Archive for January, 2005

From the Internet Stock Blog, some highlights from Verisign’s conference call (VRSN):

“our mobile content services were the highlight… even without a major new market entry impacting Q4. Revenues… were up 27% sequentially, as we saw increased penetration in Europe and the initial contribution from Australia”

Clearly the U.S. market for mobile content is growing rapidly

Even if you’re not interested in the money side of things, the Internet Stock Blog has some pretty sweet tidbits and insights.

Opera Watch (The Unofficial Opera Blog) has An Interview with Opera’s Berit Hanson. It’s a good read. It sounds like Opera plans to stay true to themselves, and if you read between the lines it sounds like they have some cool things just around the corner. Opera has always been the most innovative company and browser, so this comes as no surprise.

XmlHttpRequest support coming

Professional web developers will be glad to hear that the XmlHttpRequest object will be supported in Opera 8. Here’s the relevant part of the interview:

Opera Watch: In version 8 beta of Opera, you introduced support for the XmlHttpRequest object, made famous by Gmail. Considering that it is not part of any standard, why did Opera decide to implement it? What are your thoughts in general on features not based on public standards?

Opera: In Opera’s case the support for XMLHttpRequest was built on top of our (pioneering) support for the W3C recommendation Dom Level 3 Load and Save. XMLHttpRequest is offered for backwards compatibility with existing Web sites.

XMLHttpRequest started as a proprietary extension to MSIE, then added to Mozilla but with a slightly different initialization since Mozilla didn’t support Active-X.

Opera supports both ways of initiating the XMLHttpRequest object, but we DO NOT SUPPORT Active-X, it just looks that way for the Web application, so we can work with existing Web pages written for MSIE. Active-X is not used internally, so you are not exposed to any of the typical risks with Active-X.

“RoomWizard is the first web-based series of signs for scheduling rooms and other shared spaces. Manage your shared meeting spaces from any network device or grab a room on the spot for impromptu meetings. “

As my friend Chanel said in her ping, “this is sooo damn cool: http://www.steelcase.com/na/products.aspx?f=12117“.

I’ve been meaning to comment on this, but haven’t quite got around to it. As a service to my dear readers, I’ll just rip Gary’s content, so please show him some love and go read it over there (then come back!).

If you haven’t checked out the “just released” new yellow pages from Amazon.com’s a9 you really should. It’s very cool. In a nutshell, a9 have already taken more than 20 million street-level photos (what a9 calls block views) of each and every establishment in yellow page directories for 10 U.S. metro area and associated these images with each entry. You can even virtually walk entire blocks. It will be a real attention getter for a9 and perhaps, even useful! It’s a must see for everyone but it’s far from complete at this point. You can also browse/search the yellow page directory via this url.

Again, check out Gary’s wonderful ResourceShelf.

(I’ll add that this isn’t a new idea — several European sites already offer this functionality, and a company I can’t recall used to have 360 Quicktime’s of every intersection in New York, way back in ‘99 or 2000 (please leave a comment if you remember the name of that site.)

I totally love that soooo much data floats around freely these days, thanks to the Web. Even when it doesn’t related to me personally, I like thinking that it’s perfect and crucial for somebody’s interests. Today’s example is a special report on Women from the US Census Bureau (via).

Some Factoids

• Men outnumber women through age 34; Women outnumber men after age 34, increasing with age.
• In 1970, 36 percent of women 20 to 24 and 12 percent of women 25 to 29 had not married. By 2000, the proportions rose to 69 percent and 38 percent, respectively.
• Married-couple households dropped from 69 percent of all households in 1970 to 53 percent in 2000.
• A greater percentage of women graduate high school. I greater percentage of men graduate college.
• A greater percentage of men than women are in the workforce.
• 47% of the workforce was female in 2000, up from 37% in 1970.
• The % of women in the workforce did not increase for Construction, Extraction, and Maintenance industries.
• Women continue to earn less than men. [Surprisingly to me,] Black, Hispanic and Other women earn 85% of mens pay, while White women earn only 70%.
• Poverty: 13.5% of the female population; 11.2% of the male population.

Now back to your regularly scheduled programming.

Send search results to your phone from your desktop.

Yahoo! Local released a new search feature today, allowing you to quickly send clips of search results to you phone via a free SMS text message. You can do this directly from the search results page - no page reload necessary. It couldn’t be easier:

Here’s how:

From the front page of Yahoo!, click the “Local” tab to toggle the search box, and enter a local search. (Or use http://local.yahoo.com directly.) Search for anything you’d find in a yellow pages, or anything with an address. All your saved addressed from Y!Maps and other Y! sites should be available as locations to search around.

From the search results page (SRP), click “Send to Phone” to send the listing to your phone. It’s sent via SMS I think.

The Send interface is straight forward, and let’s you enter a phone number, or select a previously used or saved mobile number. (It seems to default to whatever number you’ve registered with http://mobile.yahoo.com, though that step isn’t necessary.)

From the standard SRP view, you can click “View Results on Map” to see them graphically displayed around your search location. (Viewing results on a map is great, and also lets you quickly find nearby parking, ATMs, restaurants — even nearby public restrooms.)

From this map view, click any of the numbered representations for more information, and the option to “Send to Phone”.

Enter the recipient phone number in the same manner as from the SRP list view.

The resulting message looks something like this:

Give it a shot, it’s pretty good. (And if you haven’t played with Local search, this is the perfect opportunity.)

Congrats to my friends Chris and Jason, who were both involved with the webdev work on this.

Update: Gary Price at Search Engine Watch has an entry on this now.