Ajax Girl

As I alluded to in an earlier post, online photo-editing applications keep getting better as the competition heats up between startups like Picnik and FotoFlexer. Today, a very large competitor, Adobe, is entering the market by releasing a Web-based version of Photoshop for editing pictures called Photoshop Express. It is in public beta and anyone can sign up.

Photoshop Express is by no means just Photoshop ported onto the web. It would even be a stretch to say it’s a stripped down version of the desktop software, since it’s intended for mainstream consumers, not professionals.

This distinction shows in both what it lacks and what it offers. There are only 17 editing features in Photoshop Express: a tiny fraction of those available with the $650 desktop software. And all of these 17 features are filters intended for tuning and effects - you won’t find any tools for drawing lines, adding text, or creating shapes. What you can do is easily take out red eye, touch up undesirable areas, change saturation, pop color, and crop (among other things).

One of the most innovative features in Photoshop Express is the ability to revert any filter you apply to a photograph. You can do this to a particular filter regardless of whether you’ve made other changes to the photo since applying it. All you have to do is uncheck the particular filter and it will be subtracted from your changes, which are represented in a historical filmstrip with all versions of the photo you have gone through. This undo functionality for particular changes partly makes up for the unfortunate absence of layers, which are so vitally important in the desktop version of Photoshop.

Photoshop Express also differs from its desktop cousin by serving as an online storage and photo sharing service. You can upload up to 2GB of photos to the web app (or pull them in directly from Facebook, Photobucket, or Picassa). They are arranged in a collection that can be made available to others or kept private. Embedding and slideshow functionality is also available.

Adobe has other motivations behind this launch: Doug Mack, the vice president in charge of Photoshop Express, says:

It is a showcase of what is the best that can be done with Flex and Flash. Hopefully, it will inspire other developers. We are also setting up a hosted services platform that we can expand to other products.

So this is just the beginning for Adobe. Should smaller fry like Picnik be scared now that Adobe is, uh, flexing its muscles online? Picnik CEO Jonathan Sposato isn’t too worried. He gives me the classic Innovator’s Dilemma argument:

We don’t envy the challenge Adobe is facing—they have to deal with not cannibalizing a highly successful finished-goods business. Adobe has a business to protect, while Picnik has a business to build.

Okay, but what about Adobe’s massive distribution through its existing products (Flash, Photoshop, Illustrator, etc.). Sposato’s got an answer for that one as well:

Sure, I think their distribution is a great strength for them. And there’s definitely a Windows vs. Mac analogy here. But i think today’s internet is so incredibly efficient that traditional models of distribution may matter less and less. The cost of switching apps for most users is just so easy. They can find new things really fast and try them out.

Hopefully, I am not smoking crack but I do think the marketplace is so efficient that we can compete based ultimately on quality and ‘winsomeness’ of the product (to use a very old fashion word).

No Jonathan, you’re not smoking crack. May the most winsome product win.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/258739423/

We’ve had two separate reader reports of a Phishing Scam targeting Facebook users.

The scam involves a notice appearing on the wall of user profiles as a message from a friend, saying “Hey, I got a new facebook account. Im going to delete this one, so add my new profile” then with a link that appears to be a link to the new profile. The actual link goes to a URL on view-facebookprofiles.com, a domain registered (and whois protected) on Namecheap and hosted at Softlayer that looks identical to the Facebook login page:

Users fooled into resubmitting their Facebook details on this page then have their Facebook accounts hijacked and all of their contacts receive a similar message, propagating the phishing scam.

It’s not clear yet exactly what the phishing scammers are planning on using the compromised accounts for, or how far it has spread. One tipper claimed that many of his friends had been caught as well.

Obviously if you see a message in Facebook similar to this, it’s a trap! If you’ve been caught or have shots of this thing in action, send us an email or leave a comment.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/258723057/

Google has replaced function tabs on Google Docs with drop down menus.

