Ajax Girl

On February 26 we reported that a TellMe acquisition by Microsoft was imminent. The WSJ has now reported (behind paywall) that the two companies are in merger talks, and that a deal may be signed this week. The price - “up to” $800 million.

Microsoft Corp. is in acquisition talks with Tellme Networks Inc., a closely held company that makes Web-based voice technology, and may sign a deal as early as this week to buy the concern, said people familiar with the matter.

A Microsoft agreement to buy Tellme could value the company at up to $800 million, said one person familiar with the matter.

TellMe, which operates consumer and back end automated voice recognition services, has raised $239 million in capital over four venture rounds. We gave a glowing review to a recently released TellMe mobile phone application.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/101281632/

Sun has organized a really cool event at their Menlo Park offices on March 19 in the evening - a discussion between Sun’s Timothy Bray and me on venture capital and Web 2.0. Registration is free.

Please come and cheer me on. Tim is smarter than two of me put together, so I need audience support.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/101290377/

Online reputation online is a fascinating area, partially because eBay, through their feedback score, is the only company to have reached scale. Startups like Rapleaf and iKarma are still young and struggling.

Perhaps their flaw has been in taking the high road, and going out of their way to ensure that reputational feedback is being left by verified identities.

New startup Gorb, which I first read about on David Berlind’s blog, takes no such high road. Gorb allows, even insists on, anonymous comments and ratings about an individual. Like someone? Hate them? Tell Gorb all about it, using their handy Ajax slider to rate them from 1 - 10 in their professional and personal lives, and leave written comments as well.

Arguing that a “non-anonymous system also contains “noise,” as reciprocity creates a fake positive response,” Gorb founder Leonard Boord (trash or glorify him here) thinks that anonymous feedback is the only way to go.

They do have some checks on the wholesale slaughter of people’s reputations. Each written comment can be voted, Digg style, up or down by other users. If lots of people agree with you, your reputation is enhanced. If they disagree, your reputation suffers. The person being discussed may also respond to each comment.

I agree with Boord that services like LinkedIn are often a farce - people leave good feedback on others in the hope that the gesture will be returned. And since the user must approve feedback before it is published to the site, only gushing testaments to perfection ever see the light of day.

Rapleaf does a much better job than LinkedIn at getting balanced feedback from users. But there is still a cost to posting something negative - Rapleaf isn’t an anonymous service, and comments are at least tied to a user name.

With Gorb, there’s absolutely nothing to lose by telling someone how bad they smell, or how much you dislike the tone of their voice. Libel away.

I think Gorb goes too far, and will appeal mostly to people who have highly negative things to say about others. Without fear of being held accountable for their words, people may go a little overboard in their quest to “help” people know the truth about themselves.

But Gorb also has the smell of success about it. People will be drawn to this in the same way they slow down when they pass a highway accident. They are tapping into basic human psychology, and may make a buck or two on the back of what is sure to be the misery of others.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/101211193/

Blake is at SXSW right now and trying to liveblog all the keynotes. He already blogged Phil Torrone doing his geekenwerk until PT and his friend Limor turned on a cellphone jammer and shut down his WAN card. Head over for some good coverage of a great event.

SXSW 2007: Dan Rather Keynote

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/101194610/

We’re pretty close now so it’s time to reveal the meat and potatoes of Highrise: People and Companies. Highrise is all about people. Who you (or your co-workers) talked to, what was said, and what needs to be done next for/with these people/companies.

People
Every contact in Highrise gets a page. You and your co-workers can add notes from calls, conversations, meetings, or any other historic information about this person to this page. You can also attach files, attach notes to cases (more on cases in another post), and set permissions on specific notes. It’s sort of like a weblog about each person you do business with.

In the sidebar of a contact page you’ll find any tasks related to that contact, the ability to add a new task about that contact, contact info, and an “about” section where you can post their bio, background, or anything else that might be relevant.

To add a new note for a contact just type it in the box at the top of the screen and click the “Add this note” button. Data entry is rocket fast with no barriers.Companies
Like contacts, company pages allow you to enter notes about conversations you’ve had with a particular company.

For example, if you deal with different people at a company sometimes it may just be easier to enter the notes on the company page instead of making separate pages for each person. We’ve been doing this internally with ADP (our payroll company). Since we talk to a different person each time we call we’ve found it better to just enter the notes on ADP’s page. Of course how you do it is entirely up to you.

