Archive for September, 2007
Microsoft Takes on YouTube & Apple TV
September 30th, 2007
MatthewIf Internet-based video is the wave of the future, many of us are already drenched with options including such as YouTube, Joost and Apple’s iTunes. But today, Microsoft is making a play to have its own video download service added to the mix.
During his keynote speech at the DigitalLife show here in New York, Microsoft executive Joe Belfiore will pitch Microsoft’s new, free streaming video service, called Internet TV.
Going into beta on Sept. 28, Microsoft’s Internet TV service will enable users to stream content from MSN Video. It will also offer more than 100 hours of additional, ad-supported content, including television shows like "Arrested Development," full-length music concerts, movie trailers, news from MSNBC and sports from FOX Sports.
YuMe, a broadband video advertising network, is handling the ad delivery for Microsoft.
Microsoft Internet TV is designed for both the TV and PC screen, the company said in a statement. The service’s video is optimized for broadband, and will be compatible with Microsoft and third-party "media extenders" devices for Windows Media Center.
These devices — a new crop of which Belfiore will highlight during the show — wirelessly connect a TV with a PC, delivering TV, PVR, movies, pictures, music and online services to any television set in a home. The products support connections to PCs running Windows Media Center in Windows Vista and generally, Windows XP Media Center Edition.
Media extenders to date include the Xbox 360 console as well as third-party products by a number of networking and storage companies. At the show, Microsoft is expected to showcase new media extenders from Cisco’s Linksys unit, D-Link, and Hewlett-Packard, which all unveiled their products today.
Belfiore said in a statement that the devices are "designed to deliver the ultimate entertainment experience to every TV set in your home."
Microsoft has long been supportive of efforts to extend Internet-based multimedia throughout the home. The company’s chairman and chief software architect Bill Gates last publicly touted extender devices in January at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
It’s also a hot category for other major players in the PC space. Apple Inc. announced its own $299 PC-to-TV device, Apple TV, only a few months before.
Apple’s offering is designed to let consumers play their movie and TV downloads on the living room TV, and is compatible with the company’s iTunes download service. In May, Apple partnered with Google’s YouTube video streaming service to provide additional, specially formatted content for the device.
When Apple launched Apple TV last year, Phil Leigh, analyst with Inside Digital Media, said at the time that such products answered a consumer desire to not just download Internet video, but to watch in on their televisions.
Today, however, Leigh described the Microsoft effort as, "an incremental step in the right direction, I don’t see it as much more than that."
Yet a number of Microsoft partners are still banking that consumers’ desire remains for watching streaming video on their TVs.
Linksys today announced two Media Center Extender products — one with a DVD player, and one without — for estimated street prices of $349.99 and $299.99, respectively.
From D-Link comes the DSM-750 MediaLounge HD Media Center Extender, which supports HD video resolutions of up to 1080i and Windows Media Video (WMV), DivX, and XVid formats. It includes a USB 2.0 port for access to music, photos and videos on removable Flash drives or external hard drives. It’s estimated price is also $349.99.
The HP MediaSmart LCD HDTV — a television with built-in Media Center Extender capability and 802.11n wireless — will be available in Best Buy stores for an as-of-yet undetermined price.
Google & Microsoft Clash over Doubleclick
September 30th, 2007
MatthewLawyers from Google and Microsoft sparred in Congress today as the Senate Judiciary committee looked into antitrust concerns raised by Google’s proposed $3.1 billion DoubleClick acquisition.
Seeking to derail the purchase of the online ad firm, Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith said in prepared oral testimony that if the government allowed the "GoogleClick" merger, "It will be bad for publishers, bad for advertisers, and most importantly, bad for consumers."
Microsoft itself had been eying a DoubleClick acquisition in March, according to reports published in the Wall Street Journal. In May, the Redmond, Wash., software giant offered to buy online ad firm aQuantive, a DoubleClick rival, for $6 billion in cash. That deal closed last month.
Despite that acquisition, Smith testified today that Google remains poised to dominate the overall online search market.
He said Google is already the leading company in search advertising, with 70 percent of global spending on search-based advertising going through its AdWords unit. Allowing Google to buy online display advertising firm DoubleClick would give the company nearly 80 percent of all spending on non-search ads as well, his testimony read.
