Ajax Girl

Arena Albionu has written about Django and Comet using the Orbited Python event driven comet server.

The article walks through the hello world of Comet… a chat server. The JavaScript looks like this:

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/206849560/django-and-comet

Apple has signed a deal with 20th Century Fox that will see video rentals on iTunes.

According to FT.com the deal will be officially announced at MacWorld on January 14. The same report also says that Apple is in talks with Sony Pictures Entertainment, Paramount and Warner Bros along similar lines.

Speculation of Apple offering video rentals via iTunes has been around for a long time and is seen as a natural next step for iTunes. We reported in June that the iTunes rental service will charge $2.99 for a 30 day rental, but final details have not been disclosed. Code to support rentals in iTunes was discovered in November.

After a year where Apple was portrayed as the bogeyman by companies such as NBC (who have now withdrawn their content), this is a big win for Apple. Another interesting part is News Corp appearing to continue to hedge its bets; on one hand it joined with NBC to launch Hulu, billed as an iTunes alternative, and yet they continue to deal with Apple directly as well. If Murdoch isn’t prepared to dump Apple and join with NBC exclusively, what does this say about what he thinks about the future of online video? Certainly from the outside its says that Apple/ iTunes is still the biggest and best game in town, and the place to be if you want to profit from your content online. It would also suggest that NBC’s strategy of not dealing with Apple may be bound to fail.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/206801952/

Google is set to sign a deal with Japan’s biggest mobile phone operator NTT DoCoMo that will see Google become the default search provider to 48 million NTTDoCoMo customers. The deal will also see NTT DoCoMo switching to Google Apps for the provision of email to it customers.

Japan is one of the few markets globally in which Yahoo is ahead of Google in search, holding 65.9% of the market in April to Google’s 27.8%. The overall gap amongst all Yahoo and Google properties however isn’t quite as wide, with Yahoo properties totaling 41 million unique visitors in August (comScore) to Google’s 31 million.

The deal will be a much needed boost for Google in a search market that it has failed to lead, unlike nearly every other country on the planet.

According to Reuters, the alliance may eventually lead to the development of new functions and handsets.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/206787612/

As we reported December 20, the last hurdle to Google’s acquisition of Doubleclick now rests with the European Union after obtaining approval for the merger in the United States.

One company petitioning against the acquisition is Microsoft. The NY Times has a copy of a leaked Microsoft document here (.doc) that details in dot points the case against the acquisition. One choice quote:

By acquiring the dominant provider of ad-serving tools that publishers use to manage and make their inventory available to advertisers, Google will force other online ad networks to build and market their own ad-serving tools. Unless and until Google’s competitors are able to obtain access to competitively neutral and unbiased ad-serving tools like those currently provided by DoubleClick, the ability of Google’s rivals to create viable alternative pipelines will be very difficult, if possible at all. Moreover, by the time competitors are able to assemble their own pipelines, given the network economics that characterize online advertising, Google likely will have obtained in non-search advertising the same unbeatable market position that it now enjoys in search advertising.

And then there’s the Powerpoint slides. Here’s Microsoft’s case in pictures:

As Erick previously noted: “The European Commission won’t bow out so easily.” The EU has a much stronger track record against anti-competitive behavior that the FTC has under the Bush Administration, and with Microsoft spending time and money lobbying against the deal it would a brave person who bets that Google is assured of getting unconditional approval for the acquisition.

(slides via Slashdot)

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/206756351/

Five years ago, Jim Clark left the speculative bust of the tech industry for the speculative promise of the real estate industry. A founder of Silicon Graphics, Netscape, and WebMD, the Web billionaire decided to build condos in Miami with former Excite@Home CEO Tom Jermoluk. Well, it looks like the two should have stuck to technology startups. Reports the NYTimes:

The first two projects by their company, Hyperion Development, are plagued with delays and unhappy buyers. Some residents at the first tower, named Blue, are threatening to sue the company for not delivering on amenities, while other owners at the 330-unit complex are trying to sell their condos for less than they paid.

Blue’s problems have hurt Hyperion’s reputation so much that consultants say some buyers who put down deposits at the company’s second tower, the 516-unit Marina Blue, may decide not to close. Other Marina Blue buyers have sued to get their deposits back.

The problems raise questions about the ability of Hyperion to repay a $110 million construction loan as well as its ability to develop future projects in the Miami market. They also offer a look at what can happen when entrepreneurs try to trade on their reputation as they branch into other areas.

Jermoluk blames rising steel and concrete prices for cost overruns. He should add easy credit to that list. Market timing is everything in business, and Clark and Jermoluk weren’t as lucky with real estate as they were with the Internet. Will they be tarred as mere speculators now in both realms?

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/~3/206709730/

Five years ago, Jim Clark left the speculative bust of the tech industry for the speculative promise of the real estate industry. A founder of Silicon Graphics, Netscape, and WebMD, the Web billionaire decided to build condos in Miami with former Excite@Home CEO Tom Jermoluk. Well, it looks like the two should have stuck to technology startups. Reports the NYTimes:

The first two projects by their company, Hyperion Development, are plagued with delays and unhappy buyers. Some residents at the first tower, named Blue, are threatening to sue the company for not delivering on amenities, while other owners at the 330-unit complex are trying to sell their condos for less than they paid.

