Ajax Girl

When you’re the distant second player in web search, you’ve got nothing to lose by making bold moves. So it makes sense that Yahoo has adopted an open strategy with the following idea in mind: woo developers to build on top of your technology, and then display your advertisements to more eyeballs throughout the long tail of the web.

Yahoo takes a large step in that direction today by announcing a radical and historical initiative called BOSS, which stands for “Build Your Own Search Service” and basically turns web search into a web service by inviting developers to leverage Yahoo’s core search technology and build their own web search implementations. Hakia and Me.dium are among the first to switch over and use Yahoo to power their web results (in Hakia’s case, as a supplement to its own search technology).

BOSS allows developers to submit queries (and their associated parameters) via an API to retrieve up to 50 web, image, news, or spelling results in XML or JSON format at a time. Per Yahoo’s policy, developers will be required to display its ads next to, or within, their results (although this requirement won’t be imposed until later, Yahoo plans to offer CPM fees as an alternative, and academics will be exempt from any such attempts at monetization completely). Yahoo won’t require anyone to mention that they are using its technology, as it doesn’t intend to drive traffic back to Yahoo proper - just spread its technological influence throughout the web. Nor will it impose any caps on daily queries, or impose standards on the design of results pages.

The self-service BOSS API can be used directly or via a mashup framework that simplifies the process of aggregating data from across the web. When using the API, developers can choose to filter porn from web results, specify the dimensions of image results, and retrieve only news results from within a certain number of days. The order of Yahoo’s results, however, must be changed after they are retrieved (you can’t pass Yahoo parameters that tweak its standard relevancy model).

If you want to incorporate ancillary data with the results from Yahoo’s main index, the Mashup Framework simplifies the process by which developers conduct joins on web data (in formats like XML, JSON, RSS, or RDF). For example, it can be used to generate results with information from both Summize and Yahoo Search, Digg and Yahoo Search, or pretty much any API and Yahoo Search. The framework will work only through Python constructs to start, but more languages should become supported in the future.

All of this forms just the first half of Yahoo’s intentions with BOSS. In a few months, Yahoo will also release APIs for what it’s calling “BOSS Custom”. This version of BOSS will allow developers to actually push data to Yahoo’s servers for indexing, and then perform highly customizable search queries against them.

So in a way, BOSS starts by opening up web search to 3rd parties, but it will go far beyond that by providing cloud-based search for all imaginable types of data. Yahoo has already enlisted a handful of partners for BOSS Custom, including us here at TechCrunch. We’re working on a search implementation that will enable readers to conduct searches across the entire network and retrieve results that have been weighted using a custom relevance model. Readers will also be able to drill down by author, comments, date, and other criteria.

BOSS is the second concrete product to come out of Yahoo’s Open Strategy. The first was SearchMonkey back in April.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/331381598/

The IPO drought is just as bad in Europe as it is here. Filling in the gap for high-growth companies hungry for capital are late-stage growth venture funds, such as the 400-million-Euro fund launched last January by Index Ventures. “The IPO market being closed is helping us,” confirms Index partner Dom Vidal.

Today, Index is announcing two big investments in that fund: $35 million (22.5 million Euros) into BestofMedia Group and $27 million (17 million Euros) into Milestone Systems.

Both companies are about ten years old and growing revenues more than 50 percent a year. Neither discloses its revenues, but Index’s growth fund managers in general look for companies pulling in at least $6 to $7 million per quarter (or around $25 million a year), with strong cash flow, and looking to keep the growth going.

BestofMedia is the Cnet of Europe. Based in France, it owns a group of tech review sites organized under the Tom’s Hardware, Tom’s Guide, and Tom’s Games brands. BestofmEdia bought Tom’s Hardware in April, 2007 for a rumored $15 million.

The company claims 25 million monthly unique visitors worldwide (comScore says 12 million), and will likely use the cash for more acquisitions and to enter more markets. BestofMedia’s sites currently operate in 12 countries, including France, Germany, the U.S., Italy, and Taiwan.

