Posts tagged point
Bing Now A Full Point Ahead Of Yahoo In Search Share — comScore
Feb 9th
Today comScore reported January search share figures for the US market. We restrained ourselves this month, not posting on subject this before the official release, given the error that happened last time with one of the financial analyst firms and the early release of the data. Google gained share…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
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Missing the Point of WordPress Entirely
Jan 11th
A post by Kevinjohn Gallagher on "no longer recommending WordPress" to his clients has gotten a bit of traction lately. While there’s legitimate criticism to be leveled at WordPress, Gallagher’s isn’t (for the most part) it. If you’re approaching WordPress with the expectation that it’s the be-all and end-all of content management systems (CMSes) you’re going to be sorely disappointed. And frankly, I hope WordPress never tries to fit the ridiculous list of requirements that Gallagher tries to saddle it with.
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Apparently this has been brewing for a while, judging by Gallagher’s comments on WPTavern in December. While Gallagher has a few legitimate complaints (no doubt many users wish the admin UI would just settle down a bit), carping about lack of reporting and support for IE6 demonstrates criteria that are more than a bit out of whack.
What Is And What Should Never Be
Let’s look at some of Gallagher’s requirements, and ask ourselves was WordPress ever intended to do these things or were the expectations a little off?
You can approach any piece of software and walk away completely disappointed if your expectations are out of whack. Gallagher’s complaints are as much a reflection on his poor choice of software as any failings on the behalf of WordPress.
Gallagher says that WordPress has "no, or severely limited" document management, workflow management, single sign-on, digital asset management, publishing options, WYSIWYG editing, multi-lingual and many others. WordPress.org describes WordPress as "web software you can use to create a beautiful website or blog."
As WordPress has grown, it’s cautiously taken on the CMS label, but it does not promise to be a full-blown content management system in the old school tradition of biggie CMS installations. And despite the fact that many folks pine for WordPress to become the Swiss Army knife of CMSes, it simply cannot while staying true to its core community.
Designing "beautiful" websites has very little to do with digital asset management features. Single sign-on is something that would be nice to have in WordPress, but is it really something that would benefit a large percentage of WordPress users for the effort required? Is true WYSIWYG editing really promised or required to build a Web site, or even necessary in any CMS?
Many of the features Gallagher wishes for are available via plug-ins, though perhaps not implemented exactly as Gallagher would wish. For example, you can get some document management with plugins. You can get workflow management with a plugin. Note that these may not suit your tastes, but then again – they might not suit your taste if they were implemented in core WordPress, either. The nice thing is that you can get different implementations that suit different use cases.
WP Document Revisions
It’s also worth noting that some of Gallagher’s complaints about WordPress are inaccurate, overly vague or exaggerated. I’m not even sure what n-to-n sharing is, and trying to find that on Google didn’t help. (Any CMS gurus care to enlighten me in the comments?) The claims that WordPress beta didn’t work in Windows at all is a gross exaggeration. And it’s a bleeping beta anyway. And was this in Internet Explorer, or all browsers? I suspect when Gallagher says "Windows" he really means "old versions of Internet Explorer."
Setting Expectations
You can approach any piece of software and walk away completely disappointed if your expectations are out of whack. Gallagher’s complaints are as much a reflection on his poor choice of software as any failings on the behalf of WordPress. As he even says in his post, "Our clients have consistently given us worse and worse feedback on the update process, and asked for more and more features that WordPress simply isn’t capable of. That is not a criticism of the software itself, though I know many will think that, it’s just that it’s not able to do what we constantly try to make it do."
Well, yeah. WordPress also doesn’t make me waffles and wash my socks. Then again, I never expected it to.
Long story short? Gallagher utterly failed himself and clients if he’s been banging away at WordPress for four years with increasing disappointment. While requirements do emerge over time in any project, it sounds a lot like the biggest failure here was in gathering requirements at the start of the project and ensuring that WordPress met them.
As I’ve said here and elsewhere a number of times, I’m a big fan of Vim. It matches my requirements for a text editor perfectly, but it’s simply not suitable for any users who are unwilling to put in the time/effort. It’s not suitable for those who need something radically different, like revision tracking features in Microsoft Word. Want an editor that runs on the iPad? Sorry. That’s not a failing on the part of Vim, it’s simply a mismatch.
