Ajax Girl

How do businesses get people to come to their events? Viral marketing is one way. But Munich-based event-management site Amiando has figured out a way to make the tickets themselves viral. Today it launched VitalTickets. If you buy a ViralTicket for an event on Amiando, you get a referral code that you can pass onto friends or colleagues. Anyone with that code gets a discount, and the original referrer gets a refund on his or her original ticket purchase. So if you buy a $100 ticket, for instance, and pass the code to three of your friends, they could each get a $10 discount on the tickets, and you could get a $15 refund (or whatever amount the event organizer decides to offer).

ViralTickets is part of a redesign of Amiando’s site, which now lets event organizers customize their events pages with different widgets. These include ones for ticket sales, car pools, message boards, participants lists, photos, music, videos, polls, surveys and more. You can also take these widgets and put them on your blog or MySpace page to spread the word even more. For instance, below is a ticketing widget for a fake event (it’s live, so don’t actually buy any tickets).

This page requires frame support. Please use a browser that supports frames.

Amiando can offer ViralTickets because it takes care of all the payments, and so can manage all of the discount calculations and refunds itself. (You can also use Amiando to manage free events). Amiando takes a 7.5 percent cut of all ticket sales to manage all the ticketing, take care of payment processing, print up badges, and manage returns. If you just want to use Paypal and deal with the ticket management yourself, Amiando lets you do that also and just takes a 1.5 percent fee.

To celebrate its redesign, Amiando is offering a free event to the first 1000 TechCrunch readers who signs up with the promotion code “techcrunch” (up to $200 worth of fees).

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/~3/338163658/

Today we released some improvements to the People and Permission screens in Basecamp. We’ve improved the process for adding new people to a company within a project and we redesigned the Permissions screen with a number of subtle usability improvements. You’ll also find a new Administrators screen to easily control which people in the account holder’s company have Administrator powers. Check out the video below to see the changes.

The redesigned Permissions screen wasn’t really a redesign. 90% of the screen looks and works the same. We worked a lot with subtle changes in text size, positioning, and color in order to bring more clarity and spaciousness to the screen.

Here’s the old version:

And the new redesign:

Some quick highlights:

• The old screen has red links scattered all over. It made the page feel messy. The new design only uses red for the “Add a new person” links.
• We replaced the red “Add a company” link with a graphic button. We reused some code from Highrise to smoothly transition between the button and the “Add a company” form.
• The old screen loosely employed a tab metaphor in the blue header. The phrases “People on this project” and “Change permissions” always appeared in the header, and one phrase would be linked while the other was regular black text depending on the page you were viewing. In the redesign, we decided to think of “Change permissions” as a process you enter and leave. We renamed that action to “Add people, remove people, and change permissions.” Now the entire blue header is devoted to this action, and there is a blue “Go back” link below the header to return to “People on this project.”
• We bumped up the font size on peoples’ names and wrapped them in <label> tags. Now each name is a generous mouse target. We did the same for the radio buttons that appear to the right of people with access to the project. Clicking around is much nicer now.

We played with a number of wilder revisions before settling on these very subtle changes. Sometimes the hardest part of redesigning something is realizing where you had it right in the first place. We hope you like the changes.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1139-new-in-basecamp-updated-people-and-permission-screens

A couple of Getting Realish ideas spotted in Best Life magazine:

Greg Gianforte is the author of “Bootstrapping Your Business: Start and Grow a Successful Company With Almost No Money.” In Follow Your Dream, he advises throwing out your five-year plan and focusing on building something now instead.

Gianforte describes how to build a company from sales rather than enlisting professional financiers. The secret is to stop sweating your five-year plan and start moving the product from day one. If your business idea requires more money than you have at hand, then shrink the idea.

“An entrepreneur getting started doesn’t need a $100 million idea,” says Gianforte. “A $1 million idea is enough. The beauty of a $1 million idea is that big companies don’t care about it. Find a niche within a niche.”

The same issue of the magazine also includes Mark Cuban’s Three Rules for Building a Company. He writes, “Do everything you can to avoid taking money.”

Sweat equity is the best equity. “Taking money from someone else kills more start-ups than anything else does. Do everything you can to avoid taking money. If you must, your best prospects are potential customers. You have something they want, so if they invest in you, it can be a win-win situation.”

Related Getting Real essays:
Don’t Do Dead Documents
Race to Running Software
Fix Time and Budget, Flex Scope
Fund Yourself

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1142-advice-for-entrepreneurs-throw-out-that-five-year-plan-build-something-now-and-dont-take-any-money

In what can only be described as a grand experiment, Fujifilm has teamed up with Ning.com to create a social network, ZSpotNow.com, based around a single digital camera. The Z20fd is a 10-megapixel point and shoot that comes in multiple fun colors and a special blog mode that reduces and resizes images for upload to blogs and email lists. It also records MPEG4 video and can upload directly to YouTube.

Do all of these attributes make for good social network fodder? Fujifilm’s concept - to wrap a series of events inside a social network - is quite interesting. Using Ning’s new event feature they’ve scheduled three concerts in Miami, NYC, and Los Angeles. The bands and DJs associated with each event will be encouraged to drop content into the social network and various widgets will spread the good word virally. Users will be able to chat and upload pictures and video from the event.

Read more…

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/~3/338083369/

I work on Google Code. Hearing that Radiohead was going to release data with progressive licensing and wanted to do so on Google Code was awesome.

Now we see how cool it is that the data is open. People like Jacob Seidelin are doing interesting things with it.

