Clear and Compelling Video Thumbnails Can Boost SEO Rankings
Multichannel Merchant
Here's why that's important for your SEO rankings, and how to make sure you're doing video thumbnails well. It hasn't been easy for online merchants to maintain SEO rankings on Google in recent months, thanks to Google's ongoing updates.
SEO Amplified Introduces Risk Free, Pay for Ranking Local SEO ServicesPromotion World (press release)

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Search Engine Journal

The Future of SEO: 5 Clear Facts You Should Know
Search Engine Journal
However, it is possible to extrapolate from their activities over the past few years and identify the trends that are pretty much guaranteed to continue going forward, and that's what we're bringing you today – five clear facts about the future of SEO …
Wake Up SEOs, the New Google is HereSEOmoz (blog)
Affiliate web businesses urged to fight the Panda with original contentLakestar Media
Google Panda: How Can Affiliate Sites Cope?Search Engine Watch
AM-online
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The head of SCVNGR, 22-year-old Seth Priebatsch, understands that SCVNGR plays in the sub-domain of a realm, inside a niche. By that he means that SCVNGR is a social game (not everyone’s type of fun) with a location-based bent, the niche inside the realm. Inherently, that limits the area of growth for SCVNGR. Yet, teamed with the company’s new LevelUp mobile payments strategy, the roadmap for SCVNGR becomes clear.

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Complexity, Foursquare & Growth

SCVNGR has raised nearly $20 million in funding over four rounds of funding. It started as an enterprise-based SMS service that did not pan out and went consumer side in May of last year with its location check-in based scavenger hunt. Its primary mode of revenue is brand partnerships with companies like Chevy and with universities to create brand awareness and achieve specific goals.

SCVNGR is fundamentally a complicated game. Go somewhere, check-in, perform and action and go to the next place. Priebatsch understands that complexity is a hindrance to SCVNGR, especially in its early battles with Foursquare.

“I think in many ways, SCVNGR was never meant to be the simplest app because of the challenges it is meant to be a deeper, richer engagement field. I think one of the biggest advantages that Foursquare had on us in the early days was simplicity,” Priebatsch said. “Foursquare has more recently become immensely complex. I use it and I understand the rules but I find myself having to think. It is different. So, with SCVNGR, you kind of enter the thing with the expectation that it is going to change. New content is created all the time and what we do with SCVNGR is very much different with where you are playing, who you are playing and why you are playing.”

The Limits Of Location Games & Opportunity With LevelUp

We will have more on LevelUp in our What’s In Your Mobile Wallet series later, but talking about SCVNGR these days without mentioning LevelUp does not do the startup justice. LevelUp is a local mobile payments system where users have a QR code in their smartphone (or any screen than can do black and white) that is attached to a debit card and they can pay merchants who have Android phones to scan the code. The code becomes the wallet, so to speak.

One might think that SCVNGR has not achieved the level of growth that many were hoping for when the app launched its consumer-facing app at Google I/O (it is backed by Google Ventures) in May 2010. Priebatsch, a bit of an optimist by nature and still young enough to be growing along with his company, likes the growth trajectory that the company is taking.

“I am really happy with the way that SCVNGR is growing, I think that it will grow more quickly in the future. I think there is a lot more cool stuff to be done. I think that the location-based space is just inherently going to be smaller than either the social networking space or the social gaming space,” Priebatsch said.

At the same time, SCVNGR inherently plays in a smaller realm. Priebatsch looks at the growth of Twitter, a utility without a lot of strings attached, and understands that the location area is never going to be that big. Fundamentally it is a different realm.

“Foursquare, I think they expect to be the size of Twitter. I don’t think that is going to happen, it is just a more narrow realm,” Priebatsch said. “That is OK because the value and especially where SCVNGR differentiates itself, the value that we can provide is the engagement at the location.”

Not For Sale: “They Do Not Have Enough Money”

Priebatsch says that SCVNGR has a “massive release for SCVNGR coming out early next year and that is what everybody is cranking on.” That release will likely tell the future of the SCVNGR as a successful product (outside of LevelUp) and determine the near-term fortunes of the company. The knock locally against SCVNGR is that LevelUp was something that the venture backers pushed on the company.

SCVNGR, for better or worse, is one of the pillars of the Boston startup community. Locally, there has been a lot of chatter recently (and a bit of controversy, caused by antics between Priebatsch and a local tech news startup) if the company is going to end up selling or being acquired. It is a legitimate question, given the venture funding the company has received and the combination of SCVNGR and LevelUp and the way the pair of products could influence brands and the mobile payments space. Priebatsch, in his slightly manic but still thoughtful way, absolutely denies that any companies like LivingSocial, Groupon, financial institutions or other mobile payments leadings are sniffing around or that SCVNGR has any intention of ever selling.

