Archive for June, 2010
Handset Detection Optimizes The Mobile Web Experience
One of the fastest growing segments on the Internet today is the mobile web. More and more people are starting to surf through websites and download a myriad of content onto their cell phones, smartphones, and other mobile devices. Unfortunately, much of the Internet has been designed to be best enjoyed on a full-size computer. For designers and developers, there is an additional issue of addressing all kinds of different mobile devices with different levels of compatibility and different screen sizes.
To help address this issue, Handset Detection offers an integrated solution that will direct visitors to the right place depending on their smartphone, cellular phone, or other mobile device of choice.
How Does Handset Detection Work?
Let’s go through a sample scenario. You have an online shop where people can buy a variety of widgets and you want to have a mobile version of the site that is compatible with as many different smartphones as possible. Should someone come to visit your company’s website from an iPhone, you can offer an iPhone-optimized site that has been designed to work best with that screen resolution and with a touchscreen-based interface. This might mean having larger buttons and having links more spaced out. By contrast, if someone were to visit the site from a BlackBerry Curve, you want the site to look best on the smaller, lower-resolution screen. Since the Curve has a trackball or trackpad, the links can be closer together and the buttons don’t have to be as big. How can you automatically redirect your visitors to the appropriate site? That’s where Handset Detection comes into play.
Using this system, a visitor attempts to visit your website. Your server then relays a request to Handset Detection asking about the characteristics of the visitor’s web browser. This request passes through a load balancer so that it can be directed to the most optimal Handset Detection server. From there, the Handset Detection server analyzes the request and sends all available information back to your server, including manufacturer, model name/number, wireless carrier, geolocation, screen resolution, and so on. Your server can then use that information to provide the most optimized user experience. Handset Detection has a device database of over 37,000 mobile devices and device variations with about 200 more mobile devices being added each week.
Providing the Right Products Too
The Handset Detection system can not only be used for the optimization of different mobile websites, but also for the distribution of digital products and other mobile content. For instance, you can offer different cell phone wallpapers, ringtones, and themes based on the handset that is identified. If someone came to the site using a Nokia E72, the desired wallpaper size would be dramatically different than if they visited using a Google Nexus One.
More Features and Highlights
Naturally, the biggest feature of the Handset Detection service is its ability to identify thousands of different mobile devices, redirecting visitors and customers automatically to the appropriate mobile web location. In addition to the handset detection, the service can also determine the location and wireless carrier of these visitors. By using this kind of customized and personalized approach, you can offer deals specific to that customer. Want to target O2 users in London? You can. Want to target T-Mobile customers in California? You can do that too. The Geo IP feature can detect carrier, country, city, region, longitude, and latitude.
The Handset Detection is system is constantly updating and learning, gaining knowledge about over 500,000 browsers, bots, crawlers, cell phones, and game consoles. You can rest assured that Handset Detection runs on redundant Amazon AWS server clusters, virtually eliminating any lag or downtime. These server clusters use AWS S3, auto scaling, load balancing, and cloudwatch.
Building with the API Kits
Detecting the different handsets and mobile devices is useful, but the information cannot be put to use if you don’t have the right content to go with it. Thankfully, Handset Detection offers a wide range of API kits for most of the major development languages. This way, you can quickly and easily optimize your mobile content for a variety of different devices. The API kits are updated on a regular basis and they include kits for PHP, Python, Java, ASP.NET, and ColdFusion. To provide the best experience, Handset Detection also welcomes developers to provide additional kits, additions, and updates to be posted on the site. This makes it much easier for designers to use. For more support, it is worth checking out the resources section on the Handset Detection site. This is a great place to learn about handset information, like screen sizes, click to call strings, and other phone properties. Additional information can be found on the official blog as well.
Analyze All Mobile Web Visitors
One of the critical features included in Handset Detection is the statistical package. You want to know more about your customers and where the greatest opportunities may lie. Most conventional analytics packages use Javascript, but 73% of mobile handsets do not support this standard. You are losing out! Thankfully, Handset Detection Analytics overcomes this issue and works with the majority of mobile devices. The detection and redirection information can be accessed from your user dashboard, letting you learn about percentage of mobile users, top countries, top carriers, most popular phone models, and so on.
Make More Money as an Affiliate
While Handset Detection will certainly help your mobile business make more money by catering to each specific customer on a near individual basis, you can earn additional revenue by signing up as an affiliate. The affiliate program actually consists of two parts. Referrers can earn 25% of any subscriber payments whereas developers can earn 25% of subscriber payments if the subscriber uses their software. If you do both for the same referral, you effectively earn a 50% commission. Payments are issued once a month via PayPal, assuming a minimum balance of $20. You can externally track the referrals using your own software if you prefer as well, but you cannot refer yourself.
