Showing posts with label internet news. Show all posts
Facebook announced this morning that it will welcome its 200 millionth user today. That's a whole lot of people. Just three months ago the company announced it was starting the year out with 150 million users. That kind of growth could make a person's brain hurt. People want to connect with each other and Facebook is clearly a very compelling way to do that these days.
Just how hot is it though? For context, we looked up some other activities and offer below a list of things that are less popular these days than being a registered user at Facebook. Bowling, for example, appears to be headed the way of MySpace - there are now twice as many Facebook users as there are people who play ten pin bowling around the world.
At 200 million users, Facebook is:
- Twice as big as the largest number of people who have ever watched a Superbowl game
- Twice as big as YouTube
- Twice as big as Skype
- Bigger than the number of people who own gaming consoles in their homes (190m)
- Bigger than the population of all but 4 countries in the world. (Just passed Brazil, next in line is Indonesia and then the US.)
- Twice as big as eBay.
- Four times as big as the number of people in the US who run on treadmills.
- It's twice as big as the number of malnourished people in India. Another way to look at that is to imagine that half of the people on Facebook were malnourished and living in one place.
Now imagine if all the brainpower spent on building stupid Facebook apps was instead spent on helping all the malnourished people in India and around the world. Imagine, though, if the 100 million people who like to bowl gave that up in favor of working for world peace.
These numbers can't be directly compared with any real meaning, but we think it's interesting for context. It's still cooler to live in France than it is to have a Facebook account, even if it is only 30% as popular.
Social networks are being demonized these days in Spain. Everything started when a journalist discovered that a 17 year old girl killed in Seville had a profile on Tuenti, a Spanish social network, and so did her friends. One of them has confessed being the criminal.
A local newspaper in Seville published an article under the title “An asassination of the Generation 2.0″. Letters that the killed girl wrote to the boy who killed her were published together with pictures taken from her profile. TV stations were even more radical, comparing this social network with a paradise for criminals.
People at Tuenti are not very happy. They think that mainstream media are using this case as a tool to fight against new media, which are attracting their users. They are very worried by the image that social networks are getting in Spain, specially with concerned parents that could start forbidding their children the use of the Internet.
To the point that Tuenti, which is only available for invited users, has changed its rules. It has deleted all profiles of people related to this case, as they became a “circus”, and has cancelled the possibility of seeing anybody’s picture but for people who are related in first or second degrees.
What mainstream media are not mentioning so much is the fact that social networks have also been used to aggregate solidarity for the girl’s family. Facebook and Tuenti now hold lots of small groups in which people express their support from anywhere in Spain.
Dear Woman,
Like you, I have an unusual name. In fact, I've only been able to find one other person with my name and she works in the public schools in Philadelphia (last time I checked).
I really wish I had a chance to speak with you before you filed suit. It's not Yahoo's fault that your name turned up results for porn and malware. Yahoo only crawl's the sites that are out there, and that would have been easier to change than filling out legal paperwork.
When I got married and acquired the last name Johnson, I decided to have a little fun and get the first page of Google results to rank for me instead of the woman in Philadelphia. It didn't take long. The poor woman is now banished to the last result on page 3 of Yahoo and nowhere on the first 5 pages of Google (I got tired of looking).
"Nathania Johnson" is not exactly a competitive keyword phrase and neither is was your name, "Beverly Stayart." All you had to do was get a bunch of social media accounts and put your full name on it. That's what I did. Blogspot and Flickr are good ones. Heck, having an account on SEOmoz will rank. Commenting on popular blogs helps, too.
Buying the URL with your name in it and publishing some fresh content helps big time.
If you really want to go the extra mile, you could have gotten all your friends to link to those sites with your name being the anchor text. Don't do too many all at once or the search bots will get suspicious. Then again, they also wouldn't have cared so much about such a little searched term as your name.
Now, a search for your name is filled with a bunch of links to sites talking about your legal case. It only took a day for that to happen, but going forward, it will be very difficult to change that. Ask any company with a negative result in the search for their name and they'll tell you how difficult it is to change this. That's why we do posts on reputation management.
