Archive for April, 2008
Google today announced that additional proxy materials are available for its stockholders in connection with the 2008 Annual Meeting of Stockholders to be held on Thursday, May 8, 2008.
The additional proxy materials are available at the following websites: www.sec.gov, http://investor.google.com/proxy.html, http://www.proxyvote.com/ (beneficial stockholders) and http://www.envisionreports.com/goog (registered stockholders).
April 29th, 2008
So long to the days of the corporate e-leash. No longer are employees stressed by their wireless devices and made to feel harnessed by too much connectivity. According to Yahoo! HotJobs’ (http://hotjobs.yahoo.com) annual virtual workplace survey, 37 percent of employees feel more relaxed than stressed when they are connected to work by a wireless device, and another 42 percent are altogether indifferent to their wireless device, feeling neither relaxed nor stressed by it.
Along with the widespread acceptance of wireless devices may come a lapse in proper etiquette. Of those surveyed, 18 percent admit to being reprimanded for having bad manners when it comes to their wireless device. This behavior extends in and out of work with another 39 percent saying that they respond almost instantaneously when they receive a professional email or call outside of business hours.
“The gravity of leaving the house without your wireless device has become synonymous with that of leaving your keys at home, if not worse,” explains Tom Musbach, managing editor of Yahoo! HotJobs. “As the wireless device becomes more ubiquitous for personal and professional reasons, many employees develop a psychological need for constant connection. While this connection can be a positive from a professional standpoint, it’s important to remember that the use of wireless devices needs to be managed and certain missteps avoided.”
Boardroom Security Blanket
With 38 percent of respondents describing their wireless device as a necessity, these gadgets have become exponentially more integrated into workplace culture:
- The majority, 55 percent, of respondents use more than one wireless device to stay connected when outside of work;
- More than half, 55 percent, of respondents say that their office supports a virtual workplace culture – allowing employees to choose from where they’d like to work;
- Almost one in three, 28 percent, of respondents say that having the freedom of remote access via a wireless device helps them work more effectively than when they are in the office; and
- Almost one quarter of survey respondents admit to only putting their wireless device down when they are sleeping, and only 5 percent of respondents admit to being 100 percent offline when not in the office—down from 8 percent last year.
Disconnect: Wireless Faux Pas
As wireless devices become further cemented into corporate culture, a spectrum of acceptable and unacceptable behavior has emerged:
Inappropriate wireless device etiquette (in order of least to most reprehensible):
- Answering a work call or email during personal time after work hours
- Talking on the phone while in close quarters (e.g. train, plane, bus)
- Talking on the phone while in the bathroom
- Answering the phone or emails while at a business dinner
- Accepting a personal call while in a meeting or presentation
Keep Your Device in Check
Moderation is key. Here are a few tips from Yahoo! HotJobs’ Tom Musbach for keeping your wireless device habits within bounds:
- Keep your device on vibrate to avoid interrupting others near your workspace.
- Take personal and any other conversations that might make your coworkers uncomfortable into a conference room or other closed off area to avoid being overheard. Only answer absolutely necessary calls when in close quarters.
- Don’t interrupt business meetings or dinners with calls or emails unless it is an emergency.
- Use text messaging and emailing when possible—it’s less intrusive.
- Let the person you are communicating with know that you are on a wireless device and that the conversation must be kept brief.
- Some buildings don’t allow wireless device use. Adhere to the signs and be respectful of the surrounding environment.
For more advice on making your wireless workplace work for you and other tools for managing your career, visit Yahoo! HotJobs at http://hotjobs.yahoo.com.
April 27th, 2008
Today, Google opened a sandbox for developers to help them build richer gadgets for iGoogle, which will offer users more powerful and interactive features.
To ensure developers get the most out of their gadgets, we’ve also launched an updated developer website which guides developers through building and distributing gadgets to iGoogle’s growing audience.
iGoogle’s new features will include left navigation, a maximized or “canvas view” option for gadgets, and social features for gadgets using the OpenSocial APIs. These social features for gadgets will include a friends list and activities displayed through a special updates gadget. The features and functionalities as they appear in the sandbox are meant for development purposes only, and may not reflect the end consumer experience.
