Apple has virtually owned the consumer tablet device market for five months now, but the company is about to face its first serious competition coming from Android-based tablets. Samsung will enter the fray by introducing its Galaxy Tab slate this week, and others are sure to follow. It will be interesting to see how devices based on an open source operating system fare against the iPad. GigaOM has a complete report today, found here.
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The war drums are starting to beat around Novell. Now that Oracle has subsumed Sun Microsystems, only Novell and Red Hat remain as large, U.S.-based public companies focused primarily on open source software, and Novell continues to stand on shaky ground. This week, the company underperformed its guidance for the fiscal third quarter of 2010, with earnings and revenues down. As Novell struggles, some foresee a VMware acquisition, and Red Hat may end up the big beneficiary.
Novell’s revenues were $199 million, a decline of 8 percent from the comparable quarter of 2009. The company reported net income of $16 million, or $0.04 per share, down from $17 million in the third quarter of 2009. Most worrisome, the company’s Linux revenues were $36 million, down 7 percent from the third quarter of last year, and Linux invoicing was down 11 percent. Regarding the Linux problems, Novell’s CFO, Dana Russell said “depletion of the original Microsoft certificates this year makes for a challenging year-over-year comparison.”
Novell fully admitted, for a long time, that it was heavily dependent on Linux-focused deals driven by Microsoft to drive its revenues and earnings. Now, the company is rumored to be the target of an acquisition by VMware, which has far-reaching partnerships with the company. Previously rumored suitor Oracle is almost entirely likely to have any interest in Novell. Meanwhile, a large hedge fund has an outstanding offer to buy the company, and is predicted by most observers to simply want to flip it for a higher price.
If you’ve ever been gridlocked in a group decision-making process, you know how quickly things can go from frustrating to downright unwieldy. Even with a common goal in mind, it’s easy to get bogged down in data and competing opinions. Analysis of Competing Hypothesis (ACH) is an open source application that’s been helping the CIA with its research methodologies for years and it’s freely available to the public to help groups look at — and solve — problems objectively.
“A natural human tendency is to give more weight to information that supports our favorite hypothesis than to information that weakens it. This is unfortunate, as we should do just the opposite,” notes Richards Heuer, creator of the ACH software notes on the Web site. ACH avoids this particular temptation by allowing users to enter and evaluate data within the context of the targeted goal. The group can work with one large table of data points, or create individual tables and let ACH merge them into one large one that identifies points of contention within the group.
ACH is a complex piece of software but it’s interface is quite user-friendly. Since a picture is worth a thousand words, let’s take a look at some screen shots.
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Many people overlook making their websites multilingual friendly thinking that the majority of their traffic or visitors understand the English language. One thing to note is that nearly two billion people worldwide now have access to the internet, which is almost one third of the world’s population.
Therefore, the expansion of your website worldwide depends greatly upon multilingual support.
Implementing multilingual support may sound as easy as just translating your pages, however in most cases, it is not. Most designers always design according to left to right languages. Therefore, right to left languages may not appear properly within the design. We discuss tips to that help make your website and design multilingual friendly.
Today we released a set of ink splatter vectors on Vandelay Premier and in this post we will be covering the process of creating these vectors. The process is not very difficult and it should be easy to follow, but it does take some time.
Here is a preview of the final result of this tutorial.
These splatter vectors are fun to create, and since the end result is in vector format it is highly versatile.
Have you jumped on the virtualization train yet? If you haven’t, you’re missing out on the incredible convenience of having more than one operating system at your disposal when you’re using a single computer. The free offerings and the fee-based ones are now so automated and easy to use that there is no reason not to explore virtualization. If you’re interested in quick and easy ways to start running multiple operating systems at the same time—and tons of applications for them—here are some good resources.
I happen to run Mac OS X and Windows XP together one one virtualized system, and Windows and Linux together on another one. There are tons of benefits to using all three operating systems. The Mac OS means that I can run the very best graphics, video and illustration apps. Windows lets me run lots of favorite apps from over the years, and Linux is awesome for secure sessions, specialized types of apps and more.
