Ajax Girl

CrunchGear’s Matt Hickey has been tracking rumors about a Zune phone for the last week. What began as a reliable tip is now a solid story: Last Monday Microsoft filed an application with the FCC for an enigmatic wireless device that could be used to talk over the Internet. The device is described as being used for “consumer broadband access and networking.” Microsoft goes on to say that the device would use OFDM as its communications protocol, not WiFi or Bluetooth. The standard OFDM (orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing) is a modulation scheme that is used widely in upcoming 4G standards of the future. Sprint/Nextel may be the carrier, since they are building out a 4G network that will work with the OFDM standard.

And the most interesting part of the story is that this device may be available in May, a month before the iPhone.

If this all fits together, it looks like MS is working on a mobile WiMax-enabled Zune Phone, which would have download speeds of up to 2Mbps, fast enough for the Xbox-to-Zune streaming we’ve heard about, and fast enough for just about anything else the Zune Phone might be used for.

The first real news is that we can expect to hear an announcement from Redmond about it before March 17, St. Patrick’s Day, at which time we should learn the name of the device. At the same time, we should also learn other launch specifics, and here’s where it gets incredibly juicy; our source says that, pending FCC approval, the specter-like Zune Phone will hit the streets sometime in May, a full month before the iPhone.

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/~3/88690144/

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been thinking about different aspects of data visualization (see an earlier post). 

Patterns in the Ecosystem

Since my first job on the web as a graduate assistant information designer, I’ve been interested in web metrics, thanks in large part to my friend and mentor, Rebecca Bernstein, the founder of the web team at the University at Buffalo, and someone who possesses the rare combination both quantitative investigation and qualitative creativity.  She spear-headed the use of metrics as both a research and marketing tool at our university.  Web statistics were the unspoken user feedback that geeks, marketers, and the administration loved.  Regardless of the initiative, if we had statistical data on the site’s usage patterns and visitors, we could convince the administration that the ideas we had to evolve and grow site features or make refinements were completely justified.  We used these metrics to guide our design and development strategies.  With a combination of frequent informal user testing and web tracking, we could check our solutions and tweak where needed to provide the best user experience possible.

Fast forward to 2007 and those metrics are still good identifiers of visitor habits, but the web has expanded to cover a great deal more than the “page.” I listened to Brian Oberkirch’s excellent Edgework podcast where Jeff Veen talks about the development of Measure Map, the web analytics tool for bloggers (direct mp3 audio).  Veen describes the true innovation of Measure Map as a new approach to a technology that already existed, and built specifically to serve an audience whose needs weren’t being met by existing software.  One simple example is the switch from using page views as the metric, but rather, focusing on posts and unique entry ID’s instead - a much more relevant and interesting statistic for blogs.  By presenting data visualizations of web traffic and conversations related to one post, bloggers can see the impact of a single idea, and its conversational net effect.  This slight shift in paradigm opened up endless possibilities for new solutions. 

With my current work with clients on social applications like Stylehive, we’ve used data and metrics in different ways - adopting game playing techniques to make data fun.  In most social applications, data grows exponentially through the ecosystem each time a member acts or plays: whether that’s posting a unique bookmark, copying someone else’s, adding tags, adding friends, importing contacts, posting comments… the list continues.  As a member, you’re interested in your own stats (points, total bookmarks, number of followers, tags, comments) and everyone else’s (popular bookmarks, recent sites, active members, new followers).  If we treat the application as a system of visualization and interaction, it’s easy to enable discovery and to provide incentive, identity and status.  All of these interactions keep members engaged and playing as your system grows and evolves.  Whether it’s data tracking or visualizations, these tools and techniques reveal the behaviors and relationships of live interactions on our sites.

Social Data Analysis

What we’re also seeing these days are two other types of tools: web services that allow you to upload your own data for graphing and charting; as well as conversations and experimentation online with public data sets, or “social data analysis.”

I recently added the visualization service, Swivel, to eHub and then saw Many Eyes, a new site by IBM. 

Both Swivel and Many Eyes explore data visualizations by allowing you to upload your own data set to graph and chart with online tools.  Both sites also encourage conversations among site visitors and the open exploration of public data sets. 