All too Common
Unfortunately, Gallagher’s reaction to WordPress is typical. It sounds very much like Gallagher plunged into recommending WordPress without really scoping his client’s requirements under the assumption that it can do anything. WordPress does have its failings (so do the other CMSes) but it’s also chock full of awesome for a wide range of projects. Part of supporting WordPress is knowing what those projects are.
Gallagher, his firm and his clients should use whatever works for them, of course. It doesn’t sound like WordPress fits the bill for whatever requirements they have, and that’s fine. But don’t slag WordPress (or any other software) for failing to deliver something it never promised in the first place.
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Daily Wrap: Pinterest from a Male Point of View and More
Jan 5th
Dave Copeland gives you a guy’s opinion on Pinterest. This and more in today’s Daily Wrap.
Sometimes it’s difficult to catch every story that hits tech media in a day, so we wrap up some of the most talked about stories. We give you a daily recap of what you missed in the ReadWriteWeb Community, including a link to some of the most popular discussions in our offsite communities on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ as well.
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A Guy’s Guide To Pinterest
Pinterest users are more likely to be female, but today ReadWriteWeb writer, Dave Copeland, decided to venture into the visually oriented social bookmarking site to give you a man’s point of view. From signing up to actually pinning some items, take a look at his first thoughts about the site.
From the comments:
Jeff Downer — “I suppose that women being the early adopters of Pinterest says something about women and visual stimulus. It must indicate something about men’s brains being different than women’s.
What that may be I’ll leave to smarter and wiser folks than me.”
More Must Read Stories:
New Chrome Will Pre-Load Web Pages Before You Hit Enter
Google Chrome released a new beta version today that takes the insurgent browser’s instant and predictive features even further. The Instant Pages feature that pre-loads Web pages in the background as you search has been expanded to the omnibox, Chrome’s combination address and search bar. If you’re typing in a site you visit all the time, and the address auto-completes, Chrome will begin pre-rendering the page, reducing load time. (more)
7 Ways to Love Blog Comments Again HOT TOPIC
Comments on blogs, what are they good for? Sometimes it’s hard to remember, but you know there’s a lot of potential in taking the democratization of publishing to the next level and letting people comment on your blog-written comments on the world. (more)
Why Tumblr Fan Mail Will Beat Facebook Messages & Twitter DMs
Tumblr just announced a new private messaging feature called Fan Mail. It’s a more personal means that’s not email, which requires you to know your favorite blogger’s email address (do you?) or the handwritten form of the 20th century, snail mail. That leaves two social network-y means of contact: Facebook private messages and Twitter direct messages. Depending on the blogger’s comfort level, however, they may not make Facebook messages on profile pages an option. Similarly, not every blogger follows fans back on Twitter. (more)
Hackers Steal 45,000 Facebook Passwords & Logins
A rampant worm by the name of Ramnit has stolen login and password information for 45,000 Facebook users, mostly in the UK and France. Prowling the 800-million-strong social network, the worm eats user names, passwords and browser cookies. It also acts as a backdoor, meaning a hacker can attack any computer that has already been infected. According to the Microsoft Malware Protection Center, Ramnit infects Windows executables, Microsoft Office and HTML files. The Ramnit worm initially transformed into financial malware in August 2011, according to reports from Trusteer. (more)
Death By Smartphone: How Mobile Photography Helped Kill Kodak
Well, it’s official. After years of struggling, photographic services giant Kodak is filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, the Wall Street Journal reported. The company, which was long known for selling film and other photography-related products, had tried everything from branching out into more modern offerings to using its trove of patents to sue others. Alas, the times have caught up with Kodak. (more)
Find Out Where Your Legislators Stand On SOPA, PIPA
There are plenty of websites – not to mention several apps – that will help you figure out where certain companies stand on the Stop Online Piracy and Protect IP Acts. What has been harder to track is how lawmakers who haven’t co-sponsored the bill stand on the divisive issues, or how campaign contributions may influence their decisions when the measures finally come up for a vote. (more)
Betting Big on the Future of HTML5, Financial Times Buys Dev Shop
In a demonstration of its confidence in the future of HTML5, business newspaper The Financial Times has acquired the development firm that built its mobile Web app. London-based Assanka was purchased by the FT for unnamed sum of money. (more)
What is Really New About the Cloud?
