BizSpark is a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.

Dear Google Apps admin,​

In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance, we are harnessing some of the latest improvements in web browser technology. This includes faster JavaScript processing and new standards like HTML5. As a result, over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 ​as well as other older browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers.

We plan to begin phasing out support of these older browsers on the Google Docs suite and the Google Sites editor on March 1, 2010. After that point, certain functionality within these applications may have higher latency and may not work correctly in these older browsers. Later in 2010, we will start to phase out support for these browsers for Google Mail and Google Calendar.

Google Apps will continue to support Internet Explorer 7.0 and above, Firefox 3.0 and above, Google Chrome 4.0 and above, and Safari 3.0 and above.

Starting this week, users on these older browsers will see a message in Google Docs and the Google Sites editor explaining this change and asking them to upgrade their browser. We will also alert you again closer to March 1 to remind you of this change.

In 2009, the Google Apps team delivered more than 100 improvements to enhance your product experience. We are aiming to beat that in 2010 and continue to deliver the best and most innovative collaboration products for businesses.

Thank you for your continued support!

Sincerely,

The Google Apps team

2. Think about the mobile user. Think “fast access to short bits of content.”

3. Keep it simple. Use short, direct sentences. Make navigation easy. Don’t expect people to fill out long forms. Let people find things with as few clicks as possible.

4. Keep it fast. Lots of video, animation, or large image files slow down your site. Keep them to a minimum.

5. Make it useful. Don’t just think about your business and your goals; think about your audience and what they really need, especially when they’re on the go.

This is just ridiculous!

I don’t have child but I think if providing food and nutrition to children is wrong or even crimial, parents across the globe would rather be wrong.

Parents may demand their kids to finish food on the dinner table but hardly is any parent would force their kids to over swallow.

Kids these days are picky about food. My aunt has a list of food my teen cousion doesn’t eat and that covers almost half of a gocery store. Every night it’s a challenge around the dinner table. She will bust into tear if he eats nearly enough for normal daily consumption. In the same time there are kids hide food under the pillow because their parents try to control their diet.

Besides who is to tell if a child is over weitght. A child can be fat in one parents eye but skinny in others. Whose business is that to eat and how much is enough if they are available in food stores. The best way of providing obesity is to entirely shut down chocolate and pop production. Even if this accusation did become law, what kinda enforcement would there be for the poor kids? Taken away from the parents to go on a diet until the body weitght drops to the so call standard? Is there such a standard? What race does it apply? Fatty food and over eatten maybe bad decision making, but it should not be child abuse.

The last thing a family wants is judgement from someone who has nothing to do with them.

Check out subject about 3D TV on Wikipeida

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_television

Research In Motion release the BlackBerry Widget Packager in late 2009 for web developer who are willing to develop web content driven application on BlackBerry a shortcut to success.  Here is the description about the package on the BlackBerry website.

” The BlackBerry Widget Packager 1.0 Beta 2 is a new tool that allows web developers to package up their web assets into BlackBerry Widgets (small, discrete, standalone web applications that use HTML, CSS and JavaScript®). A BlackBerry Widget looks, behaves and has the same security mechanisms as a native BlackBerry smartphone application. BlackBerry Widgets can be installed on a BlackBerry smartphone like any native application and extended to use device-specific information and data using the BlackBerry Widget APIs. ”

If you understand Adobe AIR, think of this is AIR on BlackBerry but only supports Javascript. The idea behind this product is to consider a native BB app as a web system. HTML controls the content, CSS controls the look & feed, and finally Javascript controls event handling or sometimes called behavior. Beyond that you can use the API RIM provided to assess the native resources of the BlackBerry devices. And that’s the only new knowledge you need to learn. The API is a powerful library that hands you the power to read, write information on a BB device, to invoke a home call or SMS, even to interact with the GPS system.

As a web developer you can develop web content in any IDE of your preference. To run your web content on a BlackBerry device, you need to create a config file that tells the device about the application you are going to deploy including version, permission and a pointer to the home page. Once all the ingredients are ready, you do the magic to brake/compile the site to a Java application package readable to the device. Don’t get scared of compiling a application if you are a script writer. Essentially all everything gets compiled, and that’s how computer works. RIM also make the compiling process painless by using BlackBerry Widget Packager. The entire process doesn’t take longer than 5 mins.

If you are a javascript web developer and you have experienced OO programming and web API, here is something to get you started.

