T-mobile G1 smart phone - with Google’s Android Operating System was launched today

What is Android - Android is a software stack for mobile devices that includes an operating system, middleware and key applications. It is developed and continuously being improved by google and other programmers as its open source.

T-Mobile officially announce the first Android-powered handset on Sept. 23. Dream (or G1)  (that’s what the phone was called before the launch) sport a large touch screen that flips out to reveal a full QWERTY keyboard. The phone is now called the T-Mobile G1.

T-Mobile USA’s parent company Deutsche Telekom will also be selling the device starting in November in the United Kingdom through its T-Mobile service. And the phone will be available throughout the rest of Europe via T-Mobile starting in the first quarter of 2009.

The smartphone has built-in Wi-Fi, GPS, and is capable of using T-Mobile’s expanding 3G network. It’s expected to be on sale in mid-October, and the handset will undoubtedly have an entire industry watching it. For Google, Android is all about getting mobile users on the Internet where the search company can use its expertise to provide a better user experience. The operating system is royalty-free so hardware manufacturers can potentially spend their money on better hardware or on research and development.

Additionally, Google wants to make it easier for mobile users to download and add applications to their mobile devices like they can on a PC. The open source nature will potentially allow others to improve the software, like with the desktop Linux. The Linux-based open source platform and the Google-backed Open Handset Alliance are seeking to merge the openness of the Internet with the mobile space.

Android’s Demo

G1 offers an experience that is hard to match on other smartphones. Google applications, such as Gmail and Google Search have been tightly integrated into the phone’s directory, making it easy and intuitive to quickly send e-mails or forward Web links to contacts. The G1 also has embedded GPS capability that allows users to get Google Maps Street View on their phones. An internal compass even allows users to navigate and see where they’re going by moving the phone in different directions. But when it comes to actually making an impact on the market in terms of sales, T-Mobile and Google will have their work cut out for them. Without corporate e-mail support, it’s unlikely the phone will take a significant market share away from the market leaders in the U.S., RIM and Windows Mobile, at least in the near term.

“Not everyone who is interested in having a smartphone wants to check e-mail all the time. The G1 is about bringing the Web experience onto a phone and letting people do things with their phone they couldn’t do before.”
Leslie Grandy, VP of product development, T-Mobile USA

Strategy Analytics predict the Android smartphone will capture 4% of the U.S. smartphone market in the fourth quarter. This represents about 400,000 units sold, and it is a healthy figure considering the handset’s not expected to go on sale until the middle of the quarter.

No more Amazon and ebay, here comes Swaptree - swap items for free

Swaptree is an amazing service. It is a new and innovative way for people to easily trade the books, cds, dvds and video games they are finished with, for the ones they want, all for free.  With swaptree, your collections stop gathering dust and can be used to acquire other items you want.

All you do is list stuff you want to get rid of, create another list of stuff you want and, with any luck, you can make a few successful trades. You first notice that Swaptree is different from other systems when you enter an item that you’re putting up for trade. Swaptree shows you exactly what you can get for it. Enter more items, and the list of things you can get expands. I am looking forward to joining its network.

swaptree.com

Swaptree is founded by Greg Boesel and this site is now creeping out of superstealth mode with a new take on e-commerce. Its high-tech bartering system lets consumers get the goods they want without paying a dime. This is not the first website to try online bartering, Peerflix, Bookins, and La La help people trade movies, books, and CDs, respectively, while SwapThing lets users combine goods, cash, and services.

“Swapping is a much simpler transaction,” says Scot Wingo, CEO of ChannelAdvisor, which helps companies sell on eBay and other sites. “You get the same result as you would selling a videogame to some guy in Maine just to get cash to buy another game.”

And the most important question - How does Swaptree make money? … Well It’s planning to survive solely by selling ads.

So you think SwapTree will take off some of the amazon and ebay customers and affect there business … you can leave your comments  - what do you think of swaptree and will it survive? …

Making iframes content Web accessible for screen readers

Recently I was working on a web project which was extensively using iframes for dynamically displaying a lot of content. The initiating action was Mouse click by the user. I was reading the content from an XML file using javascript and was displaying the info in an iframe.

Now my biggest concern was to send a notification to screen readers to start reading only the dynamically loaded part of the page. While doing some research on the internet I found 2 extremely good articles on accessibility using javascript and AJAX.

