Ajax Girl

Xcavator.net is a stock photo search portal based on visual search technology.

Xcavator.net provides natural and intuitive interactive search for stock photography providing buyers with a browsing experience based on both visual content and keywords. The key to the visual search capabilities is the portal’s color and image search engines, powered by CogniSign Intelligent Image Recognition Technology.

In laymen’s terms, Xcavator.net offers three types of interrelated search options. Tradition search delivers photos based on tagged keywords and is much the same as others in the stock photography market. Where Xcavator.net gets interesting is in color and image search. Xcavator.net allows color search matching, for example if a stock photograph was needed that matched a brochure or web site in terms of colors, users are able to refine the photo search to those colors by utilizing a color chart or by inserting the exact hexadecimal color into a box. Image search provides similar photos based on a user uploaded image or via a drag and drop of images found in an initial search.

Xcavator.net competes with other visual search sites including Riya, Pixsy and PicSearch. Xcavator isn’t necessarily better than any of their competitors, but different. The color and related search capabilities don’t have the same level of user enjoyment as Riya’s search features do, yet Xcavator.net’s features feel more practical and are definitely more finely targeted at niche stock photo search.

Xcavator.net recently signed a deal with iStockphoto that delivers 1.8 Million images from 38,000 contributors into the Xcavator.net search database. The site comes out of Beta on July 2.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/126884771/

A good deed never goes unpunished. Over at CrunchGear yesterday, Nicholas broke the story of the WWDC beta of Mac OS X Leopard’s leak onto the Oink BitTorrent Web site. (Oink is a so-called “secret” or “private” BitTorrent tracker that specializes in music, though it also has a fairly vibrant Mac software user base.) We did so because of the particulars involved. No, that a copy of Leopard finds its way onto the Internet isn’t news per se; that happens with every developer build. But the WWDC beta—build number 9A466—is a near-final version of the upcoming operating system and rumors had suggested that Apple had taken great care in making sure that the build would never be leaked. So when it did leak yesterday morning, we considered it newsworthy.

Apparently, several Oink users didn’t agree.

Within minutes of posting the story, several people, presumably Oink users, had flooded the post with genuinely vile statements. I don’t know how his reporting on the illegal leak of a piece of software gives them the right wish awful, terrible things upon Nicholas’ family members, his mother especially, but that’s their prerogative. It’s important to note that also within minutes of our reporting on the story the Torrent file in question was removed by an Oink admin, only to be re-uploaded soon after.

The Leopard beta has since spread across the Internet and is now available on more public BitTorrent trackers like The Pirate Bay. It’s also in the process of being uploaded onto Usenet. So any effort on Apple’s part to stop the bleeding, so to speak, has just become harder.

For most of the day today the Oink Web site has been down. Whether or not Leopard’s leak (or even our reporting) has anything to do with this I don’t know. We contacted Apple yesterday regarding the leak and didn’t receive a reply, but it’d be naive of me to believe that Apple and other parties aren’t currently monitoring these so-called “private” BitTorrent trackers for such activity.

How Apple chooses to respond to Leopard’s leak remains to be seen.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/126878423/

Ask’s latest musical advertisement is out, and apparently the search engine under-dog can help you find Kato Kaelin, an obscure non-celebrity that according to Wikipedia is known for a minor role in the OJ Simpson trial.

Advertisement as below. I was always under the presumption that one of the key points of advertising was finding a connection with your audience. When people talk about Ask being a niche player it would appear that they weren’t kidding; Kato Kaelin is so obscure the name will likely be lost on a good portion of the viewing audience.

(via Inside Google)

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/~3/126853171/

Great parody video of the recently announced Microsoft Surface Computer. “One day, your computer will be a big-ass table.”

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/~3/126809519/

Callwave, one of the original Internet voicemail systems, will be offering the official version of its vTXT voice-to-text service on Monday, ending the beta testing phase. The service is two-fold, offering SMS summaries of voicemail messages as well as a full email message. There are no “live operators” involved, thus ensuring privacy. I gave it a whirl this morning and the service performed, ummm… acceptably?

