Written by:
Mihai Moscovici

 

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Windows 7 and the buzz around it

Windows 7 Release Candidate 1 (RC1) will be made publicly available for download starting May 5, but the news already generated a big buzz on the web lately. The buzz is all about the great features of the conceptually new Windows 7: Windows XP Mode for Windows 7, driver compatibility between Vista and Windows 7, Windows 7 is much faster than Vista, and other multiple small, but nice changes.

The buzz around Windows 7 is also a marketing trick, as there are already discussions that XP Mode in Windows 7 is a scam, not all Vista drivers are supported in Windows 7 and for most part Windows 7 feels like Vista Second Edition. However, the marketing trick has its effect over the development process and support around the product.

Making the beta and RC1 available to millions, Windows 7 development team is able to receive huge feedback and fix an incredible amount of bugs before releasing the final product. This is what Windows 7 developers say about their feedback experience: “At the peak of the feedback cycle, we were receiving a “Send Feedback” report every 15 seconds for an entire week.” Finally, the RC1 will be used by manufacturers to adjust their driver support for Windows 7 before it is officially released as the final product.

Nothing is better than the personal experience and Propeople already tested Windows 7 Beta extensively. Thomas Sørensen, Senior Project Manager is using Windows 7 as the main OS on his computer for the last few months. Thomas described Windows 7 in just few words: “It’s much lighter and totally faster. The new navigation and interface is awesome.”

However, there are some bothering issues. The main problem is that “the beta is graphically buggy, missing some GFX drivers. Hope the final product will be 100% driver supported.” In addition to drivers, many programs that are running on Vista are not working on Windows 7. Another problem is that the system comes with IE8 preinstalled and Thomas believes “it is a shame that it comes embedded in the OS, because IE8 is not for everyone.”

Beside bugs, Windows 7 has its nice part: “Super cool and functional Office integration and very fast navigation on Toolbar makes the work process a lot smoother and easygoing” Thomas says. Finally, another new great thing about Windows 7 is the library system: “It doesn’t matter where files are placed on the hard drive u can group them by interest or filename. It’s pretty similar to iTunes library, but I liked it better.”

It seems Windows 7 is touching not only the market, but user’s hearts too. Even a high-profile tech analyst, Joe Wilcox, who describes himself as "neither Mac fanatic or Windows fanboy" said the Windows 7 beta was enough to make him switch back to PCs from the Mac.

It’s somehow premature to predict whether Windows 7 will conquer the market and outbid the competition, but it is clear that Windows 7 is already a huge step for the OS industry and for the final user experience.

Propeople expert

Martin Kulov is Microsoft department manager at Propeople with more than 10 years of experience. He is a leading expert in such technologies as WCF, VSTS, ASP.NET and IIS. Martin is member of INETA Speakers Bureau and often speaks at international events. In 2006, Martin has been awarded with the award Microsoft MVP (Most Valuable Professional) in Team System category. Feel free to contact Martin info (at) propeople . dk write "Martin" in the subject.

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Mihai Moscovici

 

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Internet invading the Eastern Europe

Internet is amazingly expanding in Europe beyond the boundaries of the high tech countries of the Western side of the continent. Since 2000, most of the Western European countries doubled or tripled their Internet usage, while Eastern Europe moved hundreds and thousands percents, and there is way to grow much more in the next years. In fact, the far Eastern Europe is the new emerging virtual field to offer opportunities and attract ventures.

When looking into the Internet Usage in Europe stats, it is incredible to see Albania to jump with such an astonishing increase of 23,100% in internet usage from 2000 to 2008. Huge numbers continue with Bosnia-Herzegovina (20,000%), Ukraine (3,250%), Macedonia (2,900%), Moldova (2,700%), Belarus (1,400%), Turkey (1,200%) and Russia (1,100%). Most of these countries have the penetration rate somewhere between 15% and 25%, which means there is room for growth and expansion.

