Posts tagged Systems
New Chrome Beta Improves 2D & 3D Graphics for Older Systems
Feb 10th
The next version of Chrome will help older computers catch up with rapidly accelerating Web-based graphics. The upcoming Chrome release will improve the performance of hardware-accelerated 2D animations using Canvas, which include many Web-based games and other graphically-intensive sites.
It will also let systems with older GPUs use SwiftShader for 3D graphics instead of WebGL, which older GPUs can’t handle. It won’t look quite as good, but users with older systems will still get more 3D content than they currently can. The new Chrome beta with these features is available today.
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Many of Google’s recent browser-based updates have pushed the envelope on hardware performance. For example, in October, Google released 3D views in Google Maps that use WebGL, so lower-end GPUs can’t display them. Even some relatively new laptops can’t handle WebGL. The new SwiftShader capabilities in Chrome will bring some these 3D graphics to less capable systems.
Other recent Chrome releases contained advanced audio APIs and the ability to run native code inside the browser. Others focused on speeding up page loads by pre-caching pages. Chrome engineers are even building new image formats to push the Web forward. These uncompromising updates were moving pretty quickly for a while, so the next version of Chrome will let older computers catch up.
If you feel like testing Google’s browser capabilities as soon as they come out of the shop, jump in the Chrome beta channel.
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How To Track Emerging Search Engine Blekko In Web Analytics Systems
Dec 30th
More than a year has passed since search engine upstart blekko launched, yet Web marketing analysts using digital media measurement tools like Google Analytics won’t have seen any traffic attributed to blekko in organic search marketing reports. Instead, traffic supplied by blekko will show…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
View full post on Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
How Amazon’s Kindle Fire is About to One-Up Handheld Gaming Systems
Nov 9th
With less than a week to go before Amazon starts shipping its Kindle Fire tablet, the company today announced the inclusion of several more Android apps. The list of new additions includes Netflix, Pandora, Facebook, Twitter and many other hugely popular apps.
Quite a few of the applications Amazon announced today are games. Apps from Zynga, EA, Rovio and a number of other mobile game makers are going to be included on the Kindle Fire, which substantially expands the catalog of games available on the device.
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With everybody chattering on about what impact the Kindle Fire might have on other tablets like the iPad and Barnes and Noble’s new Nook, it’s easy to overlook another class of devices that may face disruption by Amazon: handheld gaming consoles.
iOS and Android: Already Disrupting the Video Game Market
In fact, this disruption is already well underway. Android and iOS have collectively begun to devour the lunch of established video game hardware manufacturers like Sony and Nintendo, according to a new report from Flurry Analytics.
Smartphones and tablets running iOS and Android will together account for nearly 60% of video game industry revenue in 2011. That percentage has in the last two years and the growth shows no sign of slowing down.
Evidently, the proliferation of tablets, smartphones and iPods, coupled with the growth of inexpensive mobile games is chiseling away at the old model of consumers spending $40 or $50 for a new game on a system from Nintendo, Sony or Microsoft.
Nintendo has already felt the heat from these trends. After it launched its much-hyped 3D handheld gaming system earlier this year, lukewarm sales forced the company to slash its price. They’ve also dropped prices on many of the games that were initially available for their Wii console.
Enter Amazon and, probably to a lesser extent, Barnes and Noble. The two companies are about to start shipping multi-purpose, Android-powered, touchscreen tablet devices that are priced competitively. Amazon’s offering will be available in over 16,000 U.S. retail stores. Neither device will single-handedly knock the iPad from its dominant position, but the availability of two entry-level tablets at half the iPad’s cost is sure to propel the growth of the tablet market overall. Analysts have predicted that Amazon could sell anywhere from 2-5 million Kindle Fires before 2011 is over.
If you think mobile games are doing well now, just wait until tablets reach 80 million U.S. consumers, something Forrester expects to happen by 2015. By then we can reasonably expect smartphone penetration to much higher than it is today as well.
Meanwhile, if these new devices from Amazon and Barnes and Noble do particularly well, Apple may be forced to reconsider its $500 starting price tag when it launches the iPad 3 in early-to-mid 2012.
