The Enhanced Mitigation Experience Tool kit (EMET) offers users the ability to deploy security technologies to arbitrary applications.

The Microsoft Security Research & Defense blog offers more details. “This helps prevent vulnerabilities in those applications (especially line of business and 3rd party apps) from successfully being exploited.”

“By deploying these mitigation technologies on legacy products, the tool can also help customers manage risk while they are in the process of transitioning over to modern, more secure products.  In addition, it makes it easy for customers to test mitigations against any software and provide feedback on their experience to the vendor.”

A formal release issued by the company explained that this move should allow “developers to build and run modern applications that intelligently share information with underlying infrastructure to maximize application performance, quality of service and infrastructure utilization.”

That should bring more users – and money – developers’ way.  Granted, getting used to a new way of doing things might be a nuisance at first, but the payoff seems worth it.

VMware’s a for-profit company with over 190,000 customers, after all, so it’s not like the cloud application platform was introduced just for the fun of it.

More information is available here if you’re interested.

Think about it. If you’re not telling your visitors what to do next, how can you expect them to do it? Sure, they can guess, make assumptions or “figure it out on their own”. But, for anybody that’s doing anything new, directions are a God send.

I recently spent 2 hours putting together a desk that should have taken me 20 minutes. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m generally more destructive than constructive when it comes to these kinds of things, but with a little help (a.k.a. reading directions), I can usually get the job done. But, on this particular desk, the directions actually didn’t help. Not even a little.

The desk had two pieces: the main desk and a small side table. Both look nearly identical, only the size is different. The directions started you out building the small table…but they didn’t make that clear. I spent at least 30 minutes putting together the larger desk with the small table instructions, wondering why things just weren’t making much sense.

Once I figured that out and moved on to building the desk with proper directions, I found several pieces that all looked similar, but with subtle differences. The directions didn’t make those distinctions, neither verbally nor visually. Luckily, I was able to stay calm and keep the cursing to a low mumble that my kids couldn’t hear!

Your content should work like directions. It needs to inform and make clear what the next step is. Giving your visitors clear directions doesn’t have to be difficult. You don’t have to re-write all of your content, adding in long prose of “here’s what we want you to do next”. All you have to do is some simple re-working of key areas.

Action Words: We often tend to write passively. We talk in terms of how things are, not in terms of what we are doing, what we’ve done, or what we want to do. This makes our content stagnant.

Instead, use words that convey action. Tell visitors how you achieved your knowledge or skills. Tell them how they will benefit from your product or services. Give them examples of the results they will see. And, most importantly, give them some calls to action.

Calls to Action: Using action words is never more important than ensuring your work calls action into your content. These are the directives that you provide to your visitors that lead them down the path to the conversion.

If you are not providing these directives, or are providing the wrong directives, you won’t be getting the response you want from your visitors. Keep in mind that there are multiple paths to the goal. Customers need to see your products before they can buy them. They also need to know product details. Trying to move your customers to the conversion too quickly simply won’t work.

Use your calls to action to lead visitors down the path of information they need to take the desired action. Some may need to see product reviews, others need to read more about your company, and still others might want to read more about what you offer. Provide calls to action to whatever your visitors might need… because they may not even know they need it.

Textual Links: Adding calls to action directly into your text is simply the best way to get visitors to heed them. Your navigation is important, but sites often put too much faith in the navigation getting the visitors to the information they want. If the visitors know where they want to go, and if they are willing to take the time to click through the navigation, then that approach would work. But, why force the visitor to disengage from your content to hunt through the navigation for what they want? Not a good idea.

That’s the biggest problem with not using textual links. You’re forcing your visitors to figure things out instead of providing them the directions they need right there where they are. If they are reading about your team’s experience, then link to your “About Us” page. If you mention a related product, link to it. If you discuss a significant achievement, place a link to the page that provides more complete information about it.

Visitors are curious. Providing links helps them satisfy their curiosity, which in, turns gives them more satisfaction that you have “what it takes” to provide what they need.

A website that’s not getting any action is a dead site. Conversion rates will be low, and bounce rates will be high. Using action words, calls to action, and textual links gets your visitors to “put out”. But, unless your content is willing to provide the goods, you may not even get to second base.

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This whole issue brings up another issue. Apparently being “penalized in Google” cost Ryan Abood’s company $4 million. From what I can tell, he may have not “done his homework” well enough and found a search engine optimization company that would answer all of the important search engine optimization questions. I have compiled a list of 44 questions that you should consider asking your potential search engine optimization company. These questions are not necessarily in order of importance, and they may not apply to every search engine optimization project. But in any case, here is my list of questions that you should consider asking your potential search engine optimization company.

What type of search engine optimization techniques do you use to achieve search engine rankings?

What type of risk is involved with your method of search engine optimization?

What will happen if our relationship is dissolved?

Can you show me examples of past work?

What was the client’s ROI of their search engine optimization efforts?

Can you give me references? Can I talk to one or more of your current search engine optimization clients?

