My Internet Notebook

a journal on software, mobile, marketing

Archive for April, 2005

Yahoo Beating Google?

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I noticed that more people were referred to my site by Yahoo! than Google in the past few days. Was it because they put this clever float search bar on the my.yahoo.com home page?

Yahoo Search Bar Float

With hundreds of millions of My Yahoo users, this could easily stole search users away from Google. Interesting fight to watch!

Written by Y.

April 28th, 2005 at 6:16 pm

Posted in Internet

Independent Software Testing (IST)

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Francesca Matteu at Stickyminds.com reports:

In response to an increase in demand for quality software products, new testing centers are sprouting up in India, which also means an increase in demand for testers. The new hiring boom for testers is evident in cities like Bangalore where there is a need for about 10,000 testing engineers that needs to be filled in the next six months. Some Indian companies have even doubled yearly salaries to attract experts from neighboring cities. Yet the increased salaries remain only a fraction of what testers make in the United States.

Interestingly these are being called Independent Software Testing (IST). Big software companies like Microsoft or Sybase are unlikely to farm out core product testing to ISTs. But I can see that smaller ISVs may get considerable benefits from not having to own/operate an internal testing group, no?

Lionbridge Technologies, the parent company of VeriTest, has set up a testing center in India, and Accenture plans to outsource their testing efforts to an Indian IST firm. Vidur Kohli, head of testing at MphasiS BFL in India, says, “They used to say this is where failed programmers went. Not anymore.”

Written by Y.

April 28th, 2005 at 10:31 am

Posted in Testing

Google Ads in RSS Feeds

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The LongHornblog and Engadget are all experimenting with serving Google Ads in RSS feeds. Phil Haack is already wondering whether “Ads in RSS Feeds are effective”

Viewing the Engadget feed in Internet Explorer (http://www.engadget.com/rss.xml), you will notice that there is the Google Ads Table where a TD tag contains the image ads: the image ad’s href points to “http://imageads.googleadservices.com/ pagead/ imgclick/ 1234000377041507?pos=0”
with image src=”http://imageads.googleadservices.com/ pagead/ads?output=png &url=http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000377041507/ The image source URL is completed by cuid=1234000377041507, format=480x46_aff, client=ca-pub-3546992251556849, hl=en, adsafe=high, color_bg=FFFFFF, color_border=FFFFFF, color_link=66666, color_text=333333, color_url=337788, color_line=337788, which are the usual Adsense stuff. It looks like the ad is just an autogenerated PNG image.

Google Adsense Ads in RSS Feeds

One of the contributors to Open Source RSS aggregator RSS Bandit is already experimenting a blocker.

Finally, when are we going to see Yahoo! come up with their RSS ads?

Written by Y.

April 27th, 2005 at 11:47 pm

Posted in Internet

Real Estate Bubble?

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Kathleen Pender at the SF Chronicles wrote that the number of Real Estate Investment Clubs in the country has increased considerably in the past ten years, while the number of traditional investment clubs registered with the National Association of Investors Corp. has fallen from 34,000 at the end of 1999 to about 20,000 today.

In hot markets like San Francisco, DC, Boston, it wouldn’t be surprising if Taxi drivers are starting to give passengers real estate investment tips!

Is it really a bubble is a question that’s left to economists’ to answer. For lucky home owners like myself, it is satisfying to see price go up on one hand. But on the other hand, you really can’t say you gained much because it is all “paper money”, just like those stock options in the good old days 🙂

Written by Y.

April 27th, 2005 at 6:35 pm

Posted in Everything Else

Microsoft Evangelism

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General manager at Microsoft Evangelism group Vic Gundotra started his own blog. He stated a number of well-known serious concerns about MSFT but failed to offer any concrete answers IMHO.

A stock price that has remained flat for some time, recent high-profile departures, repeated slips in schedule for major products, the success of companies like Apple and Google, the emergence of the web as a platform and other very compelling arguments are all used as evidence to point to the decline of Microsoft.

In general, I found that all Microsoft employee blogs share some of the same tone/attitude, i.e. I am working on some of the greatest technology that is going to impact millions of people around the world; I work with smart, passionate co-workers, etc etc. We all know that! What I would like to see really is how MSFT reachs out and relates itself to those smart and passionate people that are not in the Microsoft camp. How about inviting some of the LAMP gurus to give talks on campus? How about creating a version of Microsoft Office that runs on Linux? How about developing a Linux emulator so you can run linux apps within Windows?

There are a lot more that Microsoft can do.

Written by Y.

April 23rd, 2005 at 12:26 am

Posted in Software