Ajax Girl

One of the risks of trying to find a niche to build a startup is that the big guys can land on your face at any time. That’s why all of these startups are going to be in serious trouble when Adobe releases a free, ad supported online version of Photoshop in six months.

This announcement comes at a time when developers are lavishing attention on Adobe’s Flex platform, particularly in the video editing and sharing space. I think it’s reasonable for startups to question if Adobe will plan on competing with them in areas beyond photo editing. If that’s the case, these startups may not want to spend their time and venture dollars testing out various products, only to have Adobe jump in the middle after all the dirty work is done.

Adobe is both a platform company and an application company. Conflicts are not avoidable.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/97700026/

A new site called Spotplex launched today that arguably sorts news in a better way than Digg does. I’ve been testing the service for the last couple of weeks and like what I’ve seen.

News stories are not submitted by users, as with Digg. Instead, sites that want to participate include some javascript code on their site, which monitors what stories/posts are read. The more times a story is read, the higher it appears in Spotplex. Very popular stories will make it to the Spotplex home page.

The resulting home page on Spotplex looks a lot like Digg, showing very popular content. Popular stories are ranked under the “popular” tag. Upcoming stories (the default view) are under the “latest” tab. Readers can also view stories based on popular current tags being used by publishers, and can view a ranked list of top publishers here.

The service is still very much in beta. For now only a handful of blogs have been included. The site itself is open for anyone to read stories, but only a few blogs are included so far. The company will be bleeding in new blogs over time to avoid strain on their servers. To kick things off they’ve agreed to allow up to 1,000 blogs in to SpotPlex. If you want to be included, just email “signup@spotplex.com.” The first thousand requests will get in right away.

Can Spotplex become as popular as Digg, or more so? I think it can if it evolves properly. Unlike Digg, Spotplex won’t have to deal with voting fraud. Spotplex will have their own unique fraud issues to manage, though. Another problem with Spotplex is the fact that large blogs and publications will dominate it to start just because they have large readership already. To avoid this “the rich become richer” problem, I’ve suggested to Spotplex that the rankings be based on a publication competing with itself - so only very popular stories on TechCrunch (compared to average TechCrunch traffic) would get to the Spotplex home page. The Spotplex team has said that they’ll be tweaking their algorithm constantly after launch based on real data they get from the beta.

Spotplex is a spinoff of another startup, Opinity. The founding team includes Doyon Kim and Young Jun Pack.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/97568585/

Adobe has announced it will release a web edition of Photoshop. Yes, it will almost certainly be Flash based, not pure Ajax (technology aside, it’s the logical choice for the owner of the Flash platform!). Still, it’s big news for anyone involved in rich web apps…it wasn’t long ago when people would cite graphical editors as a typical example of what not to webify. Today, we already have several web-based image editors in production, and today’s news means we will soon have an official web edition of the best known desktop image editor.

Hoping to get a jump on Google and other competitors, Adobe Systems plans to release a hosted version of its popular Photoshop image-editing application within six months, the company’s chief executive said Tuesday. The online service is part of a larger move to introduce ad-supported online services to complement its existing products and broaden the company reach into the consumer market, Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen told CNET News.com.

Software publishers have often produced free or inexpensive “lite” editions. Now, it seems, Adobe’s plan is to use the web for a lite edition and continue using the desktop for the full package. It makes sense from the user’s perspective, as the web is an ideal, low-barrier, platform for trying out an app. On the other hand, you have to wonder about the engineering effort involved in maintaining dual editions - maybe this is where technologies like Adobe’s Apollo come in, to let you share code between desktop and web.

Chizen said Adobe laid the foundation for a hosted Photoshop product with Adobe Remix, a Web-based video-editing tool it offers through the PhotoBucket media-sharing site … Like Adobe Remix, the hosted Photoshop service is set to be free and marketed as an entry-level version of Adobe’s more sophisticated image-editing tools, including Photoshop and Photoshop Elements. Chizen envisions revenue from the Photoshop service coming from online advertising.

Adobe’s announcement comes a few days after Google introduced its premium Google Apps service, charging $50/user/yr for companies to use Google’s various Ajax tools, and Adobe is upfront about the impetus for this new initiative.