When asked how they “compared themselves to Swivel” in a post by Tim O’Reilly, the team behind Many Eyes answered, “…Swivel seems to have some neat data mining technology that finds correlations automatically. By contrast, we’ve placed our emphasis on the power of human visual intelligence to find patterns. My guess is that both approaches will be successful because social data analysis is a powerful idea.”

Swivel allows data upload with four methods: copy and paste into a web form, spreadsheet (CSV, Excel), import from a web page with tabular data, or a document that contains a table (PDF).  One you upload data, you can preview and make various configuration changes, add an image, and preview.  Once you create a graph, it’s easy to share the link to the page, or embed the graph into your post with a snippet of HTML.

Here’s an example at Swivel of the US Government Budget for 2006:

Many Eyes excels by providing mutiple visualization methods to create visualizations from new or existing data sets.  The methods include the standard bar charts, pie charts, and line graphs, but also include more specialized views such as a network diagram, scatterplot, bubble chart, block histogram, and tree map.  Any data set that’s already been added to the site is available for “remixing.”

Here’s an example of top sites that get the largest share of attention as a treemap:

Of course, many of these graphs aren’t compelling on their own and data visualization is an entire field of its own used in a wide cross-section of industries.  For some examples, visit one of my favorite sites - visualcomplexity.com, “a unified resource space for anyone interested in the visualization of complex networks. The project’s main goal is to leverage a critical understanding of different visualization methods, across a series of disciplines, as diverse as Biology, Social Networks or the World Wide Web.”

But, what’s interesting about the new visualization services and trends online is that the technology is beginning to come into the hands of enthusiasts and individuals (eventually, en masse) rather than solely available to business or specialized industries.  Just as publishing became easier with blogging tools, visualization services are going to become more accessible as well.  What will happen when we can also be statisticians with our own and the “world’s” data?

[Technorati tags: visualization, swivel, many+eyes, web+2.0, ehub, emily+chang, web+applications, social+design]

Source: Emily Chang
Original Article: http://www.emilychang.com/go/weblog/comments/social-visualization-looking-inside-out/

“Setting the Table: The Transforming Power of Hospitality in Business” is restaurateur Danny Meyer’s new book. In a speech at NYU, Meyer explained his philosophy:

“The customer is not always right. While the customer is not always right, he/she must always feel heard.”

Meyer said his business strategy is built on both good service, defined as the technical delivery of a product, and “enlightened hospitality,” which is how the delivery of that product makes its recipient feel. He argued that hospitality is the distinguishing factor for success in this new, service economy. In the information age, competitors know how to offer the same products and services, but the culture and experience companies create for their customers will help them stand out. “It’s all about how you make the customer feel. You must make customers feel that you’re on their side,” he said.

To create this hospitable culture, restaurants must hire the right people, said Meyer. He hires “51 percenters” – staff with a high “hospitality quotient (HQ)” whose skills are 49 percent technical and 51 percent emotional. The emotional skills that are required to create a high HQ are: (1) optimism and kindness, (2) curiosity about learning, (3) an exceptional work ethic, (4) a high degree of empathy, and (5) self-awareness and integrity.

Meyer reinforced that the first and most important application of hospitality is to the people who work for you, and then, in descending order of priority, to the guests, the community, the suppliers, and the investors. “By putting your employees first, you have happier employees, which then lead to a higher HQ. A higher HQ leads to happy customers, which benefits all the stakeholders. The cycle is virtuous, not linear, because the stakeholders all impact each other.”

In an interview with Amazon, Meyer discusses “hospitalitarians” and the restaurant version of defensive design:

[A hospitalitarian is] someone with a very high “HQ”—or hospitality quotient. It’s someone whose emotional makeup leads them to derive pleasure from the act of delivering pleasure…

Don’t judge a restaurant by the honest mistakes it makes; do judge a place by how effectively and thoughtfully it strives to overcome those mistakes!…

People will generally forgive an honest mistake when someone takes responsibility for it with genuine concern.

Mark Hurst has invited Meyer to speak at GEL and yesterday posted an excerpt from the book where Meyer describes the difference between “service” and “hospitality.”

