Ajax Girl

No surprise really: iPhone buyers are flooding eBay with their new iPhones with bids starting from $1 and buy it now prices as high as $1500.

For those outside of the United States desperate to get their hands on an iPhone, a number of listings offer worldwide shipping; this listing for example posts to Australia for $50. However be aware that the iPhone does not support simcards and today no one has worked out how to unlock the phone from AT&T, although you could always buy it now and work that part out later (or use the iPhone as an expensive video iPod). MacNN has screenshots on the iPhone’s innards for those interested in hacking it.

If you do sign up for an AT&T plan and live outside the US, be warned that AT&T’s international roaming rates would make a drunken sailor blush.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/129134231/

A 3G iPhone for Europe will be announced Monday, according to an unconfirmed report from Guy Kewney at Newswireless.

Engadget points out that Kewney was recently eWeek.com’s European wireless editor and would be well placed to know.

The European 3G iPhone is said to be distributed via Carphone Warehouse with Vodafone in the UK and T-Mobile in Germany the European carriers. No word yet on other European countries. The phone is said to go on sale in Europe before the end of the year.

If the rumor is true (and it is just a rumor at this stage) it’s a positive sign for the rest of the world, particularly Australasia where the slower 2G systems are being phased out as 3G coverage is already ubiquitous. It would also create two tiers of iPhone users: Americans with the slower 2.5G versions and the rest of us with much faster 3G versions; as the saying goes: all good things come to those who wait.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/129118355/

Thousands of people are eagerly waiting in line to get their hands on the iPhone. However, for those of us tied into long term contracts or who just find the high price tag too much cash to part with, we’ve compiled a list of how to emulate iPhone’s features on your everyday handset.

Visual Voice Mail

Perhaps the most talked about feature, visual voice mail easily lets you play your messages out of order with more detail about who called and when. There are a couple of startups who offer this feature, Callwave and Gotvoice. Both of these programs also have other features like voice-to-text, or voicemail-to-email.

Browser

People have been gushing over iPhone’s browser, which lets you surf the “real” internet through a zoom and scan interface. Opera has recently come out with Opera Mini 4 Beta that has the same zoom navigation feature controlled by your number pad. Microsoft has their own version for Windows Mobile called Deepfish in limited beta.

Email

iPhone offers a rich HTML email interface including attachment support. Microsoft Exchange support stirred up quite a bit of controversy, but that may be resolved. Email has been offered on cell phones for a while now. Either Gmail, Yahoo, and Windows Live mail will work on your phone. Of course, Blackberry users need not apply.

Maps

iPhone is featuring a version of Google Maps that takes advantage of the touchscreen interface. A simpler Google Maps version is available for the rest of us and Yahoo is expected to release a mobile maps product on its Go platform soon. For voice and maps integration, readers should check out TellMe as well.

Music

Apple is claiming the iPhone is the best iPod to date. We’ve covered several other mobile solutions for playing music on your phone. The most recent player has been MusicStation, which mimics iTunes and plays songs with accompanying album art. If you’re only interested in playing the music you already own, you should also check out MyStrands, Avvenu, and Pandora.

Widgets

iPhone also lets you get information like weather and stock quotes through widgets. There are several companies already offering content widgets on a variety of phones. You should check out Bluepulse, Widsets, and GetMobio for ways of getting the content you crave to your phone.

Of course, if you’re willing to spend a couple days installing all this software, you might as well wait in line.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/129104340/

Today, Tips Club 2.0 has been launched, with lots of new features that has been added and tested in Tips Club labs .

Now members have the opportunity to use social bookmarking for any post on Tips Club, also they can add any of them to their own favorite menu .

Besides, now members can interact with Tips Club by posting new ebooks, magazines and video tutorials on the home page.

Resource : Welcome to Tips Club 2.0

Adeel Khan has created another HTTP shell called htsh using PHP on the backend and jQuery for the front end. It currently supports most common commands, like cd, chmod, cp, edit, exit, ls, mkdir, mv, rm, rmdir, touch, unzip, and zip. It is also very easy to add your own commands. It even supports tab-completion.

There is a demo to play with that doesn’t have all of the commands enabled for security reasons.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/129010530/htsh-http-shell

Since all you people seem to want to hear about is the iPhone, here’s a pretty good parody ad from CollegeHumor. They say they’ll have two more up on the site today - check here.

