Tribute to Steve Jobs, Visionary of Computing World

Steve Jobs passed away at the age of 56 on October 5th, 2011. One of the greatest luminaries in the computing world, he brought us the Macintosh II, iMac, iPod, iPhone and most recently the iPad. A vast number of must have gadgets started out from One Infinite Loop, with Steve's vision and leadership. 

Even if you are not a fan of Apple products, like myself, we can all agree that Apple products are in a class of its own. Very rarely does other products able to rival the elegance and naturalness of Apple's gadgets. More than creating great products, Steve also inspire us to dare to dream and follow through on it.

Stay hungry, stay foolish

One of the most popular quotes by Steve - do zou remember when a PC means a beige box? When music sharing online were threatened by RIAA and the music studios? How impossible it is to move beyond the desktop/laptop into smaller, more user-friendly devices? With one sweep of his hands, Steve manage to revolutionize the whole industry. 

Listening to Steve's inspiring speech during the 2005 Stanford Commencement Address

Here's to the crazy ones.
        The misfits.
                The rebels.
                        The troublemakers.
                                The round pegs in the square holes.
The ones who see things differently.

They're not fond of rules.
        And they have no respect for the status quo.

You can praise them, disagree with them, quote them,
        disbelieve them, glorify them or vilify them.
About the only thing you can't do is ignore them.

Because they change things.
        They invent. They imagine. They heal.
        They explore. They create. They inspire.
They push the human race forward.
Maybe they have to be crazy.
How else can you stare at an empty canvas and see a work of art?
        Or sit in silence and hear a song that's never been written?
Or gaze at a red planet and see a laboratory on wheels?
We make tools for these kinds of people.
Because while some see them as the crazy ones, we see genius.
And it's the people who are crazy enough to think they can
change the world who actually do.

Test

Related articles

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• Steve Jobs Remembered: 10 of His Most Magical Moments [VIDEO] (mashable.com)
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Google Analytics Update - Increase Your Website's Effectiveness

Recently Google Analytics has had a major upgrade to v5. Some of the new features, as well as demonstration of how to effectively use Google Analytics is covered today at Go Measure in Malaysia.

These are some of the notes I have taken at the event.



First off, you need to activate the new features by clicking on

Instead of the drop-down list of all your sites, you will see a much cleaner interface of all Google Analytics profile at the home page. Accessing the dashboard for each of the site is as easy as clicking on any of your tracked site.

The main features in Google Analytics such as Reports, Intelligence, Goals, E-Commerce and Multi-Channel Funnels are just one-click away at the top navigation bar. There is much more focus on what you are trying to achieve with Google Analytics, rather than focusing on just plain statistics. So less about visitors, content and traffic sources, but more about assists and conversions.

Measurement

“Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted”
Albert Einstein

Go Measure Keynote: Rethinking Measurement and Attribubtion

When you build your website, you care a lot about the overall theme, photos that you use, font type and all the little details to project your brand. Most people hire a professional web designer to create their websites. Once the website is launched, is that the end of the story?


Certainly not. Unless you are assuming that the website is already perfect, and will automatically get new customers, and ensure all existing customers stay loyal. You will not know how website visitors got to your website, what pages they browse and how many of them actually make a transaction if you do not measure. 


The core concept of Google Analytics is to gain Insight into the current visitor's behaviour, and then take Actions to attain your website's Goals. 

Go measure 2011 - URL Tagging & Campaign Variables

Goals

If you don't know where you are going. How can you expect to get there? - Basil S. Walsh

Defining & Measuring Goals  

Similar to an organization, a website also have goals. Without a goal, a website is simply one of those random, "me-too" collection of HTML pages.

Do you remember the Geocities, Tripod and AngelFire homepages in the '90s?

Surely you will want to design your website to achieve certain goals such as strengthening your brand, increasing loyalty among existing customers or converting visitors to customers and closing sales.



The example in the slides above shows that Brazil has the 3rd highest number of visitors. But if you look at the conversion rate, Brazil is not even in the top 10! This is the type of valuable insight that Google Analytics gives you, and you can turn into some actions such as:

• Creating Portuguese version of the website
• Find out and use the most popular online transaction method in Brazil, etc

Assists

A typical activity flow shows a user clicks on an advertisement, and provided that the  landing page is attractive enough, there will be a conversion. In reality, there are many assists before conversion (>10 is normal). 

The new Google Analytics now has much more focus on goals, and how to link your goals to actual conversions. 

