Ajax Girl

It is no surprise that a bunch of news over the weekend has been related to developers spending time with the iPhone. We aren’t interested in “i love the iPhone” posts, but there are some interesting ones such as Firebug for iPhone.

Joe Hewitt was sick thinking about debugging with alert() again, and didn’t want to use Firebug Lite for screen real estate issues, so he created Firebug for iPhone as a proxy.

When your JavaScript console.log()’s away, it send the info to your computer which is running a nice 30″ monitor for you to debug on.

As another option I would like a Firebug Lite on the iPhone itself though. What if I could do a finger gesture flip and have the debug window show up to play with.

This all goes to show that whatever you think of the iPhone itself, the biggest gift that has been given to us is the focus on mobile Ajax applications.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/129639166/firebug-for-iphone

There’s a growing list of companies lining up to port their application to the iPhone’s Safari browser. Jajah is the first to bring their VOIP client to the new iPhone.

iPhone’s standard contract isn’t cheap ($60 - $100/month). If you want to make international calls, you’d have to pay an extra $3.99/month and around 23 cents a minute for a call to the UK. However, Jajah is the first of the VOIP carriers to tailor their site for iPhone users, letting them make the same call to the UK for just 3 cents a minute. Since Jajah makes long distance calls cheaper by bridging two local calls with a VOIP line, you still have to spend some of your plans minutes on the phone call. The program is available to iPhone users through freeyouriphone.

There are quite a few other companies launching applications for iPhone’s browser such as iZoho. However, since the iPhones keypad only pops up for web forms, you can’s use your keyboard to edit documents on iZoho.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/129633391/

So I’ve had a week now to play around with Pownce, Kevin Rose’s (the founder of Digg, pictured left) newly launched Twitter killer.

Twitter, which launched a year ago, was obviously used as the initial inspiration for the Pownce. They both allow users to sign up, add friends, and broadcast quick notes to people. The main differences: Twitter is mobile-ready, allowing users to receive friend requests and new messages via text message. And Pownce gives users more flexibility in communicating by allowing messages just to friends. Pownce also allows different kinds of messages - file transfers, events, links and plain text messages (Twitter allows text and links only). There’s no reason, though, that users will use both. They’ll go with one or the other, or neither.

So is Pownce good enough to beat Twitter?

The early adopter crowd is going to be torn on this one. (Just about) everyone loves Kevin Rose, and anything he launches is going to get serious attention - on Digg, tech blogs and mainstream press. But a lot of people like Twitter, too, and that application has already reached the “network effect” stage of its business cycle. It continues to grow fast. And Evan Williams, the co-founder of Twitter (and Odeo and Blogger), is also well liked in Silicon Valley.

A breakdown of the basic features is in the chart to the right. Pownce also provides a few other bells and whistles not included in the chart. For example, it lets you forward a message to others (and also allows you to exclude those that have already received it). And they also give basic stats on messages, like how many people have received it. Pownce has an AIR desktop application, although there are similar apps for Twitter, too. Another thing to consider that’s not on the chart - Twitter has had, and continues to have, massive performance issues. It is slow or down way too often.

Services like Twitter and Pownce (and there are others, too - Jaiku, Kyte and many more) are highly viral and benefit from the network effect. People want to join the service that all of their friends already use, and so each new user adds value to the network as a whole. By that measure, Twitter is far ahead of Pownce.

Frankly, unless you really like the mobile aspect of Twitter, there isn’t a whole lot of difference between the two services. I expect Twitter will add most of the Pownce features in the short term anyway. And many of the unique features of Pownce - like file sharing, group messaging, etc., are handled pretty well already by…email. Gmail, for example, lets users send files of up to 20 MB. Pownce lets you send up to 10 MB files, unless you pay for a pro account (then the limit is 100 MB). And email is certainly very useful for private and group messaging.

People use Twitter to quickly tell the world (or at least the people who care) what they are up to and what they are looking at on the web. Like blogging, it’s a one-to-many application that works very well. Twitter does that perfectly, and does little else. Pownce does it, too, but all the other features are really just distractions.

Pownce also does something that I find highly annoying. By default, you receive an email message every time you get a new friend or receive any sort of message. My inbox quickly filled up with dozens of emails telling me I had a message. But to read the message I have to click on a link and go to the service. The only reason for that is to generate page views

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/129612172/

I’m betting that Lauren Turner’s job duties at Google will no longer include blogging. Yesterday she wrote an anti-Sicko (Michael Moore’s new movie lambasting the U.S. health care industry) post on the Google Health Advertising blog, and encouraged health care companies to look to Google advertising as a way to spread their counter-message. That didn’t go over so well with the blogosphere (our coverage here).

The movie, Turner said, “fails to show healthcare’s interest in patient well-being and care.” More than a few people agree with that statement, and were immediately turned off by Turner’s comments. Particularly since there was a clear profit motive to the post - getting more advertising dollars.

There is no way anyone who’s blogged or worked in PR for more than, say, a week would post something like that on a corporate blog. The health care industry is generally reviled in the U.S., and such a polarized topic is hardly one in which a company like Google wants to take a stand. And if they did take a stand, it would be with Moore.

Less than 24 hours later Turner recanted and said the post was her opinion only, and not that of Google. That’s fine, but the damage has been done and egg is all over Google’s face.

What I don’t want to see is Google start to reign in its bloggers. It’s clear that legal and possibly PR don’t review posts on all of Google’s blogs before they are clear to publish. That allows the writers to use a human voice and express real opinions. If Google shuts that down, we’ll all have less insight into what’s going on there.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/129523369/

MyThings is a service that allows users to create an online portfolio of valued belongings.

We reviewed iTaggit earlier this week; MyThings operates in the same space. Both provide personal asset management although MyThings is the more extensive offering of the two; MyThings took $8million from Carmel Ventures and Accel Partners in May 2006 and the funding shows.

MyThings offers a integrated one stop shop for collectibles. Items can be included in the database, with tags and pictures. Once listed users are able to obtain a valuation for the item, buy (or extend) the items warranty, purchase insurance, sell the item on eBay and even donate am item to a worthy cause. MyThings also includes an extensive database of items reported lost and stolen from the world of art, antiques and collectibles; MyThings users are able to add stolen items to the database at any time and likewise the service is able to screen new submissions for items that may have been stolen.

The company has offices in Menlo Park, London and Tel Aviv, delivering a global product with a lot of appeal. Perhaps my earlier assessment of the space (in the iTaggit review) as being niche was unwarranted; the extensive user collections listed on MyThings would indicate that listing collections online may actually be a hot vertical.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/129415542/