Ajax Girl

Last.fm does for music what Dutch startup Wakoopa wants to do for your desktop applications. Like Last.fm, Wakoopa uses a downloaded tracker, except if follows how often you use applications instead of listen to music. Similarly, Wakoopa has also built a Rails-powered social website around the data, letting users share their preferences with friends, write reviews of their favorite application, and download new ones. Wakoopa is backed by a fund of the three biggest media companies in the Netherlands (Ilse, IDG, Telegraaf) and launches May 2nd.

Wakoopa’s tracker logs what applications you use and for how long, updating your personal profile every 15 minutes. On the website, the aggregate data lists the most recently used applications and most used applications of all time. Each application has a profile that lists the people and groups who use it, reviews, and tags. For free applications, it also includes a download link for various versions, potentially creating a more social SourceForge. For the private beta, Firefox is the top used application, used by 23 people logging over 117 hours. MSN messenger is an odd second place, logging a total of 14 hours.

Since raving about desktop applications doesn’t have the same mass market appeal of music, I can’t see it breaking out of the developer community unless the tracker is bundled with some really attractive freebies.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/112531669/

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Voxbone - A VoIP carrier providing centralized access to local phone numbers and toll-free numbers around the world. They have their own network entirely devoted to voice traffic powered by Cisco routers and switches. With their network, you can allocate blocks of phone numbers to your customers, connect calls between VoIP and PSTN phone lines, share phone traffic capacity, and create your own solutions with their API. All for one fixed monthly fee.

Plazes - It’s what I would call geographic social networking. Plazes helps you friends see where you are and what you’re up to while on your computer or mobile phone. You can use it to keep in touch with friends and family or find new friends who are Plazes users that share the same location or interests. Plazes also connects you to the places you go to, letting you save pictures and media to the places you go.

Conduit - Personalized tool bars. Conduit lets publishers (or anyone, really) create specialized tool bars that provide all tools you and your community need. TechCrunch has it’s own tool bar (download here) that lets you search, keep you up to date on the feeds for the entire CrunchNetwork, and even listen to the latest TalkCrunch podcasts. If that’s not good enough for you, then build your own.

Pageflakes - Customized personal pages. Pageflakes lets you create your own personalized portal to the web. You can easily customize you page by selecting your interests or fine tune it by selecting from their wide array of widgets based off of their API. Recently, I’ve been using their backgammon flake. It’s simple to share the page with friends by making it public. No sign-in required.

Edgeio - Classified listings and content had always come together in print because advertisers wanted their message to reach the publisher’s readers. Edgeio is letting advertisers get that same exposure on the web, syndicating listings through publishers that cater to the advertiser’s audience. TechCrunch’s own CrunchBoard is powered by Edgeio’s latest product, Edgeio Marketplaces, which lets publishers monetize their sites through listings advertised on their own site and Edgeio’s whole network.

Auction Ads - eBay is great, but Auction Ads helps you reach potential buyers in their day-to-day web surfing. Auction Ads lets you publicize your auctions or make money as a publisher in three simple steps.

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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/~3/112551870/

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 recently launched with a streamlined, cut-through-the-crap service-level agreement (SLA). The old version was seven pages, the new version is one page (competitor Novell’s is 36 pages). According to Red Hat, the new SLA eliminates legalese and offers “no questions asked” support on anything it makes.

With one fell swoop of a presentation slide, [Red Hat vice president of support Ian] Gray took the nine-page document that accompanied Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and turned it into a one-page affair meant to simplify a customer’s service experience. “If we ship the bits, we support the bits,” he said. “No more legalese.”

In the old SLA’s place was a “production support scope of coverage.” While technically an SLA, this one-page document now says if Red Hat made it, and it’s production-ready, then Red Hat will support it—no questions asked.

Plus, the company is simplifying support for customers too. It is creating the Red Hat Cooperative Resolution Center to solve problems even when they come from partner products.

In addition, Red Hat created a support center called the Red Hat Cooperative Resolution Center. The center will work to solve issues whether they arrive from Red Hat technology or a partner’s applications, executives said. With this center, Red Hat will take sole ownership of inquiries for any partner’s product that runs on RHEL 5, regardless of whether the problem lies with RHEL 5 or the partner’s product. It’s important to note that Red Hat says it isn’t just covering vendors like Oracle, but all of its partner applications as well. According to Red Hat, its support technicians will accomplish this by working with the support staff of a customer’s vendors to solve a problem.

Kudos to Red Hat for seeing things through their customers’ eyes. Customers don’t care who/what caused the problem, they just want it fixed. When multiple technology providers are involved, it’s nice to know you can count on someone to get it done rather than shift the blame. [tx ED]

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/401-red-hat-if-we-ship-it-we-support-it

I hope Joe had a nice warm beer last night after he released the final version of DWR 2.0.

We have been talking about this release for awhile, and it is great stuff. Now you can do amazing things with Reverse Ajax, and know that security is core to the framework.

We asked Joe now that this version is out of the door, what is he looking to do for future releases:

JMS support, and OpenAjax Hub support so you can do pub/sub across
reverse ajax from one browser to another and back onto an enterprise
message bus.

ImageConverter to take Swing Images and turn them into Gifs. This would
make things like JCaptcha easy, but it also enable sexy things like
running a Swing app with -headless, taking screenshots and broadcasting
them to browsers. Add some event handling and you have multi-user X over
Ajax.

