… Ecommerce, Internet Security, Economics, and Entrepreneurship

Author: golf Page 14 of 22

AuctionBytes Conducts Online Shopping Survey

AuctionBytes.com, one of my favorite ecommerce news sources, is conducting another survey to study online shopping behavior.  The survey explores a number of areas that are important for small business ecommerce merchants to fully understand about their customers.  If you have a few extra minutes, I encourage you to complete this survey.  Ina Steiner, the editor, will publish the survey results in a few weeks, and I will make sure to share with you as well.

You can complete the survey here >> http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=vX4t6OvcNW0_2fO8NFL8pFuA_3d_3d

Daily Roundup for 2007-12-24

  • A parody of Clement Clark Moore’s "A Visit from St. Nicholas" by Margaret Woda.  Yes.  Margaret is related to me.  She is my mom, and she is really teaching me a thing or two about how to blog for business.  Keep up the great work Mom!
  • December is an unlucky month for one online payment service. BidPay.com sent an email to users on Wednesday informing them it was discontinuing operations effective December 31, 2007, but gave no reason. It was 2 years ago this month that First Data Corporation abruptly closed BidPay before selling it to CyberSource Corporation.

Daily Roundup for 2007-12-23

  • It has been called a competitor to Wikipedia, Jason Calacanis’ Mahalo, Seth Godin’s Squidoo and Yahoo Answers: Knol is Google’s foray into knowledge aggregation. Knol lets users produce web pages devoted to various subject matter.
  • The year 2007 may go down in the annals of Internet crime as the year when organized cyber criminals finally got serious about their marketing strategies — crafting cyber schemes that were significantly more sophisticated and stealthy.  Security experts say criminals are increasingly trying to ensnare Internet users by lurking on familiar Web sites and using purloined data to craft scam e-mails that are more believable, and thus more likely to entice an unsuspecting user.

How to Answer the VC Valuation Question

Over the last few years, I have presented to dozens of venture capital firms while fundraising, and inevitably, the venture capital investor always asks you what valuation you are looking for.  This reminds me of that job interview question we have all been asked… "What are your biggest weaknesses?"  There really isn’t a right answer, but there sure are a lot of bad answers.

Stu Phillips does a nice job of explaining how to answer this important VC question on his blog, Soaring on Ridgelift

One hint… Don’t answer the question! 

Well, there is actually more to that conclusion, but you can read the details in Stu’s blog post, The Valuation Trap.

Nice post Stu!

Daily Roundup for 2007-12-16

  • Some marketers think "social media marketing" or "social media optimization" means "social media manipulation." There is a steady stream of how-to articles describing how to game the system of sites like Digg, or to develop linkbait to drive untargeted traffic to your site.  A better way to approach social media is to remember that behind every successful blog is a person. Reaching out to bloggers and building a relationship with them can go a long way in improving your social media efforts, your search ranking, and your overall marketing plan.
  • In the world of pay-per-click advertising, there are three well-known players: Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing and Microsoft adCenter. However, there are several other interesting pay-per-click sites you may not be familiar with, which you might find useful.

Daily Roundup for 2007-12-14

  • Microsoft Corp. said Wednesday it has acquired a United Kingdom online mapping company to enhance its existing Windows Live Web-based services.The software maker did not say what it paid for Multimap, which provides street-level maps, travel directions and local information. Multimap also offers hotel and restaurant-booking services and builds private-label mapping tools for companies, including Hilton Hotels and Ford.
  • A federal judge ruled that Web auctioneer eBay Inc. must pay about $30 million in damages to MercExchange LLC as part of a long-running dispute over a patent related to the ecommerce company’s "Buy It Now" fixed-price feature. The ruling marks a setback for eBay in a series of recent legal challenges.

Daily Roundup for 2007-12-13

  • This is the first in a series on osCommerce, the popular free, open-source shopping cart alternative, and the industry it has spawned. I found this article to be an excellent overview of the history of osCommerce shopping carts, the major osCommerce players as well as the technical support resources that exist for the osCommerce products. As you may know, buySAFE is available for most of the osCommerce shopping cart platforms including osCommerce, Cube Cart, Zen Cart, CRELoaded, and X Cart, so if you already use one of these platforms and are interested in buySAFE, just email buySAFE’s customer support team and we will help you out.

Facebook, Executives, College Students and Love

Facebook I was recently invited to join a professional colleague’s Facebook network.  Up until then, I had strictly used LinkedIn as my only social network primarily because a) I have always found LinkedIn to be very useful for business, and b) I perceived Facebook as a playground for college kids.

Well I was wrong.  Facebook is awesome, and many of my professional colleagues were way ahead of me in discovering the network’s value. Its utility becomes very powerful as your network multiplies and matures.  To be quite honest, I now view LinkedIn as a great place to view a professional profile or resume, but that is about it. Facebook provides a scalable method for communicating with your professional network.  The bottom-line is that I am learning to love Facebook. 

Since we are talking about Facebook, I thought you might also enjoy this article about the Facebook phenomenon.

For college students, if it’s Facebook, it’s love | Reuters” 

For the Facebook generation, love now comes with a drop-down menu.

With profiles on the Facebook social networking site (www.facebook.com/) almost de rigueur on college campuses, students can define their relationship status with menu choices ranging from “married” to that perennial favorite, “It’s complicated.”

“It’s complicated” could also describe the emotional calculations people in their late teens and early 20s make as they decide whether their relationships are what they call “Facebook-worthy.” MORE >>

My Social Network Profiles:      
Facebook >>    
LinkedIn >>    
deli.cio.us Bookmarks >>

Daily Roundup for 2007-12-09

  • Happy Holiday for European Web Shops? – eMarketer
    Retail e-commerce continues to grow in the largest Western European economies. 160.6 million European Internet users visited online retail sites in the month of October 2007.  This article provides a number of other interesting facts about European ecommerce.
  • This week PayPal released a new Web widget that lets you embed a virtual storefront onto your blog or any Web site that uses HTML code. The PayPal Storefront Widget allow you to list products, set prices and start selling in an online storefront format.  This Widget has real utility, and so you will want to check it out.

Daily Roundup for 2007-12-08

  • Henry Blodget writes in Silicon Alley Insider that eBay CEO Meg Whitman is "one of the Valley’s most celebrated and admired executives" but thinks it is becoming increasingly clear that Whitman is not the right person for the job. In this blog post, Ina asks the hard questions.
  • A Consumer Reports press statement on the problem of counterfeit items said consumers should be suspicious of third-party websites that offer deep discounts for products that are usually pricey. eBay has become a Market for Lemons in a number of product categories (Tiffany products is just one of many examples), and so this is not surprising.

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