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Social Web CMS - a Pligg fork web software, version 1.0 release

Mircea Goia — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 06:24:29 +0000

I didn’t know that Pligg had a spin-off (spin-offs which plagued other web software like Mambo - Joomla being the successful spin-off).

I just found out today when Venturebeat announced the launch of Tipd.com service which is based on Social Web CMS web software.Here is the example of how Social Web CMS works: Tipd.com

Social Web CMS reached the version 1.0 after a series of candidate releases.

In the team’s opinion this release means:

Social Web CMS has a long-term roadmap for improving the product which can be found here. It can be downloaded from here.

About Social Web CMS
Social Web CMS (SWCMS) is a mature, full-featured, and open source social news application written in PHP and utilizing a MySQL backend. From the web newbie looking for a simple way to enter the playing field to advanced developers hoping to drive social news to the next level, SWCMS is your best source for full, free, and actively developed social news applications.

The niche of this web software is social news (pioneered by Digg and Reddit ). In this model of social news the front-page news is determined not by a small group of editors but rather by the viewer community. This helps ensure that the topics covered are diverse - featuring multiple viewpoints rather than a select group’s editorial bias. Social News also helps ensure that the news is always the latest and freshest.

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SQL Server 2008 Database Performance and Scalability - the Microsoft approach

Mircea Goia — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 10:23:37 +0000

These are excerpts from the Microsoft whitepaper “SQL Server 2008 Performance and Scale” published here (MyTestBox.com got the permisison from Microsoft to reprint it here).

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 incorporates the tools and technologies that are necessary to implement relational databases, reporting systems, and data warehouses of enterprise scale, and provides optimal performance and responsiveness. With SQL Server 2008, you can take advantage of the latest hardware technologies while scaling up your servers to support server consolidation. SQL Server 2008 also enables you to scale out your largest data solutions.

Introduction
Today’s organizations need easily accessible and readily available business data so that they can compete in the global marketplace. In response to this need, relational and analytical databases continue to grow in size, embedded databases ship with many products, and many companies consolidate servers to ease management concerns.
Companies must maintain optimal performance while their data environment continues to grow in size and complexity.

This white paper describes the performance and scalability capabilities of Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008 and explains how you can use these capabilities to:

Optimize performance for any size of database with the tools and features that are available for the database engine, analysis services, reporting services, and integration services.

* Scale up your servers to take full advantage of new hardware capabilities.

* Scale out your database environment to optimize responsiveness and to move your data closer to your users.

Optimizing Performance with SQL Server 2008
Because your corporate data continues to grow in size and complexity, you must take steps to provide optimal data access times. SQL Server 2008 includes many features and enhancements to optimize performance across all of its areas of functionality, including relational Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) databases; Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) databases; reporting; and data extract, transform, and load (ETL) processes.

Relational Database Performance
In most business environments, relational databases are at the core of business-critical applications and services.
As volumes of data increase, and the number of users and applications that are dependent on relational data-stores grows, organizations must be able to ensure consistent performance and responsiveness from their data systems.
SQL Server 2008 provides a robust database engine that supports large relational databases and complex query processing.

Measurable, Real-World Performance
SQL Server 2008 builds on the industry-leading performance of previous versions of SQL Server to provide the highest possible standard of database performance to your organization.

Having demonstrated the high performance capabilities of SQL Server in the past with the Transaction Processing Performance Council’s TPC-C benchmark, Microsoft was the first database vendor to publish results for the newer TCP-E benchmark, which represents more accurately the kinds of OLTP workloads that are common in modern organizations.

Additionally, SQL Server demonstrates its performance capabilities for large-scale, data warehousing workloads through TPC-H results in the 3-terabyte and 10-terabyte categories. (For current benchmark results, see the TPC Web site at www.tpc.org.)

(more…)

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Host Color, web hosting provider, announced the launch of TextPattern CMS Hosting Plan

Mircea Goia — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 05:05:36 +0000

Host Color said that it now offers an authoring hosting plan based on TextPattern (TXP) CMS. TextPattern CMS is an elegant web content management platform, best for writers, journalists and other professionals who need to publish online textual presentations and easy to manage them (it’s the equivalent to Wordpress and MovableType blogging platforms).The Hostcolor’s TextPattern hosting service is made exclusively for TXP websites. It can not be used to run other software applications. It is priced at $3.99 per month and enables owners of TextPattern CMS websites to work in customized web hosting environment.

