Starting a Website? Get a Domain Name and Hosting for $19

The cost of a website in the early 90's was equivalent to the cost of a computer to serve the site yourself... thousands of bucks. Now, sites are hosted on shared servers and overall cost is cheaper. Today, io9 readers can get a domain and shared hosting for only $19.

That's $100 off the rack price and amounts to just $1.62 / month. DreamHost to bring you this offer since over a thousand readers at io9's brother site, Lifehacker, voted the company the best web host for their needs.

Whether it's a an app you've created, a blog you want to write, a resume and professional presence, a fan fiction masterpiece for Game of Thrones, your astronomy photography portfolio, or a marketing site for an entrepreneurial venture... you have probably found yourself needing a website at some point. The Internet has changed a lot in the last few decades, but having your own presence is still a necessity for many.

To redeem this exclusive deal, head to the link below. You can sign up for a new account that includes a free domain name and a year of hosting for $1.62 / month which adds up to only $19. The deal price will expire 12/31/2013. Note: This offer works for the first 12 months as a promotion for new customers and then the price goes back to normal (currently $8.95 / mo).

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>> Get one year of a domain name and hosting for $19. [DreamHost]

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This is a sponsored post is in partnership with Dreamhost. So to be clear, this is not editorial.

(Image courtesy of Google / Connie Zhou)

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Cool Websites & Tools – Remote Website Sharing, Local Law Enforcement On A Map & Build Tours On Google Earth

Uploadcare – is a service that gives you the ability to upload, process and use CDN (Content Delivery Network) storage. This means that any media you add to the service will be stored on cloud servers. This removes the loading speed issues that you would have to deal with if you were to store the files on your own server. The free plan gives you 250MB of space.

Surfly – is an app that facilitates screen sharing between yourself and others. Just type in the URL of a website that you want to show them, and send them the unique link provided. Then they will see what you see, and you can show them the various areas of your site. Or you can use it to help someone navigate a site, or plan a vacation

Top Secret America – ever since September 11th, various law enforcement agencies and counter-terrorism forces have sprung up, in order to combat the various threats against the United States. The Washington Post has compiled a map where you can enter a zip code and be shown which agencies – local, state, and federal – is in that area.

Picsastock – is a German-based stock photo website where you can upload and sell your photos. Customers can also buy and download those photos for their own web projects. The price includes social media usage and the right to edit the photo. A lot of the photos currently seem to be of the landscape variety and are of very high quality.

Tour Builder – is a beta Google product which gives you the tools to create your own “tours” on Google Earth. Perhaps you want to show a variety of places on the map for a holiday, or perhaps you want to show how a historical event unfolded? Simply mark the points on the map and embed photos and videos on each point to describe why that place is significant.


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Oops -- YouTube's new commenting system actually increased spam

Call it a work in progress. YouTube is now trying to stanch the increased flow of spam on its site, just weeks after a new system was employed to clean it up, the company recently said.
Earlier this month the Google-owned site overhauled its commenting system to push better quality comments and ones from certain people higher up, while diminishing less important or spammy posts. As part of those changes, users were forced to sign up for Google+, if they hadn’t already, and comment using that account.
The new system was designed to reduce spam and lead to better conversations on the site, but things didn’t quite turn out that way.
While the system did address previous spam issues, it also introduced new opportunities for abuse, YouTube said in a Monday evening blog post.
After the revamp, the site received a lot of feedback from creators citing an increase in comment spam, YouTube also said. The site did not say exactly how much spam increased, and a YouTube spokesman declined to comment further.
To reduce the spam, YouTube has made a number of updates to the site, the company said. The fixes include better recognition of bad links and impersonation attempts, and changing how long comments are displayed, YouTube said. The site is also improving its detection of ASCII art, the graphic design technique known for producing in-comment images made from text characters.
So far, the fixes might be working. A quick review of some of the most popular videos on Tuesday did reveal mostly intelligible comments, though some were more frivolous.
New features like threaded conversations and formatted comments will continue to improve the site’s comments, YouTube said. There are also improvements on the way to help creators better manage their comments, as well as improvements for comment ranking and the moderation of old-style comments, the company said.
YouTube might have longer-standing issues to fix. A number of users were upset over the change forcing them to use Google+, judging from a petition on the site Change.org. But the problems might go back further than that.
“Ever since Google has taken over YouTube, it just hasn’t been the same,” the petition reads.

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It’s All E-Commerce Now

E-commerce is an idea whose time has come and gone. Here’s why.

  

When you think of Macy’s, you probably picture Santa Claus, a Thanksgiving Day parade, or its eleven-story, 2.2-million-square-foot flagship location in Manhattan, once known as the world’s largest store.