Developers are an important part of Google’s innovation ecosystem and we’re always striving to provide tools to help them innovate in new directions that will ultimately make the web richer for all users. By building more powerful and interactive gadgets for iGoogle, developers will have an opportunity to share their gadgets with the tens of millions of iGoogle users.
To see the video for developers on the iGoogle sandbox, please see:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6KVwATfCdM
April 22nd, 2008
Google today announced financial results for the quarter ended March 31, 2008.
“Our ongoing innovation in search, ads, and apps helped drive healthy growth globally across our product lines, yielding another strong quarter for Google,” said Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google. “As we integrate DoubleClick into our advertising platform, we see exciting new ways to improve the user experience and increase value for our advertisers and partners. Also, while exercising operational discipline, we continue to explore opportunities that add value to users everywhere and to Google in the long term.”
Q1 Financial Summary
Google’s results for the quarter ended March 31, 2008, include the operations of DoubleClick Inc. from the date of acquisition, March 11, 2008, through the end of the quarter, and are compared to pre-acquisition results of prior periods. The overall impact of DoubleClick in the first quarter of 2008 was immaterial to revenue and only slightly dilutive to both GAAP and non-GAAP operating income, net income and earnings per share.
Google reported revenues of $5.19 billion for the quarter ended March 31, 2008, an increase of 42% compared to the first quarter of 2007 and an increase of 7% compared to the fourth quarter of 2007. Google reports its revenues, consistent with GAAP, on a gross basis without deducting traffic acquisition costs, or TAC. In the first quarter of 2008, TAC totaled $1.49 billion, or 29% of advertising revenues.
Google reports operating income, net income, and earnings per share (EPS) on a GAAP and non-GAAP basis. The non-GAAP measures, as well as free cash flow, an alternative non-GAAP measure of liquidity, are described below and are reconciled to the corresponding GAAP measures in the accompanying financial tables.
- GAAP operating income for the first quarter of 2008 was $1.55 billion, or 30% of revenues. This compares to GAAP operating income of $1.44 billion, or 30% of revenues, in the fourth quarter of 2007. Non-GAAP operating income in the first quarter of 2008 was $1.83 billion, or 35% of revenues. This compares to non-GAAP operating income of $1.69 billion, or 35% of revenues, in the fourth quarter of 2007.
- GAAP net income for the first quarter of 2008 was $1.31 billion as compared to $1.21 billion in the fourth quarter of 2007. Non-GAAP net income in the first quarter of 2008 was $1.54 billion, compared to $1.41 billion in the fourth quarter of 2007.
- GAAP EPS for the first quarter of 2008 was $4.12 on 317 million diluted shares outstanding, compared to $3.79 for the fourth quarter of 2007 on 318 million diluted shares outstanding. Non-GAAP EPS in the first quarter of 2008 was $4.84, compared to $4.43 in the fourth quarter of 2007.
- Non-GAAP operating income, non-GAAP operating margin, non-GAAP net income, and non-GAAP EPS are computed net of stock-based compensation (SBC). In the first quarter of 2008, the charge related to SBC was $281 million as compared to $245 million in the fourth quarter of 2007. Tax benefits related to SBC have also been excluded from these non-GAAP measures. The tax benefit related to SBC was $51 million in the first quarter of 2008 and $42 million in the fourth quarter of 2007. Reconciliations of non-GAAP measures to GAAP operating income, operating margin, net income, and EPS are included at the end of this release.
April 18th, 2008
Salesforce.com and Google today expanded their global strategic alliance to make it easy for companies of all sizes to run their business in the cloud with Salesforce for Google Apps. The combination of the Google Apps™ suite of productivity applications and the Salesforce suite of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications enables businesses to effectively communicate and collaborate without any hardware or software to download, install or maintain. Salesforce for Google Apps also leverages the Force.com Platform and Google’s open APIs, opening up even more development opportunities for developers and partners.
“Google and salesforce.com have always had similar models and philosophies about delivering innovations made possible by the Internet,” said Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google. “Salesforce.com was a pioneer in Software-as-a-Service and a year ago we joined them in this mission to bring the benefits of cloud computing to businesses of all types. Together, we are making more applications and services available online so customers can focus on building their core business rather than the applications that support it.”
