Web Design Trends In 2013.

Web design evolution

Anno Domini 2013 - must-have

* responsive design - desktops, smartphones, tablets

* social logins - FB, TW and LKNDIN

* white hat SEO status quo - great content and shareable

* bigger everything - pics, calls to actions, phrases, fonts

* simpler design - simple layout, white spaces

* video on homepage - visual content

* mega menus - really

Consulting Information Model

Making sense from information & providing meaning
/ specific / expensive/ niche -> information

- what works
- what's important / only important
- real usage / use
- identify alternatives
- assess risks
- give solutions
- identify trends / patterns
- key performance indicators
- ratios
- available raw statistics
- market making
- market research
- costs & prices
- information sources
- bibliography

Does WolframAlpha knows more or just crunches numbers better ?

The first search engine calculator.
Could WolframAlpha be important as Google ? Overhyped ? Tuning to electronic brain ?



Champaign, Illinois, USA - Computational knowledge engine sounds bold and geeky. Are we talking about Web Service or desktop PC program ?
Are you willing to change your habit ?

But is it magic or too much mathematics ? We'll see. Wolfram Alpa sells the image of something important in the web age 2009 and anticipation of it is dosed in a clever manner ( blog, webcast, newsletter, email invitation, FB group, twitter, Youtube channel, screeencast ).

Google is boring, though. Many people are waiting for '' wow effect '' in web search.
Google is God.

First thing, domain name. WoframAlpha.com is too long. Alpha totally unnecessary.

Wolfram comes from founder's name. Capitalism tells us this is wise move since people tend to care much more about the products and company when they use their names directly.

Wolfram Alpha itself is limited liability company not corporation. Wolfram Research Inc. is a company that develops Mathematics software , a computation solution for many industries.

Wolfram search engine has academics background.
Stephen Wolfram is founder - british physicist and mathematician. He thinks knowledge should be extracted from the Web in an easy-to-use interface.
He claims The Wolfram|Alpha engine differs from traditional search engines in that it does not simply return a list of results based on a query, but instead computes an answer.

Doug Lenat was impressed.

According to public information, there are no investors in the company as of today.

New York Times described search engine .

While search engines like Google, by and large, find things that already exist on the Internet—Web sites, photos, videos, blogs—Wolfram|Alpha answers questions, often by doing complex, and new computations.”

But how to get started searching ? What's ahead after homepage ? There are screenshots about this. Looks like you need to go deeper and refine your search. Maybe this data and answers are powerful indeed, but is this information layer usable and easy to navigate ?

More questions pop up. Is this search engine for consumer market or power users ? For serious researchers only ?

There are 150 people in the launch team and huge cluster of computers ready to go live and load all those queries. Everything sounds very ambitious.

Math to rule or to kill ? That is a question now. May 18th is the only way to know this. Countdown begins for launch of this ''rich search engine'' :))

Who knows the answer ? Machine or human ?
It certainly isn't replacement for Google. Better at numbers, but worse at words.
Here's a screencast.

Bonus link:
John Dvorak's second opinion
What's Google worried about ? No click-throughs as before...

WEB TREND MAP

Information architects did it again. Version 4.


TOKYO- This is perhaps one of the most concise and best structured summaries of the 2009 technology world. New version of the Web Trend Map.

A yearly publication mapping 333 web domains, and 111 influential people on a Tokyo Metro map. Read more or download it here

Each “line” on the map is a different category: Application, Publishing, Opinion, News, etc. The map is certainly overwhelming, but pretty fun to explore. You can even send IA an email now to reserve your copy of the printed poster.

Heights represent success in traffic and branding. Subway lines are colored by area of interest. For example, take the orange line to find the creatives. Notice that there are several colors passing through Apple.

VIRTUAL COMPANY AND COLLABORATION

Virtual Inc.




DJURDJEVAC- Setting up a virtual company is easy.

You need tools to manage your , usually, small group of people from all over the world in a consisten way. Robin Good posted excellent list of these collaboration tools available online for free or for a small fee .

It's basicly everything you need to work on a project from your home and collaborate with other people in the virtual company.

The mix of these tools depends on the type of project you work on. So, here's my selection of these tools for simple online collaboration based on my experience, familiarity, practicality and value ( relative price ) :

E-mail, IM, web phone, chat:
Gmail ( Google account )
Skype
Meebo
Tinychat

Project management:
Basecamp
Zoho Project


Event scheduling:
Google Calendar

Collaborative writing:
Google Docs
Zoho writer

Video conferencing:
Meeting24

Document sharing:
PBWiki
Google Docs

WorkGrouping:
Google groups
Meetup
BarCamps

Web presenting:
Slideshare

Co- browsing:
PageShare
Pocket Meeting

Whiteboarding:
Dabbleboard

But the aim is to keep it simple, easy and uniform. To be clear, these are basic collab tools ( for internal process ) and do not include ''external'' web services you use for other business purposes like PR, marketing, sales or business productivity ( Facebook, Twitter, Google Analytics, AdSense, SugarCRM, Highrise, YouTube etc. )

BONUS:
Entrepreneur's toolkit

DEVELOPERS IN DEMAND

Talent rooster


DJURDJEVAC - As soon as I start my new project, unknown timeframe, but sometimes in the future, I will look for developers with 10 skills that have been listed by Justin James in an article '' 10 skills developers will need in the next five years''.

Let the headhunting begins. I will be picking up only '' kings'' and ''lions''.

Facebook's ponzi scheme about to end ?

One night stand and its supply

BBC reports reversal in Facebook's growth trends.
The rush might be gone.
The whole point, IMHO, is about sustainability of those businesess. Where are they ? I can't see it more than a fency ( IN ) night bars.

Tomorrow you might go to some other bar to meet new people ( or the bar will stay at the same location but will get a new owner ;))
A place could get boring and we might overestimate our ability to manage our digital personas and get hurt someday and become a victim of our fullish openess.

gBluff

An old form of poker known as bluff

Google is bluffing.
All those recent fancy announcements about OpenSocial and Open Handset Alliance is just a grandious bluff.
It's the game that would be in the state of war called ''positional fighting''.

Not that other are doing something extraordinary .
Amazon, Yahoo and Ebay are doing pretty much the same spinning around itself and buying innovative internet products and services .

Thought of a day about mobility

Two simple truths:
The World Wide Web is vast, and mobile phones are small.

Mobile Web Certification

Excellence

The folks at dotMobi are partnering with Prometric for Mobile Web Development certification.
Their initiatives are heading toward more attention for ''Mobile Web'' or whatever we might call it.

Vikendi.net to locate your weekends in Croatia

Find me escape I just might need, you portal :)

Before I go on weekend, few quick infos to add about Vikendi.net
Vikendi.net is a new croatian tourism site that immediatly appealed to me.
It is a nice user-generated portal for tourism providers ( users ) and related fields, still in its infancy.
The beuaty is in short distance traveling and the site provides infos for recreation, places and tourism offers. I think the audience will come and the base will grow ( if properly executed ).
The service Vikendi.net is very simple and works fast.

I can see it's done with PHP and has great SEO structure of links which will make them high with search engines.
The catalogue of information is structured naturally, and information are vertically and horizontally alligned ( geo information, type of service, offers ).
Yes, Google Maps is mashed up as well.

Finally something creative ( solves the problem ) on croatian web and decent idea for web site.
If I'm venture capitalist, you know what my words would be... ;))
To add my two cents, if possible, make it in english as well. There's huge expat community in Croatia and looks for weekends as well.