Posts tagged Faster
Facebook Credits Update: Faster Payments, Greater International Reach
Nov 18th
On the same day that PayPal announced its peer-to-peer Facebook payments app, it also updated Facebook Credits, the company’s virtual currency for buying goods in games and apps on the site.
Facebook Credits now includes a resolved known pay flow issue, updated payment methods for international markets and an updated transfer policy.
Facebook resolved a known pay flow issue that had significantly slowed payments. This issue dealt with callbacks generated by the Pay Dialog. Instead of receiving a callback “status=settled,” which resulted in some users not getting what they paid for, Facebook told developers to fulfill orders after receiving the callback “status=placed.” This cuts out the middle step so that orders will be fulfilled more quickly. On March 1, 2012, Facebook will eliminate the “status=settled” middle step all together.
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Facebook expanded its payment methods worldwide, adding ELV (Germany), MyCard Mobile (HongKong, Macau, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan), Visa Electron (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Finland, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand) and WebBilling Online Bank Transfer (Austria, Germany, Spain, Switzerland). For the full list of payments methods for purchasing Facebook Credits, go here.
Facebook Credits also debuted a new credits policy that “prohibits routing Credits from one app to another app without prior authorization.” Apps that transfer money to each other will not be permitted.
In October, Facebook began testing Credits on outside websites. Earlier in the month, Facebook Credits became available as a payment option on mobile apps except for those running iOS.
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SEO Services For Better Search Rank To Grow Your Website Traffic Faster – AddPR.com (press release)
Nov 2nd
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SEO Services For Better Search Rank To Grow Your Website Traffic Faster
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How Much Faster is iOS 5 For Mobile Browsing? (Infographic)
Oct 25th
Apple released the latest version of its mobile operating system two weeks ago, boasting 25 million installs within the first week.
In addition to over 200 new features, iOS 5 came with the promise of enhanced speed. Just how much faster is it? When it comes to mobile Web browsing, iOS 5 loads pages slightly more than twice as fast as its predecessor, iOS 4.
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This is according to a side-by-side test of 3,000 Web apps performed by New Relic, who provided us with the infographic below. They loaded those sites using Safari 5.1 on iOS 5 and compared the results to what they saw when using Safari 5.0 on iOS 4.
According to these tests, it would appear that iOS 5 is substantially faster than the previous version, and is most likely worth the upgrade for most users. The new OS upgrade is available for either version of the iPad, the iPhone 4 and 3GS (it comes installed on the new 4S) and new iPod Touch devices.
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Run Microsoft Office on Your iPad Faster: Cisco Hard-wires Xen
Oct 13th
In the past few years, one of the game-changing technologies that has helped Dell claw its way back against HP in the server arena is automated deployment tools, letting admins remotely install software on hundreds of clients in minutes. But consider this: If applications like Microsoft Office could be run on remote servers and streamed remotely to thinner clients – even to tablets like Apple’s iPad – without installing it to those clients in the first place, why bother with automated deployment at all?
The answer to that question has typically centered around performance. Imagine an application that stu-stu-stu-stutters like Max Headroom running on your state-of-the-art qua-qua-quad-core PC. Yesterday, Cisco blew a hole in that argument, announcing a network optimization service specifically designed for Citrix XenDesktop – the system that powers the revolutionary Citrix Receiver that makes Office run on the iPad.
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The delivery platform for Citrix’ high-definition streamed services is called HDX. Although its principal use today is for streaming virtual desktops to a variety of client form factors, including tablets, it’s a versatile enough technology to be used in the future for such things as live HD videoconferencing that shares the screen with both TV and PC services. Yesterday, Cisco announced its Wide Area Application Services (WAAS), whose sole functions are to accelerate HDX traffic and optimize bandwidth on wide-area networks that use Citrix XenDesktop for their virtual desktop infrastructure.
