Ajax Girl

With the launch of the new competitively priced 3G iPhone just around the corner, there has been a lot of speculation about the effect it will have on the mobile market. Since the iPhone has released its SDK, and added GPS capability, it is an opportune time for third-party companies and developers to take advantage of the possibilities that GPS offers. Throughout it all, venture capitalists have been pouring money into mobile-based solutions and analytics, and advertising platforms have been working to extend their reach to the iPhone and other handsets.

AppLoop is a startup launching today that will provide developers with a self-service platform for tracking mobile application usage and distributing ads on top of these apps. It also claims to be the first ever real-time, location-based mobile ad network. By leveraging the iPhone 3G’s native GPS capabilities, AppLoop will tell when a consumer is close to a specified business address and then serve up ads for that business accordingly. This enables businesses and restaurants to attract nearby consumers to their location with promotions, coupons, and discounts.

In addition to tailoring ads to locations, AppLoop offers developers a comprehensive set of statistics for developers to track usage, location, and session info. It provides custom action logging, which makes it possible for developers to track which of their features are used most often.

AppLoop provides location-based usage and session information so that developers can track how often and how long people in each region are using their applications. These capabilities potentially allow for better advertising opportunities and could also deliver greater insight into how to design marketing campaigns.

An advertiser dashboard can also be used to create ads and target consumers based on region or proximity to a specific address. It also offers an option for advertisers to filter by which types of applications they want to advertise on.

Mobile advertising, specifically location-based enabled advertising, is a big market. eMarketer reports that mobile ad spending will reach $5 billion this year alone. Most major ad networks are attempting a mobile web or application advertising platform, but few have hit on anything successfully, thus far. It seems logical though, that in such a competitive marketplace, the big dogs will be the ones to take over. They have the resources, users, and trust, to be the go-to ad network of choice. But it won’t stop companies like AppLoop from trying.

There are currently several competitors in the iPhone advertising space including Pinch Media, a startup that recently launched its initial set of tools for iPhone SDK developers. Pinch Media offers a similar iPhone analytics toolset to AppLoop, including a geographically-based set of statistics with usage and session data. However, the Union Square Ventures-backed startup does not yet offer custom action logging or an ad platform, though have signed up advertisers for an upcoming release.

AppLoop’s closest competitor is Smaato’s Open Mobile Advertising Platform (SOMA), which offers advertising and analytics for mobile applications, but do not offer location-based ads. Other mobile advertising networks include AdMob, Ad Infuse, and mKhoj.

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/~3/324592771/

The internet is full of vapid words and catch-less phrases, but one that I’ve long been particularly peeved about is the word “play”. As in this company is an “infrastructure play” or a “CPM play”. Blogger, please.

Using “play” feels like it’s just pointing to how unsubstantial something is. Like that this is their third play. And oh hell, if that doesn’t work, we’ll just get more of other people’s money and try to play again. Or that it’s a play as in pulling the lever on a slot machine and if you’re lucky gold will flow.

Do, or do not. There is no try.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1119-play-this

It’s no secret that Evite sucks. It’s cluttered, it unnecessarily withholds information from email messages in order to drive page hits, and it looks like it hasn’t seen a facelift in about a decade.

The latest company to take on the much-maligned site is Anyvite, a Y Combinator-funded startup that launches today. Anyvite has taken a very streamlined approach to the invite process, requiring a minimal amount of information to get an event setup. And replying to an invite is even easier - you can actually RSVP from the email itself (take that Evite).

One of Anyvite’s most valuable features is its integration with mobile devices. The site features a robust mobile site (http://m.anyvite.com) that makes it easy to create and edit events on the go. Perhaps even more useful is Anyvite’s integration with SMS, which allows users to immediately get updated on a change in plans. You can also send mass SMS messages to anyone else that has been invited to an event, which makes it sort of like a Twitter for groups.

Anyvite president Jeff Morin says that these mobile features are designed to make the site better suited for impromptu get-togethers. You can create general events, like “Friday Bar Night”, and let your invitees discuss the details over SMS and email. Then, once you’ve figured everything out, you can send out an updated invitation with the details. In practice everything worked as advertised - it took less than a minute to create an event and the very web-2.0 interface was easy to navigate. Maybe this will be the site that finally gets people to stop using Evite.

