Ajax Girl

Wellshpere is launching an alpha version of their wellness community site tomorrow. It joins a host of other health related search, training, and Q&A sites we’ve covered. Wellsphere is concerned with day-to-day sorts of health choices that make up “wellness”, the kind you don’t ask your doctor, but consult your peers about. Wellsphere is meant to help people with these choices and motivation by providing users with access to similar people and to health-related resources in their area. These resources are split between personal profiles and databases of health-related locations they’ve put together.

Their personal profiles are much like any social networking site with the addition of a blog like feature called a “Wellsphere”. Wellspheres are comment threads attached to your profile dealing with a goal you want to accomplish or some specific knowledge you have about being healthy. Any registered user can subscribe to updates on the sphere or add to the conversation by posting their own input. You can imagine there being a lot of duplicate discussions, which Wellsphere deals with by allowing members to vote for other users by “endorsing” them.

Instead of purely making friends, like on social networking sites, Wellsphere pitches them as “activity partners”. The hope is that people are more likely to keep up their fitness goals if they schedule activities as part of a group of people who depend on them to show up, and I agree. However, while the search function lets you find people in your area with similar interests, activity planning is left up to members. It seems like a MatchActivity-like solution, matching up people training for a marathon, or weight training once a week would be an ideal addition. EmilyR seems like a perfect candidate for this, considering she’s already looking for a running partner.

The final part of the site is the databases for health related places like gyms and therapists, as well as healthy restaurant suggestions. You can search the databases by location, to look for gyms or maybe a chiropractor in your area. It even looks like you can filter your search by what kind of music the gym plays. The databases link up with the rest of the site by including what listing what members go there, making it easier to find workout buddies in your area.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/83276995/

Podtech’s LunchMeet vidcast has done an interview with Kris Tate and Thomas Hawk of Flickr rival Zooomr. Zooomr has a lot of nice features, but one thing that stood out in the demo was the use of popup icons that appear when you hover over the photo. As you hover, they show up in the corner, and allow you to do things like open the photo up as a lightbox or toggle its “Fave” status (i.e. declare it as one your favorite pics).

The neat thing about this popup mechanism is that it’s pretty consistent across the site…whether you’re looking at thumbnails or a detailed view of the pic, you get that consistent set of icons. This means you can mark a pic as your favorite without having to open it up first. In the ongoing effort to build a rich collection of tags, it’s also conceivable that users could tag the photo with a similar popup mechanism.

From an eye candy perspective, the Ajax-powered (or DHTML if you like) portal feature is pretty sweet too. Like Flickr’s popup notes, the pic shows a box outline. With portals though, what you see when you hover over it is a new inset photo and you can actually scroll around the second photo while looking at the portal photo. And of course, clicking on the inset photo opens it up. Hard to explain, but easy to understand if you try it out.

Watch Lunchmeet’s Eddy and Irene talk to Zooomr’s Kris (founder/CTO) and Thomas (CEO) …

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/zooomr-popup-icons

A heavily produced YouTube video from Mark Erickson at “Infinite Solutions” shows users how to get in on the super-secret beta of Google TV beta. It involves sending yourself an email and then logging in and out of Gmail multiple times until a tv icon appears in the Gmail logo. In the comments to the video, some users have tried logging in and out of Gmail hundreds of times without it working.

This is almost certainly a fake, as Google Blogoscoped reports. Erickson then posted a second video to prove the authenticity and saying that Google had increased the login requirements “substantially”. A+ for effort and originality. Both videos are below.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/82885594/

Undoubtedly you’ve heard the term “Rich Internet Application” (RIA) with increasing frequency lately. Sometimes you hear about it in context of Ajax, sometimes with Flash, and now even Microsoft gets talked about as having an RIA solution with “WPF/E”. The reality is that this is still a very unknown subset of the technology world and anyone who tries to define it (myself included) is fighting an uphill battle. However, there is one technology which has sparked quite a bit of interest across the board, Adobe’s soon-to-be-released Apollo platform.

For those who aren’t familiar with it, Apollo is a cross-platform runtime that is still in pre alpha and allows developers to build applications for the desktop using web technologies including Flash, HTML and PDF. While Web 2.0 has prominently declared the desktop dead, its demise has been greatly exaggerated which is why I implore you to take a look at Apollo. Mike did an interview with Adobe senior vice president and chief software architect Kevin Lynch about Apollo over on TalkCrunch and I recently interviewed Mike Downey, the Sr. Product Manager for Apollo. I also interviewed Kevin Lynch himself about Apollo earlier this year.

The reason Apollo is so important is because it changes the rules of the game. It is taking the technologies and tenants of the web and bringing them to the desktop. Apollo is cross platform and gives web developers access to things like the file system and close integration with the operating system in a set of APIs that are the same whether you’re writing in JavaScript or ActionScript. The web fostered an explosion in the creativity of application development and Apollo will undoubtedly do the same for desktop development.

So as entrepreneurs and developers, you need to be aware of the potential impact of Apollo. The desktop will see the same creative infusion that the web once did, but with more features and with the web’s most ubiquitous display formats (HTML, Flash and PDF). Early adopters to the platform have the potential to reap a bonanza and bring about the gold-rush like mentality that swept the web. Is someone going to figure out how to serve AdWords on the desktop with Apollo’s online/offline capabilities? Is it a new way to deliver rich media? A killer solution for email that spans web and desktop and integrates IM or VoIP? A new way to tie customers back to online properties? Desktop development is now going to be as open as web development was and the entrepreneurial spirit is going to bring about some fantastic innovation that blends the best of the web and the best of the desktop. That’s something that end users and startups alike will benefit from.

Ryan Stewart is an expert in Rich Internet Applications. Ryan writes his personal blog here and also writes a RIA blog for ZDNet called The Universal Desktop. We hope to have him back regularly to review new Adobe Apollo applications.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/82837524/

I never really got personally angry with Google over their decision to do business with the Chinese government by launching a censored version of their search engine at Google.cn in 2005. But in late 2006 I visited Taiwan for a conference and learned a lot more about some of the things the Chinese government continues to do, particularly torture and other reported atrocities perpetrated on Falun Gong members. Still, Google’s position on China, which is that they can do more good in the long run by working with the Chinese government and slowly opening it up, made at least some sense.

Now Google is saying they regret the decision to work with China. But they aren’t saying they regret the decision because it was the wrong thing to do, and helps prop up a government that continues to violate the human rights of its own people. Instead, they’re saying it was a bad business decision.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin said he regretted the decision because “On a business level, that decision to censor… was a net negative.”

I’m glad that these remarks were made somewhat informally and without massaging from Google PR. It is a rare glimpse into the heart of an organization struggling with coming to terms with its own power, still only a few years old. But if Google wants to stay in the good graces of the smug western crowds, they need to say they regret working with the Chinese government because that government is evil, not because it turned out to be “a net negative” business decision.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/82778350/