Ajax Girl

By crazy popular demand we present the Highrise API. The Highrise API now joins the Basecamp API, Backpack API, and the unofficial Campfire API.

So what can you do with the Highrise API? You could create useful things like Dashboard/Yahoo/Vista widgets for quick contact lookups or adding notes or tasks. You could write a tool to sync Highrise with Outlook, the Mac Address book, Plaxo, or your mobile phone. You could make a Highrise Quicksilver plug-in like this Backpack Quicksilver plug-in. There are a thousand ideas out there waiting for you. Here are some of the things developers have done with the Basecamp API.

Let us know what you build and we’ll happily help you promote it to our Highrise customers. Have fun and build something useful!

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/409-the-highrise-api-is-here

Recent jobs on the Crunchboard Job Board:

• Flash Design and Production Artist at Filter in San Francisco
• Sr. Software Engineer at Piczo in San Francisco
• Web 2.0 Software Engineer at R7 Solutions in Houston
• Technology Evangelist at Truveo (AOL) in San Francisco
• Marketing Manager at Snapvine in Menlo Park, CA
• Senior Product Manager at iWin in San Francisco
• Senior Java Performance Engineer at CNET in San Francisco

Become a CrunchBoard Affiliate

Edgeio, which powers CrunchBoard, recently released an affiliate feature. We’re offering a 30% affiliate fee, which means you earn $60 for any job listings you generate. See here for details.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/115149982/

“Against the Odds” is the autobiography of vacuum guru James Dyson. Jason recently mentioned it in our internal Campfire chat room: “One of the best books about design, business, invention, and entrepreneurship I’ve ever read. Highly recommended. It’s really inspirational. His persistence is otherworldly. You won’t believe what he went through to get this product to market.” Here’s
one customer’s review of the book at Amazon:

I especially enjoyed the part about the early development of the machine, in which he made something like one version per day for over three years, varying things one at a time, measuring everything to exhaustion, all the while sinking further and further into debt. Edisonian it was, but sometimes that is the only way—the quest for the quick breakthrough emphasized by modern industrial managers can be a real obstacle to progress.

Ahead, a couple of interesting excerpts from articles on Dyson…

The inventor's life, he says in The Independent, is "one of failure".

When you watch a writer on a movie programme tearing up page after page, you think he’s in utter despair. And, in many ways, that’s what it’s like for us, but you learn much more in fact from an experiment which didn’t work out how you intended, but instead sheds some light on possibly another way of doing something. It can get very depressing but then suddenly, one day you make a break through, and that’s very exciting…

You can’t go out and do market research to try to solve these problems about what to do next because usually, or very often, you’re doing the opposite of what market research would tell you. You can’t base a new project two years ahead on current market trends and what users are thinking at the moment. That sounds very arrogant. But it isn’t arrogance. You can’t go and ask your customers to be your inventors. That’s your job…

The article also describes the suspended table in the company’s boardroom:

Mr Dyson thought it might “be nice” to have a table with no legs. At all. So in the company’s boardroom there is a giant glass table that is suspended from the ceiling by four cables. Another cable in the centre anchors it to the floor. And there you have the perfect example of how form fuses with function in Mr Dyson’s world.

In Fast Company, He advocates doing things the wrong way.

I made 5127 prototypes of my vacuum before I got it right. There were 5126 failures. But I learned from each one. That’s how I came up with a solution. So I don’t mind failure. I’ve always thought that schoolchildren should be marked by the number of failures they’ve had. The child who tries strange things and experiences lots of failures to get there is probably more creative…

We’re taught to do things the right way. But if you want to discover something that other people haven’t, you need to do things the wrong way. Initiate a failure by doing something that’s very silly, unthinkable, naughty, dangerous. Watching why that fails can take you on a completely different path. It’s exciting, actually. To me, solving problems is a bit like a drug. You’re on it, and you can’t get off.

Related:
“I just think things should work properly” [SvN]
Dyson does it again with “The Ball” [SvN]
This commercial for the Dyson Slim digs at the competition in a lighthearted way, a tough thing to do.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/408-james-dyson-on-living-a-life-of-failure

MooTools version 1.1 has been released with “with crazy optimizations for speed, compatibility, flexibility, and all around greatness.”

