Yes, you do not use Bing. Neither do I. But some people do, enough that webmasters and other such people have to pay it some mind. After all, how are people going to find their dose of Kardasiawhater if the Internet’s sites aren’t well tuned?
Today Bing released an update to its suite of webmaster tools, working to promote, according to the company’s notes, increased transparency, more shared data, and more total features. Or, more simply, to make interacting with Bing less difficult and more useful.
What is in the update? We have broken it down into useful bullet points to save you time:
- Expanded crawl information: Bing is now sharing more information from its crawl process, including being “no longer limited to just seeing inbound links which point only to pages returning a 400 header response code.”
- Improved email alerts: Bing will email you if it wants to change how it crawls your site. That is, if it wants to get up in your business a bit more.
- Increased URL normalization power: Bing will now allow for up to 50 “query string parameters that can be normalized” that can be normalized per website.
- Increased data provided by Bing’s Index Explorer.
- Expanded DNS verification for domains, including a “third option will now allow you to place a discrete CNAME record to your DNS to validate a domain.”
- ntegrated data from AdCenter: “when viewing Traffic data and looking at the keywords which drove traffic to your site, you’ll notice an Avg CPC column on the left now, with more details in a floating pane to the left of that.”
It’s a good list of solid incremental improvements to Bing’s toolkit. In its blog post, Microsoft cited a year’s worth of listening to come up with this specific list of upgrades. You can therefore hope that the company managed to put together a strong
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Did you know that Facebook is one of the top 10 video destinations in the US, with 135m streams per month?
Let’s have a closer look at these interesting figures:
According to Nielsen, over 164 million Americans have watched audiovisual content online during the month of September. Besides, US viewers spent an average of almost 5 hours watching online video, compared to 4h30 in June.
The top 10 online video destinations
The top 10 online video destinations in September were almost the same as in June, to the exception of ESPN, which made its entry on the list, and Netflix, which exited it.
Still, it’s worth looking at the details and notice that the vast majority of viewers accessed YouTube, which attracted 126m unique users out of 164 (vs. “only” 108m YouTube users in June.) Both Facebook and Yahoo! have gained users, but Yahoo! grew even faster, taking Facebook’s third place in the ranking.
The impact of long term content
However, things are quite different when sites are ranked by time per viewer. Indeed, Netflix is now back on the list, and in the pole position. Indeed, its users spend a whopping 10 hours on the site each month, while YouTube users, in comparison, spend less than 3 hours on the site.
This is easy to explain, as Netflix focuses on long-form content (film and TV series.) Besides, it has paid subscribers, who want to get their money worth of film and TV content.
Although you may be surprised to see Chinese sites on the list, such as Tudou and Youku, the explanation may well be similar. Indeed, these video streaming platforms are also known for hosting long-form content – which users often upload without owning the rights to do so. The same goes for Megavideo, which hosts many pirated films. This
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John Theriault - Executive VP of Apple Global Security Left Company.
According to a 9to5Mac, the Vice President of Global Security at Apple, John Theriault, has left the company.
This comes amidst ongoing criticism after the lost prototype of the iPhone 4S. Having worked for the FBI and at Pfizer as the Chief Security Officer, Theriault joined Apple in 2007. He reported directly to General Counsel Bruce Sewell, according to a organizational chart published by Fortune.
It’s not known if Theriault was forced out, or chose to leave on his own. During his tenure, there were two lost iPhone prototypes, both involving a bar. The previous lost stolen iPhone was purchased by Gizmodo.
Perhaps the shakeups at Apple are inevitable, as Tim Cook is now the full-time CEO. Other notable Apple employees who have left recently are Senior Vice President of Retail Ron Johnson, Senior Vice President of Mac OS X Bertrand Serlet, Vice President of iAds Andy Miller, and lead designer Sarah Brody.
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Google Calender Suggested Times Feature
Google continues to roll out updates that focus on usability of its existing products. Today, the company announced the addition of a feature called “Suggested Times” to its Google Calendar product.
The Gmail team had this to say on its blog about the new feature:
[code]Creating an event is easy, but finding a time that works for everyone is sometimes tricky and time consuming. To make this easier and save you time, we’ve added a new ‘Suggested times’ feature to Google Calendar.
To get started, create a calendar event, add guests and click Suggested times. The resulting list will include upcoming times where all participants are available. For example if you want to create an hour long meeting with Kara, and she already has an hour long meeting at 3pm, then times like 2pm and 4pm will be suggested.[/code]
The feature is quite useful, because the worst part about setting up meetings is when people can’t make it and they respond with “No”. This causes you to have to send out a new invite, confusing everyone involved. If your entire company is using Google Apps, suggested times for meetings based on your colleagues calendar is brilliant and will save you a lot of time and headaches.
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Jeff Zwart's 2011 Porsche 911 GT2 RS at Pikes Peak.
Last month we showed you a video chronicling Jeff Zwart's 1,132 mile road trip from Southern California to Pikes Peak in his quest to break his own 2WD Time Attack record in a stock Porsche 911 GT2 RS. The second video, showing Zwart's run up the mountain, has now been released. The footage of the attempt is excellent.
