Web Development Live

Chief has adopted a new mount configurator on its site. As a complement to the MountFinder database, which links flat-panel and projectors with compatible mounts, MountBuilder helps visitors, mainly custom integrators, virtually build a set-up using the proper equipment.

MountBuilder automatically calculates things like weight capacity and drop distance as parts are added to a system. Integrators can create a log-in name and password, then save a configuration, and go back and edit parts or quantities at any time as the job changes. Once a configuration is completed, installers can create a PDF with a virtual image to include with a proposal, along with Chief’s Easy Bid Spec Form.

“We are often told by customers that we offer so many mount accessories and applications that it’s hard to know which accessories to choose for each application,” explained Laurie Englert, Director of Marketing at Chief Manufacturing. “With the goal of making this easier for the customer, the team went to work and came up with this incredible concept. We’ve shown it to customers and they are thrilled to get a visual tool of the many different options.”

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Synplicity, supplier of solutions for the design and verification of semiconductors, has announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to be acquired by Synopsys, a provider of software and IP for semiconductor design and manufacturing.

When completed, the acquisition will expand Synplicity product portfolio and extend the market reach of its industry leading products. Under the terms of the agreement, Synopsys will pay USD 8 cash per Synplicity share, resulting in a gross transaction value of approximately USD 227 million, and approximately USD 188 million net of cash acquired. The transaction is expected to close in the second calendar quarter of 2008, and after the closing, Synplicity will become part of Synopsys, and Synplicity stock will cease trading. ynplicity strong product portfolio, expertise, and customer reach will be ideal complements to Synopsys, said Aart deGeus, chairman and CEO of Synopsys.

he combination will expand our presence in the systems and mid-tier market segments, will support our strategy to provide rapid prototyping capabilities to a broad set of customers to enable much faster software development, and will enhance Synplicity already strong offering in the FPGA implementation market.The acquisition is expected to help the companies accelerate the revenue growth in the rapidly growing market for SoC verification solutions. According to the Synplicity, the acquisition also provides the opportunity to leverage Synopsys advanced IC technology to further improve Synplicity FPGA synthesis products, and Synplicity will gain an expanded product portfolio with which to serve its approximately 1,800 customers.

