Monday, January 21, 2008

Should You Cancel All Your Advertising?

Source: http://www.grokdotcom.com/2008/01/06/should-you-cancel-all-your-advertising/

Jeff BezosIn February 2003, Amazon.com canceled all their advertising and put that money towards free shipping as a word of mouth strategy. Many thought Jeff Bezos was crazy and that Amazon.com would never turn a profit. In 2007 they were solidly profitable with over $15 billion in revenues. Bezos knew that marketers used to get paid to make promises the business had no intention of keeping.

He understood that, in an increasingly transparent environment, being truly customer focused would matter more than telling customers about how great your service was.

Recently, Joe Nocera of The New York Times told millions of people that Amazon puts customers first in his part article, part testimonial, part morality tale, "Put Buyers First? What A Concept." You should read it in full but here are a few excerpts:

"They care about having the lowest prices, having vast selection, so they have choice, and getting the products to customers fast," [Mr. Bezos] said. "And the reason I'm so obsessed with these drivers of the customer experience is that I believe that the success we have had over the past 12 years has been driven exclusively by that customer experience. We are not great advertisers. So we start with customers, figure out what they want, and figure out how to get it to them."

Anybody who has spent any time around Mr. Bezos knows that this is not just some line he throws out for public consumption. It has been the guiding principle behind Amazon since it began.

[…] Amazon says it has somewhere on the order of 72 million active customers, who, in the last quarter, were spending an average of $184 a year on the site. That's up from $150 or so the year before. Amazon's return customer business is off the charts. According to Forrester Research, 52 percent of people who shop online say they do their product research on Amazon. That is an astounding number.

[…] Indeed, in a presentation to analysts in late November, the company's chief financial officer, Thomas J. Szkutak, showed one slide that read, "Over $600 Million in Forgone Shipping Revenue." And that was just for one year.

Wall Street, however, has never placed much value in Mr. Bezos' emphasis on customers. What he has viewed as money well spent — building customer loyalty — many investors saw as giving away money that should have gone to the bottom line.

[…] There is simply no question that Mr. Bezos's obsession with his customers — and the long term — has paid off, even if he had to take some hits to the stock price along the way. Surely, it was worth it. As for me, the $500 favor the company did for me this Christmas will surely rebound in additional business down the line. Why would I ever shop anywhere else online?

Clearly, it was worthwhile for Amazon to cancel its advertising.

Am I advocating that you cancel your ad budget? Perhaps. How are your products, service and customer experience doing?

Your customers' delight matters even more tomorrow than it did yesterday, especially online.

When a visitor comes to your website, will they brag to their friends about what they bought and who they bought it from, or will it be somebody else they rave about?

Can you tell me why they shouldn't brag about you, your products, and your service? After all, it's the customer experience that matters. So why aren't they buying?

Do you need help figuring out why they don't buy from you? We can't fix your products or services but we can help you improve your online customer experience, increase your conversion rates and help you understand your customers better.

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Running out of ideas on what to test?, Let us provide you with some ideas. Download our 10 Tips to Start Optmizing Your Website whitepaper for free.

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Google Reveals What People Are Buying Online

Source: http://www.grokdotcom.com/2008/01/11/google-checkout-trends/

google checkout trendsWouldn't it be great if we could get insights as to which products people preferred. We could get research into which products we should merchandise more prominently. Google just released a new trending tool for those of us curious what people are buying and selling online. From the official Google Checkout Blog:

Many of you are aware of Google Trends, the handy tool that enables you to track and compare what Google users are searching for. Now imagine a similar tool that can give you some insight into what people are buying and selling online. That's exactly what we've built: Google Checkout Trends aggregates the sales data of Google Checkout merchants and charts it in a matter of seconds. (Of course, all the data is anonymized first.) So if you're interested in how sales of Batman or Spider Man paraphernalia compare, or are wondering just how popular Ugg boots are these days, visit Checkout Trends for a glimpse into online shopping. Go ahead and try it out — and get creative with the searches. You may be surprised at what you find.

google checkout trends errorI was having problems this morning getting any results from my searches, even from their six suggested searches. Every time I searched, I received a message that said:

Your terms - ipod, zune do not have enough search volume to show graphs.