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/~3/129006755/

Are we headed towards a world dominated by amateurish art, truthiness, photos of cute animals, and video clips of people being hit in the nuts? That’s the fear expressed in The Cult of the Amateur: How today’s Internet is killing our culture (review), a new book by Andrew Keen. The book examines what Keen sees as the dark side of information democratization.

Mr. Keen argues that “what the Web 2.0 revolution is really delivering is superficial observations of the world around us rather than deep analysis, shrill opinion rather than considered judgment.” In his view Web 2.0 is changing the cultural landscape and not for the better. By undermining mainstream media and intellectual property rights, he says, it is creating a world in which we will “live to see the bulk of our music coming from amateur garage bands, our movies and television from glorified YouTubes, and our news made up of hyperactive celebrity gossip, served up as mere dressing for advertising.” This is what happens, he suggests, “when ignorance meets egoism meets bad taste meets mob rule.”

The book grew out of this essay published last year by The Weekly Standard. In that piece, he argues personalization is just another word for narcissism.

The consequences of Web 2.0 are inherently dangerous for the vitality of culture and the arts. Its empowering promises play upon that legacy of the ‘60s—the creeping narcissism that Christopher Lasch described so presciently, with its obsessive focus on the realization of the self.

Another word for narcissism is “personalization.” Web 2.0 technology personalizes culture so that it reflects ourselves rather than the world around us. Blogs personalize media content so that all we read are our own thoughts. Online stores personalize our preferences, thus feeding back to us our own taste. Google personalizes searches so that all we see are advertisements for products and services we already use.

Instead of Mozart, Van Gogh, or Hitchcock, all we get with the Web 2.0 revolution is more of ourselves.

He says not writing may be the new rebellion…

Orwell’s fear was the disappearance of the individual right to self-expression. Thus Winston Smith’s great act of rebellion in Nineteen Eight-Four was his decision to pick up a rusty pen and express his own thoughts…

In the Web 2.0 world, however, the nightmare is not the scarcity, but the over-abundance of authors. Since everyone will use digital media to express themselves, the only decisive act will be to not mark the paper. Not writing as rebellion sounds bizarre—like a piece of fiction authored by Franz Kafka. But one of the unintended consequences of the Web 2.0 future may well be that everyone is an author, while there is no longer any audience.

Keen’s got a point in some areas but it all seems rather elitist. One man’s “mob rule” is another’s democracy. If individuals can’t decide for themselves what to like, who should do it? Is he proposing we all obey a Committee of Good Taste or something?

Besides, culture was suffering before the internet too. As far as I’m concerned, the death of the crappy sitcom, bad Hollywoood movie, overproduced major label schlock, etc. is just fine. And viva enthusiastic amateurs creating amazing stuff like this handmade Modest Mouse video.

That said, one area where I share his concerns: newspapers. Newspapers employ the people who actually cultivate leads and grind out stories. TV news blows and hardly any bloggers do any real reporting (commenting on the news is a lot different than discovering it). We all suffer when reporting disappears. And right now the future of the newspaper business ain’t looking too rosy.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/497-is-the-web-killing-our-culture

Collaborative communications tool, Foldera, is going into public beta today with the release of their 3.0 version (Note: Michael Arrington is on the board of directors of the company). Foldera is aimed at small to medium sized businesses looking to aggregate all of their project related communications into collaboratively managed folders - think of it as Outlook online, but self-organizing by topic. It competes with Outlook/Microsoft Sharepoint, Live Office, and recently profiled Orgoo.

We covered last year’s private beta. The 3.0 version features simple search across all your content (contacts, emails, events, tasks, and files), contextual help, and an intuitive drag and drop interface.

Once your organization is on Foldera, you can trade information and bundle your projects into discrete folders. You get your group started by each signing up for accounts and importing your email and contacts from Outlook, Gmail, or Yahoo contact list on to the service. Editing and access to contacts can be managed through permissions. Foldera’s user interface looks very similar to Gmail’s AJAX interface. On the left hand side, you have a list of folders by subject containing your calendar, email, files, and tasks tied to that subject. The main pane on the right shows the content.

