@BasilPuglisi

Content & Strategy, Powered by Factics & AI, Since 2009

Basil Puglisi's Brand Blog #AIassisted

What is the Microsoft Cloud?

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Although the Cloud sounds fluffy and inviting, it really is just another name for the internet. All of us are Cloud users in that aspect, as anytime we use Facebook, or log into Hotmail, we are on the Cloud.

However, recently the Cloud has expanded its niche into an entire new range of different business services. Some of the detailed applications that help business owners are now accessible via the Cloud without the necessity of having them installed on your computer. This gives users the ability to access their information online from anywhere in the world that an internet connection is available.

Although the name ‘Cloud’ was coined for this aspect of internet interaction from the cloud symbol commonly used to represent the web in diagrams and flowcharts, it is a bit more complicated than the name implies. The Cloud uses three distinct types of service.

  1. Platform-as-a-Service
  2. Software-as-a-Service
  3. Infrastructure-as-a-Service

These services can be:

  • Sold on demand. Commonly these services are those that are useful by the minute or hour.
  • Elastic services. These services allow a user to have as much or as little of the specific service.
  • Fully managed services. Users will need nothing but their own computer and a connection to the internet.

Benefits for Business

The bottom line of course, is that the Cloud can save you time and money. Your list of software to be purchased to get your business off the ground can be significantly reduced. With no need to buy multiple copies of individual software, this can be a huge money-saver for any business owner.

There will be no money or time focused on maintaining or upgrading services or software.

It is an easily accessible way to carry out required online tasks.

On-demand access for your employees will cut time wasted and allow them to be more productive and effective with their allotted time. It can also reduce the time they spend communicating with one another.

Cloud can also help to reduce operational and capital expenses depending on what may work best for your particular business. With less management and maintenance time spent the Cloud may, in fact, be a very willing and effective partner in most small, or even larger businesses.

Personal Cloud computing can mean that a user can have every piece of data they need to manage every aspect of their business at their fingertips.

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Social Media & Brand Monitoring Part 1: Radian6, Scout Labs, FlipTop

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Social Media has, in many ways, taken the place of the generalized web search. Personal comments, posted by happy or disgruntled customers, can have a tremendous impact on the reputation of a brand. It doesn’t take long before a social comment creates a chain of complaints, and if it goes unanswered can damage any business. There is no vacuum in the world, scientists tell us, and if you are not present on social media, your competitors can take advantage of your absence.

With so many social media platforms, and new ones joining all the time, the amount of users and comments on social media platforms has overtaken the amount of search engine queries, and by doing so have turned social media into a prime target for advertisers. Where the clients are, that is where advertisement should be.

With that proliferation, business owners have faced a dilemma; devote many hours of the day to monitoring their brand name and engaging in personal advertising across many sites, or hire additional employees to deal with those issues. But help was not far behind. To make it easier to monitor and to use so many social media sites for reputation and advertising, a few companies have created tools to monitor social media presence and plan a quick response. These are tools that not only tell you who is talking about you, what he/she says, but give you tools to see it in one place and analyze the information.

Radian6

By far the most robust site and the most talked about it Radian6.  Formed in 2006, the site helps companies with social media monitoring that enables business owners listen to what is said about their business online, across a wide network of social site including Twitter and Facebook, through text, tweets, pictures (Flickr), Google Buzz, videos, forums and blog posts. Radian6 gathers all that information and gives the business tools to analyze, manage, track and respond in real time.

Users of the software can choose any number of topics and keywords they want to track and get information within seconds. They can even compare them against each other to see which keyword gets the most uses in the social media circles.

Radian6 is a desktop application built on Adobe AIR. This paid program (about $500 a month) is meant for marketing, communications and customer support professionals. It also allows assigning tasks to different team members, and planning engagement times. Users can customize the tracking grid and break down the information by broad or specific topics, by tagging customer lists or by media types.

Radian6 was originally marketed to ad agencies. When the agency works with many brands, it could offer social media monitoring services for their clients. From there it expended to businesses beyond advertising companies and PR firms. They are probably best suited for medium to large sized brands and businesses.

But by far the best feature of the site is its analytics; after some training, you can slice and dice the data you get any way you want; who is mentioning your brand, on what platform. You can get an “influencer report” – who is mentioning your brand and on what source. The workflow view of the site allows users to follow, assign and report on news in real time. You can even have it sent to you via instant messenger.  

