CeBIT Australia ‘08: Open Source for business gets show underway

With around three weeks to go, organisers of CeBIT Australia 2008 - Hanover Fairs - has confirmed global experts from technology giants Oracle, Red Hat, Google and Varien will join local specialists like Atlassian and Solutions First at Open CeBIT।

CeBIT Australia 2008, is one of the largest business technology trade events in the region and will be held at the Sydney Convention and Exhibition Centre in Darling Harbour from May 20-22।

The Open CeBIT conference, a sell-out in 2007, explores business opportunities presented by Open Source platforms and applications। This conference focuses on the strategic advantages offered by Open Source at all levels of the software stack, from operating systems to database to corporate applications and personal productivity solutions.

Open CeBIT includes detailed case studies on how successful implementations take advantage of the open collaborative process to create flexible, robust and cost-effective solutions for business, said Jackie Taranto, managing director of Hannover Fairs Australia।

“Open Source software has moved into mainstream business across all industry sectors,” she said। “This is well beyond just being a technical movement for the technical crowd, Open Source software today is a strategic business decision that reaps real business rewards.”

Speakers at this year’s Open CeBIT include Mike Cannon-Brookes, co-founder and chief executive officer of Atlassian; Grant Allen, Google Architect; Shane Owenby, an Oracle Corporation senior director; Frank Feldmann, Red Hat Asia Pacific senior product manager on powerful Open Source models; Senator Kate Lundy and Roy Rubin, founder and CEO of Varien – the US-based developer of the just-released Open Source e-Commerce platform Magento।

According to Taranto, Open CeBIT is a flagship conference event at CeBIT Australia 2008। The event’s strategic business agenda differs from more technical Open Source events.

source=http://www.crn.com.au/

Powerful Web Design

With dozens of new sites coming online every second, it's important to make your company's web page stand out from the pack. Effective design can help you establish a strong internet presence; a good site design can help you increase sales and improve click-through ratios, not to mention boost your visitor count। Therefore, when creating a site layout for your business, it's important to remember a few key points.

Abide by the carpenter's old saw: measure twice, cut once. Before going out and spending a large amount of money on a site design, make sure that you have a clearly defined stylistic direction। Many companies, small and large, make the mistake of using "brainstorming on the fly", raking up huge contractor bills through countless tweaks during the (very expensive) design process. This is an incredibly costly mistake, yet it can be easily avoided by a bit of planning. Decide on the basics: target functionality, color scheme, performance target, and browser compatibility. Once you've got those down, move on to sketching out some designs (or, if your not too much of an artist, writing out a description of the site's layout). Armed with rough sketches/outlines and a plan for your site's "look", you'll be better prepared to work with the company/individual doing the redesign.

Watch the competition. The Internet landscape changes quickly, so it's critical that you keep an eye on your competition. You don't want to find out that your competitor recently revamped his online store, and you're now loosing money because your site design doesn't compare well. Don't fall prey to the "not invented here" syndrome. If a competitor's site features an innovative design technique that allows for faster navigation or a better user experience, you should take a close look at it, and see if it can be adapted for your site. Don't copy designs -- use your competitors sites as a target for your site's design. If your site is more aesthetically pleasing and easier to use than your competitors, then you've met your most important design goal.


Have navigation. At a bare minimum, your site should have navigation available at the top -- but splitting the navigation between the top of the page and a sidebar is an acceptable alternative। The main point is, have some. It's not 1997 anymore -- you should never tell users to click their back button, nor should you make them feel as though they have to in order to navigate your site. Instead, your navigation system should allow them to easily see all their navigation options. Clean design is especially important when it comes to menus: the easier to read the entries, the better. Remember: if it's easier for your visitors to navigate your site, it'll be easier for you to make money.

Choose solid fonts. Typically, fonts should be clean and out of the way -- you want your users focusing on the text of the site, not the type of text. Arial is a good standard choice for body text, and Georgia is often picked for headlines -- but really, any sans-serif (or clean serif) font will do. Just make sure you don't pick a font that's not available on the majority of your users computers (or if you do, specify a good-looking fallback।)

Pick colors consistent with your brand/image. Your website is an extension of your company, and its design should reflect that. Customizing your web site layout to your brand is worth the time it takes: your customers will see a polished, professional site।

Think speed. Did you know that the average visitor forms an opinion about the website he's visiting in less than two seconds? While you can change first impressions, it's difficult to do, especially if the user has navigated away from your site। Prevent that by having a page that loads quickly on the lowest common denominator connection that your users use.

Don't depend on JavaScript. I'm not saying that your site should avoid using JavaScript at all -- it's a fine language, and it has it's uses। However, at no point should you make your site dependent on JavaScript. Not only will you prevent a percentage of your users from using your site (screenreaders don't support JavaScript, and some people don't have it enabled), but you'll open yourself up to having to deal with numerous cross-browser incompatibilities.

By following the above rules, you should be able to get through the site design process with a minimum of expense, ending up with a polished, refined, optimized site design that will put your competitors to shame।

source=http://www.informativepost.com/

Microsoft Extends Contract With Mobile Commerce to Provide Location Based Services for MSN Mobile

Microsoft today announced plans to extend its contract with the award winning UK company, Mobile Commerce, to continue providing RoundTown, MSN’s branded mobile location-based service.

RoundTown is a mobile search service which allows users of any internet-enabled mobile phone to access a comprehensive range of location based information।

The MSN Mobile service features a range of art, entertainment and business listing content from partners such as TopTable, the Press Association and Multimap. Users are able to locate, find and secure bookings for a variety of events and services: everything from booking a restaurant table to reading a gig review or even finding a hotel room or nearest cash point.

The service also integrates with ScreenTonic’s ad server allowing MSN to monetise the service with both banners and sponsored लिंक्स.

Hugh Davies, Head of Mobile at Microsoft, commented, “Location based services are central to our mobile internet strategy. With mobile handsets becoming ever more technically advanced, our users expect the depth of content and experience on mobile to replicate that of the traditional PC based internet. We are committed to providing our users with the very best mobile internet experience and are pleased to be working alongside Mobile Commerce on RoundTown as their expertise in this area remains unmatched”.

Steve Page, CEO of Mobile Commerce added, “We are delighted to be able to continue working with Microsoft on RoundTown and look forward to building on the success that together we’ve already made in location-based services.”

The secret is in the hug

Cynthia Karena learns how Lullabot guides the way through open source।

Hugging in the workplace was "a change in philosophy" for James Walker when he joined Lullabot but he soon got used to it।

Hugs are a symbol of openness and sharing, says Mr Walker, Lullabot's director of education। He was in Melbourne this month to conduct Lullabot's first workshops outside the US.

"There's very little ego involved in a hug," says Mr Walker, 30। There's a tendency in companies to keep information and answers close to the chest, as there's a fear that they won't be needed any more. But at Lullabot we want to not be needed any more.

Lullabot, an open-source web design consulting company, wants to help its clients be self-sufficient, says co-founder Jeff Robbins, 39।

"We want to clone ourselves। We want our clients to have the knowledge so they can go on without us. It's not a good business model but it's very rewarding. We do the same thing in teaching workshops. As more people find out about the power of the software and know about it, then more people will want to use it."

Mr Walker says: "There's a lot of websites out there and we can't build them all।"

Lullabot was born out of frustration, says Mr Robbins, who had long been building websites। In 2001, he and his wife began building dynamic websites for others.

"We got a gig building Ringo Starr's website। Ringo likes to make movies and he wanted a content management system to show his videos. Ringo was an early video blogger. This was before YouTube."

Mr Robbins was interested in all the "free stuff" that was available for creating websites with a lot of features, such as e-commerce, social networking and blogging। He was looking for a way to link it all together and then he found Drupal, an open source content management system written in the PHP web programming language. Drupal is used to build websites, including discussion sites, e-commerce sites and social networking sites.

But learning how to use Drupal was a steep learning curve for him। "With open source it can be a cacophony of voices - the tools are there but there are different levels of difficulty, documentation and usability. I was drowning trying to figure out Drupal and how to use it and implement it. I never wanted to be an expert."

Lullabot was formed to help others with Drupal's famed steep learning curve।

"A lot of that has to do with the power of open source and the difficulty of open source," says Mr Robbins। "People aren't paid to polish the software. There is no marketing arm. So it gets 90% of the way and it's up to other people to take it the rest of the way. This is where Lullabot comes in - to identify and help people with the difficult pieces."

