Spartan golf club by Richard Fonteneau

One plus One by Aleksey Bokov

Imaginary Friend by Yeria Elsafan

Bread & Breakfast by Strudel Design

Circus of Magazines by Olivier Courbet

Help Hand by Alexey

The Waterfront by SML

Who You know by Simon Says

Fork & Knife by Nick Sickelton

Optimistic Beverages by Helms Workshop

illusion by Anthony Lane

Mr. Cutts by Tabitha Kristen

Portrait Photos by Atakan Seçkin

Pencil by Reghardt Grobbelaar

Human by Social UK

Napoleon Sushi Bar by Badvosky

Poker Hills by Alen Pavlovi

Version2 by James Cullen

Code Fish by Mabu

AIDS Taskforce 25 Years by Mikey Burton

Fit by Tinkov

EcoDiva by Ocularink

Coffee by Jan Zabransky

Women Meet Literature by Emrekoc

Horror Films by Siah Design

RIP Steve by Jonathan Mak

Jupiter by Stelian Vasile

I started my exploration of Australia with Melbourne and I immediately fell in love with it.  It is a vibrant and a culturally diverse city with a flare of Toronto and Paris but with a much warmer climate.  The city has an amazing coffee culture that rivals those of France and Italy.  Forget about Starbucks – Melbournians take their coffee seriously. I have to admit that a daily cup of a freshly brewed coffee during my morning stroll to the office became a daily routine that I miss dearly.

Besides coffee, Melbourne (and Australia in general) boasts an impressive restaurant culture. Food is very diverse and delicious but expensive.  My personal favorites:  Kangaroo streak, oysters, meat pie (traditional Australian dish) and of course fresh seafood (barramundi and Tasmanian trout are to die for).   The only thing I have to say I didn’t like was Vegemite - a dark brown, salty food paste made from yeast extract.  No offence but I honestly don’t know why would anyone voluntarily choose Vegemite over butter on their toast. Sorry, Peter!

Enough about food. We are a technology blog so let me shift gears to that.  Australia struck me as a technologically advanced country.  Something that you notice right away is the shining new infrastructure, from airports to busy city centers.  It is impressive how everything is well planned and functional.  In fact, it is this mix of ultramodern developments combined with a rugged “Crocodile Dundee” outback that makes Australia so unique.

Surprisingly, broadband Internet in Australia is slower and more expensive than in most other developed nations. For example, I paid nearly $200 USD for a week’s Internet access in my hotel in Melbourne, which was also capped at 500 MB/ week. That is barely enough to check e-mail.  Forget about uploading photos or using Skype.  There are hotspots around Melbourne and Sydney but they are all extremely slow and most of them limit your use.  This came a surprise compared to the States and Europe where every restaurant and coffee shop has unlimited free Wi-Fi.   It is understandable that due to Australia’s large size, sparse population and relative remoteness to other countries, it requires an enormous investment into infrastructure for Internet communications.  Nevertheless, limited Internet connectivity in large metropolitan areas such as Sydney or Melbourne came as a surprise to me.

Another thing that you may not now about Australia is that the government censors the Internet. The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) has the power to enforce content restrictions on Internet content hosted within Australia and also maintains a “black-list” of websites which have undesirable content blocked by government filters (much like in China).  The debate over Internet filtering has incited some tension in Australia and remains a highly debated topic.   Current filters often mistakenly block websites that don’t violate laws and there have been reports of controversial misuses of the program to block websites for political reasons.

Besides censoring Internet (with which I personally disagree) I have to say that I was impressed by the efficiency with which the government in Australia operates.  I had a pleasure working side by side with the State of Victoria government (Department of Business and Innovationt) employees and I must admit that the efficiency, dedication and the long term vision not only exceeds that of the U.S. government, but rivals that of some of the most well-run private firms.  Projects that would normally take years to plan in the U.S. get done quickly and effectively reaching the end user when they are most needed.  This has to be one of the reasons behind the recent impressive development and growth in the technology sector in Australia.

After taking care of business, I decided to take some time off to continue my exploration.  I rented a car and set off to see the real Australia I always wanted to see – its rich and diverse natural treasures.   My first obstacle was the bizarre Melbourne hook turn (of course, it had to be the first turn I took after getting out of the car rental place) that in addition to driving on the left side of the road took some time to get used to.

My first destination was the Great Ocean Road – a coastal highway with views so breathtaking that it is hard to take a corner without constantly pulling over to take pictures.  The Great Ocean Road stretches for a few hundred kilometers and took me to the Great Apostles – a collection of limestone stacks off the shore of the Port Campbell National Park.

Australian Wildlife is out of this world. Literally, it felt like visiting a different world. After seeing kangaroos, koalas, wallabies and penguins (yes, penguins) in their natural habitat, it is hard to find another place on Earth with a more diverse and exotic flora and fauna that one in Australia.  It is definitely a “must visit” destination for anyone who enjoys nature.

