Ajax Girl

Hewlett Packard has announced a deal to ship a P2P IPTV system with their notbooks (notably the Presario and Pavillion models) beginning in late September. It will also be available as a system update for exiting HP Vista computers. The system is called Next.tv and powered by Dave Networks, a white label IPTV provider. For the launch, Next.tv will feature content from CBS, Freemantle, and Endemol. Their sneak preview also includes MGM, eye.tv, Lazy.tv, and Reality.tv as well. Other partnerships, filling a total of 50 channels, will be announced throughout September.

Next.TV has plans for a desktop version for non HP users as well.

Rex Wong, the former CEO of Applied Semantics (later Google Adsense), is the CEO of Dave Networks. Wong previously expressed a desire to do for video what AdSense did for text. Last April, Rex Wong said, “We will be using the same technology used by Homeland Security to monitor [telephone] chatter. Audio keywording will allow us to contextually figure out where to sell ads and to place more than just pre- and post-roll ads.” He planed to launch the contextual video advertising service on their YouTube competitor, Dave.TV.

While Next.tv’s distribution deal through HP gives them a good head start, they’re going up an increasingly crowded marketplace. Joost, Babelgum, Veoh, British Telecom, Zattoo, and Vuze are amongst the competition. Scoring the best content deals will likely determine who makes IPTV work.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/152740783/

It’s just two weeks until TechCrunch40 kicks off on September 17 in San Francisco. Last week we announced that we’ve doubled the number of presenting companies from 20 to 40. And today we’ve announced the two keynote sessions to be held at the conference, in addition to the 40 new products (see our partner Jason Calacanis’ blog post about this here).

• The first keynote session, “Humble Beginnings,” features Sequoia Capital partner Michael Moritz interviewing three legendary founders - Marc Andreessen (Netscape, Opsware, Ning), Chad Hurley (YouTube) and David Filo (Yahoo) about the early days of their startups - when money was scarce, users were few and far between and most of the quality coding was done in a garage or other low-rent office space.
• The second keynote session is a talk I’ll be having with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Facebook is the hottest startup on the planet right now and has gone through significant strategic evolution this year. I’ll have 45 minutes to talk with Mark about the early days of Facebook, their recent growth and transition to a platform, as well as the future of the company.

The full agenda for the two day event is here.

The event is quickly selling out, although we made a couple of hundred more seats available two weeks ago by removing some tables and otherwise rearranging things to accommodate more people. A list of some of the financial and press attendees is here. Register for TechCrunch40 here.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/152720967/

After one too many “unreasonable threats”, video site Veoh preemptively sued Universal Music last month in federal court, seeking a declaratory injunction to bar Universal from taking legal action. Now it seems Universal has finally made good on some of those threats.

Universal is suing the startup for copyright infringement, using some strong language in an L.A. court hearing today. Universal said, “Veoh follows in the ignominious footsteps of other recent mass infringers such as Napster”. Adding, “Veoh’s rampant infringement will not stop until Veoh, and those who own, control, and run it, are enjoined and held financially responsible”.

The suit joins a heap of lawsuits UMG had launched against MySpace, Grouper (Crackle), and Bolt (since deadpooled).

Veoh is partly financed by Time Warner and Michael Eisner’s Tornante Co.

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/~3/152637540/

It looks like everyone wants to put out some form of Adobe AIR application and Twitter-based apps seem to be all of the rage, possibly because of the ease of integrating with Twitter’s API.

Apparently, Jonathan Snook didn’t want to be left out of the fun and created his new Twitter app appropriately called Snitter:

I built Snitter for a couple reasons. First off, I wanted to take AIR out for a spin and see what it could do. Secondly, I find using the Twitter web site frustrating at times because it doesn’t offer up features that I’ve always felt could be easily added. So, I’ve gone ahead and built an app with the features that I’ve always wanted.

