Technology, media, architecture & strategy
Well this was on the cards:
If you’ve wondered why there haven’t been many Gears releases or posts on the Gears blog lately, it’s because we’ve shifted our effort towards bringing all of the Gears capabilities into web standards like HTML5. We’re not there yet, but we are getting closer.
Extracted from the Gears API Blog
From smh.com.au:
Australia is on the top 10 list of countries on Hulu’s international expansion plans, its director of international business development, Simon Gallagher, said at the Media 2010 event.
The web TV service has had explosive growth since it launched in 2007, delivering popular shows to American homes via broadband. A collaboration between Fox and NBC Universal, it aims to combat online piracy of television programs.
The strategy has worked, Gallagher said, citing figures that show a significant fall in pirated shows when the programs were available on Hulu. The service is free for viewers and shows are aired online immediately after they are broadcast in Hawaii (the latest broadcast time in the US).
The research I have read is that Australians pirate free-to-air TV more than anything else. Are we all just time shifting?
Odd. Interesting. Not enough. Nostradamus was truly a man ahead of his time.
This is an interesting discussion on some ways to change the way a user enters their password to gain access to a web application. Interesting Nielsen recently suggests the dropping of password masking.
By Simon Canning, The Australian:
The internet advertising industry has missed breaking through the $2 billion barrier it had expected to clear last year. However, the head of the Internet Advertising Bureau has tipped the medium could now top newspapers at more than $3.5bn as the biggest advertising channel as early as 2013.And video is poised to become the new boom sector as other areas slow.
ElasticSearch is an open source, distributed, RESTful search engine built on top of Lucene. Its features include:
I am reading this White Paper today, here is an abstract:
A business must be decisive, based on decisions that are accurate, timely, consistent and easy to change. And businesses rely on IT to build systems that enable and automate decisive results. For organizations implementing applications on the .NET platform, IT has the opportunity to leverage investments in key Microsoft technologies including Visual Studio and Word.
This paper provides .NET architects and development and project managers with a basis for understanding dynamic business applications and dynamic decisioning. It outlines five practical strategies for implementing dynamic applications on the .NET platform, including diagrams depicting several possible integration approaches.
Architects, development and project managers, business analysts and subject matter experts (SMEs) will benefit from an introduction to the capabilities of a Business Rule Management System (BRMS). In addition this paper offers tips for leveraging investments in key Microsoft technologies and exploiting the power of .NET.
From CMS Watch:
Buyers of the Linux and UNIX versions of FAST’s Enterprise Search Platform (ESP) got some bad news the other day: It’ll now be necessary to switch to a Windows server platform, or else move to some other product for enterprise search.
Microsoft Corporation, which as you may recall acquired FAST two years ago for $1.2 billion, has confirmed it will stop development of FAST’s ESP core on Linux and Unix after the release of SharePoint 2010 later this year. Microsoft has in effect said it will now build its FAST search engine only for Windows.
This leaves several sites I work on right now in an interesting position. Time to look at other solutions…
Firebug is an extension for Firefox, but what happens when you need to test your pages in Internet Explorer, Opera, and Safari?
The solution is Firebug Lite, a JavaScript file you can insert into your pages to simulate some Firebug features in browsers that are not named “Firefox”.
Extracted from NPA:
Media is to launch iPhone apps for its masthead news sites within six months – and it will charge readers. iPhone apps for The Age, Brisbane Times, Sydney Morning Herald and WA Today websites are in development, according to Darren Burden, Director of News and Platforms at Fairfax Digital.
No decision has been made on the charge for each app. The new apps would go beyond a normal web browsing experience, he promised. Fairfax has only recently upgraded the design and layout of mobile versions of its websites.
“The key benefit of the app over a mobile site is that an application can use the native part of the phone, and you can use parts like the address,” he said.
I don’t think a fee for an iTunes app counts as a paywall, which is how the opening sentence reads to me.