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According to the annual convention, Google released the top Global Popular Search Keywords in 2012 — Google Zeitgeist. In the year 2012, Among the global fastest rising search keywords (the fame keywords), Whitney Houston is on TOP, Gangnam Style, iPad 3 and Diablo 3 are all on the rank.

The global superstar Whitney Houston is ranked in a number of countries and regions search words, her death shocked fans all over the world. In South Korea, the PSY "Gangnam Style" caused sensation on YouTube, the dance style is sweeping across the world as storms and result in NO.1 hits in many countries and regions.

Below is the rank list over several topics, you can visit this google page for all.

Related post: Google zeitgeist 2011

Any product or service from techn company may result in failure, even like Google or Apple such giants also have to face the harsh reality. We summarize the "died" technologies, concepts and products in 2012. Part of those failure products and services from Google, Apple. However, there are more survivals in their product/service lists so they can continue to develop new technologies.

Cisco Tablet PC for Enterprise user – Cius
Cisco closed Cius project in June of this year. Cius is a business tablet PC with Android OS. The Cius life cycle is actually less than one year from the first shipment in to market.

While iPad is dominating the world, the Cisco Cius just want to share a small part of business tablet space, however it's failed. John Chambers, CEO of Cisco said the Cius project should have been closed 9 months before.

Ping, MobileMe and iWork sharing
Even companies like Apple can not guarantee all their products can be accepted by the market. On Sep 30th 2012, Apple closed Ping which is introduced into the iTunes music network in 2010. Although there're some supporters of Ping, it's lack of integration with other popular sites.
MobileMe mainly offers cloud network service to mobile devices like backup etc. However, with the increasing user requirements , it led to a more mature product – iCloud. After that, Apple group encourages people to migrate to iCloud and finally closed MobileMe on Jul 1st this year.

iWork sharing service is the same as MobileMe, people need to migrate all data to iCloud.

Motorola Webtop
Webtop is a software designed for Motorola smart phones. It's able to convert smart phone to a special table PC accessory and doing the pc work like web browsing. At the very first of Webtop, people in the industry believe it will be the future of mobile computing.

Unfortunetely, Webtop does not receive positive feedbacks and selling is not very good. As the Android developed more similar service, webtop is being igored by mor and more people.. After merged to Google, Motorola pays further attention to Android OS improvement especially the desktoplike function development. The new Adroid phones will no longer include Webtop.

Google Postini
Google is ready to shut Postini – their spam filtering and email archiving product. Meanwhile, google intends to move all Postini users to Google Apps before 2013. Google has added the Postini security features to Google Apps. Comparing to Postini, Google Apps is a larger, more reliable platform.

iDen network of Sprint
US mobile communications Corp Sprint plans to shut down iDEN Network in June 2013. In 2005, CDMA tech based Sprint acquired Nextel with big money and got the IDEN technology. But later it approves it is a failure attempt. The United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has announced to allow Sprint iDEN band for 4G services.

Microsoft Windows Live
The Microsoft Windows Live is now "dead"! Microsoft launched the service in 2005, but now it's planned to close. In fact, the closure of Windows Live started from 2008. The core service "search" and "Email" have been transferred to Bing and Hotmail. In 2008, Microsoft Windows Live Book Search function and help the community got closed, Windows Live Spaces was shut down in 2010 and Windows Live Group discussion closed in September 2012.

MSNBC from Microsoft and NBC Universal
In July of this year, Microsoft and NBC Universal announced to end the 16 years partnership in msnbc.com/MSNBC cable TV. As a result of that, the Microsoft first try in traditional television media gone to the end. NBC workers have moved from Microsoft headquarters in Redmond to NBC headquarter in New York. MSNBC will be renamed to  NBC.
Microsoft will focus on MSN.com online customer. With their advanced technology, users will be able to read the breaking news in real time.

SOPA bill
SOPA is short of Stop Online Piracy Act. It's firstly announced on Oct 26th 2011 by Lamar Smith. Because it will affect the internet freedom as well as user privacy, it's opposed by almost every internet giants including Google、Yahoo、Facebook、Twitter、AOL、LinkedIn、eBay、Mozilla、Roblox and many human rights associations. On Jan 14th 2012, Obama officially announced not to support SOPA bill.

Juniper’s Peribit WAN optimization
Juniper announced in August to co-operate with Riverbed company who is competitor in WAN Optimization. That means the $337 million acquisition over Peribit Networks in 2005 to develop their own products completely failed. The cooperation between Juniper and Riverbed can improve both performance and security across different devices, network and cloud application delivery.

