Slowly, but surely, Internet Explorer 6, long the bane of many a web developer, is dying. And you’re invited to its funeral.
A Denver, CO-based design company, Aten Design Group, has built a site to mark the occasion. At IE6funeral.com you can RSVP as to whether you will be able to attend the funeral service or not. It’s at the company’s headquarters in Denver, but those who aren’t able to attend in person are being asked to send flowers. For those who can attend, “Funeral attire is encouraged.”
From the site:
Internet Explorer Six, resident of the interwebs for over 8 years, died the morning of March 1, 2010 in Mountain View, California, as a result of a workplace injury sustained at the headquarters of Google, Inc. Internet Explorer Six, known to friends and family as “IE6,” is survived by son Internet Explorer Seven, and grand-daughter Internet Explorer Eight.
Sadly, this funeral will not actually be the last we heard of IE6. While Google Docs may be ending support on March 1, YouTube won’t kill it off until March 13. And then of course there are tens or hundreds of thousands of sites out there that not only support IE6, but in some cases are built specifically for it. It’s going to be a hard sucker to kill. But at least a funeral will provide some closure until we find the body.
If you’re a webmaster / blogger, its very likely that you’re FireFox lover like millions out there, but its also a fact that there are people romancing with Google Chrome amidst all this. I’ve been trying Chrome for sometime now and honestly its impressive. But something was not quite right with Chrome, or may be everything was too perfect. And recently Google added the extensions feature which opened up a whole new world of opportunities. With all these great extensions Chrome is as good as FireFox or even better sometimes. Check these extensions out and you’ll love it.
1. Access all you Google Tools with one single button
If you’re the “awesome” type of blogger, then you’d have all the Google apps in your browser. Gmail, Reader and all that. And if your browser is crowded with extension buttons, this is the extension that will save you a lot of clicks, time and clutter. One button for all.
2. Shorten URLs with one click while you’re browsing
With all the social networking frenzy, you never run out of short URLs. You deal with them daily. And this extension makes it easy for you to shorten any URL you’re browsing right from the browser with a click, and that too the goo.gl format.
3. Arrange your tabs vertically – save space and clicks !
If you’re anything like me, there would be at least a 25 tabs open in the browser anytime of the day. This chrome extension arranges all the tabs that are open in your browser vertically. Ah ! Thank god we have this now.
4. Get alerted when a new item is posted in your RSS subscriptions
If you’ve lot of RSS feeds subscribed to in Google reader and keeps a Google Reader tab open all the time, this extension will save that one tab and the frequent visits there to check for new updates. It shows a button that sits right in your browser window that pops up when a new item is posted to your RSS feeds.
5. Store snippets of information for daily use anywhere on the web
This extension lets you store customized snippets of text/information like username / password or just about anything that you can use repeatedly anywhere on the web. Saves a lot of time typing.
6. Get a bunch of SEO stats for any webpage, anytime in one click
If you’re the blogging/webmaster type, because of your curious nature you’d digg for SEO stats of those interesting websites you come across. This extension helps you get the basic SEO stats of any webpage in one button click. Stats include IP address, Host country, Alexa rank, Google Page Rank etc.
7. Save visits to Wikipedia and Dictionary, get word meanings on mouse hover
While searching for information you come across a lot of words which you wish you knew meaning of. And you often visit Wikipedia or Dictionary.com not to mention the hours you spent searching for stuff there. Now save on all that by getting to know the meaning of words right above them while you hover the mouse over.
8. Get advanced SEO stats of any webpage in one click
You’ll love this extension if you’re an SEO. This chrome extension gives you access to a full bunch of detailed SEO statistics like number of pages indexed on various search engines, Backlinks on other search engines, Traffic and ranks etc. To get this data otherwise, you’ll have to spent a lot of time and energy researching and collecting data.
Feeling nostalgic or trying a cross browser compatibility test ? No need to open that ugly thing again ? Using this chrome extension you can open any webpage in IE right inside Chrome.
This one’s amazing as it converts any webpage to PDF saveable/downloadable format in one click. It uses an external web service, but there’s no glitch while using it, easy as click-wait-download !
Asia’s Internet speed is not surprising news, but the details of this recent report on the Internet by Akamai show how much Asia and South Korea dominate the world of high speed Internet. Korea is also increasing the average national Internet speed at the fastest pace of any country in the world.
