This morning at the American Astronomical Society in Austin, Texas, Google Engineering Director Andrew Moore announced a new version of Sky in Google Earth. Sky now includes several new features that provide scientists, students and amateur stargazers with new tools to explore the millions of stars and galaxies visible in Sky, get up to date on current sky events, learn basic concepts of astronomy, see historical sky maps and much more:
Earth & Sky Podcasts: podcasts about stars, galaxies, planets and events coming up in the sky from the NPR program Earth and Sky
Current Sky Events: provides timely updates on recent cosmological events from VOEventNet
Featured Observatories: images from NASA observatory satellites including x-ray images from NASA’s Chandra satellite; infrared images by the Spitzer Space Telescope and the Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS); ultraviolet images by the GALEX Satellite; and a microwave map of the sky by the Wilkinson Microwave Anistropy Probe (WMAP)
Historical Sky Maps: a favorite in Google Earth, David Rumsey’s historical maps of the sky date back to 1792 and illustrate how conceptions of the sky have changed over time. Also available is a beautiful Constellations Art layer based on engravings by astronomer Johannes Hevelius from 1690 Grand tour of the sky: the best of Sky imagery in a tour that takes the user through 100 of our favorite spots in the Sky
Sky community: The best content published by the Sky community on the Sky discussion forums
To access Sky, users need only click “Switch to Sky” from the “view” drop-down menu in Google Earth, or click the Sky button on the Google Earth toolbar. The interface and navigation are similar to that of standard Google Earth steering, including dragging, zooming, search, “My Places,” and layer selection.
Also introduced today, the Sky API will enable developers to develop their own sky mashups using the extensive sky imagery. Already several partners have implemented the API: Night View from the folks at www.heywhatsthat.com and a version for the iPhone from Alasdair Allan
January 10th, 2008
Microsoft today announced that it will make an offer to acquire Fast Search & Transfer ASA, a leading provider of enterprise search solutions, through a cash tender offer for 19.00 Norwegian kroner (NOK) per share. This offer represents a 42 percent premium to the closing share price on Jan. 4, 2008 (the last trading day prior to this announcement), and values the fully diluted equity of FAST at 6.6 billion NOK (or approximately $1.2 billion U.S.). FAST’s board of directors has unanimously recommended that its shareholders accept the offer. In addition, shareholders representing in aggregate 37 percent of the outstanding shares, including FAST’s two largest institutional shareholders, Orkla ASA and Hermes Focus Asset Management Europe, have irrevocably undertaken to accept the offer. The transaction is expected to be completed in the second quarter of calendar year 2008.
“Enterprise search is becoming an indispensable tool to businesses of all sizes, helping people find, use and share critical business information quickly,” said Jeff Raikes, president of the Microsoft Business Division. “Until now organizations have been forced to choose between powerful, high-end search technologies or more mainstream, infrastructure solutions. The combination of Microsoft and FAST gives customers a new choice: a single vendor with solutions that span the full range of customer needs.”
The companies possess a number of complementary strengths that advance a shared vision for helping businesses deliver information worker productivity and improved business results. FAST has a deep talent pool and is respected throughout the technology industry for its expertise in best-in-class, high-end search solutions. Microsoft offers worldwide customer reach and an extensive partner network, and is the recognized leader in business productivity with the popular Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, which combines search with best-in-class collaboration, business intelligence, portal and content management capabilities.
“This acquisition gives FAST an exciting way to spread our cutting-edge search technologies and innovations to more and more organizations across the world,” said John Lervik, CEO of FAST. “By joining Microsoft, we can benefit from the momentum behind the SharePoint business productivity platform to really empower a broader set of users through Microsoft’s strong sales and marketing network. It validates FAST’s momentum and leadership in enterprise search.”
In addition to bolstering Microsoft’s enterprise search efforts, this acquisition increases Microsoft’s research and development presence in Europe, complementing existing research teams in Cambridge, England, and Copenhagen, Denmark, with new and significant capabilities in Norway.