“They do not have enough money,” Priebatsch said. “Making a bunch of money is fundamentally uninteresting. Making money move, the second derivative of money, is fascinating. That is really cool. Viewing the economy as a game, a system of interchanging parts, is interesting. What would it mean if interchange were zero? And how can you make that happen? Would that actually accelerate the economy to the degree that frictionless information flow accelerated the Internet. Is that a valid analogy, I don’t know.”

Discuss

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The head of SCVNGR, 22-year-old Seth Priebatsch, understands that SCVNGR plays in the sub-domain of a realm, inside a niche. By that he means that SCVNGR is a social game (not everyone’s type of fun) with a location-based bent, the niche inside the realm. Inherently, that limits the area of growth for SCVNGR. Yet, teamed with the company’s new LevelUp mobile payments strategy, the roadmap for SCVNGR becomes clear.

Sponsor

Complexity, Foursquare & Growth

SCVNGR has raised nearly $20 million in funding over four rounds of funding. It started as an enterprise-based SMS service that did not pan out and went consumer side in May of last year with its location check-in based scavenger hunt. Its primary mode of revenue is brand partnerships with companies like Chevy and with universities to create brand awareness and achieve specific goals.

SCVNGR is fundamentally a complicated game. Go somewhere, check-in, perform and action and go to the next place. Priebatsch understands that complexity is a hindrance to SCVNGR, especially in its early battles with Foursquare.

“I think in many ways, SCVNGR was never meant to be the simplest app because of the challenges it is meant to be a deeper, richer engagement field. I think one of the biggest advantages that Foursquare had on us in the early days was simplicity,” Priebatsch said. “Foursquare has more recently become immensely complex. I use it and I understand the rules but I find myself having to think. It is different. So, with SCVNGR, you kind of enter the thing with the expectation that it is going to change. New content is created all the time and what we do with SCVNGR is very much different with where you are playing, who you are playing and why you are playing.”

The Limits Of Location Games & Opportunity With LevelUp

We will have more on LevelUp in our What’s In Your Mobile Wallet series later, but talking about SCVNGR these days without mentioning LevelUp does not do the startup justice. LevelUp is a local mobile payments system where users have a QR code in their smartphone (or any screen than can do black and white) that is attached to a debit card and they can pay merchants who have Android phones to scan the code. The code becomes the wallet, so to speak.

One might think that SCVNGR has not achieved the level of growth that many were hoping for when the app launched its consumer-facing app at Google I/O (it is backed by Google Ventures) in May 2010. Priebatsch, a bit of an optimist by nature and still young enough to be growing along with his company, likes the growth trajectory that the company is taking.

“I am really happy with the way that SCVNGR is growing, I think that it will grow more quickly in the future. I think there is a lot more cool stuff to be done. I think that the location-based space is just inherently going to be smaller than either the social networking space or the social gaming space,” Priebatsch said.

At the same time, SCVNGR inherently plays in a smaller realm. Priebatsch looks at the growth of Twitter, a utility without a lot of strings attached, and understands that the location area is never going to be that big. Fundamentally it is a different realm.

“Foursquare, I think they expect to be the size of Twitter. I don’t think that is going to happen, it is just a more narrow realm,” Priebatsch said. “That is OK because the value and especially where SCVNGR differentiates itself, the value that we can provide is the engagement at the location.”

Not For Sale: “They Do Not Have Enough Money”

Priebatsch says that SCVNGR has a “massive release for SCVNGR coming out early next year and that is what everybody is cranking on.” That release will likely tell the future of the SCVNGR as a successful product (outside of LevelUp) and determine the near-term fortunes of the company. The knock locally against SCVNGR is that LevelUp was something that the venture backers

SCVNGR, for better or worse, is one of the pillars of the Boston startup community. Locally, there has been a lot of chatter recently (and a bit of controversy, caused by antics between Priebatsch and a local tech news startup) if the company is going to end up selling or being acquired. It is a legitimate question, given the venture funding the company has received and the combination of SCVNGR and LevelUp and the way the pair of products could influence brands and the mobile payments space. Priebatsch, in his slightly manic but still thoughtful way, absolutely denies that any companies like LivingSocial, Groupon, financial institutions or other mobile payments leadings are sniffing around or that SCVNGR has any intention of ever selling.

“They do not have enough money,” Priebatsch said. “Making a bunch of money is fundamentally uninteresting. Making money move, the second derivative of money, is fascinating. That is really cool. Viewing the economy as a game, a system of interchanging parts, is interesting. What would it mean if interchange were zero? And how can you make that happen? Would that actually accelerate the economy to the degree that frictionless information flow accelerated the Internet. Is that a valid analogy, I don’t know.”

