14Oct PDA: Suicide kittens viral to promote 4mations
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Channel 4 is using a series of viral games and videos to draw the crowds to 4mations, its new (ish) video-sharing animation website.The site, which launched three weeks ago as collaboration between Channel 4, animation specialists Lupus Films and Aardman Animations, has collaborated with developers Rubber Republic to create two videos and a game where users can aid General Tiddles’ bid for self-destruction.
22Sep BSkyB battles rivals with broadband ads
(1 votes, average: 5 out of 5) Loading ...BSkyB is set to throw down the gauntlet to rivals with an ad campaign claiming it is the only company to offer truly unlimited broadband usage.
The company is preparing the campaign after deciding to remove its fair usage policy, which caps heavy downloaders, from its top-tier Sky Broadband Max product.
It also said that because it does not “traffic shape” - regulate or cap broadband speeds at peak times to manage heavy internet usage - it can now claim to be the only UK company to offer “unlimited” broadband.
“Customers have told us that they want unlimited broadband to be exactly that, so we’ve acted on their feedback,” a BSkyB spokesman said.
“We believe that we are now the only major broadband provider to offer truly unlimited broadband.”
The BSkyB ad campaign, which will include TV, press, direct marketing and digital advertising, is timed to break later this month, with the company expecting it to spark a marketing battle with rivals.
“We believe that there is no other ISP that makes both of these promises, and we are going to start talking about this more openly in our marketing,” said a BSkyB spokesman.
“This is likely to open up a new front in the highly competitive broadband marketplace, where most advertising has so far focused on either price or headline download speeds.”
BSKyB said it will still maintain its “acceptable use” policy, but this relates to the type of content users download and not the amount.
The move will irritate rivals, which have fallen foul of regulations while trying to market unlimited broadband services, and potentially attract the eye of the advertising watchdog.
In July, the Advertising Standards Authority banned a print campaign by Virgin Media, which promoted broadband download times for TV shows and music, after complaints that they were inaccurate because the company “traffic shaped” at certain times.
Last year, Orange was censured by the ASA for claiming it offered “unlimited downloads” when in fact its fair usage policy meant that some internet users might be impacted by its fair usage policy.
BSkyB notched up a total of 1.6m broadband customers as at the end of June, making it the fifth biggest broadband provider in the UK.
The company has had huge success in tapping the market - the 200,000 customers it put on for the three months to the end of June accounted for almost 50% of all new sign-ups in the UK for that period.
On Friday, Goldman Sachs issued a note, based on Virgin Media chief executive Neil Berkett’s speech at its Communacopia Conference, stating that it expects the “soft launch” of the company’s mega-speed 50Mb service to launch in late October.
Virgin Media also said that it had upped its expectation of 40% UK coverage for the 50Mb service by the end of 2008 to 50% reach of UK homes.
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08Sep XHTML & CCS Validation
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Since I have just validated my hosting site (7spire.com) I thought I would tell you how to validate your own site.
Info:
Validation checks your code to see that it comply’s with the web standards. Internet browsers such as Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox also keep to these web standards (although they also have their own code..) so making sure your code in valid means users should be able to view it fine in whatever internet browser they may have..
How:
Visit this link for HTML validation - http://validator.w3.org/
or this link for CSS validation - http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/
Type in your website address in the Address box and click Check.
If your website is already valid, it will tell you and give you some code that you can add to your site to show others your site is valid but that’s not required. If your site is not valid you will get a list of the problems and advice on how to fix it.
How many errors did you get?
08Sep Admiration and concern as Google celebrates its 10th anniversary as a corporation
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Google, which enjoyed its 10th anniversary as a corporation yesterday, has a lot to celebrate. During that short period it has become the most interesting - and powerful - company on the planet. Its search engine, the motor for its vast advertising-generated profits, is the gateway through which most people on the internet gain access to knowledge about practically anything. From this ubiquitous base it has expanded - often by acquisition - to provide for all our web needs, including spreadsheets, email, documents, video (YouTube), blogs, calendars and news. One of its projects is scanning practically every book in the world for our perusal; it has just launched a virtual world to compete with the likes of Second Life; and in a few weeks it will release Android, its operating system for mobile phones, which could be its most important product when mobile devices become our main access to the internet.
Last week it threw another pebble - or maybe boulder - into the pool with the release of a web browser, Chrome, to challenge Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (which has more than 70% of the global market). Like other Google consumer products this was free, built with open-source methods and so available for any other browser, including Explorer, to adopt or adapt. This is not philanthropy. It is an each-way bet. If it upsets Explorer’s dominance of corporate markets it will be a big victory in Google’s aim of establishing an online alternative to Microsoft’s 90% armlock on PC operating systems. If it does not, but makes all browsers more effective, then more people will use the web - thereby boosting Google’s search-linked advertising.
Google started off as a new kind of corporation that people could actually feel a part of. It had the motto “Don’t be evil” - which it now seems to be playing down a bit - and a wonderful mission to make all the information in the world available to anyone. If it succeeds, the whole world will be better-educated. So far it has mainly kept to its principles, despite an ill-advised move to bow to censorship in China. But as it gets bigger, the awesome responsibility of curating the frightening amount of data it collects about us - which the FBI and MI6 can only dream about - becomes overwhelming. Even more urgently, Google’s recent deal to let Yahoo adopt its contextual advertising capability means Google could command 90% of the web’s contextual advertising. This is a monopoly - and potentially a very unhealthy one. Google, which won admirers through being a David against the Goliath of Microsoft, must be prevented at all costs from becoming a similar monopoly, even though it is giving its products away free.
05Sep Google celebrates its 10th birthday in September - or does it?
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One day this month will mark Google’s official 10th birthday. The company will probably celebrate with a blog post and a special logo and we’ll see a slew of articles about how much they’ve accomplished in those 10 years. A few publications couldn’t wait and got their Google tributes out last month.
But when exactly should we be celebrating? Almost certainly on September 27. But the real answer is way more complicated than that.
Google is actually nearly 13-years-old, if you go by their corporate history page: “By January of 1996, Larry and Sergey had begun collaboration on a search engine called BackRub, named for its unique ability to analyse the ‘back links’ pointing to a given website.”
But if you go by when the Google.com domain name was registered, September 15 1997, the company will turn 11 next week.
However, the date Google celebrates as their birth month is a year later, September 1998. They celebrated on September 7, the date of the company’s incorporation, until 2005. Since 2005 (and also randomly in 2002), they’ve celebrated on September 27.
So why do they celebrate it on the 27th? According to Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan, who wrote about this mess last year, they pushed the date forward in 2005 to allow for the announcement of an index-size milestone (ie the record-breaking number of pages the search engine was sifting through).
At least Google is consistently inconsistent: “Google opened its doors in September 1998. The exact date when we celebrate our birthday has moved around over the years, depending on when people feel like having cake.”
So Happy 10th, 11th and/or almost 13th birthday Google! The first three people who sing Happy Birthday to Google in a video comment below (all the way through, full volume, go for it) get a TechCrunch T-shirt.