But that wouldn’t be an accurate picture of the U.S. retailer. In recent years, Macy’s has turned into a digital hybrid nearly as familiar with GPS signals and online advertising as it is with clothes racks and perfume counters. According to its annual report, it’s now “an omnichannel retail organization operating stores and websites.”
“Omnichannel” is a buzzword that describes a survival strategy. Threatened by the growth of low-cost online merchants, traditional retailers are reacting by following customers onto the Internet. Macy’s does it as well as any. On its website, it installs 24 different tracking cookies on a visitor’s browser. On TV, it runs ads with Justin Bieber that urge millennials to download its mobile app, which tells them which of the chain’s stores is closest to their location. Once inside, they can use the app to scan QR codes on a pillowcase or a pair of shoes. Online orders now ship from the backrooms of 500 Macy’s stores that this year began acting as mini distribution centers.

So what’s online and what’s offline? And does it matter anymore in retail? These are the big questions behind this month’s MIT Technology Review Business Report. “Getting into data, analytics, or mobile isn’t even a decision anymore, so we should stop calling it e-commerce and call it just commerce, or maybe pervasive commerce,” says Chris Fletcher, a research director at Gartner who works with retailers. “It’s happening and you have to deal with it. But companies are just getting used to the idea that it’s all one experience.”
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, which tracks economic data, only 5.2 percent of U.S. retail purchases were made online in 2012 (13.1 percent if you don’t include gasoline, groceries, or automobiles). So in-person sales still dominate. But these figures underestimate the effect of the Internet. When stores like Best Buy survey their customers, they find that 80 percent of them have already searched for price information online. A third of them do so on a phone while inside a store.
Coloring the situation is just how badly most large merchants misjudged technology. Back in 2008, Accenture found that retailers invested only 2 percent of their revenue in technology while most other industries invested two to three times that much. As they stood by, Amazon.com has amassed annual sales of $60 billion, six times the online sales of its nearest U.S competitor, Walmart.
With its thousands of engineers, Amazon is starting to look like a software company that just coincidentally sells things. But now it and other Internet companies, including eBay and Google, are investing in same-day delivery—getting goods to people just hours after they order them. With their drop boxes and fleets of delivery cars, they’re bidding to eliminate one of physical retailers’ main advantages: immediate gratification.
Traditional chains are running in the opposite direction. They must reach customers on social media, on the Web, and on their phones. But their stores—often thought of as a costly liability—may turn into an advantage. One emerging technology is indoor mapping, which enables retailers to capture customers’ cell-phone location while they’re browsing. With Wi-Fi sensors and even video surveillance, chains may be able to do the same kind of behavioral advertising that’s possible on the Web. Imagine them, for instance, sending a timely coupon to that shopper circling the outdoor grills in Aisle 6.

“Retail has become a blur. And the blurring is 100 percent driven by technology,” says Tige Savage, a partner at AOL founder Steve Case’s investment company, Revolution, which is investing in new online retail startups. “Are you at the store? Or is the store at you? And then there’s mobile, the store is in your pocket. The game is to satisfy demand wherever and whenever it is.”

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'So, that's why it's called Bluetooth!' and other surprising tech name origins

This logo might RUNE your day.

The startup world is filled with all manner of intentionally misspelled nonwords and incomprehensible baby talk. It’s enough makes one nostalgic for an earlier time when tech names actually meant something.
The stories of how some of the world’s biggest brands and technologies came up with their names open a window to a different era—a simpler time before Web squatters took all the normal names and corporations focus-grouped language to death.
A better time.
Here we present the hidden—and occasionally accidental—histories behind some of the biggest names in tech.

Bluetooth

Like most normal people, you probably haven’t invested too much of your valuable time pondering the origins of the term “Bluetooth.” As it turns out, the ubiquitous wireless technology’s name has nothing to do with being blue or tooth-like in appearance and has everything to do with medieval Scandinavia.
Harald Bluetooth was the Viking king of Denmark between 958 and 970. King Harald was famous for uniting parts of Denmark and Norway into one nation and converting the Danes to Christianity.
So, what does a turn-of-the-last-millennium Viking king have to do with wireless communication? He was a uniter!

Harald Bluetooth in an ancient version of Instagram.

In the mid-1990s, the wireless communication field needed some uniting. Numerous corporations were developing competing, noncompatible standards. Many people saw this growing fragmentation as an impediment to widespread adoption of wireless.
One such person was Jim Kardach, an Intel engineer working on wireless technologies. Kardach took on the role of a cross-corporate mediator dedicated to bringing various companies together to develop an industry-wide standard for low-power, short-range radio connectivity.
At the time, Kardach had been reading a book about Vikings that featured the reign of Harald, whom he viewed as an ideal symbol for bringing competing parties together, as he explained:

Bluetooth was borrowed from the 10th-century, second king of Denmark, King Harald Bluetooth; who was famous for uniting Scandinavia just as we intended to unite the PC and cellular industries with a short-range wireless link.

