Irish Web Technology Conference
This major four-day event includes 11 separate tracks and over 50 sessions in all covering everything from Business, Design, Development, SEO, Analytics, Marketing and Legal.
“The IWTC is the largest web conference ever held in Ireland and includes a number of renowned speakers from the web industry,” said Barry Alistair, the conference project manager. ” It is being held in the CineWorld complex because, with cinema-style seating and presentations on the BIG screens, it lends itself incredibly well to a superb audience experience which is second to none. In true IrishDev.com community style, we have involved the Ruby Ireland, Python Ireland, PHP, Microsoft and Dublin Java user groups in speaker selection and they have done a fantastic job getting a schedule together which will appeal to web industrialists, regardless of position, seniority and technology preferences.”
Wireless access will be available for delegates to follow the presenters or even to keep in touch with important e-mails or work throughout their time at the conference.
The Irish Web Technology Conference will also provide an opportunity for delegates to participate in “Open Coffee and Bottle” sessions as well as user group meetings. Another major event will be Ireland’s very first “Girl Geek Dinner”. Organised by Martha Rotter, who is part of the IWTC committee, the “Girl Geek Dinner” is an informal event which is open to all women in technology. “It has been around in the UK for a couple of years now,” Rotter explained. “We plan on rotating the event around Ireland and we’re using IWTC 2008 to launch the first one. Of course, men may also join in the fun. However, they will need to be invited by a female attendee.”
For more information, including a full list of speakers, go to www.iwtc.firstPort.ie.
Nokia has started on-line game service N-Gage
Finnish company Nokia has started on-line game service N-Gage for mobile devices. Through service N-Gage users can communicate with friends, read reviews, load demonstration versions of games and buy the liked software products (mobile phones Nokia N73, N81/N81 8GB are supported, N95/N95 8GB and a number of other models, which list will extend).
Service N-Gage should open in November of the last year. Then start of a site has been transferred on the end of December and again postponed prior to the beginning of current year, informs Reuters.
Simultaneously with start N-Gage new social network Share on Ovi has been opened allowing users to exchange a various content by means of a mobile phone or an ordinary computer. Service is constructed on the basis of technologies of American company Twango which Nokia has got in the past to year. Universal platform Twango, enables users to organize, transfer and store multimedia files, and also allows developers to create accompanying appendices and to integrate them with other on-line services.
Let’s remind, that game service N-Gage and social network Share on Ovi are a part of platform Ovi (in Finnish means “door”). Within the limits of project Ovi company Nokia plans to give to users access to various interactive a web-services. One of components of initiative Ovi - new musical shop Nokia Music Store.
Microsoft is measured to buy Yahoo for 44,6 billion dollars
Corporation Microsoft has suggested to get for 44,6 billion dollars of one of leaders the Internet-search company Yahoo. Decision Microsoft is caused by necessity to make a competition of company Google on which share it is necessary more than 60 % of search inquiries on the Internet. Search service Yahoo 13 % of users, and Microsoft - use almost only 2,9 %.
For each action Yahoo president Microsoft Steve Balmer has offered 31 dollar that exceeds market cost of securities popular the Internet-portal on 62 %. Steve Balmera’s offer promoted growth of the price of actions Yahoo in one and a half time, informs АР.
Bill Gates’s company has suggested shareholders Yahoo to exchange the actions either for cash, or on actions Microsoft. In case of the consent the Internet-giant, half of sum of the transaction half - cash will be paid by actions, and.
Experts in the field of the Internet-marketing consider that tandem Microsoft-Yahoo ” basically can become competitor Google in the given segment of the market (search systems), however on it greater expenses ” be required. Thus experts have declared, that association of the companies can ” introduce set of innovations that is good help ” on the market.
Last years company Yahoo gradually loses the positions. In 2007 the net profit of the company has decreased on 12 % in this connection management Yahoo has declared the future reduction of staff.
IBM Opens Jazz Dev Community
IBM announced last week that it would open up its Jazz.net development platform to developers. Jazz.net is an open commercial software development community that helps to create global collaboration solutions based on IBM Rational technology. Jazz was originally open only to IBM staff, academics and customers. Now, any registered Jazz contributor can influence projects using the open standards, Eclipse-based Jazz platform.