Spotted by the ever vigilant Philipp Lenssen, the new drop down menus join the new Google Docs Toolbar added in February. Combined the service now looks more and more like Microsoft Office (pre 2007) and is no doubt being implemented by Google to make the service more familiar to Microsoft Office users in its push to grow the Google Docs user base.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/258687771/

About 3 hours into my flight it dawned on me. I had to take a leak. I wasn’t expecting a rendezvous with great design, but there it was in the most unlikely of places. The airplane lavatory (and, BTW, why don’t they call it a bathroom or restroom or toilet — who calls it a lavatory in everyday life?).

When you lock the door the lights turn on. When you unlock the door the lights go off. Perfect. It’s sorta like being in a huge refrigerator, but in reverse. In this case when you close (lock) the door the light goes on.

Anyway, I thought it was great design. Why should two things that always happen together (lock the door and turn on the light) be a two step process with different controls? Just make it one step, one control. Lock and light, one switch. Great thinking. I wonder who invented that.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/936-great-design-the-airplane-bathroom-lock-and-light-switch

It takes either a very brave or very foolish company to enter the browser wars. But that is exactly what AT&T is doing—in as small way. I was just shown a demo for Pogo, a 3D browser based on Mozilla that is in private beta (we should be getting invites in a couple weeks). It is a project that comes out AT&T’s business development group and Vizible, a Toronto-based company whose 3-D rendering engine gives Pogo a very different look than other browsers. “The concept is not to rebuild the browser,” says Vizible founder and CTO Anthony Gallo, “it is to extend it.”

Pogo works like a regular browser, but it manages pages more visually. Instead of tabs, it has a scrollable strip on the bottom that shows a thumbnail image of each site you’ve visited during your session. A “Springboard” button on the top left takes you to a grid view of your favorite sites—akin to what you might put on your book mark toolbar. You can also view the rectangular cells in various Coverflow-like animations. You can do the same with regular bookmarks, which are treated as “collections.” You can drag Website images into each collection or associate a collection with a tag. Then any page you tag going forward gets automatically placed within that collection. Your browsing history is also represented visually, as is your search history. For any particular search, every page you click through to gets saved as part of yet another collection—although you can only see one search set at a time.

The visual tricks are neat, but at this early stage I am not sure how many people would ditch their existing browsers for better visualizations. But presenting the Web in a richer, more visual way is definitely part of a bigger user-interface trend we’ve been seeing, especially in search (SearchMe, Snap, and ManagedQ come to mind). Where Pogo is going is more interesting than where it is at this early stage. Imagine being able to manage all your media—video, audio, photos—through the same visual interface. Check out the video below of Pogo in action, which was taken by my colleague John Biggs of CrunchGear. Towards the end you will see some shots of the underlying Vizible technology, which I personally find more exciting.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/258596018/

CNET has announced that it will cut 10% of its workforce, or 120 people, effective immediately, in a move said to help it “focus on long-term growth amid complaints from some investors.”

CNET has had no shortage of headlines recently, from changes at the top through to an ongoing battle for control against largest shareholder Jana Partners.

According to an internal memo from CEO Neil Ashe, the restructure will include stronger emphasis on centralized services in areas like IT architecture, SEO, yield monetization, Facilities, Legal, HR and Communications.

Business Unit Realignment: with the introduction of an open API, “CNET will move its services, catalog, content management system onto one platform, making content development, syndication and content import easier and more open.” CNET has realigned its investments in TechRepublic and ZDNET “to improve monetization,” although exactly how and in what form was not specified. TV.com will be abandoning its emphasis on video for more (we presume low cost) content such as “entertainment features, breaking news, trivia competition, and polls.”

International: CNET is considering raising local capital to expand in China, but the rest of the international business operations appear to be subject to a review with an announcement in weeks, by that we presume that CNET may be closing some international sites.

Restructure costs: $3.5 million and $4 million to be accounted for in Q1, 2008.

More when we have it. Staff being terminated were to be informed at 2pm PST.

