With single click I could see 2D video into seemingly 3D video. I don’t have 3D glasses at the moment to test it out, but the effects i am seeing naked eyes makes me feel that there is subtle 3D effect YouTube was able to introduce, on the fly in an plain 2d video.

3D TVs are not selling at the moment, and one of the big reasons is availability of 3D enabled programming. But with YouTube’s capability to render 2D video into 3D might change it forever…

I am pretty sure that there are tools available online which can convert (or try to convert 2D video into 3D) but being able to integrate that into full blown commercial video platform is big. This is big!

But first What is CDN?

From WikiPedia

A content delivery network or content distribution network (CDN) is a system of computers containing copies of data placed at various nodes of a network. When properly designed and implemented, a CDN can improve access to the data it caches by increasing access bandwidth and redundancy and reducing access latency. Data content types often cached in CDNs include web objects, downloadable objects (media files, software, documents), applications, live streaming media, and database queries.

When is best time to start using CDN?

It depends on what kind of content you are trying to serve in which part of world. If you have a website which serve rich multi-media contents for global audience, you should consider starting on CDN from day one. On the other hand, if you have website which serves a local community with some static pages, serving files via CDN might not be that beneficial(from ROI perspective)

Most of us would find us in the middle of the two extreme scenarios I have mentioned above, and there is no better way for you to find if you need a CDN or not than running some tests. Below are steps:

1. Run your website on http://www.webpagetest.org
2. Keep note of results.
3. Move files to CDN (you only pay for use, so couple of tests wont cost much)
4. Re-run tests and see if it made difference for you.
5. If you see good difference in the page load time, and believe that would benefit your customers (and you at the end), go for it!

BTW, there are other great recommendations you will get on http://www.webpagetest.org when you run test on it, like zipping content n stuff, which would help you reduce latency.

Know any better way to improve latency? Share with readers as comment below

From Bill Buxton’s collection

You can read and download IE 9 here http://www.beautyoftheweb.com/. I love it!

But if you are one of the guys like me who like building and playing web and have been dog fooding Release candidate, you might have noticed that there are some cases where IE9 does not renders your website as good as IE8 was.

I don’t want to get into the discussion of why it doesn’t? (fairly long discussion).

So just in case, your website is not getting rendered as expected on IE9, and before you figure out how to optimize your website for IE9, below is a small trick.

Use below string in your meta data of your website template. Whenever a user hits your website using IE9, IE9 will smartly figure out that it needs to behave like IE8 and would render your website

<meta http-equiv=”x-ua-compatible” content=”IE=8″>

You can read more on document compatibility http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc288325(v=vs.85).aspx

NDTV streams its TV content on internet on their website www.ndtv.com of which I am a regular viewer. Surprisingly, they decided to stream their content( with the advertisement they show on the TV) to be streamed and then also choose to put video advertisements on top of it.

End results –> Internet user sees more advertisement than a TV user.

It completely makes sense to show location aware contextual video advertisements on the actual content, but it doesn’t make sense to retain and stream ‘TV advertisement’ to the internet users, even if advertisers are paying you to do so.

Reasons below:

1- Wrong target market: lets take an example of Tata DoCoMo, They are running a campaign for their services ‘Be the first one to experience 3G’. Heck, I have been using 3G ever since here in USA and even if DoCoMo have something more futuristic say 4G, I cant use it in USA.

Assuming that NDTV is charging these advertisers to show their advertisement on internet steam, advertisers are for sure looking money here.

2- Bad user experience: More you show ads less captive is your audience. Bad user experience, see I am writing this blog post.

3- Costs more money: Every extra byte streamed over internet costs money. Every extra space used to store original content with advertisement costs money.

Serving content over India is still in nascent stages for Indian market and I am sure that eventually NDTV would fix this as they understand more about internet users and the business of doing business over internet.

How do you see old media adopting to new age tools? Share your comments and thoughts below.

User experience: I use freeway 520 everyday and if you live in the same area where I do, you must have noticed lot of construction going on lately. Every other morning when I hit 520 I see vehicles slowing down(dead slow) because the road travelled yesterday is no longer detour to get to the destination. A big mind blocker.

Think of your new shiny website design as a ‘blocker’ for your users which would slow them down and even make them shoo away because they found a better stable road( competitor).

Availability: Believe me or not, its hard to deploy all pieces of complex portal in one shot successfully. I have seen it taking many days to complete a deployment by really smart people. Would you rather like your customers to see your old website(which was generating revenue) than keeping it down for two days!.

