Emil Dudek, a South Wales, U.K., technology enthusiast has for eight years been acquiring calculators made in the 1970s, deconstructing them, photographing them, analyzing the technology and posting them to his website with specs and comments. In all, his site features five hundred eighty-three calculators and 128 brands.

“Calculators were what we drooled after as kids with our nose stuck to the shop window…The calculators gave us the freedom and power to do complex calculations"

Says Dudek.

Each of the 583 calculators on the site feature power, case, size, display information, year manufactured and name of manufacturer listed. Dudek's ultimate goal is to catalog the 3,000 to 5,000 calculators all of which were manufactured in the 1970's.

Interestingly, for a whole generation, calculators were an introduction to the world of digital computing. Back in the day, the desktop and later pocket-sized machines freed users from log tables and charts.

“I am a collector in transit,” says Dudek, “The important thing is the information. The whole purpose of my site is to take obscure things from the past and put information about it on the web so other people who may be searching for that information can find it.”

Here are some comments on the site about the American M-26 calculator from 1975 or 1976, unknown manufacturer:

“The logic is pretty poor with no recovery, disappearing negative sign, negative zero and divide to negative zero bugs, basic percentage function and quirky constant function. My example does not have reset on power-up either. A must for anyone’s collection — just to see how bad a calculator can be…”

Dudek says:

“I have comments for every calculator on my site and those are the important part…I have to explain how the the device works…I didn’t realize how few companies made the guts of the calculator…It’s very interesting to see the chips that ran these devices and where they came from.”

Now, thanks to some recent advancements in cascading style sheets, web designers have available on their palette a throng of fresh tricks which once were only possible via JavaScript. Such effects include, drop shadows, rounded corners and rotated elements or gradient fills. Both CSS 3 and modern web browsers support these brand new gifts to code creators.

But it is not exactly that simple. While CSS 3 is stalwart certainly, remembering each and every detail of each and every element’s syntax is overwhelming. And to further confuse matters, CSS 3 actually has yet to be completed.

So in the meantime browser makers are using browser-specific prefixes for the new features. For instance, to get an orange to green radial gradient in Firefox, you would use: background:-moz-radial-gradient (60% 50% 40deg, #866400, #FF4E28 71%).

Now, cheat sheets do help, but sometimes it is just easier to let an automated tool do the hard work for you.

Some sites that'll help you include:

Randy Jensen’s CSS 3 Generator, and CSS 3 Please.

On CSS 3.0 Maker sliders allow you to tweak each effect, control variables like shadow x- and y- offsets or the midpoint of a gradient without too much ware and tear of the mind. Once you get things just the way you like them, you can either cut-and-paste the code or download an HTML file with inline style definitions. CSS 3.0 Maker also displays the browser compatibility for all of the new tools and controls the vendor-specific prefixing so you don't have to.

One common mistake that online sales people tend to make is that their business model actually only vends but one single product. Retailers should be selling Back End products to their perspective customers.

What are backend products? They are other products which you might offer to your existing customers once they have made a first purchase with you.

Like suggested items which you find when you browse or purchase at Amazon or other places, you get a sense of what your customer will likely buy next.

By simply adding one more product to your site, you will increase the lifetime value of your customers and also increase your revenue by up to 25 to 50%.

Lifetime value is simply the amount of income generated by one customer over the course of your business relationship. If you sell your customer only one product, then your customers' lifetime value will be limited to the net income which comes from one sale of your product.

By selling a wide range of products, your income will grow exponentially.

New to the internet, one viral marketer Miss Crystal Gibson has just invented something ingenious. Why, it is Monopoly the Social Media Board Game.

The game, posted to Bite by Gibson, is a version of Monopoly which features indirect and direct references to certain social media virtual hangouts. The game even comes with a complete set of Community Chest and Chance cards.
In the game, the jail is replaced with a “Just Visiting” MySpace holding cell, and even a cross-board Cyperpolice space that instructs players to:

“Go to Myspace. Go Directly to Myspace. Do not pass Wi-Fi. Do not collect $200.”

Twitter and Facebook are the priciest social properties, filling the spaces on the board and in our mind which were previous filled by Park Place and Boardwalk. YouTube, Metacafe, Vimeo, Gowalla and Foursquare also come with impressive price tags, while LinkedIn, Reddit and Digg are priced a bit more sparingly.

The Mashable and Technorati-themed cards are a set of game instructions which make the social media side of the game come alive. One Mashable card reads:

“You’ve unlocked the ’stalker’ badge on Foursquare, collect $100.”

Another Technorati card informs:

“Your video has become MySpace video of the week. No one cares. Don’t do anything.”

LinkedIn, a small company which enjoyed recently a shooting appraisal up over the $2 billion mark, has made its very first acquisition by buying the recommendation service mSpoke for a price still undisclosed.
　
As the company looks to keep its users more entertained and engaged on their site, this latest move is something of a technology investment.
　
CEO of LinkedIn, Jeff Weiner said:
　

"mSpoke and LinkedIn’s shared focus on generating relevant content make this acquisition a natural fit for us. We’re actively investing in solutions that help deliver valuable professional insights to LinkedIn members."
　

But if you were getting bored with LinkedIn or perhaps wondering why you had the darn thing in the first place, be informed that the site has renovated recently or added to the social features which it offers.
　
For example, the revamping of its Groups with "Likes," "Follows" and "Discussions" options.
　
So the online resume service is not so useless after all – or anyway, it does not want to be.
　
The social site has been adding more Facebook and Twitter-like features – starting with a news feed, an application which if added takes up most of the room on a user’s homepage; and more recently with a new link sharing feature to engage the faithful LinkedIn-inians and get more information sharing and Web and social news pumping through the electric site.

