MicroSofts Surface- Coffee Table Computer

Microsoft Corp. has taken the wraps off "Surface," a coffee-table shaped computer that responds to touch and to special bar codes attached to everyday objects.

The machines, which Microsoft planned to debut Wednesday at a technology conference in Carlsbad, Calif., are set to arrive in November in T-Mobile USA stores and properties owned by Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc. and Harrah's Entertainment Inc.

Surface is essentially a Windows Vista PC tucked inside a shiny black table base, topped with a 30-inch touchscreen in a clear acrylic frame. Five cameras that can sense nearby objects are mounted beneath the screen. Users can interact with the machine by touching or dragging their fingertips and objects such as paintbrushes across the screen, or by setting real-world items tagged with special bar-code labels on top of it.

Unlike most touchscreens, Surface can respond to more than one touch at a time. During a demonstration with a reporter last week, Mark Bolger, the Surface Computing group's marketing director, "dipped" his finger in an on-screen paint palette, then dragged it across the screen to draw a smiley face. Then he used all 10 fingers at once to give the face a full head of hair.

With a price tag between $5,000 and $10,000 per unit, Microsoft isn't immediately aiming for the finger painting set. (The company said it expects prices to drop enough to make consumer versions feasible in three to five years.)

Some of the first Surface models are planned to help customers pick out new cell phones at T-Mobile stores. When customers plop a phone down on the screen, Surface will read its bar code and display information about the handset. Customers can also select calling plans and ringtones by dragging icons toward the phone.

Guests sitting in some Starwood Hotel lobbies will be able to cluster around the Surface to play music, then buy songs using a credit card or rewards card tagged with a bar code. In some hotel restaurants, customers will be able to order food and drinks, then split the bill by setting down a card or a room key and dragging their menu items "onto" the card.

At Harrah's locations, visitors will be able to learn about nearby Harrah's venues on an interactive map, then book show tickets or make dinner reservations.

Microsoft is working on a limited number of programs to ship with Surface, including one for sharing digital photographs.

Bolger placed a card with a bar code onto Surface's surface; digital photographs appeared to spill out of the card into piles on the screen. Several people gathered around the table pulled photos across the screen using their fingertips, rotated them in circles and even dragged out the corners to enlarge the images — behavior made possible by the advanced graphics support deep inside Windows Vista.

"It's not a touch screen, it's a grab screen," Bolger said.

Historically, Microsoft has focused on creating new software, giving computer programmers tools to build applications on its platforms, and left hardware manufacturing to others. (Some recent exceptions include the Xbox 360 and the Zune music player, made by the same Microsoft division that developed Surface.)

For now, Microsoft is making the Surface hardware itself, and has only given six outside software development firms the tools they need to make Surface applications.

Matt Rosoff, an analyst at the independent research group Directions on Microsoft, said in an interview that keeping the technology's inner workings under wraps will limit what early customers — the businesses Microsoft is targeting first with the machine — will be able to do with it.

But overall, analysts who cover the PC industry were wowed by Surface.

Surface is "important for Microsoft as a promising new business, as well as demonstrating very concretely to the market that Microsoft still knows how to innovate, and innovate in a big way," said Michael Gartenberg, an analyst at Jupiter Research.

Have a look below -

The ROI of SEO

Organic optimization brings more than just results in the search engines.

The infograph below shows the additional benefits and return on investment that comes along with properly optimizing a site and pursuing targeted keywords:

Graphic by Elliance

Google Now Crawling And Indexing Flash Content

Historically, search engines have been unable to extract content, such as text and links, from Flash (SWF) files. Subsequently, much of the Flash-based content on the web has been unavailable in search results. This situation has been frustrating for web developers, who have tried to come up with workarounds to help get search engines to index and rank their Flash pages.

This situation hasn't been ideal for searchers either, as this limitation has kept them from seeing potentially great matches for their queries because they've been locked away in Flash files.

