Some people view shoes as practical necessities, while others have a shoe obsession. Most people probably land somewhere in between. This article provides some basic but useful rules for men to choose shoes.

General rules:

1. Try to pick a shoe that matches, or is darker than your pants.
2. Although it is a safe bet, socks do not need to match your shoes. Instead, think of your socks as you would a tie – an item that can bring bring the whole outfit together.
3. If wearing a belt, try to match your shoes to it, unless of course, your belt is some multi-colored striped thing.

Men’s Shoes for Jeans
You can wear almost any color or style of shoe with jeans, but avoid very shiny shoes that were obviously intended for more dressier outfits.  Boots, lug soles, sneakers, loafers and sandals all work great with jeans, so you may find it helpful to let the style of your shirt guide you.  For example, a sporty, polo shirt might work with a loafer; t-shirts go well with sneakers or retro-style shoes; long, artsy button-downs work well with sandals or contemporary styles.

Men’s Shoes for Casual Pants
Whether you call them Dockers, chinos, or khakis, there are a variety of loafers, oxford and other men’s shoes that work well with casual pants.  Let the ornamentation and style of the shoe guide you towards the look you’re trying to achieve.  For example, a tassle or a buckle is a little more on the dressy side, while a woven pattern or heavy stitching is a little more on the casual side.

Men’s Shoes for Dress Pants
With dress pants, shoot for the same type of shoe that you might wear with a suit. Shinier materials usually indicate a dressier shoe, as do less bulky heels and soles. Choose a shoe that is the same color or darker than your pants, and if wearing a belt, match your shoes to it.

Color Matching for Men’s Shoes

1. Black shoes work well with navy, grey or black pants.
2. Brown shoes are best suited to tan, brown, beige, greens, other darker earth tones.
3. Burgundy shoes work well with khaki, lighter browns, blue and grey.
4. Tan shoes look great with lighter earth tones, blue, beige, lighter tan or white.

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BEIJING (Dow Jones)–China President Hu Jintao on Wednesday urged the country to speed up the transformation of its economic development, according to a statement posted on the central government’s Web site.

China should rely less on investment and exports for economic growth and instead shift to a balanced reliance on a mix of consumption, exports and investment, Hu said, according to the statement.

China must also increase the contribution of services and the agricultural industry to economic growth, he said.

The foundation of economic recovery is still not solid and the financial crisis has highlighted problems in China’s development, he said.

Hu reiterated that China will strive to maintain fast and stable economic growth.

Hu’s comments are among the strongest yet from the Chinese leadership on the long-standing goal of adjusting China’s economic growth pattern.

Transforming China’s economic growth model is the only way to fulfill the Communist Party’s commitment to improve the daily lives of the Chinese people, he said.

-By Aaron Back and Patricia Jiayi Ho, Dow Jones Newswires; (8610) 8400 7702; patricia.ho@dowjones.com

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The search marketing team of Yahoo! says that firms need to upgrade their search engine optimization (SEO) campaign to make sure they get better return investments.

In the search engine’s blog, marketers were advised to do proper keyword selections, saying that this area is important especially when a company starts using professional SEO services.

Depending on the goal of an SEO campaign, sites will need to focus on high-volume search terms or product-specific phrases.

It is also important for an SEO campaign to respond to consumer behavior.

The Yahoo! marketing team explained: “Users are more sophisticated in their searches now, and we’ve seen that up to 20 per cent of searches in any given month can be search queries never seen before by a search engine.”

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Who could resist the months of hype that paved the way for Apple’s iPad debut last week? Apparently not Google, which has shown its interest in tablet computing with its browser-based Chrome OS.

On Monday, Glen Murphy, a user interface designer for Google’s Chrome browser and the Chrome operating system based on it, pointed to image and video concepts of a Chrome OS-based tablet that went live two days before the iPad launch. Apparently nobody noticed initially, because only now did Murphy tweet, “Apparently our tablet mocks have been unearthed.”

The site also shows the array of devices Google envisions for Chrome OS.

