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Posts Tagged ‘Backend’

Site news: new commenting and login system is on the loose

If you noticed a little wonkiness here and there on Ars Friday afternoon, don’t panic! We’ve been transitioning our user database and comments over to a new system we’ve been working on.

We’ll expound on all the benefits of the new system and perhaps some of the technical details later on, but over the weekend we’re more interested in learning if anyone runs into any weird bugs on their systems. We’ve been beta testing it locally for a while and we’re satisfied that the system is ready for wider use.

This article (and all articles from here on out) will be the only articles using the new commenting system. All posts prior to this one will use the old AJAX system.

Here are the top-line details of the new system:

• New comment threads use an absolute minimum of JavaScript. No longer do you need JavaScript enabled to read or make comments on the site. The only feature which currently requires JavaScript is editing a post; we’ll be looking for ways to eliminate this in the future.
• There still is a tiny bit of JavaScript, however. We use it for editing, like I said, and for when you click on the “reply” links. This will prepopulate the text area with the text of the post you’re replying to, replete with the right UBB tags.
• We’ve also moved to a more reliable, stable, and tweakable backend for our user database and profiles. This means you’ll be logging in and managing your profiles at a different location—arstechnica.com/civis, instead of civis.arstechnica.com. We think this will eliminate a lot of minor irritations you may have experienced in the past. The coolest thing? We have a lot more flexibility in how we expand these types of services in the future.
• While we’re talking about flexibility, our new system will let us more easily and quickly explore new commenting features in a way we weren’t able to do before. We’ll also be able to run down commenting and user database bugs a lot more easily now.
• The first example of the above is that you should now see comment counts on articles and all over the site beginning with this article. This was something we couldn’t easily do before and which was made easy by this switch.

That’s all for now. If you’re running into any reproducible bugs or simply cannot login to the new system, please e-mail us at civis@arstechnica.com or let us know in the comments—assuming you can comment.

In addition, if you have any specific questions about what we’re up to here, leave those questions in the comments (or e-mail us at the aforementioned address) and we’ll do our best to answer.

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Open Text Buys Up Content Analysis Startup Nstein Technologies For $34 Million

Enterprise content management juggernaut Open Text has bought content analysis startup Nstein Technologies for $34 million. Nstein’s Text Mining Engine helps businesses centralize, understand and manage content through semantic and text analysis.

For example, Nstein powers the backend of The Financial Times’ semantic search engine, called Newssift, that indexes about 4,000 business news sources, from online newspapers and blogs to news portals and research sites.

Open Text’s digital media solution help its customers manage rich-media content, so Nstein’s technology should boost Open Text’s existing offerings. Last year, Open Text, which is a publicly traded company bought up 3-D interface innovator Vizible.

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What The Wii Did For Console Gaming, Glitch Wants To Do For MMOs. And It Just Might.

Last night, the news started to come out about Glitch, the new massively multiplayer online game that a few of the key cogs that built Flickr had been developing in secret for much of last year. Today, I got to see a still relatively early build of the game. It is both beautiful and impressive.

I met up with Stewart Butterfield, one of the co-founders of Flickr, so he could demo Glitch for me. Sitting in a hotel lobby on a WiFi connection being used by who knows how many other people, the game, which runs in the browser and is Flash-based, was incredibly smooth. Even more impressively, Butterfield was able to manipulate the game from the backend (using his “God” mode tools) to add new elements on the fly right in front of me. This is a key part of what will likely make or break Glitch.

While Glitch itself as a game is still coming together (it’s not going to be released until Fall 2010), Tiny Speck, the company behind the game, has spent much of the last year creating a backend that can allow them to quickly and easily build out an expansive multiplayer world. In fact, up until this point, about 80% of the time has been spent on building this backend, with only 20% devoted to the frontend of the game itself, Butterfield says. Over the next nine months, that will flip.

So how easy is it to add elements to the game? Right before our meeting, Butterfield asked one of his developers to create a Michael Arrington element in the game. When we sat down, there was Mike, in the game, ready to go (see picture below). Butterfield also dynamically altered worlds on the fly and added new elements all with a few mouse and keyboard clicks.

