Monday, December 19, 2005

Gee, Thanks for the Tip Microsoft

Microsoft is advising Mac users of IE5 that they should move to alternative browsers such as Apple’s Safari or the open-source Firefox as they are formally ending support for IE5

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An Audience of One Billion

At this time last year, the world had over 800 million Internet users and according to a December 26, 2004, press release from Internet World Stats we would hit the one billion mark by the end of 2005. Based on the current statistics on their Web site, it looks like they were correct and we will ring in the billionth online user concurrent with the upcoming New Year’s celebrations.

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Friday, December 16, 2005

Virtual Keyboard Creates Constant Ties to the Internet

Cell phones and PDAs have begun to blur the lines between our work lives and personal lives, but they still don’t provide the full functionality of a desktop PC. (Building a complex spreadsheet or presentation on a PDA can still be a daunting task.)

A new generation of virtual devices has the potential to put a full-size keyboard, mouse and monitor into the user’s pocket. The Virtual Keyboard (with virtual mouse) from Virtual Devices projects the image of a keyboard onto any flat surface. A small camera in the system records the user’s keystrokes. The keyboard is currently available for PCs and will soon be available for PDAs and cell phones.

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Google Posts Another Double Digit Increase

Search engine giant Google posted another double digit increase in search queries according to Nielsen/NetRatings. The Nielsen survey compared search engine queries from June through October 2005 with the same period last year. Google searches were up 21 percent in that period. The total number of searches in October exceeded 5.1 billion.

The average increase for all major search engines was 15 percent across the same period. Though a small percentage of total search queries, the highest rate of growth came from Ask Jeeves which grew at a rate of 77 percent over last year.

Google was the source of 47.7 percent of all searches, Yahoo second at 21.8 percent, and MSN came in third at 11.3 percent.

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Wednesday, December 14, 2005

Ten Years of Thinking In One Issue

There is a good article in the latest issue of strategy+business magazine/enews. There is a discussion of conceptual breakthroughs in business going back ten years to 1995. Many of you will recognize these concepts, but there was a voting process and it is interesting to see which breakthroughs were the most popular from the magazine’s readers (reader demographics here).

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