The guys behind Anyvite launched a very similar site called Coordinatr last February (the FAQ section looks cut-and-pasted). Morin says that Coordinatr was primarily used as a technology test with only a few, basic features (it lacked the SMS functionality entirely). Since then the team has gradually improved the site, but after becoming affiliated with Y Combinator they decided to rebrand and relaunch as Anyvite.

Besides Evite, Anyvite will see competition from a number of similar invite services that include Socializr, MyPunchBowl, and MadeIt.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/324468034/

June was a great month for the Open Web. First, Apple delivered a one-two punch with showing Mobile Me, powered by the native Web and SproutCore, and showing SquirrelFish as JavaScript starts to get a loooot faster on browsers. Firefox had a party as millions of people downloaded Firefox 3 final release, and immediately talked about 3.1 coming soon. The flywheel is moving. Opera 9.5 is also there, and IE 8 beta 2 is coming in August.

Velocity, the performance conference, also showed the interest in making the Web faster, as many tools were announced to help out us devs. We also saw a lot of cool uses of Canvas/SVG, as developers delve low level and see that they actually work very well.

So, we sit at the crux of two paths. On the one hand, browsers are getting faster and faster and adding great new technology for us (including small things like CSS variables. finally!). On the other hand, we are creating more compelling user experiences (e.g. 280 Slides, Mobile Me). These forces work with each other. As we do cooler apps that push the boundaries, the browsers have to come back with better performance and tools to match. Expectations are changing, and we need to match them.

Here is the full roundup:

Browsers

• Flipping out over Safari
• IE 8 beta 2 coming in August
• X-UA-Compatible: IE=EmulateIE7
• Mozilla Week: From Client (Firefox 3) to Server (Weave) to Mobile (Fennec)
• Opera gets proactive and helps you fix your code
• Browser Memory Footprints; Watching with real usage
• Browser News: IE, FF, Safari, and Opera

Standards

• New in standards: Acid4 and HTML 5 update
• W3C Progress Events 1.0 Working Draft
• OpenAjax Alliance white papers on Mobile Ajax and recent browser advances

Performance

• SquirrelFish: Details on the new
• SquirrelFish: Technical excitement
• String Performance in IE: Array.join vs += continued
• Is “finally” the answer to all IE6 memory leak issues?
• Jiffy Firebug Plugin: Fine grained calculation of performance timings
• YSlow now has Firefox 3 support
• Rendering performance in Canvas compared to SVG and VML
• Clientperf: Simple Client-Side Rails Performance
• KITE: Keynote’s Internet Test Environment
• A Technique For Lazy Script Loading
• Velocity Conference Videos and Slides

JavaScript

• An interview with 280 North on Objective-J and Cappuccino
• Steve Yegge on Server Side JavaScript
• Javascript HTML Construction Benchmark
• The fight for cross domain XMLHttpRequest
• eval(’foo=a’, obj.fn); How you aren’t private in Firefox
• Google Analytics after onLoad and document.write for XHTML
• Johnson: Wrapping JavaScript in a loving Ruby embrace, and ARAX
• Gaia Widgets 3.0 “Glory”
• Audible Ajax Episode 27: SproutCore with Charles Jolley
• SproutCore: Being talked of as a Flash killer? Really?
• Apple, SproutCore, and Coherent
• modules.js: A New Stand-alone JavaScript Module Loader
• Mascara: Putting lipstick on JavaScript?
• Validanguage 0.9: More form validation
• SymbolicWeb: Ajax and Comet with Lisp
• dragtable: drag-and-drop reorderable columns for an HTML table
• Pingdom checks on JavaScript usage on top sites
• ensure: on demand resources
• Algebraic Data Types in JavaScript

ExtJS

• Leveraging Ext JS on the Server via Jaxer
• WiiExtJS: Building Ajax apps that run on the Wii Opera browser

Dojo

• Badging Flickr with Dojo
• Dojo Firebug Lite: Beyond console.log
• Nexaweb announces dojo.E markup and runtime
• A Double Dose of Dojo
• Dojo gets AIM API Support from AOL
• Working with Web Services with ease; dojo.data and the WikipediaStore

YUI

• YUI Autogrid: Correctly resize the grids

MooTools

• MooTools 1.2 Released
• CNET Updates the Clientside MooTools Plugin Repository

jQuery

• jQuery UI 1.5: Effects, API, and Themes
• jQuery Release 1.2.6: Performance Improvements and Dimensions Plugin Added to Core
• Implementing infinite scrolling with jQuery
• jQuery Selectors Refcard Now Available
• Preloading Images with jQuery
• jsTree: jQuery-based JavaScript tree component

