Ajax Girl

Fuzzwich is a dead simple application for creating and publishing animated shorts. The animation editor comes pre-populated with a random selection of music, background, and cartoon characters. However, you can easily change them to any of their other 42 characters, 15 songs, or 14 backdrops. The content library will be changing over time, and they plan on adding a character editor soon.

After you have the basic layout, you can animate and resize the sprites in real time by just dragging and dropping them around the scene. The player records you movements as the clip runs. Some characters and scenes come with animations (moving arms or mouths), and speech bubbles can also be adrded. After publishing it can easily be embedded or linked to on another site. I made one myself in 5 minutes and I’m completely addicted. I’m a big fan of these hypnotic pandas.

One serious limitation of the service is that users cannot upload their own images or sound files and include them in cartoons. They do, however, plan on letting people to upload their faces on the cartoons. The also have a more feature rich animation studio in the works, but have initially focused on this simpler editor since it’s accessible to a wider audience.

We’ve covered two other startups, Aniboom and MyToons, that are aiming to be the “YouTube” of online cartoons. Fuzzwich competes with Aniboom and MyToons somewhat, but it is also different. You must use the Fuzzwich tools to create cartoons hosted on the site. Aniboom and MyToons do not offer cartoon creation tools.

Fuzzwich is a Y Combinator company.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/141434150/

The Opera folk have released an API that allows you, the developer, to be able to monitor all of the remotes that are connected with The Wii Remote API.

This means that you can watch up to four people buzzing around the screen:

Polling the status of a remote

The Wii Remote data is accessed through the opera.wiiremote object. This object offers a single method opera.wiiremote.update(n) which is used to obtain the status of an individual Wii Remote. The method expects a single parameter; the Wii Remote number. The number is zero-based, so it starts at 0 for the first remote, and ends at 3 for the fourth remote. The method returns a KpadStatus object, which has several properties that give information about the remote.

This update method can be called as often as is needed to obtain a fluid response, but note that the Wii is not as powerful as most desktop computers, so it is important to make sure that it is polled only as often as the script that uses that data can process it. For example, if a script uses the Wii Remote status to update the display of a canvas element, and that update will take perhaps 50 ms to update in Opera on a desktop computer, it may take over 100 ms on a Wii. Attempting to use a polling interval of less than 100 ms will cause the response to appear very sluggish.

Note that the opera.wiiremote object only exists in Opera on Wii, so it is important to check for its existence, as well as the existence of the opera object, before attempting to use it.

Examples

There are a bunch of demonstrations, including a simple game.

I can’t wait to see the Star Wars light sabre web game… and then see a Comet based app that grows beyond the four connected devices!

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/141382356/the-wii-remote-api-now-your-userbase-is-four

London-based Viagogo, an online marketplace for event tickets, is invading the U.S. market. It’s a European version of StubHub, which sold to eBay for $307 million back in January.

The site was founded by Eric Baker, one of StubHub’s founders, and launched in 2005 after a falling out with the company. Baker is now returning to the US market to take on StubHub, with a fresh $30 million coming from a series C round led by Index Ventures. Other participating investors included LVMH Chairman Bernard Arnault, German media mogul Dr. Herbert Kloiber, and international financier Lord Jacob Rothschild. The company has a total of $50 million in financing.

For their US launch, they’ve closed a deal with the Cleaveland Browns to be the official secondary ticket provider. The deal, however, comes on the heels of StubHub’s larger exclusive deal to be the MLB’s official online ticket resale marketplace.

Viagogo still has a larger presence in Europe, making exclusive ticketing deals with a number of Europe’s top teams, including Manchester United, Chelsea Football Club and Bayern Munich. Baker’s previous experience at Viagogo seems to be helping. The company claims to be generating more revenue in June, its tenth month in operation, than StubHub did in its first 15 months combined.

Viagogo makes money by adding a 10 percent service charge to ticket prices for buyers and takes a 15 percent service charge to sellers. So, a ticket listed for $100 costs a buyer $110, with $85 going to the seller. StubHub follows the same pricing structure.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/141349726/

Nick Gonzalez from TechCrunch posted about a “great iPhone chat application” by a company called Mundu.

Then he slings this at his 500,000+ readers (many of which are calling bullshit in the comments):

“So why in the world will they eventually charge $11 for it? There are way better ways to monetize software. Offer a free version and drop an advertisement into the conversation every once in a while, for example. But if Mundu wants to get a lot of users fast before Apple adds their own apps, they can’t be screwing around with charging customers. The marginal production cost of software is zero. That’s what the price should be.”