Milestone Systems, which is based in Copenhagen, offers IP security surveillance systems. Video surveillance technology is at the early stages of a shift from proprietary technologies to ones based on IP networks that can interface with many more different kinds of cameras and equipment. Those systems can also be more easily upgraded and customized with software passed over the network. The digital portion of the multi-billion dollar surveillance industry is growing at about 40 percent a year, and Milestone is growing even faster.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/331414362/

Challenge Games, the maker of fantasy fighting game Duels and fantasy baseball game Baseball Boss, has raised a $4.5 million first round of funding from Sequoia Capital. Sequoia’s Roelof Botha has also joined the Challenge Games board of directors.

Duels, where users create fantasy characters and fight other players asynchronously, first launched last year and scaled so quickly it brought the site to a crawl for weeks. Even so, a million deaths a day were occurring on Duels by December 2007.

Baseball Boss, which uses the same underlying engine as Duels, beta launched last week. Users create baseball teams based on real MLB players (they have a licensing deal in place with major league baseball).

Normal gameplay is free, but users can pay to upgrade players. A significant percentage of users actually do pay to get that special sword, spell or baseball player, the company says. Based on my own brief but intense “testing” of Duels last year, I can say that the games are very addictive. I had to quit cold turkey when it began to affect my productivity.

Challenge Games’ founder and CEO Andrew Busey was the co-founder of Pluck, which Demand Media bought in March for $75 million.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/331382734/

Today, Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama voted for H.R.6304, which amends the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (F.I.S.A). In doing so he voted to give telecommunication providers immunity against civil damages that they might incur in the course of enabling the government to execute wiretaps and other types of electronic surveillance. He did so, after an amendment to the bill that would have stripped out the immunity provision, S.Amdt. 5064, was defeated 32-66. In voting for the bill, Obama acted in direct contradiction to his earlier statements. In 2007 Bill Burton, an Obama campaign spokesman, said “To be clear: Barack will support a filibuster of any bill that includes retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies.”

The original F.I.S.A statute was passed in 1978 in order to protect civil liberties against overly expansive government surveillance, and had clear penalties of $100 per person, per day, plus punitive damages, for telecommunications companies that conducted electronic surveillance without judicial oversight. Given that each day tens of millions of people have their data go across the networks of some of the larger telcos, the risk that these companies faced by working with the government on extra-judicial wiretaps was extreme. In giving companies that work with the government immunity from these penalties, H.R. 6304, and Barack Obama who voted for it, just took away the only reason stopping AT&T, Verizon, and others from helping the government use extra-judicial wiretaps. In voting for the bill, Obama not only helped the telco’s, but also broke his promise to protect the American people from expansive government surveillance.

The image above was created with this site, which lets you add whatever message you want to Obama’s campaign platform.

Note that TechCrunch endorsed Barack Obama, partially on his policies towards telecommunications companies.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/331261881/

Apple finally let developers know when their iPhone apps will be live on the App Store for users to download and use: around 9 am PST Thursday morning. That, at least, is when the embargo lifts and press can start writing about the specific applications. Presumably the App Store will go live, along with iPhone 2.0 software in general, around that time.

We’ve created a directory of some of our favorite apps and will be posting on each of them then. We also have some TechCrunch-related news around an iPhone App as well. It’s not too late to submit your app for inclusion - details for submission are here.

And just as the news dies down on the new apps, get ready for the iPhone 3G, which goes on sale starting Friday morning at 8 am.

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/~3/331255383/

Playboy has published profiles of nine women bloggers (loosely defined) - Xeni Jardin, Violet Blue, Julie Alexandria, Veronica Belmont, Amanda Congdon, Brigitte Dale, Sarah Lacy, Sarah Austin and Natali Del Conte - and asked readers to vote on which one is “sexiest.” The winner will be asked to pose for Playboy.

