For the spillover
February 18th, 2010 — gear
GorillaPod, the bendy tripods you know and love, just announced its newest version: GorillaPod Magnetic. This guy has magnets on each of its feet, allowing you to stick it to pretty much any magnetic surface.
Of course, it’ll still work without sticking to a surface, as it’s still a normal GorillaPod above the feet. But if you feel the need to have your camera attached to the side of your car door, well, now you’ve got the ability to. It’ll be available in April.
February 18th, 2010 — gear
I don't know how to best sum up Infinitec's new "flash drive" in a headline—which is obvious at this point. But what it can do is pretty unique, once you wrap your head around it.
Infinitec has created a USB stick that contains an 802.11n module capable of creating an ad hoc network through any device’s USB port. But on the receiving end, it appears as nothing more complicated than a flash drive.
In other words, you can stream media to devices that aren’t necessarily so thrilled with you streaming media. Placed in a DVD player, for instance, you need not worry about the player’s supported network standards or your PC’s sharing settings. Just set the Infinitec stick to anywhere from 1GB to 1TB+ (depending on how much storage you expect your player to support), then load MPEG4s right from the stick…streamed from your PC loaded with accompanying software.
I could see several uses for Infinitec's little device—namely, adding a media extender to any room that has a TV with a USB port. That is, if the price is right whenever it eventually comes out. [Engadget]
February 18th, 2010 — amazing
Alan sez, “A great, but slightly disturbing, look at how pervasive green-screening has become in simply every scene in television these days. Pretty much everything you think is outdoors is faked, at least to some degree. I particularly like the faked ferry fire…”
Stargate Studios Virtual Backlot Reel 2009
(Thanks, Alan!)
February 18th, 2010 — web20
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Although CSS is generally considered a simple and straightforward language, sometimes it requires creativity, skill and a bit of experimentation. The good news is that designers and developers worldwide often face similar problems and choose to share their insights and workarounds with the wider community.
This is where we come in. We are always looking to collect such articles for our posts so that we can deliver the most useful and relevant content to our readers. In this post, we present an overview of useful CSS/jQuery coding tips, tricks and techniques for visual effects, layouts and web form design to help you find solutions to the problems you are dealing with or will have to deal with in future.
You may want to look at similar CSS-related posts that we published last months:
[Offtopic: By the way, did you know that Smashing Magazine has a mobile version? Try it out if you have an iPhone, Blackberry or another capable device.]
Facebook Style Footer Admin Panel
Learn how to re-create the Facebook footer admin panel with CSS and jQuery. Also check out part 2.
Adaptable View: How Do They Do It?
This tutorial explains how to manually change a layout, and it shows two great examples and “how they did it.”
Easy Display Switch with CSS and jQuery
A quick and simple way to enable users to switch page layouts using CSS and jQuery.
Quick Tip – Resizing Images Based On Browser Window Size
In fluid layouts, formatting text to adjust smoothly to window size is easy, but images are not as fluid-friendly. This quick tip shows how to switch between two image sizes based on the size of the browser, the DIV or whatever else you choose.
One Page Résumé Site
A clean layout on one page—literally (just one index.html file with optional images). It comes with contact information in microformats and a main area for the resume using a definition list (dl). And it prints well.
Pegs: Automate Display: fixed++
Chris Wetherell posts on Pegs, a strategy for having one scroll bar but independent scrolling areas. After the first one, click on the other items to flip between sizes. You will see that an area’s scroll depends on the configuration.
CSS 100% Height
A common problem among designers is how to get a div to stretch 100% of the window’s height. There are a few different techniques out there, and this tutorial shows one of them.
CSS3 Drop-Down Menu
A clean, simple a nice navigation menu, designed by Nick La.
CSS Trick for a Scrolling Transparent Background Effect
Scroll the page to watch a battle between good and evil take shape. The effect requires two images: one transparent and one tiled gradient image. The gradient scrolls under the transparent PNG. Because it matches the colors in the PNG, each set of images disappears, depending on the part of the gradient they’re on top of.
Fluid Images
By default, an image element that is 500 pixels doesn’t exactly play nice with a container as large as 800 pixels or one as small as 100. What’s a designer to do?
