Will Speaking

Congratulations to Keren Perlmutter and Sharon Perlmutter from our AOL Irvine office. They were awarded a patent for technology that is used to restore 3-strip technicolor films. The patent is entitled "Registration of Separations" and the patent # is 7092584. Way to go! Abstract: Separations or images relating to film or other fields may be registered using a variety of features, such as, for example: (1) correcting one or more film distortions; (2) automatically determining a transformation to reduce a film distortion; (3) applying multiple criteria of merit to a set of features to determine a set of features to use in determining a transformation; (4) determining transformations for areas in an image or a separation in a radial order; (5) comparing areas in images or separations by weighting feature pixels differently than non-feature pixels; (6) determining distortion values for transformations by applying a partial distortion measure and/or using a spiral s...

Check out the press release today , announcing the work AOL has made towards the DOJO Javascript toolkit!   Lots of contributions have been made from a few engineers within AOL (including James in Irvine, who contributed a great deal!). It is good to see an official press release. Sponsors and Partners The Dojo Foundation is supported through the generous donations of it's sponsors and members:                

This is an internal blog, so no one on the outside world can read this.   But sometimes I wish they could. It makes me upset/angry/annoyed to see the continued shots at AOL.  Obviously we've had a rocky past few weeks with the release of the search data.  But the latest issue is "AOL is Badware".      Such a term is way off the mark.    To see the traffic on WEB-DEV,  even employees believe this.   Everyone can have an opinion, but I think we should remember the details and not jump to such crazy conclusions. Yes, AOL installs a bunch of software on your machine. Much of this due to product bundles (Spyware protection, Port Magic, Computer Checkup)  that _we_ thought would help the user with a better experience.       Some of this stuff is annoying for sure to us techies,  who don't want anything on our machines.    But to someone not in the "tech" crowd,...

Fortune magazine have the founders of MySpace on the front cover, and a lengthy article on the future of myspace ,  what it is like to be part of News Corp,  and some other insights. It's a good read, check it out.   "Before I could do whatever I wanted. Now it takes more time to get people to agree on things. All the budget reviews and processes. That can be a pain. But it's not stopping us. One night this past April, I was on MySpace and spotted a link to something called kSolo (it lets you record karaoke online and e-mail songs to friends) on a user's profile page. I tried it out-I played Pantera's Cowboys from Hell. We sent word to Peter Chernin and Rupert Murdoch that they should buy kSolo. Rupert pulled the trigger. It's such a great fit for MySpace."

FS spent some extra hours getting a prototype to of public journals on your cell phone.  Check it out.  Good stuff! "Enter a SN, and you can browse all enteries in any public journal that the person has. This demo should work on both WAP and XHTML capable phones. Please point your phones to: http://topspeed-web.netscape.com:8000/a Enter a SN, and you can browse all enteries in any public journal that the person has. This demo should work on both WAP and XHTML capable phones. It took me a couple of weeks of working in my spare time to get this up and running. "

The latest AOL Pictures Blog post has an interesting Poll.... Why don't you go ahead and check it out and vote :-) http://journals.aol.com/aolpictures/AOLPictures/entries/2006/08/25/the-faces-behind-the-blog..../1350  

Frank shared the new AIM / Buddy Icon website ... it's pretty fun!  Give it a try! http://aim.weeworld.com/  

StumbleUpon just switched on RSS feeds of user ratings for web sites .  An interesting feature, and maybe the basis of a potential mashup (e.g. imagine overlaying some of this info on top of the website itself -- or on top of the news article, music page or local gig you may have seen). This is part of the power of the community - getting other people's views and opinion, and matching you with "like minded people".                          What is interesting is where the ratings come from. On the "Netvibes" feed, reviews come from England,  Switzerland,  Italy, Sweden and of course the USA.     Go here , then enter the URL of a website (e.g. cnn.com), then you get the feed of reviews.  Or  stumbleupon.com/url/<url of website> Examples Reviews : Grouper.com ,  Myspace.com ,  Netvibes.com , Pageflakes.com ...

Remember this keyword : Change Plan. It allows you to change your plan -- online -- to the free AOL for Broadband service. No need to call up AOL member services, just login with your master screen name and you can change to the $0 or $9.99 plans. Be sure to jot it down.  KW: Change Plan

We now have two new product blogs that cover  more Mountain View based products. Be sure to check them out : AIM and AOL Websuite Product Insider UnCut Video Product Insider In addition, we have the AOL Pictures product Blog : AOL Pictures Blog The AIM/AOL WS Blog has a huge audience already! It is linked directly from Websuite, so will get a lot of great coverage!

