Posts tagged Around
How to Be a Marketing Leader: Make Everyone Around You Better
Apr 15th
A good commander is tested in his absence. Whether you are managing a marketing team, a company, or an agency, the only way to truly succeed (and scale) is to make sure you empower your team enough to do the job – even when you aren’t there.
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
SEO: Working Around a Redesign – Practical Ecommerce
Dec 14th
|
SEO: Working Around a Redesign
Practical Ecommerce Title tags are an evergreen optimization target because they're the most influential SEO element on the page. They're also typically easy to modify and require no development support. In addition, title tags can be optimized for pages that will be … End of Year Housekeeping for Robust SEO Campaigns |
View full post on SEO – Google News
SEO: Working Around a Resdesign – Practical Ecommerce
Dec 14th
|
SEO: Working Around a Resdesign
Practical Ecommerce Title tags are an evergreen optimization target because they're the most influential SEO element on the page. They're also typically easy to modify and require no development support. In addition, title tags can be optimized for pages that will be … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Zynga Explains Earnings Drought, Rallies Around Mobile Apps And Virtual Gambling — With Real Cash
Oct 24th
Zynga’s logo walked into the boardroom with its tail between its legs today as the company presented its third quarter earnings. On the call, CEO Mark Pincus announced the company’s plan to wrap a tight tourniquet around its ongoing losses.
How to turn things around? Pincus said development teams would cut costs even further, ramp up mobile app development, and pursue gaming models with higher engagement and monetization opportunities, namely by expanding into virtual casino games that pit players against eachother with real cash at stake.
In the third quarter, the company surpassed its own standards — but that isn’t saying a lot. Zynga reported $316 million in revenue, and lost $52.7 million, or 7 cents a share, beating out its own intentionally rock-bottom forecast of losing 12 to 14 cents per share on an estimated $305 million. In the same period last year, Zynga raked in $12.5 million in profits on $306 million in revenue.
What’s more addictive than virtual farming? Gambling.
Beyond emphasizing mobile app launches, the company will get its hands dirty with “real money gaming.” Through its purchase of online gambling company Bwin.Party, Zynga will launch U.K.- exclusive real money gambling games.
Real money gaming is a departure from the company’s existing model, but not that much of one, all things considered. The kind of micro-transactions — think buying virtual garden gnomes to decorate your digital farm with real cash — that power Zynga’s arsenal of casual games are already capitalizing on psychologically addictive models to have users turning their wallets inside out.
Moving into straight-up virtual gambling just subtracts the layer of artifice populated by digital denizens tilling the virtual fields.
Out With The Old, In With The Profits
On the heels of yesterday’s 5% workforce reduction, Zynga also announced that in order to remain afloat it would be “sunsetting 13 underperforming older games” and slowing development of The Ville, Zynga’s copycat of publisher EA’s endlessly remixed franchise The Sims. Pincus also noted that Zynga’s Boston homebase would be shuttered, with tentative plans to follow suit with Zynga’s Japan and UK studios.
According to an internal letter sent to the Zynga team yesterday by CEO Mark Pincus, “These reductions, along with our ongoing efforts to implement more stringent budget and resource allocation around new games and partner projects, will improve our profitability and allow us to reinvest in great games and our Zynga network on web and mobile.”
Risky Reliance On Facebook
Unsurprisingly, Zynga’s symbiotic relationship with Facebook is a noted earnings liability. The company noted its “relationship with Facebook” and potential unforseen “changes in the Facebook platform” as major risk revenue factors. Facebook-related earnings represent a whopping 80% of the company’s total bookings, with mobile filling out the remaining 20%, so it’s no surprise that Zynga is looking to tip the scales toward the latter.
It probably doesn’t help that Facebook made a distinction between the troubled Zyngaverse and the rest of its online gaming ecosystem in its own earnings call yesterday. As Zuckerberg snarked, “Overall, gaming on Facebook isn’t doing as well as I’d like, but the reality is that there are actually two different stories playing out here. On the one hand, our payments revenue from Zynga decreased by 20 percent this quarter compared to last year. But the interesting thing is that the rest of the games ecosystem has actually been growing.”