Scroll/Follow Sidebar, Multiple Techniques
A really simple concept: the sidebar follows you as you scroll down the page. There are a number of ways to go about it. Two are covered here: CSS and JavaScript (jQuery), with a bonus CSS trick.
Vertical Centering With CSS
There are a few different ways to vertically center objects using CSS, but choosing the right one can be difficult. Here is a list of the best ways and an explanation of how to create a nice centered website.
Create YouTube-like adaptable view using CSS and jQuery
Other than the “Turn off the lights” feature, YouTube has great stuff, such as the “change view” feature, which allows you to switch between normal and wide mode, thus expanding or shrinking the video area. Creating this is very simple.
How To Create a Horizontally Scrolling Site
If websites were made of wood, the grain would run up and down. Vertical is the natural flow of the Web. But browsers are equipped with vertical and horizontal scroll bars, right? We have the choice to go against the grain and create web pages that scroll primarily horizontally and that even expand horizontally to accommodate more content. Perhaps a slight blow to usability, but a cool creative touch nonetheless!
Purely CSS – Faking Minimum Marginsmin-margin is non-existent in the CSS world. After you’ve pondered and Googled it, check out the solution here.
Create Sidebars of Equal Height with Faux Columns
CSS can be tricky business. Creating columns of equal height, where the content in one column is longer than the content in another, is frustrating. Here’s where the faux-column technique can help. Find out how this solution makes even the most complicated layout a breeze to code.
Setting Equal Heights with jQuery
Here is a script to match the heights of boxes in the same container and create a tidy grid, with little overhead.
Quick Tip: Centered Fake Floats
There were ways to center-align left-floated elements, but then inline-block became popular and everything changed. After a bit of tinkering, Zaharenia Atzitzikaki found an efficient and (mostly) cross-browser-compatible way to center elements without floats.
6 Flexible jQuery Plugins to Control Web Page Layouts Easily
A collection of six jQuery plug-ins to manage page layouts easily.
Four Methods to Create Equal-Height Columns
This article discusses ways to create equal-height columns that work in all major browsers (including IE6). All of the methods show how to create a three-column layout.
How to: CSS Large Background
A tutorial with various CSS examples for how to create a large background using either a single image or double images.
A Nice Little CSS Positioning Technique
Here, we have a basic unordered list (ul), with left-floated images where the text doesn’t wrap under the images. Of course, this technique could be deployed in loads of other instances.
Perfect Full Page Background Image
This technique allows an image to fill the page, with no white space. The image scales as needed and retains its proportions, without triggering scroll bars.
Smart Columns With CSS and jQuery
In observing liquid-width websites, Soh Tanaka sees two common techniques for displaying columns: fixed columns and liquid columns. He points out the drawbacks of both and pitches his solution.
A Beautiful Apple-Style Slideshow Gallery With CSS and jQuery
Create an Apple-like slideshow gallery, similar to the one used on Apple’s website to showcase products. It works entirely in the front end; no PHP or databases required.
Rolling a coke can around with pure CSS
Román Cortés is having a lot of fun doing CSS tricks these days. He just built a rolling coke can that uses background-attachment, background-position and a few other tricks to achieve the effect. No fancy CSS3 needed here!
Grayscale Hover Effect With CSS and jQuery
A few months ago, James Padolsey introduced a cool grayscale technique for non-IE browsers. His technique inspired Soh Tanaka to come up with a workaround with a similar effect. His solution relies on CSS Sprites and a few lines of jQuery, but it requires a bit of preparation before implementation. It is not recommended for large-scale projects; it is probably best for portfolio pieces.
Codename Rainbows
Some JavaScript and CSS magic is used here to apply a two-color gradient to text. Shadows and highlights can also be applied. This works especially well on big websites and for dynamic content where creating images for every instance would be impractical.
3 Easy and Fast CSS Techniques for Faux Image Cropping
This article summarizes three fast and easy CSS techniques for displaying only a portion of an image. All of the techniques need only a couple of lines of CSS. You are not literally cropping, which is why it’s called faux image cropping. These techniques can be helpful if you want to keep images to a certain size (for example, thumbnails in a news section). Being able to use CSS to control which portion of an image to display is great.
