Having raised approximately $1.6 million in funding, Codementor is poised to grow into an elite marketplace for freelance software developers. Peer Idea, the parent company of Codementor, is based in Mountain View. They've graduated from the Seattle-based Techstars organization, from which they were able to secure $1.2 million in early-stage funding. Founder Weiting Liu feels that the company originally started as a coding boot camp, but soon grew into an on-demand educational brand. He feels that the company will supplement the various free and paid software development resources currently crowding the market.

One of the company's top investors, Yvonne Chen, says that Codementor needs to focus on enhancing the algorithms its Web portal uses to match engineers with new developers. The company already has 150,000 developers looking to improve their programming skills by learning from 5,000 mentors. Each of these mentors is an expert in a particular programming language.

The Internet of Things is touted to become the next big battleground for technology. As you would expect, Google is at the forefront with its recently launched platform called Android Things. Developers can now avail of the preview version.

The highly popular OS has become a springboard for IoT. It's not the first attempt from the tech giant. A former project, Brillo, had similar features but it did not catch fire. More features are coming soon in an effort to match Apple's HomeKit platform for the same space.

Google is lending support to the early adopters of Brillo to ensure that their projects can be migrated seamlessly. Android Things is seen as its natural evolution with a more polished design thanks to hard-earned learning's.

GoDaddy, the web-hosting service provider, is looking to broaden its service offerings. It took a huge step towards that goal recently by acquiring WP Curve, a service designed for startups and websites using WordPress. The financial details of the deal are now known publicly. GoDaddy will be picking up WP Curve's customer list and their assets. Some of the employees will transition over to GoDaddy as well.

Dan Norris and Alex McClafferty created WP Curve three years ago. The Australian software designers one place to access many different startup services. Some of the most popular services offered by WP Curve are SEO, conversion, and even website design. Pretty much ever online service a new company would want to use is offered through WP Curve.

Black Friday sales online to hit an unprecedented $3 billion, more than $1 billion on mobile devices

Black Friday Internet shopping is still growing, and last Friday was a case in point. A recent report by Adobe, that tracked ecommerce transactions over the sales period, showed that Black Friday broke records by exceeding $3 billion in turnover. Also, it is predicted to be the only day in American retail history to generate more than one billion dollars off of mobile devices.

With $3.05 billion predicted by the close of the day, Black Friday 2016 has surpassed Black Friday 2015 by 11.4 percent, according to Adobe.

With Zencaster, it is easy to record good quality podcast audios.

Podcasting has become a popular broadcasting medium, and a new era of audio recording equipment is emerging. Zencastr is one such example. The firm's new product, introduced today, is intended to make it easy to record good quality audio for interviews, wherever the interviewee is based.

The issue the firm is addressing is that interviews via phone sound terrible, and VOIP products such as Skype frequently do not degrade adequately. That is to say: A bad web connection can scupper an interview.

Rather than recording audio through a telephone line, Zencastr allows interviewers to do this through the interviewee's computer. Of course, there are other methods of doing this (like explaining to podcast guests how to record speech on an iPhone, computer or individual recorder). However, this assumes that the interviewees have sufficient technical knowledge to save, record and send the files, which often isn't the case.

Ahead of its time in the unlimited music streaming industry, Omnifone briefly enjoyed some high profile success in the early 2000s, but recently filed for bankruptcy (August 2016).

Now, TechCrunch has revealed that Apple has picked up some of Omnifone's assets, including some 16 members of staff, and probably some technology to go with it.

A quick analysis of the employee's LinkedIn profiles shows that they have changed employers to Apple, and are working in various roles, including some in iTunes and app development.

While Apple has a history of acquiring technology companies for their assets, this is not a standard acquisition following their usual processes. However, Omnifone does possess a number of patents which might be of interest to Apple, which fuelled speculation that they might have bought out the company for 10 million.

Recent studies of Twitter user behavior have indicated that business owners who respond to tweets in a timely manner will see improvements in their customer loyalty over time. Many common Twitter conversations revolve around a negative experience with a company when the business owner answers and wants to make amends. The question is whether this is an effective use of the company's time.

According to current research from both Twitter and Applied Marketing Research, responding to complaints is a positive way to build better customer rapport and correct problems. When a customer receives a response to a complaint, they're up to 20 percent more likely to spend more on a product or service from the same business. They're also up to 44 percent more likely to recommend the business to their friends and family.

Generally, people who run online businesses constantly need to make daunting decisions. Perhaps the biggest of this is the choice of hosting service to reliably power a WordPress blog. The WP Engine is a service that claims to offer support, speed and security all while providing utmost uptime.

Why Consider WP Engine as Your Primary Option?

There are various features that make this hosting service highly beneficial for bloggers. For starters, this service will greatly help your effort to establish and anchor yourself in the web arena for a long time. WP Engine has maintained a good reputation in the WordPress community for a while now. But to be honest, one would likely start searching for an alternative hosting service upon viewing the price at which WP Engine's entry-level hosting plan goes for.

Whether you are searching on your laptop, desktop or tablet, if your pages take a while to load, it can affect your ranking in Google's ranks, and of course, your ability to attract and keep customers.

Three Suggestions for Website Speed Improvements

Compression Images

Using high quality images is important, and today's technology allows you to reduce the file size of your images, without losing the overall quality. To lower the image size, use an image compressor after you have saved it in the most appropriate format, such as jpg.

Streamlining Code

These days, advances in technology means you can use less code to create more features. You may well be using outdated technology if your website is a few years old, and your site may well be slower than it needs to be if you haven't updated it in two or three years.

The freshness update that Google has implemented in its algorithm opens up greater opportunities for websites to increase their overall rankings. With slight adjustments to older content bloggers can benefit from this update. The Google Freshness Update is great for searchers because it ensures fresh content and also benefits bloggers who are rewarded for making the appropriate changes to their content.

Bloggers can update content via different methods. The following goes a little deeper into these methods.

Because Google wishes to reward bloggers who create content more frequently, websites that update their content on a regular basis will be scored with higher rankings. But, just posting new content more frequently is not the only factor that should be considered. The quality of your content is also important. Posting high quality content on a regular basis is the best combination to ensure your SERP rankings increase.