Mr Walker says first-time Drupal users are frustrated trying to understand how to use all the features Drupal has to offer। "People see Drupal sites, like them and then when they install Drupal it looks different. When you first install Drupal, it has a default layout. The hurdle is in harnessing the power of Drupal by understanding and using more complex layouts.

"People also get frustrated with Drupal terminology and not understanding why changes are made।"

"The Drupal development community tends to be made up of very technical people," says Mr Robbins।

"They are looking at a text editor all day - and creating a webpage that's supposed to look pretty with big buttons and making it easy to use (isn't their strong point)। There are not a lot of web designer people in the Drupal development community.

"Lullabot bridges that gap। Half our time is spent on client work and the other half is dedicated to doing work in the Drupal community. We are selling our clients our knowledge of Drupal work and our familiarity with the community."

But Lullabot doesn't accept all clients. "Our clients interview us but we also have a list of questions for them," says Mr Robbins. "We don't work for a lot of potential clients because we don't feel we're a good match. Some clients have no concept of what they want. They can pay us but does the client have the pieces they need? The designer? The project developer? Do they have an idea of the features they want? It's not enough to just say 'we want a website'."

Joomla! Accessibility by Joshue O Connor

More accessibilty than Joomla!

This book concentrates mainly on making websites accessible, particularly to the visually impaired. These techniques are then used, more briefly, to explain how to make Joomla! sites accessible. The book’s author, Joshue O Connor, is clearly an expert on accessibility and has covered these areas well.

Joomla! Accessibility - A quick guide to creating accessible websites with Joomla!, published by Packt is a short book that contains materials that every web designer should know and offers sound advice on understanding the problems faced by web users with disabilities and ways to deal with these problems।
The focus of the book is not always clear; however, the content should be known by every web developer, especially as there are legal requirements in many countries—some of which are explored in the book। The assumptions of the reader’s knowledge vary considerably, though the vast majority of readers will gain an good understanding of accessibility.

The print is very legible, with plenty of white-space। The print is slightly glossy and the index is good.

source=http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/

Indian software, BPO industry to touch $132bn

The Indian software and BPO segment will grow at a rate of more than 16 per cent to become a $132 billion industry by 2012, global infotech analyst International Data Corporation (IDC) said today.

"The Indian domestic IT and ITeS market is expected to cross the Rs 2,00,000-crore ($50 billion ) mark in 2012. This translates into a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 18.4 per cent in the five-year period. It was Rs 90,014 crore in 2007," IDC said.

Together with IT and ITeS, and exports revenue of Rs 3,20,278 crore, the total IT and ITeS industry would grow to Rs 5,29,976 crore ($132 billion ) by 2012, representing a growth of 16.5 per cent, said IDC.

Exports continue to be the biggest segment at Rs 97,492 crore. In 2008, IDC expects the IT and ITeS industry to grow at 20 per cent, with the domestic market growing at 22.4 per cent.

The overall industry is projected to be of the size of Rs 5,29,976 crore, or $132 billion, by 2012-end, with the share of domestic IT and ITeS revenues being 40 per cent of the total compared to the current 37 per cent.

The IT and ITeS exports market is likely to more than double to Rs 3,20,278 crore in 2012, IDC claimed.

In 2008, IT and ITeS exports segment is expected to clock a growth of 20.4 per cent to touch Rs 1,86,142 crore. "The domestic IT and ITeS industry CAGR of 18.4 per cent (during 2008-12) is expected on the back of a robust growth of the past five years (2003-2007)", IDC India Country Manager Kapil Dev Singh said.

The Indian IT and ITeS industry grew to Rs 2,46,609 crore in 2007 from Rs 2,01,413 crore in 2006, representing a growth of 22.4 percent.

source = http://www.business-standard.com/

4 threats to Indian software industry

What is software quality? How can it be ensured?

“Quality is a hidden attribute or virtue that defines ‘worthiness for use’ of any product or service. It comes to light only under detailed scrutiny. Software quality is this dimension of the hidden worthiness, of software,” answers Raghav S. Nandyal, author of Making Sense of Software Quality Assurance (www.tatamcgrawhill.com).

The best way to ensure software quality is to build it into the software product from the very beginning, he avers. “The earliest opportunity to build software quality into a product is at the time of requirements definition and elicitation.”

Some of the quality attributes Nandyal mentions are clarity, consistency, correctness, completeness and testability. “When the complexity of the required software product is known and well understood, these attributes are likely to result,” he adds, in an e-mail interaction with eWorld.

“Since software quality is hidden from apparent view most of the time, there is very little chance in ensuring software quality in a product, as an add-on activity with software quality assurance practices of reviews, inspection or testing. Software quality has to be built into the very guts of the product at each stage in the product evolution.”

Excerpts from the interview, in which, apart from sharing his insights on software quality, he also discusses passionately the four threats that the Indian IT industry faces.

Does our IT education system have to be modified to cater to software quality needs?

Having integrated Peter Senge’s seminal work on ‘The Fifth Discipline,’ into my understanding of process management, I can say that most issues are complex systemic issues that deal with dynamic complexity. To address them effectively, one needs to have systems thinking — the Fifth Discipline — instead of linear thinking.

This shift requires a holistic approach to improving all aspects that bear upon the final determinant – good quality software. This includes improving the basic education system with a curriculum that is kept current and fresh catering to the needs of one of India’s cash-cows: the IT industry.

I would not be surprised if the current software engineering curriculum of most universities would not even make a footnote reference to the CMMI or the People CMM! Yet, a well-grounded understanding of articulating process models and an integration of such practices to a competency framework is what the IT industry needs.

In terms of software quality, how does India fare, globally?

In a very popular TV broadcast in the US, called ‘60 minutes,’ the presenter is quoted to say: “The United States imports oil from Saudi Arabia, cars from Japan, TVs from Korea and whisky from Scotland. So, what do we import from India? We import people! Really smart people”.

This sums up the trust and importance the world has placed on the Indian software professional. They trust the quality of the work that is produced; for, the highest number of high process maturity software development organisations found anywhere in the world are still in India.

With strong middle-class values and an emphasis on good quality education, our ethos is still very much learning-oriented and geared towards improving the intellectual faculties. Infrastructure provided by most software development organisations in India is world-class. At times, they even beat the best-of-the-best in the world!

The logical and analytical abilities of the Indian software professional are unrivalled. Costs to produce good quality software using Indian software organisations are still within acceptable parameters of economic value.

Given the nature of geographically distributed software development, assigning a unique ownership to the goof-ups is difficult. Often times, the customer is not sure of what they want until they see a prototype or some abstraction of what is in their reality. This is one opportunity where Indian software houses have to improve a great deal.

We are very good, I believe in giving what the customer wants — and not leading him, literally, by the nose. We have to make entrepreneurial leadership across the rank-and-file in an organisation, a core competency.

Developing individuals with excellent communication and presentation skills is still a big opportunity to improve. This gap is significant and I believe is the primary reason why we still don’t have ‘great software companies’. We might have many ‘good software companies’. Again, good is the enemy of great!

Consider this: who is the closest to the customer? The humble software engineer found in the trenches! The CEO of an Indian software organisation can do precious little marketing of his talent base given the fact that all such follow-up business opportunities get defined in the trenches – by the one who is dirtying his hands – the software developer or the tester. The CEO of an Indian software organisation is seldom in the trenches!

I find another aberration, which is hard to digest. The Indian culture unfortunately has still not produced or created enough numbers of what is called the Level 5 leadership by Jim Collins. Level 5 leaders are modest and wilful, humble and fearless.

From the People CMM perspective, it is very surprising to note that despite all notions that the Indian IT industry is informal with boss-subordinate relationships and so on which humanises the IT work culture, the most intimidating and hostile relationship is still the same – boss-subordinate relationships! I find this duality very difficult to digest.

A third critical factor is – we have not learned to walk away from bad business practices. Indian software organisations are still mostly bottom line driven. When businesses function purely from a bottom line perspective, values and principles get thrown out of the window.

The biggest threat, which established Indian software organisations must be sensitive about, is mostly internal. One need not look at other lower-cost countries as the threat.

I am sure that the dominance of these established businesses can be easily challenged by a few upstart companies driven by entrepreneurial leadership that is highly ethical, people oriented, competency focused and quality driven.