The numbers and the potential market look promising, however despite similarity in culture, transition and attitude, Eastern Europe is yet a spectrum of different trends and opportunities. Lumping Eastern Europe together is wrong and each country require an individual approach and strategy.

Graphics: geopromining.com

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Mihai Moscovici

 

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Ecommerce open source solutions

It seems ecommerce is one of the few fields not severely affected by the global financial meltdown. Despite the financial crisis and market difficulties, ecommerce is still an industry to register increases in sales and transaction value.

The Census Bureau of the Department of Commerce estimates the U.S. retail ecommerce sales for the fourth quarter of 2008 totaled $37.1 billion, an increase of 17.3 percent from the third quarter of 2008. While the total ecommerce sales for 2008 were estimated at $133.6 billion, an increase of 4.6 percent from 2007.

Financial reports of some e-retailers surpassed analysts' forecasts. For instance Amazon’s net profit rose 9 percent, to $225 million, in the fourth quarter of 2008, up from $207 million, in the same quarter of 2007.

Furthermore, ecommerce is not only on a path for climbing profits, but also support other adherent industries such as postal services. The United Nations Universal Postal Union reports that “thanks to ecommerce, the postal sector has largely been able to stave off the slump wreaked on the global economy by the current financial crisis”.

Although analysts have cut estimates in almost every sector, including ecommerce, they agree that ecommerce will continue to see growth in 2009. According to projections from Forrester Research, U.S. online retail sales are expected to rise 11 percent to $156 billion this year, excluding revenue from travel.

Strong ecommerce trends may encourage traditional retailers to adopt an ecommerce strategy. One of the key elements of an ecommerce strategy is to choosing the right software to run the online stores. There are literally tens and hundreds ecommerce platforms, but the truth is there are quite few open source ecommerce solutions to provide virtually unlimited options and settings for any online store. We would like to share with you two of the best shopping/ecommerce platforms: Ubercart and Magento.

Ubercart is an open source/free ecommerce solution fully integrated with the leading open source content management system, Drupal. Ubercart leverages the advantages of Drupal’s major core and contributed systems, providing your users with shopping cart functionality. The benefits of using Drupal are well described in the article “Why use Drupal for ecommerce?” In addition, developers can add to or alter Ubercart features to accommodate virtually any ecommerce need. Feel free to test-drive the latest Ubercart release on a special demo site.

Magento is an open source ecommerce web application built on components of the Zend Framework. You can download Magento Community Edition for free, but this is only a limited version. If you want to have all the best features of the software, you’ll need to buy Magento Enterprise Edition. Magento may be used as a stand-alone online store or can be combined with Drupal through different modules. Test-drive Magento on the demo site.

Before moving forward to open an online store, consider exploring different ecommerce open source solutions to make sure you’ll select the one you really need and the one that will contribute to the profitability of you business.

P.S. We would really love to know your experience with an open source ecommerce solution. Please share it with us.

Graphics: Softlution

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Written by:
Mihai Moscovici

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Popular browsers around the world

Yesterday we announced on Twitter that according to some stats, Firefox 3 just became the most popular browser in Europe. This is great news for the web-development industry and for Propeople in particular, as we are a full service creative web agency. We are looking forward for users to use browsers that support all coding standards. Also, we already explained why we want to get rid of IE6.

We looked deeper into statistics to see what browsers are used in different countries and parts of the world. Here is what we came up with.

First, we discovered there are big differences in browsers usability in different part of the world. Europe is on the edge between Firefox 3 and IE7, North America is dominated by IE7 and Asia is deep into IE6 and IE7.

Second, users from different European countries prefer different browsers. For instance, in Denmark over 55% of users prefer IE7, and only about 20% use Firefox 3. We found quite the same picture in Netherlands (IE7 – 58%, FF3 – 19%), Norway (IE7 - 52%, FF3 - 23%), France (IE7 - 52%, FF3 - 27%), UK (IE7 - 49%, FF3 - 24%), Sweden (IE7 – 48%, FF3 - 23%), Italy (IE7 - 43%, FF3 - 28%).

