DoubleClick,a global leader in digital marketing, advertising technology and services is being acquired by Google for a whooping $3.1 Billion in cash. The all-cash buy-out is about twice the amount Google spent to buy YouTube. Well, it is now pretty clear who will dominate the online advertising market. With this acquisition, Google have easily sidelined Yahoo and Microsoft. Google says that the acquisition is a big win for the publishers, as well as for advertisers and Internet users. Later in a conference, Google promises that user privacy will be handled as top priority among all the different integration challenges.
Google acquires DoubleClick for $3.1 billion
— By Brajeshwar
Mixercast – the cat is already showing its head out of the bag
— By Brajeshwar
After many major iterations, including the name change from Nanocast to Mixercast, it’s time for our application to finally see the light of the Public Beta crowd. Words have been officially spread and today, Tom Foremski of Silicon Valley Watcher wrote an article how Jennifer Cooper, the current CEO at Mixercast (erstwhile Nanocast) is able to finally bring out MixerCast out of its Stealth-Mode.
MixerCast will be finally released to the Public in its beta form on Monday, April 16, 2007. I don’t have the final confirmation but I am sure MixerCast will also be at the Web 2.0 Expo 2007 – Launch Pad happening from April 15-18, 2007 at San Francisco, California. It will come complete with video, music and photos which are licensed from major content providers. MixerCast will allow users to bring in contents from anywhere (RSS, URL, Direct Import) and mashup, then publish them anyway they want, anywhere they choose.
Just add to your robots.txt – no need to submit sitemap to Google
— By Brajeshwar
Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml
Add that to your robots.txt. That’s all you need to tell search engines where your sitemap is located.
Google Blogoscoped says, the big search players Google, Yahoo, Ask and MSN together announced they’ll be adding a new way for you to tell them where you store your Sitemap XML file. As Sitemaps.org explains, Sitemaps are a way to tell search engines of your URLs to help their crawlers index them.
Adobe Creative Suite 3 India Release
— By Brajeshwar
Adobe Creative Suite 3 will be launched in India with a special event at Mumbai. The event will be on Thursday, April 19, 2007 at 08:30 am in the morning at Hyatt Regency, Sahar, Mumbai. The venue/hotel is located near the International Airport in Andheri (E).
The Agenda starts at 08:30 am starting with Registration and will last till the end of the day at 05:45 pm. After the tea break starting 11:45 am till 12:00, there is an “Apple Keynote”. I am suspecting that it should be Apple Mac’s geared agenda for Adobe Creative Suite 3.
Register today for the event.
Read the full article →
Indian BPO industry leaping forward big time
— By Brajeshwar
India Inc in its fury to become big and developed, is going on a frenzy overseas buy-outs and acquisitions. Some of them are Power and Energy (Reliance Energy, Tata Power and Lanco eyeing after Global power company – Globeleq with a valuation of over $2 billion), in Healthcare – Ranbaxy and Cipla are eyeing for Merck’s generic business, expected to be valued at $5,2 billion, Tata Power eyeing coal in Indonesia which will cost about a billion dollar and Suzlon’s hunt for REpower which might cost about $1.3 billion.
Not to be left out, the IT, ITES and the Technology Service sector is also in the mad race to acquire more overseas holdings. Software and BPO company Hexaware Technologies plans to acquite a US IT Firm or a European one for as much as $40 million. This is done so Hexaware can expand its overseas operations. The BPO company also plans to increases it Indian staff to about 6,000 by adding another additional 1,000.
SWX – A new data exchange format for Flash
— By Brajeshwar
SWX is designed to provide Flash developers with a simple and enjoyable experience when building data-driven applications. The key words here are simple, enjoyable and experience. SWX is compatible with Flash 6 r65+ to Flash 8 (ActionScript 1 and ActionScript 2). On the server-side, it has been tested and works well with PHP 5. At the time of its alpha release, SWX does not support ActionScript 3 and Flash 9.
At the core of SWX is a SWF assembler (SwfCompiler.php) that creates SWX SWF files from PHP data structures. (Currently, only PHP is supported) and a SWX gateway (swx.php) that acts as a front controller for data requests. On the client side, SWX serializes any data to be sent to the back-end using the native object notation for the back-end. Currently, there is support for PHP with PHON (PHP Object Notation).
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Flash 99% Good
— By Brajeshwar
Jakob Nielsen once said that Flash is 99% bad. He goes to dispute that although multimedia has its role on the Web, current Flash technology tends to discourage usability for three reasons: it makes bad design more likely, it breaks with the Web’s fundamental interaction style and it consumes resources that would be better spent enhancing a site’s core value. Well Flash improved and was way up on accessibility and usability; Jakob even joined erstwhile Macromedia to work together to improve Web Usability and develop best practices for developing Rich Internet Applications.
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Subversion Best Practices – Quick Notes
— By Brajeshwar
I was trying to know a bit more about Subversion folder management myself. While looking around, I found a quick and to-the-point article at Subversion Best Practices. I decided to profile a Quick-View version for my reference.
BASIC
- REPOSITORY: Official recommendation is to have three folders/subdirectories under the Project Root – “trunk”, “branches” and “tags”.
- COMMIT WISELY: Commit to reflect a single purpose.
- ISSUE-TRACKER: Create 2-way links between Subversion changesets and issue-tracking database.
- TRACK MERGES MANUALLY: Write descriptive log message that explains your merge.
Lorem Ipsum WordPress Theme
— By Brajeshwar
Last Sunday, I had nothing else better to do than to stay back home and cleanse some WordPress installations – upload files, optimize some database tables, check broken links and write some re-direct code for 404 pages on my blog. While I was on to three to four new WordPress installations, I felt that I needed a Theme replacement for the Default WordPress Theme. I was feeling tired of it and the new K2 Theme is overly complex for what I was looking. Despite a serious hunt, I was unable to find one that caters to my likings; so, I decided to do one myself after seeing few other themes that I somehow like but needed some more simplicity and whites.
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FUSE+Media
— By Brajeshwar
Independent studies have revealed that the growth of India’s Entertainment and Media (E&M) industry will touch a record breaking Rs. 1 trillion mark in the next 4 years (by 2011). The E&M industry is growing at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 18%. It is currently floating around Rs. 437 billion and is expected to outgrow the country’s economy. This growth is party due to the several positive measures taken by the government. It has also been boosted by technological advancements and entry of large corporate players into all segments of the industry.
In the wake of all these out-growth frenzy in the Entertainment & Media Industry, here we have FUSE+Media, formed by Keyur Patel of Com Ventures as an entity for media investment in India. He is the Managing Director and CEO of FUSE+Media. On one of his quick black-berry-ed email while he rush off to United States, he informed me that FUSE+Media is planning to announce a series of deals in the Entertainment and Media industry. He further told me that it will focus primarily on TV, Film, Print, Radio and of course one of his love – the web. If I can guess it right, there will be announcement on the acquisition and/or stake buy-outs of a radio firm, security company that provides security to media events and perhaps some Production Houses and/or Animation Studios.
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