NEW MEDIA GURU NEWS:
NEW MEDIA GURU (NMG) renews its membership with Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) Partner Network (APN), as a Consulting Partner. Hence, we will continue to support our customers with market leading cloud based web application solutions. We look at Amazon Web Services not only as a great scalable cloud platform, but also as a perfect Data Center completely competent of accommodating an entire application and enterprise stack.
WHAT’S HAPPENING IN ECOMMERCE?
Magento is continuing to advance its platform and make development more efficient by adding support for PHP 5.4. Moving to PHP 5.4 offers several advantages, including better performance, more efficient memory usage, and access to ongoing updates and security fixes. Know More!
As more online retailers seek to provide a good mobile shopping experience, expect to see a significant number of site redesigns in 2014. Ecommerce platforms like Magento, Shopify, or even WooCommerce (on WordPress) can have a strong influence on how online shops are designed. In fact, some predict that in 2014 mobile Internet usage will pass desktop Internet usage, and mobile-based ecommerce might account for 30 percent of Internet retail sales. Check out 7 Ecommerce Design Trends for 2014!
2014 has 20 new ecommerce themes for WordPress! Here’s a compiled list of new premium ecommerce themes for WordPress. WordPress makes it easy to get a shop up and running in no time.
WHAT’S HAPPENING IN .NET DEVELOPMENT?
Here comes ILSpy! A free tool that will decompile any .NET DLL back to either Visual Basic or C# (your choice), and provide a viewer that lets you browse the results. If you want to find out how the code behind the framework DLLs works (or if you’ve just lost your source code), ILSpy will let you see it.
Brad Anderson, Corporate Vice President, Windows Server & System Center announces General Availability (GA) of Windows Azure Hyper-V Recovery Manager service. Windows Azure Hyper-V Recovery Manager Service protects your on-prem applications by orchestrating the protection and recovery of Hyper-V Virtual Machines running in a private cloud (i.e. System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 R2 or System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 SP1) to a secondary location. Read the full coverage!
There’s not yet been a good solution under web sites for doing regular jobs and batch work in the background. Now Azure Web Sites support a thing called “Azure WebJobs” to solve this problem simply. Read more!
Check out some recent updates-
Release of ASP.NET MVC 5.1, ASP.NET Web API 2.1 and ASP.NET Web Pages 3.1
ASP.NET 4.5 Web Forms and Visual Studio 2013 Tutorial Series
WHAT’S HAPPENING IN CREATIVE?
Here’s a perfect opportunity to find out more about the latest techniques directly from distinguished authors and speakers. Check out the exhaustive list of Upcoming Web Design Events (Jan. 2014 – Jun. 2014). Get to know your peers in the Web design community and absorb an enormous amount of information in only a short period of time.
WHAT’S HAPPENING IN SEARCH?
Google Adwords announces new Google look and feel will be rolling out to AdWords, giving more screen real estate to the tools and reports you love, and helping you focus on improving your performance. Check out what has changed in User accounts!
Google publicizes that in 2014 Learn with Google webinars are moving to Hangouts On Air. These sessions will include all of the best practices, how-to’s, and information as before, but with the ease and benefits of the Hangout platform. Check out the upcoming Learn with Google Hangouts On Air in the coming months.
Here’s a summary of a few of the improvements in 2013 that have helped advertisers to better connect with consumers and grow their business. Google also indicated substantial improvements around workflow efficiency, campaign planning, analysis and reporting, opportunity identification, and testing. Things are being worked upon to make it easier to run AdWords campaigns as a direct extension of your business. This means providing ways to bring your business and website data more directly into AdWords, and allowing campaign elements to work in a more seamless, dynamic, and optimized manner.
WHAT’S HAPPENING IN MOBILE?
Google and a number of car makers announced the “Open Automotive Alliance” (OAA) with an objective to build Android into the connected car. This open development model and common platform will allow automakers to more easily bring cutting-edge technology to their drivers, and create new opportunities for developers to deliver powerful experiences for drivers and passengers in a safe and scalable way. Read the full coverage!
PayPal has approached Apple about integrating itself into the latter’s rumored payment technology, three payment industry executives claim. The people tell Re/code that PayPal is effectively willing to white-label portions of its payment service if Apple is willing to use them. Some shared components might include fraud detection, backend infrastructure, and actual payment processing. Read more!
WHAT’S HAPPENING IN SEO?
Google shares the beta release of official Google Publisher Plugin, which adds new functionality to publishers’ WordPress websites. If you own your own domain and power it with WordPress, this new plugin will give you access to a few Google services — and all within WordPress. Read the full coverage at Google Wen Master Central.
