Ajax Girl

Seattle-based news site Newsvine will relaunch this afternoon with significant changes to the user experience. They’re calling the release “Evergreen.”

Among the changes: like Netvibes, Pageflakes and other personalized homepages, users will now be able to move most modules on the Newsvine home page around, or delete them altogether. Users can also add whatever news feeds they want to the home page by adding a RSS feed module.

Until now, web services that allow customization generally put the feature in a standalone area. Yahoo has my.yahoo, for example, but doesn’t allow users to make changes to the main Yahoo home page. Like their often-copied feature of allowing user comments to news items, this may be another way that Newsvine reshapes the online news industry. I wouldn’t be surprised to see the New York Times, USA Today and other sites allow users to create their own version of the newspaper, possibly even allowing outside RSS feeds in, in the next year or so. This builds intense user loyalty and makes it much more likely they’ll spend even more time on the site.

Other features include the addition of local headlines and weather and a slideshow called “News In Pictures” that shows a continuous stream of AP pictures.

Newsvine also just got bigger, stretching from 900 to 1240 pixels. The extra width can be collapsed with a click.

Newsvine has raised just $1.25 million in a single round of financing in July 2005 from Second Avenue Partners. They have six employees. The site currently brings in 600,000 monthly unique visitors generating 3.5 million monthly page views.

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/~3/111651039/

Look for music Lyrics to be added for hundreds of thousands of songs to Yahoo music later today, the first time they will appear legally on the Internet. They are being provided through a partnership with Gracenote, which is best known for its technology to detect and block copyrighted songs on websites. The company has been working with labels for some time to aggregate rights to song lyrics.

Yahoo Music’s Yahoo VP of Product Development Ian Rogers (see our interview here) says a post will be up on the Yahoo Music blog this afternoon with details.

Update: Rogers has posted on the Yahoo Music blog, and Lyrics are now live. See music.yahoo.com/lyrics. The lyrics are provided to Yahoo for free in exchange for a revenue share from ads shown on the site.

This is the first time I’ve seen the word “motherf****ers” on Yahoo.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/111633478/

This is truly inspirational.

Roger Ebert’s salivary gland cancer spread to his right lower jaw. Part of his mandible had to be removed. It’s not pretty and he can’t speak.

Tomorrow night his Ninth Annual Overlooked Film Festival opens at the University of Illinois at Urbana.

Most folks – especially public figures – in this condition would stay away from the event in order to hide from the cameras and gawking gazes. Ebert says no way.

I was told photos of me in this condition would attract the gossip papers. So what?… I have been very sick, am getting better and this is how it looks. I still have my brain and my typing fingers. We spend too much time hiding illness. There is an assumption that I must always look the same. I hope to look better than I look now. But I’m not going to miss my festival.

And what a positive attitude:

Why do I want to go? Above all, to see the movies then to meet old friends and great directors and personally thank all the loyal audience members who continue to support the festival. At least, not being able to speak, I am spared the need to explain why every film is “overlooked,” or why I wrote “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.” Being sick is no fun. But you can have fun while you’re sick. I wouldn’t miss the festival for anything!

I can’t imagine I’d have this kind of courage. Check that: I know I wouldn’t. It’s such an inspiration to see Ebert approach his current condition and life with such optimism. What a wonderful thing.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/391-roger-ebert-i-aint-a-pretty-boy-no-more-and-so-what

San Francisco-based CastTV, a video search service that is yet to launch, announced a $3.1 million round of financing from Draper Fisher Jurvetson this morning.

We first wrote about the company, which is led by husband and wife team Edwin Ong and Alex Vikati, last October. See our post and screenshots here.

AOL arguably has the best video search technology through their acquisition of Truveo in early 2006. Google also has a growing video search engine that includes both Google Video and YouTube videos.

