Turning Visitors into Customers
Business websites often encourage visitors to leave contact information so that sales staff can get in touch, but this only rarely works. “How do you leverage otherwise anonymous traffic?” asks Martin Longo, chief technology officer of startup Demandbase, based in San Francisco. Last week, his company released a tool, called Demandbase Stream, that aims to answer this question. It digs up information on Web visitors in real time, helping salespeople follow up on a visit with a cold call and a pitch.
Source: Erica Naone, Technology Review, September 2, 2008
When LinkedIn knows where you are
Within two years, I believe mobile social networking will become the most valuable business application since e-mail. [...] As we speak, the convergence of social networking and mobility is starting to grow worldwide among teenagers and young adults. ABI Research predicts that mobile social networking will reach 90 million new users over the next four years and rake in $3.3 billion.
Source: Mike Elgan, Computerworld, September 2, 2008
Ice Age lesson predicts a faster rise in sea level
If the lessons being learned by scientists about the demise of the last great North American ice sheet are correct, estimates of global sea level rise from a melting Greenland ice sheet may be seriously underestimated. Writing this week (Aug. 31) in the journal Nature Geoscience, a team of researchers led by University of Wisconsin-Madison geologist Anders Carlson reports that sea level rise from greenhouse-induced warming of the Greenland ice sheet could be double or triple current estimates over the next century.
Source: University of Wisconsin-Madison news release, August 31, 2008
Solar Powered Desalination Farm to Bring Life to the Sahara
The ingenious plan, known as the Sahara Forest Project is simple: combine huge greenhouses with concentrated solar power (CSP) and plain old seawater. The solar power provides electricity for the farm of greenhouses, the desalination of the seawater provides both the freshwater and cooling required to grow a wide variety of crops.
Source: Mark Selfe, Red Herring’s Blog, September 2, 2008
A new way to concentrate sunlight could make solar power competitive with fossil fuels.
Source: Kevin Bullis, Technology Review, September/October 2008
You could think of this as the Tarzan protocol for Wi-Fi. The goal is to improve interactive Wi-Fi connections dramatically for moving vehicles. Dubbed “Vi-Fi,” the protocol lets Wi-Fi clients keep in touch with several access points at once. In a sense, Vi-Fi lets overlapping access points coordinate with the moving client, minimizing the disruptions that can zap interactive applications. The tests, published in a recent technical paper, showed that Vi-Fi doubles the number of successful short TCP transfers and doubles the length of disruption-free VoIP sessions compared to an existing, more fragile Wi-Fi handoff protocol.
Source: John Cox, Network World, September 6, 2008
Turning Visitors into Customers
Business websites often encourage visitors to leave contact information so that sales staff can get in touch, but this only rarely works. “How do you leverage otherwise anonymous traffic?” asks Martin Longo, chief technology officer of startup Demandbase, based in San Francisco. Last week, his company released a tool, called Demandbase Stream, [...]
