DanSolo’s HQ

It is great to feel the good vibes at Mozilla HQ today as we launch Firefox 3.5! It is always an interesting ride to see a browser develop, and realize how complex and large the work is.

Congrats to the browser developers out there who are working hard to make the Web better. With final versions of Firefox 3.5, Safari 4, and Chrome 2 out in the wild.... things are picking up nicely.

The Firefox 3.5 release is exciting for me because it really benefits the developers. We get Open Video, @font-face, cross site XHR, Geo Location APIs, CSS Media Queries, Native JSON, Offline support, Web Workers, and so much more.

And, the world keeps moving. I have seen some very cool things in the nightly tree, and look forward to beign around as the team works on the next great Firefox.

Updates

Steve Souders has posted on Firefox 3.5 getting 10 out of 11 in his UA Profiler tests.

Watch the downloads come in with this cool download tracker that uses Canvas and SVG, all thanks to Justin Scott. The stats so far show that if the current rate trends hold we will beat the Firefox 3.0 download day, which is a surprise to all.

Sean Martell has created a nice wallpaper and persona to commemorate!

UK real estate startup Zoopla has confirmed that it is in advanced talks to purchase the PropertyFinder Group, which was put up for sale recently by joint owners REA Group and News International. My sources say the deal is all but done at a price of £1.5m. A potential management buyout appears to no longer be in the running.

It’s a far cry from 2005 when News Corp and Australian property group REA bought Propertyfinder for £14 million. It was later joined by UKPropertyShop and HotProperty.co.uk for £5.6 million. REA alone has now written off around AUS$61 million.

Zoopla commented on the record to TechCrunch Europe: “We can confirm that Zoopla.co.uk is currently looking at purchasing the PropertyFinder Group. We have a great deal of respect for the business and the brands that have been built within this group and will have further comments on our plans over the coming weeks.”

Zoopla has been playing a canny hand, using user-generated data to provide accurate house price estimates and building a lot of data-driven services. It took a Series B funding round at the beginning of this year from Atlas Venture and Octopus Ventures.

On June 26, REA Group and News International announced the “potential sale” of all or part of their jointly owned UK online business, which runs the Propertyfinder, Hotproperty and UK Propertyshop websites.

Propertyfinder‘s CEO - Gillian Kent, the former MSN UK head who joined in January ‘08 - had previously been leading an attempt at a management buy-out from joint owners News International and REA Group, but I understand that deal is no longer on the table. REA is retrenching back to Australia while News Corp is going through something of an anti-online rampage right now. News Int also has a stake in the free property listings site Globrix.

Propertyfinder is understood to have 2.3 million unique visitors and falls between FindAProperty and Primelocation according to comScore.

Back in December last year the UK government announced it would back the creation of a “£1bn venture fund” to invest in startups. At the time it sounded rather far-fetched. However, yesterday it was confirmed that this would indeed be going ahead, along the lines proposed by the NESTA, the National Endowment for Society, Technology and the arts.

The fund is broadly aimed at startups, but it’s likely to concentrate around science and technology, since its specifically aiming at “innovative, fast-growth companies” - and these don’t tend to be companies created to sell socks online. Thus, the fund is expected to focus on clean technology, bioscience, digital technology and advanced manufacturing. According to government figures there are 1,093 venture capital backed tech companies in the UK employing more than 40,000 highly skilled workers. That’s relatively small, however venture capital backed companies significantly out perform other companies and and 69% of these venture backed companies introduced entirely new products or services into the market.

The UK Innovation Investment Fund, as it’s called - announced by by Lord Mandelson, First Secretary of State at the London Stock Exchange yesterday - will invest £150m, to be matched by private sector backers. Prime Minister Gordon Brown has suggested that the fund could be higher, up to £1bn, if enough private investment is forthcoming - I think we can safely say that’s very much up for debate in this current climate. This notional £1 billion figure comes from a 10 year window for the fund.

Lord Drayson said £100 million of the £150 million will come from the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills, with the remainder being put up by the Department of Health and the Department of Energy and Climate Change. The fund will invest on an equal basis in a process known as known as “pari-passu”. The fund will be regulated by the Financial Services Authority (FSA).