Take for instance Amari's advertisement campaign for their hotels in Thailand. The results from Google Analytics shows that there are a lot of click-throughs from Google Adwords, which brings the user to a typical landing page with a very clear call-to-action and minimal information. 

This tactic does not result in much conversion, show that the current landing page is not effective. Amari was courageous enough to increase the amount of information on the landing page, such as details of the hotel room and services available. The result: 44% increase in conversion rate in one month. 

This Mckinsey's model of Consumer Decision Journey captures the full life-cycle of a customer making purchases. To learn more, head over to the full article including interaction diagram at Mckinsey's website. 

Social Networks

We have heard about the phenomenal growth of social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and Google+, and how much these networks shape the behaviour of Internet users. No web campaign is complete without taking into account the approach for social networks, as well as measuring the Return on Investment. 

Google Analytics now provide a one-stop solution with a single view of your campaign in other advertisement as well as social networks. 

Are there any product listing pages on e-commerce websites without a "Share on Facebook / Twitter / Google +1" button? Blogs, including this one, and news websites have been effectively using the link sharing ability of social network to increase the trustworthiness of their content as well as loyalty among users. 

Measuring Social using Google Analytics  

Using the social plugin in Google Analytics is as easy as adding an additional line of Javascript code

_trackSocial(network, action, target_url);

In fact, if you are using Google's +1 button, no setup is necessary.

A good example is MilkADeal.com using Facebook's Like button, Facebook's share (a URL), Google's +1 button and share via email. Facebook being the most popular social network, especially in Malaysia, we can logically expect Facebook Like / Send to have the most users as well as highest conversion

What's surprising is email conversion is 40%, compared to Facebook Like's 27%. Having known this fact, MilkADeal.com can then make email sharing more prominent.

The best source to learn more about Google Analytics is at Conversion University. The slides are very well: see for example the lesson on Campaign Tracking and AdWords Integration.

 Learn more about Google Analytics at http://www.google.com/analytics/education.html 

Check your about.me email in Gmail

Yesterday, about.me made personalized email address publicly available. Instead of having to manage yet another email address, why not consolidate it with your existing Gmail account? Note that your about.me email is actually AOL mail.

There used to be an option to enable forwarding of all emails to another address in AOL mail. Although mail forwarding is no longer available, you still can access your about.me email from Gmail via POP or IMAP.

This is AOL mail's IMAP and POP settings

IMAP Setup Information

• Email Address: <your_username>@about.me
• IMAP Username: <your_username>@about.me
• SMTP Username:  <your_username>@about.me
  
  SMTP Password: same as used to login to Mail
•  imap.aol.com (Use port 143 for standard or 993 for SSL connections)
  pop.aol.com (Use port 110 for standard or 995 for SSL connections)
  smtp.aol.com Set the port to 587

Within Gmail, click on the Settings icon on the top right corner, and select Mail settings. Next, in the Import mail and settings section, click on Import mail and contacts

In the pop-up window, type in your about.me email address and click Continue.

Key in the password

If it does not work, you may have to specify the pop server to pop.aol.com instead of pop.about.me

Once Gmail is able to connect to the AOL about.me mail server, you can now create a new label (for example: about.me) and choose to leave a copy of the email on the server

There you go - your about.me email accessible from your Gmail inbox

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Personalized about.me email address

about.me is now offering personal email address, in the form of user@about.me



If you are an existing about.me user, you may have received an email today for you to sign up for a personalized email address.

You can also sign up manually by going to http://about.me/dashboard/#!/offers, and you should see an offer for a free email address

Click on the "Claim Your Free Email Address" button, fill in your date of birth, and you will get your email address. Do take a quick look at the Privacy Policy as well as the Terms of Service. They are pretty standard as far as I can see, and even allow you to opt out of interested-based advertisement.

about.me is owned by AOL, so what you will get is AOL mail.

If you like to, you can check your about.me email at http://mail.aol.com/, using your about.me logon email address and password.

How to move your Gmail signature above quoted text

By default, Gmail's auto-signature will post the signature at the end of the email, even if you are replying to an existing email with long, quoted text.

If you are like me and tend to reply above the quoted text, you may find it annoying to keep cutting and pasting the signature from the bottom of the email to the top.

There is actually a Gmail feature that can automatically move your signature to the top of quoted text by default. Click on the settings icon on the top left corner of Gmail, and click on Labs.

Search for this feature called Signature Tweaks, and when you have found it, enable it.

Remember to Save Changes before going back to your Inbox. Now, when you reply to an email, your signature will be automatically on top.

