Quark and other similar design programs are infamous for having a very tough learning curve, making it extremely difficult for amateurs to pick them up and make anything of quality. The company is looking to make layout and design more accessible for the general public with the introduction of Quark Promote. The goal of Quark Promote is to allow individuals and small business owners to quickly and easily create promotional materials.
Quark Promote's online template gallery features professionally designed templates for everything ranging from business cards to letterhead. Once users pick a set that they like, the Quark Promote application quickly installs and launches. Users can then enter in their own information as well as play with the color schemes and layout.
Quark Promote features hundreds of professionally designed templates that you can customize for your needs.
(Credit: Screenshot by Harrison Hoffman/CNET)The actual Quark Promote application is very easy to use and is not intimidating. It doesn't have all of the functionality of the full blown version of Quark, but there is enough there to tweak the design to your liking.
Up to this point in the process, everything is free. Users don't need to pay for templates like they do with other services. Rather Quark thinks that you will like the design enough to want to make prints. Quark Promote gives you the option to order prints by mail or to find a neighborhood printer where you can pick them up yourself. This is where Quark makes its money--on the referral fees from printers.
When I talked with the guys behind Promote, they said they have bigger plans for the service, moving forward, which include partnering up with stock photo sites such as Getty and iStockphoto to give users more customization possibilities with images. It is also possible that they will add support for searching for Creative Commons licensed content on Flickr to the application to widen the selection of available images that users can use in their promotional materials.
Lately Google seems to have put forth most of the little niceties that turn forgetful, or otherwise inept, people into functional members of society. Late Wednesday Facebook rolled out one of its own features that falls within that category. Now those who are lucky enough to be in a relationship can plug in when their love affair began. Facebook will then send both of those users a reminder (in the form of an event) when it's coming up.
Facebook users in a relationship can now add in their anniversary dates in order to get Facebook to send yearly reminders.
(Credit: CNET)Right now the feature has the same privacy level as a relationship, so if your friends can see it, they can also see the date. Although they will not be alerted to it the same way they are for something like a birthday--something Facebook says could eventually change.
Maybe this is the first step in Facebook creating something similar to its now-removed friends timeline feature, but for relationships, so that users will be able to get a chronological view of every relationship other users have had. Though in truth, this is likely just another way to make it easier to sell advertising for things like chocolates, flowers, jewelry and "sorry I missed our anniversary" cards.
Career site Glassdoor.com has announced the employees' choice awards for the top 50 best places to work. Unfortunately, tech companies didn't make the top five.
According to Glassdoor, Southwest Airlines, General Mills, Slalom Consulting, Bain & Co., and McKinsey & Co. were the best places to work this year. Only General Mills and Bain & Co. were in the top five last year.
On the tech side, it was enterprise-solution provider Juniper Networks that led the way for the industry, placing 10th in the list with a 3.9 (out of 5) company rating from employees. Google placed 14th with a 3.9 rating, followed by NetApp, which also received a 3.9 rating. Last year, Google was ranked seventh on the list. NetApp was ranked 10th.
Some other tech notables from the list: Apple placed 22nd with a 3.8 company rating, which is a little lower than last year's 19th place. Online career site CareerBuilder took the 26th spot with a 3.7 rating. The site experienced a steep decline, dropping eight spots from its 2008 ranking of 18th.
But it was Adobe Systems that declined most of all the tech companies on the list. The company placed fourth last year. This year, its rating slipped to 3.7, giving it the 29th spot on the list.
Intel is new to the list this year, garnering a 3.6 rating and taking 41st place. Best Buy inched up to 45th place from 46th last year with a 3.6 rating as well.
CEO ratings
Glassdoor also asked employees to rate their CEOs. According to the company, Google CEO Eric Schmidt received an 87 percent approval rating from employees, while Apple CEO Steve Jobs scored a 91 percent approval rating. CareerBuilder's Matt Ferguson had a 78 percent approval rating. Adobe's Shantanu Narayen had a relatively low 60 percent approval rating. Best Buy's Brad Anderson didn't fare too well either, garnering a 64 percent approval rating from his employees.
Don Reisinger is a technology columnist who has written about everything from HDTVs to computers to Flowbee Haircut Systems. Don is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and posts at The Digital Home. He is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
Gmail's new merge tool can get rid of all your dupes at once.