If you’re interested in running all three of these operating systems, Lifehacker has an excellent how-to article up about it. They detail how to get going with VirtualBox.
Just the other day, we were considering what impact on enterprises the dust-up between Google and Oracle may have. In case, you’ve been trapped under a rock for the past couple of weeks, Oracle has filed a lawsuit against Google claiming that it inappropriately modified aspects of the Java code. Now, Google—considered by many to be extremely friendly to open source, especially among large tech companies—has pledged to pull out of the big Java One conference, which tends to have news full of relevance for enterprises and smaller businesses alike. Meanwhile, some observers are claiming that Google may indeed be in the wrong in the case. But isn’t Oracle pushing a questionable agenda?
We live in a technology world that is full of patents, and Oracle inherited some valuable patents when it acquired Sun Microsystems. ZDNet, among others, has already gone on record saying that Oracle may be correct that Google inappropriately modified parts of Java:
Over the last month, Union Street Media has had the opportunity to launch new and redesigned websites for several clients. We are happy to include them in our expanding portfolio. In the following snapshots, we discuss the different ways in which we have either given an older site a refreshed look, or have used our Premium platform to build affordable, innovative real estate websites.
As a successful and innovative real estate agent in Boston’s North Shore, Ed Cashwell needed a website that would not only stand out from the crowd’s; it would also engage potential leads to work with him. When the Premium platform came out, along with its pricing, Ed signed up, excited to broaden his referrals, as well as bring in new leads. Ed currently features his happy clients on the homepage and continues to work with USM’s Internet Marketing team to build his site’s search engine visibility.
Taking advantage of all of our newest real estate web tools, local Burlington office, Attaca Realty, worked with USM to focus specifically on their marketing of recreational properties with Cabela’s as well as their Residential, Relocation and Rental services. Whereas Union Street Media focuses on the 3 R’s of Report, Recommend, Revise, Attaca has a 4 R focus, and we drew those elements out with custom homepage images including Attaca’s signature door to bring clients in to specific parts of their website. Post-launch, Attaca is working with USM in monthly RRR to continue tuning up the site’s reach.
This month, we rolled out five new Interactive sites. We’re proud to unveil the new website designs for St. Joseph Catholic School, Shelburne Vineyard, Crate Escape, Charlie Smith for Senate and NNECAPA!
With a close-knit school community, St. Joseph Catholic School came to Union Street looking for a website that would connect their parents and administration. Using compelling images, clean design and well-written content, we were able to create a complex, yet easily navigable site that will allow their current school community to connect while attracting new families, as well.
Vermonters are proud of their dairy and produce, but surprisingly, they can now be proud of their wines, as well. When Shelburne Vineyard approached Union Street, we were eager to build a beautiful site that would showcase their award-winning wines and their vineyard’s stellar location. This Wordpress site combines beautiful photos with a navigation that emphasizes the numerous ways in which you can experience Shelburne Vineyard wines. With a blog, events calendar, visit schedule and active social media, Shelburne Vineyard can now interact with their customers in a more robust way.
Consumers have an insatiable demand for bandwidth-hungry applications, and there are a multitude of challenges in trying to appease them. Researching behaviors through its application enablement program, Alcatel-Lucent has developed a series of four recommendations for network providers on how best to meet consumer demands:
Build a holistic financial case. Look beyond app store revenues and take into account indirect benefits such as brand loyalty, lifetime value of customer, and cost reduction through greater insight into customer behavior. In addition, make sure your incentives are aligned with your developers’ incentives. The type of motivation will often depend on the size of the development team. For example, a small team may respond to a contest for recognition and money, unlike an enterprise team. Also accept two-sided business models that allow room for low-priced, ad-supported, or free applications to survive.
Explore new business models. Across all its carrier partners, Alcatel-Lucent has seen the emergence of five different models: operator-led, aggregator, mass wholesale, trusted partner, and enterprise customer. Each model varies in how transactions are held, the responsibilities of the partners, and how close the network provider is to the customer.
Industrialize processes. You may not be able to predict customer demand, but you can create scalable processes to deal with that demand.
Search Engine Optimization