IBM also announced IBM Rational Team Concert Express beta 2, the first planned product based on the Jazz technology platform. The product is designed to help small and mid-sized development teams located around the world collaborate on projects in real time. It aids companies with widely distributed workforces or organizations that need to facilitate communication between groups. The solution uses Web 2.0-style dashboards to illustrate the project status information. Users can use IBM’s DB2 database or other databases as a repository for project information.
The new solution is referred to as one of “a new family of development servers” that IBM is working on, according to the company’s press release. While IBM Rational Team Concert Express has an open source flavor, the aim of the Jazz project is still commercial. The technology supports open standards for middleware, and those open standards are also used by IBM in its WebSphere servers and in the open source Apache Tomcat server, according to IBM’s announcement.
The Jazz project simply opens up the development process to include customer feedback, according to Dr. Danny Sabbah, IBM’s general manager of Rational Software.
“Open commercial development at Jazz.net is changing the way IBM products are delivered to customers by making the process truly a community effort,” Sabbah stated in the announcement.
Most of the IBM Rational portfolio will gradually evolve to include Jazz technology, facilitating the integration of IBM’s products with those of its partners, the announcement added.
The beta 2 version of IBM Rational Team Concert Express is currently available at Jazz.net. IBM plans to make it available as a product sometime later this year, although qualified open source projects and academic organizations will be able to use it for free.
Another project that is being developed as part of Jazz.net is Project Bluegrass, which aims to create a more visual user interface for collaboration and communication among teammates. It’s designed for post-Baby Boomer generations.
Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition
Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) defines a standard in developing multitiered enterprise applications. Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition simplifies development by using standardized modular components and providing a full complex of services for them.
The J2EE platform was developed by Sun Microsystems. It consists of a set of services, APIs, and protocols that provide functionality for developing multitier applications.
J2EE abilities:
* JDBC API for database access;
* CORBA technology for interaction with existing resources of an enterprise;
* Security model for data safety of even web-applications;
* Support of such components, as Enterprise JavaBeans, Java Servlets API, JavaServer Pages and XML;
* Set of specifications and compatibility tests for application transferability in all existing enterprise systems supported by J2EE.
Java EE application server handles transactions, security, scalability, concurrency and management of the components used in it, i.e. developers can concentrate more on the business logic of the components rather than on infrastructure and integration tasks.
Application servers and development tools for J2EE-applications are released by different vendors, including BEA, Borland, IBM, Novell, Oracle, Sybase, Sun, and support a wide range of platforms and DBMS.
The ability of Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition to implement component-based enterprise applications on several tiers, independent of a platform can give a competitive advantage to active enterprises.
Outsourcing boom
More than half (53 percent) of companies plan to increase outsourcing spending in 2008, up from 38 percent in 2006 and 48 percent in 2007, according to a survey of 250 IT professionals by US-based outsourcing and business process outsourcing (BPO) company Syntel.
Bharat Desai, chief executive of Syntel, said outsourcing is one industry that will not suffer from the crisis in the credit markets.
Desai said in a statement: “In a weak or uncertain economy, companies look for technology solutions that will increase productivity, efficiency and savings.”
The link between outsourcing and savings was reinforced by a separate study by BPO provider Sutherland Global Services, which found cost reduction and the ability to provide a variable cost model was in the top five reasons for outsourcing for more than 90 percent of businesses it questioned.
The study of BPO trends for 2007 surveyed major global companies in the insurance, banking, telecom, retail and banking industries. It found that tech support and customer care departments continue to be the most commonly outsourced divisions, standing at more than 60 percent and 40 percent respectively, and that India and the US are the most popular locations, chosen by about 70 percent and 60 percent of respondents.
Data and site security topped the list of what companies want from their outsourcers for 80 percent of businesses, with an understanding of process and industry experience close behind.
Social SEO
There has been a lot of talk about social media and social book marking as taking over the tradition SEO industry. While it is true that some of the major social media sites are taking over the top listings in Google.
These days it isn’t unheard of to see multiple listings for the same content that has been linked to from the various sites like Digg and Boxxet. Sure these sites will help you get your content spread all over the search engines but is it the same as getting your page to rank high in the search engines? The short answer is no.
You see the reality is this; your content will rise to the top of the engines quite quickly but not for your site, it will be for the social sites that are hosting the snippets of content from your site. Good for the social site and if anybody actually visits those links, it could be good for your site as well.
Another way that this is different is in the amount of time that your content stays at the top of the search engines. At the time of this writing these social sites usually were ranking for about 2 weeks before they disappeared from any meaningful rankings. This is not too bad for content that has a short shelf life but what about content that has a longer shelf life… not so good.
