From the very start, Internet was entirely English — American English, to be precise. Originating from Arpanet, which prime purpose was to aid the information sharing over the government defense agency, the network standards didn’t seem to care of those who don’t speak English. But things change, and now, according to ICANN, more than half of multimillion Internet audience use non-Latin alphabets in their mother tongues. Despite being negative at first, ICANN has finally responded to a global call for nationalised domain names, and recently announced the program for ‟…delegating a number of internationalized top-level domains”. In layman’s terms, it means that the unipolar Internet world of ICANN holding all the strings in one hand would develop to distributed system, with each country having a body that manages nationalized top-level domains.

Russian officials were among the first who’ve applied. President Dmitry Medvedev is excited about the opportunities to deploy a range of government services over .рф zone, which stands for Russian Federation — but, according to The New York Times, there are other opinions. Technologists express their concerns on new and potentially unstable systems to be introduced; business people don’t see a reasonable ROI in having Russian site names as registrars made sure to make a fortune out of this. Interesting also is the fact that English version of the same page doesn’t list ridiculous prices like ~$350.000 for any domain at the opening day. Alex Gostev of Kaspersky lab notes that it would be a whole new field for fraudsters — and businesses agree: lots of them will be acquiring Cyrillic domains for the only reason of protecting themselves from scam and cybersquatting.

Despite of potential issues, there is a positive side to this novelty. People who are not familiar with English would find native language domain names easier to read and memorize, which will potentially increase the Internet use and penetration. The global network is commonly associated with freedom of speech and thought, ease of access to the most recent information and news etc — so making it easily reachable for the whole new audience is a positive thing indeed. There are concerns expressed in the same NYT article that ‟local internets” would be somewhat hermetic — but they might as well serve as a bridge to global space for those who haven’t had such a possibility in other cases.

Bottom line is, the whole process of introducing non-Latin zones is quite rough around the edges, bringing both problems and opportunities — as any innovation is in its early days. Lots of tech issues to be solved, and lot of political questions as well, which we don’t touch, being a technology company. Let us hear from you instead: what do you think about the future of nationalized domains?

Written by: Yuriy Pryadko

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Creating successful startup enterprise is a great experience, but going through a failure may be a huge experience as well – at least this is what Eric Ries states in his talk at Stanford University earlier this year.

Amongst the main lessons Eric claims he has learned during five years of building out product with $40 million investment is “Don’t be crippled by “shadow believes” rule. “Shadow believes” are believes which are universally shared inside the company but never spoked out loud, never documented or discussed, never tested against the real world.

As Erick states, major of these “shadow believes” are:

1. We know what customers want – think whether the vision that you’re following really and truly reflects the reality – the actual needs of your customers

2. We can accurately predict the future – a sheet with numbers frozen in business plan months (or years) before you’ve got first investment round and never changed after that can NOT be relied upon as true prediction of future market and company conditions. Any predictions should be questioned, criticized and reanalyzed all the time as the company develops

3. Advancing the plan is progress – advancing the plan looks like absolutely right thing to do, BUT – is this plan any good? Is it worth while to advance it? Same as knowledge of customer needs and future prediction values, development plans should also be questioned all the time and adjusted to reflect the current reality

Written by: Sergii Gorpynich

Tags: startups
Posted in Uncategorized, Web 2.0 business | 2 Comments »

Just a few days ago we had a chance to look at Appcelerator platform and its  Titanium family of products.
We looked primarily at Titanium Mobile, as both Android and iPhone  are of a significant interest for us – we do lots of development for these platforms.

So we’ve played quite a bit with Titanium Mobile and here’s quick summary of our opinions:

Pros:
• Same code that works on iPhone and Android platforms. As Android market gets traction, the option to “kill two birds” with one code-base looks like really cool.
• Enough to know html/CSS/js to develop. This is important. Especially for iPhone. While we regard Android Java SDK as a very good development platform and our J2EE engineers just love coding for Android (although they quite shun from J2ME)  iPhone Objective C is pretty different story. It is difficult to learn, it is bug-prone. It has quite weird callback logic. In fact, it is literally impossible to train Java or Ruby or Python engineer into iPhone engineer. Titanium Mobile opens iPhone apps world to even more light-weight technologies, and this is just great.
• Easy to install and to use.
• Free and open source.