“While its primary focus is Netbooks, Chrome OS could eventually scale to a wide variety of devices. Each would have vastly different input methods, available screen space, and processing power,” according to the Chromium form factors site. Chromium is the name of the open-source developer project that underlies the branded Chrome product.

It’s possible that Chrome OS could be an easier sell on tablets than on Netbooks, the class of device on which Google said it plans to launch Chrome OS. Netbooks often are used as general-purpose PCs, so the browser-based philosophy of Chrome OS is a more jarring transition.

Today’s tablets, in contrast, tend to focus more on a collection of specialized uses such as reading books, surfing the Net, and chores that only require light typing. With that approach, Chrome OS’ break from the PC world could be less jarring. The tablet market isn’t as big as the Netbook market, though.

The ideas are only mock-ups, but Google has established itself as a real if not dominant force in the computing industry. Its Android mobile-phone operating system is increasingly influential, and its Chrome browser continues to steadily grow in usage.

The tablet mock-ups show a variety of Chrome OS tablet ideas, including a virtual keyboard taking up the bottom half of the screen or detached and floating as a separate window. Also included are a slideshow mode, an application launcher, sidebar-mounted browser tabs, and a pop-up contextual menu.

The video mock-up shows a much larger tablet, with hands resizing and moving windows through the multitouch interface, scrolling through text, and typing a search query.

It’s all very rough at this stage, but none of it is too remote from a multitouch-enabled version of the Chrome OS. Google plans to debut Chrome OS in Netbooks later this year, and development of the open-source operating system is well under way.

In a statement, Google didn’t share any specifics about its plans: “Google Chrome OS is still in development, and we are constantly experimenting with various user interfaces to determine what designs would produce the best user experience. As we’ve said all along, the UI is still under development and will continue to evolve as we determine which designs work best for our users.”

Computing companies have been trying to make tablets for years, with little success. Apple hopes its design will change that with its iPad selling from $499 to $829. It’s more of an iPhone with a large screen than a MacBook with no keyboard.

Google is taking a different approach with Chrome OS. Instead of programs running straight on the computer’s hardware and its underlying Linux operating system, Chrome OS applications run directly in the browser.

What’s similar to the iPad, though, is that both have somewhat of an applications head start compared with a computing platform that’s starting from scratch: the iPad can run existing iPhone apps, and Chrome OS can run existing Web applications such as Google Docs.

One thing that’s changed since early tablet years is the arrival of e-book readers as a real phenomenon. Amazon’s Kindle is the most notable example, but there are others, and Apple touted book reading with the iPad. Google, it should be noted, has a conduit to millions of books via its Google Books service.

Given that Apple chose to use a variation of its iPhone OS for the iPad, it’s interesting but not terribly surprising that Google chose to use Chrome OS rather than its phone operating system, Android. In the big picture, Google clearly hopes the browser will be the foundation for applications, letting them run more easily on a multitude of devices.

Android uses a variation of Oracle’s Java technology as a program foundation. Perhaps ironically, Java was launched with the motto for programmers of “write once, run anywhere,” and it is that vision Google is trying to realize with Web applications.

Source: CNET

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We could one day be spending our holidays in a gigantic vertical airship that floats thousands of meters above ground if a design concept by Seymourpowell becomes reality.

The project dubbed the Aircruise is a radical new design that promises to accommodate guests in a 265-meter tall hotel that could float above city skylines or over dramatic landscapes.

“The Aircruise concept questions whether the future of luxury travel should be based around space-constrained, resource hungry, and all too often stressful airline travel,” Nick Talbot, head of transportation at Seymourpowell said.

“A more serene transport experience will appeal to people looking for a more reflective journey, where the experience of travel itself is more important than getting from A to B quickly.”

While the Aircruise is only a conceptual proposal, designers developed a detailed and achievable technical plan for the craft that could allow it to be built in the future.  A maximum of 100 guests and crew would be allowed onboard and there would only be 10 luxury apartments available for rent.  There would also be large internal spaces for dining as well as a bar and lounge area for passengers.

“I can’t think of another way you can experience pure luxury travel,” Talbot said.  “Imagine sitting in your stateroom and seeing the Serengeti below you or floating above the tallest skyscraper in the world.”

