Agriya

Agriya announced the release of a new version of Kootali – Kootali 2.0.6, a closed social networking script. In the latest version, they have enhanced the features of Kootali to facilitate webmasters to build a user-friendly social network.

A web-based HTML text editor called ‘FCK editor’ is made available in the blog. FCK editor is a WYSIWYG text editor that offers control over styles, paragraph formatting, fonts, colors, border and all the powerful formatting functionalities of known desktop editors like word.

Now users can share their profile on Kootali with their friends even without them logging into Kootali. The information displayed in the profile can be controlled by the user. In order to help users know where they are and navigate to each section, breadcrumb navigation has been implemented in the video and audio pages.

A statistics box is introduced in the play page to give more information like total video duration, description, and uploaded user name. In order to make users’ job easier, links like “Add more videos”,“ Edit Video” and “Delete” have been provided to help video owners add more videos to the same album, edit it and delete it on requirement.

Kootali offers more control over the video embedding option, to provide capability for video owners to control publishing of videos on external websites.

Speaking on the announcement, Sheerin, Vice President of Marketing at Agriya said “This release marks yet another iteration in the Kootali product series. Once again we have listened to client feedback and implemented features that they have demanded. Kootali is the natural choice for any business or social group to run a social network and we are confident that we can evolve it to meet the changing requirements of the customers”

Kootali, used by such sites as paloozaz.com, meuno.org, fessbook.com, talk2me.info has proven to have a major impact on business that have chosen to use it. Clients are delighted by the after sales support and regular updates provided by the developers.

For more details visit Kootali.com.

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British scientist Stephen Wolfram, inventor of Mathemetica, will unveil his latest creation Wolfram Alpha on May 15, 2009. Alpha is a computational knowledge engine, and it uses built-in models of different domains that represent real-world knowledge, for computing the answers to factual questions.

It understands and then computes answers for questions using the built-in domain knowledge models without searching for answers in a big database. It provides textual results along with graphs, charts and other graphical elements necessary for the search query. For instance, if the query is “current American economy”, Alpha will offer numeric details along with comparison graphs. This will help almost everyone understand finance better.

Dr. Wolfram gave a demonstration of Alpha at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. During the demonstration, Wolfram typed in the question ‘What is the GPD of France divided by Italy?’ Alpha gave the correct answer supported with graphs and other statistics.

Dr. Wolfram said at the demonstration, “Our goal is to make expert knowledge accessible to anyone, anywhere, anytime. Like interacting with an expert, it will understand what you’re talking about, do the computation, and then present you with the results.”

Wolfram is different from Google. Two things can be compared only when they are comparable. Google is a search engine while Wolfram is a computational knowledge engine. However, Alpha will be rival for Wikipedia and other reference materials. Instead of searching tons of books and finding answers to any factual questions, users can just open Alpha and obtain answers.

Stephen describes Wolfram Alpha – “It will raise the level of scientific things that the average person can do. People will find that the world is more predictable than they might have expected. Just as running Google is like having a reference librarian to help you, running Wolfram Alpha will be like having a house scientist to consult for you.”

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The sky is the limit when it comes to learning. Learning never ends. One can gain knowledge through books, newspapers, magazines and many other things. The difficulty involved in information gathering is that one has to get desired material from various places to get what they are seeking. Libraries and tutors help to a great extent.

With advancement in technology, collecting details and related information has become a lot easier than it used to be. People can get required material from anyone in any part of the world, through the internet.

Anyway, acquiring specific information from internet can be quite a task, as information on different fields are scattered throughout the net. Search engines like Google have made the search process a little bit easier by dragging information matching users’ search queries. The process is made even easier through social networks where you can interact with people apart from sharing resources.

Learners can share images that correspond to their area of study, which could range from geography to art lessons. It is easy to track blog postings and articles with certain tags. The educational content prepared by anyone can be uploaded in a social network and made available for others. The content may be in text, video or audio format; social networks will offer the uploaded content to other users.

Social networking will bring together people who have taken the same course to share learning resources, career options and experiences, and recommend learning materials. Reaching educational goals is a lot easier with support from people with the same goals. The networking features allow learners to interact with tutors and experienced learners, and complete their course with a lot more than was probably expected.

Building an educational community will help learners throughout the world come together and share materials and details necessary to build a strong foundation that is vital for their career.

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Agriya, a web development and web servicing company, announces the release of a new version of Anova, a knowledge sharing script. Right after the release of previous version, they have received many responses including comments, suggestions and recommendations from valuable customers. Based on customers’ feedbacks they added several new features to Anova and released it as a new version.

The following are the new features:

In the new version, apart from setting the audio and video details, admin can also view the video and audio settings in the admin panel.

The ‘recently answered question’ tab is added in both the index pages, to enable members to view the recent answers to their questions on a single click.

