Ajax Girl

Truveo, which was acquired by AOL in early 2006, is considered to be one of the best video search engines on the Internet. It looks beyond metadata attached to the video file itself and explores the content on the website around the video - resulting in more data to index and better search results.

The traffic figures support this. Comscore reports that the site has 40 million monthly unique visitors and is growing at about a 50%/month rate.

Truveo says this is a combination of their approach to search as well as the fact that copyright holders are becoming more diligent about pulling down unauthorized uploads on YouTube and other sites. The result is that YouTube is no longer the single place to find good video clips. People are turning to search to find Daily Show clips on the Comedy Central website, for example, instead of just looking for them on Youtube.

The company is also partnering outside of AOL to get broader distribution for the engine. Brightcove, Clevver, CSTV, Flock, Pageflakes, PureVideo, Qwest, Search.com, Sportingo, Netvibes, Widgetbox and YourMinis all now use Truveo for video search, joining existing partners AOL Video, AOL Search, Excite, Infospace.

There’s a new kid on the block, though, called CastTV, which recently announced a $3.1 million Series A round of financing from Draper Fisher Jurvetson. They haven’t launched yet, but the results from demos show it to be as good or better than Truveo. Given that AOL already owns Truveo, look for a quick acquisition of CastTV, probably by Google, if the technology is as good as the demos suggest.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/126286852/

Microsoft has agreed to make changes to Vista in response to a complaint by Google alleging that Vista’s inbuilt search functionality competed unfairly with Google Desktop Search.

According to a NY Times report, Google’s complaint was made confidentially in line with rules established as part of a previous settlement over anti-competitive behaviour by Microsoft. The settlement between state prosecutors, the Justice Department and Microsoft will avert the prospect of litigation over the matter.

The changes Microsoft will make to Vista have not yet been made public.

It’s an interesting case. Microsoft has a long history of anti-competitive behaviour however in recent years the company has been a far better corporate citizen, in large part due to the terms imposed on it by previous settlements. On the surface it seems a little strange that Microsoft could be in this position; Vista’s search capabilities really do nothing more than deliver decent search functionality out of the box for Windows. Search functionality has been available in some form or another in ever version of Windows since Windows 95, the difference being that previously those search capabilities have been substandard compared to offerings from Google and Yahoo with their own respective desktop search programs. Whatever the actual details of the case may be (and we may never know) it’s a win for Google. For Microsoft, questions remain: is this simply a case of Microsoft waiting to fight another day, or is the company now seriously spooked by both the threat of anti-competitive litigation and Google? It’s certainly very un-Microsoft like to simply settle without a fight.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/126277204/

Here’s the latest from the CrunchBoard job board:

• 3 Summer Interns at TechCrunch in Atherton, CA
• Manager, Wireless Product Development at NBC in Englewood Cliffs, NJ
• Director, Strategy and Business Development at NBC in Englewood Cliffs, NJ
• Director, Corporate Business Development - Consumer Team Lead at Cisco in San Jose, CA
• Songbird: Senior Developer Evangelist at Songbird in San Francisco, CA
• EXPERIENCE MANAGER at Respectance in San Francisco, CA
• Video Search Associate - Truveo Video Search at Truveo in San Francisco, CA
• Senior Unix System/Applications Administrator - Truveo Video at Truveo in San Francisco, CA
• Technology Evangelist - Truveo Video Search at Truveo in San Francisco, CA
• Business Development Manager at TheStreet.com in New York, NY
• JSP Web Developer / Programmer at The New York Times in New York, NY
• WORDPRESS/PHP MYSQL DEVELOPER at The New York Times in New York, NY
• Director- Customer Service at Virgin Charter in Santa Monica, CA

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/126269002/

Wesabe’s “online Quicken” product apparently caught the eye of Union Square Venture’s Fred Wilson, because he’s just written a check to lead a $4 million Series A round. This follows a seed round of $700,000 led by O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures (OATV) just a couple of months ago. OATV also participated in this round.

Wesabe is differentiating itself from Quicken in three ways. First, it’s only online. Second, they’ve added tagging to transactions that are shared among users - when enough users tag a specific merchant, that tag is automatically added as a suggestion to your transaction. Finally, Wesabe is security-focused. Your third party bank and credit card account credentials are not stored on Wesabe’s servers - instead they are downloaded to your personal computer. Hackers can’t access your account credentials by breaking into Wesabe’s servers.

There are other startups generally in this space, but the real heavyweight (we hear) is Mint, which has guarded the specifics of its service closely. Those who’ve seen the demo, though, say it’s a winner.

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/~3/126225335/

Google made another acquisition announcement today - they’ve bought a company called Zenter (”a company that provides software for creating online slide presentations”) to help complete their upcoming Powerpoint/presentation application. The price wasn’t disclosed.

This is another liquidity event for Y Combinator, which funded Zenter (we covered their debut here).

