This is our tumblelog. An ongoing collection of short, mixed-media posts with the ocassional news article. Seldom relevant but always fresh. So far we have 240 posts and 41 people have commented.
Google has added ‘bicycling’ as a method of transport for the Google Maps ‘directions’ feature. It joins the existing, walking, by car and by public transport options as a fourth alternative method of transport.
The only difference I can see that a ‘cycle route’ offers to walking is the estimated time, I am unsure how well mapped out, even if there are any routes designed JUST for a bike.
The feature is still only available for the US map but expect it to be rolled out worldwide in the nest few weeks and months.
In September 2007, the world’s fourth biggest city was scrubbed of almost every type of outdoor advertising, even leaflets. It was all part of mayor Gilberto Kassab’s quest to eliminate visual clutter, making the city the focal point rather than coluorful, increasingly desperate marketing campaigns.
Outdoor advertising is so ubiquitous in almost every urban setting around the world, it’s difficult to walk down a street, take an escalator or sit on a bench without getting slapped in the face with one product or another. But the city of São Paulo, Brazil is like an advertising ghost town: all of its billboards stand oddly blank and empty.
“The Clean City Law came from a necessity to combat pollution..pollution of water, sound, air, and the visual. We decided that we should start combating pollution with the most conspicuous sector – visual pollution,” said Kassab.
The results are astounding: gone are the 50-foot lingerie ads and oversized neon signs a la Times Square. In their place are strange vacancies, gaping holes… space. Suddenly, the architecture and natural scenery come into sharp focus.
While advertisers weren’t too happy about the law – $8 million in fines were levied against those who dawdled in taking ads down, and Clear Channel launched an unsuccessful campaign to raise support for putting them back up – the citizens clearly approve. Surveys found that at least 70% are happy with the change.
photos and videos can be found over at http://weburbanist.com/2010/03/06/clean-city-sao-paulo-scrubbed-of-outdoor-ads/ where the original article was spotted
It appears that Microsoft is as happy as anyone to see the death of IE6.
At the browser’s “funeral” held yesterday by a web design company in Denver, organisers received a bouquet of flowers from the Internet Explorer team at Microsoft. The flowers were accompanied by a letter of condolence, saying “Thanks for the good times, IE6. See you all @ MIX, where we’ll show a little piece of IE heaven. Internet Explorer Team at Microsoft.”
It’s nice to see Microsoft has a sense of humour about the funeral, but it also reveals that Microsoft is about as sick of IE6 as web designers are.
It’s not hard to see why. Although IE6 is still their product, it’s positively archaic compared to the browsers that the IE team have released in the past couple of years. While IE7 and IE8 aren’t the best browsers on the market, they’re at least able to render unicode without crashing. IE8 in particular (especially when paired with Google Frame) is a legitimate competitor to Safari 4, Firefox 3.6 and Chrome.
Despite their hard work, neither browser has a commanding lead over IE6 in market share. IE7 and IE8 each have between 20% and 25% market share, the same amount as IE6 does.
The IE team’s note does reveal an interesting bit of information. They talk about revealing a “little piece of IE heaven at MIX” which suggests that they’re going to be showing off IE9 at the conference, which is less than a week away.
The IE team is no doubt tired of patching up the broken old machine that is IE6 at the expense of focusing on IE7, IE8 and IE9, but they have no choice in the short term. Even though Google no longer supports the browser, there are still too many business systems based off of IE6 for the browser to die right away. Indeed, Microsoft has said they plan to support the browser until at least the planned 2014 end of support for XP SP3. Here’s hoping that day comes quickly.
Permuto have released sales stats for online vs ‘offline’ sales with data from the US census Bureau.
The categories where online sales typically outsell in store purchases is the entertainment industry with books, magazines and dvds coming out on top as online purchases.
Quite suprisingly, pharmaceutical products where bought on the high street by nearly 10-1..Something tells me the email advertising for certain products aren’t as successful as the spammers hope they would be!
The other main industries where ecommerce sales triumphed over the high street where:
Clothing, Electronics, Furniture, Music/Videos, Office Supplies and Toys and Games.
We’ve been detecting most mobile phone models for a few months now, and we just rolled out an update which makes this information available to all of our website statistics customers. We are also providing a general hardware report, showing the top phone models used to access your web site. These are grouped by operating system family, as you can see in the second screenshot below.
This data has also been added to the “Platforms” dashboard module (renamed from “Computer”), and has been added to the iPhone mobile interface as well.
Igoo has recently launched grouptyre.co.uk the corporate website for Group Tyre, the largest wholesaler of tyres in the UK. Group Tyre offer a comprehensive one stop shop for tyre retailers offering three core principles of product availability, an unrivalled delivery service and competitive pricing, supported by hands-on technical and sales training; ongoing support from major tyre manufacturers and Group Link, a virtual online warehouse.
The group tyre website www.grouptyre.co.uk is the second website in a line of planned development where the igoo team work closely with Group Tyre staff and members.
@iA about 25 times better than the current iteration, seems like some decisions they make are based on a coin toss. I like the column logic3 days, 8 hours ago
RT @iA: iA’s 2006 Facebook Designs, Redesigned http://is.gd/9YoSb [new iA blog post]3 days, 8 hours ago
