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Written by Administrator
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Jan 15, 2008 at 08:15 AM |
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Microsoft Corp. said Tuesday it will pay about $1.2
billion to acquire Oslo, Norway-based Fast Search & Transfer as
part of a move to expand its data-search business in the corporate
market.
The Norwegian software developer, founded in 1997, develops
technologies used by business customers to search their databases,
although Fast Search has lately branched out into the field of online
advertising.
Microsoft has been
beefing up its search and online advertising capabilities to better
compete with Google and Yahoo, although the Fast Search deal is
unlikely to help the company in the consumer online market, analyst
Brent Williams of The Benchmark Company told clients. He viewed the
move as a "tuck-in deal rather than as a game-changing acquisition."
Shares of Fast Search, a company bathed in controversy
over the past year, slumped in 2007 after sales tapered off, board
members engaged in heated public disputes and the company acknowledged
flaws in its accounting methods.
Yet Fast Search's
technology was still considered valuable enough for Microsoft to swoop
in to buy the company. Customers include Disney, UBS, Pfizer,
LexisNexis and Comcast Corp., which struck a deal with Fast Search in
late December.
In the most recent
third quarter, Fast Search reported a net loss of $100.4 million on
revenue of $35.6 million, down from $42.5 million in sales in the
comparable 2006 quarter. A few months before those results were
released, Fast Search unveiled a reorganization plan under which it
would reduce costs, trim its payroll and refocus on higher-growth
markets.
The board of Fast
Search has unanimously recommended the offer and shareholders
representing 37% of the stock have made a binding commitment to the
deal. Those commitments include Fast's two biggest shareholders, Orkla
ASA and Hermes Focus Asset Management.
Shares in Fast Search surged 39.3% to 18.60 kroner in Oslo. In U.S. trades, Microsoft stock was down 0.6% to $34.43.
John Lervik, chief executive of Fast Search, said Microsoft's sales and
marketing platform will help Fast grow much more quickly.
"This acquisition gives
Fast an exciting way to spread our cutting-edge search technologies and
innovations to more and more organizations across the world," Lervik
said in a statement.
Erik Hjulstroem, an
analyst at Kaupthing Bank, agreed. He said Microsoft will be able to
integrate Fast Search's search algorithms across many of its divisions,
both to corporate and consumer clients.
The analyst previously
had a reduce rating on Fast Search because the company on its own would
struggle to build the necessary scale. "We advise investors to accept
the bid, given the poor outlook the company has on a stand-alone
basis," Hjulstroem said in a note to clients.
Jeff Raikes, president
of Microsoft's business division, said the acquisition would enable
business customers to pick just one vendor to handle all of their
needs. "Until now, organizations have been forced to choose between
powerful, high-end search technologies or more mainstream,
infrastructure solutions," he said.
Microsoft said the deal
is subject to approval from shareholders representing more than 90% of
Fast's shares and added it expects the deal to be completed in the
second quarter of 2008.
Goldman Sachs advised Microsoft, and Merrill Lynch is acting as adviser to Fast Search.
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Last Updated ( Jan 15, 2008 at 08:16 AM )
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Written by Administrator
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Jun 20, 2007 at 04:12 AM |
You want some traffic, huh? Well, first of all you need to figure out exactly who you want visiting the site. Is the site personal or business to business? What is the overall subject matter? What are the specific topics covered? The
answers to these questions will lead you directly to the keywords that will enable the site to be found.
First, you need to create a list of words that will draw traffic to your site. There are 4 very specific things you need to do in order to zero in on those precise keywords that will open the doors.
1.Look at your log files to see what people actually typed in the search box to get to your site.
2.List all the words that describe the content of your site.
3.List all the products and services.
4.List the benefits of the products and services.
In addition, I strongly urge you to sign up for a report of the week's most popular keywords from WordSpot and see if any of your words match those that are on your list (if they are, needless to say, use them). If the keywords you
have for your site aren't on the list, you can order tailored reports (fairly inexpensive, by the way) that will focus on the weekly position of your selected keywords.
