Ajax Girl

When I heard that Flickr was making announcements this evening, I assumed it was the long awaited integration of video into the service. That isn’t happening (it will soon, though), but they are making significant upgrades tonight around geotagging and a new area of the site is launching called “Places Pages.”

GeoTagging Updates

Flickr first launched geotagging for photos a year ago - to date 29 million photos have been geotagged, with 150,000 new ones coming in each day. They aren’t making any changes to the way photos are geotagged (using Yahoo maps), but they are updating the results pages for searches.

The existing pages don’t show large numbers of geotagged photos effectively; the new pages do a better job by placing actual tags from photos on a world map. Users can quickly find photos based on tags and geotagged information. Enhancements to navigation are also being introduced.

Overall, the enhancements are good, but the real win here comes when devices auto tag photos via GPS devices. Until then, most users can’t be bothered with taking the time to add the appropriate meta data.

Places Pages

Now this is more interesting. Flickr is launching “Places Pages,” which are dedicated pages that provide users with specific information about places. We’ve uploaded an overview PDF to Scribd, here.

Pages are built around the Flickr concept of “interestingness,” but based on places and tags. So China/bicycle shows popular photos of bicycles taken in China. Paris/architecture is another example. Any of 70,000 places can be viewed, optionally followed by any tag. Flickr is also adding in additional information on the place, such as weather and local time, as well as relevant Flickr groups.

The product will get better over time, too. Eventually users will be able to adjust pages by time or season, so pictures from New York in the Fall can be viewed, for example. Or pictures from a specific event that happened in a city.

Flickr now has over 1 billion photos and 37.7 million unique monthly visitors. 2.5 million news photos are uploaded daily by 15 million registered users. I wonder if founders Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield ever wish they hadn’t sold out to Yahoo so quickly, for just a rumored $30 million or so in 2005…

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/171894275/

Today’ Web 2.0 Summit ended with a Launch Pad session where six startups each got six minutes to pitch their companies to the crowd and a panel of venture capitalists. Here’s a thumbnail sketch of each with my initial impressions (For a more thorough take on these startups from a real venture capitalist, read Christine Herron’s post):

CleverSet—Best of Show went to CleverSet, a Seattle-based company that takes a sophisticated statistical approach to product recommendations and personalization. This is not exactly an unknown company. It’s technology already powers 85 sites, including Sephora’s, Wine Enthusiast, and part of Overstock (I also wrote about them last summer in Business 2.0). CleverSet is applying some advanced math to improving recommendations, and claims to increase revenues for Websites that implement its technology by 18 to 30 percent, on average. If that’s true, they deserve to win. CEO Todd Humphrey told me later in the hallway that Sam’s Club is going to do a bake-off between CleverSet and competitor Aggregate Knowledge, using the same data set. But then I ran into Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, who is offering a $1 million prize to anyone who can improve his movie recommendations, and he expressed some skepticism about how useful any statistical approach can be. Hastings has found that even within just the category of movies, knowing what horror films someone likes tells you nothing about what dramas they might like. So making statistical correlations across products would be even more difficult.

TripIt—A company that presented at TechCrunch40, TripIt builds a personalized itinerary starting from your airline confirmation. A useful travel organizer. See Mike’s previous post.

G.ho.st—All of our data and applications are moving online, why not the operating system? G.ho.st is a Web operating system of sorts that ties together all the data and applications you may be using across different Websites with one password and URL. Conceptually, I’m with them. But getting people to change their behavior and abandon everything on their desktops except for their browser is going to be tough. (G.ho.st was in the TechCrunch40 Demo Pit)

SpiceWorks—Ad-supported enterprise software. Already 160,000 IT professionals use SpiceWorks to help manage their computer networks. SpiceWorks then serves up news feeds and product deals targeted at the specific devices on the networks they manage. It’s a consumer approach to enterprise software. This will work—until the ad bubble pops.

ClickForensics—The CEO claims that the click fraud rate is nearly 16 percent (and over 25 percent on distributed advertising networks like AdSense or Yahoo Publishers Network). ClickForensics offers a neutral service to both advertisers and publishers that audits the quality of the click traffic generated by any given ad campaign. This is a community approach to solving a growing problem, although some argue that the click fraud rate is already priced into what advertisers are willing to pay per click, so it is already being taken care of by the markets.