If you want to see what the graph of results looks like you can find people discussing it here, here, and here.

Regardless, I think once these issues are resolved, like Google Trends this will provide some interesting data. One thing to keep in mind though is that in our analysis for our 2007 Customer Experience Retail study we found only 10% of the 300+ top retailers offered Google Checkout as an option.

How meaningful will the results really be?

Have you had better luck with Google Checkout Trends? Your impressions?

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Running out of ideas on what to test?, Let us provide you with some ideas. Download our 10 Tips to Start Optmizing Your Website whitepaper for free.

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Old Navy's New (E-commerce) Tricks

old_navy.jpg Recently, Old Navy redesigned their site, adding a lot of value with a few changes. The new site provides several good examples on how to improve e-commerce usability by focusing on ways to reduce friction in the customer experience.

So, let's take a look at some of the changes to their product pages and shopping cart to get a better sense of what they've done a good job of so far, and share a few ideas for other changes worth testing…

Better Image Views on Product Pages

Old Navy product page zoom

As you can see, the site allows you to easily zoom into the product you're looking at by using your mouse as a virtual magnifying glass. This saves the visitor time by not requiring them to open a pop-up window to view the product in detail — although they provide that option as well, it's not as helpful as this excellent zoom view. By not forcing the customer into an extra step, the zoom feature will likely reduce Bounce Rate. But more importantly, better product views make people more likely to buy.

Easy Size Adjustments + Cart View

Old Navy add to cart

When you add items to the cart, you're not taken directly to the cart and away from the shopping process. Instead, they acknowledge that your items are in the cart with this mini-cart drop-down on the upper-right side of the screen. After you've added the item, the mini-cart retreats to a simple checkout summary (# of items in cart and total price). Of course, you still have the option to go to checkout if you're done shopping, but they're not in a rush — in fact, they'd like it if you bought more stuff — which should help increase Average Order Value.

Adjust Your Order Without Leaving the Cart

Old Navy shopping cart

Once again, OldNavy.com is looking out for the customer — right in the shopping cart, this time. They make editing item details as easy as I've seen it on any e-commerce site. One click of the "edit" button brings up this slick tool (pictured above), which allows you to change the size and color of your items in case you have a last-minute change of heart. Now that's a smart way to lower cart abandonment. (Here are a few more.)

Ideas Worth Testing…

• I'm not sure why they're advertising "free returns on all womens plus styles" when all the items in my cart are menswear; nor does it make sense that they let me know they have the product "Up to XXXL" when I've already chosen "Large" as my size; but those are minor details that shouldn't have much effect on the shopping process. Still, this is prime real estate they're wasting by delivering me a message that's meant for someone else. The OldNavy.com team should consider tailoring these messages based on what customers have already added to cart, and testing whether it improves conversion and/or average order value.

• When planning an e-commerce site, ask yourself at least this one question: "What do I hate about shopping online?" I'd be interested to hear your response in the comments section, but in the meantime, I'm sure that if I were to poll everyone at Future Now, most of us would answer, "When sites make me 'register' before checking out." They should test getting rid of that immediately. If you want to a customer's permission to be contacted when they're not currently trying to give you money, the least you could do is ask them instead of forcing the issue. If you do ask — and you most definitely should — please do everyone (your customers and your CFO) a favor and only ask people to 'register' after you've got both their money. You'll have their email address by then, anyway, so it's not as big of a deal at that point.

[Editor's Note: Want more tips on how to optimize your e-commerce site? Read our free white paper on website optimization. Need specific ideas for your checkout process? We can help.]

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Seven Years of Change, Seven Years of Staying the Same

from GrokDotCom by

Time flies in the Internet world. It doesn't seem like that long ago that I wrote my first ClickZ column.

Over the past seven years as a columnist and marketing practitioner, I've continued to be impressed by how dramatically the Internet has changed our lives and our world. Blogs have become a major voice in society. Social media and online video have become giants. Google's revenue is growing like a major leaguer's biceps on steroids. New technologies continue to barrel at us like a hailstorm, and the industry is bright-eyed and bushytailed about the promise of Web 2.0.

But the more things change, the more they remain the same. Companies still struggle to monetize their traffic. Organizations still look to technology to bring them dollars on silver platters. Overall site conversion rates haven't increased as hoped.

