Ajax Girl

For those of you who thought OpenSocial was going to make things easy for developers who want to create social networking apps once and deploy them everywhere, think again. More splintering is occurring. Tonight, rising music social network imeem (an original member of OpenSocial) is releasing its own software development kit for programmers to create applications on imeem. Imeem is not abandoning OpenSocial, it is just that programmers will be able to build a lot cooler apps using the new imeem Media Platform. But don’t worry, support for OpenSocial is “coming soon.”

So what’s so special about this API that would make programmers bother to take the effort? It offers access to imeem’s vast music library and all the profile data of its 24 million members worldwide (comScore says 19 million, but who’s counting?). It is also the same platform that imeem itself uses to creates its own applications. CEO Dalton Caldwell realizes he is not going to convince developers to ditch Facebook or OpenSocial, but he does think he is offering something unique enough to pique their interest. He admits:

This is a baby step. We are just shipping code. This is something we built for our own consumption. We are not saying just, “Hey, port your existing app to imeem.” That is played out. What we think is cool is enabling new apps by saying, “Hey, you can access this insane library of music.”

Developers will be able to tap into imeem’s fully licensed library of millions of songs from all the major record labels and create their own music apps on imeem. Imeem’s media player, music search, recommendation engine, member profile data, contacts, playlists, videos and photos will also be exposed in the APIs. The apps will all be built on Adobe Flex to start, with support for Javascript coming down the line. And there will eventually be a way to port OpenSocial apps to the imeem Media Platform.

The types of apps that could be created include music players with new skins and controls, dating apps based on musical compatibility, smart playlists automatically generated from a user’s list of favorite bands, a “Name That Tune” quiz, or a playlist based on what your friends are listening to. All of this would be great if programmers could take these apps to other sites like MySpace. But for now they can’t (there are a few little licensing issues to work out). So is this dead in the water or will imeem’s large audience and music library be enough of a draw?

Here is the full list of the imeem Media Platform’s capabilities:

* Access any music, videos, and photos available on imeem

* Fully customize the imeem media player (via a “chromeless” player)

* Upload music, video or photos, and modify metadata for that content

* Access imeem’s social graph, including users, friends, and associated profile data

* Create, edit, and manage new playlists, or access millions of music, video and photo playlists created by imeem users

* Search imeem’s media content by keyword, artist, song title, or album name

* Ability to favorite media and playlists back to the user’s profile

* Access imeem’s recommendation engine and discovery tools

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/257422956/

“A typical vacation in 2008 is to spend a week at an undersea resort,” wrote James R. Berry in 1968. His article, 40 Years In The Future, had a few things almost right, and a ton of things that probably won’t be reality even a hundred years from now.

Berry guessed right on flat panel displays and computers that do a lot of work for you. But he also thought we’d have robots to do our housework, cars that go 250 mph in heavy traffic, and domed, climate controlled cities.

Sadly, he also guessed that medical care was universal and competent, his biggest mistake: “Medical research has guaranteed that most babies born in the 21st century will live long and healthy lives. Heart disease has virtually been eliminated by drugs and diet. If hearts or other major organs do give trouble, they can be replaced with artificial organs.”

He almost touched on the Internet, too, when he said “The single most important item in 2008 households is the computer,” and “TV-telephone shopping is common.” And he came earily close here:

Suddenly your TV phone buzzes. A business associate wants a sketch of a new kind of impeller your firm is putting out for sports boats. You reach for your attache case and draw the diagram with a pencil-thin infrared flashlight on what looks like a TV screen lining the back of the case. The diagram is relayed to a similar screen in your associate’s office, 200 mi. away. He jabs a button and a fixed copy of the sketch rolls out of the device. He wishes you good luck at the coming meeting and signs off.

Overall, not a bad job and, frankly, better than most of us could probably do at predicting the future 40 years from today. The entire article is below.

(more…)

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/257407610/

The Facebook Platform, launched in May 2007, has been an unqualified success. Nearly 20,000 applications have been released by third party developers, and it spurred Google to quickly launch a competing platform of its own. At least two venture funds have been created that focus solely on Facebook applications. Etc.

But the flood of applications caused problems right from the start. Facebook has repeatedly changed the rules, but always seems one step behind the creative moves by developers to spam their way into gaining new users. Most recently, limits were put in place that limit the number of invitations users could send out. The more people who ignore requests from a particular application, the lower the limit for that app.

Clearly Facebook is a little tired of beating questionable developer tacticts away with a stick. So now they will try the carrot approach as well - by rewarding developers who play by the rules and build useful, popular applications. The new program is being called the Preferred Application Program.

