PEER 1, the parent company of ServerBeach, has launched today a new video contest and is giving away $10,000 in prizes to the winner! Along with the contest, the company has released the second episode of it’s award-winning short series “Growing Pains” which follows the trips and follies of a home-based business startup that grows quickly out of control causing new employees and servers to take control of the home.
PEER 1 is giving it’s viewers of the episode the opportunity to create their own growing pains video that shows their personal experiences for a chance to win a prize package of 12 months of free managed hosting, a 15-inch MacBook, and a Sony HD camcorder, at a total value of $10,000.
To watch the new episode of Growing Pains and enter the $10,000 Giveaway Contest, go to www.peer1.com/growingpains
Good Luck!
Episode 2 – “A Walk in The Park.” Some time after being tossed out of the house, Todd and Janet try to mend fences over a nice walk in the park. All seems well and the moment feels right, or so Todd thinks.
“An effective web design is one in which your users are able to find information quickly and in a logical fashion.”
We all visit websites, leaving many of them quickly for any of the following reasons:
Loads too slowly
Too hard to navigate around
Information you’re searching for seems like a game of hide ‘n seek
If you’re interested in analyzing and optimizing your page layout Six Revisions has posted some extremely useful tools that you can use to help.
A couple of tools listed on that site include -
ClickHeat, which is an open source visual tool for showing “hot” and “cold” zones of a web page. It allows you to see which spots users click on most, and which spots are being ignored
Crazy Egg, who offers a myriad of analytical tools to help you visualize what visitors are doing.
Check out the rest of that list and see if your site can benefit from any of those tools.
I ran across a YouTube channel today about online marketing. It’s huge - as of this morning its had 201,532 views. The host Charles Lewis is an online marketer for Pop Labs who goes by the name of “The Poetic Prophet” . He likes to rap about his subject of expertise, SEO. His videos are not only entertaining, they’re remarkably informative.
ServerBeach is a self-managed dedicated server provider built on the rock solid PEER 1 network. We give you a server loaded up with power, bandwidth, DIY tools, and support:
24/7 Support
24/7 Live Person available by Phone
Personal Account Manager
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Free Rapid Reboot
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Choose between 3 data centers across the US: East Coast, West Coast, Central
Check out the server packages in Categories 3 and 5 that we have to offer and get free setup + 1GB RAM.
May 3, 2008 is starting to draw a lot of attention around the internet. On this day, people from all over the world will shut down their computers for 24 hours.
In todays world I often wonder how difficult my life would be without my computer. Considering that it’s become a part of my daily life for both work and personal tasks. If I didn’t have it.. for just one day, would I be able to cope? Of course. Well…probably. OK, who am I kidding? As I type this blog post, I realize just how dependent I’ve become on my laptop to get me through the day or night. If I’m not doing work on it, I’m reading news and current events, e-mail, IM’ing, or shopping. Sure, I could certainly come up with other things to do - such as work in the yard, relax by the swimming pool and what not. Perhaps on May 3rd, I just may do that.
Now that I’ve shared that with you all, I’m sure many of you are thinking, “Wow, get a life!” But I’m also sure that many of you are sitting there nodding your heads, wondering what you’d do without your computer for 24 hours.
Check out what many are talking about over at a website titled Shutdown Day, which they’re claiming will be “one of the biggest global experiments ever to take place on the Internet.” The idea behind Shutdown Day is to find out how many people can go without a computer for one whole day, and what will happen if we all participate!
I have always loved candidness from businesses. I get tired of hearing corporate canned sales pitches or canned responses to the press. When businesses are open, honest, frank, and to the point about their products whether it be good or bad - it’s always a win.
For those of you familiar with NVIDIA’s CEO - Jen-Hsun Huang, you know that he’s a very down to earth man who speaks candidly. During the company’s recent financial analyst meeting, not long into the call Huang began to speak what was on his mind -
“We’re going to open a can of whoop ass,” he told analysts, who quickly broke out into laughter.
Intel and NVIDIA have been playing a game of cloak and dagger with technology press, along with secret slide shows and secret slide show rebuttals. The sole reason for this battle is the integrated graphics market, and some of the claims attached to it. Jen-Hsun Huang doesn’t hide the fact that his company is spending nearly a billion dollars each year ready to take on Intel’s graphics offerings.
Throughout the bulk of the conference call, Huang continued to lament Intel for poor graphics performance. He hints at another Intel slide deck that claims Intel GMA 3100 is Windows Vista Premium compatible — a claim which was debunked by Microsoft employees in a recent lawsuit.
Intel fired back minutes later, sending emails to analysts detailing NVIDIA’s poor track record when it comes to Vista crashes due to incomplete drivers. Almost on cue, Huang responded once again.
“NVIDIA has to support several new titles every week,” he said, alleging that Intel’s graphics just have to support the basic office packages. “You already have the right machine to run Excel. You bought it four years ago,” he said.
The statement clearly struck a nerve with Huang, who paused for a second before adding “How much faster can you render the blue screen of death?”
I stumbled across an article at ComputerWorld not long ago that shows a few possible future designs of notebooks.
Just as futuristic show cars give us insight into what we might be driving in the future, concept notebooks offer a sneak peek at how we’ll be computing. These concept notebooks typically are created by independent designers and firms retained by laptop vendors. This is highly secretive business — the designers we spoke were willing to talk about some of their concepts but couldn’t tell us who they were working for.
Some of the pictures in that article were amazing. If this is what we have to look forward to when it comes to laptops, which have now become a part of our daily lives that many of us cannot function without, then I can’t wait to see what else the (tech) future has to hold.
When it comes to gadgets, electronics, and the like, we seem to enjoy the small and convenient ones. Some things like USB flash drives are getting ridiculously smaller in size, getting easier and easier to lose but we still seem to buy them because they’re convenient. Yet we always seem to get quite angry when we lose them.
I stumbled across a site today that I hadn’t seen before that had a cool little USB smart cable. This little cable is cheap at only $9.00US, not to small, and looks to be pretty rugged. The charging cable doubles as a microSD card reader and is available in three versions supporting mini-USB, mini 18 pin, or Nokia DC 2.0 devices.
After browsing around their website, it seems they have quite a few neat little accessories that will appeal to some of us geeks.
