Web developers: OpenX, the ad server software company, wants you!
Sep 29, 2008 by Mircea Goia MyTestBox News
OpenX, the well known open source ad server software company, is looking to hire experienced open source web developers.They have several projects and wants developers with proven experience extending open source content management systems or analytics tools.
One big appeal: the location of the developers doesn’t matter! The work can be done remotely (I don’t know if you will be paid for this so you have to ask).
If you are interested then email to tellme@openx.org (include a summary of your experience and some details of one project you worked on and think it demonstrate experience in extending a CMS or analytics application).
If you know a friend or someone interested you can forward this offer to him/her. More of their blog.
We, at MyTestBox.com, have reviewed OpenX ad server software here. We found it to be a very good choice if you want to “take control of your advertising”.
OpenX is well-funded (21 million dollars to date) and is set to become one of the leaders in ad serving software field.
Sphere: Related Content
Tags: ad management, ad server, advertising, analytics tool, cms, hiring, maxmediamanager, mysql, open-source, openads, openx, php, phpads, phpadsnew, software, web developers
US Senate passes intellectual property bill (this interests software makers as well)
Sep 26, 2008 by Mircea Goia MyTestBox News
According to Associated Press US Senate just passed, unanimously, the intellectual property bill (today – Friday, September 26).
This would give the Justice Department more resources to combat intellectual property theft, including patent and trademark infringement, counterfeiting and copyright crimes.
This bill also would authorize funding for federal and local law enforcement to fight intellectual property theft and expand the scope of things that could be seized in a criminal case.
The legislation would create a new position in the executive office of the president to coordinate enforcement of intellectual property rights across federal agencies and departments.
“Intellectual property makes up some of the most valuable, and most vulnerable, property we have,” Patrick Leahy (Judiciary Committee Chairman) said in a statement. “We need to do more to protect it from theft and abuse if we hope to continue being a world leader in innovation.”
That sentiment was echoed by the Copyright Alliance, a nonprofit group whose members include the Business Software Alliance, the National Association of Broadcasters, the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America. Member companies include software, media and communications companies like Microsoft Corp., AT&T Inc., News Corp., Time Warner Inc. and Walt Disney Co.
“We can look forward to U.S. artists and creators maintaining their leading role in the world of producing creative works that enrich our culture and drive our economy,” the Copyright Alliance said in a statement hailing the bill. That applies to software creators as well.
There’s is a concern that this bill will favor more large media companies and the public-interest advocacy group Public Knowledge is worried about that, especially that the bill would allow a court to order the forfeiture of any property used in an infringement.
That could include servers owned by Internet service providers or Internet companies.
Tags: copyright, intellectual property bill, media, software, US senate
Cloud computing, grid computing, utility computing – list of top providers
Sep 22, 2008 by Mircea Goia Miscellaneous
Everyone can build a website, but not not everyone can build a good and popular website. If you can pull it off, you can enjoy benefits like building something people are using, recognition and – sometimes – money. It can be a good business, even your full time job. But bad things can happen, and you should be prepared for it. One of those things (well, actually this is not a bad thing!) is to have spikes in traffic… maybe as a result of getting on Digg.com, Reddit.com, Google News, or another major media outlet frontpage… or getting reviewed by Techcrunch or another major technology blog.
You want to be prepared for this, but you don’t want to spend tons of money on it. For example, having your own dedicated server costs more than a shared hosting account and requires you to have knowledge to administer it. Maybe you don’t have the knowledge or you don’t want to become a server administrator…and don’t have money to hire one. Even having your own dedicated server doesn’t guarantee it will survive the hordes of visitors coming from those major media outlets (having more than one dedicated server would help tremendously, but the cost also increases).
Imagine having the power of tens or hundreds of servers for the cost of a several shared hosting accounts. Sounds fantastic, right? Well, now it’s possible.
Welcome to the world of “cloud computing!” (or “grid computing” or “utility computing”, which are terms for the same thing).
What is “cloud computing?”
