Ajax Girl

Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote about German startup SellABand when it launched last August.

Like Amie Street, SellABand has an innovative way for struggling new artists to get their music heard, and make some money as well. Artists sign up and upload some of their music. Users listen to it. If they like it, they pay $10. If a band reaches $50,000 in donations, SellABand helps them record an album with a studio and expert producer.

It’s great in theory. At the time of our original post there wasn’t much data - 130 bands had signed up in the first couple of weeks, and had raised a few hundred dollars each.

But a few months later, wow. 2700 bands from all over the world have signed up, and four have already reached the $50,000 mark and have recorded albums (Nemesea, Cubworld, Second Person and Clemence, and more are on the way. Mandyleigh, one of our readers, is currently no. 4 on the top list and looks to be headed to the studio soon.

Listeners who donate to an artist get a free CD when the goal is reached - and are refunded their money if it isn’t. Artists get 1/3 of all advertising revenue from their profile, and 60% of proceeds from eventual album sales. They also get all rights back to their music a year after the album comes out.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/105286835/

Online Videos by Veoh.com

Prom Queen is coming, and it will be distributed on MySpace. Is the future of new media going to be a world where stories are told over eighty episodes that are each ninety seconds long? And advertising galore - pre rolls, post rolls, and product placements. This may be the highest advertising to content ratio ever seen. The budget for the show is just $100k, which is nothing more than a rounding error in Hollywood.

If enough MySpacers put up with the ads and watch Prom Queen, there will be literally thousands of these shows hitting the web. And all the big portals will gleefully pushing them to us, because they’ll get a revenue share from all those ads.

And if there’s a show that’s any good, users will strip out all those ads, mash those eighty episodes together into one 700 MB file and put it on bittorent. Then the lawsuits sill start.

In an interview with NewTeeVee, ex-Disney Chief Michael Eisner (the guy behind Prom Queen, through his startup Vuguru) talks a lot about protection of intellectual property (”I think the Viacom lawsuit [against Google/YouTube] is very promising”) and how people must get paid for their work.

Those are important messages, but as I said with a post about Clown Co., save it for the shareholders. Users want a compelling product, with as few ads as possible mucking things up.

He never talks about the user experience, of the rise of the cream from the chaotic cesspool of user generated content as a real threat to Hollywood’s professionals. He thinks new media is nothing more than “technological advancement and expertise in distribution and exhibition.” “Old media, where he lumps “Greek mythology and Shakespeare and Eugene O’Neill and Happy Days” together, is where the creativity is. He says old media types “understand motivation, and character, and where the denouement goes, and how to develop interests between characters, and make people laugh, and cry”

It’s good to see the Shakespeare and Happy Days guys trying new things. But I think he’s underestimating the seismic shift that’s occurring right now around content creation and distribution. Unlike before, the audience can easily create their own content and distribute it to millions on YouTube. Some of that content will be better than anything Hollywood produces. And it won’t cost even $100k to create.

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/~3/105243354/

Scrapbook maker, Scrapblog strutted its stuff at the We Media conference last month, went off the grid, and finally came back online today.

Scrapblogs are Flash-based slide shows made up of pages of photo or video layouts you can jazz up with a myriad of designs and effects. Transitions can be added between each page and you can set the mood with some background music as your show plays. You can publish a Scrapblog publicly or by invite only and embed it as well. If you choose, viewers can leave Flickr like embedded comments on key spots of the show.

Scrapblog’s editor is a flash application, which may make a lot of you cringe, but not for good cause. Scrapblog, as we’ve mentioned before, has one of the most natural feels of any online application out there. It’s full screen and closely mimics the design of a Windows desktop application.

Creating a Scrapblog starts with a creation wizard that lets you pick one of 19 different design themes to frame your pages of photos. You can then cover this canvas with by dragging and dropping in photos, clipart, shapes, text, and even videos. Each of these media objects can be hyperlinked, overlayed, resized, rotated, and edited along several parameters.

Photos are given special treatment and support frames, shadows, as well as that quintessential web 2.0 effect, reflections. Photos can be pulled from your computer, Photobucket, Yahoo Photos, Flickr, and WebShots. Video, on the other hand, is drawn solely from YouTube. After you’ve laid out the pages, you can choose from 12 different transitions between them and from 22 different songs to play along with the show.

