The Currency Cloud Secures $4M To Disrupt The Trillion Dollar Foreign Exchange Market

The Currency Cloud has developed a Foreign Exchange (FX) payments automation platform which supercharges the tired old world of cross-border business payments, aiming to reduce costs for business and make multi-currency payments more frictionless. Since FX is one of the last great ripoffs in finance, this might actually be a pretty big deal.

Why is this interesting? Well, we’re talking about a team from the City of London that built the UBS online FX platform bringing their skills and experience to the combined revolutionary powers of the Cloud and SaaS.

Obviously Foreign Exchange is a big market to attack. According to the Bank for International Settlements, the average daily turnover in global foreign exchange markets is estimated at over $4 trillion.

techcrunch

Good to see Facebook putting pressure on the mobile manufacturers to standardise their HTML5 implementations

Try it here http://rng.it

Facebook today addressed three challenge areas that make it hard for developers to build apps on the mobile web: app discovery, browser fragmentation, and payments. As part of the second one, Facebook released Ringmark, a new mobile browser test suite, which it developed with open web technology company Bocoup. Facebook will soon open source it, publish it on GitHub, and donate it to the W3C.

The test suite for mobile browsers helps you, the developer, understand which mobile browsers support the functionality your app needs, such as orientation lock for games or camera functionality for social apps. Facebook says it is comprehensive, fair, and tests the feature sets which developers really need.

zdnet article

This is how I discovered Pinterest… I already new that only google employees post to G+

TheAtlantic: Abysmal Google+ Numbers: Users Spending 3 Minutes per Month on the Site

Original post from April 18, updated for the 1 year anniversary of apple web-apps going dark!

Being a developer of several web-apps for both pc and mobile phones, I read with interest way back in March the brouhaha regarding whether Apple had intentionally hamstrung web-apps performance on the iPhone by preventing their use of its brand shiny new Nitro javascript engine.

The question that remains is whether this is an oversight on the part of Apple, or whether it is quietly intentional. With the company’s stand against Flash, an open standard of HTML5 should be its next logical thing to support. But if it doesn’t fix the problem in future versions of iOS, that leads a hefty credence to the rumor mill.

The debate primarily centred around whether with their update to Safari in iOS 4.3 Apple had purposely excluded web-apps for security reasons (JIT’s ability to mark memory pages in RAM as executable) or something more nefarious, such as perhaps feeling threatened by the rise of web-apps and a potential hit on the native app-store revenue….that debate rages on.

As I mentioned, I develop a number of websites with web-app versions customised to run on mobile phones. One of these apps is SwipeStudy (a flashcard study tool) which I submitted to the Apple web-app library, which is (or perhaps was) a very useful and thoughtful site provided by Apple for developers to showcase their (typically freeware) web-apps. However on my last update I mistakenly entered the web address without the http:// prefix (my mistake I admit) which causes the link to wander off to some internal Apple error page…doh!

I have been trying to contact apple to rectify this link, but started to suspect and now after the passing months am pretty sure that they are no longer maintaining this site. In fact the last update to was 3rd Dec 2010, over 4 months ago a year ago!

So I conclude with the question that if Apple are playing with a fair hand with respect to web-apps on iOS, why would they stop updating this site. I guess they may just be too busy dealing with their undoubted many successes, or could they see the writing on the wall with a business model based on app-store revenue when the whole app-ecosphere is converging on html5?

So I was off to Darling Harbour for the annual Geek-fest that is #gdd11, and was pretty impressed with the quality of the lunch boxes…the talks weren’t bad either. Actually the highlights were Timothy Jordan & Julia Ferraioli’s presentation on Using the Google+ APIs and also Eric Bidelman’s Bleeding Edge HTML5. I even managed to incorporate some new HTML5 features into SwipeStudy during the presentations!

Later in the evening Presented SwipeStudy at Google Creative Sandbox 2011, Carriageworks Sydney.
, a great night despite the stormy weather, I was almost electrocuted on the monorail trying to get there…

Thanks to all you marketing types who gave me great feedback on swipestudy and it’s potential uses in training and education.

But I think there’s actually a very good reason why we should, in fact, embrace the term “HTML5” as an overarching buzzword for this latest round of web standards and specifications. Our industry has proven on several occasions that we don’t get excited about new, interesting, and useful technologies and concepts until such a buzzword is in place.