Gears, AIR, and more

• Gears 0.3 Released, and Google I/O videos on Ajax related content available
• Frizone: JavaScript dev, test, and deployment environment
• Frank Sinatra, Flash, and Ajax: Deckmyplace.com
• flXHR: Flash based XHR from flensed
• SEO and RIA get closer together with Flash indexing news
• Fluid.app gets another new build

Design: CSS, SVG, Canvas

• Yahoo! Design Stencil Kit 1.0
• Using CSS transforms to Build a Coverflow Effect
• Mozilla Experiments with Applying SVG Effects to HTML
• Coda Slider Effect
• Algorithm Ink: Algorithm-driven Painting with Sharing and On-line Editing
• Photo Collages with Canvas
• CSS General Sibling Combinator in action
• CSS Variables are …. here!
• ShiftZoom: Zoomify your oversize images
• MooWheel and MooCirclePack for visualizations
• Hypno trip down the fractal rug
• Our Signal: Page Cloud Visualization of Digg, Reddit, Delicious, Hacker news
• Processing and Obsessing

Showcases

• Addressbook History goes into the cloud with App Engine
• Endpoint Resolver: JavaScript Library to hunt for Location redirects
• Acrobat.com: PDF and Flash sitting in a tree
• crossdomain.xml, Java, and JNLP
• Canvas Quest: Rogue like RPG game
• Yet Another Web 2.0 Button Generator
• PodiPodi: Enso / Quicksilver for the Web
• 72photos: Proto/Scripty Photo Sharing Site

Utilties

• NitobiBug: Cross browser debugging
• JavaScript Protocol Fuzzer
• JSON Diff Released
• TileStack: HyperCard for the Web

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/324378230/state-of-ajax-for-june-2008-apple-flexes-open-web-muscles

Who is winning the race to become the top site for live Web video? A quick check on Google Trends for Websites and comScore suggests that over the past four months Jusin.tv is pulling ahead of the pack. According to Google Trends, Justin.tv is attracting more than 300,000 unique visitors a day, compared to only about 60,000 for both Stickam.com and Ustream.tv. Comscore measures visitors on a monthly basis, but shows a similar relative breakdown, with Justin.tv pulling in 1.9 million monthly uniques worldwide versus 860,000 for Stickam, 790,000 for Ustream.tv, and 440,000 for Mogulus. (See chart below).

Both of these measure only the traffic to the main Websites of each competing live Web video service, and do not include how many people watch the videos in embeddable players elsewhere on the Web. But they are apples-to-apples and should give a good indication of the overall trend.

Ustream.tv, at least, realizes it needs to change something in order to catch up. Today it launched a redesign of its site, which gives DIY broadcasters the ability to add text and graphic overlays to their videos and better metrics on how many people are watching their videos. Also, viewers can now subscribe to specific broadcasters. The company claims 10 million unique viewers overall for the month of June, including videos watched offsite. It has 410,000 registered users. 100,000 of them are active and are broadcasting 10,000 to 15,000 live events a day Some of its better known users include Johnny Knoxville, Dane Cook, James Blunt, The Plain White Ts, and both Presidential campaigns. Steve Gillmor, the editor of TechCrunchIT, uses it as well for his NewsGang Live show.

But that right there might just be the problem. Would you rather watch Steve Gillmor talking with his wife about Twitter on a split screen while her cat climbs the couch in the background (this is actually on right now), or French cowgirls in bikinis on Justin.tv? No offense, Steve, but the featured live streams on Justin.tv just seem younger and more fun than the stuff on Ustream.tv.

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/~3/324357250/

I’m just going to write this once, and point back to it in the future. If you are a recruiter representing an executive quietly looking for a new job, it probably isn’t the best idea to call and leave a voicemail with details on the person and asking for advice on which companies would be a good fit.

Yes, we probably have a good idea of who’s hiring and might be interested. But we’re also a blog and we quite publicly write about this stuff, usually before the executives have actually resigned or told anyone internally. And you just handed me a great story.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/324296821/

Google and Adobe have been working on improving the indexing of Flash applications. In the past we could simply look at the SWF files and try to grab strings out of them, but there was zero context.