On the opposite side, there are countries where users prefer FF3 over IE7. These countries are Germany (FF3 - 54%, IE7 - 22%), Finland (FF3 – 47%, IE7 – 29%), Poland (FF3 – 44%, IE7 - 20%), Switzerland (FF3 – 40%, IE7 – 35%), Romania (FF3 - 38%, IE7 - 21%), Bulgaria (FF3 - 35%, IE7 - 25%) and Czech Republic (FF3 – 41%, IE7 – 26%).

Overall, it seems internet users in Central and Eastern European countries mostly prefer Firefox 3, while Western Europeans like IE7.

Third, there is almost no difference in browser preferences in USA and Canada. In both countries, users prefer IE7 over FF3. However, recently Firefox 3 started to gain more ground in the US.

Finally, Asia surprised us the most. It’s incredible that Chinese (57%), South Korean (44%) and Indian (41%) users choose to browse the web using IE6. In Japan, IE7 is the most popular browser (42%), followed by IE6 (22%) and FF3 (21%). The opposite, in Indonesia and Philippines the most popular browser is Firefox 3.

We were amazed to discover a totally special case in Kazakhstan, where the most popular browser is Opera 9.6 (23%), followed by Firefox 3 (20%), IE7 (18) and IE6 (13%).

In conclusion we can certainly say there are big differences in browsers’ popularity in Europe, North America and Asia. Moreover, there are significant differences between countries within the same part of the world. Indeed, when developing a web product for a specific country, it is totally useful to observe browsers usage stats and trends in that country... because they are all different.

Data from gs.statcounter.com

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Mihai Moscovici

 

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Where is the Web heading?

It’s in human nature that people never stop looking forward to see what’s beyond the horizon. I was amazed to read an older article written by Janus Boye in 1998 where the author tries to predict what the web will look like in the near future. He does a great job to envision community, technology and usability to become the most important aspects on the web, and we all know this is exactly what happened.

Periodically it’s worth trying to foresee the new trends on the web. Foreseeing is not predicting, it is just drawing a blurry sketch for what may happen… or what would be good to happen.

Users: Communication & Interaction
Since 1998 the Web evolved into Web 2.0. Now hundreds of millions people around the world communicate and interact through social networks. There are no borders and limits to access, share and exchange information between people, while communication and interaction is the drawing force for all social networks.

Users will look for new opportunities to enhance their communication/interaction experiences on the Web. In this regards, Second Life proposed a new approach to enhance users’ communication/interaction experience, but it’s not clear yet whether users will adopt the Second Life concept as “the Web”.

Technology: Compatibility and Integration
Over the last 10 years, web technology was made simpler and more user-friendly. Now the average Internet user has all the tools to make his voice heard by millions. People are becoming “Internet Rockstars” by writing blogs, sharing their pictures and videos, adding value to the existing technology, and simply exposing their daily life.

Next Web technology needs to get smarter so it will become an intelligent assistant for the user. Intelligent technology means the data would be aggregated and processed in a way that the user will no longer need to browse tens and hundreds of pages. Technology of the next Web should be able to allow users to make sophisticated operations in matter of few clicks or short voice commands.

Web industry: Open source and Open standards
Open source is the new and the next industry model of the Web. Open source standards replaced the commercial way to develop technology and conduct business. In order to make its way into the next Web, the open source technology needs to have an improved support and training, to adopt a long term roadmap and the velocity of change.

In terms of business, open source technology will be provided for free, but the money will come into play when extra-value is needed. Open source technology will improve and more paid-features will be provided for free, and businesses will innovate in offering extra-value for money. A new business cycle emerges: businesses propose new paid features that become free as technology evolves, and again businesses have to innovate for new paid features that would eventually become free, and so on.