This is typical of the sensational tech/media/business press: an obsession with all things free, all things inflated, and all things unsustainable. Sustainability doesn’t mean going back to your investors for another round because you don’t have enough to pay your employees because you don’t have any income because you don’t charge for your products.

They forget that not everyone has Google’s search subsidies, Yahoo’s traffic, or Apple’s hardware revenues making up for their “free” bundled software. The rest of the companies in the world have to put a price tag on their wares and sell them on the public markets. And surprise!… The public is happy to pay for great products. Advertising-subsidized product revenue is just a teeny tiny sliver of the overall economy. Most of the rest is buying and selling of goods.

“The can’t be screwing around with charging customers” and “Why in the world will they eventually charge $11 for it?” and “Offer a free version and drop an advertisement into the conversation every once in a while” are toxic suggestions. That is unless you want to go broke. And to suggest that software should be free because the marginal production cost is zero is about the most bizarre proclamation I’ve heard in a while.

With a few obvious bigco exceptions, I’d like to see a count of successful and sustainable software companies that are surviving and thriving giving everything away for free. I can point to hundreds of examples of small software companies running in the black by selling their products to their customers. The shareware industry, for example, puts much food on many tables for many families because the software builders price their products and put them on the market. People try it and people buy it. People are happy to pay for things they find valuable.

So don’t think for a second that you’re “screwing around” if you charge customers. What you’re doing is saying “This is our product, we believe it’s valuable, and we think you will too.”

There are few things more satisfying than having people find enough value in your ideas and products to trade their earned money for what you’ve produced. It’s primal and wonderful and every vendor should experience it. It’s great business and it makes your business great.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/562-fleeing-free

Another social networking embarrassment for a presidential candidate: Rudy Giuliani’s 17-year-old daughter Caroline supports Barack Obama for president over her father. Until this morning she was a member of the One Million Strong For Obama Facebook group, and lists her political views as “liberal.” Caroline removed herself from the group after Slate emailed her about it, but it remained in her newsfeed.

This is certainly not the first time social networks have been a thorn for political candidates. In March, Senator John McCain’s MySpace profile was hacked to suggest he was in favor of gay marriage. The incident was later picked up by the Daily Show.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/141313244/

The folk at Me.dium have announced a new widget that you can use to show Me.dium on your own site, and the full release of their IE 7 support.

Below is an example of a Me.dium widget that is bound to ajaxian.com as the central point. Me.dium is now opening up to your signups, so go ahead and try it out. To add a widget yourself, click on the “manage widgets” section.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/141307676/medium-widgets-and-ie-7

Bike shed – a discussion that pointlessly dwells on details and wastes time

Example: Someone posts a variation on a screen and one person offers .02 on the copy, another wants the header color changed, another wants a different image used, etc. Too many chefs on something that doesn’t even matter much.

It’s something we have to watch for in our Campfire chat room where it’s easy to have pile-ons that don’t really accomplish much. Someone has to blow the whistle every once in a while and say, “Is this conversation really helping?” Calling out “Bike shed” is a quick way to do that.

About the term
Poul-Henning Kamp used the term in “A bike shed (any colour will do) on greener grass…” and gives credit to C. Northcote Parkinson, a management guru who compared building an atomic power plant to building a bike shed. Kamp’s summary:

Anyone can build [a bike shed] over a weekend, and still have time to watch the game on TV. So no matter how well prepared, no matter how reasonable you are with your proposal, somebody will seize the chance to show that he is doing his job, that he is paying attention, that he is here.

More Parkinson wisdom
Parkinson is also the namesake of Parkinson’s law: “work expands to fill the time available.” He observed that the total of those employed inside a bureaucracy rose by 5-7% per year “irrespective of any variation in the amount of work (if any) to be done.”

Some more interesting quotes from C. Northcote Parkinson:

Delay is the deadliest form of denial.

Expansion means complexity and complexity decay.

Expenditures rise to meet income.

The Law of Triviality… briefly stated, it means that the time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum involved.

The man who is denied the opportunity of taking decisions of importance begins to regard as important the decisions he is allowed to take.

When any organizational entity expands beyond 21 members, the real power will be in some smaller body.

Men enter local politics solely as a result of being unhappily married.