With your list prepared, rank each word according to its importance (the tailored reports do that quite nicely for you...because they show which words are more popular in actual searches). Take the most important word you have
chosen and do searches on it with at least 3 different search engines and see what comes up. If the results show competing sites, you are on the right track; if not, go to the next word on your list, until you locate these sites.
Next select the 12 or 13 most appropriate words from your list and use them in the keyword tag for the home page with the most important or representative keyword in the first position. The search engines will give added weight to
the site based on searches for this "first word".
Most search engines only use the first 12 or 13 keywords, so don't waste time putting in any extras. And, don't use a word like "sex", for example (unless it really, really, really has relevance to your site). If your site has nothing to do with "sex", you are wasting effort, time and money. And, perhaps, more important is the fact that the search engines may just ban your entire site because you
are "spamming" the system with content that has nothing to do with the keywords you are using. Then, you go back to no traffic.
Now that you have picked your keywords and chosen the primary keyword, its time to build the rest of the meta tags around that keyword. There are 2 additional areas that need to be massaged according to that primary keyword.
1) The TITLE tag needs the keyword in it (with one or two other words preferably with the keyword in the first position).
2) The DESCRIPTION Tag needs to be created using the primary keyword in a sentence that, hopefully, grabs attention.
Ok...if you do at least these three things, your site is in the 35% that actually uses meta tags properly. But there is more to do...I'll talk about that next week.
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Written by Administrator
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Jun 16, 2007 at 06:04 PM |
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The overall .NET platform architecture can be divided into four main areas:
•.NET Infrastructure and Tools: The infrastructure and tools to build and operate eBusiness systems, including Visual Studio.NET, the .NET Enterprise Servers, the .NET Framework.
•.NET Foundation Services: The .NET services are a set of information sharing services for the Internet, such as Passport.NET (for user authentication) and services for file storage, user preference management, calendar management. These services will be offered by both Microsoft and Microsoft partners.
•.NET User Experience: This will be a broader, more adaptive user experience, where information is delivered in a variety of ways on a variety of different devices.
•.NET Devices: This device software enables a new breed of smart Internet devices that can leverage Web services.
.NET Framework and Visual Studio.NET
Perhaps the most important part of the .NET platform is the .NET Framework. This is a general runtime environment closely associated with the operating system. It includes the component-oriented middle-tier infrastructure (COM+), the Common Language Runtime (CLR) environment, a just-in-time compiler, and a set of operating system libraries packaged using the .NET component model. Each of the server-side tiers in a .NET system (with the possible exception of the data tier, which I will discuss under interoperability) will be running an operating system supporting the .NET Framework.
Closely associated with the .NET Framework is the main programmer development tool, Visual Studio.NET. Programmers of the presentation tier use Visual Studio.NET to define the logic that delivers HTML pages to thin client systems. Programmers of the business tier use Visual Studio.NET to implement business logic in a wide variety of languages and then to package that business logic as COM+ components.
Visual Studio.NET is language neutral. It is best thought of as an open programming platform into which a variety of languages can be plugged. The "standard" Microsoft languages that will come with Visual Studio.NET are VisualBasic, VisualC++, and VisualC#. Other languages will be available through third parties, including COBOL from Fujitsu and Eiffel from Interactive Software Engineering. Many other Visual Studio compatible languages including Haskell, Mercury, Oberon, and Perl are being investigated by university research groups.
The language neutrality of Visual Studio.NET (and in fact, the whole .NET platform) is critical to the .NET platform strategy. It is achieved by translating all Visual Studio.NET languages into a common language called Intermediary Language (IL). In fact, it is through the creation of an IL translator that language vendors make their languages compatible with Visual Studio.NET. Such a language is referred to as a .NET enabled language.
IL files are typically packaged together in deployable units called assemblies. These assemblies are loaded into the common language runtime (part of the .NET Framework), compiled by the just-in-time IL compiler, and executed within the Common Language Runtime (CLR). The CLR provides many features we usually associate with a particular language, including garbage collection, type definitions, polymorphic method resolution, error handling, and the deployment model.
