Windowfront Signage…what to consider
When considering windowfront signage for your small business, there's a few mistakes that most businesses make that keep them from realizing the full value of the advertising space. To be sure, your front windows are one of the cheapest and easiest opportunities you have to make a branding statement, as well as an opportunity to get the attention of people passing by your store. Not utilizing them to their full potential is a big miss! In this article, we'll cover your two main choices on messaging, and some tips and tricks to get your signage noticed.
One Cup Coffees: Distinguishing Quality from Mediocrity
Americans have an ongoing love affair with coffee, and it is estimated that roughly 54 percent of adults in the United States drink an average of 3 cups daily. Coffee kick starts you in the morning, making you feel fresh and motivated to tackle the day ahead.
In the last few years, single serving coffee has been gaining popularity due to its relative convenience, variety, ease of use and cleanup and specialized packaging to keep the coffee fresher. Like regular coffee, not all one cup coffees are created equal. Machine type, cost per cup, coffee source, cleanup and brewing time considerations can make for a difficult decision. To help you make a more informed decision, here is a comparison of some of the most common single serve coffees on the market, everything from cheap K cups to the popular "pod-style" coffees.
Lower Your Hot Water Bill
When we think of how to lower our energy costs, most people think about turning off their lights and lowering or raising their thermostats based on the season. But another important way that you can lower the cost of energy for your home is to reduce the amount of hot water you use. According to the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, heating our water is the second highest energy cost for a residence, so focusing on hot water usage can yield significant savings for consumers. Check out these energy saving tips for some more specific guidance...
Why you should try a BMI Calculator
A BMI calculator will allow you to quickly determine your Body Mass Index. Your Body Mass Index (BMI) is a number derived from your weight and height, and is intended to be a rough estimate of the level of body fat you are carrying. Although it's not a direct measure, the BMI reading can be a surprisingly accurate measure of overall body fat percentage for both men and women . Your BMI is not a true measure of the amount of body fat, nevertheless your Body mass index ratio has a strong correlation to it...this correlation has been proven in various studies. It's quick and easy to do, and will provide you with a high-level indicator that lets you know if you may need to undertake some changes in your diet or lifestyle. After reading this article, you might want to have a quick look at a BMI calculator and see where you are.
Are BMI readings used by Doctors?
Free Money and Easy Government Grants – Be Careful!
Who wouldn't want “money for free” or “government grants” that just magically falls into
your lap? When you hear this kind of thing, you might wonder “Does money really grow on trees?”. After reading the article "Free Money?", I decided to do a little research of my own, and share what I learned:
If you were to believe the infomercials on late-night TV or perhaps the ads in the local classifieds paper , you would probably assume that it's possible. These smooth talking guys on TV invite you to their seminars, where they will show you how to get all this free money to pay your bills. They have even smoother looking people telling you how they got a grant from government for $ 40,000 to run their small businesses. Or they will tell you that they got thousands of dollars which they do not need to return, to use as they wish.
Google’s SearchMash
Google has started a new site called SearchMash which seems to be intended to test out new UI ideas for search results. It’s AJAX-based and currently has web page and image search.
Currently they show images to the right of web page results and the green URLs are clickable menus. When you click on “more web pages” it expands in place, giving you a longer scrollable page instead of a new one, which looks good and is useful.
It appears that they will experiment there so it should be fun to go back every now and then. Nice to see more of AJAX and JavaScript.
A9 drops unique features and switches to MSN search
Amazon’s search engine effort called A9 has quietly dropped their unique and highly publicized features. They are no longer remembering all past search queries by logged-in users. This is odd since they could have built a great personalization feature using this information. Perhaps they are worried about privacy issues.
They have also removed the street-level images that they so painstakingly collected over several years. These were pictures of store-fronts that were shown when you searched for an address in twenty cities. They must have spent quite a fortune to take these pictures so it’s surprising that they have removed them.
In addition to this they have switched their search engine from Google to MSN. Since Microsoft’s search engine is not quite up there in quality yet this is puzzling. They will likely lose a lot of their users because of this at least in the short term. I suspect there are business strategy decisions behind all this but for the moment what remains of all the hype on A9 is a pretty pedestrian aggregated-search site. It will be interesting to see where A9 is headed.
Web Search, Extraction & Machine Learning positions at Radar Networks [San Francisco]
Required Skills
- Java development: Exceptional skills with Java – at least 3 – 5 years of professional (or significant academic) coding experience in Java.
- Search engines for the Web: Crawling, resource discovery, indexing, harvesting, extraction, using tools such as Lucene, Nutch, Hadoop etc. Experience in scaling search engines to handle massive amounts of data. Experience in using ontologies/taxonomies in search is desired, graph search and social network analysis are also of interest.
- Experience with modern software engineering practices and paradigms - we want you to develop beautiful code which is a pleasure to look at and is easy to maintain.
Optional Specialized Skills
- Data Extraction and Harvesting: Harvesting knowledge from unstructured and structured datasets. Entity detection, topic detection, document segmentation and classification. Familiarity with products such as InXight, GATE, UIMA, MinorThird, Mallet, WEKA, and/or other text mining technologies. Natural language processing skills are also a plus.
- Machine Learning for Search and Classification. Machine learning algorithms to assist with search, classification, clustering, personalization, optimization and data extraction. Supervised, unsupervised, Bayesian learning, SVM, HMMs, graph theory and graph search and vector search algorithms.
- Semantic Web: Experience the Semantic Web, RDF, OWL, reasoning over semantic data and ontologies.
Wikio, a new news aggregation and moderation site
It’s becoming clearer by the day that news is too important to be left to the media corporations. They show us what they would like us to learn and believe, but that is often not what really happened. With modern technology it should be easier to give this power to the people. This idea works quite well with blogs, e.g., Memeorandum.com.
News aggregation has been dominated by Google News. Now there is a new French site called Wikio.com that looks promising. It’s still in beta, but TechCrunch has had a look. Digg.com, of course also works well, but is mostly for technology topics.
3D photo collages created automatically from photos
Researchers from Microsoft and the University of Washington have created a very impressive way of organizing and indexing unstructured photos. The system extracts distinctive features from the images that are then aligned pairwise. By using all these alignments, the original position of each camera can be estimated. It’s impressive beacuse the system does not need to know the geometry or lcoation of any of the cameras, and any picture can be used for this, not just images from the same camera.