In this case, Jacob has created amazing visualizations of the data using JavaScript and Canvas:

I figured it would be a nice little experiment to try visualizing this data using JavaScript and Canvas so I went and did just that. The data is simply point clouds, meaning a whole bunch of points with x,y,z values (and intensity) for each frame. The data on Google Code is about 800 MB, so obviously a bit of trimming had to be done. You can’t expect 30 fps with Javascript doing with this kind of data, so I’ve only used every 5 frames giving us a framerate of 6 fps, not great but acceptable. Then the actual points, each frame has about 12,000 points. No way this will render with 6 fps in any browser, so again I’ve taken only 10% of the points. Additionally, I’ve tried to filter away the noise around Thom Yorke’s head since that took up a good deal of points. The interesting bit is him singing, anyway. In the end, we have a dataset of about 4 MB (converted to a JS array) for the one minute clip they released.

Now the data is in a more manageable state and the visualization can begin. It’s not as good as the real thing, obviously, but I think it’s ok (it’s best when you look at Thom in profile). The audio clip is as usual played via SoundManager 2 which also gives us free timing information to sync the rendering to. I’ve played around and made a few different effects that you can toggle on and off (by pressing keys 1-9). While it is playing you can also rotate around the vertical axis by moving the mouse horizontally over the video. Also try clicking/doubleclicking.

Great publicity for Radiohead too. When you are first to do something, that is often the case.

Source: Ajaxian » Front Page
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/338056445/radiohead-open-data-javascript-canvas-visualizations-of-their-work

Sibley Verbeck is moving past Second Life. The CEO of the Electric Sheep Company has made a lot of money creating virtual islands in Second Life for big brands such as CBS, Showtime, and Intel. But now he is ready to bring those virtual worlds to the Web in regular browsers. Today, he is releasing WebFlock, a Flash-based 3-D virtual world application he is offering as a hosted software service.

WebFlock worlds are private-label virtual environments targeted at big brands who want to have a 3D presence online that is more accessible than worlds liek Second Life, which require a separate software download. Although we’ve seen $345 million invested in virtual-world startups so far this year, there is a definite trend of those worlds moving into the browser. For instance, recently launched virtual-world startup Vivaty is all browser based, and Google is experimenting with Lively, its own browser-based virtual environments.

None of those other efforts, though, are Flash-based. They only work on Windows machines (because they tap into ActiveX). WerFlock worlds are viewable in any browser that supports Flash (i.e., nearly allof them). It supports 3D avatars, chat, virtual currencies, games, and embedded images and videos from YouTube and other parts of the Web.

Verbeck is offering WebFlock as a hosted service to the same types of big brands he creates virtual islands for on Second Life. For instance, his first customer is Showtime’s The L-Word, which already has one of the most popular Second Life islands (created by Electric Sheep). By bringing that same virtual environment to the browser, Showtime thinks it can reach a much bigger portion of its audience.

Verbeck took the same underlying technology Electric Sheep uses to create other virtual environments, called Aspen, and is now applying it to browser-based worlds. He envisions these 3-D worlds as standalone places integrated into different Websites. Connecting them together would make them more interesting.

WebFlock does not come cheap. A ‘basic implementation,” which includes a 3-D space, avatars, and basic features, will cost “under $100,000″ for 12 months. And he is not abandoning his Second Life business entirely, but this new emphasis shows that he sees that the writing is on the wall for virtual worlds that are closed off (or at least hard to get to) from the rest of the Web.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/338037919/

Mathieu Henri saw Scott Schiller’s generated favicons VU meter and wanted to “push the concept of generated favicons further and pack a thrilling retro shooter in 16×16 pixels using JavaScript, canvas and data: URIs.”

Wow. He went and did it. The entire game runs in the favicon!

DEFENDER of the favicon was done in 3 nights, from start to finish. Each frame of the game is generated on the fly in JavaScript into a 16×16 canvas element, then converted to a 32bits PNG image and used in place of the favicon. The core of the game act as a state machine. Notice a few details such as the pause when this window is not focused, and the resuming and game over transitions.

Obviously since this little game makes use of canvas and the toDataURL method, it does not work in Internet Explorer, and Safari does not seem to support PNG favicons. Prefer Opera or FireFox, although FireFox 3 suffers from garbage collection hick ups when playing in the favicon.

The game logic isn’t really complex but remains true to the original Defender and provides enough action for 16×16 pixels. The original game mechanics would make Defender of the favicon insanely difficult. Therefore a few adjustments were done : none of the enemies fire at you, your Defender got upgraded with a shield, and finally the Landers do not mutate into unstoppable war machines after abducting a humanoid but wander in your general direction.

Source: Ajaxian » Front Page
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/338037753/defender-of-the-favicon

Putting YouTube on something is like a gang initiation for Valley companies. “Sure,” VCs say, “You’ve made a plastic robotic drink coaster with social networking capabilities. But does it have YouTube?”

That said, Series 3 and HD TiVo owners will soon be able to download YouTube content through the TiVo dashboard. Series 2 owners, however, are out of luck because the H.264 used in the service can’t be added to Series 2 hardware.

TiVo users should notice the update by the end of the month as the 9.4 software update hits machines.

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/~3/338012528/

Shouldn’t there be a free trial period for paid iPhone apps?

Source: Emily Chang
Original Article: http://www.emilychang.com/go/weblog/comments/free-trial-for-paid-iphone-apps/

Jeffrey Barke has written up a tutorial detailing how to create a density map with Prototype, the Google Maps API and the HeatMapAPI.

The heat map API looks cool indeed, and that piece of code looks simple:

Source: Ajaxian » Front Page
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/337975278/a-tutorial-on-prototype-google-maps-api-and-the-heatmapapi