Realius—Combine casual gaming and real estate porn and you get Realius. The fantasy real estate site, which will launch in beta in two weeks (and was also in the TechCrunch40 Demo Pit), will take real listings and let people guess how much each house is worth (using a slider that shows where other people have voted). Revenues will supposedly come from advertising, referral fees, and service fees from brokers who can use the game for training purposes. The game is based on actual real estate data. The CEO lost me, though, when he said that you don’t find out if your guess was right until later when they send you an e-mail (which is designed to drive you back to the site). Any game that does not generate instant feedback on how you’ve done is dead in the water, IMHO. Check your e-mail to see if you’ve won! That’s going straight to the junk folder.

Other startups that didn’t quite make the short list include Castfire, Kango, Footnote, Lemonade, Search-to-Phone, WooMe (another TC40 company), Sprigley, and GoXDML.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/171929379/

The Google train keeps on rolling. After seeing its stock rise above $600 per share not even two weeks ago, Google has exceeded forecasts by earning a profit of $1.07 billion in the third quarter of 2007, a 46% increase over $733.3 million it earned during the same period in 2006. Sales have risen 57% to $4.23 billion.

The company is attributing the overall rise to the increasing profitability of search advertisements. Google’s stock has settled to about $639 since the announcement.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/171860381/

Per tutti quelli che come me vorrebero tanto avere un tool tipo Firebug per Internet explorer ecco arrivare CompanionJS. CompanionJS implementa una consol di logging sul browser Microsoft e consente di scovare facilmente i bug del nostro codice Javascript. Siamo solo alla versione 0.2 ma promette decisamente bene !

Source: Ajax Blog
Original Article: http://ajax.blogon.it/debug/debug-javascript-facile-con-companionjs.html

Tripit, one of the companies that launched at TechCrunch40 is an extremely useful application for frequent travelers.

It’s dead simple to use and it keeps you organized - all you have to do is forward confirmation emails to them when you purchase airline tickets, hotel reservations, car rentals, etc. Tripit pulls the relevant information out of the emails and builds an organized itinerary for you. You can send emails in any order, for multiple trips, whatever. It just figures everything out and organizes it.

The best part is you don’t even need to register to start using it. Just take an email and forward it to plans@tripit.com. Within seconds you’ll get a confirmation email back and you go from there. If it doesn’t recognize the email format from the seventy travel companies they currently support (orbitz, united airlines, marriott, etc.), you can add the information in directly on the website.

Today at the Web 2.0 Summit CEO Greg Brockway is launching a new feature that makes the service even more useful, particularly on a mobile device (what you have with you when you travel). You email a basic command to the service and it responds with relevant information. “Get Flight Today” will return today’s flight information, for examle. Or just “Get Trip” to get full details of your most current trip. Or just email “Help” to get a list of possible commands and modifiers.

San Francisco-based TripIt has raised $1 million from O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures.

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/~3/171820414/

Utterz è un curioso servizio americano che permette di pubblicare informazioni sul web utilizzando le funzionalità del proprio cellulare, si possono cioè pubblicare sia testi che video, audio o foto. Nulla di speciale tutto sommato ma la cosa che ho trovato molto interessante è la possibilità di utilizzarer Utterz anche per pubblicare tali contenuti automaticamente sul nostro blog. Le piattaforme supportate sono molte ed includono Myspace, Wordpress, Blogger, Facebook ed altri. Per i sistemi non supportati nativamente è invece disponibile un widget.

Source: Web 2.0 Blog
Original Article: http://web20.blogon.it/social-networks/utterz-mobile-blogging.html

Dennis Eusebio asks:

Many design thinkers really advocate deep, rich design research. Its a lot of documentation, interviewing, meetings and even more documentation just to get to the planning/prototyping stage. After reading some of the literature 37signals has put out, it seems like you guys stray away from this workflow in general. What’s your general workflow like? Is it different from traditional design workflow?

We conduct research all the time. But it’s a different kind.

It’s important to know that research is guesswork. The further out you try to guess, the bigger your margin of error. Like you said, many people do research before they start building their product. They write lots of documents and diagrams and specifications. The problem is, it’s all hypothetical. Until you’ve actually thrown the ball at the wall, you don’t know how it’ll bounce back.

People often think that research is like preparing for a long journey. Like the more food you stow on the ship the safer you are. But you don’t want to go on a long journey. You want to take as short a journey as possible, and come back for a reality check. See how you’re doing, then go for another short trip. Long journeys are the death of software.

