Ajax Girl

Social Gaming Network, a startup behind a number of popular social network games, has partnered with the Arbor Day Foundation to create a Facebook game to raise money for, of all things, planting trees. SGN has created a game called “Space Movers: The Bloom Initiative”, and will donate up to $50,000 of the game’s advertising revenue to the cause. You can check out the app by going here.

The game itself plays almost exactly like Bejeweled, with a few goofy characters and icons that all fit under a vague “nature” theme. And while the gameplay may not be too original, the game has high production values, with a full soundtrack and animations.

The partnership is the latest in a string of unconventional promotions we’ve seen from developers on social networks, who are going to great lengths to increase exposure and help their games “go viral”. Last month Slide partnered with VH1 to to promote its application alongside a marathon of reality shows.

SGN focuses on games that include social interaction, and claims 1.1 million daily active users across Facebook, Bebo, MySpace, and hi5, with a reported 54 million application installs. The company has raised some serious cash, with over $20 million in funding and investors including Jeff Bezos. Zynga, its closest competitor, recently closed a $29 million Series B funding round led by Kleiner Perkins, and has raised a total of nearly $40 million.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/eVUnOEVOHOE/

We’re going to start using Twitter a lot more to announce news, new features, special offers, live Q&A sessions, events, and more. If you want to be one of the first ones to know, make sure to follow us on Twitter!

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1175-follow-37signals-on-twitter

The Yahoo shareholder meeting is going on right now, but already not everything is going according to plan. Yahoo was able to avoid a showdown today with activist investor Carl Icahn by agreeing to open up three board seats. Icahn is taking one, and the board will vote for the other two members. Former AOL CEO Jonathan Miller was added to the list of candidates at the request of Yahoo, and was considered a shoe-in for one of the two other available seats. Not anymore.

At the 11th hour last night, Time Warner decided to object to Miller’s appointment to the board, according to three sources, including a former AOL executive close to Miller. Without Time Warner’s blessing, Miller cannot serve on Yahoo’s board since he is still under a non-compete agreement with AOL.

Why Time Warner would decide to do this is unclear. Before Yahoo and Carl Icahn publicly disclosed Miler’s name as an addition to the slate of people Yahoo’s board will choose from to fill the extra seats, Time Warner gave the green light to Miller’s inclusion. Now the strategy has changed, and last night Time Warner CEO Jeffrey Bewkes reneged on his earlier approval in a phone call to Miller. It gave no reason for the about-face. (Former Viacom CEO Frank Biondi is now a favorite to take one of the two available board seats).

When Jerry Yang found out about this he was “fucking livid,” says a source. Miller was someone Yang felt he could work with on the board and lean on for advice, given Miller’s past experience running AOL. Miller was someone Icahn was happy with as well.

So Time Warner just pissed off one of two possible buyers for AOL. Time Warner management has been obsessed with trying to sell off AOL, and the only two realistic buyers are Yahoo and Microsoft. “It is the entire AOL strategy,” says the former AOL executive. Now,Time Warner is angering a potential bidder for AOL, and effectively giving Microsoft more leverage to give a lowball offer. Institutional shareholders, many of whom own large chunks of both Yahoo and Time Warner, won’t be too happy about that.

“If you are the SS Titanic of AOL, you have to be friends with everybody,” says the befuddled former AOL exec. What is ironic is that if anyone could have made a Yahoo-AOL deal work it would have been Miller.

So does Time Warner think that it can make Yahoo less attractive to Microsoft, and AOL more attractive, by keeping Miller off the board? Or can Jeff Bewkes simply not stand the thought of Miller (whom he removed as CEO of AOL in favor of his own guy) becoming the CEO of a merged Yahoo-AOL down the road? That might make Bewkes’ earlier decision look stupid, especially given AOL’s poor performance since the switch. In business, it’s always personal.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/YaRvXjdRz60/

Greg Murray has blogged about a new release candidate for Aptana Jaxer that contains a lot of new features.

Kevin Hakman told us about the release:

We’ve had server-side JS database APIs all along, but now handing result sets is even easier. There’s also now full fine grain control and access to the entire communication cycle with APIs for message headers, redirects, content and types. Speaking of types… for the first time with Jaxer, you can return content types other than HTML including JSON, XML, GIF, etc… Yes, even GIFs. Jaxer has a fresh new Image API that among other things can convert Canvas to static images and serve them up. Like, Greg, I too really like the idea of using Jaxer for easily creating JSON data services which is a rapidly growing trend as developers discover the powerful capabilities of JSON more and more. In Jaxer, it’s very cool since it’s all native JavaScript on the client, on the wire, and on the server. There’s even enhanced JSON serialization to make it even easier than before on both client and server. JSON services also open Jaxer to be useful in combination with rich internet clients other than Ajax UIs such as Flash, Flex or even Silverlight since all those support JavaScript on the client and can consume JSON data. For Ajax and RIA developers this is a boon since you can now write your client-side and server-side code in the same language. And if you prefer XML data services Jaxer’s native E4X (ECMAScript for XML) support means you can handle XML docs natively in JS on Jaxer as well.