In terms for development tools, there is a number of options mentioned on the BlackBerry web site that could be some how confusing for developers that don’t have any experience with Java. Here is a list of tools to get your start.

First of all you need a Windows environment, but Parallel on OSx works too.

You will also need to sign up for a free BB developer account before you can download the tools.

http://na.blackberry.com/eng/developers/

Java Development Kit

(Programs written in Java need this to run)

http://java.sun.com/javase/downloads/widget/jdk6.jsp

BlackBerry Web Plug-In with Eclipse 3.4

(This is recommended by RIM but you can use any IDE you prefer)

https://www.blackberry.com/Downloads/contactFormPreload.do?code=DC727151E5D55DDE1E950767CF861CA5&dl=65B5D3C3EE185EA85D834F59369793A3

BlackBerry Widget Packager

(This program convert a web site to a BlackBerry application)

http://www.blackberry.com/developers/widget

BlackBerry Device Simulator

(You need a simulator to test your program before it gets deployed to an actually device. All available simulators can be found in the combox on the bottom right corner. You need a V 5.0 simulator but the Strom and Strom 2 work the best. Trust me on this you will appreciate it one day)

http://na.blackberry.com/eng/developers/

Once you have everything installed. Here is the place you can find all the resources about the Widget SDK. Make sure you watch the video

“How to Use the BlackBerry Widget Packager to Create Your BlackBerry Widget”

before you start.

http://na.blackberry.com/eng/developers/devbetasoftware/widgetsdk.jsp

Okay. Now you should have everything to start. Hope one day this will be the new highlight of your portfolio.

Essentially, in a lease, you never “own” the car. You make payments for 2-3 years, then hand the car back. Think about it almost like a long-term rental.

If you purchase a car on a conventional ‘buy’ contract, but trade it off before you are done paying for it, you never *owned* that car either. If you routingely trade out of cars every 2-3 yrs, you never *own* them at all. You are just moving from one monthly payment to another.

Dealers make no more on a lease than they do on a purchase. The cap cost of the car is the same as the ‘buy’ price. A lease customer has no need to buy extended warranties or any other extras – in fact lease companie usually don’t allow for them. So we typically make LESS on a lease than a ‘buy’. The residual is set by the bank, not us. When the car is handed in at the end of the lease, the dealer is just an agetn for the bank. We don’t stand to gain anything on the residual, except hoping you buy another car in teh process.

There are some advantages to leasing under the right circumstances.

First, if you trade out of cars every 2-3 years, it might be right for you. In a lease, you have a contract for a fixed amount of time. I discourage leasing past 3yrs – 2 is better. In a ‘loan’, after 2 yrs, if you try to trade you will probably be upside down, and owe more than the car is worth. So, in order to get out of it, you have to have a lot of cash, or finance that negative on the next car.

The contract will tell you that your payments are $x per month plus tax. At the end of the term, you will have a residual value for the car. The lease company basically says “In three years, we feel this car will be worth $Y” You have the option to buy the car at the end of the lease for that amount. If you are in love with the car, or it is worth well above the residual, you may want to consider that. However, in most cases, you simply hand over the keys and walk away.

In a lease, there is a specified amount of mileage. Most leases are constructed around 12K or 15K miles per year. If you go over the mileage, there will be a per-mile penalty at the end of the lease. So, if you drive a lot, it may not be for you.

Leasing typically allows a person to get a nicer car for the same payment as a lower-end car on a loan. that is because of that residual. You are only “financing” the difference between sales price and residual. In a loan, you are financing the entire purchase price.

In other words, if a car has a sale price of $25,000. on a three year lease, lets say the residual is $12,500. You are only “financing” $12,500 for 3 yrs. If you were to buy that same car, you would finance $25,000 either for a longer term, or a much higher 36 month payment.

Lastly, in a lease you pay less sales tax. In a conventional purchase on that $25k car, you pay tax on the whole 25,000. In a lease, you pay sales tax on the monthly payment. In other words, your payment of $300/month is actually $300+sales tax. BUT you are only paying tax on the leased amount – in the earlier example you are only paying sales tax on $12,500.

To those who say “never lease” — read this forum for 30 mintues. For every lease ‘horror story’ you read, you will see 20 people who are upside down on a 6 yr purchase and no way out. The key is to be thoroughly informed about the pros and cons of both, and make an educated decision based on your needs and lifestyle.

Times leasing is good: You trade cars ever few years, you dont drive more than 12-15k per year, you want to put less down

Times it is bad: You like to keep cars a long time, you drive a lot, you want to put a lot of cash down.