I'm sorry that your name returned porn and malware sites. There is a reason Yahoo is number 2 - and I mean a distant number 2 - when it comes to search engine share.
I'm afraid you're likely to use your case. But if your true goal is to have better results for your name, do read the posts you find here at Search Engine Watch on a regular basis.
Sincerely,
Nathania Johnson
Myspace, Intel and Yahoo have launched a social networking application that allows people to surf Myspace on their TV while watching it. This means people can read and reply to messages, comments and everything else without being at their computer. The new Myspace widget was announced ahead of the Consumer Electronics Show, that took place in Las Vegas on January 8-11th. It will be available on any Internet-connected consumer electronics, such as set-top boxes, Blu-ray players and TVs, the companies said. Although no exact launch date was provided it is assumed that it will be released in the near future. Basically Myspace, Intel and Yahoo have developed a widget that will be able to sit at the bottom of your TV screen and used whenever you wish. It was developed by Myspace using a set of development tools that Intel and Yahoo have created called the Widget Channel. For anyone interested the widget channel was created so that applications can be made for TV’s that use information from the Internet to complement what is on the TV (e.g. a widget could allow someone to purchase a product that was on an advert from an online store without them having to go to a computer). From what I know this Myspace widget will allow people to view profiles and receive updates (messages, comments, etc) and reply to these updates accordingly directly on their TV screen, without the need of an Internet browser or having to refresh a page for updates to appear. To reply to updates you would use your remote to type whatever you wanted with an on screen keyboard. Now in my opinion I really hate this widget. It will either be a great development for them or just a flop, and I would guess that it will be the latter. Okay so I’m not one for sitting watching TV and being on the Internet at the same time, I like to concentrate on whatever I am doing, I mean while I am watching a TV show I don’t like being online as well (e.g. on a laptop) because I miss parts of the show and it just ruins it. It’s kind of like having someone come into the room and start talking to you when your obviously trying to watch something. I know a lot of people won’t share this opinion and do like to surf the Internet while watching TV, but most of these people have laptops or a computer near their TV so they are able to do this, and most wouldn’t like to be limited to only surfing one site (Myspace) while doing it. I think that this is just an attempt to try and make TV more interactive, but like the attempts before I think this will end up nowhere. Its either that or an attempt to try and combine the audiences of Fox and Myspace (both owned by Rupert Murdoch). Either way I really think it is pointless and they won’t get many people using it, but I have been wrong in the past. What do you think about it all?
You can download it from iPhone AppStore for $5.99 (too expensive, right?)
Are you addicted to YouTube? Definetly you need this app. TubeJunkies is an app made just for YouTube addicts. You can subscribe to video channels and never miss any new videos uploaded.
Its features include:
* Keep the article body clean
For various reasons, when crawling an article, Google News checks to make sure it can find the article body. If your article body is broken up by
tags, ads, sidebars or other non-article content, we may not be able to detect the actual article body, and reject your article as a result. In addition, if you place the beginning of your article's body near the title in the HTML, we'll be more likely to extract the correct title and snippet.
* Make sure article URLs are permanent and unique
If you reuse article URLs, our system may have difficulty crawling and categorizing your stories. In addition, make sure your article URLs have at least three digits that don't resemble a year (for example, 5232 is ok, but 2008 is not.) You can get around this requirement by submitting your articles in News Sitemaps. Also, please note that session IDs can confuse our crawler, and we may not realize that two distinct URLs actually point to the same page. You can learn more about some of these requirements here.
* Take advantage of stock tickers in Sitemaps
Google News Sitemaps allow publishers to specify stock ticker symbols for companies mentioned in individual articles. Using these symbols helps us better identify the subjects of your articles. You can read more about the format we use for this data here.
* Check your encoding
We occasionally see articles that declare themselves to be encoded in one format (say, UTF-8) and are actually encoded in another (say, ISO 8859-1). Don't do this. It hurts us.