Google has been rumored to be creating an online Powerpoint clone since February. In April the rumors were confirmed by Eric Schmidt and then on the Google blog. As with the other applications in Google Docs & Spreadsheets, most of the technology seems to be imported. Google previously acquired Tonic Systems for their presentation technology.

Zenter was focusing on the front end of the application, as well as community/sharing features. It complements Tonic, which focused on the back end technology for converting powerpoint presentations into Java objects. Zenter takes a more social look at slide shows, letting users share their projects and incorporate content directly from the web, including Google Images.

You can see coverage on other Y Combinator startups (like Weebly, Buxfer, Writewith, Overhear.us, Snipshot, Justin.tv, and Xobni) here and here.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/126215622/

Have a tough time choosing the right title for what you do? Design pioneer Alvin Lustig (1915-1955) felt your pain:

The words ‘graphic designer,’ ‘architect,’ or ‘industrial designer’ stick in my throat giving me a sense of limitation, of specialization within the specialty, or a relationship to society that is unsatisfactory and incomplete. This inadequate set of terms to describe an active life reveals only partially the still undefined nature of a designer.

Who is Lustig? He doesn’t get as much attention as some other influential designers, but his book designs revolutionized the field:

The current preference among American book jacket designers for fragmented images, photo-illustration, minimal typography and rebus-like compositions can be traced directly to Lustig’s stark black-and-white cover for Lorca, a grid of five symbolic photographs linked in poetic disharmony…

When Lustig’s approach was introduced to American book publishing in the late 1940s, covers and jackets were mostly illustrative and also rather decorative. Hard-sell conventions were rigorously followed. Lustig’s jacket designs entered taboo marketing territory through his use of abstraction and small, discreetly typeset titles, influenced by the work of Jan Tschichold. Lustig did not believe it was necessary to “design down,” as he called it, to achieve better sales.

Lustig even managed to continue designing after he went blind:

One of Lustig’s great strengths, which made it possible for him to continue to work despite his blindness, was his honed ability to visualize the problem before him in both two and three dimensions. Even at the end of his life he was actively designing everything he could, including advertisements, by dictating what he saw in his mind’s eye to his assistants who transcribed his words into concrete form.

There’s more interesting text about him and lots of work examples at alvinlustig.org.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/470-alvin-lustig-refused-to-design-down

Just over a year ago DabbleDB launched, allowing people to create quick database driven applications with very few programming skills. Since then we’ve seen Zoho Creator, WyaWorks and Coghead launch their own competing applications. Salesforce AppExchange is arguably also a competitor, as are a number of other build-your-own-apps like Yahoo Pipes, Teqlo and Microsoft Popfly.

This is a crowded space, and there’s a reason for it. These tools let non-developers create useful and otherwise expensive applications for busineses that can be accessed directly or via the intranet. They can also be tailored to an infinite degree, giving companies more flexibility with off the shelf stuff. Most of these tools also allow for simple web application building as well, from simple web forms to more complicated, interactive applications.

LongJump, which launches today, is the newest entrant. The new service is a spinoff of an already profitable bubiness, Relationals, which was founded in 2003. The founder, 37 year old Pankaj Malviya, says the company needs no additional funding in the near future.

LongJump is focused on letting people create applications without any programming skills whatsoever - something Coghead is also striving for. In a demo yesterday I watched Malviya create a couple of applications very quickly, including a highly customized shared contact and calendar resource for a business.

LongJump is also approaching their community in a realy smart way - like Ning, applications can be shared with other LongJump users, cloned, and customized. Sharing is optional, and all business data is stripped out and replaced with sample data. But in the near future users will be able to build on what others have created, giving LongJump a nice library of sample applications.

The ease of use combined with the community sharing features are really thoughtful additions to the product. We’ll check back in with them in a couple of months and see how the library of applications is coming along.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/126076983/

Ryan Johnson has created an event model for all Objects that mimics Event.observe from Prototype (A little like the events in Dojo):

Object.Event allows you to create and control events on any JavaScript object. This does this by providing an observer/observable implementation nearly identical to the one implemented in Prototype’s Element.observe(), except that it is not specific to DOM events or Element objects.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/objectevent-event-model-for-all-js-objects

Some argue that the fact that using Safari is the “SDK” for the iPhone is a cop out. Other’s thing it is genius.

One thing is for sure. There is already a list of iPhone applications being built, as shown by iPhone Application List. This is pretty impressive since hardly anyone even has the device yet!

What did these people need to know? The dimensions of the darn screen. They also needed Safari (hence the Windows release for Windows developers). Of course, they aren’t making use of any special API calls that the phone may give you (e.g. openGoogleMap(’….’);).

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/iphone-application-list

Adobe is putting on a bus tour around the US to get developers up to speed on AIR.

The tour is free, targeted at JavaScript developers, and is a great way to quickly gain a solid understanding of what the Adobe Integrated Runtime is.

The tour is running from July 10th in Seattle, to September 29th in Chicago. Take a peak at the full schedule to see when it comes to a city near you.

There are a ton of feeds that you will be able to get from developers on the bus, and at the events themselves.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/adobe-air-bus-tour