One reason Tiny Speck is able to do this is because they decided to focus on making the game 2D rather than 3D like some of the more popular MMOs out there right now, such as World of Warcraft. This saves them countless hours of rendering time for countless angles. More importantly, Butterfield says he realized during his last gaming project, Game Neverending (which eventually gave birth to Flickr, before it was bought by Yahoo), that how a game looks matters less to a lot of users after a few minutes of play. All of that peels back to the fundamental gameplay, which Glitch is focusing on.

And that’s not to say Glitch doesn’t look nice. In fact, as I noted above, it looks great. Tiny Speck has several artists developing the landscapes for the different worlds in the game, as well as different intricately designed elements that you use in the game itself. The game already has a distinctive look even though Butterfield is quick to point out that maybe the key element, the characters you inhabit in the game, aren’t done yet.

So what’s Glitch all about? Well, it’s a bit convoluted, but basically you start out in the future and travel backwards through time to save the future. In doing so you jump in and out of the minds of eleven giants. Or something. See? Convoluted. But that shouldn’t matter — many of the best games are.

Ultimately, it’s a collaborative puzzle solving game on a massive scale. Interacting with people in the game is key, and meant to be fun. It’s a big part of Tiny Speck’s goal to do for MMOs what the Wii did for console gaming — which is to bring it beyond the stereotypical players and to the masses. Butterfield notes that while World of Warcraft is huge, its player base is just a fraction of those who play Farmville, for example. The goal is to find a middle ground.

And that middle ground applies to revenues too. While World of Warcraft is pulling in a ton of money for each player (thanks to its subscription model), Farmville pulls in much less (because it’s mostly based around micro-transactions). Butterfield sees a middle ground here too that Glitch will try to tap. While the core game will be free to play, users will be able to buy items in the game, and hardcore users will probably be able to pay for special rights, maybe even voting on new features (an interesting idea that Butterfield floated out there).

Since the game is Flash-based, I asked Butterfield for his thoughts about the recent controversy surrounding Flash-maker Adobe since Apple and Google appear to be moving away from Flash and towards HTML5. Butterfield said that while they have no allegiance to Adobe, there is simply no way they could have made Glitch the way it is trying to use anything but Flash. And while performance is often a knock of the technology, Tiny Speck has done a ton of work to optimize things on their end to keep the game running smoothly, even as it scales (obviously, they test that sort of stuff even in this early stage).

I also asked Butterfield why not just build Glitch as a Facebook game, like Farmville? His response was that their vision for Glitch was to use more than the small window within a social network. Fundamentally, it’s an extension of what he started with Game Neverending, but they’re far beyond what was capable back then, so the technology is finally matching the vision.

And as a best case scenario, Butterfield also hopes to see Glitch extend beyond the browser and onto systems like the Wii and Xbox 360. And while there may not be a full iPhone app, he foresees them using that platform (and Android) to make app mini-games of sorts that give you power-ups in the game when you play them.

On top of being a co-founder, Butterfield is serving as President of Tiny Speck. His other co-founders include Eric Costello (also the Client Lead), Cal Henderson (the former head of engineering for Flickr who is now Tiny Speck’s VP of Engineering), and Serguei Mourachov (who is the Server Lead). As we noted back in September, they also hired Digg’s lead designer to be their be their Director of Design, Daniel Burka. There are about a dozen or so people working on Glitch now, with most based in San Francisco or Vancouver (where Butterfield spends most of his time).

Tiny Speck quietly raised a seed round of funding last year led by Accel Partners, and including angels such as Marc Andreessen, and Jeff Weiner. Butterfield said they’ll soon raise a larger Series A as well. They’re going to need it for such a lofty goal. And they’ll get it, when the VCs see how nicely the game is coming along.

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GROU.PS DIY Social Network Platform Reaches 2 Million Users, Becomes More Customizable

GROU.PS, a do-it-yourself social network focused on moderated online collaboration has steadily gained an impressive amount of users and added compelling features to its application. The social network platform has just hit 2 million users, adding another million members in just 6 months.

And GROU.PS has amped up its offering for publishers by launching Elastic Modules, which gives publishers the ability to change the way the data is displayed to their visitors. To date, the highest reach of look and feel customization was at the template level; the
publisher could only change the skin of their site. Now publishers can actually modify the backend of the social network they’ve created.

GROU.PS counts Don Dodge, developer evangelist at Google, is among the community builders that have chosen GROU.PS as their online platform. “Don Dodge’s Startup List” is sort of a Crunchbase for Boston area.