A Reverse Ajax compiler so we can take a large Javascript API (like for
example GI and create a Java version that generates script that can
be posted over reverse ajax.

An a million dull things like a better API to convert from
ScriptSessions to HttpSessions, session delete on window close, etc.

Good stuff to come!

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/dwr-version-20-final-released

Brightkite
Ryan Mendoza: “Came across this ‘we’ll let you know when it launches’ screen (at brightkite), which is a little bit out of the ordinary. It lets you get notified not only via email, but also via IM and SMS. Pretty neat, given that the product they’re promoting is about notifications.

Chicago2016
Derek Vaz: “Chicago2016.org has a nice litte form treatment for entering your reason why you support the bid. As an IA I’m always trying to make forms smaller, simpler and warmer. This actually invites me to ‘speak my mind’ instead of just ‘enter text here’.”

NBA fonts
Jeremy Wallace: “One often doesn’t see fonts competing like this…I’m going to have to go with the Jazz based on readability.”

NBA box score
Check out San Antonio veteran Robert Horry’s line from this NBA game (it’s since been modified).

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/397-screens-around-town-brightkite-chicago2016-and-nba

Real Editor is a real-time CSS editor, built on SAJA.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/real-editor-online-css-edits

DD Tab Menu is a standards compliant, 2 level tab menu. Move your mouse over a tab, and a 2nd level content appears beneath it. The script uses CSS to control all of its appearance, and plain HTML to implement the entire menu tabs and contents.

Highlights of this script are:

• Standards compliant, with menu tabs and sub contents defined using
  plain HTML, making customization a breeze. Five styles to choose from by
  default, or customize the tabs yourself.
• Entire menu and its contents search engine friendly.
• Set which menu tab should be selected by default when the page loads
  (ie: 1st tab, 2nd tab etc). If the tab contains a sub content, that
  content is shown as well. Or, have the script automatically
  select a tab when the page loads based on a match between the current
  page’s URL and one of the menu tabs’. If there is a match, that tab is
  selected.

Note that the “auto select tab” feature mentioned above is rudimentary
and isn’t meant to replace directly selecting or using server side
scripting to identify which tab corresponds to the current page. It
won’t account for all possibilities where two URLs are the same. Use it
as a convenience and fallback plan!

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/dd-tab-menus

Red Swoosh (acquired by Akamai for $15 million earlier this month) released v1.0 of FoxTorrent today. This is a fully functional BitTorrent client for Firefox that works cross platform (Windows, Mac, Linux) and has a very cool additional feature - the ability to stream files as they are downloading.

This is no Azureus (my BitTorrent client of choice), but it does the job and saves time by allowing you to manage torrents directly from the browser. I tested it on a few (non-copyright infringing, of course) files and it worked great on the standard BitTorrent functionality. Streaming just didn’t work, although with the way the BitTorrent protocol breaks files into pieces and reconstructs them in a non linear way means you may have to wait until the file is mostly complete to even begin streaming. I’ll try it again once the files are nearly complete.

A good early review is here.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/112387493/

A new service called ScratchYourself came to our attention today. It’s a fairly simple Flash application that lets users upload an image and build a lottery-style scratch card from it. During the beta period people have a chance to win some very limited cash prizes that total $90 or so per day across all winners.

Once a scratch card has been created, users can email it to friends or embed it on their site. I created a quick scratch card with our logo and have embedded it below.

What interests me more than the front end, which would easily be duplicated, is the business model and payments infrastructure they’ve put in place. Users have an incentive to create and embed these on their blogs, MySpace page, etc.: if you create a scratchcard and someone wins a prize, you get the same prize as the creator of the card. Prizes are awarded, at the winner’s choice, via paypal, mailed check or amazon gift certificate.

The company’s business model is to attract advertisers to sponsor prizes (cash, products, coupons). If ScratchYourself turns out to be trustworthy and can circumnavigate the rather complicated federal and state regulations governing sweepstakes, brands could be attracted to this. You get a good long look at the image underneath the scratch area, which is more than can be said for most banner advertising. And publishers will like the ability to win the same prizes as their readers.

Shycast and Bix (acquired by Yahoo) are also experimenting with brand based contests, albeit through video (and Shycast is also a social network).

Note: If you make a goatse scratchcard, please do not share it with me (yes, I thought about all kinds of things that you people will want to try out).

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/~3/112381980/

I’ve become a bit of a twitterholic over the last month or so, and update my twitter page frequently with updates that don’t belong here or on Crunchnotes. I’ve suffered through a slow and sometimes down site without complaint - they’re growing like a weed and need some time to stabilize.

But then my account was deleted. My last post before the deletion was directed at Twitter co-founder Evan Williams - “@ev never, never, never say that. never.” I was responding to a jab he was taking at Apple products.

I noticed that I couldn’t log in and assumed the service was simply down. But it went on for days and no one else was complaining. So I emailed to ask what the issue was, and they were able to restore the account. no data seems to be lost.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone says they haven’t received any other messages about deleted accounts. He alse says

It appears that during a routine backup, your index was somehow misplaced or not copied correctly which is why it resulted in a “404 - Not Found” error. Once you emailed me, we found your updates in the database right where they should be and corrected the error.

There were zero reports of 404 pages like this aside from yours so while we’re not 100% certain it looks to have been just the sort of error 404 pages were born to handle. Upgrades and/or maintenance we were doing on the same day was thought to be unrelated when I asked the rest of the team about this.

So there’s no conspiracy, it’s just the growing pains of a very popular service.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/112365430/