Archive for July, 2007
Amazon is jumping on the social networking train with the launch of Askville. The concept of the site - Askville allows users to post any question they want and get answers from real people - is similar to Yahoo Answers and Answers.com.
Users will rate other people’s answers with “experience points” based on how helpful the answer is, aspiring experts can gain or lose points. Additionally, users gain Quest Coins for every action they complete, from voting to asking a question. Amazon describes them as virtual currency that can be used on a yet-to-be launched site called Questville. Amazon boasts in its FAQ section for Questville that “on Questville you will be able to use your Quest Coins to participate in exciting new adventures and other cool things!â€
July 10th, 2007
Google announced today that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Postini, a global leader in on-demand communications security and compliance solutions serving more than 35,000 businesses and 10 million users worldwide. Postini’s services — which include message security, archiving, encryption, and policy enforcement — can be used to protect a company’s email, instant messaging, and other web-based communications. Under the terms of the agreement, Google will acquire Postini for $625 million in cash, subject to working capital and other adjustments, and Postini will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Google.
The agreement is subject to customary closing conditions and is expected to close by the end of the third quarter 2007.”With this transaction, we’re reinforcing our commitment to delivering compelling hosted applications to businesses of all sizes. With the addition of Postini, our apps are not just simple and appealing to users — they can also streamline the complex information security mandates within these organizations,” said Eric Schmidt, Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer of Google.
Hosted services, like Google Apps and Postini solutions, provide organizations with high quality communications tools without the expense and hassle of traditional on-premise solutions. Google Apps, which includes Gmail, Calendar, Talk, Docs & Spreadsheets, and Personal Start Page, has been adopted by more than 100,000 businesses already. Postini solutions include Email Security, IM Security, Web Security, Message Archiving, Message Encryption, and Policy-enforced TLS.
“The response to Google Apps has been tremendous, with more than 1,000 small businesses signing up for the service every day. At the same time, large businesses have been reluctant to move to hosted applications due to issues of security and corporate compliance. By adding Postini products to Google’s technology, businesses no longer have to choose — employees get the intuitive products they want, and the company achieves the security and assurance it needs,” said Dave Girouard, Vice President and General Manager, Google Enterprise.
“As the market leader in on-demand secure communications and compliance solutions, Postini complements Google perfectly. We share a commitment to providing enterprise customers with compelling technology alternatives. This is an exciting milestone, one that will certainly lead to the next level of rapid innovation,” said Quentin Gallivan, President and Chief Executive Officer of Postini.
“Postini’s founding vision is to bring to market technology solutions that address enterprise messaging problems in a different way. Our on-demand offering liberates businesses from the burdens associated with traditional on-premise solutions. We are proud of what we have done to achieve our vision on behalf of our customers, and combining Google and Postini is a powerful next step in this creative journey,” said Scott Petry, Founder, Chief Technical Officer, and Executive Vice President of Product Development at Postini.
Google will continue to support Postini customers and invest in Postini products.
July 9th, 2007
The latest release of adCenter includes exciting ways to improve advertiser visibility into the area of click quality. Because all clicks don’t necessarily carry the same value, adCenter categorizes them as either standard quality or low quality. Standard-quality clicks are the clicks that you want, that ordinarily result in conversions, and that you are billed for.Â
Low-quality clicks are clicks that adCenter classifies as non-billable, including those that adCenter has identified as:
- Invalid clicks
- Clicks that have characteristics of low or unclear commercial intent
- Clicks that exhibit patterns of unusual activity
- Clicks that originate from spiders, robots, questionable sources, or test servers
- Clicks that should be filtered out for other reasons
Some traffic that adCenter has flagged as low quality might ultimately result in conversions for you, which is why the label “low quality,†rather than “invalid,†provides a more accurate description of this class of traffic.
July 6th, 2007
Google Software Engineer, Aleksander Fedorynski, announces several improvements on Google Search Code, a tool for locating publicly available source code. Some of the improvements are:
- Expanded crawling of individual code files and code snippets from webpages - previously only complete archives and repositories were indexed.
- Class and function definitions are now closer to the top of searches for improved ranking,.
- Code search is now available in other domains outside of United States - Poland, Brazil, China, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Korea, the Netherlands, Russia, Spain and some more.
July 6th, 2007
eBay and Yahoo! have teamed up to create a new version of the eBay Toolbar that combines features from both sites. The new Toolbar contains the following features:
- Improved Search - Use the new Toolbar to search items on eBay and Half.com, or do a quick Yahoo! search to find matches across the entire web. An advanced web search will help you find local businesses from Yahoo! Local, as well as content from Yahoo! Video, Yahoo! Answers and more.
- One-click access to your favorite destinations - Jump directly to features such as Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo.com and My Yahoo! As before, Toolbar also provides buttons that make eBay.com and My eBay just a click away. Customize your toolbar to add and remove the buttons of your choice.
- Account Guard, eBay alerts, and more - The new eBay Toolbar featuring Yahoo! offers many of the great features of the old Toolbar. Account Guard helps protect you from spoof websites. Desktop alerts let you know when there’s been activity on items you’re watching, bidding on, or selling. Plus, the new toolbar has a number of bug fixes and updates that address issues from previous releases.