I think it is time for such a revolution in India. Many business opportunities across the globe are awaiting someone who can just venture out, make marginal improvements, year-on-year on these four dimensions.

Nandyal is an SEI-Certified High Maturity Lead Appraiser, authorised by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI), Carnegie Mellon University to lead SCAMPI appraisals on both the CMMI and the People CMM. He has been a prime consultant, coach and an assessor on Software and People CMM based process improvement initiatives in leading multinationals, worldwide. Nandyal has served on the international review panel for IEEE Software.

source = http://sify.com/

A-host plans centre to help local developers

To help local independent software vendors (ISVs) gain experience in developing solutions with the latest technologies, Application Hosting Services (A-HOST) has joined with Oracle, Hewlett-Packard (Thailand) and Software Park Thailand to set up the A-HOST Oracle Solution Centre.

A-HOST managing director Bunprasit Tangchaisuk said the centre hopes to build a community of local ISVs and encourage local developers to build solutions based on the Oracle Enterprise Database, Fusion Middleware, as well as applications based on the HP platform. The centre will be used for skill development, proof-of-concept prototypes and technical workshops with assistance from Oracle and A-HOST.

The centre will also offer solution demonstrations. As of now, there are 120 ISVs participating at the centre and it is expected that this number will double in the next five years.

"The centre will facilitate ISVs, customers and local partners in developing solutions, such as grid computing, customer relation management and software-service applications to attain international standard," Bunprasit said.

Oracle Asean regional managing director Natasak Rodjanapiches said the company will provide Oracle solutions, its e-business suite and Oracle applications to support the centre.

It will use its Product Technology Services team, which is a pooled-resource team, to support and assist local business partners. The company will support local partners through various technical and marketing programmes under the Oracle Partner Network.

Hewlett-Packard ( Thailand) managing director Sapat Sopon said the initiative is in line with HP's direction to utilise information technology to enable Thai people to enter the information technology era.

Software Park Thailand director Suwipa Wanasathop said the centre will encourage local software companies and partners in creating an environment conducive to the development of the software industry.

Through the centre's efforts, the park will help build connections to the market.

"We expect that the centre will help in developing the local software industry, improve the quality of products and services as well as promote ICT use among customers and offer greater benefits to them," Suwipa said.

source = http://nationmultimedia.com/

Software industry piracy rate drops again

China's software industry piracy rate dropped four percentage points in 2007, according to sources from "2007 China's software piracy rate survey" assessment meeting held by the State Intellectual Property Office recently.

In 2007, China's software industry's sales, including computer software products and embedded software products, rose to 580 billion yuan, the survey which is commissioned by the State Intellectual Property Office and conducted by the internet laboratory shows.

Calculating the price of the pirated software by their market value, in 2007 China's software industry piracy rate dropped from 24 percent in 2006 to 20 percent, a decrease of 4 percentage points.

The main reason for the drop in piracy rate is China's efforts in promoting genuine software in recent years, experts said. The mandatory installation of the operating system in particular, effectively checked the most serious problem, operating system software piracy.

By People's Daily Online

source = http://english.people.com.cn/90001/90776/90884/6403240.html

Technology news

KEYBOARD GERMS
Keyboards are often home to more dangerous germs than door handles and toilet seats. A Which? computing magazine lab test found many keyboards housed well-known bugs such as E coli and even bacterial traces of faecal matter. Eating over keyboards and a lack a hand washing are the main causes of contamination.


CHIP REVOLUTION
Scientists at Hewlett-Packard have designed a new circuit element that could revolutionise computing and help develop machines capable of imitating the biological processes responsible for vision and speech comprehension. The element, called a 'memrister' (a resister with memory properties), was proposed in theory 40 years ago. Analysts expect that memristers will be included in mainstream electronics within a few years.

FACEBOOK THREAT
BBC's Click programme has discovered a security hole in the Facebook social networking system. The exploit depends on Facebook's applications, which are small add-ons for Facebook user profiles, designed by individuals and companies unaffiliated with the site. The flaw leaves some personal information, useful for identity theft, available to hackers.

FLASH AVAILABLE
Adobe Software has announced that it will be opening its dominant Flash online media format to developers. The software provides the framework on which many online games and video sites, such as YouTube, run. Adobe intends to encourage the development of Flash applications for mobile phones with the move, which will provide many of the previously secret technical specifications of Flash to content providers.


GTA BREAKS RECORD
The fourth instalment of the popular Grand Theft Auto series of games has broken UK sales records, selling 609,000 copies on release day. The series, developed by Rockstar North of Edinburgh, has come under media fire for its explicit portrayals of violence, lawlessness and sex. Despite the controversy, the critical reception to the game, below, has been overwhelmingly positive.

source=http://scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com/scitech/Technology-news.4049114.jp

Effective Web Content Has Personality

CMSWIRE: We’re all dressed up or down and off to go interneting. And by interneting, we mean we’re going content consuming.

You’re dressed up. I’m dressed up. So what we want to ask is: What’s your content wearing?

No, this isn’t your CMS trying to seduce you. It’s a valid question. As we’ve discussed many times here, there’s much more to content than management. You are what you wear or what you eat…or some such thing. And the same goes for your content. So let’s talk about its personality.

It’s all about letting your content express itself and show its true colors. Before a word is even written, ask yourself “who is my content?”, “what’s it look like?”, “what’s it’s attitude?”. Personifying your content is a good way to conceive of its voice. To develop a persona, determine the characteristics of your content.

Is it:

* Pretty?
* Traditional?
* Formal, casual, snarky?
* Chit-chatty or straight to the point?

Figuring out content characteristics in advance will help to set the tone for the site and for the customers.
Tailor Your Content’s Clothes

Users like to feel special, spoken to. Tailoring your content to fit their needs is essential if you want to sustaining a readership and achieve a rapport. The content of a parenting site should be different from the content of a science site. By making your content conversational and less formal it can convey a message of warmth and understanding, while more formal and sophisticated content reveals a focus on business and the bottom-line…or worse, perhaps a dated style of communication.

If your content is wearing jeans and talking to men in suits, the message will likely have less impact. Learn how to speak your reader’s language, literally and figuratively. Many sites provide dynamic content in both English and Spanish, among other relevant languages.
A Catalog of Style

Incorporating a style guide is also helpful. Not only will it help to establish branding details like fonts, colors and logos; it can be used to establish a consistent voice for your communications.

Often the scope of style guides goes beyond the web, offering templates for letters and emails. Update guides accordingly and in a timely manner. Seasons change and content can go out of style just as easily as tapered slacks.
Never Fully Dressed Without a Smile

Of course using the wardrobe metaphor can get a little old, but don’t let it stop you from learning more about how your existing content was developed and how to create new content.

Best of all, let your content express your company’s passion for what you do. Writing content that embraces your customers’ qualities and values will bring them back time and again to a place where they feel as comfortable as their favorite pair of jeans.

