Paul Gurney

July 18, 2012July 18, 2012

Yahoo – asking the wrong questions about its future

From a comment by the new CEO of Yahoo, Marissa Mayer:

Ms. Mayer may have the hardest time taking Yahoo into the mobile advertising arena, a market dominated by her former employer. Unlike Yahoo, Google and Apple dominate the mobile advertising space with hardware and software options.

And that’s where it runs headlong into its identity problem. “Yahoo is still mainly a media company. It doesn’t have an operating system. It doesn’t have the devices,” Mr. Hallerman, of eMarketer, said. “I don’t know if there’s room in the market for a fourth mobile platform.”

Asked whether she plans to run Yahoo as a media company or a technology company, Ms. Mayer said, “It’s not the right question. The most important thing is to give end users something valuable, inspiring and delightful that makes them want to come to Yahoo every day.”

Marissa Mayer is just 37 years old and has uncommon wisdom among the tech analysts and elite. Best of success to her!

July 5, 2012July 15, 2012

Making rich graphical emails from your desktop email program

A client recently asked about placing graphics into an email template — namely, background graphics.

Email programs (Outlook, Entourage, Thunderbird) are not designed to easily create rich graphical HTML emails. They make it difficult to embed background images (for mastheads, say); they vary in their support and tools for styling CSS, and there are greatly varying display abilities of email platforms across the internet.

HTML emails need to be designed as simple as possible — no backgrounds, complex CSS, floats, etc. since there are 100+ different email readers/webmail systems [hotmail, gmail, yahoo, aol, cpanel webmail, etc.] with varying levels of support. In all, your emails’ html and css must be very simple to be cross-platform.

All the fancy emails you and I get (from Amazon to Gap to Starbucks to NatGeo) are sent by dedicated email publishing systems… carefully constructed to let the sender add design elements to the templates that will work on most email platforms.

The client, if its needs are growing for rich graphical emails, needs to use a 3rd party tool like Campaign Monitor or Mailchimp, or build its own email publisher tool.

These types of emails are useful for communicating with their audience. For internal emails, using Outlook can work, since all employees are likely on the same platform.

We can hack and tweak our way to success in Outlook or Entourage or Thunderbird, but it’s not for the faint of heart.

To make a template in Outlook, for example, a background image behind the title text can’t just be copy/pasted in. Outlook provides an import/place menu command to insert the image in the background.

June 19, 2012

Wring the most performance from the Google Analytics script

From an excellent post by Mathias Bynens… originally posted in 2010 but updated in June 2012.

http://mathiasbynens.be/notes/async-analytics-snippet

<script>
  var _gaq = [['_setAccount', 'UA-XXXXX-X'], ['_trackPageview']];
  (function(d, t) {
    var g = d.createElement(t),
        s = d.getElementsByTagName(t)[0];
    g.src = '//www.google-analytics.com/ga.js';
    s.parentNode.insertBefore(g, s);
  }(document, 'script'));
</script>

June 16, 2012June 16, 2012

Vizio – an American success story

From an article at The Verge: Vizio has 414 US employees who oversee a vast army of suppliers making their products at the manufacturing level. The founder says that 50 percent of their job is orchestrating.

And why are the TVs so low-cost?

“We’re here to make innovative technology a commodity,” Wang told Inc magazine at the time.“ We’re not here to build cheap product, we’re here to make the product affordable.”

You know Vizio for its affordable LED TVs sold at Costco and Walmart… and maybe for its tablets or monitors. But they also are making PCs.

“PCs aren’t going away,“ says McRae. “They’re still extremely important devices in people’s lives and they’re really becoming an entertainment product as much as a productivity product. And if it’s an entertainment device, it’s in our wheelhouse. We do entertainment devices pretty well.” Vizio first tried to expand beyond TVs into smart devices with the Vizio Phone and Tablet, which launched at CES 2011, but McRae killed the phone after dealing with carriers proved frustrating and expensive. PCs and tablets can be sold directly to consumers — something Vizio is pretty good at.

They have innovative ideas about the direction of PCs:

“The tablet has forced the PC industry out of its slumber. There wasn’t much going on. But the next three to five years in PCs will actually be very interesting. You’re going to see new form factors, you’re going to see touch embedded over time.

April 27, 2012April 27, 2012

SSL vulnerability called BEAST

Does it affect your secure webserver?

You should know, if you accept credit cards or handle social security numbers on your website.

See these two articles for more expert information:

http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2012/04/90-of-popular-ssl-sites-vulnerable-to-exploits-researchers-find.ars

http://luxsci.com/blog/is-ssltls-really-broken-by-the-beast-attack-what-is-the-real-story-what-should-i-do.html

Testing:

This company will test your https connection. Here’s a example report.

https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=https%3A%2F%2Fmillfalls.com&hideResults=on

From Lux-Sci: Real-world vulnerability? What is affected by BEAST?

This problem can affect people browsing secure web sites, allowing eavesdroppers to gain full access to your accounts on those web sites under certain conditions. It does not affect

Other secured services such as email (IMAP, POP or SMTP) that use SSL or TLS for security.
Use of SSL-secured web site connections for posting data (i.e. posting data from secure web forms)

It does affect:

Accounts you may have with secure web sites that you login to, like PayPal, LuxSci, Gmail, Bank of America, Facebook, etc.

Solution:

It is not yet feasible to use a browser or webhost that supports TLS 1.2. For now, here is LuxSci’s advice:

The Take Away Message

People should always be concerned and aware of security as the landscape changes constantly. We think that beyond the need to upgrade and to implement software fixes, consider the following:

We should actually use SSL and TLS whenever possible. Insecure sites puts our browser and computer at risk, as we have no control over what malicious third party may inject into our browsing session. SSL and TLS actually protect us from that threat.
When going to secured web sites, it is best to start in a new browsing session or one that has only visited other secure (https://) sites.
Make your home page a secure site and your other secure sites easily-accessed via bookmarks
Use a separate web browsers for normal insecure browsing and for access to your secure sites.
Keep your software, web browsers, operating system, anti-virus, and other components up to date.