Areatrade
Our thoughts, rants and inside knowlege of web design & development!
Our thoughts, rants and inside knowlege of web design & development!
Oct 26th
It’s been more than a year since Google launched localized versions of Google Autocomplete (formerly Google Suggest) that offer relevant search predictions tailored for different regions. More recently, they took these tailored predictions to a new level in the U.S. by targeting to specific metro areas like San Francisco and Chicago. This week, they have extended these hyper-local predictions around the globe to every country that has Autocomplete. This means that the list of predictions beneath the search box will seem more locally relevant than ever updating the searches with the areas you are searching within.
For example, when you’re in Barcelona, Spain and you start typing [rest] there’s a good chance you’re actually looking for restaurants in Barcelona:
However, if you’re in Madrid, you’ll probably want to check the restaurants there:
Oct 26th
Android (Android) has just rocketed past a major milestone: 100,000 applications available in the Android Marketplace.
The announcement was made with just a tweet from the Android Dev Twitter account. “One hundred thousand apps in Android Market,” was all the tweet needed to say to spread the news. The search giant recently expanded the Android Marketplace to 20+ countries in an effort to kick its developer ecosystem in high gear.
Google’s open-source mobile OS has been on a tear, but its rapid growth has come at the cost of OS fragmentation across hundreds of devices. And while Android may be flooding the market at breakneck speed, Apple’s iOS App Store is the dominant mobile store by leaps and bounds. There are more than 280,000 iOS apps available, nearly triple the offerings on Android.
Do you think Android can catch upwith Google?
Oct 26th
The number of people who tried to get their posts to go viral (by writing list posts and publishing images) increased dramatically and, at the same time, Twitter and Facebook REALLY took off. People that wanted to ‘share good stuff’ found these services easier to use for sharing than having a WordPress or Blogspot blog. The result? If you create linkbait and it goes popular, then you should expect a lot of re-tweets/stumble thumbs-ups/Facebook ‘likes’ but a very small number of links from different unique root domains. Do these links from Facebook/Twitter carry any special importance?
Matt Cutts once said in a YouTube video that they rate links from Facebook and Twitter just like any other link! Yay!
One recent lesson I’ve learned about ‘niche’ link building is that you can get viral in your niche community. Take SEO and this blog, for example. I’ve witnessed how different SEOs follow each other and, in case someone has something interesting to share, then other people in the industry re-tweet him and the chain goes on. This is not the case for every niche market unfortunately.
What’s the Future of Natural Link Building? Is it DEAD?!??!Okay, 3 points here:
Oct 26th
After retiring the floppy disk in March, Sony has halted the manufacture and distribution of another now-obsolete technology: the cassette Walkman, the first low-cost, portable music player.
The final batch was shipped to Japanese retailers in April, according to IT Media. Once these units are sold, new cassette Walkmans will no longer be available through the manufacturer.
The first generation Walkman (which was called the Soundabout in the U.S., and the Stowaway in the UK) was released on July 1, 1979 in Japan. Although it later became a huge success, it only sold 3,000 units in its first month. Sony managed to sell some 200 million iterations of the cassette Walkman over the product line’s 30-year career.
Somewhat ironically, the announcement was delivered just one day ahead of the iPod’s ninth anniversary on October 23, although the decline of the cassette Walkman is attributed primarily to the explosive popularity of CD players in the ’90s, not the iPod.
Oct 23rd
China’s State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping has launched an official online map service called Map World.
The service is simple to navigate, even though it’s in Chinese. A zoom slider on the left and various views (map or satellite) populate the upper right corner. Zooming into most parts of the world will only result in a blank page after a certain zoom level, except in China and Taiwan where the images are available in higher resolutions.
The 2D part of the service is similar to Google Maps. A 3D viewing tool, that should make the viewing experience similar to Google Earth, is also available.
According to Asiaone News, 31 companies have been granted a mapping license, including Nokia, Baidu, Alibaba and others which could spell trouble for Google Maps in China.
Still, the Google Maps service is currently available (in a censored form) in mainland China at the address ditu.google.cn.
The map is available at www.tianditu.cn or www.chinaonmap.cn.
Oct 22nd
Google’s ultra high speed fiber network — which they claim can offer speeds of up to 1 gigabit per second —is about to get its first trial outside the Googleplex.
The trial is pretty small and is only being rolled out at Stanford University, not far from the Googleplex to a samll group of faculty and staff owned homes on campus.
Google has again stated it has no plans to get into the ISP business, as many originally speculated. They have said it is just a move toward making the Internet faster.
Do you think this is another bold move by Google to take over the world, or improve the world?
Oct 22nd
Facebook, Kleiner Perkins, Zynga and Amazon have launched a $250 million sFund their message for all entrepreneurs: our help could be yours.
The sFund is designed to provide support to companies in the social media space. Investments can be as low as $100,000 or as high as $100 million. In addition to Zynga, Amazon, Kleiner Perkins and Facebook, Comcast, Liberty Media and Allen & Company are also committed investors. On top of funding, these companies will provide guidance, advice and “relationship capital” for anyone funded by sFund.
The sFund lead manager, Bing Gordon pitched to Entrepreneurs with a poem – see below.
Hey, Entrepreneurs
We are convened in the “House that Friends Built”, Where the tipping point is in full tilt, Where brilliant devs are told to be bold but rash, And everybody likes to Flash.
I never thought I’d be on stage With Zuckerberg, Pincus, Bezos & Doerr. It sounds more like the name of a law firm, Than where the Internet (Internet) is going toward.
I don’t have Zuckerberg or John Doerr’s genius, Pincus’ intensity or Bezos’ laugh, Hey, entrepreneurs, their help could be yours, If you add them to your company’s social graph.
We’re sitting on a quarter of a billion George Washington’s, And More >
Oct 22nd
At present we are seeing more smart phones being sold than actual computers. This will the inclusion of iPads and other such mobile devices such as laptops and bluetooth headsets old technolgies such as pagers are a distance memory.
According to a recent Foresters Survey of nearly 10,000 small business owners, it seems that a huge 49% of small business owners are reported to own smartphones. The stats break down like this:
35% – BlackBerrys 33% – iPhones 25% – Androids 7% – Windows Mobile devices.
The survey also interestingly shows that even though 82% of Americans own a phone, 50% have internet on their phones but only 17% actually have smartphones. It would seem at the moment most users are opting for a cheaper model.
Viewing A Mobile Phone Website Design Versus Viewing Website Designs On PC’s
Whichever way you look at it website design / Ecommerce Web Design needs to cater for this new wave of mobile digital experience. Viewing a website design on a computer is a completely different experience to viewing the same website on a mobile device, smartphone of no smartphone.
An average time spent viewing a website on a computer is between 3 – 4 minutes (depending on the website), whereas More >