“Salesforce.com is thrilled to be offering Google Apps integrated with our Salesforce applications and Force.com Platform-as-a-Service to the millions of businesses looking to manage their entire office in the cloud,” said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of salesforce.com. “The combination of our leading CRM applications and Google’s business productivity applications pushes forward the transformation of the industry to cloud computing. The end of software is here.”
“Since the launch of Google Apps a year ago, we have been following a trail blazed by salesforce.com and delivering cloud computing to business of all sizes,” said Dave Girouard, Google vice president and general manager of Enterprise. “In addition to providing services to hundreds of thousands of customers, we have witnessed firsthand the benefits of the cloud: salesforce.com was one of the first Google Apps customers, and Salesforce has been an invaluable tool in growing Google’s business.”
Salesforce.com and Google – Cloud Computing for the Enterprise
Both salesforce.com and Google have altered the software landscape by delivering SaaS applications, for CRM and productivity respectively, over the Internet. Today, this shift in the technology industry is being referred to as cloud computing, and salesforce.com and Google are well poised to deliver it to the enterprise. In June 2007, salesforce.com and Google launched Salesforce Group Edition featuring Google AdWords™, which has become a valuable tool for thousands of businesses by encapsulating every element of the customer life-cycle - advertising, lead generation, sales, and customer support - in one solution. In today’s announcement, salesforce.com and Google are expanding their strategic alliance and delivering a second joint product to enable companies of all sizes to achieve success in cloud computing – Salesforce for Google Apps.
Salesforce for Google Apps
Salesforce for Google Apps is a simple, yet powerful combination of essential applications for business productivity (email, calendaring, documents, spreadsheets, presentations, instant messaging) and CRM (sales, marketing, service and support, partners) that enables an entirely new way for business professionals to communicate, collaborate, and work together in real time over the Web. Salesforce for Google Apps offers a complete way for businesses to harness the power of cloud computing without the cost and complexity of managing hardware or software infrastructure. Salesforce for Google Apps includes:
- Salesforce and Gmail™ – Businesses can now easily send, receive and store email communication, keeping a complete record of customer interactions for better sales execution and improved customer satisfaction.
- Salesforce and Google Docs™ – Create, manage, and share online Google Documents, Google Spreadsheets, and Google Presentations within your sales organization, marketing group, or support team for instant collaboration.
- Salesforce and Google Talk™ – Instantly communicate with colleagues or customers from Salesforce and optionally attach Google Talk conversations to customer or prospect records stored in Salesforce.
- Salesforce and Google Calendar™ – Expose sales tasks and marketing campaigns from Salesforce on Google Calendar. Built by Appirio, this application is one example of a new category of partner extensions to Salesforce for Google Apps.
“Salesforce.com and Google have changed the game again. This is, hands down, the best example of the consumerization of the enterprise. This is revolutionizing the way people work,” said Sheryl Kingstone of the Yankee Group.
“The combined offering from salesforce.com and Google brings together the best in enterprise CRM and productivity applications, all delivered over the Internet. Salesforce for Google Apps enables us to extend our company’s SaaS strategy even further,” said Doug Menefee, CIO of The Schumacher Group.
“While salesforce.com has always enabled us to work easily with client desktop productivity tools, we love that we now have the freedom to run our office in the cloud,” said Prasan Vyas of UST Global.
Force.com and Google Platform – Delivering Success to Partners and Developers
Salesforce.com and Google’s alliance has created the world’s largest cloud computing platform for building and running applications. The Force.com Platform-as-a-Service encompasses a complete feature set for the creation of business applications and Google’s open APIs enable integration and extension of the applications in Google Apps. The integration of the two creates many new opportunities for developers and partners to build and run business applications that help customers run their entire business smarter in the cloud. Today, applications like sales quote generation and business forecasting are now easy to build and test, and can be deployed by customers with just a few clicks via the AppExchange.
Appirio and Astadia are the first companies to take advantage of these new development opportunities made possible through the Google and salesforce.com partnership. Each company has developed several applications that enhance Salesforce for Google Apps, and all of these applications are available today in a newly created AppExchange category, Google Apps, at http://www.salesforce.com/appexchange.
Pricing and Availability
Salesforce for Google Apps is available today to all salesforce.com customers at no additional charge.