What stays the same is why people do what they do. How they buy. Principles of marketing, business, and sales.

During my time here, I've done my best to shout, beg, and plead that we not lose our focus on these basis principles. So as I looked back at some of my 273 columns, I wanted to again share some of the columns that have caused the most stir, been popular or helpful to readers, as well as a personal fave or two.

Bloodletting and Why Testing Can Be Unscientific

This column explained how testing marketing and persuasion is not a linear, scientific process:

    Persuading is influencing opinions or affecting attitudes by means of communication. It means not only informing but also providing new information to the readers so they can make decisions. It also requires motivating people. It means affecting the hearts as well as the minds of people (a message has to have emotional appeal while possessing rational elements).

It continues:

    There is a human need for rules, especially in the Web's technology-worshiping culture. Just look at the demand for successful books and articles out there with titles incorporating things like seven habits, nine rules, and 12 mistakes (we do it, too, because people want it). The left brain demands control while the right brain insists on freedom. Left- and right-brain concepts collide in your cranium every day. We constantly struggle with choices between cold logic and heartfelt intuition, control or liberty, exactness or beauty.The process for persuading human beings to take action is indeed a system, but it's not a hard science based on predictable rules that could produce perfectly replicable results in a laboratory.

Do You Want to Inform or Persuade?

    The process we use to plan persuasive elements of a Web site is called persuasive architecture. It is the organization of the buying and selling processes married to the information flow. The focus is persuading visitors to take action. It's similar to information architecture, which involves the design of organization and navigation systems to help people find and manage information more successfully. Whereas the goal of information architecture is to inform and educate, a commercial Web site should inform and persuade your customer. [Read the entire column.]

There is No Egg in Eggplant

    I've found that the fascinating similarity between all the business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) sites I've been analyzing is the weakness of the copywriting. Each site fails to precisely and fully describe what the writer wants from the visitor. After all, the word "egg" may superficially resemble the word "eggplant," but, if you mean "eggplant," you should say it. [Read more.]

The Difference Between ROI and Marketing Accountability

A bit of wisdom from my brother Jeffrey:

    Measuring the ROI of lead generation isn't the same thing as full accountability. If marketing is a profitable activity, it still doesn't mean that what it is communicating to the universe of buyers is building the business. I've seen lots of marketers sacrifice early and middle stage buyers because they had to show an immediate ROI on each campaign they ran. Who is accountable for all the potential business they lose by saying the wrong the thing to the right people at the wrong time?

How to Decrease Sales by 90 Percent

    How can it be that two case studies contradict each other so blatantly? The answer is no business is linear. There are many facets, or topological elements, to consider in designing an effective online strategy to maximize your conversion rate. Your conversion rate is only a reflection of the marketing and sales effectiveness and your customers' satisfaction. It depends! It always depends! If you're looking for one canned, simple solution, you're bound to be either bankrupt or very disappointed. [Read the entire column and the follow-up.]

The Land Beyond Usability

    Make your Web site easy for your visitors to use, and they'll become more proficient users. But if you want them to become customers, you have to think beyond usability. Think of it like taking a road trip. Usability gets rid of the obstacles to driving: the potholes, bad signage, dead ends. It makes it easy for your customers to go places comfortably and smoothly, with minimal interruption.But it can't intrinsically tell them where they ought to be going, much less how to get there the quickest, easiest way.

    Usability testing usually measures the effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction with which specified users can achieve specified goals in a particular environment. Wouldn't you want your goal in e-commerce to be a sale and, eventually, a delighted customer? Just because users can complete a purchase does not mean you delighted them or that they will ever buy from you again. [Read more.]

The Power of the About Us Page

Your "About Us" page should:

  • Let customers see a more human side of your company. E-Trade's advertising makes it seem like a fun company, but the "About Us" page displays none of that human personality.
  • Tell your company's story. McDonalds's does a nice job with this, as does Dave and Busters. A company history timeline is a great way to highlight achievements without braggadocio.
  • Reflect your company's passion. Check out Nike.com's "About Us" page.
  • Reflect your company's personality. If you're a fun company, your "About Us" page should be fun.
  • Let the customer inside your company. Bungie, makers of Halo, go so far as to have Webcams online.
  • Reiterate your company's competence to serve the customers by using all the above tools.

