Ajax Blog

Music and movies may grab the most headlines when it comes to piracy, but many content providers on the web are also having trouble managing their images, which are easy to crop, resize, and copy. Some services, like Attributor, try to monitor and track offending images, but the ultimate solution may well lie in removing the temptation in the first place by offering cheap and easy to find legal images.

Earlier this year, GumGum launched an image licensing platform that was designed to help publishers quickly locate and license images. The site served as a content hub, offering a searchable database of images that could be licensed on a CPM basis or for free alongside an ad.

Unfortunately, every one of GumGum’s images was served as an embeddable Flash widget, which made them both clunky and annoying for publishers, as the images couldn’t be resized or modified. The use of Flash allowed GumGum to include their ads with the images, and also made it harder for people to rip them off (though you could always just take a screenshot). PicApp, a similar image search and licensing platform, uses Flash as well and suffers from the same issues.

Today GumGum has announced a new approach to their licensing platform, and this time, there won’t be any Flash involved. To use the system, users need only include a single line of JavaScript on their page. From there, they can include any image they want using a standard HTML tag. The pricing models will be the same: publishers can either pay a fee based on image impressions, or they can include ads on top of their images. GumGum’s new platform can detect licensed images and overlays the ad on top of it, so there’s no need to use a special widget.

Another key shift in GumGum’s new approach is its decision to stop acting as an image hub - you’ll no longer be able to search through content catalogs to find an image. Instead, GumGum says that it will connect you directly with the content providers, who typically offer their own databases. By taking this approach, GumGum is turning away from the typical consumer and is becoming more of a B2B solution for blogs and sites that frequently rely on licensed images.

GumGum isn’t going to be able to stop image piracy - there’s simply no way to get around the “Print Screen” function without including an annoying watermark. But businesses who can’t afford to be caught up with illegal content may well appreciate GumGum’s new more flexible system, provided the company can make good on its arrangements with content providers. The service has already landed some big customers, including MTV Europe.

In conjunction with the launch of the new platform, GumGum has annouced a Series A funding round of a reported $1.2 million.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/c2bRMEdc0cE/

One month after launching its new recommendation system, Digg is already reporting positive results. Digg recommends stories based on other members with similar voting patterns and interests. Chief scientist Anton Kast writes on the Digg Blog:

- Digging activity is up significantly: the total number of Diggs increased 40% after launch.

- The Recommendation Engine is running strong: at any given point in time, the system is generating over 54 Million Recommendations, with the average Digger having nearly 200 Recommendations from an average of 34 “Diggers like you”.

- Friend activity/friends added is up 24%.

- Commenting is up 11% since launch.

Digg’s recommendation engine takes a Last.fm approach to finding people’s whose tastes overlap with yours and then suggesting stories they’ve Dugg up but that you’ve missed. It is collaborative filtering for news.

As Digg becomes more mainstream, it needs technologies such as this to bring it back to its glory days when everybody was interested in the same niche categories. Social recommendations work best when they are extracted from niche communities who are obsessive about one or two topics. Digg started out as a haven for hardcore techies, but has branched out.

The recommendation system is designed to, in effect, help Diggers carve out their own niche communities again. If you happen to like tech industry news, you will see stories from other like-minded Diggers. If you prefer politics or sports, you’ll get those stories. And if you like a combination, the system will grab recommendations from each appropriate bucket.

At least, that is how it is supposed to work in theory. The recommendations seem decent. But I personally haven’t noticed anything that really strikes home. Over time, it should get better.

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

Embedable stock charts are nothing new, and neither are interactive charts that give you price information as you mouse over different dates. Both Yahoo Finance and Google Finance offer interactive charts on their respective sites, and Yahoo offers embeddable static charts. Neither one brings that interactivity to chart widgets that can be embedded on other sites.

But starting today you can get interactive, embeddable WikiCharts like the one below from Wikinvest. Hold the mouse down over the chart and you can pan it from left to right. Hover over the line and you will get date, price, and volume, information.

And it’s a wiki, so anyone can add an annotation. Do you think you know what’s been driving Yahoo’s stock price up and down lately? Stick in your best explanation before or during big price movements as an annotation.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/GX2tRKEozWQ/

Secure in knowing that he will get minority seats on Yahoo’s board, Carl Icahn has decided to skip tomorrow’s shareholder meeting. He doesn’t want to cause a “media event,” he says. (Because he’s so shy, you know).