* Make your article publication dates explicit
In order to help our crawler determine the correct date, please make the actual publication date of your articles explicit. You can do this by placing the article date and time in the HTML, between the title and the body. Also, you can remove other dates from the HTML of the article page, and add the required
Note that the article times and dates displayed on Google News reflect the time at which we originally crawled the articles, and may not be the same as the publication date.
* Keep original content separate from press releases
If your site produces original content and distributes press releases that you'd like us to crawl, make sure to separate your original news content from your press releases by creating two different sections on your site. As you may know, Google News labels press releases distinctly in order to alert our users that the article they're about to read is a press release. If your original news sections have links to press releases, adding the rel="nofollow" attribute to all links that point to your press release articles will ensure that they're labeled correctly. You can learn more about this attribute here.
* Format your images properly
To help Google News identify your images and crawl them along with your articles, use fairly large images with reasonable aspect ratios and descriptive captions. Make sure to place them near their respective article titles on the page and make the images inline and non-clickable. Images in the JPEG format are more likely to be crawled correctly.
* Article Titles in Google News
In order for Google News to crawl the correct titles for your articles, make sure the title you want appears in both the title tag and as the headline on the article page. In addition, don't hyperlink the headline on the article page - after all, your reader is already there! And it's always a good idea to have links that point to your articles use the article title as anchor text.
If you found these suggestions helpful, you might also want to check out our more generalWebmaster Guidelines. The Webmaster Guidelines aren't necessarily specific to Google News, but much of the wisdom you'll find there can help make your site Google News-friendly. Our Publisher Help Center contains lots more information about many of these topics. And you can always check out the Google News Help Forum to give us feedback on these suggestions, and share other tips and advice with webmasters and News users.
ASUS has once again reinvented modern computing with its recently launched Eee Top PC, all-in-one touchscreen computer. Seeking a browser that could adapt seamlessly to its unique touch capabilities, ASUS chose Opera for smooth and easy touch navigation — requiring neither mouse nor keyboard. Pre-installed on the Eee Top PC 1602, Opera is customized to enable touchscreen Internet browsing. Opera brings drag-and-drop functionality, onscreen panning and an automatic virtual keyboard to the Eee Top PC. “Opera has always been dedicated to enhancing Web browsing experience. Touch Web navigation is one of the new trends for desktop PCs,” says Jon von Tetzchner, CEO, Opera Software. “Through close collaboration with the pioneer ASUS, we have optimized the Web experience, making it easy-to-use with a few taps of the fingers.” Eee Top PC users can also take advantage of four conveniently built-in widgets, which give home-screen access to an Opera Widgets tutorial, an analog clock, a dictionary and a calendar. Opera Speed Dial (providing a shortcut to online favorites) has also been customized for the new ASUS touchscreen computers. “Eee Top PC brings flexibility into the home with its portable nature and user-friendliness for both new and advanced users. To ensure its success, we required a compatible software solution that could be optimized for the touchscreen computer,” says HH Cheng, General Manager of Desktop System Business at ASUSTeK. “Opera is the premiere touch-browsing solution, as the company has extensive experience in modifying their product for unique devices, such as ours. The result is an interactive Web-surfing session where the human touch is the ultimate navigation tool.” The Eee Top PC will be available in the US market through ASUS-authorized dealers in North America onMarch 9, 2009. ASUS is a leading company in the new digital era. With a global staff of more than ten thousand and a world-class R&D design team, the company’s revenue for 2007 was 6.9 billion US dollars. ASUS ranks among the top 10 IT companies in BusinessWeek’s “InfoTech 100”, and has been on the listing for 11 consecutive years. ASUS was also selected by the Wall Street Journal Asia as No.1 in quality and service in Taiwan. Opera Software ASA has redefined Web browsing for PCs, mobile phones and other networked devices. Opera's cross-platform Web browser technology is renowned for its performance, standards compliance and small size, while giving users a faster, safer and more dynamic online experience. Opera Software is headquartered in Oslo, Norway, with offices around the world. The company is listed on the Oslo Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol OPERA. Learn more about Opera at http://www.opera.com/.About ASUS
