Avenue A | Razorfish Technology

Microsoft adds new features to .NET

Paras Wadehra — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 05:20:00 +0000

Microsoft has introduced new features in .NET with their Service Pack 1 (SP1) release of .NET Framework 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008.

Most of the stuff included in the service pack releases is new features and functionality rather than bug fixes and updates to existing feature-set. For example, .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 adds a new concept called the .NET Framework Client Profile, which enables an application to be delivered with just what is needed to install and run the app, rather than the whole framework. This can reduce the size of installation files by 86.5 percent, according a Microsoft spokesperson. Other major features in .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 include a 20 to 45 percent improvement in Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) applications and changes to the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) to change the way data and services are accessed.

The changes in the Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 are listed here.

New social media offering

Raymond Velez — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 17:30:35 +0000

Image by ocean.flynn via Flickr

We just announced a new offering with our social-media partner Pluck and their product code-named AdLife. AdLife will inject social media features like customer comments and user-generated content into digital advertisements such as banner ads or micro sites - in effect, turning mainstream ads into social media opportunities distributed across the digital world.

From a technology community perspective we have worked with Pluck on several clients to bring social media features to client’s websites. Plucks services are available through software as a service which enables us to drive faster solutions for our clients. The are some key elements such as dealing with a AJAX/Flash/Silverlight integration and still enabling SEO. Unfortunately, search engines are not able to deal well with rich internet applications yet, but we have some ideas on how to deal with this.

That being said, I think there’s a couple of critical element to why we have to make our sites social.

We are social beings, our sites should follow. Communities will help us make our sites better, by adding the right metadata through comments or confirming where we get it right or telling us where we get it wrong - wikipedia anyone:).
Without bringing social technologies to our client’s sites, the sites we build won’t be found. Organic search engines depend on social to surface pages. Remember google bombing? That was enabled through blogging and trackbackids, a key aspect of social. If your site/page isn’t enabled socially, it won’t rank in google, live, and yahoo.
Outside of organic search people read things on the web, so they can send them to their social graph. Again, we mush make it easy for people to connect with their social graph, so people can passively or actively tell their community about the content.

At Avenue A | Razorfish, we’re one of the largest buyers of online media in the world and we’re partnering with Pluck, a social media technology vendor serving 2.5 billion impressions a month to bring this to life. For more information read the press release or read David Deal’s blog.

How cool is this new search engine - cuil.com ?

Salim Hemdani — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 20:58:00 +0000

By now almost everyone who keeps an eye on search market is aware of the launch of new search engine - cuil.com. And to my amazement most of us have already given a verdict on this new offering as to if this is a real Google killer or just another dying hope for those Google haters. Cuil has also got a lot of attention from Google lovers - this launch was a real attention grabbing hoax.

So what makes cuil.com center of attention?

Cuil.com is developed by couple of engineers who have a hand in developing Goggle’s search engine. This particular fact has given them a lot of credibility.
Secondly, this search engine indexes many more pages than Google does. I did not know that Google does not index the entire world’s web pages – may be cuil indexes pages from other planet’s ecosystem too but any how this fact makes cuil.com an attractive offering. More pages means more results .
Finally, last but not least and I think most important is that cuil.com does not remember your search queries – a big win for those privacy advocates who are trying to get Google for a long time now.

So what is your verdict of this cool or not so cool offering? I will share my first experience and for those who believe in “first impression is the last impression” I did not have a good experience. My first hit to cuil.com on the day it launched resulted in a service not available page (too many hopefuls flocking on to cuil.com). Since then service has been bought-up and I have given it few more tries but I could not make up my mind.

As of today Google is still the kind of search for me and I bow to thee. What you guys think?

Yahoo! UI Blog recognizes Fred and team

Raymond Velez — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 02:13:09 +0000

Recently, the Yahoo UI blog recognized Fred Welterlin and team’s outstanding work on the Pulte Home’s new site. The post talks about the Yahoo UI components used and how we made the Javascript Library choice. This is typically a challenge for us given the great selection of libraries out there. It’s interesting how Fred highlights one of the drivers for choosing YUI being it’s usages of the Auto Complete Pattern. Congrats to Fred and team for being recognized for their great work.

ICANN threatens to change the rules of the domain name game

Paras Wadehra — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 00:11:13 +0000

You may be used to typing in top-level domains (TLDs) like .com, .net or .edu when heading to websites, but the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) hopes to change that with a decision to open new TLDs for registration, according to today’s Wall Street Journal.

Under the new rule, ICANN would let anyone with $50,000 to $100,000 register any TLD they want, so for example, a web address could become paras.wadehra, rather than paraswadehra.com.

The WSJ has more on what the decision may mean for regular consumers and businesses, but there are also a couple ways it could change the Internet landscape for startups — most notably, domain speculators like Demand Media and Marchex.

Those companies, and other speculators, have plowed billions of dollars into millions of hot domain names, sometimes backed by high-profile investors like Oak Investment Partners or, for Marchex, public shareholders. The idea is generally to buy up lots of obvious domain names, like business.com, which holds the sales record at $350 million. Most good names that are auctioned get less, but still routinely receive six figures.

Those domains are worth so much because of a kind of traffic called type-in traffic, which is distinct from search traffic from Google or linked traffic. Right now, if a web surfer — especially an unsavvy one — wants to find, say, exchange rates, they might type exchangerates.com in hopes of finding an exchange calculator (they’d be disappointed).

Although the strategies of the two companies are different (Marchex, notably, wants to build out a locality-based content business), they both rely on one crucial assumption: that the dominant TLDs, primarily .com, continue to be the first thing people type in when they’re looking for something, whether it’s exchange rates or Disney.com. So what happens if ICANN manages to reeducate Internet users, and popularize sales of new TLDs?

