Ajax Girl

ChipIn, a free widget based service that enables users to collect money has launched a Facebook application that brings micropayments to Facebook.

ChipIn on Facebook supports existing Facebook events or can be used separately with ChipIn created events. Creation of new “ChipIn’s” is simple, the ChipIn Widget can be customized using photos from a users Facebook account and each ChipIn can also be promoted directly to Facebook friends.

We covered Lending Tree, the exclusive Facebook P2P lending service on June 20; ChipIn is at the other end of the spectrum targeting micropayments, yet together they demonstrate the continuing growth of finance on Facebook. There is any number of new Facebook applications being launched daily, and whilst many provide a wow factor and are useful, not that many to date have a real world financial use. It’s not too farfetched to imagine ChipIn being used as a political or charity fundraising tool on Facebook in the near future.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/127203811/

A new version of the popular and wildly addictive Desktop Tower Defense has been released.

The new version includes new Ink, Snap & Boost Towers, New Morph & Dark Creeps, New Trickle, Random, 15 Tower & Splash/No Splash modes, 10K mode is now 100 levels. The Bash tower is improved and the interface has been overhauled.

The new version delivers a more complex game that provides new challenges for regular users.

I’m siding with Jason Kottke on the changes: a lot of the changes make the game more complex without delivering more fun; trying to succeed with a number of the new features is plain difficult and literally means having to relearn the best way of playing the game. The in-game advertising with the letter K appearing on creeps referring to a sponsor is intrusive and a step too far. Many will enjoy the new challenges of Desktop Tower Defense, but for others it will lose its appeal.

Previous TechCrunch coverage here.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/127195917/

Los Angeles based Dreamcrowd wants’ you to share your dreams on its dream sharing community.

Users post their dreams in a similar fashion to a blog or bookmarking site. Other users can then assess the meaning of your dream and the “dreamopedia” automatically provides analysis based on key words from your dream; for example the word kill gives a result of “To dream of manslaughter, signifies fear and scandal.”

Dreamcrowd as a concept comes from wide left field, and yet in the age of Lifecasting it won’t surprise many people; why stop at streaming your waking hours to the web when you can now share your sleeping hours as well. There is something slightly creepy about reading other people’s dreams; is nothing safe from our increasingly voyeuristic society? On the other hand, if you’ve ever wanted your dreams psychoanalysed without the need for a $300 an hour shrink appointment then Dreamcrowd is for you. It’s only a matter of time until someone posts “every night I dream that my startup is acquired by Google”; I wonder what the dreamopedia will make of that?

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/127168292/

Controversy surrounds social media rigger Subvert and Profit. The service, which helps advertisers get on the front page of Digg, has been a thorn in the side of the service and the bane of many of Digg’s users. Subvert and Profit, like User/Submitter and Spike the Vote, pays users for digging stories in the hope that they’ll make the front page. For the service, they charge advertisers $1 per Digg. Feeling they have Digg under control Subvert and Profit has taken dead aim at eBay’s most recent acquisition, StumbleUpon.

Although, at one point Digg was able to ban about 100 users from S&P, the main hurdle for these services has not been Digg itself, but its users. Founder Ragnar Danneskjold says their biggest problem has been with users burying their stories. In the past, Digg users have gone to great lengths for the company. When Spike the Vote went up for sale on eBay, a Digg fan bought the service for around $1,200 and handed the domain over to the company. Digg and Michael Arrington talk it over on TalkCrunch.

S&P was able to bounce back from their banning and now claims to get 2 out of every 3 stories submitted to the front page, having processed over 120 stories total. They’re even considering a front page “money back guarantee” at the $200 level where they will craft the titles and descriptions themselves in order to increase the chances of getting the 60-100 Diggs needed to get on the front page.

They chose StumbleUpon over competitors like Reddit for a few key reasons they outline on their blog. StumbleUpon makes a good target because it provides continuous traffic, has 2.6 million users, and is one of the fastest growing social media services out there. It’s also a lot easier to game because there is less transparency behind who voted “thumbs up”.

