Image Source : Web

Google has published a detailed, 49-page report that rates the search engine optimization (SEO) on its various properties including the Google search home page. The result? It’s failing in a number of categories.

On the bright side, the company says it plans to use this information to better its own SEO, and that to help others, the company has shared some of the metrics it’s used.

The report covers 100 of Google’s products. The company is also planning a follow-up that will cover international localizations.

Among the items under scrutiny, one of the biggest areas of failure for the company is in “search result presentation”, where the company scored a 33/100 or lower in three different categories, the lowest being “title tag format and length”. This is how much information appears in the large, blue search result links as well as the text descriptions that appear below them. The report points at several ways to fix this, including the use of “descriptive words and phrases in your page’s title tag”.

Another low point of the report is the company’s score on the destination sites where images of logos led. These are the Google product logos that tend to reside in the upper left hand corner of the screen. The report found that well over half of these simply linked somewhere they were not supposed to, including 404 pages. Google’s solution, which is SEO friendly, is to use 301 redirects across the board; that way all the links go to the same place, and the search engine can re-index the page in the proper location.

Not all the report was bad though. Google scored well in offering a clear main page result (or only having one or two links that lead to the main product page), as well as having proper use of headline tags and internal anchor text. Read more ……

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Intuitive 3D Desktop | Image Source : Bumptop.com

BumpTop™ is a fun, intuitive 3D desktop that keeps you organized and makes you more productive. Like a real desk, but better. Now with awesome mouse and multi-touch gestures!

Your desktop, your way

Your desktop doesn’t have to be a boring graveyard for lost and forgotten files anymore! Transform it with BumpTop. Create the desktop that suits your needs and style.

BumpTop Gets Multi-Touch Support on Windows 7

A while back, we gave you a sneak preview of some of the new multi-touch features we were hard at work on this summer. I showed off our basic gestures, but mentioned that we’re a few really cool gestures that I couldn’t tell you about yet. Well, I’m happy to say that I can finally talk about them. Today, we’re announcing BumpTop 1.2, which contains some awesome new multi-touch features for Windows 7.  Read more ……

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MacBook Spying Case | Image Source : Appleinsider.com

FBI investigates, federal prosecutors subpoena documents in MacBook spying case, say reports.

The parents of a Pennsylvania high school student have asked a federal judge to bar school district personnel from switching on cameras in school-issued MacBook laptops, calling the security feature “peeping tom technology.”

In their motion Friday, Michael and Holly Robbins of Penn Valley, Pa., asked U.S. District Court Judge Jan DuBois to issue a restraining order preventing the district from remotely activating the webcams on student notebooks. They also requested that the judge block the district from recalling the laptops from students, saying that they believe school officials will then wipe the MacBooks’ hard drives to delete evidence of any camera activation.

“There can be no assurances that the School District will disable the use of the remote webcam or, once deactivated, make an internal decision to reactive the webcam,” the motion argued.

Elsewhere in the motion, the Robbins labeled the camera functionality “peeping tom technology,” and disputed the district’s account that cameras had been activated only when a notebook was reported lost or stolen. “[Blake Robbins] was at home using a school issued laptop that was neither reported lost nor stolen when his image was captured by Defendants without his or his parents’ permission and while he was at home,” the motion said. Read more ……

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Google has finished its acquisition of video-compression-technology vendor On2 Technologies, boosting its efforts in online video.

The deal closed after gaining approval from On2 shareholders and was valued at $124.6 million, Google said in a brief statement late Friday. The figure was about $18 million more than the value stated when the companies announced the acquisition last year.

On2 provides video compression technologies for mobile video, embedded devices, Adobe Flash Player and VoIP (voice over Internet Protocol). Its customers include Skype, Nokia, Sony and Adobe, according to its Web site.

Google last year said On2 would provide it with video compression technology and that it hoped the acquisition would help further innovation in online video quality. Read more ……

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Image Source : womensrights.change.org

The greatest threat to healthy female body image might just be…a computer program. That’s right : Photoshop isn’t just manipulating the colors and shades of the sky in the background, it’s manipulating the way we think about female beauty. More specifically, reinforcing the aesthetic of the skinny, the skinnier, and the emaciated.

The program can be used to do all sorts of things, from inserting people of color into all-white spreads to shrinking the size of cheeks and hips to fazing out ex-boyfriends. And while not all of these things are necessarily bad, most of the connotations we have with Photoshop are negative, as The Guardian points out.

