Thursday, April 30, 2009

What If Everything Was Made by Microsoft

I was just surfing the web when i came across these humorous pictures on the web. These pictures are created by various artists at cracked displaying their skills in the competition. The pics are so funny and indicates a great display of skills from the contestants. Have a look into these and judge yourself the best ones :).

by AceJustice

by Daedalus

by gm_zero

by Heart87

by Orchard

by R.Matey

by Rubbin Hood

by tayser

by Tupper

The Future Pizza Box Has Arrived

If you are one of those Green Planet lovers i would like to share with you this Pizza serving video which has got something to teach us on the Pizza box and Green Planet. Just check out this video of Future pizza box ;)

Twitter Admin Hacked ?

There is lot of buzz on the twitter and web today regarding the admin panel hack of Twitter account. According to a post on the French blog by Korben the actual url of the admin panel of twitter https://admin.twitter.com/admin/ (You cannot login through this url as it requires a password) is hacked by a crafty hacker who has managed to get into the twitter admin panel.

The person who has managed to take the screen shots is clever enough to mask his profile pic, but a search for their latest update shows it is in fact Jason Goldman, who is Director of Product Management at Twitter.
Hacked Twitter Admin Panel screenshots:












Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Google launches - Google for Advertisers website

For all those who are looking to accelerate their business through various Google advertising solutions, Google has come up with an all new website called Google for advertisers which aims to help the advertisers by bringing all the marketing solutions of google and how best one can use with various tools provided by them. Users can discover the right combination of various tools which best match their requirements from this new website.

The Google for Advertisers website gives you:
1) A neat description of each of googles platforms along with the tools supporting them.
2) How to reach your audience across different locations and languages.
3) ways to explore marketing examples which describes how google tools can solve a particular goal.

For more information visit Google for Advertisers

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

View PowerPoint and TIFF in Gmail as Inline

Seems Google is not going to sit quite. Just few months ago Google introduced faster viewing of online PDF's in browsers. Now they have come up with another new features added into the Gmail which supports viewing of TIFF and Microsoft Powerpoint formats too. Earlier there is a "view as Slideshow" option for all the Ppts but now, with the inclusion of these cool features users no longer have to save the files into their computer nor they have to buy and install any software to do so. Just they can directly view them in the browser itself.

Also, users are relieved from the hassles of installing a Flash plugin on their browser. Some additional features like:
1) zoom in and out
2) Select text to copy and paste
3) Print the presentation to a PDF doc

are also included in the roll out of these new features.

Monday, April 20, 2009

Oracle to acquire Sun Microsystems - $7.4 billion deal

Sun Microsystems Inc. and and Oracle Corporation today announced that they have entered into an agreement under which Oracle will be acquiring Sun for $9.50/share in cash. The deal is estimated a value at approx $7.4 billion, or $5.6 billion net of Sun’s cash and debt.

In a statement issued Oracle President Safra Catz said that
"We expect this acquisition to be accretive to Oracle’s earnings by at least 15 cents on a non-GAAP basis in the first full year after closing. We estimate that the acquired business will contribute over $1.5 billion to Oracle’s non-GAAP operating profit in the first year, increasing to over $2 billion in the second year. This would make the Sun acquisition more profitable in per share contribution in the first year than we had planned for the acquisitions of BEA, PeopleSoft and Siebel combined,".

This deal is going to bring substantial long-term advantages to Oracle which owns two important Sun software assets: Java and Solaris. The Sun Solaris OS has been the leading platform for oracle data base and with the acquisition of Sun, Oracle can optimize their Oracle database for some of the unique, high-end features of Solaris.

The Board of Directors of Sun Microsystems has unanimously approved the transaction which is expected to close by this summer.

For more information visit the Web site at http://www.oracle.com.

Friday, April 17, 2009

Yahoo Shutting Down Jumpcut In June

After announcing in December that that no new videos could be uploaded, but that they will be keeping the Jumpcut site up and running for the foreseeable future. Yahoo has finally decided in shutting down of their video service Jumpcut. From an email sent out to its users Yahoo says that the future of their video service ends in June.