It would also make Google the "overwhelmingly dominant pipeline for all forms of online advertising," Smith said in his testimony.
He also sought to raise privacy concerns over giving a single company control over what he called "the largest database of user information the world has ever known." Specifically, that suggests Google will establish a database tracking not just searches, but movement across sites serving DoubleClick ads.
"With this merger, Google seeks to record almost everything you see and do on the Internet and use that information to target ads," Smith said. "This merger will create a whole new meaning to the term ‘being googled.’"
Microsoft’s lawyer concluded his testimony by reminding the committee that since the passing of the Sherman Antitrust Act, "no one is permitted to buy success by purchasing its largest competitors."
It’s this point that Google Chief Legal Officer David Drummond primarily addressed in his prepared rebuttal testimony.
"Our purchase of DoubleClick does not raise antitrust issues because of one simple fact: Google and DoubleClick are complementary businesses and do not compete with each other," Drummond said. "DoubleClick does not buy ads, sell ads, or buy or sell advertising space. All it does is provide the technology to enable advertisers and publishers to deliver ads once they have come to terms, and provide advertisers and publishers statistics relating to the ads."
Microsoft first protested Google’s acquisition in April. Since then, both have been able to rally third-party support to their cause. For its part, Google cited analysts and columnists quoted in the media.
Additionally, Thomas Leonard, a Senior Fellow at the deregulation-friendly Progress and Freedom Foundation, argued today that online advertising remains in a nascent state, and that "government interference with this evolving market, which is still in its infancy, could be quite harmful to consumers."
On the other side, Microsoft helped sponsor an AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies research project to show how display and search advertising dollars come from the same pool, thus enabling Google to dominate the entire ad market.
Also in the anti-GoogleClick camp, Marc Rotenberg, president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), testified before the committee to present the deleterious effects a Google/DoubleClick merger would have on consumer privacy.
"We believe that the commission should act to block the deal or to impose substantial privacy safeguards as a condition of the deal’s approval," Rotenberg’s testimony read.
In addition to the Senate Judiciary committee, which has yet to weigh in on the proposed acquisition, the DoubleClick deal also remains under Federal Trade Commission regulatory review.
Earlier this year, EPIC, along with the Center for Digital Democracy and the U.S. Public Interest Research Group (US PIRG), filed complaints with the FTC over privacy implications in the merger.
CSS Backgrounds
September 30th, 2007
MatthewFor many years, web sites all over the world generously offered free tiled background patterns to budding young web designers as a way of “enhancing” their web pages. Derided by many designers in the field as tacky, these backgrounds were generally used sparingly, if at all, by professional designers, especially where download speed was of major concern—and in those heady days of 14.4kbps modems, download speed was always of major concern.
How times have changed in the past ten or so years! With the advent of CSS and the increased proliferation of broadband, backgrounds have become an integral part of web design and development. Backgrounds are no longer simple repeated patterns or, in more abstract cases, extremely large photographs. Nowadays, they form the basis of many a well-designed site. From CSS rollovers and “Faux Column” layouts, to form styling and fluid layouts, backgrounds have become an integral part of the developer’s toolkit.
In this article, we’ll first of all deal with the theory behind the, um, background, in which we’ll break down the properties of backgrounds. Armed with this theory, we’ll proceed to walk through a case study together, in order to see some of the techniques that are utilized by developers faced with a challenging and daunting site design. Finally, we’ll predict the advent of CSS 3, speculating as to what may be in store for designers in the near future.
Background Basics
Before we begin our case study, we’ll need to be equipped with an understanding of the basics of creating backgrounds. For the sake of keeping this instruction brief and concise, let’s just look at the shorthand notation of the background property to start with. It looks like this:
body {
background: #1299AB url(images/myBackground.gif) no-repeat
fixed 10% 50px;
}
That’s your background, right there. But to the uninitiated, this code probably doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Let’s break it down into its individual properties—backgroundcolor, background-image, background-repeat, background-attachment, and backgroundposition.
Setting background-color
Let’s take a look at the specification of the background-color property:
body {
background: #1299AB url(images/myBackground.gif) no-repeat
fixed 10% 50px;
}
This property can take as its value a hexadecimal number, an RGB color name value, for example, rgb(255,0,0) for red, a name value, or a transparent keyword.
