Ajax Girl

Google ignominiously shut down its video marketplace today via an email to us and everyone else who’s ever tried the service. The product, announced in January 2006 at CES by Larry Page, was an answer to iTunes’ sales of television shows. It was largely forgotten afterwards and if sales were occuring, we didn’t hear much about it.

The email to users, which is copied below, also lets them know that any videos they’ve purchased will no longer be viewable. Money spent on videos is not being refunded, either. Users get a sixty day credit on their Google Checkout account instead. That should spur sales of their new overflow storage product, at least. I just wish I could use it on ebay. heh

It’s a mistake not to fully refund every dollar in video purchases. Users are going to be hesitant to try out Google services in the future if they can’t believe that something they are buying is really theirs to keep.

Hello,

As a valued Google user, we’re contacting you with some important information about the videos you’ve purchased or rented from Google Video. In an effort to improve all Google services, we will no longer offer theability to buy or rent vi deos for download from Google Video, ending the DTO/DTR (download-to-own/rent) program. This change will be effective August 15, 2007.

To fully account for the video purchases you made before July 18, 2007, we are providing you with a Google Checkout bonus for $5.00. Your bonus expires in 60 days, and you can use it at the stores listed here: http://www.google.com/checkout/signupwelcome.html. The minimum purchase amount must be equal to or greater than your bonus amount, before shipping and tax.

After August 15, 2007, you will no longer be able to view your purchased or rented videos.

If you have further questions or requests, please do not hesitate to contact us. Thank you for your continued support.

Sincerely,

The Google Video Team

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/142959170/

Bar Camp, an open multi-day event where people can share ideas and talk about just about anything they like, is a very important event for me. Two years ago I attended the first Bar Camp, which was held at Social Text’s offices in Palo alto. It was just a few weeks after starting TechCrunch, and nearly everyone I met there is now a friend. It was held just before all the craziness happened with the web, and the people who were starting companies weren’t expecting much of a return - they were doing it out of passion.

Pandora and TechMeme launched at the event, and we got our first glimpse of Flock. My notes on the event are here and here.

Since the original event there have been over 150 Bar Camps held around the world. 10,000 or so people have attended at least one of them.

This year, Bar Camp is back at the original location at Social Text’s offices in Palo Alto. But far more people are going to attend, so the organizers (Chris Messina, Ross Mayfield, Liz Henry, Tantek Çelik and Tara Hunt) have received city permission to take over the entire block (and so the event is called Bar Camp Block) At least 1,000 people are expected to flow through the three day event.

Event information is here. You can also sign up to attend at that link. See you there.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/142928628/

Classified listings service Edgeio now lets you sell content through your listings. The new type of listing called “Paid content” consists of the same listing Edgeio already hosts, but comes with an embedded digital locker. Through the locker, users can securely sell text, file downloads, and streaming media through a widget hosted by Edgeio.

It seems a good fit for selling podcasts or research reports. Affiliates can also grab the widget code to sell your product on their own sites as well for a revenue share determined by the content owner. Michael Arrington, the editor of this blog, is a founder and investor in the company.

Digital lockers are nothing new. E-Junkie, Payloadz, Tradebit, and Bitpass (shutdown) have done it for a while. However, Edgeio has the added advantage of leveraging the paid listings through their existing listings network and providing a very straightforward product.

It’s pretty simple to get started. You sign up to create a listing like any other through the “Paid Content” link. Next, select your content type, price (currency), affiliate percentage, and coupon code. Finally, Edgeio lets you make a teaser “preview” for the content to give buyers an idea about what they’re purchasing. Once completed, you get some embed code and the listing is placed in Edgeio’s index, linked to the page where the widget is embedded.

An example of one of the widget embeds is included below. The other version of the widget initially shows visitors a teaser, until the content is purchased and unlocked. Use the coupon code “vgforfree” to unlock the content. To purchase the content, you need to sign into your Edgeio account and to pay by credit card or PayPal. The content is then unlocked for your Edgeio account.

Edgeio splits revenue from sales through the widget 80/20 in favor of the content creator. The creator can then split that 80% for sales through affiliates at any percentage they like.

