10.31.05

Halloween Edition

Posted in General at 5:58 pm by Christine

According to Engadget Rotani has created a dual card “AirReferee” 802.11g router with a technology that they say can reduce interference by 800% or more. What does this mean to you? Well not much if you’re operating that WiFi network of yours in the midst of a vacuum, but for those competing for signal with a microwave, a few cordless handsets, and other frequencies, this seems like it should give your connections a bit of a boost.

Also according to Engadget, it seems that there is an official Sony-made PSP headset coming soon. The first of what keen followers hope will be many Sony-made PSP accessories to be released this holiday season. Apparently this bad boy’ll ship the 5th of November, and will run you up $19.99.

Google celebrates Halloween:
google halloween

To all keen travelers, Travelocity has just launched a new program that tells you when fares to your favorite destinations drop by at least 20%.

Is $450 the next stop on the Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) freight train? Nearly a dozen analysts raised their estimates on the dot-com giant after the company’s blowout third-quarter report. Three in particular — Lehman Brothers, First Albany, and RBC Capital Markets — declared $450 as the high-octane stock’s new price target.

Something Weird: This is probably old news to most of you, but somebody discovered that you can not create a folder anywhere on your PC named “con”. At Microsoft the whole Team, including Bill Gates, couldn’t answer why this happened!

An absolute hoot: check out this article proof of Google’s ownership of internet. [thanks andrewB]

In searching for my bi-weekly newsletter’s blog of note, I stumbled across this one: pretty nifty…Its called “hack a day

On a personal note:

Marketing is such an important aspect of any company. So often it falls short of delivering to the public the image that you wish to portray – if it even ever gets that far that is!

I was speaking to some people on the weekend and they asked who I work for, so I mentioned the company name and the general response was “huh?, who? What do they do?” My favourite response was, “well, we manufacture a new type of sneaker glue”. Obviously this is not the case – I as you all very well know work in Search Marketing. Now it would be fine if the people we were speaking to were ‘ignorati‘, but they were mostly well skilled developers who should have heard of the company name after 7 years of existence! Now there is your prime example of a dire need for result oriented or aggressive marketing and why it is so important.

One of my friends sent me this link to a very informative article about Absinthe. It makes me wonder how the one that they currently sell here in South Africa would rate against the traditional one…

Joey and I went to the recent Whisky festival that was held at the CTIC last week Thursday. (I cant believe they used a splash page!) We sampled some great whisky’s my favourite of the evening being the Glenfiddich 21 year old and Johnnie Walker Gold, Joey’s (of which he proudly bought a bottle) the Caol Ila 12 year old.

We got to dress up for one of our friend’s birthdays on Friday. He proudly made us all dress up as Pimps & Prostitutes on Friday evening. Boy that was a bunch of laughs and “no” I will not post the pictures, but perhaps Joey will. Lol ;)
Well season is finally here and we managed to get to our first outdoor party again, Timecode, which was held in Robertson on Saturday on a beautiful venue, Pat Busch nature reserve. (What’s up with those splash pages?!) It was just incredibly hot, but luckily the dams sufficed to cool most of the party goers off!

10.20.05

Of Honourable Intent

Posted in General at 5:05 pm by Christine

I have recently joined the Business and Technology Book Club Blog where I will be one of four members discussing new books and hot topics in the industry. I finally managed to get a copy of John Batelle’s book, so will be reading that one real soon, since it is one of the books that is on our review list. Make sure you check it out!

Ok, so it’s a bit outdated, but Yahoo has bought WhereOnEarth a search company with WiFi location based services, wait for it…remember Google’s San Fransisco ambitions? Enter Yahoo….;) This could get interesting.

That is all I have time for folks…work beckons!!

On a personal note:
The weather has been beautiful of late here in Cape Town. People are donning tans and frantically going to gym to shed those last kilos and I guess in a way cleaning out the proverbial house for the upcoming new year.

Which got me thinking…

Playing open cards in business is very important to me as well as following through on your proposals – I believe that in business (and of course on a personal level) people should honour their intentions.

Why such a strong conviction on this topic today? Well it’s just that I have only met a handful of people that do.

I had a chat with one of my colleagues just yesterday where we were discussing how small a business community Cape Town is, and should you cross someone here, your business could pretty much fold very rapidly. Which took me down another trail of thought…

In business I, and I am sure quite a few of you as well, have been painted many a rosy picture and been made many promises which mostly turned out to be empty. What is that saying….Once bitten twice shy.

Perhaps I leave it at that for the moment…

10.18.05

UI Display

Posted in General at 1:36 pm by Christine

Well, I know that Google has been testing their UI display which some of us could see on their SERPs. I am sure that I posted one before where they were testing the Sponsored results display…which I have never been able to reproduce since.

I came across this one today which is quite interesting:
It was for a very generic search on the word Make

All results were posted below one another…check out the screen cap:

Google SERP display

Apparently it has something to do with the information below the line being semantically linked rather than a direct continuation of results. Which makes absolute sense since it was rather a broad search. Nothing is mentioned about this on Google though….

Would be nice to discuss this one….I know Matt Cutts recently posted about a SERP display as well…

On a personal note:
Being a bit of a horror fanatic I finally watched the House of Wax the other day. It’s not really a horror in the traditional sense, I would put it down as a suspense thriller. I think they did pretty well on the remake. Some parts are pretty gross, but for the boys, at least Paris does a teeny strip tease…;)

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