Ajax Blog

Two weeks after laying off 30 percent of his employees, Jaxtr CEO Konstantin Guericke finds himself out of a job. He is being replaced by vice president of engineering Bahman Koohestani (former CTO at Cyworld and Orbitz), who will be acting as “interim” CEO.

Jaxtr offers VoIP calls to both your regular and mobile phone. Its last round was a $10 million Series B in June. Investors include Lehman Brothers Venture Capital (yup, they are still around), August Capital, Mangrove, Mayfield, DFJ, and angels Ron Conway and Reid Hoffman. (Guericke was part of the founding team at LinkedIn).

The company is obviously going through a rough time, but Koohestani still spins it as a “very healthy” business. He offers the following partial stats:

On average paying members go through $10 worth of jax calling credits in just nine days, leading to strong repeat purchase behavior where now 68 percent of our minutes are now paid for and we are seeing a strong commitment to purchase premium memberships. 43 percent of our new buyers opt for a premium membership. This is a predictable revenue stream, which is subscription-based.

That is great that such a high percentage of Jaxtr’s phone minutes are being paid for. The unanswered question, unfortunately, is whether the amount Jaxtr charges covers its costs.

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There is no escape from the advertising recession. Not even for hotshot TV advertising startup Spot Runner. Despite having raised more than $111 million, half of that as recently as last May, the LA-based company may be in for a major round of layoffs next week following the election (and the associated last-minute media blitz).

As many as 25 percent of its more than 300 employees may find themselves without a job come next Thursday. While the exact number has not yet been determined, I have been able to confirm that the company is currently going through a cost-reduction planning process and is looking at all options in light of the deteriorating advertising environment.

Any job cuts would be on top of an earlier round of layoffs last August, which resulted in 50 people losing their employment. Another 50 or so subsequently left on their own account. According to one former employee who quit, morale is low and a sense of disillusionment permeates the company, at least among the engineers. That’s not a good thing for a tech company. This engineer describes Spot Runner as being more of a tech facade for a regular ad agency.

Spot Runner ramped up employees too fast in a rush to grab market share before Google gets truly serious about the same Web-mediated TV advertising opportunity. Now, it has to worry more about making its cash last and getting to profitability. The number of expected cuts among employees is another 50 to 75. But, again, our understanding is that the exact number has not yet been finalized. When and if job cuts occur, we will add them to our Layoff Tracker.

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Paul Colton of Aptana has announced the Jaxer 1.0 release. This comes on the heels of the general availability of Aptana Cloud, and of course their Studio product that ties things together.

First, Jaxer 1.0:

If you’ve already been using Jaxer you’re likely familiar with its database, file system and socket APIs and its ability to not only run JavaScript and process the HTML DOM at the server, but also to expose server-side functions to the Web such that a HTML page can call back to those functions directly from the Web page. Thus Ajax communications could not be any easier with Jaxer: You just write a server-side function, “proxy it” with one line of code, then call it from the Web browser as if that function were part of the web page. Jaxer handles the client/server communications, data transformations, and provides the client-side function with its return value (either synchronously or asynchronously).

Recently we’ve added even more capabilities based on community feedback. These including support for RESTful APIs as well as native support for JSON to supplement the E4X (XML for JavaScript) support that’s been there all along (thank you Mozilla!). The combination of these means you can easily create RESTful services that can be consumed by a wide array of Ajax applications, Web gadgets, Facebook or OpenSocial apps, and even Adobe Flash or Microsoft Silverlight based apps since those support JavaScript too. Plus mobile devices like the Apple iPhone and phones from other manufacturers are nearly all supporting JavaScript and Ajax. As you can imagine we’re excited to see JavaScript become more and more the lingua franca of Web applications. It’s already ubiquitous on the client side and now you can use it confidently on the server side.

We sat down with Paul, Uri Sarid (CTO), and Kevin Hakman (Director of Evangelism) to talk about this release in particular as well as the other recent news and the grand plan.

We have the audio directly available, or you can subscribe to the podcast.

There are a series of nice new screencasts to give you a quick feel for it all. Learn more about Jaxer, Cloud, and Studio.

