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Is it just me or has Google gone into overdrive? As a professional full-time online marketer I have to keep my mind firmly placed on what Google is doing. As much as I try not to because Google has probably driven more people around the bend than Chrysler and Mercedes-Benz put together. Like any professional marketer, I monitor my numerous keywords on a daily basis – especially my major targeted keyword phrases that bring in the most sales and subscribers. For years now, I have had top rankings in Google for my chosen phrases; they move up and down, but mostly they don’t leave the first page.
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Recognizing that it is not much fun to watch movies on a tiny cell phone, a number of companies are racing to develop gadgets that project what’s playing on the small screen onto walls, table cloths and other handy surfaces. ”Pico projectors” that are small enough to carry around in a shirt pocket are expected on the market later this year. Eventually, the technology will be tiny enough to be built into phones and portable media players, the companies say.
Author: golf Page 11 of 22
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Can fewer clicks on its search ads lead to more revenue for Google? That is the question investors, analysts, and the company itself are trying to answer. The debate was launched after a Mar. 26 report from researcher comScore (SCOR) showed a decline in the number of clicks from the prior month on Google’s search-related ads. According to the research firm, clicks on ads declined 3% in February from the prior month and were up just 3% compared to last year. Some analysts cautioned investors against buying additional Google (GOOG) shares; Google’s stock declined 3% on Mar. 27, to $444.
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Mashups–online applications that combine data and tools from different websites–are becoming increasingly useful. Although they started out as simple consumer programs, such as a tool that placed housing listings from Craigslist onto Google Maps, mashups have grown in complexity and are becoming popular with corporations, too. As a growing number of tools are released to help people easily build mashups, experts are also taking a look at how to head off the security risks.
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Most savvy SEOs know that Google is placing an increased weight on links from “authority” websites. Wikipedia, a free internet encyclopedia that can be edited by any user, is certainly one of the top authority websites in the eyes of Google and I´m certainly not the first SEO to observe that an awful lot of Wikipedia pages are currently ranking quite highly in the SERPS. Many of you likely have tried to place your website link on a Wikipedia page. What most probably happened is a zealous Wikipedia editor likely removed your link very quickly because the prevailing view is that appending your external link to the bottom of a previously created page adds little to the community and likely only benefits you.
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The results are in: Wild Planet Toy Store (Shopwildplanet.com) has reported an increase of 10.4% in conversion rates since the site adopted the buySAFE Seal. Wild Planet Toy Store partnered with buySAFE, Inc. in early 2007 to test the effectiveness of the buySAFE Seal. The store has integrated the buySAFE trust solution into its ecommerce website so that all of its pages display the Seal. Its shoppers are able to guarantee their purchases with a buySAFE bond up to $25,000 . After testing for almost six months across a base of over 150,000 store transactions, Brian Almashie, CEO. of Wild Planet ssaid that “The results speak for themselves: Conversion and revenues are both up more than 10% … I can’t think of anything else I could have done so easily to have such an impact on my business.”
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Regions of the West Coast and Midwest moved ahead of Washington as top destinations for venture capital in recent years, as the local venture economy grew more slowly than the national average, a Washington Post analysis shows. In 2001, the year the technology bubble popped, Washington ranked sixth among top destinations for venture capital, after Silicon Valley, New England, the New York metro area, Texas and the Southeast. Last year, it was ranked 10th, overtaken by the Northwest, San Diego, the Midwest and Los Angeles/Orange County.
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Scroll the list of the 10 most popular Web sites in the U.S., and you’ll encounter the Internet’s richest corporate players — names like Yahoo, Amazon.com, News Corp., Microsoft and Google. Except for No. 7: Wikipedia. And there lies a delicate situation. With 2 million articles in English alone, the Internet encyclopedia ”anyone can edit” stormed the Web’s top ranks through the work of unpaid volunteers and the assistance of donors. But that gives Wikipedia far less financial clout than its Web peers, and doing almost anything to improve that situation invites scrutiny from the same community that proudly generates the content.
If there is a lesson from former New York governor Eliot Spitzer’s scandal-driven fall (aside from the most obvious one), it is this: banks are paying attention to even the smallest of your transactions.
For this we can thank modern software, and post-9/11 U.S. government pressure to find evidence of money laundering and terrorist financing. Experts say that all major banks, and even most small ones, are running so-called anti-money-laundering software, which combs through as many as 50 million transactions a day looking for anything out of the ordinary.
In Spitzer’s case, according to newspaper reports, it was three wire transfers amounting to just $5,000 apiece that set alarm bells ringing.
