Posts tagged Alliance
7 Steps to Prepare For the Search Alliance in the UK
Jan 27th
After a year’s delay, Microsoft adCenter will start to power the PPC results on Yahoo UK in Q2 of 2012. Discussion of its potential for success aside, here are some useful links and an action plan for preparing UK paid search campaigns.
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
SEO Firm Brick Marketing and PPC Firm Clix Marketing Form Strategic Alliance … – San Francisco Chronicle (press release)
Jan 10th
|
SEO Firm Brick Marketing and PPC Firm Clix Marketing Form Strategic Alliance …
San Francisco Chronicle (press release) Full service SEO firm Brick Marketing (www.brickmarketing.com) announces today that they have formed a strategic partnership with PPC advertising management firm, Clix Marketing. Brick Marketing will now refer all current and potential PPC management … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
The Logistical Mess Created by Ice Cream Sandwich For the Android Update Alliance
Oct 20th
The release of Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich yesterday is going to pose a bit of a problem for the Android ecosystem. Overall, Ice Cream Sandwich should prove to be a boon for the leading smartphone platform. There will be new devices with great new functionality and user interfaces coming from the top manufacturers in the world. What is not to like?
The problem that the Android ecosystem is going to face is how to bring the majority of released devices up to date to version 4.0. At Google I/O in May, Google announced the “Android Update Alliance,” a partnership between the top OEMs and major carriers. Little has been heard from the Update Alliance since. The nature of what Ice Cream Sandwich brings to the table is going to make the alliance’s job all that much harder.
Sponsor
The Alliance & Its Goals
The Update Alliance includes Verizon, HTC, Samsung, Sprint, Sony Ericsson, LG, T-Mobile, Vodafone, Motorola and AT&T. The goal is to make sure that new Android devices get platform updates for 18 months after initial release as long as the hardware allows.
There is no coincidence with the 18-month update guarantee and the fact that all four of the major U.S. cellular carriers allow users to upgrade their phones 18 months into a 24-month contract. If devices no longer get new platform updates then a user may be more likely to go buy a new device.
Android took a major jump in functionality at version 2.2 Frozen Yogurt. It was the first time that Flash worked on Android and enabled applications like Netflix to finally make the jump to devices. The jump between Eclair 2.1 and 2.2 is really where the whole “fragmentation” and user outcry that they were not getting platform updates in time came from. Gingerbread 2.3.4 was released and those with Froyo did not cry quite as loud as they did when jumping from Éclair to Froyo. Gingerbread, in the longer scheme of Android evolution, was a minor update.
Ice Cream Sandwich is not a minor update. This is a completely new version of Android, built on top of Honeycomb version 3.x, not on top of version 2.x. That is why the update process for existing smartphones is going to be difficult.
Fragmentation & Skins
As Phil Nickinson of Android Central points out in his recent article on Android fragmentation (which was a response to this article by Molly Wood of CNET), the types of updates that we have seen this year for Android really have very little to do with the Update Alliance. Nickinson correctly points out that the updates that came from May through the summer were more or less already planned by the OEMs and carriers. It is also worth checking out the fragmentation charts from Oct. 15 on exactly how fragmented the U.S. Android ecosystem actually is.
The fact of the matter is that the Gingerbread update was not a hard one for the carriers and OEMs to rollout. There was very little jump in functionality. The problem is going to come with how the carriers and OEMs try to reconcile Ice Cream Sandwich into various bloatware and skins.
HTC, which has been one of the OEMs on top of updating its Android line, may be in trouble here. To a certain extent, HTC just had its lunch eaten by an Ice Cream Sandwich. Android 4.0 institutes a lot of what HTC has been doing with its “value added services” and Sense Android skin. On one hand, kudos to HTC for making a great skin for Android. HTC certainly makes a tastier version of Android than Samsung’s TouchWiz and certainly the ill-fated Motorola Motoblur. The problem is that HTC is going to have a hard time reconciling Sense to Ice Cream Sandwich because the skin is so baked into the hardware. Motorola and Samsung are not going to have quite as hard a time because the skins the companies use lays more lightly on top of Android than Sense does.
HTC released a statement regarding its Ice Cream Sandwich plans saying that it would “look at the new version” and decide its roadmap going forward.
On the carrier end, as long as the OEMs have Ice Cream Sandwich updated to their existing phones and ready to ship, there is no reason not too. Android over-the-air updates are expensive on the carriers, which is one of the (many) reasons that new Android flavors do not get shipped in a timely manner. This was the problem that Samsung and AT&T had when updating the Galaxy S Captivate from Éclair to Froyo.
One thing that Ice Cream Sandwich does that makes will ease the burden on the OEMs is that it makes Android backwards compatible to a variety of screen sizes. In theory, that should help speed up development cycles. Otherwise, updating older Android phones to ICS is a logistical mess that will only be solved with time as consumers upgrade devices.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Former Google Search Reps Start Search Quality Alliance by @rustybrick
Oct 10th
A new site just launched under the name Search Quality Alliance, which is currently made up of five companies that offer SEO and web services. The big punch line here is that these five companies are all founded by former Google Search Quality representatives.
