Answer My Query

A couple of months ago we posted an article showcasing great website navigations. Consider this the sequel.

The navigation of a website is meant to be clicked. It doesn’t need to blend in or be hard to find. It’s important that it stands out from the rest of the elements on the page, but yet still matches the overall style of the design. Here is a showcase of websites that achieve this in a very stylish way. These navs look amazing, have serious click appeal, and are guaranteed to inspire you.

Clicking on the images will take you to each site.

Vegas Uncork’s

SYNTHVIEW

Help Your Habitat

Electric Pulp

The House Media

Breezy Baby

Curious Generation Group

Pastebot

Chirp

Delibar

Comfort Brothers

Narwhal Co.

Michael Dick

Yellow Bird Project

Ugmonk

Image Spark

Intuitive Designs

Iconlicious

Oval Cube

Neutron Creations

TheOldState

Digital Podge 2009

Arbutus

8Interactive

Cannonball

Sower of Seeds

Ready Made Designs

QBOS, a developer and provider of innovative web-based management solutions serving large and small businesses, announced that Cbeyond Inc. has successfully launched its TradeSpace Management System to their nationwide Field Service Partner network. The QBOS TradeSpace Management System will extend process automation, document management, workforce management and collaboration capabilities beyond corporate boundaries to Cbeyond’s field service partners who provide VoIP equipment, installation, and other communications services to Cbeyond’s 35,000+ small business customers.

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Layered Technologies, a leading worldwide provider of on-demand and cloud computing IT infrastructure, today announced a $20 million equity infusion from investors led by Accel-KKR, a technology-focused private equity firm. The new investment will help Layered Tech fuel further growth, which includes making strategic acquisitions. Layered Tech’s already strong product offerings in managed services, virtualization and cloud computing business will have an even greater competitive advantage by being well-capitalized and having the long-term commitment of a strong financial partner like Accel-KKR. With eight top-tier data centers around the world, Layered Tech’s infrastructure powers millions of Web sites and Internet-enabled applications including e-commerce and software as a service (SaaS). Layered Tech has seen rapid growth in recent years, and in 2009 was ranked in the top 15 percent of Deloitte LLP’s Technology Fast 500.

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Greetings…

As many of you know, IBM is committed to building and advancing open standards and platforms. Openness fosters an ecosystem of innovation, promotes customer choice, and allows enterprises to build solutions that best meet their needs. We’ve been working with the OpenSocial Foundation to help define and implement the requirements of enterprise customers.

Recently, we put together an article that can be found on DeveloperWorks that describes how you can use IBM Mashup Center to build complex Web 2.0 applications that use OpenSocial gadgets by simply dragging them from a pallet and dropping them on a page.

However, OpenSocial gadgets are not the only component model available, for example there are OpenAjax widgets as well as one that IBM uses for many of our products called iWidgets. Because of the importance of interoperability with previously deployed products that leverage different component models, this article demonstrates how you can build a mashup using different types of gadgets/widgets and still have them interoperate and communicate with each other. This interoperability is achieved by leveraging the OpenAjax Hub, a proven technology for inter-gadget communication available from the OpenAjax Alliance.

The article on DeveloperWorks represents an initial step. Members of the OpenSocial Foundation and the OpenAjax Alliance are now working together to support inter-gadget communication into the next version of OpenSocial by integrating the OpenAjax Hub. The designs and work items can be found on the OpenSocial wiki.

Feel free to jump in and help continue to evolve OpenSocial for use in enterprise environments.

Posted by Mark Weitzel, IBM SWG Strategy & Technology, Emerging Standards Team

Data Robotics, Inc., the company that delivers the best data storage experience ever, today announced that its DroboElite virtualised data storage... Read more at VMblog.com.