I wish construction at 520 finishes soon, its going on for more than a year.

SEO: Big redesigns often comes with change in the page URLs, because old URLs no longer make sense for the new design. But what about all that effort and money you have put last year to make your site/content appear on top of search results.

Damn! my GPS doesn’t recognize this new road, it doesn’t have latest map.

Business Intelligence: Moment you launch a completely overhauled website, its all gone. You are starting almost from scratch. This is because your assumption and pathing and funneling no longer holds true(most likely). You just re-designed whole thing. Fun part is even if you see increase in your traffic and revenues, you no longer know what to attribute it to.

Hmm, will it take 10 minutes or 15 minutes for me to reach office.

Marketing: I am sure if you club all that great features into one big yearly launch, you have got lot of material to talk about, BUT what you really need at the end of day is ability to retain and increase your user base and not just ‘noise’.

Signs reads as “heavy construction underway” 

I am not discouraging you from taking bold step, but yes its challenging to do it right even for the big guys across the street.

You need to re-design your site piece by piece, organically by not leaving your customers shocked/stranded in the places you thought are the masterpiece work of a developer/designer.

How do you re-design and launch your website? Share your thoughts below in comments.

I discovered something amazing about Amazon.com  this morning, while I was watching this interesting presentation on design treasures of Amazon.

Amazon.com makes $19billion every year and have total customer base which is larger than the populations of some countries combined and is known for its excellence in running experiments online based on customer behavior.

While the presentation overall is a great presentation to listen about design techniques, something caught my attention, a slide called Amazon’s ‘Negative Operating Cycle’.

Above explains the fact that why Amazon can sell products like iPod cheaper than most of the other companies including Apple itself.

Secret lies in the fact that Amazon can sell its product faster than BestBuy (for example) and uses the positive cash float to make money. What that means is they can take no-profit on most of their product and can still make money.

Interesting concept, maybe very common in practice n term in retail business, but very interesting to me. What do you feel about this?

It’s a prompt for a potential Security issue, and I love that IE cares about security of my machine and data on it. But I really don’t like this message popping up all the time.

So I figured out a way to disable it

1. Go to Tools->Internet Options->Security

2. Select the ‘Security’ tab

3. Click the ‘Custom Level’ button

4. In the ‘Miscellaneous’ section change “Display mixed content” to ‘Enable’

I know that this makes my machine potentially vulnerable, but then, you know, I am a risk taker….

Thanks to my friend who helped with this setting.

I have my internet wireless router kept 2 rooms away from my usual working location at home here in Redmond, WA. I decided to run speedtest on my internet connectivity at home and I am surprised.

You are reading it right, these are real internet numbers and not because of some error.

My another machine which is connected over wire, shows much better numbers

Then I asked Vishwa who lives in Pune, India to run the same test on his connection and below is what he found. Ironically, he was getting this poor internet speed at Pune IT park.

Update: A friend of mine told me that, most of the internet service providers in USA do a trick so that when someone performs a speed test like i did using the site, numbers are high! Whenever you open a site, first few incoming/outgoing bytes from a new site will be marked for faster delivery and then packet speed for the later goes down slowly.  This would make most of the speed test results inaccurate which are based on the first few byte test.

There are some great Facts & Figures available about the facebook, but then there was not enough data which conveys user sentiment if they want to use facebook based login to various other sites who implement facebook connect.

Results are here, and below is the data from this survey (all figures below are %)

Geographic distribution of survey participants

As expected most of them are using Facebook and some people use twitter as well When asked about how often they visit facebook? Most of the people visit facebook pages multiple time in a day

Most of the people use facebook for personal needs than for business

I wanted to find what personality survey respondent have. Is she someone who jumps on whatever comes in front of her, like signing up for a new portal without reading much detail about it . My exact questions was “You find a new interesting site which require you to sign-up to get extended features, what do you do most of the time?” below is how people responded.

Coming to the question, I wanted to find if people really like using facebook connect or twitter based login to other sites. Below is the answer.Conclusion: Roughly 70% people who took survey said they don’t want to sign-up to a site using facebook or twitter based login.

Note: Sample size of this survey is very miniscule as compared to the facebook overall user base and might not represent accurate behavior. So if you are considering using facebook connect or say twitter based login, use your best judgment

You can now also follow me on twitter @ruchitgarg