Last Wednesday I attended MIX Essentials conference organised by Microsoft. Overall attendance wasn’t really great as most employers can’t afford their employees waste one day on conference.

I’m not a Microsoft fan as I do love Apple more, but it is always important to know news from competitors. I do love testing so seeing what’s new in IE8 was very valuable for me. It was also interesting to see their new search engine Bing.com which I still haven’t tried. If you want to know more about IE - try their blog.

Let’s make quick list of new things that seemed important to me in IE8:

• Standards compliance - their new IE won’t be compatible with previous IE however it will now follow all standards - CSS, HTML, ACID2 and DOM
• Rendering website to previous IE versions. This is a big benefit to all developers and testers. Finally we don’t have to install numerous IE versions to make sure our site looks good on all of them. It is also possible to set a meta tag for website to make it allways be generated as one previous IE versions.
• Web Slices - follow only the part of site you are interested. E.g. in independent.ie there is section of latest news. You can slice only that section and see it almost like bookmark (hard to explain it, I know). All you have to do is add to the < div > tag text class=”hslice”. To be honest is very similar to Apple Web Clips which have been around for quite a while. There is still no standard for Web Slices.
• Accelerator - it is possible to add pop-up menus for different words on sites. E.g. if I select word Paris, my pop-up menu might contain hotel deals, flights or search for it in Google.
• Be a Search Provider - IE8 allows you to use different searches from websites. E.g. not only Google search, but also independent.ie search. You can do this with simple XML.
• IEAK - build your own IE8 with settings you want your users to use and let them download your version
• As usual there is a lot of improvements in security - anti-phishing, data protection, XSS filters, InPrivate browsing and InPrivate blocking. And I hope they won’t do the same mistake as before where there was more security than usability.
• Improved Performance allowing more threads and connections as well as JavaScript improvements
• New Developer tools - JavaScript debugger, HTML&CSS debuggers, JavaScript profile

Second presentation was made by Sabrina Dent. I have been looking at her blog before and I really love design.

Her presentation was meant to start with Froggie ad from 1955. However, there was connection problems so we missed it. We received few really great tips on how designer should work.

1. Eliminate choices. If you give customer too much choices of design, he gonna pick what he thinks important from all of them. So at the end you will get good for nothing design. 90% clients will be happy with first version you send to them.
2. Like Yoda be - to be honest I didn’t got this point
3. Just say No and don’t explain. If client wants some small changes (from his perspective) and you know it will take few days, say No. He took you do the job and he shouldn’t teach you how to do it. You don’t teach dentist how to fix your teeth, don’t you?

After this presentation I really understand why people love Sabrina. She has really strong personality and does what she loves to do.

See more at the presentation slideshows here

Following our new marketing plan by Una (and I would suggest her to anyone planning marketing), I have been doing research on incubation spaces in Ireland. Apparently I knew about 6 of them beforehand, but I wanted to make complete list before planning how to approach them.

I do believe that doing research through Google is waste of time. It’s not that I can’t find things - there is just too much of them and takes time to filter out information you need. Also - problem with searching incubation spaces is that each university has one and most of them don’t advertise it.

That’s why I went to twitter and I’m really grateful to all who replied to me. @UKBI gave me list of UK & Ireland incubation spaces which wasn’t really big, but there were main Irish incubation spaces mentioned. My list grew to 18 incubation spaces at that point.

Researching more in Google about incubation spaces brought me to new page I haven’t seen before for start-up businesses. Sorry - design for that page is crap (I like business-startup.ie much better), but it has a lot of valuable information. And there were over 50 incubation spaces in Ireland. I’m gonna work forward from this list.

Update July 1st:

Another list provided by twitter friend @NiaLLLarkin from startup-ireland.org.

I’m really interested in seeing results of this. Our company is same as others and we are affected by recession. Maybe not so bad as others, but still.

Here is link to survey. Don’t forget to fill it in

Today is traditional Ligo festival in Latvia. Unfortunately I can’t get Latvia or Cork or Limerick where the celebration takes place. It’s the middle of the working week…

Ligo festival is about dressing up in traditional costumes, putting on flower crowns, singing and dancing traditional songs, making fireplaces and jumping over them, eating traditional cheese and drinking beer. I miss it very much since I first came to Ireland.

