We heard the talk and now here's the confirmation: Flash Player for mobile devices is officially dead. Adobe is reaffirming its commitment to "aggressively contribute" to HTML5, a platform with broader support and capabilities than Flash was ever able to deliver. Adobe will of course also be pushing developers to work in its AIR platform for a more native experience, and the company will continue to work on Flash Player for desktop operating systems, but one can't help but see the platform as a whole standing on fairly shaky footing at this point.

-source engadget.com

A couple of interesting things happened in the world of Web browser usage during October. The more significant one is that Internet Explorer's share of global browser usage dropped below 50 percent for the first time in more than a decade. Internet Explorer still retains a majority of the desktop browser market share, at 52.63 percent, a substantial 1.76 point drop from September. However, desktop browsing makes up only about 94 percent of Web traffic; the rest comes from phones and tablets, both markets in which Internet Explorer is all but unrepresented. As a share of the whole browser market, Internet Explorer has only 49.58 percent of users. Microsoft's browser first achieved a majority share in—depending on which numbers you look at—1998 or 1999. It reached its peak of about 95 percent share in 2004, and has been declining ever since.

-read the full article via arstechnica.com

Starting today, Quantum Dynamix will be paying homage to some of the great flash cartoons and animations of our time. We figured that The End of The World was as good a place to start as any. Let us know what you think and enjoy your weekend!

If you've stayed with friends who live in European cities, you've probably had an experience like this: You hop onto their WiFi or wired internet connection and realize it's really fast. Way faster than the one that you have at home. It might even make your own DSL or cable connection feel as sluggish as dialup.

So what's the difference? Engadget's reporting suggests a one-word answer: Government.

Not government spending. The UK's administration hasn't invested a penny in broadband infrastructure, and most of the network in the Netherlands has been built with private capital. (The city government in Amsterdam took a minority stake in the fiber network there, but that's an investment that will pay dividends if the network is profitable — and the private investors who own the majority share of the system plan to make sure that it will be.)

The game-changer in these two European countries has been government regulators who have forced more competition in the market for broadband.

-read the full article via engadget.com

Imagine you’re a small business owner. You have to choose between two propositions:

1. You can pay $62,500 for marketing. You’ll get a whole lot of customers coming through your door. No guarantees if they will ever come back, but they’ll come once.
2. I’ll pay you $21,000. You get $7,000 in about 5 days, another $7,000 in 30 days and the remainder in 60 days. In exchange, you’ll give my customers cheap products for the next year.

I’ve been working on local for a long time and I know it’s hard to get small businesses to spend money on advertising. Really hard. Even getting $200 a month ($2,400 a year) is a high hurdle to meet.

There’s no way a business will sign up for #1. Most merchants would laugh you out of the store if you asked for $60,000.

Except they are. In droves.

Although they sound completely different, #1 and #2 are really the same—it’s the Groupon business model.

Businesses are being sold incredibly expensive advertising campaigns that are disguised as “no risk” ways to acquire new customers. In reality, there’s a lot of risk. With a newspaper ad, the maximum you can lose is the amount you paid for the ad. With Groupon, your potential losses can increase with every Groupon customer who walks through the door and put the existence of your business at risk.

Groupon is not an Internet marketing business so much as it is the equivalent of a loan sharking business. The $21,000 that the business in this example gets for running a Groupon is essentially a very, very expensive loan.  They get the cash up front, but pay for it with deep discounts over time.  (This post applies to Groupon operations in the United States and Canada; it’s different in other parts of the world.)

In many cases, running a Groupon can be a terrible financial decision for merchants. Groupon’s financials also raise questions about its ongoing viability. Buying Groupon stock could be as bad a deal for investors as running a Groupon offer is for merchants.  This is my opinion, but I have some facts to back it up.

-read the full article via techcrunch.com

To make special characters and accented letters show up on your pages, website developers and website designers use a special set of codes called character entities, which they insert into HTML code and which browsers will display as the corresponding symbols or characters.

The most common character entities have been collected by the International Organization for Standardization and compiled in the ISO Latin Alphabet No. 1 table, which includes special characters, letters with diacritical marks (accents, umlauts, etc.), and scientific and currency symbols. The Latin-1 table contains 255 characters. 

