Posts tagged service.
Tax Resolution Service in Houston, TX, Uses SEO Firm to Provide Tax Help to … – openPR (press release)
Feb 11th
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Tax Resolution Service in Houston, TX, Uses SEO Firm to Provide Tax Help to …
openPR (press release) Through search engine optimization (SEO) techniques, Prospect Genius is helping to increase the prominence of Taxation Solutions, Inc. in online searches for tax resolution and IRS assistance. One of the main objectives of this SEO campaign is to help … Tax Attorney Firm in Cambridge Hires Local SEO Team to Bring in More Maryland … |
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RedBox And Verizon Team Up On Streaming Service To Challenge Netflix – ReelSEO Online Video News
Feb 7th
 ReelSEO Online Video News |
RedBox And Verizon Team Up On Streaming Service To Challenge Netflix
ReelSEO Online Video News The following is an index of our more popular video search engine optimization (Video SEO, VSEO,… Many of us here at ReelSEO are still settling back into our routines following the awesome SMX West… Google has been giving users "instant previews" … |
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Google Begins Building 1-Gigabit Internet Service in Kansas City
Feb 6th
Google breaks ground today on the super-fast fiber optic network it plans to build for the lucky residents of Kansas City, Kan. They’ll get a 1 gigabit-per-second Internet connection, which will offer downloads 100 times faster than what most Americans get. Uploads will be a thousand times faster than average.
Kansas City won this privilege over 1,100 other cities in March 2011. Since then, Google and the city have been surveying, planning, and eating “way too much barbecue,” says Google’s manager, Kevin Lo. Today, they start laying cable. A few months behind the Kansas side, neighbors on the other side of the river in Kansas City, Mo. will get the hook-up as well.
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How Fast Is Fiber?
Fiber optic cable contains a bundle of glass fibers about the width of a human hair. The fastest Internet connection on record was established by researchers at the SuperComputing 2011 conference in Seattle. They were testing ways to share the enormous amounts of data from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Center for Nuclear Research. That connection reached 186 gigabits per second. Google Fiber is just 1 gigabit.
That’s not too shabby, though. Verizon’s FiOS network, which is among the fastest commercially available in the U.S., gets only 150 megabits per second. Google Fiber will be almost 7 times faster than that.
How Will Kansas City’s Fiber Work?
Kansas City won the Google Fiber competition because it met all of Google’s various requirements. “Our goal was to find a location where we could build efficiently, make an impact on the community, and develop working partnerships with the local government, utility and community organizations,” its FAQ says. “We believe we’ve found this in both Kansas City, Kansas and Kansas City, Missouri.”
Lo says the network will use “thousands of miles” of cable. The backbone of the network will be built first, and then Google Fiber will be connected to homes around Kansas City. The cable work starts today after months of surveying and measuring, as well as some negotiations around how to use the city’s utility poles.
The Kansas City Star reports that Google and the Kansas City Board of Public Utilities had some disagreement over how the network would be hung on the city’s utility poles.
The Wyandotte County government wrote the plan with an unusual stipulation that Google would be allowed to hang its cables for free, using part of the poles typically reserved for utility companies to hang their own communication cables, not for third parties. Phone and cable companies typically use a lower part of the pole, and they pay a fee to do so.
The special installation for Google would also have required more specialized crews, so it would be more costly. The Star’s source says that Google will opt to pay the regular fees like any third-party provider.
Google says the later stages of this experiment will reach over 500,000 people. Google has promised competitive prices for residential Internet service, but it hasn’t been specific yet.
Why Is Google Becoming An ISP?
Google’s not just doing this to collect Internet bills from homes. When the Internet gets faster, Google’s whole business benefits. Google wants to test new, bandwidth-intensive “killer apps” to see what kinds of future services it can provide. But even for normal Web services, speed benefits Google. Put bluntly, the faster your Internet, the more Google ads you can see. That’s why Google search and the Chrome browser are so dang fast.