Source: cmswire.com

CyberSource and PayEase Open Doors to eCommerce in China

Past challenges
eCommerce solutions for selling into China have long been problematic. Only 6% of Chinese citizens hold credit cards. The common electronic payment vehicles are Chinese debit cards(1), offered by over 20 different key banks in the country. Merchants seeking broad access to the market are required to integrate with each of these disparate institutions, in addition to satisfying regulatory requirements regarding licenses and domicile.
The PayEase/CyberSource solution
The collaboration between CyberSource and PayEase provides merchants with fast and cost-effective access to the majority of online payment vehicles in China. With the PayEase/CyberSource solution, merchants gain support for both Chinese credit cards as well as debit cards from over 20 key banks. PayEase can also help foreign companies navigate the various regulatory requirements associated with conducting eCommerce in China, such as licensing requirements for Internet Content Providers, by, for example, helping to identify professional advisers in China familiar with such regulatory requirements. PayEase also offers customer loyalty programs designed to help promote new foreign merchants to Chinese nationals that have previously purchased online.
Full Payment Management Support
The integration between CyberSource and PayEase reaches beyond payment acceptance to tap the full range of CyberSource and PayEase payment management solutions. Merchants can opt for real-time tax calculation for local Chinese value-added tax. CyberSource's industry-leading fraud management portal, Decision Manager, supports payments through PayEase, including the ability to recognize the Chinese language character set, and incorporates country- specific decisioning rules to automate the acceptance or rejection of orders. Financial transaction reports are available in English to ease reconciliation. For more information on accepting payments in China and internationally, please visit: http://www.cybersource.com/global/.
"We see this alliance with PayEase as an extraordinary opportunity for merchants who wish to expand into the Chinese eCommerce market," said Scott Cruickshank, CyberSource president and COO. "We believe that PayEase has unmatched credentials for managing eCommerce in China for domestic and foreign companies, drawing upon years of experience working with English-speaking and multinational corporations seeking entry into that arena. We believe our merchants will now have a unique opportunity to engage consumers in China as growth in that market accelerates."
Fred Sum, CEO of PayEase said, "Electronic payment in China is an underserved market with great potential. CyberSource is one of the world's most trusted and experienced payment management companies. We believe the combined capabilities of our two companies will offer significant help to U.S. and U.K. merchants that see China as a logical extension of their worldwide sales efforts."
The PayEase/CyberSource solution is available now. A merchant's ability to accept credit and debit cards through PayEase is subject to satisfaction of certain eligibility criteria and regulatory requirements.
PayEase's major shareholder, Capinfo Company Ltd., a public company in Hong Kong, is affiliated with the Beijing municipal government and was initially formed by various Chinese ministries and government entities to promote eCommerce in China.
About CyberSource
CyberSource Corporation is a leading provider of electronic payment and risk management solutions. CyberSource solutions enable electronic payment processing for Web, call center, and POS environments. CyberSource also offers industry leading risk management solutions for merchants accepting card-not-present transactions. CyberSource Professional Services designs, integrates, and optimizes commerce transaction processing systems. Approximately 228,000 businesses use CyberSource solutions, including half the companies comprising the Dow Jones Industrial Average. The company is headquartered in Mountain View, California, and has sales and service offices in Japan, the United Kingdom, and other locations in the United States including Bellevue, Washington and American Fork, Utah. For more information on CyberSource please visit http://www.cybersource.com or email info@cybersource.com. For more information on Authorize.Net small business solutions, please visit http://www.authorize.net or email sales@authorize.net.
About PayEase
PayEase is currently China's leading payment & loyalty marketing service provider. PayEase is the first payment service provider in China established in 1999. Through Chinese banking relationships (nationwide), PayEase facilitates payments among merchants and unifies functionality through a single interface. PayEase's secured platform provides a unified solution that includes various channels of payment such as Online, Mobile, POS, Call Centers, and E-wallet. In addition, PayEase supports over 65 different types of debit cards and four international credit cards. Additionally, PayEase offers tailor-made CLP (Consumer Loyalty Program) to our clients enhancing their strength in building loyal relationships with their customers.
"Safe Harbor" statement under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995
Statements in this release that are not purely historical are forward- looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, including, without limitation, statements regarding the company's expectations, objectives, anticipations, plans, hopes, beliefs, intentions or strategies regarding the future. Forward-looking statements in this release include, without limitation, statements regarding: (1) the growth of online consumers in China; (2) Chinese market being a key target for leading eCommerce brands around the world; (3) the CyberSource PayEase relationship being an extraordinary opportunity for merchants; (4) PayEase having unmatched credentials; (5) CyberSource merchants having a unique opportunity to engage consumers in China; (6) growth in the China market accelerating; (7) CyberSource being one of the world's most trusted and experienced payment management companies; (8) combined capabilities of CyberSource and PayEase offering significant help to U.S. and U.K. merchants. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from the forward looking statements include risks and uncertainties such as changes in regulatory requirements, changes in customer needs, the risks of the economy, in general, and online economy, in particular, slowing down, new products and services offerings by the company and its competitors, any unforeseen event or any unforeseen system failures, and other risks indicated in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. It is important to note that actual outcomes could differ materially from those in such forward-looking statements. Readers should also refer to the documents filed by CyberSource with the Securities and Exchange Commission, specifically the annual report filed on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2007, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on March 11, 2008, and our quarterly reports filed on Form 10-Q from time to time, all of which identify important risk factors.
(C)2008 CyberSource Corporation. All rights reserved. CyberSource is a registered trademark in the U.S. and other countries. All other brands and product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.
(1) People's Bank of China, as quoted by Xinhua, official press agency of the government of the People's Republic of China, on March 30, 2008.
SOURCE CyberSource Corporation

SugarCRM Manages End-to-End SaaS Offering With Zenoss

Market Leading ISV Manages Networks, Servers and Applications With Open Source IT Management Solution

ANNAPOLIS, MD--(Marketwire - April 16, 2008) - Zenoss Inc., a leading provider of commercial open source network, systems and applications management software, today announced that SugarCRM, the world's leading provider of commercial open source customer relationship management (CRM) software, has deployed Zenoss for Service Providers to monitor and manage its end-to-end Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering, including networks, servers and end-user application performance through synthetic transactions.
"We evaluated the leading IT management solutions in the market and concluded that Zenoss offered the best combination of functionality, price and flexibility," said Lila Tretikov, CIO of SugarCRM. "With Zenoss, we're able to monitor and manage our entire hosted service offering through a single solution. Because it is commercial open source, it's much more affordable than proprietary solutions and gives us the control to develop specific value-added capabilities for our customers."
SugarCRM delivers its CRM solutions to customers in several ways including SaaS, on-premise and appliance-based. Under its SaaS model, SugarCRM maintains instances of its application on networks and servers within enterprise-class data centers. Because its application is so important to the day-to-day operations of its customers, SugarCRM commits to high levels of application performance and uptime. In order to meet its service level agreements (SLAs) across a rapidly expanding customer base, SugarCRM selected Zenoss as its enterprise IT management solution.
Zenoss proactively alerts SugarCRM IT management personnel of potential issues based upon performance trends or outages and helps them to isolate root causes via a consolidated event console. SugarCRM personnel then remediate issues, typically before customers experience any service impact.
"We know first-hand the unique challenges service providers face," said Bill Karpovich, Zenoss CEO and Co-Founder. "Zenoss for Service Providers is a new alternative that provides the right combination of functionality, flexibility and economics."
Zenoss Inc. delivers open source IT management solutions to organizations across the globe. Flagship product Zenoss Core is a complete network monitoring and systems management platform that discovers networked IT resources, monitors them for performance and availability, and tracks changes through a configuration management database (CMDB). One of the ten most active projects on SourceForge.Net, Zenoss software was downloaded over 350,000 times in 2007. Recent product accolades include Network World's Clear Choice Award, Enterprise Open Source Magazine Readers' Choice Award, and a nomination for Best Technical Design in the SourceForge 2007 Community Choice Awards. Zenoss' customers include some of the world's largest corporations as well as Federal and State government agencies. Zenoss, Inc. is privately held and headquartered in Annapolis, MD. For more information,
source = www.marketwire.com

Drupal's Test Framework Means Better Releases

Drupal, recent winner of a Webware Top 100 place is at it again. The open source Web Content Management powerhouse has created a new addition to their framework. It’s going to mean either more frequent releases or (ideally) better releases.
Drupal, the open source CMS that is highly utilized by the music industry has created a testing framework and added it to the Drupal 7 core. This occurred recently at a code sprint held in Paris.
The addition of a test framework will help to shorten code freezes during the release process — which occurs frequently and is usually why release dates are pushed back. The framework allow for two things:

source = www.cmswire.com

Joomla! and the latest trends in the open source revolution

Australia's Andrew Eddie and Brad Baker, two of the core team members of Joomla!, the free open-source Internet content management system (CMS) that in three years has grown into a global development community with more than three million downloads in a year, will be guest speakers at a special event in Sydney on May 19, 2008.
Australia's Andrew Eddie and Brad Baker, two of the core team members of Joomla!, the free open-source Internet content management system (CMS) that in three years has grown into a global development community with more than three million downloads in a year, will be guest speakers at a special event in Sydney on May 19, 2008.
The content management system has grown into a global development community with more than three million downloads a year.
Eddie and Baker will talk about the latest trends in the open source revolution.
In a statement they said:"We will talk about the latest trends in the open-source revolution that has liberated online software from the proprietorial designs of companies like Microsoft and made feature-rich Web sites affordable for all businesses, not-for-profit groups and individuals."
Eddie and Baker are keynote speakers at the annual JoomlaDay Conference being held at the Sydney Conference and Exhbition Centre in Darling Harbour.
The Joomla! project has deep Australian roots.
It began in 2005 as an offshoot of the Sydney-based Mambo content management system, after members of the Mambo development team became concerned about protecting key open source principles they believed were being violated.
Andrew Eddy (aka "MasterChief") wrote an open letter that within a day had garnered the support of a thousand developers in the global free software community.
The name later chosen for the new open source project is derived from the Swahili "jumla," meaning "all together" or "as a whole."
Since then the community has grown exponentially.
As of February 2008, the official Joomla support forum, moderated by Brad Baker, has more than 260,000 threads and 1.2 million posts from more than 170,000 registered members in 40 languages.
Joomla! leverages much open source and Web 2.0 technology, and now offers more than 3,000 add-on features, from podcasts to calendars, wikis to social networking tools.
A live demonstration of the power of Joomla! will be held on May 20, 2008, with a team of developers building a fully functional Web site for a nominated charity in less than seven hours.
source = http://news.idg.no/