I said we do a different kind of research. Here’s how we do it. We build something, then we collect feedback on what we built. For unreleased products, that feedback is our own opinions and review process. Does it do what we wanted? Does it feel right? Is it easy to understand? Will it support more features and future changes down the road? In the case of released products, we always listen to emails and forum posts from our customers. In both cases, the feedback on what we’ve built arms us for the next phase.

It’s like a conversation. You don’t sit down at the cafe, listen to your friend for two hours straight, and then talk for two hours straight. You take turns, constantly going back and forth, and the discussion finds its way.

Of course, you might wonder how to start. We build products we need ourselves, so our initial research is made of our own wishes, itches, and frustrations. When it comes to client work, my best advise is to become friends. Spend time together and discuss what they do until you can see through their eyes a bit. Pay special attention to their language and the words they use. Make notes, but don’t put them in the documentation shrine. As soon as you know enough to build the first basic feature, do it. Break away for a week or two and build it. Then come back, talk about it, learn more, and decide what to build next.

Research can make you feel informed, but I guarantee that building real software in many small steps gives you a lot more knowledge and confidence. If you’re interested in how to better share headspace with your clients, I highly recommend absorbing the Ubiquitous Language pattern from Domain Driven Design.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/661-ask-37signals-what-about-research-interviews-and-documentation

The platform wars are over. Long live the Web. That was the basic message delivered by Jeff Huber, Google’s vice president of engineering, in a ten-minute presentation at Web 2.0 a few minutes ago. His talk was nominally about widgets (which Google calls Gadgets). Huber noted that over 100,000 sites have already embedded Google Gadgets, with 63 of them attracting more than one million active users a week. While the first phase of these gadgets involved people using them to syndicate content out to other sites, the real promise he says is their ability to spread applications far and wide:

What we see is applications fundamentally changing. Just like the model for content changed from monolithic sites, now applications are going to be feeds and containers.

A lot that you have heard here is about platforms and who is going to win. That is Paleolithic thinking. The Web has already won. The web is the Platform. So let’s go build the programmable Web.

Take that, Facebook.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/171730479/

It didn’t take long for all the media companies to respond to Google’s launch earlier this week of its copyright fingerprinting system on YouTube. Today, they announced a set of limp-wristed “guidelines” that both technology and media companies should abide by in order to protect copyrighted content going forward. Companies who signed on to the guidelines include Viacom, News Corp., Disney, CBS, NBC, and Microsoft. Notably absent was Google itself. Just now at the Web 2.0 conference, Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman was asked what he finds insufficient about Google’s system. It seems that the biggest problem the media companies have with the Google system is that it is not theirs. Here is Dauman’s combative response:

If the media companies (and Microsoft) actually have a competing copyright protection system to offer up rather than some vague guidelines, they should do so. An industry standard that works across all media and technology companies is preferable in theory to one imposed on everyone else by a single company. But someone needs to create that system. (A startup called Attributor thinks it has the answer. Maybe the media companies should take a look at it).

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/171724746/

Have you or a loved one been injured in a car accident? Suing TechCrunch? To answer these questions, soon-to-launch SueEasy.com is hoping you turn to them before the white pages, FindLaw, or ratings sites like Avvo. They’re currently in a private beta, tweaking the service.

The site is kind of a reverse directory for lawyers that’s sure to be a haven for personal injury lawsuits. It’s similar in concept to what ThemBid is doing with auctions for local services. Instead of searching for a lawyer, you list your case and lawyers find you. The site handles two major kinds of cases, class action and individual. Each of those sections is then divided into sub-categories such as DUI/DWI, bankruptcy, or asbestos settlements. Plaintiffs list their grievances in these categories and attach any relevant documentation.

Licensed lawyers, and only lawyers, can log on and review the listings, hunting for attractive cases. Anyone can join a class action lawsuit, though. Lawyers bid to contact potential clients with the highest bidder winning and Sue Easy getting the money. However, that doesn’t mean you have to accept the counsel after reviewing their profile and reviews. You can always pass and move on to another lawyer.

But I’m not so sure if taking the highest bidder is the best system. It cuts down on consumer’s selection to one at a time. I imagine there will be cases where a close second to the highest bidder may serve a clients needs better but is closed off from contact.

Sue Easy was a TechCrunch 40 semi-finalist and is currently taking private beta testers.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/171724281/