Friday, March 30, 2012
Sunday, March 25, 2012
Saturday, March 24, 2012
Thursday, March 22, 2012
Startups Aim to Make Coding Fun
Treehouse, from Ryan Carson? In Orlando? Wow! We're going to get to know them better
Wednesday, March 21, 2012
Monday, March 19, 2012
Sunday, March 18, 2012
Friday, March 16, 2012
How to Protect Digital Photos on your web pages
Blocking Right Click or the Context Menu
One of the simplest ways to help prevent your images from being downloaded without your permission is to put up a no right-click script. When people right click on your page, they will either get no options to download the image, or they will get a pop-up error message (depending upon how you code the script).
This is very easy to do, but also easy to get around.
Shrink Wrapping Images
Shrink wrapping an image is a JavaScript technique where you display your image with another, transparent image overlaid on top. Then when the thief tries to download the image, they get something else instead - usually a blank image.
For someone who is determined, this method can be circumvented as well.
Watermarking Is Fairly Effective
Watermarking is where you place an overlay directly on the image. This usually impacts the quality of the image such that potential thieves don't want to steal it. This is a very effective way to protect your online images if you don't mind the text across the top of them.
Using Flash Can Protect Your Images
It is also possible to set up a slideshow in Flash to display your images. This makes it impossible for thieves to download the images directly.
But, Fully Protecting Your Images is Impossible
If you post your images online, it is possible for someone to steal them and use them somewhere else. No matter what you do to protect them.
No right-click scripts can be defeated by using a view source bookmarklet and browsing to the image directly. Shrink wrapping the images can be defeated the same way.
Watermarks can be removed (with difficulty).
Even if you embed your images in a Flash object or something else to protect them, it's possible to take a screen shot of the desktop as that object is displaying your image.
If your image is so valuable that you want to be sure no one ever steals it, then don't post it online. That is the securest and safest method of protecting your digital images.
Wednesday, March 14, 2012
Stock Photo Site Fotolia Acquires Wilogo, A Crowdsourced Design Community | TechCrunch
Fotolia, the company that’s home to an online marketplace of royalty-free stock photos, has just acquired Wilogo, a crowdsourced design community. The all-cash deal involves the acquisition of the team, the website and services, and will see Wilogo remaining independent when the deal completes.
Founded in 2006, Wilogo is currently doing a couple of million in revenue per year, but mainly in Europe. (The company is based in the U.S., Germany and France.) Through Fotolia, and the forthcoming co-promotions the deal allows for, Wilogo will now be able to better address the U.S. market.
A competitor to major stock houses like Corbis and Getty, as well as micro-stock sites like iStockPhoto and Shutterstock, Fotolia is backed by private equity firm TA Associates, which invested $75 million into the company back in 2009. (At the time, the report was between $50-$100 million, but Fotolia CEO Oleg Tscheltzoff confirms it was $75M).
Today, Fotolia has over 3 million users, hosts 16 million+ files, and is available worldwide in 12 languages and 14 countries. Tscheltzoff tells us the company now has a run rate of over $100 million dollars in revenue per year.
For those unfamiliar, here’s how Wilogo works:
For $250, clients post their design specifications to thousands of designers, which results in hundreds of custom designed logos. The clients pick their top choices, which are then modified and presented with complete international usage rights.
Tscheltzoff says that the service complements what Fotolia is already doing online. “Both Fotolia and Wilogo are pioneers in the democratization of graphic design on the Internet,” he says. “We’ve helped hundreds of thousands of photographers sell images at affordable prices to millions of business owners and graphic designers. Wilogo goes a step further by helping business owners launch their businesses with the look of an amazing brand on a bootstrap budget.”
Wilogo has served a number of well-known clients, including L’Oreal and Seesmic, Wilogo CEO Jérôme Bazin adds.
The crowdsourcing aspect sounds a lot like what Accel-backed 99Designs is doing, which we should note, has not been without its own controversy. A vocal segment of the design community took issue with the idea of professional designers doing spec work for free. But when the Internet disrupts, it’s often about leveling the playing field – 99Designs, Wilogo and sites like that are just one of the results of such a shift.
For what it’s worth, Fotolia also owns other properties, including Flixtime.com, a site that turns photos into videos, and subscription photo service Photoxpress.com.
The acquisition price was not disclosed.
Learn moreFotolia is a low-priced stock photography site, offering over 12 million images for publishing and advertising, at prices as low as $1 per photo. Unlike the two major players in stock photo sales (Corbis and Getty), Fotolia’s images are mostly from semi-pro and amateur photographers, though the photos are of similar quality. Fotolia photographers earn 30%-60% of the sales revenue from their images. In an effort to compete with Corbis and Getty, Fotolia introduced a service called Infinite Collection...
Learn moreWilogo, is a website offering to all customers a logo in a few days, through an international community of designers. ——- You can choose between 2 offers: The Logo offer: for 800 € you get at least 80 different logos you can choose from. This offer is for a company logo, a product’s logo, a logo for a service, a website logo… The illustration or packaging offer: for 1050 € you get at least 15 illustrations you can choose from. This offer...
Tuesday, March 13, 2012
The World's 25 Most Valuable Companies: Apple Is Now On Top - Forbes
Apple is now the most valuable company in the history of the world based on it's soaring stock price.