New Features

• Custom Events: A brand-new API to define custom events. The events ‘mouseenter’, and ‘mouseleave’, and ‘domready’ have been added as custom events.
• Enhanced Element(): New methods, and enhancements such as an improved way to add HTML, such as:
  PLAIN TEXT
  JAVASCRIPT:

  1.  
  2. var note = new Element(’div’, {
  3.         ‘id’: ‘note’,
  4.         ‘class’: ‘note’,
  5.         ’styles’: {
  6.                 ‘left’: 15,
  7.                 ‘top’: 15
  8.         },
  9.         ‘events’: {
  10.                 ‘click’: noteConfirm,
  11.                 ‘mouseover’: noteShowMore
  12.         }
  13. });
  14.  
• Element Filters: $(’myElement’).getChildren().filterByClass(’myClass’);
• Perfecting Ajax: Ajax::cancel allows running requests to be aborted, Ajax::evalScripts has been enhanced to include global eval and automated evaluation of responses with a JavaScript Content-Type
• Hash.Cookie is an extended Hash Class that can automatically and manually save and load Hash values using JSON in a Cookie.
• Generics have been added for native prototypes, Element, and Elements.
• Advanced Garbage Collection: $(’content’).empty().setHTML(newText);

For more information check out:

• Documentation
• Download
• Demos
• What’s New

‘

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/mootools-11-released

Dougal Matthews has created a phpMyAdmin Query Browser as part of a University project that he has been working on in Edinburgh, Scotland. This is a prototype system that he plans on continuing over the summer, adding cross browser support, reducing the library dependences and fixing problems.

The project using Prototype, Script.aculo.us, and xajax.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/phpmyadmin-query-browser

When James Hong and Jim Young founded HotorNot in October, 2000, they had no real plans for the service to be anything other than a fun site for a few friends. They turned a free low end computer they received for setting up an etrade account into a web server, launched the site from their house in Mountain View, California, and emailed 40 friends. By the end of the day, 40,000 people had visited the site, which now had 30 second load times.

It wasn’t too long before the service was hosted at RackSpace and the users were flooding in to rate user-uploaded pictures of themselves on a scale of 1-10. In January 2001 they added a dead simple dating site. Instead of reading endless profiles and trying to find a connection, users just say yes or no to a given picture. If it’s a yes, the other person is shown your picture the next time they look through profiles. If they like you as well, a connection is made.

The Money Rolls In

Until last month, HotorNot was free until that last crucial stage when two people wanted to meet each other. At that point, one of the members (usually the man, Hong tells me) must have been a paid subscriber, which costs $6/month. Hong says their conversion rate was extremely high - 15% of active users eventually upgraded to premium accounts.

The premium revenue, plus advertising and fees for virtual flowers, soon topped $600,000 per month. Nearly all of that was profit for the two founders, who reportedly pocketed $20 million or so between them over the years. The company has never raised any outside funding.

Hong says they receive 2-3 emails per day telling them about marriages that resulted from an initial meeting on HotorNot.

In the last year though a few competitors have popped up (see yesnomayb, a copy of the business model) and a number of free dating sites also started to eat away at traffic. Traffic started to drift sideways, and the developers were getting bored at doing little more than site maintenance.

Going To A Free Model

That’s when Hong and Young decided to rip apart their business model and remove the requirement for members to have premium accounts to talk to each other. A month ago, the requirement was turned off, and about $500k/month in revenue disappeared overnight. The founders also turned the company into a proper “C” corporation and issued stock options for the first time to all employees.

(I can’t help thinking that if HotorNot took venture financing somewhere along the way, they would not have been able to get their board of directors to agree to this.)

Hong says this lit a fire under the company, which is now running on reserve cash of a few million dollars. So far things look good. Traffic jumped over 60% - 10 million people visited the site in the last month, up from 6 million the month before. Advertising and virtual gift revenue spiked, and the site is now break even even though they killed their largest revenue stream.

Hong and Young aren’t stopping there. They have plans to expand the site greatly and say they will launch new products in the coming weeks.

Whether this works in the long run is yet to be seen. But the company wanted to try something new, and the founders took enough money off the table to be comfortable for life. Entrepreneurs tend to have a screwed up way of measuring risk - the more the better - and these guys are no exception.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/115001349/

Reports at Infoworld and CNet News that Sun will roll out a Java-based product family called JavaFX at the Java One Conference in San Francisco today.

