Internet Marketing
Content-Search Deals Make Twitter Profitable
Data-mining deals signed in October will bring in $25 million in exchange for rendering Twitter’s tweets searchable on Google and Microsoft Bing
Twitter is ending 2009 on a high note. The microblogging site has reached profitability after inking $25 million of deals that make its content searchable by Google (GOOG) and Microsoft (MSFT), Bloomberg BusinessWeek has learned.
In October, Twitter said it had struck multiyear arrangements that make users’ short blog postings available on Google.com and on Bing, which is run by Microsoft. Those agreements carry sufficient value to help Twitter achieve a small profit for 2009, say two people familiar with the company’s finances, who asked to remain anonymous because Twitter’s books are not Continue Reading
eGether: A Social Network For Pitching And Getting Pitched, Without The Email Overload
The overflowing inbox. It’s a problem many a journalist or blogger has had to deal with, but it’s often a necessary evil. After all, we’re all on the hunt for the next big story, cool gadget, or interesting startup, and Email has long been the standard for receiving pitches. Unfortunately, Email is really bad at filtering through the noise, so it’s easy for good stories to fall through the cracks. That’s where eGether comes in. The new site is looking to offer an alternative to the pitch-by-Email method. It’s essentially a social Continue Reading
Why eBay’s recent search outage is GREAT news for you
If you were on eBay last Saturday Nov. 21st, you might have discovered to your horror that your keyword searches were yielding no results!
According to eBay, the unprecedented outage was caused by an unexpected surge in listings. As of Saturday, there were 200 million listings on eBay, which is a 33% increase from this time last year.
eBay has announced that they will be refunding listing fees to sellers who missed out on sales due to the search outage. They’ll also remove negative and Continue Reading
LinkedIn works with Twitter, and vice versa
Today we’re announcing a partnership between LinkedIn and Twitter – and new features that we think are going to make both Twitter and LinkedIn more powerful for you.
The idea is simple: When you set your status on LinkedIn you can now tweet it as well, amplifying it to your followers and real-time search services like Twitter Search and Bing. And when you tweet, you can send that message to your LinkedIn connections as well, from any Twitter service or tool.
Why? Because when you’re trying to get something done, you want Twitter and Continue Reading
Salesforce Chatter: A Real-Time Social Network For The Enterprise
We’re here at Dreamforce, Salesforce.com’s annual cloud computing event in San Francisco. CEO Marc Benioff is delivering the keynote and we will be live-bogging the news below. Salesforce has had a banner year, reporting strong earnings yesterday for the third quarter, launching a new version of their fastest growing product, Service Cloud 2; and rolling out a lightweight contact manager for small businesses. So what is the future? Benioff has long praised the virtues of the real-time cloud and said recently that real-time technology is not only crucial to Salesforce’s offerings but is the future of the company’s products. Benioff has even praised Twitter for making the transition between the cloud and real-time web seamless.
Today, Salesforce is making its own venture Continue Reading
SEO: Essential to Survival
In the realm of e-commerce, one of the top marketing tools a company has is a Google ranking. The difference between a page 1 or page 2 search engine ranking can be the difference of tens of thousands of dollars of revenue for a company.
Because of this, companies are allocating more budget space than ever toward search engine optimization (SEO), the strategy and process of improving the volume of traffic to a website by improving the search rankings of various search engines like Google, Yahoo!, AOL, Ask and MSN.
For many online companies like My1Stop.com, an online printing company, using SEO techniques to achieve a high search engine ranking is essential for survival.
“Our website is our complete livelihood, since 99 percent of every penny that comes into Continue Reading
Google Chrome OS To Launch Within A Week
Google’s Chrome OS project, first announced in July, will become available for download within a week, we’ve heard from a reliable source. Google previously said to expect an early version of the OS in the fall.
What can we expect? Driver support will likely be a weak point. We’ve heard at various times that Google has a legion of engineers working on the not so glamorous task of building hardware drivers. And we’ve also heard conflicting rumors that Google is mostly relying on hardware manufacturers to create those drivers. Whatever the truth, and it’s likely in between, having a Continue Reading
A Guide to Marketing basics
What is Marketing?
In plain and simple terms, marketing activities and strategies result in making products available that satisfy customers while making profits for the companies that offer those products. That’s it in a nutshell!
Marketing produces a “win-win” because:
* Customers have a product that meets their needs, and
* Healthy profits are achieved for the company. (These profits allow the company to continue to do business in order to meet the needs of future customers.)
Stated another way: A focus on what the customer wants is essential to successful marketing efforts. This customer-orientation must also be balanced with the company’s objective of maintaining a profitable volume of sales Continue Reading
LinkedIn Reveals New Look, Better Navigation
Some LinkedIn users will have noticed a change to the navigation and user interface of the LinkedIn.com website, announces a company blog post. The business-focused social network is in the process of rolling out an updated design that aims to improve and simplify site navigation while also offering a cleaner, less-cluttered look. Does the fresh coat of paint hit the mark?
