Ajax Girl

Google gadgets came to the Mac today and now Yahoo is releasing an update of their own. They’ve upgraded their Konfabulator widget platform to 4.5 (not currently up) and overhauled their site’s user interface to incorporate better user feedback.

While you can get all the technical improvements from Yahoo’s own upcoming announcement. The highlights are support for Flash and HTML and the addition of some new partners. Flash and HTML support mean that widget development won’t only be more familiar to web developers, but also more easily support new applications such as video.

Yahoo is also following through on some previous partnership announcements, making Netvibes UWA available as desktop widgets as well as adding the widgets from widget analytics services Clearspring and MuseStorm.

MuseStorm

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ClearSpring

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netvibes

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cb_widget_report_widget(”cb_widget_1196314693″); cb_widget_report_element(”cb_widget_0_1196314693″,”musestorm”); cb_widget_report_element(”cb_widget_1_1196314693″,”clearspring”); cb_widget_report_element(”cb_widget_2_1196314693″,”netvibes”);

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/192225797/

Yahoo and Adobe have teamed up to give publishers the ability to offer contextual advertising as part of their PDF document downloads.

Users upload their PDFs to Yahoo’s ad network and then Yahoo hosts the document for download and serves up contextual advertising in a panel to the right of the given document’s content.

According to CNet, sites participating in the current closed beta include IDG’s InfoWorld, Wired, Pearson’s Education, Meredith Corporation and Reed Elsevier. No word as yet as to when it might be broadly available, although if it is eventually rolled out as part of the Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) it will be a US residents only service.

On one hand contextual advertising in PDFs probably falls into the “why didn’t they think of that before” category, but on the other hand there’s probably a reason this is a new concept, because I can’t see there being a stampede of people wanting to use the service. It will be interesting to see however whether the ads convert, and it may provide an additional revenue stream for ebook sellers and similar online users and creators who regularly provide PDF downloads to visitors.

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Silicon Valley based Ning and Los Angeles based Flux are “networks of networks” that allow communities to build feature rich social networks with a few clicks.

Ning, which launched in 2005, has raised over $44 million in capital and has 130,000 social networks on its platform. Ning was founded by CEO Gina Bianchini and Marc Andreessen, pictured to the right.

Flux, which launched in September, is a joint venture between Viacom and Social Project (formerly Tagworld). They are pre-launch, but power a number of social networks around Viacom properties (including MTV) and third party sites.

The two companies are on a collision course. Both platforms share users, meaning once someone has signed up for one social network on the platform, joining another one requires just a single click. Ning has built its community from the bottom up, and has benefited from backlash against the big, sometimes impersonal social networks. Flux, the newcomer, carries the weight of Viacom’s hundreds of brands behind it and will soon open up to any third party that wants to join.

But something about Flux doesn’t sit well with Bianchini, who sent us a long analysis of their business model. She goes into detail on Viacom’s history with partners, their tendency towards litigation, and conflicts between Flux’s marketing materials and terms of service. Flux undoubtedly will respond. For now they have no comment.

The analysis, written by Gina Bianchini, is below. I’m staying neutral on this for now until Flux fully launches and they’ve had time to respond to this. But I’ll say this - it is refreshing to see a company be willing to mix it up and say exactly why they think they are the better service. Too often, PR-speak gets in the way of clear communication. That certainly didn’t happen here.

(more…)

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If you need any further proof that Google flat out owns the online advertising space, just look to the right. Both Yahoo and Facebook are using Google Adwords to advertise their competing advertising platforms.

Now if Google would just start advertising back, the companies could pass revenue around in a circle indefinitely.

Thanks for Aniq Rahman for emailing this in.

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New York based Cellfish Media has launched a new service that delivers media to mobile phones, complete with on the fly conversion that provides access to most handsets.

AddtoPhone works via an embeddable button; users click the button, add their cell number then AddtoPhone sends them a SMS message with a link to the content. The service renders the media on the fly to fit the specific handset in formats including h264, h263, mpeg4, 3gp and 3gp2, and supports pictures, music, videos, or news feeds. Users are able to keep content via a “locker” that is accessible via the web or their mobile phones.

