Ajax Girl

JibJab, the creators of the famous 2004 U.S. presidential election parody cartoon “This Land” have a new original video out called “The News,” embedded above. The new video premiered tonight at the annual Radio and Television Correspondents Dinner.

All of their original videos can be viewed here.

JibJab is slowly expanding from pure content creation to becoming a hub for humor-related video and other media. In October we mentioned their Great Sketch Experiment.

In my opinion, “The News” isn’t as good as previous content from JibJab, although things really pick up at the 1:20 mark.

The company was founded by brothers Gregg and Evan Spiridellis and is currently headquartered in Santa Monica, CA. JibJab raised a Series A round of funding from Jon Flint at Polaris Ventures in June.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/105065959/

TripSync, a distributed booking system aimed at trip planning for small to medium sized businesses, quietly launched last week. We recently reported on some other distributed booking systems as well.

TripSync is a web based application that lets your business book and manage the three major details of any business trip: flight, rental car, and hotel. You use a search wizards to find and make bookings in each of these categories. After specifying all the details, you can pay for all the arrangements by credit card, or hold off on payment and reserve the listing for 24 hours (most travel sites don’t have this option). When the booking is finalized, an itinerary with accompanying maps is saved to your online account and emailed back to you.

That would be all well and good for a one man show, but TripSync also has an administration level making it possible to plan trips for other members of your organization. Each user can make the administrator’s job a bit easier by setting their preferences for the types of flights, cars, and hotels they want. Armed with this info, the admin can then make and manage trips for every employee and post them to their TripSync account.

Each trip can be managed on site, or through an easy to use Outlook plugin that automatically posts your trip itineraries to your calendar (Google and Yahoo calendar coming). The Outlook plugin makes it easy to rebook your plans by simply dragging and dropping the appointment to a new spot on your calendar. If the slot is available it will rebook. They have a great demo of the whole process here.

TripSync has larger plans than being a destination site for trip planning. They are currently integrating their technology with various partners in tied to booking services such as conferences, expense reporting programs, and CRM applications. They also plan to lower the affiliate margins travel services have to pay. Currently the site’s search engine uses Sabre Holding’s database of travel information for flights, cars, and hotels (Travelocity also uses them). Sabre charges monthly fees for storing this information as well as a for each booking made on through the service. These fees are somewhere around $9-$12 per booking for flights (depending on complexity) and cut into airline’s profit margins. South West has decided not to play this game and decided to never participate in these large globally distributed databases. TripSync wants to circumvent Sabre and book directly through the service providers for a smaller affiliate fee, allowing them to compete with lower booking prices.

TripSync is based out of White Plains New York with $3.5 million in financing they received from lead investor Ascend Venture Partners along with First Round Capital and various other angels last April.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/105064362/

Wired Magazine is hiring one or two bloggers for its Epicenter business blog. You must be “fast, accurate, curious, motivated and willing to trash Digg every once in a while to be considered (I added that last qualification myself ).

To apply, email them a 200 word blog post on a recent Silicon Valley business topic. Details on the position and how to apply are here.

Of course, if you think you’re really hot, send me an email instead. We give stock options.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/105071074/

Join me for a three-hour workshop on web-app design in London on April 17th. I’m giving the workshop once in the morning and again in the afternoon.

We’ll take an in-depth look at my design process. In particular, we’ll discuss specific UI techniques and pitfalls along with best practices for collaboration among designers and developers. I’ll present individual techniques against the wider backdrop of “What really matters” to make software that people love.

I hope to take a lot of questions and learn a lot from the attendees as well, so bring your thoughts and experience!

Future of Web Design Workshops
17th April 2007
Kensington Close Hotel, London
£395 exc VAT
Plus a copy of the Future of Web Design Conference on DVD!

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/341-ui-workshops-with-ryan-in-london

TailRank, a popular blog news organizer that competes with TechMeme and Megite, has opened up its back end and will provide the service as a platform to application developers who would like to add a blog index and ranking service. The new service is called Spinn3r and goes live at around noon today. Rumor is it already powers Gnoos, which we covered last June.