Why? Because, well, in a society cluttered with ubiquitous and constant media images of young, absurdly thin white women used to sell products, Photoshop is most frequently associated with the exaggeration and reinforcement of the unhealthy standards of beauty to which women are held. There’s the altered Demi Moore cover, where Moore’s hip had miraculously disappeared. The aforementioned Ralph Lauren photo, which spawned protests against Photoshop outside the Ralph Lauren store in New York. Then an even more hideous Ralph Lauren disaster in which the model looks so thin it’d almost be laughable if it weren’t so awful.

Image Source : Askmen.com

It’s frustrating that so often technology gets manipulated for the purposes of exploitation, particularly the exploitation of women (See: iPhone Apps). In this case, the manipulation is particularly egregious, because it is an outright but often believable lie that asks women to compare themselves to an ideal that’s been entirely fabricated by a few brushstrokes. Read more ……

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Battle Pandemics in a Digital World | Image Source : Superstock.com

People concerned about contracting the H1N1 virus, or any other potential illness now have some new tools to help them keep tracking of pandemics and stay healthy.

In the age when digital devices rule, consumers and health organizations can now stay up to date on the latest flu-related information with a few taps of a button, thanks to the increasing number of iPhone apps, social networks and informative Web sites dedicated to the cause. Users can now share information and track other health threats instantaneously.

For example, the HealthMap Outbreaks Near Me iPhone (News – Alert) application displays red pins on a map, which show nearby cases of swine flu. The app also shows how users can report cases they know about. The app is one of more than 100 swine flu apps for Apple (News – Alert) Inc.’s iPhone, according to The Associated Press. Some are free, whereas are fee-based.

Beyond consumer apps, the CDC News Reader iPhone app, gives officials from the Center for Disease Control swine flu updates, public health articles and travel notices. What’s more, swineAware offers links to swine flu statistics and briefings from the CDC and the World Health Organization.

Such applications can help reduce the number of people infected by the virus. The H1N1 virus, also known as swine flu, claimed more than 11,000 lives and required the hospitalization of some 250,000 people, more than the number in a typical flu season, The AP said. Read more ……

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Barbie Computer Engineer | Image Source : Escapistmagazine.com

Barbie is no longer the less-than-intelligent blonde she once was, now earning her keep as a professional geek.

Barbie has had over 100 careers since 1959, taking on the work of firefighter to astronaut, and Mattel has just revealed her latest. Barbie’s 126th career will be computer engineer, establishing her as an official nerd.

Computer engineer was chosen by the popular vote of over 500,000 people; the first time Barbie’s career has ever been decided this way. Other choices included architect, environmentalist, news anchor, and surgeon, with news anchor set for Barbie’s 125th career as it won the popular vote amongst girls (take that, guys). In the field of computer engineering, men often outnumber women, so the hope is that the doll will help to inspire young women to become code monkeys.

Computer Engineer Barbie is set to make her programming debut in Fall 2010. She’ll be wearing a binary code t-shirt, carrying a smart phone, and talking to her corporate drone boss on a Bluetooth headet. Just because Barbie is a computer engineer doesn’t mean she can’t still accessorize, as her hot-pink glasses will match the hot pink laptop she stares at for 10 hours a day.
Computer Engineer Barbie is supposedly available for pre-order at the Mattel shop, but I couldn’t find the link, so maybe a more enterprising Barbie fan can discover how to reserve one. Read more ……

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A series of mysterious music clips uploaded to YouTube over the last week have been viewed hundreds of thousands of times and have bloggers excitedly guessing which artist is behind it. Is it pop princess Christina Aguilera? Scandinavian electronic duo The Knife? Or perhaps it’s a viral campaign to launch some hitherto unknown artist?

Four clips have been uploaded so far by a user called “iamamiwhoami”, the longest is 82 seconds and the shortest runs at 63 seconds. The clips are dark, weird and show a muddy-faced blonde singer. The music, meanwhile, is electronic and nods towards the experimental without being too alienating. The title of each clip is a simple numerical code, the latest of which spells “Mandragora”.  Read more ……

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Chinese New Year is a holiday that celebrates the beginning of a new year according to the lunar calendar. It is considered to be one of the most important holidays for Chinese families.

The start of Chinese New Year changes every year since it is dictated by the lunar calendar. The Gregorian or solar calendar–which is based on the Earth’s movement around the sun and has a fixed number of 365 days a year (366 during a leap year)–is the most widely used calendar system in the world and has been the official calendar used in China since 1912.