What type of volume increase in traffic is reasonable to expect from search engine optimization?

How long until I start to see results?

What would you expect from OUR end to aid your work?

What were some of your top search ranking achievements?

What types of internet marketing services do you offer to supplement your SEO (search engine optimization) offerings?

Will my web site point to your web site?

How many number one search engine rankings you have achieved for your clients?

How long have you been providing search engine optimization services?

Are you an individual consultant or are you part of a search engine optimization team?

How long have you and your search engine optimization team been online?

What types of web sites will you not promote?

Do you participate and/or, are you a moderator for any of the SEO – Search Engine Optimization / SEM – Search Engine Marketing Forums? If so, what is your username and can you provide links to your most recent or notable discussions?

Can you describe and/or produce recent successful search engine optimization campaign results?

If so, can I use those clients for references?

Do you have web site design experience?

What is your technical background?

What types of programming environments are you experienced with?

What are your opinions in regards to Best Practices for the SEO – Search Engine Optimization / SEM – Search Engine Marketing industry? How does a company effectively compete online using traditional optimization strategies?

Can you assure us that the search engine optimization strategies and methods that you are utilizing fall under the criteria of Best Practices for the SEO/SEM Industry? Can we assume that this means no penalties for our website?

How many search engine optimization campaigns have you been involved with?

What was your role for those projects?

How many of those search engine optimization projects are still active?

How many of those search engine optimization projects inactive?

If inactive, why?

Do you have experience managing PPC – Pay Per Click, CPC – Cost Per Click, and other bid management campaigns?

What types of programs do you use for PPC bid management?

Are there any guarantees for top search engine positions if we decide not to use a PPC program?

The web sites we are currently linked to have no rank, which means to me that these links are useless.

What linking strategies would you use to increase link popularity for our website?

Is this service part of the proposed price? What types of websites will you target for link exchange?

Our main competitor’s Google PageRank falls between 1 and 3. How would you address improving our PageRank with Google, and other search engines that calculate the number of quality inbound links to our website? Is it possible to rank higher than our competitors?

What changes can we expect you to make to our website to improve our positioning in the search engines?

Will these search engine optimization changes be visible?

Will there be changes in the coding of our website?

What type of reporting (website log analysis) will you provide to us? How often will you provide those reports? Will you provide consultation on how to interpret the reports so that we have a basic understanding of the statistics?

Do you offer ROI analysis? Is this in addition to your contract pricing? Please explain the process of how the ROI will be determined.

Matt Cutts, from Googke, recently had this to say about what you should ask your SEO:

Do you buy links that pass PageRank?
What’s the most aggressive tactic you use?
Anything violate G’s guidelines?

Okay, well, there you go. 44 questions to ask your potential search engine optimization company. If you are employing someone to do your organic search engine optimization, then you might go through this list and see if you can answer all of these questions. If you cannot, then I would ask them. And if they do not answer your questions or cannot answer them, you might reconsider your relationship with them.

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Built by and for professional game developers, the Rocket Engine is a fully integrated solution for plugin-free browser game development. The game engine is fully compatible with all major browsers and social gaming platforms, including the iPhone, iPad and Android devices, with no installation required.

Our goal is to create high quality games that can be played anywhere, and we were used to professional tools such as the Unreal Engine or Unity3D.”, says Jiri Kupiainen, one of the founders of Rocket Pack.

“Nothing existed for professional plugin-free browser game development, so we built it ourselves.”, Kupiainen adds.

Loretta Chao reported earlier this afternoon, “Baidu Inc. unveiled a platform that lets users run applications through Baidu’s website, a step that could help shape China’s fledgling apps-store sector.”

Chao then continued, “Users of the new service can run games, videos, electronic books and other applications on Baidu’s site.  The service, which opened for business Wednesday evening, offers software similar to that available through websites like Facebook or platforms like Apple Inc.’s App Store or the Android Market based on Google Inc.’s mobile operating system.”

The interesting thing is that Baidu’s new offering is much more accessible, with basically no restrictions related to devices or browsers.

This could pose a problem for Google and Apple in China.  Fortunately for developers who operate in other markets and create apps for Android and iOS, Baidu hasn’t made much of an international push.

First download this crinkle paper texture

Now open a new document 300X300px in photoshop

Create a new layer and choose your ellipse shape tool.

Now create a circle in the middle of the canvas any color you want.

Now I am going to make it a bluish color, similar to the twitter color blue. To do this go to your blending options on the layer

Go to color overlay and type in the color #33ccff

Once you made that blue open your crinkle paper image.

Now drag it into your canvas above your circle.

Once you drag that in, turn the opacity of the crinkle paper down to about 65% so you can see the blue circle behind it. I am doing this so I can move the crinkle paper around to see which part I want to go on the sticker.

After you figure out what part you want on your sticker turn the opacity back down. Now I am going to hold down ctrl on my keyboard and click the preview icon beside the circle layer so it will create a selection in the shape of the circle.

If you do that correctly you will see a selection made in the shape of your circle layer.