No matter how you slice it, we’re going to see huge growth in tablet adoption a year from now. In addition to reading, social networking and watching plenty of video, the devices are going to continue to be used quite heavily for gaming, something Sony and Nintendo are surely aware of.
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Farmer Brown Hires Octadyne Systems for Search Engine Optimization – eYugoslavia.com
Oct 15th
 PR Web (press release) |
Farmer Brown Hires Octadyne Systems for Search Engine Optimization
eYugoslavia.com In an effort to keep pace with the changing technology and conducting business online, Farmer Brown sought out Octadyne Systems for help in maintaining a top-notch web presence using Search Engine Optimization (SEO). “We selected Octadyne Systems … Farmer Brown Hires Octadyne Systems for Search Engine Optimization |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Google Maps Gets Zooming 3D Views, But Not For “Low-End” Systems
Oct 14th
Google Maps and Google Earth are converging on that virtual-reality future we’ve dreamed about. Today, Google announced Google MapsGL, an enhancement to Maps that uses WebGL to generate swooping 3D graphics inside your browser; no installations necessary. If your hardware meets the requirements, and if you use a WebGL-capable browser, you can opt into the 21st-century Google Maps experience.
Turns out that’s a big “if,” though. The requirements are pretty stiff. “Some low-end integrated GPUs” aren’t supported, and apparently that of the latest MacBook Air is too “low-end.” Even a 2-year-old MacBook Pro gets a warning message that MapsGL will “run slowly.” You also have use Chrome (of course) or the latest Firefox 8+ Beta; Safari or … the other ones … won’t cut it. MapsGL sure looks cool, though!
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It’s new technology, so Google is brave for pushing things forward, and anybody with a computer that isn’t designed to scrimp on performance (like mine) should be able to get results. MapsGL provides sweeping, panning 3D views that let you rotate your satellite maps and watch the shadows change. When you want to go to Street View, drag the little man down, and your view will swoop down in three dimensions and put you on the street. Accordingly, Street View is faster and more responsive now, too.
Unfortunately, for some of us on brand new “low-end” computers, MapsGL is more likely to do this:
The Future of Maps
No hard feelings, though. The LatLong team has shipped a slew of impressive features recently. You can now fly along your directions in Google Maps using Google Earth views inside the browser, and that one will work for just about anybody. Maps also got a weather layer, which is handy for planning trips and outings.
Google Maps is also expanding its international reach. They’ve stepped up the importance of Google Map Maker for editing, recently graduating a big class of new crowd-sourced country maps to the live Google map.
Does MapsGL work on your system? Try it out and let us know how it goes!
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Medio Systems Rolls Custom Cloud for Five Nines (or Better) Uptime
Aug 8th
What do you do when you have more than 2.5 million users daily and have to deliver five nines uptime? If you’re Medio Systems, you roll your own cloud using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), Hadoop, and IBM System x servers.
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Medio Systems is in a bit of a niche market. The company provides a predictive analytics platform that takes a great deal of data and turns it into actionable data for network operators, handset providers, and application providers. The data is used to try to not only drive users to buy and/or consume more services, but also improve customer retention by providing information that helps providers understand customers better.
According to Medio co-founder and CTO Brian Lent, the company is not just providing reporting, but predictive analytics. What’s the difference? Lent says that there’s four stages:
- Query & Reporting: How many customers do I have?
- OLAP: Where are my customers?
- Data Mining: Which customers might buy more services?
- Predictive Analysis: What do we offer the customer right now?
In other words, instead of just getting reports about what users have done, Lent says that the goal for Medio is to help companies understand “how to make interaction with the consumer better.” That, in turn, drives a lot of data and response times are crucial.
The initial solution being offered by Medio, wasn’t cutting it. Medio was deploying co-located servers that let individual customers process data. According to a case study released today (PDF), the custom cloud using RHEL, Hadoop, and 60 IBM System x servers have a response time in the range of 75 milliseconds – down from 894 milliseconds. The number of transactions has increased from 41.5 per second to 1,200 – all while maintaining 100 percent availability.