The offer will be subject to customary terms and conditions, including receipt of acceptances representing more than 90 percent of FAST shares and voting power on a fully diluted basis, and receipt of all necessary regulatory approvals on terms acceptable to Microsoft. The complete details of the offer, including all terms and conditions, will be contained in the offer document, which is expected to be sent to FAST shareholders during the week of Jan. 14, 2008. The offer will not be made in any jurisdiction in which the making of the offer would not be in compliance with the laws of such jurisdiction.
January 9th, 2008
Yahoo! Co-Founder and CEO Jerry Yang kicked off the 2008 International CES Industry Insider Series today detailing the company’s vision for delivering the most personally-relevant and indispensable Internet experience to consumers worldwide. Addressing the needs of today’s users, Yang provided the first public demonstration of Yahoo!’s latest mobile offerings and offered a concept demonstration of the future of the desktop experience.
In his speech, Yang said “from the newest to the most experienced user, Yahoo!’s goal is to be the simple starting point for a much richer and more complex world so you can get more out of it. Whether you’re looking for fun, information, entertainment or social connections, you want to experience everything to the fullest – this is living life with an exclamation point.”
According to Yang, the company’s goal is to strengthen Yahoo!’s role as the preferred starting point for anything and everything users need online. To this end, the company plans to focus resources on becoming the best starting point for the entire web.
“To be the best starting point, it’s clear that we need to open the Yahoo! experience to any device or user. Mobile is a perfect example since more consumers are soon expected to come and go from the Net via their phones rather than desktops,” he said. “We’re committed to creating the best and richest mobile experience for all consumers – making it extremely personalized to their individual style and needs while opening up the Yahoo! mobile platform to allow anyone to participate.”
During his address, Yang welcomed the company’s executive vice president for Connected Life, Marco Boerries, on stage to demonstrate several new mobile offerings launched at this year’s CES and to elaborate on Yahoo!’s mission to foster a mobile ecosystem – ultimately serving billions of users – by providing indispensable and compelling services to consumers, developers/publishers and advertisers.
Yang also provided a preview of several exciting technology concepts that deliver upon his vision by sharing a glimpse of what his Yahoo! Mail inbox could look like. Yang demonstrated how Yahoo! could determine a user’s most relevant personal connections across both Yahoo! and multiple social networks. In doing so, Yahoo! would create a smarter mail box that prioritizes the most important messages from the most important people, providing a more personally relevant e-mail experience for consumers.
Not only did Yang show how Yahoo! Mail could prioritize a user’s most relevant connections, he also demonstrated how Yahoo! could open up Yahoo! Mail and incorporate mini applications (or widgets) from both Yahoo! and across the Internet. For example, by simply scrolling over relevant terms in their e-mail, users in the future could access things like maps, local reviews, invitations and more, directly from their inbox without having to open another browser.
By opening up Yahoo! Mail in addition to other services across Yahoo!, third party developers would be able to create new applications that delight hundreds of millions of users worldwide.
“Yahoo! has today outlined what is possible and that the future is not that far away,” said David Filo, co-founder and Chief Yahoo!. “Yahoo! is uniquely positioned to make this all a reality – we have scale, a huge community of users, great applications and APIs and insightful data. We now have an open platform for third party developers to build some interesting applications.”
“That’s the vision of the future we want to leave you with today: Yahoo! helping make the most of the Internet and the people you care about on whatever platform,” he continued. “We will continue working to provide you with an online starting point that’s more relevant, fulfilling and fun.”
January 8th, 2008
Yahoo! today upped the ante in consumer-centric mobile design by launching a new version of the company’s mobile home page in early beta at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2008. Today’s announcement further extends Yahoo!’s mobile leadership by providing consumers with a visually-stunning and easy to navigate interface for the most visited mobile site in the U.S. (M:Metrics, October 2007). By visiting http://beta.m.yahoo.com from select mobile phone browsers, consumers will experience an open and customizable home page where users can personalize their mobile experience like never before, drawing content from the Yahoo! network and leading Web properties from around the Internet.
