Japan is the place to be if you’re looking for the bandwidth to tackle future technologies – things like HD video streaming, visual networking and large file-sharing, according to a study by researchers from the Said Business School at the University of Oxford and the University of Oviedo’s Department of Applied Economics.
The researchers looked at 42 countries to understand how prepared each nation was for future Web technologies. Japan ranked first but the U.S. was No. 16 on the list, still ahead of the U.K. and Canada but well behind Korea, Germany and France, among others. In Europe, Sweden and The Netherlands had the best performing broadband connections not only because of their investments in fiber and cable network upgrades but also because of strong government vision and policy, the researchers found. From the study:
The Broadband Quality study was developed on the premise that the new generation of web applications will rely on a higher level of performance of broadband connections. Average download speeds are adequate for web browsing, email and basic video downloading and streaming, but we are seeing more interactive applications, more user-generated content being uploaded and shared, and an increasing amount of high-quality video services becoming available. Moreover, because the study also found significant correlation between a nation’s broadband quality and its advancement as a knowledge economy, policy makers may need to consider how to create an environment to improve key broadband performance parameters in the future.
The U.S. is becoming somewhat of a third-world country when it comes to broadband deployment and adoption. These findings drive home that point even further and should send a wake-up call to Washington that a cavalier attitude toward technology and innovation will eventually catch up the U.S. and cripple its citizens and businesses as a competitor on the global business stage.
Apple yesterday announced at their keynote speech that as of yesterday the new iTunes 8 music software will include accessibility features. This will help users with disabilities to interact with the software. Apple have understood that by adding such features to their software it has opened the possibility of new customers being able to access their software for the first time. The same rules cross over to website, if your site has been developed in an accessible way from the start it will not only attract these customers but make your site more search engine friendly too.
Here at TomatoNetwork we are always looking for ways to help our clients improve their productivity. We developed a barcode scanning inventory system recently for our TomatoCart shopping cart. This system is used at www.stuartslondon.com and allows in-store stock to be synchronised with web stock. When an item is sold in store it is simply scanned with our scanners to decrease the stock level on the web site. TomatoNetwork will hopefully be utilising this technology with another client to allow check-out and check-in of tools, this will help our client track the total lifespan of any tool/machinery in their company.
Lightbox, and the newer Lightbox 2, is a JavaScript application used at TomatoNetwork to display content and large images that would normally have required a new window for. The advantage we find for using a Lightbox box is the user can stay on the same page while viewing their shopping basket or enlarged image. Deactivation of the Lightbox is usually done by clicking a cross or outside of the Lightbox area. The technique has gained widespread popularity due to its simple yet elegant style and easy implementation.
TomatoNetwork can implement Lightbox’s into any of your projects and style or animate them to fit with your site.
The BBC this morning reported on the state of web sites in the top 30 UK businesses. The full article is below:
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By Geoff Adams-Spink
Age & disability correspondent, BBC News website |
The internet can be as challenging as the physical environment
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A survey of the UK’s 30 most important retail websites shows that none of them meet minimum accessibility standards for disabled shoppers.
The research was carried out last month by Nomensa, a specialist access consultancy firm.
Websites were evaluated using manual and automated testing, looking at retailers’ homepages and their terms and conditions page.
A British Retail Consortium spokesman said the rules need clarification.
‘Online responsibility’
Nomensa used the internationally recognised Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) as the basis for its testing.
Although none of the sites met the minimum accessibility standards, John Lewis, Marks & Spencer and Tesco were considered to have paid particular attention to accessibility.
Nomensa’s managing director, Simon Norris, said the UK’s 10 million disabled people ought to be able to buy a Christmas present online for a friend or family member this year.
“These research findings show that anyone with serious physical impairments, visually impaired people or those who need glasses to read would encounter difficulties and in many cases would give up trying,” he said.
Mr Norris is urging companies to extend their corporate social responsibility programs to include web accessibility.
“I’m calling on the boardrooms of these retailers to really start to take their online responsibility just as seriously,” he said.
Losing sales
Nomensa’s research has found that:
- Three out of 30 terms and conditions pages achieved basic accessibility standards
- 23 websites used search and navigational features that would not work without Javascript something that a large number of people do not have enabled
- 29 of the websites had text that would be difficult to read for people wearing glasses
- Only Apple computer and John Lewis had added text descriptions to all images which is helpful to blind and partially sighted people
- 25 of the 30 sites continued to use pop-up windows
- 29 websites do not use shortcut links to enable people to navigate the page without using a mouse
Mr Norris recommends that companies devise, implement and then monitor their accessibility standards in order not to lose potential income.
According to IMRG, a lobby group of online retailers, 40% of the UK population shopped online in the run up to last Christmas and spent an average of £94 each.
