With intelligence gathering, profiling and just general snooping a favoured water-cooler topic, more and more people have been giving consideration to the way they do their business (personal and work) online. One of these considerations has been in how they search and where they search.

Search engine DuckDuckGo has been around for a while and is one of those resources those in the know have always been a bit reluctant to share in the fear it may attract the wrong kinds of attention and perhaps lose it’s appeal. Yet, this week more and more people certainly appear to be more aware of it, after recording a best ever week of traffic – albeit still not a patch on Google and Bing.

The operation which bills [no pun intended] itself as an escape from the data-tracking search engines like Google and Bing promotes itself as an anonymous search that helps you escape from or indeed avoid the filter bubble an give you clear and natural search results.

Have you used DuckDuckGo? How have you found it? Could it every really compete with Google?

At a time when more and more video is being watched on smartphones and mobile devices then it is also perhaps not surprising that one of the most recent ventures into this market is a smartphone add-on from Japanese company ChatPerf. At present it comes as a plug-in for iPhone less than the size of a USB stick to fit well  with its parent handset (Android versions are expected later this year).

Contained within the clip-on is a capsule of scent. Activated by electronic impulses through the standard Apple 30pin socket the scent can be released with a puff of smell literally at the touch of a button on the phone’s screen and possibly via a trigger within game-play on the smartphone. At present the scent tank can hold just a single smell but the company is confident capsules could be designed to hold multiple scents.

The company are set to release an SDK toolkit and are calling for developers to get involved to help them discover the true potential of the module and also whether or not there really is a market for smell-o-vision of of it is just forever confined to the world of cartoon concept.

What do you think? Could smellovision ever really take off? Is the sense of smell too complicated to be catered to via technology alone?

In fact according to International Data Corporation (IDC) gamers will spend more money on mobile and tablet games this year than they will on handheld games, and that is a massive market – IDC predict the mobile and handheld market will have a value of near US$23 billion by 2017. However, the differential in price cost is likely to mean handheld gaming will still be around for a while yet. Although the add-on purchase model and regular special additions has increased the revenue options, the smaller costs of mobile games means the spend per handheld user far surpasses that of the mobile user.

Ironically, the report from IDC suggests that handheld gaming companies could learn how to increase reach and profitability from the freemium business model that has been so influential in offering ‘tasters’ to the gaming community via mobile markets.

For those with a technical bent, the switch to mobile gaming also offers a greater opportunity to get involved in new markets. Whereas routes to market for a new game developer in the handheld sector are very limited, the mobile gaming market is effectively open to all and certainly far more accessible. While the majority of the top downloads are dominated by big name development companies, there is opportunity for smaller companies and even start-ups to get involved, which is perhaps part behind the success of mobile gaming with more competition breeding greater creatives.

Have you dabbled in the world of mobile games creation? Had you previously considered handheld game production? Is there really ‘profit’ to be made in the busy mobile gaming market?

Official launched on 20 March this year, it had been used by some as Momento and is now available as an Android app in the Google Play application store and as a web application via Google Drive.

It’s not much different from existing apps like Evernote and Remember the Milk, but it is Google and that integration, trust and reliability (bar the outage earlier today of Google apps of course!) is likely to mean Google Keep is here for Keeps.

Check it out yourself.

1. Search engines love them

Possibly because of the constantly updated content from a variety of authors, forums still regularly appear high up in the search charts, which suggests those in the know about traffic etc also believe forums still have a big role to play. Controversially, may I also suggest it is heavily down to the fact that nobody is posting SEO optimised content. They are just posting naturally and what they are writing is being indexed with high rankings organically. Perhaps proof that too much thinking about keywords and SEO can be dangerous and the fact that content really is king.

2. They are there to help

And so are the people that frequent them. They are the experts and the people often with the most knowledge in the field, so if you need to ask a question where better place to ask? Obviously, there is a risk that if you don’t study the forum first, or perhaps read the FAQs or thread headings properly, that you could be shot down by a few, but that’s general courtesy that if you come to a party you at least know what the party is about and who is there. This same reason also applies if you have a new project in the offing. Don’t just turn up on a forum and start touting your wares, but if you are already an active member of a community you will find many will be keen to help road-test any beta-versions of your project, offer feedback and possibly advice and suggestions too.

