Israeli startup Personyze is launching its website personalization, segmentation, and analytics platform today. Personyze provides businesses the ability to turn their website into a more personalized site that puts the visitor in the center.
The idea behind Personyze is that website owners can quickly and easy ramp up personalization to their visitors. Personyze’s SaaS allows owners to return content in real-time based on each visitor’s past site activity, online search history, Facebook preferences, location, etc., Personyze can give web marketers the ability to personalize the whole site rather than just the ads and banners or landing pages.
After a visitor gives permission, Personyze’s Facebook integration allows users to publish messages on visitors’ walls, so website owners can post promotions and offers to visitors. Other features include offline tracking to measure the effectiveness of campaigns, email personalization, custom event tracking and AdWords integration.
For example, if a visitor arrives at a website after searching “discount toys,” with Personyze you can redirect the visitor to the “Toys on Sale” page and sort the product display by lowest to highest price. Or you could display a banner that offers customers a 10% discount if they buy that day. And Personyze allows you to send a follow-up email advertising a special promotion on toys for a set number of days, if they did not buy something on their first visit.
Of course, for Personyze to truly work, the visitor has to opt-in to this experience. Many visitors may not want to hand over their information, or allow website owners to track their activity.
Web designers spend most of their time working from mainstay apps like Photoshop and TextMate, but the small utilities used to make various tasks quicker are an essential part of their daily workflow. Here are 11 of them that are worth checking out.
Paparazzi!
Paparazzi! is a tool that makes screenshots of webpages. You can set the size of the browser window, making it the perfect tool for grabbing shots for comparison of sites that use media queries.
Sequel Pro
Sequel Pro is a free alternative to Querious, the MySQL database management app. If you don’t want to set up a script like phpMyAdmin, Sequel is a great option.
Xee
Xee is a lightweight image viewer and browser that can replace Preview to give you more power and speed without the accompanying bloat that would mean you may as well fire up Photoshop. If you want to view hundreds of image files and make simple changes such as rotating and cropping, this is your app.
Colorate
Colorate is a light color scheming app that assists you in creating harmonized color palettes. You can generate and customize palettes from a single base color or an image, and save them as standard .clr files.
Simple CSS
Simple CSS is a visual CSS authoring tool. Most of us prefer to write our CSS manually in our editor of choice, but for some a more visual application is preferable. Simple CSS might not have an interface up to the standards of the popular CSSEdit, but it is free.
Alkaline
Alkaline is a tool for checking your designs in Windows browsers without firing up Boot Camp. The paid plans, which give you access to 8 browsers for testing, are pretty expensive, but according to the company you can test Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2 for free. Since most designers have recently stopped testing for IE6 this may be enough for you.
Dashalytics
Dashalytics is a widget that brings your Google Analytics data to the dashboard. Handy for quick checks on how your latest sites and designs are doing.
SvnX
SvnX is a GUI for Subversion that allows you to browse your repositories and working copies and work with them. If you’re a Subversion user who happens to be command line-averse, check out this app.
GitX
GitX is the same sort of deal as SvnX, but for Git, allowing you to explore your trees and commit from the GUI. Another app for the command line-averse.
Though in all seriousness, anyone serious about web design and development should get used to the Terminal.
ImageOptim
ImageOptim is a fantastic image optimization tool, one that I use all the time. Even when you’re saving for the web through your favorite major software package such as Photoshop, ImageOptim usually manages to reduce the size of your images by a whole lot more without compromising the image quality. If you download one tool from this list, ImageOptim is that tool.
Structurer
Structurer from Nettuts+ is a super simple but very useful tool for creating file and folder structures for new projects. Where it gets really useful is in its ability to grab the latest version of a framework or web app you enjoy working with — be it as simple as HTML5 Boilerplate or as complex as WordPress — and set it up in your project’s new folder, saving a whole lot of time going and manually downloading the files, uncompressing them and moving them to your folder. We’ve covered Structurer before, but no designer utility list would be complete without it.Image Credit
Productivity software forms the crux of daily tasks for many of today’s workers, no matter what field they find their employment in. The reigning king of productivity suites, Microsoft Office, is the market participant to beat, and Google is lining up to do just that.
