Ajax Blog

Seriosity has a solution for over-crowded email inboxes. If you want someone’s attention, you’ll be paying for it.

The company’s hook is that they’ve studied World of Warcraft and other multi-player games and believe they’ve found the right way to get people’s attention - virtual currency. You attach a payment to an email, called a Serio, which is transferred to the recipient. The recipient is able to determine how important an email is based on the size of the payment. When an inbox is overcrowded, presumably the reader will sort through to the higher paying emails.

This strongly reminds me of beenz, a Web 1.0 currency that would be handed out for doing various things, like visiting web sites, that users otherwise wouldn’t be bothered to do. The company fell apart just after the Nasdaq tanked earlier this millennium.

What isn’t clear is what people can do with the currency other than send emails. Let me convert this into cash or frequent flyer miles or something else, and I’m in (beenz did this). Otherwise, what’s the point, other than to amass a stunningly large number of Serio and then spend it on…sending emails.

The company, founded in 2004, is based in Palo Alto and is using $6 million in venture capital to feed 27 hungry employees. See CNET for 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/~3/97449251/

There were a bunch of product demos today at Adobe’s Engage event, but there were a few that stood out and should have a big impact on the startup world. They also happened to be some of the best demos of the day.

Virtual Ubiquity - Rick Treitman demoed their word processor application, BuzzWord, which was built entirely in Flex 2 and looks like it could be a direct competitor to Google Docs. The team focused heavily on making sure pagination and typeography were first class, something Flash has been bad at. They’ve created a great UI around the document workflow and have features like ruler tooltips when embedding assets that help people work with their documents. They are focusing on the collaborative document space so that users can be designated as reviewers, read-only, or actual authors and discuss the document. They are aiming for a public beta later this summer.

Scrybe - Faizan Budar presented Scrybe and showed the features that were in the video that generated so much buzz. He demoed all three major features live and made a point of saying that everything in the video is now working in the application. He showed off the calendar portion of the application, which has a great UI, the “PaperVision” which allows you to print your information into special pocket size chunks, and the option to save content to your Scrybe account from any website. The user interface is clean, useful, and it all works offline. They’ve opened up the beta to a limited number of people and hope to open it up to the general public after their next round of features are complete.

yourminis - Alex Bard, the CEO of Goowy Media , demoed what yourminis is working on. A lot of it has been covered by TechCrunch, but they really dug into Apollo and the API that they plan to release next week. With Apollo, they are building out a widget platform that will touch the web, embeddable properties, and the desktop. Alex took a yourmini widget and dragged it to the desktop straight from the browser which made for a poweful demo. Their API is going to enable developers to create their own widgets on the yourminis platform. They built a Twitter widget using the API that is great, so I think content providers are going to be excited about the freedom that the API allows.

Intelisea - One application that didn’t fall into the category of web startup but demonstrated how far the Flash application has come was an app from Intelisea. The application, built in Flex 2, is the front end for controlling a yacht. It runs on a touch screen interface and allows the user to look at engine stats, fuel levels, weather and GPS coordinates. There’s also a security feature that uses RFID tags to track the people on the boat and sounds an alarm when someone falls overboard. It displays a red dot on a schematic of the ship to indicate where the person fell off. It’s something that will never be seen on Web 2.0, but makes for a fun story when it comes to the Flash Platform.

Engage did a good job of showing how diverse the Flash platform is. There were a lot of great questions about the role Adobe needs to play in the design community and what makes web apps better (it’s not gratuitous animation or UI). And there are a lot of interesting startups using the Flash platform. Luckily we got a look at some of those today.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/97428397/

François Zaninotto has been talking about a new Unobtrusive JavaScript Plug-In for symfony.

Simple Example

How it is generated

this becomes...

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/symfony-unobtrusive-javascript-plug-in

So far we’ve talked about the big picture, permissions and groups, and the welcome and workspace tabs. Next we’re going to talk about adding people to Highrise.

Adding people manually
Speed is king. We’ve taken speed into consideration every step of the way in Highrise. And there’s more to speed than just page load. Speed also involves thinking about what information you ask for and when you ask for it. It goes beyond just required and optional fields. It’s about presentation.

The add a person page just asks for a few key data points. First name, last name, title, and company (and only first name is required). You can add contact information (phone, email, IM, address, etc.) now or later. You can also set permissions now or later.

Adding people with vCards
Adding people manually is great for one-offs or someone you just met or a lead that just called on the phone. But sometimes you already have people’s contact information elsewhere. Sometimes you have a lot of people to get into Highrise quickly. Enter vCards.

With Highrise you can upload a vCard to create people or augment an existing person quickly. Highrise can also accept a single vCard with multiple people. For example, the Apple Address Book allows you to export all your contacts into a single vCard. Highrise can read that card and import all those people at once.Adding people from Basecamp
Got a Basecamp account? If yes, you can pull over all the people you’ve already added to your Basecamp account right into Highrise. And everyone part of the main company in Basecamp will also have their username and password carried over from Basecamp so they can log right into Highrise without having to set up another account.

The mystery way
There’s one more way to get new people into Highrise. We’ll be covering it in a future preview post.