As Wikipedia describes it in technical terms:
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Cloud computing is often confused with grid computing (a form of distributed computing whereby a “super and virtual computer” is composed of a cluster of networked, loosely-coupled computers, acting in concert to perform very large tasks), utility computing (the packaging of computing resources, such as computation and storage, as a metered service similar to a traditional public utility such as electricity) and autonomic computing (computer systems capable of self-management). Indeed many cloud computing deployments are today powered by grids, have autonomic characteristics and are billed like utilities, but cloud computing can be seen as a natural next step from the grid-utility model. Some successful cloud architectures have little or no centralised infrastructure or billing systems whatsoever including Peer to peer networks like BitTorrent and Skype and volunteer computing like SETI@home.
The architecture:
The majority of cloud computing infrastructure currently consists of reliable services delivered through next-generation data centers that are built on compute and storage virtualization technologies. The services are accessible anywhere in the world, with The Cloud appearing as a single point of access for all the computing needs of consumers. Commercial offerings need to meet the quality of service requirements of customers and typically offer service level agreements. Open standards and open source software are also critical to the growth of cloud computing.
Characteristics:
As customers generally do not own the infrastructure, they are merely accessing or renting, they can forego capital expenditure and consume resources as a service, paying instead for what they use. Many cloud computing offerings have adopted the utility computing model which is analogous to how traditional utilities like electricity are consumed, while others are billed on a subscription basis. By sharing “perishable and intangible” computing power between multiple tenants, utilization rates can be improved (as servers are not left idle) which can reduce costs significantly while increasing the speed of application development. A side effect of this approach is that “computer capacity rises dramatically” as customers do not have to engineer for peak loads. Adoption has been enabled by “increased high-speed bandwidth” which makes it possible to receive the same response times from centralized infrastructure at other sites.
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Or, put more simply, (Om Malik’s way), cloud computing means that the applications are running somewhere in the “cloud” (whether an internal network or the Internet). We, as users, don’t know and don’t care. Done right, cloud computing allows developers to develop, deploy and run applications that can easily grow in capacity (scalability), work rapidly (performance), and never – or at least rarely – fail (reliability), all without any concern as to the nature and location of the underlying infrastructure.
One pioneer who helped tremendously in developing the concept of virtualization/cloud computing was VMWare (now a public company). Others followed soon after (including Microsoft).
In a previous article we have presented a list of content delivery networks from around the world.
Let’s now present a list of companies which offers cloud computing/grid computing/utility computing.
Sphere: Related ContentTags: cloud computing, grid computing, infrastructure, low cost computing, scalability, utility computing, virtualization
Pandora’s iPhone Mobile Ad Platform launched today: Best Buy and Becks nab first positions
Sep 22, 2008 by Mircea Goia MyTestBox News
With over 1 Million iPhone application downloads, Pandora’s mobile ad platform is ready for prime time!
But for now you have to wait in line: Best Buy and Beck’s beer signed the #1 and #2 premiere contracts for Pandora’s iPhone ad platform (the contracts secure their rights to be the exclusive advertisers on the new mobile platform: Best Buy for the first thirty days, Beck’s for the subsequent thirty days).
Today, September 22, when users launch the Pandora application on their iPhone, iPhone 3G, and iPod touch, the Best Buy campaign will be activated and will be the first beneficiary of Pandora’s hugely successful iPhone application which still hovers around the #3 most popular application in Apple’s App Store (1,1 million downloads so far since July 11, reaching one out every ten iPhone and iPhone 3G).
With their respective campaigns, Best Buy and Beck’s will be the first to tap the highly attractive and affluent demographics of Pandora’s registered iPhone users who are predominantly male and aged 36 on average. Among all iPhone users, they skew somewhat older with a higher than average household income and wield greater purchasing influence among their family members and friends.
Pandora’s iPhone ad platform also has the ability to hyper-target audiences for highly relevant and personalized marketing communications, such as by gender, age, geographic location, music genre and day part listening.
“We’re thrilled that Best Buy and Becks are our first advertisers on our iPhone mobile platform,” said Cheryl Lucanegro, vice president of advertising sales for Pandora.
“Through diligent product development and research, we figured out what works best online to generate a high level of engagement and response for marketers while enhancing the user experience at the same time. Our goal is to translate this knowledge, advertising philosophy and product development schema to the mobile platform.”
“As we see users react and engage with the Pandora iPhone platform, we’ll develop and launch new advertising products consistent with this strategy that increasingly leverage the mobile experience,” added Lucanegro.