How Much Does It Cost?
Handset Detection’s pricing model is scalable to suit the specific needs of your business. Starting small? Take the smallest package? Already have a large enterprise-level operation? Go for a bigger package. The Supporter plan is just $5 a month and it includes up to 30,000 detections, comes with full API access, and stores twelve months of history to go with your mobile analytics. Other plans include the $18 Blogger, $47 Professional, $97 Business, and $147 Enterprise. The Professional plan is the most popular with 450,000 monthly detections, soft limits, unlimited history, 3 server license, and live updates. Considering the rising popularity of mobile web access and cell phone digital content, Handset Detection sounds like a great fit to accommodate as many different devices as possible. After all, not everyone uses an iPhone.
Google.com Powered With SSL For Encrypted Private Searching
If you spends more time on the internet then I am sure you want more control and security over your online communication. Secure Socket Layer (SSL) connection being used for encrypting information travels on networks. Its usually recognized by a web address containing “https” or a browser lock icon, as we have seen it with many e-commerce or banking sites, well not just for banking and e-commerce, people uses it for private exchange and for processing credential information as well.
Now I am sure you got the idea of what is SSL and encryption. So, if you concern about security then Google have now added SSL encryption to their search engine https://www.google.com.
Using https://www.google.com, a very secure connection is created between Google and your browser. This secure connection between you and Google make sure the protection of your search terms and search results pages from being intercepted by a third party on your network. A modified logo as given above helps you to indicate that your are searching via a secure connection.
Its a beta version. So, it only covers the core web search product, I mean you wont be able to see the links of image search, books search, and news search etc, as they do not support SSL at this time. Also, as the SSL connection requires additional time to create the connection between your browser and Google, you will experience searching a bit slower than regular Google Search but, the search results will be the same.
It will not be that slow as searching over SSL dosent reduce the data sent time to Google, it only hides the data from third parties. So, if you care about security more, then you should start using Google with SSL. Personally, I like Google and their products like I am anxiously waiting for their Google Chrome OS.
Here’s how searching over SSL is different from regular Google (In their own words) :
- SSL encrypts the communication channel between Google and a searcher’s computer. When search traffic is encrypted, it can’t be read by third parties trying to access the connection between a searcher’s computer and Google’s servers. Note that the SSL protocol does have some limitations — more details are below.
- As another layer of privacy, SSL search turns off a browser’s referrers. Web browsers typically turn off referrers when going from HTTPS to HTTP mode to provide extra privacy. By clicking on a search result that takes you to an HTTP site, you could disable any customizations that the website provides based on the referrer information.
- At this time, search over SSL is supported only on Google web search. We will continue to work to support other products like Images and Maps. All features that are not supported have been removed from the left panel and the row of links at the top. You’ll continue to see integrated results like images and maps, and clicking those results will take you out of encrypted search mode.
- Your Google experience using SSL search might be slightly slower than you’re used to because your computer needs to first establish a secure connection with Google.
Thank You Our Valued Sponsors For Being With Us In The Month Of May
This is a post in which we want to say a big Thank You to the SmashingApps’ fastest growing community for regularly visiting our blog. Do you want to be the first one to know the latest happenings at SmashingApps.com just subscribe to our rss feed and be the one of 600k+ subscribers. But how can we forget to say a Great Thanks to our valued sponsors who helped us to make this blog possible in reach of everyone in the month of May, 2010 as well.
Do you want to get noticed? Advertise with us and feel the difference!
Smashing Apps always welcome new sponsors for our large and diversified visitor base from more than 188 countries. They are designers, developers, internet marketers, bloggers, IT entrepreneurs, etc. You will get noticed by the thousands of visitors every day. Moreover, a monthly recognition post to thank you as our valued sponsors. Are you really interested? Click here to contact us or see advertisement section for more information on advertising details.
Our valued sponsors were:
AN Hosting hosts more blogs than anyone else, hosting tens of thousands of independent blogs. With plenty of disk space, huge data transfer and the ability to host 20 sites on one account. You will get relax with them. We are thankful to them for hosting our website and to make us free of tension.
Wix.com is a Flash website builder, built to create a simple way for everybody to build and design Flash website. Create a free website like whether it’s business or personal, music or art. Wix’s Flash website builder is simple to use with a “drag and drop” builder and is the complete solution to publish & promote your Flash website like a pro.
