Ajax Girl

Online discussion aggregator and management service Grouply has taken $1.3 million in funding from Reid Hoffman, SoftTech VC, Harvard Angels, and Western Technology Investment. The funding is on top of their initial $935,000 taken from the same investors in June 2007.

Grouply offers a centralized discussion platform that allows users to track and manage their discussions on sites such as Google Groups (coming soon) and Yahoo Groups.

To quote Nick from our November 2007 review:

Grouply, in effect, takes over your interface with the groups websites. You can carry out all your normal tasks from Yahoo Groups, but with an added management and social layer. Simply give it your credentials and Grouply starts tracking your conversations across your groups. Technically speaking, Grouply does this by substituting an @grouply email address for your email contact to start receiving group updates on your behalf. All your messages are collected into one main feed with several intelligent ways of sorting through them for information you care about. Messages are organized by group, threaded by conversation, rated, and tagged. Any ratings or tags users add to a messages are shared with other members. Each message thread is automatically put into one of five groups identified by icons: discussion, wanted, events, for sale, and news. They’re also organized into summary feeds and smart digest, which only show you updates for conversations you’ve shown some interest in by reading.

Grouply

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/215314199/

A Chinese blogger has been beaten to death by Government authorities for the crime of attempting to record a protest on his mobile phone.

When Wei was present at some sort of confrontation or protest by local villages against municipal authorities when more than 50 municipal inspectors turned on him, attacking him for five minutes.

According to CNN, the killing has sparked outrage in China, “with thousands expressing outrage in Chinese Internet chat rooms, often the only outlet for public criticism of the government.”

The Chinese Government has moved swiftly to detain those involved, arresting 24 municipal inspectors whilst investigating more than 100 others in relation to the incident. Notably (for China) the story was published by the official state news service Xinhua, in what is believed to be an attempt to head off dissent over the mater by demonstrating that the Chinese Government does not condone those involved in the beating.

(image credit: AP/ CNN)

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/215301023/

Spotted by Google Operating System is a new iPhone specific interface for Google’s personalized webpage product iGoogle. The page can accessed directly from http://google.com/ig/i, although iPhone users should be immediately redirected to this page when trying to access iGoogle.

The new iPhone interface is a step up from Google’s previous offering of a mobile specific page at google.com/m (our review here) which only offered limited customization options.

iGoogle for iPhone will compete with Netvibes, who launched their one iPhone specific version in August 2007.

First impressions: this is good. As someone who has long given in to the Google borg all the major services I use (email, RSS reader etc) are through Google, and now iGoogle will give me a start page that links into those service. Google fans will love this, however if you’re not a heavy Google user nothing to see here, move along.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/215293671/

Web-based productivity apps may be where software is going, but the budding market will also see its share of casualties. One early casualty could be ThinkFree, which looks to be in turmoil.

The company’s Web-based versions of Office never really gained much traction—they trail well behind Google Docs, Zoho, and others. Founder and CEO TJ Kang is on the outs with Haansoft, the Korean software company he sold a majority stake to in 2003. ThinkFree’s chief marketer Jonathan Crow just left, explaining that ThinkFree and collaborative online tools are “evolving to the next stage” and that Korean parent company Haansoft:

. . . is now taking a more active role in the strategic and tactical activities of ThinkFree. They are now deep into what this shift means for our development roadmap as we head into 2008.

Is that marketing speak for, “There is no money in online productivity apps and Haansoft is pulling the plug”? Not necessarily. The Website is still up and running, and all subscribers were upgraded to premier accounts about a week ago.

It sounds more like the company’s Korean masters have put ThinkFree in a holding pattern until they figure things out. One tipster tells us that ThinkFree has shut down its San Jose, California headquarters. Calls to that office just keep going to voicemail. But a spokeperson assures us that there are still people there.

We won’t put ThinkFree in the deadpool quite yet, but it is on death watch.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/215243742/

The Crunchies are only a week away. Voting is closed. But the last batch of 150 tickets just went on sale. The startup awards ceremony and party will be held on January 18 in San Francisco, at the Herbst Theatre at 7:30 p.m. and will be followed by a party. This event is being produced by Read/WriteWeb, Venture Beat, GigaOm and TechCrunch.

In addition to the Richter Scales singing their Here Comes Another Bubble song live, Jib Jab will unveil some new videos at the ceremony.