Image Rollover Borders That Do Not Change Layout
With CSS, the border of any block-level element is factored into the element’s size in the layout. So, if you add a border to an element on hover, the layout will shift. In this post, you will find how to use the regular border property and create inner borders to get around that.
Horizontal Stripes
This tutorial shows you how to create never ending horizontal stripes in your web design using CSS.
Nine Techniques for CSS Image Replacement
Put nine different techniques of image replacement to the test.
Bokeh effects with CSS3 and jQuery
This tutorial teaches you how to re-create the bokeh effect with CSS 3. With some help from jQuery, we can add some randomness in colour, size and position for the effect.
A Stationary Logo That Changes on Page Scroll with CSS
Here is an interesting effect that modifies the logo when the page is scrolled, using the CSS background-attachment property.
Silhouette Fade-Ins
To achieve the effect in the image above, first we need a DIV with the silhouettes as a background image. Then we put four images in that DIV, all the exact same size, with each band member highlighted. These images are hidden by default. Then you absolutely position four regions on top of the DIV; these are the roll-over link areas. With jQuery, we apply hover events to them, fading in the appropriate image.
Creating Triangles in CSS
Few people realize that a browser draws borders at angles. This technique takes advantage of that. One side of the border is given the color of the arrow, and the rest are transparent. Then you give the border a large width; the ones above are 20 pixels.
A parallax optical illusion with CSS: The Horse in Motion
Time for some fun with CSS and optical illusions.
Pure CSS Line Graph
The idea here is not only to offer data visualization to people who aren’t comfortable using scripting languages, but to demonstrate the power of CSS and offer a different way of using CSS. If you are not a fan of line graphs and data visualization, you may still benefit from this article. Think of it as a CSS experiment, and learn a thing or two about CSS Sprites and positioning.
Zooming with jQuery and CSS
This post is about text zooming with jQuery and CSS. This is a basic-level tutorial about changing a style using a jQuery script. A simple way to zoom website content.
Create Resizing Thumbnails Using Overflow Property
This tutorial teaches you how to control thumbnail sizes. Sometimes we don’t have enough space to fit large thumbnails, and yet we would rather avoid small indecipherable images. Using this trick, we can limit the default dimensions of thumbnails and show them at full size when the user mouses over them.
Cross-browser drop shadows using pure CSS
Most methods of adding drop-shadows to content blocks require additional HTML mark-up and one or more PNG images. But by combining the Glow and Shadow filters, something that fairly closely resembles the rendered CSS3 shadow can be achieved.
Date Badges and Comment Bubbles for Your Blog
One of the things you have to deal with when your blog grows is having to cram more info into less space to show everything you want to show. One thing you can do is add an icon for the date and then a bubble over it with the number of comments for that post.
UX trick: display form data as tabular data
This is a little trick to enhance the user experience of forms. It displays editable form data as readable tabular data.
Tables: Not As Evil As You Think
Tables are evil, right? Yes and no. For tabular data, they’re not, of course. That’s what tables are for in the first place. CSS can do an excellent job of styling a properly formatted table, and the table structure provides good scaffolding for JavaScript calls. But what is addressed here is using tables for non-tabular data (i.e. for the layout). Yes, that’s right: using tables for layout.
Perfect Drop-Down Log-In Box Like Twitter Using jQuery
This shows you how to create a Twitter-style drop-down log-in form using jQuery. It’s really easy, it saves space on the page and visitors feel comfortable with the awesome toggle form.
Make a Select’s Options Printable
When printing a Web page with select elements on it, the select drop-down prints just as it looks on the Web. This of course is practically useless on the printed page. One option for handling this is to follow every select HTML element with an unordered list that duplicates the content. Hide the unordered list in your main CSS file and reveal it with your print style sheet. This is a reasonable approach, except that it’s a big ol’ pain in the butt to deal with all the time. Let’s rely on jQuery to do the heavy lifting instead.
Twitter-Like Log-In With jQuery and CSS
This post explains how to get the Twitter-like hide and show effect for logging in using jQuery and CSS.” Very simple: just five lines of JavaScript for the hide() and show() events and a little CSS.
Clean and Pure CSS Form Design
This tutorial illustrates how to design a pure CSS form without using HTML tables.