Folders are permission controlled workgroups, where you can send emails, assign tasks, trade files, and plan events on the calendar. All activity from that folder can be commented on by other users and is tied to that folder and the contacts it’s shared with. When you receive email replies to messages you sent from within the folder, they’re automatically filed in that folder for all members to see.

Within the folders you can also plan events, assign tasks, and share files (1GB of storage). When tasks are completed, the person who assigned them is notified by email. The calendar is a lot like Google calendar, with the ability to easily overlay events from other folders or users, but doesn’t allow exporting or importing feeds. The file system tracks versions of files as they are uploaded to the service and lets you easily attach them to emails.

Google’s addition of folders to Google Docs generated a great deal of conversation yesterday over the benefits of tags and folders. However, Foldera’s folders are a bit more flexible than traditional folders because they do allow files to linked to multiple projects (folders) in their drag and drop interface.

Foldera is Free for 5 users, but charges an extra $6 a month for each user beyond that.

Foldera is very late to launch, and some users who expressed enthusiasm over a year ago may now have moved on to other solutions. Give it a try and let us know what you think.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/128981966/

The Genographic Project: $99 to learn where you came from

“With a simple and painless cheek swab you can sample your own DNA and submit it to the lab…Your results will reveal your deep ancestry along a single line of direct descent (paternal or maternal) and show the migration paths they followed thousands of years ago. Your results will also place you on a particular branch of the human family tree.”

Feng Shui in Retail Stores

“There are four types of buildings; those that are good for people, those that are good for money, those that are good for people and money, and those that are not favorable for either. When selecting a location, a Feng Shui practitioner will examine the surrounding environment and then utilizing a Chinese Lo P’an and age old calculations will determine the nature of the building and whether the occupants should move in. Ideally, you want a building that is favorable to both people and money. In the case where it is only good for one, you can enhance the other using either the Earth element or the Water element properly placed.”

Behind the curtains of Wufoo, Blinksale, FeedBurner, and RegOnline

“Support is more demanding than most would anticipate. While multiple things can lead to support requests (poor code, bad interface, complexity, lack of documentation, etc.) what seems to matter the most to customers is how quickly, friendly, and accurately you handle it.”

Q&A with the CEO of Lego

“Monocle Editor-in-chief Tyler Brûlé talks to Lego CEO, Jrgen Vig Knudstorp, at the company’s innovation centre in Billund, Denmark.”

Managing Humans

“This book isn’t just about management, it’s about creating places where people can comfortably build stuff. It’s about what to do during the first ninety days of your new gig, and explains why you should pick a fight, because bright people often yell at each other.”

Chef sues over intellectual property (the menu)

“[Motu chef] Homaro Cantu, has applied for patents on a number of his culinary inventions, like a method for printing pictures of food on flavored, edible paper. Mr. Cantu also makes his cooks sign a nondisclosure agreement before they so much as boil water at Moto, his restaurant in Chicago.”

ChangeThis: Escape Adulthood

“Whether your childhood is filled with fond memories, or something you’d just as soon forget, always be mindful that it’s never too late to have a second childhood, one that’s even better than the first. There is a child inside you who can’t wait to run free, who is eager to stomp through puddles, believe in fairy tales, and live life with reckless abandon.”

TimmyOnTime = IM time tracking

“TimmyOnTime is a time management tool that uses instant messaging such as MSN, AIM or GoogleTalk. No need to install any new software! Use your favorite instant messaging application and you are ready to go.”

Interview with “Chief Customer Officer” author Jeanne Bliss

“To examine the best practices of our customer-service elite, BW Management Editor Jena McGregor spoke with Jeanne Bliss, author of Chief Customer Officer and a former Land’s End head of customer service, about what works and what doesn’t.”

How many engineers does it take to turn on a light bulb?

“I gave a talk at Sun Labs where I encountered a special light switch in one of their conference rooms. At first I thought it was some kind of silly ‘engineer’ joke. But the light switch functions as stated for real. Does it win the award for the most confusing light switch? I bet there are other ones out there that are equally complex to use.”

Reggie Watts: “Out of Control”

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/494-sunspots-the-dna-edition

&otAs we rant and rave about CSS the true artists are up to amazing things with HTML tables

Here is some Friday fun:

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/128948733/art-with-tables