Yellowseed Web Design Services

On the banks of the windswept Columbia River, Google is working on a secret weapon in its quest to dominate the next generation of Internet computing. But it is hard to keep a secret when it is a computing center as big as two football fields, with twin cooling plants protruding four stories into the sky.

Google is preparing to launch a system for handling online transactions. The system will compete with EBay's popular PayPal system providing a "free" system for online transactions.

Natural language speech recognition is markedly improving voice-activated self-service. Powered by artificial intelligence, these speech-recognition systems are altering consumer perceptions about phone self-service, as calls for help no longer elicit calls for help. That, in turn, is spurring renewed corporate interest in the concept of phone self-service. In 2004, sales of voice self-service systems topped $1.2 billion.

Yahoo gets ad placements on eBay, while eBay auctions will appear on Yahoo, and PayPal becomes payment backend for Yahoo online payments.

The overtures of a merger? Read this story here.

In a split with other tech firms, Cisco, 3M, Qualcomm and others ask Congress not to enact any new laws mandating Net neutrality. Check out the story here.

Wondering how much you can get for your domain? Linkfish.com performs an instant analysis of you domain and assigns it a market value based on a number of factors. This is a great tool if you're considering selling your business - your domain's value can boost your asking price. It can also be helpful in choosing a domain.

Skype makes a break for it. The company is now offering FREE phone calls to any phone in Canada or the US.

With the launch of it’s new calendar service, Google has shown once again that it is the world’s leading developer of web-based applications.

Google Calendar is an incredibly useful tool that uses the iCal protocol first developed by Apple to allow users to create and share their calendars. Because it can display and publish iCal and XML feeds, sharing and collaboration are easier than ever.

Google Calendar also integrates seamlessly with gmail which means that not only is Microsoft Outlook in trouble, but Google has served notice that desktop productivity and office applications will soon be obsolete.

Sign up for you own google calendar at http://www.google.com/calendar/

The Viral Garden has done a nice job of uncover the Internet's 25 most popular marketing blogs. Why should you care? Well, the latest trends and techniques in marketing are bound to turn up on one of these blogs long before you'll read about it in your local paper.

After profiles on digg.com and MSNBC, the Great News Network surpassed the 20,000 visitor per day mark. The site has received great reviews for its comprehensive summary of the day's positive news and its easy-to-use layout. The site also provides a great system of positive news RSS feeds based on topic and region.

If you're not using Mozilla Firefox, you should be (unless you're running a Mac). One of Firefox's best features is its ability to utilize "Extensions". Extensions are little programs that make the browser do extra little things. Visit mozilla to learn more and get some of your own.

Here's a term you should know: social bookmarking. What is it? Why should you care?

A meme is like a gene, but of culture. It is self-replicating and often infectious, a piece of information that passes from one person to another (and through the electronic media) like a virus. They can be folk wisdom, advertising jingles, trends, fashions, styles, and technology that make up today's cultural genome. Online, memes are everything. I'll post more about all of this soon.

After many months of planning and work, we've finally launched our new website. This is a major plank in the development of Yellowseed 2.0 - a faster, friendlier and better quality web design company. We redesigned our logo, motto, accounting, customer support and we've made a new committment to web standards like XHTML 1.0 and CSS 2.0 (Painful irony: this site isn't completely compliant - dratted Internet Explorer has forced us to comprise). Anyways, hope you enjoy it and if you have any questions please email us or send a ticket through our Consulting and Support system.

Yesterday, I received a strange email from a friend. It was a petition demanding the end to "bonsai kitten" - a pasttime in which a person stuffs a live kitten into a small glass jar for a year with the hope of creating a shrunken and distorted "bonsia" cat. My friend had received the email about bonsai kitten from another friend, and because she has a good social conscience, immediately forwarded it to everybody she knew. Sound familiar?

Lunarpages.com got nailed by a denial of service (a.k.a. DoS) attack today, resulting in a number of their servers being unavailable. A number of Yellowseed clients are hosted at Lunarpages but, thankfully, only 1 client was affected. Their site was unavailable for about 15 minutes at around 10:30am.

So, what is a Denial of Service attack?

You've already heard that businesses are using blogs as a way of talking to their customers, employees, and investors in a more personal way (Here's an example if you need more evidence than what you're reading right now). Blogging makes a company seem more human and community focussed despite a global medium that de-emphasizes face-to-face contact.

Not to overstate the point, but I think the blogosphere is the foundation of tomorrow's media.