From the read at Venturebeat, ZoneAlarm has just toughened up its software, and now more people can be better protected against computer viruses and worms. One feature that has caught my attention is that ZoneAlarm provides keystroke encryption. This very feature allows ZoneAlarm to encrypt whatever you type on your computer in real time, and as ZoneAlarm claims, it will stop keyloggers. Keyloggers are programs that stay hidden on your computer and logging what you had typed down; this can be used by hackers to retrieve passwords and other confidential information from you. Also as more laptops get sell than ever before, protecting data on laptop is now even more important, and so ZoneAlarm is now providing hard-drive encryption. Hard-drive encryption is important for laptops since laptops are easily be stolen or lost.
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Walmart is growing its business through online sales by selling other companies products on its website. Not all companies are now qualified for partnering up with Walmart through its online store. Walmart is doing this to counter its recent offline slow growth of sales. So why are we talking about how Walmart sells its products in a technology blog? Because what Walmart is doing is utilizing a technology that everyone is using everyday known as the Internet. Walmart is using the Internet to grow its business.
If you want to make money online, and you’re telling your friends about this, some of them may say that you’re dreaming. They may be speaking of the truths since not everyone gets to make lot of money by doing business online. It’s harder, a lot harder, than you may think! Using the Internet technology to grow a business is part art, part psychology, and just plain old technology. We can safely say that the Internet is an old technology, whether you agree with me or not, Internet has been around for decades. Humans have been tinkered with the Internet since 1960s. Now the Internet is not something that we just being amuse of, but it is powering companies and business to transact sales, transfer encrypted data, and much much more.
Doing business online is part art because you have to know how to create a website that can maximize the user experiences to potentially boost your online sales. Just a few things on the top of my mind that you may have to consider of when making a website for your business — picking correct pictures to display on your website, display website’s links using attractive buttons and navigation styles, using attractive website layout, applying correct programming languages and content management systems to ease the process of adding contents and products, writing attractive introduction and contents for your business and products, using good third party services or your own system to accept payments, applying correct online security technology to protect your customers’ personal data and payment data, and so much more. I’m calling this an art because you have to know what technologies you need, how to arrange these technologies together and have them working as a whole, and either hiring a web designer or bringing the creative side of you to create a beautiful looking website to attract customers.
Doing business online is part psychology because you have to know what your customers want. Surprisingly, this process is not at all different from doing business offline. All businesses need to know their customers’ behaviors, desires, and so on to be able to target the customers with the right products and generate sales. Online businesses need to know how to market their products online to be successful, and everyone knows that when come to marketing either for offline or online — the right way — sometimes require the field of psychology. Some online businesses use Google’s Adwords to advertise their products in Google’s search engine. Google offers Adwords, but it doesn’t offer you a psychology class, and that you have to know how to do on your own. Others use Adbrites, Commission Junction, LinkShare, Walmart, Amazon, Ebay, Craigslist, and so on to market their products online. Some online businesses go as far as utilizing the social network portals such as FaceBook, MySpace, Twitter, and so on to market their products. Using social network portals to connect to customers is just another way that businesses are applying psychology! I’m sure there are hundreds, if not thousands, of other ways that someone else can think up to help boost sales online — it’s all about the psychology! Don’t every business, either online or offline, want to know how to control the minds of the customers?
When come to cost, in most cases, doing business online is cheaper than doing business offline. You don’t have to worry about the cost of atoms such as electricity, space, and large personnel. You still need to do some hiring for doing business online such as doing the hiring of engineers, web designers, database engineers, and so on, but in many cases you can usually hire some of these folks on case per case basis. Without the need of shelling out huge sum of cash to get a business going online, big businesses like Walmart and others have no hesitation to launch their online businesses. In this case, Walmart utilizes its brand name and online present to help other businesses sell products online. What Walmart is doing is not cutting edge, but what it’s doing is smart. In a way, Walmart is the offline king, but the online king is Amazon; Walmart is just playing catch up with the likes of Amazon and Amazon itself. In a way, Walmart can grow its business even more by utilizing the Internet the right way!
Good news folks! Google is ready for you to download over a million of digital books in EPUB format that can conform to the mobile screen sizes. The books you get to download from Google, many are no longer under copyright law. As the way Google puts it, converting atoms to bits — it’s a great thing since the bits world is much much more affordable! Imagine of all those trees you’ve saved by using electronic copies of the books. Imagine how much more affordable for the schools to allow students to download a literature than printing it.
Ready to download some books and get on with your reading? No problem, just visit http://books.google.com/.
The process of getting digital books to work with different mobile devices was not easy, but Google have done it! You can read all about it at here. Many digital books are in PDF and other image-like formats, but those formats are great for computer screen’s sizes, but when come to mobile devices, the books’ image-like digital formats aren’t so great for the readers! One way to go around it is to extract words from images, but how to do that? Google is using Optical Character Recognition method to do so. Though as Google puts it, smudges on physical pages, fancy fonts, and many annoyances that bound to physical world can be tough to extract even though Optical Character Recognition is designed for this very task. Google is trying its best to improve Optical Character Recognition technology, and in doing so there will be more books in Google’s digital library for you to enjoy!