Watch a video presentation:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqv_RuGxPqQ]

Radian6 biggest customers include Dell, Microsoft, PepsiCo, Kellogg’s, Fujitsu and Sony Ericson.

Scout Labs

 

The company was founded in February 2009, after two years of testing and development. Priced at around between $99 and $250 a month, scout Labs will give the user, after an initial set up, charts and graphs for volume of mentions and compare it to the competition you have set up to track. An automated ‘sentiment report’ follows every search, so you know at first glance if the comments are good, bad or neutral. This aspect is manually scored on Radian6 and comes with the highest paid package. On Scout Labs it is presented right there and then. But, it requires you to trust the algorithms which are applied, to understand the nuances of the language.

Scouts lab allows you to quickly scan all the social media sites for specific keywords or terms. Experts say it turns in more results from pictures and video than Radian6, and the ‘sentiment’ scoring makes it quicker to deal with problems. For $99 a month, their basic program is enough to handle a single brand or small business, and monitor 3-4 competitors. For $249, you get the ability to do more searches for competitors and divisions of your business.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDtKahqGBuo]

You get a better price point with Scout Labs but not as through analytics as you get with Radian6. The latter has internal project management software for quick response that the former has not. Whether you choose Radian6 or Scout Labs depends on the size of your company and the information you want to have. Both are useful and worth the time and money you’ll invest in learning how to work it properly. From there, it will enable you to see a clear picture where your business is, in the big scheme of things.

FlipTop

In its beta stage right now, this promising new Social Media Tool shows some amazing potential, while it offers analytical tools, Fliptop is setup to leverage relationships across the different platforms in such a way that tracking profile and demographic information from those platforms may make target marketing more effective both in, and outside of social media. This tool may not only have the pulse of the social media realm, it may have the pulse of each individual tool providing valuable insight to what is and isn’t working in each type of social media.  

Early Estimates show that it may enter the market at a price point of $99 a month, which should make it very competitive with the existing market. However, don’t expect that price point to last long once they go public, as the suite of tools it seems to have in the beta are likely to get a lot of attention.

I going to stay vague for now, as my beta to this tool was a leap of faith and I want to finishing using it for a little while. I also want to let my contact work with me on  this, but I promise you from what I have seen and heard from the FlipTop rep this is a very promising tool.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JYkqwsQfiA]

This is Part 1 of Social Media Monitoring Tools, Part 2 will be later this week.

Sources:

Facebook Marketing Tool: Involver.com

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Noah Horton and Rahim Fazal founded Involver.com in 2007 in efforts to provide a startup that can help brands begin to get a grip on managing their social media channels. Having grown from a company of a dozen employees to over sixty with many offices in areas such as Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and Austin, and with more coming soon, it looks like Involver, is in fact, fully involved, with no plans of leaving any time soon.

Involver has four main ways in which they help companies and organizations create rich and helpful experiences all across the social web.

  1. Involver helps to generate earned media by attracting attention from influential sources.
  2. Involver helps to get prospective customers engaged with your products and services through social networks.
  3. Involver can help to reduce marketing cost through a series of fully automated social networking services.
  4. Involver helps to maintain constant and consistent branding and advertisement for your products and services.

This kind of brand management can be critical to a company and its ultimate success online. Those who use Involver will also want to take advantage of the features offered in the applications area.

Flickr

You can bring all of your Flickr photos to Facebook with the Flickr App from Involver. This will allow users to stream their Flickr photos displaying their entire album, or allows users to choose sub albums to categorize their photo streams.

YouTube Channels

You can set your video to directly deliver to your social networks upon uploading. This will help incorporate your YouTube videos into your active marketing campaigns.

With so many more applications available there are bound to be at least a handful of ways to improve your social media interactions in Involvers many apps.

  • Facebook Stories
  • Social Catalog
  • RSS Feed
  • Promotion Galleries
  • Music Player
  • Polls
  • Coupons
  • Static HTML for Pages

Many more apps available make this attractive and professional option in social media marketing and product or service branding an invaluable tool in the likely already full bag of marketers tricks of the trade.

Get 10,000 Fans on Facebook

“It was in November of 2010 that my train baseball fan page had reached 10,000 fans and I decided that I would finally start a business that aimed at helping other small businesses like you get off the ground using tools like Facebook. So this is where things sit today. I’m 24 years old, and get a pretty neat opportunity to help out small businesses make better use of facebook.”

