Web Development Live

Front Seat is a two-year-old software company created to exploit the power of technology to positively impact civic life.  Front Seat is a rare opportunity to work with a world-class software team where social benefit is the top priority.  We’re looking for a seasoned backend engineer to compliment our UI expertise and help us dream up the next wave of civic innovation driven by software.

Our flagship project is Walk Score, a site that promotes walkable neighborhoods by providing a walkability score for any address.  Walk Score created a tsunami of media coverage and users have scored over 5 million addresses on the site. Other projects include CountMore.org, a site that helps students decide whether to vote in their school state or home state, Kathy’s Climate Kit, a global warming gift box that we’ve spun off as a separate consumer products company, The Predatory Lending Assocation, an experimental political satire lampooning payday lenders, and Better Bills, which promotes energy conservation through better bill design.

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BrowserMedia is pleased to announce its participation in the release of an iPhone application for LivingSocial, a social discovery and cataloging network that allows more than 6.8 million users to review and share their favorite movies, books, games, music, restaurants and beer.

BrowserMedia worked closely with the LivingSocial team to develop an iPhone application front-end to their existing social networking platform. Features of the application include account integration via webservices, the ability to review, rate and share, the ability to take and upload photographs, the ability to search and browse reviews, integrated recommendations, and the ability to browse friend profiles and review feeds.

Kerry Gunther, President and CEO of BrowserMedia, said, “Native iPhone application development is an emerging technology that can expand customer reach and give you an edge over your competition. We’re especially proud of the co-development of LivingSocial’s iPhone application and the collaborative process with our friends at LivingSocial that led to its development.”

BrowserMedia’s dedicated iPhone technology practice group provides an end-to-end solution for native iPhone application development. Using an agile development approach, BrowserMedia’s development offering includes strategic assessment and product placement recommendations, information architecture, creative services, and Cocoa software development. Since the Apple iPhone SDK was released on March 6, 2008, BrowserMedia has successfully developed more than a half-dozen applications.

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Now that they have officially released their website development platform, Sitemasher has put together a Partner Program designed to help web development and marketing firms quickly build customer websites using it.

CMSWire covered the news of the Sitemasher Web Development Platform an all inclusive platform offering a website builder, content management, analytics, SEO and managed hosting in one neat little package. Although not something groundbreaking, we did acknowledge it as a solution for small to mid-sized companies trying to get something off the ground.

Sitemasher also appears to have recognized another potential market that of the basement website developer and non-technical kind. It has opened up a partnership program for web development and marketing firms who want to quickly build websites for their customers.

“We strive to help design, development and marketing firms find ways to make money faster. Most are artists and designers at heart, not technologists. By removing the technology side and giving them powerful design tools, they can increase revenues, profitability and even reach out to new markets,” said Sitemasher Vice President of Marketing Nicole Denil.

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Perceptionsystem, the India based web development company is known for
the value of their web development services for business houses. The company has started to offer a range of outsourcing services in all areas of web development specially designed to meet the diverse needs of small businesses.

Perceptionsystem has a dedicated and experience team for web development projects, dynamic websites, ecommerce shopping cart, database designs etc. Our PHP and .NET developers have expertise in open source customization, integration, template integration, joomla content management and more.

Perceptionsystem use Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP) and ASP.Net which provides a framework for building dynamic web applications which enable Internet and Intranet applications to be interactive.

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Yahoo on Tuesday introduced its Yahoo Open Strategy (Y!OS) 1.0 Developer Release, a set of programming resources to help developers to build social applications for use on Yahoo.

“At a high level, we’re rolling out a social platform that will draw on the hundreds of millions of connections on Yahoo everything from random encounters with someone who commented on the same photo as you, to deep connections you have with friends who know nearly everything about you,” said Jay Rossiter, head of Yahoo Open Strategy, in a blog post. “By using the social contacts you already have on Yahoo through Mail, Messenger, Flickr, Finance, Fantasy Sports, etc.

Second, there’s Yahoo Query Language (YQL), a new Web service API for accessing other Web services using a SQL-style query language, rather than a lower-level programming code. Yahoo describes it as “a command-line version of Pipes,” Yahoo’s visual programming system for mashing up and remixing Web data, like RSS feeds.

Third, there’s the Yahoo Application Platform (YAP), a set of software and services to build applications that run on Yahoo. It includes a browser-based development environment, various APIs and Web services, a distribution and discovery infrastructure, and a runtime and rendering environment.

The week before that, Yahoo released its “universal profile,” a reworked identity scheme for managing personal information and activities within Yahoo’s rewired social infrastructure.

