Archive for the ‘News’ Category
The Future of the Internet
24May 2010 |
Most people who have spent enough time on the internet may not recognize the phrase “social networking”. However if you ask most people if they’ve heard of a blog, a forum, or a MySpace page – most of these people will say yes. The very origin of the internet was as a giant social network. It was a system called ARPANET that, for the most part, connected University systems together. This system became a true social network once an email system was invented to be used on the network. Once the internet exploded – the dot-com boom brought a major commercialization of the internet and enormous investments into ads and attempts to get people to make purchases over the internet. However the medium of the internet did not lend itself to massive sales because people were largely concerned about privacy and the security of financial transactions. Even today – many people will not make purchases online because of these concerns. However, from its very beginnings, through the dot-com bust, and continuing today – social networking has been at the very core of what drives the success of the internet. What People Use the Internet For In the late 1990’s, Carnegie Mellon University conducted a field trial study to understand how people use the Internet at home. The study separated the various categories of internet use by demographics. However the most significant finding of the study was that, “The most popular reasons they cited for using the Internet were to get information relevant to a hobby or a personal interest, to communicate with family and friends, and to ‘enjoy myself’”. In other words, the most popular use of the internet wasn’t for purchasing goods, but instead it was to conduct research for a hobby, and to communicate with other people. The very origins of the internet, and the findings of this study clearly prove that the heart of the internet itself is social networking. The Future of Social Networking The fact that social networking was the very foundation of the internet tells us that it is essential to its future. People log onto the internet to talk to people across the world on forums, they write blogs to tell people across the world about their lifestyle and home life in their region of the country or to share with other business owners the secrets of their business successes. Still others communicate through messaging systems like Skype, MSN, or IM which offer various forms of communication including chat, voice, and messaging systems. Social Networking on the internet has become a variety of technologies and web pages that are used to connect people to people in ways that were only imagined in science fiction novels ten years ago. Today we can video conference, post images and files on collaborative forums, and we can share videos and information through profile pages on the thousands of social network websites that are peppered throughout the internet. Specialty Social Networks target specific niches that are related to particular hobbies, businesses or industry. These niches are where the most successful entrepreneur will focus his advertising resources. Specialty Social Networks provide businesses with a rapt audience related to specific topics such as antiques collecting, web design, automobile repair, or millions of other potential interests. Just about every of these interests and hobbies require supplies, information, and services that a savvy business person can subtly offer on the social network. As long as the business person doesn’t spend their entire time on the network trying to sell their product or service, but instead focuses on meeting people and making friends, they will find more success in social networks than they will in any other ad campaign anywhere on the internet. Social Networks in Ten Years The new internet of the future is one that will seamlessly integrate technologies of images, voice, and data all into one entire networked system that is now known as the internet. In the future, it is very likely that the social networking sites that currently exist on the internet will mature, as will their users, into sites that offer a multitude of technologies that seamlessly mesh with our everyday life. The internet will integrate with television sets and telephones. We will have the ability to communicate with our social network contacts through the television, telephone, cell phone or computer – as they will all share common voice and data communication technologies. Contact with our entire social network will no longer by only through the computer – it will be possible to contact any contact within the network regardless of where you are in the world. Automobiles will all have active connections to the internet, and movies, radio, and all communications will be fed to cars, busses, trucks, trains and planes. No matter where you are ore what you are doing, you will no longer need to locate a computer to get in touch with a business colleague or a friend on your social network. You will be connected everywhere. The future of Social Networks is the future of the entire internet. This is what the internet has always been primarily used for, and it is what the internet will continue to be used for in the future. This article was posted by RANGIKA PERERA |