Billions of words have been written about “the cloud” and its benefits, implications, and challenges. Hundreds of vendors have sprung up or re-positioned themselves as cloud companies, and there is a vast amount of real business change underway. However, I have seen very little that explains for the layperson what is actually new about the cloud that makes it so interesting and important. (more)
More than 66% of Users Have Upgraded to iOS 5
A lot is made of Android platform device updates. Is your phone going to be getting Ice Cream Sandwich? According to the latest numbers, Gingerbread is the dominant version of Android in the wild, with version 2.2 Frozen Yogurt still on more than 30% of all devices. What about Apple? iOS 5 has been available for about three months. How many users have upgraded their phones to the newest platform? (more)
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Check Point Offers New Cloud-Based Firewall for AWS
Jan 5th
Check Point announced today their Virtual Appliance for Amazon Web Services can now be purchased as an Amazon machine image to directly protect any AWS-based resources running on Amazon’s EC2 service. For those of you that are familiar with their integrated security appliance, it is certainly something to consider.
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There are several steps required to install their security appliance on Amazon. First, you need to set up Amazon’s VPC to create a VPN connection to EC2. You then locate the Checkpoint virtual appliance – it is an unlisted AMI – and set up the networking addresses to bridge your network and AWS’. Finally, you download the Windows management tool to configure the various security policies.
The virtual appliance is similar to an actual Check Point physical appliance: it comes with a series of add-on “blades” that are separately priced for other things besides a simple firewall that include URL filtering, application control and data loss protection. Things start at $2000, which includes the firewall blade and virtual gateway. Customers can add on additional software blade protections that begins at $1,500; some are based on a subscription model, such as Intrusion Prevention.
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SEO 2012: 7 Point Checklist for Search Engine Ranking – SubmitinME
Jan 3rd
 Caribbean Media Vision |
SEO 2012: 7 Point Checklist for Search Engine Ranking
SubmitinME SEO is here to stay, probably till the end of the world (hope it is not on 21st December 2012, when the Mayan calendar ends). SEO continues to grow all the more important in 2012 adding social ranking factors to it thereby evolving into what could be … Don't Fall Into The Made-For-SEO Website Trap BizCloud Provides SEO Tips for New Websites 12 SEO Resolutions for 2012 |
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Got Opinion but No Camera? Illustrate Your Point of View with Xtranormal
Dec 20th
Can you create a YouTube video to influence public opinion without a video camera? Well, four new animated videos use Xtranormal Movie Maker, which lets you to turn anything you type into a fully-animated CG movie, to promote a point of view.
Fo…
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DIY Enterprise Apps Hit the Tipping Point
Dec 14th
Earlier today, my colleague John Paul Titlow posted a piece on comedian Louis CK’s DIY efforts to shoot and publish a performance video online. You can also draw some parallels with those enterprise folks who are building their own apps. Now comes this study done for Intuit that is worth taking a look at.
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Intuit hired the Global Strategy Group to survey nearly 1,000 people who are building their own apps outside official IT channels. The survey found that half of information workers now turn to online databases and Web-based productivity apps, instant messaging platforms, video chat services and social networks to solve their own business problems. Many of them are taking less than a week to do so, too, and an overwhelming majority of these apps are still in use. Talk about creating the next legacy platform! Here you can see some of the other survey results (the full infographic is at the link above.)
The survey found that 17 percent of information workers said they select tools and software to meet their needs without IT approval or support. Of course, one of the tools used by the respondents is Intuit Quickbase, so these results are somewhat self-serving. But still, worth further investigation.
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MLB.com Challenge 4th Inning: The Point of No Return
Nov 11th
Hinds Hall, Syracuse University campus, 2:48 am ET November 11 – Three in the morning is a magical time. There’s a certain weightlessness about 3 am, when you’re up all night working on a huge project, after midnight has hurdled you into the great unknown, when you realize you’re reaching maximum altitude and every action seems effortless. Inertia seems to carry you forward, and for a few moments, it’s as though your body were floating in front of you.
From the point of view of 3 am, everything seems equalized. The pressure subsides, a new rhythm enters your head, and only tomorrow exists. For the students cranking away at the MLB.com University Challenge, there’s no question any more about which way to go. That decision was already made, the booster stage has already blasted off, and from here until the rest of the project, they’ll be feeling more and more like passengers.