One might wonder why Medio decided to deploy a custom cloud rather than using hosted cloud services from providers like Amazon or Rackspace. According to Rob Lilleness, Medio’s CEO, it’s all about uptime. “We do have some of it running on AWS… but certain larger enterprises have demanding SLAs. In fairness to today’s cloud market, it’s challenging to get an effective price point and get that high level of availability.” Lilleness did note that “it may be changing” and the company isn’t “wedded” to its own cloud – but right now, he says cloud providers “don’t deal with that kind of volume.”
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Fuze Meeting Now Integrates With High-End Telepresence Systems
Jun 15th
FuzeBox wants to make telepresence a less proprietary, boxed-in experience for businesses. To do this, they’ve begun integrating Fuze Meeting, their cross-platform online meeting product, with high-end telepresence systems like Polycom, Tandberg and LifeSize.
This move lets companies hang onto their legacy teleconference solutions while easily extending their functionality onto smart phones and tablet devices.
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Fuze Telepresence Connect, as it’s called, is “the world’s first telepresence gateway for H.323, SIP and H.264 that links high end telepresence systems to a personal device such as iPad, Android and Honeycomb tablets, as well as PCs and Macs,” according to a statement from the company.
Some of its key features include HD multi-party video conferencing, error resilience, resolution and rate matching and support for video standards.
Fuze is a Web-based videoconferencing application on par with GoToMeeting and WebEx. It was the first such product to make its way onto Android tablets and the first to offer the ability to schedule meetings directly from tablets, rather than having to do so from a desktop.
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5 Cloud-based Operating Systems That Are Still Standing
May 13th
The announcement of the official Google Chromebooks has rekindled interest in Google’s Chrome OS. But you don’t need to wait to rent a Chromebook if you want to use the operating system. People have been running Chromium OS on netbooks for quite some time. And Chrome/Chromium isn’t the only option for a cloud-oriented OS – we covered a few that were already available as of November of last year.
One of those OSes, Joli OS, has gone a step further and started offering a cloud-hosted version of its environment. You can access your Joli OS desktop from almost any browser. But it’s not alone in the cloud-based OS world. Many Web desktops have come and gone in the past few years. Here’s a look at a few that are still around.
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CloudMe
CloudMe, formerly known as icloud, is a storage-oriented Web desktop. It offers 3GB of storage for free, and Web applications such as a Zoho-based office suite, a photo editor, an instant messenger, a Twitter client, games and more. It has a mobile client available Android and iOS and a mobile-optimized website, allowing you to access your files from your phone or tablet but not the full desktop environment.
One big disadvantage is that the Web desktop environment is a Java applet, and it’s slow and buggy.
eyeOS
eyeOS has been around since 2005, and has been steadily updated since then. It’s written primarily in PHP and JavaScript, and is open source so you can download and and install it on your own Web server. It does use some Flash, but it’s not required.
It has a mobile-optimized version that enables access to files, but it’s not the desktop experience and documents can’t be edited.
Glide
Glide is a Flash-based Web desktop. It’s also been around since 2005. It has the usual features: an office suite, photo editor, IM client, etc. It’s big advantage is that it offers 30GB of free storage space. A premium account, which costs $50 a year, will buy you 250GB of storage. It also has the ability to sync files Windows, Macintosh and Linux desktops.
Glide has both mobile-optimized site and an iPad-optimized site that provide a relatively complete set of features, including the ability to create and edit documents. What it doesn’t seem to offer, however, is the ability to access your files offline from a mobile device.
Joli OS
Joli OS used to be called JoliCloud. Now JoliCloud refers to a service from Joli OS that allows you to access your Joli OS desktop from the Web. The desktop version is a Linux-based OS optimized for netbooks. The Web-based version is written in HTML5 and works from most browsers, including the iPad. An Android version is in the works. However, since the JoliOS desktop mostly just provides shortcuts to Web applications, the Web-hosted version feels like more of a hosted bookmark system than a full OS.
You can find our past coverage of Joli OS here.
Netvibes
Netvibes takes a different approach but offering a number of widgets arranged in a dashboard. We’ve covered Netvibes often. The company now seems to be more dedicated to creating enterprise dashboard products than consumer dashboards.
Other Alternatives
Some might find this approach old fashioned, considering the availability of services like Box and Dropbox – or more importantly, Google Docs. Google Docs has been expanding its storage space, and its functionality. Is there really a need to mimic a desktop operating system when what you really need is universal access to your files?