Ouch.
But Zynga doesn’t only have Facebook to blame. Pincus admitted to lapses in game execution, mostly failing to innovate to keep players interested in major titles like CityVille and then being too slow to the market with new games to offset those drooping numbers.
Oddly enough, Zynga’s stock popped up a tiny bit after the earnings announcement. Then again, Wall Street now values the company at only $1.6 billion, which is about what it has in cash. Not exactly a vote of confidence.
View full post on ReadWrite
Introducing Trove: Already The Best Facebook Search Around & Set To Tackle Other Social Networks Next
Sep 14th
It’s no secret that Facebook’s existing search engine is bad; that drum has been beaten to death. But you don’t have to wait for Facebook to make it better; there’s a pretty darn good Facebook search engine out there now. It’s called Trove, and it’s officially…
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
Lesson From Burning Man: The Social Network Is All Around You
Sep 10th
Every year at Burning Man, I have the same argument. Someone plays the role of the starry-eyed futurist, someone else is the grizzly survivalist. The futurist says, “If only we had map and chat apps out here, we could meet everyone and see everything! It would be a utopia!” The survivalist says “Hell no. We come out here to get away from all that.” At Burning Man, as in everyday urban life, the answer lies somewhere in between.
I think what scares the grizzly survivalist (which was me this year) is the notion of burners walking around Black Rock City peering down their arms at the glow of a smartphone instead of looking around at the people and the spectacle. It’s already happening to some extent. Now that smartphones are many people’s primary camera, people have them out even without a data connection.
That’s bad enough. On Saturday night, when the Man burns, it’s hard to see the real thing through the forest of arms holding up phones and cameras in front of you. I understand why people want a document of this mind-blowing event, but how many (thousand) copies do we need? The grizzly survivalist worries about the spirit of those spectators who watch life through the screens rather than connecting directly through their optic nerves.
There are Burning Man-specific apps, like iBurn, but I have never seen the thing in use. Frankly, I hope I never do. Black Rock City is designed to be dead easy to navigate, and Burning Man is the best place in the world to ask for directions. It doesn’t even matter where somebody sends you; you’re going to like it.
Meeting People Is Easy
The topic of social networking also comes up inevitably in Burning Man’s annual tech conversation. There are too many cool people there to meet them all, the reasoning goes. Wouldn’t a little app with searchable profile pages, photos, lists of interests, events and messaging help us have the best possible time?
If you ask me, the repeated failures in the meeting-people app category in the general should be enough of a lesson. People don’t like meeting people this way. It locks you into plans and creates pressure to be in specific places at specific times, all for the uncertain payoff of meeting someone you only know as a performance of social media skills.
But that’s hardly the biggest issue. At Burning Man, anything that keeps you from physically approaching a person and saying hello is a problem. The social network is implicit there. Burning Man is a gathering of collaborators. Everyone is a partner working together on building and maintaining a city that’s also an art project. You’ll have something to talk about with them, so just do it.
It seems to me that we’d do well to treat every urban encounter this way. Just because Burning Man is explicitly an arts festival doesn’t mean that Manhattan or San Francisco can’t be regarded as collaborative works in progress.
Art is a critical part of any shared civic space because it gives people something to talk about. It contributes to a shared identity. Art is a technology for creating networks of people nearby. And the best part is that they share the experience, rather than each having their own glowing, 4-inch window on it.
Building A Lighthouse
Amber Case posed a question that perfectly framed this issue on the urban design website Smart Urban Stage: “How do we make public areas where strangers are encouraged to communicate with each other instead of stare into screens?”
She laments the fact that “modern cities are full of ‘non-places’ – locations where people are strangers to one another and have no impetus to interact.” Cell phones provide a “comfortable lighthouse in a sea of uncertain social situations” in our dislocated urban lives.