3. They understand trends before they start

Again if you are planning a new launch, check out relevant forums first. If these are populated by thought leaders, what they are talking about could be very relevant to how you skew your product or even just your launch. While all social media offers this sort of opportunity, high volume posters on forums tend to be the right audience for you to aim at. They are often more respected that those highly followed on Twitter or Facebook, as other social media tends to also attract followers from rivals and those with conflicting ideas. Forums on the other hand tend to be dominated by those almost elevated to ‘king’ by those who read their posts.

4. They teach engagement

Many of us strong on social media nowadays learnt our ‘trade’ in the internet forums. How to deal with trolls, how to respond to different cries for help and how to offer negative but polite criticism are skills that are well learnt in the forum and messageboard domain that transfer to the Twitters and Facebooks of this world very well. There is often a true sense of engagement with every post. Proper forums rarely have a strand with just a single post, even if they are off-topic. Forum postings also have longer life, so remember that if you are looking to post. Twitter posts can often be missed on busy timelines but a forum post may often stay alive on a thread for months and even be re-invigorated years later if people find the thread via search engines, etc.

5. They are a great way to network

Don’t imagine forums as standalones. They are all part of the social media sphere and should be used as a way of reaching out into new communities but also bringing existing communities together. Some that post on forums will be die-hard against Twitter and Facebook, etc, but others will include all their contact details / credentials in their posting footer encouraging you to link across networks. Embrace both types of posters, they are all experts and all worthy people likely to be great contacts in the modern world build around networking.

So in summary, forums are t he same but different from the bigger social networks. Consider them as bespoke and more targeted resources. Don’t just use them as a spare tyre however. You will get a better response and you will get much more out of them if you play an active part in web forums and hopefully you will also play a part in keeping these valuable resources going.

This week Twitter is celebrating it’s 7th Birthday. Yes 7 years. If it was a child we would barely trust it to make us a cup of tea, but in the business networking world and in many ways for up to the minute news, those who use it, trust it almost implicitly – sometimes wrongly – and couldn’t imagine what life was like before it. Twitter itself has created this fantastic video about how Twitter has been used and how Twitter has made an impact on the 21st century in those past 7 years. It really is remarkable:

In the same week, the Official YouTube Blog has been celebrating hitting one billion unique users every single month – ironically for the home of video, without a video. the stats it includes though about one billion users are pretty hard-hitting:

• Nearly one out of every two people on the Internet visits YouTube.
• If YouTube were a country, we’d be the third largest in the world after China and India.

Just two of those amazing statistics. What is also impressive is the way business is now embracing YouTube, not surprising one half the internet’s traffic is there. As the blog points out “All of the Ad Age Top 100 brands are now running campaigns on YouTube”.

And we had best not forget Facebook either. They celebrated one billion unique users before the turn of the year and with tweaks to the advertising opportunities and promoted posts, their appeal to businesses is only likely to rise. Then there is Google+ which as this socialstatistics site shows is on the rise and becoming ever more important, not only with the web and dev communities but also celebrity-led culture that seems to be so important in our modern society.

So if you are not on social media yet. Give it a chance. Spend an hour so talking to people who are and ask them to show you how it works. Start with one network first and get to know it and understand it. You don’t even need to use any real identifiers for you personally or your business, so you can teach yourself the ins and outs without worrying of harming your existing reputation etc.

Are you new to social media? Are you not yet on social media? Let us know your thoughts.

Of course once it is trendy, it is no longer unique, but if you are looking for a quick hit with traffic, following trends and having a familiar but funky feel is a great way to go.

Here’s five ways you can try:

Icon driven

We live in a mobile dominated world. How easily they can access a site on a smartphone or tablet is how many people assess a web site design. Hot on the heels of icon based websites and moving it to a next level are also a host of infographic driven designs too.

Fixed Header Bars

Giving your visitor the ability to quickly understand the navigation of your site and move from one section to another is vital. If your site looks complicated many will just not bother. Effectively stapling the navigation to the top of the screen wherever the user scrolls to, ensures they are only a short movement away from moving deeper into your site, making them also less likely to be one short movement from moving away altogether. The fixed header bar isn’t anything radically new. Using CSS to position it is a fairly simple task that many have been performing for a while, but as with every trend, it is growing immensely popular and more and more people are using it. It offers constant support for your navigation and a clearly identifiable route back to the home page. It doesn’t matter what your website is about or what content it features, a fixed header rarely looks out of place in modern design. Aesthetically pleasing and a big boost to the user experience, it is no surprise this is a rising trend.

