While it was missing the skydiving antics of last year’s event, Google’s I/O keynote last week wasn’t short on product launches. In between the splashy updates to Google Maps, Search, Android and everything else Google announced, the company also briefly talked about Web Components for a few minutes. While Google’s Sundar Pichai noted that it’s still early days for this technology, he also said he believes that “the vision for it is clear” and that it will allow developers to build “elegant user interfaces that work across all form factors.”

Web Components are clearly a topic that’s close to the heart of a number of Chrome developers. Many of them, for example, cited it as one of the Chrome features they are most excited about at a fireside chat later in the week.

A number of Google engineers are also working on Project Polymer, which aims to write a web application framework that’s built upon the idea of Web Components and will allow developers to use the ideas behind Web Components on browsers that don’t even feature all of the necessary technologies yet.

The fact that it made an appearance during the keynote, right next to WebGL and other more established web development techniques, makes it pretty obvious that this is a technology that Google believes has the potential to change how developers write web apps going forward.

So what is this all about? Essentially, Web Components give developers an easier way to create web sites and recyclable widgets on these sites with the help of the HTML, CSS and JavaScript they already know. The ideas behind Web Components have been around for a while (and a few years back, Microsoft backed a similar initiative that never got any traction), but even today, this is still a topic that’s pretty foreign to most.

Building large, single-page web apps with a smart component models isn’t easy today. Web Components help developer encapsulate they HTML, CSS and JavaScript so it doesn’t interfere with the rest of the page and the page doesn’t interfere with it.

It’s worth noting that, for the time being, developers can’t rely on this to work in all browsers. Chrome Canary includes support for Web Components, but it’s hidden behind a number of flags. Mozilla will likely start adding support for it in Firefox soon, too. Most importantly, though, the Polymer project aims to bring the concept to all browsers with the help of a polyfill.

Web Components relies on four pieces – the template element, decorators (which apply templates to CSS), custom elements (which allow developers to create their own elements) and the Shadow DOM (which sounds ominous, but which really just defines how all of the other pieces play together and shield the other three pieces from the regular DOM if necessary).

Putting all of this together, including Custom Elements, developers can suddenly create their own HTML tags like after creating them using the tag. they can also extend existing elements. In addition, Web Components also allow developers to more easily separate content from presentation and the Shadow DOM ensures that the styles you create for the rest of your site don’t interfere with the widgets you build using Web Components.

All of this sounds pretty dry, but if it catches on – and there is no reason to think it won’t – this will change how developers write web apps (Google’s Eric Bidelman calls it a “tectonic shift for web development”) and there are some inherent advantages to Web Components that will also help it speed up the web browsing experience for users. In the end, though, this represents a completely new way for writing web applications and it will probably take a bit before the repercussions of this evolutions fully sink in.

If you want to take a deeper dive into this topic, take a look at this presentation here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

When it comes to consumer apps, the debate over HTML5 vs. native has seen native win a couple of key rounds recently, with a number of high-profile tech companies eschewing the open standard because of performance issues. However, when it comes to enteprise services, it looks like we may hear a different tune. Gizmox, which operates a platform that helps enterprises create new and translate existing IT services into mobile apps using HTML5, today is announcing that it has raised another $7.5 million and appointed a new CEO, Eugene Kuznetsov, to capitalize on what it sees as a growing market for HTML5 among business apps.

The funding was led by Atlas Venture with participation from other existing investors Citrix, IVC and Consolidated Investment Group, and takes the total raised by Gizmox to $18 million. As part of the deal, Jeff Fagnan and Christopher Lynch at Atlas Venture are joining Gizmox’s board.

With this, the company’s second round of funding (“you could call it a Series B” said Kuznetsov in an interview), Gizmox is looking build on the groundwork established by Navot Peled, the founder who had been CEO but is now shifting to hold the title of president.

Kuznetsov has cut his teeth both at large corporates and as a successful entrepreneur himself. After time spent at Microsoft working on Internet Explorer among other things, he left to start his own enterprise software company, DataPower, which was eventually sold to IBM, where he stayed on for 2.5 years integrating and developing the business, before leaving to start a new company, online privacy company Abine, where he remains as chairman. Atlas, which had invested both in DataPower and Abine, likely had a role in putting Kuznetsov into the new position.

So where is the opportunity for consumer-challenged HTML5 with enterprises? As Kuznetsov describes it, not only is it impractical for enterprises to use native platforms for the job, but it’s unnecessary.