About Opera Software ASA
As someone who sells SEO as a service it is often not in my best interest to tell people they can do SEO on their own. But it's true. Just as changing the car's oil, fixing clogged pipes, or painting a house are all relatively easy, most business owners can SEO their website on their own. All it takes is some knowledge and time. If you want to optimize your site yourself then you need to simplify. A lot of what you'll learn about SEO can be complicated. Especially when you start reading about .htaccess, robots.txt, 301 redirects, absolute links, and so on. This is all good information to have but you don't always have to start there. If you're doing it yourself then start with the things that you can do yourself. Don't get caught up in all the complicated issues that go beyond your knowledge or ability to implement. The more difficult technical tasks may still be necessary down the road, but for now, do what you can with what you have. Here are some things that you can often do easily enough on your own: 1) Customize all your title tags. If your site is big this may take some time. If its dynamically generated then you may want to have your programmers implement a template that pulls in and inserts keywords based on the page. 2) Customize your content. This can be especially important if you sell products. Don't settle for stock descriptions, and take the time needed to write somethign different for each of the 20 products you have that are simply different versions of the same thing. This customized content is essential. 3) Get content on all of your pages. If you have category pages that link to products or other information pages, put at least a paragraph of text on each page. 4) Link, link, link. Add links throughout your content to other pages and products of your site. Link back and forth between pages, add links to related products, link to your blog and from your blog. 5) Blog. Write content that your visitors will love. Don't just use your blog to pimp your products or services. Write helpful tips and tutorials or provide insight that your readers can use. It's only when we over-think SEO that it becomes more complex than it needs to be. There certainly are aspects of SEO that require a technical mind and someone savvy enough to implement it. But there are plenty of areas that can be done in just an hour a day. Do what you can and leave the heavier lifting to someone who has the machinery to do it.
Knowledge can be found easily enough for free, and time, well, that's not something you likely have an excess of. Fortunately, SEO doesn't all have to be done at once, it can be implemented a little at a time, as you have time.
Akky Akimoto at the Asiajin blog recently reported that Google Japan was paying bloggers to review a new Google widget. Using pay-per-post service CyberBuzz, blog posts like the following popped up, strangely resembling each other, as Asiajin reports: The Google Hot Keywords blog widget [link to Google’s page] can show you what is in fashion now, and what other people are interested in. It’s appealing that you can view buzzwords from the previous day or the previous week. I am sometimes surprised to see that such words are so popular! Personally, I like the “fortune-teller” feature from the previous week’s ranking. When I click on a keyword, I am quickly taken to Google’s result page and so I enjoy the feature. I might not have noticed them by myself, but now I understand that these things are what people care about. I am participating in CyberBuzz’s campaign. Asiajin says, “CyberBuzz is one of the biggest pay-per-post agencies in Japan and are known for their high payouts,” with some posts getting “$100 for a single entry.” Asiajin explains “These articles, which look almost the same as regular ones, have ’ad’ tags ... [at the bottom], which are very subtle, and will no doubt not be noticed by many readers,” adding “So they are now link-building using monetary incentives to try to crook their own search results in a malicious way.” TechCrunch comments, “It’s interesting to see that Google, a company that not too long ago radically took action against PayPerPost bloggers in the US [see Google’s Matt Cutts’ post], today thinks the concept is suitable as long as it helps them advance in Japan”. By now, Google Japan issued an apology. Asiajin translated the post: Google Japan is running several promotional activities to let people know more about our products. It turns out that using blogs on the part of the promotional activities violates Google’s search guidelines, so we have ended the promotion. We would like to apologize to the people concerned and to our users, and are making an effort to make our communications more transparent in order to prevent the recurrence of such an incident.