Salesforce.com also will be offering Salesforce for Google Apps Supported, a package that includes integrated telephone end user support, unified billing and provisioning, enhanced platform APIs, additional third party applications, and advanced Google Apps functionality, all for $10 per user, per month. This package is currently scheduled to be available in Summer 2008.
April 15th, 2008
Yahoo! today announced the release of Slurp 3.0 on the Yahoo! Search Blog:
Over the past few weeks, we’ve been preparing for the latest version of the Yahoo! Search crawler with some infrastructure updates, which recently caused a variance in our crawl behavior.
With everything now in place, the rollout has officially begun. The new Yahoo! Slurp 3.0 recognizes the same user-agent and all robots.txt directives for ‘Yahoo! Slurp,’ though it’ll identify itself as Slurp 3.0 in your web logs.
As the new software undergoes a phased rollout to our production crawlers over the next several weeks, you’ll see the following changes:
a) The crawlers will start crawling from a different and much smaller set of IP addresses, but it’ll still be from the crawl.yahoo.net domain. Any reverse DNS checks to identify our crawler will continue to work. Please note that if you’re using IP-based recognition of our crawlers, you might see a drop in crawl/coverage from Yahoo! We strongly recommend that you move to reverse DNS-based identification of Yahoo! Slurp if you’re using any other method to avoid this problem. The current set of IPs will disappear from your web logs in the next several weeks.
b) The crawlers will also publish a new user-agent, ‘Yahoo! Slurp/3.0.’ Existing robots.txt directives for ‘Slurp’ or ‘Yahoo! Slurp’ will continue to work, but if you have directives specific to ‘Slurp/2.0,’ they won’t be recognized by the new crawler (though usage of the ‘Slurp/2.0′ user-agent is very rare on the web, so you won’t likely be affected). We recommend specifying the shorter version of: User-agent: Slurp. Check out “How do I prevent my site or certain subdirectories from being crawled?” on our Help page for more details.
These changes will affect the main Yahoo! Web Search crawlers. Crawlers that similarly respect the Yahoo! Slurp directive but identify themselves more specifically, such as Yahoo! Slurp China and others, will not be impacted.
April 15th, 2008
Yahoo! and MLB Advanced Media, LP (MLBAM), the interactive media and Internet company of Major League Baseball, today announced a three-year video and advertising partnership that includes access to out-of-market MLB games on Yahoo! Sports. The agreement will make MLB.TV available on Yahoo! Sports, bringing Yahoo! users more than 2,400 out-of-market Major League Baseball games each year, live and on-demand, through the 2010 season. Additionally, Yahoo! will exclusively manage online advertising sales for MLB.TV in the 2009 and 2010 seasons.
This deal represents a continuation of Yahoo! Sports’ commitment to delivering the most compelling sports content on the web while significantly increasing the amount of high-quality video advertising inventory available to Yahoo! advertisers.
“This agreement exemplifies Yahoo! as the partner of choice to premier media organizations, as we’re providing MLB.com an opportunity to extend its reach to the largest possible audience, while at the same time maximizing monetization of its video subscription product,” said Todd Teresi, senior vice president of the Yahoo! Publisher Channel. “Partnering with MLB.com allows Yahoo! to offer our users an unmatched baseball experience, and also presents our advertisers with a new opportunity to reach a large, engaged audience of baseball enthusiasts.”
Yahoo! Sports will offer MLB.TV to fans in 11 countries, including the United States, Canada, Mexico, UK, Philippines and Germany. The games will be available through a co-branded player on Yahoo! Sports at http://sports.yahoo.com/mlb and MLB.com. During the first year of the deal, Yahoo! and MLBAM will jointly sell advertising for the video inventory, using Yahoo!’s advanced video ad format, Clickable, in addition to traditional pre-roll and post roll formats. For the remaining two years of the agreement, Yahoo! will be solely responsible for selling video advertising inventory for MLB.TV. All of this will be powered by Yahoo!’s industry-leading advertising management platform, AMP! from Yahoo!.
“Yahoo! has been a valuable partner with MLB.com in the past and this agreement represents an important evolution of our relationship with an industry-leading gateway to the Internet,” said Kenny Gersh, senior vice president, Business Development, MLBAM. “We are excited to leverage the popularity of watching live baseball games via MLB.TV with Yahoo!’s remarkable distribution portal and its well-established advertising sales capabilities.”
