Ajax Girl

iTaggit aims to change the way people collect, organize, and enjoy their personal items and collections by providing a service to catalog collections online.

iTaggit provides an online environment for cataloguing, managing, and sharing collections of items, while preserving user and data privacy. The site features community resources, where users can connect and interact with friends, like-minded collectors, and experts. Recent upgrades include an Add Item Wizard, a Flickr-like picture uploader, an Amazon import tool, and Item Publisher.

The best way of describing iTaggit is as a personal asset management service. If you’re a hobbyist or someone who likes cataloguing collections then iTaggit will appeal; although notably this would likely be a relatively small vertical.

iTaggit took $1.04 million Series A financing round in August 2006 and makes revenue from eBay and similar affiliate advertising programs.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/128836305/

People are clamoring on the iPhone buzz to get developers using their products for iPhone development.

Two early IDE folk are Morfik and Aptana:

Aptana iPhone Support

We’ve released the first beta of our iPhone Development Plugin for the Aptana IDE. Since ‘Web 2.0’ is the development model of choice for the iPhone, and that is what the Aptana IDE is all about, it made sense that we’d support it in every way we could. For this first beta, here are the features we have (and some that are coming):

• Preview of your iPhone projects in horizontal or vertical mode
• iPhone Project contains starter files to get you going easily on your iPhones apps
• Several example apps that leverage the iPhone form factor
• Easy import of Ajax libraries into iPhone projects
• Integrated content assist for iPhone-specific APIs (coming soon)
• Help and online documentation (coming soon)

Morfik

Morfik has also provided a web development environment for the iPhone including iChess an example application that works on the iPhone.

Scriptor will have iPhone support released by Friday.

No matter what you think about the “SDK” issues (I am sure you can get some Cocoa going in the future) it is amazing to see how fast these vendors have jumped in, and how fast developers have built applications. And, this is still before the phone is released.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/128763286/iphone-development-aptana-and-morfik

Some recent activity at our internal 37signals Campfire chat room:

YouTube commenters

iPhone service plans

Mark I.	AT&T & Apple announce iPhone service plans: http://www.prnewswire.com/mnr/apple/28807/
Jason F.	Oh cool, checking
Mark I.
Jason F.	I love that there are just 3 plans
Mark I.	I love that there’s unlimited data access.
Mark I.	The cell providers usually charge through the nose for it..
Jason F.	of course people will look at the minutes and price and just compare those to other plans
Jason F.	And when you do that it looks expensive
Jason F.	But with unlimited data… It’s a fair deal.
Jason F.	And AT&T has rollover too, which is great
Mark I.	These plans are totally driven by Apple, it’s obviousl
Mark I.	They make too much sense to have originated at a telco.

UPS alert

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/496-fly-on-the-wall-youtube-commenters-iphone-service-plans-ups

I just posted on the Swaptree private beta and upcoming launch. You can actually join right now, and there are no limits on signups. Just go to swaptree.com/techcrunch.htm and follow the instructions. Let me know what you think.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/128705456/

The iPhone keyboard video shows how the spacebar is replaced by web-centric options when you’re entering a URL.

URLs can’t contain blank spaces so the iPhone gets rid of the useless key and replace it with ones that add value. Great example of context over consistency.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/492-iphones-disappearing-spacebar

Robert Cerny has created a JavaScript library in his own image Cerny.js.

The library has an entire slew of things:

• method call interception,
• type checking for arguments and return values on function calls,
• programming by contract,
• logging,
• validation of an object against a schema,
• dictionaries,
• pretty printing JSON in text or HTML,
• dependency management,
• easy configuration and
• good documentation.

One of the more out there ideas is for putting design by contract into your JavaScript world via something like this:

A lot to check out here.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/128656822/cernyjs-method-call-interception-schemas-type-checking-and-more

Ryan Johnson has developed PhotoFolder, a simple library that “scans a given folder for JPEG files with any number of thumbnail sizes per image. If the resized images do not yet exist, it will automatically create the thumbnails for you. The result is that your workflow for adding new images to an application built with PhotoFolder is a simple as putting named JPEG files in a directory.”

The demo will show you all you need to know. Ryan is going to be speaking at The Ajax Experience, so come heckle!

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/128636095/photofolder-json-image-gallery-api

I was sure trading site Swaptree had been abaondoned. After a flurry of press about them over a year ago, they went very quiet. Potential investors told me they’d just stopped returning calls completely. My own emails went unanswered as well. They had the smell of death about them.

But it wasn’t so. It turns out Swaptree had merely gone quiet and was focused on building out the product. They are now in private beta and say they will launch to the public in just a few days, on July 4.

Like Peerflix and LaLa, Swaptree is focused on letting users trade certain stuff with other users. Users can trade CDs, DVDs, video games and books.

To use it, you build two lists. The first is a list of items you are willing to trade. You can simply type in the UPC code or ISBN of the item - Swaptree will then add a picture and other important information. The second list is made up of things you want. This list can be created by clicking on items on the Swaptree site, or even easier ways like importing your Amazon wish list or using a plugin to click on items on Amazon directly and have them included on your Swaptree “wish list”.

Swaptree will then look at your demand list and supply list and try to set up trades for you. To make things simple, Swaptree assumes you’re willing to give up any item on your trade list for any item you want. They will then set up a trade, using as many as four users to make it happen. That way, the person with the item you want doesn’t need to want something you have.

The only way the model will work is if Swaptree gets a lot of users who each add a lot of items they want, and are willing to trade. To help things, Swaptree doesn’t charge anything for trades - you only have to pay the outbound postage on the item you are sending. The company will make money from advertising on 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/~3/128630916/

Dekoh is rolling out some of their widgets as open source standalone components.

New widgets will be released every week during the run-up to the product release of Dekoh itself, and they have started with a tag cloud.

To find out how you can embed it in your application or to download the widget source visit the documentation page. If you want to tweak your data model or want to use the widget with Ruby on Rails, you can go over the documentation here.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/128621033/open-source-ajax-widgets-available-from-dekoh

There’s a subset of viral video sits that have been popping up focusing on verticals. One of the more recent entrants was the comedy site Funny Or Die, which made waves when Will Ferrell’s short sketch “The Landlord” exploded across the net (over 36,539,017 views). Monster Dare joins DareJunkies in bringing dares to social video. The idea is a bit like a softer version of MTV’s Jackass Mixed with the competition site Bix.

Monster Dare is a social network where you can wager money on daring your friends or the general public. Each of the dares is broken down into categories like romantic, challenging, or even x rated. When a dare is declared, members can donate to a money pot to entice anyone or a specific person to carry it out. They can collect on the dare if they provide photographic or video proof for the audience. By contrast, Dare Junkies has a large pot that users are competing over, which goes as high as $5,000 for any of the challenges they put on the site.

Since Monster Dare’s payments are made through PayPal, they are somewhat bogged down with transaction fees that may kill the service. They charge 50p if you deposit £5, but nothing on depositing higher amounts. They also charge a flat £1.50 for removing money and take 10% from winning dare funds.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/128605387/