The various interested parties eventually came together to form the Bluetooth Special Interest Group, which developed the agreed-upon standard we know and love today. “Bluetooth” was originally meant to be a placeholder, but the name had already taken off in the press and thus remains around today.
The millennium-old shout-out doesn’t end there. The Bluetooth logo—that cryptic symbol in a blue oval printed on the box your phone came in—is actually the initials of Harald Bluetooth written in Scandinavian runes.

eBay

The Web’s go-to site for acquiring Justin Bieber branded duct tape and oddly shaped potato chips might be excused for including the “e” prefix in its name. The nearly 20-year-old site was born in a technological era when “e” was the accepted prefix to indicate to all things “electronic.” But as it turns out, eBay’s “e” stands for “echo,” and its “bay” just stands for itself—and neither “echo” nor “bay” has anything to do with online bidding.
The site that would become eBay started life as the more aptly dubbed “AuctionWeb,” which was part of a larger personal site run by former Apple software engineer Pierre Omidyar.
As AuctionWeb grew in popularity, Omidyar decided to spin it off into its own entity, which he wanted to call “Echo Bay” after his consulting firm, Echo Bay Technology Group. Unfortunately the echobay.com domain was already taken, so Omidyar shortened it to the available “ebay.com.”
Takeaway: Sometimes success means just settling for what’s available.

Google

We all do it: We use the awesome power of Google to correct our common misspellings. For example, I never spell the word “bureaucrat” correctly on the first try, but I can depend on Mountain View’s algorithm to provide the correct spelling whenever I plug in “buerocrat” or some other massacred linguistic approximation.
Unfortunately, this spelling-correction wizardry was unavailable to the site’s founders in the 1990s.
The word googol (note the third “o” and the lack of an “e”) is a mathematical term for the number 10 to the 100th power (or a 1 followed by 100 zeros). Cofounder, and current sad CEO Larry Page decided that it would be the perfect name for his new company as it reflected the nearly unimaginable vastness the Web.
However, the two-“o” “Google” we’re familiar with today is the result of an accidental misspelling by one of Page’s classmates, Sean Anderson. David Koller, another Stanford classmate of Page who was around at the dawn of Google recalls the story behind Google’s name on his personal Stanford site:

[Fellow Stanford student] Sean [Anderson] and Larry were in their office, using the whiteboard, trying to think up a good name—something that related to the indexing of an immense amount of data. Sean verbally suggested the word “googolplex,” and Larry responded verbally with the shortened form, “googol”...Sean is not an infallible speller, and he made the mistake of searching for the name spelled as “google.com,” which he found to be available. Larry liked the name, and within hours he took the step of registering the name “google.com”...

Amazon

Amazon.com is the global superstore that places everything from diapers to streaming original sitcoms to questionably legal botanicals a single click away from increasing your credit card debt. But what does the name “Amazon” have to do with the site’s original niche—books—let alone with its expanded mission as an electronics manufacturer and a seller of all things sellable?
Well, they’re both big, and they both start with the right letter.

Bezos wants to bring you all the things.

Founder Jeff Bezos had originally dubbed his company “Cadabra” (as in “abracadabra”). But when his lawyer misheard the name as “cadaver” (as in “dead person”), Bezos decided his company needed a new, less morgue-friendly name.
Back in the pre-Google world, a company’s position near the front of alphabetized phonebooks (and of early web approximations of phonebooks) was still a chief concern. “A” was where you wanted to be.
So Bezos went rummaging through the dictionary’s first chapter in search of a likely business name—and eventually settled on “Amazon.” Why? According to him, because it referred to the biggest river in the world. The biggest by a long shot.
On a tangential note: Take a look at the subliminal messaging in the current Amazon logo, which features a slightly askew smirk beneath the Amazon name. Note how the smirk resembles an arrow connecting the first “a” in “Amazon” to the letter “z,” subtly driving home the point that the store delivers everything from A to Z.

Etsy

Etsy is the multi-million-dollar virtual marketplace for occasionally insane homespun crafts. But what is an “etsy” exactly? If you think it’s just some made-up nonsense word that has no meaning, you’re absolutely correct.
Launched in 2005, the company came about at a time when natural language URLs were already in short supply. Etsy cofounder Robert Kalin has admitted that “etsy” was simply an available nothing word, but one that sorta has some nice happenstances of translation.
“I wanted a nonsense word because I wanted to build the brand from scratch,” Kalin said in a 2010 interview with Reader’s Digest. “I was watching Fellini’s 8½ and writing down what I was hearing. In Italian, you say etsi a lot. It means ‘oh, yes.’ And in Latin, it means ‘and if.’”
So the company’s name means “and if” in a dead language. Try as Kalin might to justify it, Etsy still means nothing.

