More is better, right? Wrong. In “The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less,” Barry Schwartz explains how too many options actually cause more psychological distress. And nowhere is the overabundance of choice more prevalent than the Internet, where any given website can present us with an overwhelming number of alternatives at once.
Google Ad Planner now support search queries (surprise!) and geo-targeting, which means you can drill-down to specific states or metros (region or cities in geographies outside the US). You can also choose among three new ranking methods to display results from the sites you’re considering running your campaigns on, and there’s also a new interactive ‘bubble chart’ which should help you compare demographics, frequency, traffic, and unique visitors visually.
Active Endpoints has announced a contest for the 2008 holiday season. Bring SOA Home for the Holidays offers evaluators of the ActiveVOS visual orchestration system for SOA and BPM applications the chance to win one of three Lenovo IdeaPad netbooks. The contest rules are simple. Evaluators visit www.soaholiday.com to register for a free, supported 30-day trial of ActiveVOS. This automatically makes them eligible for the contest.
The explosion of cloud computing providers dramatically lowered the barriers to entry for web entrepreneurs and innovative projects. However, the lack of interoperability and consistency across services keeps many businesses from adoption. There have been several calls for standards to help make services from different cloud providers interoperable and ultimately more useful to businesses. Uncertainty abounds, with questions such as “Are standards really needed?”"Who should be involved?” and “What are potential consequences?”
“There have been 4 different revolutions of software,” said Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch this morning as he keynoted the 6th International AJAX World RIA Conference & Expo in San Jose, California. The fourth revolution, in which we are rediscovering expressiveness on the Web and recovering what Lynch called “the lost treasures of the desktop,” is the one being led by AJAX developers and front end engineers, a great many of whom were in the crowded keynote room as Adobe’s CTO - a true Web pioneer and one of the coiners of the ‘Rich Internet Applications’ category in 2002 - gave his rousing keynote covering “The Web Experience Revolution”.
“Some aspects of Cloud Computing have clear value for modern enterprises,” declares David Linthicum, “but the trick is to figure out your own needs and what products will fulfill those needs.” Proprietor of David S. Linthicum, LLC - an internationally known firm that provides quality EAI, SOA, enterprise architecture, and Web 2.0 spaces consulting services to organizations that seek “guidance beyond the hype” - Linthicum made the comment as he announced the launch of a Cloud Computing Podcast on iTunes.
It’s likely that the cuts were prompted by investors like Sequoia pushing for cost cutting (the VC gave portfolio companies a 56 Slide Presentation of Doom last month in light of the economic crisis). But LinkedIn isn’t about to run out of money: the company just closed a $22.7 million infusion, which came on top of a $53 million Series D round in June that pegged LinkedIn’s valuation at $1 billion.