(Credit: CNET)Gmail on Tuesday introduced a new feature that lets users remove every single duplicate contact entry at once. Previously, users had to go through their address book one at a time--a process that could be both tedious and time-consuming.
The new system runs a simple scan on your contacts, and provides a one-button solution that will merge the information for each contact. This is a non-destructive method, and the same that's carried out each time you run the normal duplicate checker. Contacts with multiple e-mail addresses just show up as the same contact in Gmail's auto-complete suggestions.
Google is promoting the new tool as a way to take contact lists that have been imported from elsewhere, including mobile phones or other e-mail services, and shrink them down into something more manageable. The company also says it was one of the top-requested features by its users.
The bulk de-duper comes some 10 months since the release of the original de-duper, a feature we were the first to report on in our six upcoming Gmail features story from January. Still missing from that list is HD video chat. However, those that made it include larger attachment sizes (which were quietly bumped up to 25MB in June), and a custom theme creator.
The groups responsible for standardizing the language used to build Web sites have begun tackling technology to provide a direct interface to Webcams.
The World Wide Web Consortium has begun work on the HTML Device addition to the Hypertext Markup Language specification. "The device element represents a device selector, to allow the user to give the page access to a device, for example a video camera," according to a December 11 draft of the specification.
The move marks another step expansion of the scope of the Web standard. Advocates are trying to make it a foundation not just for static Web pages, but for interactive Web applications; the latter benefits from the direct access to hardware that applications running natively on a PC enjoy.
HTML is jointly overseen by two groups, the World Wide Web Consortium and the less formal WHATWG (the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group) that branched for a long interlude when the W3C wasn't interested in HTML. Ian Hickson, a Google employee, is editor of the new HTML5 specification under development. The HTML Device specification, though is part of a broader HTML effort.
The WHATWG draft of the HTML Device specification has wider options, including interfaces to "a USB-connected media player" and an RS232 port, the latter an ancient standard, in computing-industry years, for serial communications.
But, the draft WHATWG specification cautions, "RS232 is only included below to give an idea of where we could go with this. Should we instead just make this only useful for audiovisual streams? Unless there are compelling reasons, we probably should not be this generic. So far, the reasons aren't that compelling."
One of the hottest use cases for Twitter, as you well know, is businesses communicating with their customers or potential customers. Up to this point, Twitter really has not introduced any new features to support these business users, but as a part of an initiative to roll out more business-specific features, Twitter on Monday introduced "Contributors." Contributors allows business accounts to designate other Twitter users, usually employees or PR, to tweet on their behalf. Twitter is currently testing this with "a limited subset of folks."
The screenshot above is what this new feature will look like, according to Twitter's blog. Tweets will still appear as coming from the business' Twitter account but will have a byline that credits the author of the tweet. This will help to put some more personal faces behind the generally faceless business Twitter accounts.
As far as we can tell, however, this will not be required for Twitter business accounts, so if you run a business that wants to keep its tweeters anonymous, you can still do that. Twitter does note that this feature is "not ready for prime time" yet, so the functionality could change around a little, but expect it to stay generally the same.
It's worth mentioning that there are a couple of business and power user-oriented Twitter apps out there right now, specifically CoTweet and HootSuite. This added Contributor functionality will be incorporated into Twitter's API, so these third-party apps should be able to support it as well. This new feature should play nicely with CoTweet and HootSuite's current offerings.
Up to this point, Twitter business accounts have had the same functionality as personal accounts. While it's not clear whether personal accounts will get the new Contributor feature, the release of this and the other business-oriented features that Twitter currently has in development might be a sign that the release of Twitter business accounts is imminent.
In August, Biz Stone said that Twitter would be offering business or "pro" accounts by the end of the year. Paid accounts for businesses has long been a rumored business model for Twitter and it looks like we are on the verge of seeing that come to fruition. While Twitter is running out of days in 2009, it appears that it is making some progress toward the eventual release of full-blown business accounts. Whether Contributors will be included in the paid offering is unknown, although some users might resent Twitter for charging for it after offering it for free initially.
Blippy is one of those ideas that at first sounds so hilariously misguided that you'd be forgiven to think it a joke: It's a service that hooks into your credit card so everything you buy gets broadcast to your friends. Eventually you'll even be able to Twitter your spending. Ack!
Fortunately, the real story is more nuanced, more interesting, and more intelligent than you might think if all you read is the knee-jerk Twitter posts from people like me.