In the current version of Anova, members can send a custom email to the member who has raised a question. The aim of the customized messaging feature is to intimate the question’s owner that their question has been answered by them.

Now members can comment on answers posted by other members, so that members will know how good the answer is.

In the old version, when a user crosses the text limit in the description box, an alert message is shown only at the time of question submission. This was annoying users. But now, the system will offer the text limit at the bottom of the text box. When a user exceeds the text limit, it displays the exceeded text limit at the bottom of the description box and disables the submit button.

For more information visit www.anova.tv

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The current fiscal year has made it tough for any kind of business to function. Many industries have started balancing this situation by downsizing or cutting salaries. Instead of reducing their expenses through job cuts and other means, they can increase their sales to meet financial needs.

Marketing is the heart of any business; only through effective marketing you can raise your financial position. It is the commercial process involved in promoting, selling and distributing products or services. Hoardings, banners, newspaper, television and pamphlets are the popular techniques used by marketing people to reach the public.

If you go for newspaper, banner or TV, then you could reach people only in a specific zone. But when you choose the Internet which is spread across the world like air, as the medium for advertising, the scope of reaching a broader spectrum of the public is more. Banner ads, text links, slide shows and podcast are some of the marketing styles followed on the Internet. These kinds of ads are placed in appropriate web pages to reach the targeted audience.

Sales can be improved only through proper promotion. In order to accomplish this, change with the trendy world and implement the effective marketing technique of Video. Video marketing will get you close to the current and future customers. You can say a lot more with videos than words. Customers will also appreciate this format compared to text and image, as they can get more information in a shorter period.

Record a video as if you’re talking to a visitor directly and explaining him how your product works or how your service will help make their life easier. For this you do not require any experts. Just use your webcam recorder tool to record it. Before you start recording, prepare a script for your video. Analyze requirements of expected visitors and write your script accordingly. Plan how you are going to deliver the products and/or service details.

Now start recording the video as per your script using a webcam recorder tool. Replay the recorded video and edit it if necessary. Attach appropriate music with it. Upload the recorded videos on popular video sharing sites like YouTube, Spike, Google, Blogger and WordPress. The video title plays a major role, so use an attractive title related to the video content. ‘How to’ title will attract more visitors.
You can also offer videos of a new product launch or any other events in your company; this will create brand awareness among people. Sit down and think of all the ways to attract more visitors and convert them into customers.

Sell your products and services through videos, and foster your business well even during the financial crisis.

We offer world class web site services, site scripts, FLV players and webcam recorder. Using Quickcam, a webcam recorder, from Agriya you can record a video and place it live on your site without any hassle. For further details, click here.

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A website is the main gateway to sell your ideas, services and products online. Webmaster tools like Google analytics help in analyzing how well you have reached the public and where you have to improve.

Check your bounce rate, which indicates the number of visitors who have come to your home page and left your site without moving to other pages on your site. The lower your bounce rate, the higher your page views. If your bounce rate is high, then it means that you are not sailing down the right path.

How do you reduce the bounce rate on your site? It is not a difficult task; you can reduce it by studying and improving certain features of your site. As you go through this article, you will see how easy it is.

Relevant Content

“Content is the king of a website”. People come to your site in search of answer for their questions. If the content on your site doesn’t answer them well, visitors are not going to stay on your site and search for something that does answer their questions. While optimizing a web page, consider your audience. Spend some time in understanding your target audience and use the terminology they use. This will decline your bounce rate significantly.

Navigation

Once visitors land on your page, they will look for specific content (like product price). If they cannot find it within a minute, they will leave your site immediately to find details of other similar products. Help your visitors in finding out their desired content by offering clear navigation, to make them stay on your site. Place menu bars in the top or side frames and offer sitemap, so that people can move throughout the site with ease.

Interact with visitors

Visitors will stay longer on your site when you interact with them through polls or surveys. It is quite natural for people to reply, vote or stick around an interesting question. You can also ask visitors to comment and provide suggestions on your site.

To be avoided

Avoid external links on the first page, this diverts users to other sites. Avoid pop ups as they can annoy visitors. Most users block pop-ups, so any content in a pop-up on your site may be missed by users completely.

It is important to optimize every single page of your site to reduce bounce rate.

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The first impression is the best impression. So if you’re going to start a website that talks about your products or services, the first thing is to impress viewers. When people visit your site, they make judgments based on look and feel of it. Using a good template will provide an effective web design and give it a professional look.

Using a template with stunning website designs is one of the easiest ways to draw viewers. Here are some tips to select a template for your website.

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Keywords and keyword phrases are what an average net user uses on a search engine to find information that they are seeking. Keywords are a crucial part of the success of your website. Well, you can now start choosing the right keywords for your site. Keep in mind that your keywords should bring targeted traffic consisting of potential customers.

Let’s take a minute to talk about how to select keywords to improve site rankings.

It is a good idea to sit down with a piece of paper and write down all the words or phrases that you think relate to your business.