Seriously, it’s probably a good idea for him not to show up. On his blog he explains his reasons, and his thinking on why he settled for a compromise deal with Yahoo instead of going ahead with a full proxy battle:

Realizing I could not gain control, I saw no point in spending the final two weeks in a debilitating fight, where little would be accomplished except to build animosity between both camps and the end result would be no better than the compromise that was reached. In fact, in winning a minority position on a board by a fight to the end, you always have to be concerned that you may be “boxed” out by the majority that remains on the board. Committees can be formed that you are excluded from and you are given information only on a need to know basis. An important part of my compromise with Yahoo is that the board in the settlement agreement has agreed “that any meaningful transaction, including the strategy in dealing with that transaction, will be fully discussed with the entire board before any final decision is made.” Additionally, if any committee is formed to negotiate a meaningful transaction, Carl Icahn will be a member of that committee.

In other words, it might become a media and shareholder circus tomorrow. But don’t look for anything “meaningful” to happen until afterwards, when the new board is in place.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/5xksqDqePhI/

YAY! The long awaited, much promised, never delivered Delicious 2.0 will launch in the next few minutes, just like they promised again last week.

The new Delicious is just like the old Delicious, except for the way it looks. They’re also promising that it will be “faster, easier to learn,” and “hopefully more desirable.”

Speed: We’ve moved to a new infrastructure that makes every page faster. This new platform will enable us to keep up with traffic growth while ensuring Delicious is responsive and reliable. You may not have noticed, but the old backend was getting creaky under the load of five million users.

Search: We’ve completely overhauled our search engine to make it faster and more powerful. Searches used to take ages to return results; now they’re very quick. The new search engine is also smarter, and more social: you can search within one of your tags, another public user’s bookmarks, or your social network. Now it’s easier to take advantage of the expertise and interests of your friends, not to mention the Delicious community at large.

Design: Finally, we’ve updated the user interface to improve usability and add a few often-requested features (such as selectable detail levels and alphabetical sorting of bookmarks). Our goal has been to keep the new design similar in spirit to the old one, so all of you veterans should be able to jump in without any confusion. At the same time, we’re hoping that newcomers to Delicious will find it easier to learn.

Users will need to log into their accounts and get a new browser cookie. Honestly, I rarely visit Delicious any more, the Firefox plugin is so good that actually visiting the site isn’t necessary. So all I’m really hoping for here is a stable service. If there are glitches, I hope they fix them quickly.

As I said in our previous posts, it’s too bad Delicious 2.0 couldn’t launch before founder Joshua Schachter left the company in frustration. I called Schachter to ask him what he has to say about the new launch. His response - “Good luck. I hope it goes well.”

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/385kqlKUAqY/

For several years, Sun CEO, Jonathan Schwartz has lobbied the SEC to allow disclosure of financial information through corporate blogs. In a landmark announcement, it seems that Mr. Schwartz may indeed get his wish, and with it, a historical decision that could break the age-old shackles that bound businesses to traditional media and distribution channels in order to satisfy full disclosure.

In a speech yesterday, SEC special counsel Kim McManus outlined new guidance the SEC is about to give companies on when they can use their Websites, including blogs, to disclose material information. What this means is that we can now finally kill the press release, at least in its current form (more on that below).

The IR Web Report explains, “UNDER certain circumstances, companies can rely on their websites and blogs to meet the public disclosure requirements under Regulation FD (Fair Disclosure), according to new guidance unanimously approved by the US Securities and Exchange Commission today.”

Chairman Christopher Cox opened up the discussion by recognizing that the Web has matured providing a big step forward for investors, “Ongoing technological advances in electronic communications have increased both the market’s and investors’ demand for more timely company disclosure and the ability for companies to capture, process and disseminate this information to market participants.”

The SEC outlines boundaries for sharing information as well as holding companies and their employees liable for the information that they post on blogs and discussion forums.

Regulation FD and Social Media

The SEC is taking the right steps to embrace the new tools and services that reach people in addition to wire services. With the recognition of blogs as a viable form of disclosure, under certain circumstances of course, the SEC is officially recognizing Social Media and in a sense, socializing the rules associated with Reg FD.