Blippy co-founder Philip Kaplan shows how his Amazon purchases make conversation starters.
(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)I talked today to Blippy co-founder Philip Kaplan about the service. He admits, "When we launched it, we thought we were kind of crazy." But I do believe he is on to something, and it it has more to do with collecting your financial data than sharing it.
Blippy lets you hook credit and debit cards into the service, as well as accounts at online stores like Amazon, Zappos, and Apple's iTunes store. Eventually it may even connect to physical retail, like Safeway. Blippy's very useful trick, which the company is still working on refining, will be collecting your financial transaction data at a very granular level. It will tell you not just where you're spending money, but what products you're spending it on and--if you set up the privacy settings appropriately--who else is buying the same stuff as you. It will combine all your spending data into one big stream and let you compare your purchase data to that of other people, again at a granular level. Eventually you'll be able to see if you're paying more than other people for Ben & Jerry's Chunky Monkey, I gather, and find deals on items you like or purchase regularly. Mint, by contrast, shows you comparative data by category and vendor, but not by item.
That's the vision, at any rate. Currently, in Blippy's very closed alpha test, it's a system for sharing transaction data. You give it a credit card account and other account info, and it will tell your Blippy friends what you're buying, and vice versa. For example, you can see what music and apps your friends are buying on iTunes, and then you can have a conversation about those purchases. There are privacy controls, of course, and you can "pause" Blippy's data collection if you want to buy a secret gift on Amazon. Or, as Kaplan says, if you want to buy something private on a credit card, don't use a card connected to Blippy.
It sounds like the last thing anyone with a sense of personal space would use, but Kaplan maintains that much of our commerce is not only not private, it's not even "important enough to tweet." Judging from the activity on Blippy, it can still be a decent conversation starter. And indeed, in a future release Blippy will be able to (optionally) update Twitter and Facebook when its users transact.
Twitter co-founder Evan Williams broadcasts his iTunes store activity to Blippy users.
(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)Future privacy features in Blippy may include the capability to lock out certain vendors from credit card data collection, and possibly an approval step for transactions before they're made public. Already you can set up your account as either open or protected, meaning, as on Twitter, you can let anyone follow you or lock it down to just those you approve.
I'm intrigued by one of the tenets of Blippy: Kaplan is interested in what he calls "passive sharing" of information. With this service, you can "check in" with your friends when you buy something--like a coffee at your corner Starbucks. Your transaction is a location beacon (I'm not sure the credit card data is updated quickly enough, but that is the vision). "Nobody is taking advantage of the fact that I'm swiping my credit card everywhere," Kaplan told me. Twitter, Facebook, Fourquare, and Gowalla require a more active check-in. (Another location check-in service, Stalqer, has a neat trick for passive check-in.)
It's not likely that old-fashioned relics like me will use this service to share financial data, mind you, but I do find the concept of using a financial system as a Foursquare-like input tracker interesting. And I would like a system that does an even better job than Mint of tracking my spending and comparing it to others.
Kaplan says he's not working on the revenue strategy yet. The company was incubated at and funded by Charles River Ventures, where he was Entrepreneur-in-Residence until last week. Potential revenues may include an affiliate model that kicks some referral money back to users when their connected friends buy what they've bought, but Kaplan doesn't want to "pay people to use Blippy," so the idea would need refinement. Blippy may also get its own credit card deal; right now you have to connect an existing card to the system to use it.
Blippy is in a closed alpha test right now. You can sign up for an invitation on the site, and it will open up in stages over the next few months.
Google ventured into new territory on Monday with the launch of a new URL-shortening service it's calling Goo.gl.
Unlike some existing and high-profile shorteners such as TinyURL and Bit.ly, Goo.gl is not a general-purpose link shrinker that users can access by going to a standalone site. Instead, it's been built into Google products, beginning with Google's browser toolbar and its Feedburner RSS service. Both of those services can now create shortened Goo.gl URLs that link to the source content while using fewer characters. This is especially important for sharing on places like Twitter, where there are size limits.
The feature goes hand in hand with the launch of a share button for the Google toolbar that lets users share whatever page they're on with a number of social services. As for its integration with FeedBurner, Google now provides feed owners with a way to automatically publish certain posts directly to Twitter, which will again help keep the number of characters to a minimum.