According to Adobe and Google, all of that is changing. Google is launching a "deep algorithmic change," augmented by Flash reader technology supplied by Adobe, that enables them to "read" Flash files and extract text and links from it for better indexing and ranking. This could be great news for both site owners and searchers.

10 Tips to Get Better Data From Google Analytics

1. Documentation. Read the major links on the Google Analytics support site (www.google.com/support/analytics/). This will give you a good overall understanding of the implementation.
2. Page Tags. Tag all your pages with the GA Tracking Code that Google gives you when you sign up. Most GA users put the tracking code into an "include" file that gets included on all your pages, like a footer. When you think you are all tagged, spend $9 to $29 for a SiteScan at Epikone (http://sitescanga.com) to verify your work.
3. Secure Pages. If you have any secure pages on your site, you need to use the secure code for them. The easiest way to do this is to use secure code on all your pages (even the insecure pages). When you sign up for GA, give your URL as https://www.mysite.com, not http, and it will generate the secure code (and don’t worry: the analytics will still work just fine.)
4. Test Profile. Create a test profile in addition to your "real" profile. That way, you can test new features. When you are sure they work, move them over into your real profile. (Under "Analytics Settings" choose "Add a Website Profile." Then choose to add a profile for an existing site. You can have up to 50 profiles in an account.)
5. Funnels. Use sales funnels (tools that allow you to observe the online sales process) for defined movement in the site -- like through a shopping cart, or from a sign-up page to the "Thank you" page. Don’t try to make your funnels teach you about undefined motion, like pathing through the whole site -- you'll just be frustrated. And don’t forget to create those funnels; they are one of GA’s greatest strengths.
6. Special Profiles. Create special profiles for important campaigns (like paid search or organic search). That way, you can apply all of the GA tools focusing a specific campaign. This is one of the best ways to segment in GA, but you have to think of it before you need it.
7. E-commerce Tracking. If you have an e-commerce site, remember to set up the special e-commerce tracking code and tell GA that each profile does e-commerce.
8. Autotag Google AdWords. If you use Google AdWords, make sure that your AdWords talk to your Analytics. Then be sure that your AdWords are autotagged (it's in the "My Account" tab of your AdWords.) Finally, go to your Google Analytics from your AdWords (you have to do it this way), choose your profile, edit the profile, edit the main website information, and choose "Apply Cost Data." Now your AdWords and your Analytics are in sync.
9. Tag Other Campaigns. Be sure to tag all your other campaigns, too – like your Yahoo and MSN paid search, your banner ads, your email marketing. Use the Google Analytics link tagging tool, being sure to include at least a campaign name, a source and a medium.
10. Analyze your data. Use all that hard work to figure out where you are getting your best traffic from, to learn where individuals are leaving your shopping cart, and to learn which keywords are working for you. After all, the whole point of having great analytics is to make more money.

Optimize Images for Search Engines

Optimize your images for search engines:

• Keywords in alt text, text around the image, image name, page title;
• Preferred image formatting - jpg;
• Separate SE accessible image folder;
• Image freshness. (SEW suggests re-uploading your images to keep them fresh);
• Enabled image search option at Google webmaster tool.
• Reasonable image file size (see the discussion at WW)
• Limited number of images per page;
• Popular and reliable photo sharing hosting (e.g. Flickr is reported to help in Yahoo! image optimization).

Optimize your images for social media:

• (obvious) use really great images to give your readers another reason to spread the word;
• (to get Digg thumbnailed submission) stick to jpg format and make sure the images can be resized to (or already are) 160×120 or 160×160 pixels (Unless you have an image that can be resized that way Digg will not offer the submitter a thumbnail to go with the post).

Optimize your images for people:

• People pay more attention to a clear image where they can see details (choose high quality images).
• (Clean, clear) faces in an image get more eye fixation. (don’t use abstract images too often).
• Keep them relevant: images are not the first thing a visitor sees on a web page but they can compel him to stay (according to the eye-tracking research web text is prior to images; when looking at a printed article people see images first; with web page they see text first - nevertheless images make the visitor stay and remember the page via relevant associations).

