 Thursday, May 15. 2008 |
Read the full press release from CNET here.
NEW YORK and SAN FRANCISCO, May 15 — CBS Corporation (NYSE: CBS.A and CBS) has entered into an agreement to acquire CNET Networks, Inc.
(Nasdaq: CNET), it was announced today by Leslie Moonves, President and Chief Executive Officer, CBS Corporation. Under the terms of the agreement, CBS will make a cash tender offer for all issued and outstanding shares of CNET Networks for $11.50 per share, representing an equity value of approximately $1.8 billion. The acquisition will make CBS one of the 10 most popular Internet companies in the United States, with a combined 54 million unique users per month, and approximately 200 million users worldwide.
"There are very few opportunities to acquire a profitable, growing, well-managed Internet company like CNET Networks," said Moonves. "CBS stands for premium content and unparalleled reach, and CNET Networks will add a tremendous platform to extend our complementary entertainment, news, sports, music and information content to a whole new global audience. Together, CBS and CNET Networks will have significant additional exposure to the fastest-growing advertising sector and can accelerate our growth through a number of new content, promotion and advertising initiatives. We could not be more pleased with the prospect of adding CNET Networks and its tremendous team of people to the CBS family. I look forward to working with Quincy Smith, Neil Ashe and the considerable combined talent at both companies, as we build upon our success."
Wednesday, May 14. 2008 |
Domain names can be tricky. All too often, a domain name ends up with some sort of wacky, unintended double entendre of meaning that may detract from your overall branding message. One famous faux pas is Speed of Art's website, found at www.speedofart.com. With a second look, you can see how this might be a little uncomfortable.
When you choose your domain name, it's important to follow some simple guidelines to ensure that your website upholds your branding image.
1. Type it out. Sit down in front of your word processor and pick a couple of different fonts. Type the domain in each font and see how it looks. Look at one letter at a time, and see which letter combinations make words that you hadn't expected.
2. Say it out loud. Watch yourself in the mirror and use a couple of different tones as you say it. Pronounce the letters one at a time and change your inflection.
3. Ask other people. Get a third-party opinion on the domain you're considering. Call your hosting provider, your advertising agency, or a trusted friend and ask them to look at it from all angles.
You'll likely want to keep this domain active and engaged for a long time—it's important to choose wisely.
If you have seen other websites or domain names that might have benefited from a second look, I'd love to see what you've found! I know there are a couple in our area that are notorious for neglecting that final proof edit--just stick them in the comments for me.
Saturday, May 3. 2008 |
We are now entering the next stage of interesting events in the ongoing Microsoft/Yahoo! saga.
Steve Ballmer has formally withdrawn the offer to acquire Yahoo! in a letter to Yahoo!'s C.E.O. Jerry Yang. The letter was so interesting that I felt it was necessary to include it for you.
Dear Jerry:
After over three months, we have reached the conclusion of the process regarding a possible combination of Microsoft and Yahoo!.
I first want to convey my personal thanks to you, your management team, and Yahoo!’s Board of Directors for your consideration of our proposal. I appreciate the time and attention all of you have given to this matter, and I especially appreciate the time that you have invested personally. I feel that our discussions this week have been particularly useful, providing me for the first time with real clarity on what is and is not possible.
I am disappointed that Yahoo! has not moved towards accepting our offer. I first called you with our offer on January 31 because I believed that a combination of our two companies would have created real value for our respective shareholders and would have provided consumers, publishers, and advertisers with greater innovation and choice in the marketplace. Our decision to offer a 62 percent premium at that time reflected the strength of these convictions.
In our conversations this week, we conveyed our willingness to raise our offer to $33.00 per share, reflecting again our belief in this collective opportunity. This increase would have added approximately another $5 billion of value to your shareholders, compared to the current value of our initial offer. It also would have reflected a premium of over 70 percent compared to the price at which your stock closed on January 31. Yet it has proven insufficient, as your final position insisted on Microsoft paying yet another $5 billion or more, or at least another $4 per share above our $33.00 offer.
Also, after giving this week’s conversations further thought, it is clear to me that it is not sensible for Microsoft to take our offer directly to your shareholders. This approach would necessarily involve a protracted proxy contest and eventually an exchange offer. Our discussions with you have led us to conclude that, in the interim, you would take steps that would make Yahoo! undesirable as an acquisition for Microsoft.
