AME Info Corporate Blog: April 2006

First MS clamshell phone

Qtek 8500, the new ultra-light clamshell EDGE music phone. The first Qtek clamshell EDGE music phone is here! Your new Qtek 8500 weights only 99 grams with battery and touts a breath-taking 16mm with a build-in 1.3-megapixel camera and music control buttons. Qtek 8500 is not your ordinary clamshell phone. With EDGE, you enjoy faster data download.

With the convenient music buttons in the front panel, a simple touch and enjoy your favorite music stored on the micro SD card right away. The main 2.2” TFT LCD with LED backlight gives you crystal clear, crisp and vibrant image and colors. The secondary 1.2” TFT LCD on the front cover keeps you always informed of the time / date, identity of callers, and what music is playing. Qtek 8500 is coming to Europe in May.

Dopod (pictured above), i-mate and O2 will most likely follow soon with their "version"

Bigdaddy dropping pages...

Some sites are nearly being dropped from the index altogether - some, however, are slowly building up again. There are people who have experienced a drop from 11,000 pages indexed down to just 2 pages the past week, another site reported a drop from 500,000 down to 44,300 pages with a sharp drop in traffic as a result. The key objective appears to be to remove spam sites and duplicated content - but that is yet to be confirmed.

One thing to bear in mind is that Bigdaddy will have different crawl priorities. That may account for some of it. If you have had any spam problems in the past, you might also want to do a reinclusion request. Spammers using the Google Sitemap to feed in pages also now need to be aware.

Matt Cutts confirmed at Boston PubCon that Google with radically change the process used to spider pages. Caching will be implemented on the spider and thus reducing the requests that Googlebot will be required to make of a page.

If you want to help test-drive the new results, you can do so by searching at 66.249.93.104. If you’re unhappy with what you find, you can use the “Dissatisfied?” link at the bottom right to send feedback, or file a spam report (include the word “Bigdaddy” in your additional details).

What is Bigdaddy?
Google has a new data center nicknamed Bigdaddy, as Googler Matt Cutts writes back in January. Matt expects that Bigdaddy’s results, which are still experimental at this stage, will become the default for Google later on (possibly in a few months). Matt says, “[Bigdaddy] has some new infrastructure, not just better algorithms or different data. Most of the changes are under the hood, enough so that an average user might not even notice any difference in this iteration.”

Microsoft starts Windows auto-piracy check

"PCs using Microsoft's automatic Windows update service will be checked for pirate versions of the operating system from today – and dodgy copies will be refused all upgrades except critical security patches.

Users will have the option, in a pop-up box that appears at the start of a scheduled update, to opt out of the validation, but they too will be refused full updates. "

Source:
http://www.pcw.co.uk/personal-computer-world/news/2154739/microsoft-piracy-check-pcs

Colour campaign

"HP, the leader in colour imaging and printing, will be painting AME Info, the Middle East's leading online business resource, with a range of vivid colours this week, emphasizing the importance, affordability and effectiveness of using colour products in the office."

This is the first time the colour-scheme of AME Info has been used in a campaign - above you can see all the colours used in the 7 days long campaign.

Read the full story

IE Vulnerability: Address Bar Spoofing

Hai Nam Luke has discovered a vulnerability in Internet Explorer, which can be exploited by malicious people to conduct phishing attacks.

The vulnerability is caused due to a race condition in the loading of web content and Macromedia Flash Format files (".swf") in browser windows. This can be exploited to spoof the address bar in a browser window showing web content from a malicious web site.

Secunia has constructed a test, which can be used to check if your browser is affected by this issue:
http://secunia.com/Internet_Explorer_Address_Bar_Spoofing_Vulnerability_Test/

The vulnerability has been confirmed on a fully patched system with Internet Explorer 6.0 and Microsoft Windows XP SP1/SP2. The vulnerability has also been confirmed in Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 Preview (March edition).

Other versions may also be affected.

Please note, there is no fix for this vulnerability from Microsoft at the moment. Secunia advises to Disable Active Scripting support.

Internet advertising revenues grow 30%

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) has released the Internet Advertising Revenue Report including final numbers for Q3, Q4, and full year 2005. The report states that Search, Classifieds, Display, and Rich Media all continue to grow at a healthy rate. Overall internet advertising revenues (U.S.) for 2005 totaled $12.5 billion, a new annual record exceeding 2004 by 30%. Q4 2005 internet advertising revenues totaled a record $3.6 billion, representing a 34% increase over same period in 2004.

Read the full story

Google web calendar service

"Google Inc. is introducing on Thursday a free Web calendar service for consumers to schedule events and share them with others, opening a new level of competition with rivals such as Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO - news) and Microsoft Corp."

Read more:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060413/wr_nm/google_calendar_dc

Try it out:
http://www.google.com/calendar