Since many videos posted on the internet contain little or no associated meta data to describe what’s in the video, services like AOL’s Truveo and CastTV look at surrounding text to help determine what the video is about, and make it more searchable. Truveo does a great job with this. CastTV is much better based on the demos I’ve seen. Alex and Edwin won’t disclose all of the technology behind the service, but part of the trick is that they are able to track videos through multiple links on a site, collecting metadata along the way. And they also parse the code on the video files as well, gathering additional information about the content. If tags are available for the videos (such as YouTube tags), these are indexed as well. The final step is actually even more interesting - CastTV will take the data they are able to collect about a video and search the web in general for additional data. If there’s a close enough match, CastTV adds that information to the content metadata. And unlike other video search tools, CastTV indexes movies and shows from iTunes and other for-pay services.

The company says they will enter private beta next month; full launch will come this summer.

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/~3/111641496/

Eric Schmidt on enterprise customers vs. consumers

“We used to think that the enterprise was the hardest customer to satisfy, but we were wrong. It turns out, consumers are harder than the enterprise because the consumer will not give you a second chance. And by the way, I would argue that we in the industry forgot this. We became as a group – certainly I did – consumed with the complexity of the systems that we were building for powerful corporations, and we forgot that there’s a much larger market around consumers for simple solutions.”

How We Learn

According to William Glasser, we learn “10% of what we read, 20% of what we hear, 30% of what we see, 50% of what we see and hear, 70% of what is discussed with others, 80% of what is experienced personally, and 95% of what we teach to someone else.”

Participation isn't huge on web 2.0

“Only .16% of visits to YouTube, .2% of visits to Flickr and 4.59% of visits to Wikipedia are ‘participation visits’. Wikipedia numbers break down to show that older users are the ones doing the editing…There is one new blog being created every second somewhere in the world. Posting volume has also gone way up with 1.5 million posts per day. Dave said that 21% of tracked blogs are active down from 36% in May of last year. He gave us a rundown of things the top bloggers do: Post frequently, stay at it and don’t be intimidated. Japanese is the largest language in the blogosphere with 37% of posts in Japanese.”

Play-Doh interface

“As I twist the Play-Doh and take bits away, the film reacts accordingly in real-time. Add too much Play-Doh and the film rapidly speeds up. An intimate connection is made between the user and the media. Every action has a reaction in the digital space. No scary buttons to press. No instructions to read. It’s just Play-Doh.”

Coda integrates file browser, text editor, terminal, etc. into “a single, elegant window”

“While you can certainly pair up your favorite text editor with Transmit today, and then maybe have Safari open for previews, and maybe use Terminal for running queries directly or a CSS editor for editing your style sheets, we dreamed of a place where all of that can happen in one place.So, that’s what we’ve built. Coda has a complete file browser (and the ability to work locally or remotely), publishing, a full-featured text editor, a WebKit-based preview, a CSS editor with visual tools, a full-featured terminal, built-in reference material, and much more.”

A “unified theory” of information software design

“The long-standing focus on ‘interaction’ may be misguided. For a majority subset of software, called ‘information software,’ I argue that interactivity is actually a curse for users and a crutch for designers, and users’ goals can be better satisfied through other means.”

Canon 3D Papercraft

“Nearly everyone has made paper airplanes or tried origami when they were children. Take these memories further when you download dozens of 3D-Papercraft projects for free.”

The path to greatness hasn’t changed

“Scott discusses a time when presidential debate questions were answered in hours instead of a couple of minutes (and the whole debate lasted half a day). He contrasts that to today where we do things in the smallest amount of time possible so that we can do other things (or multi-tasking) and presidential debates last an hour…If we want to achieve greatness that we should pay attention to how the great people who came before us paid attention—by blocking distractions out and focusing on the task at hand.”

Car keys on the way out

“Today’s keyless models use a fob — the small remote control device that most modern cars use to lock and unlock doors — but it performs the additional duty of sending a signal to the ignition. For the car to start, the fob has to be somewhere near the dashboard, perhaps stowed in a cup holder.”

Animation of flight patterns

Ghostly and cool animation of flight patterns.

Dilbert on naming a product

Company lawyer: “I did a trademark search on all of the excellent product names you suggested. Every one of them is taken…”

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/389-sunspots-the-keyless-edition

Satama is a dutch design firm that has a nice new site, showing off their portfolio.