This release also includes a totally new concept: a secure sandbox which as Greg explains, “lets you load, on the server, pages from other domains and allow their JavaScript to execute without giving them access to the Jaxer API or your own server-side code, but still gives your code access to their window objects and anything inside them”. For anyone who has ever done screenscaping for mashups or other applications, this really helps a lot since Ajax pages have historically thwarted scraping operations. With this feature in Jaxer you can securely get a remote page, execute its functions, and scrape the resulting DOM nodes (yes, you need not do tedious manipulations with strings) and voila!

Here are the features:

• Application context settings that allowing for easier app configuration, app properties, database settings, etc…
• Database API enhancements with richer APIs for working with result sets.
• Server-side image manipulation including server-side canvas support and ability to convert to other image types.
• Native command execution API so that you can run system commands and handle the output from those.
• Asynchronous server-side JavaScript processing lets you implement callbacks in your server-side code too.
• Ability to return custom content types (e.g. json, xml, gif, html, etc…)
• Full control of the request/response lifecycle including setting redirects, headers, content, etc…
• Secure sandbox supporting cross domain calls, sandboxed JavaScript execution, META refreshes, …
• Serialization support for JavaScript objects to and from XML, E4X and JSON.

Uri Sarid has a great post that shows how you can do DOM Scraping with Jaxer, and updates it for this latest release:

There’s a lot of other new goodness in Jaxer 1.0, as well as the official released version of the Mozilla engine found in Firefox 3. So for example getElementsByClassName is natively implemented (see John Resig’s speed comparison), in addition to the other Mozilla features such as built-in XPath functionality and a very robust DOM feature set — just what you need for some serious ’screen scraping’, mashups, and content repurposing.

Let’s see it in action!

It includes code that shows the Sandbox in action, as well as the DOM work:

Source: Ajaxian » Front Page
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/352885199/another-jaxer-10-release-candidate-with-new-apis

You can now grab Nullriver’s NetShare app, which lets you browse the web from your computer using your iPhone’s data connection , from this direct link. You’ll probably want to grab it quickly, as Apple may well pull it down again.

Last night Apple posted the application to its App Store, but quickly pulled it down after only around 20 minutes. The application lets users of both the original (EDGE) and 3G iPhones browse the internet on the go wherever their cellular network has coverage.

Many phones with high speed data plans can already tether, but most carriers charge users steep fees for the service (AT&T typically charges around $30 per month). Such plans have never been available for iPhone users, and while users with jailbroken (hacked) iPhones have been able to tether for some time, it violates AT&T’s terms of service.

NetShare, which offers tethering for a one time price of $10, likely has AT&T up in arms, as it totally undermines their ability to collect fees on the service. Apple has a lengthy review process (or at least a long wait time) for each app, but it appears that this one may have somehow slipped through the cracks.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/RUbkqeKb7TA/

From MobileCrunch:

US Lawmakers are sick of people sitting on airplanes, talking about all sorts of private matters while waiting for the plane to taxi. After a round of story-telling on conversations they’ve overheard in the past, the House of Representatives has voted to upgrade the FAA’s ban on in-flight cell phone usage to “Permanent” status.

On one hand, I’ve felt their pain: a few plane trips ago, a girl three seats from me was proudly divulging how sick she’d been a week prior. I’ll spare you the nitty-gritty, but it involved poop and pants. On the other, it’s not everyone’s fault that a few people can’t remember to not talk about poop in public. Taking their cell phones away isn’t going to make them any more courteous.

Read more…

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/67AOVM_B_Eo/

Amazon has acquired twelve year old Canadian company Abebooks (formerly the Advanced Book Exchange), the companies just announced. AbeBooks is an online marketplace for books focusing on used, rare and out of print titles for sale by independent booksellers - it currently has 110 million books for sale from 13,500 sellers.

The company has been around since 1996 and fills a niche for Amazon in hard-to-find or out-of-print books. Rather than hold its own inventory, it acts as a digital marketplace for established booksellers.

AbeBooks also owns 40 percent of LibraryThing (a social app for keeping track of your books and finding other like-minded book lovers). Whereas Amazon is an investor in Shelfari. Now Amazon will own a piece of both of those competing startups.

AbeBooks CEO Dr. Hannes Blum sent an email out to its booksellers today talking about the acquisition, saying the company would continue to operate as a stand-alone business. The email is below; the press release is here.

Dear Booksellers,

AbeBooks has reached an agreement to be acquired by Amazon.com, Inc. This is a major landmark in the 12-year history of AbeBooks.