MLB.com launched its most significant MLB.TV upgrade to date on Opening Day of the 2008 season by offering MLB.TV Premium subscribers live out-of-market games in an enhanced video player with a television-quality picture through MLB.TV NexDef(TM) at either 800k or 1.2MB. An MLB.TV Premium subscription, available for $119.95 a year or $19.95 a month, also includes access to the Emmy Award winning MLB.TV Mosaic application, giving fans the opportunity to watch up to six live games simultaneously. MLB.com also offers its out-of-market subscription product at 400k for $89.95 a year or $14.95 a month.
“Yahoo! Sports has established itself as the leading online sports destination by partnering with organizations like MLB Advanced Media to offer the most compelling sports experience to our users,” said Jimmy Pitaro, general manger, Yahoo! Sports. “The addition of MLB.TV to Yahoo! Sports helps solidify our position as a true leader in online sports.”
The agreement also provides that Yahoo! Sports will distribute MLB.com’s FastCast, a quick highlights-based recap of the previous day’s games, and can utilize select other MLB.com video content within Yahoo! Sports’ original programming. MLB.com began offering live streaming video of games in August 2002 and launched the first full-season subscription video product in professional sports the following April. Since that time, more than one million fans have subscribed to MLB.TV.
April 13th, 2008
The accessibility of a web site relates to whether its content is compatible with all members of its potential audience. If, for example, people with impaired vision are unable to read the text on your pages then your website is inaccessible to them. An accessible website needs to anticipate the requirements of visitors and the different tools and settings they will be using when they browse your pages.
There are a number of features within Dreamweaver which help web developers ensure that their pages are accessible. The program can be set up so that it will automatically offer you a series of accessibility options whenever you add an image, media element or form field to a page. There is also a built-in utility which you can use to check whether your pages contain elements which are not accessible.
The main settings in Dreamweaver are located by choosing Edit - Preferences. On the left of the Preferences screen there are a series of categories. In the General category, you should ensure that the option to use CSS instead of HTML tags is activated. Also, in the Accessibility category, you should switch on all of the checkboxes for displaying a dialog of relevant accessibility attributes for form object, media (Flash, video etc.) and form elements.
So what is the result of switching on these various preferences? Well, firstly, Dreamweaver will use CSS tags whenever you format text or the background of the page. The CSS tags contain the formatting information and will be placed in the head area of the page away from the content which will be in the page body. The program will also display a dialog box with accessibility options each time you insert an image, form field or media element such as a Flash movie or video clip.
When you add an image to any page, you will see a dialog box which invites you to enter the alternate (alt) text. You should key in a brief description of the image. This alt text will be displayed in the browser if the image itself is not displayed, for example, when the user has deactivated the display of images. Screen readers will also speak your alt text whenever an image is encountered.
Dreamweaver will also prompt for the insertion of a link pointing to a long description of an image. This option should be used for complex images whose content cannot be adequately described in the brief alt text attribute. Examples of such images would be charts, diagrams, paintings or photos containing groups of people.
Just as the alt text describes the function of images, the label attribute describes the function of each form field. When the accessibility preferences are active, Dreamweaver will prompt you to enter a descriptive tag for each field. In addition, you can specify the tab order of each element. This is the order in which elements within the form can be accessed by users by simply pressing the Tab key.
Similarly, if you add a media element to a page, the accessibility dialog pops up and prompts you to enter up to three elements: a title, an access key and a tab index. The title should be a description of the media element and serves a similar function as the alt text which is used with images. The access key is an optional keyboard shortcut which can be used to make the media element active. The tab index is a number which indicates the position of the element in the tab order for that page. The tab order is the order in which elements are accessed when the user presses the Tab key.
As well as these useful prompts, Dreamweaver will also produce a report of any items on the page with possible issues relating to accessibility. To access this feature, first save the page then choose File - Check Page - Accessibility. Dreamweaver analyses the page then produces a list of items which might need attention. Double-clicking any item in the list activates Dreamweaver’s split screen view (showing both code and preview) with the relevant item highlighted in each pane.
The author is a trainer and developer with Macresource Computer Solutions, an independent computer training company offering Adobe Dreamweaver training courses in London and throughout the UK.
April 12th, 2008
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