Cooperation between Sprint and LightSquared
Cooperation agreement between U.S. telecom operator Sprint and LightSquared was terminated on March 16 2012. Under the agreement, Sprint will return LightSquared pre-payment of $65 million which is paid in 2011. Sprint and LightSquared signed a 15-year-long cooperation agreement, there LightSquared will pay Sprint $9 billion in the first 11 years in spectrum, network services, LTE and satellite purchasing. Another $4.5 billion payment will authorize LightSquared to offer 4G service. However, the plan was rejected by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) rejected because it will obstruct the airline and military GPS system. Soon after that LightSquared encountered $56 millions of the debt crisis, to reduce operating costs the company was forced massive layoffs, the company CEO resigned because of this.

Naked DSL projects by Verizon
In May of this year, the U.S. mobile operator Verizon stopped "naked DSL" business. Verizon explained only around 10% DSL users signed the service. Since from May 6, clients will not be able to sign up this service but it will remain for existing users.

Megaupload website
The famous file sharing site Megaupload was shut down by the U.S. Justice department in January this year. The site owner is also arrested by U.S goverment for international piracy. This event resulted in lots of attacking to U.S goverment and other big websites. Megaupload headquarter is located in Hong Kong, and it's founder Kim Dotcom was arrested in New Zealand.

Microsoft Metro
August this year, Microsoft determined to give up the word "Metro" in Win8 and Windows Phone system due to the METRO brand trademark disputes. MS does not explain about the dispute but call it internal study code in early days.

Google Picnik
Picnik is online photo editing and sharing website which is acquired by Google in 2010. On April 19 2012, Google shut down Picnik and migrated some popularly used tools and functions to Google+ Creative Kit. Google enterprise management department vice president Dave Girouard said, google hopes to improve the quality of service and offer better user experience.

Adobe does not support Android 4.1 and further versions
Adobe announced in June said Flash Player will only support Google android system till version 4.0. 4.1 and further versions are not compatible. After Aug 15th 2012, the program will not be available from Google Play online store, only previously installed equipment can continue to download. However, Adobe will provide document files on their official site to users or developers to download.

Microsoft MIX conference
Microsoft held MIX conference for developers and designers since from 2005, but Microsoft did not as usual this year. Microsoft has determined to merge it into the BUILD conference held in October. Microsoft said in 2005 IE6 was being developed, Microsoft needs developers gathered together to fix problems, but now the situation has changed, and there's overlap between MIX and BUILD, it's not good to invite developers to participate two similar Conference.

Oink
Oink is the first product by Digg founder Kevin Roseafter leaving Digg. Oink is a mobile application that allows users to scoring in different places for anything and share with your followers. We can also find the best stuff in a city or a specific location by Oink. However, only afeter four months in the Apple store, he decided to use the limited resources to other projects and Oink closed on March 15 of the year. BTW, there're over 100,000 downloads when Oink just came out for 3 weeks and the lab Milk also received a $1.5 million investment from Google Ventures.

Harris remote cloud hosting service
Military radio equipment manufacturer Harris Corp. announced to close remote cloud hosting service business in February due to low rate user adoption. As international communications and IT service provider, Harris set up a 10-million-square-foot data center in Virginia last year. Now Harris has to close the remote cloud hosting service and sell it's data center.

Amazon Kindle DX
Amazon e-book reader Kindle DX officially released on May 6, 2009. In November of last year, Amazon suddenly cut down Kindle DX price from $379 to $259 on official site, the downgrade is up to 32%. Now DX is not available on Amazon site for no reason. From all online analysis, Kindle DX is a failure because just in September of this year, Amazon launched a new e-reader — 6-inch size Paperwhite. If the user need bigger size, Amazon also introduced a 8.9-inch size tablet pc Kindle Fire HD.

GROWING ACCEPTANCE: TRENDS IN THE 2012 FUTURE OF CLOUD COMPUTING ANNUAL SURVEY

Cloud computing is no longer the new kid on the block. That means it's losing its novelty and coming under real scrutiny. The good news? It's really coming up trumps. In this article, we'll take a look at the strong trend between the 2011 and 2012 Future of Cloud Computing annual survey – the trend of growing confidence in cloud computing as an IT strategy.

The Future of Cloud Computing annual survey takes a statistical approach to canvassing the opinions of hundreds of corporate bodies – 785 this year, up from 417 in 2011 (and including companies such as Citrix and Microsoft) – to get an overview of the sentiment about cloud computing in the business sphere. There were some key takeaways for System Admins to consider in the survey, but there was also a lot of strategically important stuff. In this article, we’re going to look at the evidence for one of the strong trends suggested by the data: that confidence in cloud computing as a bona fide IT strategy is rising rapidly.

First up, there’s the sheer impact that cloud computing is having in the IT development sphere. More than 50% of recipients believed that cloud computing would have a disruptive influence on ‘most’ categories – including Big Data, Mobile, Office Productivity and even Communications and HR. Perhaps as a result of this awareness, 55% of CIOs are to increase spending on SaaS (Software as a Service) in 2012. Software has seen some of the greatest disruption to the typical ‘code and manually distribute for individual clients to run’ model, with 6x more software coded for remote cloud computation (SaaS) than for individual client computation. At current rates, predictions are that 84% of new software will be SaaS.