Jonathan definitely has a flare for style and he’s brought that over to a really nice looking application:

You’ll need the following to run the app:

• A Twitter account (duh!)
• The Adobe AIR runtime
• The Snitter AIR file

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/152596583/snook-gives-adobe-air-a-try

Hop on over to CrunchGear to see the real time coverage of the special Apple press event today that started at 10 am PST. Lots of new iPod news, and a make-your-own ringtone tool in iTunes. And they always save the best stuff for last.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/152594100/

When computer scientist Jim Gray was lost at sea earlier this year, Amazon stepped in to help. They arranged for a satellite sweep of the area and stored the images on their S3 storage service. They then created a task on their Mechanical Turk service to allow volunteers to scan the images to look for the boat. Thousands of people joined the search, but he was never found.

Now Steve Fossett, a 63 year old aviator, sailor and adventurer with a number of world records, has disappeared as well. On September 3, an airplane he was flying in Nevada failed to return. No one has any idea where he is.

His friend Richard Branson now says he will use Google Earth to try and find Fossett. Google may have taken new satellite photos over the last few days which may have information that can help find him.

With Gray, there was a lot of data to review and a boat appears as a very small number of pixels in a given satellite image. Looking for a plane, or even a weather disturbance, in the Nevada desert may not be much easier. Still, if Branson and/or Google call for volunteers to help with the search, I am sure that thousands will join the effort. And once again, Mechanical Turk would be a perfect way to organize the volunteers, even if they are looking at Google data.

Let’s all hope that this has a happier ending than the Jim Gray story.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/152564883/

As anticipated earlier this month, San Diego based Nirvanix has launched and will offer an alternative to Amazon’s S3 storage service, which is growing rapidly.

The company is positioning itself against Amazon by saying it’s easier to integrate than S3 and they offer a service level agreement to guarantee 99/9% uptime (Amazon does not offer an SLA).

Pricing is $0.18/GB/month for storage and $0.18/GB of data transferred. By comparison, Amazon charges $0.15/GB/month for storage, and $0.10/GB of data transferred in and $0.13-$0.18/GB of data transferred out.

The lack of a service level agreement at Amazon has led many startups to use it for backup purposes only, keeping primary storage under their direct control. They may find Nirvanix as an attractive alternative (and this may also give Amazon an incentive to add an SLA soon).

Nirvanix, however, is affiliated with MediaMax, which has recently gone through a hellish transition that left customers offline and furious. The connection between the two companies is going to create some marketing stress for Nirvanix as it rolls out its new service.

The company has raised $12 million in funding.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/152578707/

Kiva is amazing. It’s a site that lets you make microloans to working poor entrepreneurs in the developing world. Farmers, shopkeepers, builders, textile workers, and shoe sellers in Azerbaijan, Samoa, Togo, Kenya, Ecuador. Kiva helps you help them for as little as $25 at a time.

It’s a loan

This isn’t charity, it’s a loan. Amazingly, 99.7% of loans are repaid. When your Kiva loan is repaid, you can choose to withdraw your funds or re-loan to a new business. It’s a wonderful idea well executed.

One-to-one lending

What’s especially cool is that you are helping one person (and their family). It’s a laser-pointer approach to helping people. Pick one person to help, watch their progress, get paid back, loan them more if they need it.

It’s a refreshing alternative to donating to a mega-charity that blurs the connection between your help and a specific human being. Instead of tossing a dollar in a pile to be mass distributed at a later date, Kiva lets you “look someone in the eye,” hand them the dollar, tell them you’re behind them, and wish them good luck. That’s extra special for the giver and receiver.

The lending process is beautifully simple which is a big part of the appeal. Here’s how simple:

Browse business owners in need

Click someone for more detail

Choose to lend as little as $25

Pay with PayPal or a credit card. PayPal provides Kiva with free payment processing – Kiva.org’s largest variable cost – so 100% of the loaned funds reach entrepreneurs in developing countries.

Keep an eye on your loans

Follow along on their journals

That’s it

It’s simple, fast, easy, and direct. 100% of the donation goes right to the person in need. Kiva’s administration costs are covered by separate donations to Kiva, not by taking a cut of the loans. When you make a loan you are also prompted to make an optional donation to Kiva to help keep their lights on.

For more information on Kiva, see their about page. And here’s a NYT video feature on Kiva.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/589-kiva-help-working-poor-entrepreneurs-in-the-developing-world

The Spring Framework continues to evolve releasing the first milestone of their next generation Spring Web Flow product:

The overall goal of Spring Web Flow 2.0 is to formally take the product from what it is today, a framework used primarily to implement linear wizards, to what it was always designed to become: a universal application controller engine for powering all types of client interactions. Such interactions include wizards, stateless “RESTful” interactions, and finer-grained, non-linear/asynchronous interactions often present in a “web 2.0″ application.