Marketing Management in a Web 2.0 World
21May 2010 |
I think we can all agree that, at this point, the term “Web 2.0” is over hyped. As digital marketers, they being told that they need to develop a blog, produce podcasts, provide mechanisms to rate our content, accept user comments and create the new mash-up of digg/YouTube and wrap it all in Ajax. And, these days, we can be in such a hurry to implement these new technologies that we forget the fact that they should actually serve some functions. There are two trends here that really interesting; the first is simply the sheer focus on getting users to go to the web. This isn’t any big surprise for us, as we are being asked to justify our marketing spend and the web is a sure way to measure our effectiveness. But the second trend is really interesting, and speaks more to how the web is becoming much more a “platform” for marketing than a vehicle to drive visibility to a corporate website. These new sites are campaign-specific. They can even be “spot” specific. The trend is toward more, smaller websites designed to leverage an experience for the consumer and to drive a specific conversion. Certainly this trend is evidenced by the new types of corporate blogs that seem to pop up all over the place. But even more distinct now are the new designs, content platforms and even brand extensions. This article was posted by RANGIKA PERERA |
Online Marketing
20May 2010 |
Marketing is a conversation you have with your customers. Key to a good conversation is your ability to listen and respond efficiently, appropriately, and in a manner that enriches the consumer’s experience of the conversation. So let’s take these trends and apply them to some specific online marketing activities and look at how a CMS can help us solve some of the problems. One of the key points of effective communication is content consistency. As an organization’s online presence grows and spreads, the primary challenge it faces is not only providing appealing and accessible content, but also ensuring that every bit of content delivered to a customer contributes a comprehensive, cohesive, and well-coordinated picture of the organization. This is another obvious online marketing activity that centers around content and the ability to easily manage it. Atom and RSS (‘Really Simple Syndication’) are two of the primary syndication standards. They allow your customers to subscribe to your content – and have it delivered to them. The CMS will enable you to set up a plan that makes constant, automatic updates of syndication files from your site data. Syndication also means that your content will now be available not just on your site, but on others as well – automatically increasing placements in search engine results. For example, if you have your content on other sites as articles, press releases or news items, the first page on a Google search may display only two links to your site; but it may have several links to your content on other sites. RSS feeds have proven effectiveness in boosting traffic, and search engines are paying increasing attention to RSS feeds. What’s more, it’s easier to find better placement in feed directories than from regular search engines. Email Marketing While Web content management systems typically do not have email campaign management systems built into them, they are still instrumental in their success. With single-sourced, centrally managed content, it becomes easy to publish directly into an integrated email system. The CMS will also allow content creators and marketers to create, manage and test the landing pages and micro sites that may be part of the call to action in the email. With style sheets and templates, the CMS can also ensure that your marketing teams need not wait for designers or technical staff to help with this process – they can publish when the need arises and not worry about branding inconsistencies or design gaffes. As user behavior and marketing techniques continuously evolve, companies could easily get left behind. However, with the growth of crucial technologies such as the CMS, adapting to new scenarios and challenges does not carry with it a large technological burden. It only remains to organizations to have a finger on the online pulse and move fluidly with the audience. This article was posted by RANGIKA PERERA |
The CRM event of the year
30March 2010 |
SugarCon ‘10, SugarCRM’s 4th annual user and customer conference, brings together SugarCRM users, developers, partners and experts from around the world. April 12 – 14 , 2010 San Francisco, CA SugarCon is a 2 day presentation will be packed with over 30 CEOs from leading business application, social media, cloud computing and open source companies to discuss the future of business and technology. Contact Information and the venue Event Registration: SugarCon Attendee $299.00 Partner Training & SugarCon $399.00 This article was posted by RANGIKA PERERA |
CDMUG Spring Jam 2010
26March 2010 |
