Posts tagged Leap
Brick Marketing Hosts February Boston SEO Workshop – PR Leap (press release)
Jan 31st
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Brick Marketing Hosts February Boston SEO Workshop
PR Leap (press release) COM) BOSTON MA – Brick Marketing, a Boston SEO company, will be holding a Boston SEO Workshop on February 22, 2012 at the Brick Marketing Boston MA office at 101 Federal Street, Suite 1900. "The Boston SEO workshop provides business and website owners … |
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SEO and PPC most in-demand digital marketing skills – Vertical Leap News (press release)
Dec 19th
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SEO and PPC most in-demand digital marketing skills
Vertical Leap News (press release) SEO and PPC are among the most sought-after digital marketing techniques in terms of demonstrating return on investment (ROI), thedrum.co.uk reports. Research by recruitment firm Robert Walters found that some businesses still see marketing as a … 6 Ways Online Marketers Can Survive The Christmas Lull |
View full post on SEO – Google News
SEO can be the great equaliser during Cyber Monday – Vertical Leap News (press release)
Nov 22nd
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SEO can be the great equaliser during Cyber Monday
Vertical Leap News (press release) SEO can be the great equaliser for small businesses trying to compete with big-name brands during the holiday season, an industry expert has claimed. Sarah Schager, who is a web strategist for a digital marketing company, has stated that quality search … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
HubShout’s New Website Grader Tool Puts the Emphasis on Valuable SEO Data – PR Leap (press release)
Nov 1st
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HubShout's New Website Grader Tool Puts the Emphasis on Valuable SEO Data
PR Leap (press release) HubShout, LLC, is a specialist in seo reseller services for SEO firms, design firms, advertising/PR agencies and any organization that has clients in need of search marketing services. HubShout resellers have the option to sell any or all of the search … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
SEO and social media “should be combined” – Vertical Leap News (press release)
Oct 31st
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SEO and social media "should be combined"
Vertical Leap News (press release) Marketers should integrate their social media and SEO campaigns into one strategy, experts suggest. With SEO and social media marketing divided into two separate entities, many firms often opt to choose one or the other. This, however, could prove to … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Matt Cutts: SEO is not spam – Vertical Leap News (press release)
Oct 28th
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Matt Cutts: SEO is not spam
Vertical Leap News (press release) Google's head of web spam Matt Cutts has gone on record by stating that SEO is not spam, reports Search Engine Land. Although he has made similar announcements during SEO conferences over the years, Cutts has still found it necessary to post a video … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
How Android Just Took A Major Leap With Ice Cream Sandwich
Oct 19th
Android made a jump today that signals the future of the platform. Anybody familiar with Android will take a look at its new Ice Cream Sandwich platform and know that Google has truly morphed its tablet version of the platform, Honeycomb, and the previous smartphone versions into an entirely new user interface. Whether or not users will respond favorably to it remains to be seen, but Android 4.0 is a dynamic update to the leading smartphone operating system.
What is new with Ice Cream Sandwich? Well, Google is playing to Android’s strengths with ICS by creating new multi-tasking capabilities, resizable widgets, improved voice controls and quicker communication controls. Android has also tied its browser to the cloud that will drastically improve how it renders and saves pages. Check out what is new with Android 4.0 below and how Android now stacks up against its competition.
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For all you users who prefer the quick-hit version, take a look at the video that Google and Samsung released with the new Nexus Prime device and how it integrates Ice Cream Sandwich:
Multi-Tasking & New User Interface
The Android developer team recognized early that it could differentiate itself from Apple’s iOS with multi-tasking. Apple has since caught up with multi-tasking in iOS, but Android still does it better and Ice Cream Sandwich gives multi-tasking a better user interface than previous Android versions.
The big jump for Ice Cream Sandwich multi-tasking is the “Recent Apps” function that will bring up users’ most-used apps from the system bar icon either at the top or the bottom of the device. The system bar icon is a feature from Honeycomb, as are a lot of the new user interface changes in Android 4.0.
Android has a new home screen folder for users to group their apps, get app info or uninstall it. There is even the promise of being able to disable a pre-installed app, which a lot of people will be happy about if it allows them to get rid of the bloatware that the carriers and original equipment manufacturers put on their devices. We will see how well it works in practice.