Of note is that fact that Jack Slocum’s Ext Framework has been adopted for the project’s Spring Faces module:

The Spring Faces module provides the Spring community a dedicated project for exploring additional JSF integration opportunities. The initial work in 2.0 M1 introduces integration with Ext, a popular Javascript GUI widget framework. Several lightweight JSF UI Components are provided that encapsulate the rendering of rich Ext widgets. The approach we took allows Ext widgets to decorate standard JSF components, adding a desktop-like look-and-feel and additional UI behaviors such as client-side validation. The following Ext component decorators are provided in 2.0 M1:

* A date validator component that performs rich client-side validation on a date text field, with a great-looking date chooser control.
* A text validator that performs rich client-side validation on a free-form text input field.
* A number validator that performs rich client-side validation on number text fields.

Ext controls look great, and because all UI behaviors execute client side the responsiveness of the UI is excellent. We will be adding further support in this area in future Web Flow release milestones, as part of the Spring Faces module.

The complete Spring Web Flow 2.0 roadmap can be found here.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/152529236/first-milestone-of-next-gen-spring-web-flow-released-now-includes-the-ext-framework

As I posted on the Google Gears Blog:

Omar Kilani of Remember The Milk took the time to write up his teams experience in Taking web applications offline with Google Gears.

The article moves past an introduction to delve into the design decisions around an offline-capable architecture, and user messaging and presentation of state. We learn why Omar decided to go with the explicit offline mode, and then the five steps to offline conversion:

• Ensuring resources are available offline
• Decoupling the application from the network
• Persisting data on the client
• Re-creating application state from persisted data
• Developing a synchronization strategy.

There is a lot to learn here.

From their architecture considerations:

RTM was designed as a client-side application from inception. The server-side portion of RTM is mainly used as a “dumb” data store, and the application periodically synchronizes with the server. In this case, using Gears to provide offline access was a natural fit, and was relatively quick to implement as we had some prior experience with data synchronization protocols.

There were some features of the online experience that could not be carried over to the offline mode. One of these was the Google Maps integration, in which users can geolocate their tasks and quickly visualize where their tasks are occurring in the real world. As Google Maps requires access to Google servers to fetch map tiles and data, and such a data set is quite large and thus hard to cache, this functionality is disabled once the user enters offline mode.

The undo feature of RTM is also unavailable in the offline version as this is a complex server-side operation (due to the multi-user nature of RTM and the ability to share tasks and lists). Instead, the user is presented with a dialog box asking for confirmation if they execute a destructive action such as delete. Undo functionality in offline mode is on the RTM roadmap, however.

To the decisions they made on showing the user information on whether they are online or offline:



A fundamental design decision is whether to implement offline support as “modal” or “modeless.” Choosing which style to implement will, in most cases, be dictated by the type of data the application works with and how much of that data will be available offline. One style is not necessarily superior to the other, and, for example, it’s much easier to implement a modeless style for tasks (in RTM) than it is for feed items (in Google Reader) based on the size of data items and the total data set alone.

Finally, we learn some tips and caveats from the RTM Gears implementation, including dealing with the LocalServer, the different types of offline, defensive coding, debugging, and coding with upgrades in mind.

Omar Kilani wraps it up in his conclusion:

By now, you should be itching to add offline support to your web application (we hope!). If you should take anything away from this article, it’s that taking your application offline isn’t as hard or complex as it may first seem, and that Gears is a joy to work with (and it’ll become even easier and more fun as the project matures and is used by more applications).

As for us at RTM, we couldn’t be happier with Gears. The speed at which we were able to provide offline functionality (four days from reading the documentation to a launchable implementation) is a testament to the quality, ease of use, and production-readiness of Gears. Many thanks to the Google Gears engineers for their foresight and for making this an open source project to which members of the Internet community can contribute.

Thanks to the Remember The Milk team for taking their application offline in record speed, and for taking the time to share their experience.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/152523351/gears-case-study-what-we-learned-from-remember-the-milk