The simple answer is that a lot of speculators will lose a lot of their own, and their investors’ money. While Demand and Marchex might be able to build up viable content portals around sites like chicagodoctors.com, the money they plowed into those names will be meaningless — as well spent on chicago.docs or chicago.dr, or any other name you can imagine. The game will become even more about search, type-ins traffic will wither.

There’s a strong counter-argument to ICANN’s action having any real affect on .com, though. There are already dozens of top-level domains, but they are thinly used, even purposed ones like .mobi (for mobile phones). The introduction of more TLDs over the years has not seen sales of hot domains diminish, which by extension probably means speculators are making as much as ever.

That may hold true, or it may be that ICANN has finally found a way to shift attention from .com, with the possibility for new TLDs that are actually meaningful or logical.

And a final argument is that it does seem unreasonable that 10 or 15 years from now, we’ll still be typing .com in for every major website. The Internet is a place of rapid change, and at some point, .com will start seeming archaic and unnecessary. But any real change would require a massive re-engineering of the web’s user-interface, at the very least, so it’s hard to imagine what those changes might be from here.

Avenue A | Razorfish wiki mention in Infoworld

Raymond Velez — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 22:42:29 +0000

It’s pretty interesting how the press and our clients continue to find our internal knowledge management wiki to be interesting. Here Infoworld captures some thoughts from Shiv Singh on why we built the wiki. It’s all about bringing some of the innovations from the consumer facing world into Enterprises. Learning from the consumer world to help enterprises is going to take some time. What I think enterprises need to acknowledge is that collaboration isn’t easy, so the technology needs to make it easy. If we ask folks to open a ticket or get permission every time they want to contribute to collaboration it’s just not going to happen. Like Shiv said, we have found people behave just as professionally in the office as they do on the wiki, so let’s trust them to use open technologies.

It’s not just the features we are talking about either. The technologies behind these platforms are interesting as well. Some of the biggest most successful sites out there aren’t build on enterprise technologies. Mediawiki, the software behind Wikipedia, is built on PHP not Java or .Net. Not only can we learn from consumer facing behaviors, we can also learn from consumer facing technologies. What’s nice about technologies like PHP is their ability to start up quickly and change just as quickly. Something that has gotten harder and harder for J2EE and .Net. After all, the one constant with web sites, is change.

LiveMesh, the new ’synchronization’ platform from Microsoft

Raymond Velez — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 21:22:26 +0000

Think about an online-offline silverlight-wpf application that synchronizes your files using LiveMesh.

I like the name. I finally see the Live brand starting to come together for Microsoft. Now all it needs is some more market awareness. So, what is LiveMesh? It’s basically a new, invite only for now, platform that allows people to sync across all devices. Windows only for now, but that seems like it will open up, especially since it can be expressed as ATOM, JSON, FeedSync, WB-XML, or plain old XML.

In a previous post, I spoke about Google Gears and their technology to bring together the off-line and on-line world. LiveMesh is actually

The more I switch across laptops, machines, etc. The more I yearn for a cloud to contain everything. I recently moved away from Trillian to Meebo, just so I had one less desktop application I was tied to. This way any machine I go to I have my instant messaging list available. Moving to a web based outlook as good as the desktop outlook would be a welcome addition. That being said, at the end of the day I want both. Especially as I write this post from the plane offline using the desktop application, Windows Live Writer.

Google Gears and the offline/online trend

Raymond Velez — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 21:18:42 +0000

With Google Gears, Adobe Air, and Microsoft WPF there’s definitely lots of exciting changes in the desktop application area. Using the openness of the web to crack open the ‘closed’ nature of regular documents that we use today. At the recent Avenue A | Razorfish Enterprise Solutions summit, Andrew McAfee asked the audience who works on documents alone. Only one person in the room of 70 people raised the hand (still not sure why:)). The point is that we collaborate on everything we do and the traditional method of document revisions and changes is much slower than real-time changes and updates ala wiki style technology. The challenge is applying that to all the tools we use on a daily basis. How can we make code changes more collaborative and less of a check-in, check-out, merge model?

Skype announces unlimited long-distance calls

Paras Wadehra — Mon, 05 May 2008 21:13:53 +0000

Skype announced unlimited calling last month to over a third of the world’s population with the launch of its new calling subscriptions. The new subscriptions signal the first time Skype has offered a single, monthly flat rate for international calling to landline numbers in 34 countries.

The new subscriptions have no long-term contract. You can make calls whenever you want – at any time of the day, on any day of the week. From today, you can choose from three types of subscription – from unlimited calls to landlines in the country of your choice through to landlines in 34 destination countries worldwide.

However its not true Unlimited calling - all calls are subject to Skype’s fair usage policy which is set at 10,000 minutes per month (which equates to just about 5 hours of calling per day). Calls to premium, non-geographic and other special numbers are excluded.

Syndicated Client Starter Kit

Martin Jacobs — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 00:25:11 +0000

When doing WPF development, a good source of information is http://windowsclient.net. One interesting download on that site is the Syndicated Client Starter Kit . It is a Starter Kit designed to make it easy to create rich, syndicated multimedia and content client applications. It has built-in ad-serving capabilities, and includes the sync framework that takes care of syncing, local storage, subscription management and the safe caching of authentication credentials. The MSDN reader sample application, and the starter kit itself, are available for download including source code.

Reviewing the source code is a great way to gain insight on how WPF applications can be structured, and some of the architectural patterns that are used within the code, such as the Command Pattern.

Another interesting aspect of this starter kit is that it uses SQL Server Compact Edition for storing data client side, and I think this is a great alternative to SQL Server Express. Even though both are free, SQL Server CE has a benefit of being more lightweight, and easier to deploy with your client application.