Sarah Lacy, host of Yahoo’s TechTicker, is described respectfully as a “curvy brunette.” Lacy says that Playboy told her about the poll before it was published but said nothing about their plans to ask the winner to pose nude for the magazine. Lacy says if she wins she won’t accept the offer to go nude.

Natali Del Conte, the host of CNET’s Loaded (and former TechCrunch writer), currently leads voting with 24% of total votes, says she was notified of the poll and gave permission to use her picture. She says if she wins she will “absolutely not pose nude for Playboy,” however. Playboy describes Natali as having a “sunshiney demeanor and girl-next-door good looks.”

I’d like to say contests like these are few and far between, but Wired isn’t much better. In 2007 they asked readers to vote for the sexiest geek of 2007 (not linking to it because the Wired article hotlinked to pictures, one of which has been changed to a goatse).

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/331222336/

Despite facing competition from thousands of other developers, Slide and RockYou have managed to establish themselves as powerhouses on Facebook’s application platform. Using a combination of social networking and clever (and sometimes shady) marketing, both companies have seen several of their applications rise to popularity in a space where the vast majority of developers fail to have even one success.

Tapulous, a new startup that formed earlier this year, is looking to do the same on Apple’s new app store, which is expected to launch this Friday. The company has accrued a stockpile of finished programs and a team of developers hoping to release new apps on a weekly basis. To conincide with the launch, Tapulous will be releasing three applications, with more on the way over the coming weeks.

The company consists of a team of “all-star” app developers, some of whom have been working on iPhone apps since long before the launch of the SDK. These developers have brought their apps with them, giving Tapulous a significant headstart against many of its competitors (they currently have six on the backburner). For the time being each app will operate independently, but Tapulous intends to build a social network on the iPhone by connecting them together at a later date.

The apps that will be part of Fridays launch are Twinkle, Tap Tap Revenge, and Friend Book. Twinkle is a Twitter client that includes geo-location information along with every Tweet. The client is also effectly a Twitter clone, as it will run over its own network whenever Twitter’s service is down.

Tap Tap Revenge is a rebranded version of the game Tap Tap Revolution, a popular app that has been used by over 700,000 users on “jailbroken” (i.e. hacked) iPhones - a huge number given the fact that many people have not jailbroken their phones.

Friend Book is a revamped address book that hopes to replace the standard app that comes with the iPhone. The app’s coolest feature is a “Handshake” that allows colleagues to exchange their information by placing their iPhones side-by-side and shaking them together (it sounds weird, but it’s actually pretty impressive).

Tapulous has raised $1.8 million in angel funding, with a slew of investors that include Andy Bechtolsheim, Marc Benioff, Rajeev Motwani, Katrina Garnett, and Jeff Clavier. The Tapulous team consists of Bart Decrem (co-founder of Flock), Andrew Lacy, and Mike Lee (Delicious Library).

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/331202406/

Music-streaming service Last.fm is now paying unsigned artists royalties for every song played on its service. Since the company announced the program last January, 170,000 70,000 artists and small music labels have signed up for it and uploaded 450,000 tracks.

What Last.fm is doing here is creating an alternative to the official royalty-collecting organization for musicians (i.e., SoundExchange). Last year, the royalty rates for music streamed over the Internet were raised, making it more difficult for ad-supported music startups to stay in business. Last.fm got bought by CBS, so it’s not in danger of going under. And for any song owned by a label or artist who participates in SoundExchange, Last.fm continues to pay the going Internet radio royalty rate. But it is beginning to bypass Sound Exchange by giving new, unsigned artists an alternative.

By cutting out the middlemen (labels, SoundExchange), Last.fm claims that artists that sign up for the program will receive more than twice the royalty rate they would see if the same song played on commercial radio. That’s because the money goes directly to the artist. (The total royalty, though, is less than what it pays SoundExchange). The royalty that Last.fm is paying unsigned artists is equivalent to 10 percent of the advertising revenues associated with their songs (update: in certain cases, see below). Musicians get a quarterly check, and can withdraw the money once it reaches $10.

