4 Virtual Reality Startup Ideas Entrepreneurs Can Jump On Now

Unbelievable! Mind-blowing! You have to see it to believe it! My life will never be the same!

These are but a few of the colorful expressions people have used the world over to describe their first experience with a virtual reality (VR) headset. By now we have all tried a rollercoaster ride with a phone strapped to our heads and have been left bedazzled by the sheer potential VR presents.

VR has really come full circle. From its origin as pure sci-fi like the yet-to-be-made hoverboard, to the $10,000 headsets a decade or two ago, to the Oculus Rift and Vive, the VR revolution is finally upon us.

While the technology is making a lot of noise in gaming circles, its ability to completely immerse a person in a virtual environment is useful in other applications as well. So, if you are looking to hop on the VR bandwagon, then here are four options to consider...

Real Estate

Real estate is no more about just putting a roof over your head. Realtors today focus on selling a lifestyle and experience which is hard to convey if your only available medium is a 2D monitor or billboard.

But imagine walking through a virtual version of your preferred property while comfortably sitting in your bedroom or an agent's office. For the first time ever, realtors can put their prospects inside a building without actually taking them there, or before the project is even complete. As all VR devices have stereoscopic 3D, it imparts depth and helps the viewer understand a space better.

Opportunities for developers: Develop apps which realtors can use to easily and affordably create virtual versions of their properties. Currently, the cheapest VR apps allow people to check out photos and videos on a website with a VR viewer like the cardboard.

However, complete walkthroughs can be costly and require a VR professional with specialized equipment. There are a range of applications here depending on how much interactivity and immersion is required.

Opportunities for realtors: Matterport can help you create virtual versions of your properties and submit them to their library. You can also try augmented reality apps such as Re-flekt to visualize your property straight from its blueprint on a table. Both these tools are awesome ways to help you explain your ideas to prospects.

Healthcare

From helping surgeons train for operations to seeing real-time images of a patient's anatomy in stereoscopic 3D, VR has tons of potential that can help healthcare professionals provide a better service. Globally, the market for VR in healthcare is expected to touch $3.8 billion by 2020.

Opportunities for developers: There's a lot of research being done on how VR can be used in healthcare, however few companies are turning the body of knowledge into practical applications, which means there is a large untapped market waiting for tech entrepreneurs. Education software and next-gen telepresence devices that can impart a more realistic look and feel of health related scenarios to doctors are the logical next step.

VR apps and tools to help patients recover from psychological issues such as learning disabilities and PTSD can also be developed.

Opportunities for healthcare professionals: Simulators such as ImmersiveTouch and Medical Realities can help doctors get better training and perform operations remotely via head mounted devices like the Oculus Rift. Another app called Virtually Better helps people with anxiety by introducing them to the stimulus that triggers unease in a friendly environment.

Training

While training is ubiquitous in every industry, it deserves a special mention here. Virtual reality has been used very effectively by the military and aerospace companies to train pilots and soldiers to become better acquainted with the stressful environments they will be working in. With tools becoming even cheaper, the tech is poised to disrupt training techniques in many other industries now.

Continue reading %4 Virtual Reality Startup Ideas Entrepreneurs Can Jump On Now%

by Parth Misra via SitePoint

9-Point Technical SEO Checklist for Developers

This article is part of an SEO series from WooRank. Thank you for supporting the partners who make SitePoint possible.

Organic search traffic is vital to any commercial website: Almost half of online shoppers begin their shopping process with a search engine, and a third of e-commerce traffic comes from search results. Even if you’re a brick and mortar shop, you’re likely reliant on organic traffic since half of mobile searches result in a store visit within a day of the search. All that adds up to one fact: if you’re trying to make money with your website, you need organic traffic. And how do you bring in that traffic? SEO.

SEO is typically viewed as the realm of marketers and writers. However, developers have a large role to play as well. If sites aren’t built correctly, search engines could struggle, or even fail entirely, to find and index pages. One false move with your robots.txt file, for example, could prevent your entire site from showing up in Google search results.

That’s why we’ve put together this 9-point checklist to help developers build sites in a way that’s optimized to rank highly in search results.

Crawling and Indexing

Since the purpose of SEO is to appear in search results for your target audience, one of the most important considerations when creating a site is getting crawled and indexed. The easiest way to get indexed is to submit your site directly to Google and Bing. Use Google Search Console to submit your URL to Google. This doesn’t require a Google Search Console account, but if you do have one, you can use the Fetch as Google tool in the Crawl section. After Googlebot successfully fetches your site, click the "Submit to index" button.

Submitting your site to Bing requires a Bing Webmaster Tools account.