Redmond Among Contributors to Open Source PHP Framework

Zend Technologies releases updated open source framework with support from Microsoft, IBM, Google and others.by Kathleen Richards
April 2008 Zend Technologies Inc. is forming alliances with key Internet players to broaden the Version 1.5 of the open source Zend Framework (ZF), released last month, adds support for key Google APIs, LDAP authentication, OpenID and Windows CardSpace. Developers using the new version can now work with YouTube upload and write APIs. Other enhancements include better support for forms, AJAX and advanced search capabilities from within the framework with the Apache Lucene search engine, according to Zend.
"Not only are we seeing a very, very broad reach of the framework -- 1.5 is going to be distributed with Ubuntu Linux -- we're actually seeing some significant enterprise uptake," says Andi Gutmans, co-founder and chief technology officer at Zend. He reports more than 4 million downloads, 500,000 of which are unique, since Zend Framework version 1.0's general availability in June 2007. (For more on Zend and the PHP community, see the Q&A with Gutmans, "Glue and Mortar.")
Part of that success may be due to the growing community behind ZF, described as a use-at-will architecture for rapid Web app and services development. According to Zend, more than 400 contributors worked on the upgraded framework, including Microsoft, Nirvanix Inc. and Fox Interactive Media. IBM Corp., Google Inc. and StrikeIron Inc. have been contributors since version 1.0. The Zend Framework is licensed under the new BSD free software license, and code contributors must agree to the Apache Software Foundation's Contributor License Agreement.
Microsoft's Open Identity"PHP works on the LAMP stack, which is essentially implemented on the Zend Framework, and that's why we made the agreement with Zend," says Vijay Rajagopalan, principal architect of platform and interoperability strategy at Microsoft. "They have a huge developer base for the PHP customers. We felt that it would be very strategic and we could reach out to the grassroots developers if we were to enable InfoCard support with the Zend Framework as well as a standalone module."
Zend and Microsoft started to work together last summer, with the Zend engineers doing the development. "Our contribution is to provide architectural items, and to make sure that the identity metasystem works on a consistent basis," explains Rajagopalan.
In September 2006, Microsoft announced that some InfoCard specifications (WS-*) were going to be made available under its new Open Specification Promise. Soon after the company took steps to ensure cross-platform implementation. "In May 2007," recalls Rajagopalan, "Microsoft sponsored open source projects to enable InfoCard support on PHP for the LAMP stack, Java for Java servers and the Ruby on Rails framework, and a cross-platform C language implementation that will enable information-card support for many Web servers, including IIS and Apache."
Microsoft has also partnered with Zend to ensure that PHP runs smoothly on Windows servers.
Varied SupportZF supports PHP 5.0. The release of PHP 5.3, which will include some features originally pegged for PHP 6.0, is expected this quarter, according to Gutmans.As of January, PHP 4.0 is no longer supported. "As far as security fixes are concerned, we're going to continue doing those until August of this year," he says.
source = http://reddevnews.com/news/devnews/article.aspx?editorialsid=1029

Thoughts on SharePoint and FAST Search

SharePoint Report 2008 we discuss SharePoint's shortcomings and strengths in the search space. While SharePoint 2007's search capabilities have been improved over the 2003 product, it's still not "enterprise class" for a variety of different reasons.

Clearly Microsoft saw this same shortcoming (both in SharePoint and it's overall search offerings) and announced that they were going to acquire enterprise search vendor FAST Search and Transfer (more information on FAST can be found in our Enterprise Search Report 2008).

For SharePoint users, this brings up a few opportunities and issues. In a previous blog post about the SharePoint conference, I highlighted the presentation that FAST employees gave. This presentation showed nifty new Silverlight-enabled search Web Parts. These Web Parts demonstrated several capabilities that FAST brings to the SharePoint world, like: content spotlighting, multimedia search, and taxonomy management.

The last capability is one that I believe would be particularly interesting for SharePoint users, since taxonomy management represents a challenging area for most SharePoint implementations -- SharePoint taxonomies are very rigidly based on physical structure of the SharePoint sites and leave little flexibility for a more logical taxonomic structure (Redmond folks would argue that the content query Web Part might help, but it's not a solution). That said, what Microsoft hasn't really provided is good guidance on what users can expect to see and any migration path between SharePoint search and FAST. Unfortunately, that really hasn't changed: Microsoft hasn't released any roadmap for FAST's integration, though you could argue it's still early.

That aside, what could the FAST acquisition mean to SharePoint customers? Here are a few of my thoughts:

• The FAST acquisition was officially completed today. This is a good thing, since Microsoft can now get down to the business of integrating the company's technology with the rest of Microsoft's products. However, it's not clear what, if any, impact this acquisition will have in the very short term. Judging by the Groove acquisition, which preceded the SharePoint 2007 release by some months, an acquisition after the release will not yield any updates in the core product until SharePoint vNext (probably around 2010 or so) and beyond. However, I'd be willing to bet that some elements of the demo given at the SharePoint conference make their way to sites like Codeplex or as free downloads on Microsoft's site.
• The former CEO of FAST will assume the role of VP of Enterprise Search. His responsibility will include all search products: SharePoint search, Search Server Express and FAST ESP. So I guess the "Enterprise Search" moniker might need to be removed or rewritten on the SharePoint search page; FAST is, by far, the new "enterprise" search product at Microsoft. What's interesting here is that Microsoft has historically brought Office-related technologies under one roof; just look at what happened to SharePoint specifically -- that product was once its own product group. As they integrate FAST, it would appear that this announcement suggests Microsoft might break out search into its own dedicated team and make SharePoint a "customer." This opens up the possibility of decoupling SharePoint from any particular search technology -- perhaps a pipe dream, but we can always hope.
• In a blog entry on the Enterprise Search blog, Microsoft stated that the FAST offering will continue its Linux and Unix support. The blog entry was quick to reinforce the message that Microsoft does not want to support or wish to invest in Linux or Unix solutions. While they would like to "delight a core part of FAST's customer base," they are openly hoping those customers will convert to Windows and .NET. This does call into question whether this Linux/Unix support will be long for the world. In the short term, however, Microsoft can boast a better product from which to launch a play to be a real contender in the enterprise search space; see our related blog entries and article on FAST here. In the long term, Microsoft will have to come to grips with the fact that enterprises will continue to leverage non-Windows technology and if Microsoft wants to benefit from that revenue, they should consider continuing FAST's support for those technologies (their recent earnings announcement, and the subdued guidance for the year, may reinforce that message).
• Microsoft won't support SharePoint on Linux . This is probably not a surprise to anyone who is even vaguely familiar with Microsoft. However, the fact that FAST (currently) is supported on Linux may introduce greater content aggregation and, certainly, search capabilities within SharePoint. Let's hope that Microsoft sees it that way.

In general, the FAST acquisition, for SharePoint, will likely have little impact short term. Over the longer term, it's clear that the Office 14 version of SharePoint will be substantially improved in the search area (depending on the SharePoint product team's willingness to implement the new technology). I would personally like to see some add-ons in the near term, since that would improve search within organizations that may have both tools.

Stay tuned for more on this topic as the integration progresses.

Source:

http://www.cmswatch.com/Trends/1219-Thoughts-on-SharePoint-and-Fast-Search

Open Source CMS’s Make the List

With the competition so high for this award, it came as a big surprise to see that the only two self-hosted open source CMS applications to make the list were WordPress and Drupal.