We regard with particular concern your apparent planning to respond to a “hostile” bid by pursuing a new arrangement that would involve or lead to the outsourcing to Google of key paid Internet search terms offered by Yahoo! today. In our view, such an arrangement with the dominant search provider would make an acquisition of Yahoo! undesirable to us for a number of reasons:
•First, it would fundamentally undermine Yahoo!’s own strategy and long-term viability by encouraging advertisers to use Google as opposed to your Panama paid search system. This would also fragment your search advertising and display advertising strategies and the ecosystem surrounding them. This would undermine the reliance on your display advertising business to fuel future growth.
•Given this, it would impair Yahoo’s ability to retain the talented engineers working on advertising systems that are important to our interest in a combination of our companies.
•In addition, it would raise a host of regulatory and legal problems that no acquirer, including Microsoft, would want to inherit. Among other things, this would consolidate market share with the already-dominant paid search provider in a manner that would reduce competition and choice in the marketplace.
•This would also effectively enable Google to set the prices for key search terms on both their and your search platforms and, in the process, raise prices charged to advertisers on Yahoo. In addition to whatever resulting legal problems, this seems unwise from a business perspective unless in fact one simply wishes to use this as a vehicle to exit the paid search business in favor of Google.
•It could foreclose any chance of a combination with any other search provider that is not already relying on Google’s search services.
Accordingly, your apparent plan to pursue such an arrangement in the event of a proxy contest or exchange offer leads me to the firm decision not to pursue such a path. Instead, I hereby formally withdraw Microsoft’s proposal to acquire Yahoo!.
We will move forward and will continue to innovate and grow our business at Microsoft with the talented team we have in place and potentially through strategic transactions with other business partners.
I still believe even today that our offer remains the only alternative put forward that provides your stockholders full and fair value for their shares. By failing to reach an agreement with us, you and your stockholders have left significant value on the table.
But clearly a deal is not to be.
Thank you again for the time we have spent together discussing this.
Sincerely yours,
Steven A. Ballmer
Chief Executive Officer
Microsoft Corporation
(source: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2008/may08/05-03letter.mspx)
No one really knows where this will go from here, but I am sure there are many people interested to see how this will affect YHOO stock on Monday morning. I would love to hear comments on this topic, so please feel free to speak your mind.
Kind Regards,
Dennis Kittrell
Saturday, May 3. 2008 |
So you've got a website, you've got ads, but no traffic...What's Next?
If you are a website owner, I am sure you are experiencing (or have previously experienced) the all too familiar dilemma we will discuss today; Monetization. Anyone can build a website these days, but to truly profit from it is the question weighing on our minds.
Whether it be through e-commerce, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, or even direct advertising, the dilemma still rings true. The bottom line is that TRAFFIC=MONEY. And without traffic, there is no money, period.
The answer is actually a lot simpler than you might think.
The answer can be expressed in two words: Valuable Content
It really is that simple. If you can create quality content that your readers enjoy, they will at least come back. In some cases, they will even shoot a link to your page over to their friend. If you are really lucky, that friend will have a website of his own and will post a link back to your site. This is the core concept of viral marketing.
The way I see it, there are 6 levels of content quality:
- Fake
- Stolen
- Genuine
- Interesting
- Catchy
- Viral
Obviously the goal here is to break the 'Viral' barrier. You want to consistently aim to create content that spreads like wildfire. This will be the primary internet marketing technique for many years to come.
To clarify, this does not mean that you need to direct your content to the masses. You simply need to hit a nerve with your audience. You have to create something that shocks them, mystifies them, disturbs them, excites them, entertains them, inspires them, educates them, impresses them, or even angers them. These are the techniques being used all across the web to create an exponential increase in traffic and user base.
So now that we have answered the question of 'What to do' the next step is to figure out 'How to do it'. So you need to ask yourself, "What is the best source for content that will hit one or more of the nerves listed above?" If you are confident in your ability to provide that content, great!! You are one step closer. If you are not, you may have to rely on other experts or even your users to provide the content. The best solution is to create content that YOU are highly familiar with, and that you can take in many different directions. Relying on your community is great, but you need a community first.
Happy Marketing!!
Dennis Kittrell
Friday, May 2. 2008 |
Over the last 5 or 6 years, 100's of CMS (content management systems) have come and gone. Only the tried and true persist in today's highly competitive open source community. Today, we are going to tackle the topic of who's who and what's what when it comes to the big players in CMS.
I will start by saying that every system has its pros and cons. Each CMS has its own community backing it, therefore they usually focus on different areas of demand. Recently the biggest players have been sneaking in on each other and are really becoming superstars in the realm of CMS.
Let's take look at the top dogs:
- Joomla (formerly mambo)
- Drupal
- PHP-Nuke
- DotNetNuke
Joomla is certainly winning the popular vote. Drupal is a close second and was originally geared more toward developers than the masses. PHP-Nuke is the resilient one (allthough its days may be numbered). And DotNet Nuke is the clear leader on the Windows Platform.