Monday, March 12, 2012
W3C CEO calls HTML5 as transformative as early Web | ITworld
March 07, 2012, 10:15 AM — "How many people have heard of HTML5?" World Wide Web Consortium CEO Jeff Jaffe asked the crowd at CEBIT on Tuesday. Almost everyone put their hand up. "Now how many of you have figured out a plan for how you're going to use HTML5 in your business?"
Decidedly fewer hands were raised.
Even if they haven't fully explored its potential, though, Jaffe told the conference crowd that HTML, just one of a series of specifications that make up the W3C's Open Web standard, will be among the most disruptive elements to hit organizations since the early days of the Internet.
"We're about to experience a generational change in Web technology, and just as the Web transformed every business, (HTML5) will lead to another transformation."
This is in part because of HTML's cross-browser capability, its improved data integration and the way it handles video, but Jaffe also said the spec makes Web pages "more beautiful, intelligent," and would offer new avenues of Web accessibility to the disabled.
It's a lot of promise for a standard spec that hasn't been fully baked yet. "It won't really be a standard until 2014, but in the Web ecosystem," nobody waits," said Jaffe, who worked as CTO at Novell prior to his role at the W3C. "They'll make minor adjustments once the standard is done."
While CEBIT is filled with vendors pitching products, Jaffe's talk offered a rare glimpse into the inner workings of the W3C, a non-profit organization set up to ensure the Web remains free and opened. Working with a relatively small staff of less than 70 people out of MIT, Jaffe said the W3C has added 22 large vendors to its roster of 340 members in less than two years, including Facebook, Motorola Mobility and LG. A key area for the Open Web standard right now, he said, is the development of protection from tracking on the Web, an issue that ties into the CEBIT 2012 theme of "managing trust." Tracking protection has become enough of a hot button that Jaffe said the W3C has created a working group to address it.
HTML5 already has significant traction in the Canadian market, where startups like Vancouver-based Mobifyhave launched products that use it to help optimize Web sites for mobile devices such as tablets. There's enough interest and enthusiasm that Microsoft Canada developer evangelists John Bristowe and Andrew Howell created an HTML5 logo with a Canadian coat of arms that has been placed on T-shirts. Last month, Toronto-based training provider InfiniteSkills launched a new HTML5 training course specifically for the Apple platform.
A good example of HTML5 products at CEBIT came from TeamLab, which launched the TeamLab Document Editor at the show that works online instead of standard on-premise word processing software. Nina Gorbunova, marketing manager at TeamLab, said the product uses Canvas, a part of HTML5 that allows for dynamic, scriptable rendering of 2D shapes and bitmap images.
"This way we can guarantee 100 per cent the identity of document versions in any browser or format," she said. "It helps us avoid all the negative consequences of using HTML4," which does not have its own engine and rendering tools and dependent on the operating system.
Apart from major use by mobile solution providers, TV and entertainment companies and social networking services (Facebook has even offered native apps on HTML5), Jaffe predicted major benefits to a wide range of industries. These included retail, where applications could be used to find product information, or airports, to assist with logistics. There could even be HTML5-based software that tells users if a car is ready to go on a particular trip.
There are a few stumbling blocks with HTML 5, of course, including perceptions it may not work as well as other platforms, which Jaffee readily conceded could be true. "There's always a challenge when you introduce a new technology with performance," he said. "You don't always get it right on the first shot."
And while the rise of mobile devices has created major opportunities for HTML5, much will depend on what users want to happen on the Web itself, or in an application. "I don't see it as a competition," said Jaffe. "It's a question of role. But there's such a diversity of devices out there that it demands standardization."
CEBIT 2012 runs through the end of the week.
Sunday, March 11, 2012
Saturday, March 10, 2012
Friday, March 9, 2012
Wednesday, March 7, 2012
Saturday, March 3, 2012
Friday, March 2, 2012
8 Experts Break Down the Pros and Cons of Coding With PHP
8. Maggie Nelson: Community and Perception
Nelson is a PHP developer currently employed by Flickr.
She says, “The great strength of PHP is not that it is easy, but why it is so. The best part about PHP is the healthy (friendly, active, productive) PHP community. If you’re just starting with PHP, you immediately have… well-maintained and easy-to-access documentation of the language through docs on php.net.”
Nelson also says the PHP community is full of “great people who are always willing to explain and help understand. Just check out the #phpc (which stands for ‘PHP community’) channel on irc.freenode.net. Even though this channel explicitly claims not to be a help channel, you will always be pointed in the right direction for whatever PHP-related problem you’re facing.” She points to PHP Planet as a great resource for and from PHP community members.
And when it comes to the language’s drawbacks, Nelson thinks it’s mostly a matter of perspective.
“These days, PHP’s biggest limitation seems to be how it’s perceived among developers. Over the years, PHP has lacked features that other languages offered out of the box. In a way, PHP is a language that’s easy to complain about. There’s the now popular complaint about the choice of the namespace separator as well as the classic annoyance with the inconsistent order of parameters in built-in functions.
“These are small things, but things that developers seem to enjoy making fun of. In reality, many of the original complaints about the language have been addressed, mitigated or outright fixed. For example, PHP now features way nicer OOP support and the wonderful Standard Public Library.”
And for those who complain about PHP’s limitations, Nelson concludes pithily, “PHP is open source for a reason — stop QQ’ing, get involved and fix it!”
PHP - NO FEAR! Lots of help available.