Archive for February, 2008
1988 vs 2008
February 28th, 2008
adminThink the iPhone is pricey? The cool cell phone of 1988 cost $4,382 in today’s dollars. A 150MB hard drive? $8,755. Take a trip with us down memory lane and you’ll never whine about the price of a gadget again.
Ever wax nostalgic about your first PC or cell phone? It’s easy to forgive your Tandy desktop or your Motorola portable for their limitations — after all, they were technological infants.
What we often forget, though, is how $%#@! expensive that crude neolithic junk was! So join us on a trip two decades back in technology’s history — and we bet that the next time you’re charged $895 for a small square of plastic and transistors, you’ll smile and say, “Wow, what a bargain!”
Home Desktop PCs
1988: Tandy 1000 TL
Price: $1,400 ($2,454 adjusted for inflation)CPU: Intel 80286RAM: 640KBStorage: 3.5-inch floppy
Monitor: 14-inch, 640-by-200 RGB CRT, 16 colors
By 1988, personal computers had found their way into about 15 percent of U.S. households. PCs dominated, but other home systems were popular as well – among them the Apple II, Macintosh, Commodore 64, Atari ST and Amiga 2000.
PCs came with DOS; Windows 2.0 was a $99 option, and one of many competing graphical interfaces. Radio Shack was home PC central, offering the Tandy 1000 TL for $1,400 in a configuration that included a 14-inch, 16-color monitor; 640KB of RAM; and a single 3.5-inch floppy drive.
Tandy’s DeskMate graphical interface provided an office suite, drawing and sound-editing apps and PC-Link online software, a precursor to AOL. The 16-color monitor, graphical OS and multimedia support were cutting-edge in an era still dominated by monochrome monitors and DOS. But the $1,400 price didn’t cover a mouse, a modem, a network card, or a hard drive, each of which was an expensive add-on. And CD-ROM drives were extremely rare. Microsoft had just released the first version of Bookshelf, a collection of reference materials on CD-ROM in September 1987, and it would be another couple years before the CD-ROM format really took off.
The situation in 2008 almost defies comparison with 1988. Instead of conserving RAM and disk space like gold, we store our entire lives on our hard drives and expect our PCs to double as home entertainment centers. For a total price of $1,000, the HP Pavilion Elite m9100z is available with Vista Home Premium, a 750GB hard drive, an HDMI graphics card, Wi-Fi, a CD/DVD recorder, an HDTV tuner, surround sound, and a 17-inch flat-panel monitor.
Build critical mass on your website
February 27th, 2008
adminWith so many websites to join, users must decide where to invest significant time in adding their same connections over and over. For developers, this means it is difficult to build successful web applications that hinge upon a critical mass of users for content and interaction. With the Social Graph API, developers can now utilize public connections their users have already created in other web services. It makes information about public connections between people easily available and useful.
Only public data
The API returns web addresses of public pages and publicly declared connections between them. The API cannot access non-public information, such as private profile pages or websites accessible to a limited group of friends.
Based on open standards
We currently index the public Web for XHTML Friends Network (XFN), Friend of a Friend (FOAF) markup and other publicly declared connections. By supporting open Web standards for describing connections between people, web sites can add to the social infrastructure of the web.
Maikai ecommerce cart
February 25th, 2008
adminWhere have we been? Are we alive. Why no posts for almost two weeks???
We have been working on an ecommerce shopping cart solution called maikai cart . This has been a huge undertaking but the website is almost up and running to show off the best damn shopping cart this side of the mississippi.. We have also finalized our partnership with a large yellow page company. Please check back soon for the latest.
Online Dm Up, Offline Down
February 14th, 2008
adminMarketers intent on following the money need look no further than their computer screens. According to a new survey from marketing service and software provider Alterian, 45% of DMers spent at least $500,000 in 2007 for online efforts, compared with just over one-third in 2006.
That spending increase has to come from somewhere, and that somewhere is likely from offline efforts. Among DMers, 30% spent less than $100,000 on offline campaigns, up from 23% in 2006 and 18% in 2005.
The move to digital marketing should continue: 84% of those surveyed anticipate their online spend will increase during the next 12 months, with only 1% foreseeing a decline.
Part of this may reflect the relative youth of the online space, but part may also reflect marketers going where the customers are. Only 44% of all marketers said their offline spending would increase, compared with 52% in 2006 who expected it to rise. The number expecting decreases was 11%, identical with 2006.
Aside from boosting their online spending, two-thirds of all marketers said they were allocating additional resources (such as headcount, man-hours or research) to database and analytical functions. Forty-two percent are putting more resources toward digital efforts, and 39% are investing more in process and operational functions.
Survey respondents are also embracing specialists for certain marketing functions. Forty-five percent outsource creative design to agencies, while another 41% rely on vendors for e-mail campaign execution. Nearly four in 10 (37%) turn to list companies to manage their files, and 35% use outside database and analytics firms. Seventeen percent have outsourced their campaign management functions.
But as marketing departments embrace a wider variety of channels, their ability to coordinate all their functions through a single management system has dwindled. Seventy percent of all marketers use at least three marketing applications to accomplish their responsibilities, and 20% rely on seven or more.
Alterian’s survey was conducted during October and November 2007 through online questionnaires and in-person interviews at direct marketing trade shows. The study incorporates responses from 852 marketing professionals.
Microsoft makes unsolicited bid for Yahoo
February 1st, 2008
MatthewMicrosoft has pounced on slumping Internet icon Yahoo with an unsolicited takeover offer of $44.6 billion, seeking to join forces against Google in what would be the biggest Internet deal since the Time Warner-AOL merger in 2001.
The surprise offer of $31 per share, made late Thursday and announced Friday, seizes on Yahoo’s weakness while Microsoft tries to muscle up in a high-stakes battle with Google likely to define the technology landscape for years to come.
I bought some shares this morning after reading the above. I do not see how yahoo could not take the offer and once miscrosoft has control, I believe the stock will rise.