Ajax Blog

Soonr, the company that lets you access desktop files and Skype from your mobile phone, has released a version for the Mac. Mike profiled Soonr in May and the lack of Mac support was his one complaint. The new version is integrated with Spotlight and can render Photoshop files from your desktop into jpg for viewing on your phone. Looks cool.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch?m=1013

A few interesting comments posted this week at Signal vs. Noise:

Edward Hall: The perfect group size = 8-12

Daniel 28 Jun 06
The statistics showed that testing with 8 subjects will indentify 90% of the problems a given interface can have. More people, and the rate at which problems are identified will only asymptotically approach 100%.

Dean Brooks 28 Jun 06
1. Group output tends in many situations to fall logarithmically with group size. Each doubling of group size reduces average output by 20 percent on average. 2. Up to a certain point, groups of odd-numbered sizes tend to have a wider range of outcomes than groups of even size…

As I said, my focus has been on historical and military problems. However, I did turn up one interesting business example: companies that make the INC 500 (a list selected for extraordinary five-year growth rates) tend disproportionately to be founded with 3 or 5 employees, rather than 4 or 6. Obviously, as they hire additional people, the group size changes — but the inference would be that they stand a better chance of making big early gains or establishing a really strong business plan with a group of 3 or 5.

Growing in vs. growing out

Scott M 28 Jun 06
“Make sure you make it easy for new people to get in. ” Another way to state your advice is to favor high growth over high margin. There are two ways to make money - with long sales cycles of high margin items to a few customers or short sales cycles of low margin items to many customers. Small software companies will find the best chances of success with the later approach. When you are small, there is simply much more opportunity for revenue increase through growth than incremental product margins and high margin activities bring a risk level (a couple big customers can make or break you) and costs (long sales cycles, higher support costs) that most small, growing companies should avoid.

Josh Williams 28 Jun 06
This is so very true. We occasionally get asked if Blinksale will grow with a business as they add more employees and salespeople. As in say, over 100 employees. And the answer is no. We built Blinksale to service smaller companies. If I had 100 employees I wouldn’t be using Blinksale. This isn’t a knock on our own software. It was simply not intended to do that. And the nice thing is that somewhere, out there, someone is making invoicing software for larger companies. It may be ugly and hard to use, but someone is making it. Just not us. And that’s okay. For every person that outgrows Blinksale, we add plenty for whom Blinksale is just right.

Phil 28 Jun 06
Why can’t something be simple but offer more for bigger companies as well? I agree with your philosophy of keeping Basecamp the way it is, but why not create another product (“Summit”) that does the more advanced things in a simple clean way? Then not only would you continue to sell to the same audience basecamp appeals to, but also sell to people who need more in the first place, and those who grew out? Software is not like a pair of jeans, for many people it requires training and getting used to the way something works (even when its simple) and it’s a pain to simple grow out of it and move on to something completely different. We love your products and are throwing the money at you, why not build it for us? :)

Liz Fraley 28 Jun 06
In many ways, I agree with Dan Bricklin: There’s no reason that software cannot last 200 years http://www.bricklin.com/200yearsoftware.htm

John Critz 29 Jun 06
The problem with the “it’s just a simple little feature, why can’t you add it” perspective is that you’re not thinking about the hundreds of other feature requests people have for the way they do business. Sure it’s probably a valid request and would save you some time, but only you and maybe a handful of others. So it’s usually not worth the development time or cluttering of the app. for a handful of people to benefit from it.

Reality vs. drawings and words

Mark 29 Jun 06
Far too many times, especially with home builders, clients are taken to a “design center” to look at swatches and samples of carpeting, paint, bricks, tile, marble…to have installed in their own homes. The problem is, there is an insant disconnect between what the customer sees and agrees to, and how it comes out in reality. The spaces aren’t the same, the play of light and shadows on the materials is different, the sunlight bouncing off the material is different than the fluorescents of the design center.

Chris 29 Jun 06
Another great facility used to help reduce the cycle for the client to understand something is quick builds. We deploy to the target environment on a nightly basis so that our client can get her hands on the latest and greatest of “what she knows”, which is the application. Instead of saying hey isn’t this great, you’ll see it in a month or so you see it the next day. Again, if there are issues or the client doesn’t like the way something feels, we know right away.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/the_filter_week_of_june_30_.php

It’s no mystery that we’re meeting averse, but here’s another reason why we think meetings are toxic: There’s no such thing as the one-hour meeting.