The trend towards cloud storage is reflected in the marketing materials from the cloud OS vendors. CloudMe has been emphasizing its cloud storage capabilities over its Web desktop in recent months.
Glide is the most impressive of the lot, but without offline mobile access, I can’t think of a reason I’d use it. In 2008 a the Web desktop YouOS closed its doors because its own developers couldn’t find a use for it themselves.
What do you think? Is there any future in the Web-based OS?
Lead photo by Michael Roper
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Will Desktop Virtualization Be Relevant in the Era of Cloud Operating Systems?
Apr 8th
Cloud-oriented operating systems like Chrome OS, Jolicloud and Peppermint OS can run on low-end hardware and provide an alternative to desktop virtualization infrastructure (VDI). Instead of running a desktop environment on a central server, the desktop is displaced entirely in favor of Web applications. This approach does away with the need to virtualize and can ease compatibility issues across platforms. The offline storage feature of HTML5 will solve the availability issue for Web applications.
If cloud-oriented OSs catch on, will desktop virtualization still be relevant?
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Porting desktop applications to the Web a great solution to compatibility issues. But there are some situations when it’s not practical. Not all legacy applications can be ported to the Web effectively. And though modernizing old desktop-based enterprise applications is a great goal, it’s not always financially feasible. In some cases, it’s cheaper and easier to use virtual machines. In these cases, running virtual desktops that are accessible from the Web could combine the two paradigms.
In some cases you might want to run Web applications within a virtual environment. Caching data locally, through HTML5 offline storage or by other means, can create security issues. You need to be able to encrypt and remotely wipe disks containing potentially sensitive data. Enterprise device management tools provide this capability, but there are some scenarios in which you may not want to wipe all the data on a device.
For example, employee-owned devices are becoming more common in the enterprise. Consider this scenario: employees using iPads they purchased themselves to access company Web applications. They use secure connections, but cache data offline. What happens when someone decides to leave the company?
You may want to wipe the employee’s device, but that would mean wiping all the personal data from the device as well as all the company data. Perhaps you could make it a company policy that employees who use their personal devices for work have to agree to having their personal information wiped if and when they leave the company. But this could be bad for morale, and discourage staff from bringing useful devices to work.
If you’re running a VM on the device, however, you can remotely wipe just the VM and leave the rest of the data on the device intact. It may make sense then to use a VM even when only accessing Web applications, so that all cached data can be selectively wiped. In this case, you’ll want to run a local VM that includes features such as a VPN client and Web browser. VMware is working with LG on a solution along these lines.
Desktop virtualization has many uses. Even as new devices proliferate and applications move to the Web, running local or remote VMs will remain a relevant technology for years to come.
Photo by Yasunari Nakamura
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Meta Description and Content Management Systems – SEO and Social Media Factors
Mar 14th
Most of us know that while the search engines no longer consider the meta description in their ranking factors, this element of your page is still important in getting traffic to your site.
How Meta Descriptions are used on Search Engines and Social Media Websites
1. While not a ranking factor, the meta description is still important in organic searches as the search engines use this in the ‘snippet’ that appears below the title in search results. The more relevant and enticing this snippet is, the more likely you are to get users to click on the listing.
Google Search Results showing Meta Description used as snippet for HighRankings.com
2. Many social media sites include the meta description when you share a link. As with organic search listings, a relevant and enticing description here is more likely to get clicked on and shared on further. (See this post on using titles for social media success for more information on how links are posted on social media sites.)
HighRankings’com page posted on Facebook showing Meta Description.
So to have relevant, enticing descriptions across platforms for all of the pages on your website, it is best if you can insert a unique meta description for each individual page, but sometimes this is not feasible.
How Content Management Systems deal with Meta Descriptions
These days, most Content Management Systems provide a field for meta description for each page (or you can use a plugin/add-in that creates this feature). After many years of coding by hand to have complete control I’ve selected to use WordPress with Genesis Theme Framework [http://www.studiopress.com/] which allows you to create unique Titles, Descriptions, etc. for each page – as well as for categories and tags.