AbeBooks will continue to operate as a stand-alone business with all aspects of AbeBooks’ bookseller and customer experience remaining intact. AbeBooks’ headquarters will remain in Victoria, BC, Canada, and our European offices will remain in Dusseldorf, Germany. We will continue to support both our international marketplaces and our domestic marketplace here in Canada. I will continue to lead AbeBooks.

We expect this change to allow AbeBooks to expand its offerings and introduce new features and services to enhance the book buying and selling experience. Amazon is committed to further developing the AbeBooks brand and building upon the success of the past 12 years. This is not the first time AbeBooks has changed hands since being launched in 1996. Hubert Burda Media, a German media company, took a majority shareholding in 2003.

The bookselling community has been a vital component in our success, and we are grateful for your continuing support. We will be happy to answer questions about our new ownership and what the future holds. A bookseller Roundtable will be held on Thursday August 7th at 2:30pm PDT/9:30pm GMT/7:30am AU where I and the Director of Sales & Account Management, Shaun Jamieson, will answer any questions you might have. In addition, the ‘Ask AbeBooks a question’ folder will continue to be available for ongoing questions from the seller community.

We realize this is important news for our community, and we are confident that this acquisition will greatly benefit AbeBooks’ sellers and provide us with many opportunities for future growth.

For more details please see the official release posted today.

Regards,

Dr. Hannes Blum
President and CEO
AbeBooks

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/o1XwQqjFgCg/

Sascha at PCMag writes a charming little piece on the death of Usenet as a method of discourse and its eventual rebirth as a repository for porn, spam, and pirated warez. He recalls the days of “serious conversations” on 8-bit Atari architecture and the rise and fall of net.manners as more and more n00bs came on to mess up in-depth threads on symbolism in Bob Dylan’s Street Legal.

Is Usenet dead, as Sascha posits? I don’t think so. As long as there are folks who think a command line is better than a mouse, the original text-only social network will live on. Sure, ISPs will shut down access out of misled kiddie porn fears but the real pros know where to go to get their angst-filled, nit-picking, obsessive fix.

In a way inconceivable in today’s Web-fragmented marketplace, Usenet was where you went to talk. Conceived back in the idealistic, non-profit days of the Internet, it was—well, it is, but it mostly was—a series of bulletin boards called “newsgroups” shared by thousands of computers, which traded new messages several times a day.

Read more…

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/WdKbNjicJBA/

Throw out that WAP browser on your cell phone. We are quickly approaching a point where a full browser experience is available on our mobile devices. And it is not just the iPhone. A startup called Skyfire is in some respect even further along than Apple in bringing the entire Web to your phone. Its mobile browser lets you slide Web pages around and zoom in like with the mobile version of Safari. But it also supports Flash and Ajax sites. (It does this by offloading most of the heavy lifting to its servers rather than the mobile client). That means you can watch Youtube videos and go to Google Maps right in the mobile browser instead of having to download separate apps. In contrast, the iPhone’s Safari browser still does not support Flash and so to watch a a video you have to launch the separate Youtube app.

As it becomes possible to do more and more inside the mobile browser itself, it raises the question of whether that indeed is the killer app for mobile Web phones. For the most part, you still get a richer experience by downloading a separate single-purpose app to your phone. But efforts like Skyfire’s point to a future where that may no longer be necessary for all but the most sophisticated apps and games.

Skyfire launched on Windows Mobile, but as of today it is also available in a private beta for Nokia phones running Symbian’s S60 operating system. The first 200 TechCrunch readers to sign up for the beta here will get invites (enter invite code: Tcrunch).

I just tried it on a Nokia N95, and watching video in the browser looks great as long as you are connected via WiFi. As 3G networks become a reality, that should change (although I am supposedly on AT&T’s 3G network in New York City, and videos take so long to load that they are basically unwatchable at this point). And I still prefer the speed of the Safari browser overall in terms of responsiveness. But for other mobile platforms, Skyfire is going to give mobile browsers like Opera’s a run for their money. And if Apple ever actually allows another browser on the iPhone, it could add some much needed competition there as well.

The company recently raised $13 million in a series B round from Lightspeed, Matrix, and Trinity. Below is a video demo of Skyfire on Windows Mobile:

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/uMTB5n3OUVU/

Brad Neuberg got a huge amount of feedback on his call for a definition of the Open Web. He distilled that information and tried hard to come up with something that fits into one sentence, and ended up with this:

The Open Web is an interoperable, ubiquitous, and searchable network where everyone can share information, integrate, and innovate without having to ask for permission, accessible through a powerful and universal client.

His litmus test for this asks if the technology in question has:

• Composability The ability to innovate, link, contribute, search, and integrate without red tape, fear of a lawsuit, or having to ask “please?”
• Interoperability The ability for developers to interoperate without having to know of each others existence
• Ubiquity The ubiquity of a set of open technologies and services agreed upon by the widest possible community
• Universal Client Empowering and evolving the browser and web technologies as a universal client

Source: Ajaxian » Front Page
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/352631367/open-web-04-composability-interop-ubiquity-and-the-client