Ajax Blog

Finally - users will be able to see music videos on YouTube.

Ok, well, now at least it’s more legal. EMI Music just announced they have reached terms with Google’s YouTube both to distribute music videos from EMI artists on YouTube and to enable consumers to leverage the EMI music library in their own YouTube video creations.

Eric Nicoli, CEO of EMI Group, said the deal “meets EMI’s objectives to offer consumers the best possible entertainment experiences, to create new ways to connect our artists to fans and to enter into innovative business models that will generate revenues for our business and our creators.”

EMI will use YouTube’s content identification and reporting system to track and monetize its content and compensate artists. The tools also give EMI Music the ability to request the removal of EMI’s copyrighted content from YouTube.

Google has now secured music-license rights with the world’s four largest music labels: Warner Music Group, Universal Music Group, Sony BMG Music Entertainment and EMI Group.

In April EMI announced a deal with Apple to start selling its artist content without copyright protection on iTunes.

Of course, just about every music video you care to see is already on YouTube. There’s even a search engine that only indexes YouTube music videos, almost all of which are posted in violation of copyright laws.

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/~3/121184662/

Lumosity is a brain fitness program from Lumos Labs which is designed to improve cognitive function through a series of web-based games and exercises.

In developing Lumosity, Lumos Labs worked closely with leading neuroscientists from Stanford and UCSF to design and experimentally test the program. In a randomized, controlled study, the exercises were shown to have statistically significant effects in improving memory and attention.

Brain games are wildly popular in Japan and Europe, the Ninentendo DS Brain Age has sold millions of copies. The delivery of similar functionality online is the logical next step and although they might not be the most engaging games, that’s not the goal here.

Details of the research and methodology behind Lumosity can be viewd here.

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/~3/121185550/

The same team that created a site on Yahoo about war zones is behind the new People of the Web, a Yahoo property that covers people doing interesting things online. It was announced on the Yahoo corporate blog. An introductory video is above.

Stories include text and video elements and allows reader comments. They’ve also integrated MyBlogLog into the site. Example: here’s a story called “Brokeback Hill” about some guy that is “outing” secretly gay politicians.

The site is intersting, but Yahoo’s forays into content creation continue to baffle me. They should get serious about it, or drop the effort.

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/~3/121182098/

Ajax developers are used to wringing a lot of functionality out of a limited and generally closed platform. Thanks to many pioneers, we’ve been able to do really rich UIs in HTML for a few years now. But going off-line has always been Really Tough.

Adobe’s Apollo project has been ahead of the game in show-casing how a traditionally on-line only medium, Flash, can make the leap to the desktop and work off-line.

Dojo Offline was the first really big attempt at delivering a solution that gives off-line to browser platform in a generalized way. But of course, before that really had a chance to spread its wings, along comes Google Gears, which also aligns with Dojo Offline and Apollo.

We’re proud to announced that Kevin Lynch, Adobe’s Chief Software Architect, will be speaking at the Ajax Experience West in July, giving an update on Apollo, Gears integration, and more. We’ll also have Brendan Eich, Mozilla’s CTO, and Chris Wilson, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer architect, and keynoting at the show to deliver their perspectives on off-line, and much more.

Brad Neuberg, the creator of Dojo Offline Toolkit, will be delivering a technical session at the show to dive deep on Dojo Offline. Google Gears was just announced, but we’re trying to get a session Gears too; stay tuned.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/ajax-experience-keynotes-announced-off-line-ajax

This guest post is written by David Sacks, the founder and CEO of new startup Geni. Previously, he was COO of PayPal. He also produced the movie “Thank You For Smoking.”

For the last several years, Yahoo, MSN and AOL have all suffered a declining share of pageviews, but that does not mean the portal is going out of style. Rather it has been redefined, first by Google, and now by Facebook in potentially even more profound ways.

The core question a portal needs to answer for a user is “How do I find the information I need?”

In the early days of the web, the answer was browsing, which made sense when there were a limited number of useful sites. (Remember when it was a big deal for Yahoo to put the “New!” or “Recommended” icon next to a website’s name in their directory?) But as the number of websites became infinite, search replaced browsing as the dominant paradigm for finding new sites, and Yahoo’s failure to keep up in this area allowed Google to take the lead.

Google has continued to leverage its lead in search to become a full-fledged portal. Once users have found what they are looking for, Google makes it easy, through their iGoogle product, to subscribe to that content through alerts, RSS feeds, or a huge selection of widgets, all of which are compacting more useful information onto fewer start pages than ever before. As a result, iGoogle has become Google’s fastest-growing product. But iGoogle has a serious limitation: it doesn’t involve sharing; each user has to make an individual investment in set-up and can’t benefit from the work of others. It’s not really a Web 2.0 product.

Facebook has a new answer to the portal question. The “social graph,” or your network of relationships, will push information to you. You’ll learn from your friends. Thanks to Facebook’s new developer platform, the types of information being disseminated now include not just news, photos, events, and groups but also music, videos, books, movies, causes, political campaigns — and the list is rapidly growing into almost every conceivable category.