Related articles

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Get more information on your goo.gl URL

When I started using goo.gl, I was surprised why statistics for older URLs went missing. Turns out that by default the goo.gl Dashboard shows only the statistics for the last week by default. Here you can see that goo.gl shows very few clicks

One of the URL has 0 clicks, which I know to be wrong because I always click on then short goo.gl link as soon as I created it to make sure its working.

If you notice on the top right corner, goo.gl Dashbord view defaults to last week's statistics. Click on all time and you will see the updated statistics.

Detailed Statistics for Short URL
Similar to bit.ly, you can easily view the statistics of the Short URL by appending a '+' character to the end of the URL. For example, the statistics for http://goo.gl/LiFgI is available at http://goo.gl/LiFgI+

Another way is to use the URL http://goo.gl/info/LiFgI. To filter the statistics by period of time, use http://goo.gl/info/LiFgI#all_time, http://goo.gl/info/LiFgI#month, http://goo.gl/info/LiFgI#week or http://goo.gl/info/LiFgI#day


QR code for your Short URL
You can get the QR code by appending '.qr' at the end of your goo.gl Short URL. For example, http://goo.gl/LiFgI.qr

Notice that when you type in this URL into your browser's location bar, it will expand to http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=qr&chs=150x150&choe=UTF-8&chld=H&chl=http://goo.gl/LiFgI

You can change the size of the generated QR image by changing the chs parameter. For example, to generate a 300px x 300px image, use the URL

http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=qr&chs=300x300&choe=UTF-8&chld=H&chl=http://goo.gl/LiFgI

The maximum allowed size of generated QR image is 1000x1000 pixels.

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Adding Facebook Like Box to Google Sites

To build up a cohesive presence on the web, you will naturally want to cross-promote all of your web presence. Especially when you have a website, but also want to connect to customers via Facebook.

Facebook have a useful tool to generate an embed-able iframe for the Like Box.

Unfortunately, Google Sites does not allow you to embed any code, or use CSS directly. The workaround is to use the Code Wrapper Google Gadget to embed iFrame.


Embedding Facebook Like Box in iGoogle

This section shows you how to add the Facebook Like Box into your iGoogle page at http://www.google.com/ig Feel free to skip to the next section

If you wish to test it first, go to http://www.google.com/ig/directory?dpos=top&amp;root=/ig&amp;url=hosting.gmodules.com/ig/gadgets/file/105629041657992777031/code-wrapper.xml and click on Add It Now

Now click on Back to iGoogle home. In the embed code text box, key in the full iFrame url. For example:

<iframe src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/likebox.php?href=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2Fpages%2Fi-Renocom%2F116267735141293&amp;width=250&amp;colorscheme=light&amp;show_faces=true&amp;border_color&amp;stream=true&amp;header=true&amp;height=250" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" style="border:none; overflow:hidden; width:250px; height:250px;" allowTransparency="true"></iframe>>

You can tweak the box's dimension and colors. For example, to change the width and height to 250 x 250

&amp;width=250&amp;colorscheme=light&amp;show_faces=true&amp;border_color&amp;stream=true&amp;header=true&amp;height=250

You should see something like this:

Adding Like Box to your Google Site page

Sign in with your Google (or Google Apps) account, and browse to the page you wish to embed the Facebook Like Box. Start by clicking on Edit Page. The webpage is now in Edit mode. At the top left navigation bar, click on Insert > More gadgets... . Type in "Code Wrapper" in the search box, and select the Code Wrapper gadget.

You will see a short description as well as the hosting URL. Click on Select to proceed.

Type in the Embed Code you get from Facebook earlier. You may want to adjust for height and width, for example 250 x 250

<iframe src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/likebox.php?href=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2Fpages%2Fi-Renocom%2F116267735141293&amp;width=250&amp;colorscheme=light&amp;show_faces=true&amp;border_color&amp;stream=true&amp;header=true&amp;height=250" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" style="border:none; overflow:hidden; width:250px; height:250px;" allowTransparency="true"></iframe>

Remember to change the width and height settings of the gadget if you have changed the Facebook Like Box's URL.

Note that the Facebook Like Box already has a title bar with the text "Find us on Facebook". Unless you have something unique to add, a generic Gadget title such as  "Check us out in Facebook" is redundant. I recommend you leave it blank.

Click on Preview gadget if you want to see how it looks like before adding to your page. Once you are satisfied, click OK.

Turn on Text Wrap and change the Alignment if you need to. Once you save your page, the update will take effect immediately.

This is how the Facebook Like Box will look like.