A government-appointed manager will run this “fund of funds” and - according to the statement - hopes to make its first investment by the end of the year - so they had better get cracking.

Part of this initial £150 million will come from £750 million strategic investment fund the government announced in April to provide financial support to high-tech companies. That announcement sparked a wave of debate on TechCrunch Europe, with an open letter from Angel investor Robin Klein and two further responses.

Accordingly, this latest move was broadly welcomed by the private equity and venture capital industry which, largely in the form of the British Private Equity and Venture Capital Association, has been lobbying the government over this issue for the last two years, along with the European Investment Fund and others.

The government says say this “Fund of Funds” structure turned out to be most attractive to institutional investors because it creates a portfolio approach that spreads the investment risk across a number of different technology fund management teams and enables the Government to back private sector innovation without distorting or competing with existing fund managers. It’s also designed to complement existing public sector interventions such as Enterprise Capital Funds, RDA European Development VC Funds as well as tax measures (though I don’t see much new initiatives on the latter of these).

However, this initiative really isn’t all that new.

It looks very much like the previous UK High Technology Fund structure that was announced in 1998. This was a £125 million “fund of funds” which invested in a number of specialised technology VC funds such as Advent, Amadeus, MTI and Scottish Equity Partners. Back then the Government provided a cornerstone investment of £20 million which the funds were able to leverage with an additional £105 million from the European Investment Fund, UK pension funds and a French bank.

So overall, the questions are this.

Is this the best way to fund good start-ups? We still haven’t seen any movement on the UK government on capital gains tax, an area which tended to provide a great pool of seed funding before it was destroyed a couple of years ago. The issue I hear from startups time and time again is that it’s pretty cheap to build a beta, but getting seed funding to do this is tough.

And why has the government not used the tax system to stimulate innovation? In France, a recent new law brought in by President Sarkozy to allow private individuals to invest in startups has proved a rip-roaring success. It even allows them to spend 25% of their allocation in other EU countries. Talking to entrepreneurs and startups in Berlin recently, the chatter even suggested that the Germans may copy this French law. Where would that leave the UK? Right now it leaves startups stumbling back into the much higher barrier to entry VC eco-system.

And which VCs will get access to this fund of funds? Will they be the “good” ones that have consistently picked big global / European plays like Skype, SeatWave, Wonga and the like?

What happens if this fund is distributed to VCs that are actually using it to prop up a failing business model? The ones which, left to market forces and the changing role of VC, would have withered and died?

Let’s take a look at who did the bulk of the lobbying. The BVCA’s committee to lobby the government on this issue consisted of the following:

Richard Anton
Alan Bristow
Mark Caroe
Rob Carroll
Andrew Carruthers
Mike Chalfen
Stuart Chapman
Simon Clark
Anthony Clarke
Russ Cummings
Stephen Edwards
Nigel Grierson
Tim Haines
Barrie Hensby
David Hunter
Graham O’Keefe
Gary Le Suer
Bruce Macfarlane
Mary Monfries
Philip Newborough
Patrick Reeve
Ernie Richardson
Simon Walker
Rob Young

Unfortunately it’s not disclosed which venture firms these people were with - though perhaps readers can help me to identify their companies. Update: He’s what we have so far:

Andrew Carruthers - Spark
Anthony Clarke - BBAA/LBS
Russ Cummings - Imperial Innovations
David Hunter - NESTA
Patrick Reeve - Albion Ventures
Ernie Richardson - MTI
Simon Walker - BVCA

So, there we have it. No tax loosening from the government, but instead a system to prop up the VC industry. Hopefully it will work and feed through into innovation and entrepreneurs. Fingers crossed.

Kyle Simpson has developed LABjs, a library that lets you define your JavaScript file dependencies, and then loads them as efficiently as possible.

Kyle told us:

This project is a simple little tool (1.6k compressed!) for being able to load javascript files dynamically. It's like a lot of similar projects where the goal is to improve the speed of page load by allowing scripts to load in parallel. The thing it does slightly differently than most others like it is it allows you to "block", which is to say, load one or more scripts in parallel, then wait for them to finish, before going on to something else, like loading more scripts.

What I wanted was a pattern where I could load scripts in parallel, just like with script tags, but also block and wait if there was an explicit ordering dependency that required it.