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By mid-afternoon the dairies had been cleaned out of the cookies and Mayell, 21 at the time, was back at the bakery that week to cook up another storm. He sold 5000 cookies the first week. The first years sales hit $240,000 and in the following years sales kept doubling.
Cookie Time was on the road — and has not really looked back since growing from zero to $19 million turnover in 25 years.
Mayell takes pride in the survival of his snacks business when so many food products come and go.
He has introduced new products which have flopped, but his chocolate chip cookie has had a 25-year shelf life that few would have predicted and made him a millionaire at 32, a couple of years off his youthful goal of 30.
The tale of this small business made good is one not of luck but of hard graft, setting goals and focusing on achieving them.
Mayell, one of the countrys best known entrepreneurs, chewed through a lot of petrol back then, visiting 71 dairies, 70 of which said they would try selling the cookies. He approached more than half a dozen bakeries before he found one which would rent him space at night. He has been grateful since to baker Paul Horniblow who gave him that break.
The idea came from the United States where Mrs Fields hot chocolate chip cookies had taken off and Mrs Fields stores were popping up all over the show. Every self-respecting American mum had a chocolate chip cookie recipe and Mayell asked one of his friends there to send him one.
He had been working over there promoting and marketing skiing and saved $10,000 which he used to try two other failed entrepreneurial ideas before having a crack at the cookie business.
Months later, Mayell was joined in the business by younger brother Guy.
The firms frontman, Mayell describes their partnership as complementary. He has his head in the clouds while Guys got his feet on the ground. It has worked well for them.
A couple of times during our history we were actually technically insolvent and it was only through the good grace of suppliers that we kept going.
Mayell enjoys the storytelling. Believe it or not, the famous chocolate chip cookie was seen as a health food when it was launched in 1983 because it contained fresh eggs and flour.
What was the secret of success for a small business which has become almost an institution in the snacks market?
Mayell says firstly the quality of the product is one of the key reasons for its survival. The cookies have just the right amount of chocolate and are made of ingredients you would have in your cupboard at home. They contain no artificial flavourings or preservatives and it shows in a superior taste, he says. Price is way down the list of considerations. The cookie had to be delicious to succeed.
In 1983 there was little in between a chocolate bar and a pie or a filled roll that could be bought at a dairy or a service station. His chocolate chip cookie filled a gap. Although sweet, it was seen as a food whereas a confectionery bar was not.
Selling them in a glass cookie jar, blown on the West Coast, placed on the dairy or service station counter was a stroke of marketing genius. It made the product look international in 1983. The cookies were the right idea at the right time.
For a food business distribution can be tricky, especially if the distributor is selling competing products. Cookie Time overcame that by developing a system of franchised distributors dedicated to Cookie Time products. The 45 distributors get a cut of the sales to retailers. Each week they visit between 100 and 150 customers to replenish stocks which means the product remains fresh.
Over the years Cookie Time has launched dozens of new products but none comes anywhere near the success of the original chocolate chip cookie, except for One Square Meal, a health bar introduced in 2005.
I think that product could carry on for 20 years. It was eaten by a lot of sports people. But the original cookie remains the top seller for Cookie Time.
Other products introduced over the years were Christmas Cookies, which sell in buckets, distributed by students. The buckets of cookies sell for $14. Christmas cookies were the solution to the worrying fall in sales they noticed each December, with sales not getting back to normal until April. They put that down to less buying of cookies and similar food in the summer and came up with the Christmas product.
Mayells restless energy saw him successfully tackle IT products. Several years ago he set up another company, TeleMessenger, which has developed IT services. One is Aristotle, a web and phone-based personal development programme he launched with his wife Melanie in 2005 which will call you up each day if you want and encourage and cajole you as well as play you inspirational messages from prominent people.
Mayell is into personal development and goal setting to achieve what you want in life and is a firm believer that out of crises come solutions which can prove beneficial for a small firm.
In 1987, four years after founding the business, he took 18 months out to travel, including completing a personal development course in the United States where he met Melanie, also from Christchurch. During that time Guy ran the business and paid him $600 a week as a way of buying 50% of the business.
His second IT business is Springdoo which allows you to send a voice message via email and was sold to a British buyer last year and is listed on Britains alternative share market.
Another, Santacall, is a service aimed at children and families where a pre-recorded and voice-prompted Santa asks children over the phone what they want for Christmas, records their replies and then sends the recording to parents. This Christmas, Santacall recorded 20,000 requests.
Theres no thoughts of selling up though hes had about half a dozen approaches to buy over the years, seriously considered one but the price was not good enough.
On a really good day we could have sold the company for a couple of million, he says.
Business owners will, like he did, go through phases of waning enthusiasm for a business they have created.
The firm celebrates its 25th with a party next weekend with events and cookies at 1983 prices at the Templeton factory, 15km south of Christchurch.

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Casio has announced the EXILIM EX-F1 camera that can shoot up to 60 frames per second or movies at 1,200 frames per second at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas.The camera has a 6-megapixel complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) sensor and a 12x zoom range. When using the sensor at its full resolution, the camera can take up to 60 images in a high-speed burst, with different frame rates possible. For example, a photographer can set the camera to take 60 shots in 1 second or 5 shots per second for 12 seconds, the company said.The high-speed shooting and super slow-motion features are a first in consumer cameras, being typically found on much more expensive and dedicated professional models. Their inclusion in the Exilim Pro EX-F1 tops a two-year development project by Casio that sought to come up with just such a new feature, said Takashi Onoda, an engineer at Casio’s research center that developed the camera.The camera can also capture movies at VGA resolution at a recording speed of 300 fps, 600 fps or 1,200 fps, which means it can record movies for replay in ultra-slow motion, a function that according to Casio has only been possible so far with a limited range of professional movie equipment.Back in September Casio said it was expecting the product to be available in the next 2 years, four months on its here and will be in the shops in March for around USD 1000.

