Ajax Girl

I will keep this review short and straight to the point, folks. You know how Google likes to keep things in Beta for years and years? Well, Android is no different. Like many of you I was excited at the prospect of a new OS to muscle it’s way in and take down the iPhone, but I’m afraid Android is not it – at least not yet. The OS actually isn’t that bad, but it does have its issues and those cannot be overlooked. Unfortunately it’s the hardware that will be Android’s folly this go around until the other manufacturers can churn out some better goods.

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Death is an unfortunate consequence of life, at least until science can prove otherwise. And while most of us would rather just avoid the subject entirely, the thought of having a sappy, cheesy funeral weighs heavy on some people. MyWonderfulLife, a Minnesota-based startup that launched earlier this month, is going to help you make sure that doesn’t happen.

You’re first asked to create profile detailing many of your last wishes, including the type of burial you’d like, who’d you’d like to have as speakers, and any music you’d like to have played. You can also upload a photoalbum that you’d like to have projected during the ceremony. If you’d like to get a bit more creative, the site features a listing of some of the more unique ceremonies users have submitted to give you some ideas.

There are also options for detailing instructions that should be carried like outside of the funeral (such as where to find the will, or what you’d like your headstone to look like). You can write letters to loved ones to be distributed after your death. And if you really want to write your own obituary, you can do that too.

After creating a profile you select up to six ‘Angels’, who are sent an Email with a link they’re told to click on upon your death (the Email is resent every 6 months so that they don’t lose it). Clicking this link takes the Angels to your MyWonderfulLife page, where they’re given the appropriate instructions. While many of the details listed are probably covered in your will, the site says that wills usually aren’t read until after the funeral, so some of your requests might not be honored unless you have another source of instructions.

As with all other “online will” sites, there’s a possibility that MyWonderfulLife will kick the bucket before you do, making this all a moot point. I wouldn’t trust any vital information to the site quite yet, but if you just want to leave your favorite playlist, it’s worth the five minutes it takes to fill out a profile.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/4ueCBIVXLdI/

SGN is definitely on to something with these Wii-like iPhone games. They’ve had over 2 million downloads of iGolf and iBowl. And tonight they’ve released the next game in the series, iBaseball (iTunes link).

Like the other games it’s free, and you use the accelerometer in your iPhone to control game play. The application includes applause and game sounds, vibrates when a hit is made, and supports left handed game play. You can also challenge your friends to play, asynchronously for now but with direct head-to-head play coming soon says CEO Shervin Pishevar.

More games are coming soon.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/mL0H6py8cD4/

What you see above is an embed of a special page on FriendFeed tracking discussion of tonight’s presidential debate. The page updates dynamically, meaning no page refreshes are necessary, using similar “long polling” code that makes instant messaging on web pages (see Meebo, eBuddy) work properly.

Friendfeed implemented the new feature tonight. Users can choose to view most of their FriendFeed pages in real time, including topical based pages.

Combining the long polling, real time view of pages and the embed feature also just happens to be a really excellent live blogging tool. Bloggers can leverage FriendFeed’s infrastructure during high traffic events like Apple product announcement and just embed the stream onto their blogs. Later, if they want, they can copy and past the content directly onto their blog for archiving and SEO. There are lots of other live blogging tools out there that do similar things, but they tend to…fail…badly…during big events. FriendFeed has been stable since launching, and seem to understand how to build a service that doesn’t go down.

Robert Scoble says “This is wild. It’s like the web has been turned into a chat room,” and I agree.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/RPwOzZYDeN0/

We’ve received confirmation that Microsoft is handing over the reins to its MSN Groups property to the social network Multiply. Microsoft is planning to release a new service called Windows Live Groups in November, and apparently doesn’t want to compete with itself. Oddly enough, Microsoft has chosen not to allow groups to transition between the two services, and instead is going to offer a migration tool that will allow users to take groups over to Multiply, which currently bills itself as the world’s 8th largest social network.

The rumor was originally reported earlier today after a series of emails were posted to a MSN Discussion newsgroup, and has since been confirmed by both Multiply and Microsoft through a blog post.

Here’s Microsoft’s explanation for the shutdown:

The natural question to ask in this situation is why we are closing MSN Groups. It is our goal to provide our customers with the most current and user friendly technology available today. We made the difficult decision to close the MSN Groups service as part of an overall investment in updating and re-aligning our online services with Windows Live. In the long term we believe that closing the service is the best way to continue to offer innovative, best of breed services that help you stay in touch with the people you care about. It’s very important to us that you keep the data you created using MSN Groups and that is why we have partnered with Multiply, so you can keep your group going into the future despite the closure of MSN Groups.

