Twenty years ago today, the first email on the postgis users mailing list (at that time hosted on yahoogroups.com) was sent, announcing the first numbered release of PostGIS.

First, I started exploring whether there was an opportunity in the BC government for a consulting company that had skill with Oracle’s spatial features. BC was actually standardized on Oracle as the official database for all things governmental. But despite working with the local sales rep and looking for places where spatial might be of interest, we came up dry.

World’s first text-to-video platform

With Synthesia you can create videos just from text in 40+ languages. Perfect for training and marketing videos.

Time and technology flies. We are now in a new era

In this article, we will be talking about alternatives for one of the most popular website user tracking tools: Hotjar. Tools like Hotjar work as an add-on to your existing Google Analytics efforts and can help you translate what your Google Analytics reports mean.

What Is Hotjar?

Hotjar is a simple yet powerful optimization tool that lets you see your customers' behavior on your site in real-time- no coding knowledge required.

It gives you access to web analytics and powerful insights into which parts of your site are engaging visitors the most so that you can make critical design decisions and start seeing better results.

Harry Brignull is the UX specialist who first coined the term ‘dark patterns’ in 2010 and launched this website. Recently, Harry has started to provide expert witness services for Dark Patterns.

Dark Patterns are tricks used in websites and apps that make you do things that you didn't mean to, like buying or signing up for something. The purpose of this site is to spread awareness and to shame companies that use them.

When you use websites and apps, you don’t read every word on every page - you skim read and make assumptions. If a company wants to trick you into doing something, they can take advantage of this by making a page look like it is saying one thing when it is in fact saying another. You can defend yourself by learning about Dark Patterns on this site.

Boring avatars is a tiny JavaScript React library that generates custom, SVG-based, round avatars from any username and color palette.

Below, you’ll find first-hand accounts of how essentially every major consumer app acquired their earliest users, including lessons from Tinder, Uber, Superhuman, TikTok, Product Hunt, Netflix, and many more. Enjoy!

My biggest takeaways from this research:

1. Just seven strategies account for every consumer apps’ early growth.
2. Most startups found their early users from just a single strategy. A few like Product Hunt and Pinterest found success using a handful. No one found success from more than three.
3. The most popular strategies involve going to your user directly — online, offline, and through friends. Doing things that don’t scale.
4. To execute on any of these strategies, it’s important to first narrowly define your target user. Andy Johns recently shared some great advice about this.
5. The tactics that you use to get your first 1,000 users are very different from your next 10,000. A topic for a different post.

In summary, top seven strategies to acquire your first 1,000 users

1. Go where your target users are, offline
2. Go where your target users are, online
3. Invite your friends
4. Create FOMO in order to drive word-of-mouth
5. Leverage influencers
6. Get press
7. Build a community pre-launch

Watch the path of a raindrop from anywhere in the contiguous United States.

Today, Data Studio users can access over 300 data sets in just a couple clicks. From Google Ads to BigQuery to your CRM data, you can spend more time finding and sharing insights and less time configuring data sources.

With two brand new data connectors you can access even more data through Data Studio to help you analyze your marketing investments and make decisions. You can now access your market research data with our new Google Surveys connector and connect to the next generation of Google Analytics with support for Google Analytics 4 properties.

Accessing the data you need to make better decisions is only the first step. Finding insights from the data and determining the best way to communicate the insights to stakeholders can be challenging and time consuming.

We’re making it easier to get started with new marketing templates across common data sets like Google Ads, Search Ads 360 and more. You can find over 30 solutions to help you get started in the Data Studio gallery.

Launched in 2009, the Shopify App Store enables developers to build applications for Shopify’s merchants. It’s become a vital differentiator for Shopify with 85% of Shopify Merchants now relying on apps built by developers to power their stores.

As of 16th May 2021, the Shopify App store has 5,918 apps across 12 primary categories created by 3,578 developers.

Find out insights like:

• The median price for each plan across all categories
• The average rating per category
• The median number of reviews per category
• Split between free, freemium and paid apps.
• And tons more!

The growth of the Shopify App store since its launch in 2009 has been staggering. We estimate it has grown at 25.8% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from 2009 to 2020.

Another way to think of this is there’s been on average, 6 apps added to the Shopify app store each day in 2021 🤯

Google announced a new addition to the performance report in Search Console, specific for the practice problems rich results. You can now track your performance for your practice problem rich results.

If you are in the education online content business, you may want to leverage these new structured data types to get more exposure in the Google Search results. These may help increase your click-through rates on some of your snippets in the search results and it may help you gain more traffic to your site.