Ajax Girl

Japan has decided to beat France and the United Kingdom (both who have similar proposals) to become the first country to ban file sharers from the internet.

Oddly the agreement to do so has not come from the Japanese Government, but from Japan’s four internet service provider organizations after pressure (not surprisingly) from the record and movie industries. According to Torrent Freak, the agreement would see copyright holders tracking down file-sharers on the Internet using “special detection software” and then notifying ISPs of alleged infringers. File sharers will initially receive a warning for a first offense, then be disconnected for subsequent offenses, eventually be disconnected from the internet permanently (it wasn’t clear whether the agreement is a three strikes proposal).

The process will formally commence in April and will primarily target users of Winny, the most popular file sharing network in Japan.

(image credit: plasticbamboo)

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/252146121/

London based Songkick, a Y Combinator startup that launched in October 2007, aims to help music artists pack fans into concerts. They’ve been developing a number of new products that are slated for launch soon. But one that they quietly launched last week without much fanfare is something they refer to simply as “Battle of the Bands.”

It’s a sort of Alexa or Compete comparison engine, but instead of comparing websites it compares bands and artists. They track any band that has 50 or more followers on MySpace - about 1 million bands currently. They then scour the Amazon sales rank for their music, mentions in 1,500 popular music blogs, total MySpace friends and plays, and other stats to determine the overall excitement for a band at any given time.

Type in one or more bands and see how they compare over time.

Who’s the hottest band right now, according to Songkick? Vampire Weekend, who are currently on tour and had 30 blog mentions this week. Hear their music here. Soon, Hogarth says, they’ll add permanent links for battles and give users the ability to embed graphs into websites.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/252107051/

Now I get it - The EU takes money from the Microsoft ATM with one hand, and then invests it in a sure-to-fail “Google Killer” with the other.

€99 million to Thomson and 22 other European companies to create Quaero, a multimedia search engine (Danny Sullivan notes Thomson was already in this business and then sold it off). This is on top of €120 million approved last year for Germany’s Theseus research project, which will develop and test new search technologies for the Internet.

Quaero and Theseus were originally the same project, but split in 2006 to focus on their respective markets.

The projects will need lots more funding down the road, so look for more withdrawls from Microsoft. And if that well runs dry, they can always figure out something to charge Google with and get a little of that action, too.

Of course, I’m stretching the facts here to make a point. The EU is simply allowing the French and German governments to make these investments with their own taxpayer’s money. There is no direct link between Microsoft fines and these subsidies. But the point is the same - the EU is not willing to let free markets determine winners and losers. The winners must be home grown, at any cost. And U.S. companies that have too much success in Europe seem to face a bleak choice - massive fines or government-backed competitors. It’s absurd. And it’s no wonder that many of the best European entrepreneurs keep coming to the U.S. to start companies.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/252068886/

Via John Resig we just got to learn about a clever technique applied by the Filament group in Boston called Progressive Enhancement with CSS support.

The study rightfully claims that object detection to determine whether a user agent is capable of supporting a certain interface is not enough. You also need to make sure that the browser supports the right look and feel - in other words that the CSS you will apply can be rendered as intended.

I’ve done similar things in the past, reading out the offsetWidth of an element to determine if the browser is in standards or Quirksmode but Filamentgroup’s test script goes a lot further than this. It tests for the following CSS support:

• Box model: make sure the width and padding of a div add up properly using offsetWidth
• Positioning: position a div and check its positioning using offsetTop and offsetLeft
• Float: float 2 divs next to each other and evaluate their offsetTop values for equality
• Clear: test to make sure a list item will clear beneath a preceding floated list item
• Overflow: wrap a tall div with a shorter div with overflow set to ‘auto’, and test its offsetHeight
• Line-height (including unitless): test for proper handling of line-height using offsetHeight, primarily to rule out Firefox 1.0

For example the right box model support is tested with this script:

When the browser passes, the script adds an “enhanced” class to the body that you can use in your style sheet.

Neat idea and very defensive programming.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/251876094/progressive-enhancement-with-css-support

Bungee Labs has raised $8 million Series C in a round that included Wasatch Venture Fund and existing investors North Bridge Venture Partners and Venrock Associates.

Orem, Utah based Bungee Labs offers Bungee Connect, a web-based Ajax environment for creating interactive web applications. Bungee Connect allows developers to “efficiently create and instantly deliver rich web applications for the small-to-medium business market” by providing an online environment where developers and clients don’t have to install anything. Bungee Connect also automates SOAP and REST based web services. See our February 2008 review of Bungee Connect here.

Bungee Connect competes with DabbleDB, Zoho Creator, LongJump, Coghead and WyaWorks.

Total funding to date was not available, with the previous rounds having been raised in August 2005 and November 2006.

(via PEHub)

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/251827632/