Google still dominates ...

Google still dominates the search engine arena with a staggering 70%. The increase of Yahoo and Bing may not be expected but I think Google will still dominate search engines for the next decade. web design norwich

Social networking is a ...

Social networking is a great platform to promote your business. The best of all is that your customers will get to know updates and news about your company. Thanks. Perth web design

InVision Raises $1.5M F...

New York City startup InVision has raised $1.5 million in seed funding to help companies answer an important question: Are we building something that people will actually want to use? The funding comes from FirstMark Capita l. Managing director Amish Jani says he was excited to invest because, for one thing, co-founders Clark Valberg and Ben Nadel are addressing a real problem that they faced. InVision came out of the pair’s web design consultancy, where they say they were frustrated by the lack of tools for creating a design prototype that actually provided a reasonable stand-in for the finished product. There are other prototyping tools out there, but none, Valberg says, that incorporate everything that InVision tries to do well. He argues that prototypes need to look as beautiful as you want the final product to be, while also incorporating real interactions. They also need to be seen in a real context — namely, a normal web browser. So InVision customers create the screens in Adobe’s designer-friendly tools like Photoshop, then link those screens up to add basic interactivity, and they can share the prototypes through a link (which can be password-protected). Other features include the ability to create mobile prototypes and to collaborate with other designers. You can play with a sample prototype here . The funding announcement comes with effusive praise from several startups, including InDinero and LaunchRock — InDinero CEO Jessica Mah, for example, calls InVision the company’s “secret weapon” which has “completely changed our design process.” Jani says FirstMark’s portfolio companies were excited about the product too, and they had plenty of feature requests. At the same time, the InVision website lists some bigger companies like Google and Whole Foods as customers. Altogether, the startup says it has been used by 19,000 designers to create 118,000 screens. In some ways, the approach that Valberg advocates, where companies run tests on multiple prototypes before writing a single line of code, runs counter to a current branch of Silicon Valley wisdom , which calls for startups to release a real product to at least a limited group of users as quickly as people. Valberg isn’t opposed to iterating based on user feedback, but he argues that it’s better to get much of that initial iteration process out of the way beforehand, before you “lose a lot of control” by making your product publicly available. Valberg also argues that InVision puts the big product decisions back into the hands of the designers, not the engineers. “Designers are the future of product creation,” he says. “The engineers ruled at the beginning … but now the question is who can create something that’s emotionally appealing and meaningful to our lives. The ones who are best equipped to do that are the designers.” Valberg says that InVision will become more of a platform this year, incorporating a wider range of ways to collect user feedback.

There are really a lot ...

There are really a lot of things that can happen just by using social media and social networking sites. I just hope that these sites will be used responsibly. web design perth

Rising Telecommuter Num...

A new poll of over 11,000 workers worldwide by Ipsos and Reuters shows that telecommuting is an increasingly popular choice, especially in non-Western countries. This will come as no surprise to many, but the numbers are higher than some might have guessed. Over 30 percent of workers in India, Mexico, and Indonesia claimed to telecommute regularly, and one in ten overall work from home every day. It’s tempting to call any work that can be done via telecommute “knowledge work” or the like, but there isn’t enough of that to create these kinds of numbers. The internet has been so incredibly enabling in so many different ways that to limit it to such a narrow category is shortsighted. Many are doing web design or creating product themselves, certainly, but many are also managing entire “virtual” businesses, handling email chains with the Chinese manufacturers on one end and the Singapore design guys on the other, or keeping track of orders and customer queries via an online clearing house. There is very little that can be done in an office that must be done in an office, and worldwide in developing markets the cost savings of that fact are being welcomed with open arms. Interestingly, it is in already-productive countries like Germany, Sweden, and Japan that telecommuting is viewed with suspicion. On one hand it is surprising: these highly wired and progressive countries are welcoming of technology in so many forms that it seems unlike them to reject it in this one. But part of their success is in their social infrastructure: cities, factories, offices, large companies in business for decades or even centuries. Telecommuting makes labor unit-based and decentralizes, preventing the kind of top-down regulation that they feel (and are certainly justified in feeling) has contributed so much to their prosperity. The personal benefits and professional problems with telecommuting were not ignored: 65 percent of those polled felt that telecommuting allowed them to be more productive because they have more control over their work life. But 62 percent found it “socially isolating” and worried that lack of face time at the office would lessen their chances of promotion. As a telecommuter myself, I am concerned more with the lack of infrastructure in place to deal with significant numbers of critical telecommuting employees. Just try to record a Skype video conversation between a three or four people, or give a presentation to 100 off-site employees and 200 on-site ones. There are solutions, of course, but many are expensive and industrial-size, requiring special equipment and software from Cisco or another enterprise enabler. Companies like Boeing may have settled the global collaboration problem, but what about a 12-person operation spread across Europe and Canada that makes camera accessories? Just as services have enabled one relatively tech-naive person to become an online business (and continue to do so), new services over the next few years will have to focus on repairing the natural loss that occurs when your employees are never physically near each other. The numbers, as shown by the huge numbers in emerging markets, are huge and getting bigger, and the big money in established countries is still waiting for the right moment to jump in. Collaboration tools and startups have been big at Disrupt and other showcases, and for good reason. The next ten years of global productivity are going to be driven by them.