Gender specific:

• women are better at recognizing facial emotions than men (research):
• men seem to be more likely than women to first look at faces rather than other parts of a nude body (source);
• women are more interested in images with more than one person (source).

Tools and fun for image optimization:

• SEO Friendly Images WP Plugin - automatically optimize image ALT and TITLE with the help of post “%title” variable;
• Play with Google Images labeling (and help improve the quality of Google image search).

How to find images online.

• Finding Stock Photos - lists 3 great resources for stock photos;
• A Guide to Finding and Using Incredible Flickr Images - describing (1) which Flickr images you are allowed to use; (2) tactics to quickly find best images.

Cuil to Rival Google

Cuil, the search engine hoping to knock Google off the top spot, has been launched. Associated with the name of the mythical Irish hero Fin McCuil and pronounced like "cool", as the Cuil FAQs point out, the name is Gaelic for both knowledge and hazel. The search engine was founded by Tom Costello, a former employee at IBM, and his wife Anna Patterson, who worked for Google for three years. They believe that the current search engines have not kept up with the exponential growth of the Internet. They claim Cuil covers more web sites than any other search engine – three times more than Google and 10 times more than Microsoft.

Google no longer reveals the size of its search index, merely saying in its corporate blog on Friday that it is "proud to have the most comprehensive index of any search engine," and that their systems show the Web as now exceeding one trillion independent URLs. Estimates put the Google index at around 30 to 50 billion web sites. In comparison, Cuil, which specialises in English, claims it has already indexed 120 billion.

Data protectionists will probably be more interested in another difference between Cuil and Google. Whereas the latter saves user data, the former does not. Cuil says it wants to analyse the web, not users. The operator's privacy guidelines are accordingly short, and they contain a passage about cookies, explaining that they are only used to save a particular user's preferences and are not stored on Cuil servers.

Cuil does not display search hits as a list of links and short key words, but rather in columns with a brief text and an image. The operators called this new way of presenting hits "organised results" and claim that the hits are more easily readable this way. In addition, a box of categories is displayed for surfers to fine-tune the hits displayed. Search results are not sorted by popularity, but rather by content. At the moment Cuil's search results preview is a bit indiscriminate as it tends to associate the wrong thumbnail images with sampled search text. For example a search for "John Hammond" shows pictures of John Hammond jnr., the famous blues singer, associated with search text for Sir John Hammond FRS and John Hammond the BBC weather forecaster.

Madrone Capital, Greylock and Tugboat Ventures have already invested $33m in the project. Madrone alone has put in $25m. In addition to Patterson, CFO and co-founder Russell Power and product manager Louis Monier are former staff members at Google. Monier also used to work at AltaVista, where he got the automated machine translator Babel Fish going. He later went to eBay to oversee a redesign.

Google Decides Against Buying Digg

Google (GOOG) last week decided not to go ahead with a $200 million deal to buy the social news aggregation site Digg.com, according to TechCrunch.

“Two sources close to the companies suggested that some issue that came up during technical due diligence was to blame,” TechCrunch reports. “One source said that the issue was more personality driven, and that Google decided after spending more time with Digg’s top team that there just wasn’t a fit.”

While we’re talking about Google, meanwhile, there is quite a flurry of publicity this morning for a new search engine started by some Google refugees called Cuil, which describes itself as the world’s biggest search engine.

Facebook to add Microsoft Live Search

Microsoft has announced that the company has expanded its deal with Facebook and will be integrating Microsoft's Live Search into the social network.

This is big news for Live search, which has been languishing behind both Yahoo and Google in the search stakes for some time.

It is understood that Microsoft will utilise this deal to serve up advertising (both traditional and sponsored search results) through Facebook by the end of the year. Microsoft previously bought a $240 million stake in Facebook at a whopping $15 billion valuation, in exchange for global advertising rights.

