Lawyer assesses Pinterest's copyright situation Become a smarter digital marketer Understanding new AWS I/O options and costs | CloudVertical Blog One of the most common issues we hear is that I/O on AWS is hard to predict, and often a bottleneck for applications. So today’s news that AWS have introduced two new ways to improve your I/O performance is an exciting development. Aside from the performance benefits, these new options also introduce a number of additional cost variables. I’m excited to announce that, on the same day of introduction (as we did we programmatic billing!) We thought you might find it useful to get more information on the cost implications, so continue reading to learn about the options, costs and how they differ from existing standard EC2 and EBS resources. New Instance Costs 3 existing instance types can now be deployed with EBS-optimized support (all examples taken using US East (Virginia) and Linux) Large: Additional 2.5¢ per hour / $18.60 per month – 7.8% higher Extra Large: Additional 5¢ per hour / $37.20 – 7.8% higher Quadruple Extra Large: Additional 5¢ per hour / $37.20 – 2.7% higher Storage Pricing
Y’a-t-il un designer pour sauver le Huffington Post ? Hello Je découvre ce matin la version française du site américain d’information, le Huffington Post. Présentée ce lundi matin, c’est la journaliste Anne Sinclair qui prend les commandes, en tant que directrice éditoriale. Curieux de découvrir ce « nouveau site »,je suis allé y faire un tour et quelle ne fut pas ma déception visuelle lorsque j’ai découvert le design du site. Pour rappel, un site d’informations est fait pour être…lu. Si ça vous intéresse : Pour conclure, j’ai rarement vu le « lancement d’un nouveau site » avec un design ancien. Je ne vous cite volontairement pas le brio graphique et ergonomique d’Owni.fr mais j’y pense très fort. Hâte de voir comment tout ceci va évoluer
Top 10 Pro Tips and Tools for Budding Web Developers and Designers | Life Hacker Web development and design are two great skills to have because they allow you to work from anywhere and create amazing, beautiful sites and apps. Nonetheless, it can be hard to get started when you don't know what to do. We can help you out with these ten great tips and tools. 10. Tips and tools are useless if you don't know the basics. 9. Picking the right font can make or break a great design. 8. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Text is not the only thing you might need to generate for your designs. 7. You know how there are no original ideas and everything is a remix? 6. For most web designers, Photoshop is an essential tool. Expanding your shape and brush collections can also provide you with new options. 5. The CSS3 Generator, the CSS3 Maker, and the CSS3 Border Radius Generator are all great examples of ways you can generate the more complex CSS code you often forget. 4. 3. 2. 1. So what frameworks should you use?
How to Use a Single Metric to Run Your Startup Collecting data is easy. There are lots of tools out there and ways to gather data about everything that’s happening with your business, from lead generation through to customer satisfaction. But what are we supposed to do with all that data? How does it help us focus on the key challenges at hand, provide us insights into our next steps, and drive success? The data you collect may be helpful at some point; but if you can’t cut out the noise, you’ll get buried. That’s why you should think about a single metric that’s most important for the stage of your company’s development, a single number that you want the entire company to focus on and improve upon. The One Metric That Matters (or OMTM) is a single number that you care the most about at the current stage of your startup. Four Reasons You Need the OMTM for Your Startup As I’ve said, the OMTM is a single metric that you care about at a given point in time, for the stage of your startup. 1. 2. 3. Focus is good. 4. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 1. 2.
Removing This Design Element Improved CTR by 27% Search filters are a critical UX feature to ecommerce sites. The larger your product assortment, the more necessary they are. But how you display the features may be helping or hurting your conversion rates. This week’s WhichTestWon feature test sought to discover if removing a “refine your search” toolbar above results on the UK Tool Centre website would increase click through rate. The hypothesis being the filter was a distraction, while pushing clickable results below the fold. Control Treatment Despite the search page having more than 100 product results, the test version without the filter improved click through by 27%. I myself found this result surprising, as I tend to take advantage of filters. If you use horizontal filters, this is a great testing idea, whether text-based or image-based. But the same concept applies to the “banners” and featured merchandising zones so common on search and category pages. Challenge your love affair with “hero shots” Relevance matters.
