By: Caroline McCarthy | Source: news.com

The NASA Ames Research Center and Google have signed a formal agreement to collaborate on projects ranging from studying scientific-data search technology to using Google Earth flyovers for the moon and Mars.

The R&D partnership was announced by Google CEO Eric Schmidt in September 2005, but a year later representatives from both Google and NASA Ames acknowledged that there were roadblocks. Monday’s announcement finally solidified their agreement and gave hints as to what some upcoming products of the partnership may be.

The NASA Ames Research Center, which specializes in science and engineering projects, is located at Moffett Field in California, on former Navy land that’s a stone’s throw from the big names of Silicon Valley–including Google’s campus in Mountain View. This year, research at NASA Ames has included heat shield technology, the commercialization of space exploration and wildfire monitoring.

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By: Donna Gunter | Source: site-reference.com

Pop up windows are the bane of existence for most of us who spend anytime online. I’ve been to some sites and had as many as 20 pop-ups annoy me while I was there until I activated the pop-up blocker on my browser. Why did I find them annoying? Because they contained advertisements of things I didn’t want and were of absolutely no interest to me. I know I’m not alone here — some statistics say that as many as 86% of pop-up ads are blocked on a consistent basis.

However, as irritating as they are, using pop-ups is an Internet marketing strategy that is incredibly effective. Some people report as much as a 50% increase of signups to their mailing list, for example, when they use a pop-up ad.

With the advent of pop-up blockers in browsers, however, this strategy has become more difficult to use. There are now software programs and services that create unblockable pop-ups for websites, sometimes referred to as popovers, hover ads, or floating windows. The two with which I’m most familiar are the Hover Ad Creator by MarketingTips.com and a monthly service called AdImpact.com. Hover ads are those pop-ups that appear in front of you and bounce several times before becoming still. The AdImpact.com pop-ups are a graphic pop-up and may appear in the form of a sticky note, a memo note, a coupon, a certificate, or any number of images.

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