* Disclaimer: I(Desmond Liang) didn’t write this article. However this article is found by me from Yahoo! Answers as an excellent resource for auto consumers.

Desmond Liang
Fashion | Stylish | Affordable accessories for Women
http://www.moniqueblvd.com

Web | Design | E-commerce for small business owners
http://www.desmondliang.com

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Monique Blvd

Are you still paying also $100 dollar a month for cable and all the movie channels? Don’t forget box office and Block Buster nights. It just doesn’t make much sense to pay big bucks for entertainment nowadays while everything is out there on the Internet.

You have the latest movie and music album downloaded on your computer but now you stuck with the computer screen which is never big enough, not to mention how crappy computer sound system general is. Even more you have to pause the video when you need to poke your buddy back on facebook or reply an email. Computers are great but there is just so much we have to do in the same time. When the LED indicator of your PC constantly flashing and work is taking longer and longer to be done, it’s time to add more computation power to your system.

Western Digital’s media player WDTV and WDTV mini is now available in Best Buy for $130 and $100. It’s a magic box that scans all media file from external storage devices and output analog and digital signal for your home TV. The storeage device could be any USB portable device.

WDTV provides a built-in menu that allows users to navigate the external storage devices in any possible way. It is a multi-task media player, you can browse photos using the remote control comes in the package while your favorite music album is being played in the background.

WD is also promoting My Book, 1TB external hard drive for $120. That is more than 100 movies in high definition or 250 thousand songs. It works perfectly with WDTV, fast and quite. The only draw back is the disk is read only on Mac.

It’s true that all WDTV does can be achieved by a not so powerful PC plus a VGA to cable and a pair of PC speakers for under $100. A machine needs to do one thing and to do it well. That’s why a PC can be a game console however it is not. Throughout history system works better when power is decentralized. No matter how powerful a home computer is, sooner or later it is gonna run into problems such as one task needs to be paused because another program needs your attention.

These is a software comes in the package that extends lifts the bar even higher. As portable as today’s Internet is, potentially with WDTV and a computer you are able to browse the web on your TV.

More to discover, up comming post will follow up on what can be done using the software provided.

It’s the third day post holiday, finally the list of required documents are put together for the tourist visa to Japan.

What’s so nice about applying a Japanese visa in Toronto that these is never a line up in the embassy. Security is so casually handled. A simple metal detector guarded by a uniformed security guard that doesn’t even seen to notice my entry.

Inside the embassy, two tables are placed besides the wall in the waiting area. Waiting area and the office area are seperated by a glass wall.

I was fill with wonder to see the lady that I spoke to on the phone. She was all nice and funny, and was thinking of my will. When I asked on the phone how long my visa will be approved she said with anxiety after a long pause “how about 1 week, is that too long?”. lol. I didn’t antivipate the lenght of the approval process was negotiable.

While she was carefully and thoroughly investigating my application, I skim the others in the office and their desk. Documents piled up on all five desks but hardly there are computers. An Ojisan with grey hair sitting straight was reading a stack of Japanese news paper.  On his desk, there are more news papers and a cup of tea. The way and speed he reads reminds me my grandpa and his all time favorite column on the local news paper during the post dinner family reading period. At the end of the office, a younger woman was on the phone the whole time. The phone seen to be the most advance technology in this small office.

The process was quick. I am here with all the required documents ready. They have what they need. I was told to revisit in a week with $30 ready, and my first Japanese visa will be ready. The whole thing is straight forward and painless compare with what I have gone through to get a visa to the Unite States. There is no full body search, no waiting, no questioning, no finger print, no eyeball scanning. Both countries are well developed, however, if applying a Japanese visa is riding the Shinkansen bullet train, getting a U.S. visa is like sitting on a double deck tour bus which is humiliating from head to toe.

One step closer. Yadaaaaa

This post is for business owners and marketers looking for effective approach to create an online appearance on facebook fan page, yet looking to make certain information invisible to non-fan facebook users.

Why FBFP(facebook fan page)?

FBFPs are prefect for campaigns that only last a short period of time. They are tighten to a FB profile. Greating and deleting the pages won’t affect the profile. FB also allows multiple fan page for one profiles. All pages are listed under Application>Ads and pages.

