Ajax Girl

Given all the chaos this week surrounding Microsoft’s bid to take over Yahoo, it’s not surprising that a new Yahoo product launch wouldn’t have an abundance of exuberance attached to it. Still, the only word anyone got that Yahoo Live has gone live is a three word post on Bradley Horowitz’s blog: “Live is live” (Horowitz is head of the Technology Development Group at Yahoo).

Yahoo Live allows anyone with a webcam to stream live video of themselves to a dedicated site. They call it “a platform for live video.”

It is very similar to existing live streaming services like Stickam, Justin.tv and Ustream and Blogtv. Users create a channel, authorize their webcam and start broadcasting to the public. Other people can drop by and watch, or choose to participate via video, sound or text chat.

We’re still testing it, but for now the service is very unstable and keeps going down. It’s also clearly got a ways to go with features - videos are not archived for playback, for example, meaning once it’s broadcast live, that’s it.

Users can set up profiles for themselves and track how many people have watched them stream live, how many broadcasts they have made, and how long total they’ve been on the air. When you’re in a streaming session with others, up to five other people can be shown on your screen at the same time, one of which is the main presenter and four others who are simply in the session. Everyone else can be seen in a chat room associated with the session, and these sessions can also be embedded around the web.

Right now it looks as though Yahoo has hired two people - one of which is a girl who will sing songs on request - to help launch the site by providing some ongoing content. Yahoo has also set up a Twitter account that you can follow to see who’s streaming at a given time. Want to pull out information from Yahoo Live and access it elsewhere? There’s also an API available.

Update: Yahoo’s Chad Dickerson responds below in the comments about the stability issue.

Stickam

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JustinTV

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Ustream

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blogTV

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A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Facebook’s innovative approach to translating its site into various laguages - get the users to do all the work.

Users can ask to translate bits of the site, which are then voted on by other users until a good localized version is created. Users have been hard at work translating Facebook into German, Spanish and French.

Facebook says that the Spanish site was completed in less than four weeks and is based on the work of nearly 1,500 Spanish-speaking Facebook users. One user alone, though, was responsible for translating almost 3% of the site.Facebook has 2.8 million active users in Latin America and Spain.

Today Facebook opened up the Spanish version of the site. If you visit Facebook from a Spanish-prevalent country starting next week, the default language will be auto set to Spanish. Users can also change the default language to Spanish in their account settings.

Facebook takes a very different approach to localized sites than rival MySpace, which is opening up offices all over the world to serve those markets.

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Source: TechCrunch
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In the words of one Silicon Valley insider that I spoke with today, “Plaxo has been desperately, desperately, desperately trying to sell” for quite some time. Late last year they got serious and hired an investment bank, Revolution Partners, to help move things along.

The rumor mill really got going when Revolution Partners started making their calls and sending out the company’s financial information to potential buyers. A rumor about a Facebook acquisition turned out to be false. Now Wired is reporting that Google may be doing the deal, for $200 million. Writer Megan McCarthy says she’s 100% sure a deal has been done, and thinks Google is the most likely buyer.

Plaxo did around $5 million in 2006 revenue, doubling that to $10-$12 million in 2007. 2008 projections are $20-$25 million. The company has 1.8 million worldwide visitors per month (Comscore).

Did Google buy them? The two companies are certainly friendly. Plaxo has been a big supporter of Google Open Social from the start, and has consistently adopted new Google social products. And Google’s new Social Graph API gels nicely with what Plaxo has done with Pulse.

More as this develops, if it does.

Plaxo

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It’s not a lot of money, but Lookery’s $900,000 seed round includes Reed Hundt, Charles River Ventures, and HT Ventures. That’s right, Reed Hundt. The former chairman of the FCC. He thinks there’s gold in Facebook ads, apparently, even though Lookery is a distant fourth compared to other social ad startups Slide, RockYou, and SocialMedia. Maybe even fifth, if you include iLike. But who is counting? Lookery is going for volume and hoping to make a couple cents on each ad.

Does Hundt even use Facebook? it looks like he’s set up a profile, at least. Reed, time to add a picture!

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The US Department of Justice has launched an anti-trust probe into Total Music, the proposed music service from Universal and Sony BMG.

As we wrote in October 2007, Total Music would offer free music to end users by charging device manufactures or ISPs. The earlier figures mentioned $90 per device for access to Total Music, based on $5 per month over 18 months.

According to The Register, Universal and SonyBMG are confirmed, with all four major record labels likely to be involved in the investigation as well.

The investigation will consider whether the big four, as providers of over 80% of all music, are unfairly using their market position to provide an unfair market advantage to Total Music. The record companies have been investigated previously for such behavior, although the earlier investigation closed in 2003 following Apple’s launch of iTunes.

In related news, the RIAA is now suggesting that copyright filtering should be done at a PC level, with the tech bundled with virus scanning software. Desperate suggestions from desperate people.

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Source: TechCrunch
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Sometimes I think that Amazon secretly wants to get out of the physical retailing business. It gets much higher margins from selling digital goods, or from collecting an affiliate fee from any sales it directs to an third-party Amazon Merchant. Any time it can avoid shipping something, it makes more money (proportionately) than if it sold you the item itself.