This deal parallels the search deal that Google signed with MySpace in 2006, when it won the rights to provide search and advertising to the News Corp-owned social network. Thus far the deal has failed to produce any real results for Google as they have struggled to monetise the worlds largest social network, but it blames the under performance on the difficulty with monetizing social networks in general.

3 Simple Ways to Increase Google PageRank

A mathematical analysis of the PageRank algorithm shows there are 3 simple, legal things you can do to increase your PageRank score.

These aren’t bogus SEO techniques like hidden text, link spam and page cloaking that will get you banned from Google. These techniques use the mathematical properties of PageRank to give your site more prominence.

Inside PageRank
The principle of PageRank (PR) is similar to citation indexes maintained for scientific and legal articles to measure influence. PR has to be easily computable on the fly, which has some interesting storage implications I’ll cover in another article.

Two papers, Inside PageRank by Monica Bianchini, Marco Gori, and Franco Scarselli of the University of Siena (AFAIK available only through the ACM) and Deeper Inside PageRank (pdf) by Amy N. Langville and Carl D. Meyer, cover the mathematical framework of PageRank. These suggestions are from the Inside PageRank paper.

Both are dense math papers, not CompSci, so if your linear algebra is rusty you’ll find them a hard slog. The references are great sources for further study though.

The 3 techniques

• Eliminate dangling pages
• Aggregate out links on pages with many site links
• Split long pages into several pages

Eliminate dangling pages
This is a no-brainer. A page with no out links is a dangling page. Even rarely used reference material should have links back into other pages on the site.

Aggregate out links on pages with many site links
Out links reduce what Bianchini et. al. call the “energy” - and PageRank - of a site. To reduce the lost energy aggregate the out links on pages with more internal links.

In this diagram, less energy is lost with the out link from page 1 than the one from page 2. Page 1 links to 3 internal pages, while page 2 only links to 1.

Split long pages into several pages
A web site has a “default energy” which is proportional to the number of pages in the site. All other things being equal a larger number of pages will get you a higher page rank. Here’s a graphic:

There is a usability issue with lots of pages, so be smart about how the content gets divvied up. Frustrated visitors won’t link to you, which also hurts your PR score.

The Storage Bits take
PageRank isn’t the only thing Google looks at, but it is probably the most important factor. These simple techniques will help your site do as well as it can in Google ranking.

Google to Possibly Buy out Digg

A blog news report says Google is set to buy new aggregator Digg for a handy $200 million — possibly.

Technology blog TechCrunch has reported that Google is close to a deal to purchase news aggregator Digg for a whopping $200 million. Or it may not, as Microsoft might step in.

According to the blog, the deal might be almost done, or it might fall through, or Microsoft might come in with a bid. But at present a Google deal seems likely, if maybe still a couple of weeks from closing.

Founded in 2004, Digg has become possibly the best-known of the news aggregators, a successful example of Web 2.0 – and it has a healthy ad deal with Microsoft.

If the Google deals goes through, Digg would come under Google News.

Amazing Stat: California Uses More Gas than China!

Given all the news coverage about the rise of the Chinese economy, you could be forgiven for thinking that the world's most populous country is hogging all the world's resources, while the developed nations are fighting for scraps.

But, at least with transportation fuel, you'd be wrong. California alone uses more gasoline than any country in the world (except the US as a whole, of course). That means California's 20 billion gallon gasoline and diesel habit is greater than China's! (Or Russia's. Or India's. Or Brazil's. Or Germany's.)

That's according to the California Energy Commission's State Alternative Fuels Plan, which was posted online last Christmas Eve (pdf). The whole report makes for some fascinating reading because it's a blueprint for a low-carbon and renewable transportation fuel future. The dominant takeaway: it ain't going to be easy.

One more choice statistic: gasoline usage in California has increased 50 percent, that's 10 6.7 billion gallons, since 1988. Has there been anything close to a commensurate increase in quality of life here to accompany that rise in energy use?