Cons:
• Optimality of generated native code and native SDK coverage is questionable. Our experience shows that all such translator solutions (and another example is Adobe’s Action Script – 2 Objective C builder) do not cover complete set of native SDK functions. Honestly speaking we did not run into such situation with Titanium Mobile, but our gut feel is that there should be some limitations.
• Ability to quikly support new SDK releases. Apple’n'Google naturally are enhancing their SDKs all the time. Ability of appcelerator to quickly follow these changes is questionable.

That said, here’s our current view on how Cogniance may use Titanium Mobile: it is definitely useful when quick’n'dirty prototyping should be done or when app functionality is pretty straightforward and simple. But, if the task is to create state-of-the-art app which utilizes many advanced SDK features we will probably not risk to go with Titanium Mobile and go straight to native layer.  Yet, we appreciate that Cogniance is not exactly target consumer for Titanium Mobile, as we’ve already got both iPhone and Android engineers and Mobile targets web developers w/o native layers knowledge.

Written by:  Sergii Gorpynich

Posted in Mobile technologies, Uncategorized, Web 2.0 technologies | 2 Comments »

I’ve first met with very strong concept of Kanban during my study at business school and was really impressed by broadness of business applications of this “invention of the Samurais”. It turns out though, that  there’s also a lot of buzz on Kanban right now in the agile software development community.  Especially there’s lots of Kanban vs. Scrum comparisons. Since Scrum has become quite mainstream now, a common question is “so what is Kanban, and how does it compare to Scrum?” Where do they complement each other? Are there any potential conflicts?

These are questions which Henrik Kniberg discusses on his blog. Here’s his paper on this topic, which is interesting as well.

I’ve met virtually with Henrik first time when I’ve red his book “Scrum and XP from the Trenches” , which I’ve found really interesting and may recommend to anyone who is interested in software development methodologies.

Author:  Sergii Gorpynich

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Yesterday I’ve come over very interesting speech by Beth Seidenberg – Partner at Kleiner Perkins venture capital company. She gave some very interesting criteria for startup company to be succesfully selected during VC filtering.

So here is Beth’s “5 key factors”:

1. A+ leadership. Passionate founders.

This  she calls “most important thing”. Your startup should have A+ class leader, passionate about the product and its users.

2. Large, fast-growing, under-served markets.

VCs do not usually look for small, emerging markets (no matter how big potential these markets have) but for large, well developed, mature markets with clearly defined demand for the service or product. And this demand has to be bigger than current supply.

3.  Reasonable financings.

Well, you’d better not negotiate too much with Kleiner Perkins, but rather accept their proposal – there will probably be no second chance ). As Beth says, the value of your company should be equal to the value of products you already have.

4. Sense of urgency.

This requirement also absolutely makes sense. If you’re slow, you’re not the first out there, if you’re not the first, this may lead you to defeat.

5. Missionaries, not mercenaries.

As Beth says, it is much more important to think about product and value it brings to customer than to focus on thinking about big revenues, quick ROI and profit margins.

Author: Sergii Gorpynich

Posted in Web 2.0 business | No Comments »

Web-Based Mapping Services

Modern Internet users have access to the wide range of mapping web services (web maps). If to take a serious view of the entire set of such services, several obvious leaders may be indicated:

• Google Maps
• Yahoo! Maps
• Microsoft Live Search Maps
• Yandex Maps

The abovementioned services stand out of the line of their rivals thanks to the rich functionality, perfect geographical coverage and user friendliness. Among their functional features is a full-blown map navigation, zooming, and specialized information resources (big cities maps, traffic flow in real-time mode, etc.).

All the mapping web services above support latest versions of popular browsers (IE, Mozilla FireFox, Safari, Opera). At the same time, Google Maps provides the best cross-browser compatibility.

Such services pull geospatial data from specialized commercial data providers.

Of course, services make out their unique functionality. For example, Microsoft mapping web-service offers an opportunity to navigate 3d street maps of the biggest US cities as well as other countries streets, while Google presents unique instrument for developers interested in any applied information on maps Google Maps API.

