Ajax Girl

Another web desktop (webtop), AjaxWindows, launched and I’m left scratching my head. The site and service is allegedly from the creators of Linspire and is a lot like DesktopTwo, which mimics a desktop environment within your browser, taskbar and all. AjaxWindows even comes with a syncing client to help mirror all your desktop data to their servers. The major value proposition for these sites is to let you access your desktop anywhere, but I think they’ve gotten the user interface metaphor all wrong.

Desktops function as ways to organize and manage applications on our operating system. Browsers serve this function for web applications. If I want to check my email, I go to Gmail. If I want to check my finances, I check out my bank’s web page. Managing these applications is best done within the tabs of my browser, not a processor intensive ajax webtop. Ironically it also has a web browser.

There’s no value added by being able to overlay my web applications in ajax windows. Moreover, any platform’s utility is linked to the quality and number of applications developed on it. In the best case scenario, AjaxWindows has to mimic the best web applications on the net within their own service. In the worst case, it simply becomes an elaborate ajax wrapper for those applications.

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/~3/124964734/

In a post last month I wrote about Powerset COO Steve Newcomb’s use of predictive modeling to guess early growth rates so that they have enough hardware to scale. Good for them, I said, for releasing some of the data publicly. And I recommended they go one step further and release the predictive models themselves:

Powerset should publish the model itself (without the specific Powerset assumptions of course) and let other startups tweak it for their own use. Most new companies don’t have the excel jockeys or the time to do this kind of work. Any competitive issues would be overshadowed by the considerable goodwill (and link juice) they’d get from doing this.

And that’s exactly what they are going to do. Newcomb says they’ll release the models in the next few weeks, minus Powerset-specific data. Don’t expect to see these on Google Docs, though (a perfect place to dump them, except that Google is who Powerset is gunning for). They’ll make the spreadsheets available for download or let people view them on the web via a Flash viewer.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/124944793/

According to Reuters, British Omnifone has signed deals with the big four music labels (Universal, EMI, Sony/BMG, and Warner Music) and 30 cell carriers to sell subscriptions to unlimited music downloads on cell phones.

No doubt this is in response to the iPhone/iTunes integration and Apple’s existing iTunes mobile extension. The spread of iTunes on mobiles, which cuts out carrier commissions, has carriers worried.

The service, called MusicStation, will work on all 2.5-3G compatible phones. It is being released throughout Europe, starting today with Sweden, a full two weeks before the iPhone release. They expect 80% of Western Europe’s existing phones to be compatible with the service.

MusicStation costs 2.99 euros/week or 1.99 pounds/week for downloading an unlimited number of songs. Songs take about 15 seconds to download and by the end of the year Omnifone expects to have a library of over 1 million songs. The application lets you make playlists, find new artists, and follow artist specific news.

Some alternative mobile music services are MyStrands, Avvenu, Pandora, or mobile Rhapsody radio, which costs $6.95/month. However, a study conducted last year found 44% of users had no interest in downloading music to their mobiles and only 6% of users would download music from their mobile provider.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/124928729/

P2P and web video sharing service Veoh has taekn $26million in Round C funding. The new money takes total investment in Veoh to $41.25million. The pre money valuation is rumored to be between $60 million and $70 million.

The company has Michael Eisner on its Board, content deals with companies like Us Magazine and United Talent Agency and as Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote in February, some very good looking technology.

According to PEHub, Goldman Sachs led the round, with earlier investors Spark Capital and Shelter Capital Partners also increasing their investment.

Veoh differs from other social video sites by focusing on syndication and video quality. They have a desktop peer-to-peer based video player for playing back longer content at higher quality. For publishers, Veoh allows uploads of any size or quality and automatically syndicates them out to YouTube, MySpace, and Google Video in the appropriate format.

Like Metacafe and Revver, publishers can also make money off of their content. However, unlike those competitors, Veoh allows publishers to directly charge viewers for content in a 50-50 split with the company. In January, Veoh’s founder, Dmitry Shapiro, told Beet.tv they had 4 million unique users.

It’s a lot of money, although in perspective Veoh has snuck up to being just shy of joining the top 200 sites online according to Alexa. There may never be a second YouTube but Veoh is a giving it a really good shot.

Check out Veoh’s Profile

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/~3/124917922/

I’ve always preferred sketching UIs with an as-thick-as-I-can-find Sharpie over a thin ballpoint pen or finely sharpened pencil.

