Input by Textbox Advertising Agency » Technology

Will the iPad Take the Sting out of College Textbook Costs

angela — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 14:07:30 +0000

Next month Apple will release the long-awaited iPad device. As a competitor to Amazon’s Kindle, what does this possibly mean for college students? As any student will tell you, forking over 700 or 800 bucks a semester for books is crazy. Especially when only a few chapters may be necessary. With the iPads release, may it finally be time for mass adoption of digital books?

Many textbook companies are lining up to take advantage of these new devices. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Pearson and McGraw-Hill signed with the software company ScrollMotion to adapt textbooks specifically for the iPad. It will be interesting to see how Apple’s bookstore fares as well as the introductory price of $499 for the base model of the iPad.

Windows 7 European Browser Choice

input — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 14:05:56 +0000

In order to comply with the European Commission, Microsoft is close to finishing their famed browser choice screen. As part of their antitrust settlement, users will be prompted and directed to make a decision on which browser to use. The top five browsers, Chrome, Firefox, Safari, IE and Opera will be randomized in order to not give any browser an unfair placement advantage. Users in the UK, Belgium and France will get to try it out this week.

New Live Video Maps from Bing

input — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 14:21:57 +0000

Last Thursday at TED, Microsoft wowed the crowd with their latest update to their search engine Bing. Blaise Aguera y Arcas, who is the architect of Bing maps, demonstrated a live video mapping feature. During the demo, he zoomed into 3-D images of the streets of Seattle which also has integrated live video.

This add-in to Bing could be a very useful feature letting you check traffic levels, crowds waiting outside of stores and restaurants, etc.

Google Wants To Organize Socialsphere

input — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 14:39:14 +0000

Although not fully released yet, Google will soon be organizing the mountains of social content that get generated by people like me each day. By utilizing their Gmail interface, Google will allow their users to track friend while spending time on their platform rather than Facebook and Twitter.

Todd Jackson from Google stated that a PageRank like ranking algorithm would be applied to social content. Stay posted to Google’s Buzz site as the roll-out takes place.

Google Chrome Voice Extension

input — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 14:00:19 +0000

Google has released another cool innovation. If you hate having to copy and paste and really who doesn’t, Chrome’s new voice extension will allow you to simply click phone numbers which will now show up as clickable links. Reports from around the blogosphere say that it is a bit of a memory hog, but Chrome is pretty light to begin with so it’s a wash.

If you are a Mac user, you will need to get the latest Chromium build in order to install the new function.

Import Your AdWords Campaigns Into Yahoo

angela — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 14:02:34 +0000

Yahoo has announced that you will soon have the ability to import your Google AdWords files into Yahoo Search Marketing in order to get your campaigns up and running more quickly. Imported elements will be limited to keywords and phrases while specific targeting settings will need to take place after the import is completed. Microsoft AdCenter has allowed this feature for the past two years.

Strictly as a nice to have feature, it is great news for the fledgling search platform. For those already advertising with Google, which is practically everyone, this will make the move to using Yahoo a little easier. Again, this feature is coming soon. I don’t see it as a real reason to all of a sudden to start using Yahoo if you are not currently doing so. Google has proven over and over again that their organic algorithm is supremely better in terms of providing relevant results which gives advertisers more qualified traffic.

AspDotNetStorefront and eBridge Partnership

paul — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 13:53:16 +0000

The fine people over at AspDotNetStorefront have just made life a little easier for small to medium sized business owners. Although their existing e-commerce software is a great feature rich platform, their partnership with eBridge to provide accounting integrations just made it all the better.

This new partnership will allow mutual customers of eBridge and AspDotNetStorefront the ability to leverage accounting integrations with many of the best accounting packages such as Intuit, Peachtree, MS Dynamics and Sage. This will reduce the need for business owner to manually enter sales orders from AspDotNetStorefront into a separate system. The time savings with an integrated system will be huge along with a reduction in data entry errors.

Google Nexus One

input — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 14:09:34 +0000

Becoming available last week on January 5th was Google’s new Nexus One smart phone. Built on the Android mobile operating system and manufactured by HTC, it looks to a great option for those looking to move away from Apple’s iPhone. At an unlocked price of $529, it can also be part of a T-Mobile two year contact for the price of 179. It offers multi-touch capabilities and can by synced with all Google applications. Early reviews state they 5 megapixel camera offering nice quality but nothing spectacular and music over the built-in speakers is ok. This is Google’s first major attempt at selling a physical product via their website.

WordPress 2.9 Is Very Fine

paul — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 14:27:32 +0000

The latest release of WordPress is 2.9, code-named Carmen in honor of jazz vocalist Carmen McRae, has a number of great new features.

A new undo trash feature allows you to bring back a post or a comment from the Trash folder. A new built-in image editor allows you to edit your images. Features such as crop, rotate, flip and scale now exist in this latest update. Batch plugin and compatibility checking is now included in the latest build of WordpPress as well.

The nice people over at WordPress have also made embedding video much easier as well supporting YouTube, Flickr, Hulu, Google Video and more. There are various other updates such as rel=canonical for SEO buffs.

I know they are already hard at work for the next release, but in the meantime if you haven’t already upgraded, do so soon in order to take advantage of these great new features.

Better Interface Design with Google Browser Size

paul — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 12:52:10 +0000

Ever wonder how your web design layouts affect the visitors coming to your site? Google has a tool called the Browser Size which is a visualization of window sizes for people who visit Google. Why is this useful? Let’s say you have a call to action (CTA) on your page which isn’t converting well, this tool will tell you based on the layout what percentage of visitors have a browser size large enough to see the CTA content.

Upon visiting the page you can enter a URL which produces a semi-transparent overlay with the percentage contours. As you move your mouse throughout the page, a rectangle follows the mouse so you can interact with your page as you normally would. According to Google, this is currently best for a left-aligned page layout as center or right-aligned layout can skew the results. However, Google states they are actively improving this tool so I am sure updates are on their way.