As it states on the website:
Search…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
View full post on Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
Digital Marketing Leaders Covario and Kenshoo Form Strategic Alliance and … – MarketWatch (press release)
Sep 13th
|
Digital Marketing Leaders Covario and Kenshoo Form Strategic Alliance and …
MarketWatch (press release) Under the terms of the agreement, Covario, the nation's largest independent provider of search engine marketing and SEO (search engine optimization) software solutions, will utilize Kenshoo's digital marketing software to enable scalable online media … Driving Business Success with an Integrated Online Marketing Campaign VILLA MALY OFFERS OCTOBER FESTIVE OF LIGHT PROMOTION |
View full post on SEO – Google News
SEO Company Services Firm Announces a Strategic Business Alliance with Buzz … – San Francisco Chronicle (press release)
Sep 1st
|
SEO Company Services Firm Announces a Strategic Business Alliance with Buzz …
San Francisco Chronicle (press release) SEO-Company-Services.com, a highly regarded SEO (Search Engine Optimization) firm announced today a strategic business alliance with Buzz-Alert.com, a leading provider of high quality web videos. "The importance of integrating high quality web videos … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
BlackBerry Goes Bing; Microsoft and RIM Form Alliance
May 3rd
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was on hand and on stage at RIM’s annual Blackberry World event. Microsoft’s main man announced what Bing called a “new alliance” between the two companies to help their “joint customers” make better decisions.
Click to read the rest of this post…
View full post on Search Engine Watch Blog
Bing, adCenter Get Boost from Nokia/Microsoft Alliance
Feb 11th
Nokia will adopt Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 as its primary operating system, which means Bing will become the default search engine on all Nokia phones. This alliance potentially could have some impact on search market share and paid search advertising.
In an open letter from Nokia CEO Stephen Elop and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, it was announced that:
Click to read the rest of this post…
View full post on Search Engine Watch Blog
Qwerly Hopes to Power Rebel Alliance Against Facebook
Feb 1st
The Qwerly API lets developers easily link together users’ various social network accounts. For example, given Tim O’Reilly’s Twitter username, it can reveal his public profiles at other services like Facebook, Flickr and Plancast. Why is this interesting? Bridging the barriers between different social networks weakens the lock-in effect that makes it tough to opt out of popular services.
Sponsor
If you decide you don’t want to participate on Facebook, right now that means losing touch with all of your friends still using it. With Qwerly, a service could let you interact with your entire social network in one place, even if some people are most active on Twitter and others on Facebook.
It’s a bit like phone number portability. In the bad old days, if you changed phone company you were given an entirely new number, with all of the hassle of telling your friends and colleagues and changing business cards and stationery. By making a connection between you and your friends’ accounts on different networks, Qwerly hopes to make switching to a new service painless.
I spoke to Qwerly’s founder Max Niederhofer about his plans for the service. He said its mission was to be “at the center of the Rebel Alliance against Facebook – we want to power the federated social web”. He continued:
“The motivation to build Qwerly was really the question ‘what do we need to build a decentralized social web platform?’ and what we came up with was ‘first, we need to find out how profiles are connected’, i.e. consolidating identities across profiles. We looked at what had happened there in terms of open protocols, like webfinger, and figured things weren’t moving fast enough.”
Originally he was planning on building his own Friendfeed-like service, but one that would instantly show your friends’ updates rather than relying on you to laboriously enter all your account details before you’d see any benefits. As he looked at what it would take to build the system, he realized the hardest step would be gathering and linking accounts across social networks, and by sharing the results as an API he’d create a platform for other startups to build their own services on. Services like the HoverMe social browsing plugin and the DuckDuckGo search engine are already taking advantage of the interface to enrich the results they offer.
Any service that deals with people’s personal data raises concerns about privacy, so I asked Niederhofer how they were different from services like Rapleaf that have attracted intense criticism.
His response was that “the difference between what Rapleaf was accused of and what we’re doing is that Rapleaf was commingling social data and cookie-based data. While social media data isn’t yet construed as personally identifiable information, it definitely serves to identify a person. So if you mix cookies and e.g a Facebook ID, you are effectively de-anonymizing web traffic.” With the focus on information gathered only from public Web profiles, with no use of cookies or other data sources, he sees the service as just aggregating freely available information in a novel way.
Though it’s still early days for the platform, I’m hopeful it can add social context to many different applications, for example transforming the humble phone address book into something much richer.
This is an area that Union Square Ventures’ Fred Wilson has been discussing a lot recently. Wilson’s colleague Albert Wenger has complained to Niederhofer about his phone: “I open up the address book, it looks like my old Palm – and I mean Pilot, not Pre!” With rich information about all your contacts’ social profiles, it’s easy to imagine something like Gist tightly integrated with your address book.
What do you think? Is this service going to open up a new world of innovative applications based on federated social information? Are you more concerned about how much personal information we’re making publicly available on our profiles?
X Wing photo by Psiaki
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