Again, here are the details:

• Friday, January 18, 2008 at 7:30 pm
• Herbst Theater, San Francisco
• Festive attire welcome. After-party to follow.
• Tickets are available here, hosted courtesy of amiando.

The Herbst Theater has 916 seats, so we have just 450 general admission tickets in the balcony and dress circle to release for the event. Tickets are $40, and $10 from each ticket will be contributed to the American Heart Association in honor of Om Malik and in memory of Marc Orchant. The balance of the tickets are reserved for the 100 finalist companies, press and corporate sponsors.

Thank you to the sponsors of the 2007 Crunchies who are underwriting the event and making it possible to recognize outstanding contributions in our industry. Award Benefactors: Adobe, (new sponsor) Ask, Charles River Ventures, The Mayfield Fund, Microsoft, Our Stage and Sun Microsystems. Thank you also to our Program Sponsors, including (new sponsor) RealTimeMatrix’s Vortex, amiando our official ticketing sponsor, WeBreakStuff for design and MediaTemple for hosting.

If you are interested in orchestra seats as an event sponsor, please contact Jeannie Logozzo. We also still have a few sponsorship opportunities available, and would much appreciate your support underwriting the event.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/215181855/

Even in the most stuffy, old-school bureaucratic enterprises there are great people who just want to get work done. And doing so often means looking past the enterprisey systems and procedures mandated by corporate IT. Accenture is calling this phenomenon “user-determined computing”:

Today, home technology has outpaced enterprise technology, leaving employees frustrated by the inadequacy of the technology they use at work. As a result, employees are demanding more because of their ever-increasing familiarity and comfort level with technology. It’s an emerging phenomenon Accenture has called “user-determined computing.”

Right on. We salute these people for trying to be the best they can despite of the organization around them. It’s so very easy to just give up and not care when you’re being stifled by mandates written by people who care even less.

It makes us smile when we see rebel factions from all over the Fortune 500 and beyond sidestep their enterprisey environments and sign up for our products. And likewise, it makes us sad when we get cancelation notices from people who regret their need to stop using the products because corporate IT feels like they can built a better mousetrap internally. Those notices usually drip with disillusion.

In any case, it’s great to see more attention being paid to this phenomenon, even if the term coined by Accenture doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/783-getting-work-done-despite-the-enterprise

Cyra Richardson, Senior Program Manager Lead on the IE team, gave a presentation at MIX 2007 on Making Ajax Applications Scream on the Client.

The scope of the presentation is to show how to speed things up right now, not in the future.

Optimizing Symbol Resolution

How to speed up in a late binding world. Discusses the scope chain from vars to the DOM itself, and how to make sure that you don’t keep running around the chain.

JavaScript Code Inefficiencies

To make string manipulation more effience in IE:

• Use local vars
• Cache strings from IE objects
• Use Array.join for concatenation

(I prefict that array.join will stick around even when it isn’t faster, just like the equivilent in Java land).

Some other thoughts:

• Don’t use eval unless you really have too. Instead of parameterized code
• SWITCH is costly for large sets, consider a hash table wrapped in a try/catch
• WITH is costly due to symbol lookups everywhere, use manual iterators
• Don’t use your own get/set accessors

IE Performance Considerations

DOM is expensive in IE, especially due to the generic nature of the platform. Also watch out for layout improvements such as hover CSS style.

HTTP Performance

Simplify and reduce:

• Script in on JS file
• Styles in one CSS file
• Fewer, smaller, unscaled images
• Simplify layout
• Use HTTP compression (lots of detail on cache control)

Tools and Techniques

• Developer Toolbar
• Fiddler: HTTP traffic watching
• Ajax View: New from MS Research. On the fly rewrite the JavaScript and add instrumentation code.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/215145115/making-ajax-applications-scream-on-the-client

“Is Hasbro just a stupid Potato Head? Or is this a brilliant game of Stratego?” That’s the big question Fortune’s Josh Quittner (my former boss) asks as he reports that Hasbro, the toy company that owns Scrabble, is trying to shut down Scrabulous,
one of the most popular Facebook apps. Scrabulous lets you play an online version of Scrabble with your Facebook friends. The app boasts 569,000 daily active user, ranking it No. 9 right after Slide’s SuperPoke, No. 8, and ahead of iLike, No. 10.