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mFBa3QVD2Q]

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Location Trends: Checkpoints

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“When was the last time you got a reward for just showing up? When did you get a prize for something you do every day? Now you can, with Checkpoints” is the catch-phrase of a new mobile app called Checkpoints.

Founded by brothers/ entrepreneurs Mark and Todd DiPaola, who put $1 million of their own money into forming a company in April 2010, the new product was launched about 3 months ago.

What Checkpoints offers is product integration, a way to introduce new clients to products in a fun and interactive way.

An example will illustrate it the best: You are about to go shopping for groceries. Opening the app on your cellular phone will show you which markets in your area are participating in the program. By going in and checking in there –pointing your cell phone camera at a bar code and taking a picture – you get some points.

The app will also show you which products in the store they are recommending. By picking a product up and scanning it (again with the camera) you will also get points. You can do the same with any other establishment, and Checkpoints is a universal currency, meaning it is not tied to a brand or to a currency. The points you accumulate can be redeemed for products; from gift cards to new electronic gadgets and airline miles.

For shoppers this app, available for all camera-equipped cell phones, is a fun way to interact with new products and get something in return.

For manufacturers and advertisers, which have been tied to a specific location in their advertisements, Checkpoints offers the ability to expend to the product level and drive customers to pick it up and really look at it, in an interactively engaging way.

Several brands have joined the program immediately; Belkin, Energizer, Seventh Generation, Tyson foods, 24/7 fitness center, and more. Just recently, Lionsgate, the movie production and distribution company has added Checkpoints to all their DVDs and Blu-rays. Customers are able to watch trailers and receive checkpoints for interaction with new movies. They will also have access to movie reviews and exclusive offers. “We know this technology increases the likelihood of purchase and we’re also excited by the sheer power of the experience and the brand engagement it creates” says Anne Parducci, Lionsgate Executive Vice President of Marketing and Family Entertainment.

Checkpoints hit the million check-ins and 600,000 bar code scans in January 2011, about 2 and half months after its launch. The brothers are now contemplating whether to continue in their boot-strapping operation with 13 employees or start a round of financing.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXwHkpGlQ00]

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Run a Website or Blog? You Can Help Japan With One Code Snippet

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Run a Website or Blog? You Can Help Japan With One Code Snippet.

Mashable is running a digital campaign to help get support for Japan, while this is slightly outside the norm for this blog, I feel that what it represents is the power of New Media and our ability to reach people and make a difference.

How You Can Help: From CNN Blog

CNN Blog

The U.S. State Department is urging any U.S. citizens to contact friends and family as soon as possible. They can also e-mail the State Department at JapanEmergencyUSC@state.gov. Those seeking information on security in or travel to Japan can call 1-888-407-4747 or 1-202-501-4444.

PLEASE:

Remember to check before you donate (know who and where the money your giving is going) and take the time to find ways to help others with your time as that in almost every case is as important as the money you can give.

Social Media Club

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In March of 2006, Chris Heuer and Kristie Wells began Social Media Club. Their intentions were to provide a format in which to explore and offer solutions to common issues facing our society as technological advancements continued to shape the way we connected socially on many levels.Benefits of Social Media Club

The global conversation on these issues has continued on to help build an organization and central location where a largely diverse group of people can continue to come together to discuss Social Media. SocialMediaClub.org can be beneficial to users in many ways.

  • All members will be able to sign up on Social Media Club’s email lists and social networks to connect with those who have similar needs and interest. This can also be based on geography if that benefits the member.
  • Members have access to publish in the Social Media Club Observer.
  • Members can receive discounts to the events organized by Social Media Club and its partner organizations and companies.
  • Members have the opportunity to be listed under the Speakers Directory and to receive invitations to members-only events.
  • Jobs in social media industries are also listed on the Social Media Club members section of the website.

Perhaps most vitally, members will have the chance to meet with people just as themselves who are looking for an edge in managing their businesses or personal social medias. Members who are unfamiliar with all of the common aspects of social media will learn to confidently utilize and apply these technological advancements in communication to their everyday businesses.

Members who have advanced knowledge of social media marketing will have many others to bounce their new and innovative ideas off of, those of whom already know their language and can respond in kind.