Yahoo!’s new mobile home page was designed to quickly become the essential starting point for the mobile Internet. Incorporating the best “home page” elements from pioneering PC portals such as My Yahoo! and the Yahoo.com Front Page, it embraces a dynamic, open and highly personalized approach.
“Today we set the standard for what consumers are demanding from the mobile Internet. As the definitive starting point for mobile users around the world, our new home page is beautifully-designed and optimized for the mobile device,” said Marco Boerries, executive vice president, Connected Life, Yahoo!. “As we’ve done before, we’ve set an incredibly high bar for the industry with our innovation and ability to deliver prolific services to millions of global mobile users, helping them discover what a truly compelling mobile Internet experience should be like.”
Simply put, the new mobile interface is stunning, easy to use, relevant and fast. Key features include:
– Personal Vitality and Status Updates – Provide an at-a-glance update of what’s new since the last visit – including recent emails, Flickr photos from your friends, upcoming calendar appointments and status of Yahoo! Messenger contacts – all without moving away from the home screen or logging into a separate application.
– Customizable Content – Offers a collection of mobile content modules known as Yahoo! Snippets that provide previews of the user’s favorite content from any source – news headlines, weather conditions, and more – whatever the user wants.
– Quick Links – Customizable links at the bottom of the page, providing fast access to the Yahoo! services and other sites across the Internet that consumers use the most. Consumers can easily add and remove quick links as they desire.
– oneSearch – Mobile search designed to give instant answers and relevant information by understanding the user’s query intent and optimizing the results accordingly. Recently upgraded to include content from Wikipedia and Yahoo! Answers, as well as airline flight status information.
Today the new mobile home page is available to consumers in the United States on numerous mobile devices including the Apple iPhone, several Nokia Series 60 devices and select Windows Mobile devices. Over the coming months, the new interface is expected to become available across additional devices and mobile browsers and also available internationally.
For more information and screenshots of the new Yahoo! mobile interface, please visit Yahoo!’s complete CES 2008 press kit at http://mobile.yahoo.com/newsroom.
January 7th, 2008
Yahoo! today announced the launch of the all-new Yahoo! Go 3.0, Yahoo!’s flagship all-in-one mobile offering, in early beta at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2008, further solidifying Yahoo!’s leadership position in delivering leading-edge mobile experiences to consumers worldwide. Thanks to the feedback from many of our Yahoo! Go 2.0 users, this new product is designed to deliver more of what consumers want, wherever however and whenever they want it. Yahoo! Go 3.0 takes mobile services to the next level with an upgraded and feature-rich user interface, a truly personalized start page and customizable access to consumers’ favorite Internet brands and services through easy-to-use third-party widgets.
Consumers in the U.S. can download Yahoo! Go 3.0 (http://go.yahoo.com) on more than 30 mobile devices from major manufacturers worldwide and use it on most wireless networks. Over the coming months, Yahoo! Go 3.0 is expected to be available on hundreds of devices worldwide, accessible by hundreds of millions of users.
“Today’s launch of Yahoo! Go 3.0 is a game-changing mobile development from Yahoo!. This new open environment provides consumers with a highly-compelling user experience and robust, personalized starting point to the mobile Internet. We are providing users with increased control over their experiences as well as increased choice in getting the content and services they want while on the go,” said Marco Boerries, executive vice president, Connected Life, Yahoo!. “With our innovative mobile services like Yahoo! Go 3.0 and deep partnerships across the industry, we are focused on making the promise of the mobile Internet a reality for consumers around the world.”
