Today’s Volusion blog post begins our series on the emerging trend of Word of Mouth Marketing (WOM). The goal of WOM is to encourage others to talk about your online business and its products. Keep reading to learn more about different types of WOM and basic elements to get started with your strategy.
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I continuously receive […]
Original post by Matt
Most think cloud computing is about the ability to save operational costs. That may or may not be the case, depending upon your enterprise or ecommerce problem domain. Indeed, there are many dimensions to consider here, including:
Let’s explore each:
Operational Cost Reduction
We all know that cloud computing is cheap…okay, cheaper…okay, it can be cheap. Thus it’s a good idea to figure out the actual cost reductions that cloud computing can bring to your enterprise IT. The trick here is not only to figure out how much money can be saved, but how much it will cost to save that money.
Preserving Capital
It’s money in the bank which allows the business to run. The more money we have in the bank, the more we can purchase things for the core business such as inventory that can be sold, or new plant equipment that will save the company money during production. In any event, it’s good to keep as much capital as possible on hand to invest in the business, and not into infrastructure such as data centers, hardware, and software.
Upsizing On-Demand
Core to the ability to preserve capital is the ability to upsize your IT infrastructure on demand, or simply pay more operational dollars for additional computing capacity which would traditionally require a capital expenditure. Many cloud computing providers call this being elastic, or the ability to grow or contract to accommodate the business. For example, you can call upon the cloud computing provider to support an additional user and processing load through the holiday, when considering ecommerce solutions.
Downsizing On-Demand
Like upsizing on-demand, you need to consider what it will take to reduce computing capacity and dollars paid. What does it take to scale down in case you no longer need the computing resource and want to reduce costs as well? Such is the case within many ecommerce systems with capacity requirements that are seasonal.
Shifting the Risk
Another core value of cloud computing is the ability to shift the risk from your enterprise to the cloud computing provider. This concept refers to the fact that, since it’s up to the cloud provider to handle the computing processing load and you’ll pay by use, then it’s possible to reduce the risk that you’ll run out of capacity to support your customers and core business processes. The risk functionally shifts to the cloud provider who is better suited to accept that risk.
Agility
Agility means the ability to change the IT infrastructure faster to adapt to the changing needs of the business, such as market downturns, or the introduction of a key product to capture a changing market. This, of course, provides a strategic advantage and allows the business to have a better chance of long-term survival. These days many enterprises are plagued by IT infrastructures that are so poorly planned and fragile that they hurt the business by not providing the required degree of agility.
This post was contributed by guest columnist David Linthicum. David is a cloud computing and SOA expert and author of several books on Information Technology.
Original post by David Linthicum
SLI Systems has given me permission to publish of nearly 80 tips on site search you’ll find in their latest e-book Big Book of Site Search Tips (free download).
Enjoy!
1. Regularly check the top search terms on your site.
They can be good indicators of new items your clients are looking for, or product lines that are performing well. For example, SLI customer Jelly Belly used to offer only a 10-pound bulk case of its Champagne Bubbles jelly beans. Using information gleaned from site search, the company discovered that Champagne Bubbles candy was the third most-requested search. They decided to offer a one-pound container, and it’s now one of the company’s biggest sellers with wedding planners.
2. Review site search terms for SEO and PPC campaigns.
This is a great source for keyword research because it shows the language your visitors are using.
3. Review the searches with poor or no results.
A poor result is one that has a low clickthrough rate. These terms either relate to content that people are searching for that you don’t have or, more often, are examples of your visitors using different language to describe your content than you do. Both of these pieces of information are extremely valuable. If visitors are searching for content that you don’t offer, then you know that there is demand for that content and may indicate products that you should be stocking on your ecommerce site. If visitors are searching for products that you are not able to or don’t intend to carry, then you can address this by showing keyword-specific banners suggesting similar products.
If your visitors are using a different language to describe your content or products, you can either start using this language on your site (which will help with your search engine optimization as well), or you can add synonyms to your search so your visitors will find the items they’re looking for.
4. Review your site search quality metrics to ensure your site search relevancy is improving over time.
A good site search solution “learns” by tracking visitors’ aggregate search queries and click-throughs to deliver results based on criteria such as popularity. This means that, over time, searchers on your site are presented with the most relevant search results and can find what they’re looking for more quickly and easily. Improved searches result in more satisfied customers and greater sales.
5. Integrate your analytics package with your site search.
It shouldn’t require too much effort to make sure your analytics software is tracking search activity on your site. Your site search provider might be able to help you with this. Being able to measure site search results – like any other marketing activity – demonstrates the value and ROI benefit you’re getting. For example, you can track the conversion rate for site search results pages as compared with other pages on your site, as well as the percentage of revenue generated by site search results pages. You can also determine the average order size for site search users as compared to those who don’t search; if your site search solution is performing well, those numbers should be higher.