There are many article directories that are still actively soliciting articles and publishers who continue to republish that content. Matt Cutts, head of search spam at Google, reveals Google’s official stance on article directories such as Ezine in 2014 – good or bad?
“We’ve seen more and more instances where you end up with really kind of spammy content getting sprayed and syndicated all over the entire web. So in my particular opinion article directories and just trying to write one article and just syndicating it wildly or just uploading it to every site in the world and hoping that everyone else will download and use it on their website, I wouldn’t necessarily count on that being effective. We certainly have some algorithmic things that would mean is probably a little less likely to be successful now compared to a few years ago, for example. So my personal recommendation would be probably to not upload article like that.”
Read more to to know the complete story!
Google defines a widget link scheme as… Keyword-rich, hidden or low-quality links embedded in widgets that are distributed across various sites. Google’s Matt Cutts recently warned against widgets as a winning link building strategy, also suggesting when it’s proper to use rel=nofollow for them.
How to Deal With Short-Term Duplicate Content Issues – If your website sometimes has minor short-term duplicate content issues, how can you avoid being caught in Google’s duplicate content filter? Matt Cutts gave an insight on what to do- “use the rel=canonical tag because even if you have multiple copies of a short story, you’ll be dividing the PageRank between those multiple stories”. Read more on using rel=canonical in different situations!
WHAT’S HAPPENING IN VIDEO MARKETING?
ComScore in collaboration with the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement (CIMM) announced plans to expand its pioneering cross-platform measurement service, which provides continuous, unified measurement of media usage on a national scale across TV, desktops, Smartphones, tablets, and radios. This expanded offering provides internet marketers and video content producers with several important new capabilities, including the measurement of:
- Multi-platform advertising.
- Mobile video.
- Time-shifted viewing (i.e. DVR playback).
- Children’s viewing.
WHAT’S HAPPENING IN SOCIAL?
Twitter-
Twitter shared updates that makes Photo editing and sharing on Twitter easier. Now, you can crop your photos by selecting an aspect, such as square or wide. You can rotate an image before you share it to make sure it fits nicely in your Tweet. And when you upload a photo of people, you’ll see a reminder to @ mention your friends so they can see your photo too. Check out the official announcement!
Twitter has now rolled out comprehensive analytics so publishers and others using Twitter Cards can gain a much greater understanding of how, what and who is engaging with their content through Twitter. There are three main navigation points within the analytics: URL Clicks, Install Attempts and Retweets. Read the full story.
Pinterest-
Pinterest launches a new recipe search feature for special dietary requirements, personalized home pages (that are still being tested) and a functionality for GIF images.
Personalized Homepage, which does not appear to be fully rolled out, shows topics that are based on the user’s pinning activity. Larger images indicate higher relevancy to that user.
GIFs is a new image format for the platform. Some users were able to see these GIF images in action.
With the new recipe search feature, users can look for recipes and ingredients and filter by categories such as Vegetarian, Vegan, Gluten-free and so on.
Google+-
Google+ users can now send and receive emails from other Google+ connections, even if they have never exchanged email addresses. Read more!
Facebook-
The latest update to News Feed ranking treats text status updates from Pages as a different category to text status updates from friends. Facebook officials say that posts from the Pages behave differently to posts from friends and we are working to improve the ranking algorithms so that Facebook can do a better job of differentiating between the two types. Check out What Happens When You See More Updates from Friends
WHAT’S HAPPENING IN ANALYTICS?
Google released a powerful version of segmentation, supporting more robust user-centric analysis last year. Now you can achieve the full power of this enhanced segmentation in Remarketing with Google Analytics. With this overhaul, you can more easily create Remarketing lists based on origin, demographics, and behavior to re-engage with your audiences like never before. Check out the official announcement.
WHAT’S HAPPENING IN CONTENT?
Recently, Matt Cutts, Google’s head of search spam, has publicized that Google is not planning to penalize publications that use guest bloggers and contributors under its new “guest blogging equals spam” warning. Check out for more!
Matt Cutts shared – “There are still many good reasons to do some guest blogging (exposure, branding, increased reach, community, etc.). Those reasons existed way before Google and they’ll continue into the future. And there are absolutely some fantastic, high-quality guest bloggers out there. I changed the title of this post to make it more clear that I’m talking about guest blogging for search engine optimization (SEO) purposes.”
Some of the key trends on the horizon for 2014 that are likely to directly affect your online content marketing initiatives, from strategic planning right down to how you execute and distribute your content… Take a look at the 5 Big Shifts in Store for Online Content Marketing in 2014:
- Marketing team makeup
- Responsive design will be a “must have”
- Link earning will (eventually) trump link building
- Curation and custom content streams will take the spotlight
- Move over marketers — brand journalists are taking the reins
Upcoming – Industry Roundup, February, 2014
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