Hackers can sometimes catch a bad reputation when in reality they often amount to little more than idealistic youth’s committing crimes on the level of civil disobedience.
Not the case in the last few weeks however, with a group known an LulzSec, who originated within the ranks of Anonymous, going on a rampage targetting everything and everyone, succeeding in causing devastation and getting away with it. Read more »
It’s not a sure thing just yet, but it’s possible that in the future we may see the dominant emergence of a currency called Bit Coin.
Bit Coins are a virtual, peer-to-peer crypto currency. They differ from everything that has come before in three ways:
– They do not require regulation and have no central governing organisation,
– They can be used completely anonymously under certain situations
– They do not claim to have any inherent value, instead relying on the market to decide their value Read more »
If you’ve ever made a website, you’re no doubt aware just how much impact a photo adds to the end result. With photos, everything just seems a lot more professional.
The only problem I had was finding photos that were a) good and b) copyright free.
As a law abiding citizen and business owner point B is actually quite important. Although it’s easy to simply take photos from images.google.com, if you use them on a professional website you’re actually opening yourself up to some serious theft of copyrighted material litigation, so you need to find photos that have been declared copyright free by the owner, or buy the license to them.
At first I looked at IStockPhoto.com, who have a massive database of photos that you can license. I hear they’ve really changed the game, changed the way photographers work, but you know what? They’re just damn expensive.
Then I found sxc.hu. Great, it’s all copyright free, the only problem is everyone wants attribution. So if you use the image in say an ad banner somewhere, you have to write who took the photo and link back to the site, urgh.
Wikimedia Commons seems pretty good, and I’ve actually used a few of their photos before. Although a lot of them seem to be of big buildings or infrastructure from the outside. They’re mostly donated by governments I think, who can’t keep the copyright anyway.
Then I found the solution, 123rf.com. At the moment it’s only $25 for 15 photos (buy more and it’s even less), completely copyright and attribution free. They’re pretty artsy too. I like sxc.hu (especially because it’s free), but for the sites I’ve started doing it’s just not cutting the mustard and I didn’t want to pay iStockPhoto, 123rf are one of the oldest players around anyway and really came to the rescue.
More professional looking sites are on the way..
If you liked this post, please consider a Bitcoin donation. Even a few cents would be huge! My address is: 1HcgS9GCPRQ1APv2TcqZMMskDxLjBaAKsG
Kind Regards,
Nick Cooper
Believe it or not, compared to your customers, you are an expert. Sure they may have a PHD in astro-physics, but when it comes to your product, the reason they’re coming to you is because you are the resident expert in that field. So why is this important? It’s an absolutely fantastic marketing tool.
The point of marketing is not force customers to buy products they would really rather not have, it’s to educate potential customers on the existence and use of your product or service. Being the local go-to person can be incredibly useful to you however, because by getting the fact that you are an expert out into the public eye in your target areas, people are instantly aware of who you are, and they’re going to be aware that you can solve their problems. Just by helping people, 90% of your marketing effort has just been completed. Read more »
Trends and buzzwords often come and go in the IT business. But a concept that’s becoming very popular and likely to stick is that of the ‘Data Warehouse’.
Business Intelligence – it’s not an oxymoron
The whole point of a data warehouse is to facilitate a very important process for upper management, the idea of gathering intelligence or information. The more intelligence or relevant information you can get into managements hands the more likely they are to make sound decisions that improve the value and revenue of the company (and hopefully improve your paycheck in the process!)
It can’t just be any information however, the key is for this information to be relevant to the kinds of decisions they’re making. As a simple example, if your company runs an online store they don’t want server logs, you want to be finding things like the average time a user spends on the store, the number of products browsed before buying, or maybe the percentage of people who abandon the checkout process after viewing the total price.
New website launched. The old one was google sites, more an experiment in using ‘apps for your domain’. It was interesting to see that these days you really can have free web hosting from google (as well as gmail@yourdomain, calendar, everything) for just the cost of the domain. Very competitive, although of course that’s googles strategy! Give you free things and use your usage data to give you more effective ads. Can’t say I’m complaining, plus they’re great online citizens.
This setup is more appropriate though, google sites still looks immature. Expect to see more posts regarding the forefront of systems and security and the things we learn about their use.