Ballpoints and fine tips just don’t fill the page like a Sharpie does. Fine tips invite you to draw while Sharpies invite you to just to get your concepts out into big bold shapes and lines. When you sketch with a thin tip you tend to draw at a higher resolution and worry a bit too much about making things look good. Sharpies encourage you to ignore details early on.

If you sketch, try a thick Sharpie next time. You may find you’re better able to focus on the concept and less on the drawing. That’s a good thing.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/466-sketching-with-a-sharpie

Crate and Barrel

Crate and Barrel offers typical product shots and also “room views” that show the product in a real context. Example: Calphalon Cookware.

Amazon

Nice touch at Amazon to disable the overnight button and explain why.

Ticketweb

Oh Ticketweb, you know my interests so well!

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/465-screens-around-town-crate-and-barrel-amazon-and-ticketweb

Rhyme & Reason provides a rich text editor for composing poems, automatically scans each line’s meter as you type and displays the marked up line in a panel below the editor. I believe it is the only online tool that can read a line of poetry and scan it automatically. It also supports scanning an entire poem for meter and rhyme scheme.

Rhyme & Reason’s has the ability to code perfect and slant rhymes in different colors and it also provides sophisticated word search through an integrated dictionary, rhyming dictionary and thesaurus combination.

You can search for words by rhyme, meter, syllable, related words and more. The site also supports publishing your poems to the site, submitting comments, recommending poems, and a library of classic poems (currently on the first several Shakespeare sonnets, but many more are coming soon.)

Evan Simeone built Rhyme & Reason based on Dojo Toolkit and FCK Editor, with Java/Spring/Hibernate/MySQL on the back end.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/rhyme-and-reason

Dan Simard has been writing about threading and JavaScript and came up with his Final Truth.

Dan has an example that has a long running function that fires of an XHR request at the beginning. Will that response come back when it is done, or will it wait for the method to complete.

There are many comments comparing various browsers, and how things change when you change between synchronous and asynchronous calls.

The truth seems to be:

• You can’t trust it to happen one way in all browsers / scenarios
• Please split up your functions

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/ajax-javascript-and-threads-the-final-truth

CNN has a new beta site that plays with Prototype and Script.aculo.us for some simple clean effects and inline Ajax.

The site also uses a StorageManager to access local storage using IE-specific, DOM storage, or cookies. This way your personalization is stored away.

If you put it side by side the current site, you will find that it looks a lot cleaner (at least it does to me).

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/cnn-beta-site

How long will it be until we can stroll through the streets in a virtual world that is identical to our own? Given the state of a number of technologies, not very long. Over the last couple of years we’ve seen Microsoft Street Side and Virtual Earth as well as similar efforts from Google. But different technologies are now being deployed that are even more interesting that the results achieved from large companies taking and processing massive numbers of photos into now-standard 3D views.

Two standouts are Microsoft’s Photosynth Project and newcomer Everyscape, which Brady Forest wrote about today on O’Reilly Radar.

Photosynth

First, Photosynth. The idea is to take many pictures of a given thing or area and combine them into a 3D image. Fly around it, zoom in whatever. The results are jaw-droppingly beautiful - see the demo video above by Blaise Aguera y Arcas from earlier this year. The BBC also just announced a partnership with Microsoft; they’ve launched a new site using Photosynth technology that will show 3D photographic representations of historic sites around the UK (Ely Cathedral, Burghley House, the Royal Crescent, Bath, the Scottish Parliament buildings and Blackpool Tower Ballroom). For now, though, Photosynth only works on Windows machines.

Everyscape

Everyscape is a much simpler product technically but is quite a bit more useful in the near term. They turn regular 2D pictures into 3D images that look like they were taken with special cameras. Viewers can pan around a 3D area, and move from point to point. See the demo on their site to get a feel for it. The video at the top of the post was created by founder Mok Oh and seems to show features that go way beyond the early beta version of the product.

Everyscape launches this Fall, promising ten cities. Users will also be encouraged to submit their own photos to be included in the models.

The company is attacking Google and Microsoft head on in those companies’ efforts to photograph the world and let people meander through it. They may have a chance - there are no special downloads required and they’ll be relying on users to take many or most of the photos used in the service. Whether they make it or not is unclear, but it’s fun to play with these products anyway. Good luck to them.

Fotowoosh is another service we’ve covered with much simpler goals than Photosynth or Everyscape: they just turn a single 2D photo into a 3D image. But the results are very cool.

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/~3/124757129/