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Team “Winston” is now committed to a Flash-based interactive mockup of its “game within a game.” They’ve moved from one of the conference rooms to one of the open iLabs, where each terminal has dual monitors, the air circulates a little more, and there’s the sound of other students in the hallways to keep you from feeling you’re in a cavern.
Ross is driving “Winston’s” vision with his trademark laser-like precision and intensity. You get the feeling that, if he were your younger brother, he’d still be badgering you like your older one.
Elsewhere in the iLabs, the “Web Gems” have hit upon an HTML5 motif. They’ve seen some impressive demos of layering, where separate elements can scroll at different speeds, creating a Disney-like rotoscoping effect.
Right now, they’re scrolling everything they can find, and they’re raiding the Web for photos. What they don’t have in mind quite yet is an application for their vision, but they know they have a technology and they’re storing up the energy to drive it. Which makes “Web Gems” like a great many Silicon Valley startups.
“The Walkoffs” have the most experienced talent in the game: two of them graduate students, one of them a senior majoring in aerospace engineering, one a senior majoring in architecture. And Reynaldo, the only sophomore, is the expert on the Android SDK. Chris, a library science major, is a JavaScript expert. His vision is to create a fully working mockup, not using Flash, but real events captured by the browser, processed, then rendered using jQuery.
Like a battle cry for the ages, Chris has emblazoned along the top of the whiteboard in his cramped lab room, “Flash is dead!” You can see the remnants of impromptu lectures he’s been giving on JavaScript events architecture. He’s teaching Deven, a computer science major but not yet the jQuery expert, how the jQuery syntax simplifies itself by chaining new methods onto the end of the results of earlier ones. The trick they’re working on at the moment, apparently, is knowing the variable type of the returned value before passing it to the next method.
It’s not the type of subject matter that keeps Deven’s eyes from glazing over at 3:30. He’s starting to switch to autopilot mode, as they engage the help of Reynaldo’s Droid phone, which is hooked up via USB cable. They’re trying to find which events fire at what times, so they can chain the events to one another in jQuery in the right order. This way, if they’re successful, they might be the only team to show their real-world mockup not on an SDK, but with an actual, live smartphone demo.
They’re not seeing the results they’re looking for, and they’re starting to blame the Android operating system. There’s too many simultaneous versions, Chris notes, so some phones may fire events that are recognized by jQuery 1.7, and some won’t. That’s a problem in the end, because Chris wants believability. He doesn’t want to say his team’s demo can do something, if it can’t work on a Droid.
“Rubin’s Army” is spinning out. They’ve abandoned their previous ideas, and now they’re scanning through the history page of the existing MLB.com in search of clues for where to go now. Their palms are telling them the only place they’d really like to go contains pillows.
“SRFA” is made up of management and entrepreneurship majors, who also happen to be dedicated console gamers. They know the Asian games market as well as, if not better than, the U.S. market. And German (pronounced “H-herr-mann,” he tells me, with Ricardo Montalban’s accent) has hit upon a market need he’d like to fill: There’s no franchise game for smartphones in the U.S. based on Major League Baseball. Ironically, there is one in South Korea, and it’s a huge hit.
From German’s perspective, it’s a no-brainer: Obviously the MLB franchise needs a smartphone game. So instead of writing one, think like a businessman, he proposes. Buy the two existing games that are already written and already supported. Merge the best parts of both into a single unit, and market it as “MLB: Challenge.” Launch it online with a downloadable component at a low $5 price point.
It would solve the problem of having to create a mockup, German reasons, as he begins listing the reasons for doing it on the whiteboard he is now the unchallenged master of. Why mock up something that’s already a huge hit? There is the problem of tying it in with the MLB.com Web site, the others point out. Don’t focus on it as a problem, German posits like a marketing specialist, but recast it as a solution. MLB.com doesn’t have a smartphone game. That’s a market void. Here’s something to fill it. Bam.
For some reason, it’s hard to sit through marketing jargon when the clock on the wall says 4 am. Funny, but at 3 am, the world seemed so effortless. Now all of a sudden, “vertical” is a direction that takes many opposing angles at once. And horizontal is starting to look like the best one of all.
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Mobile App Inflection Point: 25 Billion Apps Downloaded in 2011
Nov 11th
Mobile analytics company Flurry estimates that application downloads to Android and iOS will hit 25 billion in 2011. That is a 300% jump from 2010, when six billion were downloaded. Of those 25 billion, five billion are expected to come in December as consumers buy new smartphones and start downloading to satisfy their insatiable hunger for mobile goodness.