Over the coming months, Yahoo expects newly developed social applications to make the experience of using Yahoo more like Facebook or MySpace. Its goal is to drive more traffic to Yahoo and its partners and to encourage deeper engagement. If Yahoo is successful in doing so, it should generate more ad revenue as a result.

Yahoo aims to avoid some of the privacy pitfalls into which social networks like Facebook have stumbled. “We’ve done all of this in a way that keeps Yahoo as safe and secure as ever, while also building in full privacy and permission control so you’ll have complete control over things like what you broadcast publicly and what information you share with third-party sites, etc.,” said Rossiter.

Time will tell whether Yahoo can open up its infrastructure without opening potential vulnerabilities.

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Unlike other businesses who find they are restructuring, and downsizing from the latest news on Wall Street, Datalis Solutions Corporation, provider of e-commerce, SEO and website development services is boldly moving forward with the launch of a new division, Affordable E Solutions, (AES).

As affordable website and business launch consultants; Affordable E Solutions wants to help new and existing e-commerce companies survive and give them the websites and guidance they need, in order to find new opportunities created by current economic conditions. AES are advocates for start up e-commerce businesses, small businesses and companies who want to take the next step in either creating websites or changing their current websites.

Affordable E Solutions is helping businesses realize that you can get that “customized professional website look and feel” and full search engine optimization (SEO) capability for your company at a reasonable cost.
“With the down turn in the economy, and more people moving to open up their own e-commerce sites, AES has found a strong demand from customers in all industries seeking a company who understand website development, SEO, and how to make it customized for their individual needs. The demand of the emerging E-Commerce market for the web and SEO services that AES offers has never been stronger.

AES has also adopted the unusual strategy of having its professionals offer a no-cost consultation to business owners who are looking for a business roadmap, idea, strategy, or solution to help benefit their business. Most importantly is for AES to develop long term relationships with its new clients.

Our marketing research shows that the amount of new e-commerce companies is increasing each month, and that we can expect an explosion of people wanting to get into the e-commerce market as a result of the current tumultuous economy. AES has found that the companies they help in the startup and fledgling stages actually go on to be counted among their best clients. For AES, this is an investment in our future business.” said Scott Peters, President and CEO for Affordable E Solutions.

One such client is Silver Age Surfers a startup e-commerce business targeting the Baby Boomer generation. Anne Hardy, President said, “AES really understood our needs and their expertise extends beyond website development. We relied on them for help with our strategic planning as we went forward developing the business. Their ability to be flexible, responsive and, most importantly affordable, are the key reasons we selected them.”

Halloween and costume retailer, Costume Super Center, CTO, John Coniglio said, “We retained AES more than a year ago for customized website work to enhance our customer buyer experience. It was a good decision and the services provided by AES had a positive impact on our sales projections.”
Kevin Leville, President and CEO of Eat Right America, an advocate of healthy eating habits and lifestyle choices said, “AES is a company with the knowledge and skill sets to quickly assess a company’s needs and design and develop a website that gives visitors a great on-line experience. We are continuing to retain their services due to their ability to work within our budget and help keep us moving even in these tough times where credit and venture capital monies are tight.”

“Affordable E Solutions designed its business to provide strong services to new and existing startups and ongoing e-commerce business ventures that do not want to pay the high costs of website and SEO development.” said Scott Peters, CEO, adding, “We are not just another provider; we offer companies the ability to have a professional website look and improved SEO at an affordable cost.”

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While much will be said about Microsoft’s cloud-computing strategy introduced Monday, at the heart of Windows Azure is a fairly simple goal: inspire corporate developers to rethink the way they develop software so applications can take better advantage of the Web.

Microsoft is trying to differentiate its Azure cloud-based development environment, unveiled in a keynote at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles, from competitive offerings like Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) by saying Azure does more than just take traditional software and put it in the cloud.

In an interview Monday at the conference, Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie described how traditionally software has been built according to a scale-up model, which isn’t practical for the current era of the Web, when applications must be flexible and accessible to a large number of users both inside and outside the corporate firewall.

“The systems we’ve built for enterprises are really the scale-up model,” he said. “We build a system and we try to add hardware to make it get bigger and bigger and support bigger and bigger enterprises, but eventually that kind of falls apart.”

With Azure, developers can build software in a scale-out model, which Ozzie described using an analogy involving tennis balls, and how a person or persons might handle them if someone was throwing balls at them.

“Let’s say [someone] throws 100 balls at me,” he said. “There are limits to the scale-up model and if I fail, all the balls will fall to the ground.”

However, in a scale-out model, an application can distribute the task of catching the balls, which gives it more flexibility, Ozzie said. “There’s a chance that by just adding more people, we can take any number of balls that he’ll throw at us. And if one falls down, then maybe the guy next to him will pick it up, but he’ll keep going.”

