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If you are citizen of an European Union member nation, you may not use this service unless you are at least 16 years old.
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You already know Dokkio is an AI-powered assistant to organize & manage your digital files & messages. Very soon, Dokkio will support Outlook as well as One Drive. Check it out today!
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Technology
Page history
last edited
by PBworks 15 years, 9 months ago
Tech trends to watch
- tech trends to watch - business models that people are currently pursuing, with some success, and maybe some bubble-like abandon. This is the place to note new trends you see...
- tech companies to watch - our watch list of interesting tech companies. Check back often, and add your own 'watch' list.
Companies Reviewed (External Links)
 3M Company - 3M is a diversified manufacturer with one of the highest international presences of any multi-industry company. With products such as Post-It Notes and Scotch Tape as well as... read more
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 Adobe Systems - Adobe Systems is a software company whose product portfolio includes several ubiquitous consumer technologies, including Flash for rich Internet applications and Acrobat... read more
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 Agilent Technologies - Agilent Technologies (NYSE: A) is the world market leader in the test and measurement (T&M) business with 2006 sales of $5 billion. Its closest but distant... read more
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 Alcatel - Alcatel and Lucent merged in 2006 to create one of the largest telecommunications equipment vendors in the world ($16.2 billion in 2006 consolidated revenue). The merger allows the... read more
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 Apple - High-profile bet correctly that its hot new iPhone would be the "next big thing"--its second quarter profits were the largest in the company's history, due in no small part to the... read more
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 AT&T - AT&T Inc. is one of the nation’s largest telecommunications companies. It provides landline, wireless, and directory services in the United States and internationally. Until... read more
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 Best Buy - Best Buy (NYSE:BBY) is the world's leading specialty consumer electronics retailers, generating nearly $31 billion in revenue in 2006. In addition to Best Buy branded retail... read more
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 Broadcom - Broadcom is a top-ten semiconductor firm that designs, develops, and sells system-on-a-chip and software solutions to manufacturers of wired and wireless communications... read more
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 China Mobile (Hong Kong) - China Mobile Ltd. (NYSE:CHL, SEHK:0941) is China's dominant mobile service provider, with 60% national market share. It is the world's largest telecom... read more
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 Cisco Systems - Cisco is the worldwide leader in data-networking equipment and software, generating nearly $35 billion in revenue in FY 2007. As the dominant player, the company is... read more
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 Citrix Systems - Citrix Systems is an enterprise infrastructure company specializing in centralization architecture and real time collaboration. The company provides a number of... read more
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 Corning - Corning Inc. (NYSE: GLW), sometimes referred to as Glow-Worm on the Street, is a specialty glass products manufacturer. Since its inception, Corning has evolved from a small bulb... read more
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 EADS NV - The European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company (EADS.PA) is the dominant aerospace company in Europe today. Its largest subsidiary, Airbus S.A.S., is an aircraft... read more
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 Eastman Kodak Company - Eastman Kodak (NYSE: EK) is the worldwide leader in imaging products and services, with 2006 revenues of $13.3 billion. Kodak develops, produces, and sells both... read more
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 EBay - eBay's (NASDAQ:EBAY) most prominent business is ebay.com, an Internet auction site that connects individual buyers and sellers worldwide. Its massive popularity--82 million active... read more
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 Electronic Arts - Electronic Arts (Nasdaq: ERTS) develops, publishes and distributes interactive software games for personal computers and advance entertainment systems... read more
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 Electronic Data Systems - Electronic Data Systems Corporation (EDS) is a global technological services company. Forty years ago, Ross Perot founded EDS and, in doing so, created the... read more
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 EMC - EMC (NYSE:EMC) has been the world leader in high end data storage solutions for the past seven years. The company sells high performance hard drives to companies that demand large,... read more
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 General Electric Company - General Electric Co. (NYSE:GE) is a multinational conglomerate specializing in technology and services. The scale of GE's operations is enormous; in 2006, GE was... read more