But in China the lunar calendar is still used to determine traditional holidays like Chinese New Year.  Since the lunar calendar is based on the phases of the moon– which has a shorter cycle than the sun–Chinese New Year is never on the same day each year, but typically falls somewhere between January 21st and February 20^th.  Read more ……

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Global Greenhouse Gas | Image : Networlddirectory.com

Part of a forest will be enclosed, heated up and pumped with CO2 to see who wins and loses if the planet heats up.

Global warming has found a willing victim: a small patch of spruce forest in the Chippewa National Forest in northern Minnesota.

There, scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory will create the conditions they expect to see in a warming world. Higher levels of carbon dioxide. Warmer average temperatures. Warmer soil.

Then scientists will watch, measure and record. They want to be able to see how microbes respond, how insect populations change, how decomposition rates change, how plants grow and produce seeds, and how water levels fluctuate. Sensors will try to determine what kind of feedback loops kick in that either increase or decrease temperature and carbon dioxide. Population studies will try to suss out which species do better and which suffer, under which conditions.

Ecosystems are wonderfully–or maddeningly–complex, depending on how you look at them. As a result they are notoriously difficult to study. They can’t be studied in a lab; in the field the variables are so many and the time scales needed to tease out trends are so long that ecologists are left with little ecosystem-wide experimental data. Read more ……

Global warming is the increase in the average temperature of Earth’s near-surface air and oceans since the mid-20th century and its projected continuation. Global surface temperature increased 0.74 ± 0.18 °C (1.33 ± 0.32 °F) between the start and the end of the 20th century. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concludes that most of the observed temperature increase since the middle of the 20th century was caused by increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases resulting from human activity such as fossil fuel burning and deforestation.

The IPCC also concludes that variations in natural phenomena such as solar radiation and volcanism had a small cooling effect after 1950. These basic conclusions have been endorsed by more than 40 scientific societies and academies of science, including all of the national academies of science of the major industrialized countries.

An increase in global temperature will cause sea levels to rise and will change the amount and pattern of precipitation, probably including expansion of subtropical deserts. Warming is expected to be strongest in the Arctic and would be associated with continuing retreat of glaciers, permafrost and sea ice. Other likely effects include increases in the intensity of extreme weather events, species extinctions, and changes in agricultural yields. Warming and related changes will vary from region to region around the globe, though the nature of these regional variations are uncertain. Source : Wikipedia

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Identity Theft | Image Source : Hiteidtheft.com

A new study shows that banks, not consumer victims, are increasingly feeling the pain of digital fraud.

Identity theft often feels less like a random act of fraud than a personal breach of a victim’s secrets. But while consumers feel the sting from having their private data stolen, it’s their banks that are increasingly picking up the bill.

That’s one finding from an identity theft study released Wednesday by fraud analysis firm Javelin Research. The study, which surveyed around 5,000 Americans last year about their experiences with identity theft, calculated that ID fraud had cost around $54 billion in 2009, a significant jump from the $48 billion it estimated for 2008. That higher cost was driven by a greater number of fraud incidents that affected 11.2 million consumers in 2009, compared with 9.9 million in 2008.

That means financial services are absorbing a much larger chunk of fraud losses, says Javelin president James Van Dyke. “Businesses are really stepping up,” he says. “Even as the cost of fraud mitigation becomes higher, they’re bringing the out-of-pocket expense for victims closer and closer to zero.”

And why are banks willing to cover a larger percentage of those fraud costs? Van Dyke posits that the firms are dealing with consumers’ increasing impatience regarding data security issues and the growing problem of losing customers after fraud incidents. In about one out of five cases, according to Javelin’s research, a victim of identity theft switches banks. “Acquiring a new customer can costs hundreds of dollars, and banks are becoming more and more sensitive to the cost of losing that relationship,” he says . Read more ……

Identity theft is a term used that is to refer to fraud that involves someone pretending to be someone else in order to steal money or get other benefits. The term dates to 1964[1] and is actually a misnomer, since it is not inherently possible to steal an identity, only to use it. The person whose identity is used can suffer various consequences when he or she is held responsible for the perpetrator’s actions. In many countries specific laws make it a crime to use another person’s identity for personal gain.Identity theft is somewhat different from identity fraud. However, the terms are often used interchangeably. Identity fraud is the result of identity theft. Someone can steal or appropriate someone’s identifying information without actually committing identity fraud. The best example of this is when a data breach occurs. There has been very little evidence to link ID fraud to data breaches. Source : Wikipedia

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Baby Boomers | Image Source : Smallbiztrends.com

In 2011, approximately 30% of the U.S. population will be over the age of 50. Yet, in 2010, they are expected to outspend younger adults by $1 trillion. Boomers are not going away quietly into the sunset.