The limitation is set due to quality assurance, so the hosting company can guarantee that customers of TXP Plan will use the promotional price of $3.99/month to host TextPattern websites only.

Host Color offers web hosting plans in price range between $2.99 and $11.99 per month. Priced at only $3.99/month TextPattern Plan is among the most inexpensive ones. Alongside with TextPattern authoring CMS Host Color allows its TXP customers to use ZenPhoto gallery.

The TextPattern hosting plan features 1,000 MB disc space and 5 GB monthly transfer. Host Color says that these quotas will be increased for anyone who needs more space and monthly transfer, but it does not want to promote any numbers that aren’t realistic or might be considered as overselling.

Besides pre-installed TextPattern CMS, customers can use a number of TXP skins without additional cost, and to meter their visitors with AWStats.
Anyone who wants to register new domain name with thei TXP plan has to pay only $8.95 for web address under COM, NET, ORG, INFO, BIZ, US or WS extensions.

Last week Host Color introduced its entry-level Virtuozzo VPS Hosting Plan - “VPS Start”. It is priced at $19.95 per month and features 192 MB RAM, 10 GB disc space and 50 GB data transfer per month.

The web host recently has been very active in promoting some national and regional Top-Level domains such as .DE, .ME, .US, .Asia, .BZ, .CN and .TW. It also opened its new Affiliate Program, that transfers 25% of the company’s revenue per sale to its affiliates and also pays them for each unique visitor sent to Host Color’s website.

About Textpatern content management system (CMS)
A flexible, elegant and easy-to-use content management system, Textpattern is both free and open source. Sites published with Textpattern can employ unlimited registered contributors, each of whom may be assigned privileges by the publisher of the site. Installing and managing plugins that extend Textpattern’s abilities is straightforward. Overall, is a good contender of Wordpress and MovableType although it’s not the most trendy publishing software outhere.

About Host Color
Host Color LLC is a quality U.S. web hosting company incorporated in Delaware. It powers thousands of business and personal websites in data centers in South Bend, Indiana, U.S. and Amsterdam, The Netherlands. The company also provides fully Managed dedicated hosting through HC Servers and European hosting services through HC Europe. It offers discounts to academics and non-governmental organizations.

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BitGravity (CDN) announces new Advanced Progressive™ API for Interactive Video Application Development

Mircea Goia — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 14:09:14 +0000

What does that mean?
It means that BitGravity’s patent pending Advanced Progressive application programming interface (API) for H.264 and FLV-encoded video now supports Progressive Downloads, Auto Bitrate Adjustment and Virtual Clips.
This is a major breakthrough in HD streaming (see the demo below).
This new API enables developers to inject advertising, automatically adjust bitrates, add virtual clips and other additional advanced features into their H.264- and FLV-encoded video, unlocking the ability to create affordable and scalable interactive HD video applications for the first time.

With the Advanced Progressive^TM API, BitGravity customers can add a variety of advanced features to FLV- and H.264-encoded video, including:

BitGravity’s content delivery network (CDN) was engineered to enable a new wave of High Definition, live and interactive content on the Internet (we’ve presented Bitgravity in the Content Delivery Networks providers list).

BitGravity offers a library of source code that makes it easy for customers to use the Advanced Progressive^TM API and introduce feature-rich interactive video applications. H.264 streaming with
Advanced Progressive^TM is a new option with BitGravity’s content delivery service.

“From inception, our service was intended for interactive, fast-loading, HD content delivery across the mainstream Internet, and this new release of our Advanced Progressive^TM API with H.264 support is another milestone in keeping with this original vision,” said Barrett Lyon, Chief Technical Officer (CTO) and co-founder of BitGravity.

“With the move toward high-definition video and the demand for advanced feature sets, successful content delivery networks must have rich APIs capable of supporting customers with cutting-edge interactive video applications,” said Dan Golding, Vice President and Research Director with Tier1 Research http://www.t1r.com.