XML Sitemaps

A basic description of XML sitemaps is a list of every URL on your site, stored as a text file in your site’s root directory. In reality, there’s a little bit more to them than that. Yes, they list every URL on your site (or at least the URL for every page you want crawled and indexed), but they also list extra information about each page and serve an important SEO function. Search engines use the information in sitemaps to crawl sites more intelligently and efficiently so they won’t waste their crawl budget on unimportant or unchanged content. When done correctly, your basic sitemap looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8”?>
<urlset xmlns="http://ift.tt/xwbjRF” xmlns:xhtml=”http://ift.tt/2bTDKEE;
    <url>
        <loc>http://ift.tt/2byyU2M;
        <lastmod>2016-8-01</lastmod>
        <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
        <priority>0.9</priority>
        <xhtml:link rel="alternate” hreflang=”fr” href=”http://ift.tt/2bTCP7v;
   </url>

What does all that mean? Here’s a synopsis:

• <urlset>: This tells crawlers that the sitemap is starting and ending.
• <url>: Denotes the beginning and end of each URL entry in the sitemap.
• <loc>: This defines the URL of the page. While the rest of the attributes found in the <url> tag are optional, <loc> required.
• <lastmod>: The date, in YYYY-MM-DD format, the page was updated or modified.
• <changefreq>: This indicates how frequently you update the page, which will help search engines decide how often to crawl it to make sure they’re indexing the freshest content. You might be tempted to lie to increase your crawl frequency, but don’t. If search engines see <changefreq> doesn’t jive with the actual change frequency, they’ll just ignore this parameter.
• <priority>: Sets the priority of the page in relation to the rest of the site. Valid values range from 0.0 to 1.0, from least to most important. Use this tag to help search engines crawl your site more intelligently. Note that this only tells crawlers how important your pages are compared to your other pages. It does not affect how your pages are compared to other sites.
• <xhtml:link>: This tag points to alternate versions of the page. In this example it indicates the French version of https://www.example.com.

Sitemaps aren’t a ranking signal, but they help search engines find all your pages and content, which makes it easier for you rank well.

If you don’t want to write your own sitemap, there are plenty of tools out there that can help you create one. Once you have your XML sitemap, validate and submit it using Google Search Console. You can also submit your sitemap to Bing via Webmaster Tools. Make sure you fix any errors so you don’t wind up impeding your site’s indexing.

Robots.txt

Like XML sitemaps, robots.txt files are plain text files stored in the root directory of your site, and help crawlers navigate your site. The file contains lines of code that specify which user agents have access to which files, file types or folders. The code is broken up into blocks, with one user agent line per section. Basic robots.txt code looks like this:

User-agent: *
Disallow:

User-agent: googlebot
Disallow: *.ppt$

The asterisk (*) is used as a wild card. In the user agent line, the wild card represents all bots. In a disallow line, it represents the URL up to a specified point. In our example above, our robots.txt disallows Googlebot from crawling pages that end with a PowerPoint file extension — the $ denotes the end of the URL.

You can block bots from crawling your entire site by using a slash in the disallow line like this:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

It’s good practice to disallow all robots from accessing the entire server when you’re building, redesigning or migrating your site. However, you have to be sure to restore access once you’re done, or your shiny new site won’t get indexed.

Use Google Search Console to test your robots.txt file for syntax errors or other problems.

Meta Robots Tag

One problem with the robots.txt file is that it won’t stop search engines from following external links to your site, so disallowed pages could still wind up indexed. Add an extra layer of protection to individual pages using the robots meta tag:

Continue reading %9-Point Technical SEO Checklist for Developers%

by Sam Gooch via SitePoint

Leverage Heroku’s Metrics for Better App Performance

img src="http://ift.tt/2gmwvde" alt="3wgIDj3j" width="300" height="300" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-143589" />

Today, we are going to talk about performance related items on Rails and Heroku. I'd like to introduce the Heroku metrics dashboard and how to make performance optimizations to our application based on that.

Heroku is a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering for hosting web applications and is one of the easiest services for getting your application online quickly. Though it's built on top of AWS, it has many features wrapped around it that make it easy and appealing over other cloud-computing services. One such feature is it's metrics dashboard which provides insights on how an application is performing at the infrastructure level.

In this tutorial we'll see how to make use of this to optimize our Rails application.

Continue reading %Leverage Heroku’s Metrics for Better App Performance%

by Vinoth via SitePoint

Ekko

Colorful launching soon page for 'Ekko' - a new online app that builds a website using your Facebook page content.

by Rob Hope via One Page Love

Programming With Yii2: Automated Testing With Codeception

11 Helpful Social Media Tools for Marketers

Looking for better social media marketing tools? There are excellent third-party apps that can help you build your brand and audience through social channels. In this article, you’ll discover 11 helpful social media tools for marketers. Analysis Tools 1. Analyze Social Media Traffic With Leadfeeder Leadfeeder is a B2B tool that lets you track website [...]

This post 11 Helpful Social Media Tools for Marketers first appeared on .
- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle

by Jordan Kasteler via

DON'T DRINK IT, EXPLORE IT

METAXA 12 Stars is not just a drink. It's a journey of discovery through the senses. Explore its classic, unmatched character in an interactive video journey with the legendary explorer Mike Horn as your guide.
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