The shiny black Nokia 7205 Intrigue cell phone features a playful design, with an exterior that appears to be a classic clamshell, until a message or call illuminates and brings it to life. It puts an emphasis on music, but the straightforward phone has no aspirations of competing with the likes of the 5800 XpressMusic.
– Nokia hopes to pique interest with its new Nokia 7205 Intrigue
a sleek, black clamshell-style cell phone with a hidden-until-lit
external show. With the phone closed, the sly exterior offers
customers access to their messages, music and the alarm clock.

Open the clamshell and you find a …

Priority List: Virtualization, green IT, data storage and digital asset management will help the San Francisco Symphony more effectively connect with its customers and leverage 100 years of music.
– Michael Skaff is the CIO of the San
Francisco Symphony, one of the country’s leading symphonic orchestras, and an
eWEEK Corporate Partner. His specialties include technology strategy/plotting,
budgeting, complex contract negotiation, disaster recovery/business continuity
plotting, LAN/WAN design…

In this second part of a five-part series on the factors that cause web sites to rank in the search engines we re going to take a close look at links and the age of the domain. We re also going to touch on the rate at which new pages are added the rate at which new links are added and hopefully torpedo once and for all the belief that toolbar page rank has anything to do with how high you rank on the search engine results pages SERPs ….

Adobe Acrobat 9 – Download FREE Trial Unify Documents, Images, Video and More. Make the Richest, Most Engaging PDF ePortfolios.

The market for 18-inch laptops has slowly been growing and now Toshiba with its Qosmio G55-Q8 2 is looking to get a piece of the pie. If you are unfamiliar with 18-inch laptops the basic thought is that laptops are the in thing so if you are looking to buy a desktop you might as well go ahead and buy a really huge laptop that has as much power as a modest desktop….

Adobe Acrobat 9 – Download FREE Trial Unify Documents, Images, Video and More. Make the Richest, Most Engaging PDF ePortfolios.

The Garmin 7 series has always been top-of-the-line. That s why nearly every release has earned high ratings from PC Magazine. So how could Garmin compete with their own track record The answer can be found with their latest device the Garmin Nuvi 755T….

Get Your “Six Sigma” Certification Earn Villanova Six Sigma Certification 100% Online Program — FREE Info.

The foundation of every relationship is communication. The quality of the communication is the first factor that determines the way the relationship evolves. This statement also holds right in the world of C and to raise the quality of communication a library called iostream has been implemented….

Adobe Acrobat 9 – Download FREE Trial Unify Documents, Images, Video and More. Make the Richest, Most Engaging PDF ePortfolios.

According to the UK site Blogstorm, Google has started ranking Twitter search pages for topics (reckon hashtag-style words) higher, often making the front page for certain queries. This is despite the fact that Twitter blocks Google’s spider from indexing search result pages. Which begs the question, how is Google determining that these Twitter topics merit a high weight?

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Google is notoriously secretive about what influences their search algorithm to generate a given result. They reserve the right to tweak this algorithm whenever they feel it is necessary, often without warning or any obvious outside influence. We can generally assume this is to improve some aspect of what Google returns in a search, either to eliminate bogus hits, or increase relevancy, or even to avoid embarrassing top results, often called Google bombs.

But what is being observed now is even more curious, especially since Google has to rely on links pointing toward Twitter Search on specific topics in order to get a hint about relevancy at all. It makes us wonder how Google would rank these results if Twitter did really optimize their search offering for SEO.

You can see for yourself easily enough, simply search for a well loved Twitter hashtag term like #sxsw or #gaza and the Twitter search link should be in the first page of results.

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In my recent visit to Silicon Valley, I got the chance to visit the Mozilla headquarters. Among others at the organization, I spoke to Chris Beard – Mozilla’s Chief Innovation Officer and the person overseeing its efforts to bring new concepts to the browser, a.k.a. Mozilla Labs. We discussed where Firefox is heading and how it compares to Google Chrome in particular. We also talked about Mozilla’s new mobile browser Fennec, the add-on platform, and how recent innovations by Mozilla – such as Weave and Ubiquity – fit into the huge picture. In this post we’ll focus on the near future of Firefox.