As Steve Lohn reported in The New York Times, Boomers show a great deal of interest in purchasing consumer electronics, more than any other age group. Focus groups, aged 50-60, and organized by the AARP and Microsoft, gathered together in San Francisco, Phoenix, Chicago, and New York to discuss the issue of future trends in technology. Contrary to many public and media perceptions, Baby Boomers have a real interest in continuing adoption of technology.

Michael Rogers, an author, futurist, consultant and former Vice President of the Washington Post’s media division, led the focus group discussions. He concluded that the Boomers will be a driving force behind the use of information technology in the next decade, particularly in the health care industry, one of the largest in our society. He commented further, that Boomers don’t want technology products that are complicated and cluttered with excessive features.

A recent study by TV Land company showed that Boomers were very involved in technology adoption, and yet are underserved by marketing initiatives, which mostly aim at younger people. Another study by leading market research company NPD Group, showed that 41% of Boomers regularly visit social networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn, and 61% visit websites that offer streaming or downloadable videos.

So it’s clear that Baby Boomers are not the Luddites that some media critics seem to suggest, and in fact are very plugged in to technology adoption, something that marketing initiatives have yet to reflect. Source : Psychology Today

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Text Messaging, SMS | Image Source : Softwarenewsdaily.com

Text messages and mapping tools are helping victims of the earthquake. Geeks and technologists around the world are creating tools to help earthquake victims in Haiti. These tools are focused around gathering and mapping the data, and broadcasting it to the relief workers on the ground.

When the news of the earthquake broke, several groups and companies sprang into action very quickly. Ushahidi, a portal originally built to track election violence in Kenya, created Haiti.Ushahidi.com. The site, developed by Patrick Meier, director of crisis mapping at Ushahidi, tracks incidents, search and rescue operations and people in Haiti.

So far more than 19,000 messages in English and Creole have been sent through the system, and the number of messages is increasing by 10% daily. The goal is to place all information reports on a map for immediate dissemination and future analysis of trends. About half the messages are useful and can be mapped (a smaller number of messages carry urgent information and are routed to the proper agency). Oftentimes, volunteers have to get clarification and more location information from the sender. Government agencies and NGOs are tracking Ushahidi’s data.  Read more ……

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Cleantech Smart Grid Market | Image Source : mercurynews.com

Cleantech’s vast ecosystem includes a dizzying array of emerging technologies, from green building materials to electric vehicles, lighting and wind power. But as Silicon Valley reinvents itself as a global center of clean technology, two sectors — solar power and “smart” upgrades to the electric grid — already are reshaping the valley and changing the way energy is produced and used.

The Bay Area is believed to have the nation’s largest concentration of cleantech jobs, and much of that job growth has been in solar and smart grid, technologies that leverage the valley’s formidable strengths. Next 10, a nonpartisan think tank, estimates that the Bay Area now has about 7,000 jobs in renewable energy alone.

“The skills that have been put to such good use in the valley with chips — engineering the processes to be more efficient, bringing costs down — are now being applied to solar,” said San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed, who wants to create 25,000 new cleantech jobs and cut the city’s per capita energy use in half by 2022. “And in order to make a smart grid smart, you’ve got to collect an enormous amount of information and manage it and network it. It’s a huge market opportunity for what companies here are already doing.”

Solar technology is an extension of the semiconductor industry — a solar cell is basically a simple, large and inexpensive chip, and some manufacturing processes are similar in both industries. Read more ……

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Densest Flash Memory | Image Source : Dvice.com

The new lithography represents a 27% reduction in size over the previous process.

Digital Business Card | Image Source : mobilewhack.com

Dave Stevens is a consummate networker. As program and events manager for the Chamber of Commerce in Mountain View, Calif., he attends several events a week, collecting stacks of business cards. When he returns to his office, however, he pitches the cards, opting instead to add his new contacts on the corporate social networking site LinkedIn.

“If I’m connected to someone on LinkedIn, I’ll always have a way of finding them,” says Stevens. “If you rely on a business card and the person moves on, you’ll get nothing but a bounced e-mail.” The updated information travels with Stevens via a mobile version of LinkedIn that syncs his new connections to the address book on his Palm Pre smart phone.