Case asks for a way to reconstruct public spaces that encourages interaction, and Charlie Todd of Improv Everywhere gives some great examples. The NYC-based group he founded stages fun “missions” to snap people out of their urban isolation.
Certainly, Improv Everywhere is a troupe after a burner’s own heart. In fact, if you drop the capital letters, “improv everywhere” is a pretty apt description of Burning Man itself. But human hacks of dreary city spaces can’t finish the job. Burning Man artist-architects build physical spaces intentionally to contain and stimulate fully human encounters, and I think our cities need those as well.
Keeping A Portal
Just about any structure at Burning Man can serve as an example, but one artist’s work consistently means the most to me. Harlan Emil Gruber’s portals are “evolutionary technology” designed to power up the people inside and bring them together.
You spot them out on the playa as brightly colored, intriguingly shaped shelters. You climb up into a space big enough to hold 10 or 12 people, and you instantly relax. The whole structure purrs with the sound of the Quasar Wave Transducer, a musical device of Gruber’s own design. That tone serves as a baseline. It grounds everyone inside to the same frequency. It brings us in tune with one another.
I’ve had countless life-changing encounters in these portals over the five years I’ve been going to Burning Man. This year, I stayed in the 12:21 Turquoise Portal overnight twice, and you can read about those weird trips over on the official Burning Blog. I’m pretty heavily steeped in technology, and nothing I’ve seen, hardware or software, has affected me as profoundly.
My friend Randall, with whom I hung out in last year’s 2:22 Amethyst Portal, wants Quasar Wave Transducers installed in bus hutches and subway stations. Artist Christopher Janney has a head start; he installed an “urban musical instrument” called Reach New York in an NYC subway station in 1996. If you’re a technologist looking for a way to bring people together, consider expanding your view. We don’t just need more apps. We need interactive public spaces. That’s how you network with the people around you.
Jon also writes for the official Burning Man blog. Check out his entries here.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
The Social Network Is All Around You: A Lesson From Burning Man
Sep 10th
Every year at Burning Man, I have the same argument. Someone plays the role of the starry-eyed futurist, someone else is the grizzly survivalist. The futurist says, “If only we had map and chat apps out here, we could meet everyone and see everything! It would be a utopia!” The survivalist says “Hell no. We come out here to get away from all that.” At Burning Man, as in everyday urban life, the answer lies somewhere in between.
I think what scares the grizzly survivalist (which was me this year) is the notion of burners walking around Black Rock City peering down their arms at the glow of a smartphone instead of looking around at the people and the spectacle. It’s already happening to some extent. Now that smartphones are many people’s primary camera, people have them out even without a data connection.
That’s bad enough. On Saturday night, when the Man burns, it’s hard to see the real thing through the forest of arms holding up phones and cameras in front of you. I understand why people want a document of this mind-blowing event, but how many (thousand) copies do we need? The grizzly survivalist worries that the spirit of those spectators who watch life through the screens rather than connecting directly through their optic nerves degrades the event as a whole.
There are Burning Man-specific apps, like iBurn, but I have never seen the thing in use. Frankly, I hope I never do. Black Rock City is designed to be dead easy to navigate, and Burning Man is the best place in the world to ask for directions. It doesn’t even matter where somebody sends you; you’re going to like it.
Meeting People Is Easy
The topic of social networking also comes up inevitably in Burning Man’s annual tech conversation. There are too many cool people there to meet them all, the reasoning goes. Wouldn’t a little app with searchable profile pages, photos, lists of interests, events and messaging help us have the best possible time?
If you ask me, the repeated failures in the meeting-people app category in the general should be enough of a lesson. People don’t like meeting people this way. It locks you into plans and creates pressure to be in specific places at specific times, all for the uncertain payoff of meeting someone you only know as a performance of social media skills.
But that’s hardly the biggest problem. At Burning Man, anything that keeps you from physically approaching a person and saying hello is a problem. The social network is implicit there. Burning Man is a gathering of collaborators. Everyone is a partner working together on building and maintaining a city that’s also an art project. You’re have something to talk about with them, so just do it.