Perhaps, the most significant change stemming from the new SEC guidance is that Web-based disclosure does not have to appear in a format comparable to paper-based information, unless the Commission’s rules explicitly require it.

This is music to my ears as it finally opens the door for the Social Media Release.

For a few years, Todd Defren, Chris Heuer, and I have not only defended and charted the opportunity for Social Media Releases (SMRs), but also fielded emotionally-charged questions from the financial and IR communities asking about whether or not an SMR would ever meet disclosure requirements for Reg FD, and without it, what good would it ever be…

While there have been many discussions and debates to whether a Social Media Release should cross the wire and if so, what format and design it should resemble, my belief is that SMRs should always reside on dedicated blog platforms (WordPress, MoveableType) as part of a Social Media Newsroom. And, Social Media Releases should only complement a traditional press release and disclosure activity and not replace it.

Originally introduced by Todd Defren in response to Tom Foremski’s call for the death of press releases, the SMR represents a new socially-rooted format that complements traditional and SEO press releases by combining news facts and social assets in one, easy to digest, and repurpose, tool.

Giving everyone what they need and how they need it, requires a different approach. Almost every press release issued today is done so without video or audio, and many still do not include links to additional information or supporting content.

While these multimedia pieces are underlying components of SMRs, there’s more to the presentation than multimedia content. The value of aggregating Social Media in one digital release connects information and content across social networks with the people looking for it, as well as the conversations that bind them together.

Picture a blog post that announced corporate data (not unlike a standard financial press release) but now, along with a custom video hosted from YouTube, supporting graphs and exec images funneled from flickr, pre-recorded audio podcasts/conferences piped in from iTunes, packaged market data sourced from Docstoc, related company and landscape stories and public commentary linked from Delicious. Content can also push to micromedia services such as Twitter, Indeti.ca and FriendFeed to contribute to the company’s brandstream. In a sense, the Social Media Release, hosted as an elegant and media rich blog post, acts as an aggregated hub for these disparate brand beacons, and at the same time, each piece is findable and sharable within each social network and they all point back to the Social Media Release.

Also, the SMR can feature tags and outbound links to increase exposure in social networks and blog-specific search engines.

Disclosure is an Expensive Business

Naturally, this at the very least, represents a potential harbinger of doom for each of the popular wire services.

A significant percentage of their lifeblood is tied to market-relevant or earnings content that, until now, required wire services, and hundreds of dollars (in some cases over $1,000) per announcement in order to satisfy SEC disclosure. For many companies, a fixed budget for disclosure absorbed the critical resources necessary to support the activity of sharing news and therefore relied upon wires to do their public and investor relations on their behalf.

But as many PR and IR professionals will concede, issuing releases on the wire is merely an expensive step in a process of creating and distributing news using traditional tools. If you represent a publicly traded company that is actively monitored by market influencers, it’s very likely that your press release will reach their systems via the wire.

These days, it’s almost certain that a reporter or analyst will, in the best case, see and file the release but most often, the very people we hope will find and in turn, report on the information discovered, will honestly never know that you released news at all unless they’re proactively contacted. Any good public relations or investor relations professional will ensure that their top financial and business contacts are alerted to upcoming news, without giving away the news, in advance.

There is no substitute for the real world relationships we forge in order to bridge the right content specifically for the right people.

Do these new guidelines offer companies the ability to shift some or all of its wire budget back into the critical role of outbound support for corporate news?

Disclosure Versus IR/PR

Disclosure relates to the market - the people who may trade or act based on the information you publish. Reg FD protects the voice of the investor and guides companies on how to publish information so that it reaches a fair share of the market so that no one person has access to information before the other.

We can’t deny or ignore the value and benefits associated with strategic support for connecting corporate news to market influencers. Now, to the defense of wire services, and as I’ve written before, wire services can bypass those very influencers to reach people directly.

Not only does wire distribution meet disclosure, the art of search engine optimized press releases (SEO releases) have the unique ability to appear in search engines tied to the key words your market uses to search for related and relevant information. PR Newswire, MarketWire, Business Wire, and PRWeb offer businesses the ability to distribute news with added SEO functionality. When paired with a well-written, SEO optimized press release, wire distribution can more than satisfy disclosure, it can carry your story directly to the people looking for it.