The increased confidence in cloud computing is also demonstrated by the increased numbers of businesses deploying SaaS applications. The survey found that 67% of companies already deploy SaaS applications, and a further 14% are planning to within the next year. Only 19% of respondents said they had no intention to – meaning that an overwhelming 81% are in favour, then.

Confidence in cloud security and privacy is also rocketing. In 2011, 10% of recipients said they were avoiding the platform as it was ‘too risky’. By 2012 this had dropped to only 3% of recipients – despite data-incursive laws such as the Patriot Act coming in to force in the US. Only 12% of recipients said that security needed to mature further – down from a quarter of all recipients in 2011 – for them to be happy with rolling out the platform more completely.

Perhaps most stunningly is the stat around overall confidence. In response to the question ‘how do you feel about cloud computing?’ an incredible 50% of all responses claimed that they had ‘complete confidence’ in the platform. That’s up from a meagre 13% in 2011. Needless to say, that sort of rise suggests a bright future for cloud. Customers lagged behind, with around 37% expressing complete confidence, so there is clearly more education needing to happen to convince customers of the benefits that vendors are happy to see.

At the moment, factors inhibiting spiralling confidence include security – with 55% of respondents saying this was holding them back – and compliance. Compliance is a serious issue at the moment –because the technology is still relatively new, regulatory bodies are not fully operational or able to act decisively on matters of regulatory ambiguity.

The ultimate measure of confidence, however, is where investment is going. And companies are certainly putting their money where their mouth is on this one; venture cloud financing sat at $1.6 billion in 2010, and rose 50% to $2.4 billion in 2011. The future is very bright for cloud computing, and confidence in the new technology is leading the way.

Search engines are being spammed by tons of spammers everyday. Especially in SEO industry, the war between whitehat and blackhat has been hot since from the very begining. However, the good times for spammer might end soon after google's rank-modifying patent. Below is the article from seobythesea. Good news for people who have been doing right on their websites.

Google’s Webmaster Guidelines highlight a number of practices that the search engine warns against, that someone might engage in if they were to try to boost their rankings in the search engine in ways intended to mislead it. The guidelines start with the following warning:

Even if you choose not to implement any of these suggestions, we strongly encourage you to pay very close attention to the “Quality Guidelines,” which outline some of the illicit practices that may lead to a site being removed entirely from the Google index or otherwise impacted by an algorithmic or manual spam action. If a site has been affected by a spam action, it may no longer show up in results on Google.com or on any of Google’s partner sites.

A Google patent granted this week describes a few ways in which the search engine might respond when it believes there’s a possibility that such practices might be taking place on a page, where they might lead to the rankings of pages being improved in those search results.

Those practices, referred to in the patent as “rank-modifying spamming techniques,” may involve techniques such as:

• Keyword stuffing,
• Invisible text,
• Tiny text,
• Page redirects,
• Meta tags stuffing, and
• Link-based manipulation.

While the patent contains definitions of these practices, I’d recommend reading the definitions for those quality guidelines over on the Google help pages which go into much more detail. What’s really interesting about this patent isn’t that Google is taking steps to try to keep people from manipulating search results, but rather the possible steps they might take while doing so.

The patent is:

Ranking documents
Invented by Ross Koningstein
Assigned to Google
US Patent 8,244,722
Granted August 14, 2012
Filed: January 5, 2010

Abstract

A system determines a first rank associated with a document and determines a second rank associated with the document, where the second rank is different from the first rank. The system also changes, during a transition period that occurs during a transition from the first rank to the second rank, a transition rank associated with the document based on a rank transition function that varies the transition rank over time without any change in ranking factors associated with the document.

When Google believes that such techniques are being applied to a page, it might respond to them in ways that the person engaging in spamming might not expect. Rather than outright increasing the rankings of those pages, or removing them from search results, Google might respond with what the patent refers to as a time-based “rank transition function.”

The rank transition function provides confusing indications of the impact on rank in response to rank-modifying spamming activities. The systems and methods may also observe spammers’ reactions to rank changes caused by the rank transition function to identify documents that are actively being manipulated. This assists in the identification of rank-modifying spammers.

Let’s imagine that you have a page in Google’s index, and you work to improve the quality of the content on that page and acquire a number of links to it, and those activities cause the page to improve in rankings for certain query terms. The ranking of that page before the changes would be referred to as the “old rank,” and the ranking afterward is referred to as the “target rank.” Your changes might be the result of legitimate modifications to your page. A page where techniques like keyword stuffing or hidden text has been applied might also potentially climb in rankings as well, with an old rank and a higher target rank.