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 Google - More than just an online search company, Google is at its core the most successful internet advertising business now in existence. In 2006, annual revenue had increased an... read more
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 Hewlett-Packard Company - Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ) is a diversified technology company that has reached several key milestones in recent years. The company generated $91.7 billion in... read more
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 Intel - Intel, Inc (NYSE:INTC) is the world's leading semiconductor producer and has been the industry leader since the inception of the personal computer. Intel produces products for... read more
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 Juniper Networks - Juniper Networks is a telecommunications equipment vendor specializing in information routing and data security. Its router products are an indispensable part of any... read more
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 KLA-Tencor - With more than 50% market share, KLA-Tencor is the global leader of process diagnostics and control (PDC). KLA provides quality assurance tools in the form of testing... read more
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 Mattel - Mattel (NYSE: MAT) is the world’s largest toy manufacturer and generated $5.7 billion in 2006 revenue selling some of the best known brands in the industry, including Barbie,... read more
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 McAfee Inc - McAfee Inc. is a computer security company specializing in comprehensive software to prevent users and software from gaining access to home, business, and enterprise systems or... read more
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 MEMC Electronic Materials - MEMC Electronic Materials supplies silicon wafers to semiconductor and photovoltaic cell companies. Its success is deeply rooted in the success and growth of the... read more
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 Microsoft - Microsoft Corporation (NYSE: MSFT) is the world’s largest manufacturer of software, also holding a near-monopoly on desktop operating systems. Recent forays into the... read more
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 Motorola - Motorola Inc. (NYSE: MOT) is the world's second largest provider of wireless handsets. Motorola also competes in the wireless infrastructure market and is the market share leader... read more
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 Nintendo - Nintendo (OTC:NTDOY) started 118 years ago as a Japanese company selling playing cards. In recent months, the company whose name literally translates to "the company that leaves... read more
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 Nokia - Nokia is the largest vendor of telephone handsets in the world, with 40% of the global market and $54 billion in revenue in 2006. Nokia both designs and produces mobile phones and... read more
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 Novell - Novell is the number two distributor of the open source Linux operating system and a major distributor of enterprise infrastructure software and service, but has seen declining... read more
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 NVIDIA - NVIDIA (NYSE: NVDA) is a computer graphics company with large interests in video game, multifunctional wireless, and other imaging markets. It holds the dominant market share of... read more
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 Oracle - Since Oracle's (NASDAQ:ORCL) founding, it has quickly become the world leader in data storage software. Oracle is primarily known as a provider of software for managing... read more
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 Overstock.com - Overstock.com is an online marketplace that offers discount brand name merchandise purchased from the surplus inventories of manufacturers and retailers. Since its... read more
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 Radioshack - RadioShack (NYSE: RSH) is a retailer of consumer electronics and services and generated $4.8 billion in revenue in 2006. The company operates over 5,000 stores in the U.S.... read more
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 Raytheon Company - Raytheon Company (NYSE: RTN) is the fourth largest U.S. defense contractor ($20.3B revenue) and has a diverse business mix of attractive products with a focus in... read more
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 RealNetworks - RealNetworks is a digital media company focusing on expanding its core businesses of casual internet games and digital music distribution to emerging markets outside the... read more
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 Red Hat - Red Hat is the world’s leading provider of open source software. Seeking to attack the 40-60% of company IT budgets that are consumed by operating and maintenance costs, open... read more
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 Research in Motion - Research In Motion Limited (NASDAQ:RIMM) is a leading designer, manufacturer, and marketer of wireless smartphones and related services. RIM is most famous for its... read more
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 SanDisk - SanDisk Corporation (NYSE: SNDK) is one of the world's largest suppliers of flash (or NAND) memory data storage products. A pioneer in NAND technologies, SanDisk holds many key... read more
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 Seagate Technology Holdings - Seagate Technology Holdings (NYSE: STX) is the largest manufacturer of hard drives with $9.2 billion in sales in 2006. The company produces drives for use in... read more