In addition, wire services have invested over the years in the development of a secondary distribution channel that has, in my opinion, remained relevant even as the Web continues to rapidly change and evolve.

When a press release crosses a wire, many search engines and their financial properties (finance.yahoo.com or finance.google.com) and all market-powered hubs, portals and dashboards, receive wire feeds which automatically populate respective “Recent News” sections. Similar to how we receive RSS feeds to seamlessly receive the news and information we prefer, investors, analysts, press, and decision makers can see, in one place, the trading status, coverage, related news, and crowd-powered discussions around the activity. This has been the case since the days of Web 1.0 and was our first taste of the Social Web that is now becoming pervasive.

Without wire services, penetrating these valuable dashboards, that are still today, a primary source of finance information and activity, is incredibly difficult, if not impossible.

This new guidance, however, presents an opportunity to connect corporate information from sites and blogs to these powerful financial online hubs so that important corporate news can still reach people, the way they’re used to receiving it.

Forcing them to change their habits isn’t a realistic expectation in the short-term.

This is a Chance to Reach More People, Their Way

Not only do SMRs socialize content and link conversations across the Social Web, they also help bloggers and online journalists more effectively write a rich media post using one resource that provides them with everything they need.

Now that we don’t need to adhere to a fixed form or design and presentation aesthetics, technically there’s nothing holding us back from carrying the torch forward. It can only help present and share information in an alternative method that complements traditional releases, outbound contact, and market-related conference calls.

Coming back to my belief that Social Media Releases should be hosted on blogs and not cross wires, with the new rules for Reg FD, an SMR by default, could now meet disclosure - assuming that the host site is recognized as meeting the disclosure standards.

Social Media Releases offer the ability to not only share relevant financial data, but also feature social content that reinforces that data and the overall company story.

We’ve discussed how information can reach the market, investors, peers, and customers through search as well through articles and blog posts and also via financial portals. Search engines are manipulated by SEO (search engine optimization). Social Media is powered by SMO (social media optimization) and the results are different in how, when, and where they appear. In most cases, SEO doesn’t affect the outcome of content within social networks. But, dedicated tagging, key words, and crowdsourced participation drive the “discoverability” of content in the Social Web.

Social Media Releases not only feature social content to more visually and authentically tell stories and share information, they also provide the tools necessary for people to further socialize and interact with them.

For readers of an SMR, the options for interaction are virtually endless. They can respond through a “moderated” comment system, much in the same way they do today in online financial forums. They can grab pieces of the content, such as embeddable video, audio, documentation and images, to repurpose as blog posts and online stories, which can also send trackbacks to help pool collective coverage. Stakeholders can subscribe to RSS feeds for the entire news stream or just those related to financial/market information. Readers can send the story back out to the social web through bookmarking tools such as diigo or delicious, as well as crowdsourced news communities including Digg and Mixx. As the existing social tools evolve and new services are introduced, the potential for SMRs aka blog posts, are truly a blank canvas for PR, marketing, and the community to define how they’re read and shared.

Executives and marketing professionals must now weigh whether the company Web site or blog are indeed a recognized channel of distribution and more importantly, whether these online properties meet public disclosure requirements under the new rules Regulation FD.

I believe this new guidance only expands the ability to share information using a variety of approved channels. It may or may not reduce costs associated with meeting disclosure, but it will in fact, improve the infrastructure for investor and public relations by socializing the process to more effectively communicate with investors and the people who care.

The reality is that businesses can only benefit by not limiting itself to one form of communication. People seek, discover, and share information differently, and combining strategic wire, Web, and blog channels will only amplify reach and visibility.

Thanks to Jennifer Leggio for getting this story started.

Follow the SEC on Twitter.

(Photo by Terence T.S. Tam).

Editor’s note: Brian Solis is Principal of FutureWorks, a PR and New Media agency in Silicon Valley and also blogs at PR 2.0.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/351765479/

I think it’s safe to say that iPhone OS 2.0 is far from perfect and anyone saying otherwise must be on Apple’s payroll. Other than the horrendous battery life (on the iP3G), what else do we all hate about the OS? The inability to run background apps! Sure, Apple’s argument against a Windows Mobile-like task manager makes perfect sense, but the ability to run background apps is something we’ve all grown accustomed to and it would be the ‘killer app’ as they say around these parts, right?
Read More

Oh, and is anyone’s white iP3G starting to crack?

