Here’s a photo of my little cutie.  She’s a happy and alert little baby. After nine days it feels great to be out of the hospital.  I want to thank you all for your support.

Paul, our Senior Media Designer, and his wife Greta had the joy of welcoming their first child into the world today.  Ava Rose Nicholson was born early this morning!

Congratulations guys!  Best wishes from all of us at iias & Ambassador Travel.  We are all eagerly awaiting our first glimpses of the little cutie!

PS. Sorry if her name was misspelled, I haven’t seen how you spell it yet. :c)

We are all well aware that Google, in recent years, has gained popularity among Internet users desirous of search (just how popular, click here). However, you have probably also noticed that Google not only offers users superior search results but also a host of other online services, one among which is iGoogle.

What is iGoogle?

iGoogle is a Google service that gives you at-a-glance access to key information from Google and across the web. By means of "Google Gadgets", you can create your own customized Google search page, organizing content such as: your latest Gmail messages, news headlines from sources worldwide, weather forecasts, stock quotes, movie showtimes, daily quotes, a daily word-of-the-day, online bookmarks, and multifarious foreign language and science resources, games, and more. Your iGoogle page can be skinned with its own theme and can include multiple tabs for organizing your desired content–all customized by means of a friendly drag-and-drop interface.

For the especially web-savvy, Google presents you with the opportunity to create your own "Google Gadgets", publishing all the information necessary to interface with their Google Gadget API.

Although services of this caliber does distinguish Google among other Internet search and online advertising providers, this is just one of the many robust features Google that provides, giving its users an enhanced and more complete Internet experience. If you are a current user of Google, try iGoogle today!

Most of you, by now, have heard about facebook in one way or another.  Your co-workers don't stop talking about it or maybe your friends or family members have mentioned it.

 

It took me a while to warm up to facebook.  After hearing about it for a year or so my wife finally convinced me to sign up. WOW, I didn't know how easy it was to find all my old friends!  Everyone is on facebook, why didn't I sign up earlier!  Within days my friends list went from one friend (my wife) to over 80 friends!  Facebook makes it super easy to connect with old friends with what they call the "Social Graph" which is basically a network of friends that can see users friends and friends of other users friends.

 

So facebook is big.  But how big?

 

Here are some statistics:

 

 - More than 46 million active users

 - More than half of active users return daily and spend an average of 20 minutes on the site.

 - More than 200,000 new registrations per day since Jan. 2007

 - An average of 3% weekly growth since Jan. 2007

 - More than 54 BILLION page views per month

 - More than 14 million photos uploaded daily

 

The numbers are staggering.  This is another case of a project started in a university that took off in a big way, very fast.  Facebook was not developed by an already huge internet company.  It was started by a few young guys!  I get a kick out of looking at their executive’s page (http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?execbios).  These young (and by young, I really mean YOUNG) lad's have made something big for them selves!

We just finished the developng of fully functional role-based login system. The system provides access to different set of pages for users with different credentials. Microsoft provides number of standart web controls intended to help in implementation of such system. These controls make the implementation easier but they have some limitations. To improve the functionality we developed several custom data providers and procedure. The system can be used for any web site having restricted areas for registred members or administrators.