Spinn3r indexed 1 million blogs. They are charging a monthly licensing fee per thousand blogs crawled, indexed, and delivered.

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/~3/104982531/

London-based WebJam, a community of openly editable personal pages, just raised $2 million from French early-stage VC I-Source Gestion. You can see our earlier coverage here.

WebJam lets you create as many personal pages as you like by using their ajax editor to drop specialized modules onto your page. It’s a little Ning and a little Netvibes or Pageflakes without the open module standards. Default pages start you off with modules for blogs, personal profiles, or personalized start pages. WebJam makes creating or modifying your own page easier by letting you to copy modules or even entire layouts from other WebJam pages to your own page with just one click.

Modules include personal publishing (blog), community (friend lists, bulletin boards…), media (photos, music, rss feeds…), and productivity tools (notepad, search, gmail…). Each of these modules can remain public, visible to friends and registered users, or kept private. Each of these pages also has a community attached to it, which you can invite other users to join. You can use this feature to emulate Ning to a degree by first creating a central group page with the community modules installed, and then inviting friends with profile page modules to join.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/104938498/

Zune

Daniel Øhrgaard writes:

Notice how the little, er, laser-beam-thing (?) above the navigation suggests moving from left to right, i.e. first you “meet zune” and in the end you, inexorably, require “support”… Well, at least it’s sorta honest.

PHP Developers’ Network

Megan Jack writes:

Check out the yellow box that alerts you that this article may be out of date. I’ve come across a lot of content on the web that is not dated. Is this article from 2005 or 1998? Who knows. The PHPMac method could be applied to any site – I think a lot of misinformation occurs when people don’t realize that content they are reading is out of date, either because there is no date or because they don’t notice that the article or website is several years old. About.com is particularly bad for this (no dates on articles).

Planet Argon

Nice “create an account” form at Planet Argon.

American Express

We have to be ThirtySevenSignals for AmEx.

Got an interesting link, story, or screenshot for Signal vs. Noise? Contact svn [at] 37signals [dot] com.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/337-screens-around-town-zune-php-developers-network-planet-argon-and-amex

Zimbra has had a local proxy solution for a long time, so it only made sense that they would innovate quickly to come up with Zimbra Desktop:

Zimbra Desktop is the next generation leap forward for Web 2.0 applications- now you can have Zimbra’s Ajax-based collaboration experience online and offline. That means when you are out of the office without a connection (say, in a plane, train, or automobile), you can keep working without missing a beat. Write email, add new appointments, edit documents and when you re-connect changes will be automatically synced to the Zimbra Server.

We talked to Kevin Henrikson of Zimbra and he kindly answered some questions:

Q. Not all offline is equal. What is Zimbra’s solution, and how does it compare to Apollo, Slingshot, Firefox…

Zimbra has used a variety of off the shelf open source technologies to provide our offline solution. Jetty(http support), Derby (SQL support), Lucene (full-text indexing), etc. The choice of these components was for several reasons. They can be embedded, Java based(our tech of choice), made reuse of our current code easy, ability to support extremely large data sets, and ability to be optimized for heavy email/collaboration work loads. The key difference is large datasets and the ways in which we need to to access that data with a mix of structural (SQL), full-text (search) and object (blob) patterns. Most other offline solutions take a file or object based storage API but for Zimbra we need to be more flexible.

Summary of ways in which Zimbra Desktop’s solution differ’s from apollo/slingshot/firefox/dojo:

• Released and publicly available today(although in alpha)
• 100% Open Source and based on open protocols/technology
• Cross platform including Mac/Linux/Win32
• Designed for very large datasets (sub-second search responses on multi-GB mailboxes)
• Reuses Zimbra AJAX web UI and SOAP/JSON based API
• Requires a local client install(some of the above may not)
• Cross browser (Safari/IE/Firefox)
• Java Based vs Rails (Slingshot) vs Flex/Flash (Apollo) vs Browser specific (Firefox)

What are the challenges for a developer to create offline capable applications?