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 Sony - Sony Corporation (TYO:6758; NYSE:SNE) is an international corporation with major businesses in electronics, video games, movies, and finance. The Japan-based company is one of the... read more
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 Sprint Nextel - Sprint Nextel (NYSE:S) is the third-largest wireless carrier in the United States in terms of number of subscribers, serving 46 million customers directly and 6 million via... read more
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 Sun Microsystems - Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ:JAVA) provides network computing solutions, including computer systems, data management products, and other services. Server and workstation... read more
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 Symantec - Symantec Corporation (SYMC), known by many as the producer of the Norton anti-virus program, specializes in providing information security and storage products. Symantec helps... read more
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 Toshiba - Toshiba Corporation (OTC: TOSBF) is a leading manufacturer of electronics, digital products, and social appliances. With a revenue of $56 billion during the year 2006, the... read more
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 VMware Inc. - VMware Inc. (NYSE:VWM) sells software integral to the operation of websites and other network computing resources. VMware's virtualization software can make multiple physical... read more
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 Western Digital - Western Digital (NYSE: WDC) is the second largest manufacturer of hard drives with $4.3 billion in sales in 2006. The company produces drives for use in desktops, mobile... read more
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 Yahoo! - Yahoo! Inc. (NYSE: YHOO) is an American global Internet services company that operates the Yahoo! Internet portal. It provides a range of products and content, from email and... read more
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Website Development
go to download.com and search for: "open source Content Management System"
I picked "drupal" software...will tell you how it goes soon...
JavaScript
Ajax
Ruby on Rails
spam filter
 Synthasite, one of a handful of companies that lets you build your own Web site easily, has raised $5 million in its first round of funding.
We’ve mentioned the company several times, referring to its tools that let you drag and drop features onto a template. While both Weebly and Jimdo — Synthasite’s most significant competitors — have more advanced products, Synthasite now has more money than the two other companies combined. Synthasite’s co-founder, Vinny Lingham, said his investor, the Swiss-based Columbus Venture Capital, is taking the long view on this investment. The company aims to be a place where anyone, regardless of programming skills, will be able to build any type of site, ranging from regular websites to blogs to storefronts and more. Vinny says Columbus acknowledges that it may take time to get the product to align with the vision.
Weebly has about 113,405 monthly uniques, according to Quantcast, compared to Synthesite, which isn’t even tracked. The market might not be so forgiving. Weebly, which has a team of three founders plus one contractor, has managed to crank out impressive products at regular intervals, starting with a remarkably simple drag-and-drop website builder and growing to a MySpace profile editor that puts MySpace’s own tools to shame. If I were Vinny, I’d set aside $2 million of that capital to try to buy Weebly.
Synthasite is based in South Africa, but hopes to move to the Valley next year.
Blogging
How Much Should a Design Cost?
Link to original article
For the sake of argument, I’m going to constrain today’s post to blog design only. When people email me and ask for a quote, I always follow the same process. I visit their current site and determine the following:
- The current CMS platform (WordPress, MovableType, Drupal, etc.)
- The scope of the site - how many unique styling elements will be required for specialty pages?
- The perceived complexity of the re-design. Does this person want a graphical masterpiece with all kinds of bells and whistles?
Generally speaking, there’s not a whole lot of variance in these areas from blog to blog, so after checking out the site in question, I usually have a good idea of how much to charge. Now, to answer the question you all want to hear…How much is all this gonna run ya?
At this time, blog designs start at $1500. This price is for a blog that has minimal graphical complexity, no customized icons, and no logo production. What you do get at this price is rock-solid, hand-crafted, browser-tested CSS, XHTML, and simple (but striking) graphic design.
In most cases, bells and whistles like plugin support, unique page designs, and extra graphics push the price up into the $1800-$2000 range. From there, the price is largely dictated by page-specific CSS/XHTML production and custom graphic design. It’s totally conceivable that a pimped out blog could run as much as $3000. Rest assured, though, that it would be totally badass, and the recipient of the design would receive mad props for having such a killer online abode.
Their Prices
Based on my experience, I have reason to believe that about 90% of you who just saw my prices thought, “Gosh, that’s awfully expensive!”
Well, you’re right, but actually, you’re wrong too.