Yahoo's letter to its users
" Dear Jumpcut user,

After careful consideration, we will be officially closing the Jumpcut.com site on June 15, 2009. This was a difficult decision to make, but it’s part of the ongoing prioritization efforts at Yahoo!

Very soon, we’ll be releasing a software utility that will allow you to download the movies you created on Jumpcut to your computer. We’ll send instructions to this email address when the download utility is available.

Once you download your movies, you may choose to upload them to another site such as Flickr, which now allows video uploads. You can find out more here: http://www.flickr.com/explore/video/

Thanks for your understanding and thanks for being a part of Jumpcut.

The Jumpcut Team"

Jumpcut is one of the popular video editing tools bought by Yahoo in 2006. Its sad to see it die :(

Successful Business Networking Factors or Tips

Networking is has become crucial for anyone these days who are into the online marketing division. You need to build such a useful network where you may find people who are going to help you and you can help them in turn. So whom all you need to choose for your successful networking.


Your Rivals - As always its important to know your competitors well. You need to keep an eye on their Advertising strategies, marketing tactics, press releases, news letters, etc. Sometimes the ideas which we get by watching our competitor's strategies fetch us more results then our normal ideas. So its a good practice to know what your competitors are also doing along with what tactics you are employing.

Friend connections - Even connecting with some novice friends on social networking services can help in your business some good if you're on mutual friendly terms. You can get yours customers yours way sometimes through them if they are into the business which you are in right now. Synonymously if a project comes to you which you may think your friend can execute well, you can bring in their expertise or can hand over to him. So its a good practice to make connections with those professionals who are in and around your area.

Local media - Its worth making connections with the members of the media who cover the news of your niche. The media can be of any form here. It may be newspapers, television, radio, blogs, etc. You can get your story listed in the news by explaining them why you are the best fit for a reporter’s beat.

These are the three important factors which i reckon for a successful business networking. However you are welcome in drop in any suggestions if you have here.

Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Upcoming Change to Google.com search referral url

Google has announced that it is bringing up some change in its Google search url's which you may see soon this week. However they said that this is not going to have any affect on the Google Analytics results.

So soon we are going to see a new referral URL format for the visitors who are going to come from the Google Search results pages. Until now we could see that search on Google for the term "flowers" would be looking something like this:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=flowers&btnG=Google+Search

But, due to this new change you are going to see a string something like this:

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=7&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com%2Fmypage.htm&ei=0SjdSa-1N5O8M_qW8dQN&rct=j&q=flowers&usg=AFQjCNHJXSUh7Vw7oubPaO3tZOzz-F-u_w&sig2=X8uCFh6IoPtnwmvGMULQfw

The notable difference among these two url structures is that instead of "/search?" the URL contains a "/url?".

This new change will occur only in a small percentage of searches initially. But, it is expected that we can see the old and new forms of the URLs as this change gradually rolls out.

Note: If you are using UTM-based tracking with Urchin Software, you need to stay tuned for a software update that Google will be making available soon. However, if you are using IP-Useragent based tracking with Urchin you are not going to be affected since this form of tracking can effectively process both current and new referral strings.

Monday, April 13, 2009

What if i'm hacked or penalized? - Matt cutts answers

If your worried that yours or your client site is being penalized by Google and you sent an reconsideration request. But never heard back from Google team. Here is a nice video post from Matt cutts which explains what you need to do primarily from your side before submitting a reconsideration request.

TwitZap - Standard Automatic Twitter refreshing Interface

I have come across a Cool Twitter interface TwitZap - which offers nice features which just might drive your attention into it. If you are not interested in switching to standard advanced Desktop clients like Tweetdeck, then Twitzap may be worth a solid choice.


Twitzap, web based Twitter client focuses mainly on 3 major features.
1) Unlike Twitter, Twitzap Automatically updates/refreshes the page in real time. You can also pause the tweets by just turning on the knob which is on the left-side. This is a good improvement from standard Twitter page which needs to be manually refreshed all the time for latest updates.
2) Twitzap claims that they help you Tweet very fast(under 800ms) even though Twitter is slow or down.
3) Unlike on Twitter where you need to click on the username in the menu on the right side to look for all the mentions on that username, Twitzap helps you to do that for any term you want. You can add any channel into your list.
4) It also provides a shorten url's button to make short-urls of any lengthy url post which we can't find in standard Twitter interface.
5) clicking on Retweet button of any post copy pastes the entire message for Retweeting which is another cool feature can't be found on normal Twitter interface.