6. Watch the keywords that are quickly gaining popularity so you’re able to continually meet increasing product demand.
Again, it’s important to understand the language of your customers – and like any trend, nothing lasts forever, including the search terms used most frequently on your site. Trends around popular terms may shift with the seasons, or with popular songs and movies, or with the latest look sported by the Jonas Brothers. The point is, as terms gain popularity, they signal to you that the products that go along with those terms will likely also gain popularity, so be prepared.
Download the whole collection of site search tips here.
Original post by Linda Bustos
No one likes to wait for a Web site to load.
Least of all someone doing some last minute birthday shopping for an expectant niece or nephew or the pressured husband that just realized tomorrow is his anniversary.
Shoppers have very little tolerance for slow loading retail Web sites, therefore, developers should do more to speed up site performance when possible.
YSlow Survey Demonstrates the Problem
I recently took a survey of 25 leading retail Web sites using Yahoo’s YSlow Firefox add-on. The tool measures site performance against 35 performance best practices. And of these best practices, I was most interested in HTTP Requests.
As the good folks at Yahoo say, something like 80% of a page’s load time is spent making HTTP requests for images, style sheets, JavaScript, and Adobe Flash or similar. Speed up this processes and a site will load faster, sometimes even if the browser is loading a greater number of kilobytes.
In my little survey, many leading online retail sites performed poorly. For example, when I ran the test, Borders received an overall YSlow grade of D and an overall performance grade of 66. But the site actually got an F for HTTP Requests. Improving this one area could have helped to pull up the site’s overall performance score, not to mention make it load faster when would-be shoppers surfed by to get a copy of Seth Grahame-Smith’s new tomb, Abraham Lincoln : Vampire Hunter or a DVD of Disney’s Up.
Online florist, 1-800 Flowers had an even worse YSlow grade and performance score, and again, an F for HTTP requests. In fact, the site sought to load 27 separate, external JavaScript files and six separate style sheets.
Some site’s scores actually varied. When I first tested Amazon, the site scored a D in YSlow, with an overall performance grade of 65. But later, I retested Amazon, and it earned a B, having less than half as many HTTP requests as it had when I first test it. While I cannot be certain why Amazon decided to load fewer JavaScripts and style sheets, I can say that making fewer HTTP requests had a significant, positive impact on how the site performed.
In my less-than-scientific survey, sites that made fewer HTTP requests generally had better YSlow scores and faster load times. Conversely, sites that made a lot of HTTP requests had poor scores and poor load times.
JavaScript Files can be Road Blocks
JavaScript, which is actually one of my favorite languages, is a leading cause of performance-sapping HTTP requests and a page block. Since while the HTTP request for a JavaScript file is underway the browser is blocked from downloading other resources until after the script has been completely loaded and, in some cases, executed.
New browsers can, in fact, load two or more external JavaScript files simultaneously, but other page elements like images or even text that appear lower in the mark up will still have to wait.
There is an excellent demonstration of how blocking—the concept that a browser stops rendering a page while it loads a JavaScript—effects a page’s load time on Steve Souders’ High Performance Web Sites Blog. Souders’ demonstration cuts a page into two sections—literally above and below a line. The top portion of the page is quickly loaded, but then the browser encounters two external JavaScripts and miscellaneous additional elements. The HTTP requests to get the JavaScript files block any other page elements from loading.
In fact, it takes almost an additional 8 seconds for the balance of the demonstration page to load.
Of course, I should point out that blocking is actually very important. Often one JavaScript file will be dependent on another. We want a JavaScript Library like jQuery or MooTools to load before any files that call functions from the library. Blocking ensures this is the case, since most browsers will not load and execute the files in order.
Addressing HTTP Requests for JavaScript
There are several things that a site developer or designer can do, to minimize HTTP Requests and blocking, thus improving site performance.
The most basic fix is to organize JavaScript files. Older web browsers, like Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) 7, can only download a single JavaScript file at a time, so many web developers began organizing all of their JavaScript into a single, often massive, file. By the way, massive is no understatement. When I conducted my aforementioned survey of leading retail sites, I found several extreme examples like Barnes & Noble’s site, which called 39 separate, external JavaScript files.
But creating a single, all inclusive JavaScript file is not always best either.
Some browsers, for example Google’s Chrome or even IE8, can load files in parallel so that two smaller JavaScript files might load more quickly than one massive file.
And as Kyle Simpson wrote in his article Tame Those Performance Monsters in the March 2010 issue of jsmag, a single combined would not make sense when you were calling libraries like jQuery, which are better downloaded from optimized content delivery networks and which can be cached.
Without a doubt you’ll want to organize files—39 is too many, one may not be enough—but some combining should probably take place.
Other potential solutions (improvements) include techniques like XMLHttpRequests (XHR), wrapping scripts in iFrames, and using the defer attribute in script tags. But each of these techniques has limitations.
For security reasons, XHR requires that all of the scripts being loaded and the host page have the same domain, so it won’t work if a site needs to load jQuery.
Wrapping scripts in an iFrame will allow the even older browsers to asynchronously load JavaScripts, but you will need to function to access the JavaScripts that were loaded with the iFrame, and you must add more mark up.