The startup’s networks are attractive to users because it lets you run all of your group’s collaboration tools from one GROU.PS domain using a single login. The system supports wikis, photos, links, blogs, calendars, chat, forums, maps, profiles, and subgroups – each of which is available as a plug-and-play module for your community. These modules also allow users to pull in their data from other third party services (flickr, Digg, blogs, etc).

The startup, which has over 40,000 networks on its platform, also recently added ActivityRank Pipelines, a point and reward system that lets moderators of a social network measure and rank members’ content contributions and then extend moderation privileges to members based on these rankings. And the social network is launching a subscription model that will allow moderators to charge subscription fees to members (GROU.PS gets a 50% cut on any fees charges).

GROU.PS just raised $1 million in funding, bringing the startup’s total funding up to over $2 million. But while the social network is growing, it is still faces major competition form the leader in the space, Ning, which recently hit 37 million users with 1.6 million social networks created on the platform.

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

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Remains Of Streamzy Picked Up, Reborn As Web Radio Service Listen.fm

Frustrated with the fact that Pandora does not provide its streaming service in Canada, Vancouver-based Jeff Anderson set out to build a community-driven Internet radio service of his own along with other music fanatics, and dubbed the project Listen.fm.

Currently still in private beta, Listen.fm is not going to be a ‘revolutionary’ service, says Anderson, but rather just a great place to listen to and discover new music that can legally be shared with others. The site has been in the works for nearly a year and should be launching in public beta some time next year.

As you may recall, Streamzy, a media search startup that used the late Seeqpod’s database as a content source but became a shell after Seeqpod folded, was recently put up for sale on eBay.

Anderson took notice of the sale, and picked up whatever was left of the project in a rush to see if some of the technology could be used to enhance Listen.fm. Turns out there wasn’t much left at all (the Seeqpod API didn’t work anymore and the YouTube API didn’t provide much benefit to what they were building either) although Anderson says they don’t regret ‘acquiring’ the Streamzy leftovers because it allowed them to play around with the backend, Google Apps Engine, in a working context.

Not that Streamzy cost him and his team a fortune: the auction closed at $2,700.

More on Listen.fm when they are closer to launching.

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

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Brightcove 4 Adds Support For The iPhone, Facebook, Live Video, And More

It’s been about a year since Brightcove released the last upgrade to its professional online video platform with Brightcove 3. On Monday, it’s going to release Brightcove 4, and it’s a massive upgrade.

Brightcove 4 now supports a native video player on the iPhone, in Facebook, and live video streaming on the Web. It’s got Twitter integration for sharing videos, faster-loading video players, the ability to switch between Flash streaming and HTTP, adaptive streaming based on a user’s device and bandwidth, behind-the-firewall video delivery, support for most major ad servers, better analytics, and a new, cheaper, entry-level subscription service called Brightcove Express.

The biggest new feature is the iPhone player. Instead of clicking off into the Quicktime player, Brightcove uses the Quicktime APIs to render the player within an app. Developers are going to love this because they can skin the player any way they want, tie it into the same ads served through a publisher’s Brightcove player on the Web, add email and Twitter sharing, and Coverflow-style browsing.

The Facebook integration will also be popular. Brightcove 4 offers a template which allows for Facebook Connect logins with realtime comments which appear in each commenter’s Facebook stream. Brightcove videos shared on Facebook will also be playable within the stream, just like YouTube videos.

Brightcove 4 will also support live video streams for the first time. Live videos of events can be scheduled, archived, mixed with on-demand videos, and tied into the same advertising backend. If a publisher has a huge event and would rather use their own CDN, they can do that as well. Why now? “We waited until there was sufficient market demand,” says CEO Jeremy Allaire. Yet more evidence that live video on the Web may be finding its legs.

So far Brightcove is mostly used by media companies and professional video publishers who can afford to pay at least $500 a month for the service. But with this release, Brightcove is also trying to broaden its appeal with service plans which now begin at $99 a month. It’s still not a consumer platform, and probably never will be. But for professional Web video publishers and companies with video marketing budgets, the new entry point should help to expand Brightcove’s market.