“I think that the challenge for businesses is somewhat different than it is for consumers,” he said of the reason for opting for HTML5 when you are an enterprise. “Businesses today have rich complex client-server applications. These are things that you and I would never see unless we worked for Fortune 500 enterprises. They are very complex, with interfaces built over 20 years. Now there is pressure for those to work on iPads and other devices.

“But in many cases you you cannot re-write those in ios or C#. It has to be something that is open and standard. Native apps are not really an option for these enterprises because the software they have is too complex and they have to support a broad range of devices and has to be something standard. HTML5 works great for this.”

He contrasts this to the priorities for consumer apps, with their 3D graphics, or accelerometers.

“HTML5 works here because these are not games. This is not Angry Birds. It’s graphs and lots of data,” he notes, adding that the complexity instead comes in the forms of security and multiple interfaces — two areas where HTML5 works well.

Current customers of Gizmox’s are in the large enterprise space and include names like Visa, Daimler and Bezeq Telecom, who have to date used the platform not only to build apps but more significantly use it to translate existing IT apps into the mobile environment. The idea, Kuznetsov says, is to expand that list of customers, and this is where the bulk of the investment will go.

As for competitors, “I don’t think anyone does exactly what we do,” Kuznetsov says, but he notes also that companies like Appcelerator have promoted the idea that the issue of mobilizing IT apps can be solved with native platforms; while Sencha covers “some aspects” of the same areas that Gizmox does.

In that vein, to better compete, it might not be strange to see Gizmox fill out and develop its product in areas like further security and performance management services for the apps once they have made it to Gizmox’s platform.

Gizmox Funded  to Capitalize on Shift to Enterprise-Class HTML5
Closes $7.5M financing; names serial entrepreneur Eugene Kuznetsov as CEO
 
Cambridge, Massachusetts – April 22, 2013 – Gizmox, a leader in enterprise-class HTML5 for new and existing business applications, has closed a $7.5M round of financing and named a new CEO to accelerate its sales and marketing efforts.  The round was led by Atlas Venture with participation from existing investors Citrix, IVC, Consolidated Investment Group, and others.  Jeff Fagnan and Christopher Lynch of Atlas Venture will join the Gizmox Board of Directors.  The funds will be used to build and staff the company’s headquarters in Boston.
 
“There is an enormous platform shift of mission-critical business applications from traditional Microsoft client-server to mobile, web and HTML5.  While this is well understood and underway for horizontal or consumer applications, the problem for complex business applications is still largely unsolved. Gizmox has a unique solution informed by years of technology development and many successful customer deployments, to facilitate this shift,” said Jeff Fagnan, Partner, Atlas Venture.
 
Gizmox provides an enterprise-class HTML5 platform for building rich UI business applications. Its two components are VisualWebGUI, a widely adopted web and mobile HTML5 framework for enterprise apps, and InstantCloudMove, which easily migrates from client-server to pure HTML5 and the cloud. Gizmox is the enterprise HTML5 platform for native-quality user interfaces. Differentiated from consumer-grade technology, Gizmox software was built from the start to provide the security, management and rich functionality required for mission-critical business applications.
 
Chris Lynch, Partner at Atlas Venture, added “Atlas Venture has led this investment in Gizmox to take advantage of the multi-billion dollar opportunity in enabling the transition to mobile HTML5 with the industry’s leading solution. With Eugene at the helm, having previously driven the shift to XML-based applications in the enterprise, we are thrilled to be part of this team.”
 
More than 50% of all enterprise applications, in most cases the core critical mission ones, are still client server, representing over 55 Billion lines of code.
 
In conjunction with the financing, Gizmox has named Eugene Kuznetsov as CEO. Kuznetsov was founder and President of DataPower, a SOA appliance company acquired by IBM, an IBM executive, and more recently co-founder and CEO of Abine, the leading online privacy company.  Atlas Venture was an investor in DataPower and is the founding investor of Abine.
 
Michael F. O’Connor, Consolidated Investment Group, said “As demonstrated by its success with major customers, the Gizmox’s technology is unique in the rapidly-growing enterprise mobile market. We are excited to participate in this financing to support the next stage of Gizmox’s growth.”
 
Guy Rosen, Maayan Ventures Chairman, said,”We are happy to complete this significant investment round in Gizmox, which has been led by an experienced VC such as Atlas Venture, with the participation of Gizmox’s existing shareholders. This round marks a great milestone for the company in materializing its vast technological and economic potential.”
 