Marissa Mayer's Data-Driven Sales Revamp At Yahoo Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has always made her decisions based on as much data as possible. She famously relied on data to pick colors for Gmail and the Google homepage Right now, Mayer, and Yahoo's chief revenue officer Michael Barrett, have some huge decisions to make about Yahoo and one of its most important groups: its sales force. It's no surprise, then, that Yahoo just sent out a survey to its advertising clients: Mayer needs data! Yahoo and other ad-supported Internet companies do surveys like these all the time, of course. Below, we've pasted some of the survey questions and some of the multiple-choice answers to them. Both are interesting to Yahoo employees and Yahoo shareholders. The survey:
Why “saving money” and “ROI” are probably the wrong way to sell your product by I can’t remember how many times at Smart Bear I tried to sell Code Collaborator with the argument that it “saves you money.” And customers demanded it — some even required that we produce an ROI spreadsheet. And we did. The argument makes sense (though it’s wrong). So the economics are obvious: If two developers would each normally spend an average of 30 minutes on a code review, once a day, that’s 20 hours of total time in a business-month. Code Collaborator costs $499/developer — one time — so you make your money back inside the first month! You can’t afford not to buy it, right? But this argument never worked, not once, even though the reasoning is sound and customers requested it. In a perfect world, if the software development organization “produced more quality code” with fewer important bugs, that’s undeniably valuable. On top of that, budgets are siloed; the “Salaries” budget is separate from the “Tools” budget. This isn’t just true with engineering productivity.
Twitter Open-Sources Clutch.IO, The Mobile A/B Testing Service It Recently Acquired In August, Twitter acquired the small A/B testing service and development framework Clutch.io and announced that it would shut the service down on November 1st. Clutch, which Twitter describes as “an easy-to-integrate library for native iOS applications designed to help you develop faster, deploy instantly and run A/B tests,” will live on, however. The company today announced that it is open-sourcing the code on GitHub. The code is available under the relatively permissive Apache License 2.0. According to Chris Aniszczyk, Twitter’s Manager of Open Source, the company plans to continue to support the project. Why The Most Important Part of Your Brand is Invisible By Mars Dorian, Contributing {grow} Columinst We talk all the time about writing cornerstone content, building effective web design, and connecting with your community in the social media world. Yessss, it’s all essential, that’s why it’s getting poured again and again into our membranes. But what about the invisible world behind engagement creation? That special “X Factor” that every great (personal) brand emanates, that elusive awesomesauce that connects them stronger to their raving audience than gorilla glued Lego pieces ? Danielle LaPorte has it. It’s often the invisible part of your online presence that turns visitors into raving fans. And before I go all paranormal on you, the “invisible” I mean doesn’t include ectoplasma and proton blasters. It’s the elusive part that people cannot FULLY explain, but that tremendously affects the way they see your brand and interact with it. Let’s start with… The reason “why” Summonin’ some subtext Putting the “you” in your work What to do? Conclusion
Does Conversion Rate Tell The Whole Story? Editor’s Note: Everyone wants to improve their conversion rates right? But are “conversion rates” the right indicators for steering you towards your most important goal: increasing revenues? The case study presented here is about how FoxTranslate.com (a document translation service), found that focusing on conversion rates alone can be misleading. Read this article to discover what they learned. You’ll be surprised and it may change the way you run and think about your website tests. As most of you know, a popular platform for A/B testing new website features and landing pages is Google Website Optimizer. Over the past few months FoxTranslate has been running A/B tests to improve our website conversions. It wasn’t until we decided to make a redesigned home page variation that we started to “see the light”. We felt the new home page: Highlighted our core service features.Segmented the data into digestible sections.Offered a slicker and professional feel. Revenue Improvement of Current vs.
SaaS products aren’t viral I recently gave a short talk to the portfolio companies of a SaaS investor, and prepped some notes around the topic of SaaS products and virality. It’s hard enough in consumer, much less SaaS For consumer internet entrepreneurs that are working on big markets, getting to virality is hard enough. There are plenty of sectors, like commerce or moms, where it’s almost impossible to achieve sustained viral growth, just because of the dynamics and narrow nature of the audience. When you turn your attention to SaaS products that are narrow in industry and profession, it’s even harder. The product is what matters1 The main point I make in this talk is that virality has a lot to do with product category. inherently social- like publishing, communication, or file-sharinghigh retention with daily usageapplies to many job titles within an organization, so that anyone can use itinvites travel through a new channel with a compelling pitchtargets extroverts :) Hope you enjoy the slides!
Building For The Enterprise — The Zero Overhead Principle Editor’s note: DJ Patil is a data scientist in residence at Greylock Partners. You can follow him on Twitter. The enterprise is back. A central theme to this new wave of innovation is the application of core product tenets from the consumer space to the enterprise. My team and I at the Department of Defense discovered this vital rule in the biggest enterprise of them all — the U.S. government. The real challenge for analysts is that they are already overloaded and tend to ignore additional tools that require training (remember these guys have real time pressure). Products that require training are a waste of time. Why do we tolerate a lack of the Zero Overhead Principle? What are the traits that the best enterprise companies use in adopting lessons from the consumer experience? 1. 2. 3. Focusing on the underserved areas of enterprise is becoming a growing trend, as savvy enterprise customers want better software.