This article explains the impact of device dependent event handlers on accessibility and how this can be gracefully handled by using device independent event handlers.

http://www.webaim.org/techniques/javascript/eventhandlers.php

Event handlers accompany existing HTML code and are triggered by a browser or user event - such as when the page loads, when the user clicks the mouse, or when the time is 8 p.m. Some event handlers are dependent upon use of a mouse or keyboard. These are called device dependent event handlers. Other event handlers are device independent and are triggered by both the mouse and keyboard or by other means. Using device dependent event handlers may cause the content to be inaccessible to someone that is not able to use the device that is required for that specific event handler.

The second article explains about screen readers and how screen readers and accessibility tools like Jaws and Window-Eyes work. This article also explains about measures that can be taken to let screen readers talk to dynamic content that is generated using AJAX, as and when its updated.

http://juicystudio.com/article/making-ajax-work-with-screen-readers.php

 To understand the issues behind ensuring that Ajax is accessible to screen readers, it’s essential to have an understanding of how screen readers work. To allow screen reader users to read and interact with web content, screen readers take a snapshot of the web page, and place this content in a virtual buffer. The screen reader uses the virtual buffer to allow the user to navigate the content. Without the virtual buffer, the screen reader only has access to the parts of the page that are focusable by non-assistive user agents, such as anchors and interface elements. Without the virtual buffer, the user cannot interact with other elements and their child nodes in the content, such as images, lists, tables, and so on. Screen readers have their own specific name for the virtual buffer, such as Virtual Focus mode in Supernova, but they essentially do the same job.

Now lets come back to my problem of making the content of iframes readable by screen readers when user clicks on a particular link. ECMAScript focus method can be used to place focus to the part of the page that has changed. For this to work, the target element needs to be an element that can receive focus. In HTML (and XHTML) the only elements that can receive focus are the a, area, button, input, object, select, and textarea elements. I used a read only text area and gave it focus as soon as its loaded. 

I used the following code in the iframe - 

<html>

<head>

<title>Coolwebdeveloper.com</title>

</head>

<body leftmargin=”0″ topmargin=”0″>

<form id=”formBody” name=”formBody”>

<textarea id=”txtarea” name=”txtarea” readonly tabindex=”-1″ wrap=”hard”>

TEST

</textarea>

</form>

<script language=”javascript” type=”text/javascript”>

window.onload = function() {

document.formBody.txtarea.focus();

}

</script>

</body>

</html>

Text area gets focus as soon as the iframe is loaded and that makes the screen readers start reading the content within that text area. This was fuly tested with JAWS screen reader and works absolutely fine for accessibility testing.

This is MK signing off for tonight from coolwebdeveloper.com

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Online Marketing strategy lessons learnt from 2008 Presidential campaign.

The 2008 US presidential campaign is a perfect example of superior marketing strategy and return of investments in the form of collected dollars from voters and business houses. Funds raised online is also an amazing example of the reach of Internet and its potential.

I am sure people managing those campaigns have to constantly adjust or change there offerings and messages in the same way we online marketers manage our online ads and keywords to reach a larger and targeted audience.

Following are some of the marketing strategies that can be learnt from the 2008 presidential campaign and can be brought into use for our day to day online marketing efforts. It really doesnt matter be it a BLOG, an online store or a business directory, the marketing strategies are almost the same at broader level with different paths separating as we move further and deeper into different streams and / or businesses.

• Monitor your competition - Just like presidentail campaigns I would start by monitoring the competiotion both past and present.You can get a lot more info by studyig any successfull campaigns in the past. A lot of case studies are available online. Have a look at there online presence. The kind of tools yur competition is using. The affiliate programs that your competition is using.
• Campaign Planning - You must spend some time laying out a proper plan or road map of your entire campaign. Search about yourcompetition online and keep logs of all your findings. I personally find it very helpfull to write down all the wonderfull ideas or at leat save them to a file on yor computer. Online marketers must have an ongoing plan to continue to raise their visibility and engage prospects. If you are new to Online Marketing I would suggest you not to put any money while learning, you can get a lot of free promotions on the web or with your hosting that canprovide you free adwords. Use those adwords to run campaigns - you will never learn unless you jump in the market and this is a good and risk free way of doing this.
• Sufficient Funding and set your budgets - This is very important. I remember during my initial days I had a tight budget and Istarted bidding on most expensive keywords. So keep in mind - stick to your budget, keep a low daily spending limit and concentrate on increasing your impressions initialy. And last but very important DO NOT BID ON EXPENSIVE KEYWORDS, pick up related keywords e.g. if you are marketing for hosting, you can pick up a keywords say - “how to host a blog” instead of bidding on “web hosting”. Budget your campaign and stick to the spending as planned. Among the factors to assess are the number of potential prospects reached and the number of prospects converted to sales, as well as total costs, total revenue, and relevant ratios.
• Change your campaign as per the need - Just as candidates must modify their platform to meet the public needs, online marketersmust consider whether to adjust messaging to reach the appropriate audience. If your campaign is not working, try creating new ad groups, try changing your keywords. Spend at least one hour everyday trying different combinations.
• Base your marketing strategy on the basis of target markets - Keep in mind the kind of audience that you are catering to.People living in different countries, states or even cities might have a very different way of looking at advertising or life to that matter. You will be surprised how people and there spending and web surfing behavior differ based on the area.
• Debate other campaigns - From an online marketing perspective, this is akin to comparison shopping. How does your product standup to the competition’s?
• Build a base of advocates - In politics, this consists of other elected officials and highly visible people who support thecandidate. Online marketers must attract advocates as well. They can use well-known celebrities, blogs, marketing gurus or enthusiastic customers to promote their brands.
• Act quickly to turn any moment into an opportunity - It’s critical to react promptly and decisively to issues that maystimulate consumers. Where possible, online marketers should consider alternatives that enable you to create purchase opportunities. e.g. Blog gurus John Chow and BLOG Mastermind Coach Yaro Starakvisited Toronto at LIVE restaurant about a month ago. Me and one of my friends not only attended that event but also write articles on our visit and experiences. And this resulted in creation of Dot Com Food Toronto, a toronto bloggers club. Noe we share our ideas and experiences blogging and learn new ways of online marketing,. And not to mention that post did created a lot of traffic as we were listed on John Chow’s web site.