The hosted version of Photoshop is part of a bigger company strategy to introduce Internet-delivered services that complement its shrink-wrapped applications and head off likely competition from Google…”That is new (for Adobe). It’s something we are sensitive to because we are watching folks like Google do it in different categories, and we want to make sure that we are there before they are, in areas of our franchises,” Chizen said.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/photoshop-online

Berkeley, California based Wesabe will announce a $700,000 round of financing tomorrow from O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures (as well as a couple of individual investors), and Tim O’Reilly will join the company’s board of directors. A good overview video of the service, which launched in December, is below.

Wesabe is best described as a web version of Quicken, but with some fundamental differences that make all the difference in the world. Transactions can be tagged, for example. Also, as individual merchants are renamed by multiple users to make it more definitive (think about the crazy merchant names that appear on credit card statements), this better merchant data is automatically distributed to all other users as well.

One key difference between Wesabe and Quicken is a maniacal obsession with security and privacy. You can download data from up to twelve credit card, bank and other financial accounts. Your account credentials are never stored on Wesabe’s servers, though. You either download the data to your personal computer and then upload to Wesabe, or store your account credentials in an encrypted format on a small piece of Wesabe software on your computer. The result is that hackers can’t access your account credentials by breaking into Wesabe’s servers.

Wesabe has also spent a lot of time making it as easy as possible to leave the service. You can easily export your data and, more importantly, delete it directly from the Wesabe servers.

The service has been live for three months: $300 million in transactions have been recorded from 130,000 distinct merchants, and 1 million tags have been applied.

The company has eight employees.

This is OATV’s third investment (they also put money into Instructables and Chumby).

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/97547225/

Seriosity has a solution for over-crowded email inboxes. If you want someone’s attention, you’ll be paying for it.

The company’s hook is that they’ve studied World of Warcraft and other multi-player games and believe they’ve found the right way to get people’s attention - virtual currency. You attach a payment to an email, called a Serio, which is transferred to the recipient. The recipient is able to determine how important an email is based on the size of the payment. When an inbox is overcrowded, presumably the reader will sort through to the higher paying emails.

This strongly reminds me of beenz, a Web 1.0 currency that would be handed out for doing various things, like visiting web sites, that users otherwise wouldn’t be bothered to do. The company fell apart just after the Nasdaq tanked earlier this millennium.

What isn’t clear is what people can do with the currency other than send emails. Let me convert this into cash or frequent flyer miles or something else, and I’m in (beenz did this). Otherwise, what’s the point, other than to amass a stunningly large number of Serio and then spend it on…sending emails.

The company, founded in 2004, is based in Palo Alto and is using $6 million in venture capital to feed 27 hungry employees. See CNET for more.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/97449251/

There were a bunch of product demos today at Adobe’s Engage event, but there were a few that stood out and should have a big impact on the startup world. They also happened to be some of the best demos of the day.

Virtual Ubiquity - Rick Treitman demoed their word processor application, BuzzWord, which was built entirely in Flex 2 and looks like it could be a direct competitor to Google Docs. The team focused heavily on making sure pagination and typeography were first class, something Flash has been bad at. They’ve created a great UI around the document workflow and have features like ruler tooltips when embedding assets that help people work with their documents. They are focusing on the collaborative document space so that users can be designated as reviewers, read-only, or actual authors and discuss the document. They are aiming for a public beta later this summer.

Scrybe - Faizan Budar presented Scrybe and showed the features that were in the video that generated so much buzz. He demoed all three major features live and made a point of saying that everything in the video is now working in the application. He showed off the calendar portion of the application, which has a great UI, the “PaperVision” which allows you to print your information into special pocket size chunks, and the option to save content to your Scrybe account from any website. The user interface is clean, useful, and it all works offline. They’ve opened up the beta to a limited number of people and hope to open it up to the general public after their next round of features are complete.

yourminis - Alex Bard, the CEO of Goowy Media , demoed what yourminis is working on. A lot of it has been covered by TechCrunch, but they really dug into Apollo and the API that they plan to release next week. With Apollo, they are building out a widget platform that will touch the web, embeddable properties, and the desktop. Alex took a yourmini widget and dragged it to the desktop straight from the browser which made for a poweful demo. Their API is going to enable developers to create their own widgets on the yourminis platform. They built a Twitter widget using the API that is great, so I think content providers are going to be excited about the freedom that the API allows.

Intelisea - One application that didn’t fall into the category of web startup but demonstrated how far the Flash application has come was an app from Intelisea. The application, built in Flex 2, is the front end for controlling a yacht. It runs on a touch screen interface and allows the user to look at engine stats, fuel levels, weather and GPS coordinates. There’s also a security feature that uses RFID tags to track the people on the boat and sounds an alarm when someone falls overboard. It displays a red dot on a schematic of the ship to indicate where the person fell off. It’s something that will never be seen on Web 2.0, but makes for a fun story when it comes to the Flash Platform.

