To reach international learners and provide courses in different languages, lynda.com said it had made its first acquisition, buyingvideo2brain, based in Graz, Austria. Launched in 2002, the company has provided online courses in web design, programming and other computer skills in multiple languages. It has more than 400,000 subscribers who access the courses via DVD or single-course downloads.

“This is very much like lynda.com, but the lynda.com of Europe and in German, French and Spanish [and English],” said CEO Eric Robison, adding that video2brain was similarly self-funded and shared the company’s culture. Europe’s online learning market isn’t as competitive as in the U.S., but Robison said it is an active space and that video2brain was the dominant player. The company declined to share financial details but said it will add 60 people and about 1,700 new courses in the acquisition.

For most of the last year, as more startups, like Codecademy, LearnStreet, Treehouse and others have launched to offer online classes on business and computer skills, 17-year-old lynda.com has kept a fairly low profile. But its newly-filled coffers now make it a very interesting company to watch — unlike startups just figuring out its business model, the company has been profitable for most if its existence and has figured out to how to attract a strong subscriber base of individuals, corporations and academic institutions.

When the company announced its funding last month, Robison indicated that it would ramp up growth internationally and into new content areas. This acquisition addresses both of those goals and shows that the company isn’t biding its time. But as the company continues to eye other international regions and content areas, it could acquire even more.

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Today, we launched phase one of our new responsive site design, and the changes we’re introducing to paidContent and GigaOM will ensure that doesn’t happen to you here. At a time when readers are using so many different devices, one big challenge for digital publishers is retaining the quality and consistency of the reading experience not only across devices but also across different operating systems and browsers.

Now, whether you’re on a desktop or a laptop, a tablet or a smartphone, our sites will automatically adjust, rendering the content in the way that best fits that particular environment. We know, for example, that it’s harder to hit a target on the page with your finger than with a mouse, and so if you’re reading us on a tablet, we’ve enlarged the target to make it easier to strike. Similarly, rather than try to cram our entire site onto a 4-inch smartphone display, we’ve removed some content from the mobile view so as to focus the presentation of the most essential information. In all cases, the site simply readjusts to fit the real estate on the screen that you’re on at the time.

Below, you can see how the presentation of an actual story changes as the screen shrinks.

Those aren’t the only improvements that we’ve made. Among the other things you’ll notice about paidContent and GigaOM:

• More curation: If you’re time-stretched, our new “Must Reads” section tells you what you absolutely shouldn’t miss.
• Easier sharing: We’ve made it easier to share not only whole stories and also pieces of content within stories.
• Better performance: Because the pages are lighter weight, they will load faster.
• Crisper display: We’ve added blur-resistant icons and new text-size controls, so there’s no more squinting to read text or straining to hit a small target when navigating the site.
• A cleaner look: We’ve ditched a lot of widgets that had simply built up over the years but no longer serve their original purpose.

For phase one of the redesign, we’ve intentionally simplified the look and feel of the site — it’s more akin to updating the plumbing in a house than redoing the facade. But without reliable plumbing, a house isn’t very habitable. These upgrades pave the way for subsequent phases of this redesign over the next few months that will include more changes in how we present our content.

Finally, I wanted to thank the fantastic team that has been slaving away on the redesign for last several months: our head of product management Raza Zaidi; engineers Casey Bisson, Matt Batchelder, Zach Tirrell and Jamie Poitra; designers Stephen Engert, Arlo Jamrog and Jonathan Koshi; and our product guys Adam Kazwell and Ian Kennedy. They’ve worked long hours — and tested countless iterations in QA — and we think the results are great.

We’d love to know what you think. If you have suggestions or comments (positive or negative), please leave them in the comment thread in this post.

Thanks again for being loyal readers.

Images courtesy of PlaceIt by Breezi.

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Today, we launched phase one of our new responsive site design, and the changes we’re introducing to GigaOM and paidContent will ensure that doesn’t happen to you here. At a time when readers are using so many different devices, one big challenge for digital publishers is retaining the quality and consistency of the reading experience not only across devices but also across different operating systems and browsers.

Now, whether you’re on a desktop or a laptop, a tablet or a smartphone, our sites will automatically adjust, rendering the content in the way that best fits that particular environment. We know, for example, that it’s harder to hit a target on the page with your finger than with a mouse, and so if you’re reading us on a tablet, we’ve enlarged the target to make it easier to strike. Similarly, rather than try to cram our entire site onto a 4-inch smartphone display, we’ve removed some content from the mobile view so as to focus the presentation of the most essential information. In all cases, the site simply readjusts to fit the real estate on the screen that you’re on at the time.

