eCommerce information, facts, news and articles.

I received this email from Microsoft Windows Azure Team, thought it was interesting with some dates to remember regarding the launch of the Azure Service.

Greetings from the Windows Azure Platform Team!

We hope you are enjoying your participation in one or more of the Community Technology Previews (CTPs) of the Windows® Azure™ platform (i.e., Windows Azure, SQL Azure and .NET Services). The feedback from these CTPs has proven invaluable in enhancing our services and we appreciate your participation.

In October 2008 at our Professional Developer Conference we opened the Community Technology Preview (CTP) for the Windows Azure platform (Windows Azure, SQL Azure and .NET Services). The CTP has been invaluable in terms of shaping many aspects of the Windows Azure platform.

PDC 2009 is an exciting event for all of us who are working on the Windows Azure platform as it’s our opportunity to show you the work that we’ve done over the past year, including some brand new features. The conference also marks the beginning of our transition from a CTP to a business. For your planning purposes, this post maps out the key stages of that transition that you should be aware of.

*     At PDC 2009, on November 17th, 2009, a number of new features in Windows Azure will be made available for the first time. The CTP will remain open through December 31st, allowing you to experiment with the full feature platform and to give us any final feedback.

*     Beginning January, 2010, new customers will have to sign up for an offer to access services on the Windows Azure platform. You’ll receive your first bill with a $0 balance, so you can see your exact usage while still enjoying free service.

*     On February 1, 2010, we will begin charging customers for using the Windows Azure platform.

Making the transition in these three steps accomplishes a few goals. First, it gives you a chance to explore our full feature set for free. Second, it allows our team time to get your feedback on the new features and address any issues that arise. Finally, it lets you preview exactly how billing will work before you need to start paying.

We’d like to thank everyone who has participated in our Community Technology Preview. Windows Azure, SQL Azure and .NET Services are better products because of you. We look forward to seeing you next month at PDC 2009!

Windows Azure Platform CTP Team

Microsoft Corporation

More information can be found on the official Windows Azure web site http://bit.ly/9vSpB

What is Windows Azure?

Windows® Azure is a cloud services operating system that serves as the development, service hosting and service management environment for the Windows Azure platform. Windows Azure provides developers with on-demand compute and storage to host, scale, and manage web applications on the internet through Microsoft® datacenters.

Windows Azure is an open platform that supports Microsoft and non-Microsoft languages and environments. To build applications and services on Windows Azure, developers can use their existing Microsoft® Visual Studio® expertise. In addition, Windows Azure supports popular standards and protocols including SOAP, REST, XML, and PHP.

The top 10 fashion and accessory websites by share of the overall total for the UK for week ending October 17 are.
1. Next
2. Asos
3. New Look
4. River Island
5. Topshop
6. Shirtinator
7. M&M Direct
8. Tesco
9. Dorothy Perkins
10. Matalan.

Whats your favourite?

source: Drapers.

Reveal the humans behind your brand:

Applications like CoTweet bring more people from your company to the social media party — now they just need nametags. Specifically, there’s a need to identify the people behind your brand Twitter account and a way to signal when each of them is tweeting.

Introducing ^CoTags, a new convention for using signatures when tweeting from a brand account. It’s really simple—just the carat character followed by the person’s initials, or other identifying set of characters.

The concept is like #hashtags. But while #hashtags provide a way to track tweets topically across many users, ^CoTags create a way to associate individual tweets within a shared brand account. And in the process, ^CoTags bring “humanness” to otherwise monolithic branded Twitter accounts. ^NB

Designing a web site, can be a challenge on a number of fronts, based on the variety and richness of not only the current design techniques & styles, but also the browser capabilities.

This article sets out in simple terms the factors we need to consider when designing a web site, and applies to all types of web sites, from small holding pages, through corporate web sites through to more complex eCommerce and eBusiness applications.

For example Google Analytics automatically tracks a number of statistics about the browser capabilities of visitors to your site:

• Browser type. eg IE, Firefox, Safari..
• Operating system. eg PC, Mac
• Browser-operating system combined ratios. PC/IE, Mac/Safari
• Screen Colours. 16 bit, 32 bit
• Screen Resolution. 1024×768, 1280×1024
• Flash Versions. eg 9.0, 10..
• Java Support. yes/no

The information below is based on actual google analytics reporting.

Browser Type.

Currently around 65% of browsers are Internet Explorer, 19% Firefox and 13% Safari. Chrome, Opera etc make up the balance.

Operating Systems.

Windows Leads the way currently, with 87% domination, MAC is around 11%.. with the iPhone and others making up the balance of 1%.

Browser-operating system combined ratios.

This is where it gets interesting, and a little harder to explain.

65% of visitors use Internet Explorer and Windows.
16% of visitors use Firefox and Windows.
9% use Safari & Mac.

All Internet Explorer visitors use Windows. [as there are no IE versions available to MAC users].  About 87% of Firefox visitors use Windows, 11% on Mac. and the rest on Linux.

About 75% of Safari users are Mac based versus 15% on Windows.  The rest are iPhone based.
Screen Colours.

Over 86% of all browsers are 32bit colour, 11% are 24bit with 16bit and under covering the rest.

Screen Resolutions
This is probably the most complex area of browser capabilities.  As a design agency we need to really focus our designs on the end user or the most popular end user profile.

There are a vast array of screen resolutions now, with different devices on the market.  The following outlines the top sixbrowsers by screen resolution.

1280 x 800 covers 37%
1024 x 768 covers 21%
1440 x 768 covers 9%
1280 x 1024 cover 9%
1366 x 768 cover 6%
1860 x 1050 cover 4%

The six above cover 89% which means there are a lot of other random sizes covering the last 11%. Interestingly less than 1% of browsers are 800 x 600, which five or six years ago was the norm.

The question is where do we design for, intial response would be 1280 x 800 a nice wide screen.. but no we need to focus on the 1024 x 768 browser as this is the narrowist width (1024) of the top six.  Especially if we are looking at a fixed width web site, then this will be set to just under 1000, so that the scroll bars do not effect the design.  With fluid or “percentage” based design then this will be ok as long as we again keep the lowest common theme to 90% of 1024 we will be ok.

Flash Versions.
Over 82% are version Flash Version 10, which shows the update mechanism is working , with version 9 taking up the majority of the rest. There are very few Flash version 8 and below browsers.

Java Support
Very simply, 93% of browsers support Java and 7% do not.

RT @google: Tweets and updates and search, oh my!

At Google, our goal is to create the most comprehensive, relevant and fast search in the world. In the past few years, an entirely new type of data has emerged — real-time updates like those on Twitter have appeared not only as a way for people to communicate their thoughts and feelings, but also as an interesting source of data about what is happening right now in regard to a particular topic.

Given this new type of information and its value to search, we are very excited to announce that we have reached an agreement with Twitter to include their updates in our search results. We believe that our search results and user experience will greatly benefit from the inclusion of this up-to-the-minute data, and we look forward to having a product that showcases how tweets can make search better in the coming months. That way, the next time you search for something that can be aided by a real-time observation, say, snow conditions at your favorite ski resort, you’ll find tweets from other users who are there and sharing the latest and greatest information.

Posted by Marissa Mayer, Vice President of Search Products and User Experience