Ajax Girl

Later this year we’re considering holding our first 37signals Customer Summit. We’d like to bring together anywhere from 100-300 of our customers to share our ideas, their ideas, and see if we can all learn a few things from one another.

The summit would be in Chicago. It would be priced at about $100 per person. The summit would be between 6 and 8 hours.

Some agenda ideas we’re considering include demos of all our products, a conversation about building useful software, lengthy Q&A with our designers and programmers, tips & tricks, demos of third party products that integrate with ours via APIs, “15 minutes of fame” sessions where customers can demo how they use our products to run their own businesses, and more.

We’re looking to make it casual, accessible, and valuable. It’s primarily about sharing ideas to help our customers get the most out of the products.

If you were to attend what would you like to hear? What sort of talks or demos would you find interesting? Any and all suggestions would be helpful so we can put together a valuable agenda.

Thanks!

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/384-37signals-customer-summit-exploration

On the same day that the news breaks that eBay is acquiring StumbleUpon for $40ish million, Google announces that they are building strikingly similar functionality into their Toolbar. Google (along with AOL) were reportedly in the running to acquire StumbleUpon until very recently.

The Google Toolbar now includes a dice icon. Click it and you’ll be taken to a new website that Google thinks you’ll find interesting based on your previous search queries.

This isn’t an exact duplicate of StumbleUpon functionality, which bases recommendations on your and other StumbleUpon users’ votes of sites. But the end result is the same - serendipitous discovery of new and interesting websites based on your core interests.

Google also has a widget that can be added to their personalized home page with recommended sites.

Om Malik says this is Google lashing out at StumbleUpon and eBay because they lost the deal. Given the timing, I tend to agree.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/110178024/

By popular demand we just launched a new Campfire feature. Anyone with Admin access can now kick a guest out of a room.

Hovering over a guest’s name in the “Who’s here” sidebar will reveal a red “Kick” link. Clicking that will boot the guest out of the room. It’s not a “ban” — they can enter the room again — but at least you have some control over rowdy guests.

We hope you find it useful.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/381-new-campfire-feature-kick-a-guest

High-flying startup StumbleUpon has been rumored to be in acquisition discussions since at least last November. Recently we’ve heard that talks have heated up again, with Google, AOL and eBay as potential suitors. A source with knowledge of the deal now says the company has signed a term sheet with eBay to be acquired. The price is somewhere between $40 - $75 million. (update: GigaOm is now reporting the price at a $40 - $45 million).

StumbleUpon lets users rate websites via a browser toolbar. At any time a user can click “Stumble!” and will be taken to a website highly rated by other StumbleUpon users who tend to vote in a similar way as the person “stumbling.” More often than not, it’s something almost serendipitously interesting to the reader. The company expanded into video referrals in late 2006.

People who are passionate about StumbleUpon say they like it because of the surprise factor in what they see next, and the fact that the product has such a high hit rate in delivering interesting new content. The StumbleUpon site says they have 2.1 million users, up from 1.7 million in December 2006. 4+ million sites are “stumbled” daily.

StumbleUpon has only raised a single $1.5 million round of seed financing.

Comscore says StumbleUpon had 6 million U.S. page views in March, doubling from the prior month. Unique visitors continue to rise dramatically: 900,000 in March, which is a 3x rise over the last year. Charts are below.

I’ve been unable to get confirmation, or even a comment, from the company or any of its investors. Frankly, they won’t even return phone calls (which also tells me a deal is brewing). But enough people close to the deal are talking. The facts are coming out.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/110117524/

pogoLibrary
pogoLibrary: “Rather than lining your walls with books, the books are the wall. You can’t have too much book space. Period. Goes anywhere. And the five shelves hold all your reading material while touching the ceiling and floor on only four white rubber feet.”

Perpetual calendar
Perpetual calendar: “There are only 7 days a month can start on and only 4 different month lengths (28, 29, 30 and 31 days). So with only 14 double sided inserts all 28 variations are covered.” [via SM]

Home Defibrillator
HeartStart Home Defibrillator Complete Kit: “The first over-the-counter home defibrillator guides with calm interactive voice instructions and determines the need for a shock, then advises it only if necessary; also coaches you through CPR.”
Illuminated Living Tea Lights
Illuminated Living Tea Lights: “Fired Up conjures up memories of warm nights, eating s’mores around the campfire. You Wish is a festive alternative to a real birthday cake, but without the calories.”

Heely’s

Shoes that roll. A design innovation that’s had a pretty amazing impact.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/379-designed-pogolibrary-tea-lights-heelys-perpetual-calendar-and-home-defibrillator

The Google AJAX API team has announced a genuinely useful Feed API that gives an Ajax developer the ability to access feeds, cached in the fast Google edge cache where appropriate, from across the web using a simple JavaScript API.

This is a subtle service that does one thing that is currently a pain-point for developers of certain applications. Ajax developers now have a clean way to access public feeds on any domain, and get access to the content in a uniform way.

Gone is the need for us to create a proxy on the server to access feeds from other domains.