It seems to me that we’d do well to treat every urban encounter this way. Just because Burning Man is explicitly an arts festival doesn’t mean that Manhattan or San Francisco can’t be regarded as works in progress.
Art is a critical part of any shared civic space because it gives people something to talk about. It contributes to a shared identity. Art is a technology for creating networks of people nearby. And the best part is that they share the experience, rather than each having their own glowing, 4-inch window on it.
Building A Lighthouse
Amber Case posed a question that perfectly framed this issue on the urban design website Smart Urban Stage: “How do we make public areas where strangers are encouraged to communicate with each other instead of stare into screens?”
She laments the fact that “modern cities are full of ‘non-places’ – locations where people are strangers to one another and have no impetus to interact.” Cell phones provide a “comfortable lighthouse in a sea of uncertain social situations” in our dislocated urban lives.
Case asks for a way to reconstruct public spaces that encourages interaction, and Charlie Todd of Improv Everywhere gives some great examples. The NYC-based group he founded stages fun “missions” to snap people out of their urban isolation.
Certainly, Improv Everywhere is a troupe after a Burner’s own heart. In fact, if you drop the capital letters, “improv everywhere” is a pretty apt description of Burning Man itself. But human hacks of dreary city spaces can’t finish the job. Burning Man artist-architects build physical spaces intentionally to contain and stimulate fully human encounters, and I think our cities need those as well.
Keeping A Portal
Just about any structure at Burning Man can serve as an example, but one artist’s work consistently means the most to me. Harlan Emil Gruber’s portals are “evolutionary technology” designed to power up the people inside and bring them together.
You spot them out on the playa as brightly colored, intriguingly shaped shelters. You climb up into a space big enough to hold 10 or 12 people, and you instantly relax. The whole structure purrs with the sound of the Quasar Wave Transducer, a musical device of Gruber’s own design. That tone serves as a baseline. It grounds everyone inside to the same frequency. It brings us in tune with one another.
I’ve had countless life-changing encounters in these portals over the five years I’ve been going to Burning Man. This year, I stayed in the 12:21 Turquoise Portal overnight twice, and you can read about those weird trips over on the official Burning Blog. I’m pretty heavily steeped in technology, and nothing I’ve seen, hardware or software, has affected me as profoundly.
My friend Randall, with whom I hung out in last year’s 2:22 Amethyst Portal, wants Quasar Wave Transducers installed in bus hutches and subway stations. Artist Christopher Janney has a head start; he installed an “urban musical instrument” called Reach New York in an NYC subway station in 1996. If you’re a technologist looking for a way to bring people together, consider expanding your view. We don’t just need more apps. We need interactive public spaces. That’s how you network with the people around you.
Jon also writes for the official Burning Man blog. Check out his entries here.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
What Start-Ups Need to Know About Protecting Intellectual Property Around the World
Aug 22nd
Intellectual Property (IP) is vitally important to start-ups. The Start-Up Genome Project, which aims to map, model and analyze what makes start-ups tick, identified IP as a top source of competitive advantage for start-ups. But start-ups face significant challenges in acquiring, maintaining and enforcing their intellectual property.
Guest author Jeffrey Shieh is a Senior Patent Attorney at inovia, a foreign filing technology platform provider. He is responsible for counseling the company and its clients in all facets of the international patent process. Prior to joining inovia, Shieh was a patent attorney at the law firms of Cooper & Dunham LLP and Amster, Rothstein & Ebenstein LLP.
We hear a lot in the news about patent wars among the tech giants – Nokia vs. Google, Apple’s lawsuits in China, and Facebook vs. Yahoo! International patent protection is clearly a key component to defensive and offensive competitive strategies within large, global organizations. But what about smaller technology players and early stage start-ups that don’t have the resources to hire full-time, international law firms? For cash-strapped start-ups, the cost to file international patents to protect their innovations is often too complex and too costly. This leaves them exposed to competition in other markets and may have a serious impact on their ability to scale long-term.