Below, you can see how the presentation of an actual story changes as the screen shrinks.

Those aren’t the only improvements that we’ve made. Among the other things you’ll notice about GigaOM and paidContent:

• More curation: If you’re time-stretched, our new “Must Reads” section tells you what you absolutely shouldn’t miss.
• Easier sharing: We’ve made it easier to share not only whole stories and also pieces of content within stories.
• Better performance: Because the pages are lighter weight, they will load faster.
• Crisper display: We’ve added blur-resistant icons and new text-size controls, so there’s no more squinting to read text or straining to hit a small target when navigating the site.
• A cleaner look: We’ve ditched a lot of widgets that had simply built up over the years but no longer serve their original purpose.

For phase one of the redesign, we’ve intentionally simplified the look and feel of the site — it’s more akin to updating the plumbing in a house than redoing the facade. But without reliable plumbing, a house isn’t very habitable. These upgrades pave the way for subsequent phases of this redesign over the next few months that will include more changes in how we present our content.

Finally, I wanted to thank the fantastic team that has been slaving away on the redesign for last several months: our head of product management Raza Zaidi; engineers Casey Bisson, Matt Batchelder, Zach Tirrell and Jamie Poitra; designers Stephen Engert, Arlo Jamrog and Jonathan Koshi; and our product guys Adam Kazwell and Ian Kennedy. They’ve worked long hours — and tested countless iterations in QA — and we think the results are great.

We’d love to know what you think. If you have suggestions or comments (positive or negative), please leave them in the comment thread in this post.

Thanks again for being loyal readers.

Images courtesy of PlaceIt by Breezi.

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Don’t get me wrong, though; algorithms still matter. In fact, Zoosk co-founder and Co-CEO Shayan Zadeh told me the company’s algorithms for exposing members to the right set of potential dates are still very much “the secret sauce in the belly of the beast,” and the company expends a lot of effort trying to get this part of the business right. Like most companies trying to match people with other people or content, Zoosk analyzes profile information, stated interests and intra-platform behavior in order to present members with the guys or girls they probably want to meet.

Shayan Zadeh

However, using big data to power matching engines (and even some more, shall we say, “experimental” user data analysis) is par for the course in online dating and studies suggest they’re not all they’re cracked up to be. Zadeh acknowledged this, explaining that “[Your] mental map of who [you] should be interested in is not the same as who [you actually] should be interested in.” Zoosk has data to prove this, which is why it tries to inject a little serendipity into its platform to break members out of the molds in which they cast themselves.

What a girl wants

To get to the next level, Zadeh said, a company has to be committed to developing products that help people use them more effectively. Meeting people you want to date is like going to the gym, he analogized: You know it’s good for you, but it takes hard work if you want to get good results. Zoosk tries to add the hookup equivalent of personal trainers, group yoga classes and other perks that make it easier and more appealing to get active.

“The magic is humans talking to each other,” Zadeh explained, “not computers picking [who you'll date].”

Zoosk for Android

And here, too, understanding the data is critical. Take, for example, Zoosk’s decision to launch a native mobile site in 2009 when a decline in web activity suggested users were ready to make that transition. “Our big data told us, ‘You’re gonna have people migrate en masse from desktop to mobile,’” Zadeh said, so the company got active building a mobile site while others waited to see how things played out.

In another instance, Zoosk determined that men are more comfortable reaching out to potential mates than are women once they’ve been presented with a pool of candidates. So the company redesigned the method by which members interact. Instead of requiring members to personally reach out to someone who they’re interested in getting to know, the product asks if they’d like to get know this person and then sends the introduction for the member.

“That subtle shift in the positioning makes a huge shift in the number of people who actually get to talk together,” Zadeh said.

Social media is a mindset

But all this work really boils down to knowing your users and what they’re after in a dating site. Whereas dating giant eHarmony might appeal to the 40-plus crowd by promising users it will find their future spouses by picking out exactly the right companion, Zadeh said Zoosk is more tailored to 20-somethings who just want to meet people and maybe go on a few dates. “We were born in the social media age and and it’s visible in every aspect of our business,” he added. (Actually, the company began its life as an app on the Facebook platform.)