To go further Google uses the SWF Searchable work from Adobe to be more of a ‘human’ actor on the application.

This is what it doesn’t do:

1. Googlebot does not execute some types of JavaScript. So if your web page loads a Flash file via JavaScript, Google may not be aware of that Flash file, in which case it will not be indexed.
2. We currently do not attach content from external resources that are loaded by your Flash files. If your Flash file loads an HTML file, an XML file, another SWF file, etc., Google will separately index that resource, but it will not yet be considered to be part of the content in your Flash file.
3. While we are able to index Flash in almost all of the languages found on the web, currently there are difficulties with Flash content written in bidirectional languages. Until this is fixed, we will be unable to index Hebrew language or Arabic language content from Flash files.

This is good news for all rich applications. One of the common worries when it comes to richer application development is “what do search engines see” and we sometimes see people go back to the simpler world just to make that happier. With the search engines stepping up themselves, we can go back to writing applications that make sense for our human users, and hope that the computers catch up. Of course, we always have to do so in a practical way.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/324261835/seo-and-ria-get-closer-together-with-flash-indexing-news

Here’s another reason to double, triple, quadruple-check yourself when you want to add a new feature. A while back Netflix added a “Profiles” feature to their service. A couple weeks ago, they decided to pull the feature because it was too confusing and it wasn’t adding value. But it was too late. People were pissed. The blog post received 1286 comments. In the face of this reaction, Netflix had to turn 180 and keep the feature. Whether Netflix Profiles are good or bad, clear or confusing, they’re here to stay.

The lesson: Once your user base has grown beyond a certain point, you cannot take features away from them. They will freak out. Whether the feature is good or bad, once you launch it you’ve married it. This changes the economics of feature additions. If you can’t destroy what you build, each addition holds the threat of clutter. Empty pixels and free space where a new feature could be added are the most valuable real estate on your app. Don’t be quick to sell it, because you can never get it back.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1118-features-are-a-one-way-street

Google Maps

Links to Google Maps are shared all the time. So how come the URLs are so unwieldy? (For example: http://maps.google.ca/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=1st+ave+and+1st+st,+nyc&sll=49.891235,-97.15369&sspn=52.967233,67.763672&ie=UTF8&z=17&iwloc=addr.) If TinyURL can figure out how to make a URL in just a few characters, can’t the rocket surgeons at Google do it?

Aaron Martin caption wrapper

Aaron Martin’s blog features this interesting caption wrapper.
John Deere

Really nice integration of full motion video at the John Deere site.

EMS

Chris Sternal-Johnson writes, “Our local sports store EMS is doing a sale in which, instead of specific things being on sale, the most expensive item in your cart receives a set 20% discount and the second and third most expensive items receive 15%. Nifty idea.”

Keane Creative

Unorthodox left side nav from Keane Creative.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1116-screens-around-town-google-maps-john-deere-ems-etc

Engadget’s editor-in-chief Ryan Block will be leaving parent company AOL shortly, sources say, to launch a new startup. Partnering with him on the new company will be Peter Rojas, Engadget’s former editor-in-chief (pictured left below, next to Block).

Block officially became Engadget’s chief editor in June 2007 (although he actually took over the site in early 2006). He took the spot after founding editor in chief Rojas left the blog full time. Rojas went on to launch RCRD LBL in late 2007, an online record label that distributes free music.

Rojas will stay with RCRD LBL and will be working with Block part time on the new project, one source says.

The new startup will be a content site around technology, we’ve heard, but won’t be a blog. It may be a forum/social network based site to create lots of user generated content. What will it be called? We perused the 39 domain names that Block owns and one stood out because he also registered the .net and .org versions (all other domains he owns are .com): Devixe. Is that the new name of the startup? From what we’ve heard, it’s only one name that is being considered.

A lot of this is still speculation, and Block isn’t saying much other than he is still with AOL and has not resigned. As to whether he plans to in the near future, and whether he intends to launch Devixe or another site with Rojas, he won’t comment.

If he leaves, Block’s likely replacement as editor in chief is Josh Fruhlinger, the current managing editor and Block’s no. 2 at Engadget. Senior editor Thomas Ricker and senior associate editor Joshua Topolsky are other candidates, although Ricker lives in Amsterdam and Topolsky is also a music producer. Fruhlinger is the likely replacement.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/324254388/