What interested me was that it is an example of “looks like Flash” but is actually simple Ajax. The application using YUI for animations, history management, and more.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/satama-nice-looking-portfolio

Aptana made news when they brought in RadRails, and now they have consolidated their Ruby support by announcing the incorporation of the Ruby Development Team project into the Aptana IDE:

The Aptana IDE is targeted at AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) style development and provides support for JavaScript, CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and HTML and is fully integrated with FireBug for JavaScript debugging. The Aptana IDE is cross-platform, open-source, and free; with the addition and integration of RadRails and RDT, the Aptana IDE will make “Ajax on Rails” a reality, company officials said.

I have been trying out Coda on the Mac, and it is pretty nice for mainstream Web development.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/aptana-ajax-ide-brings-together-rdt-and-radrails

Gaia Ajax Widgets is an ASP.NET Hijax library, meaning you don’t have to write JavaScript at all to use it but can use C#, VB.NET, Iron Python or any other .Net language you wish. Your code will just transform into ECMA 1.5 and XHTML.

Gaia implements most of the ASP.NET 2.0 WebControls like for instance Button, RadioButtonList and DropDownList in addition to some more “advanced” controls like a Ajax Menu, AutoCompleter, Window and DateTimePicker.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/gaia-ajax-widgets-for-net

I don’t know what it is about Seattle and travel startups, but newcomer Yapta now joins Farecast and TripHub, two other startups we’ve been tracking from that cold, rainy place.

I saw a pre-launch demo of the company yesterday from co-founder and CEO Tom Romary. The site, which should launch around May 15, helps users find deals on flights and (later this year) hotels.

Yapta is very different from other travel sites. It is not hooked up directly to airlines’ systems (as Expedia and Oribitz are), nor is it essentially a search engine for low fares like Farecast. Instead, they’re using some of the ideas behind del.icio.us and bookmarking to create a potentially compelling new way for people to search for cheap flights.

The core of the Yapta service is a browser bookmarklet or addon that lets users “bookmark” fares that they find on major travel sites. At launch, ten airline and travel sites will be supported, many more will be added over time. See a flight you are interested in and bookmark it. The flight and fare information is then stored in your account at Yapta.

Find a number of different flight options at different sites, and then go back to Yapta to compare them. This is particularly useful when you fly Southwest or Jetblue, which do not provide flight information to other services. If the fare increases or decreases before you make a purchase, that will be reflected on the Yapta site.

If you make a purchase by clicking through to the airline or travel site from Yapta, they’ll continue to monitor the price. If it falls, they’ll ping you and suggest you contact the airline for a refund or flight coupon. All airlines offer these on price drops but few consumers follow up. Yapta will help by reminding you.

The company has quite a few sources of revenue. They collect affiliate fees from most airlines and sites if the user clicks through and purchases a previously bookmarked flight. There will be some advertising on the site, and Yapta will offer information on Travelzoo-like “deals” to users who opt in. Finally, for customers who are eligible to receive flight coupons for price drops, Yapta will offer to do all the work to get the coupon for a 10% fee (or a flat yearly subscription fee of $40).

In beta testing with 275 users over the last several months, Yapta found that 34% of purchased tickets became eligible for a refund. The average refund was 16% of the ticket price, or $85. During the beta period that worked out to a total of $28,900 in aggregate potential refunds, or about $100 per beta user. If Yapta can successfully tap into this refund pool and get a share, the numbers look good. More importantly, this is a great service for consumers, who rarely even bother to check for price drops. Users can also use just this feature of Yapta by entering in the flight information on the Yapta site - they are not required to use the Yapta service for research or buying beforehand. For a lot of users, just this one aspect of the service will be very compelling.

I know I’ll be using it.

See Erick Schonfeld for more. He also saw the Yapta demo and wrote about it a couple of days ago.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/111535822/

Colin Ramsay has rolled his own TickerTape cmoponent that will scroll through items retrieved from your backend.

It is very simple, allowing you to create a ticker tape via:

It would benefit from not scrolling while you have you mouse inside, and Firefox wasn’t happy with the demo.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/tickertape-scrolling-tickers-in-javascript