Friday, August 26, 2011

publishflow is cookie free

There is a growing movement internationally towards improving online data privacy and protection for consumers.

Website owners are being pressured and directed by government bodies to become more transparent about their online data collection practices.

The main area of priority for privacy regulators right now centers around the policing of "Cookies".

Cookies are text files installed on a website visitors computer. They are used to store information about website visitor activity.

Some cookies expire when a website browser is closed down (Session Cookies) and some remain on a users computer after a browser is closed (Persistent Cookies).

Some cookies are installed by the website owner (First Party Cookies) and some cookies are installed by third parties (Third Party Cookies).

publishflow currently uses a single cookie to identify new viewers vs returning viewers on our client websites.

For all new clients signing up for publishflow, we now offer a cookie free option.

We take your privacy concerns very seriously and have taken steps to become one of the first real time analytics service providers to offer a cookie free service.

You still get access to all the same real time audience, competitor and topic trending data , however you can be confident that we are not capturing and storing session based data or viewing history depending on your privacy requirements.

If you have any questions about this please contact us directly

Thursday, August 11, 2011

Amazon Cloud Reader validates HTML5

A lot has been said of HTML5 and its potential to disrupt or eventually displace the stranglehold Apple has over the mobile app marketplace. As with many new technologies, we all wait to see the killer app to teach the rest of us what is possible and to raise the bar. Amazon has done this with their web based book reader. I 'installed' it (by visiting https://read.amazon.com/about in my browser) last night on my first-gen iPad, logged in and started reading a book where I had left off the previous evening. It just works. Scrolling and swiping through pages felt no different than the native reader.

One of the first things the app does is request permission to increase the amount of local storage permitted to 50MB. The reader takes advantage of HTML5 local storage and lets users read while offline. For what it's intended to do, read books and browse/buy from the Amazon book store, it's excellent.

I think this app will show other book, newspaper and magazine publishers 'how to do it' and slowly begin the move away from Apple's app store. Publishers that make the move will gain access to a broader audience across more devices while keeping an additional 30% of each media sale in their pocket rather than handing it over to Apple.