Nintendo

Though it wasn’t the first home console system, the Nintendo Entertainment System was the biggest of its day. But few American children who spent the late 1980s addicted to goomba-stomping were aware that the Kyoto-based Nintendo Corporation had been in existence for more than a century.
Nintendo traces its roots back to 1889, when the company produced hand-made playing cards painted on mulberry tree bark and used in a game known as Hanafuda. Hanafuda is a game of chance that dates back several centuries and is closely associated with gambling and the Yakuza (indeed, the name ya-ku-za translates as “8-9-3,” a losing hand in a Blackjack-like game). The name “Nintendo” in Japanese roughly translates as “leave luck to heaven” or “in heaven’s hands.”
So how did playing cards eventually lead to Mario Kart? After trying its hand (excuse the pun) at numerous endeavors over the next century, the company eventually found its way into the toy industry, which by the 1970s was a natural jumping-off point into the burgeoning video game market.
Should Nintendo’s video game future falter on the trainwreck of a system known as Wii U, it can always fall back on its roots as a maker of playing cards, which it continues to produce for the Japanese market.

Nokia

Michael Homnick

The Nokia brand may soon go away following an all-but-final acquisition by Microsoft, but the Finnish company can claim a history that reaches back nearly 150 years.
Nokia began its existence far from the world of mobile technology—as a paper mill. The nascent company’s second groundwood pulp mill was built near the town of Nokia (about 100 miles northwest of Helsinki), which the company decided to adopt as its name when it became a public share company in 1871.
Over the decades, Nokia dabbled in all sorts of industrial ventures, which eventually led to its forming a telecommunications department in the late 1960s. By the 1980s, the company had become one of the first manufacturers of early mobile phones, such as the nearly 2-pound Mobira Cityman 900 in 1987.
Flash-forward to 2013, and the company manufactures mobile phones with some spec-tacular imaging hardware that is unfortunately attached to a Windows phone. And if everything goes Microsoft’s way, Nokia may remain married to Windows phones for a looong time.

Sony

In its first decade of existence, the company that would go on to create the Walkman, the PlayStation, and various other forms of bathtub-proof gadgetry went by the name Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo—or in English, “Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Company.”
The company’s founders felt that they needed to change its decidedly Japanese name would changed if it was to compete successfully in the developed postwar markets in Europe and the United States—especially at a time when, in those markets, “Made in Japan” was synonymous with cheap junk.
In a bid for Romanized respectability, the company’s founders chose the word “Sony” as a combination of the Latin word sonus, meaning “sound,” and the common American colloquialism “sonny-boy.”
The first Sony-branded product was the TR-55 transistor radio, which went on sale in 1955 as Japan’s first portable radio.

Yahoo!

God bless her, Marissa Mayer continues to do her darnedest to transform the once-powerful brand from a virtual warehouser of stale email addresses to a powerhouse of hip.
We wish her the best, but Yahoo’s best years may far behind it.
Indeed, those heady days are so long gone that most people forget when the company’s curated list of links was quite a handy tool to have around.
The company began as a hobby. Stanford University Ph.D. candidates David Filo and Jerry Yang kept a list of all their favorite sites. As the list began to grow plump with categories and subcategories, the pair realized they might have a service that would be useful to early Web surfers.
Though they originally matter-of-factly dubbed their service “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web,” the pair eventually decided on the fun exclamation-enlivened brand “Yahoo!”—which was bacronymed to encompass “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle” (the full name lacking an exclamation point, for some reason).

Apple

According to Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography, the largest electronics firm in the world picked up its name in the most casual of ways.
As Jobs and Wozniak were mulling over a name for their nascent company, Jobs had just returned from a visit to a communal apple farm. Off the cuff, he proposed the name “Apple Computer.” The term, he explained to Isaacson “sounded fun, spirited, and not intimidating. Apple took the edge off the word ‘computer.’ Plus, it would get us ahead of Atari in the phonebook.”
Once again, that phonebook was a big deal. Which might also explain why Google finds multiple companies answering to the name Aardvark Electronics.

An end to nonsense names?

The past decade of tech names has been an unimpressive mess of language. Arguably, the biggest contributor to the disarray has been the dearth of available dot-com domain names.
Perhaps the new-released bounty of top-level domain names will shake things up. Perhaps companies will take advantage of their new freedom of URL and begin to veer away from the plague of nonsense.

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