If you’re a budding Front-End genius with a strong background in programming fundamentals and a passion to learn, [Yahoo! would] like to hear from you.
…
The vision of the Juku program is to provide top-quality training in frontend technologies (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP) with the ultimate goal of producing great frontend engineers. Participants are put through 3-4 months of intensive training taught by some of the best frontend engineers at Yahoo!, focusing not just on concepts, but also on best practices in terms of maintainability, accessibility, and performance.

I like that Yahoo is addressing the lack of CS dept. attention toward web development skills, while so many social websites bring web programming into day-to-day lingo. And in the ashes of the Yahoo-Microsoft merger coverage (disclosure: I work for partly MSFT), it is nice to see focus continue on efforts like education, even with so many open questions about where Yahoo heads next.

For many credit card firms this meant massive losses, and many officials were concerned that all credit card users would suffer as a result of these losses. It appears that they were right.

Over the past couple of years credit card fees, charges, and interest rates have rocketed, as the firms try to claw back the lost revenue from the capped penalty charges.The following Credit Cards are for People with Bad Credit or less than perfect credit. These cards may be able to help build, rebuild or re-establish your credit if you make on-time payments with all of your creditors and maintain your account balances below the credit limits. Choose from both secured and unsecured credit card offers below.
badcreditoffers.com is solution for you have bad credit credit cards. They can give service for comparison website for people with bad credit. Badcreditoffers.com featuring credit cards, home loans, auto loans, personal loans, and much more. You can apply for the offer that’’s right for them, and by making payments on time you can start down the road toward rebuilding their credit and, perhaps, your financial future.

So here’s a progress report:

Creating an identity

The first thing I did was to decide on a name and create a logo for the new business venture. In my opinion, it is very important to get this out of the way first, as you need to be able to visualize your dream business and without a name / logo, that’ll never happen.

Business Cards

Many people will argue that business cards is not needed for online professionals, as their website / blog / online portfolio becomes their “business card”. Even though I might tend to agree with that argument, a lot of corporates still prefer exchanging business cards - so it is better to be prepared (and have your business card ready) when go to a project pitch with the big-wig corporates…

Anyway, this means that I had a 1000 cards printed for {radiiate} (will still post photos of them, when I find the inspiration to photograph them ) and they’ve already been pretty valuable on a few occassions.

Registering a company

This is super, super important - you have got to distinguish between your own, personal finances and that of the company. So I’ve registered a Closed Corporation (CC) in South Africa - basically a Limited Liability Company - to allow me to have a separate legal entity to work with. Since I bought a shelf company (I needed to have a company that was already registered on 1 March this year for tax purposes), I’ve filed for the changes to the name and members’ details - which should take about 2 / 3 weeks to be approved.

Hiring!?

Since I don’t have offices yet (I’m still living the freelance life and working from home), I haven’t been able (or interested really) to employ anyone full-time. I have however established relationships with a bunch other freelancers, to whom I can outsource work on-demand. In addition, I have found a local designer / coder to basically work for me on a freelance basis, whereby I send him work on a daily basis and he bills me per hour (as I’m booking out 90% of his time at the moment, he is almost an employee, except for the fact that his remuneration is not part of any of my overheads).

Remaining To-Do’s

I’ve still got quite a bit to do, before I can say that I’m running a new business… Here’s the most important things that still needs some attention:

• Bank Accounts. I’ve already got a meeting at the bank later this week and I need to get my business accounts sorted out ASAP, as all of my current income is going straight into my personal account. On the other side, I’m not overly keen on getting more bank accounts, as all it means is that I have to pay more monthly bank charges…
• Office Space. I don’t even want to talk about this, as it has been a real mission finding office space in my area! I’m not keen on driving more than 10 minutes to work every day and I can’t afford a massive place - which means that it has been difficult finding something appropriate. But I’d really like to move out to an office by the end of July to allow me to collaborate more efficiently and have a dedicated meeting space to meet with clients.

So what do you make of all of this? Got any experience in this regard?

(Image by ~dontvu219)

On this first blog review I will cover the design and layout aspects of FavBrowser.com, a blog coming from one of our readers (I asked his permission to review it).

In future reviews we will cover different aspects, like search engine optimization, content quality, promotion strategy and so on. If you took the time to watch the video, please let me know if you would like to see more of them, and if you have any suggestions for topics or formats.

If for some reason you can’t see the video player, here is the link for the YouTube page: http://youtube.com/watch?v=WI074pRX13w.

On this first blog review I will cover the design and layout aspects of FavBrowser.com, a blog coming from one of our readers (I asked his permission to review it).