Like on Digg, S&P plans on charging $1 per positive vote. According to their numbers this is expected to be a pay per click rate of about $0.004, comparable to an advertiser paying them $80 for Digg and getting 20,000 hits. However, there’s also the constant debate over the quality of traffic from the two services. According to the company, only one or two votes would be needed on StumbleUpon to get 500 or so visitors. But I wonder if advertisers will just vote up sites themselves if they only need so few votes.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/127148954/

George Orwell: "Politics and the English Language"

“Modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy. It is easier — even quicker, once you have the habit — to say In my opinion it is not an unjustifiable assumption that than to say I think. If you use ready-made phrases, you not only don’t have to hunt about for the words; you also don’t have to bother with the rhythms of your sentences since these phrases are generally so arranged as to be more or less euphonious.” [tx B]

How uses, not innovations, drive human technology

“Carl Sagan once said, ‘We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.’ If he meant that we are unfamiliar with the principles on which the technology around us works, he was right—there’s an enormous gap between the knowledge of makers and the knowledge of users—but this is exactly as it should be. As users, we typically want our technology to be a black box; we don’t want to be bothered with adjusting it, monitoring it, repairing it, or knowing about its inner workings. A sure sign of the success of a technology is that we scarcely think of it as technology at all.”

Humane interface philosophy

“Setting the time on a wristwatch, for instance, shouldn’t be that hard; on old analog wristwatches, it basically involved pulling out a knob, twisting it until the watch showed the correct time, and pushing the knob back in again. But on newer digital wristwatches—ones that claim to be more powerful and feature-loaded than their analog counterparts—it involves pressing a series of buttons in a hard-to-remember, often unforgiving order. Most people dread setting the time on their digital watches, and for good reason.”

Video: David Byrne and Daniel Levitin conversation

The singer/songwriter/artist/author discusses music, science, memory, and more with the producer/neuroscientist. Fascinating discussion.

Are you climate friendly?

“Calculate the carbon emissions from driving your car, air travel, and the electricity used in your home or office or combine travel and power to offset events such as a wedding or conference. We’ll tell you how many carbon credits you need to neutralise your emissions and become Climate Friendly.”

iPhoney

“Looking for a way to see how your web creations will look on iPhone? Look no further. iPhoney gives you a pixel-accurate web browsing environment—powered by Safari—that you can use when developing web sites for iPhone. It’s the perfect 320 by 480-pixel canvas for your iPhone development. And it’s free.”

Freegans

“Freegans are scavengers of the developed world, living off consumer waste in an effort to minimize their support of corporations and their impact on the planet, and to distance themselves from what they see as out-of-control consumerism. They forage through supermarket trash and eat the slightly bruised produce or just-expired canned goods that are routinely thrown out, and negotiate gifts of surplus food from sympathetic stores and restaurants.They dress in castoff clothes and furnish their homes with items found on the street.”

Comet killed the mammoth?

“There are intriguing new clues in the mystery of how the woolly mammoth met its demise in North America more than 10,000 years ago…Recently, a group of more than two dozen scientists offered a new explanation. They have found signs that a comet — or multiple fragments of one — exploded over Canada about 12,900 years ago with the force equivalent to millions of nuclear weapons. That unleashed, they said, a tremendous shock wave that destroyed much of what was in its path and ignited wildfires across North America.”

2008 political futures

“If a single prediction market is wiser than the pundits and the polls, imagine how wise all the prediction markets are together. That’s the idea behind Slate’s ‘Political Futures,’ which offers a comprehensive guide to all the big political prediction markets.”

Interactive US budget chart

A visual guide of where your taxes go. [via GK]

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/476-sunspots-the-black-box-edition

James MacFarlane developed this real estate map to give real-time data of unit availability in one of our rental developments. You can mouse-over the available units to view the townhouse details, and click to view the floor plan. It’s simple, clean and to the point.

The application makes heavy use of Prototype and Script.aculo.us throughout.

Since it is Friday, he even has an easter egg in there.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/127021786/fv3-real-estate-unit-info

Peter Alguacil and his team have created Pingdom, a free tool that tests the load time of websites and all included objects such as images, CSS files, scripts, etc, and shows this information graphically with an Ajax interface.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/127017768/pingdom-load-time-tester

The growth of Youtube and it’s subsequent $1.65 billion buyout left behind a bevy of competing video sites. Since then competitors have been seeking to differentiate themselves by focusing on longer videos, higher (bitrate) quality videos, professional content, and paying their users. However, one of the more unique approaches to differentiatio has been streaming live video over the internet. If social live video gets big traction down the road, it’s most likely going to be led by one of these startups:

The oldest of the bunch, launching back in February of 2006, Stickam lets you host your own live show stream and chat on their site or embedded in your own. When you’re show isn’t live, you can show a pictures, audio, or recorded shows on a MySpace-like profile page. The front page of the site features the most recent show and their number of live viewers, which currently are floating around 3,000.