I think the real battle here is between Joomla and Drupal. They have the biggest communities and (in my humble opinion) the best platforms for growth and future expansion. The gap is slowly decreasing between the developer and the standard web user and these two (CMS) platforms are the driving force that makes this possible. I am not sure about the rest of you, but I am certainly keeping my eyes on this battlefield as I can foresee an epic battle of many forces to take on these two.
I would definitely like to hear from our readers if you have an opinion on this topic. I am sure there are some very stern viewpoints when it comes to this. Please also share any new and exciting CMS systems out there that I have not yet seen as I would love to take a look at those as well.
You might also want to keep your eyes on this site to stay up to date with new CMS systems.
Thanks as always, and I am looking forward to your comments!
Dennis Kittrell
Wednesday, April 23. 2008 |
As you may know, this week is the SBA's 55th annual Small Business Week, an event designed to put America's small businesses in the spotlight.
But, considering that the week consists of celebrations and awards held almost exclusively in Washington, D.C. and New York City -- should you even care?
Fortune Small Business Magazine's Brandi Stewart runs down the reasons why you might want to pay attention:
[A]fter more than 50 years, the annual Small Business Administration-run event still remains off the radar of many small business owners. ...
Started in 1963 to spotlight small-business contributions to America's economy, National Small Business Week features a mix of awards ceremonies, networking events, discussion forums and educational talks by politicians and business executives. Held in Washington, D.C., and New York City, the events will be webcast for the first time this year, so that entrepreneurs around the country can tune in.
"What they'll get is the chance to hear from key leaders on some of the critical issues impacting small business, such as doing business with the government and going global," said Susan Walthall, chairwoman of National Small Business Week and the SBA's acting deputy associate administrator for entrepreneurial development. "We're going to cover those two areas, as well as health care and the energy challenge."
Most speakers on the roster this week are government officials, such as President Bush, United States Trade Representative Susan Schwab, and Michael Leavitt, secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. Small-business voices will surface primarily in panel discussions and during awards ceremonies.
Some business owners who make the effort to attend National Small Business Week events say they provide valuable information and networking opportunities.
Serial entrepreneur Peter Justen first learned of the week three years ago as he started his most recent venture, MyBizHomepage.com, a software company that offers dashboards to help business owners navigate Intuit Inc.'s (INTU) QuickBooks and manage their financials. Justen attended for the first time last year, and came away impressed. At one lunch, he met Brian Moran of the Moran Media Group, a publishing house that produces magazines for trade groups and many of the SBA's partner organizations. Justen worked out a deal to advertise in Small Business Success, a biannual magazine sent out to SBA, SCORE, and small-business development center offices.
"Our paths probably would have never crossed otherwise," Justen said. "Typically, I would have had to do a blind call to the editorial staff and worked my way up from there."
... Small Business Week permeates Washington, D.C., at the highest levels: President Bush, who will meet with some award winners Wednesday at the White House, opened the week with a formal proclamation calling on Americans "to observe this week with appropriate ceremonies, activities, and programs that celebrate the achievements of small business owners and their employees and encourage the development of new small businesses."
But little action is tied to the lofty rhetoric. The week's organizers at the SBA acknowledge that they are focused more on raising general awareness of small businesses' hefty contributions to the American economy than they are on pushing forward direct policy advances to help business owners.
That needs to change, especially as the ailing economy takes its toll on entrepreneurs.
"Washington hasn't been stepping up to the plate nearly enough," Senator John Kerry, chairman of the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship, wrote in an e-mail to FSB. "National Small Business Week is a time to insist on actions not just words to help the small businesses which created more than nine out of 10 new jobs over the past 15 years. These small business owners are out there everyday in today's tough economic climate where it's harder and harder to afford the energy bills, pay for health care for their employees, and expand their payrolls."
For more information on National Small Business Week, click here.
Tuesday, April 22. 2008 |
Yesterday, the New York Times ran in interesting article detailing some of the changes the world of Internet advertising is undergoing thanks to the current economic slowdown.
Granted, Internet advertising is already a very dynamic force, something that evolves and adjusts on an almost daily basis. But, at the same time, as it becomes a larger and larger part of the American economy, it tends to stabilize into something predictable (and therefore, reliable). In other words, as more and more money is put into it, the less dynamic it tends to be; investors want results, not uncertainty.
So even though the Internet advertising industry is thriving like never before (it was a $21 billion industry in 2007, according to the article), there are some big changes underfoot. Anyone in the online business game should be aware of the current evolution the industry is facing.