Hexadecimal values use the fewest characters, and are the most common method of defining colors in CSS. So, for simplicity, we’ll use hexadecimal values.
Setting background-image
The background-image property is also very straightforward:
body {
background: #1299AB url(images/myBackground.gif) no-repeat
fixed 10% 50px;
}
This property gives us most of our design flexibility. The location of the image should be specified relative to your CSS file. For example, if you keep your images in a subdirectory of the folder containing your CSS files, and this subdirectory is called images, you’d need to edit the location of the image like so:
body {
background: #1299AB url(images/myBackground.gif) no-repeat
fixed 10% 50px;
}
Simple!
Setting background-repeat
Here’s the background-repeat property:
body {
background: #1299AB url(images/myBackground.gif) no-repeat
fixed 10% 50px;
}
The valid values for the background-repeat property are:
- no-repeat
As its name suggests, the no-repeat value causes the background-image to be rendered once, at the point determined by the background-position property. - repeat-x
repeat-x forces the background image to repeat horizontally, left-to-right. - repeat-y
Setting background-repeat to repeat-y results in the image being repeated along the Y axis, starting at the top of the element. - repeat
The default value for background-repeat, repeat causes the background-image to be tiled across the entire area of the element, starting from the top left.
Setting background-attachment
Let’s investigate the background-attachment property:
body {
background: #1299AB url(images/myBackground.gif) no-repeat
fixed 10% 50px;
}
The only valid values for this property are:
- fixed
- scroll, the default value
The background-attachment property defines whether the background-position is calculated relative to the page content (scroll), or relative to the browser viewport (fixed). The most notable difference between these values is that background-attachment: fixed; will cause the background-image to remain stationary if the user scrolls the page.
For the purposes of this article, we’ll ignore the background-attachment property, and it’ll therefore assume the default value. We’ll gloss over the background-attachment property, due to the lack of support for the fixed value in Internet Explorer 6, which still holds a large share of the browser market despite the release of IE 7. IE 6 only supports backgroundattachment: fixed; on the body element.
Setting background-position
Here’s the background-position property:
body {
background: #1299AB url(images/myBackground.gif) no-repeat
fixed 10% 50px;
}
The background-position property defines the starting X and Y coordinates of the background image. Keywords (left/right/center/top/bottom), relative (percentage) values, or absolute values (px/em/pt/mm) are valid options for setting the background-position.
The horizontal keywords that determine the X position of the background image are:
- left, the default
- center
- right
The vertical keywords which determine the Y position are:
- top, the default
- center
- bottom
Google Adds Texting Tech
September 30th, 2007
MatthewText messages sponsored by Google ads? That scenario, and others like it, look increasingly likely after Google today announced it acquired Zingku’s mobile messaging and social networking service.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Zingku’s service enables mobile users to establish groups of contacts and share text and picture messages with them, as well as to store photos and schedule reminders on personalized sites. The company also offers marketing services, enabling online merchants to print codes in their real-world or online ads. When entered into a Zingku user’s phone, these codes download a coupon or advertising material, which can then be shared with other users.
Despite some of the obvious marketing implications for the service, the search advertising giant did not say how exactly how it aims to integrate Zingku’s technology into its own plans.
"We believe these assets can help build products and features that will benefit our users, advertisers and publishers," a Google spokesperson told InternetNews.com.
Google has become increasingly active in the mobile space during the past several years, evidently seeking to map out an advertising strategy for an increasingly hot platform.
At this year’s Search Engine Strategies (SES) convention in San Diego, Google’s Marissa Meyer characterized mobile as the next great application opportunity. Mayer, vice president of search products and user experience at the company, noted that despite the summer slow-down, Google had seen an increase in the number mobile users getting online this season.
Google is even rumored to be building its own mobile device. At SES, Meyer played down the possibility of a "GooglePhone," but the topic remains popular speculation among Google-watchers.
Prior to the acquisition, Zingku’s operated in a private beta. Since then, the company has closed the gates to new members. A notice on the Zingku’s site indicates that user accounts will be transferred over to Google beginning in October.