In future reviews we will cover different aspects, like search engine optimization, content quality, promotion strategy and so on. If you took the time to watch the video, please let me know if you would like to see more of them, and if you have any suggestions for topics or formats.

If for some reason you can’t see the video player, here is the link for the YouTube page: http://youtube.com/watch?v=WI074pRX13w.

When asked about how to get more people actually thinking about and working on things that might end up changing the world, he answered:

There are a number of barriers in place. Let me give an example. In our first founders’ letter in 2004, we talked about the risk profile with respect to doing new innovations. We said we would do some things that would have only a 10% chance of making $1 billion over the long term. But we don’t put many people on those things; 90% work on everything else. So that’s not a big risk. And if you look at where many of our new features come from, it’s from these riskier investments.

Even when we started Google, we thought, “Oh, we might fail,” and we almost didn’t do it. The reason we started is that Stanford said, “You guys can come back and finish your Ph.D.s if you don’t succeed.” Probably that one decision caused Google to be created. It’s not clear we would have done it otherwise. We had all this internal risk we had just invented. It’s not that we were going to starve or not get jobs or not have a good life or whatever, but you have this fear of failing and of doing something new, which is very natural. In order to do stuff that matters, you need to overcome that.

This advice is good for pretty much anything you decide to carry on in your life. Blogging and online ventures are no exception. If you want to succeed on the web, you will need to let your fear of failure go away, and to try new and innovative things.

When asked about how to get more people actually thinking about and working on things that might end up changing the world, he answered:

There are a number of barriers in place. Let me give an example. In our first founders’ letter in 2004, we talked about the risk profile with respect to doing new innovations. We said we would do some things that would have only a 10% chance of making $1 billion over the long term. But we don’t put many people on those things; 90% work on everything else. So that’s not a big risk. And if you look at where many of our new features come from, it’s from these riskier investments.

Even when we started Google, we thought, “Oh, we might fail,” and we almost didn’t do it. The reason we started is that Stanford said, “You guys can come back and finish your Ph.D.s if you don’t succeed.” Probably that one decision caused Google to be created. It’s not clear we would have done it otherwise. We had all this internal risk we had just invented. It’s not that we were going to starve or not get jobs or not have a good life or whatever, but you have this fear of failing and of doing something new, which is very natural. In order to do stuff that matters, you need to overcome that.

This advice is good for pretty much anything you decide to carry on in your life. Blogging and online ventures are no exception. If you want to succeed on the web, you will need to let your fear of failure go away, and to try new and innovative things.

There are all sorts of tips and tools included, from reducing the number of HTTP requests to compressing images and playing with caches. Here are six articles that I wrote on the topic some time ago (they were included on the list):

1. Speed Up Your Site: Optimize Images
2. Speed Up Your Site: Image Formats
3. Speed Up Your Site: Optimize your CSS
4. Speed Up Your Site: Use a slash on your links
5. Speed Up Your Site: Use the height and width tags
6. Speed Up Your Site: Reduce the HTTP Requests

Remember though, the first step towards a fast website is actually the hosting company that you choose.

There are all sorts of tips and tools included, from reducing the number of HTTP requests to compressing images and playing with caches. Here are six articles that I wrote on the topic some time ago (they were included on the list):

1. Speed Up Your Site: Optimize Images
2. Speed Up Your Site: Image Formats
3. Speed Up Your Site: Optimize your CSS
4. Speed Up Your Site: Use a slash on your links
5. Speed Up Your Site: Use the height and width tags
6. Speed Up Your Site: Reduce the HTTP Requests

Remember though, the first step towards a fast website is actually the hosting company that you choose.

Sponsor:

Web Apps

The Favorite Web Apps of RWW Readers

A couple of weeks ago we held a competition, asking you to tell us what web 2.0 apps most excite you currently. We had a great response, with 113 comments. I decided to list each web app mentioned in a spreadsheet and count up the most popular. What surprised me was the number of web apps that got at least one mention: 161. No doubt some of those were left by the developers themselves, but many were left by seemingly passionate users. The most popular were the usual suspects: Twitter, Flickr, FriendFeed, Google Reader. See our post for the full list.

BlogRize: Social News Gets Personal

The idea behind BlogRize is that the "wisdom of the crowds" works best if you have the right crowd. While sites like Digg.com have chosen to go mainstream, BlogRize believes that finding the best content from the web should be a more personal experience. To achieve this goal, BlogRize's solution is to build news communities based on the blogs you like reading the most...blogs like the one you're reading now, for example.