But China's oil thirst is growing -- to almost 20 billion gallons in 2007 -- and perhaps as early as this year, China's 1.3 billion people will overtake California's 37 million people in total gasoline and diesel usage.

Cancer Risk From CellPhone Use Issued

Now he's done it. Dr. Ronald B. Herberman, director of the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, has said what no one else would -- no cancer experts anyway. Herberman told his faculty and staff today that they should limit their use of cellphones. Why? They might increase the risk of cancer.

Here's the AP story: Pittsburgh cancer center warns of cellphone risks. In it he says, essentially, that he'd rather be safe than sorry.

Other doctors have been more reluctant to warn against the devices, saying there's just not enough solid evidence to warrant full-fledged alarm.

Here's a recent review of the data from Health reporter Shari Roan: Cancer risk from cellphone use is still a matter of study. This was published just a couple of weeks ago when that pesky new California law took effect.

Ah, well, if you're gonna panic, do it wisely. Here are some tips, which accompanied the earlier story, on how to reduce one's exposure to cellphones' radio-frequency emissions.

* Use cellphones for short conversations or when a conventional phone isn't available.

* Use a hands-free device that will place more distance between the cellphone's antenna and your head. The antenna emits radio-frequency waves. And your brain lies just beyond your ears.

* Limit children's cellphone use -- both to reduce their exposure at a time when their brains are still developing and to reduce their lifetime exposure. (Unlike us, they still have a lot of years left.)

* In the car, use an external antenna mounted outside the vehicle.

* Keep the phone away from your body when it's turned on. Sure, it's adorable, but you don't need to hold it all the time. Nor do you need, if you're the more manly type, to clip it to your belt.

* Check your phone's SAR value at the Federal Communications Commission website. This value, for Specific Absorption Rate, is the amount of radio-frequency absorbed from the phone into the user's tissues.

In the meantime, I guess we'll wait on proof.

Google Trends data indicates SEO getting more popular than PPC

Whether it's just down to people's search terms changing it's difficult to tell but over the last 12 months the searches for the term SEO have caught up with and outstripped searches for the term PPC.

Google trends provides a great suite of search analysis tools and the trend is apparent in the US, the UK, Australia and Canada and could well hint that advertising budgets are being squeezed as the economy slows and search engine optimisation methods are taking their place.

Traditional Pay Per Click is very much "You get what you pay for" and as soon as the budget is turned off the traffic stops. An SEO campaign whilst much more "slow burning" will yield longer term traffic results as sites climb the natural search listings.

United States analysis

United Kingdom analysis

Australia analysis

Canada analysys

If the trend does reflect a change in attitudes and focus it&s an interesting change on emphasis in the online marketing world.

Whether the markplace will changing in the coming months or this is a deeper trend only time will tell.

Source: Hit Search

65 ways to increase visitor traffic and build backlinks

1. Write something great about your niche and email other bloggers to let them know there's a good chance they'll link to you

2. Have a signature link in forums that points to your site

3. Post links to your pages to social bookmarking sites.

4. Leave comments on other people's blogs and link back to your site (tip: look in the digg upcoming section for blog posts about to get a lot of traffic).

5. Have the opposite opinion on everyone else on a popular topic, providing you can justify it. Everyone will get annoyed and link to you saying your wrong

6. Answer questions on Yahoo Answers - quote your website as the source.

7. Post in Yahoo and Google Groups with a link to your site in your signature

8. Make a 404 page that redirects to your homepage, no point losing visitors

9. Have an opt-in form trade links with someone else who has an opt in form on your confirmation page

10. Review a product or company if your review is positive email the company and ask to be featured in their press section. (this has worked really well for me)