Here is some links you might find interesting.

Chrome Experiments is a very interesting project. I love just play around with it. And it works on other browsers too.

I love music on faq.ie and sometimes leave it in background. Almost as good as radio.

Friend of mine created new interesting project about discounts in grocery stores. It should be going good at recession, when everyone is searching for that. It’s name is Cheep Cheep.

If you don’t know something and what to learn it from experts in less than 5min - this site is for you. I actually spent too much time on it because it’s too interesting.

Summer is here and it seems there is less events happening. All conferences will be in August or September as at the moment everyone is going for vacation. So here is my list - if you are not going anywhere, I hope you enjoy networking.

• 13 June 09:30 (tomorrow) / 101 Podcasting - Introduction to Podcasting for Beginers from Podcasting Ireland / Digital Depot, 100 EUR
• 15 June 17:30 / Venture Networking / The National Yacht Club Dun Laoghaire - mail and ask do they still have places
• 16 June 08:30 / Industrial Design Breakfast Seminar / Synergy centre - free
• 16 June 12:00 / Future Focus Dublin conference by IBM / Guiness Storehouse - free, targeted mostly at medium sized IT companies
• 16 - 19 June all day / Comsware 2009 / Trinity College Dublin - they have quite a lot of interesting speakers (prices 99-939 EUR)
• 18 June 19:00 / Dublin ALT.NET / The Vault (this time there will be projector) - free, but you have to confirm attendance. This weeks topic is “Behavior Driven Development”
• 20 June 10:30 / Open Coffee Dublin / Dakota bar - great place to meet fellow developers & business owners
• 24 June 09:00 / User Experience Seminar: Demystifying WCAG 2.0 and Web Accessibility / Fitzwilliam Hall, Fitzwilliam Place, Dublin 2 - organised by IIA Web development group. Price 65 EUR IIA members, 95 EUR non-members
• 24 June 09:30 / Mix essentials. Pure Information / Hilton Hotel Dublin, free - how create next generation web experiences
• 26 June 18:30 / Connector No.11 / The Church, free - meet special guest Liam Cunningham and see 10 winning Canon videos
• 30 June 09:30 / Think2Act - A Free Advisory Conference for People Recently made Redundant or Those Looking for a New Career / National College Ireland (NCI), IFSC, Dublin 1 - Free

And don’t forget by end of month order tickets for OWASP conference to get special discount  €90. Very good price for conference like this.

Last week I attended Google seminar for half day. I have heard before about people being amazed by Google internal politics. And I just loved their office! It’s not easy to get employed for Google, but when you actually get in you can travel (and still get job), get free chocolates, crisps and sandwiches all day. You can take shower, play snooker or build a tent in office. It’s all about creativity. I loved colors and comfort everywhere. Gordon House on Barrow Street is Google EU head office for 44 countries.

Look at some photos here:

Here is some summary from presentation and workshops.

Statistics:

• 59% people purchase products online because of brand
• 57% people search for brand after hearing link on TV ads
• 80% internet users have broadband in Ireland
• 70% households has computer in Ireland
• Internet usage : 1.2 billions people using through PC; 3+ billions people using through mobile
• 121.5% people in Ireland has mobile phone

Free Google Tools:

• Google Webmasters - all about Google generic search and how get in top of it
• Google Insights - check keywords, keyword seasonality, increasing brands online (e.g. your competitors)
• Google Analytics - easy setup tool for seeing your website statistics (e.g. visits, page view, visit time). I learned few new things about Goals and Funnels. Setup goals - what you want users to do on your site. Setup Funnels - what path user should go through.
• Google Website Optimiser - it is possible to show two website versions at the same time and analyse design.
• Google UK Online Ad Toolkit - UK case studies for keywords specific to market. Great source if you are searching keywords for your website.
• Google Adwords Conversation Tracking - if you want to follow people from keyword search till goal on your website, this is tool for you.

Tips for your homepage:

• Landing page should show what you want users to do on site
• People scan webpages not read them. They start with left top corner so make sure your most relevant information is right there.
• Give people options how to contact you
• Don’t make people to fill massive forms.
• Don’t use flash on websites as it won’t show on most of the mobile phones.
• Speak people language (don’t speak to technical)
• Create competitor alerts in Google