Update (Arrington): This is a company that I co-founded in early 2005 with Keith Teare, months before I started TechCrunch. There is a clear conflict of interest, although I did not write, edit or give input on this post. For a balance of viewpoints, see Techmeme.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/142839215/

In honor of CrunchGear’s first birthday, the CG team is giving away over 30 prizes in the next 10 days, culminating in a get-together in Manhattan and maybe an iPhone or two. Head on over to check it out.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/142796840/

If you needed more web regular expression options, this is your lucky Friday. RegexPal does the job, and changes colour on the fly as it mixes and matches.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/142709245/regexpal-now-with-colours

My colleague Brian Dillard has written a review of Learning JQuery:

Having spent most of the Ajax era at a large dot-com writing custom JavaScript backed by Prototype and some really solid internal libraries, I’m astounded by the staggering number of competing frameworks that have been quietly chugging along while I was busy elsewhere. It’s time to play catch-up. Helping me in that mission are Jonathan Chaffer and Karl Swedberg, authors of the new “Learning jQuery: Better Interaction Design and Web Development with Simple JavaScript Techniques.” The title’s a bit of a mouthful, but this beginner’s tutorial offers the same elegance and simplicity as the jQuery JavaScript framework itself. Assuming a solid grasp of basic UI technologies (XHTML, CSS and JavaScript) on the part of their audience, Chaffer and Swedberg dive right into the basics of using jQuery to speed development of RIAs.

There’s a lot to like about jQuery the library:

• The CSS selector-based DOM traversal provides a single, unified method of manipulating your markup and data. It’s less flexible than Prototype’s grab bag of DOM methods, but it’s easier to master. All of the major frameworks are scrambling to optimize their DOM traversal methods for speed and scalability, so it will be interesting to see how jQuery evolves.
• The crazy method-chaining allows simple, elegant DOM manipulation. Grab a node reference, change some visual properties and add behaviors - all on a single line.
• The stripped-down base library and plug-in framework offer an attractive solution to feature bloat and gigantic code footprints. The base jQuery library provides the underpinnings, but the plug-ins provide the bells and whistles one at a time.
• The organization of the jQuery object itself keeps the global namespace free and other libraries working properly. jQuery doesn’t rewire core JavaScript objects, either, so it plays well with legacy code written in POJ.

More…

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/142764372/review-of-learning-jquery

John Resig has aggregated the Why Tamarin? debate:

What’s the advantage of Tamarin over integrating the Mono VM into Firefox?

Mike Shaver:

Here are a few, at least as I see them:

• Optimized to run JavaScript and sibling languages, which is our most important language target by a vast margin.
• Licensed appropriately.
• About 1/25 the size, I think (200KB for Tamarin, 5MB for Mono as described by Miguel elsewhere)
• In my coarse measurements, significantly smaller memory footprint.

I was once quite a supporter of getting Mono into our world, including writing a prototype XPCOM binding for it, but I didn’t see a path to getting the important factors (performance, licensing, footprint in code and memory) resolved, and I don’t think it’s much closer today. Nobody in Mono-land was interested enough to contribute to that, which is another counterpoint with Tamarin I suppose, where we have very active contributions from Adobe and others to help us get it in the state we need for it to be a suitable basis for building our whole app on.

It’s not like we didn’t look hard at Mono, and in the case of many of us lobby hard for licensing and patent concerns to be swept aside. Tamarin is a very good fit for us in a large number of ways, unfortunately including a number of ways in which Mono is not.

[Why doesn’t] Mozilla build on the Java platform rather than Tamarin?

Brendan Eich:

Moreover, for Mozilla at least, we absolutely cannot depend on closed source, and we require a non-copyleft BSD license, or at most MPL/GPL/LGPL. Java was not even open source until recently (I don’t remember the date; it was preannounced one too many times :-/), well after we had to make our own plans and commitments.

Finally, in spite of the prospects with JRuby, the JVM really is about Java first and last. Tamarin is about an ECMAScript variant, so it’s a better target now, and more likely to evolve to support JS1 and JS2 in a first class way, than the JVM.