Last year, [Tyler] Townsend, [a digital media manager] said, many clients were happy to spend money just to raise awareness. Since January, however, "everyone’s retail-oriented. They want as many clicks for the dollar as possible," he said.
So far, the threat of a recession has not slowed the migration of ad dollars to the Internet — as Google's strong results showed on Thursday, when it reported a 30 percent jump in net income for its first quarter. But as Mr. Townsend's campaign suggests, the slowing economy might be changing where those ad dollars are being spent.
Increasingly, marketers are looking to ad networks, which sell display advertising across groups of Web sites. Some networks offer targeted advertising; others, called vertical ad networks, include sites that focus on one subject, like travel or sports.
Their growth could mean a lower share of advertising for portals like AOL and particularly for Yahoo, which is particularly strong in traditional display advertising. (Yahoo will report its quarterly earnings on Tuesday.)
In 2007, United States revenue growth slowed at three of the four major portals (Yahoo, AOL and Google) according to an analysis by eMarketer. The fourth is MSN. Any downturn could also be bad news for media sites that attract a lot of display advertising, like CNN.com or nytimes.com, at premium rates.
In the United States, $21.1 billion was spent on online advertising last year, up from $16.9 billion in 2006, according to eMarketer. Search advertising — Google’s stronghold — is the majority of that spending, according to Jeffrey Lindsay, an analyst at Sanford Bernstein.
... The reasons ad networks are thriving are price and improved technology. Ad networks charge much lower cost per thousand ads served (known as CPMs), as low as $4 on an ad network with some targeting, compared with $40 and up for some ads on premium sites like MSN or Yahoo.
"While the home pages are still very effective media buys, the price tags on them have become a little outrageous for many advertisers. For all the growth that has gone on from a site standpoint, there are other ways to amass that type of audience fairly quickly that are more efficient," said Margaret Clerkin, the chief executive of Mindshare Interaction, a media-buying firm.
Click here to read "A Web Shift in the Way Advertisers Seek Clicks" by Stephanie Clifford.
Monday, April 21. 2008 |
We at Aplus.Net have just announced that we're now offering Microsoft adCenter search advertising service to our web hosting customers. We think you'll agree that it's the perfect addition to our award-winning line-up of website marketing tools.
"As the preferred web hosting provider for America's small businesses, it's important that we provide every possible advantage for our clients to achieve online success," commented our Senior Vice President of Marketing and Sales, Alex Yevelev. "And we feel that Microsoft adCenter is among the best tools to help our customers do just that."
From the official Aplus.Net press release:
A search advertising service renowned for its innovative approach to pay-per-click advertising, Microsoft adCenter offers benefits such as demographic targeting, ease of use, and free support. It also provides supplemental search engine tools such as keyword generator and keyword optimization, both designed to help users enjoy maximum control over their advertising efforts.
Unlike similar search programs, Microsoft adCenter allows advertisers to target their ads directly at a specific demographic, defined by such criteria as age, location, and gender. The service even allows users to display their ads during specific times of the day or week.
As part of this new offering, Aplus.Net is offering up to $200 in free Microsoft adCenter credit for its web hosting customers. The service is available now at the company's website; please visit http://www.aplus.net/msadcenter.html for further details.
Have you been looking for that perfect way to give your online business a boost? Then this is the news you've been waiting for! Head on over to the Aplus.Net website to sign up for web hosting today.
Friday, April 18. 2008 |
Hey readers! As you may have noticed, we here at Aplus.Net are in the process of making some big changes to our products and services. From rebranding our hosting services to reducing prices on our dedicated servers, it's all an effort to make sure that Aplus.Net customers have the best possible advantage in the competitive world of online commerce.
With that in mind, we're very interested in learning what you, the readers of the Aplus.Net blog, think about the Aplus.Net website. ( Click here to check it out now.) Do you find it useful? Do you like the design? Do you think it could be better? As we work to improve our services, we'll be adjusting the face of our website, and we'd love to hear any suggestions you may have -- about the website, or anything else you'd like to share. Please leave your comments in the blog or send us an email at marketing@aplus.net.
As always, thanks for reading.
Thursday, April 17. 2008 |
[T]he interest of the Mac world this week swung from 3G iPhone rumor-mongering to South Florida, where a company called Psystar has put up a Web site selling a product called an Open Computer. The product is essentially a white-box Mac with Mac OS X Leopard preinstalled, and a violation of Apple's licensing agreement for Mac OS X.
CNET News' Tom Krazit today nicely summed up the latest controversy in the consumer tech world: The Psystar "Open Computer," which is being called a (possibly unethical) clone of the Mac.