Seventeen Internet firms, including Facebookand Myspace, have agreed to take steps to protect children inEurope from abuse on social networking sites, the European Commission said Tuesday. In a pact signed in Luxembourg, the companies agreed to put a "report abuse" button on their sites allowing people under 18 to report inappropriate contact or conduct by another user by clicking on it. They will also ensure that the online profiles and contact lists of users under 18 are set to "private", making it harder to get in contact with young people, and make sure that they cannot be located with a search engine. The firms will also prevent under-age users from accessing their services. The pact is aimed at stopping cyberbullying -- where children are harassed on the Internet or with mobile phone messages -- grooming, in which adults befriend children to abuse them, and protecting personal data. "With one click, you can easily harass someone, intimidate someone, particularly if they are under 18 years old," a commission spokesman said. The commission, the EU's executive arm and which brokered the agreement, estimates that almost 42 million people regularly use social networking sites in the 27-nation bloc and that this number will rise to 107 million by 2012. The companies involved are Arto, Bebo, Dailymotion, Facebook,Giovani.it, Google/YouTube, Hyves, Microsoft Europe, Myspace,Nasza-klaza.pl, Netlog, One.lt, Skyrock, StudiVZ, Sulake/Habbo Hotel, Yahoo!Europe and Zap.lu.
Thanks to its open-ended design and a thriving user community, Twitter is fast outgrowing its roots as a simple, easy-to-use messaging service. Enterprising hackers are creating apps for sharing music and videos, to help you quit smoking and lose weight -- spontaneously extending the text-based service into one of the web's most fertile (and least likely) application platforms. Hardware hackers have set up household appliances to send status alerts over Twitter, like a washing machine that tweets when the spin cycle is through, or a home security system that tweets whenever it senses movement inside the house. Others have incorporated Twitter into their DIY home automation systems. Forgot to turn off the lights? Send a tweet to flip the switch by remote control. "It's so simple and easy to access, people are thinking of more and more uses for the platform," says Dan Wasyluk, creator of the Twitter-based Snipt service. Wasyluk launched Snipt last week as a way to let programmers share short snippets of code over Twitter. Launched in 2007, Twitter quickly became a darling of the life-and mind-casting interneterati. But some saw boundless possibilities in the 140-character limit, and what was a slow trickle of innovation is now quickly elevating what is essentially a micro-blogging service into one of the internet's most important technologies, along with instant messaging and e-mail. Though it's main use -- sending and receiving short messages to your social network -- is often dismissed as time-wasting trivia, Twitter's potential as a broad internet platform is just beginning to be fully realized. Twitter has grown into a ubiquitous presence -- you can send tweets from your phone, your desktop and your browser -- that has potential to not only facilitate communication among humans, but even to make machines do your bidding. Businesses are starting to be built around it. Botanicalls, for example, sells a Twitter-enabled hardware kit that lets your neglected house plants alert you when they're thirsty. The company has developed a tiny moisture sensor attached to a circuit board with an Ethernet port. You stick it in your plant's soil, and when the moisture levels drop below a certain level, your plant sends you a tweet begging to be watered. Using Twitter's application programming interface (API), a programmer with even a modest amount of experience can create a webapp that gathers public data from Twitter, or uses it to send links, commands or bursts of information. "[Twitter's] open API is a huge reason it has grown into such a platform," says Wasyluk. File sharers were the first to rush in. The photo-sharing service TwitPic, one of the oldest Twitter mashups, lets users send pictures to their followers by storing a photo on its servers, then passing the link around on Twitter. Now there are newer apps like Tweetcube and Twittershare, which let users share larger media like MP3s and videos. Twitter's limited format of short, text-based announcements are a natural match for sites like TrackThis, which you can use to get status updates on FedEx and UPS packages, and Tweetajob, which job seekers can use to get real-time updates about new job openings. Anyone who needs help quitting smoking can use Qwitter to monitor their progress. Those looking to lose weight can turn to TweetWhatYouEat or TweetYourEats. Hardware hackers have put a new spin on the Twitter mashup -- as it turns out, just about anything that can be plugged into the internet is capable of talking to Twitter. Programmer Ryan Rose rigged up his washing machine to send him a tweet when his clothes are done. He just follows his machine's twitter account (it's PiMPY3WASH) and he knows when to go downstairs and move his undies to the dryer. Linux hacker Shantanu Goel set up a video camera and some motion-sensing software on a PC connected to the internet. If anyone breaks into his house or goes snooping through his room, the software detects the movement and sends out a tweet. Tech-savvy environmentalists can install Tweet-a-Watt, a gadget that plugs into your wall socket and connects to your wi-fi network. Once a day, the pocket-sized device broadcasts stats of your daily energy usage to Twitter. Whether that sort of transparency results in embarrassment or bragging rights can be determined by a system like the one created by Justin Wickett. The Duke University student wired up his home so he couldturn his lights on and off remotely, just by sending a text message to Twitter from his mobile phone
If you've ever tried to book a multi-destination airfare online or a round-the-world ticket, you know that it's not as easy as a basic point to point flight. In fact, travelers often tend to book more complicated airfares through a bricks and mortar travel agency or if they do attempt to book online, they proceed by purchasing individual sectors separately, possibly paying a lot more for one-way fares and forgoing frequent flyer points.
