Page, along with Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt, spoke with reporters this week at the Allen & Co. conference, according to Reuters. Jobs was invited, but did not attend.

Page, on Thursday, said that Jobs’ suggestion that Google was responsible for the animosity between the two companies by choosing to compete with the iPhone in creating its own Android mobile platform was “a little bit of rewriting history.”

“We had been working on Android a very long time, with the notion of producing phones that are Internet enabled and have good browsers and all that, because that did not exist in the market place,” Page reportedly said. “I think that characterization of us entering after is not really reasonable.”

Schmidt added that he believes the market is large enough for both Apple and Google to thrive. He said most people incorrectly “assume that these are zero-sum games, which are battles to the death.”

Schmidt noted that Apple and Google still have important partnerships. Google powers the Maps application found on the iPhone, and powers the native YouTube application as well. And it is also the default search provider on all iOS devices, including the iPod touch and iPad.

Schmidt also said that he believes that Chrome OS, set to arrive later this year, will appear on tablet PCs, and will compete with Apple’s iPad.

Last summer, as both companies grew in competition, Schmidt resigned from the Apple Board of Directors. His departure was seen as necessary as Google and Apple now compete in numerous markets in the technology sector: Google’s Android mobile operating system competes with Apple’s iPhone; both companies recently made large mobile advertising acquisitions; Google’s forthcoming Chrome OS will see the company enter the traditional PC space; the Chrome browser competes with Apple’s Safari; and this fall, Google TV will be released and will compete with Apple TV.

In March The New York Times reported that Steve Jobs feels Google betrayed Apple by partnering with hardware manufacturers to make cell phones that resemble the iPhone. Jobs also allegedly let his feelings be known to employees at a company meeting in January.

“We did not enter the search business. They entered the phone business,” Jobs reportedly said. “Make no mistake, Google wants to kill the iPhone. We won’t let them.”

The executive made similar comments on the record in early June, at The Wall Street Journal’s All Things D conference, noting that his company wants to make better products than Google. He said that competing, however, doesn’t mean you have to be rude.

“We didn’t go into the search business,” Jobs said of Google.

Despite animosity between Google and Apple, Jobs was spotted having coffee in public with Schmidt back in March. The two were seen talking at a cafe in Palo Alto, Calif.

Source: Apple Insider

http://events.apple.com.edgesuite.net/1006ad9g4hjk/event/index.html

I am a designer with an old school mindset.  There are methodologies or rules in the design world that “just are” – some have valid reasons and others are personal preference, but regardless they are concrete pillars that shouldn’t be moved.  Then there is the “new school of thought” which has caused riffs with the purists and old-timers like myself.  Many of these battles have to do with the advancement in technology and the tools at our disposal.  The digital age has changed some of the methodologies on how we used do things, which is both good and bad.  This blog post stems from the Smashing Magazine blog post called The Dying Art of Design and which led me to Confessions of a Template Whore by Sabrina Dent.

This is going to hurt but I’ll say it  … I agree that designers are getting lazy.  I feel that in many ways we have neglected the true creativity that is hidden within us and settled for mediocrity in order to pump out our work.  Things have changed and it reminds me of the first MTV music video I ever saw, Video Killed the Radio Star, at the age of eleven.  Digital killed the the artistic star.  Terrible, I know!  However, on the other hand the advances of technology have been extremely beneficial for graphic and web designers.  Who remembers burnishing Letraset for ads or coding on the Tandy TRS-80?  Some things in the past were just a pain in the butt to do and now we can be more creative in certain areas, more quickly.

How does this relate to WordPress themes for web design?

Simple.  There are those discussions where the purists thumb their noses at the kids who “cheat” and use a template, theme, or stock art.  But is it really cheating?  Can we blame some designers for finding ways to be more productive and for making more money by not creating everything from scratch?  Here are some considerations:

• It takes a lot of energy and time to create something from nothing
• The world has devalued true artists and the worth of creativity to who can do it for less
• The economy really sucks and those ‘cheap bastards’ have gotten cheaper
• Many people wait to the last minute and then need it yesterday
• Business is about being profitable not winning design awards
• Solopreneurs or small shops are limited by time
• There really isn’t too much new or original under the sun

If you just consider these true and valid thoughts, then it absolutely makes sense to streamline the creative process or development.  Time IS money. You either can sell your custom artwork or creativity for a very high and lucrative price because you do less projects and time is limited, or you can sell efficiency and good enough work for less and bang out more projects.  As long as the client who is paying your fee is happy, why does it really matter?

Please know that I value custom artwork and the lost arts and crafts we once knew.  I also value the ability to make quick money and getting on to the projects that I really love that might not pay.  My belief is that using WordPress themes or stock artwork is definitely not cheating or wrong – it’s smart business!

How do you feel about it?