[SNIP] and I don’t know how to do we can you I bites me how to do it [SNIP]

There were a few things like this to iron out but I got the gist of the message and was then able to listen to the entire thing through my web browser. The SMS option shortens the message considerably, ensuring you don’t rack up messaging bills and the email has a regular “play” button and the dictated message tacked onto the end.

Clearly, this space is opening up and I think Callwave’s competitors should take note and current competitors in this space, Jott included will probably step up development of voice recognition quality as a result. A rising tide…

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/126800411/

The WebKit team announced a new version of the Web inspector that includes:

• Completely redesigned interface, no longer a transparent panel
• Works with any WebView inside third-party applications, not just Safari
• Supports docking to the inspected page
• Shows all resources included by the page, sorted into categories
• Global search through all text-based resources
• Console to show errors and warnings with live JavaScript evaluation
• Network panel showing resource load timeline along with HTTP request and response headers
• Resource size and load time summary graph in the Network panel
• Syntax highlighted HTML source
• Inline JavaScript and HTML error reporting

You get the inspector when you grab nightly.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/126769088/new-safari-webkit-inspector

The Ext integration keeps growing. GWT and Ext are a good match, as the widgets fit in nicely with the GWT model.

Sanjiv Jivan has created a GWT Ext wrapper and rewrote the Feed Viewer.

On the Java side it looks like this:

For a closer look, download the code.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/126766244/gwt-ext-integration

Jim Davis has released a simple little JavaScript dumping library, DP_Debug, that supports circular and recursive references, most system objects and specifies certain otherwise ambiguous conditions. It allows for depth of recursion control, labeling and interactive collapse/expand of results. It’s based in essence on the ColdFusion CFDUMP.

In addition the library allows for simple access to Query String and Cookie values and provides basic logging, code timing support and program integration support (the ability to enable or disable debugging). There’s also built in quick reference documentation.

• dump(): Converts JavaScript objects (their properties, values and relationships) to an HTML representation and displays this in the console for review. It supports objects with circular/recursive references. It’s similar to the insanely useful CFDUMP tag in ColdFusion.
• dumpCookies(): A convenience method which dumps all available browser cookies to the console.
• dumpQueryString(): A convenience method which dumps all available query-string names and values to the console.
• logger(): A method for logging messages to the console using either custom or predefined types. logInfo(), logWarning() and logError() are all shortcut methods for logging specific types of messages easily.
• timer(): A method for timing blocks of code.
• getType(): Provides more advanced Object type-recognition than the native “typeof” operator.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/126764082/dp_debug-javascript-debugging-extensions

We recently decided to stop diving in too deep on tasks right away. Instead, we’re going for four hour chunks upfront. We start work on a task and then, after the first four hours, come up for air.

Why? When you’ve done nothing, you don’t have a realistic view of what it’s going to take. But when you’ve spent days or weeks on something, you can get too invested. It becomes hard to change, admit you’re wrong, or that what you’ve been doing isn’t actually worth more effort.

Four hours lets you get your toes wet. Then you ask questions. Is this worth continuing? Are you on the right track? Is there a way to judo this? Should you bring in another set of eyes?

If it’s all good, then keep on going. But a lot of times this forced break can reveal hidden solutions and/or lead you in a different direction.

It’s easy to get excited about solving the problem at hand, even if the solution is complex. But then you can wind up spending way too long on a problem that’s just not worth it. Sometimes you’re better off restating the problem or even tabling it and moving on to something more important. The four-hour upfront technique prevents you from going too far in the wrong direction.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/469-four-hours-upfront-and-then-reevaluate

German Twitter clone Dukudu is listed for sale on eBay.

The project is said to have cost its developers €25000. Despite a relatively low Alexa score, Dukudu ranks at a respectable 2,608 in Germany. At the time of writing the auction has 28 bids with a top bid of €9000.

The developers claim in the auction listing that Dukudu is more than a simple Twitter clone, being “more beautiful, rock-solid, full of important additional features and more secure”. Visually it is well designed, but that’s as far as I could get, the site is entirely in German and does not offer an English language version.

Dukudu joins the TechCrunch Deadpool.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/126640006/