Launched back in May, BlogTv also lets you start your own live show and chat. Every show you record is broadcasted live and then archived. You can subscribe to each show on your account, embed, rate, and recommend them. Live shows are shown on the front page, but you can also review the archived footage in their library.

Yet to get out of private beta, Mogulus is focused on live video production tools. Using their tools, you can see how many viewers are waiting for your broadcast and storyboard the show you’re about to broadcast on your own Mogulus URL. With storyboarding, you can drop recorded videos into your feed at cue and even overlay graphics such as logos or titles. You can even collaborate with another producer and cooperatively shape the storyboard.

The oddest of the bunch, Justin.tv launched with a splash and then again when police raided their apartment. The novelty of the site centered around one of the co-founders, Justin Kan streaming his life 24/7 from a head cam. Justin.tv has yet to launch an open network, and has instead opted to expand slowly by adding a select number of dedicated “lifecasters”. Each caster gets a live feed, video archive, and chat channel. Instead of just featuring what’s live on the front page, they’ve also developed a “tips” service that lets users dig up key moments.

Launched back in March, Ustream is another lifecasting network letting anyone plug in and start streaming, similar to Stickam. It’s caught on in the tech crowd with people like Robert Scoble and Cris Pirillo streaming their own shows from offices or on the road at conventions. Each caster gets a profile page where they can post their videos, photos, and thoughts. The player comes with live chat, the ability to archive footage, and embed it on your site.

Live flash video is a different animal than the recorded videos you see on all over Youtube. These sites require more accurate distribution networks because like FedEx, their packages always have to arrive on time. Back in March, Youtube delivered over 1.1 billion streams to 53.5 million unique users. That’s an unheard of number for live video on the web. You can see a comparison of the above site’s traffic on Alexa here, but be warned that streaming sites don’t need to be refreshed to consume more content and therefore don’t generate as many pageviews as non streaming sites.

Live video also complicates the trend toward time shifted video. The serendipity of live video makes it engaging to watch, but at the same time hard to bubble interesting content to the top. Sites have reacted to the problem by archiving and rating the videos, or more interestingly, voting up individual clips.

One final problem is the accessibility of live video production for consumers. Anyone with any kind of camera can upload to one of the social video site, but with live video, producers have to be more committed if they’re going to produce quality content. To avoid the hum drum of being chained to a webcam, users have to either be very talented, or construct their own mobile cameras. Advancement in mobile phones may change that, but right now it’s a significant limitation.

Live video has one great strength, however, the ability to directly engage the audience, be they friends or admirers. This is why I think if we see tremendous success in live video casting, it will come from sites that focus on building a community around a few top new media stars that can captivate their audience and drive the bulk of the traffic to the site.

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/~3/126993088/

Amir Salihefendic has taken the idea from MochiKit and developed a standard alone 2k DOM library called Magic DOM.

Instead of writing:

you would do:

Download MagicDOM for more info.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/126991513/magic-dom

Vuze is a BitTorrent based content distribution platform that competes in the ever growing TV over internet market.

Vuze comes from BitTorrent application provider Azureus and is built on the Azureus platform. We previously looked at Vuze when it was known as Zudeo in December 06. An awful lot has happened in this space since in the past six months, including the launches of Joost, Bablegum and Veoh. Vuze has evolved as well.

The key selling point of Vuze is HD content, which the company provides through a variety of content partnerships with companies such as Starz, The BBC, A&E, and Showtime. Vuze has a strong emphasis on community; users are able to create channels for content, rate, and have conversations around content. Producers can upload their original works and can even charge a download or rental fee.

Comparing it to the competition is difficult as Vuze is a distinctly different offering. Vuze is extremely easy to use, which in itself is rather amazing given it comes from Azureus; the Azureus BitTorrent client being known for its relative complexity. The line up is solid; yes, you can get a lot of the content elsewhere but usually it’s not in HD. The need to download content could be seen as a negative, low resolution previews are available on demand but for full HD clips it’s a matter of waiting, and depending on your internet connection this can involve a long wait. Then there is the legal aspect: this isn’t BitTorrent as most people know it because all content is 100% legal and in many cases is charged for, which begs the question: if it’s not delivered on demand and you have to pay for some of it, wouldn’t some users just download the illegal version for free? Perhaps iTunes would make for a better comparison in terms of the model.

Overall though Vuze is a good package, maybe not quite as appealing as Joost but with more to offer than Bablegum. I can’t fully compare it to Veoh yet as the Veoh client has crashed for me three times in as many hours but I can say with certainty that Vuze is more stable.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/126935622/