In digging into the background of Psystar, the company behind the new computer, Mr. Krazit claims that the company has been repeatedly changing its address to evade investigation. From the article:
I tried to call Psystar executives Wednesday morning and was directed to submit any questions to an e-mail address at Psystar. The company doesn't appear to have been prepared for the onslaught of attention following the discovery of the Open Computer on its Web site, as its online store was briefly down Wednesday morning. It's now back up and taking orders.
Perhaps foolishly, once the Web store came back online I placed an order for an Open Computer with Leopard preinstalled. I got the basic model for $554.99, although they kill you on shipping with a $93.41 shipping and handling fee for UPS Three-Day Select.
A gentleman who answered the "sales" extension at Psystar's toll-free number told me there is a 7- to 8-day build time right now for the Open Computer. When I asked him what accounted for the delay, he said the company had received many orders in the past few days. He also said he had only started at the company a few days ago.
In other Psystar news, the developer who created the firmware emulator that allows the Open Computer to bypass Apple's restrictions on Mac OS X is peeved that the company is using his technology without his permission.
Netkas, who created the EFI v8 emulator, says he released the software under a strict noncommercial license. For a while, Psystar had not even acknowledged his contribution, but the company has added an "open source" section to its site noting his authorship of the EFI v8 emulator and saying, "Psystar will promote Open Source projects in every way possible."
Computerworld adds to the story:
PsyStar also tried today to explain its shifting mailing address in the Web site statement. The company now lists its location as 10475 NW 28th St., Doral, Fla.; that address is the fourth used on the site since Monday.
"We're in the process of moving to a new location," said the company. "The first new address posted (10481) was in error and our correct address is 10475 NW 28th Street."
PsyStar has listed, in chronological order, a residential address, 10645 SW 112 St., and two commercial addresses, 10481 NW 28th St. and 10471 NW 28th St., so far this week.
According to a reverse look-up using WhitePages.com, two businesses are at PsyStar's newest address: Vipal Rubber Corp. and a firm called Stop Mold Dry. When contacted, Vipal said it had moved to another location -- an additional search found it at a new locale -- but the phone number for Stop Mold Dry gave only a rapid-busy signal.
For its part, PsyStar claimed it has simply been overwhelmed. "[We were] not ready to handle the enormous production capacity demanded by the online community," the company said on its site. "Due to the incredible response, we have now expanded to a larger commercial unit to handle the supplies and assembly of Open Computers."
PsyStar's toll number, which was disconnected Wednesday, was back in operation today.
Tuesday, April 15. 2008 |
It seems that the 21st Century Digital Revolution, as it may someday be called, is getting bigger and bigger with each passing month. As is well known, financial losses faced by the movie industry and the music industry are increasing monthly as bootlegs made possible by digital versions proliferate. New digital models that could not have been predicted a decade ago are supplanting traditional business models so quickly that both of these industries are in very real danger of collapsing altogether.
Now, however, another, more unlikely victim may be added to the list: The publishing industry.
The New York Times recently ran a story profiling Philip Parker, an entrepreneur who has invented a way for books to be written by a computer algorithm. Or, rather, a way for books to be "compiled". He doesn't simply distribute existing books online; he's created a business where the books themselves are written not by people but by a computer program.
From the article:
But these are not conventional books, and it is perhaps more accurate to call Mr. Parker a compiler than an author. Mr. Parker, who is also the chaired professor of management science at Insead (a business school with campuses in Fontainebleau, France, and Singapore), has developed computer algorithms that collect publicly available information on a subject — broad or obscure — and, aided by his 60 to 70 computers and six or seven programmers, he turns the results into books in a range of genres, many of them in the range of 150 pages and printed only when a customer buys one.
If this sounds like cheating to the layman’s ear, it does not to Mr. Parker, who holds some provocative — and apparently profitable — ideas on what constitutes a book. While the most popular of his books may sell hundreds of copies, he said, many have sales in the dozens, often to medical libraries collecting nearly everything he produces. He has extended his technique to crossword puzzles, rudimentary poetry and even to scripts for animated game shows.
And he is laying the groundwork for romance novels generated by new algorithms. "I’ve already set it up," he said. "There are only so many body parts."
The technique isn't perfected yet; and the end result at this point does leave something to be desired:
While nothing announces that Mr. Parker’s books are computer generated, one reader, David Pascoe, seemed close to figuring it out himself, based on his comments to Amazon in 2004. Reviewing a guide to rosacea, a skin disorder, Mr. Pascoe, who is from Perth, Australia, complained: "The book is more of a template for 'generic health researching' than anything specific to rosacea. The information is of such a generic level that a sourcebook on the next medical topic is just a search and replace away."
