redhex.hedir

Here is a interesting article from quicksprout that talks about the design of business cards. Or name cards, depending on the region you are from.

And it seems that the follow details:

• The card is thick, yet feels soft.
• Corners of the card are rounded
• The card color is green
• The typography is a bit rounded

will give the recevier a warm and fuzzy feeling that you are a friendly person. True?

And to add a few more pointers, quicksprout included the following guidelines:

• Color of Card
• Paper
• Uniqueness
• Typography
• Feel

For the blog post, find it here.

I wish to add some extra (slightly more conservative) guidelines:

• Stick with standard size
• Round Corners are good
• Keep close to paper surface that you can write on
• Use light colors which offers good contrast to write on with normal pens

There are enough of those moments that the receiver might want to scrible some extra information about me and I will gladly allow them to write on the back of my card. Not that I consider that rude or something. The business card have static data and the world is too dynamic to consider writing on business card a rude gesture.

Again, I will ask the card giver for permission before doing so.

This post is sponsored by ablewise.com. The people’s free online classifieds solution.

Mashable have a fantastic article that list a good number of People Powered Search.

It interested me simply because over here at Hedir.com, we are a human edited directory. Anyway, here is the summary of the list:

1. Mahalo
2. Wink
3. Cha Cha
4. Search Wikia
5. Jookster
6. Sproose
7. Gravee
8. Eurekster
9. Prefound
10. Yahoo MyWeb Search

So there we have it, 10 people powered search. Now, the issue is how useful are this search engines? Time will tell.

This post is sponsored by ablewise.com. The people’s free online classifieds solution.

Read this interesting article on nytimes.com, which discuss about the latest development in online marketing. The article focus on the concepts behind the latest cutomised advertiment technique made possible by the growth of the intenet.

The new science of online display advertising involves a potent mix of behavioral targeting, social networking algorithms, predictive economics, pricing optimization and other mathematical strategies.

What caught my fancy is the idea of a real time auction where the commodity are internet’s surfers’ eyeballs and attention.

Imagine that moments before you surf to a page, the page will fetcht the content, check information collected about your demographics data, and match this with the latest merchant offerings, before send the “best matching” advertisment to complement and garnish the page that the reader will be reading.

Sure sounds like a lot of science behind the whole thing. The artilcle quoted 200+ startups in this business and are funded. Surely Google have a lot of competitors… or a lot of opportunites to cherry pick the best company in this new “optimized marketing” industry.

This post is sponsored by ablewise.com. The people’s free online classifieds solution.

Latest news from CNN Money:

Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith and licensing chief Horacio Gutierrez sat down with Fortune recently to map out their strategy for getting FOSS users to pay royalties. Revealing the precise figure for the first time, they state that FOSS infringes on no fewer than 235 Microsoft patents.

The report covers the threat from Microsoft to sue the end users of certain Open Source programs which Microsoft themselves feel that are infringing on their patents.

The Open Source Community are unfazed by the threat as reported with their grounds on the fact the software algorithms are nothing but a sequence of mathematics equation and hence cannot be patented. True enough, we have seen the outcome of the gif format lawsuit and many Open Source project had since not undertake the gif format in their features. But of course there is PNG who comes in and fill the gap left by gif.

My opinion is that the threat by Microsoft is one to retart the market share lost it is experiencing in their flagship product of MS office. OpenOffice offers a strong alternative to MS Office and it is literally free. Likewise Apache host most of the internet websites as compared to MS Server.

Giving such threat may slow down the take up rate of Open Source programs by some entities but if it comes up blank, MS will need to have some really huge PR campaign to make up for even more lost ground.

My take on this: If MS wins, users who cannot afford MS office goes to Google Apps. If MS list, users who are afraid of potential similar lawsuit, will move to Google Apps.

Now now, MS is playing catching up on the Search Engine front, while waging a war that can potentially drives more users to Google Apps. Hmmm… Hope MS’s legal eagles are doing the right thing.

Google wins.

And Open Source to come back stronger, even with their own patent. Not to mention that some big companies behind the Open Source Movement may throw their muscles behind Linux and co. programs to ensure a mutually assured destruction via Patent Armageddon.