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Casio has announced the EXILIM EX-F1 camera that can shoot up to 60 frames per second or movies at 1,200 frames per second at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas.The camera has a 6-megapixel complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) sensor and a 12x zoom range. When using the sensor at its full resolution, the camera can take up to 60 images in a high-speed burst, with different frame rates possible. For example, a photographer can set the camera to take 60 shots in 1 second or 5 shots per second for 12 seconds, the company said.The high-speed shooting and super slow-motion features are a first in consumer cameras, being typically found on much more expensive and dedicated professional models. Their inclusion in the Exilim Pro EX-F1 tops a two-year development project by Casio that sought to come up with just such a new feature, said Takashi Onoda, an engineer at Casio’s research center that developed the camera.The camera can also capture movies at VGA resolution at a recording speed of 300 fps, 600 fps or 1,200 fps, which means it can record movies for replay in ultra-slow motion, a function that according to Casio has only been possible so far with a limited range of professional movie equipment.Back in September Casio said it was expecting the product to be available in the next 2 years, four months on its here and will be in the shops in March for around USD 1000.

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Casio has announced the EXILIM EX-F1 camera that can shoot up to 60 frames per second or movies at 1,200 frames per second at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas.The camera has a 6-megapixel complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) sensor and a 12x zoom range. When using the sensor at its full resolution, the camera can take up to 60 images in a high-speed burst, with different frame rates possible. For example, a photographer can set the camera to take 60 shots in 1 second or 5 shots per second for 12 seconds, the company said.The high-speed shooting and super slow-motion features are a first in consumer cameras, being typically found on much more expensive and dedicated professional models. Their inclusion in the Exilim Pro EX-F1 tops a two-year development project by Casio that sought to come up with just such a new feature, said Takashi Onoda, an engineer at Casio’s research center that developed the camera.The camera can also capture movies at VGA resolution at a recording speed of 300 fps, 600 fps or 1,200 fps, which means it can record movies for replay in ultra-slow motion, a function that according to Casio has only been possible so far with a limited range of professional movie equipment.Back in September Casio said it was expecting the product to be available in the next 2 years, four months on its here and will be in the shops in March for around USD 1000.

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Casio has announced the EXILIM EX-F1 camera that can shoot up to 60 frames per second or movies at 1,200 frames per second at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas.The camera has a 6-megapixel complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) sensor and a 12x zoom range. When using the sensor at its full resolution, the camera can take up to 60 images in a high-speed burst, with different frame rates possible. For example, a photographer can set the camera to take 60 shots in 1 second or 5 shots per second for 12 seconds, the company said.The high-speed shooting and super slow-motion features are a first in consumer cameras, being typically found on much more expensive and dedicated professional models. Their inclusion in the Exilim Pro EX-F1 tops a two-year development project by Casio that sought to come up with just such a new feature, said Takashi Onoda, an engineer at Casio’s research center that developed the camera.The camera can also capture movies at VGA resolution at a recording speed of 300 fps, 600 fps or 1,200 fps, which means it can record movies for replay in ultra-slow motion, a function that according to Casio has only been possible so far with a limited range of professional movie equipment.Back in September Casio said it was expecting the product to be available in the next 2 years, four months on its here and will be in the shops in March for around USD 1000.