You’re right because $1800 is a decent chunk of change - for an individual. You’re wrong because companies throw this kind of bread around all the time. They do so because they understand that crafting a brand holds a value that is oftentimes hard to measure in dollars and cents alone. On top of that, companies typically have a monetary objective behind the launch of a new design, so to them, there’s a foreseeable payoff. Individuals, on the other hand, are oftentimes unable to see things in such a positive light. Let’s face it - most people don’t make a sustainable (or even decent) income off of their blog.
Everybody wants a killer design, especially after seeing one that they lust over. Problem is, nobody wants to pay for it. At this year’s SXSW, I attended a very informative roundtable discussion that focused on - what else? - blog design. Naturally, the hottest topic of discussion was pricing, and the panelists freely gave out information regarding not only their prices, but also some info regarding industry pricing trends.
For instance, The Blog Studio charges $3000-$5000 for a blog design. Some people thought this was quite high, but Peter (who runs TBS) was cool enough to break things down into their individual elements to explain pricing more thoroughly. It’s been nearly three months since SXSW, so I’ll try and rehash things as best I can here…The major elements of blog design include:
- Graphical comps produced in Photoshop
- Graphical splicing for optimal CSS/XHTML structure
- CSS/XHTML production in standards-compliant fashion
- Unique CSS/XHTML adaptation to CMS platform of choice
- Bell-and-whistle functionality to meet client requirements
All of the steps highlighted above require a certain degree of expertise to be completed in professional fashion. Unfortunately, people who want designs are oftentimes unfamiliar with the amount of knowledge required to pull all this off in seamless fashion. Sometimes I think people see a design and think it’s all just a matter of applying a “look” to stuff that’s already there. In reality, that’s basically what’s going on. In practice, however, things are intensely more complicated.
And this is why you hire a professional. Another person on the panel at the SXSW design discussion was the female member of a husband and wife design team. While I don’t remember her name, I certainly remember what she said about blog pricing. $2500 and up, and this “just really begins to cover the actual time investment” required to deliver a complete, robust design. Want another example? Javier Cabrera, a talented designer who’s responsible for some really great stuff, charges $2500 as a base price. How’s my $1800 price tag sound now? Looks to me like I need to raise my prices
Watch out for that curveball!
People like surprises. Unfortunately, when those surprises include a hefty price tag, people hate them. Here’s why professional web designs are the curveballs of the site construction process. Well, hey, let’s look at the process first:
Buy a domain name: $10
Buy a hosting package: $60/yr. with two years prepaid - $120
You set everything up, and then you realize you need a design because your site currently looks like 50,000 others out there. Whoops.
The problem here is that when setting up a new site, newbies often think, “$10 for a domain? Awesome, let’s get started!”
Next, they get hit with the reality of hosting fees, and while they’re a little bummed about having to pre-pay for two years in order to lock in that great price of $5.50/mo., they go ahead and kick down $100-$200 to set up their hosting. Their tab is already up around $200, and now they’re beginning to wonder if this web stuff is all it’s cracked up to be.
Unfortunately, they get hit with a wicked case of design lust while browsing and getting acquainted with the blogosphere, and now they really want a hot design. “Shouldn’t cost too much, right? After all, look at all those cool designs out there!”. And then BAM! They get slapped with the reality that a wicked design is going to cost them $1500+, and they totally reject the idea, especially since the hosting fees were already a tough pill to swallow. Talk about your curveballs.
Web 2.0 - defined
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html
Basically Web2.0 is what people (and investors) are calling the second generation of internet websites. People that witnessed the bursting of the bubble have tried to learn from their mistakes.