Gone is the need to have to deal with all of the feed types. RSS, Atom, RDF, we can now use either MIXED_FORMAT or JSON_FORMAT to use the uniform access. The full set of feed formats supported is Atom 1.0, Atom 0.3, RSS 2.0, RSS 1.0, RSS 0.94, RSS 0.93, RSS 0.92, RSS 0.91, RSS 0.9. The unified feed result elements are: title, link, description, author and a list of entries[]. The entries[] list has the following elements: title, link, content, contentSnippet, publishDate, and categories.

XML and mixed formats allow you to also get access to the XML document itself, and then you can use standard DOM tactics to get what you want from that content (e.g. getElementsByTagName). You would want to use XML if you needed to grab out something specific from the feed, such as the digg:count.

RSSBling Redone

Funny story. Ben and I created Ajaxian.com as a place to host RSS Bling back in 2005, as you can see via the Wayback Machine. It was only later that we started the blog.

RSS Bling was an offline RSS reader that we create as an example of doing offline and Ajax before it was cool. We got a lot of mileage out of doing presentations and unplugging the net and seeing that it still worked.

One of our problems was getting access to feeds. We could have created a proxy to feeds, but instead we used bloglines as the proxy, and got the data from there.

With the new Feed API we can go directly to the feeds itself. We ported RSS Bling to use the API, and you can view it here.

Once you load the Feed API, you can grab a feed using google.feeds.Feed, passing in the feed URL, setting any values on it (e.g. the mode to use, how many entries you want in the result size, etc.), and then calling load(callback). The callback allows the API to grab the feed asynchronously, and holds the result itself.

Here is an example from RSS Bling that loads a feed and shows the entries in the main window:

I am really looking forward to seeing how the API is used.

For more infomation you can visit the Ajax Feed API home or check out the FAQ.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/google-announces-new-ajax-feed-api

Ryan Breen put out a call for help on a distributed performance test that had many people hitting a Dojo charting system.

The results are now in and the data seems to show:

At 37ms, Safari is easily the fastest implementation, over 3 times faster than Firefox. Internet Explorer is by far the slowest, but this may be a generic statement for the speed of VML operations. Opera was the 2nd fastest browser, narrowly losing out to Safari and turning in a time over twice as fast as Firefox.

There may be some bias in the data given that the majority of people running WebKit Nightlies are likely doing so on sexy multicore Mac hardware.

Firefox on Mac is significantly slower than Firefox on Windows. OK, so either all Firefox Mac users are on boring old PowerPC tech, the Firefox SVG implementation on Mac is slower than Windows, or my Safari hardware bias theory is totally busted. Perhaps a combination of the three. Any way you slice it, Safari’s dominating performance can’t be rationalized away — the WebKit guys have done some seriously good work on the SVG front.

Looks like Microsoft made some improvements to the VML engine in IE7 — there is a significant improvement from IE6. In the SVG space, Firefox appears to have made some marginal improvements in 2.0. Safari SVG support is new, and the per-version sample size on Opera is too low to draw any trend conclusions.

Thanks a lot to the community for helping with the test, and thanks to Ryan for compiling the data.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/performance-test-results-show-strong-webkit-outcome

In low-level land, the try/catch trick that Prototype uses was king for ‘most fun way to get the XHR object’.

Nicolas Faugout has put his hat in the ring with:

This feels like the Just Another Perl Hacker hacks in Perl land. Next we will see examples with rot13.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/make-the-xhr-abstraction-shorter

TechStars is doing something similar to what YCombinator has done – they’re funding 10 teams with up to $15,000 in seed capital and providing office space, operational support, and mentors from business leaders (and potential follow-on investors) in Boulder, CO. In exchange for the investment and everything else, the teams give up a meager 5% equity position in their companies. Our previous profile of them is here.

Ten startups ideas have now been selected out of 300 applicants.

All start-ups move to Boulder on May 15 and the program starts May 21 for 3 months. There will be 3 evening sessions each week that’ll give the teams access to 40 mentors for personal meetings and panel discussions. They’ll also have extensive meetings and access to the four founders of TechStars – notable VC Brad Feld, David Cohen, Jared Polis (founder of BlueMountain and ProFlowers) and David Brown.

Information is vague at this point on the selected start-ups, but two of them are Socialthing! and Intense Debate. Socialthing! is going to be doing something in the social networking space and Intense Debate has something to do with real-time debating online.

YCombinator’s model is similar – they give $6,000 per founder and take 6-8% of the start-ups’ equity. The model has worked – one of their investments, Reddit, went on to be acquired by Condé Nast last Halloween.

Of the selected teams, founder ages range from 20-36 with median age at 25. Seven of the teams are B2C (social learning, social networking, social media, mobile, social media sharing, alerting/messaging, local/community) and the other three are B2B (SMB/new media, infrastructure / VOIP response, enterprise social networking). One team has a partner coming from Sweden, while the other teams are all from USA (NYC, Philadelphia, St. Louis, South Carolina, Denver, Seattle, Jacksonville, LA).

Of the applicants, 80% were between 20-30 years old – youngest was 14 and oldest was 62. Of the ideas, 75% were B2C, 20% B2B, and 5% “public good”.

Editor’s Note: This post by Steve Poland, co-founder of WeBothLike.

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/~3/109968546/