The Next Seven Years

Here's to the next seven years. Thank you for paying attention, commenting, and inspiring me in so many ways. May you have great success. May your conversion rate soar.

Any topic suggestions for one of my next 273 columns? Let me know.

[Editor's Note: Originally seen on ClickZ.]

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Evo Builds Green Marketplace Via Affiliate Feeds


There are huge volumes of product data in the affiliate marketing data on the Internet. Now eco-rating site Evo wants to use this information to do for green what Zillow did for real estate.

When sellers want to promote their product on the Internet, they often rely on other sites to send them traffic. This means millions of referring sites and millions of products for sale. There are several affiliate marketing aggregators (such as Linkshare; Performix, which is now owned by Google through the Doubleclick acquisition; and Commission Junction) who handle the commission programs of thousands of sellers. Referring sites get from 5 percent to 20 percent of the product price, depending on the product and market.

The aggregators provide product information — such as price, description, discount, and country of origin — to the sites that want to promote a product. Evo.com, a green rating startup, searches this data to decide which products and vendors are better for the planet. It's a tough challenge, because there aren't any well-defined standards for publishing environmental data. So Evo built a keyword analysis system to look for green-relevant data in these unstructured feeds.

The result is technology that can tell how green a product is.

Most consumers, says Evo CEO Dan Siegel, are asking, "What does it mean to be green?" Prior to Evo, Siegel built Student Advantage to bring college students and marketers together. When he wanted to build homes that were more green, he realized there was no reliable way to find relevant products. Working with co-founder and COO Mark Eastwood, whose background includes working with eToys, rent.com and eBay, they realized that the Internet's affiliate data feeds were an untapped source of product detail.

The pair started by defining a set of "green" attributes, such as where products are made, materials, transportation, and the company's practices. They also determined the impact rating of each class of products, since some products, such as energy and home materials, have more significant effects on the planet. They fed several million products into their system. Roughly 5 percent qualified as "net green," meaning that their green benefits outweighed their drawbacks.

Evo uses human editors to tweak these initial results, as well as spiders to crawl the web for new products. The company also plans to add data from other green rating sources such as Coop America and Climatecounts to further improve accuracy.

The real way to ensure the right rankings is to create a community that will rate products and flag violations. "If a seller is claiming to have practices that aren't true and they get called out, they first get a warning, and then they get taken off the site," says Siegel.

Dealing with misleading referrals is nothing new to the pair — Rent.com (part of eBay) faced a similar challenge: Landlords would list properties on the site, but in order to avoid paying fees, wouldn't tell the company when someone had rented. So rent.com offered a $100 rebate to consumers for telling them an apartment had been rented.

User feedback isn't the only clue Evo uses. Their analytics detect deviations and suspicious behavior — for example, if a vendor who previously listed their country of origin as China deletes the country in order to hide the long shipping distance, Evo flags the change.

The company is taking steps to prevent sellers from gaming their algorithms in the way Search Engine Optimization tries to improve Google rankings. But Evo wants sellers to add environmental data to product descriptions, since it ultimately improves transparency and increases environmental awareness.

Evo also ranks members, and will eventually implement a system similar to the Karma scores of Digg and Slashdot, in which positive recommendations improve a reviewer's credibility on the site. But like any community-based site, there are bound to be cases of abuse. "We're already starting to see a company that says, 'we don't like products from this other company,'" observes Siegel. "It doesn't take more than a click or two to find out they represent another company with a competing product."

Evo makes its money from referral fees, just like any other affiliate. Siegel feels that smaller sites are happy to give him a piece of the revenue, because referral fees are a normal part of online business. But if a site isn't participating in affiliate programs today, Evo just sends them the traffic for free. "We don't have a 'We're free for six months' window," says Siegel. "Our intention is to work with the folks that don't have an affiliate program in place."

Down the road, if Evo becomes big enough, it might bypass the affiliate aggregators and offer its own affiliate system the way online giants like Amazon and Pricegrabber do. "It's a question of getting to a certain scale," says Siegel. "It's a lot easier from a management perspective to have three points of data distribution."