The Microsoft post also states that users will have until February 21, 2009 to migrate their groups over to Multiply, after which point the site will cease to exist.

This just seems weird - why would Microsoft abandon a sizable (but dwindling) chunk of users to an entirely unrelated social network? It’s nice that they aren’t leaving their users out in the cold, but why not just cut off new signups to MSN Groups and allow the legacy users to continue on in peace? Microsoft may appear to have made the gesture in good faith, but it’s likely that the company is hoping users will scoff at the idea of having to migrate, and just sign up on the new Live service when it launches. Whatever Microsoft’s intentions, Multiply is sure to be happy with the deal, as it has just been handed well over a million new users.

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Source: TechCrunch
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Although eBay beat its downwardly-revised earnings numbers today, its earnings call was filled with glum news for investors. (Full earnings slides embedded below). After three flat quarters, revenues declined 3.6 percent from the second quarter to $2.2 billion. Free cash flow has been going down each of the last four quarters, and so has the total value of goods traded over the auction and e-commerce site. eBay is leaning much more heavily these days on merchant-dominated categories like autos than on auctions between ordinary people.

Even PayPal’s revenues were flat in the quarter at $597 million. Maybe the $945 million acquisition of Bill Me Later will help reignite growth. Its classifieds business (Kijiji) brought in a respectable $250 million in revenues.

Another eBay business that is holding its own, surprisingly, is Skype. Revenues for the third quarter were $143 million. Although its growth rate is slowing, at least it is still growing, both on an annual (46 percent) and sequential quarterly (5 percent) basis. Its total registered users grew 51 percent to 370 million, and those people used up 16 billion minutes of talk time.

The annual growth rate of those minutes ((63 percent) is actually accelerating compared to the preceding quarters. And, most important of all, the number of minutes people actually pay for (2.2 billion Skype Out minutes) is also experiencing accelerating growth (54 percent).

Unfortunately, at only ten percent of eBay’s total revenues, Skype is still too small to counteract its overall decline. Maybe they can still sell it.

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Source: TechCrunch
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Sad, sad economic news: Mother’s Cookies has shut down. Mother’s produced Iced Oatmeal cookies, Mini Chocolate Chip cookies, and the grand old favorite of many, the Iced Circus Animal cookies.

The iconic company started out as a one-man shop in Oakland, CA, by a newspaper vendor from San Francisco. As Foodlocker puts it, ”…He toiled all night baking cookies in a three square foot oven with a nightly capacity of about 2000 cookies or 150 boxes. These sold for $1 a box and his vanilla cookies were an overnight success.”

The success unfortunately could only weather 92 more years, and just last week Mother’s closed after seeking bankruptcy protection during these tumultuous times.

This isn’t some behemoth of an investment firm folding, its CEOs running off with arms full of millions. This isn’t a mismanaged bank selling themselves to some other giant bank. There was no bailout plan for this piece of American history.

I am sad. I am craving Circus Animal cookies, the pink and white frosting and rainbow sprinkles reminding me of much better, much happier times. I can’t buy them anymore.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1314-goodbye-mothers

Automattic, the company behind WordPress, has acquired Irish startup Polldaddy for undisclosed sum. The purchase gives WordPress an infusion of polling technology and seems to be justified simply on the basis that bloggers love polls (we use PollDaddy here at TechCrunch for many of our posts).

There appears to be a plugin rollup strategy of sorts underway at the highly decentralized blogging startup, one that will result in the absorption of features into the WordPress codebase that are currently provided through extensions. Automattic recently purchased Intense Debate, a small TechStars startup working on an advanced commenting platform. Further back, it also acquired Buddy Press, a project for layering social networking features onto WordPress, in March and Gravatar, a universal avatar system, last Fall.

Like Intense Debate, Polldaddy doesn’t offer its technology to WordPress publishers alone - and it doesn’t plan to phase out its support for other platforms post-acquisition. But we can expect both companies’ efforts to be driven primarily towards improving WordPress - both the open source version offered at WordPress.org, but even more importantly the hosted version at WordPress.com (with which Automattic can actually make money).

Given the economic concerns that many startups (domestic and global) have in these volatile times, I’m sure that both PollDaddy and Intense Debate are happy to have found a home within a larger and better funded startup. The fact that PollDaddy is based in Ireland shouldn’t have much impact on Automattic’s corporate structure. As CEO Toni Schneider explained at a recent Startup2Startup event, Automattic has no central office and all its employees work remotely from home, only to meet up a couple times per year as a company.

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This is the week of the plugin. First we had the launch of Silverlight 2, and then, quickly on the back of that we get Adobe Flash 10 at the same time as the entire Creative Suite 4 (which has great Flash authoring tools of course).

