Category: Services & Products

Bring back that brand new blogging feeling

Liz Strauss, famous online community builder, blogger and author of the book “The Secret to Writing a Successful and Outstanding Blog”, recently ran a contest on “Bring Back That ‘Brand New’ Blogging Feeling Event” and gave the bloggers around the world a chance to win a premium WordPress Theme from Blog Design Studio and a copy of her ebook.

Only 50 winners in the contest and luckily, I won !!

To enter the contest, here is the image of my first blog post back in 2002 …

Google Chrome – the next network OS ?

Probably the biggest news in recent weeks, Google launches their own browser – Chrome. They have posted the behind-the-scene information about Chrome with 38 pages of comics. Indeed, if you read the pages without knowing the software beforehand, you will probably think they are talking about building an operating system. Anyway, if you don’t have the time to read thru the 38 pages, here are some main points:

  • A browser design around web applications, instead of web pages
  • It needs to be stable, faster, more secure, clean & efficient user interface … and make it open source
  • Make it a multi-process browser, not multi-threaded – no more browser crash just because one tab’s web page has memory leak or rendering bug …
  • There is a built-in task manager such that you can eliminate some mis-behave processes, if needed.
  • The beautiful part is, to me, Google can test each build of the Chrome browser by simply using their massive infrastructure to crawl tens of thousands of web pages. And they can also use the ranking of pages to test the most popular pages in the Internet …
  • Webkit is the rendering engine Chrome uses, and it is fast …
  • They also built a Javascript virtual machine. Instead of “interpreting” Javascript code, it generates machine code of the source. In addition, Chrome also improves the Javascript garbage collection method.
  • The user interface of the browser is redesigned – now the tabs are on top. And the URL box is now the Omnibox – it shows the search suggestions, top pages you have visited and those you have not visited.
  • There is a new tab page that shows the thumbnails of the 9 most visited pages.
  • You can turn on the read-only mode (they call it incognitco window) and it will not save your browsing history, cookies etc.
  • Each process has its own sandbox and cannot write / read files off your hard drive. No more watching your sensitive data and running malware … as soon as you close the tab, everything bad running in this tab is gone.
  • Chrome runs a security model better than BIBA security model which is used by Vista.
  • Chrome will warn the users of phishing and malware websites from lists Google is maintaining.
  • Google also introduces Gears to help the developers to improve the capabilities … 
  • It is an open source project, make available for all bright developers.

So, how’s the beta version performing so far ? Not as fast as it claims … but once it loaded the page, the speed is pretty good. And the page scrolling is a bit strange … Will keep you all posted.

GPS assisted travel

In my home town there is really no place for GPS as our city is so small and the transport system is so efficient that we can always go to one place from another easily. With the help of 3G iPhone and its AGPS, the trip to Boston was my first time to travel abroad with a GPS … and it was really a great device that helped a lot.

Same as a well designed webpage navigation system, it is important to know where you are, where have you been and where you can go. That’s exactly what the GPS could do for me in Boston and it was fast to track the location as well (thanks to the AGPS, instead of typical GPS).

The first pic shows how I could go to the Boston Apple store from the hotel I stayed, as suggested by the iPhone.

And this pic shows it all, the famous Google pin … I know I am in the right place.

E-2-S-2-C Commerce

One of the first things to do in my Boston travel planning is to get tickets for the Blue Man Show (one of the best multi-media shows in USA). To promote e-Commerce, I of course first visited their official ticket site – www.ticketmaster.com to buy tickets. Unfortunately, all tickets were sold out for all the days I’d stay in Boston, according to the website.

So, I tried the other way – S-Commerce (i.e. Scalper Commerce). That is, somehow another party got the tickets and willing to sell it to yet another party – with a higher price tag. I checked the site www.ticketsnow.com and found that I could get the tickets but the original US$ 58 tickets (for a seat 10 rows from the stage) were selling at US$ 148. Toooo expensive I think …

Therefore, I decided to leave it to the last resort – C-Commerce (i.e. Concierge Commerce). I checked into the hotel and immediately asked the concierge for help … and the gentleman kindly promised to help and get me the ticket. The next day the gentleman told me the good news – ticket with seat 5 rows from the stage and it cost only US$ 58 plus US$ 5 handling fee (i.e. together US$ 63 a ticket, which I was very happy to pay for the services).

Lesson learnt – Ticketing websites still cannot replace a good concierge.