According to Nielsen Media’s Q1, 2008 research data on iPhone users, they represent the best of the advertising targets groups:
- 25-34 years old
- 55-64 years old
These two age groups tend to spend more:
- 36% have a monthly phone bill of more than $100
- a full sixteen percentage points higher than the average American mobile user and love their music
- 75% use the iPod function on their iPhone, second only to email at 76%
The Morgan Stanley Rubicon report (March, 2008) also found that 10% of iPhone users buy something from iTunes daily and that their ownership of more than one mobile phone places them at the leading edge of consumers driving the wireless industry.
About Pandora
Pandora (www.pandora.com) is a personalized internet radio and music discovery service available anytime and anywhere on the PC, in the home, and on mobile devices via partnerships with AT&T, Apple and Sprint. Listeners can simply enter a favorite song or artist, and instantly launch a personalized listening experience which includes discovery of new bands, artists and songs.
Today, Pandora has a growing user base of more than sixteen million registered listeners, a database of over 550,000 songs, and national advertisers such as HP, Microsoft, Honda, Procter and Gamble, and Nike.
Tags: 3G, ad platform, advertising, becks, best buy, iphone, ipod, mobile, online music, pandora
Magento Commerce continues to gain momentum (450,000+ downloads to date)
Sep 20, 2008 by Mircea Goia MyTestBox News
The latest release of Magento, Version 1.1.6, was released this week and contained updates to the admin, a new design Skin and more. To coincide with the availability of 1.1.6, the Magento Team at Varien also released a new Blank Theme to assist designers in creating new custom themes for Magento.Version 1.1.6 is now available for download and includes a few great updates, along with bug fixes which are listed in the release notes. Version 1.1.6 is a continuation of the Version 1.1.5 release.
Version 1.1.6 includes an update to the category management tool which allows store owners to more efficiently manage a large number of categories. This feature can be tested on our demo admin site. The release also comes with a new skin, Blue Skin, which can be seen on the demo frontend site.
As a reminder, they do not recommend upgrading directly on a live environment. For more information on the release please see their blog announcement.
To coincide with the availability of Magento 1.1.6, we have also made a new Blank Theme available via MagentoConnect.
With ‘Blank Theme‘ the Magento team answers the call of numerous community members out there who’s been inquiring about an extra light theme to use as a basis for theme customization. With this theme we’ve removed all the custom CSS formerly used in Default and Modern Theme, and replaced them with minor typography and positioning CSS assignments.
References to the class names were left in the CSS files to provide a solid starting ground for designers/developers. Markups were also revisited and cleaned up in theme-level.
Download, customize, and enjoy the new ultra light Magento theme!
Sphere: Related ContentTags: ecommerce, magento, open-source, php, platform, software
Web Help Desk software is integrated now with Apple Remote Desktop
Sep 17, 2008 by Mircea Goia MyTestBox News
MacsDesign Studio LLC, the developers the Web Help Desk (the leading cross-platform help desk software solution), announced today the integration with Apple Remote Desktop 3, Apple’s award-winning desktop management system for Mac OS X.
The easy access to ARD information and instant remote control connectivity from within the Web Help Desk promises to boost technician productivity and raise the bar on customer satisfaction.
A scheduled or on-demand import of asset discovery data directly from the ARD database to the Web Help Desk provides support professionals with the critical, up-to-date asset information required to efficiently resolve service requests. This new integration makes Apple Remote Desktop 3 asset data available to any web browser through one centralized web application.
Web Help Desk’s integration with Apple Remote Desktop 3 makes initiating an ARD control session a simple mouse click away. Technicians can instantly access all of ARD’s features and benefits from a Web Help Desk ticket or asset view.
Hopefully, they will add even more features in the future making it better. We, here at MyTestBox, will review this help desk software soon.
Sphere: Related ContentTags: apple remote desktop, customer support, email support, java servlet, mysql, open-source, software, tomcat, web help desk
Content Delivery Networks (CDN) – a comprehensive list of providers
Sep 10, 2008 by Mircea Goia Miscellaneous
Yes, we build web applications…and there are plenty of them around. Some are or will be presented here on MyTestBox.com. Now, if we hit the jackpot and our application becomes very popular, traffic goes up, and our servers are brought down by the hordes of people coming to our website. What do we do then?