[Diagram courtesy Cisco]
On both sides of a wide-area network, WAAS forms a kind of tunnel. Although that tunnel manages all traffic, it specifically optimizes HDX traffic. Cisco promises that WAAS will expedite HDX traffic by up to 70% on average, while reducing bandwidth consumption by as much as 60%.
Of course, your next question should be, “Sixty percent over what?” Cisco cited a typical 10-user XenDesktop deployment scenario as requiring close to 1.1 Mbps of bandwidth. Its numbers say WAAS will cut that consumption down to about 550 Kbps. Businesses that use dedicated T1 lines for their WAN connections, and that could previously support only about 12 simultaneous XenApp users, can now potentially support 25.
With respect to Office, which is perhaps the most frequently virtualized application suite in all of XenApp, launch response times (according to Cisco’s numbers) are reduced from 7.5 seconds down to 1.5 seconds.
What this means for branch offices such as banks, financial planners, and franchise auto sales is that they can now feel free to try accessing Excel and PowerPoint through their iPads. Consider how this can improve the customer experience: No longer do salespeople have to leave customers waiting in the lobby while they go look something up on their computer. No longer do they print out the charts or spreadsheet tables so customers can see them. Now an automobile salesperson can take the iPad with him, stay with the customer, walk the entire breadth of the lot, and configure deals through the tablet.
I seem to recall beginning this article with a mention of something called “automated deployment,” but already that sounds so 2009.
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Guess How Long it Takes to Fix Google Maps: It’s Faster Than You Might Think
Oct 6th
Google Maps is an incredible technology. Built by acquired startups and licensed commercial data, it’s refined, repaired and extended by thousands of everyday people around the world using Google’s Map Maker editing service. Just today a big batch of new citizen contributed roads and landmarks went live in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.
But what about when there’s a mistake? Let’s say that an address or landmark is wrong on Google Maps and someone, somewhere uses Google Map Maker to fix it. How long does it take to show up in Google Maps – and how long does it take to populate out into all the embedded Google Maps around the world that are powered by the Google Maps API, the most popular API in the world. According to the company this week, it now takes as little as fifteen minutes. Even a market leader like Google Maps has to stay on its toes because there’s a whole lot of competition trying to win the hearts of developers who use maps in apps.
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The Google Geo Developers blog announced a number of new changes to the geo API this week including faster response time pushing changes from Map Maker through to the Google Maps API. “For many countries, including the U.S.A., this means that corrections made with MapMaker can reach the Maps API within 15 minutes,” says Thor Mitchell, Product Manager of the Google Maps API.
Impressive. They say that the web is like a living ecosystem. So too it seems are the web’s leading maps of the offline world – from beginning to end, from the user mapping app through all the API powered maps around the web.
Right: An 800 year old map of the Belgian village of aalbeke. Note, this one is not in real time so that giant man-eating fish may not be in the same place in the water anymore.
There’s enough competition in the map data space, even though Google is clearly dominant in the developer community, that near real-time edits just make sense. Developers choose every time they embed a map from options that include Google, Bing, Mapquest, OpenStreetMap and new entrants like ESRI’s lightweight new Canvas Maps and the forthcoming super-cool looking startup CartoDB.
Maps have got to stay fast these days to compete.
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Bing Shopping Adds Faster Refinements, Sales & List Sharing
Aug 15th
Bing announced new features for their Shopping Search features. The features inluce: Refine Your Searches Faster Find Sale Prices Share Your Shopping Lists on Facebook Bing Shopping has added a form of Google Instant results for shopping refinements. Here is an example: You can also just filter by…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
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Akamai’s State of the Internet Report Shows Its Faster, No Surprise
Jul 26th
Internet content hosting provider Akamai released its latest “State of the Internet” report today for the first quarter of 2011. The report shows a slight increase of 5% in total IP addresses connected to their network from last quarter and an overall increase in 20% from last year. Italy replaced Canada as the source of traffic in the top ten countries.
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New this year is a graphing tool that can generate graphs highlighting average connection speed, average peak connection speed, and high broadband/broadband/narrowband adoption rates. A sample chart showing speeds of three countries is shown below.
