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Wolphram Alpha Gets Into Local Search — Very Badly
Apr 26th
It’s unlikely to impact Google or Yelp in any way but Wolphram Alpha is getting into local search. According to a blog post today users can now search online or on its mobile apps for nearby businesses in a range of categories (chains only right now): Wolfram|Alpha now knows the…
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SEO PowerSuite Software Gives Ever-Deeper Insight into Google Analytics Data … – DigitalJournal.com (press release)
Apr 18th
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SEO PowerSuite Software Gives Ever-Deeper Insight into Google Analytics Data …
DigitalJournal.com (press release) Com, the tireless SEO software innovator and the company behind SEO PowerSuite, announced today new functionality that delivers Google Analytics data to users right inside SEO PowerSuite, enabling them to better understand what traffic each keyword and … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
SEO PowerSuite Software Gives Ever-Deeper Insight into Google Analytics Data … – Seattle Post Intelligencer
Apr 18th
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SEO PowerSuite Software Gives Ever-Deeper Insight into Google Analytics Data …
Seattle Post Intelligencer Com has added new functionality to spot traffic brought by every keyword and webpage to help users see the cause-effect relationship between their SEO activities and web traffic. Besides, additional backlinks are pulled from Google Analytics by SEO … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
SEO PowerSuite Software Gives Ever-Deeper Insight into Google Analytics Data … – PR Web (press release)
Apr 18th
 PR Web (press release) |
SEO PowerSuite Software Gives Ever-Deeper Insight into Google Analytics Data …
PR Web (press release) Com has added new functionality to spot traffic brought by every keyword and webpage to help users see the cause-effect relationship between their SEO activities and web traffic. Besides, additional backlinks are pulled from Google Analytics by SEO … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Clickable’s Widget Dashboard: Expansion Into Cross-Channel Intelligence
Apr 13th
Along with Google AdWords, it seems like the common denominator in every search marketer’s tool stack is Microsoft Excel. But for years, technology vendors in the search marketing industry have vowed to get us out of workbooks and have built workflow, analytics, and reporting tools aimed at doing…
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Who Wrote OpenStack Essex? A Deep Dive Into Contributions
Apr 9th
It’s always interesting to see who really contributes to open source projects. That’s doubly true when it comes to projects that are corporate-driven, because they provide a lot of insight into which companies are driving a project and have a stake in supporting it. Looking at the numbers for OpenStack’s Essex release, it’s clear that only a small subset of companies involved in OpenStack are driving development.
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Mark McLoughlin, an OpenStack contributor and Red Hat employee, took the time to come up with stats culled from the commits and Gerrit code reviews for Essex.
McLoughlin provides several different pieces of the puzzle when looking at the OpenStack picture. He’s looked at the developers who’ve had the most change sets for the release cycle, the most changed lines, and the most lines removed. He’s also looked at lines reviewed, as well as the number of developers by employer.
It’s not a perfect picture, of course. Having the most changes doesn’t mean that the changes were important, for instance. It does give a clearer picture of what’s really going on in OpenStack development.
Developers by Employer
The first figure to consider is the number of developers contributing by company. No one should be shocked to see that Rackspace leads by a wide margin with 51 employees. To put that in perspective, Rackspace’s Stefano Maffulli identified more than 200 people and 50 companies that contributed to OpenStack in the Essex development cycle. McLoughlin’s figures say 226 developers.
This means that more than a fifth of the contributors to OpenStack are on Rackspace’s payroll.
HP has made a big public commitment to OpenStack, and it seems to be living up to it. HP has 19 people identified as contributors to OpenStack Essex.
We told you that Red Hat was contributing heavily to OpenStack in February. But at that time it wasn’t entirely clear where Red Hat fell. Turns out, it’s third in developers, with 12 developers contributing.
After Red Hat, there’s Citrix (9), Nebula (8), Cisco Systems (6), Canonical (6), Piston Cloud (6), Dreamhost (4) and SUSE (4) in the top 10.
The number of bodies, though, can be misleading. It may be that HP and Red Hat developers are not exclusively tasked with OpenStack, though. Some of Red Hat’s developers, for instance, are also doing work packaging OpenStack for Fedora and/or working on OpenShift. A company might only have two employees doing OpenStack work, but they may be doing it full time and/or doing some of the most difficult work.
Code Influence
To get a clearer picture than we have just by looking at developers, we can also see what companies are responsible for the most code changes and code reviews.
OpenStack uses Gerrit for code review, so it’s possible to see who’s reviewing and approving code. Rackspace dominates here, with 68.1% of reviews. Nebula is next with 12.6% of the reviews, Red Hat has 4.4%, HP has 3.7% and Nicira has 2.4%. When you get to the bottom of the top 10 (Piston Cloud, Canonical) you’re looking at less than 1%.
In terms of lines changed by employer, Rackspace is at the top with 46.8%. Nebula has 24.4%, Red Hat has 5.4% and Citrix has 4.0%. Midokura, a company I hadn’t heard of until doing this piece, is in fifth place. Despite Dell’s vocal support for OpenStack, the company doesn’t seem to be contributing a great deal.
Change sets are a slightly different story. Rackspace still dominates, with 55.2%. Nebula has 10%, Red Hat has 7.9%, HP has 2.9% and Canonical has 2.6%.
Another view we have is bugfixes, out of the Launchpad statistics. Again, Rackspace is at the top with 800, Nebula comes in with 240, Red Hat has 140, Nicira has 69 and Canonical has 50.