Source: Ajaxian » Front Page
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/438301187/aptana-jaxer-10-released

The latest video market share figures for September from Nielsen Online’s VideoCensus have been leaked to Beet.TV, and they show a huge 56 percent jump from Yahoo to 264 million videos streamed during the month. Yahoo’s share still pales next to YouTube’s 5.3 billion streams. But it pumped out 95 million more streams than in August, when Yahoo was trailing Fox (i.e., MySpace), MSN, and Nickelodeon, according to Nielsen Online. And Yahoo attracted 10 million more individual viewers online, to 29.9 million. (Compare to comScore’s Video Metrix numbers from July, which had Yahoo in the fourth spot).

People still watch twenty times more videos on YouTube than on Yahoo. And just the number of streams YouTube added in September alone (592 million) was more than twice as many as Yahoo’s total stream count. YouTube also has a bigger overall audience (81.9 million unique viewers).

But the percentage of videos that Yahoo can put ads up against is much higher than YouTube’s. One estimate that was thrown around at a recent online video panel that I co-moderated earlier this week was that YouTube only monetizes four percent of its videos, which would be 214 million streams. So depending on what percentage of Yahoo’s videos are shown with ads, it might catch up to YouTube on revenues faster than the raw numbers would indicate.

The same logic can be applied to Fox’s 242 million video streams, and the other big video sites behind it. Although Fox, MSN/Windows Live, and Nickelodeon all saw declines during September in Web video market share.

What accounted for the big jump in Yahoo’s video share? Original programming such as Primetime In No Time< /em> (a synopsis of what Web watchers missed on regular TV) is generating 100 million streams, according to Jimmy Pitaro, Yahoo’s VP in charge of sports and entertainment. And the No. 1 video on Yahoo is this fan mashup of the Shakira song “Hips Don’t Lie.” No, they don’t.

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There is nothing like a downturn to force a company focus on the bottom line, even a company like Google whose bottom line is still growing at a healthy pace. Continuing its recent efforts to juice advertising revenues wherever it can, Google is changing the way ads are placed on its search results pages.

One of the two biggest determinants of where an ad ranks compared to other ads on the same results page is an ad’s “quality score” (the other is the amount an advertiser bids for a particular keyword). Google is making two tweaks to how the quality score is calculated that could have a major impact on which ads appear at the top of the page.

Lots of factors go into Google’s algorithm that determines the quality score for any given ad, but how many people actually click on the ad is one of the major ones. Ads that appear first, though, get a boost in click-through rates simply by being listed above all the other ads. Google is now taking into account the boost in click-through rates an ad gets by dint of its position, and backing that out from the quality score. That should result in a boost to overall quality scores.

The second change will be more visible. We’ll be seeing a lot more ads above search results in addition to the side because Google also just made it easier for ads to occupy those slots. In the past, only ads with that were both ranked the highest and met a minimum quality score would be placed above the regular search results. Here’s how Google explains this change in its AdWords blog:

To appear above the search results, ads must meet a certain quality threshold. In the past, if the ad with the highest Ad Rank did not meet the quality threshold, we may not have shown any ads above the search results. With this update, we’ll allow an ad that meets the quality threshold to appear above the search results even if it has to jump over other ads to do so. For instance, suppose the ad in position 1 on the right side of the page doesn’t have a high enough Quality Score to appear above the search results, but the ad in position 2 does. It’s now possible for the number 2 ad to jump over the number 1 ad and appear above the search results. This change ensures that quality plays an even more important role in determining the ads that show in those prominent positions.

The change also ensures that there is a larger pool of ads that can be placed up top. Those ads occupy the most valuable real estate on the page. Putting more ads there should result in more clicks, and thus more revenues for Google. And remember, because of change No. 1, there should be more ads with high enough quality scores to make it to that coveted spot.

In the past, Google has been conservative about which ads it would place above search results because it does not want to dilute the overall search experience. By redefining what makes a quality ad, it can put more ads up there and still feel good about itself.

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I can't figure this out. This video, from MTV's video site, has been bleeped by MTV in an effort to hide file sharing system names in Weird Al Yankovic "Don't Download This Song." The original lyrics:

Once in a while maybe you will feel the urge To break international copyright law By downloading MP3s from file-sharing sites Like Morpheus or Grokster or Limewire or KaZaA

Strangley, all of those file-sharing sites are bleeped out. Is it a conspiracy?

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/cHb22AypcUQ/

[via Simon Willison]

A little bit of Friday JavaScript-craziness for you.

