Ajax Girl

A pact between the French Government, French ISP’s and the local music and film industry will see French users who download material from P2P networks losing their internet access.

French internet users will face a three strikes and you’re out policy, according to the NY Times. Users will receive a warning for each illegal download before losing their service on the third infringement.

French president Nicolas Sarkozy endorsed the deal with rhetoric that is bound to win him an Honorary Life Membership of both the RIAA and MPAA: “We run the risk of witnessing a genuine destruction of culture…The Internet must not become a high-tech Far West, a lawless zone where outlaws can pillage works with abandon or, worse, trade in them in total impunity. And on whose backs? On artists’ backs.”

The Far West of where? Perhaps I’m mistaken in believing that the far East (ie China) is the global hotbed of Internet piracy…or did he mean the wild west? lost in translation perhaps.

An independent authority supervised by a judge will manage the scheme and decide if and when users should lose their internet access.

Not surprisingly the recording and music industry loves the move, with the head of the IFPI (the international recording industry body) John Kennedy telling the Times that “this is the single most important initiative to help win the war on online piracy that we have seen so far..President Sarkozy has shown leadership and vision. He has recognized the importance that the creative industries play in contemporary western economies.”

image via Wikimedia Commons

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New product press releases unencumbered by the complexities of releasing actual software set off alarm bells. And when those press releases are so boastful as to suggest that the (unlaunched) product can hurt a competitor’s $20 billion revenue stream, the alarm bells get much louder.

So with alarm fells screaming, Hotmail co-founder Sabeer Bhatia announces he’s going to war with Microsoft by (someday) launching an online version of Office. The fact that Bhatia got rich when Microsoft bought Hotmail for $400 million in 1997 only adds additional drama to the story.

The as yet unlaunched product, called Live Documents, will be a Flash based online suite that competes with Word, Excel and Powerpoint. The company will also release plugins that work with the desktop Office software that lets users store and collaborate on documents online.

If this sounds a bit like Google Docs and Zoho, that’s because it is. The differentiating factors for Live Documents, besides the fact that it’s built on Flash (Google Docs and Zoho are Ajax applications), is that they are promising feature matches with Office 2007 and they have the offline plugin component.

It’s not clear that Flash is a better (or worse) interface than Javascript, but it isn’t much of a competitive advantage either way. And we note that Zoho has their own plugins for the desktop Office. Zoho also has an offline version of their product via Google Gears; its likely that Google is not far behind.

CTO Sumanth Raghavendra says Live Documents “break’s Microsoft’s proprietary format lock-in.” But in reality Live Documents has absolutely nothing new to offer users based on what we’ve been told so far. And as Dan Farber notes, they aren’t yet releasing the product and don’t even have screen shots to share with us.

There are additional red flags as well. As Zoho’s Sridhar Svembu notes, Bhatia is making a big mistake by estimating Live Documents revenue based on taking market share from Microsoft. Bhatia says “If Live Documents makes 1 per cent of Microsoft Office revenues, then we would earn USD 200 million a year. If Live Documents makes 10 per cent of Microsoft Office revenues then our revenues would be USD 2 billion a year in the next three to four years.” Svembu notes Guy Kawasaki and others who’ve warned against this kind of analysis.

So far Live Documents is nothing more than bullshit and smokescreens. That may have been the way to do business when Bhatia co-founded Hotmail in 1996, but his software is going to have to survive on its own in a hyper competitive marketplace when it actually launches. Hubris alone won’t do it. We’ll see if he can pull off a second win, or if Bhatia is, in the end, just another one trick pony. So far, I’m underwhelmed.

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Back in the 1920s, the Dadaists came up with a parlor game of sorts called the exquisite corpse. One would start a drawing (or a poem), then pass it along to a friend, who would add the next segment, and so on, until it was completed. Now, a young entrepreneur named David Hissami wants to bring a similar concept to Web video (although, he is not calling it that). On December 1, he plans to launch the Whoa Show, an audience-produced video series. The basic concept, explains Hissami, is this: “At the end of every clip, someone gives a direction. The first person to follow it makes it on the show, and gets to direct the next person.” The only way to get on the show is to be the first to follow the previous direction and submit your clip.

