Posts tagged Challenges
B2B challenges: Can SEO content solve common marketing concerns? – Brafton
Apr 11th
 Brafton |
B2B challenges: Can SEO content solve common marketing concerns?
Brafton A new study from Crain's BtoB Magazine noted that 43 percent of B2B brands report a slowing sales cycle. Marketers can blame the world's economic woes or the proliferation of web content as educational resources that make people more choosy, but the … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Google Challenges U.S. National Security Letter in Court
Apr 5th
Google is fighting a National Security Letter (NSL) issued by the U.S. government. A court filings revealed Google’s opposition to handing over users’ data. Google is one of the first communications companies to fight an NSL, according to the EFF.
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
Top SEO Challenges – Business 2 Community
Mar 31st
 Business 2 Community |
Top SEO Challenges
Business 2 Community Constant algorithmic updates to Google have every SEO almost chewing to the meat of their nails. No matter how prepared an SEO could be, in the end, Google is a 3rd party enterprise and what they say, SEOs must follow. There's not much democracy here … Major Changes in Search Engine Algorithm Coming Your Way Pete Mill and Mark Gorman partner to launch professional blogging agency … SMX West 2013 – A Few Takeaways |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Solutions for New Email Delivery Challenges Imposed by Email ISPs
Mar 20th
As if getting your emails through to subscribers was not already challenging enough, email service providers are making the job of email marketers even harder. In an effort to streamline and improve the user experience, Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, and AOL are slashing delivery rates. The result is that more of your emails are not [...]
Author information
The post Solutions for New Email Delivery Challenges Imposed by Email ISPs appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
View full post on Search Engine Journal
On International Women’s Day, Marketers Share Challenges & Reasons to Celebrate
Mar 8th
Many women are helping to shape the marketing world by sharing insights and expertise. We ask some of the smartest women in marketing to reflect on the women who helped or inspired them, and share some challenges women in our industry are facing.
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
FoundationDB’s NoSQL Breakthrough Challenges Relational Database Dominance
Mar 8th
NoSQL databases are well-known for their speed and scalability – useful traits when dealing with the size and complexity of big data and hyper-fast transaction requirements. But one thing they have lacked has been strong data consistency: the ability to ensure that an update to data in one part of the database is immediately propagated to all other parts of the database.
A startup database vendor launched this week is making claims that its database, FoundationDB, finally delivers on the promise of true data consistency for a NoSQL database, without a huge loss of speed or flexibility.
Understanding why this is such a big deal in the Big Data (or any) sector requires a little background on how NoSQL, or non-relational, databases work.
Solving The ACID Test
When talking about relational databases, like PostgreSQL, MariaDB, Oracle and the like, there’s one acronym that keeps coming up: ACID. ACID stands for Atomic, Consistent, Isolated and Durable – core aspects that must apply to all data within a relational database. Data is broken down to atomic values (name, address_1, city…) while remaining consistent across the database, isolated from other transactions until the current transaction is finished, and durable in the sense that the data should never be lost.
The infrastructure of a relational database is well-suited to meet the ACID criteria for data: Data is held in tables connected by relational algebra, and transactions are performed in a way that is consistent with ACID principles.
But for non-relational databases, such as Bigtable, MongoDB or Dynamo, ACID has always been sacrificed for other qualities, like speed and scalability.
This tends to freak out some companies, stopping them from moving to NoSQL because they can’t give up ACID. Especially the “C,” because not having data consistency is a particularly terrifying prospect for companies dealing with financial transactions.
Yet non-relational databases are being used by firms like Amazon and Google every day, with great success. Amazon, in particular, needs to track millions of sales transaction on any given day – how does it get away with inconsistent data?
The short answer is, it has to. The trade-off would be a relational database that could never keep up with the speed and scaling necessary to make a company like Amazon work as it does now. Recall that non-relational databases are structured to sacrifice some aspect of ACID to gain something in return. In the case of Amazon, its non-relational DynamoDB database is willing to apply an “eventually consistent” approach to the data in order to gain speed and uptime for the system when a database server somewhere goes down.
Bringing Back Consistency
It’s not that having ACID compliance on a NoSQL database is impossible, explained David Rosenthal, one of FoundationDB’s co-founders. It’s just that most people think that applying ACID to NoSQL systems would come at a huge cost.
That’s certainly what Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon, thought in a 2008 paper that described the company’s Dynamo database and it’s relationship to consistency.
Data inconsistency in large-scale reliable distributed systems has to be tolerated for two reasons: improving read and write performance under highly concurrent conditions; and handling partition cases where a majority model would render part of the system unavailable even though the nodes are up and running.
Translation: Requiring ACID on non-relational databases would make that database too slow and inflexible.
For the longest time, everyone using NoSQL systems was resigned to this eventual, or “weak,” consistency model. After all, they had money to make and data to analyze. Who cares if consistency was not at the top of the priority list?
It turns out, quite a few people, including the founders of FoundationDB, Rosenthal, Nick Lavezzo and Dave Scherer.
Inside FoundationDB
After a successful start up with Visual Sciences, a technology that’s now part of Adobe as the Adobe Insight product, the trio turned to developing another successful project, and hit on the lack of ACID-capable non-relational databases as a goal.
“We weren’t satisfied with any of the data guarantees on non-relational systems,” Rosenthal explained, even as they understood that the needs of many potential clients would preclude relational systems like MySQL or Oracle because of performance limitations.