Also, how long do you really think it will be before Google steps in to the fray to deal with what in essence is nothing more than duplicate content diluting their so called “quality results”? Does anybody truly need 20 or 30 listings to the same story spread over just as many social domains? I think not. Do I take advantage of it? I sure do!
Now what about SEO – is that going to disappear as a marketing tool? The quick answer is hell no. If you were given a choice on getting your site/pages to rank at the top of Google for years or weeks I am pretty sure which of way you would go.
Back in 2004 I obtained top 3 rankings for some fairly competitive gambling related terms in Google and those sites have had almost no updating or link building since then and yet they remain at the top of Google. You are not going to get that kind of sustained ranking with social book marking.
At this time the best thing one can do is to use the social book marking while it still works, to help your sites gain some ground in the search engines by combining it with solid SEO tactics.
Social Media is the buzz right now but it can’t last as it is way too easy to exploit just like some of the other techniques of old – can you say keyword stuffing? Use it while it lasts but trust me – it ain’t going to replace solid SEO tactics. That will come later when there is a breakthrough in artificial intelligence brought on by semantic search but that is for another rant.
Coghead Moves Web App Development Platform to Amazon EC2
Coghead announced it will move its do-it-yourself Web application development platform to the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). By using Amazon Web Services to host the Coghead system, Coghead will be able to scale rapidly to meet growing user demand then adjust capacity instantly to address peak loads. Along with its move to Amazon Web Services, Coghead is introducing Coghead 2.0 with new functionality that will make it easier for any developer to build applications that leverage Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3.
Coghead’s use of Amazon Web Services supports the continued expansion of the Coghead Web application service. With the release of the next version of the platform, Coghead 2.0 is leveraging the same highly reliable, scaleable and cost-effective technology infrastructure that Amazon has spent 12 years and over $2 billion building for its own Web-scale operations.
“Amazon Web Services was designed to provide a highly reliable, cost-efficient infrastructure that can scale as a company’s needs change,” said Steve Rabuchin, director of developer relations for Amazon Web Services. “With Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2, Coghead customers can be confident that their applications will be supported by the same technology infrastructure that Amazon.com uses.”
“Our passion is to provide a massively scalable, highly reliable and secure application platform that a broad class of developers can use to efficiently build and deliver Web applications that solve specific business problems,” said Coghead CEO Paul McNamara. “With Amazon Web Services, we can take advantage of their unmatched expertise in building high reliability, Web-scale applications, and provide the infrastructure we need to rapidly scale the Coghead service to meet the demands of our ever-expanding roster of developers.”
Currently, more than 25,000 do-it-yourselfers have registered to use Coghead’s online application platform to create business applications and entrepreneurial opportunities. An intuitive, drag-and-drop interface makes it easy and fast to build sophisticated, robust business applications — from managing sales pipelines to tracking supplies for restaurants — without any coding. The Web-based services are developed and delivered using Coghead’s all-in-one platform, resulting in a radical reduction in the time and expense normally required to develop and deliver business applications that scale on-demand.
Storage maker EMC plans to invest $100 million in its operations in India over the next five years.
The money will be spent to strengthen the company’s software development center set up at Bangalore in January, as well as to expand sales and customer operations, company officials announced in India this week.
The Indian development and support center is designed to initially perform software maintenance and support activities for many of the company’s open software product offerings. Gradually it will be expanded to contribute to the development of a full range of EMC storage software products, the company said.
The data storage giant has been working hard to broaden its reputation as a viable provider of storage software. Its acquisition of Legato Systems, a maker of backup and recovery software, was a part of this strategy.
An EMC spokesperson said the center is part of the company’s development and support facilities that include R&D facilities in the United States; Cork, Ireland; Brussels, Belgium; and Kawasaki, Japan.
Dynamic Sites and Navigation
All the effort needed to optimise every page is only useful if the pages can be crawled successfully but a robot spider. Dynamic sites producing “id=?” with large query strings are generally not easily penetrated. In situations like this you may need to consider URL rewriting.
At best this means that the migration of PageRank (Google’s measure of a pages importance) is poor.
Text navigation is preferred by most engines. A search engine spider can understand a link that is text. Image links are generally not so well understood although alttags are helpful.
The use of java navigation, flash or other more adventurous navigation systems are often completely invisible to spiders.
