Ajax Girl

Here’s a good brain teaser for those famous Google job interviews: If you pay me $1,000, and I give you $2,000 back, how much profit does that leave me?

Unfortunately, this is not a hypothetical question. It’s an actual promotion for Google’s radio ad network, known as Google Audio. That’s right, Google is offering $2,000 to any advertiser who spends $1,000 on a Google Audio ad campaign. The $2,000 comes in the form of a credit on future ad campaigns, but part of it still comes out of Google’s pocket since it needs to pay the radio stations who will run the ads. It amounts to a “buy one, get two free” offer and is good through the end of the year.

This is but the latest piece of evidence that, while Google may be golden in online advertising, its forays into off-line advertising have yet to catch on. Google must be having a real hard time selling those radio ads to have to resort to such a blatant attempt to buy market share. It’s not the first time it’s tried such tactics either. Last year, in an effort to jumpstart Google Checkout, for instance, Google paid $10 for every $30 in sales that merchants directed through its PayPal competitor. I’m not sure how well that went. But last time I checked, PayPal was still around.

Just because Google has cash to burn doesn’t mean it should use that cash to try to buy market share. If it truly has a better way of buying and selling radio ads, advertisers and radio stations will quickly figure that out on their own. It is not a good sign when Google has to resort to paying customers to try out a new product.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/168765164/

Over the next few days, Microsoft will be rolling out a new service called Windows Live Events, which will be a customized version of Windows Live Spaces for organizing events and sharing memories among participants. (The link above may redirect to Windows Live Spaces for some people, as the roll-out of the service will be gradual across different geographies). Windows Live Spaces is, of course, Microsoft’s family-friendly answer to MySpace—and it’s not doing badly, drawing 100 million unique visitors and 2.5 billion page views a month, according to Microsoft.

Windows Live Events is an attempt to carve out a specific niche for for Windows Live Spaces around events. It’s like Evite with a little social-networking fairy dust sprinkled on top. You can manage invitations and RSVPs for a party, wedding, or any other event by setting up an invite list and sending out a mass e-mail with a link back to your Windows Live Event site. All the event details are also available as an RSS feed, making it easy to export the information. On the site itself you can post information about the event, but it is also a place where attendees are encouraged to come back to share their photos, videos, or blog posts after the fact.

Thus, every event big or small can have its own social Website. “We want it to be a place where people can share their memories and stories after an event,” says Windows Live group product manager Jay Fluegel. Your guests always take better pictures than you at your kid’s birthday party. Now they have an easy way to share those pictures with everyone who was there.

As with Windows Live Spaces, Windows Live Events is very customizable. You can change the color, fonts, background, and play with the design and different features on the site, including adding discussion boards, blog posts, and photo- and video-sharing modules. You can also take your pick from the assorted gadgets (aka widgets) available in the Windows Live gallery. For instance, you could add a countdown-to-the-birth gadget for a baby shower or an Amazon wish list for a birthday party.

Here is Microsoft’s official blog post about the service. Microsoft keeps dribbling out these Live services. Some are unremarkable, and some are solid improvements over Microsoft’s current offerings. People who live on Facebook or MySpace probably won’t flock to this service. They will manage their events where their friends already hang out online. But for everyone else, especially families, I can see this gaining some traction. Expect Microsoft to launch more Live services before the year is out.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/168680630/

In the past we’ve posted communications whenever someone has threatened to sue us. I think it’s entertaining, and it hopefully makes people think twice before firing up the legal machine with ridiculous claims. So when YouTube sent us a cease and desist letter, I posted it. And when that asshole Shannon Terry threatened to sue us out of existence, I posted that too.

Now the most ridiculous claim yet. Richard Figueroa, who claims to have the rights to this image of Ashton Kutcher, is demanding that we pay him $150,000 immediately or else he’ll sue us for $1.5 million.

Hi Michael, My name is Richard Figueroa and I am contacting you on behalf of the image you are using of Ashton Kutcher that Beth Boldt had taken. Beth is upset that your company has been using his image to generate traffic and revenue to your company without her permission.We are asking that you pay Beth $150,000,00 for the image that you have been using to generate business. If you choose not to settle this bill now we will ask for $1,500,000 in damages in loss of income form the image you have been borrowing for creating traffic to your website with here picture.if you google Beth Boldt you will get an idea of who she is in the modeling and entertainment industry.We would like to settle this quietly without the media getting involved however if you choose not to agree on these terms we will file a lawsuit against your company for copyright violation and we all know how that’s going to turn out since she’s the photographer of the image you are using.
So here is her invoice: Please make check out to Beth Boldt in the amount of ($150,000,00) send it to
201 Dement st Huntsville AL,35801
Phone number is 256-653-7946
or 256-653-4813
And after payment is made you may not use the image of Ashton anymore unless you want to negotiate a contract.