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Unfortunately, I have to unsubscribe to the Dilbert Blog

Source: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/thisisgoingtobebig/~3/219974611/unfortunately-i.html

A while back, Scott Adams wrote how blogging wasn't really boosting his bottom line the way he thought it would, so he decided to make some changes.  He has decided not only to blog less, but also to go to partial RSS feeds. 

His reasoning is that, unless you were coming to the site, he couldn't monetize you as well.  It wasn't clear that he had ever heard of Feedburner ads for RSS.

So, he made the calculation that he could force those reading his RSS feed to come to the site to read full feeds.  In my case, he can't, because I read a lot of my RSS feeds offline, when I'm on the subway reading through my phone, though Newsgator Mobile.  When I like a post, I clip it, and often send it to others or tag it in del.icio.us for later, meaning the link winds up on my blog and I send some traffic his way.

Either way, as an RSS reader, I'm still net positive on total pageviews.  Moving me to partial feeds doesn't make me add pageviews, it makes me completely disappear.  This is the case for a lot of RSS readers...  going to partial feeds will make your RSS audience dry up, engage less, and certainly never pass the site to others.

I kept the feed in my reader hoping it would change back, but he seems pretty set in his ways, so I'm unsubscribing.  I read RSS feeds and if you're not going to publish a full feed, then I'm not going to read you.  It's a shame, b/c the Dilbert Blog was one of my favorites.

Blogged with Flock

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Photo Sharing Server Photwo Launches - Easiest I've Seen To-Date

Source: http://www.centernetworks.com/photwo-photo-sharing-launches

PhotowoLook, we all know that Flickr is great and not everyone wants something as robust as Flickr. Enter Photwo. It's the quickest, simplest photo sharing service I've seen so far. From account creation to gallery URL created for sharing was about two minutes. It reminds me of the "Gallery" app that's been circulating around the Web for years.

Account creation is simple - no email confirmation required. After login, a box appears on the right (uses Java) to drag and drop photos from your computer. The photos then scale accordingly and show up in your folder. You can see my test gallery here. Registered users can comment on photos and create friend links. Galleries can be made public or private.

From there, you send out the link to the gallery (they need to add sharing buttons) and Photwo offers two embed options - a simple photo viewer which I've emedded below and a funky photobox looking embed.

The site is based out of Norway and founder Magnus K S Andersen tells me that their business model is to sell prints and premium features which will be coming soon.

Some of the options I'd like to see is the ability for friends to add photos to sets, sharing buttons, Facebook/Myspace app, more size options on the embed, watermarking, and the ability to embed a single image with a link back to the image but more importantly a link to the content creator's site.  I do like how simple Photwo is currently and wouldn't want them to build another Flickr.



powered by Photwo.com

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Metaplace: tiny personal virtual worlds like homepages

Source: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/220224038/metaplace-tiny-perso.html

The Technology Review has a great feature on Metaplace, a virtual world startup that aims to allow users to create tiny, individual multiplayer worlds that they can link together like homepages. I'm a huge fan of the founder, Raph Koster, who previously created Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies, and I love the idea of letting players shape their worlds in simple, easy-to-understand ways.

With Metaplace, designers can build worlds using a markup language, style sheets, modules, and a scripting language. Every world acts like a Web server, Koster says, and every object in a world has a URL. What this means for users of these worlds is that they can move seamlessly from the rest of the Web into the virtual world and back again, he says. A user can browse to any object in a Metaplace world from outside, and every object can be linked to the rest of the Web and exchange information with Web services. With this architecture, Koster says, he plans for users to be able to build worlds with games as simple as a two-dimensional Tetris game, or as complex as the World of Warcraft, a massive, multiplayer, online role-playing game. Users might also build widgets, such as a virtual weatherman who could deliver the latest news from weather.com, or a Coke machine that gives them a real-world coupon whenever they drink a virtual Coke. Koster says that users should be able to stage up a basic world with chat functionality and a map within about five minutes.

Koster envisions users coming to a Metaplace world by clicking on a link in a Web page. That link launches a page where the user finds herself inside a world, perhaps using a default avatar, but no log-in or registration is immediately required. "They don't make you log in to play a YouTube video," Koster points out.

