12 reasons Chrome OS will fail
Yesterday, Google held a press conference at its Mountain View headquarters to provide the world with an update on its new operating system, Chrome OS.
A lot of new details were forthcoming, which have have been well-covered by others. The questions on everyone's mind: is Chrome OS the real deal? Where does it fit in? How will it impact the OS market. My answers: it isn't, nowhere, it won't. Here are 12 reasons why Chrome OS is going to fail.
How can etailers handle the Christmas rush?
Over the past year, we've seen a couple of examples of well known e-commerce sites being unable to cope with traffic spikes, mainly caused by sales.
This time last year, Debenham's website went down for around 24 hours thanks to the weight of sales traffic, while the Next website had to implement a queuing system in July thanks to a traffic spike.
But what can online retailers do to avoid such problems?
Load time: coming soon as a Google ranking factor?
Google's algorithm looks at a significant number of ranking factors when it decides where a site should be in the SERPs. These ranking factors, and the weight they're each given, change over time.
Last week at PubCon, Google's Matt Cutts revealed a new ranking factor that may debut in 2010: page load time.
ACTA could be the worst thing for the internet - ever
If the leaks that have been released in the past day are to be believed, the internet may be facing its biggest threat yet: the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). The negotiators who are sitting down behind closed doors today to iron out this international trade agreement have the internet on their mind.
And that's not a good thing.
Got traffic? Yahoo has a gift for you
If your website gets massive traffic, or you are building a new website and can't sleep at night because you're worried that you will, Yahoo wants to help. And it doesn't want anything in return, except maybe your love.
On Tuesday, Yahoo will announce that it has open sourced Traffic Server, the HTTP web proxy cache it uses internally to serve up millions upon millions of requests to its users on a daily basis in an efficient manner.
Amazon's cloud grows in size
Amazon is flying high. While the online retailer is still pulling in the vast majority of its revenue from retail, it has also become one of the biggest players in the cloud computing space.
And Amazon's cloud is only growing in size. Yesterday it announced that it will be launching a new relational database as a service called Amazon RDS and a new range of high-memory instances of Amazon EC2.
Cloud #fail: Sidekick data loss sideswipes T-Mobile customers
The past week hasn't been good for T-Mobile and Microsoft subsidiary, Danger. An apparent hardware failure has left hundreds of thousands of T-Mobile's customers using Sidekick phones without access to the data services that are relied upon to deliver almost all of their mobile services, including address books and calendars.
The news doesn't get any better for those customers who don't have the data stored on their devices: it may all be gone. While reports are coming in indicating that data has been restored for some users, rumors have also circulated which claim no working backups are available.
Q&A: Dane Atkinson, CEO of Squarespace
Before the company's Twitter marketing campaign went viral, Squarespace wasn't a brand known to many. But the company has experienced rapid growth building a niche in the competitive market for content management solutions/publishing platforms. And it has done it by doing something many others have avoided: charging users.
I spoke with Squarespace CEO Dane Atkinson about the company, its success with a paid business model and what ROI the company's viral Twitter marketing campaign produced.
WordPress attack catches bloggers off guard, but it shouldn't have
Over the weekend, reports surfaced of a seemingly widespread attack targeting older versions of the popular blogging software WordPress. The attack leaves WordPress installations severely compromised and appears to be part of a campaign to spread spam and malicious code.
Numerous bloggers found themselves victims. One of those bloggers was popular tech personality Robert Scoble. He claims that two months of his blog's content was lost and that his site was booted from Google's index because of malicious code that had been inserted (ouch).
Is the cloud a weakling?
The cloud is all the rage today. For online business owners and startup entreprenurs, the cloud is often pitched as a low entry cost solution to many scalability challenges. Just throw your web application into the cloud and pay as you grow.
But does the cloud deliver? According to researchers at the University of New South Wales, the cloud may not be all that it's cracked up to be. When put to stress tests, cloud computing solutions offered by Amazon, Google and Microsoft showed some weaknesses.
Social media: the best and worst of 2009
Email marketing: six steps to improving customer engagement in 2010
Web 2.0
Graham Charlton
Strategy & Planning