Social Media Statistics

It is a fact that we will likely never return to our parents, and their parents generations that flocked to radio and daily print to absorb our local or global news and information. Statistics regularly monitored in social medias only continue to grow in unfathomable numbers.

In 2010, during the average twenty minute excerpt of time, there were 1,5870,000 posts to Facebook walls and 2,716,000 photos uploaded. 10,208,000 comments were also posted.

Since April 2010, Twitter has increased their user list by 40,000,000 and have had a 62% increase in the use of mobile platforms.

The average U.S. user will watch at least thirty minutes of video online each day, compared to around five hours of T.V. per day.

Social Media Club Goals

Ultimately, the goal of Social Media Club is to continue to provide a forum where individuals can work together for a universal common good. Part of that goal means to continue to build up and build on more local chapters for all members.

Additionally, Social Media Club stresses that education, management and helpful tools and services are not limited to online availability and that offline events, meets and other knowledgeable networking functions are just as important as the time you spend utilizing them online daily.

Social Media Club Long Island

Founded in 2010 by Hillary Topper, Social Media Club Long Island has developed a following rather quickly in just under a year. The group received its official charter in early 2011 and features guest speakers at every meeting. Much like a Chamber of Commerce, the group gathers business owners and entrepreneurs alike.

The last SMCLI meeting took place on March 4, 2010. I had the pleasure to attend as I recently joined the SMC as a professional member.

The March 4 meeting featured speaker Steve Poppe, Managing Partner of What’s The Idea? (slideshare posted below). Sueanne Shirzay of SMCLI wrote in a follow up SMCLI  internal blog “Importance was put on the tremendous value of creating original content in blogs and websites, as only a paltry 8% of social media users currently do this. He described the creators or original content as “posters” and those who retweet the content or copy it as “pasters”.

In addition to the poster and paster comparison, Steve also brought our attention to the format or content type we use in our posts when we do post. As Steve pointed out that we have all become heavy text based posters, this gave pause to the entire room with a moment of silence to ponder the possibility that even those of us that are creating original content or “posters” have mostly become text based. I took a bit of pride in realizing that I had caught this in my blogs and made the adjustment back at the end of Dec 2010. Yet somehow most of my other social media activities are still overwhelmingly text based.

Social Media Week 2011: Social Media Camp NYC presented by Social Media Club

SMC has networked itself right into the heart of Social Media activities, I recently presented at Social Media Week 2011 and Social Media Club was the organizing sponsor of the event. Clearly this organization warrants keeping an eye on, but clearly it’s something any social media professional will want to join.

[slideshare id=7151078&doc=psomelisomeclub0304-110304112129-phpapp02]

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Digital Marketing Trend: Microsoft Tag

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Microsoft Tag is a new experience in connecting the digital world with the real world.  By scanning a tag – a new kind of bar code – with your cellular phone, you can have immediate access to information, websites, videos, reviews and more.

 

When you scan a Tag displayed on an establishment or product, it will automatically open a web page and give you all the pertinent information.

  • What was said about the coffee shop you are looking at?
  • Who is the owner?
  • What other users said?
  • You can also see if the place is offering special deals.

Scan a Tag on a concert poster and you will get the dates of their next performance in your city, you could buy tickets or sample a song.  The Tag will display a massage, dial a number or add the contact to your address book.

Shopping, Microsoft says, has become a lot smarter and fun; Tags lets you discover interesting new places, it can give access to the things consumers love and then bring them together.

Tags are free to create and use. They can be added to ads, posters, websites, packages, billboards and clothing. And this is but a part of the list. Adding the Tag to your business card will enable the user to add your contact information immediately into their address book.

For merchants, using the Tag not only give them access to customers they never had before, it also enables them to create media campaigns and have advanced analytics to measure campaign effectiveness. This can give you detailed information where the Tag was scanned and what was your most popular ad location.

The Tag reader is a downloadable application from a single website (to eliminate confusion) and can be as small as you want it to be so it won’t interfere with the design. Tags can be customized to your brand’s specific look and feel.

Microsoft is using a cloud based technology that provides access to data that isn’t possible with other bar-code systems because of the amount of information a cloud can store. Unlike other 2D codes that have permanent information and are associated with a single URL, Tags allows you to change the data in its source, update is as frequently as you want, allowing you to reuse campaign materials.

