Ajax Girl

Google threw a new product called Goog-411 into Google Labs today - a free telephone based information service that could replace toll 411 calls. About 2.6 billion 411 calls are made in the U.S. each year, and it is a $7 billion/year market.

Goog-411 can be accessed by dialing 1-800-GOOG-411. The product is completely automated and there is no way to talk to a human for additional or clarifying information. You tell it your city and state, and then ask for a specific business or business category. In my tests the product was excellent. Although the voice recognition was only working at about 70% efficiency, I just said “back” and retried when it didn’t understand what I said. Results are spoken back or text messaged back to you, and you are automatically put through to the phone number requested.

GOOG-411 is using Google’s normal local business information available on Google Maps and elsewhere. Businesses that want to add or correct data can do so here.

The product competes head on with Jingle Networks, which has taken 6% market share in the U.S. 411 business over the last year. AT&T is also experimenting with free 411 calls. None of these products come anywhere close to as good as TellMe’s rich client business information tool for mobile phones, but few phones support TellMe at this time (TellMe was recently acquired by Microsoft).

The paid 411 market is so dead. I’m betting these free alternatives take at least 50% market share within a couple of years.

Update: This is actually a product that Google’s been testing in various formats for some time. Steve Poland (a regular contributor here) is pointing me to some posts (and here) by Greg Sterling from last year that discuss this. The earliest reports on this are from October 2006, and the service may be from an acquisition of 1-877-520-FIND. More information here.

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/~3/107189138/

Technorati has retained New York-based James & Company to conduct a CEO search for the company. For the last few weeks, the firm has been reaching out to potential candidates in Silicon Valley and elsewhere to gauge their interest in leading the nearly four year old company. No word on whether founder and current CEO Dave Sifry will take a new position at the company or will move on to something else. it’s also possible, of course, that no suitable candidate will be found to replace Sifry.

Technorati’s stats have been largely up recently, although a number of distribution deals they currently have in place may be in jeopardy. Employees of the company were reportedly told about the CEO search last week.

Technorati is the largest blog search engine, with blogsearch.google.com taking the second spot. Of course, Google is indexing blogs much more regularly today than they were even a year ago - suggesting that Google’s main search engine at Google.com is most likely Technorati’s biggest direct competitor.

Technorati has not yet responded to an email request for comment. Rumors of a CEO search at Technorati were first reported by Valleywag.

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/~3/107132467/

Azer Koculu has created JSMP, a JavaScript media player.

It has an interesting effect.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/jsmp-javascript-media-player

MediaMaster is a new web service that, like Faces and Oboe, let’s users upload music from their hard drive and listen to it online.

The original service to experiment in this area was MP3.com’s My.MP3.com service. Then, users could “prove” ownership of music by placing a music CD into their computer. MP3.com would then give that user access to an online copy of the songs on that album. They were sued by the music industry and lost. Eventually the site was sold off and dismantled, and CNET now owns the domain name.

MediaMasters is pretty simple to use. You sign up for a free account. Your music folder starts with one classical music sampler, the equivalent of MySpace’s “Tom” for MediaMaster’s music service. Users can then upload songs from their computer into their MediaMaster account. Music you’ve selected for upload sits in a queue until the transfer is complete. They’re currently not limiting your account size, but disk space is cheap and users upload bandwidth is a good limiting factor. All the files you upload are linked to some nice looking album art, making it easy to drag and drop them into playlists.

You can consume your playlists in a variety of ways. You can listen to them from within your web account, a widget like the one to the right, or a “radio station” playable on any program that can process a .pls playlist file URL (ex. Windows Media Player). Once music is uploaded, MediaMaster never lets you download the whole file. Instead, the players stream music to you through each of these methods, perhaps dodging some legal bullets.

Oboe offers similar services, but is a desktop application that automatically syncs your music to your online account, allows you to download your music on another system, and doesn’t have an embeddable widget. Like Oboe, Faces allows you to sync your desktop music with your online account, but with the end goal being proliferation of your music on their social network through a widget. The Faces widget plays your own song list, but can also add and play your friend’s playlists via RSS.

MediaMaster is planning on going the same social music discovery route as Faces and the host of other social music sites and services out there. The widget is the first evolution of this idea and there will no doubt be a variety of new features added onto the little player in the near future. See Josh Lowensohn’s early review, and the demo video below, for more details.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/107113557/

The cult of transparency and why secrecy is dying

“Radical forms of transparency are now the norm at startups – and even some Fortune 500 companies. It is a strange and abrupt reversal of corporate values. Not long ago, the only public statements a company ever made were professionally written press releases and the rare, stage-managed speech by the CEO. Now firms spill information in torrents, posting internal memos and strategy goals, letting everyone from the top dog to shop-floor workers blog publicly about what their firm is doing right – and wrong…The very process of developing ideas, products, and messages is changing – from musing about it in a room with your top people to throwing it out on the Web and asking the global smartmob for a little help.” [via BF]

Logos that look different each time you see them

“Saks’s chopped-up logo is the latest and most visible example of what graphic designers call a dynamic visual identity. That’s design-speak for a logo that looks different each time you see it — like MTV’s graffiti-esque initials or the customized symbols with which Google celebrates Thanksgiving and Valentine’s Day — as opposed to the old-fashioned corporate ones, which always look the same.”