The defer attribute, which is part of the World Wide Web Consortium’s HTML 4.0 Specification, essentially tells the browser to wait until the page is loaded before executing the enclosed script.
<script language=”javascript” defer>
But defer is not supported in every or even most web browsers.
I don’t mean to dissuade you from using these solutions, but I want to introduce you to what I believe is a better one.
The LABjs Solution
Kyle Simpson, who I mentioned above, started the LABjs project and has since gotten help from performance guru, Steve Souders, who I also mentioned above. LABjs is a tool for dynamically loading JavaScripts in parallel while preserving the order of execution and dependency.
LABjs also enables the browser to load both JavaScripts and other page elements at the same time, so your images and text, don’t have to wait for your JavaScripts.
Implementing LABjs is also pretty easy. You end up replacing mark up like:
<script src=”http://jquery-ui.googlecode.com/svn/tags/latest/jquery-1.4.2.js”></script>
<script src=”some.js”></script>
<script src=”someother.js”></script>
With mark up like:
<script>
.script(“http://jquery-ui.googlecode.com/svn/tags/latest/jquery-1.4.2.js “)
.script(“plugin.framework.js”)
.script(“myplugin.framework.js”).wait()
</script>
According to Simpson’s jsmag article, using a page calling three external JavaScript files went from loading in 16.84 sections to loading in just about 6.24 seconds when LABjs was used, demonstrating a significant improvement.
This post was contributed by our guest columnist Armando Roggio. Armando is a journalist, web designer, technologist and the site director for Ecommerce Developer.
Original post by Armando Roggio
Volusion has recently been named as a Codie Awards finalist for Best Ecommerce Solution by the SIIA. This is the record-breaking sixth consecutive year for the shopping cart software company to receive this distinguished honor.
The accolades just keep rolling in…
Thanks to consistent feedback from our valued customers and thousands of hours of hard work from […]
Original post by Matt
Niche Blueprint 2
At this time you can certainly discover the way in which to make cash on the internet using Niche Blueprint 2.0. The following course …
Original post by default@goarticles.com (D. F.)
Spotted a clever way to entice repeat orders – offer a credit off a customer’s next purchase. If the credit is unused after a period of time, send a triggered email reminder, as 1-800-Headsets does below:
Subject line: You have a credit waiting for you at 1800Headsets.ca
Email body:
We thought you should know, you have a $10 credit with us
You earned it, so why not enjoy it?$10 may not sound like a lot, but ten bucks could get you 25% off a cellular headset, an extra 17% off a new Bluetooth headset, or even better…
Take $10 off any:
* Wireless Headsets
* Computer Headsets
* Home Office Headsets
* Wireless TelephonesThere are many new headsets at 1-800-Headsets.ca
Call a friendly Headset Specialist at:
1-800-HEADSETS (1-800-432-3738)
9:00am to 7:30pm Eastern Time Mon – FriOr claim your $10 credit online by clicking the “Use Your $10 Credit Now” button below. Your Priority Number will be entered automatically at checkout.
Customer # HDS1231443
Priority # EH59720
There are several things I want to point out about this email’s brilliance:
1. The subject line gives a strong reason to open the email, piquing curiosity about the credit: “You have a credit waiting for you at 1800Headsets.ca”
2. “We thought you should know, you have a $10 credit with us” as a headline reinforces the promise of the subject line
3. Suggesting “ten bucks could get you 25% off a cellular headset” is smart. I purchased a computer headset. I’m more likely to be intrigued by a cellular headset than another computer one. It’s possible 1-800-Headsets segments customers by product category and customizes the message accordingly.
4. The credit is auto-applied by clicking the big (and I mean big) shiny red button. This makes it easy for the customer, no promo code to remember. It may also create urgency as to have the credit applied in the future would mean digging up the email and clicking through it again.
5. The products on the right hand side all have value propositions: best selling, best range and perfect for noisy offices. If you want to increase your click through for featured products, give the customer a good reason to be interested in them.
An added bonus of the credit idea is you are not reducing the perceived value of your products by reducing the price. Rather, you are selling at full price (and full value) and giving the customer virtual dollars to spend. Sales are boring, and “come back and we’ll give you 10% off something” is overdone and not that exciting.
Original post by Linda Bustos
How to sell your products online, but aren’t sure where to start? It’s difficult to know which ecommerce solutions to use because there′s so …
Original post by default@goarticles.com (Mark Spenser)
Summary: The rapid growth in online users coupled with an increase in the total amount individuals spend in online purchases make ecommerce a tantalizing prospect for new business owners.
Ecommerce…
Original post by default@goarticles.com (Scott Lindsay)
The cheapest e-commerce web hosting services makes it possible for anybody that wants to set up his or her website to do so without the fear of lack of money. These cheap web hosting services which ar…
Original post by default@goarticles.com (Dhruv Patel)
The goal of this article is to change the way you may think about making money on the Internet with a website.