Liskula Cohen, a Canadian model, sued Google in court to reveal an identity of a blogger since that blogger called her a skank, a whore, and many other things on his/her blog. The court ruled in her favor. I think it’s wrong for a blogger to be so offensive in defaming someone else with or without public life in anyway, but I think the Internet should be anonymous. For an example, if a blogger is living in a suppressive country but wanting to blog about the corruptive conditions that occur in his/her country, and he/she should have no reason to fear in doing just that because the Internet provides that anonymous curtain. When the Internet stops being anonymous, it’s when bloggers cannot speak his/her mind anymore either for good or for bad.
I wonder even if Google wants to reveal the identity of a blogger to the model based on the court’s ruling, can they even do it since many bloggers created fake profile for their blog accounts and using public hotspot locations for Internet access (public IP addresses). If only a blogger hosts his/her own blog software on a paid web hosting account or a dedicated server, then the identity of a blogger can be revealed easier. This case is somewhat bringing back some memory of how Yahoo exposed a Chinese blogger Shi Tao who wrote things that were offensive to the Chinese government, and Shi Tao were arrested and sentenced for 10 years in prison. Though pale in comparison, this case allows the anonymity to be lifted, and the future will be full of ridiculous lawsuits over trivial Internet quarrels.
Publishing a book now a day is not delicious as it used to be, and the digitizing of books is the more popular trend. The problem of digitizing books is that it can be pirated. Then again, by digitizing books, it’s easier for search engines to crawl, and people can search for the books that they want easier. Google is set out to digitize as many books as it can, but other books related organizations are against this. Google intends to digitize enough books and allow everyone to have free access to its archive. Last year Google had settled an agreement with book publishers, and will provide compensation for authors and publishers; this allows Google’s digitizing book project to move forward.
This year, Amazon and Yahoo and Microsoft, the three and couple other organizations are challenging Google on this very matter. They think it’s an antitrust matter. They also think it’s a privacy matter. For whatever purposes that these organizations have in mind, it’s obvious that Amazon and Yahoo and Microsoft want to stop Google’s book invasion. At the very least they want to bring forward some merit arguments to eventually have the court changes some of the terms that Google has dealt with other publishers, and in this way the whole thing will be favorable for the three. With a glance, Amazon has Kindle, Yahoo is a media company, and Microsoft has touched on anything that could slow down the Google machine.
If Google wins, nothing will change, and you will have free access to Google’s books archive. If Google loses, the book project may be less desirable for everyday people to use. If you are just a normal person who want to have more access to books for free, then you probably are praying for Google to win, but if you are a book publisher or an author, you probably are praying for the others. The thing is if we keep on making publishing books as more undesirable than it’s now, then there will be less authors around to publish books. Then again, if you are looking at the positive aspect of this whole thing, we can safely assume that only the passionate writers are willing to publish good books in undesirable book market. What are you in for?
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Tr.im announces that it’s going open source! What is this talk? Tr.im was supposed to shut down it service completely, but had decided to stay around. Then come this new news that Tr.im will release its source code for everyone. This means you and I can go get Tr.im’s source code, install that onto a server, and run a free URL Shortening Service.
Bloggers and Twitterers love URL Shortening Service as it allows them to shorten their blog posts’ web addresses, and promote their blogs on Twitter and other similar social network portals. Shorter URL saves some space when using Twitter as Twitter allows only so many characters to be in a tweet. Also, Shorter URL makes a long ugly link looks nicer.
The problem of using URL Shortening Service is that you are relying on a third party to handle your web links. When a URL Shortening Service that you are using is going out of business, all your web links that you had promoted to friends, online social network portals, and so on will be lost. Your true web links are still there, but the problem is that newer people won’t be able to find your true web links.
If URL Shortening Service is a must for you, I suggest you run a URL Shortening application on a server or on an affordable web-host, and use that for yourself. You don’t have to advertise your URL Shortening service at all, unless you want to run a free URL Shortening Service. With this in mind, you can use Tr.im’s source code to run your own operation.
Hard to find local news, hard to find public records, and you can even enter your zip code to find what is happening in your area are done superbly by EveryBlock. If you’re living in Atlanta, Boston, Charlotte, Chicago, Dallas, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle, and {Washington, DC}, then your local news are covered.
EveryBlock was independently owned for two years, but MSNBC just bought EveryBlock recently. Although EveryBlock is now owned by MSNBC, its brand will stay the same!
First look at EveryBlock’s website, it looks like any other blog’s pages, but when you click onto a city that you want to get your local news from, it gets interesting from there. When entering a city’s front page, you see a box that allows you to enter your zip code right away. When entering your zip code, if there is no news available for your area, EveryBlock offers you to sign up for email alerts, or you can choose the other option which is subscribing to an RSS feed. There are featuring events and featuring news show right below the zip code box in the front page. You can also browse news by neighborhoods. Each news has a map on the sidebar to show the story’s location. There is so much more…
EveryBlock has become my next favorite website. Before the buyout of EveryBlock, I had never heard of EveryBlock, but by browsing the Internet for news, I saw EveryBlock got purchased by MSNBC, and by exploring EveryBlock, I’ve come to like it very much. By the way, if you want to run a website like EveryBlock, you can! How? EveryBlock is offering its source code to you for free.
And so the social race is heating up even more! MySpace decides to take some glory off of FaceBook’s recent FriendFeed buyout by buying up iLike for $20 million. iLike is a social online application/service that adapts to music lovers’ behaviors and offer its recommendations on popular music. FaceBook’s users and other social network portals’ users are using iLike in millions. This means MySpace is trying to turn on the heat on this social race.
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