If you’re going to schedule a meeting that lasts one hour and invite 10 people to attend then it’s a ten-hour meeting, not a one-hour meeting. You are trading 10 hours of productivity for one hour of meeting time. And it’s probably more like 15 hours since there are mental switching costs associated with stopping what you’re doing, going somewhere else to do something else, and then resuming what you were doing before.

Is it ever OK to trade 10-15 hours of productivity for one hour of meeting? Sometimes, sure, but it’s a heavy cost. Meetings are expensive when you think about the opportunity cost. On a pure cost basis, meetings can quickly become liabilities, not assets. So when you schedule that one-hour meeting for 10 people think about the 10-15 hours lost. Is it still worth it?

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/theres_no_such_thing_as_the_onehour_meeting.php

Ted Murphy, CEO of advertising firm Mindcomet, has launched a new service called PayPerPost.com. You guessed, it’s a marketplace for companies to connect with bloggers who are willing to blog about a product - for a price. The companies can set guidelines for their requests such as whether a picture must be included and whether they will only pay for positive blog coverage. There does not appear to be any requirement that the payment for coverage be disclosed. There is a requirement that PayPerPost.com must approve your post before you are paid. Wow.

TechCrunch does not accept payment for posts.

Is this a bad joke designed to torpedo the blogosphere’s credibility in general? It doesn’t appear to be. If we’re all trying to negotiate a space between Hollywood and mainstream journalism, this is taking things way too far towards the most insipid parts of Hollywood.

Clearly comfortable with the “all press is good press” paradigm, Murphy is emailing bloggers with a link to scathing coverage at Business Week (”Polluting the Blogosphere“) and even includes the words “As seen in Business Week” in the company logo. Blogger Jeremiah Owyang gave us the tip on PayPerPost.com and assures us that though he has grave concerns about this, Ted Murphy is not the devil. I don’t know if I’m convinced.

If you visit the Mindcomet.com website you’ll see that they do advertising for some very high profile clients. I can imagine many of them wouldn’t want to be associated with a project like this at all. Like EarthLink. They have a major campaign underway to improve advertising by paying people to make authentic promotional materials for them. How ironic.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch?m=1012

In Olivo Barbieri’s aerial photographs, people look like ants and cities like toy models. He shoots from a helicopter using a tilt-shift lens. He says that “allows me to choose what I really like in focus: like in a written page, we don’t read [it as an] image but one line at a time.” There’s a profile of him w/ some photos at Metropolis mag’s site and more photos at the Yancey Richardson gallery site.

If you dig the effect but want a cheaper solution (tilt shift lenses are a bit pricey), here’s a hack for building your own tilt-shift lens. Or try Lensbabies, selective focus SLR camera lenses, which bring one area of a photo into sharp focus surrounded by graduated blur. Too bad there’s no hack for building your own helicopter.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/olivo_barbieris_aerial_photographs.php

Vi segnalo APIlitAx, una libreria Ajax rilasciata con licenza BSD per gestire il proprio account Google Adwords direttamente dal proprio sito sfruttando le potenti API messe a disposizione da Google. L’aspetto estetico sembra ancora un po’ primitivo e, a vedere gli screenshot l’interfaccia mi sembra decisamente caotica. Pu� trattarsi comunque di un ottimo spunto per creare il proprio sistema di gestione campagne CPC.

Technorati Tags: google adwords api, ajax showcase

Source: On Ajax
Original Article: http://www.onajax.com/apilitax-google-adwords-in-ajax/

Newsgator and Feedburner are the two most active companies in the RSS space right now. When either of these companies say anything, I pay close attention. Yesterday Newsgator founder and CTO Greg Reinacker posted something that everyone interested in the future of RSS should pay attention to - a big roadmap for the company’s near term future.

Newsgator properties (including the Mac NetNewsWire) are the second most frequently used feed readers by TechCrunch subscribers according to Mike’s post on CrunchNotes - behind FireFox. I think the company’s roadmap speaks to the future of RSS syndication in general. What are the most recent innovations at Bloglines? Folding blog search into Ask.com and supporting flash inside the reader. The Newsgator next steps discussed in Reinacker’s post blow those away. I think that these are the features and issues that we’ll see from every other vendor in this space.

Highlights discussed below include:

• recommending feeds
• niche default subscription options
• social networking/comments about feeds
• RSS everywhere - where else can it go?
• feeds and podcats by phone
• advertising, enterprise and private label possibilities.

Here’s my summary of and thoughts on the roadmap points.