Google says the shortening service is both fast and stable. The company has also placed the same security measures that go into its search index to block pages that may contain malware or phishing schemes.
In an introductory post on its official blog, Google said that it may eventually roll out the service as a standalone site, but that for now it's being built into Google products. Such a feature would likely allow third party sites to build Goo.gl link shortening into their own products. In the meantime, other Google properties that could certainly benefit from having link shortening built-in include YouTube, Maps, Reader, and Blogger--many of which have integrated sharing features.
Update 2 p.m. PST: As we should have mentioned before, .gl is the top-level domain for Greenland. Also, Google's launch comes on the heels of Facebook having quietly launched its own URL-shortening service called FB.me. Heading there in your browser simply takes you to Facebook's home page, whereas sharing links through Facebook's mobile site will shorten them for you using a shortened FB.me URL. More on that as soon as Facebook publicly acknowledges its existence.
Visitors of Goo.gl get this page, which tells them what the service does, although will not let just anyone create shortened URLs. Instead, Google is allowing use of its service through its own products.
(Credit: CNET)
Google is offering Groups to its enterprise Google Apps Premier and Education Edition customers, the company announced late Tuesday.
As one of the search giant's "most widely used applications," the addition of Google Groups allows users to more effectively collaborate with others within the workplace.
According to Google, companies will be able to use Groups "as mailing lists, but they can also share documents, spreadsheets, presentations, calendars, videos and sites with groups, instead of many individual recipients." The app will allow those users to receive messages in their in-box or in the Groups forum view. Group managers will be able to send messages on behalf of the entire group. All discussions, files, and other content is archived and searchable, Google said.
IT administrators will need to activate Google Groups from Google Apps' administrative control panel. Once complete, users will be able to manage their own groups without requiring IT-administrator approval. That said, administrators can still set group policies and manage group settings.
Google Apps Premier and Education Edition customers can try out Google Groups now.
After more than five years as a publicly available test version, Gmail shed its beta label in July. Now one feature key to the Net giant's cloud-computing aspirations, offline access to Gmail, also has grown up less than a year after its debut.
"Offline Gmail is graduating from Labs and becoming a regular part of Gmail," Google programmer Aaron Whyte announced the change Monday in a blog post.
Offline Gmail support, which relies on a Google browser plug-in called Gears, lets people read, search, organize, and compose e-mail even when there's no Net connection; sent messages are queued up in an outbox for delivery when the network access is restored and the account on the computer can resynchronize with the server.
"Offline Gmail has proven particularly useful for business and schools making the switch to Google Apps from traditional desktop mail clients--they're used to being able to access their mail whether or not they're online, and Offline Gmail brings this functionality right to the browser," Whyte said.
Google Apps, a bundle that includes Gmail, Google Calendar, and the Google Docs suite of online applications, is available for free for educational users or smaller organizations. Premiere accounts cost $50 per person per year, and Chief Executive Eric Schmidt called such enterprise-oriented services Google's "next big billion-dollar opportunity."
Gears is built into Google's Chrome browser, but other browsers rely on a plug-in. However, Google has stopped developing Gears in favor HTML5's equivalent features. That overhaul of the standard for displaying Web page includes local data storage on a computer as one feature, and it's now enabled by default in Chrome even though HTML5 isn't a final standard yet.
Updated 1:45 p.m. PST and 5:46 p.m. PST: For some Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard users, Gears doesn't work, hampering use of Offline Gmail.
Google initially said Tuesday that Gears doesn't work on Snow Leopard but later amended its statement, narrowing the problem to Apple's Safari browser.
"It turns out that Gears does work on Firefox for Snow Leopard and Leopard, though it still doesn't work on Safari," Google spokesperson Victoria Katsarou said. "There was a bug that was preventing Gears from downloading on Snow Leopard, but we're fixing it and at we'll be updating our Help Center article and Download page to reflect the change."
She declined to comment on when or even if an HTML5-based version of offline Gmail might arrive.Offline Gmail didn't even work Tuesday in the new Chrome for Mac beta version. Gears is built into Chrome, but trying to enable offline Gmail with the browser yields a "browser not supported" error message.
For the rest of you, here are Google's instructions for getting set up with offline Gmail:
1. Click the "Settings" link in the top-right corner of Gmail.
2. Click the "Offline" tab.
3. Select "Enable Offline Mail for this computer."
4. Click "Save Changes" and follow the directions from there.