Stevens isn’t the only person tossing business cards into wastebaskets. Frustrated with the limitations of paper, workers around the globe are experimenting with digital ways to exchange contact information. Entrepreneurs, in turn, are racing to develop Web sites and mobile software that ease the process. Read more ……

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Cleantech | Image Source : Cleantech.com

President Obama said the nation that leads the clean energy economy will be the nation that leads the global economy and America must be that nation.? At the same time, on the other coast, 75 clean energy investors, entrepreneurs, and researchers were debating whether the U.S. can gain this leadership position. They agreed that even though Silicon Valley leads the world in technology, it is not clear if it will ever lead in Cleantech.

The Valley may develop some breakthrough technologies, but without government help these are unlikely to translate into global leadership. The technology world is rightfully allergic to government assistance and intervention. Cleantech is different, however, and we aren?t dealing with a level global playing field. Read more ……

Cleantech is a term used to describe knowledge-based products or services that improve operational performance, productivity, or efficiency while reducing costs, inputs, energy consumption, waste, or pollution. Its origin is the increased consumer, regulatory and industry interest in clean forms of energy generation—specifically, perhaps, the rise in awareness of global warming and the impact on the natural environment from the burning of fossil fuels. The term cleantech is often associated with venture capital funds.

The term “cleantech” first emerged in widespread use to describe a group of emerging technologies and industries, based on principles of biology, resource efficiency, and second-generation production concepts in basic industries. Examples include: energy efficiency, selective catalytic reduction, non-toxic materials, water purification, solar energy, wind energy, and new paradigms in energy conservation. Since the 1990s, interest in these technologies has increased with two trends: a decline in the relative cost of these technologies and a growing understanding of the link between industrial design used in the 19th century and early 20th century, such as fossil fuel power plants, the internal combustion engine, and chemical manufacturing, and an emerging understanding of human-caused impact on earth systems resulting from their use (see articles: ozone hole, acid rain, desertification, and global warming). Source : Wikipedia.org

Accelerating the next wave of innovation^®

Stresses in the global economy are being compounded by repercussions from climate change, scarcity of food, water and other commodities, and concerns about energy independence. Investing in clean technologies holds the greatest promise of addressing these challenges, while generating superior returns and job creation.

Today, as a global company with offices in North America, Europe, India, China and the Middle East, the Cleantech Group accelerates the development and market adoption of clean technologies by providing clients with the tools they need to be successful: market-leading research and data, industry insight, access to innovation and deal flow, news coverage, sales leads, networking events, promotional/brand-building opportunities and custom advisory services. The Cleantech Group fills market gaps to accelerate market adoption, stimulate demand and remove barriers. Read more ……

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IE6 Must Die | Image Source : Frugalinfotech.com

The war against IE6 continues. Effective March 1, 2010, Google will begin phasing out support for Internet Explorer 6 in Google Docs and Google Sites.

The war against IE6 continues. Effective March 1, 2010, Google will begin phasing out support for Internet Explorer 6 in Google Docs and Google Sites.

Google has just announced the news that it’s joining the long list of companies that will no longer support IE6. Once Google begins phasing out support for the archaic browser, Google Docs and Google Sites will be the first to go, but we should expect most Google products to become much less functional in IE6 in 2010. Read more ……

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Image Source : Silicon.com

London: A group of computer scientists have come up with a system that deciphers the templates a botnet uses to create spam, and these templates are then used to teach spam filters what to look for. This can be used to block the most common kind of spam.

Most spam messages originate in networks of compromised computers, called botnets, and owners are unaware that the machines quietly run malicious software in the background that pump out spam, reports New Scientist. But researchers have now come up with a system that deciphers the templates a botnet is using to create spam, and these templates are then used to teach spam filters what to look for.

The system, developed by a team at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, California, and the University of California, San Diego, works by exploiting a trick that spammers use to defeat email filters. As spam is churned out, subtle changes are typically incorporated into the messages to confound spam filters. Read more ……

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Apple iPad | Image Source : Apple.com

Apple on Wednesday launched its much-awaited iPad tablet device, a handheld that will allow users to view movies, surf the Internet and play high-definition games.

iPad features include the ability to browse the Web and listen to music, with photo, calendar, and maps applications. It will work with the iTunes store to let users discover and purchase music, movies and TV shows.

The product’s launch comes after a few years of rumors and speculation surrounding Apple’s development of a tablet-like device. Media outlets and enthusiast sites reported the device would fill a product gap for Apple between its iPhone smartphone and MacBook device. The Financial Times reported in December that Apple would host an event to launch the tablet-like device in January. Read more ……

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