Korea, Japan and Hong Kong have the world’s fastest connections
Although South Korea continued to hold the top spot as the country with the highest average measured connection speed at 14.6 Mbps, its fastest city (Masan) was ranked fifth among Asian cities, at approximately 1.2x the country average. South Korea, unsurprisingly, has six of the top 10 fastest cities in Asia, all with average speeds above 15 Mbps. South Korea, Japan and Hong Kong are in global top 5 for increasing average speed.
As compared to the second quarter of 2009, South Korea saw a shift in the distribution of connections to higher speed buckets, with the 5-10 Mbps bucket declining from 35% to 29%, while the higher speed buckets all saw increases, with more than 10% of connections once again being made to Akamai at speeds greater than 25 Mbps.
The increased percentages of extremely high speed connections are in line with South Korea’s third quarter growth in both average measured connection speed and high broadband adoption rates.
While having a high broadband adoption rate that approaches just half of South Korea’s, Hong Kong has the second highest levels of extremely high speed connectivity among the top 10 countries, with more than 2.5% of connections to Akamai at speeds between 20-25 Mbps, and more than 5% at speeds in excess of 25 Mbps. The distribution of connection speeds above 5 Mbps remained fairly flat in the United States between the second and third quarters, and the United States remained #12 globally for this metric.
According to Gizmodo, Akamai has released their updated quarterly report on the State of the Internet. Gizmodo posted a very interesting chart from the repot which ranked countries of the world according to fastest Internet speeds. South Korea is way out in front with an average speed of 14.6 Mbps, followed by Japan, Hong Kong and Romania. Canada and the United States both well outside of the top 10. Ireland, which was 6th on the fastest Internet speed list, showed the greatest year over year increase of 73%.
Streaming music firm We7 announced at the recent MidemNet event in Cannes that it will launch advertising-free premium services on 1 February, but today it’s released the prices for its two packages. However, the jury is out on whether revenues from premium subscriptions will cover the costs of music licensing, which remains the final ‘last mile’ in making free online music streaming services scale effectively.
We7 Premium will offer unlimited streaming of over four million songs (including personal radio, playlists and sharing) for £4.99 a month. There’s an introductory offer of £3.99 a month for the first 90 days.
We7 Premium Plus adds mobile to the element, making it a direct competitor to Spotify’s mobile offering. We7 will start with iPhone and Android apps, bringing in other smartphones later this year. Crucially they are matching Spotify’s offline mode ability to listen to your playlists without a 3G or Wifi connection. That costs £9.99 a month, the same price as Spotify’s premium product.
Now, there is a way forward here for We7 since Spotify’s free product is still invite-only. We7’s is free-to-air for anyone. But increasingly I think this battle will come down to quality of service, and just, well, user experience.
User experience matters in music
Spotify’s desktop and mobile services avoid Flash players and web streaming and instead use P2P to create an extremely luxurious user experience. Here’s what it’s often like to crank up a track on We7 or a common-or-garden Wifi connection, listen to the first 20 seconds:
What we also see is that a decent desktop app like Spotify’s has an effect on services which concentrate on streaming from a site. It’s already potentially killing off local competition in France, where Deezer is going through huge problems and has failed to get a desktop application out.
At the same time I think We7 is missing a huge trick, namely it’s widget strategy. In theory it could in fact have a huge advantage over Spotify in terms of distribution. It’s widgets can be embedded in any web page or social page, so there are many possibilities.
Spotify has taken a different approach, letting others be creative about playlist sharing, hence Sharemyplaylists, Spotifyfriends and Spotylist.com among many others do the heavy social lifting.
And yet when you look at the We7 site the feeling you get is not of a celestial jukebox or of a vibrant social site, but of a rather average, editorially driven site.
Here’s a new strategy for We7
Look at Tweetmeme and SoundCloud.
Tweetmeme’s widget strategy has been a case-study in how to distribute content. By getting sites to embed its retweet button, it’s traffic has gone through the roof and it is already being talked about in terms of an acquisition by Twitter at some point. We7 needs to seriously look at how it’s widget embeds could be distributed far better. We7 could also look at how Tweetmeme’s actual site “bubbles-up” content from the crowd of users.
In the same way, SoundCloud’s highly customisable and social features could be applied to We7’s service. We7 could take some of those ideas and make them far more applicable to it’s mainstream audience, which is quite different from SoundCloud ‘music obsessive’ audience.
We7 could also look at some of the ideas in Gigulate, which is trying to be a kind of Techmeme for music.
That’s We7’s site. But what it does on the mobile will also be crucial to how this battle with Spotify will play out. It’s quite clear now that Spotify’s premium subscriptions rocketed once it launched a mobile version which offline caching.
That still leaves the issue of the “global play”.
