The Landscape and Garden Blog
Jan
25
Back in the 19th century, the telephone slowly made its way into popular usage with a simple ring indicating that a call was incoming. No one could have imaged in that long ago era, that an entire industry would someday exist solely to support the customization of the sounds played for incoming telephone calls.
In the 1970s it became possible for manufacturers to create electronic ringtones for phones and in the 1990s that technology was adapted to cell phones. By 2003, the global ringtone market was worth between $2.5 and $3.5 billion in sales (USD).
This explosion was due to several factors. The first being the unprecedented adaptation of mobile phones around the world. The development of different technologies to record and transmit sound files also played a significant role. Lastly, the marketing strategy of getting customers to download free ringtones to introduce them to a new service was also pivotal. While some users would stubbornly stick to the free options, others would want to purchase the longer and higher quality ringtones. In some cases, individuals are willing to pay as much as $3 for a single sound file or music snippet to use on their phone.
Some analysts insist that the ringtone industry has peaked. Sales of $714 million in the US in 2007 were followed by a drop to $541 million in 2008. While some of that decline was due to the major economic recession being experienced at that time, there is some reason to believe that the drop was partly a result of the ability of users to create their own ringtones, which meant they no longer needed to purchase them.
Nov
27
On the world wide web there are essentially three kinds of sites. Personal sites are created by individuals or organizations to express an idea or simply share things with the world. Business sites, even if non-profit, as designed to interact with consumers to either sell something or to provide information. Government and educational websites can also be considered business sites. The final category is web developers. These are the people and companies who design and create websites for those in the second category, and sometimes just to experiment with new features and code.
While there are some basic similarities between personal and business websites, developers have more advanced needs when it comes to web hosting. These people require an account with much more functionality and power than most business sites.
The best web development hosting are going to be completely customized to the needs of the specific developer. Language support is critical, with most hosting companies providing compatibility with PHP5, MySQL and Ruby on Rails. Developers are likely to need SSH capabilities, access to managed servers, and the flexibility and power offered by VPS (virtual private server) hosting.
With the proper hosting, developers can work on multiple client sites, experiment with test sites, and easily test and tweak the design, usability, and functionality of any required site feature.
Oct
21
With it’s large high resolution screen and the ability to digitally download content, many newspapers and magazines believed that the the iPad would be the solution to their internet problem. Most have fallen victim to the stream of free information and news available online, suffering falling subscription numbers and loss of advertising revenue. They hailed the iPad as a way to recapture audience, providing customized content to new subscribers who would access their news through the device.
Now that the iPad has been available for six months, industy analysts have been researching the pull of the iPad. Their finding indicate that the iPad hasn’t been the revolution publishers expected, but it is slowly making progress. iPad developers have created more than 900 apps that fall into the “News” category in the Apple App Store. However, some of those apps are content aggregators and feed readers that aren’t traditional news media.
News publishers are still hopeful. After an initial frenzy of early adopters , iPad sales have slowed to a more moderate rate. Research predicts that the device won’t achieve mass-market penetration for another three years. Newspapers are counting on their audience growing as use of the iPad increases. Many are offering free access to their news for a limited time or only headlines. The hope is that once users get a taste of the content, they will pay to subscribe to the full version. The final word on the impact of the iPad on traditional media is still a few years off.
Aug
23
It is a difficult thing to get into the world of contemporary computer technologies. Like any new system that holds the potential for being inclusive and radically independent, the first stages of its growth is often accompanied by what many new users perceive to be difficult language. It’s a complication that arises in anything new and possibly transformational. It’s also something of a criticism that’s often leveled at philosophers and academics as they begin developing new theories of how things are, or how things seem to be.
It’s not a new development, although it certainly seems to be. New concepts, new structures, and new ways of thinking do require a new language. In the early 1960s, when post-structural philosophy was making waves in Europe, the intellectuals were vastly excited, and the students were either taken in by the wave, or else left terribly confused. In that particular context, the thinkers of the time were responding to the notion that language had suddenly become a tool not of revelation or communication, but of intentional obfuscation .
That’s not the case today, although a first look at computer language might suggest otherwise. With a bit of time, however, it becomes easier to understand, and is actually as user-friendly as the programs have become. The metaphors are embedded in the names, so that cloudshare refers to the interconnected networks in a company, but also create a visual picture of clouds in the sky, separate but moving along the same air flows. These metaphors are the very key to understanding the systems.
Jul
18
In real estate parlance, the host of a web site could be said to be playing the role of the mortgage title company. They’re the ones who make it possible for the site to live on the internet. It’s almost like setting out the parameters for the property to be built. It’s up to the company or individual to build the site, although there are plenty of ways to contract other people to do that complicated work. It’s not uncommon, however, to find that the web site hosting company will also help to build and design the site, too, making it a business that has its hands in all areas related to web sites, from design to implementation.
The site’s domain name acts as the physical address. Like the address of a house, it is a direction for browsers to get directly to where they want to go. Interestingly, this connection between a domain and a physical house address was much more abstract just a few years ago. The culture at large has become accustomed to thinking about the world differently. Where once there were physical maps, now domains like mapquest and gps systems can give directions in moments. The generation growing up now is used to this as a matter of course, so the metaphor of real estate and domain names isn’t difficult to connect to. In fact, it’s become part of the way that humans perceive reality.
Designed by Tim Sainburg from Brambling Design
