We are proud to announce that our CRM platform is integrated with Yahoo’s Fire Eagle, and we believe the marriage of the contact management and geo-location will extend users’ benifits.

Enjoy!

If you enter a phone number (marked as Skype), and you’ve installed skype on your computer, you can click the skype user name to call.

Additionally, if you are using Skype Firefox Extention, all the phone numbers will be highlighted, and you can click the numbers to make phone calls via Skype.

Enjoy!

NBC Online Video Hub – Videos of all games (Watch while “on the go” and off-line)

New York Times – Schedule, Timetable, Tracker and News

NBC Olympics – Real-time Complete Medels Standings

CNET News – Break News

Google has launched a brand new searching related app today, Insights for Search.

It helps users to track multiple search terms’ popularity across different verticals, geographic regions and time periods.
Let’s take an example of the search term CRM Software. The results include all popular search terms related to the search term and a list of Rising Searches as well.

1. Top Searches List: free crm, crm software free, microsoft crm software, business software, open crm, act crm
2. Rising Searches List: web based crm, vtiger, sugar crm, top crm software, sage software, saleslogix

In addition, it provides a heat map to explain where the searching come from.

Bizroof uses prototype and scriptaculous as javascript framework in order to provide desktop-like look and feel. But, the framework itself is big in size and therefore takes quite a while to load. Although it only happens once to download the files, it still annoys the first-time visitors.

Without gzip – The first screenshot shows all the components needs to be downloaded for our sign in page, and the total file size is more than 310KB. It takes 8 seconds to response with standard DSL connections. Gosh! That is pain in the neck!

Screenshot 1 - Firebug Report - Without gzip

With gzip – The best solution we found is to gzip all the javascipts and css files. As shown in the second screenshot, for the same sign in page, first-time visitors only have to download 75KB, that takes less than 3 seconds. After the page loaded once, only 14KB need to be loaded each time, and that takes 0.6 seconds on average. What a big change! All we need to do is just to gzip all the javascripts and css files.

Screenshot 2 - Firebug Report - With gzip

To Developers and designers

In case you want to know what exactly we’ve done to gzip the files, here are a examples:

Javascript Example: prototype.js

1. Rename the file to prototype.js.php
2. Add the following php script as the first line of prototype.js.php
   <?php require_once(’gzip-javascripts.php’); ?>
3. Create the gzip-javascripts.php which will compress the files

<?php
if ( ((!empty($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'])) ? strtolower(htmlspecialchars((string) $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'])) : ” && strpos((!empty($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'])) ? strtolower(htmlspecialchars((string) $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'])) : ”, ‘msie 6.0′) === false) && extension_loaded(’zlib’) && !ini_get(’zlib.output_compression’) && ini_get(’output_handler’) != ‘ob_gzhandler’ && ((version_compare(phpversion(), ‘5.0′, ‘>=’) && ob_get_length() == false) || ob_get_length() === false) ) {
ob_start(’ob_gzhandler’);
}
header(”Cache-Control: public”);
header(”Pragma: cache”);
$offset = 2592000; // 60 * 60 * 24 * 30, Expire time
header(”Expires: “.gmdate(”D, d M Y H:i:s”, time() + $offset).” GMT”);
header(”Last-Modified: “.gmdate(”D, d M Y H:i:s”, filemtime($_SERVER['SCRIPT_FILENAME'])).” GMT”);
//header(’Content-Type: text/css; charset: UTF-8′);  //Uncomment this line for CSS files
?>

4. Use the new file name

For example: <script type=”text/javascript“ src=”/js/prototype.js.php“>

Matt

We just upgraded the bizroof blog to wordpress 2.6 with the K2 theme 1.0-RC7.

And here is a list of wordpress plugins we are currently using:

1. AddThis Social Bookmarking Widget (Reason: promote blog)
2. Akismet (Reason: stop spams)
3. FeedBurner FeedSmith (Reason: redirect blog feeds to our FeedBurner)
4. Google XML Sitemaps (Reason: inform search engines whenever blog updated)
5. K2 Disable Widgets (Reason: integrate the K2 theme)
6. WP Google Analytics (Reason: track bog statistics)

Give us a shout if you think we missed any great plugins.

Matt