Azure, then, allows developers to build applications according to this model, which means an application won’t break down as it tries to process all the different connections to users behind the firewall, on the Internet and to myriad devices that the current wave of Web applications must juggle.

Ozzie used the example of Microsoft’s Hotmail e-mail service as an application developed according to a scale-out model because the company knew from the beginning it would have to serve millions of users coming in from various connected environments. However, it didn’t build its e-mail server software, Exchange, in this way, and had to rearchitect the application later to fit this development model, he said.

“There’s a process you use to take an enterprise app and change it and rethink it to be that broad, horizontal thing,” Ozzie said. “We’ve done that with Exchange, and we’re doing that with more and more.”

In offering a cloud development and deployment platform, Microsoft has a harder task than competitors like Amazon or Salesforce.com, both of which started their businesses on the Web. With its software legacy, Microsoft has to tend to millions of developers who use its platforms to build software meant to live on premise in a corporate data center while balancing the rapidly evolving needs of more sophisticated Web applications.

James Governor, principal analyst for analyst firm RedMonk, had a more simplistic and tongue-in-cheek description of the scale-out model Azure is trying to provide for corporate applications, comparing it to “wearing your underpants on the outside of your clothes.”

Developers need to find a way to expose their applications to as many users as possible but still keep the security, scalability and other factors intrinsic to corporate computing environments in mind, he said.

Pitney Bowes Management Services, a subsidiary of Pitney Bowes that outsources business services such as mailing, communications and shipping to Fortune 1000 companies, is one company that is facing this problem. Pitney Bowes Management Services is working with Microsoft to test a version of its dMail digital mail conversion service running on Azure.

Terry Doeberl, director of business development for Pitney Bowes Management Services, said one benefit to a Web-based development model for applications is that it will make applications independent of the desktop operating systems, which he called “the bane of many companies’ existences” because of how difficult it can be to install new applications across desktop PCs.

As described by Microsoft, Azure abstracts the application from the OS using virtualization technology, which means the two can act independently of each other.

Doeberl said the separation between the application and the OS also simplifies the maintenance of support of individual desktop users while making the applications more accessible from mobile devices.

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The Church of England’s national network of local campaigners on world development issues is being linked together more effectively on the worldwide web in a bid to amplify their voices on crucial global topics.

The new ‘Partners in World Development’ website provides parishes with up-to-date information on issues such as trade justice, debt relief and climate change.

It also provides profiles of many Church of England dioceses, with overviews of the projects they have underway and details of their link dioceses overseas. These also include contact details for each diocese’s World Development Adviser, or similar usually a volunteer who helps co-ordinate structured work to raise awareness of these subjects locally.

The site features a calendar of forthcoming local and national events, links to Anglican development agencies and other in-depth resources, including prayer prompts.

Many other British denominations are heavily involved in development campaigning, too, although many of them do not have the kind of resources available to the C of E. The Methodists and Catholics have been especially strong in pioneering justice and anti-poverty campaigns, among others.

The Rt Rev Tony Robinson, Bishop of Pontefract, is the Episcopal Adviser for the Church of England’s growing network of diocesan World Development Advisers.

“Exactly three months ago at the Lambeth Conference, the Anglican Communion showed what impact a public commitment to work together on pressing world issues can have, when the bishops and their spouses walked through London to urge international governments to keep their promises on the Millennium Development Goals. And exactly one month ago, this call was echoed at the UN summit in New York,” he said.

“This new site makes a vital contribution to the ongoing process of encouraging and resourcing such campaigning. It’s inspiring to see the contributions that parishes and dioceses are making to building a world in which people everywhere can have an opportunity to flourish.”

Design and development costs for the new website were met by the Archbishops’ Council’s Mission and Public Affairs Division.

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Yahoo will launch its platform for Web developers next week, part of an effort to attract more visitors by adding Facebook-like social networking features to Yahoo’s Web sites.

Yahoo hopes to drive more traffic to its sites by allowing people to share information about their interests and activities with friends. Like on Facebook, they’ll be able to create a network of connections and send alerts to those people when they upload photos to Flickr or comment on a story at Yahoo News, for example.

The platform will extend to non-Yahoo sites such as Amazon and Digg, so that users will be able to see from within Yahoo’s Web sites what their friends have been doing elsewhere on the Web. And third-party sites will be able to publish user activity back into the Yahoo network, which could help those sites draw more visitors.

The search company is making the data it stores about users — such as their contacts, interests and location — available for developers to build their applications. End users will be able to regulate which of their information friends and developers can see, said Yahoo officials, who previewed the platform in San Francisco on Friday.