Fan page adopted the best of the funtionalities of FB. Wall, note, discussion and photos. As administrator, you will be able to review the Insights section on the left side no far below the profile photo. This section provides break down of page traffic report by period, language and geographic region of your choice. What’s even more about FBFP is its support to applications. You can install facebook apps that serve the propuse of your campaign on your fan page under a separated tab in clicks. And the secrect ingredient that makes a fast membership program the FBML app.

FBML allows fan page administrator to write HTML code on a separated tab. We are not going to talk about programming in HTML in tech terms because at the end of the day, who cares? But one thing we need you about the FBML+HTML combo is that it creates the possibility of controlling a part of the fan page to be visible to fans only. Keep in mind that one your fan page is published, everything on it is visible across the internet. If you are running a campaign that only allows facebook fan to see member only content such as promotion discount code or business contact info, this FBML feature is very handy.

Suppose you fail HTML 101, here is how you can get your job done in steps.

Step 1. Create two images that carry different information, one for everybody, the other for fan only. KEEP IN MIND THAT FANS CAN SEE BOTH IMAGES WHILE NON-FAN MEMBER CAN ONLY SEE THE ONE THAT’S VISIBLE FOR THE PUBLIC. So make sure you don’t repeat the information on the public image again on the fan-only page. Upload these two images to your server or online photo album. Grab the ABSOLUTE URL (i.e. http://www.yoursite.com/…/imagetitle.jpg) to the images and save them in a text file for later usage.

Step 2. Install FBML to your page by clicking “Add to my Page” on the left at Here

Step 3. Go back to your fan page on facebook. Click “edit page” under the profile image. Scroll to almost the bottom of the page, click on “edit” in the FBML box. Enter the Box Title, that’s going to be the caption of your stand alone FBML tab on your fan page. Paste the code below to the FBML box. Don’t know what it means, no worries. Just copy and paste it in.

<table width=”100%”  border=”0″ cellspacing=”0″ cellpadding=”0″>
<tr>
<td>
<img src=’#image for public and fan#‘>
<fb:visible-to-connection>
<img src=’#image for fan only#‘>
</fb:visible-to-connection>
</td></tr></table>

Step 4: Replace the string with the ABSOLUTE URL to the PUBLIC ONLY image. Once again, replace the string with the ABSOLUTE URL to the FAN ONLY image. Click “Save Changes”. You are all set.

Test it out. Go back to your fan page, you should see a new with the title you previously enter. Supposed you are an administrator, you should be able to see both images. Get someone who is not a fan to make sure that the fan only image doesn’t show up.

Later you also have the option to set this tab as the landing tab of your fan page.  Go to the “Edit Page”>”Wall Setting”, click on the combox besides “Default Landing Tab for Everyone Else:”. I believe you can figure the rest out.

I hope this helps. Don’t forget to comment if you have any questions or suggestion regarding this post. For more updates, follow me on twitter or facebook.

I am gonna start by correcting the impression of those whom think this kind of of events are nothing more than a group of nerds get together to talk about things only they care. That’s true, and that’s awesome. When you were emailing or browsing the web on your iPhone while you were waiting for the bus or the food in that favorite restaurant of yours, have you ever appreciated the work the men who created iPhone and the apps have done. I have, and even more after the conference today.

Apple app store is only 15 months old, but more than 100′000 as counting apps are being hosted up there as we speak. Over 18′000 apps are downloaded every minute.

The prerequisite of attending the AITT is a iPhone App developer certificated and at least one iPhone App published on the app store. All seminars focus on technical problems developers face everyday from architecture design to debugging. There is absolutely nothing related to sales and marketing strategies which is fantastic. Usually this kind of events are organized by PR and marketing firms, and are heavily flood by commercials from supporters the PR and marketing firms gather up. That takes a lot of credits out of the significance of the event. The sprite of programming is about scientific innovation which is not PR and marketing is all about. Apple did a good job hosting such an event for developers and developers only.

The conference room in Hyatt Rengency Toronto on King street is fill with approximately 300 iPhone developers today. Many of them comes from varies programming language background, mostly C++ and Java. Plenty of them come from the U.S. Developers in Toronto are lucky to live in one of the four North American cities in which the conferences are hosted.

What impresses me the most is the difference between what Apple tells the public and what they actually did to develop iPhone as a part of the Apple development framework. Stop right there if you think that I talking about their marketing strategy which was very intelligent by the way, but what I am talking about it how much Apple has done to make the system stable and reliable v.s. how little Apple talks about the tremendous amount of work they have done to make it happen.