Thank you
Richard Figueroa
BethBoldt

Here’s the problem: we never used that image of Ashton Kutcher on any of our websites. The one image we did use (in this post) was supplied by Ooma (Kutcher is the creative director for Ooma), and Ooma says they own that image.

The problem turns out to be that if you do a search on Google (or “the Google” as Figueroa calls it), the image in question appears at the top of the results and is linked to TechCrunch. Why? Well we did some digging and it turns out that someone linked to the image in a comment to one of our posts.

I explained all of this to Figueroa on the phone but he insisted that Google bought us and that we need to remove the image from Google immediately. Sadly, Google has not acquired us, and I have no easy method for removing images from Google’s servers.

Normally I’d just let something like this drop since this guy doesn’t understand anything about copyright law or the Internet, but he has also been calling and emailing our advertisers and threatening to sue them, too (listen to the voicemail below). They are understandably concerned, and Heather and I now have to spend time today calming everyone down.

Don’t be this guy.

The voicemail below is to one of our advertisers. Listen to a second one, sent to Ooma, 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/~3/168666977/

Om Malik says Facebook traffic is tanking, based on the September Comscore data which shows a 9.3% decline in uniques v. steady uniques at MySpace.

There’s a problem though - he’s showing unique visitor data but talking about traffic. The Comscore data for U.S. traffic shows only a 4% decline, from 15.2 billion to 14.7 billion page views. MySpace declined 2% in that same period.

And the data is also only taking U.S. traffic into account. Over the last year, non U.S. users have grown to become more than half of Facebook’s total audience. Comscore worldwide data runs a month behind U.S. data, so that information is not yet available for September.

But the bottom line is, there isn’t enough information yet to make any kind of definitive statement about Facebook traffic. It’s also worth noting that something very similar may have happened last year (a September dip in traffic) At the very least we need to wait for the international data.

Data is below - unique visitors is top, below is page views.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/168610980/

Google wants you to watch YouTube videos everywhere. Now you can watch geo-tagged videos inside Google Earth. Any video tagged with a latitude and longitude will show up when this new layer of Google Earth is turned on. So you can watch videos about the places you are exploring inside Google Earth.

It’s a good way to show videos in the context of where they were shot, and also gets more plays for videos that might have otherwise been lost in the YouTube vortex. Of course, people have been embedding YouTube videos in 2-D Google Maps for a while now. But that seems to require more of a manual process. I’d like to see all geo-tagged videos automatically pop up in a video layer on Google Maps as well.

Projects like this point to a day when the entire world will be tagged by its citizens—with videos and text and photos and hyperlinks. Add mobile maps to the equation, and the line between what is virtual and real will begin to blur. Imagine flipping open your phone to see how other people have tagged the spot that you are standing in (although, this is more a Google-Maps scenario than a Google-Earth scenario, at least until you can run Google Earth on a phone). It would be a great way to create travel video guides.

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/~3/168576367/

I moderated a panel on Tuesday at the Graphing Social Patterns conference. Dave McClure, a panelist, called it “the most fun, crazy, 90-mph rollercoaster, good time panel session i’ve EVER had the pleasure to be on.” I’m not sure I agree it was the best panel ever, but we had a lively discussion about the value of Facebook, the value of Facebook platform to developers, what should be done about black hat developers, and Jason Calacanis, in addition to his insightful comments, threw in a few entertaining personal attacks as well. Thanks to Robert Scoble, Dave McClure, Jason Calacanis and Rodney Rumford for their participation. Video of the session is below.

Click To Play

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/168637823/

Supplementing GWT’s basic set of widgets with wrappers around those of existing widget frameworks has become a bit of a cottage industry. There are wrappers for Scriptaculous, JsGraphics, TinyMCE (see the GWT Widget Library for these), Ext Js and many more. Now add Rialto to that list. (For a demo of the Rialto widgets, such as the interesting GridTreeView, see here.)

