Backbase Newsletter - March 2008

Dear ${Demographic.FirstName},

Vote for your favorite company, website and person in The Next Web Awards (in cooperation with TechCrunch). Winners will be announced at the The Next Web Conference. Backbase is nominated in the On-Stage category: all votes are welcome!

Click Here to Vote »

As a subscriber you are entitled to a 30% discount for The Next Web Conference in Amsterdam, and also to a discount for the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. See below for details. We hope to see you at these events.

Best regards,
Jouk Pleiter
CEO, Backbase

PS. Join the new Backbase LinkedIn Group

Next month we’ll have the first European Online Ajax Training: we received a lot of requests to have the US training at a convenient time for European participants. The new training will start at 9.30am CET (Amsterdam/Paris). Introductory pricing is $350, approximately 225 Euro: during checkout, enter the coupon code euro_training to get the discount.

Immediately after the launch of IE8 beta 1 the Backbase R&D team has compared the performance of IE8 with the nightly builds of Safari and Firefox and the current browser versions. The new versions are all faster, while Firefox and Safari nightlies are blazingly fast.

View the Browser Performance report »

The Next Web Conference is THE European conference for industry thought-leaders, leading web-companies, innovative Startups, visionaries and real Web savvies. This third edition will be held in Amsterdam on April 3rd & 4th. Use the coupon code backbase08 to get a 30% discount on the regular price of 750 Euros.

Learn More & Register »

Backbase will officially launch its Adobe AIR support at the Adobe AIR Tour in Amsterdam, with a presentation by Sergey Ilinsky, Senior Developer in the Backbase R&D team. The Event is sold out, but you can follow it online.

Follow the Adobe AIR Tour »

A key benefit of 3.1 is the improved JavaScript performance, which is clearly noticeable. Also, standards support has been extended, for example for CSS 3, HTML 5 and SVG. See the full feature list on the Apple website. There has been some discussion about changes in key event handling, and PPK has updated his CSS compatibility tables for Safari 3.1.

Download Safari 3.1 (Win + Mac) »

Backbase is an exhibitor at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, April 22-25. We have secured unlimited free Expo passes for Backbase community members, a $100 value. You can also get a $100 discount on the full conference price. Use the discount code websf08co56 to claim your discount.

Yahoo!’s performance guidelines are pretty famous by now, and they’ve again added 20 more rules, as reported on Ajaxian. Especially when your Ajax applications are used world-wide or used over modem connections, these guidelines squeeze additional performance out of your Ajax app.

Read the 20 New Yahoo! Performance Rules »

Earlier this month Microsoft released IE8 beta 1, with improvements in standards support, performance and more. Ajaxian has an overview of the new features, and so does Microsoft. A key improvement is that IE8 will use Web Standards by default, rather than using the compatibility mode for IE7. In this standards mode it also passes the Acid 2 test for CSS compliance.

Download IE 8 Beta 1 »

Many people are using LinkedIn to manage their professional network. To facilitate networking among Backbase users, we’ve created a Backbase group. Please join this group, and a Backbase icon will be added to your LinkedIn profile.

Join the LinkedIn Backbase »