What can start-ups do to protect their innovations and IP on the world stage during the four lifecycle stages identified by the Start-Up Genome Project: Discovery, validation, efficiency and scale?
Discovery and Validation
The first step is to think globally and act locally. Start-ups should begin by applying for a domestic patent. This will give them an exclusive right to their invention for a set period of time and afford them the opportunity to formulate an international patent filing plan. Because patents are country-specific and are limited to the borders of the issuing country, start-ups need to take a hard look at their financials and come up with a strategy and budget for entering select countries. They also need to keep in mind that after filing for a U.S. patent, there is a limited timeframe available for applying for international patent protection. The worst case scenario would be for a start-up to forgo international patent protection and later realize that it isn’t able to protect their its invention against infringers in other markets.
So while a start-up may operate only in the U.S. today, if there’s a chance that it may somedayt manufacture in Asia, sell in Europe, or compete with a company in Australia, it must act now.
Efficiency
Don’t be discouraged. There are several best practices to foreign patent strategies and obtaining broader patent protection while minimizing costs.
First, start-ups should consider filing a Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) application instead of filing direct via the Paris Convention. The PCT provides a unified procedure for filing into the 146 member countries and offers a more cost-effective route if filing into more than just one or two countries. The PCT also offers the advantage of time. After the PCT application is filed, the applicant has up to 18 months before filing into the individual countries where protection is sought (“national stage entry”), providing a start-up with time to refine the invention, research its markets and look for licensees or buyers.
Second, start-ups should select their countries intelligently. Start-ups need to know where their inventions will potentially be sold and where they can be made in the future. Start-ups can then prioritize the countries they want to file into. Additionally, start-ups should know whether a country has patent laws affecting their technology. For example, some countries prohibit the patenting of methods of treatment on human or animal subjects. Other countries make it very difficult to patent business methods or software. For these jurisdictions, start-ups may need to draft the claims in their application specifically to overcome these obstacles.
Third, start-ups must ace the patent application process. With a basic background understanding of the process, start-ups can reduce their filing costs. Knowing when deadlines are approaching and making sure to provide instructions in advance will help applicants avoid unnecessary time extensions or rush charges. Some jurisdictions (including Europe) charge excess claims fees for each claim included in an application over a certain number. If start-ups can reduce their claims, they can avoid or reduce these fees.
Finally, start-ups should explore their options for either bringing IP tasks in house or outsourcing them. Depending on the amount of work a start-up has in its patent portfolio, it may be cost effective to pay the salary for an in-house patent attorney, rather than retain outside counsel. Outsourcing certain services, such as foreign filing or annuity payments, can also help reduce legal fees.
Start-ups must make sure to research their options for foreign filing and run cost comparisons. Many steps of the foreign filing process, such as PCT national stage filing and European validation, are largely administrative and can easily be outsourced. Specialist foreign filing providers can often offer time and cost savings.
Scale
Start-ups raise the most funds during stage 4 of their lifecycle: Scale. In this stage, start-ups try to drive growth aggressively and maximize their profits. For many, the key at this stage is their ability to grow in international markets – which could depend on their international patent protection.
Even thought they may be strapped for cash, startups must think long term and protect the future of their business by securing both domestic and international patent protection. They must intelligently weigh large, known upfront costs against an unknown benefit down the road – and that’s a scary prospect. But by employing a few simple best practices, start-ups can maximize their patent protection, cut costs and future-proof their innovations.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
SEO Help for Local Business Owners in Dublin, CA – Around Dublin Blog (blog)
Aug 22nd
 Around Dublin Blog (blog) |
SEO Help for Local Business Owners in Dublin, CA
Around Dublin Blog (blog) The City of Dublin, CA, in partnership with the Dublin Chamber of Commerce and the Alameda County Small Business Development Center, have been providing a variety of interactive business seminars to support local business owners. These seminars are … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
How eBay Turned Around a Dying Business (Secret Word: Mobile)
Aug 21st
As Yahoo plots a new course under CEO Marissa Mayer, it may want to study what’s happened with eBay in recent years. After a long and dicey effort, the online retailer has pulled off a rarity in the Internet industry: It turned around a business that many critics has written off as dying. Here’s how a combination of bold product redesign and mobile innovation did the trick.