We’re not talking a lot of money here, a few fractions of a penny per song. But as the online music industry grows, and along with it online advertising targeted at music listeners, these numbers in aggregate could start to become meaningful.

More importantly, it creates a direct economic link between Last.fm and up and coming artists that have not yet been discovered or signed by a label. The program is also appealing to tiny labels that don’t participate in SoundExchange because they are too small or it is too much of a hassle. (Anyone who already collects royalties through SoundExchange is not eligible for the program). Of the 170,000 signups so far, 30 percent are labels. And daily artist account creation in general is up 60 percent since the announcement in January.

Since it is Last.fm’s program, it controls the royalty rates it pays out, which it can adjust according to how much advertising revenues these songs generate. Now, does anyone actually want to listen to these songs and ill musicians shift over in massive numbers from the labels to this sort of direct arrangement? That is what will determine how disruptive this really is.

Update: Last.fm is offering tiered royalty rates. From the FAQs:

* If your track is played on our free radio service you will accrue a 10% of the Share of Last.fm’s Net Revenue (see the definition of “Share” and “Net Revenue” in the terms and conditions) from the free radio service.
* If your track is played on our personalised premium radio service, you will accrue the greater of either 10% of the Share of Last.fm’s Net Revenue from the personalised radio service, or US $0.0005 for each complete transmission on the personalised radio service.
* If your track is played on our free on-demand service, you will accrue 30% of the Share of Last.fm’s Net Revenue from the on-demand radio service.
* If your track is played on our premium on-demand service, you will accrue the greater of either 30% of the Share of Last.fm’s Net Revenue from the premium on-demand service, or US $0.005 for each complete transmission on the prepaid or subscription on-demand service.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/331154736/

Passpack notified me they have released a client-side library to communicate with their Host-Proof Hosting (HPH) server-side infrastructure. Up till now, the only access was via their own web app, but they are now hoping to garner interest from third parties:

I think the most important part of HPH is that it provides users with real-world data privacy, it’s not just a theory, it works now. I’d love to see the pattern get some traction with SaaS providers, but it’s not the most obvious system to implement. To this avail, we’ve just released an MIT/LGPL library for creating Host-Proof Hosting applications: http://code.google.com/p/passpack/

Host-Proof Hosting is the pattern whereby the server knows nothing about the user’s data, because the browser ensures it’s kept encrypted each time it goes over the wire. It’s been practiced in the real world for a couple of years now, but has received some extra attention lately. Clipperz, a Passpack competitor, recently mentioned interest from Richard Stallman in its advocacy for “zero knowledge web applications”.

In their response to Clipperz, Passpack expressed a more pragmatic view:

The Zero Knowledge Web Application as-is, is a theory. This is not to say that there couldn’t be a future where it might become a credible solution for privacy, but until that happens, it is inappropriate to ask people to trust a theory with just too many inconsistencies.

Source: Ajaxian » Front Page
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/331014928/passpack-releases-host-proof-hosting-library

When Gruber first linked the TripLog/1040 UI by Stevens Creek, I wasn’t kind either. Bright colors, controls seemingly placed at random. It was the opposite of what designers strive for in our circles. A mess. Soon the Flickr page was a schoolyard of insults. And then something interesting happened. TripLog’s designer Steve Patt posted a comment amidst the bile to share the rationale behind his design. The many who chose not to listen to him won’t learn anything, but the rest of us may find fruit in Mr. Patt’s thoughtful explanation and twenty years of software experience.

The first charge against TripLog is “clutter,” that there’s too much on the screen at once. We’ll get to clutter, but first we have to talk about speed. Patt explains that the #1 purpose of TripLog is to help people track their deductible or reimbursable mileage. If people can’t enter their trips very quickly, the friction of entering data will overpower the motivation to track. For customers, untracked data means miles that aren’t reimbursed. So speed is Patt’s top priority.

