Posts tagged Continues
Kodak’s Decline Continues as Digital Cameras Get the Ax
Feb 9th
Kodak, once a symbol of technological innovation, is lately looking more like a textbook example of a disrupted company. The company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection last month, after years of struggling to keep up in a landscape dominated by digital cameras, smartphones and photo-sharing apps.
One of the ways that Kodak tried to stay competitive is by manufacturing and selling digital cameras. Today, those efforts come to an end with the news that the company will be getting out of the digital camera business altogether.
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The gravity of Kodak’s decline can hardly be overstated. The company invented consumer photography, the hand-held camera and even digital photography, but failed to keep up with other emerging trends to a sufficient enough extent to retain its dominance in the marketplace.
This is an organization that has innovation in its DNA. Yet its ability to adapt to later, more fast-paced innovation from others has led the company to where it is today. It would be like if, 50 years from now, Apple went bankrupt, surrounded by more nimble competitors and unable to keep up with whatever super-futuristic space gadgets other companies will be making. Hard to imagine, right?
What Kodak used to specialize in – consumer photography and related goods – is now something that’s almost fully democratized by smartphones, photo apps, cheap point-and-shoot cameras and the Web, which enables instant sharing of photographs. Most of the methods and processes for creating and sharing photographs that Kodak invented or perfected are now obsolete.
The company isn’t dead yet, though. It’s just under bankruptcy protection, and will use this time to fine-tune its business in the hopes of emerging from Chapter 11 status. Part of that involves laying people off, but whittling down its product portfolio is another important aspect of the process. Thus, it’s killing off its line of digital cameras and instead focusing elsewhere: maintaining photo kiosks and selling printers, for example.
Kodak may well succeed in emerging from bankruptcy with a leaner, more profitable business. Even if it does, the prospects of the company returning to its heyday don’t look especially promising.
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Nginx Continues Growth, Adds Commercial Offerings
Feb 8th
According to the Netcraft Web Server Survey for February 2012, Nginx was “the only server to experience a non-negligible market share increase this month” by picking up 0.27 percentage points. Good news for the upstart Web server, just as the brand-new company behind Nginx takes the wraps off its commercial packages.
Nginx has had quite the growth spurt over the past year. In February of last year Nginx had 7.57% of the market, or about 21 million domains hosted with Nginx. Microsoft had 20.04%, or about 57 million. Apache was at 60.10%, with more than 171 million domains.
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Fast-forward to this February, and Nginx has grown to 9.89% of the market surveyed by Netcraft. The overall market has grown considerably, as well – Nginx now has about 60 million domains. Microsoft has dropped to 14.38% of the overall market, with just over 88 million domains, and Apache has reclaimed some of the market and sits at 64.92% or more than 397 million domains. To put that another way, in the last year (according to Netcraft) Nginx has picked up nearly 40 million domains, while IIS has picked up about 31 million.
From the Netcraft February 2012 Web Server Survey
That’s not too shabby for a project that has a tiny developer team and a mere $3 million in funding so far
Commercial Offerings
The first set of commercial offerings from Nginx are three support tiers that range from $1,100 a month to more than $6,600 a month. The starter package, Essential, includes support for up to 10 servers and covers two incidents per month with a resolution time of 96 hours (or less). It includes no phone support, optimization assistance, or feature development options.
For companies that are depending on Nginx, there’s the big daddy package that starts at $6,600 a month or $70,000 a year. It has 24×7 support, covers an unlimited number of servers and an 8-hour response time for “severe” issues. Customers also get 12 hours of support calls per year, optimization assistance and can even get developer time to implement features (at an extra fee, of course).
All plans come with emergency bug fixes, updates, software updates and security fixes.
So far, the commercial entity hasn’t diverged from the open source Nginx offering. It will be interesting to see if the company also starts offering proprietary add-ons for Nginx or if they stick with a support-only model. Given the rapid adoption of Nginx, it seems likely that the company will be hearing from quite a few businesses that want a support contract.
If you’re using Nginx, I’d be curious to hear how smoothly your deployments have gone and if you’ve run into any major issues that would have benefited from support.
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SOPA Saga Continues: Tech Giants Consider Internet Blackout and Support OPEN Act
Jan 6th
When Congress reconvenes later this month, they will consider passing the highly controversial Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). Currently, the Senate is scheduled to debate the matter on January 24th and vote shortly thereafter. Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader from Nevada, recently said: “This is a bipartisan piece of legislation which is extremely important. [...]
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No Quick Fix: Google+ Traffic Continues Downward Trend
Oct 14th
Over the past few days there has been a lot of buzz surrounding the coverage of Google+, particularly focusing on the measured 60% downward trend seen in the site’s traffic as reported by Chitika Insights. In further investigation of this matter, Chitika researched traffic patterns of the social network to determine whether the downward trend witnessed was a short term fluctuation as some proposed, or just the start of a longer term trend.
The data revealed that the trend seems to be continuing. Although Google+ saw a brief uptick in the sites traffic after it went public, Chitika Insights reported a prolonged and sustained downward trend in overall activity coming from the site. The new data reveals an even sharper drop in traffic from its peak of 70%.
This prolonged downhill trend is potentially impacted by the following reasons:
- Google may have focused too much on building a social network that would be able to compete with Facebook, rather than innovating and developing one which could outperform it.