Drupal, is an open source CMS that has become widely used by the music industry. It is similar in operation to others such as Joomla and Mambo. It is designed for more in depth and larger sites with potentially large amounts of users accessing and updating it.

WordPress is of course the premier open source blogging CMS. It is by far the most used blogging platform out there with more plugins developed daily than any other CMS out there.

Over 1.9 million votes were cast for the 300 finalists this year. These finalists were selected (by Webware editors) from a pool of over 5000 qualifying nominees. But the 100 winners were selected by popular vote. These winning 100 products represent the best of the Web, according the people who use it.

Based on these numbers, we here at CMSWire are proud to congratulate both these two on overcoming massive competition in one of the most highly competitive web app fields out there. When competing against other well established platforms such as Joomla, phpNuke, Pligg and Moveable Type, it is a high honor to be the only two to make the list.

Source: cmswire.com

Learn To Joomla at JoomlaForBeginners.com!

This is the home of free Joomla! Video Tutorials.

That's Right! As in "Completely Free", "Gratis", "No Obligation", "No Registration", FREE Joomla! Video Tutorials.

We LOVE Joomla! and want to share it with everyone! We feature video tutorials for both major versions of Joomla!, 1.0.x and 1.5.x

Our Joomla! Video Tutorials are High Quality, Crsytal Clear and recorded in Real font sizes that are easy to read... They are narrated by a Joomla! professional so you can also Hear the instructor. We offer more COMPLETELY FREE Joomla! Video Training Tutorials than anyone.

WATCH our free Joomla! Video Tutorials as often as you like. It's like having Joomla! Training Videos On-Demand; there's no waiting.

SHARE our free Joomla! Video Tutorials with your friends. Add our free videos to your Blog or Website. We provide the script; it's as easy as copy and paste.

DOWNLOAD our free Joomla! Video Tutorials to your hard drive or portable media device and watch them any time you wish, even without an internet connection.

Enjoy our new "Joomla! Recipes" feature, where we take an exsisting Website and reveal it's recipe and how to build it.

Just for fun we also offer other items like the free and exclusive JoomlaForBeginners.com Windows screensaver with Joomla! RSS News updated around the clock, and the free and exclusive JoomlaForBeginners.com Sony-Ericcson w580i mobile telephone/walkman theme.

What can we say? We love Joomla!

Google Internet Share March 2008

Google Inc. (GOOG) received 67% of all U.S. Internet searches during the four weeks ended March 29, according to information service Hitwise.

Google received 64% of all U.S. Internet searches in the same period a year earlier.

Yahoo Inc.'s (YHOO) search engine received 20% of U.S. Web searches in the more recent period, while Microsoft Corp.'s (MSFT) MSN Search drew 7% and Ask.com 4%.

The remaining 46 search engines in Hitwise's search engine analysis tool accounted for about 2% of searches in the U.S.

Source : CNN Money

Web design India: IT on a new high

In business world, growing competition and brisk changes have made the outsourcing one of the most popular and growing area. Offshore outsourcing in web development, web designing and SEO services is now multi billion industry. Most of the European companies are outsourcing functions from logistics to Human resources to Information technology to Payroll processingto India.


This outsourcing boom has transformed India from a developing country to an emerging economy and a superpower in the making. Dipstick survey shows that India is the first choice as a destination for outsourcing services based on techno-environment, hard working and skilled manpower, effectively managing and mitigating risks involved and helping maintain profound relationships with the customers.

India enjoys a boon in offshore outsourcing services. Indias government manifested its support to IT education by heavily positioning its investments on infrastructure improvements related to telecommunications. Also, generous tax incentive - schemes never fail to attract more companies to outsource its services to India.


Demand of web designing service in India is continuously picking up. The reason for that is, India is a rich source of programmers coupled with academic excellence. India has an extensive pool of programming talent, at high levels of expertise, who are English proficient, and work virtually around the clock. At a fraction of the cost paid to programmers in the US, UK and Japan, India can provide a host of programming experts. Furthermore, web designing companies in India not only consider graphic design and logo design but also give great importance to the content and SEO services. Because a relevant quality content with continuous latest useful information with its visual effect at first look is always important for any business. So that potential customers who once visit your site love to visit it next time for more information, this flow will serve your business purpose - changing visitors to customers, who take interest in your services and products.


The other thing is that web designing company India also boast of their dedicated, genuine, experienced professionals who are adept in adopting latest technologies. And they organize quality and productivity solutions from the initial step of web development which makes them to deliver results faster at reduced time.


Thus, by seeing the present edge dynamic softwares and cutting edge technologies, obviously India is the best site for Offshore Outsourcing Company Website Development because of its easily available rich resources from every perspective. To end with it can be said that India is the most preferred destination for web design and other IT work because of its ability to offer quality services at competitive cost.

Source: Fibre2fashion

Different Between HTML 4 and HTML 5?

It's not as a big of change as it may seem. Keep in mind that "backwards compatibility" is of the utmost concern when releasing a new level of HTML/XHTML. For those of you who may be interested in the forthcoming changes, the W3 have a working draft of a document that details the differences between HTML 4 and HTML 5.

• HTML 5 differences from HTML 4
  http://www.w3.org/TR/html5-diff/

We will be paying very close attention to the progress of HTML 5. We'll be running a series of articles in layman's terms to help you understand the benefits of semantic document structure and using proper markup. We suggest that you take an hour or two each week and review the HTML 5 Working Draft and prepare yourselves for the future.

SEO Benefits

Online ad agencies struggle with this issue everyday. How do you generate the same profit from organic search engine optimization when it requires a lot more effort, expertise, and expense to produce high rankings and organic traffic? How do you sell the possible disruption on a web site to clients, in order to make it rank well? It's a lot easier to throw up a brochure site with a few catch phrases and graphics and bid on some AdWords advertising.

Part of the problem can be solved by valuating search engine optimization services more highly. SEO is grossly underpriced. In my situation, clients are paying 4 times as much for PPC clickthroughs as for organic clickthroughs. Studies show that people click on organic listings in the results pages, even though the space given to text ads is almost pushing them off the screen. Text ads still aren't precisely targeted either. Why should they be? If they're poorly targeted, it creates more clicks and more revenue for the search engines.

Organic rankings don't suffer that problem. If the person isn't interested, you're not out much.

Another solution is to create new web sites to cover specific facets of a product or service. This ensures funds will be invested in SEO, thus creating an opportunity for SEO to generate sales leads and revenue. Many companies stick to one web site when they should have 4 or 5. A single site is under tremendous pressure to perform. Putting all your eggs in one basket is not good risk management strategy since competitors will find it easier to beat your one site, and Google could alter its algorithm overnight resulting in a loss of half of your traffic. Not a likely scenario, but it does happen.

Source: seoconsultants.com/articles

Five Simple Ways To Keep Your Reader’s Attention

In today’s world of evolving blogs and on-line newsletters, readers are swamped with so much information that they become more sensitive to the quality of articles that they are reading. I highly recommend that you follow these five steps to keeping your reader’s attention while at your site, blog, or article:

1. Be Clear. It is always refreshing to use clear language and understandable terms that keep the reader “in the know”.

2. Be Brief. I know it is great to write articles like “100 Ways To” but these articles can tire the reader. Brevity is a real blessing sometimes.

3. Humor is always nice. As much as you might be saying something serious, still, an appropriate use of humor is always refreshing.

4. Be Honest. When the reader can see into your sincerity and candor, that is a real great trick to keeping the reader at your article.

5. Be Unique. This is why websites and articles really make it - uniqueness. This one I will let you interpret for yourself. This is a surefire method to get readers to return to your articles, website, and/or blog with frequency.

Add social bookmarking to wordpress

In this tutorial I am going to show you how to create a quick and simple social bookmarking option to your blog similar to what you see on this site. This is for wordpress themes only although with a bit of tweaking it may be able to work on other blogs.