The Apple system is known by its simplicity and delightful usability. However work never gets done in easy ways. One thing that I keep on hearing today is “take no shortcut, it’s worth”, almost in every seminar by Apple developers. They mean it and they prove to me by showing their methodology of coding. The tools that they develop to help diagnose and fix bugs, the level of detail that these tools dig into, is very deep. All these are done however just so that developers like me can focus on what we care the most without having worry about the boring stuff.

I am not one of those cool artists that likes Mac because their knowledge of PC is narrow. Me myself have been a Window developer since the age of 15. I have seen programmers and companies that build great apps and over emphasis the hard work they have done and the details that they focus on. That scare people because complex devices are more likely to break down. However, Apple has done not any less than that but not much of it has been mentioned to the public. On the other hand Apple’s main focus has always been about fun and enjoyable experience, because, as engineers we know to hell how much pain it’s to code, debug and deal with customers. Why mention it again if it’s painful. It’s like a man who always gets the job done but ask no recognition. The truth is he does get paid well, so forget about pain, time to move on. However to celebrate the achievement should take priority.

So next time when you use a computer (Mac or PC) that gets your job done. Please do appreciate the work and thoughts engineers have done for you. It’s never easy, and never will be.

Desmond Liang
Web | Design | E-commerce for small business owners
http://www.desmondliang.com

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So the decision ready comes down to fighting back or switching to the other provider.  Watch this video, this is the kind of marketing strategy to lose customers. Good job BELL. You did it.

There is been complain about Facebook’s Suggested Friends feature recommendind reconnection to ex-girlfriend/wife even dead people causing serious distress.

For those of you who don’t know about this feature, it is a little section close to the right top corner of your Facebook profile that lists two people that are not your facebook friends yet facebook thinks that you may know them. There is also a See All link that takes you to a longer list of nominees. The complains come from people who think Facebook is making inappropriated recommendations.

Facebook is a great tool when it comes to finding lost connections. It’s very handy when you are too busy to collect the contact info of people you met in social gathering. Since people who are invited to the social event are most some how related to each other, so the conversation these days ends like
“are you on facebook?”
“yes just look for me on John’s friend list”
Isn’t it just great? It’s even more handy for people like me who are terrible with names. The average time for me to forget a person’s name is 10 seconds. With facebook I can always check back and by the way learn a little more about my new friend’s past.

Facebook is designed by very intellegent web designers and developers. It’s been talked about and studied as an example of marketing and technology innovation. 20 year ago it was Microsoft, 10 years ago it was Google, now it is facebook that had changed the way we live in both virtual and the real socity. Microsoft charges a killing. Google is free. Facebook provides a platform for hard working and smart people to create income by providing open API such as facebook connect. There are only a handful of web service providers can maintain high quality application like facebook now, and there won’t be too many in the future.

To most users. Facebook is free. As long as you are siting in front of a computer with Internet connection. There you have facebook. No computers, no problem. Facebook works on a variety of mobile devices. So when you use some thing for free, I don’t think you are in the position of complainning. My dad has been stealling wifi signal from the neighbor for years because the neighbor is dumd enough not to password protect the connection. My dad swears on the computer when he lost the wifi while he is checking up something online. I always told him to stop the complain because he is not paying for the wifi, and better be ready to bear with any kinda inconvenience.

I personally believe the developers and designers in facebook have done their best to create the recommend feature as everyone of them should realize every update they have done is going to impact thousands even millions of lives. And by the way how can any one expect the computer program to know all your personal history and even more ridiculous to know if the profile owners are still alive while the whole world is pointing fingers to facebook for privacy violation. If anyone is not happy with the recommendation, my advice, either hire a lawyer to take care of your social media, or hire one for your ex-wife /girlfriend and your friends in the dust (don’t laugh someone has done it after her 15 year daugther passed away ), or ignore the suggestions. Simple. You are not in the position of complaining if you made no contribution to the service.

Turns out there wasn’t only one food stand selling smoked quails. There were several of them and of course the lineup goes to only one that actually specializing smoked birds.

The idea is straight forward. Do what u are good at.

The company that I used to work for tried to take on as many things. They enter the market aggressively, let a team of people who have no experience in that industry to battle with the competitors. The result, needless to say.

This fish market in Kensington put up smoked sardin during a street fest attracting lots eye balls and cash. The sardin may be just as good or bad as in any other fish market in town, but instead of chicken and beef, it give consumers a sense that they know what they are doing.

Desmond Liang
Web | Design | E-commerce for small business owners
http://www.desmondliang.com

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