“AJAX,” of course, is the canonical example of this. DOM scripting, XMLHttpRequest, and dynamic Javascript all existed long before the term “AJAX”. But it wasn’t until the clever term was coined that anyone really cared. As soon as we had a single, simple word we could all get behind, Javascript really took off. A proliferation of frameworks and libraries hit the scene, and suddenly we were all building dynamic web projects. And the term was misused. Badly. Left and right. Much of the great code being written didn’t use XML. Much of it wasn’t asynchronous. But most of it was pretty great, and it was usually called “AJAX” wether it really was or not. And pedants went crazy. They argued about the semantics of the term “AJAX” until they were blue in the face. But in the end, no one would argue that “AJAX” wasn’t a good thing for our industry. Without that term, we wouldn’t be where we are today.

And it’s not just AJAX. If you want other examples, look no further then “Web 2.0” and “Microformats.” “HTML5” is today’s “AJAX.” Just as with “AJAX,” people are misusing the term all over the web. But it wasn’t until influential people and companies (notably Apple) started misusing the term that web developers at large (myself included) starting taking this new collection of web standards, specifications, and best practices seriously, as something that might be useful before 2022.

Sometimes we just need a word to rally behind. And put in job descriptions. And claim we “support” (another word that is mostly meaningless). It’s a language thing and a human psychology thing.

So be pedantic about the semantics of “HTML5” if you want, but don’t be surprised if no one really listens. This is something most people can understand and get behind. This, on the other hand, is not.

http://jeffcroft.com/blog/2010/aug/02/term-html5/

Just put the finishing touches on CurrencyConvert.biz – A quick and easy Web 2.0 currency converter.

Please leave any comments, bugs or feedback as a comment here.

thx
David

For the home page of my site I wanted to cause certain divs to fadeIn using jQuery after varying amounts of time. In javascript we can use setTimeout() to schedule an arbitrary function call for some point in future. However the function works differently between Firefox and Internet Explorer (MSIE).

In FireFox, you would do this:

setTimeout(myFadeIn(), 1200, "id1");
setTimeout(myFadeIn(), 2700, "id2");
setTimeout(myFadeIn(), 3500, "id3");

Except, MSIE doesn’t like this. And in fact the additional parameter is not even part of the official javascript spec.

So how can we work around this ?

Closures. In the below example I use closures to pass an anonymous function to setTimeout() that contains in its “frozen in time local scope” the id of the div to fadeIn.

// Return delayed fadeIn closure function 
function delayFadeIn(id){
    return (function(){
        $('#'+id+'_img').fadeIn(1000);
    });
} 

//Setup three delayed fadeIns by passing closures to setTimeout
function setupFadeIns(){
    setTimeout(delayFadeIn("id1"), 1200);
    setTimeout(delayFadeIn("id2"), 2700);
    setTimeout(delayFadeIn("id3"), 3500);
}

And this will work in both MSIE and FireFox

The opening keynote at Facebook’s f8 conference today in San Francisco was short and sweet. But don’t let that fool you. It contained some huge announcements pertaining to how the service will interact with the broader web going forward. The three big ones: social plugins, Open Graph, and Open Graph API, make Facebook’s intentions very clear: they want to be the fabric of the web.

Am enjoying the Multi-tasking and folders but my beloved nytimes app is crashing boohoo

Hmm maybe we should put more thought into our tweets…Library of Congress Will Save Tweets as History

Knowing that the Library of Congress will be preserving Twitter messages for posterity could subtly alter the habits of some users, said Paul Saffo, a visiting scholar at Stanford who specializes in technology’s effect on society.

“After all,” Mr. Saffo said, “your indiscretions will be able to be seen by generations and generations of graduate students.”

People thinking before they post on Twitter: now that would be historic indeed.

Read the article here: nytimes.com

Could this be the end of ‘Freemium’ and advertising centric web models?

Rupert Murdoch has launched a spirited defence of putting up paywalls around his newspaper websites, while embracing the game-changing potential of Apple’s iPad. The News Corporation chairman hailed the device as a possible saviour of the newspaper industry.

Link to SMH Article