You do not need a degree in web programming or any formal training in web design. All I′…
Original post by default@goarticles.com (davi La)
Business organizations, both large and small have resorted to the internet for transactions. This has led to the development of many ecommerce websites. Electronic commerce is actually the process of …
Original post by default@goarticles.com (Arun Kumar)
Volusion is proud to announce the beta release of our latest feature that will revolutionize the way you sell online. With Volusion mCommerce, you’ll have an optimized version of your online store so customers can conveniently shop on their smartphone.
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We’ve got some VERY exciting news for you. As we’re all learning, the importance of […]
Original post by Matt
Not long ago I had the privilege of teaming up with George Michie of the Rimm-Kaufman Group for an interview on ecommerce issues. George has graciously reciprocated to offer his expertise in paid search. George is a well respected thought leader in search marketing, serving as co-founder and CEO of RKG, member of Google’s SEM Advisory Council, professor at Market Motive, columnist for Search Engine Land, frequent speaker at ecommerce and search conferences and has worked for top retailer Crutchfield Corporation. You can follow George’s blog here.
Linda: We’re seeing a lot of changes with Yahoo and Bing merging. Does that make things easier or more complicated for advertisers?
George: We think it will help search advertising, at least in the short term. The richer data set afforded by combining the Bing and Yahoo.com traffic will be a boon to those who know how to exploit the long tail, and having one less set of copy changes to make won’t hurt either.
Long term, is the industry better served having one larger competitor to Google or two smaller ones? That’s a tough question. To the extent that Google acts as simply a marketplace where advertisers compete against each other for placements, one could argue that a Google monopoly poses no real risk. On the other hand, given an absolute monopoly, who’s to say that Google will stick to the auction model? If negotiated placements yielded more revenue per impression and greater profits, they’d drop the auction in a second. I don’t think that’s likely to happen; I think the reason for Google’s success lies in the fact that the ads are cost effective when managed properly, and moving away from that model makes them just another portal.
Linda: It’s rare to talk about paid search strategy and escape the topic of the “long tail.” As you elude to, those who know how to work the long tail have an advantage. [Reader note: “Long tail” queries refer to searches that happen only a handful of times per year (maybe only once) can make up the lion’s share of clicks and sales.] What is the best way to capture the long tail? Is the broad match type with a thorough negative keyword list the answer, or should you try to predict the tail with keyword research and exact match terms?
George: I’ve written about this a good bit recently. The importance of the tail does vary a great deal from advertiser to advertiser so it’s not quite true that it matters tremendously for everyone. However, when it does matter, there’s no question about it: broad match by itself is not the best solution.
The right way to approach the tail is to build out the keyword list thoroughly and carefully, with attention to landing pages and copy to maximize both CTR and conversion rates. Then, with sophisticated bid management and flexible attributes applied smartly, the real power of targeting bids to the differentiated value of the traffic takes over.
We like using broad match as a catch-all with lower bids on the broad matched versions than the exact matched versions. The keyword list can never be perfectly comprehensive, and broad match is tremendously valuable for catching word orderings and typos that you’d never catch with exact or phrase match.
Linda: Keeping up with the changes in search engines and advertising program capabilities is a full time job in itself. It’s almost as if when you take a week’s holiday, you’ve surely missed a major announcement or change to the way things are done. The result is do-it-yourselfers may be relying on outdated books or blogs for guidance in managing their PPC campaigns, and even the professionals can be behind the times. In your experience, what’s the most outdated tactic that is still in use by too many advertisers?
George: Things do change all the time but in many senses the fundamentals haven’t changed, and what surprises me is the number of folks who still don’t seem to know the basics.
The fact that so many folks are still bidding by position just amazes me. In fact most of the platforms available for rent and used by many agencies are nothing more than position crawling systems. Even when turned to “efficiency targeting”, they find efficiency by hunting and pecking for the right position, rather than measuring the value of traffic, bidding what makes sense, and letting the position fall where it may. Position crawling guarantees inefficiency and lost opportunity, but even though careful studies have proved that the value of traffic is largely independent of position, people still use position crawlers.
Linda: Surely ignorance is not bliss! That reinforces the importance of having a search manager that really knows what they are doing. Often paid search is outsourced because the retailer does not have the in-house expertise to manage or even understand a campaign, which leaves the program without much oversight. How can you verify your campaign is being managed well? When do you know it’s time to fire your agency?
George: The devil is in the details. I outlined a process for a top-down evaluation of a paid search program. It’s imperative to periodically take the program apart to make sure it is being managed well. Too many folks assume that because they’re using a well-known, expensive agency that their program is therefore well-managed.
Certainly, you shouldn’t have to micro-manage your agency; if you do, what’s the point of outsourcing? But if periodic, detailed evaluations of the program reveal significant problems, the solution isn’t micro-management, it’s finding a competent agency.
Linda: I suppose when clients comes to you after working with another agency, there’s a certain degree of “reworking” you need to do. In your experience, what is the biggest (or most common) mistake that online retailers make in paid search?