When told via e-mail that his suspicion was correct, Mr. Pascoe wrote back, "I guess it makes sense now as to why the book was so awful and frustrating." Mr. Parker was willing to concede much of what Mr. Pascoe argued. "If you are good at the Internet, this book is useless," he said, adding that Mr. Pascoe simply should not have bought it. But, Mr. Parker said, there are people who aren’t Internet savvy who have found these guides useful.
It is the idea of automating difficult or boring work that led Mr. Parker to become involved. Comparing himself to a distant disciple of Henry Ford, he said he was "deconstructing the process of getting books into people’s hands; every single step we could think of, we automated."
He added: "My goal isn’t to have the computer write sentences, but to do the repetitive tasks that are too costly to do otherwise."
Should authors be worried? Probably not, at least not yet. There's a wide gap between what a computer can compile and the nuanced hand of a skilled artist. Still, this news is a bit unsettling to those employed in the creative arts. And, taking the music industry as an example, it doesn't seem well advised to underestimate this sort of development. It's the kind of trend that could as easily become a dead end as an overnight sensation. Either way, it's worth consideration.
Click here for the original story. More on the Digital Revolution in the coming days. Stay tuned.
Monday, April 14. 2008 |
When you first decided that you needed a website — and therefore, a web hosting provider — you probably did what most of us do: You went to your favorite search engine, typed in some variation on "web hosting" or "website host" and then sorted through the results that followed.
The problem is, how to make the right choice in web hosting providers when there are so many to choose from? California-based news website "Best Syndication" reports that there are now "more than a staggering 50,000 web hosting providers" competing for your business. ( Read "Web Hosting Providers Rule The Web" here.) And anybody who's ever searched Google or Yahoo for hosting services can tell this firsthand.
Now each and every week it is estimated more than 50,000 websites are launched and need to be hosted somewhere online. This figure continues to grow and grow.
In fact the current monthly count for the number of searches at Yahoo for the term 'web hosting' is a whopping 2,149,851. That's right, over 2 million!
Also just recently it was reported that the popularity of blogs was seeing tens of thousands of new blogs launched each and every day. While many of these are hosted freely, the more serious bloggers each require an account with a reliable web hosting provider. ...
By far the most popular top level domain is the .com There are currently over an estimated 40 million of these registered.
The .com top level domain currently holds over an estimated 70 percent of the domain name marketplace. The .net top level domain currently holds just over an estimated 10 percent of the domain name marketplace.
The good news for web hosting and domain name customers is that incredible deals have become available as competition increases among web hosting providers.
So how to choose, then? Considering just how competitive the web hosting industry has become, Aplus.Net is particularly proud to be among the most long-lived of all these companies. We just recently celebrated our tenth year of web hosting, and we've actually been in business since 1992 — try to find a competitor who's been around that long.
But what does the average consumer care if Aplus.Net has been around longer than our competitors? How does that translate into value? For one thing, since we specialize in partnering with small businesses to provide all their online needs, it's a source of comfort to know that the partner you trust has an almost two-decades-long track record of stability. It's also a source of comfort to realize that any company, in any industry (and especially a technology-based industry) must have a history of innovation to be able to survive in such a notoriously competitive market for so long, while so many other start-ups have fallen by the wayside.
Most of all, though, you can be confident that Aplus.Net's history of award-winning services couldn't have been achieved without making a lot of customers happy. Our plans and prices speak for themselves. We've also recently entirely rebranded our hosting plans to make the process of choosing the right plan even more easy for our valued customers, including simplifying our plans, adjusting prices and eliminating set-up fees.
So, if you're an Aplus.Net customer, you can rest easy knowing that you've made the right choice, however difficult that decision may have been. And if you're not yet a customer, now is the perfect time to make your choice: Give Aplus.Net a try and see why we lead today's web hosting industry. Click here to check out our award-winning services now.
Friday, April 11. 2008 |
Although written for a European audience, we found a recent CNBC Business Report entitled "Top Ten Tech Trends" very much applicable to the United States as well, if not for the whole modern world.
And that's not just because it's based in large part on American technology giants like Microsoft, Intel and Google. It's also because Europe has shown itself adept at applying innovations on a large scale in a way that often wins enthusiastic response from the consumer and business markets.
CNBC's Tony Glover is confident that several of the new innovations we've seen lately are just the beginning of larger trends that will revolutionize the telecom and IT industries over the next few years. Looking at some of the examples he sites, it's hard to argue with his conclusions.
