This is where FBML comes in. It is basically HTML laced with a few facebook api features to display custom written content in a Tab alongside your Wall and Info pages. It allows for a promotional page, an informational page and also more advanced features to further promote your presence as a business on facebook. A particularly useful feature for some publishers is the fact that this new FBML tab can be set as the landing page for when visitors visit your Page.

We are offering FBML page creation for companies who wish to take adventage of this powerful, yet unobtrusive method of customising there Pages to further promote and pursue more advanced control of the content using FBML. It is powerful enough to create a mirco-site within you Facebook Page, i.e. allowing for details of products, google maps, special offers and many more possibilities limited only by imagination.

I hear you asking, why would I pay for an analytics service when Google Analytics is free? There are numerous reasons to add FireTracker to your web traffic analytics arsenal, first and foremost it is a lot more user-centric and user friendly, providing an unparalelled clarity in gaining essential insights into your traffic sources without delving through the bloatware and complexity that is inherent in Google Analytics.  But thats only for starters, the single greatest reason to adopt this alternative is the availability of real-time reporting, no need to wait 3 hours or longer for data refreshes; you will see traffic data to your site as it happens - immediately - no waiting!

Free Trial and new subscription options

We have now implemented a free trial by popular demand for those who wish to take a peek at the reporting capabilities without committing to buy.  The free version is fully functional, only takes two minutes to sign-up, but there’s no such thing as a free lunch so tracking data is reset daily only offered reporting data on a rolling day to day basis.

Subscriptions start at a very reasonable rate from €14.99/month with the first week free, or an annual subscription for €149.99 with the first month costing only €4.99.

FireTracker Analytics

This is essential maintenance which will result in improved performance and reliability as well as additional security for Blue Star services and all our clients.  Thank you for your understanding.

The registry found a total of 9,781 .ie domains were registered in the first quarter of 2009, and that registrations in that period were up 28 per cent over the final quarter of 2008.The previous highest number of registrations was recorded in the first quarter of 2008 - at 9,092.

Over 80 per cent of the new .ie website addresses were registered by sole traders or limited companies, with the rest registered by clubs, societies and charities. A total of 98 per cent of the growth in registrations was generated by .ie resellers.

According to the IEDR, the increasing number of companies and sole traders moving their business online with a .ie website is one of the main reasons for the increase.

The phone system settings are a bit all over the place with some illogical menu choices to get to what you want, could be laid out better and more obvious.  Saying that setup with a Google Account is stragiht forward, and it accepts Google Apps account with no hassle by simply entering full email of Apps domain as Google Account username.  For me this is a big thumbs up.  The Gmail client and Google Talk offer push notifications on email and IM’s while the apps are running, calendar events are also synced to phone quite conveniently, a usable task list/mobile calendar with the familair Google usability offered by Android under the hood.  I notice that several apps make use of Gears, I had an inclination Gears would run on Android, makes sense to have offline capabilities, particularly on a mobile device. The basic support for Google Docs is somewhat dissappointing but I’m sure this will improve with time.

Of course, with Android, its all about the apps.  But decent hardware is needed to back it all up, with HSDPA, WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS connectivity and also 3.2 MP camera with video.  The device is powered by a Qualcomm 6246 800 MHz CPU with 256Mb RAM, when you think about it makes it about as powerful as a PC of the late 90’s. Sound quality for music is only so-so, one thing that could be improved on, but voice is crystal. The software stack and Android itself appear to based on a linux kernel gathering from a debug app I installed. Good choice.

The native support for DivX is most welcome, simply a matter of copying a movie direct to phone’s SD card.  It is worth reducing resolution of video to 320 x 240 to save space on the memory card, many free apps can do this, I use mencoder myself.

Getting to the Apps, essentials to get immediately on this device are jkAppSwitch, as the phone lacks a basic task manager, and also the Astro file manager is definite must.  The usual crop of apps one would expect are available and for the most part implemented quite well.  Facebook, Twitter, WordPress are all very well supported and really do make Android a killer social networking platform when coupled with Google notifications.

The first app I looked for after sorting out the basics was an SSH client, connectBot works quite nicely for this.  This was the most impressive feature for me as it is so useful to have.  I had yet to come across a phone that would read a QR code successfully with built-in camera, including the iPhone, an was mighty impressed when the Barcode Scanner app picked it up straight away and decoded it- these are appearing everywhere now more and more.  I think this was mostly to do with the camera, which has a very intelligent auto-focus and image stabilizer, probably the best I’ve seen on a phone.

Of course with live mail, twitter, facebook, gtalk, etc all running one gets inundated with information overflow so I suggest just running the apps you need updates from at any given time, and watch out for data charges if operating on phone network and not a wifi zone.

There are the usual batch of cool-for-the-sake of cool apps, GPS tracking, send a file with gesture movement, disco lights and all sorts of other weird, wonderful and wacky apps.

It looks like an Android 2.0 firmware update will be available soon, which is nice to know, 1.5 (Cupcake) is on the model I purchased.  In the end I have gotten past the fact it is a Samsung and Android can fill any gaps missing natively on the phone until something better comes along on O2.  Battery life is an issue however, but time will tell this more as I have being using it a lot since I got it.

–
In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance, we are harnessing some of the latest improvements in web browser technology.  This includes faster JavaScript processing and new standards like HTML5.  As a result, over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as other older browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers.

We plan to begin phasing out support of these older browsers on the Google Docs suite and the Google Sites editor on March 1, 2010.  After that point, certain functionality within these applications may have higher latency and may not work correctly in these older browsers. Later in 2010, we will start to phase out support for these browsers for Google Mail and Google Calendar.

Google Apps will continue to support Internet Explorer 7.0 and above, Firefox 3.0 and above, Google Chrome 4.0 and above, and Safari 3.0 and above.

This will provide you with all the Google products you are familiar with such as Gmail, Calendar, Docs and more; all hosted on a domain of your own choice. You can get me@mydomain.com and use the familiarity of Gmail to manage your mail, with a simple login like http://mail.mydomain.com and you can add up 200 friends, colleagues or co-workers, you can also login to your mail from an internet phone and never miss an important email. Similarly you can store your documents on http://docs.mydomain.com and have access to them online from anywhere including your mobile phone.

After year free service, the yearly cost is only €25 (€65 for .ie domain)