Matt Wescott has created a ZX Spectrum emulator in JavaScript. The Sinclair ZX Spectrum was an old-skool PC from the 80s.

Details:

• Readme file
• Run JSSpeccy online (includes 10 classic games!)
• Download JSSpeccy (644Kb)
• JSSpeccy Subversion repository

I especially like how Matt describes himself:

I’m really typecasting myself here. If there were an international “Person most likely to write a Spectrum emulator in Javascript” award, I’d have taken it for the last five years running.

If you crack this thing open, you’ll see Matt is using the Canvas tag to do some interesting things:

The rest is just creative abuse of the element, as usual… it’ll take advantage of the putImageData interface to do the pixel pushing if available (on my machine Firefox has it, Safari doesn’t) and fall back on drawing 1×1 pixel rectangles otherwise. This time I’ve thrown in Google’s ExplorerCanvas as a nod to those poor unfortunates still stuck with Internet Explorer. Incidentally, I’d be curious to know how it rates on Google Chrome (I don’t have an XP/Vista box to test on) - if the hype is true (and it implements the putImageData interface like all good up-to-date browsers should) then I’d expect it to comfortably reach 100% Spectrum speed on modest hardware.

Source: Ajaxian » Front Page
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/437970266/jsspeccy-a-zx-spectrum-emulator-in-javascript

Kaazing has released Kaazing Gateway, an open source HTML 5 WebSocket Server.

The HTML 5 WebSocket specification is a standard that attempts to simplify much of the complexity around achieving bi-directional communications between browsers and servers. The specification provides a simple JavaScript interface that enables developers to open a full-duplex socket connection and connect directly to any TCP-based back-end service (for example, JMS, JMX, IMAP, Jabber, and so on).

Kaazing Gateway makes it possible for developers to take advantage of WebSockets today by providing a JavaScript library that emulates the HTML 5 WebSocket, making it possible to build applications that leverage the WebSocket interface and that can be deployed to both modern and future browsers.

The ultra high-performance server behind Kaazing Gateway can support tens of thousands of concurrent connections on a single node. Multiple instances can be clustered with traditional HTTP load-balancers or DNS round robin, making it possible to support any number of persistent client connections. In addition to large numbers of connections, Kaazing Gateway can also handle high data throughput thanks to its high-performance, staged event driven architecture (SEDA).

The Atlantis release of Kaazing Gateway also comes prepackaged with JavaScript clients for popular message services such as Apache ActiveMQ and RabbittMQ as well as clients for XMPP services such as OpenFire, Jabberd, and other popular chat servers. This makes it easy for you to quickly build web-based chat applications or messaging applications such as stock matrixes, online trading platforms, or online games.

What is the WebSocket API?

Source: Ajaxian » Front Page
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/437928712/kaazing-gateway-html-5-websock-server-released

Yoono, the slick browser plugin that serves as both a social network aggregator and media hub, has announced its impending support for Internet Explorer which will be available on November 7th. In conjunction with the the new version, Yoono is also announcing integration with both imeem and MySpace, as well as a powerful new widget that will help the plugin monetize.

Yoono has existed for a few years, but recently overhauled its browser plug last May. Since we last covered Yoono, it has become a featured Firefox 3 Recommended Download, and has grown to a total install base of around 1.8 million users (though only 500k of those are using the new version).

Beginning today the plugin will begin supporting imeem and MySpace, which join Flickr, Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook, and a number of others as supported services. imeem users will be able to play their music from the sidebar as they use other widgets and browse the web. Yoono acknowledges that there are other social aggregators that support more services (and are adding them at a faster pace), but says that it is striving to go through “all the proper channels” for each site to ensure future support and the tightest integration possible. Along with the additional networks the plugin has also seen a nice UI change, remedying my earlier concern that navigating the sidebar was too difficult because it was overly cluttered.

On November 24th the site will launch a Shopping widget, which Yoono says will be a key point in its monetization plans. As users browse the web, the Shopping widget will automatically search for relevant goods for purchase across shopping partners like Amazon, eBay, and iTunes (the site gets paid if users click the link or buy a product). I think that this approach to generating revenue beats putting display ads in the sidebar (as some competitors have tried), but I wonder how often users will voluntarily choose to have the shopping widget maximized as they browse the web - I’d probably minimize the widget and use that sidebar space to see more of my friends list.

Yoono competes with a number of other plugins like Minggl, as well as the Flock web browser.

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