Ajax Girl

Google Blogoscoped (and the Google Analytics Blog) is reporting that Google is now giving users the opt-in option to share their Analytics data with other Google services, and/or in an anonymous, aggregated way in a new benchmarking service.

This is certainly useful for some companies - particularly since Google is only making new services based on this data available to users who’ve opted in: “only users who have opted to share their site’s data with Google may use these new or improved services.”

A screen shot of the options is above - but I’ve added my own fantasy third option in addition to the first two that Google announced today.

What I want to see is a flat out option for people to share some or all of their Analytics data publicly, without restriction and without anonymitiy. We’re seeing startups send us this data more and more often to counter under-counting in Comscore, Alexa and other services. They say they’re more than happy to see us publish the data, so readers will understand exactly how well they’re doing. A lot of companies want this data to be public.

Transparency is a good way to gain the trust of the community, and I think Google would be surprised to see how many customers would be perfectly willing to share their analytics data publicly. The logistics of the sharing is less important - it could be done via a widget or an API, or a variety of other methods. But I believe the demand is there. All Google has to do is flip a switch.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/246554883/

I had the opportunity today to catch up with Scott Guthrie, Vice President of Microsoft’s Developer Platform and one of today’s Microsoft keynote speakers.

In the video above we cover a range of Silverlight topics, from the SeaDragon implementation, through to the future of Silverlight. Guthrie wouldn’t confirm that Silverlight would be moving offline to become a full blown AIR competitor, but he does discuss certain ways Silverlight is already accessing offline data. On the iPhone and Silverlight he says that Microsoft will be looking closely at tomorrow’s iPhone SDK launch from Apple, and that ultimately they want to see Silverlight on as many devices as possible.

Apologies for the video quality, I should have a better quality version up later tonight (if I can get it uploaded).

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/~3/246528573/

Tune in tomorrow here and on CrunchGear for live coverage of Apple’s iPhone SDK event at Apple HQ in Cupertino. The event starts at 10 am PST.

What do we expect will be said? Well, hopefully we’ll get an idea when the SDK will be available, since it really looks like Apple will miss their promised February launch.

Apple is also saying they’ll announce “some exciting new enterprise features.” I hope that means business users will have Exchange Server like features going forward.

Lots more rumors over at iLounge. In a few short hours we’ll know what’s up.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/246454493/

Lots of bad news leaking out of Israeli startup eSnips this week. The company, which is part social network and part file uploading service, continues to grow - recent Comscore says they had 8 million unique visitors in January, up from 2.2 million a year ago. But founding CEO Yael Elish left the company for “personal reasons” just as they were closing a round of funding a couple of months ago.

The funding, inevitably, fell apart. The company tried to regroup under chairman Nahum Sharfman, who took over as acting CEO. But they eventually went the layoff route, letting most of the 16 or so employees go.

It’s not clear if the company will fold or find a way to continue operations. But storm clouds have massed over what was once a promising startup.

To date eSnips has raised $5 million, mostly from Gemini Israel Funds and Greylock. We’re putting them on DeadPool watch.

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/~3/246438236/

Asterpix is a company working on technology that adds so-called hotspots to video. These hotspots, which look like dash-bordered boxes, hover over particular objects in a video and can be triggered to show popup information when you place your cursor over them. The popup information has relevance to the object under consideration and consist of things like a description, related links, related videos, and theoretically advertisements.

Up until now, these hotspots had to be created manually by the content producers or publishers themselves. While they can still use Asterpix’s tools to do so, the company has begun automating the process by deploying bots that will find videos already posted on the web and using algorithms to tag them with relevant hotspots.

Asterpix bots are already crawling the various video sharing sites and hotspotting them at a rate of thousands per day. These indexed videos are being listed in Asterpix’s own video directory, which is provided through its site. The process is therefore mainly an exercise in testing and demonstrating the bots’ capabilities, since not a lot of people actually watch videos listed on the Asterpix homepage. The ultimate goal is to have video sharing sites like YouTube adopt the technology and index their videos with Asterpix hotspots automatically when users upload them.

So how are the bots managing to figure out not only the most important objects in videos but they popup information they are supposed to add for them? First, they judge the objects to hotspot depending on how long the camera focuses on them. The objects are essentially ranked by how much screen time they get. Then the bots determine the frequency of the terms used in any text associated with the videos. These are pulled from areas like titles and descriptions and are also ranked from most to least frequently used. At last, the bot matches the most frequent terms up with the most frequently viewed objects under the assumption that the two will match up appropriately.