It’s an ambitious project that required Yahoo to “rewire” its properties to create a single underlying platform that connects them all. Those services existed in the past as “silos” that allowed for little interaction between them, said Ash Patel, executive vice president with Yahoo’s Audience Product Division.

“The platform is how we start rewiring and reforming the user experience,” he said.

Yahoo launched the first piece of the puzzle last week, a site called Yahoo Profiles where end users can manage their activities, interests and social connections in one place. Next week will mark the launch of the developer component. It’s built on top of Yahoo’s existing network infrastructure and consists broadly of three layers.

The first is the Yahoo Social Platform, a repository where Yahoo stores the personal data about its users, along with their “social graph,” or information about who their friends are. Above that is the Application Platform, which provides the development framework. And above that is the Yahoo Query Language, which developers will use to pull personal user data from Yahoo’s servers and write their programs. YQL is very similar to the widely used SQL database language, according to Yahoo.

The platform also makes use of public APIs such as Open Social, for aggregating user data from other social networking sites, and OAuth, a protocol for consuming and publishing personal data. The tools and documentation will be available for free download next week from the Yahoo Developer Network, said Jay Rossiter, head of Yahoo’s Open Strategy project. He wouldn’t say exactly which day.

Yahoo officials gave examples of the types of applications it wants developers to build. If a person receives an e-mail telling them it’s a friend’s birthday, an application could allow them to view their friend’s Amazon.com Wish List from within Yahoo Mail. Another program might automatically upload photos received via Yahoo Mail to an online photo account, be that Flickr or a non-Yahoo service such as Shutterfly.

Part of the challenge will be getting Yahoo’s users to buy into the idea. At some time in the future, when they log into a Yahoo service they’ll see the Yahoo Activator, which will present a list of all their contacts pulled from Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Messenger and other services. They’ll use this to build their connections list and decide who can see what information.

Activations can already be done at the new Yahoo Profiles site and with a beta of Yahoo Messenger 9 that was just released. Activations will be rolled out more widely in a few months when the option is presented to people when they log into their Yahoo Mail accounts, and at other Yahoo services after that.

Each new application will have to warn users about the data it plans to access, such as their address book, inbox or profile, and about who the information will be shared with. Patel admitted that this is a delicate area. Yahoo will make certain selections by default that users can then alter.

“Choosing the right defaults so people don’t inadvertently give away their privacy is part of the challenge,” Patel said.

The OAuth protocol allows users to give a site access to their data for a limited time, such as two weeks, said Neal Sample, a Yahoo chief architect.

Yahoo doesn’t expect the Profiles page to become a major destination. Instead, users will eventually be able to install applications and display updates at their My Yahoo page, in Yahoo Mail, and possibly at Yahoo’s main home page.

Yahoo, which has been struggling to sustain its growth rate, hopes the social networking features will encourage people to use more of its services. If the average user visits two or three of its sites today, it hopes that seeing what friends are doing elsewhere in its network will prompt them to visit four or five sites in the future, Patel said.

Yahoo spent the past year developing the platform. Much depends now on the creativity of developers to make it a success, Patel said.

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Web development gurus Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith are leaving their previous positions, at Google and as a consultant respectively, to join forces and head up a new group at Mozilla called the Developer Tools Lab.

“We’re now the co-directors of the developer tools group at Mozilla and we’re really jazzed about it,” Almaer told eWEEK in an interview. “This is the first time the dominant platform is the open Web platform and is not in a position where a specific vendor has control over it. We’re psyched about building tools and making them available to everybody as open-source software.”

Almaer and Galbraith co-founded the popular Ajaxian.com site and are known as a hot draw on the developer-oriented trade show circuit. The team has a particular style that plays well to developers as they joke and banter amongst themselves, with Almaer’s British wit playing against Galbraith’s impish American-geek sense of humor. Other talented technical presentation duos that come to mind include Don Box and Chris Anderson of Microsoft and Miguel de Icaza and Nat Friedman of Novell and Ximian fame.

Almaer and Galbraith will be missed by their former employers, but welcomed with open arms at Mozilla. Almaer served as an engineer and evangelist on Google’s open-source team, where he contributed to several projects and turned out some of the best video interviews and other content related to Google’s developer-oriented initiatives. In addition to serving as a software consultant to many organizations, at MediaBank Galbraith was CIO and chief software architect.

Almaer said despite having left Google to start up a developer tools effort inside Mozilla, he has not severed ties to the search giant. Indeed, he said he hopes to maintain a close relationship with Google and other potential partners such as Adobe Systems.

“Being Mozilla and open, we want to work with other companies on this,” Almaer said. “We are especially excited to work with companies like Google who care about the open Web.”

Galbraith said Mozilla is focused on “creating development tools that make the open Web productive for developers.”

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