Best of all, he feels that these consumer tech breakthroughs will result in "unprecedented opportunities for small and medium-sized players" — great news for small business owners looking for new ways to compete with the big guys.
The basis for his review is the big 3GSM Mobile World Conference in Barcelona, the world's largest exhibition for the mobile technology industry. The GSM is a worldwide mobile communications network that originated in Europe and is now used by over two billion people in 212 countries, according to the article.
Once again Bill Gates and Steve Jobs will be going toe-to-toe to decide who will dominate the next generation of computing. But the fact that the US computing industry’s major battleground in 2007 will be high-end wireless handhelds is testimony to the global success of the GSM network, the European Commission’s mobile communications standard. The number of people using GSM has mushroomed from around one million in 1993 to over two billion today, operating across 212 countries.
And the top ten trends are:
1. If there is one trend that will dominate in 2007, it is the globalisation of mobile communications. The mobile phone industry estimates that around 1.3 billion mobile phones will be sold in 2007, with the rapidly developing economies of India and China being the main engines for growth. Mobile operators in India, for example, are signing new mobile phone owners at the staggering rate of about a million a week. ...
2. The second trend ... is the way in which mobile communications are becoming more sophisticated and relying less on basic voice services. Mobile operator O2, owned by Spain’s Telefonica, predicts that all phones will be email-enabled by 2010. This will effectively leapfrog consumers in markets like India and China from the 19th to the 21st century. They will be able to move from being without a phone or PC straight to the world of always-connected email and internet services simply by signing up for a mobile phone. Way before this happens, devices such as Apple’s new iPhone will have introduced users to high-definition mobile audio and video. Electronic gaming, music and even TV programmes will become available to millions almost overnight. ...
3. The third major trend ... is the continued convergence of IT and telecoms. Not only will mobile phones behave increasingly like computers, but telecoms operators ... will also use their broadband services to supply services such as internet TV (IPTV) to customers. ... BT (British Telecom) has recently struck a string of deals with content providers including Universal Music and Time Warner in order to be able to provide an ever-wider choice of on-demand entertainment. ...
4. The fourth trend will see the rise of increasingly sophisticated forms of internet-based advertising as IPTV takes off. Microsoft is now determined to take Google’s ball away and run with it. It has, for instance, developed its own form of Google-style paid-for search that uses Microsoft’s vast database of personal information to allow advertisers to target specific demographic groups.
"Advertisers can see the age and sex of web surfers clicking on their ads as a result of information gathered by Microsoft properties such as MSN Hotmail, which requires those registering to submit their age bracket and gender," says James Colborn, product manager at Microsoft's adCenter research labs. He adds that advertisers do not have access to the names of those visiting their sites, merely a demographic overview of their age and sex.
According to Colborn, the adCenter labs on the Microsoft campus outside Seattle are about to release even more precise online advertising tools. Microsoft is launching a trial IPTV advertising service with an as-yet-unnamed major US retailer that will make a technological prediction made by Bill Gates last year a reality. ...
5. The fifth major trend [is] the way in which all consumer IT devices, mobile and fixed, will become content guzzlers. The competition to acquire quality content will become intense, but ironically, the very technology providing consumers with the ability to access such a wide range of content will also make it increasingly difficult for major content owners to derive any revenue from their products.
6. This is a result of the sixth trend, which will be the proliferation of free services. The early years of the internet trained users to expect internet-based services to be largely free, and this has become a well-established trend. It will benefit small and nimble players with low overheads offering the kind of services capable of generating advertising.
Traditional entertainment giants like the Hollywood film studios will become increasingly vulnerable. Having been weaned on free music download sites such as Kazaa, many younger consumers now see nothing inherently wrong in using file-swapping services based outside the US to download copyrighted film and TV content for free.
7. The seventh trend will be the growing familiarity of the letters DRM – short for digital rights management – as traditional content providers such as the major Hollywood studios fight tooth and nail to protect their investments. New US laws designed to give long prison sentences to movie pirates are just the start.
8. The eighth trend [is] mobile operators such as Vodafone finally starting to accept that consumers will never use their handsets to access high-priced data services in the way these companies anticipated when they started to build their 3G networks at an estimated cost of €200bn. Instead, these operators will turn to business customers. Companies like Vodafone are already seeing business revenues rise as corporate users install 3G cards on their laptops.
9. This move to increased business mobility will be accelerated by trend number nine, as new types of mobile device from companies like Intel bridge the gap between mobile phones and laptops. Ultra-mobile laptops are shrinking, as evidenced by OQO’s Vista handheld computer. The key element to this trend is that the computing industry will finally abandon its one-size-fits-all philosophy. This will offer new opportunities for small and nimble companies to deploy mobile workforces and save money on the cost of centralised offices.