One of the security features in Flash 10 is the requirement for the user to act on a Flash movie to be able to access certain APIs. This has caused some Flash upload components to break (ones that use a hidden Flash movie, such as SWFUpload Flickrs FancyUpoad). The solution is quite simple, you need to make the button that launches the upload a Flash control itself (versus an HTML button for example).

Harald Kirschner has jumped on it and created a FancyUpload for Flash 10.

You can check out the showcase and do a view source to see that the link is not a link

What else is in Flash 10? Here are the top features that Adobe mentions:

3D effects

Create more intuitive, engaging interfaces using built-in support for 3D effects. Get started quickly without being a 3D master by designing in 2D and easily transforming and animating in 3D. Fast, extremely lightweight, and simple-to-use APIs, along with 3D tools in Adobe® Flash® CS4 Professional software, make motion that was previously accessible only to expert users via ActionScript® language or custom third-party libraries available to everyone.

Custom filters and effects

Create high-performance, real-time effects for cinematic experiences that quickly engage users. With new Adobe Pixel Bender™, the same technology behind many filters and effects in Adobe After Effects® software, these dynamic and interactive effects can be used both in production with After Effects CS4 and live with Flash Player 10. The Pixel Bender just-in- time (JIT) compiler can also be used to process other types of data, such as sound or mathematical functions, asynchronously in a separate thread.

Advanced text support

Take advantage of a new, flexible text layout engine that brings print-quality publishing to the web, building on more than 25 years of Adobe expertise in typography. Gain more control over text layout using an extensible library of ActionScript 3.0 text components to flow text and sophisticated typographic elements such as ligatures across multiple columns, around inline images, bidirectionally, vertically, or chained together. Create multilingual rich Internet applications (RIAs) using device fonts that can now be anti-aliased, rotated, and styled, or build your own unique text components.

Dynamic sound generation

Use enhanced sound APIs to dynamically generate audio and create new types of audio applications such as music mixers and sequencers, real-time audio for games, and even audio visualizers. Work with loaded MP3 audio at a lower level by extracting audio data and supplying it to the sound buffer. Process, filter, and mix audio in real time through the Pixel Bender JIT compiler to extend creative freedom beyond the visual experience.

Drawing API

Perform runtime drawing more easily with restyleable properties, 3D APIs, and a new way of drawing sophisticated shapes without having to code them line by line. Developers can tweak parts of curves, change styling, replace parts, and use custom filters and effects, delivering improved throughput, creative control, and greater productivity. Enhancements to the Drawing API add the z dimension, real perspective, textured meshes in 3D space, a retained graphics model, read/write rendering, and triangle drawing with UV coordinates, while adding memory and improving performance.

Hardware acceleration

Use the hardware processing power of the graphics card to paint SWF files into the browser and accelerate compositing calculations of bitmaps, filters, blend modes, and video overlays faster than would be performed in software.

Vector data type

Use the new typed array class for better performance, efficiency, and error checking of data.

Dynamic Streaming

Show exceptional video with streams that automatically adjust to changing network conditions. Leverage new quality-of-service metrics to provide a better streaming experience.

Speex audio codec

Take advantage of the new, high-fidelity and open source Speex voice codec, which offers a low-latency alternative for voice encoding. Flash Player also supports ADPCM, HE-AAC, MP3, and Nellymoser audio.

File upload and download APIs

Bring users into the experience by letting them load and save files from your web application. New file reference runtime access allows local processing of data without roundtripping to the server.

Source: Ajaxian » Front Page
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/421961005/fancyupload-for-flash-10

Ignighter, the group dating site that is part of the TechStars class of 2008, has closed a $1.2 million angel funding round. CEO Adam Sachs says that the money will be used to expand its team (particularly its development staff), and will also be used for a marketing push to increase awareness.

Ignighter allows small groups of friends to collaborate on a group profile, where they can include photos and specify their interests. The site then presents a list of possible matches with other groups and helps them arrage get-togethers in the real world. The group environment helps avoid the awkward 1-on-1 situations that result from tradional dating sites like Match, and there’s less pressure - if you don’t hit it off with anyone, you can still have a good time hanging out with your buddies.

The site made its debut at the TechStars demo day in August with an estimated 10,000 users, and has since grown to 15,000 registered members. TechStars is a seed-stage investment fund that is comparable to Y Combinator and DreamIt Ventures.

The dating space is very crowded with some very well established players, but popularity has recently been shifting away from traditional sites towards alternatives, which Ignighter may be able to capitalize on. Also see Mixtt, a similar group dating site that launched at TechCrunch50.

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