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Thanks to the availability of a couple of premium video extensions that it’s been helping to develop along with other Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C) members, Netflix today is announcing support for HTML5 playback on Samsung ARM-based Chromebooks. According to an entry on the Netflix Tech Blog, the development of Media Source Extensions (MSE), Encrypted Media Extensions (EME), and Web Cryptography API (WebCrypto) will soon allow it to support HTML5 playback on a whole host of modern browsers without the need for a third-party browser extension.

While a large number of web publishers have begun to move toward HTML5-based playback over the last few years, Netflix hasn’t been one of them. It’s required users to download the Microsoft Silverlight plugin for browser-based viewing for the last several years. But with Silverlight slowly making its way out, and technologies around HTML5 getting better, the streaming video company is beginning to test out new ways to make its movies and TV shows available without a plug-in.

That’s opening the door for Netflix to embrace a more standards-based format for video playback, but it’s doing so cautiously. The reason for Netflix’s use of Silverlight in the first place is due to its need to provide DRM and ensure that its users aren’t copying its content or displaying it in places where they’re not authorized to.

While HTML5 video playback has become widely adopted for user-generated content, standards around DRM have been slow to develop for HTML5 browsers. Netflix has been working to change that, and its first support of those HTML5-based video technology is finally out in the wild.

MSE allows Netflix to “control how to download the audio/video content in our JavaScript code,” so that it can choose the best HTTP server for content delivery based on real-time information. Meanwhile, EME ensures the content is DRM-protected. And WebCrypto allows Netflix to “encrypt and decrypt communication between our JavaScript and the Netflix servers.” Together, they work to ensure smooth, secure playback in an HTML5 environment.

That said, there’s still work to do. Netflix was able to work with Google to get its videos working on those Chromebooks, thanks to a proprietary Netflix-developed PPAPI (Pepper Plugin API) plug-in which takes the place of the WebCrypto extension. But once WebCrypto is available through the Chrome browser, Netflix should be able to extend its support of HTML5 to Windows and Mac PCs without the need for Silverlight.

That’s good news, since Microsoft has announced that it will end support for Silverlight in the coming years. While Netflix and other video providers have until 2021 to move off Silverlight, the move to support HTML5 only makes sense. It’s the future, after all.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Facebook is testing a new way for Android users to receive app updates without going through the Google Play store.

Some Android users are now receiving “silent updates,” which download in the background while a user is connected over Wi-Fi. Instead of users receiving a notification about a new app version through Google Play, the Facebook app downloads its update automatically and then prompts users to install it. A number of users report that the prompts are persistent and a user’s phone will beep or buzz until the update is installed.

Facebook says the silent updates are a way to “make sure everyone is using the best version of our app.”

Liliputing first reported that the new version of Facebook for Android included a new permission to “download files without notification,” which would give it a way to bypass Google Play and give users a way to install updates directly from Facebook. However, many users initially worried that the unfamiliar message from Facebook was actually malware and raised questions in Facebook’s Help Center and Android forums. The social network confirmed that the update is legitimate and added a new section to its Help Center to clarify.

Facebook has moved to a four- to six-week cycle for Android updates. Some users might not download new versions that frequently and end up using an older version that might be slower or lacks a new feature. This change could help make app updates more automatic for users.

TechCrunch says this could also be a way for Facebook to push more beta features to a smaller number of users, as it was able to do more when the app was primarily HTML5. Now the app is moving to more of a native approach, which improves speed and performance, but tends to allow less flexibility for frequent testing.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Prezi has added audio capabilities to its presentation platform and has surpassed the 20 million user mark, more than doubling its base in the past year.

The new audio feature allows users to add sound to the different path points that customers use to build and organize their presentations.

Customers may also use the audio feature to make soundtracks for their presentations.

Prezi is an all Flash player that differentiates through its emphasis on space as opposed to a slides based platform such as a company like SlideRocket. This provides a way for the company to serve as a platform for more than presentations but also as a way for organizing ideas, like mind maps.

Lacking is a microphone, which would be handy for narrating presentations. As Prezi is all Flash it is also limited to some extent. Prezi Co-Founder and CEO Peter Arvai said in an interview that HTML can still not provide the level of quality that customers expect.

HTML5 does offer rich capabilities, especially with audio and video. It’s complemented by WebRTC, a standard that provides native support for web browsers with Real-Time Communications (RTC) capabilities. On the flip side, WebRTC is barely emerging and will take some time to become a core feature for presentation technologies.