Googles Free Ad Creation Tool
September 28th, 2007
MatthewIf you could use some help spreading the word about your small business, let Google lend a helping hand. Google’s now offering an ad creation tool to help advertisers develop newspaper ads using pre-designed templates. The tool itself is free, though it’s only available to AdWords advertisers. Marketers can also search through Google’s inventory of 450 newspapers and chat directly with Print Ads account representatives.
web design galleries
September 25th, 2007
MatthewWeb Design Galleries
- webdigity
- alvit
- anjo.dekiteharu
- beautifully-webdesign
- bestwebgallery
- brdcast
- ceeses
- coolsitecollection
- creative-pakistan
- css-demo
- css-design-yorkshire
- css-galleries
- css-gallery
- css-website
- css11
- cssbased
- cssbeauty
- cssblast
- cssbrain
- cssclip
- csscollection
- csscontainer
- csscool
- cssdesign
- cssdrive
- csselite
- cssexchange
- cssfill
- cssflavor
- cssgalaxy
- cssgalerie.net
- cssgalerie.com
- cssgallery
- cssglobe
- cssgreen
- csshardcore
- csshazard
- cssheaven
- cssimport
- cssimpress
- cssinsert
- cssliquid
- csslove
- cssmania
- cssmess
- csspinoy
- cssprincess
- cssreboot
- cssremix
- cssshowcase
- csssmoothoperator
- csstux
- cssvault
- csszengarden
- dailyslurp
- designbeauty.wordpress
- designlinkdatabase
- designmeltdown
- designscreme
- designshack
- designsnack
- devhome
- e-motionaldesign
- edustyle
- galerie.crooco
- inspirace.dobrestranky
- inspirationking
- lightondark
- moderniweb
- mostinspired
- najdizajn
- netzfruehling
- onepixelarmy
- per.fectio
- piepmatzel
- plasticpilots
- refreshlinks
- screenalicious
- screenfluent
- showcase
- standardsreboot
- stylecrunch
- stylegala
- stylegrind
- styletheweb
- submitcss
- tagacloud
- thebestdesigns
- thehorizontalway
- thesis.veracon
- unmatchedstyle
- w3csites
- wakeupgallery
- webcreme
- webdesign-inspiration
- webgallery.dimix
- webtest
- welldonesites
- withstyle
7 Keys to motivation
September 25th, 2007
Matthew
1. Assign a major goal, but follow a path.
Break down a major goal into a path of smaller goals. As you achieve these smaller, more manageable goals, you will be naturally advancing along the path to your major goal. 2. Always finish what you start.
A half finished task is of no use to anyone. Quitting is a natural habit. You need to develop the habit of finishing self-assigned tasks. 3. Learn how to learn.
We all have the ability to learn without instruction. When you learn the art of self-education, you will create opportunity to find success beyond your wildest dreams. 4. Socialize with others of similar interest.
Mutual support is motivating. You will develop the attitudes of the people closest to you. If they are losers, its more than likely you will be a loser. If they are winners, you will be a winner. 5. Harmonize your natural talent with interest that motivate you.
Natural talent creates motivation, motivation creates persistence and persistence gets the task completed. 6. Increase your knowledge of subjects that inspire you.
The more you know about a subject, the more you want to learn about it. A self- propelled upward spiral starts to develop. 7. Take Risks.
Failure and bouncing back are elements of motivation. Failure is a learning tool. No one on this earth has ever succeeded at anythinh worth while without failing first.
Tripit
September 25th, 2007
MatthewAs I am getting my plans finalized for my annual trip to hawaii, I came across a great website for helping you keep your plans in order.<br />
Enjoy Better Trips With All Your Information In One Place
TripIt is a new kind of online travel service that automatically organizes all your travel plans into one master online itinerary with everything you need for your trip – including travel confirmations, daily weather, local maps, city guides and more.
2012 Olympic Games Logo
September 25th, 2007
MatthewThe controversial new logo for the 2012 London Olympic Games has been released costing a massive £450,000.
This logo proves what my wife has been saying for the past few months ” the 80’s” are back. But in 2012??
New Trick
September 25th, 2007
MatthewMagazine style drop caps available in css. I am not sure of any clients I currently have that would benefit from this right now. But I am very excited about this.