Resizable widgets are also an improvement from Gingerbread that takes a hint from Honeycomb. This is a product of the developer environment that Android created with Ice Cream Sandwich as developers now have the ability to set device specifications with backwards functionality. That will allow developers to create different options for the size of widgets and applications with a few additional lines of code in the Android developer ecosystem. Resizable widgets will help users with different screen sizes take advantage of landscape of Android devices, from large tablets on down.
Data, Voice Input & Photo Editing
Android had the early lead in voice input, another area where the platforms’ developers could take a step ahead of iOS. Apple has caught up, in a big way, with iOS 5 and Siri.
From a marketing and user interface standpoint, Siri is a brilliant creation from Apple. Android 4.0 voice controls may work as well or better than Siri, but it cannot match the fact that Siri is a likable character that lives inside your iPhone and says some weird stuff sometimes. The voice input engine in Ice Cream Sandwich allows users to dictate text to the phone for as long as they want in any language. Forget the comparisons with Siri, that is a pretty neat innovation in its own right.
Last week, Opera Mobile released a browser tied to the cloud that can allow users to moderate data usage. The third-party Bolt browser that was announced at CTIA in San Diego does the same thing. In a way, Bolt and Opera were lucky that Google and Samsung pulled out of CTIA and made the Ice Cream Sandwich announcement in Hong Kong this morning because the Android browser now has the same exact functionality and may do it better.
Ice Cream Sandwich also brings native photo editing to the Android camera interface. This is another space where Android is stealing some of the thunder from the application ecosystem that had previously filled the holes that the platform did not provide. There is an array of photo editing features for both pictures and video. The biggest change here and one that brings it much closer to iOS is the ability to easily take screenshots. Apple has had this functionality for a long time and it was more difficult to perform in Android.
Android’s Native Browser Makes A Leap
Why are there so many third-party Android browsers? A couple of reasons. Unlike iOS, Android as an open application ecosystem is much friendlier to mobile browser developers. The second is that developers saw an opportunity with browsers because the native Android browser offered a subpar experience. That is about to change.
Mobile browsers are taking to the cloud. It is not actually a difficult implementation. Off loading page rendering to the cloud speeds up the browser. Google claims that the new browser in ICS is shows a 220% improvement over the Gingerbread browser. It can switch between desktop and mobile versions of a site, allow for tab preferences and Instapaper/Read It Later functionality with offline reading.
The new Android browser is actually very similar to what Amazon did with Silk and improvements that Mozilla has made with its Fennec mobile browser. The cloud functionality will help with mobile developers creating HTML5 applications and make for a better user experience on the mobile Web.
The cloud also helps with text input and email. Android 4.0 has an improved auto-completion feature. There is also an integrated menu that in the new email application that will help organize IMAP, EAS v14 and Exchange email, which will be a boon to enterprise users that have had a frustrating experience with the Android email client so far.
Android Beam & Connectivity Innovations
Near-field communications is often tied to mobile payments. Google Wallet is Android’s big push in that direction. Yet, as is often pointed out in the comments section of ReadWriteWeb, NFC can be used for much more than just payments.
Android Beam is like the next evolution of Bump that lets users share content and contacts between two NFC-enabled devices. Users can share apps, contacts, photos, documents. Ice Cream Sandwich also allows users to do this through Wi-Fi Direct and Bluetooth.
Big Picture: How Does Ice Cream Sandwich Stand Up?
Google just put the smartphone and tablet world on notice. There is a lot to like in Ice Cream Sandwich. Some of it is new (like the Face Unlock feature for security), a lot of it involves improvements to existing systems (multi-tasking, voice input, camera and calendar upgrades) and some of it is riding new trends that Android is trying to do better (NFC, cloud browsing).
There is a reason that it took Google and the Android ecosystem a long time to release Ice Cream Sandwich. Morphing the smartphone versions with Honeycomb took a lot of work but following what the competition was doing and then improving upon it is a daunting undertaking. If there is a unique feature in any mobile platform, Google just integrated it.
Ice Cream Sandwich shows us why a lot of tech pundits found the iPhone 4S so disappointing. Apple could have done almost all of these things (and probably will very soon) but the iPhone refresh was not a jump like Android 4.0. It is a game of leapfrog. Google jumped iOS with Ice Cream Sandwich and Apple may come back and jump Android with the eventual release of the iPhone 5. Everybody else, from Windows Phone, BlackBerry and even smaller platforms like Tizen, are going to be playing catchup to Google and Apple in the near future.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
OpenStack Diablo is a Quantum Leap for Open Source Cloud
Sep 22nd
The OpenStack Project is moving a bit closer to its proprietary competition with the Diablo release, out today. In addition to improving the three core projects, OpenStack is now adding a Web-based dashboard, unified authentication, and an API for configuring virtual networks. With Diablo, OpenStack is poised to manage global clouds.