Hydrogen gas would be used as the primary lifting gas and it would be capable of lifting around 1.2 kg per cubic meter of volume.  Large hydrogen fuel cells would also provide on board power and some drinking water. The cruising speed of the Aircruise would range from 100 to 150 kilometers an hour and a journey from London to New York would take 37 hours.

“We think the new form of luxury will be those that have the time to enjoy an experience,” Talbot said.

“We think of this as taking a cruise, except you’d be floating high above the earth.”

The Aircruise’s designers say that it would take a huge amount of money to actually build such a thing and at its current stage, it’s only a feasibility study.

Source: CNN London

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Facebook officially denied they have any plan to charge users monthly in response to the current rumours.  It is widely spread that Facebook will start charging users from US$4.99 to US$14.99 per month.  Although Facebook denied they have plans to charge users, it is interesting to see what Facebook will do in order to generate huge profits from their large user base.  Monthly fee? Charges applied to Facebook Fan pages or business groups?  Let’s see.
The following is presented by Facebook:
“A false rumour suggesting that Facebook is to start charging is being used to bait malware traps.

Thousands of disgruntled punters, angry at the $4.99 a month charge for using the social networking site that will supposedly kick in from June (or July, according to other …false reports) have been induced to visit “protest group” sites in response to spam emails.

However, in reality, there is no such plan and the protest pages often contain malware, as urban myth debunking site Snopes warns: “The protest page was a trap for the unwary; clicking on certain elements of it initiated a script that hijacked users’ computers. Some of those who did venture a click had their computers taken over by a series of highly objectionable images while malware simultaneously attempted to install itself onto their computers.”

Snopes published its warning on 31 December, but groups on Facebook itself protesting the supposed upcoming charges remain active almost two weeks later. A quick check on one such UK group contains no scripting unpleasantness directly, but it does link to numerous third-party sites whose provenance remains suspect.

Searching for “Facebook charges July 2010″ leads to fake blog entries as well as some legitimate results, evidence of an ongoing black hat SEO campaign of a type commonly used to punt rogue security scanner software over recent months. We asked Facebook what steps it intended to take, if any, against groups spreading the false rumour and will update this story as and when we hear more.”

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If you have an AdWords campaign set up to reach searchers using Google’s mobile search, you’ve got a new feature to enhance your efforts. Google is enabling click-to-call phone numbers in the ads that appear on mobile web browsers.

Google Jan. 28 took its AdWords click-to-call ad program out of beta, offering advertisers a potentially lucrative new way to connect with their target audiences through high-end smartphones with HTML Web browsers.

Click-to-call ads let advertisers add local business numbers alongside their destination URLs in mobile search ads. When users of smartphones, such as Apple’s iPhone or Google’s Nexus One, search for a local business from their mobile phone and stumble upon ads that have these numbers, smartphone users can click on the ads’ phone numbers and a call is automatically generated. If a smartphone user is searching for a local pizza place on their mobile device, then they can now simply click on the ads phone number and order up their favorite pie.

Since Google’s mobile click-to-call ads are generated based on location, if your company is a chain, an ad will be served up with the closest location to a user – and will contain the appropriate phone number. This Adword feature is important because it allows users to find out the most approriate phone number when the company has multiple shops.

How to utilize this Adwords feature?  To add click-to-call in mobile AdWords ads, simply set up location extensions and add your business phone number. Then make sure your campaign is set up to appear on mobile devices with full Internet browsers.

Google explained its rationale for offering such ads, and how searches made on mobile devices differ from those on computers, in a blog post:

“When people search for goods or services using their mobile phones, they often prefer to call a store rather than visit that store’s Website. Whether they’re placing a direct order, making a reservation or inquiring about services, the ability for prospective customers to easily call your business is a key distinguishing feature of searches made on mobile phones versus computers.”

BroadPoint AmTech analyst Benjamin Schachter said in a research note advertisers pay the same cost-per-click for a call as they would for a “click-through” to the destination URL.

Schachter added that a meaningful percentage of mobile queries are for phone numbers or local information, making a phone number associated with an ad a highly relevant component on a search engine results page.

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