So these were a few lessons that we can learn from 2008 presidential campaign. This is your friend MK signing off for tonight from coolwebdeveloper.com

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What is ASP.NET Full trust hosting? and A few good Full trust hosting plans.

In my previous post titled Install dasBlog, you need Full trust hosting I have talked about installing ASP.NET blog (dasBlog) and why it requires FULL TRUST hosting.

Today we will talk more about - What is full trust hosting and what is modified full trust hosting? A lot of web developers building web applications turn to web hosting companies to host their website. Web hosting companies offer a variety of plans.

Two type of plans largely offered are -

1. Shared web hosting or Shared plans
2. Dedicated web hosting or Dedicated plans

Shared plans, are the most economical and practical for low-traffic websites, can have anywhere from 25 to 150 separated websites hosted from the same web server. When hosting multiple websites on the same server, it is important that one website cannot affect or harm another site. For example, both the web hosting company and its customers want to prevent one website from, say, reading the connect string information from Web.config of another website.

Microsoft’s ASP.NET web technology / language allows for web hosting companies to define trust levels, which dictate what operations are permitted by ASP.NET applications. A web hosting company can either use one of the preset trust levels - Full, High, Medium, Low, or Minimal - or can create a custom trust level.

Full trust is the default, allows ASP.NET applications to execute native code, to read from the Registry and Windows Event Log, and to read and write to files outside of the application’s virtual directory. In short, with full trust one web application could delete the entire contents of another web application.

WebHost4Life.com (Click HERE to visit) (WebHost4Life.com is what I use and have been using it for last 4 years now with no problems and provides a fantastic customer support)

I am satisfied with both WebHost4Life.com and Alentus. The only reason I am using 2 different hostings is because I am linking between my existing sites and Google crawlers dont give a very good search ranking if your linked sites are on the same server.

Now most web hosting companies run in medium trust, which greatly reduces the potential for harm by limiting the set of operations an ASP.NET application can perform. But Medium trust will place a number of restrictions on an application, including limiting an application’s file access to within the virtual directory where the application lives. While the protection granted by medium trust is reassuring, its limited functionality can be a cause of worry for developers. There are a lot of web applications and components in the market which do require full trust to work as desired.

Now what will happen, in this scenario. In this case a lot of web hosts run the web applications as modified full trust, which is a modified version of full trust and web hosting companies block certain modules or permissions of full trust. e.g. you can change this full trust to be effective only for the needed functionality (or vice versa, disable it for the File IO). This can be done through the .NET Framework Configuration tools on the server (caspol.exe etc) but it will require some additional setup.

Also, there are ways of allowing applications run in full trust while still keeping them in a sandbox. Many respectable shared hosts do allow this as its required for applications like FlexWiki, but is something that must be requested.

Here is a list of ASP.NET web hosting companies providing modified FULL TRUST HOSTING service or modified Medium trust hosting service or running the server in a sand box.

WebHost4Life.com (Click HERE to visit)

Alentus (Click HERE to visit) [A publicly traded company in Canada]

(WebHost4Life.com is what I use and have been using it for last 4 years now with no problems and provides a fantastic customer support)

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