One shortcoming of Rialto’s GWT wrapper, however, is that all of the widgets are subclasses of JavaScriptObject rather than Widget. A best practice that has emerged for wrapping other frameworks is to wrap a Widget adapter around a JavaScriptObject so that the wrapped framework’s widgets can play nice and integrate with other existing GWT widgets. The Rialto wrapper doesn’t do that and also implements a parallel set of event, clicklistener and other classes. This shortcoming needs to be resolved in order for this particular framework wrapping to be useful.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/168548161/gwt-wrapper-for-rialto

Does the world really need another travel site? With Expedia, Orbitz, Travelocity, TripAdvisor, Farecast, TripHub, Yapta, and many more, prospective travelers already have more than enough to choose from. (With an estimated $87 billion in travel booked online, it’s no wonder why). Soon they will be able to add Kango to that list.

The startup, which has been in stealth-mode until now, does manage to add a new twist to search travel. It is indexing 18 million opinions and reviews across 1,000 travel-related sites to derive the best travel search results based on what type of trip you want to take. If you are planning a romantic getaway in Big Sur, you will get one set of results. If you specify that you are looking for a family outing instead, you will get another. Or you can look for pet-friendly hotels and activities. Of course, you can also search by price or amenity, like any other travel site. And you can see where each hotel or activity is located on a small Google Map.

But what’s promising about Kango is the way it slices up search subjectively. Kango is building a semantic search engine focussed narrowly on travel. It parses the language in all of those reviews and guides, and categorizes them by generating tags for them. “You cannot wait for users to add tags, you have to derive them,” says CEO Yen Lee. So hotels that have been reviewed across the Web (on sites like Yahoo Travel, TripAdvisor, or Yelp) with words such as “perfect,” “relaxing,” “couples,” “honeymoon,” or “spa” would rank higher in a search for romantic travel. Hotels associated with the words “kitchen,” “pool,” and “kids,” would rank higher in a search for family trips.

Whether this will be enough to draw people from other travel sites is hard to say at this point. But Kango’s executive team has an impressive pedigree. Lee is a former general manager of Yahoo Travel. His search architect, Huanjin Chen, used to be the search architect at eBay. His natural-language search scientist, Boris Galitsky, used to do work for the British government. And his head of marketing, Elliott Ng, headed up marketing for Intuit’s QuickBooks and is the founder of Netcentives.

Lee estimates there are 6 billion to 8 billion travel-related searches done every year, and he thinks Kango can help expose more of the hidden gems in travel that today don’t quite make it to the first page of most travel sites. He plans to make money on travel-specific search advertising, rather than on booking or listing fees.

Kango will be rolling out a limited beta in the next few weeks, and is reserving 100 spots for TechCrunch readers who sign up here.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/168527427/

The Ext team continues to move forward on Ext 2.0, announcing the availability of Ext v2.0 Beta 1. This release of the Ext framework features updated portal and desktop examples, documentation updates, and bug fixes.

Big enhancements were done to two sample applications, Web Desktop and Portal, which make extensive use of new functionality in Ext 2.0.

The Web Desktop has been drastically enhanced to include a start menu as well as functional icons on the desktop. It truly looks like you’re working within an operating system like Windows.

Web Desktop:

Portal:

All of the updated Ext 2.0 Beta 1 samples can be seen at the Ext 2.0 Samples page.

In addition, the documentation continues to be updated to incorporate the new features of Ext 2.0 and a migration guide is soon to be released.

Ext 2.0 Beta 1 is available for download at the Ext website.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/168494335/ext-20-beta-1-released

When we wrote about Bernard Sumption’s Animator.js there was a lot of “interest” in Bernies position that OO inheritance sucks.

Bernie decided to fuel the fire and expanded his thoughts, explaining how the strategy pattern is in fact your saviour

All of the pain caused by inheritance can be traced back to the fact that inheritance forces ‘is-a’ rather than ‘has-a’ relationships. If class R2Unit extends Droid, then a R2Unit is-a Droid. If class Jedi contains an instance variable of type Lightsabre, then a Jedi has-a Lightsabre.

The difference between is-a and has-a relationships is well known and a fundamental part of OOAD, but what is less well known is that almost every is-a relationship would be better off re-articulated as a has-a relationship.

The article takes the world of Jedi and then writes a real example using Balls and BouncingBalls. He also explains why he thinks that Flash’s DisplayObject hierarchy is good, and that EventDispatcher is bad.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/168480183/inheritance-is-evil-and-must-be-destroyed-part-1