What most loaders fail to do well is let you define "dependencies" simply based on loading order. With regular script tags, the browser blocks for you, so you can make sure for instance that jquery.js loads before jqueryui.js. But imagine you've got 3 scripts that can download in parallel (not dependent on each other), and then two more that need to wait for those 3 to load. You can't do that with script tags, and you also can't do that very easily with a lot of the script loaders/frameworks that I've found.

Most of them rely on intrusive concepts to do "dependency" management. For instance, each child script has to "signal" (callback) that it's done loading, to the parent page. Or the parent script and child scripts have to explicitly declare dependencies using some framework or conventions. Also, some other loader libraries rely on attaching a single load callback handler for EACH script. This makes it awkward or difficult to wait for several to load at a time, before proceeding, since you as the author have to keep track of what has loaded yourself.

jsLAB lets you load pretty much any script file, whether you control it or not, with no intrusion or convention for dependencies, other than the order and blocking that you define. It keeps track of what you've asked for and what has downloaded, only loads a unique script filename once, and lets you only define your handler once for a set of scripts that will load together in parallel. The API style (with chaining) makes is very easy to convert a set of script tags in your page into code to load them, without having to worry that race conditions will cause issues for scripts loading in the wrong order if there are implicit dependencies involved.

Example

Old:

New:

In the above example, "jquery.ui.js" and "myplugin.jquery.js" can load in parallel because there's no dependencies, but they will wait for "jquery.js" to load first, since they depend on it, and then "initpage.js" will wait for all of them to load before it runs, to it makes sure all code it will call is in place, similar to a $document.ready(...) concept.

The page link above also shows a few other variations on the .script(...) signature. For instance, you don't have to do a single script() call for each file (though I think it makes thing more readable). You can pass as many scripts singularly as parameters to one script() call. You can also pass an array of scripts, and it will loop through them and load them in the same way. Lastly, you can pass in an object instead of string, and the object literal can contain "src", "type", and "language" specifications, if you want to override the defaults of "text/javascript" and "Javascript", for some reason.

Kimengi is a new Dutch startup providing ”related-content” to bloggers and publishers via a recommendation widget called “f>>dforward” (feed forward). Once installed, the widget automatically provides related articles from multiple sites based on a combination of tag matches and  collaborative filtering techniques (“Users similar to you liked…”). If that sounds a lot like Zemanta which then you’d be right. Kimengi faces direct competition from the Slovenian startup, which provides an impressively slick Firefox plugin and API recommending not only related articles, but also photographs and video. Zemanta also works with email.

However, Kimengi has some traction already. Two big names in the Dutch publishing world, Het Parool (an Amsterdam-based newspaper and ILSE Media (the biggest dutch blogging network), are about to announce the use of f>>dforward in their publishing properties. The widget is already being trialled by about 40 high-traffic Dutch blogs with a particular focus on technology blogs.

Martijn Wuite from Het Parool says this kind of content recommendation allows the paper to provide links not only related to the subject of the current article, e.g. other sports articles, but also to the interests of the user based on the preferences of similar readers. Publishers can designate particular sites as part of their network, e.g. Ajax football club fan sites for Het Parool, and recommendations from those sites will get higher priority. The thinking is a world away from some of the current “non-linking” theories spreading around the newspaper world at the moment.

But what of Kimengi’s positioning against Zemanta? There are a couple of notable differences between the two services. Kimengi has some catching up to do with Zemanta’s pleasing design while Zemanta’s roster of content sources seems somewhat less configurable than Kimengi’s. Zemanta is English-only for now while Kimengi already caters for multiple languages starting with Dutch and English. Finally, Zemanta charges for more than 50,000 calls per day. Kimengi expects to add premium services allowing companies to not only track how their brand is being written about online but also who is consuming that content.

Ultimately, Kimengi has bigger ambitions than the widget alone. In his canal-view office in Amsterdam (nice wallpaper too) CEO Lucien Burm told me that the widget is just the first step towards the highly-scalable, personalised and real-time recommendation engine on which the company is working. The launch horizon for the engine is sometime in 2010. One to watch.

XRegExp is an open source (MIT license) JavaScript library that provides an augmented, extensible, cross-browser implementation of regular expressions, including support for additional syntax, flags, and methods.

