Software Everywhere : feature

Adobe Search&Promote Arrives in Style

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 18:30:00 GMT

This week the site search market got a new player as Adobe has introduced Adobe Search&Promote. The site search and merchandising application aims to help marketers anticipate visitor search intent and promote the most relevant products and content across desktop and mobile website searches.

The application, which is powered by Omniture technology, seems to provide marketers with a lot of control, including metrics-based relevance and personalization. Adobe is touting the application’s ability to handle millions of pages and products and high search traffic volume, removing concerns of hardware procurement and provisioning, and offers real-time indexing to ensure visitors have access to the most up-to-date content.

The solution also features built-in analytics provided by Adobe SiteCatalyst, (again powered by Omniture) which will enable marketers to automate and tune search and ranking results based on key metrics such as conversion rate, page views and customer ratings. This also enables businesses to monitor conversion rates from search terms and the paths visitors take to understand what visitors are finding and not finding in order to improve their site experience.

Perhaps most exciting about the solution is its ability to integrate with other applications within the Adobe marketing suite. For example, Search&Promote user can test various “search experiences” with Adobe Test&Target, provide product or content recommendations using Adobe recommendations (the “people who searched for this, bought that” algorithm, and what I find most interesting is the connection with Adobe Scene 7 which automates the delivery of “richer” product results through interactive zoom, 360-degree spin, alternative image sizes and more.

Gmail to Provide Backup for Microsoft Exchange Users

Linc Wonham — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 21:33:00 GMT

Just as Microsoft’s Bing has made the search environment a little too crowded for Google’s tastes, Google is doing the same thing to Microsoft with office productivity tools.

Thursday’s launch of Google Message Continuity reiterates a message that Google has been trying to send to businesses and IT managers for a few years now. That message being that Gmail is a reliable and valuable cloud-based alternative business email solution if your company’s on-premises email system such as Microsoft Exchange should ever fail.

Google Message Continuity is a cloud-based service that helps ensure that businesses will always have access to their email. It works by replicating email accounts hosted on Microsoft Exchange servers in the cloud, using Gmail, Calendar and Contacts. If the Microsoft Exchange server fails or requires scheduled maintenance or downtime, all users have to do is log into Gmail and continue regular, up-to-date email communications through Google.

Since Gmail and Microsoft Exchange are constantly synchronized with each other, employees can seamlessly switch from one email environment to the other.

The new service is one result of Google’s 2007 acquisition of Web-based communications provider Postini, and more information can be found on Google's Postini Web page.

Adobe Flash Player 10.2 - Beta Available

Pete Prestipino — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 16:24:00 GMT

Adobe has announced a beta release of Flash Player 10.2 for Windows, Mac, and Linux is now available for download. This beta version introduces several enhancements, namely Stage Video, a new API that deliver cross platform video playback.

Stage Video will help web sites deliver video across devices and browsers by enabling access to hardware acceleration of the entire video pipeline with shockingly little processing power. Adobe has worked with hardware vendors to take advantage of the GPU to offload not only H.264 hardware decoding (introduced in Flash Player 10.1) but the rest of the video rendering pipeline, including color conversion, scaling, and blitting. Adobe, using Stage Video, has seen laptops play smooth 1080p HD video with just over 0% CPU usage. That is pretty amazing and it has not gone unnoticed. Google TV already takes advantage of Stage Video in Flash Player to deliver 1080p HD video playback on TVs.

For content providers, Stage Video will work with all of the existing video viewed in Flash Player once they utilize the new API in their video player SWFs, with no changes to their encoded videos or infrastructure required.

Additional enhancments included in Flash Player 10.2 include Internet Explorer 9 hardware acceleration support, enhanced text rendering, a native custom mouse cursors API and support for full screen playback with multiple monitors.

SEO Spyglass Collecting Links from Blekko

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 16:11:00 GMT

SEO solution provider Link-Assistant.com announced some interesting enhancements to its SEO PowerSuite offering (an SEO software solution) today.

The firms's SEO Spyglass tool, which shows the sources of backlinks used by competitors in link building campaigns, is now collecting links from the Blekko search engine. According to the announcment, the update now lets users identify up to 120,000 backlinks per analyzed competitor’s domain.

Link-Assistant's Rank Tracker was also enhanced with a module for competitor rankings monitoring which will allows users to detect their competitors position changes.

The SEO PowerSuite software works on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. To see the suite of tools in action, a free fully-functional version is available for download.

Split Testing WordPress

Pete Prestipino — Fri, 26 Nov 2010 15:48:00 GMT

Are your weblog post headlines driving clicks? What impact do various elements in your theme have on conversion? Where is the optimal location for calls to action? Split testing does not really get a lot of attention in the WordPress community - or at least not as much as it should. Below are a few plugins to get you started in the world of split testing for WordPress.

Headline Split Tester is a new plug-in that allows bloggers to enter an alternate headline for every post on their blog. The headlines are then randomly alternated on the website until a certain number of "headline views" has been reached. At that point, a "winning" headline (as determined by the number of people that have clicked on each headline to date) is determined and that headline is shown going forward.

SES Theme Split Test is a plugin thay enables bloggers to set up two different templates with elements that might increase conversions, serve the different templates up to users, and track their activity using custom segments in Google Analytics.

Visual Website Optimzer is a plugin thay enables bloggers to connect their VWO account in order to create multiple version of your website, define what you want visitor to do, and split test the website traffic amongst those versions. This is a commercial plugin but there is a free trial for evaluation which will test up to 1000 visitors for 30 days (although you can only run one test).

In the Cloud: Sales Performance Management from Xactly

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 16:30:00 GMT

Xactly today released version 1.6 of its SMB sales compensation management solution Xactly Express.

The self-service sales compensation management software enables users to create sales commission plans, calculate commissions, and export payments to payroll. What makes the release noteworthy is that Xactly Express is delivered in the cloud using the salesforce.com Force.com platform, so it can be up and running in a matter of hours. New features within Xactly Express 1.6 include:

Express Estimator: uses the opportunity data in Salesforce CRM to calculate estimated commissions on upcoming sales deals. With the feature, sales reps can model how different products and service mixes will impact pay-outs for specific sales opportunities.

Improved Hold and Releases on Payments: enables outstanding payments to be released through an intuitive interface (in addition to a file import), allowing for better visibility and flexibility in managing the payment of commissions.

High Transaction Volume Support: makes it easier to handle high data volume on several screens, as well as to build and save views, allowing faster and easier access to key data.

“For SMBs, Xactly Express is the affordable answer to eliminating time consuming, error-prone sales commission spreadsheets - allowing them to spend more time selling and focusing on their core competencies,” said Christopher Cabrera, president and CEO, Xactly Corporation.

Screenshot of Xactly on Force.com:

DotNetNuke WCMS Gets Serious with v5.6

Pete Prestipino — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 16:10:00 GMT

Popular .Net web content management platform DotNetNuke released version 5.6 of its professional edition and enterprise edition.

The new version includes a new Site Search feature (which includes for Boolean searches, phrase searches, relevance searches, wild cards, fuzzy searches, and groupings - based on Lucene by the way), enhanced analytics support (through an integration with Google Analytics) which enables the tracking of sub-domains.

DotNetNuke has also made improvements to its content approval workflow feature, the true sign in my opinion of the quality of an enterprise level CMS. This version of the CMS allows managers to configure approvals in a top-down hierarchy at the site, page, and module level.