The advantage of this approach is that it makes it relatively effortless for users to access a world of information that is both increasingly comprehensive and personal to them. Even if all this information were available through search (and it’s not), search actually requires work; the user must know what they’re looking for and type it in. Then they must parse the results to determine which are valuable, labor which is not shared and reused by others. By contrast, Facebook requires no work once your network is set up. Your friends push information to you that is likely to be useful, and if not you can tune your preferences until it is. Facebook promises a kind of Socratic knowledge: it tells users things they didn’t even think to ask.

While the process of structuring new kinds of information for the social graph to distribute is still sorting itself out, it is easy to object to the frivolity of information on Facebook. For example, Facebook is great at telling me what my friends just had for lunch, but how about hard news? Well, for starters, I’m waiting for the Digg application to not only display articles I’ve digged on my profile, but also to aggregate all the articles dugg by my friends. This could lead to the kind of social news site that MySpace promised but failed to deliver.

Not only Digg, but virtually all Web 2.0 applications which are based on the wisdom of crowds can be reconceived as Facebook apps based on the wisdom (or trust) of friends. To the extent that these services cater to publishers who seek a mass audience, such as YouTube or Flickr, the social graph will not threaten their business. But to the extent they publish content intended for friends, or if the value of their service increases with the participation of friends, these applications face only two choices: get each user to recreate his or her friendship network on their own site or migrate their service to the Facebook platform lest someone else does it first.

The potential for Facebook to layer on any feature whose value increases with the participation of friends is an incredibly broad canvas for a portal. Moreover, as each new application gains acceptance, it enriches the overall value of the network and makes it incrementally more likely that the next application will be tried. Much of what we know as “Web 2.0″ will eventually be rebuilt on top of Facebook.

To be clear, the social graph will not replace search, in the same way that search did not replace browsing. And search may still be more easily monetized than the social graph. Still, as a basis for a portal, neither Google nor Yahoo has anything nearly as cohesive holding its properties together. Google can layer on any feature where search is paramount, which is hugely valuable, but as it expands beyond this core competency, it becomes increasingly hard to press its advantages into new areas. Yahoo already seems to have reached the limits of its far-flung empire, eliminating redundant operations such as Yahoo Photos.

In my view this is a misdiagnosis of what ails Yahoo. The problem is not too much peanut butter (i.e. that it’s spread too thinly). The problem is the bread at the core. Browsing plus second-tier search is not sturdy enough to hold everything together. The new portals are defined by the quality of their bread, not their peanut butter.

Yahoo was right to focus on an acquisition of Facebook but not for the reason it thinks. In its view of the world, Facebook is just another media property, a particularly fast-growing and sticky one to be sure, but ultimately just more peanut butter. In reality, Facebook’s social graph could have provided the bread to connect Yahoo’s far-flung empire.

But what would be in such a deal for Facebook? They will have their own empire soon enough.

Find out more about Geni at the Techcrunch Database.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/121140079/

We can get greater quantities of every other resource we need, except time. [Peter] Drucker reports that executives spend their time much differently than they think they do and much differently than they would like to. His solution is to begin by measuring how you spend your time, and compare it with an ideal allocation. Than begin to systematically get rid of the unimportant in favor of the important. His suggestions include stopping some things, delegation, creating policy decisions to replace ad hoc decisions, staying out of things that others should do, and so forth…One of the best points is to give yourself large blocks of uninterrupted time to do more significant tasks…

Drucker argues that we should focus on what will make a difference rather than unimportant questions. Otherwise, we will fill our time with motion rather than proceeding towards results.

From A review of The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done by Drucker.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/421-time-is-the-one-truly-limited-resource

XM Packaging process
From: Ed Illig

Over time I’ve noted you guys enjoy works that incorporate handcraft, process and technology. With that in mind I kept thinking this post may interest you for Signal vs. Noise — from our .think blog on an XM package development process:

XM Satellite Radio: A Packaging Process Overview

This article, an insight into the design of a consumer package for satellite radio provider XM, includes many aspects of a typical package development process. In the interest of time, we’ll skip research, diagnostic and technical methodology phases and concentrate on the basic iterative process steps in this article.

Husbandry vs. parenting
From: Mark Barry

Thought this blog post about using lessons from animal husbandry in everyday parenting can in a lot of ways also be applied to software design. Check it.

What I knew about animals was actually quite applicable, and so I began to rethink the adventure as not so much “mentorship of a child” as “husbandry of an animal.” Here’s what I gleaned from my years at the animal hospital that was really useful.

“SANS Top Three Programming Errors”
From: Joseph Mako III

SANS.org, the people who maintain isc.sans.org, the Internet Storm Center, have started an institute for secure code. The .pdf provided at www.sans-ssi.org titled “SANS Top Three Programming Errors” (PDF) is a great read.
Jitterbug Phones
From: Jean Moniatte

Saw an ad in the Smithsonian for Jitterbug phones that you might like:

It does not play games, take pictures, or give you the weather. Introducing the Jitterbug. Simply designed to be the best telephone a cell phone can be. Nothing more and nothing less.