Compilation heroics can help, but the browser will remain an environment where compilation must be very fast. Wherefore our forthcoming work on a trace-based JIT.

Then some commenters disagreed with the performance results, and claimed that a JVM would be faster but the benchmark was brought into question:

No contest indeed, Tamarin is optimized towards small footprint and instantaneous startup, compared to Hotspot. However, it can do better. If I add a return type annotation, and place a package {} declaration around the test (triggering early binding), Tamarin avoids boxing overhead, and the test results drop from 56s to 11s on my T60p, solidly inbetween Rhino-JS and pure Java.

Having a JIT running our JavaScript will be great step, however we get there.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/142709246/the-choice-of-tamarin

Israeli-based VOIP start-up Fring has closed an estimated $12 million second round, led by US VC fund North Bridge Venture Partners. VenFin and previous investors Pitango, Veritas and Yossi Vardi also participated. If the investment estimate is accurate, it would be one of the larger rounds for a VOIP company.

Fring is a mobile application for Windows and Symbian phones that uses VOIP to make cheap/free mobile calls and instant message. Unlike Jajah, but like Truphone, Fring sends calls and chats over Wi-Fi internet access or your 3G or GPRS Internet data plan. Like Skype, users are charged a nominal fee to call standard phone lines. However, calls made to other internet phones are free. Fring connects to standard phones, other SIP based VOIP clients, and chat applications (Skype, MSN Messenger, ICQ, Google Talk, and even Twitter).

Fring has received a lot of praise from Crunchgear and TechCrunch, mostly due to its multi chat integration and free calls. However, call quality was an issue and the 3G phones Fring works on can be expensive. You should also see our previous coverage of other VOIP carriers.

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/~3/142706477/

Lots of storage news today from the big guys. Microsoft launched its Live.com online storage solution, called SkyDrive (predicted earlier this week after a Japanese press conference). And Google announced for-pay overflow storage on Gmail and Picasa. Both fell flat.

Microsoft Live SkyDrive

SkyDrive, which is demo’d in the video above, has a ho-hum interface and gives a measly 500 MB of storage. Files can be private, shared or public (although the public folders in my account crash every time I open them).

It will likely get a lot of non-early-adopters to try out online storage for the first time, but as Richard MacManus points out, there is a lot of competition in this space. Microsoft enters the market late with a product that is not as good as the competition. Still, kudos for launching before Google’s storage product. And not a peep from Yahoo, which is still offering a 90’s era product that weighs in at 25 MB of storage capacity.

Google Overflow Storage

Google’s news is purely about money. Users can purchase up to 250 GB of extra storage for email and photos. Prices start at $20/year for 6 GB, up to $500/year for 250 GB. Presumably Google will continue to increase the free storage offered at Gmail over time (currently 2.8 GB), and charge only for usage over that free baseline.

Now certainly Gmail users are better off today that yesterday - they can now choose to exceed the storage limits by simply paying a fee. But something about the news falls a little flat. Perhaps it is because Yahoo recently began offering free unlimited email storage to all users. We’re a fickle bunch in silicon valley, and like to see the big Internet companies continually one-up each other. Today Google said they were not going to play that game any more. They effectively took their toys and went home. I never thought I’d see that.

Disclosure: I am an investor in Omnidrive, a competitor to SkyDrive.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/142677487/

Some of you may remember our ridicule of the unlaunched Australian search engine MyLiveSearch back in May after a glowing but research-free Australian newspaper article about them. Being unlaunched is fine, but suggesting that Google is worried about them is a little over the top to say the least.

Dubbing itself the “world’s first live search engine” it promises to show us the 4/5 of the web that Google doesn’t index - this includes the grey web of dynamically created web pages as well as real time indexing of more traditional pages. Their sub tagline: “Searching the internet will never be the same!”

The company promised to debut the service in June. They missed that deadline and still haven’t launched. And frankly I probably never would have written about them again except that they’ve started emailing us again for coverage. They won’t tell us anything about the service, apart from the hyperbole. No demo’s or screen shots either.

But there is a bit of good news. They’ve ditched the old logo and have come up with something much more webtwoohified. Stay tuned. They promise to announce the (new) launch date shortly.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/142663044/