Read more of "The Technology That Toppled Eliot Spitzer" – Technology Review >>>
Technorati Tags: Bank Fraud Software,Eliot Spitzer
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A woman who claims the recording industry’s anti-music piracy campaign threatens and intimidates innocent people has filed a new complaint accusing record companies of racketeering, fraud and illegal spying.
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One of the great things about the Internet is the way people post reviews on just about anything you are considering trying, whether it is a movie, a new restaurant or the local florist. This also introduces one of the worst things about the Internet: trying to figure out which reviews to trust. Was that effusive praise written surreptitiously by the merchant? Was that anonymous online slam posted by a devious competitor? The dilemma might be unavoidable in this age of abundant user-generated content, when we have to be smarter about separating signals from noise. But a startup called RatePoint Inc. begs to differ. It wants to play referee, giving consumers more clarity into a business’ reputation and protecting the business from unwarranted blights on its credibility.
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US direct marketers may reduce their media budgets this year, judging by Target Marketing’s "Media Usage Forecast" report. Nearly one-quarter of respondents surveyed in January 2008 said they would reduce their media budgets compared with last year. The n
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Yahoo Inc, still fending off a $41 billion takeover bid by Microsoft Corp, unveiled a cell phone tool on Tuesday that lets users keep up with their favorite topics using dynamic bookmarks. OnePlace, to be launched in the second quarter, allows users to ma
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The HowTo team at Mahalo has been an amazing surprise effort. We didn’t plan on making howto articles, but when we built various how to search pages we realized that many howto articles were, well, lacking. So, we started building select ones where we thought we could help. This one on how to save money is very good. I’ve got a bunch of tips on how to do this for business.
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Mark Zuckerberg’s highly anticipated keynote interview with BusinessWeek’s Sarah Lacy at the South by Southwest Interactive conference was panned by the audience here — and in near-real time in the blogosphere. That the social-media circus turned against its reigning ringmaster had more to with Ms. Lacy’s meandering questions and diversions into anecdotal tales of her previous interviews with Mr. Zuckerberg than it did with the Facebook CEO’s answers. Indeed, at one point he even suggested to her that she ought to ask questions — as opposed to sharing her thoughts — prompting the restless SXSW crowd to burst into applause.
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Silicon Valley is where most everyone’s goal is to be wildly successful in changing the world – creating a runaway success and being rewarded with a big payday. All know the odds, and the daily struggle of insatiable demands for the next big thing with the very least investment, and industry-wide contempt for those who have failed. Despite this, all are driven to grasp for the shiny brass ring that’s always, though sometimes barely, out of reach. It is an environment of soaring hopes, crashing defeats, and maddening near-misses. Despite this, entrepreneurs never lose their yearning to change the world and be entrepreneurs. While they love the perceived freedom, they live in the constant state of self-consciousness (they may deny it), feeling their entire worth as a human being is being judged by people who are risk averse, lack vision, and not technically one’s peers.
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Bill Gust, like most venture capitalists, is an optimist. The managing general partner of Anthem Capital Management’s Baltimore office expects a tougher year for entrepreneurs looking for funding, but said opportunities still exist for the right ideas. Entrepreneurs seeking capital have become more confident and experienced, said Don Rainey, a general partner with GroTech Capital Group. He said the tech bubble burst and Sept. 11 terrorist attacks had a greater chilling effect on entrepreneurs than today’s economy. “The current credit crisis doesn’t cause the same kind of hesitancy,” Rainey said. “I think quality has been improving for a couple years; the management are more mature and experienced than they were a year ago.”
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When a small padlock appears in the corner of your Web browser’s address bar or the entire bar turns green, it seems like a powerful signal you’re safe to proceed. But experts say the SSL certificates those green lights signify — digital stamps of approval that Web sites buy to prove they’re running a legitimate business and can send and receive encrypted data safely — don’t provide the safety they seem to. "They instill some sense of security, but that could be a dangerously false sense of security," said Paul Mutton, a researcher with UK-based security firm Netcraft Ltd. The site itself could still be riddled with security holes for hackers to exploit. And the certificate could simply be bogus: Criminals have been forging them to get the padlock icon and dress up fraudulent sites.
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During the Web’s heyday, a profitable Internet company nearing $100 million in annual sales while luring a million new customers a month would have found itself on the IPO fast track. But that’s hardly the case for LinkedIn, a professional networking site that has cleared those hurdles and then some. Instead, LinkedIn is hewing closely to the Web economy’s new motto on initial public offerings: Easy does it. Founded in 2003, LinkedIn may not sell shares until some time next year. Likewise, social networking site Facebook, worth $15 billion on paper, may not go public until 2010,