You can create a Tag by going to their website at tag.microsoft.com and sign in. Since May 2010, Tags has graduated from the beta trials and is now available everywhere. For some reason it caught on much quicker in Europe than in the US. In Amsterdam, for example, they are using the Microsoft Tag to advertise accurate bus schedules.

Since the beginning of its Beta trials and until May 2010, over 1 billion tags have been printed all over the world.

Sources:

Special Thanks to David Tesser for presenting this technology and subject to me for the blog.

Blog Tag: URL 2D

SmB Digital Trends: Groupon, Google Offers & Facebook Deals

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Small Business Trends: Groupon, Google Offers & Facebook Deals

Groupon burst into the scene of business client relationship in 2008, and changed the advertising model. It’s mindboggling rise in 2010 is proof they’ve hit the jackpot – an uncharted territory of local businesses and internet users. The virtual world and the physical world intersecting with each other.

A deal-a-day website, Groupon focuses its attention on the buying power of the surge. Every day a new deal in a specific area is advertised, announced by e mail to users by geographic location. The deal offers deep discounts – between 50%-90% off the regular price, and it can be made on merchandise or services (diving lessons for example). For businesses, even though the margin of profit shrinks, the deal has the potential of brining in many new customers and creating repeat business. For the customers it is an opportunity to buy something at a drastically reduced price.

Groupon’s scouts reach out to local businesses they deem worthy and offer to make a deal. Today, Groupon has scouts in over 300 markets in 35 countries, looking for businesses that meet their standards. There are some businesses they stay away from; shooting ranges, abortion clinics, plastic surgeons and strip clubs to mention some. Groupon has a subscriber base of 50 million members.

Forbes Magazine said about Groupon, as was quoted in The Wall Street Journal “We are projecting that the company is on pace to make $1 Billion in deals faster than any other business, ever.”

With the success came attempts by bigger companies to buy them out. Yahoo was rumored to make an offer, which was rejected, then, at the end of 2010, Google offered to buy Groupon for $6 billion. The offer was rejected in December 2010. It is rumored they are preparing for an IPO that can bring in as much as $16 billion.

Google didn’t wait long. At the end of January 2011, Google announced a new product which is in its testing stages. It is called Google Offers.

Google Offers

On January 20, 2011, Google announced on their blog “… a new product to help potential customers and clientele find deals in their area through a daily e mail”.

On the surface it seems to be the same deal as Groupon, but those who saw the program say it is a different model.

It will be an extension of their Google Coupons. You can see it if you google: coupons site:maps.google.com intitle:Google Offers. There you’ll find a list of coupons for businesses according to the geographical location. As you can see on the page, it is not very attractive and it is not easy to find deals in your area. But, if Google will let you know the deal in a daily e mail, incorporating their Gmail service, their potential customer base is enormous.

Opportunity? – With google shifting to local search results in Nov 2010, it might set the stage for a local offer to be ties into the search results in a big (or popup) way! Currently for as little as $25 a month Google places lets business owners produce a deal or coupon special, but this is likley just the begining.

Nate Tyler, Google spokesman, sent this statement a few days later:

“Google is communicating with small businesses to enlist their support and participation in a test of a pre-paid offers/vouchers program. This initiative is part of an ongoing effort at Google to make new products, such as the recent Offer Ads beta, that connect businesses with customers in new ways. We do not have more details to share at this time, but will keep you posted.”

And they are not alone. Where Google goes, so does Facebook (or vice versa).

Facebook Deals

Millions of people use Facebook Places to tell their friends where they are at a certain moment. Now Facebook is going a step further and launching an additional program for smartphone users called Facebook Deals.

We all like to feel we got the best deal possible, especially when it is shared with friends. Starting in November 2010, when you ‘check in’ to a business page on Facebook on your computer or mobile phone, you will see notations if the business is offering a deal. Clicking on it will show you the type of deal this business is offering.

Facebook Places lets you share where you are with your friends and see where they are. With Deals you can also see which businesses offer discounts in the area you are and share that information with your friends. When you go to the establishment, all you have to do is show your phone to the cashier to get your discount or gift.

There are 4 kinds of deals Facebook Deals is offering: Individual, friend, loyalty and charity.

