iTechnoBuzz!!

Hellow Readers!

Apple’s iPad is something every Gizmo Freak is busy knowing about these days. Here are some of its major drawbacks:

Big, Ugly Bezel
Have you seen the bezel on this thing?! It’s huge! I know you don’t want to accidentally input a command when your thumb is holding it, but come on.

No Multitasking
This is a backbreaker. If this is supposed to be a replacement for netbooks, how can it possibly not have multitasking? Are you saying I can’t listen to Pandora while writing a document? I can’t have my Twitter app open at the same time as my browser? I can’t have AIM open at the same time as my email? Are you kidding me? This alone guarantees that I will not buy this product.

No Cameras
No front facing camera is one thing. But no back facing camera either? Why the hell not? I can’t imagine what the downside was for including at least one camera. Could this thing not handle video iChat?

Touch Keyboard
So much for Apple revolutionizing tablet inputs; this is the same big, ugly touchscreen keyboard we’ve seen on other tablets, and unless you’re lying on the couch with your knees propping it up, it’ll be awkward to use.

No HDMI Out
Want to watch those nice HD videos you downloaded from iTunes on your TV? Too damned bad! If you were truly loyal, you’d just buy an AppleTV already.

No Flash
No Flash is annoying but not a dealbreaker on the iPhone and iPod Touch. On something that’s supposed to be closer to a netbook or laptop? It will leave huge, gaping holes in websites. I hope you don’t care about streaming video! God knows not many casual internet users do. Oh wait, nevermind, they all do.

Adapters, Adapters, Adapters
So much for those smooth lines. If you want to plug anything into this, such as a digital camera, you need all sorts of ugly adapters. You need an adapter for USB for god’s sake.

It’s Not Widescreen
Widescreen movies look lousy on this thing thanks to its 4:3 screen, according to Blam, who checked out some of Star Trek on one. It’s like owning a 4:3 TV all over again!

Doesn’t Support T-Mobile 3G
Sure, it’s “unlocked.” But it won’t work on T-Mobile, and it uses microSIMs that literally no one else uses.

A Closed App Ecosystem
The iPad only runs apps from the App Store. The same App Store that is notorious for banning apps for no real reason, such as Google Voice. Sure, netbooks might not have touchscreens, but you can install whatever software you’d like on them. Want to run a different browser on your iPad? Too bad!

Enjoy!

Firefox 3.6 has some cool consumer facing features like Personas and a better Plug-in Updater, but developers have a lot to be excited about too.  Developers will appreciate the increased stability, especially the work done to prevent crashes with third party software.  There are also enhancements like improved JavaScript performance and optimizations to speed up everyday Web tasks to make web applications snappier.  However, what developers will be most interested in are all the new features around CSS3 and HTML5 that bring the future of the Web to Firefox 3.6 today.

This is an exciting release because we have built on the progress we made with Firefox 3.5 just a few months ago and have implemented even more cutting-edge features that will make the Web experience more engaging and interactive than ever before.

Today’s Firefox 3.6 release and the upcoming mobile release of Firefox for Maemo are both based on Gecko 1.9.2 and bring a number of big features including:

• New CSS3 features: Improve your style with support for gradients, multiple backgrounds, pointer-events and more.
• Drag and Drop: It has never been easier to move files from your desktop to the Web.  You can now drag content into the browser window and leverage the FileAPI for instant access to that content.
• File API: Support for the latest HTML5 specification allows Web applications to access local files and interact with them in new ways.
• Web Open Font Format (WOFF): Add a touch of typography to the Web with WOFF support, which makes even more possible than the existing support for OpenType and TrueType fonts.
• Device orientation: Discover new ways to manipulate and interact with Web content with access to the orientation of supported laptops and devices.
• XMLHttpRequest improvements and more…

For a more in-depth look at all the changes that developers will want to know about please check out Firefox 3.6 for Developers on MDC. And if you haven’t already, go get Firefox 3.6 now!

At the beginning of this year, analyst firm Gartner released a report that highlights up-and-coming mobile technologies which they predict will impact the mobile industry over the course of the next two years. According to Nick Jones, vice president and analyst at the firm, the technologies they’ve identified will evolve quickly and will likely pose issues that will have to be addressed by short term strategies.