Demo
You can see a demo of their technology here: http://demo.bitgravity.com/advanced

There are two links there: “H264 Advanced Seeking and Auto Bitrate” and “H264 Virtual Video Clipping”

By default, “H264 Advanced Seeking and Auto Bitrate” will be opened and you can start testing.
Follow the red arrows from the image below.
For advanced seeking, you can drag the arrow to the location you want along the loading bar, even if the clip is not fully loaded yet. For audio bitrate adjusting, click on the spot that the red arrow is pointing to.

There are three options: high, low and automatic.
The changes can be seen in real time (especially if you choose the “low” option and then back to “high“).

To see “H264 Virtual Video Clipping” click on that link and follow the red arrows from the image below.
Choose a time interval (between 00:00 and 20:54) and click Update. You will see the jump.

About BitGravity
BitGravity, Inc., built the first content delivery network (CDN) optimized to instantaneously deliver HD-quality video on demand, live and via interactive applications to massive audiences on the Internet.
The company is based in Burlingame, CA and is privately held, with strategic investment from Allen & Company, Tata Communications and private investors.

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Web developers: OpenX, the ad server software company, wants you!

Mircea Goia — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 19:36:55 +0000

OpenX, the well known open source ad server software company, is looking to hire experienced open source web developers.They have several projects and wants developers with proven experience extending open source content management systems or analytics tools.
One big appeal: the location of the developers doesn’t matter! The work can be done remotely (I don’t know if you will be paid for this so you have to ask).

If you are interested then email to tellme@openx.org (include a summary of your experience and some details of one project you worked on and think it demonstrate experience in extending a CMS or analytics application).

If you know a friend or someone interested you can forward this offer to him/her. More of their blog.

We, at MyTestBox.com, have reviewed OpenX ad server software here. We found it to be a very good choice if you want to “take control of your advertising”.

OpenX is well-funded (21 million dollars to date) and is set to become one of the leaders in ad serving software field.

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US Senate passes intellectual property bill (this interests software makers as well)

Mircea Goia — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 23:41:24 +0000

According to Associated Press US Senate just passed, unanimously, the intellectual property bill (today - Friday, September 26).

This would give the Justice Department more resources to combat intellectual property theft, including patent and trademark infringement, counterfeiting and copyright crimes.

This bill also would authorize funding for federal and local law enforcement to fight intellectual property theft and expand the scope of things that could be seized in a criminal case.

The legislation would create a new position in the executive office of the president to coordinate enforcement of intellectual property rights across federal agencies and departments.

“Intellectual property makes up some of the most valuable, and most vulnerable, property we have,” Patrick Leahy (Judiciary Committee Chairman) said in a statement. “We need to do more to protect it from theft and abuse if we hope to continue being a world leader in innovation.”

That sentiment was echoed by the Copyright Alliance, a nonprofit group whose members include the Business Software Alliance, the National Association of Broadcasters, the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America. Member companies include software, media and communications companies like Microsoft Corp., AT&T Inc., News Corp., Time Warner Inc. and Walt Disney Co.

“We can look forward to U.S. artists and creators maintaining their leading role in the world of producing creative works that enrich our culture and drive our economy,” the Copyright Alliance said in a statement hailing the bill. That applies to software creators as well.

There’s is a concern that this bill will favor more large media companies and the public-interest advocacy group Public Knowledge is worried about that, especially that the bill would allow a court to order the forfeiture of any property used in an infringement.
That could include servers owned by Internet service providers or Internet companies.

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Cloud computing, grid computing, utility computing - list of top providers

Mircea Goia — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 02:15:52 +0000

Everyone can build a website, but not not everyone can build a good and popular website. If you can pull it off, you can enjoy benefits like building something people are using, recognition and - sometimes - money. It can be a good business, even your full time job. But bad things can happen, and you should be prepared for it. One of those things (well, actually this is not a bad thing!) is to have spikes in traffic… maybe as a result of getting on Digg.com, Reddit.com, Google News, or another major media outlet frontpage… or getting reviewed by Techcrunch or another major technology blog.

You want to be prepared for this, but you don’t want to spend tons of money on it. For example, having your own dedicated server costs more than a shared hosting account and requires you to have knowledge to administer it. Maybe you don’t have the knowledge or you don’t want to become a server administrator…and don’t have money to hire one. Even having your own dedicated server doesn’t guarantee it will survive the hordes of visitors coming from those major media outlets (having more than one dedicated server would help tremendously, but the cost also increases).