Wednesday, April 8, 2009

Twitter employee hands over personal details of @Skype registrant to Skype – Privacy issue?

On twitter anyone can grab any famous person name or brand and there is not much policing going on regarding this. But issues were raised when Twitter has handed over the personal details of a brand registrant to his original brand company without alerting the original registrant or performing any kind of standard due diligence. This move has raised huge issues for the site.

Not so long after the launch of Twitter Stephanie Robesky of Atomico, the venture fund established by the former founders of Skype, registered @Skype while still at the company. She says in her blog post that she forgot about the move and came to know of the incident only when a Skype employee who has been handed over her contact details contacted her, who in in-turn got those name, email address and contact details from a Twitter employee. In an open letter to twitter she mentioned that
"This is a violation of my privacy and, quite honestly, probably a big violation of your privacy policies. It is unprofessional of your team to hand out users information regardless of circumstances and this is something that we never would have done at Skype – even if Obama himself couldn’t log in to an account that he says wasn’t even his!."

A response from a Twitter employee to Robesky accuses her of violating Twitter’s terms of service, despite clearly having revealed her personal information.
"From: XXXXXXXX XXXXXXXX
Sent: 07 April 2009 16:31
To: Stephanie Robesky
Subject: Re: Skype name account
Hi Stephanie,
I was informed by a representative of Skype that you had set-up
the account on their behalf but you were no longer an employee
and they did not have access to the account. In such situations we
do release the account to them.
Just curious why you didn’t turn over the keys to your employer before
you left the company? In which case, you’re violating our Terms of
Service by squatting on the user name.
Cheers,
XXXXXXXX "


The serious question now in this case is that whether twitter has the right to release the user information in special cases and how that determines that a company gets precedence over a Twitter name, as opposed to an individual.

I feel in case of such incidents the user has to be informed regarding the use of brand names and a notice can be issued to them to hand over the account details to its original brand company. Another solution can be they can delete the previous account and ask the original brand company to create another fresh account with their brand name. Both these can be good solutions for such privacy issues where in the privacy of the users can be maintained.

Tuesday, April 7, 2009

Popular and Better Desktop Client for Twitter - Nambu?

Most of the people who use Twitter uses Tweetdeck and Twhirl as their popular Desktop clients as they are most popular desktop clients for Twitter these days. Among these Tweetdeck being the popular among most of the users. But this weekend there comes another desktop client for twitter called Nambu a new Mac OSX Twitter client creating some buzz on the internet. Lets have a peak into this.


Nambu features:
1) Nambu consumes low memory when compared to the new version of Tweetdeck.
2) Nambu allows the users to create groups and seperate separate columns for specific searches just similar feature to Twwetdeck.
3) Nambu also supports more than one twitter account and the default url shortening service is tr.im which was developed by the Nambu team itself.
4) You can also translate any tweet into English with a simple keywboard short cut.
5) New users can be added into the group with rigt click menu.
6) It Automatically organizes your conversations into threads which is one of the interesting feature with nambu. It also does this for conversations that you don't participate in, but you have to be subscribed to both sides of the conversation.
7) Nambu also offers an iphone application.

There can be some bugs in this application but, Nambu is still in its beta stage. The new version seems to be consuming more memory than the earlier. We can expect some breaks now and then. But, the development teams seems to be working hard on it and issuing updates regularly which makes the process move fleetly.

But if you are a Mac User then definitely Nambu is worth a look.

Google rolls out local search results for better results

In order to make the search as easy as possible Google has announced a worldwide rollout of local search results on a map, which will come along even when you don't type in a location name. When you search in Google for generic terms like "restaurents" or "doctors" they will guess the location where you are based on the IP address and show the results near to you. Click the image below


They are also providing the "Change Location" option which will help the users to specify their likely location.

You can also search for specific stores or street addresses near you. For example like [cornelia st cafe] in New York.

Or [111 8th ave] in New York.

With the roll out of these new cool feature Google makes the search a bit easier for its users.