Engage did a good job of showing how diverse the Flash platform is. There were a lot of great questions about the role Adobe needs to play in the design community and what makes web apps better (it’s not gratuitous animation or UI). And there are a lot of interesting startups using the Flash platform. Luckily we got a look at some of those today.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/97428397/

François Zaninotto has been talking about a new Unobtrusive JavaScript Plug-In for symfony.

Simple Example

How it is generated

this becomes…

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/symfony-unobtrusive-javascript-plug-in

So far we’ve talked about the big picture, permissions and groups, and the welcome and workspace tabs. Next we’re going to talk about adding people to Highrise.

Adding people manually
Speed is king. We’ve taken speed into consideration every step of the way in Highrise. And there’s more to speed than just page load. Speed also involves thinking about what information you ask for and when you ask for it. It goes beyond just required and optional fields. It’s about presentation.

The add a person page just asks for a few key data points. First name, last name, title, and company (and only first name is required). You can add contact information (phone, email, IM, address, etc.) now or later. You can also set permissions now or later.

Adding people with vCards
Adding people manually is great for one-offs or someone you just met or a lead that just called on the phone. But sometimes you already have people’s contact information elsewhere. Sometimes you have a lot of people to get into Highrise quickly. Enter vCards.

With Highrise you can upload a vCard to create people or augment an existing person quickly. Highrise can also accept a single vCard with multiple people. For example, the Apple Address Book allows you to export all your contacts into a single vCard. Highrise can read that card and import all those people at once.Adding people from Basecamp
Got a Basecamp account? If yes, you can pull over all the people you’ve already added to your Basecamp account right into Highrise. And everyone part of the main company in Basecamp will also have their username and password carried over from Basecamp so they can log right into Highrise without having to set up another account.

The mystery way
There’s one more way to get new people into Highrise. We’ll be covering it in a future preview post.

Merging duplicates
It happens. You enter the same person twice or import someone that already exists or someone else adds someone without checking to see if that person is already in Highrise.

If you want to merge duplicates in Highrise, just go to the person you want to “lose” the merge. Then you click the “Merge” link. Then you see a screen like this:

Step 1 explains the rules. Step 2 shows you exact name matches. Step 2 also allows you to search for someone else that may not be an exact name match, but is the same person. Step 3 merges the winner and the loser into a single winner. Any contact information the loser had that the winner doesn’t have will be carried over to the winner. It’s simple and works beautifully.

Sign up to have a chance at a Golden Ticket
As we get closer to launch we’ll begin issuing “golden tickets.” Golden ticket holders will have access to sign-up for Highrise prior to the public launch. To sign up for a chance at a golden ticket, be sure to sign up for the Highrise announcement list.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/297-preview-4-adding-people-to-highrise-and-dealing-with-duplicates

Gabi S. in what appears to be her first blog post has already started off with a bang. In tutorial form she shows how to integrate GWT with Spring.

To integrate [the GWT application] with Spring we only have to register our GWT servlet in our web.xml so we can simply use Spring’s ServletForwardingController to call services by name. We also have to modify a bit our GWT client to reflect a path change we have to do…The ServletWrappingController [defined in the Spring application context] controls the RemoteServiceServlet’s lifecycle completely, emulating the servlet-container.

So once you have instantiated your GWT services with Spring, you are free to use all of that good stuff, like inversion of control (IoC), aspect oriented programming (AOP), etc. For those wanting a quick overview of Spring, the “swiss army chainsaw of Java and .NET frameworks,” have a look here.

Note: we are using Spring on the server side here, not the client side. For IoC in the browser, see the earlier post on JDA.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/gwt-spring-integration-demistified

Alphabet 26 combines the “best” upper and lowercase letters into an alphabet using only 26 symbols.

The impetus for Alphabet 26 was provided in 1949 as he watched his young son labor over his first reader. As he watched, he made a discovery. His son was able to read the first sentence, “Run Pal,” but stumbled over the second sentence “See him run”. Obviously the boy was confused because the symbol R in the first sentence became a totally different symbol ‘r’ for the same sound in the second sentence. Results: Learning to read is that much more difficult. The act of reading is that much slower…A graphic symbol, or for that matter any trademark worth its salt, to be efficient, should be constant.”

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/284-redesigned-alphabet