Imagine having the power of tens or hundreds of servers for the cost of a several shared hosting accounts. Sounds fantastic, right? Well, now it’s possible.

Welcome to the world of “cloud computing!” (or “grid computing” or “utility computing”, which are terms for the same thing).

What is “cloud computing?”

As Wikipedia describes it in technical terms:
___________________________________________
Cloud computing is often confused with grid computing (a form of distributed computing whereby a “super and virtual computer” is composed of a cluster of networked, loosely-coupled computers, acting in concert to perform very large tasks), utility computing (the packaging of computing resources, such as computation and storage, as a metered service similar to a traditional public utility such as electricity) and autonomic computing (computer systems capable of self-management). Indeed many cloud computing deployments are today powered by grids, have autonomic characteristics and are billed like utilities, but cloud computing can be seen as a natural next step from the grid-utility model. Some successful cloud architectures have little or no centralised infrastructure or billing systems whatsoever including Peer to peer networks like BitTorrent and Skype and volunteer computing like SETI@home.

The architecture:
The majority of cloud computing infrastructure currently consists of reliable services delivered through next-generation data centers that are built on compute and storage virtualization technologies. The services are accessible anywhere in the world, with The Cloud appearing as a single point of access for all the computing needs of consumers. Commercial offerings need to meet the quality of service requirements of customers and typically offer service level agreements. Open standards and open source software are also critical to the growth of cloud computing.

Characteristics:
As customers generally do not own the infrastructure, they are merely accessing or renting, they can forego capital expenditure and consume resources as a service, paying instead for what they use. Many cloud computing offerings have adopted the utility computing model which is analogous to how traditional utilities like electricity are consumed, while others are billed on a subscription basis. By sharing “perishable and intangible” computing power between multiple tenants, utilization rates can be improved (as servers are not left idle) which can reduce costs significantly while increasing the speed of application development. A side effect of this approach is that “computer capacity rises dramatically” as customers do not have to engineer for peak loads. Adoption has been enabled by “increased high-speed bandwidth” which makes it possible to receive the same response times from centralized infrastructure at other sites.
___________________________________________

Or, put more simply, (Om Malik’s way), cloud computing means that the applications are running somewhere in the “cloud” (whether an internal network or the Internet). We, as users, don’t know and don’t care. Done right, cloud computing allows developers to develop, deploy and run applications that can easily grow in capacity (scalability), work rapidly (performance), and never - or at least rarely - fail (reliability), all without any concern as to the nature and location of the underlying infrastructure.

One pioneer who helped tremendously in developing the concept of virtualization/cloud computing was VMWare (now a public company). Others followed soon after (including Microsoft).

In a previous article we have presented a list of content delivery networks from around the world.

Let’s now present a list of companies which offers cloud computing/grid computing/utility computing.

(more…)

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Pandora’s iPhone Mobile Ad Platform launched today: Best Buy and Becks nab first positions

Mircea Goia — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 10:00:16 +0000

With over 1 Million iPhone application downloads, Pandora’s mobile ad platform is ready for prime time!

But for now you have to wait in line: Best Buy and Beck’s beer signed the #1 and #2 premiere contracts for Pandora’s iPhone ad platform (the contracts secure their rights to be the exclusive advertisers on the new mobile platform: Best Buy for the first thirty days, Beck’s for the subsequent thirty days).

Today, September 22, when users launch the Pandora application on their iPhone, iPhone 3G, and iPod touch, the Best Buy campaign will be activated and will be the first beneficiary of Pandora’s hugely successful iPhone application which still hovers around the #3 most popular application in Apple’s App Store (1,1 million downloads so far since July 11, reaching one out every ten iPhone and iPhone 3G).

With their respective campaigns, Best Buy and Beck’s will be the first to tap the highly attractive and affluent demographics of Pandora’s registered iPhone users who are predominantly male and aged 36 on average. Among all iPhone users, they skew somewhat older with a higher than average household income and wield greater purchasing influence among their family members and friends.

