Posts tagged drops
Bing And Google Gain Market Share While Yahoo Drops
Mar 8th
The comScore February search market share numbers are being exposed by the various financial and investment firms this evening. Bing continued to gain, while its partner Yahoo lost market share. Google was up compared to January and year over year. Keeping in mind this isn’t yet the official…
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
Amazon Leads Price War: Drops AWS Pricing Again, Leans Heavy on Reserved Instances
Mar 6th
According to Amazon’s blog today, the company is now on their 19th price cut since AWS debuted, but who’s counting? Well, they are, apparently. The company is lowering pricing on EC2 instances, ElastiCache, Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) and Amazon Elastic Map Reduce are all dropping significantly. Significantly, Amazon is heavily emphasizing its price cuts on Reserved Instances.
The EC2 pricing is dropping by up to 10% for on-demand instances. If you’re consuming Reserved Instances, Amazon is dropping prices up to 37%.
Sponsor
Amazon is also appealing to heavy users with its price cuts, offering volume discounts of 10% for customers that own more than $250,000 of Reserved Instances for additional Reserved Instances. After the $2 million mark, Amazon is offering a 20% discount, and Amazon is asking customers to call if they pass the $5 million threshold.
The prices for RDS are dropping by similar amounts. If you’re using on-demand RDS, pricing drops by up to 10%. Amazon has shaved pricing as much as 42% for Reserved Instances of RDS. Likewise, ElastiCache is dropping by up to 10% if you use on-demand instances. (ElastiCache doesn’t have reserved pricing on its pricing page.)
What’s interesting, aside from the actual price drop, is the emphasis Amazon is putting on the Reserved Instances. By moving more customers to Reserved Instances, Amazon can better plan its capacity needs for the next few years and
helps lock customers into using AWS. Companies could switch to RackSpace, Google or another provider – but they’d be losing some significant chunks of change in doing so.
This seems like a pretty smart move on Amazon’s part, and I’m wondering how long it’s going to take for other providers to introduce something similar. As far as I know, Amazon is the only major player offering this kind of pricing scheme and seems to be handily undercutting the other players.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
“Spreading Santorum” Drops At Google; New Site Keeps Anal Sex Definition At Number One
Feb 29th
As Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum loses two primary races to rival Mitt Romney, perhaps he can console himself with, ironically, another loss. Spreading Santorum, the page defining “santorum” as a by-product of anal sex, has finally dropped from the top results on…
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
Chrome’s Market Share Drops In January; Was It Due To Google’s Penalty?
Feb 3rd
After 17 straight months of gains in market share, Google’s Chrome web browser dropped 0.17 percent in January, and the company that tracks browser market share suggests that it’s because Google penalized Chrome after a botched sponsored blog post campaign. The figures come from Net…
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
Google+ Drops Age Restriction, Now Accepts All Teenagers
Jan 26th
Google today dropped the age requirement from 18 to 13 for teenagers who want to join Google+, bringing Google+ in line with Facebook’s age policy. Bradley Horowitz, Google VP, product management, also announced new features for teen users.
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
Coffee & Power Drops Virtual Currency For Real-World Work
Jan 11th
Coffee & Power, the experimental “meta-company” that lets remote workers hire each other for small jobs, has decided to drop its virtual currency in exchange for regular old U.S. dollars. The change will have no impact on functionality or in-progress jobs; it’s simply intended to make Coffee & Power easier to adopt. Existing balances in the virtual C$ will be automatically converted to US$.
Coffee & Power was founded by Second Life creator Philip Rosedale, whose interest in virtual currencies built a thriving economy in that virtual world. But for Coffee & Power, whose users do real-world work, Rosedale thinks a real-world currency will be easier to understand.
Sponsor
When Coffee & Power launched, Rosedale hoped the “sticky” nature of virtual currencies would stimulate more work. He says buying into virtual currencies – even when the exchange rate is 1-to-1 as C$ were – is an investment in the community, encouraging reinvestment rather than cashing out.
Coffee & Power charges a 15% transaction fee for money withdrawn from the system, which is how the company makes money. There’s no fee to add money, so the decision to drop the virtual currency is intended to reduce the friction even further.
