News Posts

Guru Kool-Aid: Are You Drinking It? – A SPN Exclusive Article

What is a guru? Literally, a guru is a teacher. The word guru means “heavy” or “deep,” thus a guru is a person “heavy” or “deep” in knowledge. In this sense, a schoolteacher is a guru, a coach or athletic instructor is a guru, a fine-arts, or even a dance teacher is a guru. One’s parents are also gurus. In the religious field, where the word is most commonly used, a guru is a Hindu religious teacher. So a priest or any person learned in Hindu lore may be a guru

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Guru Kool-Aid: Are You Drinking It? – A SPN Exclusive Article

Apple warns appayola-using app-makers

App Store competition can be tough, but Apple has warned the consequences of trying to game the system are tougher. Apple is reminding app-makers that using appayola services – paying to artificially inflate an app’s chart ranking – will lead to them being stripped of their ability to release apps in the App Store. In a post on Apple’s Developer website, the company said: “Once you build a great app, you want everyone to know about it. However, when you promote your app, you should avoid using services that advertise or guarantee top placement in App Store charts. “Even if you are not personally engaged in manipulating App Store chart rankings or user reviews, employing services that do so on your behalf may result in the loss of your Apple Developer Program membership.” The reminder appears to have come in response to a recent conversation on the forum for the mobile games site Touch Arcade. In the forum posting , an independent developer claimed to have been contacted by an ad network charging $5,000 (

Deleted photos live on in Facebook servers

Old Facebook photos may still be accessible for months – or even years – after being deleted, living on in the depths of the social network’s servers. First revealed in 2009 by Ars Technica, the firm recently queried Facebook again after discovering backup copies – that could potentially be accessed by users – still existed some three years later. “Users who might have had second thoughts about posting a photo could certainly remove the image from Facebook’s main user interface, but as long as someone had a direct link to the JPEG file in question, the photo would remain accessible for an indefinite amount of time,” the company said in a blog post . According to Facebook, a poorly-functioning legacy system is the culprit, but a new system is on its way to ensure deleted photos can no longer be accessed. “We are in the process of migrating these photos to the newer system to ensure proper deletion, but until this migration is complete, CDN URLs from deleted photos stored on this legacy system may still be accessible,” Facebook spokesman Frederic Wolens told CNET

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Deleted photos live on in Facebook servers

How to Generate Leads With Linkedin

Imagine – a platform of only business owners and business professionals that has over 140 million members and is growing daily; where the average income per member is $120,000 US. And the best part? Almost no-one is using this to its full potential. What is LinkedIn? LinkedIn is a business directory that specializes in finding businesses, talent, and opportunities. It is therefore a place to discover businesses and for others to discover you. A place to discover talent; for recruiting, outsourcing, partnering with, or consulting. In short, people who can help your business

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How to Generate Leads With Linkedin

Technology Solutions: Cloud Computing

Economic uncertainty has created the need for swift, responsive and highly secured IT infrastructures that are also environmentally friendly and more business focused. Organizations are struggling to find the competitive edge, turning to the bounty of opportunities technology provides. Cautious to jump at the latest buzz phrases and hyped solutions, many have cautiously investigated recent technology breakthroughs, many of which have one thing in common: redistribution of IT roles. There is no better time than the present to revamp technology strategy focused on hosted solutions. Clouds are gathering… Cloud computing has emerged as one of the major ways to secure an upper hand in today’s highly competitive market. Minutes of downtime means the loss of vital sales as businesses with prolonged data loss find themselves in a real position of collapsing. Cloud computing changes the traditional corporate data center structure that resides on company premises. Instead, systems are moved to secure outsourced data centers, either in a private or public configuration. Private clouds are dedicated servers used exclusively for a single company, whereas public clouds have multiple companies sharing the same resources

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Technology Solutions: Cloud Computing

Study finds Twitter hard to resist

A new study is suggesting that Twitter users may not be able to help themselves, as it’s revealed the microblogging site just might be more addictive than cigarettes. The University of Chicago Business School study – measuring how well people can resist desires – also claimed that some individuals may be more likely to give into cravings for social media than those of sleeping and sex. “Modern life is a welter of assorted desired marked by frequent conflict and resistance, the latter with uneven success,” experiment leader Wilhelm Hofmann said. The study monitored participants aged 18 to 85, who were signalled seven times a day over a 14 hour period. They were asked to report whether they were experiencing any desires, what type of desires they were experiencing, the strength of the desire and whether it was in conflict with any other desires they might also be having. Researchers discovered that as time wore on, participants found their willpower weakened – the most frequent instances of ‘self-control failure’ were recorded with media.

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Study finds Twitter hard to resist

9 Common Title Tag Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

A website’s title tags are very important for several reasons: 1) The title tag shows up in search results as the blue link, and a good one helps the site get more clicks and visitors from search results. 2) Title tags are a crucial SEO element that can help the website show up higher when people search for the words in it. 3) Title tags show up when web pages are shared on social media sites like Facebook. This is important because social media mentions are now a ranking factor in Google search results. So if you have the time to optimize one thing on your website, title tags are it. Here are some of the top mistakes and missed opportunities I’ve seen in title tags. Avoid these and you’ll be ahead of the game. You’ll rank higher in search results and entice more people to click on your site. 9 Signs of a Bad Title Tag: 1.

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9 Common Title Tag Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

Top 5 Link Building Strategies for Your Site

The best Search Engine Optimization (SEO) experts can guide and assist you in link building strategies that will increase your website’s visibility on the internet. The following categories of backlinks give an excellent overview of the wide variety of options available for improving your site’s SEO ranking. Links from Multiple Domains While your link building strategies should focus on volume, your plan should not be to get most links from a single site. Instead, work towards just a few links from many sites for best results. As search engines rank sites, they consider how relevant the content is to the keywords and search terms. When you get links from multiple domains, you demonstrate that many sources find your content useful. This is critically important when you develop additional backlinks from authoritative domains. Deep (Ingrained) Links Instead of directing links to your site’s main page, use links directly to specific pages of content or images

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Top 5 Link Building Strategies for Your Site

Apple pulls iPad and iPhones in Germany

Motorola has dealt a double-whammy to Apple in Germany. Following a December ruling by a German court that Apple failed to license one of Motorola’s wireless intellectual properties and the ruling’s subsequent patent injunction, the Cupertino-based company has now begun to pull older iPad and iPhone models from it German online store. In a separate lawsuit, Motorola also won a permanent injunction against the push email service of Apple’s iCloud and any devices that can access the services in Germany. The sales ban relates to a Motorola-owned patent for a “method for performing a countdown function during a mobile-originated transfer for a packet radio system.” The separate push email ban would only come into effect if Motorola decides to enforce the judgement, which deals with a patent relating to two-way communications between pagers and other devices. Apple isn’t taking the news sitting down, however, and has vowed to appeal the rulings and to keep its products available elsewhere for its German customers.

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Apple pulls iPad and iPhones in Germany

Android Market gets a Bouncer

Google has released an automated service for the Android Market to help detect malicious apps when they are uploaded. The new service – code-named Bouncer – “provides automated scanning of Android Market for potentially malicious software without disrupting the user experience of Android Market or requiring developers to go through an application approval process,” VP of Engineering Hiroshi Lockheimer wrote in a blog post . “Once an application is uploaded, the service immediately starts analysing it for known malware, spyware and Trojans. “It also looks for behaviours that indicate an application might be misbehaving, and compares it against previously analysed apps to detect possible red flags.” Once scanned, if the app has been identified as malicious it will be scanned manually for confirmation.

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Android Market gets a Bouncer

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