July 5th, 2007
Beginning today, two of FeedBurner’s previously for-pay services, TotalStats and MyBrand, will be free:
FeedBurner Stats PRO
PRO is feed analytics taken to the next level. You will now have access to the number of people who have viewed or clicked individual content items in your feed and “Reach,†which estimates the daily number of subscribers who interacted with your feed content. You can turn this on by signing in to your account, navigating to the Analyze tab and heading to the FeedBurner Stats PRO section. Click the “Item Views” checkbox to activate these PRO features.
MyBrand
The MyBrand service (also PRO-level) is located under the “My Account” tab after you’ve signed in. MyBrand lets you maintain consistency between your feed address and your hosted website’s domain, if matchy-matchy is your thing. For example, rather than using feeds.feedburner.com/MyFeedName, your MyBrand-ed feed address can be feeds.myexcellentdomain.net/MyFeedName. To get started with MyBrand, sign into FeedBurner, click the “My Account” link in the upper left-hand corner, and then click “MyBrand”.
July 4th, 2007
Googled today confirmed the acquisition pf GrandCentral Communications, a company that provides services for managing your voice communications. GrandCentral is an innovative service that lets users integrate all of their existing phone numbers and voice mailboxes into one account, which can be accessed from the web.
They offer many features that complement the phone services you already use. If you have multiple phone numbers (e.g., home, work, cell), you get one phone number that you can set to ring all, some, or none of your phones, based on who’s calling. This way, your phone number is tied to you, and not your location or job. The service also gives you one central voice mailbox. You can listen to your voicemails online or from any phone, forward them to anybody, add the caller to your address book, block a caller as spam, and a lot more. You can even listen in on voicemail messages from your phone while they are being recorded, or switch a call from your cell phone to your desk phone and back again. All in all, you’ll have a lot more control over your phones.
Google will move their technology over to Google’s network, a limited number of invitations will be available to register for a GrandCentral beta account. If you have a U.S. telephone number, you can sign up for an invitation at www.grandcentral.com. Current GrandCentral customers will continue to have uninterrupted access to the service.
July 3rd, 2007
Yahoo! today announced the launch of Yahoo! SmartAds, a new, innovative advertising platform that allows marketers to deliver powerful, tailored display ads to highly targeted audiences. SmartAds combines Yahoo!’s leading consumer insights and rich media capabilities with new ad serving technology that automatically converts marketers’ creative campaign elements and targeted offerings into highly-customized and relevant display ads.
“Yahoo!’s SmartAds gives marketers what they want from online advertising: the ability to deliver customized marketing messages to consumers, and still engage very large audiences with their brand,” said Todd Teresi, Yahoo!’s senior vice president of display marketplaces. “By enabling marketers to reach consumers on a more tailored basis and helping creative agencies support those customized campaigns, we can provide an even more engaging, relevant online experience to the more than 500 million users of Yahoo! branded products and services.”
Yahoo! SmartAds is powered by Yahoo!’s leading behavioral, demographic and geographic targeting capabilities and aim to connect users with what they are looking for based on their distinctive, expressed interests. For example, if a user is browsing for hybrid cars in Yahoo! Autos and has selected San Francisco as their default location in Yahoo! Weather, Yahoo!’s SmartAds platform can assemble and deliver a display ad in real time that showcases a hybrid vehicle from a major auto brand, as well as local dealer information and current lease rates. This provides a relevant experience to the user and allows the marketer to reach a user who is likely to become a customer.
In addition, Yahoo!’s patent-pending SmartAds platform allows advertisers and agencies to design a single set of individual creative components, provide Yahoo! with that artwork and a feed to their entire database of offers, then allow Yahoo!’s SmartAds technology to automatically generate the hundreds - if not thousands - of unique ad combinations based on those components. This helps advertisers and agencies scale to take full advantage of all of Yahoo!’s audience targeting capabilities while maintaining control over how their brand is presented.
“Yahoo!’s SmartAds is the breakthrough marriage of brand and direct marketing that advertisers have been waiting for,” said David Kenny, Chairman, Digitas and Publicis Groupe Digital. “By combining its huge audience, dynamic ad creation capabilities and deep knowledge of user interests, Yahoo! has developed a true innovation that will benefit agencies and its clients, especially companies with a large number of offers to present to many audience segments.”
Yahoo! is taking a phased approach to the SmartAds platform, making it available first on its owned and operated properties to travel industry advertisers in the U.S. The company has plans to expand it to additional vertical industries over the coming months and, in the future, deliver Smart Ads on its broader network of sites. In testing conducted on Yahoo! FareChase, SmartAds generally resulted in click through rates of two to three times higher than static, non-customized display ads using the same targeting and placement.
Yahoo! SmartAds furthers the company’s long-term advertising and publishing vision: To build the industry’s leading advertising and publishing ecosystem - both on and off Yahoo!’s network - and transform how advertisers connect to and engage with their customers. For more information about SmartAds or to view an online demonstration, visit: http://advertising.yahoo.com/smartads.
July 3rd, 2007
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