Rosedale says the change is “only a brand issue.” The key aspect of Coffee & Power’s economy, he says, “is the ability to earn money and then re-spend it on others without needing to put in money of your own.” Until users withdraw money, there are no fees, so C&P workers can participate, create value and spend it without even needing a credit card. This functionality is unaffected. “For now,” Rosedale says, “it seems more likely that people will understand and start using the service if it looks like dollars.”
Last December, Coffee & Power’s first real-world workclub outside San Francisco opened in Santa Monica, Calif. It’s currently working on expanding to the Portland, Ore. and Chicago, Ill. areas. Coffee & Power is available anywhere, but the physical workclubs provide workspaces and community hubs for its members.
Yo #Chicago – we need your help to find a new CP Workclub space in the windy city: ow.ly/8p24M
— Coffee and Power (@coffeeandpower) January 11, 2012
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Google Drops Tele Atlas & Uses Their Own Maps Data For UK Maps
Dec 9th
Google announced on the Google Maps blog that they are now powering their own map data in the UK, Germany, Finland and Sweden. Google maps data in the U.S. and many other countries is powered by Google’s own data. But this week, Google dropped their third-party map data provider, Tele Atlas,…
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
Irish Hotel Drops Autocomplete Defamation Case Against Google
Nov 24th
An Irish hotel was suing Google for an autocomplete suggestion that implied the hotel was in financial trouble. That case has now been withdrawn, although no details of any settlement have been released.
Hotel Defamation Case Withdrawn
The …
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
Google Drops Chromebook Prices & Adds A Black Friday Model
Nov 21st
Google gave Chromebooks a refresh for the holidays, introducing a new Samsung Series 5 notebook and dropping the price of Acer and Samsung Chromebooks to $299. The new Series 5 is sleek and black (and Wi-Fi only), an impressive-looking refresher for the ailing netbook category.
Google has also overhauled parts of the Chrome OS user interface. The login screen is now so fresh and so clean, and the new tab page now includes a shortcut to the file manager.
Sponsor
“The computer that keeps getting better” lives up to that promise, but the Chromebook category hasn’t caught on. It advertises “nothing but the Web” as a feature, but our experiences have found that to be a limitation. We weren’t sure why Chromebooks had to be more expensive that plain old netbooks, but today’s price drop – and for a sleek, new model, too – is a welcome gesture.
The Chromebook and Chrome OS have gotten some important updates this year. Will you be getting one for the holidays?
Read more on the Google Blog.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
A Case Of The Drops: Is Third-Party Smartphone Insurance Necessary?
Oct 17th
The danger with carrying a smartphone in your pocket is that it is essentially a piece of glass held together with metal and plastic with sophisticated electrical innards. Warranties from original equipment manufacturers tend to not cover a phone if it is broken or has water damage. What if you drop your brand new iPhone 4S into a puddle? The glass is going to break and it is going to get water inside. When that happens, you are in trouble like a half-plucked turkey the day before Thanksgiving.
The folks at SquareTrade like to break things. SquareTrade is a third-party device warranty company that basically offers insurance for what Apple or the other OEMs will not cover in warranties. The company posted a video positing a Samsung Galaxy S II against an iPhone 4S. The results are not for the fanboy faint of heart.
Sponsor
For most of us, the idea of third-party device insurance feels like a scam. Isn’t that the way it always feels with insurance? You do not trust the provider, and things never seem to be covered when you want them to and the deductible is too high. The carriers offer additional warranties on the devices they sell, but the carriers are even worse than the average door-to-door salesman. It is also expensive, with either a flat rate that costs as much as the phone or a monthly fee attached to your bill.
SquareTrade’s iPhone 4S policy
The big retail stores offer the same type of services. What do you think the Geek Squad is but device insurance and warranty protection? In addition to SquareTrade, there is also Securranty, a company that offers the same functionality and pricing as SquareTrade. What these companies will not cover is data or device loss. There are other ways to find lost phones though, with mobile device management solutions (if your phone is tied to your business) or “find my phone” services through Apple or security companies like 3LM, Lookout and Norton.
What do you think about a third-party $99 warranty for your iPhone 4S, Android or other device? Is it worth it? Maybe, if you have a serious case of the drops. Let us know in the comments.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