By Ward Tipton (c) 2010

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If you are new to the world of SEO and SEM, you may not know all of the actual subtleties involved. But, if you are going to hire someone to do your SEO work for you, you better know a whole lot more or you could suffer far worse than you ever would trying to do SEO work yourself… even without any real experience. Even if you hire an SEO Professional to promote your site, if they do anything that the search engines decide is unethical, your site will be banned and you will have no recourse, legal or otherwise to get it back in!

If you have already looked around the freelance sites, you may see all sorts of jobs people want done regarding SEO work. Somebody here needs ten PR5 or better one-way links to their site. Somebody over here wants 100 comments on DO Follow blogs. If none of that makes sense to you, you really do need to learn what it means whether you are going to promote websites yourself or have someone else do it for you. Why?

If you do not learn about SEO, your work could very easily get you banned from the Search Engines or decrease your rankings whether you do the work or not!

What? How? Huh?
The top search engines are constantly evolving their algorithms or the methods that they use to decide both your page’s rank and its placement on the SERP or Search Engine Results Page. A while back, three-way linking or Pyramid linking was all the rage but they quickly became more costly than effective. The basic idea was to provide mutually beneficial, one-way links by linking three sites rather than just two. Thus, instead of reciprocal links (which are still valued less) between Site A and Site B, there would be a link from Site A to Site B, a link from Site B to Site C and a final link from Site C to Site A.

This effectively provided all three websites with one-way links and increased the value of those links. It may have taken the search engine a while to figure out this tactic but figure it out they did and many of those sites were penalized in rank and placement while some were banned altogether. Many of the people doing this were hired by people just like you. While some of the people simply lost page rank, some of them really did lose any ability to get their site indexed on the search engines at all.

Over 80% of all organic traffic comes from the search engines!

Once your website has been banned, sandboxed or otherwise removed from the search engine indexes you may just as well shut that site down and build it from scratch. Google does not care what SEO Service you paid to promote your site. Bing does not care what SEO Company you paid to promote your site. Yahoo does not even care what SEO expert you hired. Once your site is off the search engines, it is off until the search engines decide to let you back in. This can take years to accomplish and most likely will require more money invested than you will ever be able to get back from your investment.

These days, as in the example given above, many people are searching for SEO Experts that will give them all these one-way links. They will only want DO Follow links back to their site and even many of the SEO “Experts” think that this is a good thing! But guess what! Google is neither stupid nor idle and when it updates algorithms, unnatural website growth patterns are going to be red-flagged first and then the search engines will begin the banning process again. With over ten billion websites indexed on each of the major search engines, they really do not need your website to provide their users with viable alternatives.

So what is the answer?
The answer is actually very simple. If you are serious about your online business and want to succeed and stay in business for the long run, do not try to jump to the head of the pack right away. Organic growth is, as the name implies, natural growth. When you are advertising and promoting your site, do not seek to aim for soley the high value targets but take on all of the possible targets.

When someone sees your link tagged on one of your comments on a No Follow site are they any less likely to clíck it than they would be on a Do Follow site? You can still get traffic, and while you may get more value on the search engines from a Do Follow site, you can still get traffic from a No Follow site and your growth will appear more natural to the Search Engines insuring that you do not have to worry about being banned or sandboxed.

If you only have one or two websites that you will not be making a lot of money from, learn about SEO and do it yourself. Would you let someone you do not know come into a brick and mortar business you have built and let them market it and promote it however they see fít simply because you do not know how … even though your lack of knowledge regarding the subject means that you cannot even be sure that they do either? You cannot run a business like that in the brick and mortar world and expect to be successful. Running a business on the Internet is no different.

If you own numerous websites or have valuable and profitable products that will allow for the costs, pay someone to do your SEO for you but be selective. If someone is promising you that they are only going to get you One-Way links on Do Follow Sites do you really think that this “unnatural” growth will go unobserved by the Search Engines? Do you really think that something so Unnatural is going to outrank a site with the same number of links but showing all organic growth or natural growth? Guess what! If you do not know anything about SEO, you need to learn … especially if you are going to hire someone to do it for you! The cost of unnatural growth can literally kill your website.

Proper SEO goes far beyond just getting all the “good stuff” and throwing it together and thinking you will come out ahead of the game. Proper SEO efforts involve many different aspects, some of them more beneficial than the others but only beneficial if you have all of them together, the better with the not so good. Anything less is putting your online business venture on a path to failure. If you are business for the long run, take the good with the better and sooner than you think, your site will be one of the best … and that means you own the Search Engines – they no longer own you because you took some time to learn proper SEO techniques!

About The Author
Ward Tipton is a Professional Writer who provides highly specialized and quality informational product creation and online content for his clients. Ward recently opened Professional Writing Services for content creation and content distribution services.

iPhone OS 4 will ship this summer for iPhone and iPod touch, and for iPad in the fall. A developer beta is available now.

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