This isn’t related to the recent CBS/March Madness issue where Facebook allowed a (paying) partner to play by different rules than the others. From what we’ve heard, Facebook is not going to be asking developers who are chosen to participate to pay in any way for this privilege. Classification as “preferred” will be merit based…although so far no one seems to know what the requirements will be.

Nor do they seem to know exactly how Facebook will reward these developers. One way is to have different rules, like allowing application users to invite more than the normal number of friends per day. That would be very attractive to developers, but the recent backlash over the CBS incident shows that the rank and file won’t stand for that.

But there are an almost unlimited number of other ways that Facebook can promote preferred developers. Preferred apps can show up higher in search, for example. And Facebook can give them a badge or other sign of endorsement that they can add to their application pages. A more subtle, but possibly more powerful benefit, may be to change the rules on how and when user activities through these applications can show up in the News Feed. Finally, new Facebook users could be presented with a set of default third party applications to add when they create an account, perhaps tailored to their stated interests.

Facebook hasn’t yet responded to a request for comment on the new program. From what we hear this is still in the planning stages and at least a month or so from being launched.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/257381119/

“Your most important social network is the one in your phone,” says Skydeck CEO Jason Devitt. With Skydeck, he hopes to do the impossible: turn your cell phone bill into something useful. You give Skydeck the login for your mobile phone account. It scrapes the page and matches the calls with your address book, turning each phone number into a name so that you can sort your phone bill like e-mail. (It’s like Xobni for your cell phone records, see screen shot below). Skydeck tells you who your most important relationships are, based on how often you call someone or they call you. It even tells you which way the relationship is skewed.

The private beta launched today. To get an invite, be one of the first 500 people to sign up here (enter “TechCrunch” in the box labeled ‘Where did you hear about Skydeck?”).

Says Devitt:

We’re trying to introduce information transparency into a market where there is none. All your call records are in your cell phone. We have figured out how to unpack that information, match it to your address book and present you with who your most important relationships are.

Once Skydeck unpacks this information you can start to do interesting things with it, like add tags to calls. Tag all you business calls on your cell phone bill, and you’ve got an expense report. You can sort by name, date, call length, or most expensive call. Skydeck lets you search your call records as easily as you can your e-mail. There is also a Firefox plug-in that keeps tabs on how many mobile minutes you have left this month.

Skydeck raised $1 million in February from angel investors. The service will be free for consumers. Devitt plans to make money by charging small businesses for premium services such as expense management. He also sees an opportunity for promoting other voice-related services such as voicemail transcription.

Devitt plans on adding many more features and services in the future, such as a reverse lookup for numbers not in your address book. The real potential for this, however, is to take that rearranged address book and import it back into your cell phone. “Alphabetical order is a stupid way to organize your address book,” says Devitt. (Unfortunately, you cannot do this yet). Devitt also wants to let people marry the social relationship map Skydeck culls from your cell phone data with your online social networks. Then you could see at a glance who your real friends are. You know, the ones you actually talk to.

Keep an eye on this one. The last startup Devitt founded was Vindigo (mobile city guides). He is a feisty entrepreneur, as you can see from this video below showing him testifying before Congress last September on the importance of open access for wireless networks:

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/257371690/

One of my largest issues with FriendFeed has been the duplication between commenting on Tweets (Twitter posts) which make up nearly half of all entries on FriendFeed, when Twitter itself is a two way communications tool. The folks at FriendFeed seem to have been listening.

Available now is the ability to respond to Tweets via FriendFeed on both Friendfeed itself and have those responses (complete with @user) posted to Twitter. FriendFeed fans will undoubtedly welcome the feature. Heavy Twitter users are unlikely to switch to FriendFeed full time quite yet (as someone said to me recently: FriendFeed needs its own Twitteriffic), but this is certainly a step in the right direction.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/257368137/

Google’s original chef Charlie Ayers claims in a new book that much of Google’s success comes from free beer and sushi.

In Eat Yourself Smart, he argues that Sushi made Google’s engineers work better: “The fat found in fish helps make the cell membranes round the brain more elastic and more able to absorb nutrients easily.”

In an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald, he explains how Google got top results out of it’s employees

[Ayers] started easing the computer engineers into the long hours culture with innovations including free beer and fortnightly “big-ass” barbecues. To introduce computer experts fresh out of university to early mornings, he developed breakfast specials, such as “French toast with coconut, macadamia and rum”. The rum, beer and barbecues provided perfect cover for converting the “googlers” to a diet that ensured they kept working after lunch, weaning them off pizzas and on to salads…..

My favorite quote (and reasonable enough thinking):

“He was hired by Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Google’s founders, in the belief that like a Napoleonic army, an internet giant marches on its stomach.”