We7 is concentrating on the UK. Spotify’s free version is currently available in Sweden, Norway, Finland, the UK, France and Spain. You can use Spotify Premium in all countries, however you can only buy premium, and sign up, in its launch countries. So in other words Spotify is already beating We7 on global expansion and mindshare. And it’s planning a US launch, probably this quarter.
The earthquake in Haiti, which rocked the capital city of Port Au Prince over the week, has been devastating to the already impovershed country, its people, and its already unstable government. According to the latest news accounts, over 100,000 are expected to have died during the quake or over the past 48 hours with the after effects of disease, dehydration and starvation.
The government and its infrastructure was also demoslihed, as the Haitian Presidential Palace is in ruins and a displaced President is now trying to govern an almost non existant government.
There are many websites and online relief efforts that have been set up over the past two days and as our little contribution to the Haitian disaster, we’ve compiled a list of sites that you can check out if you want to monitor what’s happening in Haiti and also make donations to the Red Cross or Doctors Without Borders.
Save the Children. Donate atsavethechildren.org or make checks out to “Save the Children” and mail to: Save the Children Income Processing Department, 54 Wilton Road, Westport, Conn. 06880
Red Cross. To Donate $10 to Red Cross for #Haiti – Text HAITI to 90999 (the $10 will be charged to your cell phone bill)”. You can also go online toredcross.org and click Donate, or call (800) REDCROSS.
Mercy Corp. Go online tomercycorps.org or mail checks to Haiti Earthquake Fund, Dept. NR, PO Box 2669, Portland, Ore. 97208 or call (888) 256-1900
Useful Number to Memorize -1-888-407-4747. It’s a toll-free number set up by the The State Department has also set up links on its Web site to facilitate donations to disaster relief agencies.
[Austria] Franz Enzenhofer, an Austrian developer, has merged two current Internet trends and created something pretty neat: MiniQR, a URL shortening service for QR Codes.
Imagine you are a company and want to create your very own QR code for a product, service or any other use. MiniQR enables you to do just that but also adds a URL shortening feature to the mix. Enter techcrunch.com as the source to be encoded, for example, and MiniQR provides a unique and clean QR Code which points to a shortened version of the URL – miniqr.com/techcrunch.
Information entered (in this case the domain) is also amended to the shortened URL, which Enzenhofer claims helps to prevent “QR domain grabbing”.
QR Codes are those 2-dimensional barcode-like stickers they you may have come across on sights, products or pretty much anything else. Using a smartphone with a QR code scanning application installed you’re able to scan the code using the phone’s camera, decode it and be redirected to whatever online destination lies underneath. This technology, which strives from Japan and was created back in 1994, has found itself being utilized in multiple ways, although mostly in marketing (aside from packaging, distribution and other B2B applications).
URL shorteners, synonymous with the real-time web and made popular through Twitter, are the quick and tiny helpers of today’s Internet. They create an alternative and much shorter URL for any web address and the idea has escalated into a huge number implementations, ultimately with Google jumping on the bandwagon.
Other small apps such as Kaywa or QR Code generator are already doing a good job of enabling a QR code to be generated within seconds, but MiniQR’s concept of positioning it as as a URL shortening service too has some added viral potential. View full post on TechCrunch Europe
Don’t look now guys, but only 16 months after it was officially released, Google Chrome is now the world’s no. 3 browser, based on Net Applications’ web browser usage data for December.
What makes this more interesting is that Chrome has edged out Apple Safari which has been occupying the third spot next to Internet Explorer and Firefox. Google Chrome registered a 4.63% market share while Safari got 4.46% making it the no.4 browser for the first time.
It is also worthwhile to note that Google just released the beta editions of Chrome for both Mac and Linux so it is most likely that this brought a sudden surge to its market share.
While Safari may have slipped down to the no. 4 spot, it still managed to increase by 0.1%. Not unlike IE and Firefox which both suffered minor setbacks with 0.92% and 0.1% decrease in market share respectively.
Joining Google Chrome and Apple Safari with increases in market share is Opera’s web browser which managed to get 2.4% of the browser market.
Net Applications’ data was based on usage share from the 40,000 sites it monitors for clients. This amounts to 160 million unique visitors monthly.
0 0, 0 Max visitors today: 56 at 07:46 am ICT This month: 56 at 08-01-2010 07:46 am ICT This year: 173 at 03-10-2010 08:15 am ICT All time: 173 at 03-10-2010 08:15 am ICT
Slowly, but surely, Internet Explorer 6, long the bane of many a web developer, is dying. And you’re invited to its funeral.
[Austria] 