To ease the burden and encourage travelers to stay loyal to their global frequent flyer program, Oneworld -- which includes American Airlines, British Airways, Cathay Pacific, Finnair, Iberia, Japan Airlines, LAN, Malev, Qantas and Royal Jordanian -- has introduced a special section on its website (www.oneworld.com) to make a multi-stop trip on its ten member airlines a seamless booking experience. The round-the-world booking tool allows you to plan and/or book either a round-the-world trip or a multi-city itinerary through six continents with multiple segments and relatively few restrictions.
Before you get started, you will need to have Flash version 9 or higher installed on your computer (or be willing to download it through the link provided) and allow pop-ups/cookies (I learned the hard way. because if you don't allow pop-ups, you will lose all your research when you try to make the booking). Also if you don't think you can complete your itinerary in one session (or are browsing for a later booking date), make sure to save your itinerary, either to your computer or to the Oneworld website, if you want to access your work again later.
You can also choose to save your itinerary and send it directly to your favorite airline or travel agency if you would prefer to book directly through them. To start, choose whether you would like a round-the-world search, round-the-world search plus booking, or a multi-city itinerary. Then, the first screen that comes up is a world map with hundreds of destination dots (unfortunately the screen isn't large enough to show the entire world so you need to know your geography a bit and scroll across, up and down). You begin by choosing your departure city and then click on subsequent cities that you want to include.
A great feature that I particularly like is that you can actually identify whether you wish to fly between sectors or will travel by surface, for example you may want to fly from Boston to London, then to Prague but want to drive to Paris before flying to Spain and then home. You then choose your flights based on airline (if multiple airlines service that route) departure time and flight time. Check seat availability and type of aircraft you'll be flying -- even your terminal departure and arrival locations appear so you can be fully informed.
You search for flights by dates but if you'd like to change the date, you don't need to scroll back or enter all the information again -- just a simple click on the calendar and you can change your dates for any sector. You can click on the "Fare Estimate" tab at any time to gauge the cost of each sector of a multi-city itinerary or the total. Prices are obviously the same as those offered on the individual airline's websites, in fact when you click on "make a booking" at the end of your search, you will be taken to your local country's Oneworld alliance member's website (in our case, American Airlines) to complete the booking.
The multi-airline, round-the-world ticket, or Explorer as it is known, is Oneworld's most popular product. The Explorer generated the largest portion of the $725 million earned by the alliance last year. There are certain restrictions with this ticket, but the website walks you through the process with ease. Cities on the map that are valid appear as green dots, whereas cities that are invalid (not part of the fare regulations) appear as red diamonds. You will notice that once you have chosen a "green" city, it will turn red as you cannot visit the same city twice. If a direct flight is not available between two cities chosen, the website will route you through a central hub automatically.
