Central Perk

luni, 23 aprilie 2012

Damn Cool Pics

Posted: 23 Apr 2012 11:23 AM PDT

Allen Fuqua likes to travel just as much as he likes movies. Two hobbies combined resulted in the series of amazing pictures where he recreates the shots from famous movies taken at various locations around the globe.

Movie: Fast Times at Ridgemont High
Actor: Robert Romanus
Location: Van Nuys High School, Van Nuys, CA

Movie: Love Actually
Actor: Liam Neeson
Location: South Bank, London, United Kingdom

Movie: You Don't Mess with the Zohan
Actor: Adam Sandler
Location: Cabo San Lucas, Mexico (Cabo San Lucas, México)

Movie: Drive
Actor: Ryan Gosling
Location: MacArthur Park, Los Angeles, CA

Movie: Rise of the Planet of the Apes
Actor: Richard Ridings
Location: Twin Peaks, San Francisco, CA

Movie: 40 Days and 40 Nights
Actor: Josh Hartnett
Location: Crepes on Cole, San Francisco, CA

Movie: Late Spring
Actor: Chishu Ryu
Location: Tsurugaoka Hachiman-gū, Kanagawa, Japan

Movie: Train Man
Actor: Takayuki Yamada
Location: Akihabara, Tokyo, Japan

Movie: Whisper of the Heart
Actor: Esimi Nakajima
Location: Temple Konpira, Tokyo

Movie: Tokyo Sonata
Actor: Teruyuki Kagawa
Location: Tokyo, Japan

Movie: 28 Days Later
Actor: Cillian Murphy
Location: Westminster Bridge, London

Movie: Before the Dawn
Actor: Ethan Hawke
Location: Paris

Movie: The Beginning
Actor: Leonardo DiCaprio
Location: Yes Stutstsi, Paris

Movie: The Beginning
Actor Joseph Gordon-Lyuitt
Location: Paris

Movie: Midnight in Paris
Actor Owen Wilson
Location: Versailles, France

Movie: Casanova
Actor: Heath Ledger
Location: Venice

Movie: The Talented Mr. Ripple
Actor: Matt Damon
Location: St. Mark's Square, Venice

Movie: Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
Actor Ben Whishaw
Location: Barcelona

Movie: Fanatic
Actor John Cusack
Location: Chicago, IL

Movie: Source Code
Actor: Jake Gyllenhaal
Location: Millennium Park, Chicago

Movie: Spider-Man
Actor Tobey Maguire
Location: Columbia University, New York

Movie: The Hangover
Actor: Ed Helms
Location: Las Vegas, NV

Movie: Vicky Cristina Barcelona
Actress: Rebecca Hall
Location: National Art Museum of Catalonia, Barcelona, Spain (Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya, Barcelona, Espanya)

Movie: As It Is in Heaven
Actor: Michael Nyqvist
Location: Cathedral of St. Jakob, Innsbruck, Austria (Dom zu St. Jakob, Innsbruck, Österreich)

Movie: Midnight in Paris
Actor: Owen Wilson
Location: Notre Dame Cathedral, Paris, France (Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris, Paris, France)

Via: Moviemimic

Just How Big Is Apple [Infographic]

Posted: 23 Apr 2012 10:40 AM PDT

It is the first company to successfully pivot from computer maker to device maker. And its devices are now ubiquitous, its annual new product releases are among the most anticipated in the world and it recently announced it would begin issuing a dividend to its stock owners expected to generate $10 billion in the first year alone. There is also speculation that Apple will enter into the payments market in the near future (allowing its handheld products to serve in the same fashion as a credit card). This alone would turn them into a trillion dollar company.

But how do Apple's eye-popping statistics translate to the real world?

Apple's total sales in 2011 were $128 billion which is more than the gross domestic product of about 160 nations around the world including New Zealand, Iraq and Syria.

Apple's current market capitalization is $508 billion making it the largest company in the world.

Apple's release of its latest iPad was massive: the company sold 3 million devices in the first 72 hours of release.

695 iPads are sold every minute. 11 iPads are sold every second.

But how do Apple's eye-popping statistics translate to the real world?

Click image to see a larger version.

Via: Bestcomputersciencedegrees

Modern Business and Content Guidance from Bell Labs

Posted: 22 Apr 2012 02:27 PM PDT

Posted by Kate Morris

I've been reading The Idea Factory, the history of the innovation that came out of Bell Labs around WWII. Innovation, invention and ideas are things that we don't get to talk much about in SEO. It's all about keywords, links, and content, but I want you to take some time today to think about ideas, inventions and innovations. Why? Because we all want to be millionaires (oh hush, yes you do), and while that might not happen to all of us, idea generation is central to our jobs in search marketing.

Bell Labs was born out of a technology being invented (the telephone) and the problems AT&T faced building a communications infrastructure in the United States (and how to connect overseas). We are talking serious problems like wood decay, birds and wires, distance and signal strength. Things we take for granted today.

The men and women at Bell Labs strove to find the best materials, to make products and services better. We can learn from the team at Bell Labs. Use the ideals of hard work, research and development, invention, and innovation to drive us to make our websites, products, and services better.

That's how you win on the internet. Be better than everyone else.