The Metaplace client is basically a Flash application, he says, and, consequently, is available to nearly everyone who uses the Internet. Currently, Metaplace does not allow users to build 3-D worlds, but Koster says that he expects Flash to add 3-D capabilities in the near future. The client will work anywhere on the Web, and Koster adds that he hopes to see user-generated clients built for mobile devices such as iPhones.

Link (via Wonderland)

(Disclosure: I'm a proud member of the advisory board for Areae, Inc, the company that makes Metaplace)

See also: Metaplace: open DIY virtual worlds for everyone

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Google Offers OpenID Logins Via Blogger

Source: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/219228203/

bloggerindraft.jpgAfter testing OpenID’s as logins to Google’s Blogger in Draft program in November, Google has become an OpenID provider itself. The news confirms TechCrunch UK’s story of January 9, which also predicted that IBM and VeriSign would soon be joining the OpenID train.

Effective immediately, Blogger users are able to use their blogs URL as an OpenID login, after toggling the option via the draft.blogger.com admin menu. Google’s baby steps follow the announcement last week that over 250 million Yahoo users would be able to use their Yahoo logins as OpenID. Reports have put users of Blogger at somewhere between 10 million and 50 million, although the service is renowned as a haven for spam so how many legitimate bloggers will take up this service is unclear. It also isn’t being provided as yet via the regular Blogger quite yet, only via the Blogger in Draft service (although this is available to those who wish to use it), however this is the regular first step for new features in Blogger so it could be expected to become a standard option sometime later this year.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

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2007 Crunchies: The Winners

Source: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/219236705/

crunchies2007.jpgA great evening was had by all tonight as some of the leading startups gathered for the first annual Crunchies, a joint production between Read/Write Web, VentureBeat, GigaOm and TechCrunch.

The ceremony went (mostly) smoothly with a couple of surprises amongst the results. For a full list of nominees, visit the Crunchies 2007 portal here.

Best Overall: Facebook

Facebook revolutionized the idea of what social networking could be.

Best technology innovation / achievement:
Earthmine

Earthmine picks up where Google Earth leaves off, bringing deep semantic data to 3D panoramas of the real world. Earthmine's system can keep track of the objects found in the real world and attribute information to each of them, such as latitude, longitude, elevation, and other attributes.

Best Clean Tech Startup:
Tesla Motors

Tesla’s green sports car has captured the imagination of a public who had come to expect electric cars to be dull are boring. Due to be released this year, the company has pre-orders from some of the biggest names in Entertainment and Technology.

Best video startup: Hulu

Hulu put television online. Their broadcasting system was modeled on the success of social video sites and drawn the praise of its previous critics.

Best user-generated content site: Digg

Digg’s simple voting system defined the emerging social media revolution. Getting “dugg” quickly became a badge of honor and established a coveted place in the geek lexicon.

Best mobile start-up: Twitter

Twitter, the new addictive microblogging platform. It wasn’t until after the South by Southwest conference that people realized the value of the incredibly simple microblogging platform.

Best International startup: Netvibes
Based in London, Tariq Karim and Freddy Mini’s Netvibes has made waves in the U.S. as a top personalized web portal.

Best consumer startup: Meebo
Meebo made instant messaging ubiquitous by bringing it online. They then developed it into a platform where anyone could add chat to their applications.

Best enterprise startup: Zoho

Zoho’s comprehensive online suite of 14 business applications ranging from document editing to CRM continues to lead the way in the move away from desktop computing to working in the cloud.

Best design: SmugMug

SmugMug is professional photo site. SmugMug’s attention to detail and design can command as much as $150 per year from their users.

Best new gadget/ device: Apple iPhone. See the Apple acceptance speech here.

Best business model:
Zazzle

Looking for a Star Wars hat or memorable mug? Zazzle is an on-demand factory of consumer goods for top brands. It also lets consumers become producers by uploading their own images onto that T-shirt, mug, or mousepad. . Consumers can also receive a commission on products that they sell and design themselves

Best bootstrapped startup: Techmeme.
Founded and developed solely by Gabe Rivera, Techmeme serves as the front page of the tech blogosphere. The site’s advanced algorithms identify the day’s top stories by making sense of conversations across the web’s best blogs.