The Explorer allows you 16 stops traveling to at least three Oneworld continents, or four from the Southern Hemisphere and Africa. Your route from one continent to another must move forward in a continuous westward or eastward direction, however, there are no backtracking restrictions so you are free to roam locally at will within a continent as long as you don't go back to your point of origin. I chose this (dream) sample itinerary and the entire process took me approximately ten minutes to complete: Los Angeles to Honolulu, Honolulu to Auckland, Auckland to Sydney, Sydney to Hong Kong, Hong Kong to New Delhi, New Delhi to Amman, Amman to Frankfurt, Frankfurt to Rome, Rome to Madrid, Madrid to New York and then back to Los Angeles.
A four continent trip like this one in economy class is priced from $4, 400 plus taxes (this actual itinerary, traveling in April and May 2009 totaled $4,922 including taxes), a three continent itinerary is priced from $3,900 plus taxes, five will cost you $5,100 plus taxes and the big daddy of them all -- the six continent adventure will set you back around $6,000 plus taxes -- a bargain considering that it the ticket is valid for a year and you can fly in and out of 16 cities around the world. All up I found the research and booking process using the Onworld round-the-world- tool rather simple, once I played around with it for a while.
My only hiccup on the above itinerary is that I needed to forgo one of my desired destinations (Tahiti) as it was not covered on the route I was taking, and a few cities I chose within Europe required flying through London and I could only fly through London once so I had to remove them. Otherwise, the world was at my fingertips and within a reasonable budget. It seems that the "Oneworld" alliance is living up to its name, creating one website that gives you world access.
If you want to prevent any of your Wordpress blogs from getting hacked make sure you keep your software up to date, and follow other basic Wordpress protection strategies, like - securing your admin folder, removing the Wordpress version number from your theme's header.php file, creating an index.html file in your plug-ins directory, and removing other common Wordpress oriented footprints like a "powered by Wordpress" signature in the page footer.
MAINGEAR, a boutique PC builder that makes machines targeted at creative professionals has just announced their newest creation, the Remix Cretaive workstation PC. Here is what this beast gets its power from:
The latest in Core i7 45nm chips from Intel
Nvidia Quadro FX or Nvidia Quadro CX (with plugins for Photoshop CS4) graphics cards
M-Audio sound interface cards
liquid cooling from CoolIT Systems
up to 12GB DDR3 RAM
dual RAID storage
This monster of a machine will look pretty nice too, being available in 6 colors with the option of custom branding.
But as expected this thing will cost you a pretty penny. The base price is $1,999 or $3,999 with the Nvidia Quadro CX. So start saving up.
Here is the full release:
MAINGEAR Launches Remix™ Creative Workstation PC
MAINGEAR Extends Lineup of Award-Winning PCs to Creative Professionals
Remix Features NVIDIA Quadro CX, M-Audio Interface Cards, and Liquid Cooling from CoolIT Systems
Union, New Jersey – January 29th, 2009 – MAINGEAR Computers, award-winning builders of high performance custom computers for PC Enthusiasts, announced the availability of the next generation of workstations in the market. MAINGEAR will be arming enthusiasts in photoshop, graphic design, video production, pro audio and other creative professions with the new high performance Remix Workstation.
“With Remix, we’ve leveraged years of experience in high performance computing in the PC Gaming and Enthusiast market and are extending that same level of performance, value and service to creative professionals everywhere with a workstation PC capable of handling even the most rigorous computing tasks” said Wallace Santos, CEO and Founder of MAINGEAR.
Optimized for Photo/Graphics/Video Enthusiasts – By integrating NVIDIA® Quadro CX®, MAINGEAR is offering the fastest creative workstation designed and optimized for Adobe® Creative Suite® 4. This will provide professionals with the tools, performance and reliability needed to maximize creativity. Harness the power of the Remix to encode H.264 video up to 4x faster with the NVIDIA CUDA™-enabled plug-in for Adobe® Premiere Pro CS4*. All this extra performance shaves hours off your encoding and rendering time, offering the power and flexibility needed to be creative during critical crunch times. This powerful system with NVIDIA’s latest graphics technology maximizes a number of visually intensive functions, including:
Bring unprecedented fluidity to image navigation. The Remix enables real-time image rotation, zooming, and panning, and makes changes to the view instantaneous and smooth. Also, on-screen compositing of both 2D and 3D content, ensuring smoothly anti-aliased results regardless of zoom level. Brush resizing and brushstroke preview, 3D movement, high-dynamic-range tone mapping, and color conversion are also accelerated.