The rank transition function I referred to above may create a “transition rank” involving the old rank and the target rank for a page.

During the transition from the old rank to the target rank, the transition rank might cause:

• a time-based delay response,
• a negative response,
• a random response, and/or
• an unexpected response

For example, rather than just immediately raise the rank of a page when there have been some modifications to it, and/or to the links pointed to a page, Google might wait for a while and even cause the rankings of a page to decline initially before it rises. Or the page might increase in rankings initially, but to a much smaller scale than the person making the changes might have expected.

The search engine may monitor the changes to that page and to links pointing to the page to see what type of response there is to that unusual activity. For instance, if someone stuffs a page full of keywords, instead of the page improving in rankings for certain queries, it might instead drop in rankings. If the person responsible for the page then comes along and removes those extra keywords, it’s an indication that some kind of rank modifying spamming was going on.

So why use these types of transition functions?

For example, the initial response to the spammer’s changes may cause the document’s rank to be negatively influenced rather than positively influenced. Unexpected results are bound to elicit a response from a spammer, particularly if their client is upset with the results. In response to negative results, the spammer may remove the changes and, thereby render the long-term impact on the document’s rank zero.

Alternatively or additionally, it may take an unknown (possibly variable) amount of time to see positive (or expected) results in response to the spammer’s changes. In response to delayed results, the spammer may perform additional changes in an attempt to positively (or more positively) influence the document’s rank. In either event, these further spammer-initiated changes may assist in identifying signs of rank-modifying spamming.

The rank transition function might impact one specific document, or it might have a broader impact over “the server on which the document is hosted, or a set of documents that share a similar trait (e.g., the same author (e.g., a signature in the document), design elements (e.g., layout, images, etc.), etc.)”

If someone sees a small gain based upon keyword stuffing or some other activity that goes against Google’s guidelines, they might engaging in some similar additional changes to a site involving things like adding additional keywords or hidden text. If they see a decrease, they might make other changes, including reverting a page to its original form.

If there’s a suspicion that spamming might be going on, but not enough to positively identify it, the page involved might be subjected to fluctuations and extreme changes in ranking to try to get a spammer to attempt some kind of corrective action. If that corrective action helps in a spam determination, then the page, “site, domain, and/or contributing links” might be designated as spam.

If those are determined to be spam, Google might investigate further, ignore them, or degrade them in rankings.

Original article address http://www.seobythesea.com/2012/08/google-rank-modifying-spammers-patent/

The London Olympics Just begins. Because it's joined by all countries in the world, a little event might cause global response. Before the Opening ceremony, all kinds of advertisements have occupied the London streets and squares because everybody would like to make their names noticed by people. Web hosting providers also joined this campaign and put their ads/promos everywhere they can thought of. In this posting Let's view some of the popular ones.

Godaddy is the leading advertiser in web hosting industry. The godaddy brand is showed in almost every important sports meeting, either civil or international. The company hopes to use the Olympics stage to try to re-brand its image. The common theme: beauty on the outside but brains on the inside.

From the overall Godaddy marketing history, they have been relying heavily on the sex appeal of its "Go Daddy girls". Although they wish to reload it's brand by the Olympics, there's no much difference with their new image comparing to old images. However, instead using the traditional sexy girl to attract eyeballs, this Olympic ads shows more about the company's customer service and website design service. Hot lady is still there but it tells us more that people who do the company’s actual work are all men.

• Godaddy Olympics ads Video show: http://www.usatoday.com/money/advertising/story/2012-07-25/godaddy-olympics-ads/56490314/1
• Picture Gallery: http://mediagallery.usatoday.com/Go+Daddy+Olympic+ads+combine+sexy+with+smart/G4168
  

Another big name in this ads campaign is 123-Reg. They're using 160 'streetliner' advertisements installed on 160 buses throughout Greater London during the Olympics period. It's said to be the first try for online hosting advertising.

About 123-reg: founded in 2000, have been offering domain registration and web hosting to tons of online business. It's by far the largest UK domain registrar. It's working similar to godaddy service and also offering lots of promotional codes. Because it's targeted to UK market, their billing is made for BGP.

More details about 123-reg ads: http://www.outputmagazine.com/wide-format-print/applications/display/internet-company-goes-offline-with-first-bus-adverts/

Other big names such as hostgator is not included in the list because they're in the process of business transition to EIG. If you have tracked the hostgator you will find their official promo/ads are less than before.

How do we think about such advertising?

Well, it's absolutely good chance to gain more business. That's why London is almost occupied by all kinds of ads. However, more ads doesn't mean the level of service quality. Especially for online business, reliability is most important factor to keep customers. Just like all other business, ads is only a method to get customer but you must do more actual work to keep the customer.