Some questions/challenges when taking a webapp offline:

• Do you take all your features and data offline?
• What browsers/platforms will you support?
• Data integrity now that an offline copy can become the master.
• Conflict resolution and change mgmt in multi-user environments/applications.
• End user desktop support. Something many web app developers take for granted.

How important is offline to your customers?

Very important. In fact this was a major driver. People have asked for a Zimbra offline solution and in particular wanted the same interface they’d fell in love with when working online. Countless number of times we’ve heard customers and our community and ask to keep the Zimbra AJAX interface when away from home and a network connection. The pain they felt when forced to use Outlook, Apple Mail, Thunderbird, or some other fat client when traveling made them want a Zimbra like interface and feature set.

Should the average Joe start trying to implement offline, or should we be waiting for the new standards to be implemented and such?

It depends. Do you users need it? Are they asking for it? Is the data your app needs offline access to small and simple? Applications like Instant Messaging don’t make sense to take offline. On the flip side applications where offline editing, composing and creating are common may have reasons or need for an offline solution today. For Zimbra we heard the need frequently. Other applications may not have that same pressure and can wait until standards are written and toolkits like Dojo stabilize and become popular making the hard things easy for the average web developer. Dojo in particular is something we are watching with great interest. Brad Neuberg has been looking at this issue for quite sometime. First with AMASS (flash backed web storage), then Dojo Storage (pluggable storage toolkit) and more recently the Dojo Offline Toolkit(complete offline framework). It’s 100% open source, cross platform and cross browser. Doesn’t quite meet the needs of an application like Zimbra but will help a large number of applications on the web today. Those apps should be able to create an offline solution rather quickly when starting with the Dojo Toolkit. In particular we like the way he’s handled online/offline detection and the automatic switch between.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/zimbra-desktop-thoughts-from-the-team

Franky Braem and his team have created wxJavaScript, a UI toolkit that started out as a port of wxWidgets:

But at this time, wxJavaScript is a lot more. wxJavaScript has an Apache module
mod_wxjs, an SQLite module, … And many
other modules are planned. So with wxJavaScript, you can write
server side scripts for generating (x)html pages, system scripts,
GUI applications, … in one of the most used programming languages: JavaScript.

wxJavaScript uses SpiderMonkey. SpiderMonkey is the
JavaScript engine of Mozilla.
E4X is activated
in wxJavaScript. E4X is a programming language extension that adds native XML support to
JavaScript.

With wxJavaScript you can write system scripts, gui applications or
dynamic webpages using JavaScript. This isn’t another Ajax library.

This release contains the following updates:

• Introduced namespaces (like used in YUI)
• + tpl (Template module) uses namespace ‘tpl’
• + Sqlite uses namespace ’sqlite’
• MySQL module introduced
• wxHtmlWindow added
• Renamed xml module into expat module
• sqlite: removed open (use ctor now), close, finalize (automatically done)
• db: removed close method (automatically done)
• renamed property isOpened to opened
• The firstline of the script can contain a shebang now (#!)
• mod_wxjs: wxJS_PreScript and wxJS_PostScript directives added

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/wxjavascript-js-port-of-wxwidgets-and-beyond

ToonDoo launched this morning, a new site that lets users easily create comic strips with pre-built or uploaded images and text. This is an Indian company, and has the same parent company, AdventNet, as Zoho (one of our current sponsors), a fairly serious online office application startup (see our coverage here).

The creation tool is a Flash applicaton that includes a number of options for characters, props, backgrounds and text bubbles. Users can also upload their own images and include them in the comic strip.

Once the strip is created it can also be published to the ToonDoo platform, along with a title, tags and a description. User comments and rankings help bring the good stuff to the front. The service just launched moments ago, so there isn’t much content there yet, but the most favorited strips are here. This is my personal favorite. ToonDoo is free.

Check Comeeko and Stripgenerator, two existing services, as well.

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/~3/104897902/