CSSG Collection: Free Comment Styles
This is the second CSSG collection from CSS Globe.
Have a Field Day with HTML5 Forms
Here is a look at how to style a beautiful HTML5 form using some advanced CSS and the latest CSS3 techniques. You will definitely want to re-style your forms after having read this article.
Editable/Printable Invoice
Create editable and printable invoices using CSS and some JavaScript. This is version 2 from Vinh Pham.
How to Mask Passwords Like the iPhone
Many smartphones, including the iPhone, show the last character that you typed in a password field with a delay of a second or two. You can see that last character but not the entire password. But browsers don’t do what these mobile devices do. Here is a solution, with some fancy JavaScript and behind-the-scenes trickery.
Make Web Forms Suck Less With Labels
We’ve been filling out Web forms for years, and we all gripe that they could be better. Even with generous padding, the fields are too small. But hardly anyone has improved the most under-rated interaction of them all: checkboxes and radio buttons.
FancyForm: JavaScript checkbox replacement
FancyForm is a powerful and flexible checkbox-replacement script that changes the appearance and function of HTML form elements. It is accessible and easy to use, and it degrades gracefully on older non-supported browsers.
jQuery checkbox v.1.3.0 Beta 1
A lightweight custom-styled checkbox implementation for jQuery 1.2.x and 1.3.x.
Disabled labels and the Trilemma plug-in
The form above on the left makes use of the disabled attribute, but the default browser settings for disabled inputs don’t contrast as much as one would like. To better distinguish at a glance between which inputs are disabled and enabled, the labels of disabled inputs in the form on the right are styled with a faint gray color.
Fluid Search Box
Creating a fluid search box when you have only a single element next to it is trivial. What you should do is wrap the input in an element and use padding to create space for the fixed element; then position the fixed element absolutely (or relatively) in the space created by the padding.
Browser Pong
A whole new pong game using three browser windows for the ball and racquets. Clever!
You may want to look at similar CSS-related posts that we published last months:
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Post tags: CSS, jquery
February 15th, 2010 — web20
GMAIL USERS: We hope you’ll join the discussion over on Mashable’s Google Buzz account.
We’ve discussed how you can integrate Buzz with your other social networks, but what about integrating Buzz with your blog? If you use a self-hosted WordPress blog (sorry, WordPress.com users), there are already a variety of Google Buzz plugins and add-ons available.
While it’s clear that people are really taking to using Buzz to share content and communicate, the service will undoubtedly reach more users as its sharing tools are integrated into other social sites. From buttons to social stream in your side bar, here’s how you can integrate Buzz with your WordPress blog.
Mashable started sporting some nifty Buzz buttons a few days ago and lots of our readers have wanted to know how to add a similar feature to their own blogs. As it stands right now, how our Google Buzz buttons work (and how the buttons other sites are using also work) is that they create a share link from that post to Google Reader. As long as Google Reader is connected with your Google Buzz account, your publicly shared items will also be shared on Buzz.
Already, a number of enterprising WordPress plugin developers have answered the call to add Google Buzz buttons to WordPress posts.
Let’s take a look:
Internet Techies created the Google Buzz Button plugin that allows you to add a “Buzz This” button to each of your WordPress posts. That icon probably looks pretty familiar — that’s because the button was designed here at Mashable (though it isn’t the same plugin).
The plugin options are relatively limited — you can choose what “rel” attribute you include with the link (the default is “nofollow”) and you can choose to display the button before or after your post content. You can also specify the icon’s height and width. Making some changes to your WordPress theme’s CSS options, you could further customize the appearance of the button, but as it stands, it’s a pretty basic (and easy) way to add a Buzz button. If you want to add Buzz manually to only certain posts, there is a template tag that you can add to those posts.
Another button plugin option is WP Google-buzz from Arpit Shah. This button is extremely similar to the Google Buzz Button plugin, but it adds a few more options. You can choose to show the button before or after content or to add it to posts manually, but there are also options for what style button you want to use. Depending on how you have your blog setup, you might want to use a different size or style of button.
Hameedulah’s WPBuzzer is the most robust of the Google Buzz button plugins as of right now. The style of the button is almost identical to what Mashable and the Google Buzz Button use (albeit, not quite as clean), but the options are where this plugin really shines.