I am not sure why Brightcove holds all of this good stuff back until they can package it in a new, numbered release, since it is a Web-based service, which could just as easily upgrade on a rolling basis. But doing it all at once like this does highlight all the changes to the code-base, and shows why Brightcove is considered the leading Web video platform for professional use. Brightcove boast 800 customers which use its players across 2,500 different Web sites. Collectively, they reach 135 million unique viewers per month, according to Allaire.

He won’t disclose exact revenues other than to say that it is in the “tens of millions” of dollars a year, and growing at a 50 percent annual rate. But he does say that the company, which has raised a total of $91 million in venture capital, isn’t burning any more cash. “During the first half of this year we were profitable and cash flow positive,” he says. Like everyone else, Brightcove cut back on expenses last year, and even went through layoffs of 13 percent of its workforce. The fourth quarter was the low point, but demand started picking up again at the beginning of the year, especially from branded goods companies, marketing departments, and even manufacturers looking to add video to their sites. Last quarter, Allaire hired 30 people, and currently employs 180. Next quarter he is looking to hire 30 more.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

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Northern Michigan University teams with Motorola for campus-wide WiMAX

Northern Michigan University was fairly early to the game in offering laptops and campus-wide WiFi to its students, and it looks like it’s now stepping things up even further with a little help from Motorola, which is providing the backend for NMU’s new campus-wide WiMAX network (a first in the US). Better still, the university is also providing some brand new WiMAX-equipped ThinkPads to nearly 3,000 of the school’s more than 9,000 students, and it’s also making a range of laptop and desktop WiMAX adapters available to students with non WiMAX-enabled computers. With a radius of some 30 miles, the network will also encompass a number of off-campus sites, and be made available to local schools and municipal offices though a licensing arrangement.

[Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons]

Filed under: Wireless

Northern Michigan University teams with Motorola for campus-wide WiMAX originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 22 Aug 2009 09:52:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Sharein Launches New Features, Becomes Must-Have for Social Media Marketers

Sharein, the new bookmarklet-based service for link sharing which launched earlier this summer, has just today introduced some new features which further solidify this up-and-comer as the new must-have tool for sharing links on the web. The service, already an easy way to share to Twitter, Facebook, and via email, is most notable for its ability to track statistics like views on the backend, a feature that should appeal to marketers looking for hard data on their social media efforts.

Today, the analytics feature has been enhanced to provide even more data than before, this time with a specific focus on Facebook shares. Also new today is the integration of Tweetmeme and Digg data into shares as well as YouTube stats for video shares. For anyone using Facebook to promote their content, Sharein has just made itself indispensible.

Sponsor

The concept of a browser bookmarklet for link sharing isn’t either new or revolutionary. Many people have become comfortable using services like TwitThis and others for some time. However, Sharein goes beyond just being a simple timesaver for sharing links and integrates the sort of analytics which marketers crave into its backend.

Better Analytics for Facebook Shares

Today, in addition to seeing the the views, reach, and re-shares for links shared on Twitter and Facebook, Sharein is now capturing data on Facebook “likes” and comments. In fact, it’s even pulling in the comments’ text itself so you can use the service as a one-stop-shop for tracking the popularity of items on Facebook.

And as before, the aggregate data tracked using the service is further analyzed on your main “Shares” page where you can see the most popular links for the past week, month, or year. You’ll also be able to tell who your most popular sharers are so you can better engage with your core fans or customers.

New Features Help Increase Clickthroughs on Facebook

The way your shared links appear on Facebook has also been revamped as of today. Sharein is (at last!) generating a thumbnail to accompany an article, just like how native link shares using Facebook’s own tool display. The shares now also feature data on the number of tweets courtesy of Tweetmeme and the number of diggs on the social news website Digg.com. This extra information can help generate more interest in the shared link as visitors will be able to see at a glance how popular the article is on other social networks.

For video shares, extra information has been added here, too. When sharing YouTube videos, the ratings info and total views are now displayed. Again, this is to help increase clickthoughs by highlighting the popularity of the content.

Try it Now!

With all the features being offered by this tool, we’re surprised that more people aren’t talking about or using the service. However, that may be because Sharein is still so new, few have heard of it yet. We’re sure that once Facebook and Twitter marketers, businesses, and any others who want to track their shares on social networks get wind of what Sharein can do, its popularity will increase dramatically. If you haven’t tried Sharein yet, you can set up an account today from the company homepage.

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