flag to mark the current session as the one of automated testing.
• AJAX framework detects the flag and passes to synchronous mode.
• In this case, a method of user action simulation (click/type) of Selenium will not return until the AJAX data is successful fetched and processed. So Selenium will not be able to continue before the page content is updated, and it’s exactly what the user expects from his macros.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/sjax-ajax-option-for-automated-in-browser-testing

Some recent activity at our internal 37signals Campfire chat room:

Smooth shopping cart

Yarn jones

Ze Frank

Sitemeter pagination

Jason	I’ve always liked the simplicity of the pagination in Sitemeter
Jason

Facial recognition at the doctor

Cheap cloning

Indian home cooking

Ricky Gervais on failure

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/227-fly-on-the-wall-yarn-cart-cheap-cloning-facial-recognition-etc

The introduction to “Made To Stick” offers advice on how to get people’s attention:

We need to violate people’s expectations. We need to be counterintuitive.

Why? The human brain is wired to perceive patterns and is drawn to aberrations. For example, the book discusses the success of Subway’s Jared ads and says the surprise factor — “I can lose weight by eating fast food!?” — was a major reason for the campaign’s stickiness.

And check out Michael P. Maslanka’s review of Seth Godin’s Small Is the New Big for another example of the power of counterintuitive statements.

[5 stars] It is all counterintuitive
The world does not work the way we think it does. In his latest, Godin takes zest in letting us know this: the internet is really bad for us (it increases anonymity which decreases civility; competence is bad (it breeds complacency and clinging to the status quo); success is unhealthy (it seduces companies to gravitate to the mean, and lose the edge that got them to success in the first place).

More excerpts from the Made To Stick intro
Business communication often goes awry when it gets too ambiguous…

We must explain our ideas in terms of human actions, in terms of sensory information. This is where so much business communication goes awry. Mission statements, synergies, strategies, visions — they are often ambiguous to the point of being meaningless. Naturally sticky ideas are full of concrete images — ice-filled bathtubs, apples with razors — because our brains are wired to remember concrete data. In proverbs, abstract truths are often encoded in concrete language: “A bird in hand is worth two in the bush.” Speaking concretely is the only way to ensure that our idea will mean the same thing to everyone in our audience.

The authors preach focusing on a single core selling point instead of a bunch of points…

A successful defense lawyer says, “If you argue ten points, even if each is a good point, when they get back to the jury room they won’t remember any.”

A “try before you buy” philosophy makes ideas more sellable…

When we’re trying to build a case for something, most of us instinctively grasp for hard numbers. But in many cases this is exactly the wrong approach. In the sole U.S. presidential debate in 1980 between Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter, Reagan could have cited innumerable statistics demonstrating the sluggishness of the economy. Instead, he asked a simple question that allowed voters to test for themselves: “Before you vote, ask yourself if you are better off today than you were four years ago.”

Related
Summary of “Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die” [The Practice of Leadership]
Audio interview with Chip Heath [Duct Tape Marketing]

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/229-stop-making-sense

Omnidrive has a remarkably rich Ajax interface to their server backend (as well as mac and windows clients).

When you login to the web based file explorer you quickly see that the experience looks very desktop-like. Right-click menus, drag and drop, and more.

Nik Cubrilovic (CEO) sees OmniDrive as “an open storage platform with a web interface and desktop clients, it allows users to store all their data in a single place, and their data can then be accessed from web apps, different computers and devices etc.
We see ourselves as an aggregator of web-related data - for eg. With Omnidrive you are able to add folders for each of your web apps (eg. Gmail, flickr, etc.) and then have read/write access to that data.”

Since it is a storage platform, they are looking at partnering with companies (such as an announcement with Zoho last week). They are looking for developers with apps to integrate with, such as photo editors, sound editors, image viewers, media players - basically any app that is good and solid and that our users would want to use with their files.

They look like they are using a lot of libraries out there. A simple view-source shows:

• Prototype / Rico / Script.aculo.us
• DWR
• Misc components (window, layout managers, etc)

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/omnidrive-ajax-file-explorer-access-to-your-files-from-anywhere

Amie Street is one of my favorite startups right now, partially because they are the embodiment of (what I consider to be) the perfect music model: DRM-free MP3s sold at pure market driven prices.

The company’s business model is dead simple - Artists can upload their music for download on the site. Users download songs, with the starting price at free. When downloads pick up for popular songs, the price starts to rise, all the way up to $0.99. If a song gets to $0.30 or so, you know its popular. The artist keeps 70% of revenues after the first $5 in sales.

We’ve followed the company through its beta and launch periods. Until now, though, the company wasn’t doing much with all the pricing/popularity data they were gathering. Yesterday, however, they started allowing people to vote on songs directly (like Digg and the recently launched iJigg), and launched new areas of the site to show popular songs.

Amie Street has also released tools to help artists promote their songs, including an embeddable player for any song (see this MySpace page for an example) and a tool to allow artists to create Amie Street song stores on their own websites.

The company says they are currently in the process of raising a Series A round of capital. In this funding environment, I don’t think it will be very hard for them to close that round. All three of the founders, Elliott Breece, Elias Roman and Joshua Boltuch (pictured here) are still, I believe, in college.

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/~3/81908569/

Dynamic Drive has a simple new Image Thumbnail Viewer that allows you to annotate your HTML with a rel="thumbnail" and a lightbox-esque viewer will be added to the link of your choice.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/image-thumbnail-viewer