Chrome gets faster
wolfenstein 3d javascript port cum flickr mashup
My hosting provider just granted universal unlimited space and traffic for a few quid a month. Interested? Sign up here
We need an animoto for video – something that will cut according to audio, action, soundtrack, ‘whitespace’, etc automagically. The technologies bound to be there and it’d make for instant polished moving pictures publishing, allowing viewers to follow in near realtime and participants to get on with the event.
more on the vc funding thing
more attack of the suits
Continue reading ‘Friday Linkjam’
Making a bit of a splash (no more I swear) online, Google Wave has been trumpeted as the replacement of ’60s’ email and IM applications. It’s also got friends in high places at Google Towers.
This could be a turning point on the web.Vic Gundotra, Google Engineering VP
On seeing a screenshot my first thought was ‘Facebook news feed’.
It’s got a similar albeit primitive system of inline comment right now. While it’s a nice to have, it’s not ‘killer’ and some of the Wave features (every character typed is spewed out in realtime as if participants were viewing the same terminal) will turn a lot of people off straight away. Indeed I’ve a few ideas of my own regarding ‘next generation’ communication, and they don’t involve greater intrusion. While the inline editing is a good thing I don’t regard it as a big enough win to justify moving onto a new platform, cloud or no cloud. What would be wrong with sticking this kind of functionality into Google Docs? We need smarter comms not more of them.
First quality flame post appears to be at Gigaom…
Free wifi is good. Lots of places do it. McDonalds is the big one, providing wifi in it’s outlets all over the country.
But.
Laptops still consume too much energy. For those of us who refuse to drop our netbooks in favour of phones, this presents a problem. Happily though there are free wifi hotspots that whether unwittingly or not also supply publicly accessible plugpoints.
Here is my attempt to map them out – everyone is free to contribute. Only add locations that have both free wifi & power points. Insert a green placemark if wifi is unfettered, red if there are restrictions such as site blockers or excessive time limits (instant arbitrary decision: anything under 12 hours). Give a description of wifi provider & location of plug point.
You’ll find FreeMap here.
Sometimes the embedded (chromeless) YouTube player will fall silent on video playback for an apparently unexplained reason, with no immediate way to fix. I think it has to do with YouTube/flash caching muted sound settings from youtube.com or other non-chromeless player and somewhere along the way these are carried over to your chromeless video.
Just include these two calls in the javascript player prior to calling playVideo():
player.unMute();
player.setVolume(10);
thus guaranteeing sound playback regardless of previous state. Similar solution for Actionscript. Further API details at http://code.google.com/apis/youtube/js_api_reference.html
Published at 7 May 2009
in cool and web.
The winners were announced this week and while it’s difficult to justify naming any one single site as being ‘the best of the web’ in any category such is the disparity of perspective on the web today, no doubt there are some nice designs & apps at work in this year’s awards.
Here’s my personal Webbys in no particular order and in no particular year – these are among my favourite sites on the web period:
finance – minyanville.com
sport – ourweecountry.co.uk
tech – slashdot.org
user content – flickr.com
hack – hackaday.com
gaming – escapistmagazine.com
tees – splitreason.com
books – amazon.co.uk
At the beginning of last month I surmised the likelihood was that this bounce would not last. However I thought there was enough optimism in the market mood in the short term despite a dark macroeconomic climate. The 8700 mark the Dow was at that day turned out to be the low for the rest of the month and the index has since consolidated above it.
Ignoring the earnings reports which ‘beat forecasts’ – when you have analysts dropping expectations to nothing that is not an argument to buy shares – the reasons I believe are twofold: An outbreak of Obamamania together with a fall in dollar Libor.
3-month Dollar Libor stands at 1.02 percentage points. It’s fall has been inversely proportional to the rise in the stock market. It may be that bank share prices have been hit so bad their market cap was having a direct effect on their liquidity, maybe even solvency. So the rising tide floating all boats scenario we have seen unfold over the past month has allowed the interbank lending rates to come down. Although it has much to fall to get to the perceived normality of 22 basis points prior to the crunch.
Obama has weathered the storm of expectation and disappointment in his first few months quite well. His finance team seem to be blundering along ok, accompanied by the rest of the Wall St walking wounded. Nobody seems to have wrapped on the general bail out everything at all costs world consensus. That seems to be doing the trick.
But for how long will this sense of benign calm last? The automakers are racing for bankruptcy sometime this summer, the banks look nowhere near ready to remove themselves from their recapitalising drip feed & economic numbers aren’t getting any better. There is also a whole host of other issues with game-changing potential. I believe Libor & consumer sentiment are leading indicators but while they have no doubt improved they are still bad.
From a trading point of view there will be plenty of time to catch the resumption in bear-related activities. Likewise if the governments really have managed to shock the economy back to life with their debt mountains the return to pre-Crunch levels (Dow 9000 for me) will not be a quick one. Lets just sit this one out for now.
Update: The eventual failure of this rally appears to be telegraphed by most reliable commentators. I’m sure many are looking to the stress test report out next week to maybe provide a catalyst for a reversal. I don’t think this will happen. The expectation is that it will require more bank fundraising. No surprises there. And surprises are what will take this market down.
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