There is a fundermental rule about advertising – you have to highlight your product in the ads. But, the new Microsoft PR story, which aired tonight, didn’t even mention the brand or any of their products.

I believe that they are trying to send out a message to explain how they have connected with over a billion people. However, the whole ads just make me feel that they should’ve/could’ve/would’ve connected with real people but they didn’t.

Here is the long uncut version:

Are you looking for a place to ……..

• Get your startup founded and get the snowball rolling;
  
• Get yourself a mentor who will see your business from a different perspective;
  
• Get significant media attention (VCs, fellow entrepreneurs and press).

TechCrunch50 (once a year)

1. Number of applicants: 1000+ groups.
2. Number of accepted groups: 50+.
3. Founding: ?.

DEMO (3 times a year)

1. Number of applicants: 1000+ groups.
2. Number of accepted groups: 70+.
3. Founding: ?.

Y Combinator (twice a year)

1. Number of applicants: ?.
2. Number of accepted groups: 20.
3. Founding: $5000 + $5000n, where n is the number of participating founders (i.e. 2 founders get $15,000, 3 get $20,000).

SeedCamp (once a year)

1. Number of applicants: 400+ groups.
2. Number of accepted groups: 5.
3. Founding: Up to EURO 50,000.

TechStars (once a year)

1. Number of applicants: 300+ groups.
2. Number of accepted groups: 10.
3. Founding: Up to $15,000.

Google Chrome Beta, was released on September 2, 2008, focuses on applications rather than web pages.

• Strength – It is fast, secure and multi-processing structured.
• Performance - Chrome uses V8 JavaScript engine to generate javascript code dynamically and hide class transitions automatically. It also uses multi-processing architecture, which allows the browser to shut down a single Tab or a plugin wherever problem occurs but to keep the whole browser alive.
• Security - Chrome warns users when they attempt to visit a harmful website based on google’s phishing and malware blacklists, which is being updated periodically.
• Usability - The Tabs are placed at the top of the window in order to make the navigation faster and smoother. Additionally, Chrome displays 9 most visited web sites and sites most often searched on the home page. This concept was first introduced with Opera’s Speed Dail.

IE8 Beta, released on March 5, 2008, was targeted for web developers and designers. It behaves significantly diffent compared to IE7 and IE6.

• Strength - It is the default browser in Windows
• Security - InPrivate, allows IE8 not to save searching and browsing history, cookies and form data. In another word, it clears the browser cache by default.
• Usability - Search Suggestions, Web Slices, Tab Color Grouping
• Performance - Accelerators, Automatic Crash Recovery

Firefox 3 final version was released on June 17, 2008 after 8 alpha, 5 beta and 3 release candidates.

• Strength - Thousands of add-ons, themes and the community of developers / designers behind it.
• Usability - The download manager and bookmark storing system are redesigned, and they looks easy to use. Also, it separates the themes for Mac, Linux and windows, and that means users will have a more native look and feel on different operation systems.
• Performance - It employs Gecko 1.9 to enhance the existing layout engine. It passes Acid2 test and gets better results on the Acid3 test compared to Firefox 2. Basically, it means that Firefox 3 is more CSS and javascript friendly.

Safari 3 final release of the Windows version was offered on March 18, 2008.

• Strength - It is the default browser in Mac, and it has an elegant interface.
• Performance - It supports for CSS Web fonts and animations and improves support for SVG and HTML 5 media. Performance improvements.
• Usability - As-you-type text search, Quartz-style font-smoothing

Performance Comparison:
Average page loading time (Bizroof Application) :

• IE 8: 1.2 seconds
• FF3 1.1 seconds
• Safari 1.0 seconds
• Chrome: 0.6 seconds

Acid3 Scores:

• IE 8: 17/100
• FF3: 70/100
• Safar: 73/100
• Chrome: 74/100

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