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NEW HAVEN, Conn. - All that Hillary Rodham Clinton would become - all that inspires her allies and her enemies alike - emerged during her years roaming the Gothic buildings of Yale Law School.She helped edit a journal that included cartoon police-pigs and that published a self-aggrandizing essay by a Black Panther who’d been convicted of murder. Yet she also helped calm a politically inflamed campus.She nurtured an interest in using the law to aid the needy - especially children - that remains integral to her politics, but which opponents use to pummel her values.She projected an intelligence that impressed many, but that could be cool and intimidating.And she met fellow student Bill Clinton and developed the first stirrings of a unique partnership that’s already made American history - and that she hopes will make more.On the campaign trail, Clinton highlights her childhood in middle-class Park Ridge, Ill. She never mentions her education at one of America’s most prestigious law schools, which was at least as important in developing the worldview that animates her campaign, an experience in which time and place combined to influence the paths and policies she’d pursue.”Much of what I believe, and much of what I have worked for is directly related to my time at the law school,” Clinton told a Yale audience in 1992.Yale was no typical elite law school stamping out high-dollar associates for white-shoe firms. Small, with a class of about 200 - perhaps 25 of them women - the school emphasized using the law for social change. It attracted students “interested in a public service career,” said Douglas Eakeley, one of Bill Clinton’s roommates.Its lessons reverberate through Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign: In a recent speech, she declared that overhauling the American health-care system was “a moral question” because it’s “unequal and unfair.”Hillary Rodham arrived at Yale in 1969 a minor celebrity, thanks to her commencement speech at equally elite Wellesley College outside Boston, where she rebuked a senator who was sitting nearby.”You knew she was impressive, although you might not know why,” classmate Paul Helmke said. “She held herself as someone that was going to be good at whatever she wanted to do. There was sort of an aura about her. Even then.”With that came a no-nonsense demeanor.”You certainly wouldn’t want to fall into her bad graces,” Eakeley said. “I don’t think she suffered fools gladly.”Rodham gained more prominence the second semester of her first year at Yale Law, when it seemed “the whole place was falling apart the most intense year in the history of Yale Law School,” said Laura Kalman, who wrote “Yale Law School and the Sixties: Revolt and Reverberations.”Several Black Panthers were on trial for murder in New Haven. The campus, opened to New Left demonstrators associated with the trial, became a circus. Downtown business owners, fearing violence, boarded up their windows. A law library was set afire. The shooting deaths of four student demonstrators at Kent State University in Ohio by National Guardsmen further enraged campuses nationwide.Rodham - sympathetic to the angry left but insistent that its grievances could be resolved within the system - moderated a tense campus meeting at which violence seemed to percolate under the surface, as students debated how to respond to Kent State and issues specific to Yale.Quoting an unnamed student, Kalman wrote: “Hillary did what nowadays would be international summitry - flying back and forth between sides,” maintaining credibility with all, impressing faculty and fellow students, helping to keep New Haven peaceful.Yale also introduced Rodham to children’s issues, through work for the Children’s Defense Fund and New Haven legal-aid lawyer Penn Rhodeen. Children would be a passion throughout Rodham’s career: serving on the board of the Children’s Defense Fund, writing “It Takes a Village” as first lady, working on children’s health issues in Arkansas and Washington.Rhodeen remembers Rodham as “a vision in purple. She had on this sheepskin coat driving a purple Gremlin, and she had long Gloria Steinem hair and Gloria Steinem glasses”; a typical early ’70s look, “only more so.” They worked on a child custody case that sparked a deep interest in children’s rights.”She had a connection with this issue which was kind of astonishing to me,” Rhodeen said. “Remember, she was just out of college. When you’re that young, the last thing you want to do is think about children. That struck me right away. Why is she so into this?”Years later, Rhodeen learned that Rodham’s mother had been abandoned by her parents and, at age 8, put in charge of her 3-year-old sister on a cross-country train to live a Dickensian existence with relatives.”Hillary talks about being very moved by