• Reinacker says there are loads of features planned for the free online version of Newsgator, including: “more interactive feed discovery mechanisms (based on the larger community of users and their subscriptions)”
  Bloglines leverages its users’ subscriptions heavily to eliminate blog search spam - searching only feeds that Bloglines users have subscribed to excludes junk splog feeds. Reinacker must be alluding here to something more proactive, probably recommended feeds determined by comparing your subscriptions to overlapping subscriptions by other readers. In other words, “you subscribed to WorldChanging, many other readers subscribed to this have also subscribed to GlobalVoicesOnline.” This type of thing is already a best practice in the social bookmarking space - it’s only logical to offer the same in RSS. ShareYourOPML is does this in the geek ghetto.
• “Completely different user interface paradigms (where a user could potentially select from different options, each catering to a different kind of user)”
  That likely means describing yourself as a certain type of user and being presented with default subscription options (an OPML file) based on your interests. It will be nice for people to be able to automatically access high quality feeds from more than just a few mass media verticals. I’d love to see an international news focus, an environmental focus, a science focus - why not? Newsgator already has the best OPML support of all the major online feed reader vendors, they should leverage that.
• De-emphasizing the term RSS feed. Reinacker says most people don’t want to see the acronym. I’m sure that’s true, and I’m all about making RSS usable by as many people as possible, but talk like that always makes me worry about decreased functionality. I hope that’s not the direction the system moves in.
• Rieneker writes about changing the way people discover feeds, adding value at the point of discovery and participating in a larger ecosystem of users. That’s social networking talk and there’s no reason given Newsgator’s large enterprise user base that feeds themselves can’t be commented on, recommended, etc. Look for Newsgator to present feeds more as objects in and of themselves; objects that contain dynamically updated information but are also identified by a static URL which can be commented on and related to in a wide variety of ways.
• The recently announced Newsgator plug-in for Yahoo! Messenger is highlighted as an example of “Newsgator everywhere”. Every major vendor in the online RSS reader space has a mobile version already - beyond the browser, the desktop, the mobile device and now IM where else could a feed reader go? What does Reinacker mean when he says that there’s more Newsgator everywhere to come? I can’t think of anywhere.
• Newsgator Mobile for Windows Mobile enabled phones launched recently, but Reinacker says that all java-enabled phones will be able to use Newsgator Mobile soon. Let’s hope it doesn’t choke on a large number of feeds - like Newsgator Online has for months. Reinacker also says the company will be offering mobile audio and video podcasting soon. That will be an important test of the podcast listening by phone paradigm - expected to be big down the road.
• Reinacker says the company has made a major commitment to the Newsgator API and improved analytics. I’ll make small mention of this here, but the implications could be big in terms of third party services. It could also mean more RSS advertising, which could be good or bad for users, depending on how it is implemented.
• On the Newsgator enterprise service, a big chunk of where the company makes its money, Reinacker says “There’s so much activity going on here, I’m not sure I can even do it justice.” Since TechCrunch isn’t an enterprise focused blog I’ll just refer interested readers to the second to last paragraph of Reinacker’s post. He mentions improved portal integration, group clippings (enterprise tagging?) and very small business tools. All to be seen in Japan first, US and Europe later in the year.
• Newsgator Private Label is one of the coolest parts of the Newsgator service. Newsgator MyUSAToday and Newsgator MyNewsweek may not be super exciting themselves, but think of the potential: a hosted community feed reader seeded with feeds selected by topical expert admin. Throw in a unique feed of items tagged as editor favorites on the community’s theme and you have a powerful online portal that’s super dynamic. Stay persistent though, I called the Newsgator sales line a while ago for a price quote on this (didn’t drop any organization names) and never heard back from them. This is big money for Newsgator and unfortunately their roadmap focus exclusively on advertising and PR possibilities for the future - though PR can be a good thing.

RSS is the foundation of almost everything Web 2.0 - isn’t it? It’s what makes blog readership scalable, podcasts subscribable, wiki changes watchable and so much more. If Newsgatgor can succeed in offering the kind of innovative features this roadmap alludes to, without falling into the trap of crass commercialism, Reinacker’s vision could be deeply influential for the future of the medium.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch?m=1011

Chinese search engine Baidu, with a market cap of about $3 billion, will be launching a blogging platform on July 13. Search Enging Journal reports (but without attribution) that Cynthia He, a spokeswoman for Baidu, said in a statement: “There’s a product named Baidu Space. I can’t describe the product or give a date, except that it will be very soon and we are very excited. But we’d like to keep a little mystery for now.”

Blogging in China is tricky business to say the least. And it’s fairly competitive - Bokee, BlogCN, ChinaBlog, Sina Blog and Sohu Blog all have competitive offerings and lots of users. Nevertheless, China is a huge market (the second largest internet audience after the U.S.) and has an active blogging community. And some of the blogs are masssive.