Conclusion: Innovation
Innovation is the key in breaking the ground on the Web. Five years ago nobody would believe that a service that allows writing 140 characters only will become one of the most popular services on the Web.

The Web never stopped innovating and surprising, and definitely will never stop. The next Web is all about innovating ideas to provide unexpected solutions for always existing problems.

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Mihai Moscovici

 

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Research about the Web

Few days ago Propeople tweeted about free access to all SAGE Journals, including such relevant domains as information science, media, marketing, and management. Being a full service creative web agency, Propeople couldn’t resist exploring the latest scholar research about and around the Web. It’s amazing how many terrific findings were stated over the last year and all of them are very practical and applicable in our work. Some of these great researches are worth sharing.

In our previous post about Creative Twitter profiles, we said one of the key factors to impress your visitors at their first visit is to have a unique and creative design of your Twitter profile. We said it based on our observation, but we also found a scientific explanation. The results of this study indicate that people make quick judgments when visiting a Web site and the most important two factors to create a favorable impression are inspiration (design) and usability of the web page.

Along with design, users pay attention and memorize the content of the page. This research suggests there are ways to improve the content in such a way that users would easier memorize the content and its elements. Specifically, researchers recommend “designers who want users to remember hyperlinks should associate those hyperlinks with content that reflects the relation between the contents on the Web pages.”

When talking about the usefulness and the impact of a campaign web site, this study concluded “that effects of campaign web sites vary across individual engagements and generally support reinforcement theory rather than mobilization theory.” In other words, a web site can have different effects on individuals, but the main fact is that a web site reinforces the message of the political candidate, rather than mobilizing supporters.

We also got to know there is no best search engine when it comes to “freshness” of the data. The results of the study sais “the best search engine in terms of up-to-dateness changes over the years and that none of the engines has an ideal solution for index freshness.” In addition, indexing is often irregular, thus causing a major problem: “the delay in making crawled pages available for searching.”

One of the great news we found for ourselves is that “students use social networks not only for leisure and personal socialization but also as a platform for more meaningful and serious deliberations”. Researches argue that employers may find young professionals over social networks and that the work environment may be improved when employees have their virtual community, especially in an international/cross-cultural company. It’s interesting that “upcoming professionals will use [social networks] far more meaningfully than current professionals do.”

Finally, we were delightful to read Niels Brügger’s (University of Aarhus, Denmark) article “Website history and the website as an object of study”. The article focuses “on the ‘website’ artifact as a medium and a text.” The author elaborates a definition of the website, and deliberates about “how the website is distinct from other possible analytical web objects (the web as a whole, web sphere, webpage and textual web element)” At the end, the researcher “outlines some of the key issues in a general discussion of website history.”

We are still browsing through the articles and continue to find new great things that are extremely useful for us as a creative web agency. The access to SAGE Online Journals is free until April 30, so you may now register on the SAGE web site and explore over 500 scholar journals to find scientifically documented data and information of your interest.

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Written by:
Mihai Moscovici

 

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Creative Twitter profiles

Twitter is simple, but having a successful Twitter experience requires more than just typing around 140 characters. Strategy, vision, continuity, openness, communication skills are all important for becoming successful, but before proving your ability you get only few seconds to impress your visitors and convince them to follow you.

There are two key factors for impressing your visitors at their first visit: your recent tweets and the design of your Twitter profile. When reading your recent tweets people may find them interesting and decide to follow you, but the best way to jump out of the crowd is to have a unique, creative, and impressive design of your Twitter profile. Believe it or not, there are literally a handful number of genuinely impressive profiles designs among millions of Twitter users.

Get inspired with these custom designed Twitter profiles and think for your own outstanding design.

@natalie


@waynesutton


@KimDeanArt


@HungryGirl


@AdrianApan


@problogger


@anousone


@gopalraju


@bartelme


@zaythar


Do you already have an outstanding Twitter profile?

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