Before you move on to implement a keyword density in your site content, you need to have at least a broad idea on a primary keyword. For example, if you are trying to sell mobile phones of some particular model or brand – let’s say blackberry, your primary keyword should be blackberry mobile. According to a recent study, more than 65% of searches consist of a keyword phrase rather than a single keyword.

Remember your target audience is looking for you – they just don’t know about your business. In order to help them find you, your keywords should be application specific.

Your keywords must balance between relevance and popularity. If you select a keyword that is highly relevant but is never searched for by people, you will not make any profit. On the flip side, if a word is incredibly popular but not relevant to your products and services, you will not get the traffic you need. Remember the more relevant a term to your product or service, the more visitors will visit your site and make call to action.

How do you find the most popular search terms? There are a number of keyword tools available on the internet. Tools like word tracker, Google keyword selection tool, trellian keyword density etc will give you keyword options.

Make sure you place keywords in the title of WebPages, Meta description tag, headline tag, and body text.

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Making your site compatible with all major web browsers is very important to reach people all over the world, as you can’t insist that people use a specific browser for viewing your site. Google Chrome is also becoming popular among the netizens, so it is better to make your site compatible with Google Chrome, apart from all the others.

The article will help you make your site compatible with Google chrome.

Detecting Google Chrome

Google Chrome is a web-kit based browser. Hence, if your site is compatible with web-kit based browsers like Safari, then your site will look good in Google Chrome as well. If it is not, then your site may not recognize Chrome’s user-string.

Google has given the following solution for this issue:
As platforms and browsers adopt WebKit as their rendering engine, your site can detect and support them automatically with the right JavaScript checks. Commonly, sites use JavaScript to ’sniff’ the navigator.userAgent property for “Chrome” or “Safari”, but you should use proper object detection if possible. In fact, Gmail has been detecting WebKit properly in Chrome since day one!

If you must detect the user-agent type, you can use this simple JavaScript to detect WebKit:

var isWebkit = navigator.userAgent.indexOf(”AppleWebKit”) > -1;

Or, if you want to check that the version of WebKit is at least a certain version—say, if you want to use a spiffy new WebKit feature:
var webkitVersion = parseFloat(navigator.userAgent.split(”AppleWebKit/”)[1]) ||
undefined;
if (webkitVersion && webkitVersion > 500 ) {
// use spiffy WebKit feature here
}
For reference, here are a few browser releases and the version of WebKit they shipped:

We do not recommend adding “Google” or “Apple” to your navigator.vendor checks to detect WebKit or Google Chrome, because this will not detect other WebKit or Chromium-based browsers!

Display Content
Google Chrome can render content correctly, only when content and character encoding declaration information are provided at the top of your document’s source. Also it doesn’t read encoding information that’s declared with document.write (). If your site has frames or i-frames, then specify the encoding information at the top of the source of those frames.

Popup
Google Chrome will display only the title bar of pop-ups in the lower-right section of the browser window, in order to prevent undesired pop-ups from covering the page. If needed, users can view a pop-up’s content by dragging its title bar into a more visible position.

Scripts
Google Chrome supports only Netscape Plug-in Application Programming Interface (NPAPI) instead of ActiveX. Hence, if you want to load ActiveX control, specify the NPAPI version of the plug-in.

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UK’s Get Safe Online campaign conducted a study on cybercrime and revealed the following result: to an internet fraudster, an identity is worth £80 and in 2008 the victim rate is raised to 23% compared to 15% in 2007.

It has become a must for every online user to be aware of cyber crimes and the safety measures to be adopted get rid of them. Here we have listed some of the common threats that are faced by most online users with solutions to avoid them.

The main focus of an internet fraudster is to find out personal details of online users, and use those details to gain access to bank accounts, run up bills, create false documents such as passports or birth certificates and carry out benefit fraud.

Generally, hackers send email messages in the name of a legitimate organization such as a bank, demanding the user to update their personal details for security. Remember, that a bank will not ask you to reveal your personal details on email. So don’t pay heed to such emails.

Many hi-tech criminals attract people by sending emails on current affairs or other attractive subjects with an attachment. The attachment could be a booby trap with a malicious program through which they can collect users’ personal details. Install an anti-virus program in your system and update it daily before opening your mail box to get rid of such viruses.

Sometimes, when you open a website, a popup window will appear and say that ‘you have just won a million dollars’ or ‘your computer is affected by a virus’. The message will ask you to click on the window which you should never do. If you click on the message, you will be taken to a website and asked to download a software likely spyware. Simply don’t respond to such popup windows. It is better to enable a plug-in to block unwanted popup windows.

Install a trusted anti-spyware program to safeguard your computer from spyware. As Microsoft’s Windows lacks security, security firms advice online users using Microsoft software to update it as soon as security fixes are available. Online users are advised to use non-Microsoft programs for web browsing.

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