This mindset manifests itself in product design, too. Zadeh says being social “is a different way of thinking about product altogether,” something learned from the likes of Facebook, LinkedIn and the other companies that used the data at their disposal to build effective and popular social networks. Some dating sites market themselves as psychology companies, he noted, but Zoosk considers itself very much a technology company and it takes that part of the business very seriously.

Like a Facebook or LinkedIn, Zoosk wants to be a platform where technology enables more interaction among people in ways that feel natural and let the users dictate how those interactions progress. “[We want to] be the tool instead of being the lifestyle prescription,” Zadeh said. “… Our job is to make it easy on them and get out of the way.”

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user Sweet November studio.

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For years, the web has consisted of just a handful of fonts, used over and over again — designers, limited by the default fonts on most computers, just slapped some Arial or Verdana, or even the dreaded Comic Sans, onto their pages and carried on. But those choices have become more complex with the advent of modern web browsers that are now capable of supporting many more fonts. As a result, a wide range of companies have sprung up to help web designers deliver really great fonts in their work: the likes of Typekit, Fontslive and even Google. Even since we outlined a few of the options last year, more have appeared, like Fontdeck and MyFonts.

But while these services are great at providing access to fonts, most of them don’t actually make the fonts themselves. That job is left to the foundries, which have to convert their existing libraries of typefaces into web-compatible fonts. Still, that task must be fairly easy, right? After all, surely it’s straightforward to take an existing typeface made for print and translate it into digital form.

Not so.

On Friday, I heard Jonathan Hoefler, one of the founders of the massively respected type foundry Hoefler & Frere-Jones, explain exactly what it takes to turn a typeface designed for print into a real web font. And it was amazing.

He was appearing at Ampersand — a conference in Brighton, England, dedicated to the art of web fonts — where he stood on stage and announced that the studio has now converted 100 percent of its typefaces for use on the web.

The news was greeted with a sage nod by attendees, but in truth it should have been met with crazed whoops, wild cheers and yelps of astonishment — because it’s really a task of herculean proportions.

Think about this: H&FJ has been designing new typefaces for more than 20 years, with clients that include Apple, the New York Times Magazine, Esquire and Sports Illustrated. In the past only a handful of these have been available as fonts to use on the web, but since 2008 — when the World Wide Web Consortium decided that next-generation web browsers should be able to support any fonts — his studio of 32 people has been working overtime trying to make web-friendly versions.

Doing that is an arduous and laborious process, because it requires a scale and flexibility that goes way beyond what a printed typeface can deliver. For instance, one of the foundry’s most popular typefaces, Gotham, had to be expanded dramatically in order to be fit for purpose online.

In print, the uses are restrained: text is used for straightforward display purposes, largely in a major language like English, and largely consisting of actual words. Online, you have to consider everything that anyone could possibly want to do with a font, which means providing as many of the 109,000 individual characters in Unicode as possible in order to cover every eventuality.

That means Gotham went from a print-based library that included 7,520 individual characters (known as glyphs) to a web version that counted 47,778. That’s almost seven times as large as the original, and each one has to be carefully designed to operate at any size and a range of weight.

At the same time, the quality assurance process — testing each glyph in different circumstances to make sure it works properly — went from 74 individual tests for print through to 210 steps for the web. In total, the team at Hoefler & Frere-Jones had to commit to more than 90 million individual operations in order to make their foundry web-compatible.

It’s nothing short of stunning, really, to understand the extent of work that goes into making those characters available for you to use on your site.

Hoefler’s revelation was part of a broad range of talks at Ampersand that encompassed almost every aspect of fonts on the web, including talks by Vincent Connare, the author of Comic Sans (“I was really, really bored,” he quipped), and Jason Santa Maria, the creative director of Typekit and A List Apart.

Over the course of the day, though, what really stood out for me was how the broad ecosystem of companies around this fast-growing area were working together, rather than against each other.

Most of the names in the area were on board with the conference, despite the fact that it was ostensibly organized by one of their competitors (design consultancy Clearleft, which is a co-creator of Fontdeck). You might expect them to push back against working together, but they seem to understand that it makes sense to partner up while the opportunities are still very wide. After all, there’s still a vast percentage of the web that remains stuck in the past, with designers still just slapping some Arial or Verdana — or even the dreaded Comic Sans — onto their pages and carrying on.