that,” Rhodeen said. “That would be enough, honestly, that would loom. I’m fully prepared to think that’s formative in Hillary’s family story.”Much later, those emerging passions provided fodder for Hillary-haters to portray her as an anti-family radical.In the summer of 1971, Rodham worked at an Oakland, Calif., law firm at which at least two partners had been members of the Communist Party; one, Robert Treuhaft, had been a leading lawyer for the party. The firm previously had defended Black Panthers.At a hearing of the Democratic National Committee in Boston, she urged that the party’s 1972 platform “respond to a growing movement to extend civil and political rights to children,” The New York Times reported. In 1973, she published an article in the Harvard Educational Review that asserted a broad view of children’s rights.Then there’s her work as associate editor of the Yale Review of Law and Social Action, whose incendiary content included an issue featuring four forbidding soldiers on its cover, wearing gas masks and armed with rifles with fixed bayonets.Many anti-Clinton books, articles and Web sites mine the Yale years; the late conservative writer Barbara Olson wrote that the Harvard article “reveals a leftist ideologue, dedicated to centrally directed social engineering, dismissive of the traditional role of the family, and interested in children primarily as levers with which to obtain political power.”Viewed through the context of time and place, there’s less there than Clinton’s opponents would like.Beyond its overheated coverage of the Black Panther trial, much of the review’s work focused on the law as social equalizer, including issues such as tenants’ rights, with a heavy period dose of privileged young white guilt.Mal Burnstein, the partner for whom Rodham did the most work during her summer in Oakland, said “the work she did with us was law. It was not politics.”Burnstein said that Clinton might have done research on a case challenging whether government doctors should be required to take loyalty oaths. Much of her work was legal research for the firm, which specialized in civil rights and civil liberties for Oakland’s poorest, including tenant-landlord disputes and domestic and personal injury cases.Her Harvard article was more about emerging legal theory than a public policy proposal, Rhodeen said.”You’re giving voice to a whole area of the law that really wasn’t thought about,” Rhodeen said. “She no more wants to pit children against their parents than the man on the moon. The thing is, when the child’s just not getting the essentials of being able to grow up as a reasonably whole and secure human being, you gotta pay attention. And then what is the apparatus that will ensure attention is paid appropriately? So how you conceive that and what structures have to be in there and how those structures could play out, worst-case scenario, you have to think about that kind of stuff.”Rodham’s time at Yale also was important for personal reasons: She met Bill Clinton in the cavernous law library in the spring of 1971. Their first date was at an art museum, and they eventually lived together on the first floor of a rickety two-story wood-frame house near the campus.Clinton was a year behind Rodham. She remained a year after she could have graduated, taking courses in child development.While the pair’s relationship has been dissected endlessly, Rhodeen thinks it came down to something elemental: “She was gaga over him.”They also shared something else: Yale provided the forum for the first display of their professional partnership. The two were teammates for the Barrister’s Union Prize Trial in the spring of 1972.In presenting their case together, they honed the diversity of skills and division of labor that they’d later deploy to land Bill Clinton in the Oval Office.”Even then, you could tell the difference in style,” Eakeley said. “Both keenly intelligent. But Bill Clinton with a much more ingratiating and folksy approach to both the jury and the witnesses. Hillary much more direct, more analytical. Both effective in their own way. They performed beautifully as a team. They complemented each other.”They lost. But in loss came opportunity.The next year, Watergate prosecutor John Doar came to New Haven to judge the trial, of which Rodham was now a leader. He hired several Yalies, including Rodham, to work on the Nixon impeachment inquiry.Well-networked, ready to use the law to pursue her passions, Rodham left Yale far more prepared for a powerful, activist future than the average young woman from middle-class Park Ridge.”It was a completely different sort of world then,” classmate Joan Tumpson said. “I don’t think the women in my class had the training to think strategically about their careers. I’m not sure I’d say that about Hillary. She always seemed to be two or three steps ahead.”