- By failing to provide developers with an API, which would support a network of useful services for their users, Google created a hurdle for themselves as they continue to be out-developed by Facebook.
- Facebook also contributed to limiting the success of Google+ in taking precautionary measures to corral their users and prevent them from switching to the new social network. This effectively restricted users ease of transition and Google+’s ability to expand.
Over the next several months, pay close attention to Google+ as it makes its attempt to claw its way up through the ranks of social networks. If Google is able to implement a platform which supports the development of a network of services which promotes user activity and accessibility, they may be successful in reversing this downward trend. Or, perhaps not — but only time will tell . . .
If you are interested in how these figures were acquired, the methodology was posted in this recent Chitika Insights post.
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Q3 Paid Search Spend Data Bodes Well for Google; Bing Continues to Slide
Oct 13th
Q3 paid search spend reports from Covario, Rimm-Kaufman Group and Efficient Frontier/Context Optional show the despite economic concerns, paid search growth is strong, with 23 and 24 percent year-over-year increase in spend in the U.S. and globall…
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How Personalized Search Continues To Challenge Marketers, Consumers – MediaPost Publications
Sep 15th
 Business 2 Community |
How Personalized Search Continues To Challenge Marketers, Consumers
MediaPost Publications In fact, some SEO experts have been tackling issues surrounding personalized search for more than a year. In a detailed post about personalized search written in 2010, Dave Harry, Reliable SEO founder, describes how it operates, … SEO, SEM, and YOU Good News for Webmasters Looking For Top Seo Services Company |
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Google Docs Continues Kicking the Butts of Paid Apps Everywhere
Sep 13th
Google Docs just launched three more new features, marking their second day in a row of little but useful feature announcements. The new format painter tool lets you quickly copy style from one bit of text to another. Google has implemented its Fusion Tables as a document type, which enable dynamic and visual uses of data. Finally, Google has added drag-and-drop for images from the desktop directly into a drawing document in the browser window.
Just yesterday, Google Docs launched a new sharing option for comment-only permissions, meaning users can offer their documents for comment without giving people the ability to edit them. Four new features in two days for a free application? Where you at, Microsoft Office?
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The Fusion Tables feature is particularly interesting. The Docs team blog posts lists these examples of what enterprising people have done with Fusion Tables lately:
- Visualize evacuation zones for New York City during Hurricane Irene
- Host data sets made public by the State of California
- Gather data from local flu shot clinics for Google Flu Vaccine Finder
- Map shelters and road status during the tsunami crisis in Japan
Fusion Tables were previously available as a standalone service, but now they’re one of the Google Docs document types (although it’s marked as “beta,” but hey, it’s Google).
The other two features, format painter and drag-and-drop images, are simple, fundamental improvements in the Google Docs user interface. They make it easier and more intuitive to use, and even more mind-blowing that we don’t pay for this service.
In fact, Google Docs is getting so useful – while Microsoft Office continues to cost over $100 – that we might begin to wonder what sort of trick Google is playing on us. In the meantime, though, we might as well get some great, collaborative work done.
What do you use Google Docs for? Tell us in the comments.
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AppMobi Continues to Bolster HTML5 Toolkit, Releases Chrome App Packager
Sep 12th
Mobile development company appMobi wants to push HTML5. It does not want to do this just as a developer framework or an alternative for publishers who are pondering native apps vs. Web apps. AppMobi wants to push HTML5 as its own mobile platform, capable of taking on Android and iOS from an application level.
The company added a new tool last week to its HTML5 developer tool kit to further boost HTML5 development. The appMobi Chrome App Packager enables developers to build Web apps and browser extensions and wrap them for submission to the Chrome Web Store.
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AppMobi’s Latest Tools For HTML5
Developing for HTML5 is not easy. Yet, the benefits of creating a well-coded HTML5 Web app can be dramatic. This is where startups like appMobi come in to create tool kits that developers can work with to simplify the development process. This is not a cookie-cutter approach to app development (we are still a long ways away from that for HTML5) but rather just a way to ease the burden on developers of creating cross-platform applications.
In August, appMobi released a new “XDK” that allows developers to build HTML5-optimized applications for the Web and mobile platforms. The Chrome Web Packager is an extension of that. Think of it like PhoneGap for the Chrome store. Instead of wrapping your app for iOS or Android stores, developers can package their apps for Chrome. It is a small new feature but an example of tools that developers find useful in their day-to-day process.
How Useful Will It Be For Developers?
“It’s a tool that we created initially for our own use, and then we realized that everyone in the HTML5 development world could benefit from it,” said appMobi CTO, Sam Abadir. “It can be used to package both hosted and non-hosted apps.”
Developers also gain access to appMobi’s cloud services for features like push messaging and in-app purchases. What is particularly interesting about the packager is that it is functionality that Google itself does not provide, at least specifically.
One curious question about the Chrome packager is whether or not it is a fully necessary item in appMobi’s tool box for developers. The company itself may find it useful, but is the Chrome Web Store even a viable target for developers? Let us know what you think in the comments.
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The Good, The Bad & The Ugly: JLU Scandal Continues
Sep 10th
When I wrote my last article, Being Bad For Great Justice: A New Privacy Scandal Rocks Second Life, and sent it upstairs to the folks that post it, I sent in a warning that things would, sooner or later, get ugly over the topic. Not surprisingly f…
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