All About Web Innovations

What do YouTube, MySpace and Facebook have in common? Well, besides having a net worth of around a gazillion dollars. Creativity and Innovation.

Social networking and multimedia sites have come a long way in such a short amount of time. For example, in the beginning there was SixDegrees.com which started in 1997. This networking site allowed its users to create their own profile and add and link to their friends. This gave way to community tools like chat and email messaging. Now there are dozens of social networking sites that feature not only the ability to entertain while maintaining a strong link to people within your network, but also the power to build relations and contacts to those who are outside the network, giving opportunities for businesses and the like to flourish. Although it has never been specified that social networking sites are created to establish small- and medium-sized businesses, these websites are flexible enough in their innovation to accommodate changing and growing needs of users. I personally know of people who owe the success of their fledgling apparel store to Facebook. Orders from all over the country (and sometimes even abroad) kick-off their small business.

People’s creativity and innovations have no limit. And one of the best features any social networking and multimedia site can offer is the freedom for these juices to keep flowing, no restrictions. Links to personal and company domain names should never be an issue either. As some people say, “Websites that work together, end up giving their owners a multi-billion dollar business.”

What is Federated Search in SharePoint Server 2010?
A Federated Search in SharePoint Server enables you to display search results for additional content that is not crawled by your search server. Using Federated Search, the query can be performed over the local content index, or it can be forwarded to an external content repository where it is processed by that repository’s search engine. The repository’s search engine then returns the results to the search server. The search server formats and renders the results from the external repository within the same search results page as the results from the search server’s own content index.

A federated location defines the federated search connection to the external content repository, and comprises Location types, Query and More Results link templates, Triggers, Display information, Restrictions, and Authentication and credentials information. Read the rest of this entry »

The mobile internet browsing experience is so bad these days: text-heavy, very little images, slow, and cumbersome. This was more likely due to both the smartphone’s hardware and integrated web browser. With the introduction of better and more technologically capable smartphones, most expect some improvements with the browser as well. Well, here comes Skyfire to make your mobile web viewing so much better.

The new mobile browser brings the true internet (like you’d experience from your desktop or laptop computer) to Windows Mobile smartphones. Flash-advertisements, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook – any and all web-pages load in speedy fashion thanks to Skyfire’s behind-the-scenes server-magic. With integrated Flash support, animated/interactive advertisements come to life, embedded videos play in the browser, and Flash-based web-pages are finally viewable.

Available for Windows Mobile 5 and 6. It can be integrated whether your smartphone is touch or non-touchscreen. It is currently still under beta testing.
More info on this site.

In considering how to extend the Web with new technologies, it is instructive to compare Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) with frames. CSS is an elegantly designed extension, whereas frames suck, as I have said many times CSS is backward compatibleto the extent that viewing a style-enhanced site with an older browser causes no problems at all. Of course, the user doesn’t see the stylistic enhancements made possible by CSS (e.g., multiple fonts and indented margins), but the text of the page will be readable and will be presented in a reasonable default style (of course, the extent to which you deem the default presentation reasonable depends on your assessment of the quality of typography in mainstream browsers: admittedly rather poor). In contrast, a page designed with frames is useless for a user with an old browser.CSS isorthogonal to other featuresin Web browsing. When multiple style sheets become supported in future releases of the mainstream browsers, users might want to learn the command to switch between styles, but they won’t have to. Read the rest of this entry »

Generally, most people have confused Bluetooth as being able to directly provide Internet access to computers once attached. This may have been due to them being confused by Bluetooth’s current capabilities. To clear things up, this article is here to define briefly what Bluetooth is and how exactly it provides internet access.

Bluetooth, generally speaking, works on the same principle as WiFi. Both use unregistered spread spectrum technology. Bluetooth is a device for connecting different devices, eg. mobile phones and computers, handsets and phones, etc., wirelessly. It is meant as a step up from the infrared technology that connected devices before. Bluetooth is more than capable than infrared in its capabilities such as being able to connect devices at greater distances and higher speeds.