Pandora’s iPhone ad platform also has the ability to hyper-target audiences for highly relevant and personalized marketing communications, such as by gender, age, geographic location, music genre and day part listening.

“We’re thrilled that Best Buy and Becks are our first advertisers on our iPhone mobile platform,” said Cheryl Lucanegro, vice president of advertising sales for Pandora.

“Through diligent product development and research, we figured out what works best online to generate a high level of engagement and response for marketers while enhancing the user experience at the same time. Our goal is to translate this knowledge, advertising philosophy and product development schema to the mobile platform.”

“As we see users react and engage with the Pandora iPhone platform, we’ll develop and launch new advertising products consistent with this strategy that increasingly leverage the mobile experience,” added Lucanegro.

According to Nielsen Media’s Q1, 2008 research data on iPhone users, they represent the best of the advertising targets groups:
- 25-34 years old
- 55-64 years old

These two age groups tend to spend more:
- 36% have a monthly phone bill of more than $100
- a full sixteen percentage points higher than the average American mobile user and love their music
- 75% use the iPod function on their iPhone, second only to email at 76%

The Morgan Stanley Rubicon report (March, 2008) also found that 10% of iPhone users buy something from iTunes daily and that their ownership of more than one mobile phone places them at the leading edge of consumers driving the wireless industry.

About Pandora
Pandora (www.pandora.com) is a personalized internet radio and music discovery service available anytime and anywhere on the PC, in the home, and on mobile devices via partnerships with AT&T, Apple and Sprint. Listeners can simply enter a favorite song or artist, and instantly launch a personalized listening experience which includes discovery of new bands, artists and songs.
Today, Pandora has a growing user base of more than sixteen million registered listeners, a database of over 550,000 songs, and national advertisers such as HP, Microsoft, Honda, Procter and Gamble, and Nike.

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Magento Commerce continues to gain momentum (450,000+ downloads to date)

Mircea Goia — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 19:34:10 +0000

The latest release of Magento, Version 1.1.6, was released this week and contained updates to the admin, a new design Skin and more. To coincide with the availability of 1.1.6, the Magento Team at Varien also released a new Blank Theme to assist designers in creating new custom themes for Magento.Version 1.1.6 is now available for download and includes a few great updates, along with bug fixes which are listed in the release notes. Version 1.1.6 is a continuation of the Version 1.1.5 release.

Version 1.1.6 includes an update to the category management tool which allows store owners to more efficiently manage a large number of categories. This feature can be tested on our demo admin site. The release also comes with a new skin, Blue Skin, which can be seen on the demo frontend site.

As a reminder, they do not recommend upgrading directly on a live environment. For more information on the release please see their blog announcement.

To coincide with the availability of Magento 1.1.6, we have also made a new Blank Theme available via MagentoConnect.

With ‘Blank Theme‘ the Magento team answers the call of numerous community members out there who’s been inquiring about an extra light theme to use as a basis for theme customization. With this theme we’ve removed all the custom CSS formerly used in Default and Modern Theme, and replaced them with minor typography and positioning CSS assignments.

References to the class names were left in the CSS files to provide a solid starting ground for designers/developers. Markups were also revisited and cleaned up in theme-level.

Download, customize, and enjoy the new ultra light Magento theme!

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Web Help Desk software is integrated now with Apple Remote Desktop

Mircea Goia — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 02:31:45 +0000

MacsDesign Studio LLC, the developers the Web Help Desk (the leading cross-platform help desk software solution), announced today the integration with Apple Remote Desktop 3, Apple’s award-winning desktop management system for Mac OS X.

The easy access to ARD information and instant remote control connectivity from within the Web Help Desk promises to boost technician productivity and raise the bar on customer satisfaction.

A scheduled or on-demand import of asset discovery data directly from the ARD database to the Web Help Desk provides support professionals with the critical, up-to-date asset information required to efficiently resolve service requests. This new integration makes Apple Remote Desktop 3 asset data available to any web browser through one centralized web application.

Web Help Desk’s integration with Apple Remote Desktop 3 makes initiating an ARD control session a simple mouse click away. Technicians can instantly access all of ARD’s features and benefits from a Web Help Desk ticket or asset view.

Hopefully, they will add even more features in the future making it better. We, here at MyTestBox, will review this help desk software soon.

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