Network Italy Web Design & Solutions

Why Microsoft, Google and Facebook Want Your Email

Network Italy — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 15:52:52 +0000

Tally up the total number of searches on Google, Yahoo and Bing and you have about 3.5 billion searches per day. It’s estimated that Twitter has about 300 million accounts and Facebook claims more than 750 million active users. As impressive as those numbers are, though, they’re a drop in a bucket compared to email – which is estimated at294 billion per day.

That, says Jeff Hardy, is why Google and Microsoft really want your email. Not because of the numbers, per se, but because of what the numbers represent.

Hardy, vice president of SmarterTools, says that Microsoft wants email because it’s profitable – and wants to convince companies that email is expensive to provide. Google, on the other hand, presents email as free, because it wants the information that comes with. And Facebook is trying to get into the email game because it’s the only way to continue its growth in the face of flattening usage.

Other companies should be competing for that business, says Hardy, and that email is dirt cheap to provide. According to his presentation for HostingCon 2011, Hardy says that you can get full enterprise-class email for less than $0.04 per mailbox, or Exchange replacement mailboxes for less than $0.39 per mailbox. But he says that each account is worth up to 10 people on average, and providers get to market their products and services to all of those users. Passing up email is passing up an opportunity to create loyalty.

Hardy seems to have a good point. Two, actually. One is that email gets overlooked compared to the new hotness(es) like Twitter or Facebook. But we still do much, much more via email. Perhaps too much, but that’s a topic for another post. The other is that companies that offer hosting (his audience at HostingCon 2011) should be focused on providing email and getting it right. There’s plenty of room, even today, for solid email hosting plans and for companies to wrangle email into much more business.

8 deadly sins of Site Design

Network Italy — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 06:18:44 +0000

You could say there is no right way to design and build a Web site – but you’ll find plenty of wrong ways. KISSmetrics outlines eight of them with an infographic that answers the question “what makes someone leave a website? If you’re designing or responsible for a site for a business, you might want to pay close and particular attention.

We’re pretty forgiving when it comes to #6 (boring content, boring design) at least when it comes to the boring design part. Why? Content is king, presentation comes second. If a site has the content you’re looking for, you’ll probably stick around as long as it isn’t hideous or afflicted with some of the other sins mentioned.

For example, obtrusive audio and video? We’re gone. We hate playing “find the tab that’s playing audio” when a site decides to start playing video or audio. Bad content structure is another killer – make it easy to find what I’m looking for. Far too many sites, especially in the enterprise space, make it easy to find what the marketing department wants me to see. That’s not the same thing as what We’re looking for, usually.

Our biggest pet peeve, though? Registration requirements. Nine times out of ten, we’re gone before a page finishes loading if we stumble onto a site that requires registration to see what we came for.

KISSmetrics has a pretty good set of rules to live by, if you want to keep visitors on your site longer than it takes to reach the mouse. Did they miss anything?

Ultrabook: Intel plan to beat Apple

Network Italy — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 05:06:38 +0000

My desktop isn’t the only computer I plan to replace in the next few months. I need a new laptop too, and my goal is simple: to find a 13″ MacBook Air that isn’t made by Apple.

It turns out that I’m not the only one wanting this mythical non-Apple MacBook Air. Intel wants them too—it calls them Ultrabooks. The chip company has been kicking the Ultrabook idea around for a few months now, and it has grand ambitions: by the end of next year, it wants 40 percent of PC laptops to be Ultrabooks.

Ultrabooks are ultralight PCs, like the MacBook Air, no more than 0.8″ thick, like the MacBook Air, with Intel processors, like the MacBook Air, metal cases for superior heat dissipation, like the MacBook Air, SSD storage, like the MacBook Air, long battery life and even longer standby time, like the MacBook Air, and affordable, like the MacBook Air. Oh, and they should boot in 7 seconds or less (which at a pinch, the MacBook Air can probably pull off, too). Is the MacBook Air actually an Ultrabook? Intel told us that that’s up to Apple—the MacBook Air is an Ultrabook in all but name.

Intel, keen to stimulate demand for PCs (rather than for ARM-powered tablets) is clearly so annoyed by the inability for PC OEMs to meet this specification that it recently announced the creation of a $300m “Ultrabook Fund” to invest in companies that are working to build this kind of hardware. That’s a damning indictment of the PC industry.

What Intel is asking for is readily attainable. We know that because Apple’s selling millions of Airs. And yet the world’s five biggest PC manufacturers—HP, Dell, Lenovo, Acer, and Asustek—have so far been unable to come up with something equivalent. And apparently they’re not close to managing it, either, because Intel thinks it must invest pots of cash to close the gap.

This isn’t an ideal approach; it would be better if the OEMs could produce these machines on their own. Still, the impetus is now there. Problem solved? Probably not.