Company pages also serve another function: They’re aggregators. Company pages aggregate all the communication you (or your co-workers) have had with any contacts at that company. It’s a great way to see all communications with everyone at a specific company. Imagine being able to see all the communication your company has had with anyone at The New York Times or at Acme Widgets, etc.

The sidebar also shows any tasks related to that company, company contact information, and the people that are part of that company. A click takes you right to the contact page of anyone listed in the sidebar.

The Dashboard
The Dashboard is the screen that brings it all together. It’s the mother of all aggregators in Highrise. It shows the latest notes/files/emails/activity entered on any contact or company page. Of course you only see items you have permission to see, but it’s a fantastic way to feel the pulse of the communications in your company.

The Dashboard also shows you your tasks in the sidebar. You can create new people or new tasks from this screen as well. And a quick person search helps you jump to any contact’s page quickly.

Sign up to have a chance at a Golden Ticket
We’ve begun 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/315-preview-6-highrise-people-companies-and-the-dashboard

Related:
Software Judo
Words of Wisdom on Learning Judo

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/312-lingo-judo

Our fellow Ajaxian Michael Mahemoff, has written about his current concerns with Ajax.

His main concerns are:

• Accessibility
• Documentation: it is getting better for Prototype, Dojo, and the rest
• Lack of good cross domain option: Are you jealous that Yahoo! can put in a crossdomain.xml in for Pipes and Flash API users can do what they want with it?
• Cross-browser programming is still painful
• Comet (HTTP Streaming) is becoming really important, but is still out of reach for the typical Ajax programmer. Too resource-intensive, too many issues to overcome, especially in the server.

Do you agree with these? Do you have other concerns?

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/current-concerns-with-ajax

Our FProd friends have created EOGallery, a concept of a web animated image gallery create using JQuery.

It uses basic jQuery functions and Cody Lindley’s Thickbox to display larger pictures. By the way, EOGallery is XHTML 1.0 strict valid and almost CSS valid, it has been tested on Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer 6 and works even with non-javascript and/or non-css browsers.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/eogallery-animated-image-gallery

Sam and the team have put out a Prototype 1.5.1 release candidate available to download here.

One of the good changes is a sign of good community. Prototype was inspired by the CSS selector performance data that Jack Slocum and others have been talking about.

Now $$/Selector is up to 5 times faster depending on the task / browser.

New features and changes

• $$ now supports virtually all of CSS3, with the exception of some pseudo-elements (like ::first-letter) and some pseudo-classes (like :hover).
• Prototype now has support for JSON encoding and decoding built in. If you’ve had issues with the official json.js library extending Object.prototype, you can now use our implementation instead. Thanks Tobie!
• Element.extend can now take a tag name or array of tag names as its first argument to apply the given methods to specific tags.
• Added String#empty, String#blank, String#startsWith, String#endsWith, String#include, and String#times.
• Added Number#toPaddedString.
• Added Form#request, which uses the form’s action and method attributes, along with its serialized parameters, to create an Ajax.Request.
• Removed support for “throw $continue” in Enumerable iterators. If you were using this in your scripts, please replace it with “return” instead.

Performance improvements

• $$ is now blazing fast. Seriously—try it out. If you’re using $$ at all, you owe it to yourself to upgrade! Element#down, Element#up, Element#previous and Element#next received performance boosts too (along with everything else that uses Selector).
• Element#getStyle and Element#setStyle are now faster.
• Array#uniq is faster. [#7417]
• String#escapeHTML now uses a cached div and text node, making it much faster. [#6937]
• Enumerable iteration is faster now that it incurs only one try/catch block instead of two (as a result of removing support for $continue).

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/prototype-151-release-candidate-released

Ara Pehlivanian has a few words to say on the accessibility of Flash:

Disabling the Flash context menu is a bad idea! By turning it off (actually setting the menu property’s value to “false“), you’re not only not allowing me to lower the quality of the animation, but you’re also not allowing people with impaired vision to be able to zoom the content for easier reading. So, though it may be cool, or “in” to do it, the next time you’re tempted to turn off the context menu, do us slower computer owners a big favour and don’t.

He must have seen this a few times recently. I like the view-source option that was added. Hopefully more and more will turn it on and share.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/flash-inaccessibility-for-the-speed-impaired