Now just hit ctrl+x and ctrl+v to cut the part out of the crinkle paper and paste it back on the canvas. You can delete the excess layer after that.

After that set the layer to overlay

Once that is complete we can start creating the peeled aprt of the sticker.

I always like to have back-ups of whatever I am doing so I am going to duplicate the two layers I have and hide the other 2.

Now the two layers that are still highlighted, merge them together by right clicking on the two layers in your layer palette and choosing, “merge layers”.

Before we move on to the peeled part of the sticker I am going to add a little touch to make the sticker stand out a bit more. I am just going to create 2 different colored lines around the circle.

First I will create a red circle the same way I created the circle in the
first step.

Once I have done that, I want to cut out the middle so there is just a line around the circle. There is a cool little trick in photoshop to help out in this situation.

Use the ctrl+click technique on the preview icon like we did earlier to create a selection around the red circle.

Now go to select>>modify>>contract

And contract it by 5 pixels

Now just hit delete on your keyboard and you have a nice little line.

Now in a new layer above that create a black circle and contract it by 8.

Now set both of those layers to soft light for a nice touch.

You can even duplicate the two layers for more of the effect.

Now make a backup of those two layers if you like and merge the others with your crinkled circle so it is all one layer.

Now its time to create the peeled part of the sticker.

First duplicate your current sticker so you have a backup.

Now grab your polygon lasso tool

Make a selection around the bottom right side of the sticker similar to this:

Now cut it and paste it back in the document

Now with that cut off layer chosen hit ctrl+t on your keyboard to transform the object then right click on the canvas. Choose rotate 180 degrees

Now move that up on the sticker

Use the ctrl+click technique on the preview image to create a selection in the shape of the cut out you just made. Then create a new layer above that and fill it with white.

Now grab your burn tool. This will be how we give the peeled back part some life.

Set its Range to Highlights and its Exposure to around 78%.

Now burn in these areas I will show you in the next image. I am going to use a 65px soft brush.

And now mine looks like this

Keep the selection there if it went away just ctrl+click again to get it to come back. Now unhide the crinkle paper layer, click on it and copy and paste the selection from it and drag it up to the top layer.

Once you do that set the layer to overlay and hit ctrl+shift+u to make it black and white.

This just gives a little dirty effect on the back of the sticker.

Now time to add a few shadows. Click back on your main sticker and add this outer glow

screensht38.gif”>

That will just add a subtle shadow

To add a shadow under the sticker peel, use the ctrl+click technique again to make a selection in the shape and underneath fill it with black.

Then add a gaussian blur to it by going to filter>>blur>>gaussian blur.

I did about a 4.5 gaussian blur level and then dropped the opacity on the shadow
to 45%.

Now I will add the twitter “T” with my text tool. I downloaded twitter font called PicoBlackAI just search for it on the web and you can find it in various places.

Here are the settings I added to the font to make it look like the twitter
logo colors.

Color Overlay

Stroke

Here is my font

The last touch I want to make is actually make the text look like it is part of the sticker, so you can see the crinkled look on the letter too.

Use the same method we did before except ctrl+click the text preview icon and copy and paste part of the crinkle paper over it, setting its blending mode to multiply and the opacity to around 45%.

Here is my final twitter icon

And here are other icons I made with this same method

Thanks for reading!

“Sales growth in digital music has been slowing, and some of that decline might be related to the distraction from apps; however, iTunes shoppers are still completely engaged with music, whether it’s about listening, discovering or buying,” said Russ Crupnick, VP and analyst for The NPD Group. “Apps and video certainly do compete for consumer dollars, but they can also be used to promote music and re-energize digital music and video download sales.”

But will users pay for apps? 9 out of 10 have downloaded a free app, which Crupnick believes “points to a major up-selling opportunity to paid versions of the same app.”69% of iPhone and iPod Touch owners who have not yet paid for an app told NPD they are interested in possibly doing so in the future.

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For the first time, AOL mobile applications will consist not only of mobile versions of its desktop and web offerings, but also include new products that launch first on mobile devices.

Rally Up will be based in AOL’s new West Coast office in Palo Alto and work closely with David Temkin, the Vice President of Mobile at AOL.

“Within the last year, the Rally Up team has demonstrated its keen understanding of the way that people want to use their mobile devices to interact, share and better communicate and of the tools necessary to address those needs,” said Temkin.

A page created to celebrate the move declared, “We’ve got lots of new and updated features to make your apps more powerful and flexible.  If you’re not already in the Early Access Program, sign up today!”  (Email pdc at palm dot com to do so.)

Otherwise, Palm was quick to discuss improved multitasking, which comes as the result of stacking related cards together.  It’s possible to connect directly to Calendar, Contacts, and Messaging, too.

Then a handful of other talking points included the Palm Touchstone, HTML5 enhancements, services, and PDK plug-ins.

All in all, this makes WebOS 2.0 sound rather impressive.  Hopefully the jumpstart provided by the preview will allow developers to make the most of it.