The web version of Prezi is free. A Pro account costs $159 a year. It provides a desktop version and premium features such as ways to create private groups and additional storage.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Google’s Super Sync Sports Chrome Experiment is what happens when you put modern web technology, smartphones and a love of 80s sports games into one rather wacky package where cupcakes race moose heads for virtual gold. The new game, which Google announced this morning, runs in your desktop browser, but you use your smartphone or tablet as the game controller to make your avatars run, cycle and swim.

Super Sync Sports uses new browser technologies like the HTML5 audio, CSS3, SVG and Canvas, but the highlight is obviously its use of the Touch API to recognize the gestures you make on your mobile device and WebSockets to make sure your phone(s) and browser stay in sync. Up to four players can join in every race.

We’ve seen our fair share of cool browser demos recently, but Super Sync Sports’ ability to turn your mobile browser into what is essentially a very basic Wii U GamePad clearly shows how far our mobile and desktop browsers have come over the last year or so.

To get started, you have to fire up Super Sync Sports on your desktop browser and mobile phone or tablet (Android 4.0+ and iOS 4.3+). After choosing whether you want to play a multiplayer or single-player game, you simply type a sync code into the web app and then it’s off to the races. The music will quickly drive you crazy, but the overall experience is quite a bit of fun, especially if you manage to recruit a few other people to play with you.

Google says it will publish more information about how it built this experience in the next few weeks. Until then, you can always use your browser’s built-in developer tools to take a look under the hood.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Crocodoc allows you to upload your PDFs, Word and PowerPoint documents and convert them into HTML5 so you can easily embed them on your own sites. The company, which has converted over 60 million documents since and signed up the likes of Dropbox, LinkedIn, Yammer and SAP as customers since its launch in 2010, just announced the launch of its new HTML5 document converter with a revamped conversion engine, better display quality, faster load times and better mobile performance.

Using HTML5 and scalable vector graphics (SVG), the updated Crocodoc converter takes a very different approach from the service’s last incarnation. As Crocodoc co-founder and CEO Ryan Damico told me in an email yesterday, the last version displayed everything with the exception of text as one large image. The text was overlaid on top of the image using HTML webfonts). Now, Crocodoc displays everything in the document as HTML5 and SVG instead of the raster graphics the last version used. This should make for crisper lines and shapes in the converted documents and should be especially noticeable on retina displays.

Documents will also now load significantly faster, as the browser won’t have to load a large image to display. “The average download size of each page of a document in our new viewer is roughly the same as a small thumbnail image of the same page,” Damico wrote.

This also means that the mobile experience is now improved. Indeed, when I tested the new document viewer on an iPhone and Safari, the speed was close to that I would have expected from a native app. Damico also says that “pinching to zoom, scrolling, and text selection works really smoothly and feels just like a native app.” He also argues that Crocodoc does a better job as displaying complex documents than the built-in document viewers on iOS.

With this update, developers also get more control over how documents render on their sites. Instead of just an iFrame, developers will now have direct access to the HTML the service generates and can manipulate it according to their own needs.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Microsoft announced a number of updates to its SkyDrive cloud storage service. SkyDrive users can now, for example, get a better overview of who they shared documents with and who currently has access to a file. In addition, SkyDrive now features some improvements for users on touch devices (including, of course, Windows 8) and improved drag-and-drop support for all users.

In addition to these feature updates, the company is also making some back-end updates that should make SkyDrive a bit faster and reliable. As usual, Microsoft is announcing this update today, but is rolling it out gradually.

SkyDrive, just like virtually all of its competitors, allows users to share access to documents with other users. Over time, though, Microsoft’s SkyDrive group program manager Omar Shahine says in today’s announcement, it becomes harder to track how you shared a file and who you are sharing it with. “To make this easier, we’ve unified all sharing-related info and tasks into a single screen,” writes Shahine. “So now when you select a document and click Share in the command bar, you’ll see all the different ways to share the item as well as who has access.”

With this update, Microsoft is also introducing a new gesture for selecting one or multiple items on touch-based devices. Users can now swipe left or right on any item in their SkyDrive folder to select it. This is similar to the built-in swipe gesture on Windows 8.