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Firefox vs Chrome

Chris Beard and I first discussed what Mozilla is doing to keep Firefox, its flagship product, competitive in the latest generation of the ‘browser wars’. Google, whose headquarters are just up the road from Mozilla and who I also visited on the same day, upped the ante in the browser industry in September last year when it launched a groundbreaking new browser called Chrome. Not only that, but Google went out of its way to claim that Chrome represents the next generation of browsers, because (according to Google) it is much better than existing browsers at managing the increasingly sophisticated web apps we see on the Web nowadays.

Beard noticeably bristled at the suggestion that Chrome performs better with heavy duty web apps. He noted that Firefox is also working hard to make highly interactive web apps run smoothly. Regarding Google’s claim that Chrome’s isolated tab processes mean a more stable browser, Beard answered that Firefox too is very stable and that it doesn’t crash much these days. And to be honest, in this author’s experience the latest production versions of Firefox have indeed performed much better than they used to. I still get the odd browser crash though.

What’s the Vision for Firefox?

But arguments about browser stability aren’t going to differentiate the two browsers, Firefox and Chrome, in the eyes of the general public. So I questioned Chris Beard to clarify Mozilla’s vision for the future of Firefox. Beard answered that the vision for Firefox is to help users navigate and manage an increasingly complex world. Beard likened this concept to intelligent agents; and he also used the term ‘trusted assistant’. Beard told me that the browser will be "tied to services" – he mentioned the current activity happening in the Linked Data and Semantic Web communities.

Add-ons are a huge part of the current Firefox experience and Chris Beard said that some of those add-ons will become more integrated into the core browser. While that isn’t a new trend, I noted that it sounds similar to what Flock has done. Flock is a browser built on the Mozilla platform that integrated many social web elements into the browsing experience (Flickr, YouTube, etc). I suggested that Firefox may want to offer bundles of add-ons, so that users don’t have to go hunting around for various individual add-ons. Beard said that yes, this is in the works. He said that users will be able to make add-on "lists" and offer them as a single click to other users – much like Amazon’s wish lists. But he noted that there are usability issues to overcome, because some add-ons aren’t necessarily compatible with others. He said that currently Firefox has around 8000 add-ons and that we can expect this bundling feature to come out in the next couple of months.

As for other upcoming changes to Firefox, Beard told me that many aspects of the current Firefox experience could be in the cloud – for example bookmarks and the “Awesome Bar” (Mozilla’s term for its adaptive learning URL bar). Beard said that portability of the user experience is vital in this era of the Web and so they’ll be looking to offer certain functionality and data in the cloud.

Another part of Mozilla’s strategy for Firefox going forward is to integrate aspects from some of its associated products, such as Ubiquity (an experimental Firefox add-on that gives your browser a context sensitive command-line – see ReadWriteWeb’s most recent write-up) and its sync product Weave (our write-up). Beard told me that all Mozilla products are designed to be extended, but this may include making them part of the core Firefox browser. Ubiquity, for example, may end up being baked into Firefox in the future.

In my next post, we’ll explore Mozilla’s strategy for Fennec (its new mobile browser) and we’ll look at recent developments in other Mozilla products such as Ubiquity and Weave.

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In most cases, the implementation of the active record pattern in PHP (and other programming languages too) is carried out through a few data mapper objects, which are used to perform CRUD operations on a group of targeted database tables. This seven-part article series describes the advantages of using the active record pattern in a variety of situations, and shows you how to do it.
– Introduction
While an approach like the one described above permits to reach a high level of SQL abstraction when accessing databases, the truth is that its also possible to apply the active record approach by means of a single database class, which encapsulates within its API all the logic require…