It's impossible to remember them all, so Quantum Dynamix of Lancaster has taken a moment to make ourselves a quick reference page. And since we have taken the time, we figured we would share it with the great people of Lancaster, Harrisburg, York, and anyone else in Central Pennsylvania or the world that might need the same list. See what I did there? We ♥ Search Engine Optimization!

ISO Entities

Gary Vaynerchuk is a genius when it comes to social media and how it can be leveraged to turn our current global economy back into the small town economy of our grandparents.

"The world is changing very rapidly, and the way the communicate, and the context of our relationships based on the micro-statements (via Facebook, Twitter, etc) is changing the way we vote, the way we buy things, and more! The economic impact of the current media structure is huge."  Take a moment and watch his full interview with Morning Joe, and then hoop over to Amazon and pick up his book.

Anyone that uses StumbleUpon in conjunction with Google is fairly familiar with the social features of the new Google +1 button.  However, while StumbleUpon has over 15 million users, that isn't nearly the hundreds of millions of people that use Google every single day! The currently "experimental" Google +1 button promises to make the Internet a more familiar place by offering its users instant information from within users' personal circle of friends and family. Watch the brief overview of how the button works in the video above. If you are interested in implementing this technology within your site, jump over to Tintation for a fairly in-depth tutorial.

Now that the whole PSN mess is (mostly) wrapped up, we discuss the changing relationship between corporation and consumer, and the trust that relationship is going to require.
-via escapistmagazine.com

I had 20 phone numbers stored in it at best, but it was my lifeblood throughout the summer. It was by my side at every waking moment, in the hope that someone would call with some earth shattering news, like a global political revolution, the discovery of distant intelligent life, or a rockin’ party down the street. No such call ever came. In the end, the phone would sit mostly dormant, except the occasion call to let my mother know to prepare for the literal garbage bags of laundry that I was bringing home from college for Christmas break.

10 years later, the communications landscape has completely changed. In today’s world, every man, woman, and child is simultaneously connected through a multitude of devices and social networks. At any time, you can get in contact with someone half a world away simply at the touch of a button.

This brings me to possibly an easily laughable question. Is this era of immediate connection a good thing? The easy answer is yes. In the matter of a decade, communications between people and businesses have been simplified 10-fold because of the digital revolution. But I am not here to argue the geo-political or economic benefits of the digital revolution. There are experts out there who have covered that topic in much greater detail.

But what has this digital revolution done to the individual? Has this rush to always be connected to the world made us less personable? Relatively often, I am at a meeting, lunch, or other social situation, and someone is on their phones and simply ignores everyone around them. The physical person must wait patiently while the digital world beacons another’s attention.

I am openly mocked by my friends when I acknowledge that I leave my cell phone at home. They always respond with asking why I even have a cell phone? I simply remind them of a simpler time when I could not be reach every waking moment. I just want to focus on what is around me and not be distracted. At which point, they laugh and I slowly lower myself from my idealist soapbox.

In a small way though, this connected era creates social choice. Today, a person has the choice to be social with the people around them or their best friend who is 3,000 miles away. Given the choice, they can pick who they would rather interact with. While those interactions may be brief text messages or Facebook posts, the idea of choice creates a unique social hierarchy. Suddenly, someone not present can take the priority over someone who is right in front of us.

In turn, we suddenly feel the need to be able to connect with someone, regardless of the time of day. How many times have you tried to call, text, or email someone and felt a little frustrated when you cannot. There is a sense a social injustice has been served when you resign yourself to the fact that you are going to have to leave a voice message.

Now, I am not advocating ignoring people, but there is nothing wrong with not always being reachable. I was in the Shenandoah National Park a couple of weeks ago and realized that I did not have cell phone reception.  I can’t tell you how excited I was to find a place where my phone simply did not work. No calls. No email. No Facebook, Twitter, or FourSquare. Nothing. Without sending a messenger pigeon out for me, there was no way the outside world could reach me. It was liberating. I felt a freedom that I had not felt since I realized that I could place a bright yellow faceplate on my cell phone.

So this Memorial Day weekend, spend time with family and friends, put some hamburgers and hot dogs on the grill, and turn off the cell phone. You will be glad that you did.