“This creates a public race,” says Hissami, “and lets you play a real-life game with many participants.” Part of the appeal is supposed to be the fact that nobody knows what will come next, and that it is only limited by the imagination of the audience. (There are a few exceptions—no directions calling for nudity or dangerous activities will be accepted). It is about “watching real people being forced to follow a direction in order to give their own, and wondering what the directions will be and who will follow them and how,” explains Hissami. Audience, entertain yourselves.

Collaborative art can be a lot of fun, but it is rarely any good. It may turn out that the only people who end up watching these shows are the ones whose submissions are accepted (and their friends). Since the hurdle for acceptance is whoever is fastest to upload a video, not whoever uploads the best video, the end result may be a little disappointing. Hissami says of the quality issue: “The Whoa Show is not so much about ‘best’ stuff as it is about ‘real’ stuff. Compared to say, traditional TV shows, Whoa Shows are more personal and social. In other words, you can better relate to them.” But not everyone will be able to relate because only one video will be selected per scene. This could limit the appeal of the site. Of course, it is impossible to say until the show actually launches. Like any participatory video, the quality will depend on who participates.

(Exquisite corpse drawing via Ghostpatrol).

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Divshare, a startup we lightly praised, has apparently put its domain name and service up for sale.

Generally putting your service up for sale on a random domain name forum is one step above just shutting it down. It means you see no real hope for growth, can’t raise any money and don’t want to keep paying the hosting bills out of your own pocket.

The company won’t comment on the sale, which doesn’t show much business intelligence. Not commenting on rumors is one thing, but posting your company for sale on a forum and then not talking to users to explain what you are up to suggests that you are not very serious about building community trust. People may not treat whatever founder David Altschul does next very seriously based on how this situation is being handled. We’re putting it in the DeadPool for now; if it sells to someone serious about pushing the service forward we’ll update.

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The rumors keep flying with the AdultFriendFinder deal we’ve been writing about (see update here).

No sale has yet been closed, but not due to a lack of a willing seller. We’ve gotten confirmation, from a new source, that their annual revenues are “over $300 million.” And we’re now hearing EBITDA numbers in the $100 million/year range. Penthouse seems to be the only serious bidder for the company, but they are clearly talking to a lot of potential buyers. They seem to be ready to sell for a little as $300 million, which suggests founder Andrew Conru wants out of the smut business, and fast.

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Holiday shopping season starts today, but chances are that you are going to end up with a bunch of gift cards this year that you may never end up using. Gift cards are expected to be the most widely-given gift this year, with 69 percent of consumers planning to buy them according to one survey. The annual value of gift cards in the U.S. is estimated to reach $100 billion next year, and about 27 percent of people who get a gift card still have not redeemed it one year later. That came to $8 billion in unredeemed money in 2006.

Gift cards are a big, inefficient business. A new startup called Leverage wants to help you manage all of those gift cards with a service it is launching next week (probably on Thursday). On Leverage, you will be able to register all of your gift cards and keep track of how much you have left or stored on each one. You will also be able to buy gift cards, or swap them with others (like Swapagift). The site will also let you manage all of your loyalty reward programs, such as frequent-flyer or frequent-stay plans. To get people to register cards on the site, it will pay “interest” on the value stored on the cards (3.2 percent for cards bought through the site, and about 1 percent for cards bought elsewhere). Leverage is not really paying interest, since it does not hold the money. It is a marketing gimmick—i.e., the nominal money it will pay out will be treated as a customer acquisition cost.

Leverage, which was founded in May 2005 and has raised $2 million in angel funding, plans to make a little money by reselling those gift cards. But its main source of income will be through lead generation and data analytics. Most retailers have no idea who ends up getting their gift cards. As more people sign up for Leverage, it can tell those retailers the demographics of the people who hold their cards in an aggregated, anonymous way. (”We will never reveal personally identifiable information,” promises CEO Mark Edwards Roberts). The real opportunity for Leverage, though, will be in ads targeted at people who already hold a cash incentive to shop at a particular store. For most people, a gift card is really just a coupon—53 percent end up spending more than the amount on the card. Leverage will know who holds cards for which retailers and will be able to send targeted messages to them on behalf of those retailers. But the targeting is transparent. Leverage members will also get to see exactly how they are being targeted—”Male 25-60 ears old, living in CA”.