It is hard to summarize the entire trip in a single post.  It is even harder to explore much of Australia in just two weeks. Australia is a vast continent that takes 4 days to cross by car and is about the size of the continental United States.  Nevertheless, I am actually glad there is more left to explore as I will definitely be back!

P.S. Special thanks to Amanda, Peter, Vanessa, Cheryl, Simon, and others at the Department of Business and Innovation for their hospitality!

Is your website ready? You can find out by asking yourself the following question:

Is your Website So-Lo-Mo Friendly?

At November’s PubCon Vegas show, the distinguished Google engineer Matt Cutts, stood in front of a crowded room and encouraged everyone to focus on three areas in 2012: Social, Local and Mobile:

Is your website properly integrated with social media? Are you piggybacking off the explosion of social networks or going against the mainstream?

• Seeing the Big Picture: A Social Marketing Perspective
• How to Automate Your Social Networks
• The Impact of Social Media on your Business

Is your website SEO optimized for local searches and closely integrated into local communities or are you competing with every other company out there?

• Effective Ways to Use Geo-Targeting for Business Websites
• New Year’s SEO Resolutions
• Keeping Up with Keyword Research

Users accessing websites on mobile devices will soon exceed that of personal computer users.  Are you ready for that?  Or will you be  losing business to your competition?

• Why you should Consider Developing a Mobile Version of your Website
• 10 Tips for Better Mobile Website Design
• High-End Clientele: Targeting iPad Owners

If you think that the look and feel of your website is starting to feel a little outdated, chances are your customers do too. Website design trends change over years and you may be losing business if you’re not keeping up.  Consider a quick web design facelift, or, a complete overhaul to help improve your overall image and even boost your sales.

• Top 10 Web Design Trends for 2012

You’ve probably heard that running a blog is one of the best things that you can do for online marketing of your website. Running a quality blog on your website will boost search engine optimization, help position yourself as an expert, and will allow you to build relationships with your audience.  All are extremely valuable benefits when it comes to your website’s success.

• Blogging vs. SEO: Which to Do First?
• 5 Top Blogging Myths

If you think your website is safe from hackers because you have nothing ‘worth stealing,’ think again. Hackers are shifting their attacks to target smaller websites and businesses, thus, website security will be a major issue in 2012. This may be a great time for a thorough security review of your website.

• 4 Overlooked Security Threats to Small Businesses
• 7 Tips to Prevent Credit Card Fraud on Your Site

Hopefully by now you’re not hosting your website out of your office. If you are, then 2012 may indeed have a doomsday scenario prepared for you.  Without professional hosting for your website, your website will always lag behind competition: it will be slower; it will probably have accessibility issues; and a lot of potential downtime.  Modern cloud computing refers to using a network of remote servers hosted on the Internet to store and manage data, instead of hosting it on your local server.  It offers increased reliability, lower cost, more accessibility and easier scalability.

• Data Backup: Preparing for a Data Disaster

1. Mobile Compatibility

Minimalistic design has been popular for many years already.  According to the latest stats, over 1/5 of all Web searches will be conducted on mobile devices in 2012. This is why having your website look good and function well on mobile devices is more important than ever.

2. Hello  HTML5, CSS3 and JQuery. Good-bye Flash.

Flash was once extremely popular but with Adobe’s announcement of discontinued support for mobile devices, we will see more and more websites starting to rely on HTML5, CSS3 and JQuery for animation and interactivity.   While we believe that Flash still has no equal to its interactivity expect to see more of HTML5, CSS3 and JQuery in 2012.

3. Creating dimensions with 3D

For a long time 3D has been the prerogative of desktop applications. In 2012 we are looking forward to seeing more websites utilizing 3D effects (from shadows to textures) to create dimensions and build rich and visually interesting applications.

4.  Typography

More browsers nowdays support different font types, which means that you will start seeing more websites using  fonts creatively: mixing font types and twisting and molding them into works of art.   The CSS3 allows using free and commercial typography that will finally help designers get away from those boring Arial, Verdana and Times New Roman fonts.

5. Think BIG

2012 is going to be Big (literally): Huge logos, large headings, enormous icons –  all oversized elements designed to make an unforgettable impression on the visitor.  As designers discover that graphics (and not the content) is what creates the first impression, the trend will be for big statements to convey the site’s tone.

6. Modal Windows

A modal window is a pop-up’s older, more sophisticated brother that allows showing information or requesting input without leaving the current page.   Expect to see them more and more in 2012: from login boxes and registration screens to image and video galleries.

7. Fixed Width + Fluid Feel

Hybrid layouts (fixed content but fluid feel) will continue to be popular in 2012. The approach means that some elements (for example, text) are of fixed width regardless of the resolution, while other elements (for example, background) are fluid and stretch to fill the rest of the space.  The advantage of this approach is clear: controlled-width content for consistent presentation and fluid framework that doesn’t make you feel like a big part of your monitor is being wasted.

8.  Minimalism

Websites in 2012 will continue to feature lots of empty space.  However, don’t expect to see many white/black backgrounds. Modern minimalistic design will feature bright and fresh colors, large images and expandable (fluid) backgrounds.