This will be the final outcome:

1. First, download these images, these are the icons for the image you see above and put them in the images folder of the theme file: socialbookmarkingicons.zip
2. Now open up style.css in your theme and add this code:
   

   .socialbookmarking {
   margin-right:5px;
   text-align:center;
   clear:left;
   float:right;
   font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
   font-size:8pt;
   color:#333333;
   border-left:1px #FFFFFF solid;
   border-right:1px #FFFFFF solid;
   }

   .socialbookmarking_digg a {
   width:27px;
   height:28px;
   float:left;
   display:block;
   background-image:url(images/socialbookmarkingicons/digg.png);
   }

   .socialbookmarking_digg a:hover {
   background-image:url(images/socialbookmarkingicons/digg1.png);
   }

   .socialbookmarking_delicious a {
   width:26px;
   height:28px;
   float:left;
   display:block;
   background-image:url(images/socialbookmarkingicons/delicious.png);
   }

   .socialbookmarking_delicious a:hover {
   background-image:url(images/socialbookmarkingicons/delicious1.png);
   }

   .socialbookmarking_reddit a {
   width:30px;
   height:28px;
   float:left;
   display:block;
   background-image:url(images/socialbookmarkingicons/reddit.png);
   }

   .socialbookmarking_reddit a:hover {
   background-image:url(images/socialbookmarkingicons/reddit1.png);
   }

   .socialbookmarking_furl a {
   width:28px;
   height:28px;
   float:left;
   display:block;
   background-image:url(images/socialbookmarkingicons/furl.png);
   }

   .socialbookmarking_furl a:hover {
   background-image:url(images/socialbookmarkingicons/furl1.png);
   }

   .socialbookmarking_google a {
   width:29px;
   height:28px;
   float:left;
   display:block;
   background-image:url(images/socialbookmarkingicons/google.png);
   }

   .socialbookmarking_google a:hover {
   background-image:url(images/socialbookmarkingicons/google1.png);
   }

   .socialbookmarking_stumbleupon a {
   width:26px;
   height:28px;
   float:left;
   display:block;
   background-image:url(images/socialbookmarkingicons/stumbleupon.png);
   }

   .socialbookmarking_stumbleupon a:hover {
   background-image:url(images/socialbookmarkingicons/stumbleupon1.png);
   }

   .socialbookmarking_live a {
   width:29px;
   height:28px;
   float:left;
   display:block;
   background-image:url(images/socialbookmarkingicons/live.png);
   }

   .socialbookmarking_live a:hover {
   background-image:url(images/socialbookmarkingicons/live1.png);
   }

   .socialbookmarking_technorati a {
   width:25px;
   height:28px;
   float:left;
   display:block;
   background-image:url(images/socialbookmarkingicons/technorati.png);
   }

   .socialbookmarking_technorati a:hover {
   background-image:url(images/socialbookmarkingicons/technorati1.png);
   }

   .socialbookmarking_yahoo a {
   width:25px;
   height:28px;
   float:left;
   display:block;
   background-image:url(images/socialbookmarkingicons/yahoo.png);
   }

   .socialbookmarking_yahoo a:hover {
   background-image:url(images/socialbookmarkingicons/yahoo1.png);
   }

3. Now add the following to the single.php page underneath the content of the post (normally something like
   

   
   &title=”>
   

   
   &title=”>
   

   
   &title=”>
   

   
   &t=”>
   

   
   &title=”>
   

   
   &title=”>
   

   
   &title=”>
   

   
   ”>
   

   
   &t=”>
   

And that’s it, you should now have an area of social bookmarking icons that is similar to the ones you see here on Help Developer.

source: http://softwaredevelopmentindia.wordpress.com

Meta Keywords Advice

Do not use the meta keywords tag. Many people still think of this as a quick fix for SEO. It's not. Google no longer uses it. Yahoo is perhaps the only search engine that still uses the meta keywords tag but places very little weight on it. By placing this tag on a web page, the primary beneficiary is your competition. How so? The meta keywords tag gives your competitors a nicely formatted list of your important keywords. Don't believe me? Try the free keyword research tool at the end of this article.

Most people agree that this tag is useless (read Danny Sullivan's 2002 Death of a Meta Tag article). I'll take it a step further and argue that it's hazardous. I know many people won't agree with me, but here's my argument:

Search engines used to rely heavily on the meta keywords tag to guess which keywords were relevant on a web page. Now search engines are sophisticated enough to examine the actual keywords in the body of a web page. Major search engines place little, if any, value in the meta keywords tag. There is more risk than reward in using the meta keywords tag because your competitors can view the meta keywords tag and can steal your keywords.

What do I mean by "steal" your keywords? By placing the meta keywords tag on a page, you are, in effect, giving your competitors a list of your important keywords. They can then use these keywords and buy PPC ads or optimize their own site for your important keywords. Why give them this sort of business intelligence? Having invested time and money on exhaustive keyword research to identify the important keyword phrases to use for your own SEO and PPC efforts, why on earth would you make a list of your high value keywords public?

Perhaps a concrete example will help illustrate the point. I was playing with the keyword tool, entering domains of other search engine marketing firms to see if they were using the meta keywords tag, and, if so, what keywords they included. Plugging one site into the tool, I noticed the keyword phrase "targeted traffic" in the meta keywords tag. Looking at the site's home page and even viewing the source, that phrase is only in the meta keywords. Nowhere else. This is what people do - they just stick their important keywords into the tags. You don't have to study the title tag, study the meta description tag, see what alt text is "behind" the images, examine the content of the page, look at the links, etc. In other words, you don't have to take the time to think like a search engine or reverse engineer a competing site. Your competitors give you all of their important keywords in their meta keywords tag. I've never thought of "targeted traffic" as a keyword to optimize for or to buy with PPC ads. Perhaps I'll run some PPC ads and see if it's a valuable phrase for SEO. Point is, I'd never have thought of it if it wasn't in a competitor's meta keywords tag.

Here is our meta keywords advice: do not use the meta keywords tag. Instead, make sure the title of your web page has your important keywords and that those keywords are repeated in the body of your web page. If you want to, create a meta description tag. The search engines do use that meta tag, but it's not essential for SEO.

Creating good content is essential. Each page should have useful content and include your important keywords. Don't try to stuff all of your important keywords onto a single page. Create pages around a theme, a small collection of keyword phrases. For instance, target 1-3 keyword phrases per page. Write a title that incorporates those keyword phrases. If the title seems awkward from the point of view of your audience (site visitors not the search engines), scale back the number of phrases and try again. If you choose to write a meta description tag, it should reinforce the keywords already in the title tag. The body of the page should then include those important keyword phrases. Again, though, the content of the page should be written for your site visitors and not seem awkward.

Since many web sites do still use the meta keywords tag, we have developed a free keyword research tool that will analyze the meta keywords of your competition. Use the tool to see what keywords your competitors are embedding in their meta keywords tags and then research these keywords using other freely available tools. When I begin work for a new client, I ask them for a list of their competitors' web sites. I plug those into the tool and it gives me an instant list of keywords. That's only the beginning, a starting point for further keyword research. These companies have spent hours upon hours performing keyword research. I can take 30 seconds, scrape their meta keywords tags and have solid keyword ideas for PPC ads to create or SEO work to perform for a client. That, coupled with the fact that Google doesn't use the meta keywords tag, convinces me that it's downright silly to use them.

As time goes on, I expect online businesses to become a bit more savvy regarding meta tags and this tool will no longer provide a quick start. In the meantime, use the free keyword tool and crush your competition!

Source: searchengineguide

9 things a web designer can’t do without

As a web designer there are certain things that any web designer would need to succeed in developing his or her skills. Below is a list of 10 key things I personally feel a web designer needs. If you know any more then please leave them as comments.