  • Individual deals offer discounts or rewards for you, like a free cup of coffee, a free entrée etc. When you check in you get the offer for yourself.
  • Friend – You have to bring your friends with you. Tagging a number of friends to a business will get all of you a discount or free stuff (like a free T shirt in a rock concert). But you have to be in the company of all those you tagged.
  • Loyalty deals – a local establishment can offers deals that are similar to the punch-in cards, in the vein of buy 5 and get the 6th one free.
  • Charity deals – The establishment will donate money to charity when you use their services.

Since the end of January 2011, Deals is available in the US, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK.

Which system is best for your business? It depends on your niche, what a surge on clients can bring, or whether you want it to be a one-time deal or an ongoing discount for repeat customers. But one thing is certain – all those offers open a new way for businesses to advertise themselves to customers in their physical area.

Sources:

Basic Guide to Understanding Code

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Making a website can be a complicated process, especially when there are all different types of code out there that you can use. Each type of code is a little bit different, with the end result going unnoticed by most casual viewers. However, the real results are highly noticeable by professionals in the web design field, as well as in the management and maintenance of the website itself.

The purpose of this post was to give a short introduction to Small Business Owners on a variety of codes. This is to provide a basic understanding and help you navigate “what my IT guy said”.

Scripting Languages

  • PHP

Scientifically known as Hypertext Processor, PHP is a scripting language created for the development of web pages that have been prepared with fresh information for each individual viewing. This is known as a dynamic web page. Although most people do not choose to run their website around this programming language, there are many great websites that are based on PHP such as Facebook and Digg.

  • Java

Widely used from web applications to an intensive variety of software, Java is still a top programming language across the net. Java is highly used for the creation of programs from applets to massive full-blow applications, that are incorporated into websites to make them more efficient, and ultimately faster. Created from C and C++ syntax, Java was first created for an idea in interactive television. However, it ultimately proved too advanced for its time. This was in 1991.

  • Flash

Flash is a scripting language developed to create vector animations for web site usage. From the creation of interactive websites as well as e-stores and even high tech digital management systems, Flash is a leading competitor for Java in the coming years. Flash has fast load times and can save on download times due to its vector base. Creating caches so future viewings do not require reload is also an incredible feature of flash programming. Viewing Flash scripting gives the viewer the impression of viewing a movie instead of a still picture, regardless of how digitally enhanced. While there are disadvantages to flash not running on Apple products and some of the SEO limitations a good programmer and/or web developer can overcome this shortfall rather easily. While there are disadvantages to flash not running on Apple products and some of the SEO limitations a good programmer and/or web developer can overcome this shortfall rather easily.

  • ASP

Similar to PHP, this language is for creating dynamic webpages. ASP is formally known as ASP.Net. It is a form of web application framework created by Microsoft. ASP assist in building dynamic web applications, web services and web sites. Web pages officially created as ‘web forms’ are some of the largest building blocks for application development in an extensive amount of areas.

  • HTML

Which stands for Hyper Text Markup Language, is the predominant markup language for web pages. HTML is the basic building-blocks of webpages.

HTML is written in the form of HTML elements consisting of tags, enclosed in angle brackets (like <html>), within the web page content. HTML tags normally come in pairs like <h1> and </h1>. The first tag in a pair is the start tag, the second tag is the end tag (they are also called opening tags and closing tags).

The purpose of a web browser is to read HTML documents and compose them into visual or audible web pages. The browser does not display the HTML tags, but uses the tags to interpret the content of the page.

HTML elements form the building blocks of all websites. HTML allows images and objects to be embedded and can be used to create interactive forms. It provides a means to create structured documents by denoting structural semantics for text such as headings, paragraphs, lists, links, quotes and other items. It can embed scripts in languages such as JavaScript which affect the behavior of HTML webpages. (Wikipedia, 2011)

  • FBML

FBML is Facebook’s mark-up language but these elements will take any HTML as well. So you have the ability to add newsletter sign-up forms, e-book downloads, and other HTML based elements. It is like HTML, but it lets you include social content inline in your markup. It is Facebook’s version of HTML, the language that web pages are written in. For the most part, knowledge of HTML is all that is needed to utilize the functionality of the Static FBML application. (Pitt, 2011)

Summary:

Although a random casual observer may not know right away what scripting language your web site uses, it is important to the type of niche, features and opportunities your site will employ. When it comes to making a decision on which scripting language is best for your site, you should always consult a professional, or at least be willing to invest many hours of research on the topic to understand it enough to make a remotely educated decision.