(img credit: TropicalIsland)

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/257353681/

Mixwit makes it easy to create embeddable mixtapes (otherwise known as custom playlists). We touched upon the company a couple weeks ago as part of our Y Combinator demo day roundup but never gave it our full treatment.

A similarly-named service called Mixaloo serves up label-sanctioned tracks and requires users to buy them to hear more than 30-second previews. Mixwit differs by drawing its songs from Seeqpod, an MP3 search engine that indexes full-length tracks from mainstream artists but charges nothing for them. Granted, not all of the audio files found by Seeqpod have decent quality (many simply don’t work at all) but that’s the price of free.

Both companies facilitate the spread of mixtapes across the net, but the costlessness of Mixwit really gives it an edge (despite Mixaloo’s promise to split sales revenues with mix creators). Mixwit also provides more extensive tools for customizing the look and feel of the mixtapes themselves, lending itself to greater ranges of self-expression. Users can pick from a collection of nice-looking skins, upload their own images, and tweak several other settings such as shadow and gloss effects.

So the creation and sharing of mixtapes with Mixwit is easy and effective. But what I find particular interesting are Mixwit’s plans to expand its offering into a more complete online media solution. The founders like to describe their company as a cross between Slide and iTunes because they plan to release an in-browser media player that will leverage the APIs of various web services to collect content found across the web. In addition to Seeqpod, they plan to include support for Flickr, YouTube, and Skreemr as well. The idea is that you’ll be able mash up different types of media (music, photos, videos, etc), bookmark them, compile them into playlists, and share with friends via widgets and the player itself.

This product has yet to make it off the drawing board (the second screenshot above is just a mockup). But the idea is promising and could be a big hit with social network junkies. It would also be a browser-based cousin of Songbird, a Mozilla-based desktop app that also strives to be the web’s media player.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/257339454/

No sooner does Google exit the FCC’s 700Mhz spectrum auction with its $4.6 billion still in its pocket and its rules imposed on its competitors than it throws up yet another ball in the broadband wireless game. Earlier today, it proposed to the FCC that the unused “white spaces” in television broadcast signals which will be freed up as a result of the transition to digital TV should be converted into unlicensed spectrum for long-distance wireless broadband applications. This spectrum could become a Wifi 2.0—free, unlicensed, and able to reach much farther than WiFi can today.

The white spaces Google is talking about are parts of the television spectrum that offered extra headroom for channels 2 to 51. Since digital TV signals are more efficient than analog signals, that buffer will no longer be necessary after February, 2009 (when the conversion to digital sets is mandated in the U.S.). So what to do with the extra spectrum? Google is saying give it away and see what happens.

That is not a bad idea. Look at what happened with WiFi. It became so popular and useful precisely because nobody had to bid billions of dollars just for the right to build out a network. Also, it is not clear how much the government would be able to raise even if it did try to auction off the white space. The spectrum is not as clean as the (separate) 700 MHz spectrum that was just auctioned off for $19.6 billion. There are more interference issues. But Google and other tech companies, including Dell and Microsoft, argue that those issues can be solved more or less.

Why can’t Google make up its mind on which wireless technology it wants to go with? Diversity, actually, is the point. It wants to do everything it can to usher in an era of wireless broadband Internet services—on existing mobile networks, on next-generation mobile networks built on the 700 MHz spectrum, on unlicensed WiFi 2.0 networks, on WiMax networks, on everything. (In fact, with recent rumors surfacing again that Sprint and ClearWire are in talks to merge their WiMax networks but are looking for investors—Intel is supposedly not interested—maybe Google will take some of the $4.6 billion it didn’t have to spend on the 700MHz spectrum to prop up that deal—although WiMax has its own technical issues).

Google also wants as many companies as possible to build Android phones and wireless devices for as many of those networks as possible so that even more people can search the Web and use Google applications when they are not sitting in front of their computers.

Keep your eye on the bouncing balls.

(Photo by SideLong).

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/257337142/

A few days ago my housemate noticed a mantis ootheca in our garden. This morning I watched as a horde of the little guys emerged in the early sun:

Welcome to life—bite some heads off!

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/928-mantis-birth

Yahoo has announced an agreement with Computational Research Laboratories (CRL, a wholly owned subsidiary of Indian conglomerate Tata) to jointly undertake cloud computing research.

Under the deal, CRL will give access to one of world’s top five supercomputers “that has substantially more processors than any supercomputer currently available for cloud computing research.”

The deal is intended to “leverage CRL’s expertise in high performance computing and Yahoo!’s technical leadership in Apache Hadoop, an open source distributed computing project of the Apache Software Foundation, to enable scientists to perform data-intensive computing research on a 14,400 processor supercomputer.”

Apache Software Foundation’s Hadoop is an open source distributed computing project. More details on the Hadoop site here.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/257353682/