Smartphones have hit an inflection point. It is not the one we are waiting for quite yet (when 50% of all U.S. consumers have smartphones) but growth like this happens when critical mass of adoption has been realized and a behavior once reserved for early adopters becomes the cultural norm.
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Around 43% of U.S. consumers have smartphones. It is likely that the 50% inflection point will come before Q3 of 2012. What will app downloads look like then? There is no way that 300% growth year-over-year can be sustained but the exponential rates will continue throughout the rest of this decade until smartphones and app adoption reaches the point of cultural ubiquity.
Flurry says that revenues from app downloads will reach $2.5 billion this year. In the New York Times story about Flurry’s data, there is no breakdown on where that revenue is broken down between paid downloads, in-app purchases, freemium services or advertising. It is likely that revenue number will double next year as more apps are downloaded and a lot of the marketing programs, analytics services, engagement activities and all the push notifications tied to those solutions mature and become more prevalent.
The NYT article also does not break that revenue down by platform. How is the pie sliced between Android and iOS? Android developers have long lamented that the platform is not conducive to making money and that is one of the reasons why developers first look to iOS with new apps before moving to Android. It used to be that iOS was just an easier environment to develop for and make great looking apps, but that particular barrier has eroded in 2011 with a plethora of terrific Android apps coming to the platform.
There is also the question of how the rest of the ecosystem will evolve or devolve. My biggest question for 2012 is: what is going to happen to Research In Motion? Will the ecosystem rebound and if so, how will its app ecosystem grow with it? Same goes for Windows Phone 7, which has positioned itself well to have a growing and robust application ecosystem that developers can monetize well.
If 25 billion apps were downloaded in 2011, developers, carriers, OEMs and consumers should be getting excited for what is going to happen in 2012 and beyond. What are your expectations for the mobile ecosystem in the coming year?
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Verifone Acquires Global Bay to Give Retailers Flexibility At the Point of Sale
Nov 1st
Payments hardware and software company Verifone today announced the acquisition of Global Bay to bring flexibility to the point of sale to retail stores across the world. Verifone is locked into a battle for mobile credit card readers with the likes of Square, Intuit, ROAMPay, Erply and PayAnywhere. In the retail channel, Global Bay should help Verifone differentiate itself from the pack.
The opportunity for mobile credit card readers is to disrupt the traditional cash register point of sale. Users want to be able scan items from their smartphones and then turn around to the next available clerk and pay for them. The idea is to make the point of sale mobile, even within a retail store.
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The new Global Bay/Verifone product will have four features: mobile point of sale, retailing (price check, customer programs, credit card enrollment), “clienteling” (information about customers for sales associates) and inventory management. The mobile POS will be integrated from both Global Bay and Verifone’s offerings while Global Bay brings the other three to the fold. Instead of a dongle, Global Bay uses a sleeve that can fit over devices such as an iPod Touch.
There is an opportunity for retails stores to vastly enhance the checkout process with mobile payments. Cherian Abraham, a developer from a company called Drop Labs, wrote extensively a couple of weeks ago about the point of sale within retails stores in relation to the opportunities created with near field communications and the Google Wallet. The idea is users can scan and purchase items straight off the store shelf, eliminating the actual cash register. Clerks and sales associates could check the mobile receipt for customers that made purchases on their way out the door.
Verifone and Global Bay do not take the solution quite that far. What the strength is for Verifone with this acquisition is the infrastructure and software support that Global Bay provides. Mobile inventory management is a good feature that not many of the other mobile credit card readers institute, except for Erply, which specializes in that particular function. Each of the major mobile credit readers & dongle providers have a specialty within the ecosystem. Square touts its ubiquity and ability to create a cash register and card case rewards program. Intuit has a wealth of financial management solutions. PayAnywhere also touts its ubiquity (hence the name) and tries to be slightly cheaper than the alternatives (if ever so slightly).
Before the Global Bay acquisition, Verifone touted its security. The company once scolded Square for not encrypting its dongles. Verifone is now looking to create value added services on tops it platform to entice retailers to use the service.
What do you think of the ability to pay from anywhere you want in a retail store? Merchants, does arming your employees with mobile readers entice you? What are the benefits? Let us know in the comments.
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