Photo slide shows are a crowded space which includes the 38 million user giant, Photobucket, along with two newer players, RockYou and Slide, bringing in tens of millions in financing. Like FlipTrack, however, Scrapblog keeps a distinct niche by offering a more richly designed presentation less like a series photos and more like a hipper version of Powerpoint.

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/~3/105224478/

Craig Newmark’s editorial on net neutrality. This is a serious issue for anyone who uses the web (and anyone who wants to offer any services over the net).

Here’s a real world example that shows how this would work. Let’s say you call Joe’s Pizza and the first thing you hear is a message saying you’ll be connected in a minute or two, but if you want, you can be connected to Pizza Hut right away. That’s not fair, right? You called Joe’s and want some Joe’s pizza. Well, that’s how some telecommunications executives want the Internet to operate, with some Web sites easier to access than others.

Write your rep and tell them to keep their hands off the net. Tell them you want the net to remain neutral.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/345-craig-keep-the-internet-neutral-fair-and-free

Want a MSN hotmail account? Be prepared to run this gauntlet:

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/344-hotmail-offers

Some recent postings on the 37signals Gig Board:

GE Healthcare is looking for a Web app visual designer with CSS/ASP.NET experience in Boston, MA.

Grockit is looking for a RoR Developer located anywhere (SF/LA preferred).

GrossLog is looking for a designer to create the UI for a killer web app located anywhere.

Housing Works Thrift Shops is looking for an individual or company to Finalize Ruby on Rails Point of Sale System in New York, NY.

Berlin Cameron is looking for a Flash designer in New York, NY.

Souliss is looking for a Web Developer located anywhere (UK/EU preferable).

Find your next gig or find your next contractor on the 37signals Gig Board.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/343–recent-gig-postings-on-the-37signals-gig-board

Talkers vs. listeners

“A few years ago I attended a meeting of the Association of Humanistic Psychology. One of the seminars was led by two eminent therapists. One was charismatic and engaging. The other was soft spoken and quietly confident. During the question and answer period, I realized that the “boring” therapist was a master at active listening. The charismatic therapist was performing.”

Sidestep premature optimization

“Sidestepping premature optimization turns out to be good general wisdom for life: Don’t get obsessed with a potential problem until it actually becomes a problem. The implicit suggestion here is that life’s curveballs often come from places where you least expect them, so it’s a waste of time and energy to focus too much on hypotheticals.”

Experts: Multitasking slows you down and increases the chance of mistakes

“Check e-mail messages once an hour, at most. Listening to soothing background music while studying may improve concentration. But other distractions — most songs with lyrics, instant messaging, television shows — hamper performance. Driving while talking on a cellphone, even with a hands-free headset, is a bad idea. In short, the answer appears to lie in managing the technology, instead of merely yielding to its incessant tug.”

Profile of Edward Tufte

”’I don’t want to sound too majestic, but my books are forever knowledge. People will be reading them a long time from now.’ By ‘forever knowledge’ Tufte means his principles ‘are indifferent’ to culture, gender, nationality or history. They apply to a 6,000-year-old cave etching, to the latest web design, to every map, chart and graph in between.” [via JK]

Look ma, no mouse!

Site annoyances add up

“Annoyances matter, because they compound. If the offending state-field drop-down were a site’s only usability violation, I’d happily award the site a gold star for great design. But sites invariably have a multitude of other annoyances, each of which delays users, causes small errors, or results in other unpleasant experiences.”

Upside down business at Patagonia

“Looking around at the bicycles, the surfboards, the solar panels, the Tibetan prayer flags, the shed full of convalescing owls and hawks, it’s clear that you’re not in traditional corporate-land, either. The place is all business, but it’s business conducted upside down and inside out. Everything about it flies in the face of consultants’ recommendations about How to Maximize Profits and Cut Costs. Simply put, it’s radical.” [via ZK]

The early bird catches the flight

“Earlier flights are more likely to arrive on time than later flights, because delays tend to accumulate during the day. For January of this year, at the 32 largest airports, flights due to land before 9 a.m. were on time more than 80 percent of the time; between 4 p.m. and 11 p.m., it was less than 70 percent of the time.”