What’s New: Navigation Improvements, Lots of Whitespace
One of the main new features of the revamped LinkedIn is the global navigation bar at the top of the page which links to all the site’s Continue Reading
Clicker: A One-Stop Shop For Online Video (1000 Invites)
Finding specific online videos from TV networks and independent producers can often be a daunting challenge. Some TV shows are on Hulu, some can only be found as paid downloads on iTunes or Amazon and some are only available for streaming on the network’s and producer’s own sites.
Clicker wants to change this by making it easier to find shows from TV networks, music videos, and web videos from across the Internet. Clicker is currently in private beta and only available in the US. The company gave us 1000 invites for our readers. Read on to find out how you can get yours.
Clicker aggregates over 300,000 episodes from over 1,200 networks, as well as 50,000 music videos and thousands of movies.
Continue Reading
Google Wave Sandbox is Now Open for Federation
Google just opened the Google Wave developer sandbox for federation. Developers can now begin prototyping tools against WaveSandbox.com. Google tested earlier versions of Wave with a small number of developers on the Wave sandbox and this server will now become the platform for testing interoperability between different Wave servers. Google also released a how-to document that explains how to set up a Java-based Wave server over the weekend. More details about how to implement the Wave Federation Protocol can be found here.
Running Wave on Your Own Continue Reading
Google Equals Apple In Value. And Vice Versa!
People often compare market capitalization (current share price times the number of shares outstanding) for public companies as an indicator of success / failure, and one surpassing the other as a sign that one is overtaking the other, regardless of whether they’re actually full-fledged competitors or not.
Google and Apple, for example, have been making headlines when stock transactions move their respective market cap to top the other company’s (see this Bloomberg article from August 2008 or this one from GigaOM from two weeks ago).
So here’s a fun fact to start off the week with: the market cap for both Google and Apple are currently tied at about $170 billion after Friday’s market close.
source: techcrunch Continue Reading
Google Makes Fading Homepage A Little Less Confusing For Unaware Searchers
We first reported on Google’s bucket testing of a new homepage that fades to nothing but its logo and the search box after receiving a tip about it at the beginning of this month. Since then, we’ve been getting more and more incoming tips from people who are starting to see this and haven’t seen our or other reports about the gimmick.
I have yet to see the experimental homepage myself, but judging from our inbox and chatter on Twitter the company does seem to be Continue Reading
Neo Technology Commercializes Next Generation Graph Based Database
A new generation of database products and companies is beginning to emerge, and one of the more interesting examples is Swedish-based Neo Technology, the developer and vendor of the neo4j graph based database (graph in the data structure sense). The neo4j product has been in development for over 8 years, and Neo Technology are today announcing a new $2.5M round of funding. The company has been developing the neo4j project as a commercial product, and is now taking it to market with a dual-license model.
A graph database is a more natural method for expressing, storing and retrieving data that does not fit well in a standard Continue Reading
Google Maps Navigation: The First Killer App for Android 2.0
Android 2.0 just got its first killer app: Google Maps Navigation. Google Maps Navigation for Android 2.0 will be available for free and will be part of the default Google Maps app on Android 2.0 phones. The service offers all the features that users expect from a modern GPS app, including traffic data, 3D view and turn-by-turn voice guidance. Because it’s connected to the Google cloud, the app can also display street view images, satellite imagery and real-time traffic data. Google also implemented a voice recognition feature.
Disrupting the Mapping Industry One App at a Time
wo weeks ago, Google severed its ties with Tele Atlas and started to display its own mapping data instead. Today’s launch of the Maps Navigation app explains why Continue Reading
Facebook U.S. Visits Increase 194% Over Past Year; Tagged is Beating Twitter?
New data released from Experian Hitwise reconfirms what we’ve known for 
some time: Facebook is killing the other social networks. Nowhere is that more true than here in the U.S. where they found that the visits to the site have increased 194% from September of last year to September 2009. However, it’s Twitter that’s seen the largest year-over-year increase in visits – during that same time period, they’re up 1170%. But one of the oddest findings being reported is how the social Continue Reading
StatusNet (Of Identi.ca Fame) Raises $875,000 To Become The WordPress Of Microblogging
Montreal-based StatusNet, the company behind the open-source microblogging service identi.ca, is closing an $875,000 seed round today. Investors include Montreal Startup, iNovia Capital, Fotolia co-founder Oleg Tscheltzoff, and Xavier Niel. The startup, which changed its name a few weeks ago from Control Yourself, raised a previous seed round of $150,000 from Montreal Startup in January, 2009.
StatusNet wants to become the WordPress of microblogging. It created an open-source microblogging software Continue Reading
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