Accelerate a variety of creative effects, making it easier than ever to add graphics and visual effects to video, which allows the artist to quickly move from concept to final product and speeds up the workflow. Effects accelerated include depth of field, bilateral blur effects, turbulent noise such as flowing water or waving flags, and cartoon effects. The Remix with the Quadro CX takes advantages of these workflow enhancements.
Accelerate high-quality video effects such as motion, opacity, color, and image distortion. The Remix also enables faster editing of multiple high-definition video streams and graphic overlays and provides a variety of video output choices for high-quality preview, including DisplayPort, component TV, or uncompressed 10-bit or 12-bit SDI.
“NVIDIA specifically designed and optimized the Quadro CX graphics card to significantly enhance the performance of Adobe CS4,” says Tyler Worden, Market Development Manager, Professional Solutions, NVIDIA. “By offering the Remix systems equipped with Quadro CX, MAINGEAR is offering its creative professional customers a complete solution that will have a transformative impact on the quality, image manipulation and processing speed of all Adobe CS4 applications.”
Enhanced for Audio Editing – MAINGEAR Remix’s advanced sound insulation makes it the perfect workstation choice for audio editing in the studio. Remix offers an array of some of the best PCI Audio Interfaces in the industry from M-Audio that offer the fullest range of audio editing capabilities designed to handle the needs of the most demanding project and professional studios.
Reliable and Feature Rich - The MAINGEAR Remix is built to meet the most meticulous specifications and supported by the best team in the industry. The most cutting edge features enable the Remix to deliver performance when you need it.
Studio quality sound insulation – Advanced insulation materials keeps the noise in and dense mesh air filters keep the dust out
Powerful components - Latest technology from NVIDIA, Intel, M-Audio put Remix at the cusp of cutting-edge technology
Skillfully hand-built in the USA - Backed by the best in-house support team in the country
Advanced Liquid Cooling – MAINGEAR partnered with CoolIt Systems to equip the Remix with advanced Liquid Cooling for the quietest, most reliable work experience available to date in a workstation
“The computing demands for creative professionals rely heavily on their processor firing on all cylinders” said Geoff Lyon, CEO of CoolIT Systems. “By incorporating Domino Advanced Liquid Cooling technology from CoolIT, the Remix ensures that Intel Core i7 runs cool and achieves optimal performance so that no task is ever too tall for today’s creative professional.”
Creative Professionals can purchase the MAINGEAR Remix at MAINGEAR’s website www.maingear.com or order by phone at (888-MAINGEAR). The base price for Remix is $1,999.99($3,999.99 with NVIDIA Quadro CX) and is available in Black, Silver, Electric Blue, Inferno Red, Alpine White, and Speed Yellow. The MAINGEAR Remix will also offer the option of custom branding.
Times Internet (Indiatimes.com) in association with Israel-based Unicell Advance Cellular Solutions has launched Active Search, a multimedia search engine that enables mobile phone users to search and download multimedia content like wallpapers, ringtones, games and animation and also read the latest news and gossip about their favourite film stars, cricketers and celebrities.
According to Times Internet, Active Search can be accessed either by typing the URL ActiveSearch.mobi on the WAP browser or by sending an SMS [Active SearchKeyword] to 58888. The service is available across all operators on SMS as well as GPRS.
Active Search does not require fixed keywords or codes. Users can use normal text messages to search content. The tool analyzes the keyword, understands it, and then generates the best possible result from premium content, mobile content and web. Another important feature of Active Search is that it will only display results that are mobile specific and can be accessed from the mobile phone.
“This is also an excellent platform for third-party content providers, advertisers, and affiliates to promote their services directly to the end users,” Times Internet has said. “Each time the user types a search keyword, the screen will show a contextual advertisement for a few seconds, till the search results are generated. This is a business opportunity for content providers, advertisers, and affiliates to promote their services or products.”
