1988 vs 2008

February 28th, 2008

admin

Think 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

Tandy 1000 TL

 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

admin

With 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

admin

Where 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

admin

Marketers 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

Matthew

Microsoft 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.

Zamzar.com

January 30th, 2008

Matthew

I came across this website trying to convert a file from one type to another. Zamzar is dedicated to helping you transform your songs, videos, images and documents into different formats. You should check it out when in need Zamzar.com

A quarter of Apple iPhones “unlocked”

January 29th, 2008

Matthew

More than a quarter of people who bought Apple Inc’s iPhone are using them on wireless networks other than AT&T’s, the exclusive iPhone carrier in the U.S., a "stunning" number that will pressure the company’s business model, an analyst said on Monday.

Bernstein Research analyst Toni Sacconaghi said analysis of sales numbers from Apple and AT&T Inc revealed about 1.45 million phones were "missing in action" at the end of 2007.

About 480,000 of those were believed to be held by AT&T as inventory, leaving another 1 million phones, or 27 percent of the total, that Sacconaghi said were "unlocked" so they could work on non-AT&T networks.

Apple executives said last week the number of unlocked phones was "significant" but declined to give an estimate. Most analysts had estimated the portion of unlocked phones at under 20 percent.

Spokespersons for Apple and AT&T declined to comment.

The higher number is worrying for Apple because the company receives a cut of AT&T’s iPhone service fees, revenue that carries a high gross margin and has fueled optimism over its earnings potential.

For example, Sacconaghi said, if Apple hit its sales goal of 10 million iPhones by the end of fiscal 2008 but 30 percent of those don’t result in any carrier payments, its revenue and profit would be $500 million and 37 cents per share lower than expected.

If Apple cracks down on unlocked phones it could preserve its high margins but miss its sales target, whereas allowing them could erode profitability and make it tough to sign more carriers to similar revenue-sharing deals.

"Besides the financial implications, we believe the prevalence of unlocked iPhones presents a significant strategic dilemma to Apple," Sacconaghi wrote.

Apple shares closed unchanged on Monday at $130.01. Over the past month the stock has fallen 35 percent on concerns over consumer spending and what some analysts say are a lack of must-have products Apple has lined up this year.

Catching up

January 29th, 2008

Matthew

In an effort to make up for a lack of attention to our blog I have put together some cool links and the following statistics in reguards to the future of internet website design.

·         43% of all retail sales are expected to be influenced by or made on the Internet by 2012. ·         75% of web users admit to making judgments about the credibility of an
organization based on the design of its web site.

·         83% of businesses use the Internet to research and find potential vendors.

 

I am going above and beyond for one client with assisting them and there wording. I came across the following websites to assist me.

Style & Diction

This is an interactive web page for checking a sample of writing. It is modeled after the ancient Unix utilities style and diction. Enter or copy text into the first box below. The scores to the right give the readability of the text according to various formulas. The Flesch reading ease score is based on a range of 0-100, with lower values for harder text and higher values for easier text; the other scores show the approximate (

US) school grade of the text. Grades 13-16 correspond to college level; grades higher than 16 correspond to graduate school level.

Tests Document Readability And Improve It

This free online software tool calculate various readability measurements like Coleman Liau index, Flesh Kincaid Grade Level, ARI (Automated Readability Index), SMOG. Document readability is the indication of number of years of education that a person needs to be able to understand the text easily on the first reading. Comprehension tests and skills training.
Tool is made primary for English texts but might work also for some other languages.

Also came across a cool idea but I am not sure how practical it really is. Anyways, take a look.

Color Scheme Selector

paypal phone number

January 25th, 2008

admin

1-888-221-1161.

Get your documents remotely

January 21st, 2008

admin

I came accross this information at msn.

To use Google’s software — among the most popular — follow these steps on both your work and home PC. First, you’ll need to set up a Google account on both machines by visiting Google.com/accounts. (Be sure to use the same account on both computers.) Then go to Desktop.Google.com to download the search software. When it’s up and running — again, do this on both machines — click on Desktop Preferences, then Google Account Features. From there, check the box next to Search Across Computers. After that point, any document you open on either machine will be copied to Google’s servers — and will be searchable from either machine.

Getting hold of your company’s internal documents could give others insight into your plans, and losing certain information could have legal repercussions. In particular, myriad state laws regulate how a company has to react when it loses private information about customers or employees; most require notifying those people about the breach in writing. Sending those notifications can be costly for your company — not to mention damaging to its reputation.

On top of that threat, researchers have found vulnerabilities in Google’s desktop-search software that could let a hacker trick a user into giving up access to files, says Schmugar of McAfee. (Those vulnerabilities have since been fixed, but more could crop up, he says.)

Matt Glotzbach, product management director for Google Enterprise, says that there are bound to be vulnerabilities in any software and that, to the best of his knowledge, none of the Google Desktop vulnerabilities were exploited by hackers. He adds that when Google finds out about a vulnerability, it quickly fixes it and notifies users.

How to Stay Safe: If you have any files on your work PC that shouldn’t be made public, ask your IT administrator to help you set up Google Desktop to avoid accidental leaks.

An alternative to this is to store your work files online. 

How to store work files online

The Problem: Desktop search aside, most people who often work away from the office have come up with their own solution to getting access to work files. They save them on a disk or a portable device and then plug it into a home computer. Or they store the files on the company network, then access the network remotely. But portable devices can be cumbersome, and company-network connections can be slow and unreliable.

The Trick: Use an online-storage service from the likes of Box.net Inc., Streamload Inc. or AOL-owned Xdrive. (Box.net also offers its service inside the social-networking site Facebook.) Most offer some free storage, from one to five gigabytes, and charge a few dollars a month for premium packages with extra space. Another guerrilla storage solution is to e-mail files to your private, Web-based e-mail account, such as Gmail or Hotmail.

The Risk: A bad guy could steal your password for one of these sites and quickly grab copies of your company’s sensitive files.

How to Stay Safe: When you’re thinking about storing a file online, ask yourself if it would be OK for that file to be splashed all over the Internet or sent to the CEO of your company’s top rival. If so, go for it. If not, don’t.

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