While Zwart didn't manage to come up home with the title, it would be difficult to not consider his drive a success. He smashed the Pikes Peak record for stock production cars, and his time of 11:07.869 bested his previous attempt in a Porsche 911 GT3 Cup race car by 24 seconds. Only Zwart's good friend Rod Millen was able to top him on the day, albeit by a mere three seconds and with a fully-prepped race car producing over 700 horsepower.
You can watch Zwart drive his 911 GT2 RS up Pikes Peak in the video after the jump.
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Abarth Punto Evo EsseEsse
It had be all too easy to forget about the Punto. But Fiat offers more than one model, and so does its tuning division, Abarth.
The Grande Punto has been around since 2005, and was updated in 2009 as the Punto Evo, something of a stopgap until its eventual replacement comes along. Abarth offers its own version of the Punto Evo for those who find the 500 either too small or too cutesy, and has now rolled out an even more powerful version of the Italian performance hatch.
Instead of the 165-horsepower turbo four in the existing Abarth Punto Evo, the EsseEsse version gets a more promising 180, thanks to revised ECU programming and bigger turbocharger. The brakes are also upgraded, as are the springs, dampers and wheel/tire package. The result is a 7.5-second sprint to 62 and a 134 mph top end.
Best of all, the modifications in the EsseEsse kit can be ordered and installed from the dealership up to a year after the car was purchased. Although the model was unveiled nearly a year ago in Paris, it's only just hitting the market. Read more about it in the press release after the jump.
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Lotus Evora Type 124
Lotus has a lot planned for the coming years, but before its next generation sports cars comes along, rumor has it some significant revisions are planned for the current Evora.
Among the 147 upgrades reportedly planned are a revised interior, a new exhaust and a sharper transmission. Convertible and plug-in hybrid versions are also reportedly under consideration, but Lotus is said to have another trick up its sleeve.
Taking a page out of the "more power, less weight" playbook used on the likes of the Ferrari 430 Scuderia, Lamborghini Gallardo Superleggera and Porsche 911 GT3 RS, a hardcore Evora GT4 or Type 124 racer for the road could be in the cards. In the process, the 345-horsepower supercharged V6 in the current Evora S could get tuned up to 400 hp. Those are some changes we could get behind.
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This is sample post to show some new features added in ASP.NET Blog Starter Kit which help users to post articles, news or blog post with integration of galleries, pictures in a clean professional way.
Note: Such type of galleries only supported if your application include & support both ASP.NET Blog Starter Kit & ASP.NET Photo Sharing Script
User or admin can easily integrate photo galleries within post by using simple BBCODE style custom tag. tag or code will fetch gallery information based on gallery id provided within tag from database, create neat style gallery and integrate gallery within post at first time of post submission.
Below gallery generated by sending gallery id 6 within tag mentioned above.
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Asymco’s Horace Dediu has done some number crunching, comparing the current enterprise value of Apple’s major mobile competitors against the liquid assets that it has on hand. The results illustrate how dominant of a profit force that Apple’s mobile business has become in just 4 years.
Dediu has compared the four main standalone competitors to Apple but has also made some educated estimations of the mobile divisions of larger companies like Samsung and Sony. At the moment only the inclusion of Samsung prevents Apple from having enough cash to cover a purchase of the whole mobile industry.
Dediu explains that he chose the four major manufacturers that sell 75% of all phones sold worldwide for this comparison. The enterprise values of those companies are as follows:
- Nokia $22.6b
- RIM $13.8b
- HTC $25.4b
- Motorola Mobility $4.2b
He says that it was more difficult to calculate the value of mobile subsidiaries like Sony Ericsson, Samsung and LG but was able to generate an estimate using multiples of trailing operating profits. Given the troubles that RIM is in right now, its inclusion in this list isn’t too surprising.
Apple currently has estimated liquid assets of $70B, greatly outstripping the enterprise value of all of its competitors combined, excepting Samsung.
If Apple’s growth several continues as it has for the past several quarters in a row, even Samsung won’t be a barrier. Apple could soon have enough cash on hand to purchase all of its major competitors without breaking a sweat.
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Yahoo shutters its Maps API, points devs to Nokia’s Ovi Maps
Yahoo will shuttering down Maps API service completely in upcoming 13th of September. So it means Yahoo again floundering with trying to figure out wat it is. Developers who have used its Maps API are in for an unpleasant surprise when know about this announcement.
In short, if you were using any of the following, you’ll need to make some changes to address the closing:
Yahoo Announcement:
As part of Yahoo!’s commitment to creating deeply personal digital experiences, we have been reprioritizing our current portfolio of mapping products to refocus on a great consumer Mapping and Local Search experience.
Yahoo does extend the olive branch somewhat, stating that its Placefinder API for geocoding and the combination of Placemaker and Local Search API will remain alive for geocaching. Interestingly, instead of pushing abandoned developers toward Microsoft’s Bing Maps, Yahoo is ushering them toward Nokia’s Ovi Maps API.
The “even worse” news? If you’re hoping to use Nokia’s product for navigation right now via a Yahoo product, you’ll have to wait a while — “This work is in-progres
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