George: The biggest mistake is also stunningly common, it’s failing to separate results of brand search and competitive search. Particularly for companies that do a great deal of offline marketing, brand search represents a fundamentally different subset of customers, those who are proverbially ‘walking through your front door.’ Crediting these sales to paid search efforts leads to tremendous overspending in competitive search.
Advertisers mistakenly believe that since the overall cost to sales ratio is reasonable, they’re spending money wisely. If we think instead about the law of diminishing returns and the question: what happened to the last $1,000 we spent and what would happen to the next $1,000? We’ll end up seeing that those answers are all found in the competitive non-brand search program, because that’s where all the incremental spending happens.
Linda: Speaking of keywords, it’s rare to talk about paid search strategy and escape the topic of the “long tail.” As you mentioned earlier, those who know how to work the long tail have an advantage. [Reader note: “Long tail” queries refer to searches that happen only a handful of times per year (maybe only once) can make up the lion’s share of clicks and sales.] What is the best way to capture the long tail? Is the broad match type with a thorough negative keyword list the answer, or should you try to predict the tail with keyword research and exact match terms?
George: I’ve written about this a good bit recently. The importance of the tail does vary a great deal from advertiser to advertiser so it’s not quite true that it matters tremendously for everyone. However, when it does matter, there’s no question about it: broad match by itself is not the best solution.
The right way to approach the tail is to build out the keyword list thoroughly and carefully, with attention to landing pages and copy to maximize both click through and conversion rates. Then, with sophisticated bid management and flexible attributes applied smartly, the real power of targeting bids to the differentiated value of the traffic takes over.
We like using broad match as a catch-all with lower bids on the broad matched versions than the exact matched versions. The keyword list can never be perfectly comprehensive, and broad match is tremendously valuable for catching word orderings and typos that you’d never catch with exact or phrase match.
Linda: Yes, sometimes the queries that trigger your ads can be very irrelevant (even humorous!) We would get searches like “granny cart” triggering our ecommerce software ads at Elastic Path, for example. When you add them up, there truly is a long tail of negative matches that can really dilute your click through rate.
Linda: If you’ve added sufficient negative matches and a keyword still suffers from low click through or abysmal conversion, Is it ever a good idea to delete the keyword? What are some strategies to turn a “dog” keyword into a “star”?
George: I once went so far as to say “there are no bad keywords, only bad bids.” That might have been a bit overstated, but my point was simply this: there are very few keywords – assuming they’re reasonably targeted — that draw in traffic of zero value. The value might be small, but it’s rarely zero. So, first and foremost is the notion that it isn’t a matter of finding keywords that “work” on the first page, and turning the others that “don’t work” off. Bid the appropriate amount and take whatever traffic you get.
Now, it is possible to improve the value of the traffic on a given keyword by identifying negative associations to knock out the wrong traffic, and by making sure the copy qualifies traffic as much as it can. If you sell “desk chairs”, but yours start at $350, where Staples has “desk chairs” for $35, you may find “$350 + for quality office chairs” helps steer the bargain hunters elsewhere.
To a large degree, paid search is dominated by mass marketers. Keywords that speak more to mass market intent can be tough for niche marketers who don’t have selections that appeal to the mass market.
Linda: Ad copy, like any copy, can benefit from split testing. What have been some of your most effective PPC tests? Are there any “rules” to live by?
George: There are very few rules that apply to every advertiser, so maybe one universal rule is to test assumptions! In truth, what may be a universal rule is this: never assume that the traffic on Google.com will perform the same as traffic on Google’s syndication network – even more true for Yahoo and its syndicates. Separate campaigns and measured bid differentials for the engine and its partners almost always delivers positive results.
We have some very exciting results from Yahoo’s new syndication bidding settings that should yield more revenue for our clients, and for Yahoo.
Linda: Sounds juicy! For my final question (you cannot interview a guru without asking something to this effect): where do you see the future of paid search going?
George: The two biggest changes on the horizon are likely to involve the ad formats and how paid search integrates with other marketing efforts.
Google is testing and testing to find formats that generate more revenue per impression, and they may find something. I don’t think product images are going to be it, though. Someone searching for “Pet Supplies” isn’t likely to respond to any particular product image. That said, giving marketers and agencies flexibility to design appropriate display ads for different levels of search depth might work. Providing a plus-box like expansion to the next level of depth, rather than all the way to the bottom with products, might be the best solution.
The ability to parse credit between multiple ads within a search program and across multiple marketing programs will become imperative. We’re launching an attribution management solution for our clients by the middle of March, and I’m sure other agencies will do the same. The better we understand what advertising dollars truly drive sales, the more efficiently we can allocate resources.
It keeps getting more complicated, but that keeps it interesting for us geeks.