The announcement follows the recent well received launch of Microsoft’s Silverlight, and as an offering will compete directly against AJAX as well.

JavaFX is said to be a new scripting variant of Java with a focus on development for the consumer communications market, including desktops, mobile clients, and TVs. The first product release is JavaFX Mobile, a software system for mobile devices.

We won’t know a lot more about the new offering until after the presentation, however my immediate thoughts are that what we are seeing here is a game of catch-up by Sun. The object-oriented applications programming language that is Java was once the cool kid on the block, a base from which a new generation of applications would be launched, taking over our desktops. And yet it never happened. The new product, with its focus on mobile technology presents the potential of dealing Sun back into the application game in a big way if it’s well received today by developers.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/115042400/

Amazon’s Customer Communities team has rolled out broader support for tag-based RSS feeds, according to a post from Amazon’s Ian McAllister.

The new functionality has been soft-launched and isn’t currently available on all Amazon pages. Support will become available across the board in the coming weeks.

The option allows subscription to feeds specific to the user’s interests and subsequently would also allow for the creation of widgets and mashups using the data created.

For those using the Amazon Associates Program, tag based feeds also support Affiliate Links.

Examples on the new feeds can be found here.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/114995470/

NewsCorp plans to pay half as much for Photobucket as they did for MySpace. Photobucket is going for $300 million with the earnout (a steal compared to Google/YouTube), and MySpace was acquired for $580 million, back in 2005.

Two separate analytics services, though, show that the Photobucket deal will bring very few new customers to MySpace because of the nearly 100% overlap in users.

Nielsen/Netratings says MySpace has 55.9 million monthly unique visitors, compared to Photobucket’s 14.7 million. Combined though, the sites will have just 57.7 million unique visitors. That means just just 1.8 million of Photobucket’s visitors don’t currently visit MySpace, too. That’s a 3% gain for MySpace. If you count just new users, MySpace is paying $167 for each one of them.

Comscore tells a similar story, showing that 77% of Photobucket’s users are also visiting MySpace regularly.

As a point of comparison, the overlap between Google and YouTube was even greater according to Comscore. At the time of the acquisition in October 2006, 80% of YouTube’s users also visited Google regularly.

MySpace already offers its users the same basic services as Photobucket (photo and video sharing). If they aren’t buying Photobucket for the product and they aren’t getting any new users…then why are they buying them? To limit the availability of Photobucket features and all that user content to other fast-growing social networks without these features? Because they can? Let’s see what MySpace has to say about this as the deal closes.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/114971644/

TheFunded is now two months old and has turned into a somewhat controversial place for entrepreneurs to provide feedback on the venture capitalists they’ve pitched.

Until now, membership was restricted. You have to be invited by another member, and you have to prove your identity as an entrepreneur by linking to a bio page or other evidence.

There are some really ugly comments on the site. Funds that have been trashed include Foundation Capital (”hot receptionist only thing of value”), Motorola Ventures (”if this were a good idea, we’d be doing it already”) and ComVentures (”a few bright sparks in a high-school locker room of uber-jocks”).

At least a few venture capitalists don’t enjoy having their flaws exposed on the site. One VC, Howard Hartenbaum, became incensed after comments said he was “rude, arrogant, slow and vomit-inducing”. Matt Marshall wrote about the incident and said TheFunded was “turning out to be a useless site.”

Well, controversy sells. Hartenbaum reportedly started asking companies that pitched him to write their feedback about him on the site. Since the date of Marshall’s post, ten new comments have come in about him, all extra-positive. Prior to that there were just four comments, half positive and half negative (the two negative comments are to the left).

Now, TheFunded says they are letting VCs participate directly in the discussion. They can write an overview of the fund and it’s partners and give other information entrepreneurs might find useful. VCs interested in building out their profile should start here. The page offers to let you “set the record straight.”

It’s not clear if this will be enough to assuage the angriest VCs, who don’t like to see their behavior reported to the world. But that may not matter for TheFunded. The more content that appears on the site the better, and if it’s controversial that will create even more attention for the young startup.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/114968587/