The Ritz-Carlton hotels are deservedly famous for their focus on service; they don’t call it hospitality. But as a guest there, I have occasionally sensed a rote quality in the process, when every employee responds with exactly the same phrase, “My pleasure,” to anything guests ask or say. Hearing “My pleasure” over and over again can get rather creepy after a while. It’s like hearing a flight attendant chirp, “Bye now!” and “Bye-bye!” 200 times as passengers disembark from an airplane. Hospitality can not flow from a monologue.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/262-danny-meyer-hospitality-is-king

I added Snap Preview Anywhere (SPA) to eHub back in December (eHub entry here). The free service provides a quick visual preview of a site whenever you roll over an external link.  This lets you get a quick glimpse of the sites I’m linking to.  In eHub, this also makes it easier to browse the list and associate a name with the visual recognition of the site preview.

Recently, I was asked by Snap to provide some (volunteer) feedback on a few methods they were testing.  Rather than having the preview appear as soon as you rolled over a link, the new option added an icon next to the link.  Hovering over that icon would activate the Snap preview.

In response to feedback from users, the team over at Snap has developed an enhancement to the Snap Preview Anywhere (SPA) web service, which will add an icon to SPA-enabled links. The idea is to visually denote which links are SPA-enabled and which ones are not, and thereby in effect eliminate the potential “surprise element” and drastically reduce the number of “accidental triggering” instances.

Snap is looking for feedback and input on the implementation.  Visit eHub to see it working (position your mouse over the icon that’s next to a link) and tell them what you think in the comments below. 

[Technorati tags: snap+preview+anywhere, snap, ehub, emily+chang]

Source: Emily Chang
Original Article: http://www.emilychang.com/go/weblog/comments/provide-feedback-on-snap-preview-anywhere/

Humument is Tom Phillips treated version of the Victorian novel ”A Human Document” by W.H. Mallock. Phillips transforms the text by drawing and painting over it and revealing just selected words. You can view the converted text online or in book form (Amazon).

In the mid-1960s, inspired by William Burroughs’s “cut-up” writing technique, Tom Phillips bought an obscure Victorian novel for three pence — W. H. Mallock’s 1892 novel, A Human Document. He began cutting and pasting the extant text, treating the pages with gouache and ink, isolating the words that interested him while scoring out unwanted words or painting over them. The result was A Humument, and the first version appeared in 1970.

The artist writes, “I plundered, mined, and undermined its text to make it yield the ghosts of other possible stories, scenes, poems, erotic incidents, and surrealist catastrophes which seemed to lurk within its wall of words. As I worked on it, I replaced the text I’d stripped away with visual images of all kinds. It began to tell and depict, among other memories, dreams, and reflections, the sad story of Bill Toge, one of love’s casualties.”

Related: Austin Kleon uses a similar technique for his newspaper blackout poems

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/214-human-document

John Resig has posted a screencast of him “taking an introductory look at the Firebug Firefox Extension and the jQuery JavaScript Library - combining the two to build a reusable bookmarklet that can manipulate Digg Posts and Comments.”

The presentation shows a couple of bookmarklets:

In the presentation, I refer to a bookmarklet that you can use to introduce jQuery into a web page. Drag these bookmarklets to your Bookmark toolbar to use them.

1. jQuerify - Introduce jQuery into any web page.
2. Fix Digg - The final bookmarklet that we made to remove all buried comments from a Digg post.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/hacking-digg-with-firebug-and-jquery

Ready to take your mind for a spin? David Kellog has created POW the Plain Old Webserver.

POW is a Firefox plugin that implements a full web server. That means that your browser client now has a server in it.

That just sounds goofy no? It can be useful though. dojo.storage needs a server to do an autoproxy with to do local storage. You could do that all via the extension.

The Plain Old Webserver uses Server-side Javascript (SJS) to run a server inside your browser. Use it to distribute files from your browser. It supports Server-side JS, GET, POST, uploads, Cookies, SQLite and AJAX. It has security features to password-protect your site. Users have created a wiki, chat room and search engine using SJS.

This version includes:

• Documentation to show you how to build a Server-side Javascript program.
• File uploading code
• SQLite interface for easy saving of persistent data

POW has more WOW than Vista!

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/pow-excuse-me-sir-you-seem-to-have-a-server-in-your-client

We are expecting Photobucket and Adobe to jointly announce a new Flash based tool for Photobucket users within the next couple of weeks. The tool will allow users to mash up videos, photos and music clips into a timeline, and add titles, transitions and other effects, and then embedded into blogs, social networks like Myspace, and other sites.