The incorporation of "language" features into a common language runtime, rather than a particular language, allows languages to freely interoperate within the overall .NET platform. Garbage collection, type definitions, and error handling are all handled in a unified fashion, giving a unparalleled degree of language interoperability. Perhaps the most impressive example of cross language interoperability is the ability to define a base class in one language (say, C#) and override methods in a completely unrelated language (say, COBOL). I gave an example of this in a recent article.
The use of the .NET Framework on the presentation tier means that any .NET enabled language (in other words, any language that has an IL interpreter) can be used as a scripting language for presentation logic. And because the .NET Framework includes the just-in-time compiler, it also means that the presentation tier scripts are compiled rather than interpreted, providing a significant performance boost.
We are seeing the beginning of a rapid increase in the types of thin clients (browsers, cell phones, electronic tablets, etc.), each supporting its own subset of HTML. Today's presentation tier scripts must first determine the type of client and then create HTML tailored for that client. This is very time consuming, error prone, and difficult to maintain as new clients systems become available.
Visual Studio.NET includes a new presentation-tier programming model designed to simplify programming for the proliferation of thin client systems. This new programming model is called ASP.NET. ASP.NET allows presentation tier logic to be client neutral. This programming model is based on today's very successful VisualBasic programming model.
Programming an ASP.NET application is a matter of dragging and dropping GUI controls (such as menus or pull down boxes) from a palette onto a canvas. The programmer then writes code in any Visual Studio.NET enabled language that responds to control events (such as a particular button being pushed). The control, not the programmer, is responsible for determining the best way to render itself based on the client's actual device. The ASP.NET framework is responsible for figuring out that a client took a particular action (pushed a button). Since all of this happens on the presentation-tier, the same code base can work correctly regardless of whether or not the actual client device supports any of the .NET technologies.
This control/event programming model, with device awareness built into the presentation controls rather than the presentation logic, greatly reduces work in both the development and the maintenance phases. The development work is reduced because a single simplified block of code can both decipher client requests and process the HTML needs of any ultimate client device. The maintenance work is reduced because we can incorporate support for new client devices just by downloading the latest versions of the controls we are using.
.NET Enterprise Servers
The .NET Enterprise Servers are a collection of add-on server products designed to provide specialized, enterprise level services. Each is priced independently, giving maximum financial flexibility in configuring an overall solution. One only pays for those services one needs.
The best known of the Enterprise Servers is Microsoft's SQL Server. This is Microsoft's high-end database product with a host of capabilities that are far beyond the scope of this article to cover. Suffice it to say that SQL Server is a high performance, high availability, and highly scalable relational database that is a formidable competitor for the enterprise market.
There is nothing, however, about the .NET platform that ties you to SQL Server. Many organizations will use the overall .NET platform to build their eCommerce systems with alternative data storage technologies such as Oracle or DB2. Every popular database can be used as a .NET data tier. Oracle, for example, can be accessed through the database neutral ADO.NET interface. The mainframe databases, CICS and IMS, can be accessed through the Host Integration Service (HIS).
The newest of the .NET Enterprise Servers is Application Center Server. This product is designed for companies that need either 24X7 availability and/or low cost scaleout. The Application Center Server is both a cluster coordinator and a cluster manager.
The Internet Security and Acceleration Server (ISA Server) is focused on the needs of the presentation tier. ISA Server provides two important functions: HTML page caching, a significant performance enhancement for many sites, and firewall functionality. Firewall functionality is, of course, critical for the security any serious eCommerce site. ISA Server provides a low-cost software solution to hardware-based firewall products. At the risk of being redundant, ISA can be used with the other pieces of .NET, but is not required.
BizTalk Server is an orchestration and integration product, used primarily to tie together the various pieces of an organization's operation and to allow that organization to interoperate with partner operations.
Commerce Server is a framework for building an eCommerce site. It primarily focuses on the needs of eCommerce retail operations. Such sites can build web sites very quickly using and specializing the components provided as part of Commerce Server.
The UDDI Collaborative Infrastructure
Collaboration is the future of eBusiness. The set of industry standards being defined to enable eCollaboration is grouped under the umbrella term Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI).
While UDDI is independent of the .NET platform, most of the UDDI related activity was pioneered by Microsoft. Therefore it seems appropriate to describe UDDI in the .NET platform section.
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