XRegExp adds new regex and replacement text syntax, including comprehensive support for named capture. It also provides a suite of 12 functions and methods that make complex regex processing a breeze. And it lets you easily create and use plugins that add new syntax and flags to XRegExp’s regular expression language.

XRegExp is fully compliant with the regular expression flavor specified in ECMA-262 Edition 3 (ES3), and has been tested with Internet Explorer 5.5–8, Firefox 2–3, Safari 3–4, Chrome 1–2, and Opera 9. XRegExp uses feature detection—no browser sniffing.

Requirements: -
Demo: http://xregexp.com/
License: MIT License

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TemplateMo.com is a website providing 100+ free CSS templates that you can download, modify and use on your websites (both free & commercial) with no restrictions.

All templates are XHTML/CSS compliant & will work flawless on all major browsers.

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Related posts

• Zoomable CSS Framework: Typogridphy

MySpace is sharing an open source project named MySpace’s Performance Tracker which is an Internet Explorer plugin for capturing and measuring possible bottlenecks on webpages.

The plugin is a great helper to developers for:

• measure the CPU hit and memory footprint of your pages
• reviewing screenshots of the page while it renders
• reviewing rendered HTML on each point of the page’s lifecycle
• viewing estimates of the time it takes to render each section of the page in different connection speeds
• validating the content of pages against a set of proven “best practice” rules of web development. 

P.S. The tool is currently in pre-alpha state.

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Related posts

• Lightweight Rounded Corners: DD_roundies
• Automated Browser Refresher For Developing Easier: XRefresh

(smt) is a free script, built with JavaScript & PHP, to create a simple mouse tracking system for webpages.

It enables you to watch how visitors interact with a webpage like:

• which areas they click
• what parts they highlight
• & more..

(smt) can work with both liquid & fixed layouts. For any user with "JavaScript disabled" it will gracefully degrade.

The script is very easy-to-install by simply uploading the project folder & including the JS files to the pages to be recorded (documentation).

With various options provided, it is possible to enable/disable viewing the mouse activity routes, distances, clicks & more.

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jQuery Dynamic Drag’n Drop
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Related posts

• User Interface Library For MooTools: MochaUI
• Use PHP Functions In JavaScript: PHP.JS
• Use Any Font In Your Websites With FLIR
• Stylish MooTools File Manager
• Stunning Ajax File Manager: AjaXplorer

Register now to lock in exclusive $300 savings for The Ajax Experience conference, September 14-16 in Boston, MA.

It's only been two weeks since we announced open registration for The Ajax Experience with the promise of additional sessions being added to the web site over the next few weeks. And while a number of your peers have already applied and taken advantage of the $300 early-bird discount (which expires at the end of next month), we've already added more sessions to our agenda, including:

• 'Cappuccino Web Framework' with Ross Boucher, Co-founder of 280 North
• 'Even Faster Web Sites' with Steve Souders, Performance Engineer at Google and author of Even Faster Web Sites
• 'Testing the Testers: YUI Unit versus QUnit' with Ted Husted, Author of JUnit in Action, Struts in Action and more.  Others from Ted: 'Testing Ajax Applications' and 'API Doc Smackdown: YUI Doc Versus JS Doc Toolkit'
• 'Advanced Web Application Security' with Joe Walker, Creator of DWR
• 'Building Accessible User Interfaces with jQuery and Fluid Infusion' with Colin Clark, Co-founder of Fluid and Contributor to jQuery UI
• 'Designing for the Mobile Web with JavaScript' with Brian LeRoux, Co-creator of XUI and a Contributor to the PhoneGap project
• Panel: 'ES5: ECMAScript Standards for a Better Web' led by Allen Wirfs-Brock, ECMAScript Language Architect, Microsoft
• Panel: Secure Mashups: Getting to Safe Web Plugins led by Douglas Crockford, Author of JavaScript: The Good Parts
• And more!

The speakers and attendees at The Ajax Experience are working with the most advanced technologies today, building Ajax and rich Web front ends, as well as figuring out new ways to make response time still faster. And if security, performance, and SOA are important to you, you've come to the right place.

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See you at The Ajax Experience!