The OpenStack Project has made impressive gains since its inception just a little more than a year ago. OpenStack has gone from a joint project between RackSpace and NASA to a massive effort spanning 110 companies and organizations.
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What’s New in Diablo
OpenStack Diablo improves the existing core projects: Nova (compute), Swift (object storage) and Glance (image storage) and adds two to the OpenStack Incubator. The new projects are Dashboard and Keystone.
Dashboard, as the name implies, is a new Web-based dashboard for managing and provisioning OpenStack-based clouds. Development of Dashboard is being led by Nebula, a company that’s basing its business on OpenStack. Nebula’s Devin Carlen, says that having a dashboard is key to adoption of OpenStack. “If you look at the adoption curves of Amazon Web Services, once they rolled out a Web-based control panel it took off. Having an official UI for OpenStack will drive OpenStack adoption.”
OpenStack Web-based Dashboard
The Keystone project will provide unified authentication across OpenStack projects and will integrate with other identity management tools in an organization. This means that companies won’t be stuck managing separate users for each OpenStack service and other internal services. Jonathan Bryce, chairman of the OpenStack project policy board, says that this will integrate with Microsoft’s Active Directory and LDAP systems, among others.
Keystone and Dashboard will become part of the “core” OpenStack project with the next release, Essex.
Quantum is a new incubator project that will debut in the Essex project cycle. Quantum is a networking API project led by Cisco, Citrix, Midokura, Nicira and Rackspace. It will allow dynamic network configuration and should extend beyond setting up virtual networking to managing physical network devices as well.
Going Global
In addition to better management features and user integration, the updates to the current core OpenStack projects are aimed at making OpenStack ready for global deployments.
- Nova is adding a distributed scheduler so that virtual machines can be deployed globally. It’s also getting a new identity stack (OpenStack Identity Management) and high availability networking mode.
- Object Storage (Swift) is getting multi-cluster container sync – which will allow organizations to choose how to replicate data across clusters.
- Glance, OpenStack’s image service, is getting new filtering and search capabilities in its API so that it’s easier to search through available images.
Nothing revolutionary, but a set of new features that bring OpenStack closer (if not on par) with offerings like Amazon Web Services.
The Linux of the Cloud
OpenStack has been criticized by some like Adrian Cockcroft (Netflix’s cloud architect) as “the consortium of people who can’t figure out how to compete with AWS on their own.” Well, he’s half-right.
OpenStack is a consortium of organizations that don’t want or need to compete with AWS on their own. Like Linux, OpenStack leverages the work of a much larger developer community to provide a cloud operating system that can be tailored to fit a variety of needs. It’s true that, alone, RackSpace would have had a hard time trying to keep up with AWS. Alone, Red Hat would have had a hard time making a dent in proprietary UNIX or Microsoft’s push into the server market.
With or without Netflix’s help, OpenStack is becoming a production-ready set of tools that can be used to build cloud services competitive with AWS and other proprietary cloud offerings. It’s not going to put Amazon out of business – but it doesn’t have to. It does provide a viable alternative for companies looking to build private cloud infrastructure and for vendors that want to offer cloud services.
OpenStack isn’t yet at par with AWS, and it may never be entirely feature-competitive with AWS. But, like Linux, it’s getting close enough that it will become a major player. Conversely, AWS will never be more than what Amazon makes of it. If what Amazon delivers is what you need, that’s great. But as we’ve seen with Linux, the ability to take a project and modify it to fit is often as important as the technology itself.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
TopSEOs applauds Xcellimark as one of the top search engine optimization (SEO … – PR Leap (press release)
Aug 31st
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TopSEOs applauds Xcellimark as one of the top search engine optimization (SEO …
PR Leap (press release) Orlando Interactive Digital Agency Xcellimark ranked in the top 30 firms nationwide on TopSEOs' list of leading search engine optimization link building companies for August 2011. TopSEOs identifies and ranks the best Internet marketing agencies and … |
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