Independence Day of India     Prashanti and Malika stopped by and told me that yesterday was Indian Independence Day .     So happy (belated) Independence Day! "August 15, commemorates the day in 1947, India's biggest secular celebration, on the anniversary of her independence from British in 1947. "

  Launch the Userplane Webchat AOL announced what I consider to be a very good compliment to our software... we acquired Userplane, a small company in LA that has gained a big reach.   Userplane has Webchat, IM (and other features) that are supported by an advertising model.    It allows anyone, anywhere, to setup a chat room that offers full video support for free.    I've used it many times on other sites,  and many of my mates in Santa Cruz have used it.  It's a smart move for AOL, since we can now embed chat on any website.  It can also [finally] take Chat out of FDO and across the web. Launch the Userplane Webchat       

When I was at the Europe office a few weeks ago, they showed me some interesting software they were developing, that enabled you to rate, review and comment on assets.   John Sturino stopped by our offices last Friday and showed me an update to the toolkit.   They now have an early beta of this here : http://gratr.uk.office.aol.com:8080/ This is a social network around cheese. They chose the subject to test the concept of ratings/reviews, not to actually get serious about Cheese.   Actually, I think they should release it, since it may get all sorts of cheese lovers. Couple it with wine, and it could be a major hit ;-) Check it out... They are trying to make a " toolkit " for the ratings/reviews, one which can be used to rate and review content (such as a music video or a news article on Boy George picking up trash from the streets of New York ).       The idea is the toolkit can be used simply on any page -- product b...

A great score for UnCut Great kudo's to the UnCut Video team, who got a great review in techweb , rating them the best community video site -- that's good for a product still in beta!   It also got featured on ted's blog ...   Under the boardwalk AOL Pictures launched "Boardwalk", the Public photo experience.   It is now officially in beta at http://pictures-beta.aol.com .  Give it a try.    The team held a very fun  "Dinner and Demo" night on Thursday, and got great feedback.     Calling all Mashups ! We need your help on widgets and mashups that can be demo'd one evening at Web 2.0 Conference. This is a great opportunity to show off a cool widget, mashup or product.    Got some ideas? Please send them in. We will me meeting next week to discuss this. Google Homepage Widgets Not sure if everyone knows about this, but we've been working with Google to deliver some aol widgets for the Google ...

              What a fun time at Roaring Camp, for the annual AOL Summer Party.  The weather was great, and it was a good way to get to mingle, eat, and then go on the train ride.    More photos are online (see here ).  I like the one of Naveed being asked to stand on the platform... we could add a caption to that one and make cards!   Click the photos to view larger.   See more pictures on AOL Pictures Public Gallery .

Countdown to Goldrush Check out goldrush.aol.com .  We announced this last week, and it will have lots of promotion around it. For those who don't know, this is an online reality series that drives you through the web on the hunt for gold.  Real gold can be won too.. so some serious money at stake!      Blogs turns 3 years old :-)  On the Magic Smoke blog ,   Joe writes that Journals has turned 3 years old! Today the team demo'd  an early dev build of blogs.aimpages.com, and it went very well.  The team is now focused on getting blogs.aimpages.com to beta.  The idea here is that every aimpage has a blog, the blog inherits your "theme" from aimpages,  and you can also "mash up" aimpages entries with ones from other sites.     Exciting stuff....    The Journals product itself has an R8 and R9 release. Numerous features in these updates.  But I've also asked the team to ...

We've had a couple of days with some big announcements for AOL moving forward.   Lots of this is very exciting for the company -- we can now set one clear message to the market and to our customers, instead of the multiple messages that we all had tales about.      I personally think this is a great shift and people will get the message. Having AOL for free on Broadband - client access as well as web - is a major shift.    It reminds me of the shift many years ago from per hour charges to flat fee charges.  Some other key notes: - Must be PRODUCT lead. Single most important thing to accomplish is to lead with great product.     This is exactly my thought too... it's all about the product and having passion for building something compelling.   - External companies say "can aol llc make products people choose to use".. The answer is Yes, for sure.   - How do we operate as a fast and lean oper...

Congratulations to the Q2 Award Winners.    Well deserved by the teams and individuals!   Team Awards Comments / Journals Team SLM Team Individual Awards James Burke Andy Hakim Ed Maier Mike Mantel Sheela Ravindran Eric Statts Sunil Tawde Greenhouse Award Jon Chester and AOL Pictures for WooHoo!