Just over a year ago, Google announced a major change to the way its search index will rank sites: it will go mobile-first. As the company explained at the time, Google’s algorithms will eventually primarily use the mobile version of a website’s content to rank its pages, to understand structured data, and to show snippets from the site in its search results. This week, Google said it has begun to make this shift – and has already transitioned a handful of sites to the mobile-first index, which are now being monitored by the search team.

The goal with the change to a mobile-first index has to do with how people access the web today – that is, they do so on their mobile devices, like their smartphone. In fact, the company said last November that “most people” today are searching Google from mobile.

But Google’s ranking systems for webpages are a holdover from the days of the desktop web. That is, they still typically look at the desktop version of a page’s content in order to determine how it should be ranked and its relevance to the user.

In many cases, that’s fine, as the desktop and mobile site are the same. Sometimes, however, the mobile page has less content than the desktop page, which can cause the system to be less accurate. For web searchers, that means they may be pointed to a page that doesn’t have the information they were looking for, and then blame Google –  not the website for having a poor mobile site – as a result.

Google said last year it understood a shift to a mobile-first index was important and needed to be taken seriously, which is why it would experiment on a small scale before ramping up to extend the index to cover more sites.

The announcement this week that Google has now shifted a series of websites to the mobile-first index was noted at the bottom of a “how to” guide for web publishers, which explained how to get their sites ready for mobile-first indexing.

Google noted that a mobile-first index means that webmasters will see “significantly increased” crawling by its Smartphone Googlebot. It also means the snippets in the results and the content on the Google cache pages, will be from the mobile version of the pages, when live.

Pages that already take advantage of responsive web design and implement dynamic serving don’t usually have to do anything to be ready, Google added.

At the end of the guide, the company noted that it has started mobile-first indexing for a handful of sites, which are being monitored by the Google Search team.

When asked, Google declined to comment on the change of some sites to a mobile-first index, but the company has been working on the project since its announcement last year, speaking about it at events, and working with webmasters. It had not before given an indication of how far the mobile-first index had rolled out.

While this does indicate the index is closer to launch, the company has estimated that it likely won’t go live until 2018 at the earliest.

Google had previously said that when it was ready to migrate sites to a mobile-first index, it would begin with those that were ready for it. The company didn’t say that had taken place, instead saying that “it would have more to announce around that later on.”

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What does the future of robotics look like? Nobody knows for sure, but Honda seems pretty certain it’ll be cute. At CES next January, the Japanese manufacturer will show off a quartet of new robot concepts, including a companion bot, an autonomous off-road vehicle, and a pair of “mobility” concepts — for moving people and things about. Two of them have actual cute faces, and the other two are at least extremely non-threatening.

But why make robots that look like this? In Honda’s case it’s because the company sees the future of robotics as rooted in human interaction. Honda’s bipedal Asimo is the face (and body) of the firm’s robotics research, but its other major products include the Uni-Cub, a wheel you sit down on a steer by leaning; and the Walking Assist — a harness you wear around your hips, and that helps you walk.

Machines like this that help with mobility are particularly crucial in Japan, a country that’s turning to robots to help look after a rapidly-aging population. And if your robots are going to be helping people all day, we know that things will go smoother if they at least look friendly.

From left to right below you can see the smiling companion bot (3E-A18) which “shows compassion to humans with a variety of facial expressions”; the “chair-type mobility concept” (3E-B18), designed for “casual use” in indoor or outdoor spaces; another “mobility concept with multi-functional cargo space” (3E-C18); and an “autonomous off-road concept” (3E-D18) which basically looks like a quad-bike. All these are concept vehicles, which means Honda has no plans right now to actually sell them.

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Read original article on THE VERGE

Alphabet’s Project Loon, which last month partnered with AT&T and T-Mobile to bring LTE connectivity to disaster-stricken Puerto Rico, says its helium air balloons have delivered internet to 100,000 residents on the island. A significant portion of Puerto Rico, still struggling to recover from the effects of Hurricane Maria, is still without cell tower reception, with the Federal Communications Commission reporting earlier today that nearly 44 percent of Puerto Rico cell sites are still out of service. Loon deployed balloons in late October in what was its fastest-ever deployment in an effort to help residents get back online as soon as possible.

“In times of crisis, being able to communicate with loved ones, emergency services and critical information is key. We hope that the connectivity Project Loon has provided over the last few weeks has been helpful, and would like to thank AT&T, T-Mobile, and our government partners who made these efforts possible,” Alastair Westgarth, a project lead on Loon, said in a statement.