Non-relational systems seemed to wear their weak consistency model like a badge of honor, but in the secret origin story of FoundationDB, the team saw weak consistency as a bug, not a feature. ”Not having transactional integrity is not a good thing,” Rosenthal emphasized.
They’re not the only ones. Google’s up-and-coming Spanner database, a second-generation distributed database that could ultimately replace the search engine company’s Bigtable systems, is being built on the premise that transactional integrity has to be a part of that database, too.
Side Effects Include…
Establishing consistency in transactions within a NoSQL database is worthy news in itself, but the implications extend beyond that core news.
FoundationDB uses a key-value-like storage engine core that’s surrounded by layers of whatever data model that’s needed, which will in turn enable developers to much more easily code their apps to reach into the FoundationDB. These layers, according to the founders, can’t be used on other key-value systems, because without consistent transactions, it would not work.
Also, since data is going to be consistent, applications won’t have to be built to “wait” for data to catch up within a given transaction – thus making apps less complex and easier to build.
The best news of all concerns the so-called performance penalty that many in the NoSQL world said will be incurred if ACID was applied to non-relational database systems. According to FoundationDB, performance is hampered by only 10%, which seems a very small price to pay for consistent transactions.
The FoundationDB database, which was launched into public beta on Monday, is available for download now.
Image courtesy of FoundationDB.
View full post on ReadWrite
SEO Conversion Challenges: When Every Page is a Landing Page – NBC Chicago (blog)
Feb 22nd
 NBC Chicago (blog) |
SEO Conversion Challenges: When Every Page is a Landing Page
NBC Chicago (blog) Try approaching conversion optimization for SEO in this mindset. Take a look at the pages receiving organic search-referred visits in your Web analytics. The diversity of entry pages will probably surprise you, as will the diversity of bounce and … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Bloomberg Billionaires Index Challenges Tech Assumptions
Jan 23rd
On Wednesday, Bloomberg released a new website for its Bloomberg Billionaires Index, complete with some snappy data visualization tools. While we’d like to see a few more features added to the mix (a year-by-year progression of adds and drops would be great), it’s a fun tool, and it makes certain trends easy to spot. For those of us who watch the tech community, the list provides a quick gut-check about where the tech sector fits into the larger world’s priorities.
Technology Isn’t Everything
Technology is important, but don’t forget that people need to build things, buy things and pay for them, and those industries generate revenue, too. Only 12 of the world’s 100 richest hail from the tech industry, so it’s far from a dominating presence. The tech billionaires are well distributed throughout the list, with only Bill Gates and Larry Ellison in the top 10, and half the techies landing the bottom 50. Tech has a significant showing on the list, but its not as strong as retail (17 total, with 9 in the top 20). Overall, technology seems to be about as lucrative as mining or finance. It’s still a much better bet than newspapers, though. Only three of the top 100 hail from the media world.
Almost All-American – For Now
All but two of the tech 12 are Americans. The others – Wipro CEO Azim Premji, (India, #49) and Samsung Chairman Lee Kun Hee (South Korea, #91) – are the first of what is likely to be many more future overseas members of the club. The U.S .list is still weighted pretty heavily toward the heavy hitters of the 1990s. SAS, Microsoft, Oracle, and Dell are solid companies, but most people wouldn’t consider them the future of tech. Yet these “legacy” companies account for 6 of the 10 Americans on the list. It’s a pretty sure bet that 5 to 10 years from now, we’ll see a lot more members from South Korea, China, India and Russia.
$10 Billion Takes Time
Becoming an overnight millionaire in the tech industry is no big deal, but there’s no shortcut to the top 100 billionairs. Well, there might be just one. Mark Zuckerberg. Zuck is the only person under 30 in any industry to make the list. Even stepping up to the sub-40 bracket, there are only three more additions: Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Colombia’s Alejandro Santo Domingo, who manages a collection of media companies and SABMiller. Technology can certainly make you rich in a hurry, but to join the ranks of the mega-mega-rich, even geeks have to work at it for a while.
Family Planning
One bonus for the children of tech billionaires is inheritance. While many of the more traditional industries seem to favor having lots of children, the tech industry tends toward a more reasonable family size. The sweet spot seems to be 2-3 children – which leaves lots more cash for each offspring. Zuckerberg and Paul Allen have no children (yet), while Jeff Bezos and Michael Dell each have 4. On the rest of the list, 21 have 5 or more kids, and Malaysia’s Robert Kuok has 8! Of course, since many of the techies on the list have already signed Bill Gates’ Giving Pledge to donate the bulk of their fortunes to charity, those kids might have to settle for measly single-digit billions, anyway.
View full post on ReadWrite
Google Challenges NORAD In Tracking Santa, Launches Google Santa Tracker
Dec 19th
Google has decided to take on the decades-old Santa tracking service that NORAD offers with its own “Google Santa Tracker.” It comes in the wake NORAD booting Google out as a partner in favor of Microsoft. How NORAD Began Tracking Santa Since 1955 First some history, then what Google…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
View full post on Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
T-Mobile Comeback Challenges Mobile Industry Predictions of Its Demise
Dec 11th
For many mobile industry analysts, T-Mobile seemed to be “going the way of the dodo”, but the world’s third-largest mobile-phone service provider now has an ace up its sleeve: the iPhone. No biggie, if you consider that many other carriers offer iPhones or support iPhones with their contracts, but a big deal if you think [...]
The post T-Mobile Comeback Challenges Mobile Industry Predictions of Its Demise appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
View full post on Search Engine Journal