January 7th, 2008
Ask.com today introduced free voice-activated capabilities to its Ask.com Mobile Directions service, the first of its kind from a search engine. Called “Click to Speak,” the new feature lets people simply speak their location and desired destination to receive directions on their web-enabled mobile devices. Easy to use, it eliminates typing addresses, which can be slow, error-prone and, in some cases, unsafe. Available immediately, “Click to Speak” incorporates unique technology from Dial Directions, the leading provider of voice-activated location-based services.
“Voice input is one more way Ask.com Mobile helps searchers find exactly what they are looking for faster and easier,” said Doug Leeds, senior vice president of product management, Ask.com. “The new ‘Click to Speak’ service is quick, free and accurate, and makes getting driving or walking directions a breeze.”
Voice In, Directions Out
Users of the Directions service on Ask.com Mobile will now see a new “Click to Speak” option. Clicking it, consumers are prompted to speak their location and their desired destination, either by specific address or closest intersection. Within seconds, they will receive a text message with a link to directions that can be viewed in either traditional list or turn-by-turn step format, with an additional option to switch between “Driving” or “Walking” routes.
“Voice input is a natural complement to the Ask.com Mobile Directions service,” said Amit Desai, co-founder and chief product officer of Dial Directions (www.dialdirections.com). “Dial Directions’ new spoken location interface technology offers a dramatic improvement over typing addresses on mobile devices. We look forward to a continued relationship with Ask.com as they look for new ways to further improve the mobile web search experience with Ask.com Mobile.”
January 3rd, 2008
Whilst Microsoft’s Internet Explorers 5 and 6 were fairly easygoing pieces of browser software which usually displayed web pages reasonably correctly irrespective of W3C compliant HTML, the same cannot be said about their successor.
Indeed, like Mozilla Firefox, the new version 7 flavour of Internet Explorer seems to be rather more discriminating when it comes to displaying HTML code.
This becomes especially apparent when one is looking at a page constructed from old style layers (div tags) such as the ones cranked out by Dreamweaver MX and its contemporaries.
It should be said that I am not in fact referring to table-less designs where the HTML code simply specifies a div id and leaves all formatting issues to the CSS; I am talking about old style div tags such as the one below:
[div id="Layer1" style="position:absolute; left:350px; top:225px; width:550px; height:794px; z-index:4"]Whatever content[/div]
Please note: < > brackets have been changed to [ ] brackets so the code can be displayed on this page.
The above approach was (and in a lot of cases still is) a firm favourite with many less experienced web designers using earlier versions of Dreamweaver and its ilk without any clear appreciation of W3C compliant HTML or the long-term implications of launching web sites with improperly formatted code.
In any case, whilst Internet Explorer in its version 5 and 6 incarnations was the undisputed king of web browsers, issues related to improperly formatted HTML did not generally come back to haunt the designer after his or her site went live, but with the advent and increasing popularity of Firefox user complaints about text overlap, collapsed page layout and other on-screen formatting issues became an annoying part of life for many designers employing the traditional div tag approach.
Yet still this was not seen as a huge problem by many less experienced professionals since Firefox’s market share was comparatively small and the majority of their client’s visitors would invariably be using Internet Explorer to surf the web and so the issue was simply ignored or put off until later.
The launch of Internet Explorer 7 however is set to change this generally lax attitude to W3C compliant HTML by certain elements of the web design industry.
In fact, Microsoft’s new and fussier browser is being adopted at an incredible rate.
January the 8th 2007 officially saw the 100 millionth installation of IE 7; quite impressive for a time span of less than three months since its release.
Some sources in the U.S. even claim that the browser has now reached a 30% market share, although this does sound a little premature.
So what about those designers now finding themselves with a portfolio of web sites increasingly plagued by screen formatting issues, not to mention the growing promotional drawbacks brought on by a lack of W3C compliant HTML?
These days, W3C compliance is an essential part of web design and site deployment, especially as Internet Explorer 7 becomes a fact of daily life on the web during the course of 2007 bringing with it an increasing number of display and functionality issues for improperly formatted HTML.