So that leaves me wanting a 13″ MacBook Air that isn’t made by Apple. Time to go shopping.

Where Google makes its money

Network Italy — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 09:35:39 +0000

An interesting infographic by Wordstream.com that shows how, web advertising and keywords searches, add to the Google business

Google Swiffy: Flash to HTML5 converter

Network Italy — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 06:14:31 +0000

Google labs have introduced a new tool called Google Swiffy that converts flash based content to HTML5 enabling flash content to work on devices that do not support flash, like iPhone, ipad.This tool will allow flash developers to convert their work to HTML5 giving their work the power to run on almost all platforms.

Swiffy requires the user to upload the flash based swf file which it renders into HTML5 content,which will run on modern browsers with a high level of SVG support such as Chrome and Safari.
Swiffy being still under development does not guarantee to convert all flash content.

As said on Google Blog, “Swiffy uses a compact JSON representation of the animation, which is rendered using SVG and a bit of HTML5 and CSS3. ActionScript 2.0 is also present in the JSON object, and is interpreted in JavaScript in the browser. This representation makes the Swiffy animations almost as compact as the original SWF files.”

This is a great tool from Google. There are some examples of converted flash on the Gallery.

Configuring E-Mail POP3 on Apple iPhone

Network Italy — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 10:17:48 +0000

If this is the first account you’re setting up on the iPhone or the iPod Touch, tap Mail. Otherwise, from the Home screen tap Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars> Add Account.
Tap Other.
Tap Add Mail Account
Enter:
- Your Name
- Enter your full E-mail Address. Example: info@example.com
- Your E-mail Password
- A description.
Tap Save
Tap POP
Enter;
- Incoming Mail Server as mail.example.com, replacing example.com with the domain of your hosting account.
- Your full E-mail Address. Example: info@example.com for User Name
- Outgoing Mail Server (SMTP) as mail.example.com, replacing example.com with the domain of your hosting account.
- Your full E-mail Address. Example: info@example.com for User Name
- Your E-mail Password
Tap Save.
A warning ‘Secure Connection Failed’ will appear. Tap continue.
Tap your email account.
Scroll down and tap Advanced.
Set use SSL to OFF.
Tap the top left arrow to go back.
Tap SMTP.
Tap your Primary Server.
Set use SSL to OFF.
Tap Server Port and enter 25 ( if you have troubles try changing port to 587 ).

Top Brands 2011: brand value.

Network Italy — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 05:46:35 +0000

You can develop products in a matter of days, but brands are intangible assets that cannot be created overnight. To erect brands, you require ample of time, investment and customer satisfaction. That is the reason when graphic designers are working on a particular brand and its logo design, they must keep the customer perspective and preferences in mind. Their designs should reflect the culture and values of the intended audience of the brand.

Every year, several famous brands scroll up and down because of an increase or decrease in their brand value. This year also, many famous brands in the category of Fast Foods, Luxury, Beverageand Retail have witnessed massive shifts.

Here it is an infografic which displays the brand value of various famous brands, from 5 different industries, statistically

Google +1 more social

Network Italy — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 15:32:37 +0000

Google is making the +1 button more social with the addition of friend annotations. “You may have already noticed faces and names when you hover over a +1 button,” Google Developer Advocate Timothy Jordan said in a post on the Google+ Platform preview. “This change rolled out late last week. Now, you can make these recommendations even more visible to your users. Simply update the +1 button code, and an inline annotation will show next to the button.” The new annotations appear when a user hovers over the +1 button. Hovering over it will display a list of friends and contacts that have already clicked the +1 button for that page. Google has also unveiled new code for the +1 button that will display the faces and names of friends that have used the +1 button. This feature works much like how the Facebook Like button appears for Mashable stories, displaying how many people have +1′d the page and which friends have +1′d it. The changes are small, but they will likely make the +1 button even more sticky. The search giant will need to do more though to compete with Facebook’s button, which has become standard on millions of websites across the world.

Where the Wold’s data being stored?

Network Italy — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 05:00:04 +0000

Data backup service Mozy (owned by EMC and managed by ReadWriteCloud sponsor VMware) is running an interesting infographic about data storage that looks into how much data there is in the world, what media that data is stored on and where the largest (in square feet) data centers in the world are.

Yahoo transitioning Organic results to Bing

Network Italy — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 01:05:55 +0000

After months of waiting and years of guesswork , the transition from Yahoo’s organic search to Microsoft’s Bing is finally over. Yahoo has announced that it is ready to transition its European organic search results to Microsoft as a part of the Yahoo-Bing Search Alliance.

Yahoo said that the transition does not involve paid search results but websites which rely on organic searches for visitors should take some precautions.

Here is the email announcing that the UK organic results will be powered by Bing from 3rd August.