Wakensys is a proud sponsor of CDMUG Spring Jam 2010 Saturday March 27th 9:00 am – Midnight If you are a Drupal fan, you will be into CDMUG’s Spring Jam. The main idea behind his is to bring everyone together for open communication, education, and most importantly fun. What is CDMUG Spring Jam? This workshop will gladly invite all the skills levels of individuals; Designers, developers, entrepreneurs, hobbyists, Drupal development companies and non-profit organizations. Conference will have presentations for beginners, themers and advanced developers during the day, Conference will be incorporated with 7 live presentations from industry experts. Most importantly the work shop is aims to encouraging new users to try Drupal. There are two sessions conducted for “Drupal for Everyone” or “Drupal for Designers”. Both workshops will start as an introduction to Drupal, but people interested design/themes will gain more from “Drupal for Designers”. Contact Information and the venue UIC Innovation Center Event Registration: $50.00 Late/Walk-in Registration (if available): $60.00 This article was posted by RANGIKA PERERA |
Software-as-a-Service
12March 2010 |
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is a growing phenomenon in worldwide business today. From the original ideas of outsourcing the data center and having third parties manage the software. SaaS also referred to as On-Demand is not “same old software as a service.” It represents a breakthrough in technology delivery, serving as a powerful catalyst for changing the value proposition and economics of business management. SaaS in the Market Today Business solutions delivered as service are a rapid and substantively growing presence today. Researchers IDC and Merrill Lynch forecast close to an $8 billion dollar spend on SaaS solutions in the Americas alone in 2008. Thinking strategies have found that enterprises of all sizes are rapidly adopting SaaS to overcome the hassles and costs of implementing traditional packaged applications. Businesses today can spend a huge amount of their budget on the software packages that they use to manage their businesses. They also spend an even larger amount on the hardware, networking, and operating software infrastructure that is required to support those applications. But they spend even more than that on the staff to service and manage them. Companies considering their software spend often forget or ignore the cost of user training, and more importantly, the long-term cost of software maintenance upgrades, integration expenses, and the cost of conducting these tasks over and over again. The Business Benefits of Software-as-a-Service Experts agree that there are many very distinctive business benefits to running a business via Software-as-a-Service. These include lower cost of ownership, access to state of the art versions of your application, faster time into production, and access to a superior computing environment than most customers can provide for themselves. Equally compelling, however, is the concept of focus within your company: the ability to focus on your business and not be distracted by the upheavals of managing a technology infrastructure and the IT staff to keep it under control. Let’s look at what research tells us are the principle benefits of the SaaS model for accessing business management applications. Cost of Ownership The cost of initial start-up may be the most well-known in cost savings with SaaS. Because the subscription model for licensing provides predictable costs (not possible with licensed software), budgeting and planning is easier and more reliable. In addition, with modular product availability, companies do not pay for functionality they do not need or want to use. Faster Time-to-Production The time to deploy an application determines just how quickly the organization can benefit from it. Unfortunately, large and complex implementations can take months or years to complete, especially when IT professionals are in short supply, users are located around the world, and disparate new business units must be brought on-line. Organizations often find that are they simply cannot upgrade infrastructures, adopt and deploy new technology fast enough to keep pace with their business needs. And protracted in-house implementations consume already limited IT resources that could be used to pursue more strategic business goals. The impact of time-to-production correlates with productivity loss in terms of personnel unable to do their jobs at maximum efficiency until the new system is deployed.
Companies expand and decrease in size over time; witness the compression in employee counts with the dot.com bust at the start of this century and the following expansion. While most proponents of the SaaS model talk about the ability to seamlessly add companies, employees, higher volumes and transaction counts over time, it is important to note that both business expansion and contraction is accommodated easily in the SaaS model. The on-demand model is designed for rapid scaling; applications are immediately available to new users when they are required, giving organizations the flexibility to expand operations without waiting for their IT infrastructure to catch up. Organizations can simply “turn on” new applications, as they are needed. This guarantee of flexibility is not possible in any other business model today. This article was posted by RANGIKA PERERA |
What Are Social Patterns?
