These days, it is pretty much essential that a business maintain a healthy website.  The problem, however, is trying to keep the traffic coming and then keeping them interested in what they see so that they come back for more.  But, doing so requires keeping track of your website statistics, preferably via real time analytics, and even more preferably with heat maps.

As far as web analytics are concerned, heat maps are relatively new to the scene, but they do have a lot of valuable information to offer the webmasters.  What they do is pinpoint the “hot spots” on the web pages, or rather pinpoint where the site visitors tend to click. To put it simply, it is a method for seeing what works on a website and what does not.

The results of heat maps are displayed through real time analytics.  When looking at the screen, it is like viewing a screen shot of your website overlaid with what you might expect a heat map to look like.  It is as if you are looking at a webpage through infrared goggles—the so called hot spots light up brighter than the less popular areas of the page.

In this way, business owners and webmasters can create a website of better quality than the completion.  It makes the decision process of what to keep on a website and what to remove much more targeted than an educated guess would be.  Obviously, anything that visitors tend to ignore is probably not worth keeping on the site and other elements that better engage users can be added instead.

Therefore, the information gathered from a heat map can help propel a business forward. It is sure to become one of the more popular tools used in real time analytics, and will likely do so fairly quickly.

The Chinese smartphone maker Huawei Technologies has beaten one time favorites of Nokia, Research in Motion, Sony and LG Electronics to become the world’s No. 3 behind Apple and Samsung Electronics. The world’s No. 1 and 2 together accounts for 54 percent of the global market share in smartphones. Huawei reportedly make $23 billion sales a year and growing at 3.5 percent per year.

Huawei Technologies was started in 1987 and made telecom gear for phone companies. Only in 2000 that the company start to make cell phones. They entered the smartphone production in 2009. Within short few years they became world’s No. 3 due to competitive pricing and good products. They were able to cut cost by putting Android operating system in their phones rather than trying to invent their own operating system. Their products are capturing the market share in China, Middle East and Africa. They expect to manufacture 60 million smartphones in 2012. They supply phones to Metro PCS and recently signed a contract with AT&T.

The company’s sudden explosion has some governments worried. The Australian government banned them from bidding on a national broadband project. The U.S. Congress is evaluating the security risk they pose to the nation and its ties to Iran.

On June 18, 2012, in Los Angeles, California the Microsoft announced that it is introducing a tablet, the Surface. It will be arriving in October 2012. Software and hardware for the Surface will be made by Microsoft. This is a new dimension for the long standing software company. Now it will compete with its business partners such as Dell, Acer, and Hewlett-Packard, and challenge Apple who is dominating the field.

Until the new Surface, only hardware that Microsoft owned was Xbox, keyboards, and mice. The Surface will weigh 1.5 pounds, 9mm thick, and will run on low-power ARM chips. It will have a built in kick stand and body made of light weight material called vapor-deposited magnesium. The inside of the cover will house a full size keyboard. Few months later a slightly bigger Surface that runs on more powerful Intel chip will follow the first release. This version will support yet to be released Windows 8 and other earlier Windows applications. According to Microsoft pricing will be comparable to similar units available in the market.

Critics say the announcement indicates hardships that Microsoft is facing. Until Surface it has not announced any plans beyond Windows 8 which is due later this year.