It includes the following technologies:

Bluetooth 3.0

This is one of the no-brainers on the list. The Bluetooth 3.0 specification will be released this year and devices will start to hit the shelves by 2010. At this point, it’s expected that the 3.0 spec will include faster speeds, reportedly transferring files at 480 megabits per second in close proximity and 100 megabits per second at 10 meters. It will also feature an ultra-low-power mode that Gartner predicts will enable new peripherals, sensors, and applications, such as health monitoring. The technology will be backwards compatible, allowing old devices to communicate with new ones, so there’s no reason for it not take off in the upcoming years.

Mobile User Interfaces & Mobile Web/Widgets

Mobile user interfaces and mobile web/widgets were listed separately, accounting for two items on the list, but we think they can be lumped together. They all point to how mobile computing is rapidly becoming a new platform for everything from consumer mobile apps to B2E (business-to-employee) and B2C (business-to-customer). (Gartner did not include B2B on their list.) Modern day smartphones like the iPhone, Android, Blackberry, the upcoming Pre, and others deliver better interfaces for browsing the web, thus making it accessible to more people. Widget-like applications, including those that replicate thin client technology, will become more common especially in B2C strategies. Yet the mobile web still has challenges ahead. For example, there are no standards for browser access to handset services like the camera or GPS, the report notes.

Location Awareness

Location sensing, powered by GPS as well as Wi-Fi and triangulation, opens up new possibilities for mobile social networking and presence applications. Technology’s earliest adopters are already familiar with social networks like Brightkite and Loopt which let you reveal your location to a network of friends. But we’re still on the tip of this iceberg. Take for example, the iPhone IM client Palringo, they’re just now adding location services to their application. This allows users to see how far away their contacts are, introducing a whole new dimension to mobile communication. Over the next year or two, this sort of technology is expected to become more commonplace, but it will also raise questions about privacy. Will you want your network of online friends and acquaintances to really know your exact location? Will turning off location awareness signal that you’re up to something sneaky (so asks the suspicious wife, husband, boss, etc.)? As a society, we will have to answer these questions and more in the near future.

Near Field Communication (NFC)

NFC is a technology that provides a way for consumers to use their mobile phones for making payments, among other things. It’s something that has taken off in many countries worldwide, but certainly not all, and definitely not in the United States just yet. Unfortunately, Gartner predicts that the move towards mobile payment systems will still not occur this year or the next in mature markets like the U.S. and Western Europe. Instead, NFC is more likely to take off in emerging markets. Other uses of the technology, such as the ability to transfer photos from phone to digital photo frames, will also remain elusive to more developed markets.

802.11n & Cellular Broadband

802.11n, a specification for wireless local area networks (WLANs), initially gave us pause. Although not ratified as an official standard yet, the technology is already commonplace. However, until it “goes gold” so to speak, it won’t really infiltrate the mobile world. Even the ubiquitous iPhone only supports 802.11 b/g at the moment.

On the flip side, the other Internet connection technology, cellular broadband, has the potential to make Wi-Fi almost unnecessary, at least for achieving high speeds. In addition to mobile phones, laptop makers will likely continue to incorporate this technology into their netbooks and notebooks using modern chipsets that provide superior performance to our current crop of add-on cards and dongles.

Display Technologies

Display technologies will also see improvements in the upcoming years. New technologies like active pixel displays, passive displays and pico projectors will have an impact. Pico projectors – the tiny portable projectors we saw being introduced at this year’s CES – will enable new mobile use cases. Instant presentations in informal settings could become more common when there isn’t large, cumbersome equipment to set up. The different types of display technologies introduced in 2009 and 2010 will become important differentiators between devices and will impact user selection criterion, says Gartner.

Hello Readers,

Today I am posting some of the most common SEO mistakes which can spoil your Website or Blog rankings.

SEO Mistake #1: Packing Meta-Tags Full Of Keywords WONT Optimize Your Page

During the 90’s, the extent of “SEO optimizing” for many webmasters was simply to insert relevant keyword phrases into the meta-tags for a page.

There’s nothing necessarily wrong with adding keywords into this field that represents valid information on the page itself, but placing a long list of similar phrases with duplicate words (reaching 10 or 12 phrases) is a major SEO faux pas.