Linda: It sure does! George, thanks again for sharing your brain. And now, we open up the floor to questions…
Original post by Linda Bustos
Wordpress is increasing its reputation as a platform for building e-commerce websites - from a simple blogging CMS, Wordpress themes and back-end functionality deliver all the functionality of a dedic…
Original post by default@goarticles.com (Lawrence Reaves)
Volusion is proud to participate in this year’s SXSW Interactive Festival to showcase our industry leading shopping cart software and make a huge announcement. Additionally, we’ll be sponsoring “Microsoft BizSpark and Volusion TECH Cocktail SXSW: Blackout Sunday,” an event to showcase multiple tech start-ups. Keep reading to learn more!
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Coming to the big SXSW Interactive festival? […]
Original post by Matt
Came across this humorous video via Storefront Backtalk. Check out Hitler’s reaction to cloud computing security problems:
Can’t see video? View it on Youtube.
Original post by Linda Bustos
There’s a ton of chatter on Techmeme today regarding iPad and Flash and HTML 5. Again. In particular don’t miss posts from ReadWriteWeb regarding Flash vs. HTML 5 speed and PC World’s comparison of HP’s new Slate vs. the iPad and how the focus will be on Flash.
Yesterday I sat down with top execs from Adobe’s Flash team. Later today I’ll have a video demo of a variety of things they announced at the Mobile World Congress, including a new Flash player for Android and Palm Pre (I played with it yesterday, very nice). I’ll link that video in here in about an hour, but wanted to get this post up while my thoughts were fresh.
Why won’t the iPad have Adobe Flash technology? Anup Murarka director of technology strategy and partner development for the Adobe Flash platform and Aaron Filner, group product manager of Flash platform, focusing on AIR, answer some of the reasons why Steve Jobs doesn’t put Adobe Flash onto the iPad in one of the videos I filmed yesterday when I visited Adobe’s offices in San Francisco. Things like:
1. It will chew up battery.
2. It will crash or be buggy.
3. It doesn’t work with touch interfaces.
4. It won’t perform well enough.
They take on each of these complaints about Adobe Flash and explain what has changed with the Flash 10.1 player.
My thoughts? I’m buying an iPad anyway (we’re even having a party at the Palo Alto store all night on the evening of April 2nd) and I have iPhones. My life would be better if Flash shipped on iPad, but it doesn’t look like that will happen. So, developers are going to be forced to build two versions of their web pages if they care about reaching me as a customer and one of those versions will need to have no Flash or Silverlight (Apple is also resisting including Microsoft’s Silverlight platform).
But Adobe is doing a pretty good job of keeping Flash developers’ skills relevant. You can build apps for iPhones or iPads in Flash and compile them using some new tools that Adobe has been showing off and will ship before July. Even Adobe’s own Photoshop app on the iPhone was built in Flash and compiled using these new tools. That’s a compelling story.
I have to admit, though, that I will be checking out other competitive devices from Google and others. I already have a Droid, which will use the new Flash 10.1 player just fine and I expect I’ll check out the new HP tablet and, especially, ones that will come with the Google Chrome OS later this year. Those, I expect, will support Flash and that could be a big deal in future device decisions.
How about you? Will you decide not to buy Apple products just because they won’t run Flash in Web pages?
Original post by Robert Scoble
Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, has been using the bully pulpit over at Techcrunch to tell everyone that how we work together is about to radically change to be more like how we are able to share photos and fun things with each other over on Facebook. He’s right, but I’m not sure yet Salesforce is really going to be the one to lead us into this new world. He recently told me what Salesforce is trying to do with its entry into this space, Chatter, and I got a separate demo of Chatter’s newly shipped beta on video. You should watch both of those to get up to speed on what Salesforce is trying to do.
Other companies like Yammer, SocialText, Jive, SocialCast, and others have actually been doing the harder foundational work here of trying to convince us all to bring socially collaborative services into our workplaces. Yesterday I sat down with Yammer’s CEO, David Sacks, and talked about the industry and what Yammer is doing (Yammer was first to bring microblogging streams inside corporate firewalls and won TechCrunch 50 two years ago because of that).
I’ve been going around this enterprise world trying to understand it. I recently visited SocialCast and talked with CEO Tim Young about how he sees this revolution taking shape (and how he views Salesforce’s entry into it). In the interview you’ll hear Tim tout his advantages: that SocialCast is runable both on its servers, but can also be run on your own servers inside your firewall, or on your own infrastructure. Enterprises in healthcare, pharmaceuticals, and banking will want to do this and won’t go with the Google or Salesforce model of “run it on our servers, they are safe, promise.”
I also talked last week with SocialText’s founder, Ross Mayfield. SocialText was the first company into this new “Enterprise 2.0″ space and they just shipped a new version that has a much broader range of applications than SocialCast or Salesforce has (spreadsheets and wikis, to name two) that are integrated deeply into its socially collaborative streams. Companies that want a complete set of applications should look at SocialText.