Facebook will soon be rolling out a new feature in the vein of WikiAnswers called "Facebook Questions," a Question and Answer service which lets members ask and respond to questions on the site posed by other users.

Facebook introduced "Questions" in a blog posted on the site:

"Millions of people ask their friends questions on Facebook every day. What new music should I listen to? Where's the best sushi place in town? How do I learn to play the piano?"

"Today we're introducing Facebook Questions, a beta product that lets you pose questions like these to the Facebook community. With this new application, you can get a broader set of answers and learn valuable information from people knowledgeable on a range of topics."

According to Facebook, the new service is only available to a "limited number of people" – that is just 1% of users, while the social networking giants tends to improvement of the Q&A service based on feedback by that 1%.

Sites like Quora, Yahoo! Answers, Ask.com, and Aardvark have already provided the Q&A service on the web. According to Mashable, though, Facebook Questions' "defining features" are: polling; tagging; Photo questions; topic exploration; and "following."

Now, out of India, resembling an iPad yet only 1/14th the cost, a new basic touch screen tablet for students, coming into production by 2011.

The Linux operating system-based computer is to be the latest in a string of the "world's cheapest" innovations to hit the market from India.

Co-founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab, Nicholas Negroponte, in 2005, unveiled a prototype of a $100 laptop for children in the third world. Well, India rejected this idea as too expensive and embarked on a multiyear effort to develop a less expensive option of their own.

Negroponte's laptop ended up costing about $200, though in May his nonprofit association, משהו נוסף?

• Microsoft Tag Is Now Available (0)
• Results Are In: iPad vs Kindle vs PC vs books (0)

With the growth of social media, marketers have learned that simply joining along in an online conversation does not always lend itself to sales.
Time and again, marketers have discovered that there is tremendous value in building brands and relationships through long-term social media strategy versus short-term direct-marketing tactics on social sites

Dell's Delloutlet Twitter stream is very popular and features a great deal of tweets announcing discounts and special offers – this is an example of what I
mean by effective social media marketing. Keep in mind though, the people who follow the Delloutlet stream know exactly what kind of content they are going to get before they actually choose to follow it – therein is the difference between a great Twitter following and simply interrupting an online conversation to push your product.
Because of their expectations from Dell, they do not turn away from the direct-marketing messages which they find there – instead, they actively choose to follow this particular Twitter stream because they want to be interrupted with the valuable offers which are communicated there.

So, internet interruption and engagement marketing very well may coexist online, though it takes research and planning to achieve much success.
Therefore it is very important to understand who your customers and target audiences are, and what it is that they want from your business. Once you've reached this understanding, then you can create the kind of content and conversations which your target audiences want and need on the social web destinations where they already spend time.

Last week, Yahoo reported that their second-quarter profits topped analysts' expectations, but overall sales fell short and company shares took a hit in after-hours trading.

For the quarter, in total, Yahoo reported earnings of $0.15 per share. Well, this is a penny higher than analysts were expecting and 53% ahead of the same period last year. Their net income for the quarter totaled $213 million – that is 51% above last year's mark.

However, minus the fees paid out to advertising partners, their overall revenue actually fell slightly short. Missing the consensus forecast of $1.16 billion, Yahoo ended up reporting a new revenue of $1.13 billion.

Shares of the company were down more than 4% in extended trading.

The flipside is that they turned in nice growth in advertising business, with display revenues on Yahoo's properties up 19% from the one-year period.

Yahoo's new CEO Carol Bartz told us:

"We're pleased that we continued to deliver strong operating income and margin expansion…Our search fundamentals are improving and we posted another quarter of healthy display advertising growth…With regard to search, we gained share in the quarter, but we didn't monetize searches as much as we expected…On the display side, with our owned-and-operated sites, we saw healthy ad spend up 19 percent but the second week in June, we saw demand slow down and a handful of advertisers pull back…The first three weeks in July indicate that we're back to normal."

With 18 months at the helm, Carol Bartz has set Yahoo into a refocusing of the content across its network of sites; this being the backbone of its display-advertising business. As well as expanding its staff of reporters and bloggers, the company also has been pondering potential acquisition targets, and last May they even shelled out $100 million to buy Associated Content, a company which employs a vast network of freelance writers to produce articles assigned around popular search topics.

The company has also struck up partnerships with mega-social sites such as Facebook and Twitter, thereby enabling users to share and view their content with their social networks on Yahoo's Web properties.

On the search side of things, Yahoo continues to rush forward with the migration of its engineering platform to Microsoft's Bing.

Celebrated guru of usability, Jakob Nielsen released recently results from a set of readability tests which compared the Apple iPad, Amazon Kindle, a PC and a real book.

Nielsen’s company made an effort to balance out the experience, making sure user’s were up to speed on how to use the Kindle and iPad for example, and having test subjects read a short story by Ernest Hemingway which took 17 minutes and 20 seconds to read, on average.

After the reading each user was given a questionnaire to test their comprehension of the story. Nielsen reports that almost of the test takers got almost all of the questionnaire correct, regardless of which device they used.

The loser of the content was the PC, coming in dead last with a score of 3.6 – on a scale of 1 to 7, 7 being the highest. After this it was almost a dead heat:

The iPad, Kindle, and the printed book all scored 5.8, 5.7, and 5.6, respectively.

As far as the speed of reading, the printed book won first prize. Nielsen reports the iPad users generally had a 6.2% lower reading speed than the printed book, while the Kindle came in at 10.7% slower than print.

Nielsen said:

“… the only fair conclusion is that we can’t say for sure which device offers the fastest reading speed. In any case, the difference would be so small that it wouldn’t be a reason to buy one over the other…

…But we can say that tablets still haven’t beaten the printed book.”