9. Single Page Layouts

The best thing about single page layouts is that they challenge you to throw away what’s unnecessary. This makes one-page layouts a perfect “business card” that presents all the important information in a condensed one-stop format.

10. Social Media Integration

Everyone has been talking about integrating social media but few actually design for social media.   Expect to hear keywords like:  Community, Social,  Fairness,  Values, and Environment in 2012.  As websites become more tightly integrated with social media, the design will have to adapt for things like Facebook Connect, Curation of content and Social Bookmarking and Sharing.

“The United States accounts for a whopping 358 of the twitter 500, nearly three-quarters of the total, with 780 million followers worldwide. The second place nation is Brazil, with 42 (8.4 percent) of the world’s 500 top tweeters and 78 million followers – considerably less than Los Angeles or New York and about the same as San Francisco and D.C. combined. The United Kingdom comes in third with 40 top tweeters (8 percent) and 65 million followers; Spain is fourth with 10 (2 percent) and 21 million followers, about as many as Chicago. India is fifth with 9 (1.8 percent) and Mexico sixth with 8 (1.6 percent). The top tweeters in these countries claim roughly 12 million followers, about the same as Miami or Las Vegas.”

“Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me … Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful … that’s what matters to me.”

“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.”

“In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer. It’s interior decorating. It’s the fabric of the curtains and the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.”

“Innovation comes from people meeting up in the hallways or calling each other at 10.30 at night with a new idea, or because they realized something that shoots holes in how we’ve been thinking about a problem. It’s ad hoc meetings of six people called by someone who thinks he has figured out the coolest new thing ever and who wants to know what other people think of his idea.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever worked so hard on something, but working on Macintosh was the neatest experience of my life. Almost everyone who worked on it will say that. None of us wanted to release it at the end. It was as though we knew that once it was out of our hands, it wouldn’t be ours any more.”

“That’s been one of my mantras – focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”

“It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”

“When we finally presented it at the shareholders’ meeting, everyone in the auditorium stood up and gave it a 5-minute ovation. What was incredible to me was that I could see the Mac team in the first few rows. It was as though none of us could believe that we’d actually finished it. Everyone started crying.”

“So when these people sell out, even though they get fabulously rich, they’re gypping themselves out of one of the potentially most rewarding experiences of their unfolding lives. Without it, they may never know their values or how to keep their newfound wealth in perspective.”

While web developers around the world aren’t exactly ecstatic about having to deal with yet another browser (it is a common practice to test websites’ compatibility in multiple browsers so this adds to the work we have to do). Nonetheless, I must admit that the new browser has one feature that is revolutionary and could really change the face of the mobile Web.

Silk has a different approach to browsing. It uses what’s called “Split Architecture”. What that means is that the execution of the browser’s subsystems (Networking, HTML, CSS, Rendering, etc.) are being split between the tablet and the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud.  In simpler terms, some parts of the webpage are processed on the tablet, and some are processed in the cloud (on Amazon’s servers).

The result: faster browsing, less battery consumption and better security.  All are critical for browsing mobile websites on a mobile device.

Amazon Silk effectively extends the boundaries of the browser and the mobile device by coupling the capabilities of the device in your hand with the massive computing power, memory, and network connectivity of their cloud. This feature alone makes the new browser unique and worth the hassle of dealing with.  It will be interesting to see if other browsers will follow the suit, especially if Chrome OS will implement something similar in the future.

So what’s new with Facebook?  Here is the scoop:

• The most recognizable changes are on the right side and in the center of the screen: Top Stories and Real-time Updates.
• Top Stories now combine all updates and appear on the top of user pages.  If you haven’t visited Facebook for a while, you’ll see top posts and updates posted while you’ve been away.
• Top Stories are stories that Facebook considers “interesting or relevant” to you. Facebook determines whether something is a top story based on multiple factors: your relationship to the person who made the post, number of “Likes” and comments, the type of story, etc. Top stories are marked with a blue corner.
• Over time Facebook can now learn your preferences when it comes to Top Stories. So if you see something that isn’t interesting under Top Stories, you can hover over the right side of the update in question, click the down arrow and choose ‘Unmark as top story’.
• Event reminders such as friends’ birthdays a friend requests are now under a ticker-like function designed to give a real-time feel more like Twitter.
• Photo posts now show much larger photographs and multiple image posts now show up differently with a single photograph standing out larger than the rest.
• Grouping of friends into categories, similar to circles in Google+. Facebook now automatically groups your high school friends into one list, and work colleagues into another, for example. You can user these groups as filters in the News Feed.
• Facebook has also launched a new “Subscribe” button that allows you to follow public updates of other, regardless of whether you are friends on Facebook. This button is now available on users’ profiles next to “Message” and “Poke”.

Facebook says the changes are designed to keep their users better updated in real time. “Our goal with these improvements is to make it easier for people to keep up with their friends no matter how frequently or infrequently they visit Facebook – and to make sure they never miss important updates,” says Facebook spokesman Jonathan Thaw.

What do you think of the new changes? Please share your experience with us in the comments below!