Myanmar ranked at the top of the list by generating 13 percent of attack traffic during the quarter, a dubious distinction. In terms of picking where you want to live based on average Internet connection speed, look to Lyse, Norway as the fastest city in Europe and Riverside, Calif. if you want someplace in the US. Asian cities again dominated the top 100 list, with 61 of them in Japan alone. In Europe, the largest increase in average connection speed was seen in the former Soviet republic of Georgia, which more than tripled over the last three years. Average connection speeds in Chile, Colombia, and Paraguay more than doubled in the past three years as well.
Based on data gathered from the Akamai Internet platform, which carries between 15 and 30 percent of the world’s Web traffic at any one time, the report provides insight into key global Internet statistics such as the world’s fastest and slowest regions for connection speed, origins of attack traffic and the highest-performing geographies for mobile connectivity.
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Google Plus One Button Now 3X Faster
Jul 26th
Google announced they have now speed up the Google +1 button for websites. The button is now automatically up to 3 times faster and best of all, webmasters do not need to update their code for the speed changes to take affect. The change is automatic. Google said, “no action is required on…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
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E-Reader Ownership Doubled in 6 Months, Growing Faster than Tablets
Jun 27th
Ownership of e-readers is exploding, according to a survey done by Pew Internet Research. Over the past six months, ownership of e-readers such as the Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook has grown from 6% to 12% of U.S. adults. E-readers are more popular than tablets devices such as the iPad or various Android slates like the Samsung Galaxy Tab which are owned by 8% of U.S. adults.
According to Pew, e-reader and tablet ownership is predominated by Hispanic adults, adults younger than the age of 65, parents of children below the age of 18, college graduates and households with and income of at least $75,000. While the Pew research is an interesting look in to the state of the mobile reader market now, it is important to note the timing of survey and movement of the market to distinguish actual digital trends.
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The six-month window of the survey was between Nov. 2010 and May 2011. A previous Pew study said that 7% of U.S. adults owned a tablet in Jan. 2011 and rose only one percentage point in the next four months. The survey was conducted by landline and cellular telephones between April 26 and May 22, 2011 with a margin of error of +/- 2.4%.
What tablets were available in late April to late May? The original iPad, the iPad 2, the Motorola Xoom, the seven-inch Galaxy Tab and the BlackBerry Playbook and a along with a couple lesser-hyped Android and Windows 7 slates. Of those devices, the Xoom launched in late February, the iPad 2 in mid-March and the PlayBook in mid-April. Except for the original Galaxy Tab (which has reportedly not sold well), none of the tablets have a price point less than $499. Missing from this series are upcoming or freshly released offerings from HTC (the Flyer and Evo View), new Galaxy Tabs (8.9 and 10.1-inch models) and the HP TouchPad. The device that kicked off the “tablet wars” – the first iPad – has only been on the market since April 2010.
When it comes to evaluation of tablet sales, the race has hardly begun.
On the other hand, e-readers have been on the popular market since the original Kindle sold out in a matter of hours in Nov. 2007. Since then, Amazon and its competitors have released several new versions of e-readers, all more advanced and, on aggregate, cheaper. Consumers can now buy an ad-supported Kindle for $114 with the Kindle 3G coming in at $189.
Why the explosion of e-reader ownership in six months? E-readers have gotten to the point where the barrier for ownership is much lower than a tablet or a new laptop, more along the price of an expensive pair of shoes. It is a lot easier to justify a purchase of less than $200 than the $500-plus it takes to own a tablet, many of which are tied to contracts and data plans that increase the cost of ownership (see Motorola Xoom). For the demographic that Pew says that are buying e-readers, it is an easy decision to make.
It will be interesting to see if or when tablets can make a similar jump in ownership when competition drives prices down along with TCO (total cost of ownership) and the tablet market evolves. Amazon may again be at the forefront of that market shift as it reportedly has multiple Android devices (including at least one tablet) coming to market later this year.
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