Innovation is a Lengthy Process

The term "innovation" dated back to sixteenth-century England. Originally it described the introduction into society of a novelty or new idea, usually relating to philosophy or religion ... an innovation defined the lengthy and wholesale transformation of an idea into a technological product or process meant for widespread practical use.

This portion of the book really hit home with me. Innovation is a lengthy process of taking an idea to a product or process for widespread practical use. There are no overnight successes, just people that worked really hard behind the scenes pouring their blood, sweat and tears into an idea.

The same should be true with your business and website. Innovation in your space is not just putting up a website and knowing the right keywords to target. It's about waking up at 5:30 in the morning to be at a networking breakfast at 8am a few times a month for a few years. Success is about determination, dedication and hard work.

The time you take to discuss your idea, how you plan to be different with members of your target market, will pay back not only in the refining of that idea, but also in friends and allies when your business or website launch. Choosing the connected people is a strategic process; if they are there at 8am, they are dedicated too and have met others that are of the same breed. Now does that mean that everyone needs to go to 8am networking breakfasts? No. I hate them. But you get the idea.

Want your website to be a success? Then spend the time in the following areas:

Business Idea - don't copy someone else's idea unless you can be better than them and everyone else in the space doing the same
Website Copy - Develop the copy for your site, and if you have products what you'll let others use. Write into affiliate contracts that your product descriptions are not to be used elsewhere. Treat website content like a white paper, protect it, don't allow others to copy it.
Promotion - I am not talking online promotion, I'm talking the whole marketing umbrella. This is not something you buy/outsource and leave alone. It's your baby, own it!

Make Goals, Not Hard Timelines

Inventions are a valuable part, but invention is not to be scheduled or coerced. Harold Arnold, Bell Labs

Need $10k by next year? Don't build a website, add products, pay someone in another country to write copy and do SEO and think you can do that. Good ideas don't fit in timelines. You cannot rely on keyword research tools to tell you what product area has low competition and can make you millions.

What you can do is find an area, a business idea that you really love: something that you can get lost talking about for hours and not mind. Your first goal should be to find that idea. Once you have that (and most of you do as you have clients or work in-house for someone that has that idea already), then you need to set goals for what you want to accomplish.

The goals should be:

Lofty but attainable (one viral infographic a month is not an attainable goal, an increase in sales from organic search by 20% is attainable)
Developed around making the customer happy (the happier they are, the more you sell, simple)
Tied to your boss's goals (even if your boss is your wife)

Once you know what you want to do, the end result, that drives how to get there. Now you have a purpose, but you can't rush it. You will fail, content will flop sometimes, there will be a keyword that you just have a hard time ranking for. Things will go wrong but things will also go amazingly right if you focus on a good goal.

Do Something

When you don't know what to do, do something!" Jim Fisk, Bell Labs

This is my new favorite motto. Do something. As Will Critchlow says all the time, fail faster. Come up with as many ideas as you can to meet your goal, no matter how far out of the park they are. Execute. Try things, be risky, and fail (sometimes). I can almost guarantee you that even if you fail; you'll learn something you can apply to your next attempt.

studying sharks

Studying Sharks

Jim Fisk proposed a $50,000 study of sharks to help naval warfare. It made it to the top and the lead of Bell Labs finally killed it. How cool a story would that have made? I would have linked to it, what about you?

Dare You

Don't know what to do? Here are some ideas for every SEO out there. I dare you to try one.

Data Mining. Take a half-day, look into the data you have in your company about clients, about the industry. If you were to clean it all up, could you show trends about your industry? Get creative and find a way to share that information in a resource, a white paper, blog post or infographic. And then do a marketing campaign around it. If it works well, make it an annual update about the industry.
Content Revisit. Find your top 10 products or services pages. Revisit the content, when was it last written? Update it! Add resources; make it the page to go to for that product or service. Think from the perspective of a potential customer, what would make that page better than all of your competitor's pages? Consider new images, a video, new resources, reviews.
Page 2 Revamp. Take 5 pages that rank on page 2. Revisit the title tag and meta description of those pages. Is the title tag over optimized? Does the meta description really pull you to the page? Rewrite them to be real, accurate and descriptive!
$5000 Challenge. Ask for a budget that is normal for a project in your company or for a client and do something that is way out in left field. You in finance? Pay off someone's car loan. Don't give away a iPad, donate 100 to a school that teaches computer science to under-privileged kids.

So would you do with $5000 to help your site? What is your shark bait?

Shark Stock Photo from Shutterstock

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Honoring the Pledge of 'Never Again'

Your Daily Snapshot for
Monday, April 23, 2012

Honoring the Pledge of 'Never Again'

This morning President Obama will speak at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum to commemorate the Holocaust and discuss how the United States is honoring the pledge of "never again" by developing a comprehensive strategy to prevent and respond to mass atrocities.

Watch the President's remarks live at 9:45 a.m. EDT

Join the conversation and engage with senior Administration officials at 1 p.m. EDT

Photo of the Day

A Wounded Warrior walks out of the Diplomatic Reception Room of the White House to participate in the sixth annual Soldier Ride, a cycling event to help them restore their physical and emotional well-being, April 20, 2012. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)