While 100,000 is an impressive metric on its own, Puerto Rico is an island of nearly 3.5 million people. A map released today by the FCC shows that a vast majority of the island’s counties still have between 20 and 60 percent of cell towers out of service. Only four counties are reporting only 1 to 20 percent of cell sites out of service, while another four counties have more than 80 percent of their cell sites down. So while Loon is certainly helping Puerto Rico’s government get more residents online, there’s a lot of infrastructure work to be done to get the entire island back online and in contact with the rest of the world.

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The final APIs for Android O arrived with the third preview release, so today’s update is all about incremental updates and stability. All of the major Android SDKs, tools and the Android Emulator will get minor version bumps in the next few days and the Android Support Library (version 26.0.0) is now considered stable, but, like before, the focus here is on making sure that developers can test their apps before the final version rolls out to users.

For users and developers, the new version of Android brings better notifications support across the OS, picture-in-picture support, autofill and more. There also are new features that are meant to optimize your phone’s battery. While none of the changes are revolutionary, Android developers should probably test their apps on Android O as soon as possible (even if they don’t plan to support the new features). To do so, they also should update to the latest version of Android Studio, Google’s IDE for writing Android apps.

The Google Play store is now also open for apps that are compiled against the latest API.

Read Full Article HERE

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Google CEO Sundar Pichai revealed Google Lens early in the conference’s keynote, and it sounds much like the technology in the original Google Glass. You can point your Android device’s camera at something, be it a flower, a restaurant, or a Wi-Fi network name, and Google Lens will give you more information about what you’re looking at. In the demo, Google showed an image of a flower that Google Lens was able to immediately identify.

Continue Reading on ArsTechnica

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Here are five things to try with the new Google Earth, which runs in Chrome on desktop and on Android for mobile users:
Enjoy 3D Maps

In earlier versions of Google Earth, certain buildings could be viewed in 3D, provided you checked off “3D Buildings” in the Layers portion of the app. But in the newest release of Google Earth, you can view, well, the whole world in 3D. When you search for a location, a clickable 2D/3D button appears on the lower right-hand corner of the screen, giving you a quick and easy way to look at your destination in another dimension.
Have another dose of David Attenborough

If Planet Earth II wasn’t enough to satisfy your love of nature, or you just can’t get enough of David Attenborough’s remarkably dignified narration of a lizard getting chased by hundreds of terrifying snakes, check out “Epic Hunts Caught on Camera.” Thanks to a partnership with BBC Earth, Google Earth now offers a series of short video clips narrated by Attenborough, which play in YouTube along the righthand side of the usual Earth view. If chimpanzees or underwater expeditions are more your thing, there’s also content from primatologist Jane Goodall and marine biologist Dr. Sylvia Earle.
See Hemingway’s hangouts

Ever want to see the places where Ernest Hemingway wrote his most important and influential works, ones that are second only to this blog post? Within the new “Voyage” tab in Google Earth, you can take a virtual tour of the Galapagos islands, the Samburu National Reserve in Kenya, and other UNESCO World Heritage sites; as well as cultural imprints like Hemingway’s hangouts, architecture by Zaha Hadid, and global perspectives on the different structures we call “home.”

Read Full Article HERE

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Take for example the infamous Microsoft versus the Department of Justice antitrust case. As one of the 12 Microsoft executives who was skewered on the witness stand by David Boies, I lived through this nightmare firsthand. The DOJ unambiguously won the legal battle. But policy didn’t win the war. While the DOJ certainly weakened Microsoft, what happened instead is technology, in particular the iPhone, broke the monopoly and now Microsoft is hopelessly behind in mobile computing.

Which brings us to the current war raging between technology and government policy. Apple has used encryption technology to protect user data on the iPhone. But they left a crack in the armor, and the FBI wants to create policy to jump through that tiny crack and read what is on Syed Farook’s phone.

What this tells us is that encryption works. If the FBI or NSA could break strong encryption, then they would remove the memory chips from Farook’s iPhone, copy the data and run it through a cloud of government computers to read the files. But they can’t. Encryption works.

So instead, the FBI has used the All Writs Act law from 1789 to convince a federal judge to force Apple to write a special version of iOS to unlock the iPhone of a bad guy in 2016. If that sounds unlikely, well, it just might work.

Continue Reading on TechCrunch

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The Google Cardboard team has teamed up with Bank Of America and Visa to bring a new VR experience to Android and iOS. The subject is the New England Patriots and you’ll be able to immerse yourself in a practice they participate in.