Now Amazon is making a move in the direction of becoming a shopping search engine. This week, it launched a program called Product Ads, which lets any Web merchant buy cost-per-click ads on Amazon linked to specific product searches. No announcement was made other than a blast e-mail to product marketers and the addition of a paragraph at the bottom of this page describing how you can advertise with Amazon. Although it is a limited test for now (in the Electronics & Computers, Home & Garden, Tools, and Toys, Kids & Baby categories), Product Ads is a direct response to the encroachment of Google and product search engines like eBay’s Shopping.com.

More people probably start their online shopping at Google than at Amazon.com these days. With Product Ads, Amazon is fighting back. Anyone who searches for a product on Amazon today will find either products that Amazon sells or ones that its merchant affiliates sell. Now Amazon is saying that any Websites that is selling something related to its product categories can buy an ad that will show up as a highly targeted product search result, along with all the items on Amazon and its merchant sites. What’s more, Websites won’t need to pay Amazon an affiliate fee or register as a merchant. They won’t even need to pay for the ad unless someone clicks on it.

Each click might bring only pennies, but search is a volume game. For Amazon, it is all gravy that could help boost the company’s overall margins if it takes off. It is also a smart defensive move against Google, which still does not do product search particularly well. If shoppers could find anything they want to buy across the Web on Amazon, it might once again become the first place to look when they shop online.

(via Josh Kopelman).

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An Apple TV patent filing lays out how widgets could play a role in the way we watch TV. The filing is an update to an older one from 2006. In it, Apple describes how widgets could appear on-screen while people are watching an Apple TV. the widgets could provide live sport scores, news feeds, or chat functionality to talk to other viewers or friends elsewhere. Really, any widget you have on your desktop could just as easily be on your TV screen. The patent describes these widgets being triggered either by a new remote control that looks a lot like an iPod Nano, or by information in the broadcast signal itself.

Patents are a dime a dozen, and just because Apple filed this does not mean it will ever see the light of day as a product. But it does shed light on how it thinks about these problems. If you are going to merge the computer with the TV, widgets are a great way to bring bite-sized pieces of data to the screen at appropriate moments. Add some transparency effects, and they visually become like personalized graphics. Done right, they even could become a very targeted advertising vehicle, bringing the relevance of internet to the TV. (Although, the patent does not mention this). Whoever figures out how to put widgets on TVs is going to control some very valuable real estate.

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I am learning at lot at the Dojo Developers Day one. Whenever I met Dojo folks I get the impression that there are 55 gems in the library that I have no idea about!

One of them is Neil Roberts implementation of the Django template language in JavaScript.

His work lives in dojox.dtl and you can check out a simple demo that renders, and rerenders a page with new content as you add it:

You can also see another interesting example which is a blog view. Take a view source on that puppy.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/231164624/django-template-language-in-javascript

What does a logo say about a company? And what does it say when those logos change? A logo is more than just window dressing. It is a company’s identity boiled down to its bare essence, and is often the essential image consumers have in their mind when they think about a corporation. Products change, but logos endure. Or do they?

Neatorama has a great post that goes through the evolution of several corporate logos. I’ve reproduced some of the images below. How many of you knew that Apple’s original logo featured Isaac Newton under an Apple tree? When you look at the Palm logos, the best one, in my opinion, is the one with the blue circle—when the company was at its height. And what’s with that Nokia fish? Talk about a company that’s evolved.

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Y Combinator startup Heroku, which has been in private beta since October, is coming out today with more details about how it’s out to ease the development and deployment of Ruby on Rails (RoR) applications.

There are two sides to Heroku’s offering. The first is a completely in-browser development environment where RoR programmers can build their apps instead of doing so with software on their own computers. Relative to other programming languages, Ruby and the Rails framework can be particularly onerous just to install and configure. Heroku wants both amateur and advanced programmers to get coding right away by making RoR development possible with any browser-equipped computer.

The second aspect to Heroku’s offering, which it is promoting with new materials on its website today, will allow RoR developers to not only build their apps with Heroku but to host and scale them there as well. Heroku is using Amazon Web Services to provide automatic scaling of its hosted apps and plans, like a utility, to charge premium users for the amount of processing power they consume. Even if you don’t want to build your app within Heroku, you can import it to (and later export it from) the hosting service to enjoy its automatic scaling capabilities.

For the time being, those who are interested in developing and/or deploying their RoR apps with Heroku can submit their names to a waiting list. Co-founder James Lindenbaum says that they are actually letting people into the site pretty quickly and are using the waiting list mostly as just a way to prevent an onslaught of new users.

A free version of Heroku’s hosting will be available to beta testers, with a premium version coming later that will remove Heroku branding, allow for custom domains, lift bandwidth and processor caps, and provide a set of advanced developer tools such as performance metrics and code optimization.

Heroku, while part of this winter’s batch of Y Combinator startups, has been in development since last June and has already attracted 2,500 users who have built about 2,000 apps. The three founders have backgrounds in enterprise software development and came up with the idea for Heroku when they witnessed the rising popularity of RoR for the enterprise but also saw the difficulties that many faced with the deployment of RoR apps.

For another company working to provide better RoR hosting, check out Engine Yard (discussed here) which provides a more hands-on approach.

Engine Yard

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