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/~3/351681658/

JavaFX was announced at JavaOne.... in 2007, and we are now seeing a preview release.

Josh Marinacci of the JavaFX team put together a post with an example that builds the following:

The code for this is simply:

And you can check out the application if you have Java 1.6 installed.

Michael Coté got together with the Sun folks and recorded a demo and interview:

I am interested to see what Sun does with JavaFX, but I have to admit to being underwhelmed and more excited about what Sun could do with the Java plugin and have that as a way to interact with Ajax applications.

Source: Ajaxian » Front Page
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/351660309/javafx-the-preview-has-landed

Kleiner Perkins is adding to its iFund portfolio of iPhone-focused startups. It’s latest investment is a series A round in stealth gaming company ngmoco. Kleiner partner Bing Gordon, formerly chief creative officer of Electronic Arts, will join the board (he is also on the board of Zynga, which KP also recently invested in through its regular fund).

Ngmoco’s CEO is another EA refugee, Neil Young (not the aging rock star). Young oversaw the development of hit totles at EA such as Lord of the Rings, The Sims 2, and the about-to-be-released Spore. He left EA in June, and wants to both develop its own games and finance and produce games from other developers. He is applying the same studio model that’s worked so well for EA to a new class of mobile games for the iPhone and future devices that have similar characteristics.

The iFund is a $100 million fund set aside to invest in startups targeting the iPhone as a platform. Other announced investments include mobile social networking service Pelago (which makes Whrrl) and iControl (which lets you control you home security through your home network and your iPhone).

The size of the round was not disclosed.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/351617253/

The first main play for IE 8 was to get developers on board, and start a conversation with us on what they are fixing, and where they are going.

There were a couple of user features such as Activities and Web Slices, but you could tell they hadn't finished there.

In their latest blog post they talk about reliability and the fact that they now have isolation between web pages and the chrome itself via processes. This means that a page could die, but the browser is fine:

One of our most significant investments is in a feature called Loosely-Coupled IE (“LCIE”), which is an architectural attribute that helps isolate different parts of the browser from each other, most notably, the frames from the tabs. LCIE is the foundation that we have built a few of our features on including Automatic Crash Recovery of which I expand on below.

For Beta 2, we added the following changes:

Frame Process Merging

To help improve startup performance, we have reduced the number of processes that we start. Instead of firing up two processes every time you launch the browser (one for the frame and one for your tabs), we now only fire up one frame process the first time you launch IE. Subsequent launches will only start a new tab process or make a new tab in an existing tab process.

For users that are accustomed to browsing websites in multiple “sessions”, for example if you want to log in to multiple email sites simultaneously, you can specify the “-nomerge” command line option to disable this feature.

More tab processes

It turns out that the vast majority of all IE sessions contain three or fewer tabs. Accordingly, in Beta 2 we try to give users three efficient tab processes. This is contingent on the user’s computer capabilities, but the more capable a computer is, the more processes we will use, up to a point. Adding more processes gives users much better isolation in the event of a failure. If each tab is in its own process, websites are completely isolated from each other.

Virtual tabs

We have also added the internal capability to “hot swap” the process from underneath a tab. Previously, Protected Mode worked on a per-process basis. For example, say you add a website to your trusted sites in IE7. If that site links to another site that is not in your trusted sites, it will cause you to switch browser windows when you click the link.

We improved this in IE8 Beta 1 with LCIE when we split the frame from the tabs. With the split we can create a new tab in the same window and switch you to that tab as opposed to being “punted” to a new window.

Virtual tabs lets you navigate across Protected Mode in the same tab since we just switch the process under the tab to the correct integrity level. This is really just “UI-sugar” – virtual tabs do not impact security or protected mode in any way, other than to make it more convenient to transition between protected mode on/off.

LCIE's capability of isolating different parts of the browser coupled with more tab processes and virtual tabs will improve the performance and overall reliability of Internet Explorer.

I saw an early IE 8 beta 2, and there are other very interesting features in there too. Some were subtle but interesting. We should get our hands on it soon!

Source: Ajaxian » Front Page
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/351589016/ie-8-and-the-user-features