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My 2 featured articles for the week ending June 16, 2006:

Archived blogs for the week of Jun. 12, 2006

1182 - June 15, 2006 - 3.32 PM EST

Ad spending to jump 12 percent in 2006

According to TNS Media Intelligence, media spending is expected to increase to 12 percent in 2006, up from just 10 percent in 2005.

Earlier this week, TNS released a mid-year report of its 2006 advertising outlook. TNS actually revised spending estimates downwards, but nevertheless bumped up the Web's advertising outlook considerably from January 2006.

By only tracking Internet display advertising, TNS Media Intelligence said such online ad spending is slated to grow 13 percent for the full 12 months of this year.

That estimate is almost 4 percent higher than from its January forecast of 9.1 percent, marking the greatest upward revision of any medium over the latest 6-month period.

Posted on Businessblog™

1181 - June 14, 2006 - 10.10 AM EST

Google wants to beat PayPal on its own turf

There are observers that suggest Google is only a few days from offering a payment feature meant to directly compete against eBay's PayPal Internet payment gateway.

Jordan Rohan, a market analyst at RBC said a few weeks ago that Google would launch a service called GBuy on or around the June 28th date.

With Google's GBuy feature, Internet merchants can engage in a payment system that empowers online consumers to make purchases using Google's new payment system.

Although it could potentially erode some market share from PayPal, Google's new proposed payment service would offer valuable data about certain shoppers' buying habits. In turn, that information could be used by the search giant to better improve its search results and ultimately its targeted ads.

In a nutshell, GBuy would take a service available to a small number of users who are already shopping within Google Base and expand it to the next level using Google search, which currently reaches ten of millions of people daily.

"Google's new GBuy feature has the potential to be important for the company and there is very little that competing vendors can do to diminish its success," Rohan wrote in a research brief.

He also said Google intended to designate merchants accepting GBuy as "trusted GBuy merchants" in its main results page, which he said could help increase click-through and purchase rates. Rohan also said the GBuy system would initially be offered free to merchants, though Google would likely move to charge a percentage of all purchases eventually.

Google has been rumored to be targeting PayPal since last year, when word emerged that it was developing Google Wallet and after it rolled out Google Base, its online database system where users can store information, making it easily searchable.

Word of GBuy's impending launch spread even as eBay was hosting its annual gathering of its devoted members in Las Vegas. eBay Live was expected to feature a number of new feature announcements from eBay, including the integration of its Skype voice chat feature into some auction listings.

Google declined to comment on the reports about GBuy. In a post to the official Google blog in February, product manager Benjamin Ling noted that "online billing and payments have been a core part of our offerings for some time" within Google's search advertising and services businesses.

"To run our ad programs, Google receives payments every day from advertisers, and then pays out a portion of those funds to advertising partners," Ling said, with Google billing more than US$11 billion to advertisers in 48 different currencies all using the Web.

Posted on Businessblog™

1180 - June 13, 2006 - 1.19 PM EST

Permission-based marketing. What is it?

The goal of all marketing is to attract interest in, build desire for, and generate sales of your products or services. Email marketing is a perfect medium to pick up where other marketing leaves off. Email marketing is still one of the most cost effective ways to contact prospects and customers.

It’s far cheaper than traditional bulk postage mail and in many cases can have a much larger impact on immediate sales and long-term relationship strength than traditional advertising.

When done correctly, email marketing can be an extremely powerful and effective marketing technique. It’s a medium that allows a buyer and seller to freely communicate with one another and build a relationship based on value and trust.

When done incorrectly, however, email marketing can be destructive, erode brand equity, and turn your happy clients into litigious flamers. It is for this reason that one must make sure they send only permission-based email communications to their subscribers.

Before we get any further, let’s define exactly what permission-based email marketing is. It is important to note that there are two types of email marketing.

One can either send unsolicited email promotions or send out emails only to persons who have requested to receive them. Unsolicited email is, of course, called spam. Sending spam will ruin any legitimate organization’s reputation and brand value faster than anything.

Rule number one of becoming an intelligent email marketer is to not send unsolicited email. Read more...

Posted on Businessblog™

1179 - June 12, 2006 - 5.31 PM EST

David Warthen joins Answerbag

A division of InfoSearch Media Inc., Answerbag today announced that Ask Jeeves' co-founder and former CTO, along with natural-language expert David Warthen have both joined the company to better focus on advanced question answering and search systems.

Populated with information on a wide-variety of topics, Answerbag is a highly accurate and trusted online social question and answer community.

"David Warthen was the visionary and driving force behind the advanced lab of people-based question and answering at Ask Jeeves. At Answerbag, he has the unique opportunity to combine early pioneering work with fresh innovations, based on Web 2.0 principles," said George Lichter, CEO of InfoSearch Media.

"I am exceptionally pleased to be working with David again, and I feel confident that his fluency in technology, innovation and fundamental belief that people, not machines, possess the unique quality of judgment will provide Answerbag with the key advantage in taking search to the next level."

As an independent social question and answer site, Answerbag has established a reputation as a trustworthy collection of information created by people who have experience and knowledge to share with people looking for direct answers to their questions. Unlike competitors, including Yahoo! Answers, Answerbag builds trust by rewarding its users only for providing high quality answers.

Posted on Businessblog™

1178 - June 12, 2006 - 1.21 PM EST

Why would BT be threatened by Google?

According to British Telecom, the company is getting ready to make some necessary changes in order to better compete against Google.

Al-Noor Ramji told delegates at the Gigaworld IT conference in Lisbon Portugal that British Telecom (BT) needs to keep pace with Google, which has, according to Ramji, "morphed" from a search engine into a business encompassing all segments of the consumer technology area.

"We see Google as our biggest threat," said Ramji. "They don't mean to, it's almost incidental." He acknowledged that Google comes from a "different world" but is expanding fast to meet consumers' needs. However Ramji claimed that BT "can do anything Google can do", hinting that the telco would move beyond its traditional role as telecoms supplier.

"I've learned that technology is the easiest thing to do," he said. "The transformation of the company is most important."

Posted on Businessblog™

Copyright © Serge Thibodeau 2006. All rights reserved.

All views and opinions expressed on this blog are those of Serge Thibodeau only and are not representative of any company listed. All slogans, trademarks, text or logo representation used or referred to on this blog are the property of their respective owners.