Big Photographic backgrounds

A picture tells a thousand words, so a larger picture must be a winner? Not in every case, but with the dramatic improvements in and tumbling costs of high quality digital cameras, almost everybody is capable of taking a top photograph. Unsurprisingly then, more and more of these are slipping into web design and becoming the background for many a new website. It is not just the creative types either, corporates are into it too as it is a very dramatic and engaging wat to capture the attention of your visitors as soon as they arrive at your site. The biggest hurdle is making any big photograph blend simply with the rest of your design. Text over photographs is not always easy and done badly can have a dramatic negative impact on the user experience. It is not only the image themselves that need to be pleasing on the eye, but the overlays too and how they interact.

Infinite scrolling

Another feature that has been about for a few years, but only really beginning to take off now as more and more mimic it. The dramatic success of Pinterest and Tumblr, especially last year for the former, has no doubt had a big impact on that making the concept much more mainstream and accessible. Once again in terms of user experience it works beautifully. It simply is simple, and those are the sort of designs that work best.

Cleaner space

Ironically, while some are following the trend of the big photographic backgrounds, others are moving the other way with the trend for white space an eternal one that has ebbed and flowed since the start of web design. It is what Apple do well. Crisp, clear lines with lots of white space in between. It is a minimalist-style approach, aimed at focusing the visitor’s attention on the actual important content rather than distracting with the fluff around.

Image courtesy of Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

The WWW is perhaps the greatest showcase of how global standards can be created, upheld and developed. In a world of technology where we seem to still have to carry a gamut of leads, cables and chargers because uniform standards haven’t been agreed, it is helpful to know that going online using your laptop, your tablet or smartphone (once designers realise Flash has reached the end of its life) is actually a fairly smooth and simple process. Standards improve the user-experience and they improve the rate at which progress can happen too. If everybody is agreed on certain standards and principles, time previously spent researching and developing those can be better spent on tweaking and improving the customer experience elsewhere.

Back in November 2011 the UK government publised it’s Cyber Security Strategy. Included in it were intentions to encourage industry-led standards and guidance so that businesses and organisations could better manage their risk to their online information. Cyber-security is one of the biggest fears about the internet both for individuals and organisations, so it makes sense to pool resources and ideas to lead to a better understanding and less confusion across the board. Information security is a key business hosting risk so addressing the uncertainty should benefit the economy as a whole.

As a result, the Government this week began a consultation period inviting discussion on how and what a cyber security organisation standard could and should look like. In the published paper Cyber Security Organisational Standards – A call for views and evidence organisations and groups are invited to indicate their interest in submitting evidence in support of their preferred standard by Monday, 8 April 2013. The government will then publish guidance for those submitting bodies by Tuesday, 30 April 2013 with the final date for their submitting evidence then Monday, 14 October 2013.

So a long process but one businesses and experts from all fields should probably be involved in, so if you are interested in having your say make sure you register your initial interest before Monday 8th April to the Cyber Security Team at the Department for Business Innovation and Skills (full details in the published paper).

Don’t play by the rules. The most successful companies like Apple or Amazon don’t.

Why? Because seeing what other successful companies do and applying it to your own will probably fail. Success is about mastering the right tools and then using them in ways that work for you and you alone. That’s how you become a threat to your competitors.

So, stop listening to other people’s research and do your own. You need to figure out for yourself what works better for your brand and not someone else’s.

Are you still asking them to buy your stuff? Stop!

HubSpot shared an extremely useful presentation called “How to suck at marketing” and it focuses on businesses that don’t lift a finger to research their audience. They just don’t seem to care who’s buying their products as long as they’re selling and making money.

So, you’re doing it wrong if you:

• Call people randomly and ask them to buy your stuff.
• Send unsolicited emails to people who have never heard of your company before (and ask them to buy your stuff).
• Rent or buy additional contact lists and ask them to buy your stuff.
• Send your entire contact list the same email marketing message and ask them to buy your stuff.
• Don’t need to listen to your customers, you always know better.
• Don’t A/B test anything because it’s all the same. You only need them to buy your stuff.