To go along with the new experience, 10,000 customized Cardboard viewers are being handed out to fans at Gillette Stadium. This is yet another Cardboard giveaway meant to bring virtual reality front and center to the types of folks who could eventually be converted into VR believers. Think the New York Times giveaway.

Here’s the 360 degree video experience, you can use your mouse to manipulate the video to see what’s happening in all directions…or grab a Google Cardboard to view it (the new Samsung Gear VR browser will show it off quite nicely, too):

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Internally, the Project Management side should ideally be a SaaS solution that is platform/browser agnostic and capable of performing all the necessary project management functions. With our internal team, we use a product called SuiteDash @ https://suitedash.com to organize our efforts. Project Management is an important tool that lets us handle a volume that would otherwise be impossible. Each project can be broken down into Sprints/Milestones and then ordered so that the whole team knows the status and progress of the project as a whole. If we need to assign the client a task, it’s very simple, and the client is notified immediately. When the client logs in, those tasks are presented in their dashboard, and any updates or files that they add to the task are immediately transmitted to the Project Manager and the other Teammates via app notifications and/or email.

Additionally, SuiteDash gives us the ability to easily turn tracked time or tasks into an invoice, or add that time to an existing invoice. It’s as easy as just a few clicks, and the completed task, or tracked time is added to the invoice as a new item. When the project reaches completion, that invoice can be finalized, and sent to the client for payment, all of which happens within the SuiteDash environment.

We can’t say enough good things about our experience with this SaaS based software solution. The developers are very responsive to our needs, sometimes adding features that we request within a matter of days. Also, we can see the direction they’re headed, and it matches perfectly with the tool we have always wished for. We have a feeling that when they build this thing out along the planned roadmap that it will be even more indispensable than it is now.

The best part of all this is the cost basis of all this. Before we were paying 3 or 4 different SaaS software solutions for various functionalities like Project Management, Invoicing, Client Portals, CRM, etc… All of those monthly payments have now been cancelled, and we are moving happily forward with only one, very low in comparison, monthly payment for SuiteDash. It’s one tool that replaces a whole range of tools that we used before, and much cleaner as well because it all just works together.

When we find a tool that works, we have no problem giving a shout out!  Go see the team at https://SuiteDash.com and start simplifying your life… and your budget.

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FULL ARTICLE AVAILABLE AT TECHCRUNCH

It has never been easier for customers to buy software. A couple of clicks or taps, depending on your device of choice, and you can be up and running with even the most sophisticated enterprise business applications.

The result of all of those fast, easy transactions is impressive: According to Goldman Sachs, SaaS revenue is predicted to reach $106 billion in 2016, a 21 percent increase over projected 2015 spending.

So if SaaS is so easy to buy, why does it often seem so difficult to sell?

Simply put, traditional software distribution channels have failed to keep up with today’s on-demand, subscription-based delivery models. In the old world of on-premise licensed-based software, 70 percent of software sales were channel based. Today, only 23 percent of SaaS sales go through a channel. On the other side of the coin, 80 percent of on-premise software vendors operate a channel program to enable other companies to sell their products, while only 20 percent of SaaS vendors operate similar programs.

Today’s software vendors are leaning heavily on direct sales, but it’s not entirely their fault. Many vendors don’t have the technology to support a balanced distribution approach that includes indirect sales channels, such as affiliates and resellers. To make matters worse, there’s no “silver bullet” that will solve every SaaS sales and distribution challenge; not only is every software vendor unique, but these companies will have different go-to-market needs at different stages of growth. In short, there is no be-all, end-all way to monetize software.

With lots of trial and error, however, some SaaS companies have managed to crack their own unique code for selling software. Let’s look at four strategies SaaS vendors can use to sell more software, as well as companies that have used them to successfully scale and drive new revenue.

Affiliates And Referral Programs

These types of programs usually operate in one of two ways. In one, customers refer others to a product for some form of incentive. In the other, vendors establish formal relationships with affiliate partners who direct qualified leads to the vendors’ websites or products; again, in exchange for an incentive.

Looking across the SaaS industry, Dropbox offers one of today’s strongest examples of a successful referral program. The cloud storage company encourages users to invite a friend to join in exchange for 500MB of free storage. This program helped Dropbox grow from 100,000 to 4 million registered users in just 15 months, a jump that represents a staggering 1,950 percent year-over-year growth rate.

FULL ARTICLE – http://techcrunch.com/2015/10/09/sell-saas-they-said-it-will-be-easy-they-said/

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