I was asked by a friend today if I could recommend any bars/restaurants/cafés in Guildford where she could access free WiFi on her laptop. Besides Giraffe I wasn’t aware of anywhere else in town so I posted the question to Yammer in the office and received a number of helpful responses. It seems that Guildford has a reasonable selection of access points; so it made sense to collect them all on a single map.

Read on...

‘Social media’ is the new buzz term. Everybody’s doing it, and why? Because it can generate masses amount of traffic to your website, which can easily turn into revenue. It’s really what ‘web 2.0’ is all about.

Read on...

The web is buzzing with the news that Google have officially announced their own web browser and it will be released (in beta) today.

‘Google Chrome’, as it will be known, has been built from scratch, is free and is open source.

Google’s has said it’s intentions for the browser are for it to ‘drive innovation on the web’.

• JavaScript Virtual Machine called V8 (faster javascript – open source)
• A process for each tab (So if one tab crashes, the whole browser doesn’t crash & better management of memory)
• Task manager to view processes (Allows you to see which website is using the most memory, downloading the most bytes and abusing your cpu)
• ‘Speed dial’ home page comprising of your most visited pages
• Google Gears is built in
• Smart search directly in the address bar (aka Omnibox)
• Uses a ‘Chrome bot’ on the google crawling infrastructure to test it works against the most popular sites on the web
• The browser runs inside a ‘sandbox’ with restricted permissions to make it really secure (It cannot effect your machine or it’s processes)
• Private browsing mode
• Automatically checks against known phishing websites (These are available in an open api)

For the full low down I highly recommend you checkout Google’s comic they released.

Amazon is undoubtedly one of the web’s most successful online shops, a global brand, with operations all over the world. However, it’s not just selling products anymore.

Just one of the growing pains Amazon has faced over the years was the requirement for a scalable storage infrastructure.

Amazon invested in building their own solution and with their experience and expertise in this area they realised a business opportunity was there to be had and released their Simple Store Solution (S3) to the web industry.

S3 offers unlimited storage with high availability, low latency and low costs.

Recently at Kyan we’ve been increasingly taking advantage of S3 in our projects. Amazon’s storage is redundant and unlimited which makes it perfect for backups.

It also allows businesses that work with large amounts of collateral to concentrate on their core competencies and not waste resources implementing and managing a storage infrastructure.

Amazing really when you think Amazon started back in 1995 as a simple on-line book store.

As the U.S. TV broadcasters switch over to digital tranmissions a great debate is just starting out…

Who gets to use the fuzzy white noise that’s left behind?

Google are campaigning for the redundant spectrum to be put to good use.

Most notably for WiFi 2.0

A longer-range wireless technology that wouldn’t be owned by any one company. WiFi 2.0 offers the possibility of, to quote Google, “Affordable, ubiquitous, high-speed Internet connections to all Americans, anywhere, at any time.”

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will soon decide on the future of the spectrum and whether it will be opened up. Google have started a petition and are encouraging everyone to spread the word via their YouTube channel.

CAPTCHA (standing for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) must have seemed like a good idea when it was first invented in 2000. Spam was beginning to become a major problem on the web and a method was needed to fight back. CAPTCHA at first glance seems ideal: a distorted image that would be instantly recognisable by humans yet incomprehensible to machines. Place some letters in the distorted image and get the user to type them back and bingo: you’ve stopped your spam problem.

Read on...

One perennial web design issue that continues to vex and frustrate designers and clients alike is the limited number of typefaces available for text when set in HTML (i.e. without resorting to images or Flash).

But please don’t struggle against the tide. Go with the flow.

Read on...

Google Analytics rocks! I could spend hours/days/weeks sniffing about the statistical minutiae that Google Analytics serves up. Three users from X visited my site last week and each spent Y minutes on landingpage Z having been referred there by using the search term Z – amazing but probably not that useful.

If there is one metric you should look at, check out the bounce rate, the ‘I came, I puked, I left’ metric as so lucidly explained by Avinash Kaushik – check out the video presentation.

When IE8 is released there is talk of it rendering, by default, as if it were IE7.

Read on...

Microsoft proves it has genuine intentions to make Internet Explorer 8 Web Standards compliant.

Read on...

Well it must be Christmas because the parcels are flowing thick and fast through Kyan Towers. Our nice postie left a particularly sweet little package on my desk the other day
in the shape of the tiny new sub-notebook from Asus, dubbed somewhat peculiarly the eeePC.

Read on...

Great to see one of the most prominent brands and technology leaders finally catching up with the ‘correct’ way to build web sites.

Read on...

When we went to the Future of Web Apps conference a while back everyone was raving about API’s – “You must build an API” we were told. I had no idea how much of an impact they were going to make.

Read on...