Scrabulous co-founder Jayant Agarwalla, 21, confirms that Hasbro “sent a notice to Facebook about two weeks ago. The lawyers are working on it.” Quittner suggests that someone start a Facebook group to save Scrabulous, but we all know how much good that is likely to do.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/215141011/

How Obama’s speechwriters (who are under 30 btw) work with the candidate

“What I do is to sit with him for half an hour. He talks and I type everything he says. I reshape it, I write. He writes, he reshapes it. That’s how we get a finished product. It’s a great way to write speeches. A lot of times, you write something, you hand it in, it gets hacked by advisers, it gets to the candidate and then it gets sent back to you. This is a much more intimate way to work.”

Customer experience case studies: Amazon, Apple, SAS, Whole Foods, and Zappos

“We now can point to case studies of major successes that explicitly and provably stem from a focus on good experience. (And they’re getting more frequent; these five case studies all popped up within the last few weeks.)”

The downside of home-office life

“For home-office workers who aren’t in regular touch with colleagues or clients, a frequent complaint — even among those who say they are distracted by other members of their households — is of isolation.”

49 simple and clean designs

“Let’s put it straight – simplicity is more complex than you probably think it is. To design a web-site in user-friendly tones, presenting all information and removing unnecessary details isn’t easy. In fact, many designers don’t manage to find the right mix between details and their presentation on the screen, which usually results in an information overkill and/or decreased usability. However, some designers do manage to find the right balance and create usable, elegant and clean web-sites with simple layouts. We’ve selected some of them.”

How the iPhone blew up the wireless industry

“Even the iPhone’s hardware and software teams were kept apart: Hardware engineers worked on circuitry that was loaded with fake software, while software engineers worked off circuit boards sitting in wooden boxes. By January 2007, when Jobs announced the iPhone at Macworld, only 30 or so of the most senior people on the project had seen it.”

Scrubbing the iPhone Scrubber

“For scrolling through menus and adjusting volume, the iPhone’s new UI methods are, IMHO, superior to the old iPod’s wheel. But the “jog dial” is still the ideal user interface for arbitrary positioning the playhead in audio and video tracks. It’s a hardware solution that has been in professional and consumer use for decades.”

Whom are you excluding?

“The first thing I’d ask myself before launching a product, a service, or a candidate is, ‘who are we leaving out?’ If the answer is no one, be prepared for uncharted waters. The future of marketing (at least the big successes) is going to be fueled by those with the guts to embrace the masses. The profits, at least in the short run, may well be found by those that embrace exclusion.”

Why Tuscany fears too many tourists

”’Progress cannot be measured only in terms of raising gross domestic product,’ said Luciano Fiordoni, an economist who spoke at a recent anti-airport rally in Siena. ‘You have to factor in quality of life,’ he said. ‘We don’t object to growth, but our main intent is to remain human.’”

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/782-sunspots-the-quality-of-life-edition

Some new data from the Pew Research Center puts some numbers around the growing influence of the Internet on political campaigns. None of this is too surprising, but it quantifies what we already know: that the Internet is becoming more important in political campaigns, especially among younger people. Each election, teh Internet grows stronger and stronger. This data suggests that in 2008 the Internet may still not be the deciding medium in the election, but it certainly points to that being the case in 2012. Here are some tables from the report, which is based on a survey of 1,430 adults in the U.S.

Nearly a quarter of the population say they “regularly” learn something about the presidential campaigns from the Internet, up from 13 percent in 2004. the Internet is still trailing TV news and daily newspapers, but is now beating morning TV shows and radio:

Those numbers change if you look at the same question by the age of the respondents. A full 42 percent of 18-to-29-year-olds (double the amount from the last election) regularly get their campaign news from the Internet, handily beating all other sources including cable news (35 percent)nightly network news (24 percent) and daily newspapers (25 percent). In the 30-t0-49-year-old age bracket that number drops to 26 percent, below cable news and nightly news and tying daily newspapers. If this trend continues, the Internet will be the deciding factor by the 2012 election:

When asked where do they get most of their campaign news from (as opposed to regularly), TV still dominates among 18-to-29-year-olds, although it is losing ground fast:

Social networking sites are exerting a small but growing influence as a source of campaign information among younger people. Of the 18-to-29-year-olds who use social networking sites, a full 27 percent get campaign information from them, but only 8 percent have signed up as a “friend” of a candidate.

Here are the top sources of online campaign news for all ages. MSNBC.com, CNN.com, and Yahoo News top the list, with more than 20 percent each, and then it trails off after that (Google News is a distant fourth with 9 percent and the New York Times is seventh with 6 percent):

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/215122909/