Update: Photographer Robert Balousek is one of the first reported casualties.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/258586344/

Mozilla invited a group of bloggers to its headquarters in Mountain View today for an open discussion centered around the upcoming release of Firefox 3 (currently in public beta).

CEO John Lilly started things off by pointing out that this coming Monday is the Mozilla Organization’s ten year anniversary. He described the organization as rather humble and discombobulated when it was spun off from AOL into an independent entity in 2003. As recently as 2005, when the Mozilla Corporation was created to lead development on Firefox and Thunderbird, the organization still struggled to keep its servers from crashing during “hours of terror” when browsers deployed across the world tried to update themselves at the same time (this problem has since been remedied).

These days about 150 international employees work for Mozilla, which has been divided into six organizations, including ones for Europe, Denmark, China, and Japan. The ratio between work performed by employees vs. the developer community at large stands at about 60/40. Mozilla’s fastest growing markets include China and Russia, with China seeing six-fold growth since a year ago. Mozilla has netted about 160M users globally.

Lilly and several other Mozilla employees including Mike Schroepfer, the VP of Engineering, spent a considerable amount of time discussing Firefox 3, which has been in development for three years. Firefox Beta 4 is the version currently made available to the public. Beta 5, which will be released next week, will be the last beta before a release candidate in late April or May. The final version of Firefox 3 has been slated for release in the first half of this year - in June or sooner.

Firefox 3 is meant to carry forward the motto of keeping the internet “open and participatory”. It will support 50 languages, unlike IE7, which was released with support for only one. About 50% of the extensions developed for Firefox currently work with FF3, with further compatibility expected to accelerate in May. There are about 20,000 community members testing the latest build of FF3 and submitting an average of 150 bug reports on a daily basis. Testers have been particularly vocal about moving the “home” button back to the main button area (and Mozilla has acquiesced).

The company stressed a few of FF3’s primary features. Native skinning has been implemented so that the browser looks at home in various operating systems (Mac, Windows, and Linux). The so-called “awesome bar”, an advanced version of the address bar, not only auto-completes but searches your browsing history for matches as well. Much of Firefox’s core has been rebuilt, including the way it handles history. Now more than 6 months can be searched instantaneously whereas before, the default was set at 2 weeks. And password management is more discreet; you won’t have to decide on saving a password until after you’ve signed into a site.

FF3 also includes extended security measures such as new anti-malware techniques that will prevent users from visiting sites that might infect their computers with malicious programs. The detection system relies on a blacklist of software that gets downloaded to the client periodically. There’s also more advanced SSL certificate handling and the ability to easily check whether you’re actually on a trusted site.

As far as performance goes, Mozilla is claiming that the FF3 outperforms competitors both in how quickly it processes JavaScript and how little memory it uses. The company has also been working on better caching methods that work particularly well with SSL-protected sites.

When asked about Microsoft’s recent public show of support for open standards and interoperability, Mozilla insisted that the Redmond behemoth still has a “mixed record” and that declaring support for CSS2.1 (a ten year old standard) is nothing to get excited about. The company points out that Microsoft has done nothing to support the next generation JavaScript spec and little to implement CSS3. The same goes for HTML5, the standard for offline functionality that has been embraced by Mozilla, Apple, and Opera.

Lastly, if you’re an iPhone owner who was hoping to run Firefox come summer, don’t hold your breath — the SDK license precludes apps like Firefox that interpret code. Mozilla does, however, still intend to ship a mobile version of Firefox. The platforms that will support it are yet to be seen.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/258576472/

It appears that Opera has passed Acid 3:

Since the test was officially announced recently, our Core developers have been hard at work fixing bugs and adding the missing standards support.

Today we reached a 100% pass rate for the first time! There are some remaining issues yet to be fixed, but we hope to have those sorted out shortly.

We will release a technical preview version on labs.opera.com within the next week or so. For now, the screenshot above shows the Acid3 test as rendered in our latest WinGogi Desktop build. WinGogi is the Windows version of our reference builds used for the internal testing of Opera’s platform independent Core.