eBay used to be among the Internet’s walking wounded. The company’s stock, having soared to $59 a share in 2004, fell to $26 in early 2008, when CEO John Donahoe replaced Meg Whitman. Since then, Donahoe has pursued a turnaround of eBay’s marketplace business that involved shifting from auctions to fixed-price sales and focusing on top sellers, even at the cost of marginalizing many smaller sellers.
At first, the turnaround seemed not to be working. One year into Donahoe’s tenure, the stock price had slipped below $10 and Donahoe was on the defensive with disenchanted investors. But he stuck to his guns. After all, turning around a business can take years, even on the Web. And four years of effort to revive eBay’s marketplace, signs of success began to emerge.
Now it’s like the company has awakened from a bad dream. As of Friday, eBay’s stock is up 55% this year, three times the Nasdaq’s 18% rise and better than Amazon’s 39% gain. The stock at its highest since January 2006, pushing its market cap above $60 billion. By contrast, Facebook’s market cap is $46 billion (or $52 billion, using a more generous calculation).
That comparison is significant. In a little more than three years, eBay has managed to grow from a company worth $16 billion to one worth $60 billion – and it did so in the Web 2.0 era, one that was dominated by younger companies like Facebook and Zynga. While those companies face their challenges, eBay has overcome its own. And it’s doing so in the same arena where Facebook is stumbling: the mobile Web.
eBay is forecasting that $10 billion worth of transactions will happen through mobile phones this year, double the figure last year. That’s equal to one sixth of the $60 billion in gross merchandise value eBay reported in 2011. In a recent call with analysts, Donahoe, noting that mobile shoppers spend three to four times as much as people who shop only on the Web, called that growth “a stunning surge in purchases and payments on devices that did not even exist just a few short years ago.”
PayPal, which has seen a similar surge in mobile payments, is also expected to handle $10 billion in mobile transactions this year. But the recovery in eBay’s core marketplace business is all the more impressive given that its growth rates had stalled in recent years.
eBay’s marketplace generated 15% growth in the most recent quarter, excluding the impact of foreign-exchange rates, the fastest growth since 2006. The bulk of that growth is coming from the fixed-price items that Donahoe redesigned eBay’s site around several years ago. After sluggish growth in 2009 and 2010, eBay drew criticism for abandoning the auction model that made the company a success to begin with, and for adopting too late a model that closely resembled one long used, with great success, by Amazon.
But in the second quarter, fixed-price sales accounted for two thirds of the company’s transactions, up from 53% in 2009. Fixed-price sales grew 20% in the quarter, compared with a 4% growth rate for auctions.
eBay also saw early on an opportunity in mobile and designed an app that appealed to mobile shoppers with features like one-click shopping, offering it an early lead that it still holds. The company bought Critical Path Software, whose developers helped design a simple yet intuitive eBay app.
Of the 45 million people who used a shopping app on a smartphone in June, 13.2 million used eBay’s, placing it ahead of Amazon (12.1 million) and Groupon (12 million). And people spent much more time on eBay’s app, 64 minutes on average, compared with 19 minutes for Amazon and 21 minutes for Groupon.
eBay continues to improve its marketplace, tweaking the design and search to improve the user experience and building online storefronts for big retailers like Toys “R” Us, Aeropostale and Nieman Marcus. And the company announced a plan to offer same-day delivery in San Francisco, working again with top retailers like Macy’s and Target.
The years of rapid growth are behindit, but eBay is showing that its future is more than a one-time auction giant that is morphing into an e-payments outfit. The company is proving that, in the age of the mobile Web, it can find a new role for itself in e-commerce. Turnarounds like that are as rare as gold in the Internet industry.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