Microsoft Live Search Maps		Yandex maps		Yahoo! Maps		Google Maps

Moreover, these services differ in coverage of different regions of a globe as well as relevance of mapping (geospatial) data. For example, Yandex maps provide the most up-to-date information for the territory of CIS (former Soviet Union) countries. Relevance of maps in Google Maps and MS Live Search Maps for different regions is 13 years. Yahoo! Maps falls behind as its data went out 4-5 years ago (incidentally, Yahoo! Ukrainian service has several grave shortcomings, for example it presents sufficient qualitative and true information about Kyiv streets not to say much for other big cities such as Donetsk.

There may be a lot of reasons to prefer a particular Web mapping service. Every user may have his or her own point of view about it. Your particular purpose is the major predominant as for what service to use to meet your current needs.

Collaborative web maps

No doubt, modern mapping web services provide a number of appealing opportunities for both experts and unsophisticated Internet users. However, they have a lot of limitations related to use of commercial data (lack of coverage in certain globe zones, outdated mapping information, etc.).

This fact was an incitement to develop alternative web mapping solutions, i.e. collaborative web maps. They rely on users to create and renew data on the map individually. As a result (ideally) reliable enough and quite free map of a region and the world entirely may be obtained.

The project Open Street Maps (OSM) is one of the brilliant solutions in this range. It was created in 2004 by Steve Cost, a young university graduate, after he increasingly disillusioned in quality and accessibility of electronic maps of Great Britain. Since then the project turned into a mass movement of GPS-mapping (now its user base is 50 thousand of registered users, with 5 thousand of active contributors).

At the end of 2007, in Ukraine, OSM Associations units appeared in large cities (Kyiv, Donetsk, Kharkiv). Consolidation of OSM Association in Ukraine was targeted in October 2008 as Kyiv mapping show was organized under support of Cogniance and Cloudmade.

One of the main features of OSM is development of key methods for automatic data input into a centralized storage using GPS-based mapping. It allows distributed editing of different parts of a globe (for example, the map of Kyiv is as follows now: http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=50.453&lon=30.542&zoom=11&layers=B00FTF).

In 2008, many leading commercial products selected OSM as a source for mapping data. For example, some VodaFone subdivisions in Europe supplied GSM-browsers to their mobile subscribers to overview maps of their regions from OSM archive (storage).

To increase popularity of OSM data, OSM founders started Cloudmade Company. It develops the family of commercial products on top of OSM data (namely, mapping Web API and Mobile API http://www.cloudmade.com/products). One of the recent customers of Cloudmade is White House (see http://www.whitehouse.gov/change/).

Another example of successful cooperative web-map is WikiMapia project, created by Russians Aleksandr Koryakin and Yevegeniy Savelyev in 2006. Inherently, it is a superstructure over Google Maps, where wiki-like interface for users data input is used.

Conclusion

Astounding growth and diversity of modern mapping web-systems is an indicator of wider use of electronic mapping data in different applied fields. Most probably just this fact will contribute to further development of geographical information system which we may witness.

Annex. Brief chronology of web-mapping

Note: See further details of mapping web-technologies chronology here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_mapping.

Written by Cogniance Team

Tags: mapping technologies, web technologies
Posted in Web 2.0 business, Web 2.0 technologies | No Comments »

The question seems to be rhetorical for those who are well familiar with Ruby frameworks. When asked the question, they would answer – hey, RoR rules the world, there’s no doubt in that! Still, on of our current projects at Cogniance was initially based on Merb, and we had to seriously think if it is worth while porting it to RoR. We’ve decided that the port is justified, after all.

And here are some of our key reasons for this decision:

1. Merb future is undefined due to forthcoming migration with Rails. Despite Merb’s author assurances, amount of work and buzz emerged around Merb have slightly decreased since the merge announcement.
2. Merb has a couple of  issues with bundler, mostly confirmed long time ago yet not fixed till now, here’s prooflink. This makes deployment a real hell. Also, Merb’s took Thor is also able to behave unpredictably.
3. Merb community is much smaller that Rails’ one. This means smaller knowledge base, less bugs fixed, less blog posts and questions asked and answered. Unfortunately, situation isn’t going to be better in a future.
4. Rails world have many times more ready, tested and working solutions comparing to Merb world. Compare number of different plug-ins for Rails and Merb, and you’ll get the picture.

Written by: Cogniance Ruby team

Posted in Web 2.0 technologies | No Comments »

WordPress is a blog publishing application and content management system. Many Internet surfers have their own blogs and some of you have the WordPress blog, because it is easy to manage, add content and edit its appearance by setting up the themes from the network or create the own one. So we all know what WordPress is, but how to make a blog more search engine-friendly? This is what my today’s blogpost about.