So here goes:

1. Well obviously a graphics design application. Personally I favour Gimp because its fast, reliable, updated regularly, free and easy to use and doesn’t compromise on features when it comes to web design. The worthy alternative to this is the slow, expensive Photoshop (oh did I say worthy, I meant unworthy, yeah I don’t like it, although a lot of other designers do.)
2. Inspiration, no web designer can produce good sites without getting ideas from other peoples sites (that doesn’t mean copy people sites, just get some ideas). There are plenty of sites that you can get inspiration from, personally I use templatemonster.com, csspick.com, cssdrive.com, cssmania.com, wpthemesfree.com and other general browsing, if I see a site design that I like, I bookmark it and come back to it later. Inspiration from other peoples work is how you can improve your skills over time as you start to wonder how they did something on there site and eventually find the answer.
3. Coding knowledge is something that quite a few designers dont take up, however learning how to code can seriously increase the amount of money you can make, people who want sites designed are more likely to go for someone who can do everything for them, not get a design and then have to find someone else to code it.
4. Templates. As you produce sites you will start to become more efficient, you will realise that the site you are creating has a similar structure to a site you have designed before, therefore it is good practise to get that template you did previously and edit it rather than start the new site from scratch. Personally I have created over 100 templates over the past year (website and wordpress), and I am in a position to code websites a lot faster because the template is already made.
5. The Web Developer Toolbar. (download here) A must have tool is the web developer toolbar, it works with Firefox and gives you all the information you could ever need when coding websites and is also handy for seeing how other people have coded their websites. This makes it a lot easier to code and is definitely an important tool to have. Unfortunately, it isn’t available for IE which is what you would use it for, all of those IE problems.
6. Validate as you go along, the worst part for most web coders is that they will create a great looking site that works perfect in Firefox, heck it may even look nice in IE (very unlikely, but one can only hope). Then comes the dreaded part, validating it to W3c standards. This can take up a lot of your time, so make sure you are validating as you go along, this will cut off that annoying period at the end of development when you can’t see what is wrong with a line of code that seems to be correct but W3c says otherwise.
7. XAMMP, If you are creating PHP/MySQL driven sites or designing skins for online tools like Wordpress then installing xammp is a must. It will enable you to create your site or template offline which speeds up development by a massive amount because you don’t need to keep uploading each revision of each file to the internet, it also keeps that project your working on secure during development.
8. Tutorials. Everybody learns how to design or code through tutorials, its just the way that it is done, when you ask a question on a forum and you get an answer, in essence you are reading and using a tutorial. There are thousands of tutorials out there, take a look around this blog and you will find some.
9. And finally enjoy what you do, if you don’t enjoy what you are doing then you are wasting your time. Don’t become a web designer because you heard it pays well because it doesn’t, it is overcrowded with kids trying to make a quick buck by undercutting the proper designers, it gets very frustrating. Life is about enjoyment, if you don’t enjoy something then it will show in the quality of the outcome.

PHP Cookies

A cookie is used to store data on a users computer. Creating and retrieving cookies and their values is an easy process in PHP and in this short guide I am going to show you how to use cookies.



Creating a cookie

The Code

setcookie(”cookieName”, “cookieValue”, cookieExpirationTime);

an example:

setcookie(”visitor”, “seenPage”, time()+3600);

this creates a cookie called visitor with the value seenPage and it will expire in 3600 seconds (or an hour)



Finding a cookies value

The Code

echo $_COOKIE[”cookieName”];

an example:

echo $_COOKIE[”visitor”];

this will show to screen the value that is stored in the cookie with the name visitor, so the result would be “seenPage” if we use the previous example



Deleting a cookie

The Code

setcookie(”cookieName”, “”, timeExpirationTime);

an example:

setcookie(”visitor”, “”, time()-3600);

you can see that the time()-3600 is similar to when you create a cookie, this is because if you replace the + with a - then it cancels out the cookie.

So there you have it a very simple quick guide to PHP cookies, I hope this helped

Microsoft releases 14,000 pages of Office suite protocols

Microsoft has taken a serious step towards fulfilling its interoperability and openness promises for developers, partners, customers and competitors, by releasing significant protocol data. .

The organisation posted more than 14,000 pages on MSDN covering preliminary versions of technical documentation for its protocols built into Microsoft Office 2007, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Microsoft Exchange Server 2007.

Tom Robertson, general manager of Interoperability and Standards at Microsoft, points out that this brings the total to more than 44,000 pages of protocol documentation now released and freely available – even to ISVs (independent software vendors), open source developers and developers in user IT departments.

Says Robertson: “We believe that providing open, consistent access to these protocols will further unleash the creativity of all developers to work on real-world interoperability solutions. The implementation of Microsoft’s interoperability principles is an important component of our overall efforts to promote interoperability in the marketplace.”

He gives the example of developers working with SharePoint protocols, who now have resources to develop products that work with Office client applications and SharePoint Server products.

source: mcsolutions.co.uk

Secret images of Google Earth

Microsoft upgrades robotics development tools

Microsoft’s efforts in developing tools for robotics took another step forward recently when the company released a preview of the next version of its programming platform.

Robotics Developer Studio 2008 builds on the original release, Robotics Studio 2006, according to Microsoft robotics group general manager Tandy Trower, and is due for release later this year. The company made a community technology preview of Robotics Developer Studio available for download on April 9. The name change lines up with existing product lines and better reflects its role as a development tool, the announcement noted.

The updated developer tools now allow the use of distributed LINQ queries to reduce network utilization and simplify service authoring. Runtime performance has also seen a boost, according to Trower, with the company estimating interservice throughput gains of 150% to 300%, between nodes as well as within a node. According to the company, services now load twice as fast as they had before.

The tools themselves have seen other work as well. The Visual Programming Language tool now allows users to visually define computational domains for managing distributed program execution. Meanwhile, the simulation environment tool now can record and play back simulations, and its floorplan editor simplifies the definition of complex interiors and building structures.

Since the launch of Robotics Studio 2006, more than 200,000 copies of the software have been downloaded, according to Microsoft. The software is free for noncommercial applications and must be licensed for commercial use.

The company also announced a virtual robotics competition, called RoboChamps, which was expected to launch April 21; details are available at www.robochamps.com.

Check Out the Latest Version of Google Earth

Today we're introducing a new version of the Google Earth desktop client. The new release, Google Earth version 4.3, greatly advances our vision of offering a realistic, 3D model of the world in Google Earth by giving users a higher quality, more immersive experience. Google Earth 4.3 also adds more realistic, real-world data so users have more ways to discover and explore all the interesting features the world has to offer.

Here are the highlights:

• New navigation -- We've created a new navigational experience so users can better take advantage of the 3D environment in Google Earth. The navigation takes the traditional pan-and-zoom approach associated with mapping programs and incorporates a first-person, ground-level perspective commonly used in video games.

• More, faster 3D buildings -- Version 4.3 also includes dozens of photo-textured cities and towns, as well as thousands of user-contributed buildings around the world. We've significantly enhanced our approach to rendering 3D data to greatly improve performance and realism of 3D data.

• Street View -- The well-known Google Maps feature gets added to Google Earth with version 4.3. Street View is a popular, engaging feature that allows people to easily find, discover, and plan activities relevant to a location.

• Sunlight feature -- This new addition is a playful way to control the sun's location relative to the Earth. When zoomed out to a view of the Earth, you can control a time-lapse view of sunlight moving across the Earth. While zoomed into a given city, you can watch the sunrise and sunset.

• Image acquisition date -- One of our most requested features, 4.3 now includes an image acquisition date, which shows you on what date a given area of imagery was taken.

• New languages -- Version 4.3 includes twelve new languages, including Danish, English (UK), Spanish (Latin American), Finnish, Hebrew, Indonesian, Norwegian, Portuguese (PT), Romanian, Swedish, Thai, and Turkish.

Keep an eye on the Google LatLong (http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/) blog for more details on Google Earth version 4.3 over the course of the week.

A whole new world to explore

On the Google Earth team, we're big fans of Earth Day, so much so that we couldn't hold out until it arrives next week to release our latest labor of love: Google Earth 4.3. With this version, we have completely rethought how you might interact with the 3D world. We've redesigned the navigation to make it much easier to fly from the heavens down to the streets of your town. And with all of the great user-created buildings in the 3D Warehouse, we wanted to make it easy for you to get right up close to see the rich detail.



Here's a sample of what you'll find in this release:

• New navigation - We've improved the zoom control so you can swoop down from outer space to street level in a single seamless motion. And with the addition of the "look" joystick, you can look up at buildings or across a mountain range.

• More, faster 3D buildings - It's more fun to navigate through a lot of new 3D content. Besides adding thousands of buildings contributed by people around the world, we've added dozens of photo-textured cities and towns in the U.S. and elsewhere.

• Street View - The popular Google Maps feature makes its Google Earth debut.

• Sunlight feature - Never seen the sunrise over the Alps? Now you can.

• New languages - There are 12 new languages, including Danish, English (UK), Spanish (Latin American), Finnish, Hebrew, Indonesian, Norwegian, Portuguese (PT), Romanian, Swedish, Thai, and Turkish.

Check out the Lat Long blog for all the details, or head over to our website at earth.google.com. And stay tuned for more details about Earth Day coming soon.