Obviously this automated technique can’t provide the level of accuracy or relevancy that could be achieved by human input, but Asterpix representatives say that the system has been remarkably good at matching terms with the right objects.

We’ve embedded a sample video indexed by Asterpix bots below. You can also browse all the bot’s videos to get a better sense of its efficacy.

For another example of how interactivity is being added to video, see my piece from yesterday on Innovid.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/246434011/

Yahoo’s Tom Coates today finally released FireEagle at ETech 2008. Seeing Tom in the office for quite a while getting everything ready makes me very happy to announce that it is out and invite you to come along and sign up for the beta to start testing and - even more importantly - developing applications for it. This is FireEagle:

Fire Eagle is an open location services platform offering web, mobile, and desktop developers a simple way to build new location-based applications while also ensuring that consumers have complete control over their data, including how, when and where their location is made available. Want to easily make your site responsive to a user’s location? Or, maybe you’ve found a way to capture someone’s location and you want to find cool apps to plug it into? By doing the heavy lifting and connecting you to a community of geo-developers, Fire Eagle makes it easier to build location-aware services.

Once you got in you’ll be able to download development kits in several languages including PHP, Python, Ruby and of course JavaScript. All the API calls are REST and the API authentication is handled via OAuth. The output format is either XML or JSON. The code is licensed with BSD and you can even contribute to the FireEagle source at a code repository.

The available API calls are:

user

Returns the location of a specific user in a location hierarchy format.

recent

Returns a list of users of the application who have updated their location within the given amount of time.

within

Takes a Place ID or a WoE ID and returns a list of users using your application who are within the bounding box of that location.

update

Sets a user’s current location using using a Place ID hash or a set of location parameters. If the user provides a location unconfirmed with lookup method then Fire Eagle makes a best guess as to the user’s location and updates.

lookup

Disambiguates potential values for update. Results from lookup can be passed to update to ensure that Fire Eagle will understand how to parse the location parameter.

You can learn more by watching the video of Tom explaining FireEagle at ETech.

The uses for a service like this are endless. From sensible search applications that show you places of interest nearby your current location up to real-life games of high-tech hide and seek everything is possible.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/246418082/the-fireeagle-has-landed-personal-location-information-for-your-applications

Hard Rock Cafe Memorabilia Site with Deep Zoom

Announced in the first Microsoft Mix keynote this morning was advanced zooming capabilities in Silverlight 2. The functionality comes from SeaDragon, a product first shown by Microsoft at TED last year.

The demonstration featured the Hard Rock Memorabilia site. It started with what looked like some basic memorabilia shots, then zoomed out to a button on a suit. The seamless image was 2 billion pixels created from many separate images with Silverlight natively providing the stitching.

The crux of the functionality is to provide the ability to zoom in and out quickly without the need to download an entire picture; Silverlight only loads what’s required as the user goes to that part of the overall image, saving on bandwidth and in theory providing a quicker and more pleasurable end user experience.

The video above is an interview the Mix crew did with the Hard Rock team that includes a demonstration of the site in action.

To see it live, install Silverlight 2 then visit the Hard Rock Memorabilia site here.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/246400420/

Starting tomorrow Photobucket will be able to edit images on the service in-browser courtesy of technology provided by FotoFlexer.

The deal, which is highly reminiscent of the one recently struck between Flickr and Picnik, allows for things like resizing, rotating, coloring, decorating, beautifying, and distorting.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/246400422/

I promise this is the last post on TC. Visit the site here if you dare.

Watch the rest, including some strange hot tub action, on CrunchGear.

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/~3/246384240/

My penchant for Christopher Alexander is on the rise again after spending the weekend at an inspiringly-comfortable bed and breakfast in Green County. Here’s an excerpt from A Pattern Language that cuts to the heart of what Getting Real is about.

202. BUILT-IN SEATS

Problem
Built-in seats are great. Everybody loves them. They make a building feel comfortable and luxurious. But most often they do not actually work. They are placed wrong, or too narrow, or the back does not slope, or the view is wrong, or the seat is too hard. This pattern tells you what to do to make a built-in seat that really works.

Solution
Before you build the seat, get hold of an old arm chair or a sofa, and put it into the position where you intend to build a seat. Move it until you really like it. Leave it there for a few days. See if you enjoy sitting in it. Move it if you don’t. When you have got it into a position which you like, and where you often find yourself sitting, you know it is a good position. Now build a seat that is just as wide, and just as well padded – and your built-in seat will work.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/897-getting-real-built-in-seats-in-a-pattern-language