First thing you might need to do is to change the permlinks through your blog to the one where the post name is present in blogpost URL, e.g /postname/ or /category/postname/. In this case you will get more visitors because post’s keywords are present in the link.

Also, change the titles to match the previous thought – to have keywords in Title. To do this, adjust the titles to the one where the post name or category name or even tag is displayed, e.g post title – blog title, tag – archives page – blog title, blog archives page – blog title.

Description meta tag as for any other html page should be added to every post page, it is suitable when a description is not the automatic words list, but human-written phrase understandable for Internet surfers.

All these above can be made using such WordPress plug in as All in One SEO Pack. Another important role in SEO is image optimization – adding title and alt tags, ensured by SEO Friendly Images plug in.

All the plugins above can improve your WordPress blog visibility in search engines; should you strive for more, please visit the page with other SEO plugins – WordPress SEO plugins. But if you are waiting for incredible results right upon optimization, you shouldn’t. You will need to engage with some other blogs, micro-blogs and social networks to get important visitors on your blog. So, good luck)

Got questions about WordPress optimization? Contact me – Yuliya Leonova

Tags: seo, social networking, web technologies
Posted in Marketing & Optimization, Web 2.0 technologies | 8 Comments »

I’ve just come over a good small article by Adam Torren dedicated to choosing a right CMS for your web site. We at Cogniance often integrate CMS into solutions we build for our clients, and we think that advices by Adam make sense. Here’s specific products he suggests:

Joomla is a highly flexible CMS that allows you to create numerous modules and components within a fresh and progressive framework. The latest version, 1.5, marks a considerable improvement. Note, though, that while you may be able to install this CMS in less than 30 minutes, it takes a while to get the hang of.

Mambo, much like Joomla, is quite powerful and is simple to use. Its control panel is more user-friendly, though, and the system is backed up by a growing community of forum support.

Drupal is considered one of the top open-source CMS systems available, especially as far as its architecture is concerned. This system is best suited for developers though, so non-techies should tread carefully. Some users find Drupal more functional than Joomla or even WordPress, but if you’re inexperienced, you may be better off sticking to the others.

Wordpress has long been known as the blogger’s platform and it’s at the top of its game. It is very simple to use, but and may not be the best platform if you require considerable e-commerce functionality.

Written by:  Sergii Gorpynich

Posted in Uncategorized, Web 2.0 technologies | 1 Comment »

Google as the world’s popular search engine has many featured search options. For example, you may find weather forecast (using phrase weather: before mentioning your location) or calculate the mathematical phrase by writing it in Google search field.

But for sites owners the interest is in featured search, to get more information about the site position, site backlinks or when and what version of site Google has cached. So lets go)

First option is info:yoursite.com – it offers you a general information on the website  (e.g. info:cogniance.com). It will present information about entered web page. On the opened page you also see several other link:

• cache:yoursite.com (e.g. cache:cogniance.com) displays cached web page, instead of the current page version. On the cached version of a page, Google will highlight terms in your query that appear after the cache: search operator (e.g. cache:cogniance.com software)
• related:yoursite.com (e.g. related:cogniance.com) lists web pages that are similar to the web page you entered.
• link:yoursite.com (e.g. link:cogniance.com) shows pages that are linked to that questioned site. Also you will find backlinks on your site. To exclude a certain website from search query type -site:site.com (e.g. link:cogniance.com -site:cogniance.com)
• site:yoursite.com (e.g. site:cogniance.com) restricts your search results to the site or domain you specify.The same option as to the previous one – you can include or remove the site from where the link would go to your site (e.g. - site:google.com).

allintext:, allintitle:, allinurl: show the search results with specified phrase in text/title/URL/subject. For example,

• allintext:software consultancy
• allintitle:software consultancy
• allinurl:software consultancy

Tag define, another operator, is also very useful for definitions search; you can specify any word or phrase and the definition for it will be found in Google. For example, define:software

The main and mostly used search operators are mentioned above. What other do you know which you think would be useful for site owners?

Written by Yuliya Leonova

Tags: online communication, seo, web technologies
Posted in Marketing & Optimization, Web 2.0 technologies | 1 Comment »