At the same time, Ian Hickson posted about changes to the test and Anne has commented that Opera is passing the latest and greatest:

“The updates from Ian have been done since the release of the test. Opera gets 100/100 on the latest version of the test.”

• Sub-pixel testing: It turns out that the original test accidentally required that browsers implement sub-pixel positioning and layout (and in fact the reference rendering got it wrong too, and relied on the same kind of rounding as Firefox does), which is somewhat dubious. I’ve changed the test to not rely on sub-pixel layout. However, it is very likely that this will be tested in Acid4, if we can get the specs to be clearer on this.
• Surrogate pairs in SVG APIs: One of the submitted tests assumed that SVG APIs worked on Unicode codepoints, but the SVG spec changed to work on UTF-16 codepoints, like the rest of the DOM API, so the test was changed there. (The test changed a couple of times, because I originally got the fix wrong.)
• The click() method: The test originally assumed that the click() method was reentrant, but the specs were vague on this and someone suggested making it fail if calls to it were nested, so I removed this part of the test (the spec hasn’t been updated yet). I replaced it with an attribute test (the new second part of subtest 64).
• The Performance Test: I made the loop counter in the performance test (a part of subtest 63) less complicated and shorter, to make it at least plausible that browsers could be fixed to pass that test quickly enough that it wouldn’t always feel jerky. At the same time, I updated the test’s infrastructure to report more details about pass and fail conditions and how long each subtest takes to run.
• Namespace bug: Someone noticed that http://www.w3.org/1998/XML/namespace should have been http://www.w3.org/XML/1998/namespace in one of the subtests.
• Linktest timeout

I made the linktest more resilient to slow network conditions. However, the test is still going to give you major issues if you are on a network with multi-second latency, or if the acidtests.org site is being slow.

Congrats to the Opera team!

Oh, and Safari is at 95/100 and will close in on 100 shortly.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/258566770/acid-3-opera-passed

Over the past couple days, conversations I’ve had with two different video-startup CEOs—Suranga Chandratillake of blinkx and Nick Grouf of Spot Runner—has got me thinking about what needs to be done to make TV advertising as relevant as video advertising. We have a long way to go, but it boils down to two things: 1) replacing 30-second commercials on TV with relevant ad overlays that pop up at exactly the right moment during a show, and 2) automating the buying, creation and placement of TV ads to make it more like buying search ads.

Yesterday, blinkx CEO Suranga Chandratillake dropped by my office and we got to talking about video ads. Blinkx is a video search engine, but it is also building a video ad network called AdHoc that attempts to place contextually-relevant, clickable text ads in a bar above the Web video being watched. For example, in the screen shot of the soccer video above, you will see a text ad for shoes. YouTube is doing something similar with its new AdSense for Video ads. The ads themselves don’t have to be text. They can be banners or logos that pop up, or even new videos-within-a-video under the control of the viewer. The point is that they exist within the main video itself, not after or before it. And they appear briefly at relevant points during a show.

Determining whether an ad is relevant for a video is done with some of the same techniques used on Web pages. Both YouTube and blinkx look at the tags and text surrounding a video, but blinkx actually goes beyond what YouTube does. It uses powerful speech-to-text translation technology to create a transcript on the fly and then matches relevant ads to the words. The ads appear as those words are being spoken. Suranga showed me the transcript-creating capabilities of blinkx, which are not visible to users on his regular site, and it was impressive. He clicked on a word in the transcript and that point in the video started to play. Once you can do that, inserting relevant ads is trivial. He says blinkx can also match ads to related concepts extracted from the transcripts.

What would it take to run ads like this on regular TV? Even if the ads are not clickable, simple banners or graphical buttons that appear in sync with what you are watching would grab your attention. Imagine a Nike logo popping up when you are watching basketball, or cruise ship when someone in a movie mentions the Bahamas. It could be annoying, but not if used judiciously. And it would certainly solve the problem of people fast-forwarding through ads with DVRs.

