Ajax Girl

John J Barton has been working hard on Firebug 1.1, but the work has been in the dark a little unless you are paying attention.

He has been putting releases up, and Kris Zyp has been kind enough to host

I have talked to a few people recently who keep Firefox 2 around just “because Firebug needs it” but the latest beta works great in Firefox 3 (which I find to be a huge leap on the Mac).

The beta features:

• eval() debugging,
• external editor interface,
• browser-generated event handler debugging,
• executable lines marked with green line numbers,
• user-controlled naming of eval() buffers,
• Stack side panel on “Script” panel for callstack,
• Supports Firefox 3,
• “better” debugging icons,
• CSS errors report against source lines,
• bug fixes (incl. issues 8, 69, 218, 230, 239, 249, 269, 314, 321, 345)
• Internal firebug debug output

I raise a drink to John for keeping Firebug going strong!

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/230064232/firebug-11-and-getfirebugcom

I met this really nice bloke at the first Ajax get together, put on a few years back, by O’Reilly and Adaptive Path. Ben and I were arguing about something or other and this guy politely told us that we were totally wrong. It turned out to be Kevin. He is a really nice chap, and is really interesting to talk too. You delve into his technical background and it is deep. Really deep. Ever play with the Newton?

Well, Kevin has been promoted to become CTO of Adobe. The press release positions it as “marking an increasing significance for Rich Internet Applications across Adobe’s business”.

All I care about is that we have a real techie who does the right thing in a more powerful position at Adobe. Hopefully Flash will be open sourced soon huh Kev? Congrats.

In this new position, Lynch will oversee Adobe’s experience design and core technology across business units. As part of this role Lynch will continue to drive Adobe’s technology platform for designers and developers, which includes Adobe Flash Player, Adobe Flex, and Adobe AIR, the new cross-operating system application runtime that bridges the computing power and data capabilities of the desktop with the real-time dynamic capabilities of the Web.

And for old times sake…..

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/230061612/kevin-lynch-promoted-to-become-adobe-cto

Whatever fear has taken hold of the public markets, it has not yet trickled down to venture capital. Canaan Partners today is announcing its eighth fund—a $650 million early stage venture fund with an international bent. Some of Canaan’s Portfolio companies from past funds include DoubelClick, Match.com, SuccessFactors, Tremor Media, Lending Club, and Blurb. In addition to focusing on getting early stakes in U.S. tech and medical startups, Canaan expects to invest a quarter of the fund in startups from India and Israel.

If India is the next China for Web startups, the fund should do well. General partner Deepak Kamra explains that the low-hanging fruit there remains me-too versions of U.S. Web companies with a cultural twist, rather than companies that come up with startlingly original products:

In India, I’d love to do more new product companies. But we have to be realistic that there are only a handful of great product companies coming out of India. In the meantime, you have this huge domestic market just coming onto the Internet. You don’t need to be the latest thing. The adaptation of Web 1.0 companies is what is happening now.

Hopefully, though, in the coming years we will be seeing a lot more Zohos invade the U.S.

Tremor Media

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Lending Club

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SuccessFactors

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Blurb

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Zoho

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Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/230060726/

Why is it so hard to contact people on some social media sites? On Digg, for instance, you can send members a “Shout” that typically appears as a public comment on their profile page, but you cannot send a private message. Mixx, a Digg clone that we like, is adding private mail and group message boards to its site tomorrow. Members will be able to send mail to any other member, and block messages from any member as well. Every group will also have a message board to discuss a general topic not related to any one story. These are pretty basic features that somehow got lost as lean-and-mean social media sites started to take off. The only other social news site that has mail is Propeller, which is owned by AOL.

Are social news sites better off keeping everything above board and public, or do private messages foster a deeper sense of community by strengthening individual links between members?

One reason not to allow private messaging is that it could be used to game the system. The most active members might constantly be getting private messages encouraging them to vote up particular stories. Sites like Mixx and Digg are all about collective action, and they should be careful not to dilute that emphasis. But sometimes you just need to contact someone, and there should be an easy way to do that too.

Mixx

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Digg

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/229943538/

Vidoop, an OpenID identity provider reviewed here that shuns usernames and passwords in favor of picture grids, has scored a coup by managing to hire the chairman of the OpenID foundation himself, Scott Kveton.

Kveton will act as Vice President of Open Platforms for Vidoop, managing the myVidoop product out of Portland. His association with Vidoop should help the company to raise its visibility and to strike deals with consumer websites that want to begin implementing OpenID authentication.