examples of web2.0 companies are:
MySpace.com
Zillow.com
Yelp.com
for more information, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0
Concepts to Consider (external links)
 3G - Mobile telephones, the 1st generation of which were introduced in the mid-1980's, have been constantly evolving since their inception. Today, over 2B mobile phones are in usage and... read more
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Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD - The battle for supremacy in high-definition DVD technology is already well under way, with HD-DVD and Blu-Ray both doing their best to gather disk and decoder/reader... read more
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Commoditization of PCs - Over the last few decades, PCs have become an increasingly important part of our daily domestic and work lives. PCs are used for tasks ranging from rudimentary email... read more
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Digital Outdoor Advertising - Digital outdoor advertising is turning old media into new media and a sluggish outdoor advertising industry into a growth industry. With digital signage becoming a... read more
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E-Commerce - One of the first and most prominent e-commerce players, iconic eBay has left a huge footprint on the way we buy and sell. The Internet has created a new economic ecosystem, the... read more
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Fixed-line telecommunication - Land-line or fixed-line telecommunication is over 125 years old and, up until the recent past, was defined as a telephone line that traveled through metal wire or... read more
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Impact of Internet Advertising - The breadth of U.S. advertisers across virtually all industries means that growth of advertising spend is highly correlated with the GDP, a measure of the... read more
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IPhone - click to enlarge image Prior to its June 29th release, Apple's iPhone had already seen the kind of media hype and expectation that other consumer products could only dream of. If the... read more
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IPod Effect - In April 2007, Apple celebrated its 100 millionth iPod sale, claiming that it was the fastest selling music player in history. Indeed, after its introduction a little over five... read more
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LCD - Liquid Crystal Displays (LCDs) are used to in flat-panel monitors and high-end flat-panel television. Recently, the market for LCDs has exploded as flat screen monitors and televisions... read more
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Mobile Phone Usage in China - China: the next big mobile phone gold mine? China's mobile telephony market can make or break manufacturers. Similarly, the enormous subscriber base of Chinese... read more
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Online Video - The explosive growth of Google's YouTube and video-sharing services such as BitTorrent has led to a dramatic increase in the amount of data traversing the internet -- Google CEO... read more
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Open Source - Open source software differs from traditional commercial software because it is generally free of charge, or in some cases offered for a minimal fee. The term "open source" means... read more
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Renewable Energy - Renewable energy refers to a subset of energy sources that are derived from constantly replenishing sources and hence, unlike nonrenewable energy, will never run out. In... read more
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Software as a Service - Software is ubiquitous in today’s business world, where software applications can help us track shipments across multiple countries, manage large inventories, train... read more
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Solar Power - Love doesn't make the world go round. The sun does. Literally. It's the gravitational pull of the sun on the earth that keeps our planet moving. The sun also, directly or... read more
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Voip - VoIP offers at the Tesco checkout counter. The UK-based retail giant operates its own VoIP service and has more than one million subscribers to date. VoIP is one of the few technologies... read more
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WiMAX vs WCDMA - 3G is the third generation of mobile phone standards. 3G is best defined as the generation that enabled mobile broadband, or the ability to wirelessly use the Internet or... read more
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Vertical search-engines
Know your subject
Jul 12th 2007
From The Economist print edition
Topic-specific search-engines hope to challenge Google, at least in some areas
ARE you a generalist or a specialist? The question can be asked of people, but it is increasingly being asked about internet search-engines, as specialist or "vertical" sites take on generalists such as Yahoo! and Google. Some are already prospering: GlobalSpec.com, for example, a profitable search-engine for engineers, has 3.5m registered users and signs up another 20,000 each week. "They own that market," says Charlene Li of Forrester, a consultancy.
This is due in large part to GlobalSpec's definable customer base. Its knowledge about the needs of its users sets it apart from the generalist search-engines, says Angela Hribar of GlobalSpec. Vertical sites, which serve up search results from a carefully selected group of topic-specific websites, can also target advertising at particular audiences more precisely.
One promising area for vertical sites is health-related search, which provides a microcosm of the threats and opportunities facing specialists. At stake are the online advertising budgets of the pharmaceutical and health-care giants, which are expected to spend $1.4 billion on online advertising in America alone next year, up from $625m in 2005. According to Jupiter, a consultancy, nearly a quarter of American internet users say the web is essential to taking care of their health. "The market opportunity for health-search is very large and growing," says Alain Rappaport, the boss and founder of Medstory, a health-search site based in Foster City, California.