Best Startup Founder: Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook)

Does this really need any explanation? At 23 Mark has built one of the world’s leading online destinations that has recently been valued at $15 billion. A remarkable achievement for anyone, let alone someone at the still relatively young 23. A well deserved award.

Best Startup CEO: Toni Schneider (Automattic)

Schnieder has lead the company from its roots as a open source alternative to Movable Type into a multi-million dollar enterprise that saves the world from blog spam and offers a free hosted blogging solution that competes with Google’s Blogger.

Best new startup: iMedix

iMedix combines search and social networking to change the way people find health information online. Users are encouraged to help each other by sharing health experiences and links from around the web.

Most likely to succeed
: Automattic (WordPress)

The open source blogging platform that powers the long tale and turned into a multi-million dollar spam fighting and hosted blogging service.

Best use of viral marketing: StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon’s service lets users bookmark and discover new sites they love. With only a $1.5 million investment in 2005, StumbleUpon gew to over 4 million Stumblers and was bought by eBay in 2007 for $75 million

Best time sink site: Kongregate

CEO Jim Greer describes Kongregate as XBox live for casual games. This site hosts some of the webs most addictive casual games. Remember Desktop Tower Defense? Moreover, the games are not only played by users, but also created by them in exchange for a share of advertising revenue and other rewards.

Most likely to make the world a better place: DonorsChose

DonorsChoose.org is dedicated to connecting classrooms in need with individuals who want to help.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

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Nielsen: Google, Yahoo, Losing Search Share To MSN. (Not A Typo)

Source: http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/01/nielsen-google-yahoo-losing-search-share-to-msn-not-a-typo.html

Interesting news to dump late on Friday: Nielsen's newest search share rankings show Microsoft gaining at Google and Yahoo. Google and YHOO saw their share drop 1.4% and .2%, respectively, while MSFT jumped 1.8% between Nov. and Dec., 2007.

All of this is newsworthy, because we've become used to watching GOOG's search share march inexorably upwards, while its competitors stumble. But it in addition to the usual caveats -- this is one research firm, and one set of month-to-month data -- the Nielsen data comes with a new asterisk.

Last fall, the firm made changes to its tracking panel, which it says resulted in "more granular reporting, increased accuracy, an expanded Internet universe and more advanced tracking." That sounds great, but the downside is that the company says it means we can't compare its pre-Nov. 2007 data with anything it's done before. Which essentially means that if we want meaningful trend data from Nielsen, we're going to have wait several months.

In the meantime, go ahead and enjoy these apples-to-apples comparisons, for what they're worth.

+----------+-----------+----------+-----------+-----------+----------+-----------+ |          |           DECEMBER 2007          |           NOVEMBER 2007          | +----------+-----------+----------+-----------+-----------+----------+-----------+ | Provider |  Searches | Share of | Searches/ |  Searches | Share of | Searches/ | |          |     (000) | Searches | Searcher  |    (000)  | Searches | Searcher  | +----------+-----------+----------+-----------+-----------+----------+-----------+ | Google   | 4,062,536 |    56.3% |      37.9 | 4,253,794 |    57.7% |      40.8 | | Yahoo!   | 1,273,688 |    17.7% |      22.4 | 1,317,919 |    17.9% |      23.7 | | MSN/Live |   995,899 |    13.8% |      31.7 |   880,550 |    12.0% |      27.8 | | AOL      |   339,761 |     4.7% |      15.2 |   332,385 |     4.5% |      14.7 | | Ask.com  |   159,529 |     2.2% |      10.0 |   195,848 |     2.7% |      10.5 | | My Web   |    70,630 |     1.0% |      10.4 |    87,001 |     1.2% |      12.6 | | Comcast  |    34,715 |     0.5% |      10.1 |    39,257 |     0.5% |      10.4 | | NexTag   |    29,019 |     0.4% |       2.9 |    27,714 |     0.4% |       3.1 | | AT&T     |    25,159 |     0.3% |       9.1 |    29,244 |     0.4% |       9.2 | +----------+-----------+----------+-----------+-----------+----------+-----------+ Source: Nielsen Online, MegaView Search

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Oh, How the Mighty Have Fallen: Joost Edition

Source: http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/01/oh-how-the-mighty-have-fallen-joost-edition.html

Joost.pngLast summer, Joost was the hottest thing going. Finally, real TV on the Internet. The traditional networks couldn't stop praising it (the first frantically waving red flag). Joost was going to steamroll sleazy and maligned YouTube, which was only making hay by stealing everyone's content. Joost already had 1 million users, etc.