Vidoop differs from other OpenID identity providers by presenting users with a grid of pictures from which they must identify a preset configuration in order to authenticate. The company is working to sign deals with advertisers to incorporate ads into the grid and pass on some of the revenues to participating websites. While OpenID has yet to gain widespread implementation, big players such as Yahoo have been showing much greater interest in the technology as of late.

Vidoop

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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/~3/229878433/

Is Digg not satisfying your desire for political news on this Super Tuesday? A newly launched site called VoteOften wants to step in and fill the void.

VoteOften is a social news site like Digg but with additional features that set it apart. In addition to user-submitted stories, the site algorithmically pulls in the top political stories from several reputable news sources. Stories are not only voted up or down but rated for their liberal or conversative bias as well. They are also tagged as relevant to particular candidates or issues, so you can view all stories related to, say, Barack Obama or national security.

More advanced features include the ability to rate candidates based on how they are portrayed by a particular story. You can indicate whether you got a good or bad impression of the candidates mentioned in a story, and the site will generate a bar graph showing how everyone felt about the candidates in aggregate.

Since this site just launched, the homepage stories are not terribly fresh yet; this will hopefully change once site activity increases. Check it out, participate, and go vote.

Digg

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/229854981/

Today, February 5th, is Basecamp’s Birthday. She turns four today. Four years old. Wow. Time sure flies.

Here’s the original blog post from Feb 5, 2004 that started it all. Be sure to browse the comments — they’re especially interesting looking back. Time puts things in perspective.

From the vault, here’s the original marketing site

Here’s the original to-do section

Here’s the original milestones section

Here’s the original messages/comments section

(You’ll notice each message category had its own tab)

Here’s the original files section

Wait, there was no files section in the original Basecamp! Yup, when we launched you couldn’t upload files to Basecamp.

A great four years

Overall, we’re really happy four years later to have maintained the UI clarity, simplicity, and spirit of the original design and vision. Some sections have gotten even simpler. And yes, some sections have grown a bit too. But all in all, looking back, we’re very proud of where Basecamp started and how it’s grown.

Thanks to everyone who made this possible. Our incredible crew, our amazing customers, the press, the pundits, the lovers and the haters. Its been a wild ride. We’re looking forward to what’s next.

Thank you!

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/834-basecamp-turns-four

Google has teamed with Twitter to provide a Twitter/ Google mashup for Super Tuesday.

Tweets relating to Super Tuesday are overlaid on a Google Map, along with other data including YouChoose ‘08 videos, Google News election headlines and primary state results. The site is live here. Google is also offering gadgets with the results as they come in.

Google has tracked big events before in a similar fashion to this, but what’s different here is the tie-in with Twitter. Google acquired Twitter rival Jaiku in October, and we haven’t heard much about Jaiku since, aside from some intermittent reports that the service was stagnating under Google and that users were switching to Twitter. Could this new deal be a recognition by Google that Twitter is where it’s at, its $100 million buy of Jaiku aside? Or was Jaiku simply another tech buy that will be merged into Android and cease to be a Twitter competitor? (Jaiku had a strong mobile platform on top of being simply a Twitter clone.)

Lets hope that either Twitter’s new hosting Verio can handle the traffic, or Google has lent Twitter some server space, otherwise by about 9-10pm EST tonight as solid results start coming through, the only thing we might see on the mashup is an error message similar to the one top right in this post.

Twitter

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Jaiku

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/229804696/

I love it when a plan comes together (removes cigar): After I played with Google charts and porting the idea of generating charts from accessible table data over to YUI charts Stoyan Stevanof had to use the same idea to generate his own, home-made Canvas-driven charts:

His solution shows in a few lines not only how to get the data from a table, but also how to do a pie chart in canvas.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/229750134/canvas-pie-chart-from-datatable

AOL has acquired buy.at, a leading affiliate marketing network backed by VC house DFJ Esprit, reports TechCrunch UK. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but well-placed sources say the deal is worth in the region of $150 million (£75 million). Although launched in the UK in 2002, buy.at now has a much bigger US operation, which is what attracted AOL’s interest. buy.at will now operate as a wholly-owned business unit of Advertising.com, part of AOL’s Platform-A organization, to which it added four other companies in the last year including Tacoda, AdTech, Third Screen Media and Quigo. Unlike previous deals which were more about ad serving, the buy.at deal is about getting closer relationships with retailers. AOL is understood to have tried to buy another affiliate network, Tradedoubler, a year ago but the deal foundered with the latter’s shareholders, who couldn’t agree on price.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/229722000/