National IT Solutions has been recognised for outstanding customer service, winning the 2013 Action Coach Asia Pacific Business Excellence Award for Best Customer Service Results, while also being nominated as a finalist for the Best Service Based Business category.

The Business Excellence Awards were created to recognise the “Best of the Best” in the small-and-medium sized business (SMB) sector. The awards honour the achievements and accomplishments of businesses in industries and categories from around the world.

National IT Solutions impressed the panel with excellent customer service results based on satisfaction surveys achieving a 99.9% near perfect rating from existing clients.

Alex Butera, Managing Director of National IT Solutions said “This Award belongs to our employees who go above and beyond in supporting our clients. It is rewarding to be recognised for providing outstanding customer service, the foundation on which National IT Solutions was established over 10 years ago”.

“Our growth over this time is due to the exceptional service we provide our existing customers who provide 98% of our new clients per year through referrals”.

“I would also like to thank Action Coach for the opportunity to participate in such a valuable awards program and especially our customers for their ongoing loyalty and support”.

Captcha codes – It’s not uncommon to feel frustrated every time you spend 10 seconds…or in some cases, 10 minutes trying to work out if that’s a g or a q.
We know they exist for a reason, but there’s no denying the annoyance of repeatedly ‘wasting’ away valuable seconds deciphering these security enhancing codes.
Luis Von Ahn, the brains behind Captcha codes shares the same concern.
Initially he was rather chuffed that 200 millions captcha codes were being typed on a daily basis, then it hit him…
200 million x 10seconds = 500,000 hours every day being “wasted” typing these annoying captchas.
The solution? Re Captcha.
The premise? Basically – to put this ‘wasted’ time to good use, by getting each user to translate a word that had been scanned from a book, therefore digitizing all of this human knowledge. Yes, those near-impossible-to-read words, are actually scans from a bunch of old books that are now being immortalized on the web.
Pretty neat huh?
Most would stop there, happy with their feat, but Von Ahn’s brain just wouldn’t stop ticking. If 750,000,000 people have each digitized at least one word of a book using Re Captcha, what else could they achieve? Large scale collaborations have produced some of mans most incredible feats; The Panama Canal, space travel…the list goes on.
Several projects later, Von Ahn posed this question to his graduate student Sevren Hacker:
How can we get hundreds of millions of people to translate the web into every major language, for free?
The ingenious idea that followed is probably one of our favourite things on the Internet.
Introducing Duo Lingo.
You learn a language, for free, whilst simultaneously translating the Internet (yes, the entire internet) into other languages, so that non-English speakers are able to access information they never had access to before.
Yep – you’ll be hola-ing your way through Barcelona before you know it, all the while contributing to making information accessible to millions of other people.

Check out the TED talk from Von Ahn himself, for more info.

http://www.ted.com/talks/luis_von_ahn_massive_scale_online_collaboration.html

The team at Google recently announced the introduction of semantic search capabilities to the search engine monster, which sent rumours flying about the future of SEO.

Semantic search means that Google will now use machine intelligence to interpret the meaning of your query rather than just using keywords in order to find the most pertinent results. Currently when you search, Google gives you results based solely on the text and keywords that you use.

Essentially, Google guesses.

Semantic search is a more intelligent way of producing results as the specific wording of the query won’t matter as much, but rather Google will be able to determine the intent behind it. It will look at the relationship between the words you use, how they work together and produce search results from there.

This isn’t an entirely new concept – Siri uses similar technology, however Google will be the first search engine to implement the technology.

Now, what does this mean for SEO?

Despite SEO’s ever-evolving nature, one thing has and will remain steady – it is driven by keywords, whether they are in your content, URL structure, tagging or links. However with the introduction of semantic search brands will have to consider possible questions and search queries from their consumers, as well as the intent and meaning behind keywords they use, and then create content around that, rather than dropping keywords into the website like landmines.

Intelligent content that answers consumer queries? Seems like a good thing to us.