Blue’s problems have hurt Hyperion’s reputation so much that consultants say some buyers who put down deposits at the company’s second tower, the 516-unit Marina Blue, may decide not to close. Other Marina Blue buyers have sued to get their deposits back.

The problems raise questions about the ability of Hyperion to repay a $110 million construction loan as well as its ability to develop future projects in the Miami market. They also offer a look at what can happen when entrepreneurs try to trade on their reputation as they branch into other areas.

Jermoluk blames rising steel and concrete prices for cost overruns. He should add easy credit to that list. Market timing is everything in business, and Clark and Jermoluk weren’t as lucky with real estate as they were with the Internet. Will they be tarred as mere speculators now in both realms?

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/~3/206709730/

You’ve got to hand it to those guys at Radiohead. Not only are they great musicians. They are great promoters who are at the forefront of figuring out how to use the culture of free music to sell CDs. On New Year’s Eve, just before their latest album In Rainbows goes on sale in stores on January 1, the band will broadcast a prerecorded concert of all the album’s tracks on Current TV. The concert will also be available on the Web at current.com. While Radiohead and Current are positioning this as a “commercial-free” broadcast, what it amounts to is a free commercial for Radiohead’s album.

Radiohead originally released In Rainbows as a pay-as-you-like digital download for a limited time. (Although, that did not stop people from downloading it from BitTorrent networks). If fans were going to download the album for free anyway, at least this way Radiohead could control the way it was distributed somewhat. It also got some karma points from their fans and even more free press than they would have otherwise. Now that all the buzz has propelled the album to No. 1 on many critics’ lists, the band is going to start selling the album in CD form through traditional channels. It is no longer available as a free download from the official Radiohead site. What better way to kick off sales than with a free New Year’s Eve concert on both TV and the Web?

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/206640208/

People who do a lot of copying of quotes from other sites are going to like Kwout, which launched yesterday. Use it to grab a quick quotation or other screen shot from a web site and embed it into a blog or other website (one click to Flickr and Tumblr).

To grab a quote, just type a URL into the Kwout home page, or use the bookmarklet when on a web page. A new window pops up that allows you to make a selection, resize the window, and grab it. Others can then easily grab the quote and embed it as well by clicking on the link below the image. Here’s an example:

Techcrunch via kwout

The tool isn’t perfect yet - resizing is clumsy, for example. Google recently released a similar tool to allow embeds of quotes from books they’ve scanned, but what Kwout has done is more widely useful. See Go2Web2 and Library Stuff for more.

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/~3/206667949/

Here’s my prediction for 2008: The deadpool is going to fill up with VoIP services. The first one to jump in may be VoIP conference-call service Foonz. News flash. There’s just no money in giving people free calls.

The CEO of Foonz’s parent company, RPM Communications, tells GigaOm that he has “shifted focus” to a new service called Utterz that lets people post voice messages, photos , and video from their mobile phones to their blogs. (Imagine an audio Twitter that actually forced you to listen to everybody’s thought-of-the-day updates instead of just being able to skim through, or ignore, everything in text). Although the Foonz site is still up and the service is available, we are putting it into the deadpool for now. If the service is still ringing in a couple months, we will pull it out again.

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/~3/206616629/

A small privacy debate is igniting over a new sharing feature in Google Reader. A couple weeks ago, Google turned on a new feature in its feed reader that lets you share posts with anyone in your Gmail or Gtalk contact list (assuming you use either of those other Google services as well). The problem is that sharing is an all-or-nothing proposition. You either share posts with all of your contacts (who also use Google Reader) or with nobody. In other words, sharing is the same as making your selections public. There is no way to pick and choose with whom exactly you want to share particular posts or feeds.

Without giving consumers that granular control, the sharing feature is in danger of becoming a spamming feature. Just because I’ve sent you an e-mail in the past does not make us friends, and it certainly does not mean that you want to keep track of every random blog post I decide to share. If that happens and I become too generous in my spreading of ephemera, Google Reader does let you hide the posts that I or any other particular contact is sharing. But it does not let you block or specify who can see what you want to share. How hard would it be to turn that around and let you block certain contacts from being able to see your shared posts or to create different private sharing groups? If we’ve learned anything from Facebook’s Beacon experience, it is to give users of social services as much control as possible over who can see their data.

To be clear, Google Reader is not broadcasting every feed you subscribe to out to your entire contact list. The default is to keep everything private until you deliberately click the “share” button. But once you do that, you lose control over who gets to see what. The appeal of this approach is that it is an effortless way to discover what a subset of people you know are sharing. But it might also create privacy issues for people who do not understand exactly how it works . There is a creepy surveillance aspect to this that might also turn some people off, or keep them from sharing anything at all.

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/~3/206577554/