Freshly Squeezed Computing » Latest Tech

Scooter Stunts in HD, Armadillo Scooterwear Tough Enough Video Ad

admin — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 14:42:58 +0000

Tough Enough is the new exciting scooter wear viral by Armadillo was shot during two intense days on the urban backstreets of London, involving an intrepid stuntman and a globally acclaimed creative team.

Fear no more & see more at http://armadilloscooterwear.com/toughenough

Armadillo Scooterwear Tough Enough from Armadillo Scooterwear on Vimeo.

Festo Bionic Robots, Swimming Aqua Penguin, Flying Air Penguin

admin — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 07:48:31 +0000

Festo Bionic Learning Network 2009

This is a video featuring the latest incredible automation inventions. Guys at Festo showcase what the modern day artificial intelligence is capable of. Latest projects include:

· Bionic Penguin – both swimming and flying

· Bionic Tripod

· Interactive Wall – my favourite (moves, turn on the light and music triggered by human’s behaviours)

· 3D printing

· Molecules which you can use to build your own robot

Watch the video here

Canonical URL tag – new solution to duplicate content problems

admin — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 21:12:08 +0000

Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Ask has come to an agreement and announced the new Meta tag ‘canonical’ which can tell search engines which URL it should have for the current page. This means that the times of duplicate content are about to end. This new ingenious element will benefit big ecommerce websites in particular.

What is it?

Canonical element is the new element that should live in the section of the page. This element tells search engines that there is only one ‘official’ URL name for particular page. Therefore, no matter how many variations the URLs this one page has, there is only one address crawlers will recognise. According to Matt Cutts at Google, canonical element is like a softer version of 301 redirects.

Example:

Let’s consider URL http://mysite.com. Duplicates can occur when any given webpage has multiple URLs that point to it. Search engines can see it in many other ways including:

http://www.mysite.com

http://www.mysite.com/

http://mysite.com/default.aspx

http://mysite.com/default.aspx?promo=ABC

Now, by adding:

… we tell search engines that the URL for this page is always http://mysite.com

Why should I use it?

To eliminate duplicate content which can eventually harm site’s rankings
To organise the URLs structure and focus on other important SEO issues
All major search engines have introduced it so it has already become an industry standard

Who should use it?

Although every webmaster and website owner can use it effectively, the tag will have a significant impact on big transactional websites, ecommerce sites in particular. Webmasters of such websites deal with a lot of duplicate content pages. A good example of that can be session ID pages on product listings where the same Meta data is present on pages within the category.

Facts you need to know about before implementing canonical

You can use a relative path to specify the canonical, but it is advisable to use relative paths.
It is fine if the canonical is not an exact duplicate of the content and search engines will allow slight differences in content, e.g. sorting products
If the rel=”canonical” returns a 404 search engines will continue to index the content and use a heuristic to find a canonical.
Pages with rel=”canonical” can be a redirected. You can specify a URL that redirects as a canonical URL.
You must avoid ‘canonical loops’, so do not say that page A points to B, and B points to A.
You can’t use this link tag to suggest a canonical URL on a completely different domain? In other words, if you want to point to different domain, you should still use the permanent redirect (301)

Pod1 uses special extension plug-ins which can be built into the content management system so the client can specify which canonical URL to choose, e.g. Magento Platform.

O2 Joggler Household Organiser

admin — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 21:15:16 +0000

O2 Family Joggler is the latest device from O2 which is supposed to replace the fridge door in organising every household. According to O2, Joggler is much more than an interactive calendar. It also allows viewing and loading your favourite music, videos and photos, providing the latest news, sports headlines, weather report and traffic updates for major roads in the UK.

Those who use the O2 Calendar will be able to synchronise all appointments with Joggler. Additional features include games, alarm clocks and a calculator.

The O2 Joggler will be available to buy online and in store from April 2009 for £149.99.

Google Sync for Mobile – GMAIL contacts and calender synchronization

admin — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 13:22:24 +0000

An overview of Google Sync for Mobile. Provides two-way contacts and calender synchronization for many mobile devices.

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 – latest beta adds ’special’ list

admin — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 13:39:32 +0000

image source: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/beta/

The IE 8 Release Candidate is the third pre-release version of Microsoft’s browser but the first to include a list of web sites that Microsoft says actually work with its browser.

The Compatibility View List was announced last month by Microsoft after it found users testing the second beta had been unable to view websites without IE 8 scrambling them.

IE 8 introduces two modes for viewing sites: default and compatibility. Default supports the latest web standards, like CSS 2.1. Compatibility is designed to let you view the millions of sites and applications built for old versions of IE that were not compliant with web standards.

The idea was that a button would let users flip over to viewing such sites, but many forgot to make the switch, resulting in scrambled sites. Even sites supposed to work in default mode were getting scrambled.

Source & More: The Register

Download IE8 Beta

Songsmith – Microsoft’s Product of the Year 2009..or not!

admin — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 16:37:45 +0000

What is Songsmith?

Songsmith generates musical accompaniment to match a singer’s voice. Just choose a musical style, sing into your PC’s microphone, and Songsmith will create backing music for you. Then share your songs with your friends and family, post your songs online, or create your own music videos.

More info: Microsoft Research

Interactive ketchup growing experiment ‘Talk to the plant’ by Heinz

admin — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 16:24:32 +0000

Interactive ketchup growing experiment Talk to the plant by Heinz (talktotheplant.com)

Live Broadcast Experiment (You will need to turn up the sound). Amazing Campaign

Create your own HD Movie Trailer with The Blue Button

admin — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 17:09:07 +0000

Google Search Wiki – Personalised Google Search

admin — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 22:52:30 +0000

SearchWiki – Make search your own!

Google have announced the release of SearchWiki, a way for you to customize search by re-ranking, deleting, adding, and commenting on search results. Don’t like a result? You can vote it down. Likewise, you can vote links up if you think they deserve a higher rank.

These changes will only appear in your Google account, and won’t influence the result sets as seen by others. However, it is hard to imagine that Google won’t take note of such signals, especially if they see broad patterns emerging, and then feed this data through into their algorithm development.

Source: SEO Book Blog