Genesis Premium WP Theme Framework SEO Options and Settings
I train my clients in how to best use these fields, but very often I find that they do not enter anything in these fields. If you don’t enter anything in the Meta Description field then there is none, there’s no default or automated description using this theme framework.
What if a page has no Meta Description?
While if you don’t enter a Custom Document Title the system makes the post/page title the <title>, the team at Studio Press, developers of the Genesis WordPress Theme Framework, have decided not to generate a default description based on input from SEOs like Joost de Valk who feel that if you are not going to handcraft a good description for a page yourself, you are better off letting the search engines generate the snippet for you, “…most plugins pick the first sentence, which might be an introductory sentence which has hardly anything to do with the subject, or another sentence with a keyword in it, which might be completely wrong to pick as description”.
SEOmoz states that in some cases you should deliberately choose to leave out the meta description, “…if the page is targeting longer tail traffic (3+ keywords), for example with hundreds of articles or blog entries or even a huge product catalog, it can sometimes be wiser to let the engines themselves extract the relevant text.”
In the image at the top of page showing Google search results for “meta description” the listing for Wikipedia illustrates the benefit of letting Google create the snippet. The page covers the Meta Element in general and the snippet shows the specific text about Meta Description. A handcrafted description would probably be too general and an automated meta description may take just the first paragraph of the page: “Meta elements are the HTML or XHTML <meta … > element used to provide structured metadata about a Web page. Multiple elements are often used on the same page: the element is the same, but its attributes are different. Meta elements can be used to specify page description, keywords and any other metadata not provided through the other head elements and attributes.”
When the Search Engine Generated Snippet Doesn’t Work Well
But the search engines don’t always do a good job with the snippets. Take the Google Webmaster Blog for example:
Google search result for “importance of meta description”
Google doesn’t even take its own advice in the post, probably because it has so much confidence in its own ability to create a snippet. This post has no meta description so the search result shows a snippet that is taken from content on the page related to the search.
In this case it is a comment posted by a reader, not even from the main post where the information on the topic should be. So a handcrafted description would probably represent the page better, but even if the first paragraph of the post was used as a default it would have made a good meta description:
The first paragraph of the Google Webmaster Post
With no meta description, the description of the page when shared on other sites is less than helpful. In sharing the link on Facebook it is again using a comment which is not that helpful.
The result when sharing the post on Facebook, showing a poor description as there was no Meta Description.
I do agree that automatically generated meta descriptions are not necessary as far as organic search results are concerned, but a description of some kind is important when sharing links on social media and some directory sites using a sharing tool or another automated method. Obviously a handwritten, unique meta description is the ideal and for best results we should aim to create these, but being realistic, and honest – I have to admit that I’ve caught myself leaving out the description more times than I am happy with – there will be many times when the meta description is not filled out.
I also find it annoying when I go to share a link to someone else’s site on one of my social media accounts and the description is not helpful so I either delete it or rewrite it. If you want people to share your links on a regular basis, it’s best to make it as easy as possible and for the information on the post with your link to be as relevant as possible.
For me an automatically generated meta description would work because I just think it’s good SEO copywriting, and copywriting in general, to include an opening paragraph which describes what the post is about and includes your keyphrases. I coach my clients to do the same, but many people do not write this way.
Balancing out descriptions for Organic Search Results and Social Media Sharing
So should a Content Management System include a default meta description if you do not add one, perhaps taken from the first 150 characters of a page? Traffic from organic search results is still definitely a more important source of traffic for nearly all websites, but social media marketing has become an important part of many online marketing campaign and the ability to share links from your website is an important part of this.
Are there other options for creating descriptions?
Open Graph protocol [http://ogp.me/] is another way to indicate the information to be posted on social media sites. Perhaps its use will become common place amongst developers of Content Management Systems, themes and plugins/add-ons; as these can be set to automate the description for social media sharing separate to the meta description. Or the developers may come up with new ways to handle this issue.
Until then I’ll have a big post-it on my computer, “Don’t forget the Meta Description!”, and if you’ve found another way to address this issue with Meta Descriptions, I’d love to hear all about it.
Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.
Meta Description and Content Management Systems – SEO and Social Media Factors
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