The big issue would be separating the ads from the underlying video so that new ads could be placed when the show goes to cable or is shown in reruns. Right now, all of those graphics you see on TV are pretty much baked into the video. Suranga said it would basically require new TVs with powerful chips and Internet connections. The computer chips alone would add about 50 percent to the price of most TVs, so it will still be a while before that happens. The other option, of course, is set-top boxes. But the cable companies don’t have any incentive to allow ads they don’t control to be seen on their set-top boxes (which is why they are trying to figure this out themselves).

On the other side of the equation is placing the ads. What is needed is something like Spot Runner’s system, which lets businesses create ads and plan media buys across cable and network TV. These ads are targetable by demographics down to the neighborhood level. Google also has its own experiments with regular TV ads through a trial on the Dish Network, where it has software on Dish set-top boxes. But Google could be doing a lot more. Says Grouf

Google is not selling targeted ads now on TV. It is selling national ads through the smallest company in the satellite space. We expect them to become more aggressive, but have not seen it yet.

These two conversations keep ringing through my head. I can see a day not too far where ads on TV start to look like the text and graphical overlays we are beginning to see with YouTube, AdHoc, VideoEgg and others. But you also need an automated placement and creation system like Spot Runner’s, which today only deals with regular 30-second TV spots. Combine the two together, and there’s the future of TV.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/258544137/

WiMax is going nowhere fast but that is not stopping a consortium of cable and tech companies from considering a plan to invest $3 billion more into a proposed bailout-through-merger of Sprint Nextel’s WiMax business (known as Xohm) and Craig McCaw’s Clearwire. The consortium that is reportedly being put together would include Comcast ($1 billion), Intel ($1 billion), Time Warner Cable ($500 million), Bright House Networks and Google ($500 million).

This latest plan comes after Sprint Nextel’s disastrous $30 billion write-down last quarter of its Nextel acquisition, and is an attempt to salvage something out of that train wreck. It also comes after Intel recently balked at putting up $2 billion itself. Intel wants to sell WiMax chips and has already sunk $600 million into Clearwire. But even Intel has its limits.

WiMax is a promising technology and these are early days. But even an extra $3 billion won’t be enough. Building out a nationwide WiMax network could cost as much as $8 billion to $12 billion. And there could be more technical hiccups. (An Australian WiMax provider is already giving up).

Clearwire, which is already operating its broadband wireless service in parts of the country, lost $727 million last year, on revenues of $151 million. So far, it has raised at least $2.75 billions dollars through private investors ($900 million in 2006), an IPO ($600 million), and a $1.25 billion line of credit. As for Xohm, it has only soft launched with employees in three cities. Nevertheless, last year it cost Sprint Nextel $577 million in capital expenditures and operating expenses.

I can see why Google might throw its hat into the ring here—anything to promote more broadband wireless networks. But Comcast and Time Warner Cable should stay away. The logic behind the investment seems to be that the cable companies could use the WiMax network to counter the moves by Verizon and AT&T into their turf (with TV service over phone lines). It is being suggested that the cable companies would be able to launch their own white-label mobile phone and high-speed Internet services over WiMax , or use it to distribute their TV content to computers and new digital devices.

Here’s where that logic breaks down:

1. WiMax is more an alternative to fixed broadband Internet access than it is to mobile phone service. Verizon and AT&T have a huge head start and customer lock-in when it comes to cell phone service. WiMax mobile phones would take decades to chip away at that even if they do offer fater data speeds. Today, Clearwire is only offering at-home phone service, not mobile. As for broadband Internet and home phone services, Comcast and Time Warner already compete effectively against the phone companies today with their alternative services over cable.

2. It no longer makes sense to try to own all the pipes because pipes are becoming a commodity. Yet pipes are an expensive commodity. If the idea is to create a new way to stream TV and movies to people, the cable companies no longer have to build out the infrastructure themselves to do that. It would be much cheaper to let the WiMax business prove itself to be viable on its own and cut deals for distribution.

(Photo via Erik Charlton).

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/258422692/