Of course, I am not talking here about the kind of traffic Digg, Yahoo Buzz or other social media sites can bring to a website, which is temporary overnight traffic, or a website which uses cloud computing like Amazon EC2 service, MediaTemple Grid Service or Mosso Cloud Hosting service.
I am talking about traffic that consistently increases over time as the service achieves success. Google.com, Yahoo.com, Myspace.com, Facebook.com, Plentyoffish.com, Linkedin.com, Youtube.com and others are examples of services which have constant high traffic.
Knowing that users want speed from their applications, these services will always use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to deliver that speed.
What is a Content Delivery Network?
A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a collection of web servers distributed across multiple locations to deliver content more efficiently to users. The server selected for delivering content to a specific user is typically based on a measure of network proximity. For example, the server with the fewest network hops or the server with the quickest response time is chosen. This will help scaling a web application by taking a part of the load from the service servers.
You can find more about CDNs here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_Delivery_Network
Some large services use their own Content Delivery Networks, but sometimes it is more effective to use a third-party CDN provider. Plentyoffish.com, for example, uses a third-party CDN (it can’t afford to have its own CDN). Both Myspace.com and Friendster.com also use a CDN.
You can see in the image below how Peer1 Networks from Canada has its own CDN setup. This kind of setup is applicable to most of the Content Delivery Networks infrastructure.
There’s an inflation of services which offer content delivery solutions and venture capitalists still pump money into more CDN solutions.
Sphere: Related ContentTags: CDN, content delivery networks, content delivery solution, infrastructure, list, storage delivery
Security update from WordPress: version 2.6.2
Sep 9, 2008 by Mircea Goia MyTestBox News
If you have a blog and allow open registration, then you definitely need to upgrade to this version!
There’s a security hole in the actual version of WordPress which allows an attacker to randomly change passwords of other registered users (done by crafting an username). The passwords won’t be revealed to the attacker himself, but it is annoying for users to have their passwords changed suddenly. This attack, coupled with a weakness in the random number seeding in mt_rand(), could be used to predict the randomly-generated password (which is not something you want).
Stefan Esser brought the attack to the attention of the WordPress team, which also helped them fix another problem (SQL Column truncation danger and weakness of mt_rand() ).
The new version of WordPress also has a handful of bug fixes (checkout the forum). See the full changeset and list of changed files.
To keep up with WordPress development, checkout their blog.
Sphere: Related ContentTags: blog, blog software, open-source, security, version, wordpress
ZenCart – open source professional ecommerce software solution review
Sep 1, 2008 by Veiko Herne E-commerce
Zen Cart (or ZenCart) www.zencart.com has been developed by group of professionals from Newcastle, England, Cleveland, Ohio and Ontario, Canada. It’s not a simple shopping cart module, but truly professional ecommerce store management platform (named also a shopping cart system) with newsletters, coupons, gift certificates, etc more capable to run Amazon type of stores than small websites with thousands of products allowing unlimited category depth and site search.
Even if Zen Cart comes with one standard outlook, there is several free sites and commercial stores (algozone.com, zen-cart-templates.ichoze.net, zencarttemplates.info, www.templatemonster.com/zencart-templates.php, themestock.com) available to give your store a custom outlook.
Installation and store setup
ZenCart shopping cart installation went smoothly, however the system complaint again several PHP setting parameters like register_globals=on (had to create separate php.ini for those), and even I didn’t had secure server protocol purchased to my hosting account, I was able to complete the installation with some simple steps.
There were eight editable pages from the administration module to customize the site layout using pure HTML language or JavaScript based Rich text editor, the side box content can be set on and off and their sort order can be modified. The software which I installed was with “Contemporary Classic Green” and English language but additional templates and languages can be purchased and downloaded.
The administration module is extremely broad and from first look, I was little bit confused where to start.Defining the products should be most reasonable step to start and as those are belonging to categories, those should be defined first. For SEO purposes, you are able to define your own Meta tags (title, keywords and description) for the category and build category tree structure.
Sphere: Related ContentTags: e-commerce software, online store, open-source, php, review, zencart
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