New Google Analytics Facing Problems?

mashable.com: "From Tuesday to Wednesday, Analytics stopped gathering data for almost a full day, before returning sometime on Wednesday afternoon with the data intact..."

I'll be keeping an eye on this. If you are a client of J.Y. Design and experiencing any issues with your Google Analytics account, please get in touch.

Competitious: New product in the works

Competitious.com: "Competitious is an early beta release of a much more robust service we’ve been planning here at RivalSoft... The service will be a comprehensive web-based platform that helps companies manage and analyze all information about their competitors, and will incorporate almost all of the suggestions and feedback we've received on Competitious. The new service will also have a new name (which we are keeping under wraps for now). All of your data from Competitious will be migrated when our new service launches. We are aiming to launch the new service in 2-3 months..."

Competitious is a great service even in its current form. It's a handy way to organize a group of related Companies / URLs and attach articles to them, create a comparison matrix for them, and also monitor Alexa traffic. You can create multiple "projects" which makes it handy for doing different competitive scenarios. I've even used it as a quick research tool when looking into topics or new market trends.

Amazon officially announces long-rumored DRM-free music store

"Amazon announced this morning that it plans to launch a music store later this year that will sell unprotected MP3 files from thousands of record labels."

This is great for consumers - from the healthy competition point of view. iTunes has the integration advantage, so I think that the one company which could be sweating it the most from this announcement is eMusic.com - because they've been the leading non-DRM MP3 store. Depending on just how deep the Amazon catalog is, and what kind of pricing structure it adopts, eMusic could see its subscription service really suffer. Shows you how much pull Amazon has in the market, since eMusic has been doing MP3 downloads for years and the only thing it has been lacking are big labels and per-song pricing.



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Electric Rain Announces "Harmony" - Flash SWF to XAML Converter

Electric Rain Harmony - Flash SWF to XAML Converter - For WPF and Silverlight: "Announcing Electric Rain Harmony - Coming Summer 2007 A New Flash SWF to XAML-markup Converter Tool for Microsoft WPF and Silverlight Application Development... Electric Rain Harmony provides designers and developers with a fast and easy way to convert existing Flash SWF files (graphics and simple animations*) into Microsoft-based XAML mark-up for immediate use in the Microsoft WFP and Silverlight (formally WPF/E) platforms."

70 Expert Ideas For Better CSS Coding

via digg: "Smashing Magazine does it again with a superb list of little CSS tips & tricks to increase your productivity."

This is an excellent compilation of many of the tips and tricks posted to digg, but all rolled up in a nicely organized package with plenty of source-links to expand on the techniques outlined. There's definitely a buzz around what's to be considered "Best Practices" when it comes to CSS design and development. I see a strong opportunity out there for the development of a tool or app that puts a ui on top of these practices, making it easier to replicate across multiple projects.

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Genuine Fractals Print Pro 5 Released

"What's New in Genuine Fractals Print Pro 5: Enlarge your images over 1,000% with no loss in image quality... Genuine Fractals Print Pro 5 is a revolutionary step forward for image enlargements. We've taken the industry standard and given it a complete overhaul. New scaling technology, faster performance, new features, new user interface, greater ease of use and much more. Compare Genuine Fractals Print Pro 5 to any Photoshop scaling method or other third party plug-in, Genuine Fractals Print Pro 5 is the industry standard in image resizing."

Also, it has Adobe CS3 support and the Mac version is Universal Binary. I've been a fan of this Photoshop add-on for a number of years for use in Poster and Trade-show projects. It really does produce better image scaling results.

Google Analytics launches new reporting interface design

The new UI looks nice. Here are some highlights: It takes advantage of full browser width; it has a customizable dashboard; larger cleaner graphs; and the ability to email and export reports. I'm looking forward to digging deeper into this upgrade.

UPDATE: mashable.com has just posted a very in-depth look at the new UI complete with many screen shots.

Photobucket Acquired By MySpace

mashable.com: "It's the deal you never thought would happen: MySpace acquiring Photobucket, the"parasite" that fed off MySpace traffic and hosted a massive number of MySpace photos. There's no word on whether the $300M price tag, which Photobucket was being shopped around for, was met..."