Call for a Blogger's Code of Conduct

“There’s an attitude among many bloggers that deleting inflammatory comments is censorship. I think that needs to change. I’m not suggesting that every blog will want to delete such comments, but I am suggesting that blogs that do want to keep the level of dialog at a higher level not be censured for doing so…e’re going to adopt a policy of deleting comments that are ad-hominem, insulting, or threatening to any individual. I’d like to see other bloggers do the same…It would be nice to have mechanisms in blogging platforms to show markers for deleted comments, with the reason shown.”

Why do icon designers deliver icons individually sized in PNG or GIF files instead of a single vector file?

“When you take a vector image, originally sized at 24×24 and scale it down to 16×16, the relative proportions do not match. There’s no way you can evenly distribute 24 pixels of information into 16 pixels of space (remember, there’s no such thing as half a pixel). So the image blurs…Now this is fine if you want Fisher Price icons, but not desirable if you’re looking for crisp and clean. And this is why we design each icon size to scale, instead of relying on a single vector file. It takes more time, and may cost a little more money, but we believe the results are worth it.”

Using blocks of color to create a grid in Photoshop

“Instead, I create blocks of solid color — usually in Web-safe #FF0000 red — to represent my grid, group them together in a layer folder ordered at the top of my layers palette, and set each of them at roughly 40% transparency. This allows me to toggle the grid on and off, and also to swap variants on the grid — different combinations of units and columns — at will. Much, much easier than using Photoshop’s guides.”

Interview with Google’s Eric Schmidt

“Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, talks about Google’s industry and competitors, about leading innovation, and career advice.” [via GK]

CEOs analyze New England Patriot’s coach Bill Belichick’s management style

Belichick 1) Is a good role model. 2) Is a keen judge of talent. 3)
Isn’t afraid to make tough calls. 4) Learns from his mistakes.

Ignore the pressure to come off as a credible member of the “enterprise” community

“Companies selling ‘business’ products can’t resist the image of the stock-art ‘professional’. You know, those people on your online banking site who just look do damn thrilled to be sitting in front of a laptop in a suit reading about their latest finance charges. Or the painfully diverse group of young professionals you see in those de-saturated photos on ‘B2B’ sites pretending to brainstorm up a heap of enterprise solutions.”

Design Rules

“Fast Company asked 15 top designers – creators of buildings, furniture, products, Web sites, costumes, and labels – to deconstruct something that exemplifies great design to them. More important, we asked them to tell us what we can learn about the art of design.”

Parents turning to children for advice more often

“They think of their computer-savvy, plugged-in children as confidants, and so they look to them for advice on life decisions, as well as major purchases: cars, computers, vacation packages, real estate, home décor. An article in the Journal of Business Research for April says today’s children ‘encounter decision-making at an earlier age,’ are ‘taking on greater roles and responsibilities in family purchases’ and are influencing their parents’ buying decisions far beyond areas where children are the ‘primary product users.’”

Cashboard

Estimate, invoice and time tracking software that integrates with Basecamp.

Justin.tv

“Justin.tv is the live videostream of Justin Kan, a 23-year-old web entrepreneur in San Francisco who has coined the term “lifecasting” with his no holds barred self-documentation approach. Kan has attached a camera to his head that delivers a 24/7 stream of his life from his point of view. (The only time he takes the camera off is when he goes to sleep at night, which leads viewers to wonder what will happen when the opportunity to get intimate with someone presents itself.)”

Chapter 1 of Mark Hurst’s Bit Literacy

“Bits reveal several paradoxes: they’re weightless, but they weigh us down; they don’t take up any space, but they always seem to pile up; they’re created in an instant, but they can last forever; they move quickly, but they can waste our time. (Compared to the wide organic diversity of atoms, which come in all sizes and configurations, bits are limited to two states: 1 or 0, on or off. Maybe it’s the close proximity of opposites that causes such frequent paradox in the bit world.) Avoiding or ignoring these paradoxes inevitably brings on overload; bit literacy teaches you how to accept and work with them, in order to take control of your bits.”

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/358-sunspots-the-vector-edition

TIBCO GI has released a new test automation kit:

To further support rapid Ajax application development cycles in the enterprise, TIBCO has released TIBCO General Interface Test Automation Kit, a free, open source kit optimized for functional, unit and regression testing of solutions built with its TIBCO General Interface Ajax toolkit. The testing suite extends the popular Selenium TestRunner open source project with additional libraries and features that streamline the testing cycles for Ajax applications, components, and portlets.

It is a very smart move to take Selenium and add features on top of that, instead of starting from scratch.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/tibco-announces-general-interface-test-automation-kit

TIBCO GI has released a new test automation kit:

To further support rapid Ajax application development cycles in the enterprise, TIBCO has released TIBCO General Interface Test Automation Kit, a free, open source kit optimized for functional, unit and regression testing of solutions built with its TIBCO General Interface Ajax toolkit. The testing suite extends the popular Selenium TestRunner open source project with additional libraries and features that streamline the testing cycles for Ajax applications, components, and portlets.

It is a very smart move to take Selenium and add features on top of that, instead of starting from scratch.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/tibco-announces-general-interface-test-automation-kit

The nice giant robots have smashed away a JavaScript REST implementation that is inspired by the Rails ActiveResource library.

Jester builds on Prototype and ObjTree, a nice DOM parsing engine for JavaScript.

Take a peak at how it works via the examples (run in Firebug):

Holy client-side programming batman!

( via Alex MacCaw )

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/jester-javascriptian-rest

Azer Koçulu developed a multi-player platform for Connect4 using php and javascript. It is possible to play the game simultaneously in multiple tables and chat with your opponents b y opening multiple game windows.

So, if you are few up wasting some time at work on Twitter, jump over and play some Connect 4!

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/multiplayer-connect-4