8March 2010 |
we have watched the proliferation of Internet technology spread These electronic connections and social tools are changing the way we interact with one another. We believe that these tools can be designed and simplified to help normal peopleexpand their online experiences with others. These social patterns of behavior and theinterfaces to support them have emerged and continue to evolve as we find better ways to bring people together. Social patterns are the components and pieces of interactivity that are the building blocks of social experiences. They are the best practices and principles we have seen emerge from hundreds of sites and applications with social features or focus. They are the emergent interaction patterns that have become the standard way for users to interact with their content and with the people who matter most to them. This article was posted by RANGIKA PERERA |
Widgets for web 2.0
1March 2010 |
Widgets are stand alone program can be embedded into third party web pages to execute within the HTML base web pages without requiring different compilations. It is a chunk of code could run on the web page to offer a service, web Widgets has described using gadget, badge, module & snippet. & so on. All these technologies have been introduced due to an evolving trend in web 2. Web Widgets are implemented using web technologies including HTML, java scripts, CSS & flash. Most of Widgets have developed using java libraries such as jQuer & Ajax which indeed makes the web page dynamic and graphically rich. Google has released many gadgets lately in 2007, for example calculators, colanders, currency converters, fun games and many more.., these are free apps anyone can fix on to their web page as a service, as well as yahoo weather checker is one of apps freely anyone could embed in to a web page. One important factor with Widgets is that the host does not control the content. The host does however control the placement of the Widget. The content would derive from another host. Therefore these apps are mostly in place to improve the looks and to increase feature of dynamical contents. This article was posted by RANGIKA PERERA |
What is Cloud Computing?
26February 2010 |
What’s the cloud? “Cloud” is a metaphor for the Internet. It’s an abstraction of how networks of computers are connected. Till recent pass most of the organization connect their resources using LAN & WAN, may be to interconnect their computers in order to use their application software within the company network. In fact with the evolving change in web 2 companies release software’s as a service where as any company that uses the application can get it as a service, Software-as-a-service, or SaaS, is an application that businesses access and use via the Internet. Software-as-a-Service and the cloud have changed the landscape for businesses worldwide, from small businesses to the enterprise. No longer do you need to purchase expensive hardware and software for many business functions. If you have an internet connection, you can move much of your business computing to the cloud.
In 2006 Google also take initiative of developing Cloud applications, software pieces released as services. Speaking in which salesforce.com Founded in 1999, salesforce.com is currently the leading cloud CRM application, with over 51,800 customers and over 1.1 million subscribers. Amazen.com was developed and released as a web services in 2002. Cloud Economics One of the significant fact of cloud computing is that Software-as-a-Service in the cloud delivers substantial cost savings compared to purchasing and maintaining software in-house. Cost analysis been evaluated on certain factors. For instance; that companies can achieve significant cost savings by migrating from on-premise email to Google Apps. Google Apps is an entire suite of business applications residing in the cloud: email, calendaring, documents, spreadsheets, presentations and collaboration. Cloud Migration Process It is challenging to determine which computing infrastructure will deliver the greatest benefits by moving to the cloud. The best starting point depends upon your current computing situation and immediate business needs; to achieve the highest short-term ROI, select the business area with upcoming hardware or software capital requirements.
This article was posted by RANGIKA PERERA |
Google Analytics
25February 2010 |
Google Analytics is a full comprehensive web-analytical service pack offered free of charge to all the users, the compelling features and benefits such as keyword comparison, custom dashboards and AdWords integration for everyone from senior executives and advertising and marketing professionals to site owners and content developers. You may already deployed some of other third party packages or techniques to track the traffic volume which is good you should try mix of all but google analytics is most often choice of all for starters. In fact, since it’s easy on your wallet because it is freely. It is used on websites from static to dynamic. There are even free Wordpress Analytics Plugins, easy to set up. You could learn more about page views, user behavior tracking, and average time on site, and importance of understanding bounce rates, unique visitors, referrer traffic and optimizing landing pages here. I recommend you to go through the video tutorials
This article was posted by RANGIKA PERERA |