And as of this year, September 2009 to be exact, due to many years of webmasters constantly using meta-keywords to spam keywords, Google no longer even looks at the meta-keywords in order to rank your website.  This doesn’t mean the meta-keywords are not useful for aligning the page with particular valuable search phrases – but it certainly is nowhere near as valuable as it used to be, and overusing it can put your site at risk for a lower ranking.

SEO Mistake #2 & #3: Not Using The Keywords In Your Title & Permalinks

Every SEO guru worth his salt knows that the two most effective areas of a webpage that you can get the most bang for your efforts is the title and permalink.

They don’t always necessarily have to the be same, but they do need to focus on the a primary keyword phrase that you’re trying to target with your article. If you don’t target that phrase in your title and permalink, you’re wasting your time and you’ll only reach a small fraction of your intended online audience. In Wordpress, you can set up your permalink to be descriptive like this.

So never set your default Permalink setting to any random numbering system.

SEO Mistake #4 & #5: Using Javascript Or Using Only Flash/AJAX

I would never suggest that a web designer shouldn’t make use of the latest and greatest website scripting languages that offer a more interactive online experience, but to use scripting to serve up all or a majority of your website content is SEO suicide.

Flash and AJAX websites are aesthetically superior to most traditional websites, however they struggle when it comes to search engine ranking because there’s virtually nothing for search engines to crawl. The same goes for websites that utilize Javascript to generate web pages on-the-fly depending on user interaction. Search engine crawlers cannot touch those script-generated pages at all.

SEO Mistake #6 – Keyword Spamming

There is nothing that Google hates more than a website that attempts to hijack the crawler with an overabundance of particular keyword phrases. You can be certain that if you are targeting the phrase “make money online,” and plaster the phrase all over your article a dozen times (this is known as keyword “stuffing”), you may actually see an immediate short term spike in traffic to that page. However, you can also be certain that in time, not only will that traffic drop off quickly, but your entire domain will struggle to rank very highly (if at all) in Google search results under every keyword phrase you write about.

SEO Mistake #7 – Spamming for Backlinks

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’ve always preached that you should post on forums and blogs in order to generate quality backlinks to your own site. This is what I described in my recent article on increasing blog traffic when I mentioned engaging the blogosphere every single day. However, simply posting for the sake of achieving a link back to your site is a major social networking no-no.

Some folks even “stage” conversations within the comment areas of blogs to generate interest. If your only purpose for posting comments to a blog or forum is to generate a link to your site, don’t bother. It won’t win you any fans within the industry or niche that you’re trying to target, and secondly, the transparency of the effort will make most readers skim right past your comment, or even worse you could get banned.

SEO Mistake #8 – Not Optimizing Images

In 2007, on the Google Webmaster Central blog, Google’s own Ríona MacNamara provided a very important clue to SEO enthusiasts with the statement, “As the Googlebot does not see the images directly, we generally concentrate on the information provided in the ‘alt’ attribute.” So, what does this mean for your SEO efforts? It means that you better start taking advantage of your image alt-text tags if you want to have some advantage over your competition.

So make sure you right relevant information about the image in its “alt” tag.

SEO Mistake #9 – Producing Stupid, Poorly-Written Content

One of the worst symptoms of black-hat SEO scammers trying to outsmart Googlebot’s crawl algorithm is the evolution of “content-mills.” Now, given just about every blog out there is a content mill to some extent, at least when there’s a certain level of investment and quality checks in place, you know that the articles you read are going to be written using proper grammar, offer a decent style of writing and provide useful content. However, there are countless blogs and writers out there who simply churn out 500 word blocks of text as fast as they can with the hopes of capturing search engine traffic.

What does this have to do with SEO? The SEO lesson to learn here is this: Yes, Google prefers websites and blogs that are fresh and constantly updated with new content, but that doesn’t mean you should ever overlook quality just to get your content published quickly. Focus on producing high-quality, valuable content that people will want to link to and return to again and again.

SEO Mistake #10 – Submitting Your Website

Do you remember the days when trying to get your website noticed online meant submitting your URL to as many search engines as possible? The fact is, these submission forms still exist on many of the major search engines even though they are completely outdated and unnecessary.