Also new in this release is improved drag-and-drop support. To move files around, SkyDrive users can now simply drag files by using the bread crumb bar at the top of the directory as their target, which should make moving files around a bit easier.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Jilion, the company behind the cloud-based HTML5 video player SublimeVideo, is today announcing SublimeVideo Horizon, a new video application framework for video publishers and brands. This framework allows SublimeVideo’s customers to create their own player interface, with the colors, fonts, features and buttons they prefer, while also allowing them to integrate with popular sites like YouTube and Vimeo to host their videos.

SublimeVideo, for those unfamiliar, has long been offering a plug-in free web player that uses HTML5 to display videos, with a “fall back to Flash” mode for older, unsupported browsers. The company commercially launched its product in March 2011, but later adopted a freemium model in November of last year, after struggling a bit to find the sweet spot in terms of pricing.

Since going freemium, the company increased signups thirteen-fold. As of September 2012, Sublime Video says it was seeing 70 million pageviews per month (in terms of sites hosting its player), which is up from 4 million last December.

Notable users include Sony Europe, Ralph Lauren, Ford, Qualcomm, Activision, NPR, Twit.tv, SchoolTube, Jingit, and others.

Today’s launch of Horizon, which Jilion co-founder Zeno Crivelli says is the “biggest thing we’ve ever released since we showed the first SublimeVideo demo back in January 2010,” is meant to better serve Jilion’s paying customer base who want to brand their own video players on their site, but who still want take advantage of hosting on sites like YouTube, Vimeo or using their preferred hosting solution.

With Horizon, Jilion is partnering with agencies to help publishers customize their player in nearly any way imaginable, not only choosing layouts, colors, logo and fonts, but also by offering ways to add interactive buttons to videos to engage users. For example, a band could add a “buy song” or “tour dates” button. A car company could add a “360 degree view” button right from within the video player itself.

These modules can be built on demand per publisher requests, and can include any sort of additional interactive function the brand requires, whether that’s social sharing buttons,  personalized information, e-commerce features linked to inventory levels, or anything else the publisher wants to showcase. YouTube, of course, offers ways to add interactivity to videos with annotations, but Jilion’s can be even more custom.

According to Jilion co-founder Mehdi Aminian, this release puts SublimeVideo ahead of its competition. “It’s our most important release, by far, because, again, our cloud-player was nice and certainly the most reliable. However it has some alternatives like JW Player, VideoJS or MediaElement.js,” he says. “We knew it was also limited and not designed to receive new features easily. That’s why we decided to remain patient and to embark into the development of SublimeVideo Horizon, in order to have the very best technology on the planet to build any player you can imagine,” Aminian adds.

The company has stayed lean, having only raised angel financing so far. With the launch of Horizon, Aminian says that the company will begin to pursue VC financing. In fact, the founders, usually based in Switzerland, are visiting the San Francisco Bay Area now, and are thinking of relocating.

Today, Jilion is bringing Horizon to market and beginning to partner with agencies, but it is not yet making Horizon widely available to all developers at this time. An SDK for broader support will be forthcoming, but no ETA is available.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Mozilla just announced the launch of its GameOn competition for web-based games built on top of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and other open web technologies like WebGL and WebRTC. Developers can submit their games until February 24, 2013. There are three categories (hackable games, multi-device games and web-only games) and the winners will get an all-expense paid trip to San Francisco for GDC 2013.

In addition, the winners will get the chance to be featured in Mozilla’s new Firefox Marketplace and to present their games to the team at Chillingo for “potential publishing on their network.”

This is the second year Mozilla is hosting this competition. Last year’s winner was Marble Run.

The Web As Console

According to Mozilla Foundation’s Chloe Varelidi, the organization wants game developers to imagine what would happen “if we looked at games as open, creative systems that, like the Web itself, are hackable by design? Games are traditionally at the forefront of tech, continually pushing the envelope of what’s possible,” she says. “Mozilla is inviting you to reimagine the Web as the console, and use the power of the browser to revolutionize the way we make and play games.”

To help developers, Mozilla also put together a site with resources for building browser-based games.

As browser developers continue to push the boundaries of what’s possible on the web, games are quickly becoming the applications of choice for the likes of Mozilla, Google, and Microsoft to show the power of their browsers. Mozilla, for example, launched its massively multiplayer game BrowserQuest earlier this year. Microsoft has been working with the likes of Atari and Cut The Rope developer Zeptolab to bring a number of popular games to Internet Explorer, and Google has long hosted and promoted ambitious experiments like Cirque de Soleil’s Movi.Kanti.Revo online experience.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch