Businesses Increasingly Looking to iPhone Apps
Published in iPhoneAppQuotes, which puts businesses together with iPhone developers, has released some interesting findings. The company has noticed a shift in app development trends.
“Business apps are proving to be the most popular category of apps as entrepreneurs and small businesses realize the marketing and additional revenue stream potential the iPhone creates,” says Founder Gregg Weiss.
Some of iPhoneAppsQuotes’ findings include:
– Medical, education, business and book applications are the most popular development requests
– In the first quarter of 2009, there was a 50 / 50 split between business versus consumer application request for development
– In the second quarter, business applications have increased by 30 percent, resulting in a 70 / 30 split
– Request for quotes to develop new iPhone applications are up 20 percent from May to June 2009
– Requests for game iPhone application development dropped by roughly 10 percent, and the development of new music applications are experiencing a steep decline
– The initiation of new weather, sports and photography have slowed to a near standstill
“Apps are now available world wide in 77 countries,” says Weiss. “With the recent news from Apple CEO Steve Jobs announcing last quarter, 5.2 million iPhones were sold, a 626 percent increase from a year ago, the customer base for iPhone apps is growing rapidly.”
“The key thing to take away from these statistics is that developing an iPhone app can create a very lucrative business for not only businesses and software developers, but also for regular Joe’s that have a fantastic concept,” he adds.
It is unclear whether the information reported by iPhoneAppsQuotes is representative of the iPhone App industry at large, or simply of the apps and developers involved with the company’s own network. Either way, it is clear that more businesses are looking to find new ways to utilize the app market for the incredibly popular smartphone.
Update: A representative for iPhoneAppsQuotes says, “The statistics in the release are from the iPhoneAppQuotes.com business rather than the industry at large.”
Yahoo Upgrades Local Search Performance
The next time you want to look up or research a local business, Yahoo intends to be there for you. Yahoo Shortcuts now display a lot more information right on the regular results pages, which should make the search process less click-intensive and time-consuming.
If you supply a business’s name and city (or even a business type and zip code), the Yahoo Shortcut is supposed to return one or more mapped-out results. Basic (but helpful) info including telephone numbers and hours of operation is often supplied. Then, things get a little more interesting with dropdown menus offering directions and Yahoo Local reviews.
Sometimes photos, Web reviews, and overviews (not shown above) will even be tossed into the mix.
A post on the Yahoo Search Blog explains, “The local enhanced Shortcut brings the most relevant information from across the Web so you can find what you need in one place. It is also a part of our continuing effort to better understand query intent – what users mean in their queries – and to match it with the right content.”
The upgrade seemed both accurate and helpful throughout a little bout of testing.
Launch of New Site Monitoring Service
UncleMoe e-Business Consultants are please to announce the launch of a new services, UncleMoe Uptime. This service will give you access to a valuable resource that monitors your website 24/7/365.
The website monitoring service will notify you as soon as an error is detected on your website or web service, so that you can act on it and reduce the subsequent downtime. With this service by your side, you can be there for your customers whenever they need you.
UncleMoe Uptime Server Monitoring
A Fresh look and feel to Google Blog Search
Over the years since Google Blog search was launched, the product from the search engine company has improved. on the 14th of May 2008, Google gave it a fresh look both internally and externally.
The Blog search engine has had an interface redesign as well as the search algorithm altered, providing a better search service to customers and fellow readers.
One important improvement to the algorithm is that Google are processing new links much faster, so the post that breaks a story and gets a lot of links is more likely to become the lead story.It may take a few days to sort out whether all of this (and a new, more barebones layout) really represents a tangible improvement over the old Google Blog Search.
Will Wolfram Alpha beat Google? or will it supplement it?
Wolfram Alpha was created by Stephen Wolfram who is a British born physicist, and according to some experts in the internet field claim that his tool could be as important as Google is to the Internet.
Like AskJeeves, Wolfram Alpha, a free tool, aims to answer questions directly to the user unlike current search engines that display the best results. This is done by a “computional knowledge engine” which was demonstrated at Harvard University.
“Our goal is to make expert knowledge accessible to anyone, anywhere, anytime,” said Dr Wolfram at the demonstration.
Developers say Wolfram Alpha can simplify language to remove ‘linguistic fluff’
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“Wolfram Alpha is like plugging into a vast electronic brain,” he wrote earlier this year. “It computes answers – it doesn’t merely look them up in a big database.”
So the question is…..will this change the way we use the internet? or will it change the way we write content for the internet so that questions get the right answers and your content is the answer that it is give….
What would happen if this technology went head to head with Google? or will all the search engines adopt this technology to help remove spam from the search results. Well all we can do is wait and see how the search engines use this tool, and how Search engine optimisation processes are effected by this.
If you would like more information about search engine contact us and we will be happy to help.
Google looking to change (improve) thier ranking algorithm
With spammers using blackhat search engine optimisation techniques, Google has been forced to make changes to its search ranking algorithm to combat the spate of links leading to malicious web pages appearing at the top of search results.
In the recent months, spammers and cybercriminals alike have been using techniques that go against Google guidelines to manipulate search rankings.
If Google fail to act on the current situation, users will be led to fake sites and untrustworthy sources leading them to mistrust Google as an organisation that they have grown to love.
A report from security company PandaLabs identified over a million links targeting malicious webpages ranking for auto part searches. Google noted that many of the phrases mentioned in the report were rare. A phrase like [1989 Nissan Pickup Truck Engine Check Light Troubleshooting], for example, only appears on attack sites set up by spammers, which explains why Google brought back so many attack sites in response to it and similar queries.
Google, on the other hand, cannot control for content appearing on the Web at large, and historically its famous algorithm performed better than any other at weeding out spammy webpages and malicious results. Unfortunately, that was a version of the Web that was more static. The live Web presents entirely new challenges manifesting as the first major weakness the search engine has faced.