AddtoPhone also provides an API that allows website owners to create their own tools using the sites functionality, or you can send a file from your computer to a cellphone as well.

Bango launched a similar service a couple of weeks back but Cellfish claims their service is easier to use, and supports sending content via AddtoPhone to anyone, which apparently Bango doesn’t yet support.

Ultimately the easiest way to view videos on a cell phone would be for cellphones to support the various file types used in online videos, but given that’s not going to happen any time soon (the iPhone still doesn’t support Flash for example) AddtoPhone provides a decent alternative for sharing online content with friends via cell phone.

I almost forgot: they have a Facebook app for this service as well that allows users to send Facebook content to cellphones (pic below).

Our previous Cellfish coverage here.

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Source: TechCrunch
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Gotuit made an “about face” when they ditched their online TV product (except for music videos) and refocused on powering video sites. Over the past year they’ve been striking deals to power video services for the likes of Sports Illustrated, EMI, Fox Reality, amongst others. Now they’re powering Extreme Outdoor TV network (XONTV), a web site dedicated to outdoor lifestyle videos.

Gotuit’s video suite lets lets XONTV deep tag key points in videos. These tags form part of the meta data Gotuit uses to index and search through movies, making it possible to easily re-order short clips of long videos on demand. In XONTV’s case, you can easily search all their full length hunting videos for instances of deer or pheasant. In the case of the NFL draft, you could pull all of an athlete’s key moves from game highlights. Other players are tackling the problem of in-video search as well. Everyzing and Blinkx process videos using speech and video analysis. Other services such as Veotag, Viddler, and MotionBox.

Viddler

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Blinkx

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EveryZing

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Veotag

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cb_widget_report_widget(”cb_widget_1196307398″); cb_widget_report_element(”cb_widget_0_1196307398″,”viddler”); cb_widget_report_element(”cb_widget_1_1196307398″,”blinkx”); cb_widget_report_element(”cb_widget_2_1196307398″,”everyzing”); cb_widget_report_element(”cb_widget_3_1196307398″,”veotag”);

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A New York City-based startup called Snooth just raised $1 million in angel financing, on top of an earlier $300,000 round. Snooth is a social wine recommendation site that lets you search for more than 300,000 different types of wine. It has 1.9 million reviews, both professional and drinker-generated. Hic.

You can see what wines your friends have reviewed, or send recommendations directly to them. The site also offers recommendations through collaborative filtering techniques, and there is a Facebook app as well. The way the site makes money is by hooking you up with about 600 (going to 1,000) online wine merchants nationwide on a pay-per-click basis. Competitors include WineLog, TasteVine, Vinorati, and the very 1.0 WineSearcher.

The site Launched in June, and is getting between 200,000 and 250,000 unique visitors a month, says founder Philip James.

I gave the site a quick run-through and like the Ajax interface. There are sliders to narrow your search by price and vintage. And there is natural-language search, so it knows what a “spicy cab” means. The ratings for wines I know seem to be on the money. (Okay, I only tried three). Check it out and tell us what you think in comments.

Here is the press release.

Snooth

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cb_widget_report_widget(”cb_widget_1196293318″); cb_widget_report_element(”cb_widget_0_1196293318″,”snooth”);

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Dov Katz ported the TWiki install for JSLoader to use Ext 2.0.

The end result is TWikiStudio, a nice looking tool for managing (view/edit/search) a TWiki (twiki.org) installation.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/191829790/twikistudio-on-ext

We just featured SCal, and now we have a MooTools Calendar component created by Aeron Glemann.

I have tried to make Calendar as semantic as possible–with proper usage of CAPTION, THEAD, TBODY, TH and TD elements–and lots of CSS styling hooks. View the Calendar stylesheet for examples of the CSS; see the Styling Your Calendar section in the Manual for references to the XHTML.

You create the beast via:

And you end up with some pretty stuff:

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/191824236/mootools-calendar-component

Do you want to have one place that tells you about all of the Safari properties?

Now we have it.

The reference shows not only the standard properties and how Safari handles them, but also all of the -webkit-* properties such as -webkit-border-top-right-radius:

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/191796579/safari-css-reference