What’s in it for consumers? They can avoid getting all of those marketing e-mails to their in-box (messages appear only when they log into their Leverage account) and they can control how often they want to receive messages from any particular retailer. And they can have a single dashboard to manage all of those gift cards and loyalty programs. Still, if I can’t even be bothered to put those gift cards in my wallet (I’m one of those 27 percent who let my gift cards languish), I am not going to take the time to enter each one onto a Website. I can see this service being useful if you get a lot of gift cards, and need to keep track of more than five or six. What would make it more appealing is if you got an actual Leverage card that acted as an uber-gift card. You know, One Card to Rule Them All. The way that could work is that the card is tied to your online Leverage account, which knows all your balances. You take it to Best Buy, it taps into the $50 in your gift card account. You take it to Macy’s, and it sees you have $75. The startup is working on just such a card.

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REST groupies can talk your ear off about resources and the difference between URI and URL. Many developers still don’t really know the difference though, and Ryan McDonough has put up this simple summary.

His summary is by example and goes like this:

URI

A URI identifies a resource either by location or name. More often than not, most of us use URIs that defines a location to a resource. However, a URI does not have to specify the location of a specific representation. Citing and example of a W3C URI for their home image, they use the following URI: http://www.w3.org/Icons/w3c_home. Note the absence of a file extension. The URI for the w3c_home image is still universally unique, but it does not specify the specific representation of the image (either a GIF, PNG, or JPG). The selection of the representation can be determined by the web server through HTTP content negotiation. The Apache HTTPD server has had excellent support for content negotiation for many years. Oddly, few sites take advantage of HTTP content negotiation. The W3C is one web application that makes heavy use of URIs and content negotiation.

URL

A URL is a URI but a URI is not a URL. A URL is a specialization of URI that defines the network location of a specific representation for a given resource. Taking the same W3C example, there are actually 2 representations available for the w3c_home resource:

• http://www.w3.org/Icons/w3c_home.gif
• http://www.w3.org/Icons/w3c_home.png

These URIs also define the file extension that indicates what content type is available at the URL. Through content negotiation, the web server will forward the user agent to the proper type, depending on the client’s capabilities, when the URI http://www.w3.org/Icons/w3c_home is accessed.

More often than not, URI is the correct term to use when referring to the location of resources on the WWW.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/189316863/uri-vs-url-whats-the-difference

IAC is planning on spending $100 million on new ventures in China and is also looking to launch a Chinese version of Ask.com

According to the Wall Street Journal, IAC CEO Barry Diller said the new push into China would involve something that is “unique” and does not compete directly with existing players. The IAC owned travel site eLong has not be doing well in China, with Diller saying that “We bought eLong and promptly screwed it up.”

Diller said that online gambling was one area that IAC would consider in China. The China focused version of Ask.com will be available “within 2 years.”

Asked about the cultural difficulties of operating in China, Diller gave the WSJ a response that is bound to upset a number of TechCrunch readers in the United States, but certainly shows respect and recognition that American law is not supreme throughout the globe and that business is bound to follow the laws of the nations they operate in, even when they don’t like those laws: “Every place has got its constraints..It doesn’t bother me … When you operate in a country you play by the country’s rules.“

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When I think of Ext, I think of a framework that really cares about the look and feel of components. Well, it seems like a real community has joined Jack and Rey and we get to see some of their recent work.

Rey details the community work:

• LiveGrid by MindPatterns: Thorsten Suckow-Homberg developed an extension that uses a buffering technique to load a specific number of records and after scrolling past the last buffered row, submits a new XHR call to return the next subset of records.
• Slate Theme by J.C.: The Slate theme really stands out for it’s visual appeal as well as the clean work produced by J.C.