In every case, the drop-off after the first five or ten companies is very significant. For example, in terms of lines changed – Canonical is the 11th company by lines changed and only claims 0.6% of changes.
What It Means
Despite the effort to paint OpenStack as a widely supported project with lots of developer commitment, it’s still Rackspace that’s doing the lion’s share of the work.
Nebula is also pulling a lot of weight in the project, though it has fewer contributors than HP or Red Hat. The top 10 corporate contributors are pulling a disproportionate share of the load in OpenStack.
This isn’t abnormal for an open source project, though. If you look at Linux kernel development, you’ll see that the top contributors are doing more than the long tail of companies that are involved in kernel development.
But the disparity is striking. No company is shouldering nearly 50% of kernel development by any measure.
Looking at recent kernel development, you’ll see Red Hat at the top of companies contributing to the kernel. But Red Hat sits at the top of the list (after developers with no corporate affiliation), with 10.7% of the changes from the 2.6.36 kernel to the 3.2 kernel. Intel has 7.2%, Novell 4.3%, IBM 3.7% and so on – down to a long list of companies contributing tiny bits.
The real contributor community outside of Rackspace doing significant development is smaller than one might think given the figures coming out of OpenStack. It looks like it’s on its way to a healthy mix, but I’m not sure it’s quite there yet.
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ModCloth Converts Customers into Brand Evangelists with YouTube
Apr 9th
In the fickle world of fashion, finding, engaging, and retaining brand devotees online is not easily stitched together. But YouTube helped one couple turn an online-only retail operation into a global, 275-employee company in less than a decade.
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
How the iPad Will Fit Into Your Future Smart Home
Apr 4th
Since jumpstarting the tablet market two years ago, the iPad has found its way into a few distinct niches in our lives. Since its first generation, the device (and those like it) have been used heavily for content consumption: reading, watching video and, to a lesser extent, streaming music.
Tablets have since begun maturing into tools for content creation, including video editing and multitrack music recording. Despite early criticism of their limitations, tablets even help people stay productive at work.
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There’s little doubt that, in the future, these devices will be even more thoroughly integrated into our lives. For clues about how thoroughly, look no further than the emerging smart home market and the products that are already finding their ways into people’s homes.
We’re already seeing the tablet take center stage in “smart” household technology usage in the living room, for example. Your iPad can be used to control an Apple TV, effectively bringing iOS to the big screen. More commonly, tablets are used as second screen devices, on which users not only control the content they’re watching, but seek out supplementary content and interact with others on the social Web. With credible rumors of an Apple HDTV still making the rounds, it’s reasonable to expect the integration between television and tablets to grow even tighter.
Tablet-enhanced home entertainment is only the beginning.
Beyond the “Second Screen:” A Remote Control for the Whole House
As households are increasingly equipped with automation, smart TVs, energy management features and cloud-based security systems, tablets are becoming a sort of command-and-control hub, allowing us to dim the lights, open the curtains, engage the alarm or check in on our kids via video feed. All of this – and considerably more – can be done from inside the home or from halfway across the planet.
Control4 is a Utah-based company that builds the software upon which many home automation systems run. The company also operates a platform by the same name, for which developers can build apps that perform various tasks within smart homes.
In addition to licensing its software to thousands of electronics manufacturers, Control4 makes its own hardware and has an iPad app, which can be used to control security features, lighting, temperature and entertainment media. Want to turn on the dining room lights while you’re out of town to make it look like the house is still occupied? Turn the heat on a few minutes before you get home? That’s precisely the sort of thing that systems such as this enable.
As is often the case, when we say “iPad,” we really mean “tablet,” the market that will likely be dominated by Apple’s beloved device for the foreseeable future. Along with smartphones, they will become the hub of any connected, automated household in the future.
Control4 offers its own tablet-like hardware, in addition to its iPad app. Comcast’s Xfinity Home Security product, which is similar to what Control4 offers, can be controlled from an iOS app or from Comcast’s own custom hardware. That device comes equipped with a cellular data backup connection in case weather or an intruder knocks one’s broadband connection offline. Similarly, 3G and 4G iPads and Android tablets can be used to ensure that connectivity isn’t an issue in an emergency situation.
Another central component to systems like this is their use of Web-connected video cameras for security. Home surveillance systems used to be prohibitively expensive, but advances (and price drops) in Web cam technology, coupled with the reliance on cloud storage for footage, have helped drive those costs down considerably.
Live feeds from cameras installed in and around the home can be viewed from proprietary touchscreen tablets such as those sold by vendors including Control4 and Comcast, or they can be watched remotely via apps for iOS and, in some cases, Android. This offers a sense of security to homeowners, and for teenagers, probably something more like terror.
Regardless of how you feel about it, the homes of the future will be more connected and automated. If you think your tablet or other mobile device feels like the center of your universe now, just wait until it can dim the lights, queue up the DVR and communicate with the WiFi-enabled refrigerator.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Tap Into AdWords for Keyword, Ad & Landing Page Testing
Apr 4th
Use the web to discover everything about your market. Craft your marketing, turn on the AdWords tap, and give it a try. Send some traffic to your landing page and see if you’re right about what people want. If not, pause, adjust, and test again.
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
B2B Blogger’s Guide To Turning Tweets Into Rockstar Conference Coverage
Mar 28th
So, you’re craving a surge of fresh, unique, valuable content on the front page of your business’s B2B blog…but scraping the bottom of the proverbial barrel for blog post topics that aren’t blatantly self-promotional or boring as ever. One solution is to attend a few…
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