Designers who have not yet made the transition from the WYSIWYG approach to actually learning about HTML would be well advised to take a look at the W3C web site and familiarise themselves with internet standards.
A small investment in some HTML learning materials and the time to put them to good use might also be an idea.
December 27th, 2007
So you now have the Dreamweaver 8 and you are just not quite sure whether your web design company is willing to shell out some more to upgrade to the latest CS3 version. This is actually a challenging decision to make for your web design company. As a web designer, you have to work with the software, so it is both your right and responsibility to decide whether the new version will help you come up with improved web design. This makes you wonder too: Now that Adobe has already bought Macromedia, what have they done to it? Have they ruined it, or have they made it so much better that you should already kick yourself now for not buying it earlier? Well, if I were to be asked, I stand somewhere in between these two.
Web design feature #1: Adobe and Dreamweaver Together
Your web design company may find it reason enough to buy the new Dreamweaver CS3 because of its full integration with Adobe graphics tools like those found in Photoshop. When you have an image, you can directly click on it and edit right away.
Web design feature #2: CSS Support Made Better
One of the best features found in the new Dreamweaver CS3 is the integration of better CSS layouts. These layouts are all well-commented in the code, so it can be pretty easy to start knowing how CSS layouts tend to work. They now have over 32 layouts that you can choose from in 1, 2 or 3-column formats, in fixed and liquid type web designs. You may also define the position where you want the CSS to be when creating a new page, not to mention how easy it is to move the CSS styles around. You can stat out by styling the tag directly into the HTML through a style attribute and move it to your style sheet. With Dreamweaver CS3, you will only have to right click on the tag and set it to “Convert Inline CSS to Rule” to build a custom class for that specific style or to create one full CSS selector.
Web design feature #3: Mobile Support
Your web design company will also be pleased to know about the mobile support integrated into the new CS3 version. Creating pages made especially for mobile devices have been popular in the recent years, but it can be difficult to design one which is compatible both on mobile and web browser platforms. However, with the integration of the Adobe Device Central into the CS3, Dreamweaver now makes it easy to view your pages in cell phones.
Web design feature #4: Ajax Implementation Now Made Possible
The Dreamweaver CS3 now has integrated the Spry framework so that it adding Ajax widgets and effects onto your pages have now been made possible. All you do is to drag and drop them and incorporate them into your dataset. Dreamweaver CS3 features Spry components which include: widgets for tables, lists and forms: transition effects such as growing, shrinking, highlighting and fading, and integration of data from XML feeds such as in database or RSS.
Web design feature #5: XLST Support
Another amazing feature about the CS3 that both you and your web design company will love is the extensive support it has for XLST through the use of XML files as database source. Through XSLT, it is easy to view the XML in a tree form and integrate it right into your HTML document. This simply means that if you have a number of XML files set in the same format; it is relatively simple to create one single template for all of them in the new CS3 using XLST.
Web design feature #6: Support for Mac Intel Processors
If your web design company works on an Intel-based Macintosh platform, you will be happy with the performance improvements of the CS3. It is now native to the platform and does not run on Rosetta so that it loads a lot quickly than before. In fact, CS3 claims that what loads in Dreamweaver 8 for 4 minutes can load in the CS3 in under one minute. You can do further testing to confirm this.
To Upgrade or Not to Upgrade
That is the question. In my case, I have upgraded and haven’t regretted any of it. I appreciate the new CSS features, the XSLT support and the Device Central. However, your web design company may see one piece that is still missing, which is that of web design time and programming. As in the previous versions, the Dreamweaver CS3 is also still difficult to use in terms of live databases and server side scripts. However, there may be extensions to make things easier for you. On a general whole, go on and upgrade and you will most likely never have to look back.
Semul Johnson is a search engine optimization specialist for SEO 1 Services specializing in Seo web design http://www.seo-1-marketing-services.com
December 22nd, 2007
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