Photograph used under Creative Commons license, courtesy of Flickr user Kate Fink

Disclosure: TypeKit is is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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“Sandvox 2 makes it stunningly easy to create powerful websites,” says Dan Wood. “We’ve made literally dozens of improvements to give our customers the easiest to use website building tool available on the Mac today. Sandvox 2 is far more flexible and a quantum leap forward for our customers.”

Drag-and-Drop Website Design

You can drag and drop images into place on the page and resize them directly by pulling on the corner handles. Text flow around the image and other parameters are adjusted by using the inspector, which also allows for setting up image galleries with lightbox overlays using jQuery animations. All very slick.

Sandvox 2.0 also supports a wide variety of widgets and “objects” that can be dropped into any page. Sites can easily integrate with Facebook (including Facebook Comments), Twitter, Disqus, IntenseDebate and more. YouTube videos can be embedded just by pasting the URL in the YouTube widget and you can insert Amazon product listings with images pulled directly from Amazon too. Under the hood, Sandvox 2.0 sites support HTML5 video and audio tags and jQuery. Sandvox is also smart enough to provide a Flash-based player for browsers that don’t support the <video> tag.

While the popularity of web-based content management systems is growing, Sandvox provides an excellent website creation tool for those that want deep integration with the media and other tools on their Mac. It’s a good compromise between the extremes of using a zero-install online service like Blogger.com or WordPress.com with little flexibility and the technical know-how of installing your own CMS on a hosted service where that flexibility comes with a steep learning curve. According to Wood:

Our customers don’t need to know a lick of HTML, CSS, jQuery, JavaScript, HTML5 or any other technical stuff to drag-and-drop their way to a cool website. That said, people who do know a bit of HTML can use their knowledge to build a powerful site, without being bogged down in the details of putting the whole website together.

Pricing and Availability

Sandvox 2.0 requires Mac OS X version 10.5 (Leopard) or higher and is currently available in English and French (additional languages coming soon). Sandvox is available through Karelia’s online store.

Sandvox 2.0 is regularly priced at US$77 and the upgrade price is US$47. Introductory pricing through May 20, 2011 is discounted by $10 ($67 and $37). Anyone who purchased Sandvox after January 5, 2011 is eligible to receive a free upgrade. New licenses, upgrades, household licenses and site licenses are all available directly from Karelia Software.

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This year, you can also buy the 24 articles that will be published over the next month in printed form. The 24 Ways Annual will be published by Five Simple Steps and costs £8 ($12.48 USD) to preorder (the book will ship in the New Year). All proceeds will go to UNICEF; 24 ways is looking for a sponsor to pay for the printing costs so that all revenue generated will be donated.

24 ways is produced by the team at edgeofmyseat, the company behind Perch, a lightweight CMS I’ve written about previously. They deserve a great deal of credit for their hard work in putting together this fantastic free resource year after year.

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BrandBucket offers some creative ideas for new domain and company names. It’s basically a domain name exchange system that connects the sellers with buyers. You can find deals from under $500 to well over $5,000, depending on the quality of the name and the domain name owner. There’s also a registry of graphic designers that you can hire to create a new logo for you.

Logoease provides a tool that will let you create your own logo for free. Is also offers a low-cost solution via some preferred designers.

Creately allows you to collaborate online to design a diagram and workflow of just about anything you can think of for your business. The free account allows up to three collaborators and unlimited public diagrams. The only catch is that you can’t save private diagrams with the free plan.

iPlotz makes designing your web site or application very easy by allowing group collaboration online with its visual wireframe designing studio. The free account allows one project with unlimited users with up to five pages.

Produle is a way for you to create cool Flash widgets and applications without any Flash development experience and very little expense. Implementing a simple drag n’ drop interface with many pre-made templates, you can come up with some slick elements for your web site or campaign such as a timer countdown to a special launch or event. You can create up to three Flash widgets for free.

Here’s a sample countdown widget I created within minutes for the grand opening of my brother’s new showroom for his home cinema business. Notice how the TV screen changes the images.

Viviti provides an easy platform to build some good looking web sites and blogs quickly. The basic plan offers a free web site with up to ten pages.

These are just some of the available resources out there that can help you with designing or redesigning your web site or just about anything else for your organization. All of them offer some form of free plan to get your feet wet and other plans at economical prices.

Know some other useful design tools? Please share them in the comments.

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