But, now, don’t miss what Google did last night (it turned on the Google Apps Marketplace). It’s big. But even more exciting and potentially revolutionary was the Gmail integrated contextual apps extensions. These let developers integrate all sorts of enterprise data right into Gmail. You can see where Google will go next, right? An enterprise version of Buzz with these widgets integrated into Buzz messages. Salesforce is actually ahead in integrating its partners’ data right into its feeds with Chatter, but it’s clear that window will close pretty quickly as Google keeps building its Enterprise Reef (my term for all the various projects that Google is stitching together). If you are interested in the enterprise space, I’d definitely watch the video presentations from last night. Salesforce has a few million users, Google has 25 million users, so you can see the relative strength of Google’s moves. Salesforce must articulate a strategy of how it will both partner with, and differentiate from, Google’s reef.
After the presentations last night I talked with executives from Zoho, Atlassian, and other companies. They agree with Benioff that a revolution at work is underway. They are seeing sizeable sales and adoption into enterprises as we all change how we work from a file-based and email-based system of working to a socially-collaborative feed way of working.
This is also why the most important panel at SXSW will be the Activity Streams panel. All of these companies need to adopt standards-based stream formats so that they can easily interoperate with each other and all the data sources that will need to shove data and reports into our work streams of the future. I’ll be there and will report more on Saturday as I understand more about the state of the art.
Are you feeling this revolution yet? Are you changing how you work with others? Or are you still only using email and Microsoft Sharepoint to collaborate with your coworkers? If you are, beware, your work life is about to change big time.
If you work at a company like Jive, SocialCast, SocialText, or Salesforce, what do you think? Are Marc Benioff’s moves important?
Original post by Robert Scoble
Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, has been using the bully pulpit over at Techcrunch to tell everyone that how we work together is about to radically change to be more like how we are able to share photos and fun things with each other over on Facebook. He’s right, but I’m not sure yet Salesforce is really going to be the one to lead us into this new world.
Other companies like Yammer, SocialText, Jive, SocialCast, and others have actually been doing the harder foundational work here of trying to convince us all to bring socially collaborative services into our workplaces. Yesterday I sat down with Yammer’s CEO, David Sacks, and talked about the industry and what Yammer is doing (Yammer was first to bring microblogging streams inside corporate firewalls and won TechCrunch 50 two years ago because of that).
I’ve been going around this enterprise world trying to understand it. I recently visited SocialCast and talked with CEO Tim Young about how he sees this revolution taking shape (and how he views Salesforce’s entry into it). In the interview you’ll hear Tim tout his advantages: that SocialCast is runable both on its servers, but can also be run on your own servers inside your firewall, or on your own infrastructure. Enterprises in healthcare, pharmaceuticals, and banking will want to do this and won’t go with the Google or Salesforce model of “run it on our servers, they are safe, promise.”
I also talked last week with SocialText’s founder, Ross Mayfield. SocialText was the first company into this new “Enterprise 2.0″ space and they just shipped a new version that has a much broader range of applications than SocialCast or Salesforce has (spreadsheets and wikis, to name two) that are integrated deeply into its socially collaborative streams. Companies that want a complete set of applications should look at SocialText.
But, now, don’t miss what Google did last night (it turned on the Google Apps Marketplace). It’s big. But even more exciting and potentially revolutionary was the Gmail integrated contextual apps extensions. These let developers integrate all sorts of enterprise data right into Gmail. You can see where Google will go next, right? An enterprise version of Buzz with these widgets integrated into Buzz messages. Salesforce is actually ahead in integrating its partners’ data right into its feeds with Chatter, but it’s clear that window will close pretty quickly as Google keeps building its Enterprise Reef (my term for all the various projects that Google is stitching together). If you are interested in the enterprise space, I’d definitely watch the video presentations from last night. Salesforce has a few million users, Google has 25 million users, so you can see the relative strength of Google’s moves. Salesforce must articulate a strategy of how it will both partner with, and differentiate from, Google’s reef.
After the presentations last night I talked with executives from Zoho, Atlassian, and other companies. They agree with Benioff that a revolution at work is underway. They are seeing sizeable sales and adoption into enterprises as we all change how we work from a file-based and email-based system of working to a socially-collaborative feed way of working.
This is also why the most important panel at SXSW will be the Activity Streams panel. All of these companies need to adopt standards-based stream formats so that they can easily interoperate with each other and all the data sources that will need to shove data and reports into our work streams of the future. I’ll be there and will report more on Saturday as I understand more about the state of the art.
Are you feeling this revolution yet? Are you changing how you work with others? Or are you still only using email and Microsoft Sharepoint to collaborate with your coworkers? If you are, beware, your work life is about to change big time.
Original post by Robert Scoble
If you’ve been reading Techcrunch or Techmeme lately you know just how in love tech bloggers are with location-based services like Foursquare. Just yesterday Facebook announced its intention to check in on this hot market.
Even the major players, like Gowalla, know that they must innovate to stay relevant. Gowalla’s CEO, Josh Williams, told me yesterday in a video interview that everyone knows that the check-in gesture will be a commodity pretty quickly, if it isn’t already (even Yelp added the “check in” gesture).