Merging duplicates
It happens. You enter the same person twice or import someone that already exists or someone else adds someone without checking to see if that person is already in Highrise.

If you want to merge duplicates in Highrise, just go to the person you want to “lose” the merge. Then you click the “Merge” link. Then you see a screen like this:

Step 1 explains the rules. Step 2 shows you exact name matches. Step 2 also allows you to search for someone else that may not be an exact name match, but is the same person. Step 3 merges the winner and the loser into a single winner. Any contact information the loser had that the winner doesn’t have will be carried over to the winner. It’s simple and works beautifully.

Sign up to have a chance at a Golden Ticket
As we get closer to launch we’ll begin issuing “golden tickets.” Golden ticket holders will have access to sign-up for Highrise prior to the public launch. To sign up for a chance at a golden ticket, be sure to sign up for the Highrise announcement list.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/297-preview-4-adding-people-to-highrise-and-dealing-with-duplicates

Gabi S. in what appears to be her first blog post has already started off with a bang. In tutorial form she shows how to integrate GWT with Spring.

To integrate [the GWT application] with Spring we only have to register our GWT servlet in our web.xml so we can simply use Spring’s ServletForwardingController to call services by name. We also have to modify a bit our GWT client to reflect a path change we have to do…The ServletWrappingController [defined in the Spring application context] controls the RemoteServiceServlet’s lifecycle completely, emulating the servlet-container.

So once you have instantiated your GWT services with Spring, you are free to use all of that good stuff, like inversion of control (IoC), aspect oriented programming (AOP), etc. For those wanting a quick overview of Spring, the “swiss army chainsaw of Java and .NET frameworks,” have a look here.

Note: we are using Spring on the server side here, not the client side. For IoC in the browser, see the earlier post on JDA.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/gwt-spring-integration-demistified

Alphabet 26 combines the “best” upper and lowercase letters into an alphabet using only 26 symbols.

The impetus for Alphabet 26 was provided in 1949 as he watched his young son labor over his first reader. As he watched, he made a discovery. His son was able to read the first sentence, “Run Pal,” but stumbled over the second sentence “See him run”. Obviously the boy was confused because the symbol R in the first sentence became a totally different symbol ‘r’ for the same sound in the second sentence. Results: Learning to read is that much more difficult. The act of reading is that much slower…A graphic symbol, or for that matter any trademark worth its salt, to be efficient, should be constant.”

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/284-redesigned-alphabet

Nikola Kocic has created Spellify, a AJAX driven web application which uses the Google spell checker to automatically spell check and display spelling suggestions after the user stops typing. The site was launched back in November 2006 and is currently in Beta. It also supports several languages and can spell check any pasted or typed text.

With spell checking showing up in browsers, the OS, in plugins, and ajax libraries and services like this, it will be interesting to see how things work together.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/spellify-automatic-spell-checker

James Wiltshire and his team at ATG have created and released a JSP tag library that is used to render JSON data from within JSP code. They use JSON as our data format of choice for
all AJAX applications being written at ATG, and they use this library
extensively to render the JSON.

This allows JSON data rendering JSPs to sit alongside existing HTML
rendering JSPs as part of the view layer when using any of the various
Java MVC frameworks (Struts, WebWork, Spring MVC, et al).

The libray has been released under an Apache License v2.0 on SourceForge.

Example

becomes:

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/open-source-json-tag-library-released

Later today music social network iLike will report that they’ve reached half a million registered users in the first four months since launching. What won’t be disclosed, but I’m hearing from insiders, is that around 20,000 new users are joining daily.

The company, along with MOG, will present at the Digital Music Forum East conference in New York tomorrow. Together the two companies are America’s best answer to the Last.fm viral machine, which sees 15 million unique visitors per month and dominates the social music space. Last.fm is headquartered in London.

The backbone of all three companies (iLike, MOG and Last.fm) is the gathering of meta data on users listening habits - all three have software that monitors what users listen to - and then integrating that data into their respective social networks. When I met with the Last.fm executive team last week in London, they told me they’ve collected over 500 million pieces of user data to date, which they call “scrobbels” (they are gathering something like 175 new scrobbels per second). Last.fm is the MySpace of the music based social networks.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/97237184/

After developing their product on their own for six months, New York based Outside.in received financing from angels and three venture firms: Union Square Ventures, Milestone Venture Partners, and Village Ventures. Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures discusses the financing here.

Outside.in aims to aggregate posts from local bloggers (placebloggers) into one tagged and searchable directory. According to Fred Wilson, they hope to do for blogging, what Google local search has done for the web. Sites like Yelp, InsiderPages, and Smalltown are also building local communities, but based around reviews, with discussions and blogs playing a supporting role. An example of the directory in action: the latest blog posts for Palo Alto, CA. Each post is given context by presenting the user with a map of the location the post is coded to, and other blogs in the area with similar tags.

A blog’s whole feed is added to a local blogroll by user submission, but not all bloggers blog only about their local town. For blogs that occasionally write about an area, Outside.in has a bookmarklet for users to suggest individual stories, and a “Feedburner flare” option that adds a “geotag this” option to the bottom of your posts.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/96979077/