Note: The results are displayed w.r.t to the IP and Location. Here the results images are accordint to the US location.

Twitter and Facebook Continues to Grow

Twitter:
Twitter was growing at a staggering 1,382% on an annual basis according to the data published from Neilson Online. According to the latest trends report from compete we can see that it is growing at 77% on YOY basis. Check the image below


According to the stats from Quantcast Twitter has a reach over 6.1 million people in US and that's include just on its website not any third party applications like Twhirl or Tweetdeck. The site attracts a young adult and more educated group audience.


Facebook:
Facebook also shown an increase of 23.4 percent month-over-month in its traffic to more than 91 million US visitors. This indicated that it has an 195.1% annual growth. Check the image below


The stats from quantcast for facebook also indicates it has wide reach over 79 million U.S. monthly people. The site has attracted a more affluent, teen and young adults with very slightly female biased following.


So whats this sudden surge in traffic to both these networking services - Twitter and Facebook. Is it because of the number of people who are using the social networking has increased or an increase in the number of internet users. Both the networkng services are coming up with new integrations and new changes into them these days and seems they are in the verge of conquering the social networking market space. The increase in the number of users for Twitter and Facebook seems to be an interesting topic for now but, how long and how far they go.. This question certainly keeps ticking in my mind. All we can do now is just Wait and Watch ! :)

Friday, April 3, 2009

FireFox Addon: Add Data to Google Analytics Data

GA Notes is a cool Firefox extension which allows users to add data to the Google Analytics so that it appears in a table format on the top of each report. Any Ga user who has this Firefox extension in his browser can add, edit and delete notes. The beauty of this tool is that you can search the results and also export the notes as XML/CSV format.


The Developer of this cool plugin Justin Cutroni says that GA Notes Runs on the Google App Engine. No data will be stored on the user machine or on their servers but stored only on Google Servers. The Firefox extension which provides the flexibility of entering and displaying the data does a encryption of data prior to all the processing and data storage on Google App Engine.


If you want to make some suggestions or ideas you can head over to to drop them

Skype iPhone Application crosses one million downloads in 2 days

Skype for iphone application which allows the users to make VoIP calls to friends and family all over the world. The Skype iphone application which was announced earlier this week hit the stores last Tuesday and since it has been downloaded a staggering one million times onto the popular iphone devices. This accounts to 6 downloads per second approx. Now thats a incredible statistics display for anyone.



In his blog post Peter Parkes skype blogger announces this milestone and says that "This is a phenomenal performance, and we’re confident that it’s one of the fastest-downloaded iPhone apps ever. We’ll be back next week with an update, but for now, Skype on"

Google Chrome market share continues to rise

Within few months of the launch of the Browser chrome by Google seems it is likely ready to capture the Browser market share. I got a sneak peak into the matt cutts post related to his Google Chrome stats for the month of March 2009. The stats suggests that Chrome is 7% of his visitors. Here is the image of the

Matt cutts browser market trends for March 2009:


After reviewing his post i just logged into my Analytics and checked his my browser trends. I can observe that Chrome seems to be rising in my list too. Here is screenshot of My Browser market share


According to the stats released by NetApplications for May, 2008 to March, 2009 Chrome increased its market share from 0% to 1.23% in between the months of Aug, 2008 to March 2009. The interesting stat to note that is in the last 1month Chrome market share went up from 1.15% to 1.23%.
Net Applications showing browser market shares


From Statcounter stats - indicate that Chrome market share increased by 1.75%.
Marketshare of Chrome from Statcounter:


Now clicky another web analytics service provider stats indicate that Google Chrome market share showed an increase of 2.86 %. In the last 60days Chrome market share went up from 2.097% to 2.491%.
Chrome market share from clicky:

Thursday, April 2, 2009

Check username Availability at Multiple Search Engines

If you are interested in finding the availability of name on different Networks here is cool tool which helps you to check the Username availability on Multiple Networks with a single click. Namechk is the tool which helps you to choose the best username available for you on dozens of social networking and bookmarking websites. Just type in the name which you prefer to use as your username and click the chk button thats it. You can know the availability of the username on different networks. This is Cool isn't it !.

You can also suggest your favorite site to be included in this list by clicking the link.
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