The chief product of an automated society is a widespread and deepening sense of boredom.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/560-bike-sheds-and-c-northcote-parkinson

Zhou Renjian has a new demo showing a Google Talk client running in the browser. He told us that:

This demo was first implemented by Java language with SWT, Smack and Java2Script’s Ajax libraries. Instantiations Inc.’s “WindowBuilder Pro” was used for SWT user interface design and implementation (Actually it’s a copy of Google Talk Client’s UI).

Also Simple Pipe was used to create and maintain a Comet connection between client/browser and server (Tomcat). A looping-query can be used instead for chatting, but the current demo does not switch to that mode.

After the demo was implemented and tested in Java the Java2Script compiler was used to convert all Java sources into JavaScript. After deploying the application, I took some time working on optimizations which included lazy loading, lazy creating, and virtual list views, which were musts for quick loading and response. I talk a little about these optimizations here.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/141166538/google-talk-client-in-javascript

We just heard about a new Israeli video/TV startup called KnockaTV, which has the tagline “The People Have Taken Over.”

KnockaTV is self described as:

Knocka.TV… the latest from the inventors of ICQ, the web’s first Instant Messenger (www.icq.com). Building on our success with bringing people together on the web, “We’ve created a new form of Television!”. It’s social and real. It’s hyper-interactive and creative. Best of all, it’s democratic. Knocka lets the People decide what’s on TV, playing only original videos from the best web video producers in a professional TV broadcasting style.

They are also looking for original content producers to submit content to the service. Beyond that there isn’t much information yet. The site has not yet entered private beta, but it does show a constant stream of quick video clips on the landing page. Some of those clips show a counter for total number of current viewers; others contain a thumbs up or thumbs down icon, suggesting viewers will vote on the content, possibly skipping stuff they don’t like (as Pandora does when playing songs). This is all speculation, though. I haven’t yet spoken to the company.

The founders of instant messaging service ICQ are behind the company. ICQ was created by Yair Goldfinger, Arik Vardi, Sefi Vigiser and Amnon Amir in 1996 (it’s not clear if all of those individuals are involved in KnockaTV) and its parent company was acquired by AOL for $408 million in 1998. Yotam Eshel’s LinkedIn profile lists him as the product manager for the company.

Alarm Clock says they raised $1 million in capital in June 2007. Evergreen Venture Partners, an Israeli firm, was named as an investor. Evergreen is also behind Aniboom, a user-generated cartoon site that launched in late 2006.

Whatever KnockaTV is, it looks like a hell of a lot of fun. Thanks for the tip, Orli.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/141140004/

Mock Ajax? Huh. That is what I thought when I first read the documentation on building Facebook applications. It was a little sad to see that your choice was either to use the “mock ajax” calls, or to jump into iframe land and do everything on your server, thus not interacting with the Facebook shell.

Well, now JavaScript is going to be a first class citizen with FBJS:

FBJS is Facebook’s solution for developers who want to use Javascript in their Facebook applications. We built FBJS to empower developers with all the functionality they need, and to protect our user’s privacy at the same.

And an Ajax object is available:

FBJS supplies a very powerful AJAX object for developers. It supports retrieving JSON, FBML, or raw text from remote servers. To use it, just instantiate a new Ajax class.

ondone 

An event handler which fires when an AJAX call returns

onerror 

An event handler which fires when an error occurs during an AJAX call

requireLogin 

If you set this to true the AJAX call will require the user to be logged into your application before the AJAX call will go through. The AJAX call will then be made with the regular fb_sig parameters containing the user’s identity. If they refuse to login, the AJAX call will fail.

responseType 

This can be on of Ajax.RAW, Ajax.JSON, or Ajax.FBML.

Ajax.RAW 

The response from your server will be returned to your callback in its original form.

Ajax.JSON 

The response from your server will be parsed as a JSON object and returned to your callback in the form of an object. Properties of your JSON object which are prefixed with “fbml_” will be parsed as individual FBML strings and returned as FBML blocks. These blocks can used on a DOM object with the setInnerFBML method.

Ajax.FBML 

The response from your server will be parsed as FBML and returned as an FBML block. This block can used on a DOM object with the setInnerFBML method.

And one method:

post(url, query) 

Start an AJAX post. url must be a remote address, and query can be either a string or an object which will be automatically converted to a string.

Hopefully this will mean richer Ajax apps on the Facebook platform.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/141103926/richer-ajax-support-for-facebook