google Archive

Eddystone – A Briefing Note on Google’s New Beacon Format

Yesterday Google announced ‘Eddystone’, a new open Bluetooth beacon format which works on Android and iOS. I’ve been doing a bit of reading about it to understand the technology and its potential, and I put together a briefing note about it for my colleagues. I’m a believer in maximising returns on my content, so it seems like a good opportunity to republish that briefing note here.

This is a very rapid and shallow look into beacons, and I’ve no doubt made some omissions or inaccuracies, so apologies in advance for that. If you think I’ve made any huge oversights or errors, please feel free to let me know in the comments.

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HTML 5 & web fonts; exciting times

With (standards-compliant) browser innovation firmly back on the agenda, there’s a lot of exciting new technology to get to grips with. This week, Google have thrown their weight firmly behind HTML5, while a new start-up aims to bring web fonts to all.

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Thoughts on Google Chrome

As you have no doubt noticed, today saw the release of Google’s new browser, Chrome. As is usual, reactions have run the gamut from “it will kick all kinds of arse” to “meh”. Some have said it will take Firefox’s market share (within three months, apparently), but I don’t agree; I’ll explain why shortly, after this bit of link love.

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Visualising search relevance with Google charts

Some search engines, particularly on content management systems, give a percentage figure for the relevance of a result to your search term. When viewing a lot of results on a page, the figures can tend to run into one another and be hard to quickly distinguish.

This was the case with a client site I’m building using CMS Made Simple at the moment, and the results page suffered from a lack of clarity. Thinking of a way to simplify the page, I remembered the old adage “a picture is worth a thousand words” and hit upon the idea of using Google’s Chart API to replace the figures:

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Aside

I’ve updated my Speaking page to include more conferences, more videos, and a little on my speaking requirements and preferences. I’m planning to cut down on the number of talks I give in 2014 (twelve is too many), but am always open to interesting offers and opportunities, so please get in touch if you’re organising an event.

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