Stop following and start listening

Research and find out who your target audience is, what their interests are and where they like to spend time online. The only stats that should matter to you are your own so:

• Listen to your data.
• Listen to your research.
• Listen to your audience.

It will never lie to you because it’s about the people you’re trying to reach, not your competitors’ or someone else’s. And it’s definitely not generic data that won’t be of any help to your business.

The best advice anyone can give you is to use your tools wisely instead of just doing what other people tell you to do. The worst thing you can do is be the schoolchild who finished top of his class by memorising dates and names.

Image by Ambro via freedigitalphotos.net

With announcements of great magnitude being issued in the coming months, Webfusion will be creating a number of case studies featuring the work of some of the most important people behind the scenes. The first is taken from a recent interview with Senior Systems Administrator (Sys-Admin), Robert Girdler. The purpose of this case study is to draw attention to the important work being done behind the scenes; further demonstrating Webfusion’s support to the customer.

The Role of a Sys-Admin

At Webfusion, a great amount of responsibility is placed on the Sys-Admin team, both internally and with customers. The day to day role for a Sys-Admin at Webfusion is to deal with the escalations of tickets from customers and to support the first and second line support team.

The first line support team will normally deal with customers directly to resolve their issues. The second line support team will take over a support request once it has been established there is a problem with their system.

‘A large percentage of our daily tasks are to deal with ticket escalations. These are mainly jobs that first and second line support may not be able to deal with due to either, a lack of privileges or it is out of their knowledge base,’ Girdler explained.

‘One of the most important things we do after ticket escalations is to monitor the hardware running our various systems, so we can pick up on the early signs of problems before they become a major issue that affect our customers. We pride ourselves on preventing services failing rather than reacting to a failure.’

Testing for Every Eventuality

One of the key responsibilities of the Webfusion Sys-Admin team is to constantly monitor systems in order to identify any problems that may arise. ‘We use Nagios Monitoring, where we check the servers. A crucial part of this is to perform load checks and make sure that all sites we host are available.’

These checks are performed on a day to day basis, with the team looking for any problems that might be out there. If issues are found, the Sys-Admin team will investigate and make the correct fixes. Customers should feel safe in the knowledge that their websites are being constantly monitored by a passionate and experienced team. ‘A lot of these checks are running every minute. A disk check may run every 15 minutes. We do have some tests that are not critical which will typically run anywhere between once an hour and once a day. This is to reduce the load on the monitoring systems and allow us to report on the critical things that need to be constantly monitored.’

Commitment and Quality of Support

One of the most crucial aspects of the Sys-Admin positions is to maintain and build relationships with customers where issues have been escalated to them. ‘If for whatever reason, either the first or second line support teams are unable to deal with issues they will be escalated to us. Essentially, you could call us the support for support!’

‘The team deals with customers in a number of different ways. If for example, a customer would like a load balancing solution, we would configure all the hardware and ensure that the load balancing software fails over correctly in the event of one of the boxes having problems. At Webfusion, everybody pitches in together. We all continue to train each other and attend external training where appropriate to ensure our skills are constantly developing with the needs of the business and our customers.’

It is this commitment to providing superior support that continues to set Webfusion apart. ‘All support jobs are important, the customer needs to have their services up and running as their livelihood can depend on it. We thrive on providing the best service we can, constantly going above and beyond.’

Increased Data Centre Capabilities

Webfusion has also announced the redesign of its UK based Data Centre. The new design will implement a new redundant modular design, featuring energy economiser cooling systems that will achieve free cooling for more than 98 per cent of the year.  Building on the excellent relationships set up with customers, this re-fit will see a new chapter written for the hosting provider.

‘The new Data Centre will see a greater capacity for more servers as well as fulfilling our commitment to be as ‘green’ a company as we can be.    The new facilities will also provide us the ability to extend our shared platform and provide more Dedicated/VPS Servers for our growing customer base. ’ Girdler concluded.

Setting the Company Apart

What Webfusion offer customers is a service that isn’t constrained to terms and conditions, something that sets the brand apart. ‘As well as off the shelf products, we provide bespoke solutions for customers from custom database setups to load balancing solutions. Further to this, we are always here to talk, even if issues are not specifically covered in our terms and conditions, we will do our upmost to help get your business back up online and keep us up there as one of the best places on the web to host your website’