The complexity of WiFi is usually too difficult for the average person to understand. To break it down, WiFi is an internet connection that uses two types of radio technology: a single carrier and a multi-carrier. The single carrier type of radio technology, direct sequence spread spectrum radio technology, was the reason behind unlicensed spread spectrum whose regulations enabled the development of WiFi as well as other wireless technology such as cordless telephones, Bluetooth, etc.The father of WiFi title has been awarded to Netherland invention, WaveLAN. Invented during 1991 by the NCR Corporation which later was renamed Lucent & Agere Systems, it held the chair of IEEE 802.11 for 10 years.

The advent of Web 2.0 has become one of the most thrilling developments in the evolutionary history of the internet. The power of the big business was liberated and brought into the hands of the users who now demand more from the web. From total satisfaction to sharing personal thought, the web has evolved so much that it is by no means any similar to the initial design and concept.
Having video blogs and blogs that earn money for that fact is making people realize that the web is more that just someplace to get mp3′s from and that they could now take the web with them all over the place. Ultra-mobile PC’s, laptops, PDA’s and even your lowly 3G mobile phone can now keep you in touch with the internet all the time.
Web development has evolved into an art with advertising now responsible for most profits of search engines and more traditional businesses. From your local hardware tot he furniture shop, they all have in one form or the other a web based ad system that gives them a bit more exposure.
But there is a dark side in all the developments that we have seen over these few years, privacy and identity theft have risen to such high levels that major law enforcement agencies have been forced to create specific offices just to deal with them. The many problems with information (classified and personal) being either lost or stolen have also risen so much that the UK and US government have had to redefine the way information is handled and transported to and from secure facilities. One of the biggest weak points that has continued to plague the privacy issue is that we humans are still the ones responsible for the loss or leakage of such information. Lost data CD’s, complacent behavior that makes us lenient in our handling of information is still one of the most vulnerable points in any IT system.

The world and the internet has truly evolved into something wonderful that allows people from across the world to get hold of information when and where ever they want it. Let us just hope that we, the creators of all this technology does not get obsolete as many of the technologies that have gone before us have faded into history.

The internet has invaded our lives and established itself as a daily necessity. Most people have access to the internet either through the home, work or even during play and it has allowed us to gather information like never before. One problem, the internet has grown so much that making sense of all the available information is truly mind-boggling. Do a simple search on a web browser and you get hundreds if not thousands of pages from which only a handful are truly useful for your particular application. The internet used to work with a program called a spider that goes through each and every web page indexing and storing all the information onto a database. That database has indeces as to what they are more likely to be relevant to a search that they are presented accordingly. Newer search engines have evolved into a sort of artificial intelligence that not only matches the words in your search but the manner and way the words co-relate to each other meaning it understands what you mean, or at least it tries to. The problem is that the total amount of information that is stored and added onto the millions of web servers are enormous and trying to handle all of them while dealing with information that is already there is quite next to impossible. Time may come when you get answers that you need as you mean them but for now, we still have to deal with a lot of garbage that finds it’s way though the search engine to your desktop leaving you to sort and determine their true value.

As if the EU hasn’t just banned the Pirate Bay people and sent them into their respective cells, here comes Norway-based, Moot, a file sharing service that allows locally linked individuals connected through the same WiFi connection. They can be friends, strangers or even the police for that matter as long as they have the necessary software installed allowing them access to the file-sharing capabilities of the software. On your mobile, you get a sort of radar screen that shows the relational location of registered members who have the software installed. It is still in it’s infancy and for it to be of any use for anybody. Read the rest of this entry »

From geo-tagging, where digital pictures were loaded with locational data from an attached GPS receiver to today’s geo-caching which is a way of reminding you where you wrote note, took a picture or did something online while on the move, the file sharing service Drop.io allows geocoding of all your files that have been uploaded to their system and that’s just the beginning with more features to come. You not only get to share content with the world, you also get to access your content, quickly through an abbreviated URL making it available anytime and every time as long as you have an internet connection. Like dropping candy for Hansel and Gretel to pick-up, you gain the ability to browse a map representing a specific area, move your mouse around and find stuff (files, notes, pictures or just about anything you deem fit to upload to their servers). Read the rest of this entry »