Health is a field where consumers do seem prepared to seek out specialist sites that provide more relevant results. According to a new study from Jupiter, to be published on July 16th, 65% of health-search users believe that relevance is the most important criterion when deciding whether to click on a particular result; only 16% rate the trustworthiness of the source as most important. In short, relevance is king, says Monique Levy of Jupiter, which suggests that a vertical search-engine that successfully pairs a broad target market with a complicated topic can do well.
But that will mean getting consumers to kick their existing search habits. A study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, a non-profit research group, found that two-thirds of Americans researching health-related topics online started with a general search-engine. Only 27% went on to a medical site of any kind, let alone a health-search site. "The path to general search engines is well-worn and familiar," says Susannah Fox of Pew. "Dr Google is the de facto second opinion in this country."
Even so, there are signs that consumers are warming to the special features that specialist search-engines offer. Healthline, a health-search site with a "symptom search" function, saw its number of unique monthly visitors increase nearly sevenfold during 2006 to around 2.5m. Some sites, such as Healia, can limit results to those written at a "basic reading" level. Others, such as Mamma Health, limit results to pre-screened medical sources. The same sorts of ideas are also being applied in other vertical-search fields.
At the same time, however, similar features and filters are appearing on generalist search-engines, enabling them to act more like vertical engines. Search for "achondroplasia" at Google or Yahoo!, for example, and you will be steered towards results sorted under the headings of treatments, causes, research and so on.
All of which suggests three possible fates for vertical-search sites. The strongest may be successful enough to dominate specific categories. The weakest may be picked off by pseudo-specialist features added to generalist search-engines. And there is a third way, namely for specialist sites to be offered under a bigger brand's umbrella. Last month Meredith, an American publisher of magazines such as Fitness and Parents, bought Healia. And Microsoft, which lags behind Google and Yahoo! in generalist search, hopes to use vertical search to fight back. It has bought several vertical sites in recent months—including Medstory in February. Health-search sites suggest a similar prognosis for specialist sites in other fields.
How does a T1 line work?
Most of us are familiar with a normal business or residential line from the phone company. A normal phone line like this is delivered on a pair of copper wires that transmit your voice as an analog signal. When you use a normal modem on a line like this, it can transmit data at perhaps 30 kilobits per second (30,000 bits per second).
The phone company moves nearly all voice traffic as digital rather than analog signals. Your analog line gets converted to a digital signal by sampling it 8,000 times per second at 8-bit resolution (64,000 bits per second). Nearly all digital data now flows over fiber optic lines, and the phone company uses different designations to talk about the capacity of a fiber optic line.
If your office has a T1 line, it means that the phone company has brought a fiber optic line into your office (a T1 line might also come in on copper). A T1 line can carry 24 digitized voice channels, or it can carry data at a rate of 1.544 megabits per second. If the T1 line is being used for telephone conversations, it plugs into the office's phone system. If it is carrying data it plugs into the network's router.
A T1 line can carry about 192,000 bytes per second -- roughly 60 times more data than a normal residential modem. It is also extremely reliable -- much more reliable than an analog modem. Depending on what they are doing, a T1 line can generally handle quite a few people. For general browsing, hundreds of users are easily able to share a T1 line comfortably. If they are all downloading MP3 files or video files simultaneously it would be a problem, but that still isn't extremely common.
A T1 line might cost between $1,000 and $1,500 per month depending on who provides it and where it goes. The other end of the T1 line needs to be connected to a web server, and the total cost is a combination of the fee the phone company charges and the fee the ISP charges.
A large company needs something more than a T1 line. The following list shows some of the common line designations:
DS0 - 64 kilobits per second
ISDN - Two DS0 lines plus signaling (16 kilobytes per second), or 128 kilobits per second
T1 - 1.544 megabits per second (24 DS0 lines)
T3 - 43.232 megabits per second (28 T1s)
OC3 - 155 megabits per second (84 T1s)
OC12 - 622 megabits per second (4 OC3s)
OC48 - 2.5 gigabits per seconds (4 OC12s)
OC192 - 9.6 gigabits per second (4 OC48s)
Here are some interesting links:
Business Broadband
ISDN Intro
WAN technologies
Technology
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