FireHost Advanced Web Security protects companies of all sizes with levels of security not found in 99% of hosting companies. We take security seriously and specialize in protecting online retailers, healthcare organizations, and high-traffic websites with mission critical applications, data and information assets.
Intervals is web-based project management software that marries time tracking and task management in a collaborative online space with powerful reporting.
UPrinting.com is a leading online printing company that provides high quality printing at the most affordable prices.
ThemeForest is a website from where you can buy and sell site templates and themes to skin popular CMS products like WordPress Drupal and Joomla. Files are priced from just five dollars, based on the complexity, quality and use of the file. Anyone is free to signup for an account and begin trading or purchasing files.
Formstack provides organizations with an easy way to build web forms that integrate with their websites without any programming, software, or special skills. Once you have started collecting data with Formstack, you can manage and edit the information online in our database, share data with others in your organization, and even use our API for greater control of the data and integration with your internal database.
FreshBooks is an online invoicing and time tracking service that saves you time and makes you look professional.
Premier Survey is the users’ choice for free online survey management. This system, a powerful self-service application developed on the concept of Software As A Service (SAAS) is designed to minimize cost and maximize ease of use.
We are also thankful to those advertisers who purchased favicon ads.
Do you want us to say Thank You in this special way? So help us to help you!
You will just need to take a look at our advertisement section on how you can start advertising at SmashingApps to grow and spread more or contact us for more information and details related to
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7 Tools And Applications To Help You Save Electrical Power
Leaving our appliances on while we are not using them is a terrible waste of electrical power. There are parts of the world that do not have electricity at all; we should do our part to respect the resources we have and save them whenever / wherever we can.
Below you will find a list of 7 tools to prevent wasting electrical power. I believe that each entry in the list serves a useful purpose; read about each one and choose the one (or more than one) that suits you best.
If you want to share more tools that can Save Electrical Power so please comment about them below. Do you want to be the first one to know the latest happenings at smashingApps.com just subscribe to our rss feed and you can follow us on twitter.
1. MonitorOff
MonitorOff is a freeware application that lets a user fully control when his / her monitor turns off. CRT monitors in particular take up a lot of power. The operating system usually has built in time durations for the screensaver to begin or for the monitor to turn off. But these settings will take a little longer to reach; with MonitorOff we can access / modify al time durations and even setup hotkeys. The application is for Windows and sized at nearly 400KB. Click here to get MonitorOff.
2. SetPower
SetPower is a unique power management application for Windows that lets us set three different power plans: Balanced, Power Saver, and High Performance. We can edit the details of these plans (such as when the monitor will turn off) as well as assign the times when these plans will come into effect. For different hours of the day, we can assign our computer with different plans, according to our usage. Click here to get SetPower.
3. AppliancesEnergyUse
AppliancesEnergyUse lists the power input of almost 50 household appliances. By finding out how much power we are using simultaneously we can see if we are wasting energy. We can also set a personal power goal for ourselves and vow to never cross that wattage at a given time. Whether or not we are crossing our goal can then be determined by AppliancesEnergyUse. Click here to visit AppliancesEnergyUse.
4. Edison
Edison is an installable application for Windows. It offers the same features as SetPower, with multiple power schemes that can set to be implemented on different times of the day. An additional feature of the application is its ability to estimate the power we are saving and use the electrical unit price to calculate our savings. We can enter our own price was more accurate results. Click here to get Edison.
5. HomeEnergySaver
HomeEnergySaver is a free to use website that lets us answer a few question to learn our electrical power usage pattern. It then suggests ways in which we can reduce our power usage. We can view the report of each of these suggestions and see how much each would cost. Click here to visit HomeEnergySaver.
6. Microsoft Hohm
Hohm is Microsoft’s version of HomeEnergySaver. It requires users to have a Windows Live ID to register for an account before visitors can use the site’s services. Once the account is formed, we answer elaborate questions so that Hohm can fully understand our power usage patterns. We are then presented with suggestions of how we can cut back on our electrical power usage. Using Hohm’s service is free but restricted to users in the US. Click here to visit Hohm.
7. FuelCharts
FuelCharts is a free to use website. We can use the site to enter our electricity bills’ amounts over a two years’ period. Bar graphs are created of each bill. These bars provide us with a good enough comparison of our last year’s energy usage and this year’s energy usage. We can change electricity with anything we like (oil, biodiesel, etc.) and achieve an energy comparison for various resources. Click here to visit FuelCharts.