Someday, this massive community of people writing and conversing can bring China out of the dark ages freedom-wise. The more people that blog in and about China, the better.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch?m=1010

This is just ridiculous. Three year old CouchSurfing, a beloved service used by some 90,000 members, had multiple database crashes, critical parts of the software and data were irretrievably lost, and the backups weren’t performed properly. They are not rebuilding the service. They literally put themselves out of business.

CouchSurfing allowed people to register their home and offer free accomodation to travelers. Creator Casey Fenton, sent the email below to all users of the service (I guess they didn’t lose that data at least).

Dear CouchSurfers,

Two days ago CouchSurfing experienced what could be described as the perfect storm. The database administrators we hired made two critical mistakes. First, we had a major, avoidable hard drive crash. Secondly, the incremental back-ups weren’t executed in the correct manner, and twelve of our most important data files didn’t survive.

I have been working non-stop trying to repair the data, but as difficult as it is for me to say, it has become clear that certain essential pieces are not recoverable. This crash happened at a particularly vulnerable time, in a transition between two back-up methods. If the crash had happened a week ago, or next week, we would have had a different outcome.

It is with a heavy heart that I face the truth of this situation. CouchSurfing as we knew it doesn’t exist anymore. We’ve had an amazing two and a half years.

Members write “CouchSurfing has changed my life” and I know what they mean, it has certainly changed mine and I am eternally grateful.

My vision transformed. CouchSurfing was born out of a dream I had to meet the most interesting people in world and experience their cultures, and it grew into a living, thriving family of almost a hundred thousand. This community has blossomed in beautiful ways I hadn’t even anticipated. It was no longer about what I got to experience, but rather, what genuine, heartfelt good this community can offer the world. We have all opened not only our homes, but also our hearts, our lives. In sharing important moments, deep and meaningful connections have crossed oceans, continents and cultures. I saw in CS, in you, the power to change not only they way we travel, but change the world itself. Thank you, CouchSurfers. You have shown me more than I could have even known. Your generosity and spirit is a gift to humanity.

I have devoted the last three years of my life to CouchSurfing. I have literally poured every cent I have into the site. I’ve sacrificed my health, my time, and my own ability to travel and meet people. In many ways I’ve put my life and wanderlust on hold to build this network. I’m not complaining; it’s been a fantastic ride. As devastating as it is to consider, it looks like the ride is over.

Life is continuously changing, evolving, dying and being reborn. After a fire, the earth is replenished; after a storm, the air is cleared. It feels to me like this loss of CouchSurfing is how it’s meant to be. This crash is like a sign from the universe. Too many random factors aligned to make it as damaging as it is, and though I’ve tried everything I can and engaged the best and brightest database managers, there’s just no way to get it back. In many respects it’s heartbreaking, but at the same time, what we’ve built together is not dead, it lives on in each of us. It lives in the connections we’ve fostered and the culture we’ve created. I want us all to take this CouchSurfing spirit and continue the mission out in the world. We’ve all experienced this common vision and the potential it has to transform the way people relate to each other. Now it is time for all of us to not bury the dream, but rather nurture it’s growth in our own ways, in new explorations and ventures. We all own a piece of the CouchSurfing flame, it’s up to us to keep the fire going and light the world. So let’s do it, let’s light the world! What will you do with your flame?

Goodnight, CouchSurfing. May our flames burn bright.

I love you,
Casey

If you wish to send your thoughts, encouragement or positive messages, contact us at shunyata@couchsurfing.com

CouchSurfing enters the TechCrunch DeadPool in the most absurd fashion yet. Thanks to David Weekly, creator of another company in the DeadPool (and one doing quite well), for sending this to me.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch?m=1009

The Downloadable Television space is heating up. PeerImpact, a service of New York based Wurld Media, announced today that it has signed deals with three major TV and movie studios to offer episodes of popular television programs for download through its peer-to-peer client. The company is adding titles from Twentieth Century Fox and Warner Bros. libraries to its offerings that already included shows from NBC Universal. The company highlighted The Loop, Firefly, The Dukes Of Hazzard and Babylon Five as shows that will be available. Warner Bros. made a deal earlier this week as well with Guba to provide video on demand.

Downloads will only be viewable for a 24-hour viewing period and prices will start at 99 cents per episode. The studios have framed the agreements as a step towards further delegitimizing piracy, but the DRM wrapped around the downloads make that debatable. Perhaps most important is the juxtaposition of three major media company names and phrase P2P. That will be great for legitimization of the medium.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch?m=1008