Adobe has been steadily increasing the power of their Flash-based video editing tools. In early 2006, startups like Jumpcut (acquired by Yahoo) and Motionbox launched early platforms for editing video online. More recently, Cuts.com announced even more advanced tools for their upcoming beta.

It’s not clear if the tools being adopted by Photobucket are more advanced than those used by Cuts.com, although the fact that Adobe will be participating in the announcement suggests they are taking this partnership seriously.

Slide, RockYou and the seriously hurting Filmloop all offer users the ability to create simple photo slideshows and show them off using a Flash based widget. Look for them to try to quickly add these new Flash video features as well to avoid losing users to Photobucket.

As silly as all this photo and video uploading and mashing up sounds, it’s popular stuff. Photobucket is a profitable company already, and Slide was rumored to be valued as much as $100 million after their last round of financing, with no revenue to date.

Photobucket already commands third place among video sharing sites (after YouTube and Myspace), after launching the functionality just last April. About 35,000 videos are uploaded to Photobucket daily.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/88456270/

“What do you need to know if you are interviewing for a job that involves Javascript development?”

That is the question posed to various people in the industry such as Elaine Wherry of Meebo, Tom Trenka of Dojo, Neelesh Tendulkar of Simply Hired, and Nicholas Zakas, author of Professional JavaScript for Web Developers.

Here are some of their thoughts:

• You need to know how to create an element on the fly, get a reference to any element on the page, insert, remove, replace, etc. nodes in the page. These methods should be memorized!
• No modern web application can survive without event handlers. Knowledge of the differences across browsers and issues surrounding event handling are a must.
• Do you have any experience with JSON? If so, … why do you think some developers may prefer to use this as the envelope language as opposed to XML?
• This means understanding how to set up a prototype chain and how to make sure a base constructor is applied correctly in the process of object instantiation.
• The basics of JS object mutability, and using that to isolate code. Basically faking namespaces by using objects to hold other objects.
• It’s really important for you to be able to write your own code without relying on JavaScript libraries like Dojo, Prototype, etc.

Do you agree? Anything you would add?

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/so-you-want-to-write-javascript-for-a-living

Silicon Valley based search engine startup Powerset has mostly been closed lipped about their product. This makes sense given that they are gunning for the fastest growing Internet company in history, Google. But their excitement over an exclusive deal to license PARC search technology was too much to hold in - the company made what looks to be an exclusive announcement through VentureBeat today about the arrangement.

Powerset argues that the key to killing Google is in natural language search. We discussed this in detail in an earlier post about the company. While other search engines tend to ignore common words in search queries (words like “by”, “for”, “about”, “of”, and “in”), Powerset focuses on those words to try to determine meaning and context. Read CEO Barney Pell’s post about the natural search problem to get an idea of what they’re talking about. To get right to the point: Google treats the queries “book for children,” “book by children,” and “book about children” as equivalent to “book children.” Powerset, however, promises to serve results that are relevant to each query.

There are a lot of critics of Powerset, who note for starters that Google will treat each of the above queries differently if user simply put them in quotations. Search engine expert Danny Sullivan took the Powerset idea apart piece by piece in a long article last year, saying “natural language search makes a compelling pitch for those who really don’t know search or haven’t heard the natural language mantra before.” Search experts we’ve talked with about Powerset agree to varying degrees - the problem is very, very hard to solve. And users have largely learned to simply change the way they search to get what they are looking for.

It’s impossible to judge Powerset before we actually see the product. They are, however, trying to solve a very difficult problem for which there may or may not be not much of a market (at least compared to simple, 2-3 word searches). And Google has “several teams focused on natural language and dozens of Googlers with a PhD in the field, including myself,” says Peter Norvig, Director of Research, Google. If we start to see some of those PhDs leave Google and join Powerset, that will be the first sign that the company is really on to something big.

Powerset is well funded, having raised $12.5 million from Foundation Capital, the Founders Fund and individuals, and boasts a $60 million plus valuation. Matt Marshall, author of VentureBeat, is clearly impressed after having seen a demo of the product - so much so that he’s largely become a cheerleader for the company. This is one product I’m looking forward to seeing, and hopefully they’ll return our emails soon. Maybe we’ll join the squad, too.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/88415437/