As we take stock of the present, and look into the future, will Microsoft Office retain its throne, or will more nimble, lightweight online software take its place? It’s a billion dollar question, so let’s get started.
The Present:
Office 2010 has been an engine of growth for Microsoft since it came out in the middle of last year, driving up both profits and revenues. If Office 2007 was controversial, with its ‘Ribbon’ design interface, Office 2010 has managed to shake off that stigma and become a user favorite in homes and workplaces alike.
But Office 2010, and its sister suite Office 2011 for Mac, are hardly the only productivity products that Microsoft is hard at work on, even if they are the most popular and best known.
Office Live, Microsoft’s oldest ‘cloud’ productivity solution in its current form barely resembles its past. Born in 2006, around the time of Vista, Office Live was a tool for small businesses to get online. For free, a small company could get a half gigabyte of storage, 25 email accounts, corporate instant messaging, and a domain name. Obviously, it was a hit among ever-frugal minor enterprises.
But Microsoft had different plans for Office Live. The product was stripped of its small business focus, and the Office files that users had uploaded were moved to SkyDrive. In October of 2008, at the Professional Developers Conference in LA, Microsoft announced that Office Web Apps would be available through Office Live in the future. After a lengthy waiting period, in June of 2010, a mere eight days before the formal release of Office 2010, Office Web Apps went live.
The transition from Office Live being a small business resource into a consumer facing product that serves lightweight versions of the full offline Office suite was then complete. If you head to officelive.com now, you are greeted with a bold call to try out Office Web Apps. Office Live is now, to all intents and purposes, Cloud Office.
For reference, this is what Word in the cloud looks like:
It is a usable product, if you don’t need to do anything to complex, data intensive, or large. As with other cloud offerings, such as Google Apps (more on that later), Office Live is not a daily use suite for the professional in need of power.
Microsoft, however, has another iron in the fire. The small business aspects that once had a home in Office Live did not die off completely, but went into hibernation. In the last week, Microsoft released the hotly anticipated beta of Office 365, the spirit-child of the old Office Live, a new product that includes Exchange Server, SharePoint server, Lync server, and Office 201o. Its feature set is far richer than what was offered in the original Office Live line, but it comes with a price tag; Office 365 has no free tier, whereas the point of Office Live was its zero cost.
“Office 365 is the best of everything we know about productivity, all in a single cloud service. With Office 365, your local bakery can get enterprise-caliber software and services for the first time, while a multinational pharmaceutical company can reduce costs and more easily stay current with the latest innovations. People can focus on their business, while we and our partners take care of the technology.”
Office 365 also includes a hosted version of Office Web Apps, bringing the cloud into the new small business suite. But for many companies, that might be somewhat troublesome if they are more conservative as to where employees can store and interact with data. Microsoft has a plan in place for that, allowing companies to host their own set of Office Web Apps on their internal SharePoint server. This is a middle solution, as using the internally hosted cloud apps away from the office carries technical difficulties.
To make it simple to understand, the following two slides are right out of the deck that Microsoft uses to pitch 365:
In typical form, adding complexity at every turn, Microsoft has manged to break its productivity products into three lines: the standard, local, Office suite of applications for OS X and Windows; Office Live with Office Web Apps where consumers can use their Live IDs and SkyDrive to host and edit documents and other files online; and Office 365, the small business solution that includes the best of Microsoft’s enterprise tools as at a lower price level, alongside hosted or self-hosted Office Web Apps.
If you didn’t get all of that, it’s fine, you don’t need to know each granular piece. Just understand that Microsoft is trying to reach all parts of the market with products that are tailored to fit. If in fact they can pitch the correct product to the correct channel, Microsoft’s strategy could be quite successful. If not, Microsoft might have spent untold sums on more than one albatross.
Israeli startup Personyze is launching its website personalization, segmentation, and analytics platform today. Personyze provides businesses the ability to turn their website into a more personalized site that puts the visitor in the center. 
