Ajax Girl

Chumby is a small, wifi-enabled linux hardware device is designed to be hacked and changed by its owners. The device has a 350MHz ARM controller, 32MB SDRAM, 64 MB Nand Flash Rom, a 320×240 3.5 inch touch LCD screen, two speakers, audio output, a microphone, and two USB ports. Chumby also has a squeeze sensor. All of this is housed within a soft, sqeezable shell about the size of a coconut.

It was announced a year ago at Foo camp, and the company gave out about 500 of the first generation devices. Users register the device on the Chumby home page and connect the device to their computer via wifi. Once registered, content widgets are added - so the Chumby may include a news widget, flickr widget, etc.

Now, a year later, the company has made upgrades to the hardware and sofware that makes up the device, and say they will make it available for sale in a couple of months. The biggest change is that Chumby now runs Flash Lite 3, which is the first mobile version of Flash to support streaming audio and video. Users can now run music or video over the Internet and play it on the Chumby. The Chumby will be sold for $179.95, fully delivered.

The company has 23 employees and is headquartered in San Diego. They raised just over $5 million from OATV, Avalon Ventures and Masthead Venture Partners in December 2006.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/127419623/

Texas based ISP Redmoon has implemented software that hijacks pages being visited by their customers by placing Redmoon’s own ads on these pages.

The technology is provided by NebuAD, which boasts that ISP delivered advertisements are an untapped source of revenue.

Every single web site owner is affected by NebuAD’s technology: whether a site is running ads or not makes no difference, Customers of any ISP evil enough to run NebuAD’s platform are going to see ads on every page on every site; ads that don’t benefit the content creator. It is important to note that these ads are NOT pop-ups, and this is not a free internet service; the ads are served as if they were part of the page, to paying internet customers who are NOT made aware that these ads have been inserted by their ISP.

As a content creator I’m horrified that any page I create could be plastered with advertisements I don’t approve of as I’m sure many others will be as well. There are probably copyright issues as well in terms of hijacking original works for profit. We can only hope that this evil form of advertising does not spread beyond Texas.

(Image Credit: Ben Anderson via)

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/127411389/

Google may shut German users out of Gmail in response to new laws passed by the German Government that would force Google to maintain personally identifiable records for every German Gmail account.

Google Blogscoped reports that the effect of the law on Google is not clear but potentially it may force Google to start requiring a verifiable full address from every single German based Gmail user.

Google’s Peter Fleischer said that the law is odds to Google’s policy to offer anonymous email accounts: “Many users around the globe make use of this anonymity to defend themselves from spam, or government repression of free speech … If the web community won’t trust us with handling their data with great care, we’ll go down in no time”.

There’s got to be something ironic about a country in the European Union, the EU being the so-called champions of privacy, imposing laws like this. Perhaps our German readers can enlighten us some more in the comments.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/127395922/

The iPhone Ajax buzz continues. Joe Hewitt (Firebug) writes about the new multi-touch events that he hopes show up:

I’ve read lots of people, while arguing for why iPhone web apps are lame, assert that web apps won’t be able to take advantage of the iPhone’s multi-touch screen. This is nonsense. I completely expect Apple to have extended Safari with new DOM events that allow any web page can respond to the variety of gestures the user can make with the touch screen and accelerometer.

Won’t it be fun to handle “ontilt” for when the user turns the phone from portrait to landscape mode, or “onpinch” for when the user pinches the page with multi-touch? Should the “onscroll” event include details about how fast the user dragged her finger, to indicate the speed to scroll? Developers are going to have a field day with this stuff. I am sure Apple has thought these things through and won’t let us down.

Robert Cringely has his opinion on iPhone and Ajax:

The iPhone absolutely needs AJAX applications for the phone to be a success on AT&T’s EDGE network. By pushing more functional logic into the browser, the bandwidth consumed per http round-trip is significantly reduced, making the phone apps faster and helping to justify that big price tag. The problem with this is that AJAX apps don’t always work the same (or at all) on every browser. The iPhone has real browser support, which is good, but remember AJAX is based on JavaScript, which in this case is not so good. JavaScript isn’t statically typed and each browser has its own version of JavaScript. Developers are typically forced to hand-code different versions of their AJAX apps for different browsers. With the AJAX economy dictating that browsers with big market share like IE and Firefox get most of the effort, that leaves Safari as a second-class browser and, potentially, a liability for the iPhone.

Bandwidth is one piece of the puzzle, but what about the cost of connections? If a connection across the network is painful (and I think it is!) then Ajax isn’t going to necessarily help, and can in fact become a hinderance if abused. Will the apps be so good to make you frustrated at the EDGE?

To get testing applications you can download iPhoney and simulate away. This is a Mac piece of software, but you can use the JavaScript version too.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/127293681/iphone-and-ajax-onpinch-mac-simulator-and-cringely

The SaveNetRadio coalition will be holding a National Day of Silence June 26 to draw attention to an impending royalty rate increase that could lead to the shutdown of most of the US Internet radio industry.

Most large online music and radio providers are participating including Yahoo, Real (Rhapsody), Accuradio, Live365, MTV and Pandora. Conspicuous in its absence is the now CBS owned Last.fm.

To date there appears to be no comment at all from Last.fm, including no response to questions by users on the Last.fm forums.

On the surface it seems strange that CBS/ Last.fm wouldn’t be participating. Last.fm is obliged to pay royalties in the same way that any online music streaming service is obliged to. CBS is an investor in TargetPoint, a company that allows advertisers to customize online radio ads, pinpointing specific demographics and locations that would be affected by any industry down-turn. Is it perhaps a case of CBS deciding to let the competition die? CBS radio stations stream online and unlike many others in the business CBS has deep pockets and a much larger advertiser pool from which to cover costs under the new royalty scheme.

No matter what the reasoning, Last.fm’s failure to participate in the National Day of Silence runs the risk of causing a backlash. Many early adopters who are also Last.fm users will not be pleased to see a company they champion being a poor corporate citizen by failing to support the online music streaming industry.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/127222032/