You can choose where you want your buttons to appear (on posts, on pages, on the home page, in your RSS feed), whether your want the button to appear before or after the post, the target for the button (a new window or a pop-up share option) and even the CSS style. You can also choose to use a small or large button.
The biggest feature is that you can track share counts (just like we do at Mashable) if you have a Bit.ly API key and login.
The Light Social plugin takes a slightly different approach to the Google Buzz button. Light Social is a plugin that inserts a set of social share links at the bottom of each of your WordPress posts. This way links to Digg, Reddit, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter are all automatically at the bottom of the post. The developer of Light Social updated the plugin to include a Google Buzz icon and share link as well. If you want to add lots of social options to your posts — Light Social is a good approach.
It’s one thing to let other people share your content to their buzz accounts, but a big advantage of Buzz is that you can aggregate your social activities into one place as well. Check out these options for adding some Buzz to your sidebar!
If you want to share your Buzz content on your blog, check out the Google Buzz ER plugin. Google Buzz ER is extremely cool. It’s a widget that will display your public Buzz content. Just enter in your username and define how many Buzz entries you want to display and drag the widget to your designated choice in your blog.
That’s it! Now you have Buzz in your sidebar! Plus, as an added benefit, other users can click on “comment” to immediately respond to what you share. As of right now, the Buzz API doesn’t allow other people’s comments to become viewable, so only your public content is going to appear on your blog.
Another option for adding a Buzz widget to your blog (WordPress or otherwise) is BuzzCounter.net. Just fill in your username and you can generate the JavaScript to paste onto your website or blog!
There are a number of different all-inclusive comment solutions for WordPress — there’s Echo, Disqus (which we use here at Mashable) and IntenseDebate. IntenseDebate is owned by Automattic, the people behind WordPress.com and some of the main contributors to the WordPress.org project. So it probably shouldn’t be a surprise that it’s the first of the solutions to offer Buzz integration into its service.
If you use IntenseDebate on your blog, you can now easily add a Buzz It button to the top of your comment form. This won’t let people Buzz their own comments (we expect something like that will come in the future), but it adds another “Share on Buzz” option for your post to your visitors. If you use IntenseDebate, you can activate the Google Buzz This plugin by enabling it in the Plugins Directory.
As Google Buzz continues to evolve (remember, it isn’t even a week old), more and more integration options are going to sprout up. Let us know what sort of integration options you’d like to see in the future in the comments! If we missed one of your favorite Buzz plugins, let us know!
Tags: buzz, Google, google buzz, how to, List, Lists, Wordpress, wordpress plugins
February 12th, 2010 — startup
The short answer is “as much as you need”. The more tactical answer is “as much as you can raise cheaply”. The latter is a pragmatic view. Raise more than you need when times are good. Just because you raise it does not mean you need to spend it – capital efficiency is always good!
In this post I look at what VC are saying SaaS ventures need to raise to get to scale and profitability. But I’ll also look at what VC are doing – what SaaS deals they are funding currently. I look at the capital efficiency drivers, what you can do to reduce your need for capital. And finally, I show you which VC are active in SaaS today.
Sponsor
The answer according to Bruce Cleveland of Interwest is about $40m.
Take that seriously. Cleveland is a SaaS specialist with serious operational experience who has done his research on this subject. But as he points out, the details matter. There are two points of caution:
Lets look at the operational details, the capital efficiency drivers, in a minute. First, lets see what VC are actually funding today.
We looked at the Series A round for 17 SaaS ventures that closed after January 2007:
These 17 ventures raised $90.25 million total, an average of $5.3 million. That sounds like the “old normal” $5 million Series A. You can see how you would get to $40 million for a venture that is getting traction and can do a series of larger rounds at higher valuations. Lets say, a) $5 million; b) $10 million; c) $25 million; and total: $40m.
If the C round is pre IPO, everybody does well. But that is the old normal. The new normal is different. First, those 17 deals had two outliers: Jive raised $15 million and Bill.com raised $17 million.
Now let’s start with a later date. If we filter by Series A deals that were done after the market meltdown in Q4 2008, the average more than halves to $2.55 million. Those five deals are:
There are two numbers to obsess over.