A project timer for Basecamp

“Timepost is a project timer that automatically downloads projects and to-dos from various web project managers. Timepost saves you valuable time by allowing you to post accurate hours directly to services like Basecamp.”

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/342-sunspots-the-universal-edition

britepic_id = “297898″
britepic_src=”http://farm1.static.flickr.com/53/144942552_81a96c87cb_o.jpg”;
britepic_keywords=”Laguna, dog, pets, cute, perfect”;
britepic_show_ads=”1″;
britepic_caption=”Laguna: Attack Dog”;
britepic_width=”560″;

The basic format for embedding images into a web page using the <img> tag has been around almost as long at HTML itself, since the first graphical web browser. It works, and it is used constantly. But can it be better?

Advertising network AdBrite, which is always looking for new ways to think about things, says it can. This morning, AdBrite launches BritePic to help people add a lot of new functionality around embedded images. Just by changing the embed code, web publishers can add a caption, watermark, zoom, share, resize and other features. And an advertisement, if they choose to.

The end product is shown above. Instead of embedding an image using a standard tag like:

<img src=”http://farm1.static.flickr.com/53/144942552_81a96c87cb_o.jpg/”>

BritePic simply uses a javascript code (non-javascript verion is also available for myspace, blogger, etc.) and a very lightweight Flash 7 player to show the image with lots of additional features. BritePic has a code generator tool (see image at bottom of post), although all of the parameters are in the code itself, so power users can just quickly write it out. Here’s the code for the above image:

<script>
britepic_id = “297898″
britepic_src=”http://farm1.static.flickr.com/53/144942552_81a96c87cb_o.jpg”;
britepic_keywords=”Laguna, dog, pets, cute, perfect”;
britepic_show_ads=”1″;
britepic_caption=”Laguna: Attack Dog”;
britepic_width=”560″;
</script>

Any of the parameters can be changed above. When you register with BritePic you add a watermark and payment information if you choose to include advertisements in pictures. The id in the code above tells it what watermark to add. BritePic doesn’t host image files, so the src field tells it where to pull the image from. Keywords can be added (future functionality will show related pictures), adds shown or not, a caption added, and the width reset.

There are also a number of features in the pull up menu at the bottom left of the image above. Zoom is my favorite. Zoom in on a picture and see a larger version of that area. If you are using a large image and resizing, there will be less pixelation. But even for non-resized images the zoom feature could come in handy. On this blog, where we are limited in the horizontal space allowed for images, it will allow us to upload larger images and allow people to zoom in, or simply click to see the larger image on a new page.

The company has created a demo video, which we’ve embedded below.

AdBrite was founded by Philip Kaplan and Gidon Wise. Background information on the company is here.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/105165920/

Joe Walker has discussed the progress of the OpenAjax Hub. He has participated in a demo of using the OpenAjax Hub with DWR or Lightstreamer. TIBCO GI is the UI side, and it plugs into either backends with no code changes.

With a traditional request/response model, DWR (and Lightstreamer) would be calling GI routines to update. With the pub/sub model the distinction between client and server is gone because the UI publishes things it’s interested in back to the hub. There’s no reason the UI has to be GI even: any UI that groks the OpenAjax hub can play. We could even have several UI components listening to the same messages on one page.

The OpenAjax Hub is getting close to a 1.0 release, and I’m hoping that DWR will have a server-side version of the OpenAjax hub soon after. This would allow you to transparently co-ordinate remote hubs, and even allow publishing of messages from one browser to another.

I’ve put the DWR version live so anyone can have a play. It’s not exciting, but you can see it in action. Just click on an “Industry Sector” to see messages published to that sector. See the DWR/OpenAjax/GI demo. I hope to move where it is hosted soon, and this is definitely something of a test, so don’t be surprised if you get a 404. I hope we can get a demo of the Lightstreamer version live soon too.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/openajax-hub-dwr-tibco-lightstreamer-example

Dylan Schiemann has posted his presentations on dojo.gfx which are themselves written in dojo.gfx instead of Powerpoint/Keynote/S5.

• Web Vector Graphics and Dojo - Draw This!
• Web Vector Graphics: Myth or Reality?
• Vector Graphics and Comet with Dojo

It would be nice if you some key bindings were put into the presentations

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/dojogfx-presentations-in-dojogfx