Search Engines rely on crawlers for visiting websites, and flling those silly forms is completely irrelevant.

Thanks!!

Technology never stops moving, but what are the technologies that CIOs and IT managers really need to consider in 2010?

We sampled opinions among analysts, vendors, users, IT professionals, system integrators and pundits and came up with the following 10 to watch:

1. Cloud computing

Cloud computing now comes in at least three flavours: on-demand applications (software-as-a-service), clouds as a source of computing infrastructure (Amazon web services and its ilk), and as a paradigm for delivering services within an organisation (internal clouds). This means almost every CIO has one type of cloud computing to consider. All three are disruptive forces, with analyst firm Gartner ranking the cloud as the most strategic technology for 2010 because it “does not eliminate the costs of IT solutions, but does re-arrange some and reduce others.”

2. Four big Microsoft upgrades

2010 will see the emergence of Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010. Throw in the late 2009 debut of Exchange 2010 and IT managers on long-term licensing deals with Microsoft have three big upgrades to consider. Office 2010 looks like another incremental update but the new SharePoint and Exchange will only ship in 64-bit versions, putting a server upgrade on many users’ roadmaps. And let’s not forget Windows 7, which many CIOs must surely be considering as XP runs out of puff.

3. Virtualisation

Virtualisation has hogged headlines in recent years but continues to evolve at an impressive pace. In 2010, Gartner says virtualisation will become a standard disaster recovery and availability technique, as the practice of moving virtual machines from one location to another matures. The idea of desktop virtualisation is also powering a new round of thinking about whether thin clients are a cheaper alternative to PCs.

4. Biometric authentication

2009 saw National Australia Bank adopt voiceprints as its preferred method of authenticating its customers for phone banking and general customer service inquiries because it improves security and customer service. Many call centres have noted this experience and this technology is ready for wider deployment in 2010.

5. Next-generation firewalls

Most organisations tend to operate a fleet of security appliances, with firewalls, intrusion protection devices and unified threat management devices all helping to build a layered defence. Firewalls, however, have grown up and can now take over some of the functions of other security appliances. CIOs wishing to consolidate their security infrastructure may welcome this evolution.

6. Employee-owned IT

Traditionally, IT departments decide what kind of computers and software employees use and they take responsibility for all maintenance chores. Younger workers, however, have grown up choosing their own computers and applications and want to keep their personalised computing styles. Enter employee-owned IT, which sees workers bringing their own computers to work so that IT can lock them down with virtualisation or multiple operating systems that deliver security. IT departments save as maintenance devolves to computer vendors, while employees swear they are more productive using a machine of their choice.

7. Loyalty schemes

Analyst firm Frost & Sullivan’s Industry Director Andrew Milroy believes loyalty schemes will go mainstream in 2010. Citing their mainstream acceptance in retail and aviation, Milroy notes their absence from telecommunications and other industries and expects newly mature loyalty software will be something many CIOs are asked to consider in 2010.

8. Solid state disks

Storage may not be fashionable but it remains a colossal industry, and right now that industry is shifting towards solid state disks – a technology that sees storage assigned to flash memory instead of magnetic spinning disks. Solid state disks are smaller, faster, cooler and use less power than conventional disks, which means they can speed up applications without the need for new servers while keeping electricity costs low – an irresistible combination. While we are on storage, note the 2010 release of LTO-5, a new standard tape format packing 3.6 terbaytes of data onto each tape.

9. Smart grids

Smart grids are an emergent technology that imagines sensors embedded in devices to monitor electricity consumption so that they can “decide” to operate when power is cheaper. This in turn allows power companies to predict demand more precisely, reducing waste. The idea is a favourite of green IT boosters and is also seen as a likely source of traffic for the National Broadband Network.

10. Hybrid servers

The big IT transaction of 2009 was Oracle’s acquisition of Sun. The former has been experimenting with all-in-ones that pack a server, storage and other goodies needed to run business applications into a single box, and is said to be keen on extending Sun’s work in the same space. HP is going down the same path, working to make its storage arrays more similar to its servers to make them cheaper to manufacture. If this trend continues, data centre hardware will start to look similar.