Quick prototyping quote from IDEO
From: Dhrumil Purohit

“One of my buddies always says never go to a meeting without a prototype, and he always wins.”
-David Kelley, founder of IDEO

Text transcript or MP3 link.

Iconic technology
From: Ernest Kim

Objects of Desire: Famous industrial designers talk about iconic pieces of technology

It’s amazing how beautiful both the original Polaroid Camera and Sony Walkman are. And here’s a great quote from John Maeda on mobile phones (his pick for an object of desire is the original Motorola cell phone):

“I have a collection of old Motorola phones,” says Maeda. “I like looking at these things. But I don’t miss them, because they’re large and clunky. You look at old TV shows and they pull out these shoe-size things. They make a better phone, because they’re just phones. Now phones are GPS and Web enabled with a heart-monitoring system just in case. I keep old cell phones on my windowsill to look at. I should probably throw them away.”

Got an interesting link, story, or screenshot for Signal vs. Noise? Contact svn [at] 37signals [dot] com.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/412-mailbag-xm-jitterbug-ideo-iconic-technology-etc

I first wrote about Israeli widget site Gizmoz in December 2006. At the time, the company hadn’t launched its product to create personalized widgets using users’ pictures and voice, but they had a working demo. Today, the product launches for everyone to use. Gizmoz is also announcing a $6.3 million Series A funding round from Benchmark Capital and Columbia Capital and distribution partnerships with RockYou and Freewebs.

These are animated, talking, 3D images that can be embedded on any website. When compared to what Sitepal and others are doing on the avatar side of things, or Snapvine in the voice recording space, it really shines (see, however, Sitepal’s comment in our previous post for a different viewpoint).

Creating a Gizmoz takes about a minute and requires a single photo of the subject. Gizmoz renders a 3D image of the photo. Users then customize it by adding hair, body, accessories, clothes, etc., and can also distort the face in a number of ways. When you add your voice, via a microphone or by typing in text that is converted to audio. the avatar adds facial expressions, eye blinks, breathing and lip syncs to the voice. Here’s an example using my photo:

The key uses for the product will be to create a welcome clip like the one above, or to create a welcome “voicemail” service where people visiting your site can leave audio messages (like Snapvine).

Gizmoz is built on the Flash platform; however, like Flektor, which was recently acquired by MySpace, all of the code was developed in-house by CEO Eyal Gever and his team over the last four years. That will make it an even more attractive acquisition target for MySpace and others.

The company has also created a cool personalized demo showcasing the announcement:

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/121073560/

I couldn't resist taking RSS Bling, and adding modern offline support to it (instead of HTA/Mozilla specific support from 2+ years ago).

I tackled a very narrow problem. Instead of grabbing feed and post data directly from an online store, I changed the code to:

• Display the feeds and posts, pulling them from the local database (Using the embedded SQLLite DB)
• Try to get updated feeds and posts, and if they are available (e.g. you are online), place them right into the offline store
• Repaint.

This simplified model takes out the complicated syncing piece (and since this is a simple read-only reader, that is quite OK!). There is no checking to see if you are online or offline. There is no visual queue for telling you that (which is a good thing IMO). It should just work.

There are times where you do need to change the UI though of course. It would be nice to say "hey, don't close the laptop quite yet, I am still downloading all of these feeds so you can read them on the plane".

For a real offline feed reader, you can use the new Google Reader that runs on Google Gears.

The work is all done in offline.js, and it has a couple of different sections.

The fun piece is the Google Gears work to setup and play with the database.

E.g.

This has only scratched the surface. I need to integrate the Resource pieces, come up with a problem that would benefit from the WorkerPool, and play.

I can't wait to see what you all come up with. There is a lot of room to do interesting offline apps, and build libraries on top of Google Gears.

Their approach hasn't been to boil the ocean of offline, but rather to give us developers a little bit to work with and then we can go to town. The recent model for this is XHR itself. It isn't the best interface, but it is a nice low-level piece of functionality that we can then riff on top of.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/rss-bling-goes-offline-with-google-gears

Google has announced some big news for Ajax developers at Google Developer Day. The announcement is Google Gears, an open source runtime to allow you to build Offline Web applications.

Some may think "hmm, what about Dojo Offline?" The great news is that the Dojo crew were in the loop wrt this project, and Brad has ported Dojo Offline to use Google Gears as the base platform.

This is fantastic news, as it means that Dojo and Google are working together, instead of fragmenting. The end result is that the open Web will end up with a much better offline solution.

We interviewed Brad Neuberg, who is working on Dojo Offline thanks to SitePen.

The discussion was a lot of fun, and covered Brad's thoughts on the offline problem, and how Google Gears and Dojo Offline fit together.

I can't wait to see what the community comes up with, especially to solve the tough syncing problems.

Without further ado, listen to the interview.

ps. I apologize for the un-produced feel of this podcast. We got to do the interview at the last minute, and wanted to get the content out there for you in a timely manner.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/audible-ajax-episode-21-dojo-offline-on-google-gears