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Casio has announced the EXILIM EX-F1 camera that can shoot up to 60 frames per second or movies at 1,200 frames per second at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas.The camera has a 6-megapixel complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) sensor and a 12x zoom range. When using the sensor at its full resolution, the camera can take up to 60 images in a high-speed burst, with different frame rates possible. For example, a photographer can set the camera to take 60 shots in 1 second or 5 shots per second for 12 seconds, the company said.The high-speed shooting and super slow-motion features are a first in consumer cameras, being typically found on much more expensive and dedicated professional models. Their inclusion in the Exilim Pro EX-F1 tops a two-year development project by Casio that sought to come up with just such a new feature, said Takashi Onoda, an engineer at Casio’s research center that developed the camera.The camera can also capture movies at VGA resolution at a recording speed of 300 fps, 600 fps or 1,200 fps, which means it can record movies for replay in ultra-slow motion, a function that according to Casio has only been possible so far with a limited range of professional movie equipment.Back in September Casio said it was expecting the product to be available in the next 2 years, four months on its here and will be in the shops in March for around USD 1000.

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The company on Monday is expected to announce that it has acquired an 11-person start-up, Virtual Ubiquity, that has built a free web word processor called “Buzzword”. Financial terms were not disclosed.

The move expands Adobe’s collaborative software services and steps up its competition with Microsoft and a host of other web application providers, including Google.

Adobe also is scheduled to announce a service, code-named “Share”, that allows people to invite others to view and access documents stored by Adobe. Documents can be embedded inside a web page as well. The service, which is still in testing mode, will offer users 1GB of storage for free.

Adobe executives are scheduled to detail these initiatives at its Max 2007 developer and designer conference, which starts on Monday in Chicago.

Microsoft, meanwhile, is expected on Monday to detail its own document collaboration service, Office Live Workspace, a free online tool for viewing, sharing and storing Office documents online.

In other Max announcements, Adobe plans to release the beta version of its desktop video viewer, Adobe Media Player, which is now being used by CBS, PBS and Yahoo to distribute multimedia content with advertising. Adobe Media Player version 1.0 is due in the first half of next year.

The technology underpinning these applications is Adobe’s Flash Player and AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime), software that lets web applications run offline. The programs were written using its Flex development tool.

The company’s strategy is to assemble a series of collaboration products and services on top of its development platform, said Erik Larson, director of marketing and product management at Adobe. Buzzword will complement its existing online services, Adobe Connect and Create PDF, he said.

“Our focus is on document collaboration around a lot of different kinds of documents,” Larson said. “There is a lot that can be done with the Adobe platform, and there are still unrealised promises.”

Larson said Adobe will focus on online collaboration of “high fidelity” documents, or those that appear the same on-screen and when printed out.

The plan is to make these applications free for paid premium services to businesses.

Rick Treitman, chief executive of Virtual Ubiquity, said his company decided to use Adobe developer technologies because they were better than other available programming methods. Adobe invested in the company last year as part of a venture fund set up to promote applications on Flash and AIR.

What sets Buzzword apart from other online word processors is the pagination; it allows people to get an accurate view of how a document will print out as the document is edited. It also has the ability to embed graphics, track changes and organise files.

“Flex and Flash were the means to where we want to go. No-one else realised how powerful it was as a virtual machine,” Treitman said.

During the Max keynote address on Monday, Adobe executives are expected to show off other rich internet applications written for Flash or AIR.

One of those will be an AIR version of Pronto, an email application from CommuniGate Systems that is expected to be released next spring when AIR 1.0 is available.

John Doyle, CommuniGate Systems’ vice president of business development, said Adobe has the wherewithal to build a line of compelling and simple-to-use rich internet applications that could lure businesses away from Microsoft Office.

“If anybody has the financial strength, the market reach and the track record of making very good applications, it’s Adobe,” Doyle said. “They’re able to overnight ship applications through Flash to browsers that will be accessible by 96 percent of the users in the world. That’s huge.”

IBM last month introduced a beta version of Lotus Symphony, a set of traditional desktop applications that the company is offering as a standards-based alternative to Office.

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