1. How much does it cost to acquire customers? Cleveland defines this as CAC/ACV, or Customer Acquisition Cost divided by Annual Contract Value. If this is less than one you are in good shape. You can take this further. If you can get your customers to pre-pay for the year and your CAC/ACV is less than one, you can self-finance growth at least on the marketing side. Charging annually rather than monthly will slow down growth but that would be a small price to pay for controlling your own destiny. In some markets, customers will pre-pay in return for a discount and that is certainly the cheapest capital you will ever get.
2. How much do you need to spend per customer on infrastructure? The SaaS pioneers made a big play out of having their own data centers. When SaaS/Cloud was new, this was essential. Today you will be courted by lots of big, deep-pocketed, credible cloud vendors selling PaaS, IaaS and HaaS on a pay-as-you-go basis. The pay-as-you-go basis means you don’t spend precious capex on infrastrucure.
But more important is the total ICC or Infrastructure Cost per Customer. If this is low enough you can afford to be more creative with your freemium strategies – which will reduce your CAC/ACV if done right. In other words, your R&D guys had better pay attention to performance engineering from the get go. The days of throwing sloppy code out there and covering your mistakes with huge dollops of cash later are probably over.
You need capital to build a SaaS venture. You can self-finance using the cash flow from another business. (Typically a professional services business as this requires no capital.) This is what both 37 Signals and Zoho/Advent did. But that is still capital, it is just your own capital!
If you have a small niche, you might need very little capital as it is easy to reach your market. Which is a good thing as no VC will fund a small niche. If you are have a venture that is in that rare magic quadrant that is both viral and monetizable… well you are one lucky dude!
For SaaS ventures that are going after a big market and have normal marketing characteristics, VC (probably preceded by Angel) is the conventional route. If you do decide to raise VC for your SaaS venture, it is better to go to a SaaS specialist.
We know this is not an exhaustive list. It is not meant to be. We have seen many VCs do one or two SaaS deals. We want to highlight the VCs that have done more than that, and that have an active focus on SaaS (a section on their site, a partner focused on SaaS, some interesting research, etc.). These are the ones that made that cut:
What you really need to know is, who is funding SaaS ventures right now. Here is the much shorter list of VC that have done two or more SaaS A Series deals since the start of 2007:
OK, let’s make a really fine filter. Who has done SaaS A Series deals since the market meltdown in Q4 2008? That list is down to two firms:
In raising money, relationships matter – a lot. So if you know a VC that is not yet active in SaaS, call them. If your venture puts them on the SaaS map, they will love you. For most VC that like Internet or software like SaaS, the business model attractions are screamingly obvious.
February 2nd, 2010 — startup
Earlier today Venture Hacks announced the launch of the AngelList – a curated list of angel investors with an interest in early-stage funding pitches. According to a blog post by Venture Hacks cofounder Babak Nivi, legendary investors like FF Fund angel Dave McClure, Techstars’ Brad Feld and SoftTech VC’s Jeff Clavier are among the site’s first participants. ReadWriteStart caught up with Nivi to find out why he was moved to create the resource.
Sponsor
“Entrepreneurs are always asking us if we know any angel investors.” He says, “It’s one of the most common questions in the startup world. So we decided to make a list of the ones we know and also open it to ones we didn’t know. We also needed a place to keep track of the angels we know for our own reference. Hence AngelList!”
Anyone who has made $25,000 dollars in investments in 2009 and plans to do the same in 2010 is eligible to apply for the list. Participating investors receive information on three vetted startups per week and a place on the Venture Hacks blog and AngelList Twitter account. While some Angels may shy from displaying their contact info to the public, the list is actually a much better way to manage the pitch process as entrepreneurs are made well aware of investor objectives and interests. Startups can browse the site for contact information, investment criteria, trusted referrers and an investor’s current portfolio.
Explains Nivi, “Entrepreneurs spend a lot of time trying to get intros to investors – even the entrepreneurs who end up raising money from Ron Conway, Fred Wilson or Sequoia. We want to make it easy for qualified entrepreneurs to get the intros.”
To check out the list, visit venturehacks.com/angellist or to make your angel financing needs known, add yourself to the VentureHacks Startup List at venturehacks.com/startuplist.
February 1st, 2010 — iPhone