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iPad2 Announced and Motorola Xoom Released!

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Even though it was questionable as to whether he would make an appearance today or not, Steve Jobs had an announcement he wanted to be the one to share. As he strode out to the tune of “Here Comes the Sun,” he brought with him the information on a much awaited device. The iPad 2.

While some of the newest viewers claim that the iPad 2’s cover is far more impressive than the moderate upgrades and updates made to the new iPad, others heartily disagree. Jobs wants users to understand, that this isn’t a simple tweaked and fluffed upgrade, but a new device created from the ground up.

Narrow Augmented Reality

This version of the iPad will be a bit thinner, a tad lighter and have a few more features than the old version. Front and rear-facing cameras will allow users to use applications like Facetime as well as take photos or video. In addition, augmented reality applications that require users to ‘look through’ the iPad while drawing data atop of the normal view is supported.

Motorola Xoom has already been tested with an augmented reality option in the recent past. In fact, the March 2011 issue of Popular Science will feature a 3D interactive cover that will reveal Android’s 3.0 Honeycomb-powered Xoom device. Xoom comes with a 1.3MP front camera, and a 5MP rear camera.

More Apps

Apparently, there can never be enough apps. With over 65,000 apps currently fueling the iPad, the new iPad 2 has already generated a whole new generation of apps. A YouTube application allows users to watch videos directly from YouTube. With a high resolution screen, users can also choose to view their videos in high definition with impressive results.  

Xoom already has its own impressive list of apps in those such as the Wall Street Journal Tablet Edition app that allows more than just an informative read, but also allows users to download entire papers to read at their own pace, even if out of range of a wi-fi connection.  Fuze Meeting, that helps to facilitate communication between team or group members has proved another reliable Xoom app.

New Processors

The new main CPU on the iPad 2 is the Samsung A5 dual-core processor. This processor will offer speeds up to nine times faster than its original device. Additionally, there is also a newer graphics processor that is twice the speed of the original iPad.

On the Xoom you will also find a dual-core processor, the Tegra 2 powered by NVIDIA. 

Aesthetics

Although unlikely to be dubbed fashion-forward by anyone, it will come available in white or black from day one this time. Also, the iPad 2 is only a mere 8.8mm thick. This is thinner than the iPhone itself. Think that is amazing? It has become even lighter at a slight 1.3 pounds.

Motorola Xoom comes in black.

However, as with just about any other mobile device, both products have already sparked another set of case and cover industries so your customization options, in the manner of accessories, is nearly limitless on both devices.

Verizon Support

If you are one of the many consumers locked into a Verizon data-network, than you will be delighted to know that there will also be a version of the iPad 2 that will support Verizon’s cellular network. Since Verizon claims one of the most widespread networks in the United States, this could be incredibly good news for an incredible amount of iPad users. Although Verizon isn’t known to be the most affordable carrier, they do boast incredible coverage that will make this version of the iPad 2 nothing short of phenomenal in coverage for this type of device.

Xoom has this covered as well. There is an available Verizon version for this device as well. The Xoom like the Ipad2 will has data and non data options.

Under the Bling and $$$’s of the iPad 2

Although iPad 2 sure does seem to sport some shiny bells and impressive whistles, in the end, it may not be enough to talk consumers out of anywhere between $500 and $1200.00 of their hard earned cash, and those at ‘auction’ pricing. 

The new iPad will be released for purchase on Friday, March the 11th, 2011 in the United States and on March the 25th in other selected countries worldwide.

Under Xoom’s Hood

Although personal choice in applications or abilities and even things such as accessories can always be weighing factors in personal choices between these types of technological devices, these specifics or details are still likely not the deciding factor for most who may be weighing which of the newer devices they actually plan to sink the funds into. Although Xoom may be a bit more expensive in initial cost at around $800 for the Verizon version and $600 for open wi-fi, in the long run, its application cost and accessories are likely to cost far less than its Apple counterparts.

My Biased Opinion

    Apple has its core following, it has grown as far as it can, now that more reasonable and advanced players are in the Market with Android it shouldn’t be long before the Android platform surpasses the iPad just like it did the iPhone.

   Steve, its called Flash, wonderful little upgrade you missed.

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