Well, you don't hear much about Joost anymore--other than about its flaws:
  • it requires a software download,
  • it needs to be turned on (as opposed to web-based video, which you encounter everywhere)
  • its technology never worked right,
  • it doesn't have enough good content
  • people don't actually want to "watch TV" on the Internet (they're fine watching shows, but they want to do their own programming, not watch "channels"), and
  • the 1 million user number might have been misleading. (We always suspected the 1 million was "downloads," not "active users," and we still don't know anyone who actually watches Joost)
  • YouTube, Hulu, et al, are vastly more convenient
Joost has now ditched its CTO, presumably in an attempt to get its technology working. That's a start, but it won't address the other problems.

Over at NewTeeVee, Janko Reottgers suggests five ways to save Joost. With the exception of "build a web version," we don't find any of them compelling. (And even that one won't help, because there already are web versions of Joost out there--dozens of them). We therefore reiterate our assessment from last summer: Joost is the PointCast of 2007.

The Chronicles of Joost:
Joost Loses CTO, Hires Comcast Exec
The Company Hulu Really Will Kill: Joost

Why Nate Westheimer Doesn't Watch Joost
Why We Don't Watch Joost
Prediction: Joost is the PointCast of 2007

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PocketGuitar Lets You Kick Out Riffs With Your iPhone [Software]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/219908574/pocketguitar-lets-you-kick-out-riffs-with-your-iphone

PocketGuitar%20GI.jpgYou were born to rock, and to help you live dream, Shinya Kasatani has released PocketGuitar for the iPhone and iPod touch, which turns your device into a touchscreen guitar. The application looks insanely great, and we cannot believe it has taken humanity this long to realize the true destiny of the iPhone. It makes so much sense now; it is the guitar of the future, sent back to destroy enemies of rock music.

If your not feeling up to an acoustic solo session, fret not, well actually, you will need to fret, but you can do all your fretting alongside music that is already stored on your iPhone. That's right, you can be Hendrix. Man, you are so in to the music, you are Hendrix. That some heavy, insane music philosophy right there. To get your fingers strumming, launch Installer and follow these instructions: Installer > Sources > Add http://podmap.net/apps to your repositories. PockeGuitar is filed under the Toys category. If this takes off in a big way, expect iPhone finger board extension peripherals to drop soon. We can't wait. [PocketGuitar via Mobilewhack]



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Bug Labs announces WiFi-free Hiro P BUGbase

Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/219116368/

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Looks like Bug Labs is fixing to release its BUGbase in more than one version due to apparent issues related to solid, stable open source WiFi chipsets and drivers. Picking up the Hiro P Edition monicker (let's hope it doesn't snow crash), this revised first BUGbase will ship without 802.11, but adds a small joystick control, and as recompense for the wireless sacrifice, Hiro P owners will get a free BUGvonhippel module (the hardware breakout box, basically), and the option to snag a pluggable WiFi attachment on the cheap at a later time. For those who want to wait for the full, integrated-WiFi experience, Bug's not yet offering a set schedule for the "regular" base kit, but Hiro P goes on pre-sale at the Bug Labs store for the regular early adopter price this Monday.

 

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AT&T offers SIM-only service, attempts to maintain "most open" status

Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/220088325/

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It looks like all that shouting AT&T has been doing lately about its "openness" is starting to manifest itself in the way the company does business. It's come to our attention that the mobile telco has started offering a SIM-only plan, thus providing the ultimate in open options. The idea being, of course, that you can bring any random / crappy / salvaged GSM-compatible handset the provider's way, and it'll let you hook a towline onto its satellites. Of course, you could just get one of those cheapo giveaways and pop out the card, but this is so much more open and free, like San Francisco in '69, a car-less road, some land of your own, and a good old-fashioned whiskey on the rocks. Oh, you still have a sign a two-year agreement... enjoy your freedom!

[Via The Boy Genius Report]

 

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