Related:

• How Best to Submit Our (Or Any) Stories to Digg
• The Decline and Fall of Quality on Digg
• Mixx Launches Innovative API - Continues to Challenge the Digg Experience
• Yahoo! Tries to Spread Buzz, Adds Widgets, RSS

Facebook Hacked Again

A report on BBC's technology program, Click, has exposed yet another security flaw in Facebook - one that could comprise users' privacy. This particular hack involves using a Facebook application to steal a users personal information - and the information of all their friends - without the user's knowledge.

Related:

• Report: In Emergencies, People Turn to Facebook

Adobe to Publish Flash File Format Specs

Adobe announced this week the "Open Screen Project", which will seek to create a consistent runtime environment for rich media across a myriad of devices. In other words, Flash on the web, mobile, desktop, television, and other consumer electronic devices. As part of this initiative, Adobe will be releasing the file format specifications for Flash (.swf and .flv/f4v) and removing all licensing restrictions involved with the Flash format. In the future, the project will be expanded to include AIR.

YouTube Aims to Monetize in a Post-TV Era

Google CEO Eric Schmidt made big promises of mysterious, highly-interactive new methods of monetizing YouTube in a CNBC interview this week. "We believe the best products are coming out this year," he said. "And they're new products. They're not announced. They're not just putting in-line ads in the things that people are trying."

As all established media (not just newspapers) face a growing challenge from the internet, with its on-demand, highly personalized and infinitely interactive social connections - can TV, and TV on the internet, learn keep up with the times?

SEE MORE WEB APPS COVERAGE IN OUR WEB APPS CATEGORY

Web Trends

Dancing With Gorillas: The New Web Era

This week we ran an intriguing 3-part series, by Bernard Lunn, on the new Web. Part 1 was The Whatchamacallit, Post Recession Phase Transition, Part 2 was The Emerging Main Street Web. Part 3, Dancing With Gorillas, is highlighted here -- but do read the whole series!

The new Web era is about the mainstream. This is when millions of small businesses and digital free agents make a good living by providing better products to a much more savvy market. This is the point in the Crossing the Chasm model when all the innovation stops, start-ups get consolidated into a few mega players and it all gets a bit boring until the next wave of innovation hits us.

Nevermind The Recession, The Web Will Change The World!

Since the Web 2.0 Expo last week, two parallel questions are being asked about the current era of the Web:

a) Are we about to enter into a recession, and if so does that mean an end to the current 'web 2.0' era of innovation in web technology?;
b) Why aren't we (meaning startups) tackling the "big, hard problems" with web technologies?

In this post we explore those questions. See also Sarah Perez's post entitled Wanted: 5 Startups To Change the World, in which she commented on Umair Haque's open challenge to Silicon Valley: find a problem to fix that will change the world for the better and he will help you do it.

Interview: How Will Live Mesh Integrate With Windows Live?

One of the highlights last week at Web 2.0 Expo was the launch of Microsoft's new cloud computing play, Live Mesh. Mesh is a new development platform for syncing user data between the desktop and the Web, and across multiple devices (currently just Windows computers, but it'll support mobile, Mac computers and other devices in the future). It can sync data for single users, as well as create shared spaces for multiple users. Currently Live Mesh is in "technology preview", so it is not a finished product. Even so, we couldn't help but notice the overlap between Live Mesh and a number of Windows Live products.

To find out more about how Live Mesh will integrate with Windows Live, RWW editor Richard MacManus interviewed Microsoft's Brian Hall - GM of Development for the Windows Live Platform.

An Ode to RSS, On RSS Awareness Day

There's just a few hours left in what should be an international holiday - RSS Awareness Day. Thought up by the good folks at DailyBlogTips.com and unknown until this morning to even RSS forefather Dave Winer, RSS Awareness Day is a fantastic idea. May 1st is a lot of things already but what the heck, let's pile another one on. We'd like to take a few minutes to reflect on the world-changing tool that RSS is, and consider how different our lives would be without it.

Related:

• Can Web Apps Get Too Drunk on Aggregation?

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

AltSearchEngines Update

By ASE Editor Charles Knight:

This past week at AltSearchEngines was a very rich one for the quality and quantity of our Guest Authors. On Sunday, Erick Schonfeld wrote a post entitled Is keyword search about to hit it's breaking point? On Tuesday, Stephen Arnold conducted an interview with Exalead's François Bourdoncle. Wednesday Nitin Karandikar reviewed the recent Alternative Search Engines Day, and Kaila Colbin from Search Insider wrote the intriguing "We're not a Google-killer" is the new Google-killer! Then we had a second interview when Susanne Koch of Pandia interviewed Venky Harinarayan, the co-founder of Kosmix. And finally Paul Heymann asked, "Can Social Bookmarking Improve Web Search?" We were very fortunate to have such a distinguished group of guest writers, and I hope you'll have time to read some of their posts.

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.