Based on these figures, Nomensa estimates that disabled people could potentially spend £376m, some of which is being lost because of poor accessibility.
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 Retailers have made huge progress in improving physical access to and within stores  Richard Dodd, British Retail Consortium
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The British Retail Consortium said that its members were committed to making their services as accessible as possible.
“Retailers have made huge progress in improving physical access to and within stores,” said spokesman Richard Dodd.
“They also continue to work on making websites easier to use but some online retailers have found that more difficult.”
Legal confusion
The BRC said a lack of information about the extent of legal obligations had hindered progress towards improving accessibility.
IMRG chief executive James Roper said e-retailers were taking their “accessibility responsibilities very seriously” but suggested that the current requirements were “both premature and overambitious”.
The online retail industry was still young, he said, while most e-commerce firms were still unprofitable and technology was evolving rapidly and continuously.
“Many [firms] are striving hard to provide excellent service to all consumers,” Mr Roper said.
Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/5360372.stm
As well as web site design and development the TomatoNetwork team are well experienced in building desktop computers. We like building high spec machines so if anyone is interested in fast office equipment give us a call.
This current machine we’re building has a spec of:
Antec Sonata II Piano Black Quiet Midi Tower - Case
E6300 Core 2 Duo 1.86GHz - Processor
ASUS P5VDC-X SKT775 VIA - Motherboard
Corsair (TWIN2X1024A-6400) XMS2-6400 1024MB - Memory
Western Digital WD2500KS Caviar SE 250GB 7200RPM SATA2/300 - Hard drive
Trust 5.1 Sound Expert Optical - Sound card
PowerColor X1600XT Bravo overclocked edition 256mb - Graphics card
NEC ND3550A 16x DVD±RW Dual Layer Internal IDE - DVD writer
LG GDR-8164BL 16×52 DVD-ROM Internal IDE - DVD reader
Speeze ChillMax 775 Pentium 4 CPU cooler - Processor fan
AKASA All-in one front panel - Lots of input and outputs on the front of the case 
Relisys TL966 19″ 600:1 8ms (1280 x 1024) Black MultiMedia TFT Monitor 3 Years Warranty - Two massive 19″ TFT monitors.
Want more accurate statistics for your site, Google Analytics offers the most compressive solution. It offers everything you’d normally see in a stats package as well as some great things that have never been seen. The best feature of it we’ve seen so far is the site overlay. This lets you see exactly where people have been clicking on your site by overlaying it with percentage bars, clicking these bars reveals the number of clicks. To get Google Analytics on your site sign-up at http://www.google.com/analytics and add their code provided to all your site pages. You may require a Gmail account to be able to sign-up as this is not on general release yet.
If you have a website built by TomatoNetwork you will have been given access to your statistics package, if not you may need to set one up with you web deisgn company or host. It can be very confusing the difference between unique visitors, visits, hits and so on. Below we have tried to explain this for you in the most simple terms.
Unique Visitors
The unique visitors section of the summary will show the amount of “Unique” or different visitors to a page. This is normally the amount asked for by other webmasters. This is a true number of visitors to a site.
Number of Visits
The number of visits is the amount of users that come to the site including return visitors. This is the amount of unique visitors combined with return visits. So if a user visits a page more then once in a 12 hour period, each of those visits will be counted and displayed here.
Pages
The pages section displays the amount of pages that have been viewed for the month. This basically shows the amount of pages within a site that have been viewed by users throughout the month. Hits Hits are the amount of visits a site receives plus the amount of connections per user. Each user that displays a web page may make multiple connections to the server to download images, text and any other information that may be needed for the page to display. This is all logged and is displayed as the amount of total hits a site receives.
Bandwidth
The bandwidth displays the current bandwidth usage for the month. It also displays the average usage per user. This is the average amount of bandwidth a user may use each visit. This will give a good idea of what the bandwidth usage is like for the month and give a basis for calculating the monthly bandwidth usage.
Everyones starting to talk about making sites accessible for disabled users. TomatoNetwork where one of many who attended the PAS 78 launch in London. Speakers Tesco and Legal & General gave big relevance to accessible website generating traffic and cutting down on customer complaints. The principal audience for the PAS 78 are businesses within the UK, but it is a relevant document for charity and volunteer organisations, as well as local and central government. Its also a useful document for web design agencies and web developers as a guide to what is expected of us. It is written from a business perspective and describes the web standards and usability testing needed for producing accessible websites.
Using Wikipedia as a tool to build up links to your site can bring some great advantages. we have noticed that with many clients using this technique are achieving many hundreds more visits to their site per month. For example a page featuring model Kat Shoob has an external link to her model profile at eye candy corporate events. Since Wikipedia is free and open to add your own information to as long as no one contests it, this is an easy way to build up links and increase traffic.