Discuss

View full post on ReadWriteWeb

The survey is entitled, “Over to You, Mr. VanRoekel: A Federal IT Referendum on Change.” Released today by the public sector IT community MeriTalk, it measures responses from some 174 IT professionals. Among them, 64% believe security issues to be among the most significant roadblocks to government adoption of cloud services. Perhaps that’s not a shock, but maybe this will be: Number two on that same list of obstacles, coming in just above budget constraints, was something called “cultural issues.”

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What are “cultural issues?” RWW asked MeriTalk spokesperson Whitney Hewson, who responded, “Good question.”

The “cultural issues” choice was left vague, without any examples provided, Hewson told us. But from the surveyors’ interpretation of responses, it was taken to include “the tendency to lean on ‘business as usual’ and agencies being unwilling to collaborate with one another in new ways, ways required for a shift to cloud services,” she said.

Some 71% of respondents were federal government employees, with an additional 7% employed with intelligence-related services including the Dept. of Defense. Five percent of respondents were state and local government IT workers.

Among federal IT workers responding, some 71% believe that federal IT policy has already improved, just in the few weeks since VanRoekel’s predecessor, Vivek Kundra, left office. Respondents told Meritalk by an overwhelming margin (92%) that cloud adoption “is a good idea” for federal IT. But in the wake of increasing security threats in the last year, their departments remain underfunded for the task of fighting them, say 59%.

Who’s ultimately responsible for federal IT security? When asked that blunt question outright, no single department chosen garnered more than 14%, with the White House tying with the Dept. of Homeland Security at the top of the list. Isn’t that a little scary?

“Unfortunately, we believe it’s accurate,” responded MeriTalk’s Hewson. “There is no clear leader at the helm, despite the requirement for government-wide / private agency collaboration. This should be an important priority for Mr. VanRoekel.”

Part of the underfunding problem may be due to a perception of low return on investment. More than a third of respondents said that cloud services would result in a reduction of fewer than 200 data centers in federal government by 2015, with 10% of respondents believing that more data centers would end up coming online anyway. And 26% of respondents believed cloud adoption would save the entire government less than $75 million. That’s with an “m.”

IT workers blame don’t blame a lack of vision on Kundra’s part so much as a lack of strategy. Apparently they’ve had enough vision to fill an encyclopedia. Some 60% of respondents would like for Kundra to have reduced the number of mandates imposed upon them, while 53% would have appreciated a realistic amount of time in which to make those lofty goals attainable.

Some of the respondents’ suggestions for VanRoekel on this front that MeriTalk shared with us included, “Focus on one goal at a time. Data center inventory/consolidation;” “Keep expectations realistic, keep the small guys in mind. Security, security, security” and “Strengthen mobility initiatives within government, highlight best practices, start Federal CTO council.”

Discuss

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Clear Channel’s iHeartRadio service uses The Echo Nest’s massive dataset of 30 million songs and 5 billion related data points to let users create radio stations based on their musical tastes. It has been dubbed a potential “Pandora killer” by Billboard and indeed its functionality could hardly be more similar to Pandora’s. Users can create stations based on a particular artist or song, vote tracks up or down and skip a limited number of songs per station.

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The service packages a personalized Internet radio streaming experience alongside a large directory of Clear Channel’s pre-programmed radio stations, which can be streamed for free.

With this launch, Clear Channel is clearly taking a shot at Pandora and similar Internet radio products. Even though traditional radio broadcast stations still make up the lion’s share of total listenership, online streaming services have been growing fast, with the newly-public Pandora posting some promising early financial results.

In testing out iHeartRadio, we found it to be a pretty solid service overall. Some of its recommendations were a little predictable, and we found that the song-to-song matches sounded more like matches based on artist. For example, we started a station based on a slow, more ambient-sounding song by Radiohead and the songs that played were just random songs by artists commonly associated with Radiohead, including some up-tempo rock songs that sounded nothing like the original track.

Still, the potential advantage that The Echo Nest’s recommendation engine offers is in the size of its dataset. With 5 billion datapoints and 30 million songs indexed, it just might pose a credible threat to Pandora’s 800,000-song index. The Echo Nest uses acoustic analysis, data-mining, natural language processing and machine learning to listen to and learn about music, including the relationships between various songs and artists. It currently powers just under 200 Web-based music apps, including from some big players like MTV, the BBC and MOG. It also powers scrappy, but neat independent Web apps like Echofi, the Spotify recommendation tool we wrote about yesterday.

iHeartRadio is in open beta. To try it out you’ll have to connect your Facebook account and ‘Like’ the product on Facebook (yes, before trying it and determining if you actually like it or not). In addition to a Web interface, the service has mobile apps for iOS, Android, Blackberry and Windows Phone 7.

Lead photo by Andrew Taylor.

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