11. Write articles and submit them to article directories

12. Write a Press Release and submit it to PRWeb (make sure it is newsworthy)

13. Use PayPerClick Traffic (e.g Adwords, MSN Adcenter, YSM)

14. Add an RSS subscribe button/link in a high profile spot on your site

15. Add a mailing list subscribe form in a high profile spot on your site

16. Add a bookmark this site link in a high profile spot on your site

17. Use a Tell A Friend Script on your site so people can email their friend about an article on your website.

18. Submit a blog to a blog directory

19. Submit you RSS feed to RSS feed directories

20. Mention your website in a post on Craigslist (don't spam)

21. Optimize the titles of your pages for keywords people will search for

22. Buy links to your site

23. Buy reviews about your site on other people's site

24. Buy banner space on other websites if you can get a good ROI

25. Send articles to ezine publishers with a link back to your website

26. Do a big viral push for a piece of link bait, post it in forums, social bookmarking sites like digg, email bloggers, and get a few people to vote for you on social bookmarking sites, this little push could start a viral chain reaction!

27. Have a link to your site on community sites like MySpace and FaceBook

28. Use a traffic trading system like BlogRush

29. Purchase misspellings of competitors domains and redirect your site (be careful of trademark infringement)

30. Create a freebie product to give away (ebook, software, whitepaper etc.)

31. Submit your site to the hundreds of free directories, use the viles-silencer list

32. Do a group feature where you get other website owners in your niche to participate, maybe asking them all an opinion on something.

33. Hold a competition for the Top 50 in your niche 1 month later post the results and let everyone know who featured watch them link back to say what there position was.

34. Pass out business cards when you go to industry events in your niche

35. If you have a product start an affiliate program and start approaching affiliates

36. Submit videos to video sharing sites like YouTube and Metacafe. Include a link in the description and within the actual video.

37. If you have a product send it to website owners to get reviewed.

38. Look at a big website within your niche and ask to write some guest posts for them

39. Create pages with links to your site on places like Squidoo and Hubpages

40. Place classified Ads on eBay with a link to your website

41. Use an autoresponder on your mailing list to keep people coming back to your site

42. Exchange links with a few related sites in your niche

43. Network! Email other site owners, phone them up, go to industry events and get yourself known. If they know your face they will likely talk about you on their site if you do something interesting.

44. Many forums have a place for you to advertise your site once, find them and do it.

45. Purchase advertising in other people's mailing lists and newsletters

46. Create an Amazon profile and start submitting reviews

47. Create profiles on MySpace and start networking in groups that are interested in your site's niche.

48. Conduct a survey and publish the results, make sure you let people know about it.

49. Get your hand on a load of PLR content for your niche. Add a commentary to the top, create a unique title, and post them all to your site, lots of new content and lots of new traffic.

50. Create a cartoon mascot for your site, then hold a competition for someone to create the best game for it, pay the winner a decent amount.

51. Make sure you have a memorable domain name that is short and catchy.

52. Use a well-searched for keyword within your domain name to help rank for that keyword.

53. If you sell a product ask someone else who sells a product to list your product with theirs, and you'll do the same for them, split commissions on sales.

54. When you write a new article on your site, link to as many blogs as possible, they will likely see your site in their pingbacks, website stats, or Technorati. They will visit your site and possibly subscribe to it and link back at a later date.

55. Get your RSS feed syndicated to different sites like Zimbio and hubpages and Topix.

56. If your site is popular and has quality unique content then apply to get listed in Google's News search.

57. Create a sitemap and submit it to Google (not great but might help)

58. Use your robots.txt file to stop Google indexing certain directories and pages on your blog (such as archives) to avoid duplicate content issues).

59. Create a couple of small 10 page sites related to your main site. Offer links on these smaller sites in return for links to your main site (this is triangular reciprocal linking).

60. Get yourself known as an expert and get featured in offline magazines, TV and radio stations.

61. Use an auto-translator service to translate your site into other languages, put it in a subdirectory and watch foreign traffic come in.

62. Post about celebrities current events if it relates to your niche, there's always a lot of people looking up celebrity stuff.

63. Write good headlines/titles, good titles get more clicks.

64. Get some stickers with your domain name on. Go out and stick them on strangers and say, My Website Yeah, Check it out.

65. Reference your unique articles in the correct section of wikipedia - using the the special reference tag.