Gowalla and Foursquare this morning checked in new iPhone apps, both of which make the experience of using these services a lot nicer. You can see Josh showing me Gowalla’s new iPhone app in the video here.
Gowalla and Foursquare aren’t the only ones trying to thrive in this space, though. Brightkite, Loopt, Whrrl, Lunch.com, and others are releasing new versions this week and are trying to find communities that will love them.
But for me the real fight this week is between Foursquare and Gowalla. I’m using both and neither has come out with a set of features that make me totally want to use one over the other.
The longer term fight (IE, between now and June) is whether any of these will be able to defend themselves against Facebook and Google.
Google’s Buzz should give some of these startups some hope. Before Buzz came out I expected it to be much more competitive with Twitter and Facebook. After it arrived we realized that Google isn’t as smart in the social arena and I thought they might be.
Already Foursquare’s co-founder is saying that Facebook is losing its “real friendness” when compared to these newer services and he does have a point, but it seems it’s way too early to poke the bear. Ask Mark Andreessen how that works out (he made Mozilla seem far more important than it actually turned out to be and woke up the Microsoft bear which proceeded to chase Mozilla off of its lawn).
Anyway, this space is white hot and the next week will decide which team or teams will get to do battle with Facebook and Google in the real test for this space.
Can this area get any hotter? Will something surprising that none of us are expecting come out at SXSW?
One thing I like is just how articulate Josh Williams of Gowalla is on this space. Anyone interested should definitely watch this video.
Original post by Robert Scoble
There are some points and tips to be kept in mind when you are going for online marketing businesses. These methodical points surely help to boost businesses. This write up explains how to focus on …
Original post by default@goarticles.com (David Ephraim)
Earlier this week, Google offered a free download of its own SEO Report Card, an open and honest document that grades around 100 of Google’s own “products” (think Youtube, Maps, Adwords, Reader, Blogger etc). While it may satisfy your curiosity on how well the Big G does at SEO itself (seasoned search pros may snicker that only 10% are using the title tag properly), it can also help you audit your own website. Topics covered include search result presentation, URLs and redirects and on-page optimization.
Here’s an example regarding canonical URLs and duplicate content:
Directory form, www.google.com/product(/)
www.google.com/product (canonical), try version:
www.google.com/product/
with: suboptimal behavior when trailing slash added
* includes product main pages in directory form without a trailing slash
200 status code given when slash added to Google Products’ canonical URL, Sept. 2009:
Avoid multiple URLs that serve the same content. From the example above, the good news is that visitors will reach the content no matter which version of the URL they choose. This is because a “200 OK” status code is given for both URLs. The bad news is that each of these URLs will get crawled and indexed by search engines, creating duplicate content. Search engines will have a tougher time deciding which URL is the canonical. Also, each URL will have its own reputation. Using a 301 on www.google.com/products/ will consolidate this valuable reputation so that the canonical can rank to its fullest.
404 status code given when slash added to Google Finance’s canonical URL, Sept. 2009:
Prevent 404s. A lot of visitors will try to reach Google Finance with the URL finance.google.com/. Many others will try www.google.com/finance, but a large number will also try www.google.com/ finance/, which leads them to an unhelpful 404 page. Some visitors will assume that the service is down (“Why wouldn’t www.google.com/finance/ work?”). Others might try another form of the URL, but say, “I never know which URL to choose for Google’s products!” Think of the most common URLs that visitors might try in order to reach your product, then 301 redirect these to the canonical URL. This will prevent a lot of frustration for users who access your product by typing the URL in their browser’s address bar.
404 page shown when slash added to Google Finance’s canonical URL, Sept. 2009:
To see the whole shebang, download the SEO Report Card
Original post by Linda Bustos
It has been announced today that Malcolm Cowley, one of the original founders of Buy.at has invested in Existem Affiliate Management and will be joining the board.
Malcolm left Buy.at in 2008 after it’s sale to AOL Advertising. During that time he’s kept his eye on the affiliate marketing sector and feels that now is the time to step back into the arena.
For my money this is a great move, I’ve always rated the Existem team as one of the top affiliate management agencies in the UK and often refer clients to them. Malcolm will be a great addition to the team and I’m sure will bring a wealth of knowledge and experience to take the business to the next level.
Congratulations guys, I’m expecting big things!
What I’m listening to right now: Gorillaz - “Plastic Beach“
Post from Kieron’s Blog
Malcolm Cowley invests in Existem Affiliate Management
Original post by Kieron
Ecommerce sites have very practical values for the modern day consumers. They always want extreme ease while getting involved in any transaction, online to be more precise. Listening to their demands …
Original post by default@goarticles.com (arun kumar)
Business on the internet is often referred to as E-Commerce. Some people do business completely through e-commerce. Their customers come from the internet, and they do all their communication on the i…
Original post by default@goarticles.com (Leslie Koch)
So what is the complete solution to all of your online business problems? The solution is called an ecommerce shopping cart system. This highly popular online business instrument enables you to ra…
Original post by default@goarticles.com (Rigoberto Vinson)
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