According to Intel, this revolution in portable computing will not merely be a question of physical dimensions. Portable computers will also be manufactured for specific environments such as schools and hospitals.
10. The tenth trend will be an extension of this kind of dedicated computing as machine-to-machine wireless communication becomes increasingly important. Machines ranging from in-car computers to heart monitors and other medical devices will be able to communicate with one another. It is estimated that by 2011 there will be over 100 million wirelessly connected devices.
Check out the original article in its entirety here.
Thursday, April 10. 2008 |
DARPA, or the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the agency that eventually morphed into the Internet, is celebrating its 50th birthday tonight in Washington, D.C.
In Monday's Washington Post, Stephen Barr writes that DARPA "pulled together researchers who created the blueprint for the Internet." The organization also "sponsored the inventor of the computer mouse (the first was carved from wood and had one button)."
DARPA is a part of the U.S. Department of Defense, created way back in 1958 as a technological solutions group prodded into action by the Soviet Union's surprise launch of Sputnik, history's first satellite. Since then, DARPA has been responsible for pioneering much of the forward-thinking technology that the military has needed over the past decades. And, not surprisingly, much of that technology has found its way into the lives of everyday Americans in recent years.
Of course, the history of all the events and people that came together to create the Internet is much more detailed than this one organization, but it is true that it provided the foundation, without which the World Wide Web would not exist as it does today. DARPA created the concept of computer networking, which of course is the very foundation of today's Internet.
Mr. Barr tells us more about the organization:
Unlike most federal agencies, DARPA operates with little red tape. It has only two management layers, encouraging the rapid flow of ideas and decisions.
About 240 people work at DARPA, and 120 of them are program managers and office directors on appointments of four to six years. The agency does not own or operate labs, but sponsors research carried out by industry and universities.
By rotating technical professionals every few years, DARPA has "a constant freshness of people and energy," Tether said. "Everything else we do stems from that."
One of those short-term managers returning for Thursday's anniversary dinner is Lawrence G. Roberts, who led a DARPA team that designed a network that evolved into the Internet. He made some of the key decisions in 1967, when he was 30. As Roberts described it, "Putting A and B together and getting Z. Taking obscure things and seeing there is an intersection there."
He hopes that DARPA will always be able to focus on innovation -- "working on something that should change the country and generate the economy shift that the Internet did."
Read the entire article here.
Wednesday, April 9. 2008 |
Contradicting earlier studies, conventional wisdom and politicians’ rhetoric, European researchers say that the Internet infrastructure of the United States is one of the world’s best and getting better.
So begins a story from today's New York Times that offers some good news: The American Internet infrastructure is, apparently, just fine.
Not only just fine, actually, but among the best: The story cites the latest Global Information Technology Report as ranking the U.S. fourth on the worldwide list, behind Denmark, Sweden, and Switzerland (in that order).
The study was done by Insead, the business school near Paris, on behalf of the World Economic Forum, a policy and conference group based in Switzerland. It used an index generated from 68 variables including market factors, political and regulatory environment and technology infrastructure rather than just bandwidth capacity and data transmission speeds.
Despite the positive report, however, some remain skeptical.
"My gut feeling is that we don’t have the type of deployment you have abroad," said David J. Farber, an Internet pioneer and a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University. "If you are looking at broadband, we have a lot of problems. We are slow as molasses in deploying the next generation."
Ultimately, though, although it's just one report, it paints a much more positive picture than what we've been hearing lately. That's good, of course, but it inevitably leads to claims that the information is flawed, since its conclusions are so much different than similar studies.
... Last year a range of statistics on global bandwidth use indicated that the United States was trailing other industrial nations in both broadband network consumption and penetration as a percentage of population.
For example, statistics maintained by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development gave a conflicting message. The average advertised broadband download speed of 23 American providers was 8.8 megabits a second, while the average for 23 providers in Denmark was a considerably slower 5.9 megabits. At the same time the number of broadband subscribers in Denmark was 34.3 for every 100 inhabitants, compared with 22.1 in the United States, according to a study in October 2007.
However, one of the authors of the Insead report said the narrow measures had failed to capture the true impact of the Internet when it was considered in a cultural, economic and political context.
... An O.E.C.D. economist acknowledged the nuances in taking into account government regulatory and related factors, and said it was hard to draw a single conclusion from the data. "I think we can say that a lot of the situation in the United States is a result of the lack of competition," said Taylor Reynolds, an economist in the Internet and Telecommunications Policy section of the O.E.C.D. "In Europe we have adopted an unbundling strategy wholeheartedly."
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