What does speed have to do with clutter? I once saw Tufte give a workshop in Chicago where he introduced a valuable concept. He said information may be displayed adjacent in space or stacked in time. Take a book for example. If two dots are on the same spread, they are adjacent in space. All it takes to switch between them is movement of your eye. Compare that to a dot on one page stacked above a dot on another page. You can’t see them at once. You have to flip back and forth between pages to see one dot versus the other.

The trade-offs between elements adjacent in space versus stacked in time are always in the mind of a UI designer. Placing many elements on the same screen reduces the need for navigation and gives users a comprehensive feeling of “it’s all at my command.” Moving focus from one element to another is instant and seamless. On the flip side, separating elements onto different screens slows things down with navigation while increasing clarity. There is more room for explanation and luxurious space when fewer elements occupy the page. The eye has less to filter through. The course of action is more obvious.

So did Patt put too many elements adjacent in space on one screen when he should have separated them out in time? Is his UI “cluttered?”
To answer that we should pull ourselves out of the computer and sink our feet firmly in the customer’s shoes. Patt explains that customers load the application for two reasons:

1. They want to log miles they just drove
2. They want to double-check that they logged a recent trip

The first is obvious. Patt explains the second:

There’s a very simple reason, which we know because we’ve been selling our Athlete’s Diary software for logging a different kind of mileage for nearly 20 years. It’s because when you start up the software, half the time you’ll be scratching your head saying, “Did I remember to enter yesterday’s ride (or run)?” … You want to be able to answer that question immediately, with just a quick glance down to the bottom of the screen.

Half the time people want to add new entries. Another half of the time, people want to verify a recent entry. On top of that, people also like to confirm the accuracy of data after they submit it. These factors together form a motivation to place the “add an entry” and “verify recent entries” features adjacent in space. It’s a decision to optimize for instant access to both features at the cost of showing more elements on screen at one time.

Beyond first impressions

When we talk about “usable” or “intuitive” interfaces, Apple devotees and the web app crowd (myself included) tend to bias toward the first-time user. The idea is an interface is easy to use if new users can figure it out and get running quickly. Or an interface is “clear” if all the parts and functions can be immediately parsed upon eye contact. Typically this means stacking features in time so that each screen has fewer elements and is easier to digest. TripLog, while far from perfect, has a different focus. Rather than first-impressions, Patt is thinking about repetition. Spatial memory and adjacency play a major role in repetitive tasks. How many of you keep an assortment of pens, papers, and peripherals on your desk in specific positions instead of moving them in and out of drawers every day?

Patt’s bias for adjacency and speed continues inside the “Add an entry” block. There are two ways to log a trip: manually enter data in the fields or choose user-defined presets called “Frequent Trips.” Both methods are exposed. However everything can’t be exposed all the times. There are some features stacked in time too. Choosing a date “Other” than Today or Yesterday, selecting a different Car (for IRS purposes), and editing the Frequent Trips list are all behind the time wall and require navigation.

So what did we learn?

The fact that a screen is “cluttered” doesn’t automatically mean it is poorly designed or ill-conceived. To many of us, screens thick with adjacent elements are like cold water we prefer not to step into. The very fact that TripLog is no feast for the eyes attests to the difficulty of bringing clarity and order to a screen relying too heavily on adjacent features. It would be a fun exercise to redesign TripLog for more visual clarity without removing any elements.

However before we criticize we should look for successes. Where TripLog fails on style it may well win on speed and pragmatics. Patt has thought about his work and designed a product intentionally. Following fashion and the status quo is easy. Thinking about your users’ lives and creating something practical is much harder. Patt can work on his colors and alignment, and hopefully please his user base with a helpful tool. Meanwhile the rest of us would be wise to work on the quality and value of our criticism.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1128-learning-from-bad-ui