This is certainly not an exhaustive list of the available plugins for Ext but it does provide a flavor of what our community is doing to enhance the capability of the framework. The number of plugins continues to grow with both the Ext Extensions page and the Examples and Extras discussion group being updated almost on a daily basis. Community-contributed extensions are an integral part of the Ext project and we certainly value the hard work and professionalism demonstrated by many of these contributors. We will continue to spotlight plugins on a regular basis to ensure that our community members are recognized for their efforts.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/189283395/user-extensions-and-themes-for-ext-20

When Ian Smith launched Joe’s Goals back in June, 2006, it was an instant hit due to it’s simplicity, excellent UI, and it’s excelllent ability to handle the task of managing your goals. By leveraging YUI, the FamFamFam icon library and ColdFusion, Ian created one of most recognizable Ajax-based applications out today.

Ian just announced a major update to the Joe’s Goals site, putting JG v2.0 into private beta and releasing a host of new features which are sure to make his users very happy. Performance was a big focus in this release as well as improving usability and reducing page refreshes:

1. Speed Speed Speed! 2.0 is a full Ajax application, no more waiting around for page refreshes.
2. Improved stats including a longest chain stat for positive goals and longest gap stat for negative goals.
3. Lighter design means there are less links to deal with and better clarity. Goals can now be edited by clicking on their name instead of on the options link.
4. Customizable display options means you can pick which stats you want to watch for each goal.
5. Printable tracker for those who like to work on a hard copy during the week and update their tracker on the weekend.
6. You can also switch back and forth between 2.0 and the classic version until everyone gets ported over.

In trying out version 2.0, it’s definitely an improvement overall to the previous version. The interface is substantially less cluttered and the use of Ajax does give the appearance of improved performance, mainly due to the lack of a page refresh. This is immediately apparent when scrolling back and forth between days which is noticeably snappier due to the partial page refresh versus the full page refresh found in the previous version.

I had a chance to chat with Ian about this new release:

How many users are actively using JG v2.0 and what’s been the response?

Our active user count various but it is between 3000 and 5000 users during most of a given month.

JG leveraged YUI from the get-go. Did you introduce any new technologies in this release (eg: new libs)?

Since JG 1.0 there have been a lot of improvements made to the YUI. I’ve tried to rely as heavily as possible on those components this time around and cut out a lot of my own hacked together code. I’m taking better advantage of the panel and animation libraries as well as their connection library. With the connection library I benefit greatly from the ability to tag Ajax calls with specific arguments so I can capture the call backs and programmatically make page changes based on which requests succeeds or fails. The connection library is the best example of this I’ve seen of any Ajax Toolkit.

I’m not sure what version of CF you’re using but CF8 now includes Ajax tags that leverage Ext, YUI & Spry. Did you use any of that?

I’m sitll using CF 7. An upgrade will probably happen in the the next few months but I’ll still probably code the JavaScript by hand though.

What contributed to the speed improvements? Was it the Ajax functionality, under-the-hood updates?

There were several changes that helped (including a rewrite of the backend code). I also develop some techniques for better handling the data in the web browser and pushing as much of the processing to the user’s computer and away from the server.

How did you go about deciding how Ajax would be expanded in JG v2.0? I think readers would be interested in knowing the UI rationale for their own work.

Yahoo Mail and Google Docs have both set the bar really high in my opinion and they both show that users are willing to adopt web applications that functional a little differenlt that your traditional page based approch. A big part of the Ajax enhancements for JG 2.0 was moving to JSON for handling the data layer and converting most of the original functionality to Ajax calls instead of page refreshes. You can now move back and forth between days, skip to a particular day using the calendar, add/edit/delete goals, filter the goals by tags, and watch your goal status update in realtime. All without a page refresh. A key part of the redesign was to shift away from HTML and to use HyperScript (http://blog.joesgoals.com/2007/07/16/3-must-read-javascript-articles/) to create the actual goal tracker grid.

Any plans for an API where people can grab the data for other apps?

Absolutely. I’m very excited about the possibilities opened up by adding an API and I’m also watching closely to see what happens in the social networking space (hint hint).

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/189283396/joe%e2%80%99s-goals-gets-a-revamp