website: http://www.magumbytransport.com

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website: http://www.promote-my-brand.com

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website: http://www.maltapanorama.com

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It is reported that MITA Chairman Claudio Grech, said  the Student Software Offer is expected to attract some 20,000 students and teachers for a total value of €10 million.

This seems to be in stark contrast to the message brought across by various entities during an ‘Open Source Software Event’ held at the Pavilion Suite – Westin Dragonara Resort, St.Julians on the 28th of April 2011. Speakers included Jonathan Sage (Government Programmes Executive at IBM), Godwin Caruana (CTO, MITA),  Zachary Borg, Research Engineer (Marsec-XL),  Jonathan Camilleri Bowman (MD, 2i) as well as Claudio Grech (Chairman, MITA). The session was moderated by Vanessa Macdonald.  The message brought forward during this event was that Open Source Software (OSS) has become extremely stable in the past few years and needed a chance to become more widely accepted in schools and government institutions thus saving millions of Euros of the local taxpayers’ money.

Establishing such contracts with proprietary software companies surely does not contribute to this line of thought.

TimesOfMalta.com reports that

“Maltese students and teachers who attend or teach in state and non-state schools from kindergarten level to University will be able to acquire Windows 7 Professional Upgrade and Office Professional 2010 for €79.79, 86% cheaper than the current market price. Registrations from students and teachers to purchase the software will be accepted online and are expected to open in September 2011.“

and

“IT Minister Austin Gatt said that the relationship between the government and Microsoft, established a decade ago, was not only built on a commercial premise but above all, was intended to have spill-over benefits through value added initiatives for the wider society and economy.

Various Microsoft related initiatives had been launched over the past 10 years, including student software offers, the Microsoft Academies at the University of Malta and the Malta College of Arts, Science and Technology (MCAST), ICT training for teachers, the opportunity given to local students to participate in the global Imagine Cup Competition and others.

“Establishing strategic partnerships with the likes of Microsoft, and similar multinational companies have been vital in the improvement of Malta’s ranking in international benchmarks which has improved in various fronts year on year and has placed Malta on the ICT map,” added Dr Gatt.“

Read more on Timesofmalta.com and MITA for related articles.

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So what are QR codes?

The Quick Response (QR) code originated in Japan as an alternative to barcodes, and have only recently began to become popular within the Middle East and Europe. Although barcodes are a quick, convenient and largely accepted form of electronic representation of codes on most products, QR codes provides more detail in the code thus allowing for a richer content of data to be included. Up to 7,089 characters can be encoded in one symbol!

Text Message describing QR codes

With the technology of smart devices continually being updated, particularly within mobile internet, QR-Codes seemed the ideal solution to quickly and efficiently bring mobile phone users onto the mobile web. QR-Codes can be used to store all kinds of data including URLs (web addresses). This then enabled offline publications such as:

Cool Idea or What ?

'Branding' exercise !

Due to the QR codes’ tolerance to error correction, they can be printed or displayed on practically any medium to advertise online products.

One can challenge this error tolerance to be creative in their display. I chose the timeless PacMan theme for mine… no tattoos yet!

Where do I get one?

Want a custom built QR code for yourself or your organization ?

Rikworkshop have just designed, developed and launched Belfa Services’s website comprising details on the company’s services, its people, offices and vacancies.

website: http://www.belfaservices.eu

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Let’s take, for example, a small club with a hundred members to which you want to email a monthly newsletter. Instead of inserting each email address every month in the ‘TO:’ field, you would only do this once, give the list a name (eg: members) and use that nickname in the TO field from then on. Here’s how it’s done.

Step 1:

Update your contact list with your members’ email addresses.

Step 2:

Once ready, click on the ‘CONTACTS’ link in the left side pane of your Hotmail Live screen.

Step 3:

Select ‘MANAGE CATEGORIES’. This will display your categories page with any existing (including the default) Hotmail categories.

Step 4:

Click on ‘NEW’ to create a new category.

Step 5:

Start filling in the category details. Give it a unique nickname (in this case I will use Group A) and start typing in the members’ email addresses which you should already have created in the contact list.

To avoid having your email rated as spam, you should be very careful not to exceed unreasonable sized contacts category lists. What is unreasonable you may ask? Well, at the time of writing it appears that 100 contacts per category is considered high but these limits may be changed from time to time. I would recommend keeping the list below 50 contacts and creating a number of groups (Group A, Group B etc) and sending your mail shot in 2 or 3 different sessions instead. This will work well for communities or personal use. For more voluminous mailshot you should really use different online services which provide for mass emails.

Step 6:

Click on ‘SAVE’ when ready updating your contacts. You should be able to see your newly created category Group A in the list.

Step 7:

You are now ready to send your newsletter to your club members. Start with creating a new email. In order to safeguard your members’ email addresses it is recommended to place your members’ email addresses in the BCC: section instead of the TO: field.

If TO: is used, then all the email addresses (even if in a category list) will show on each members’ email message, consequently exposing other members’ personal address unnecessarily which can lead to abuse. BCC: (standing for Blind Carbon Copy) on the other hand ensures that all email addresses are ‘masked’ and remain hidden to all.

If your BCC: field does not show on screen under the TO: field, click on ‘Show Cc & Bcc’ link towards the right top of the screen.

Step 8:

Click on the Bcc: Button, then on Categories Tab and Select ‘Group A’ which should include all the members’ addresses in that group (in our case only 2 members were inserted).

Step 9:

Proceed with writing your email with an attractive subject line and some great content which your members will be pleased to read.

Click on ‘SEND’ to send the email !

The site contains professional medical writeups and personal experiences, as well as details on fund raising activities and social events.

website: http://www.starskidsmalta.com

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The latest release (v10) boasts better speed, simpler configuration options and better security. A first look at this claim follows:

Speed:

We use very simple techniques for measuring website load speed, I guess it’s the same metric everybody uses when opening up a webpage .. count!

Well www.cnn.com loaded twice as fast on Google Chrome than it did on Mozilla Firefox and four times as fast than Opera Browser. Again, www.timesofmalta.com loaded faster than the other browers as well as a few other websites which I consider really demanding on resources.

Simplicity

Chrome’s options used to open up in a separate window in previous versions. It now opens in a browser tab instead which gives one a familiar interface, complete with a context sensitive search option.

In simple terms, if you want to find options related to passwords, simply enter the word ‘password’ in the search field and bingo .. all options related to that key word are displayed. No more digging around to find that menu item that’s been eluding you for ages!

Simple? Yes!

Security

Google claim that every tab and window processes are now protected in what’s called a ‘sandbox’. Basically this means that every process runs in a silo completely separate from the other concurrent browser tabs/windows.So if a malicious program should attack a particular process, the rest should be unaffected. Even Adobe’s Flash and Acrobat plugins are individually protected from such abuse.

Regretfully .. I could not test this, but it sounds rather cool.

Verdict

As as web developer I’m a Mozilla Firefox advocate, but as a user I cannot but recommend the new features of Google Chrome. They’re innovative and practical and stick to standards, as do Firefox, Opera, Safari and a few other browsers (please note I have omitted Microsoft Explorer from the list .. and for a good reason).  If you haven’t tried Chrome .. give it a shot. If you have, then make sure you upgrade to the latest version. If it does not update automatically then head to the Options (spanner) icon and click on ‘About Google Chrome’ to start the update.

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This website contains a library of current and upcoming movies, categorized into a number of easy to browse sections – alphabetically, by genre, by media etc, and is also fully searchable on any title, actor and similar key words. All movies come with embedded synopsis and trailers, so you know exactly what your next choice is going to be about.

website: http://www.activizionmalta.com

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