Google refers to this Google Fiber project as an “experiment,” so don’t get too excited about 1-gigabit fiber in your neighborhood just yet (unless you’re in Kansas City). But as Google said in its initial announcement, there are big implications for testing this out in the U.S. The country isn’t even in the top 10 for average connection speed. Google wants to push U.S. Internet infrastructure forward.
As for Kansas City, with these kinds of speeds, there’s sure to be a boom in next-generation Internet start-ups.
Photo courtesy of Shutterstock
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Handyman Service in Fort Worth Hires Local SEO Group to Aid More Texas Customers – PR.com (press release)
Feb 2nd
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Handyman Service in Fort Worth Hires Local SEO Group to Aid More Texas Customers
PR.com (press release) Richland Hills, TX, February 02, 2012 –(PR.com)– Andy OnCall, a comprehensive home remodeling and handyman service in Fort Worth, Texas, is pleased to announce its new SEO marketing campaign developed by Prospect Genius, an Internet advertising firm. |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Video Service Tout Claims It Boosts Users’ Facebook, Twitter Followers
Jan 30th
Tout got a big boost when Shaquille O’Neal announced his NBA retirement in one of the service’s 15-second video clips. Before then, few people had herad of the service, which allows users to easily link the videos to their Facebook and Twitter accounts.
Prior to O’Neal’s unsolicited endorsement, few people had heard of Tout, which just launched in April. After Shaq’s quick message thanking fans, however, interest in the service exploded. “We got lucky with him being so involved with it,” said Melissa Breen of Tout.
But since then, interest in Shaq may have risen thanks for Tout.
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The ex-NBA big man has seen his number of Twitter followers grow to 4.9 million since he started using the service eight months ago. Prior to that, Breen said, he had been “stuck at about 3.5 million for quite some time.”
Breen claims other Tout users are seeing a boost in followers as a result of the service. A sizzle reel she played on Saturday at Columbia University’s social media weekend in New York big increases from average users to Ryan Seacrest. Traffic on the site is growing at about 25 percent per month.
It’s hard to attribute how much of the growth is organic and how much can be attributed to Tout. But the company likes to point to CBS News anchor Katie Couric, who gained 10,000 new Twitter followers within 10 days after she started using the service.
“We don’t want to take credit…[but] the only answer is that it’s more immersive. People want to connect,” Tout’s Gardner Loulan told CNET.
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Appliance Repair Service in Plymouth, MA, Hires SEO Pros to Improve Online … – PR.com (press release)
Jan 29th
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Appliance Repair Service in Plymouth, MA, Hires SEO Pros to Improve Online …
PR.com (press release) Plymouth, MA, January 29, 2012 –(PR.com)– Mr. Appliance of Southeast Massachusetts, an appliance repair service in Plymouth, MA, recently joined the SEO program provided by Prospect Genius, a leader in local online advertising. |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Market Target Launches Hometown Helper Service, Providing Internet Marketing … – San Francisco Chronicle (press release)
Jan 27th
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Market Target Launches Hometown Helper Service, Providing Internet Marketing …
San Francisco Chronicle (press release) San Diego SEO Services company Market Target announced today the launch of a marketing service designed specifically for underserved small town businesses. Hometown Helper Service is designed to get small town businesses a revenue generating presence … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Who Will Win the Race to Build the Web’s Best Real-Name Identity Service?
Jan 25th
When Mixel — an iPad-based collage app — launched last November, one of its features quickly caused frustration: Its requirement that users log in with Facebook before they could start creating and sharing art.
The reason for that requirement, Mixel co-founder (and former NYTimes.com design director) Khoi Vinh explained, was real names. Vinh wanted to build the Mixel community around real names, not anonymity or pseudonyms. “We think this is essential to the kind of experience we’re building: a family-friendly environment that’s suitable for just about anyone,” he wrote.
At the time, Facebook was pretty much his only option. But that is starting to change. And as proving your online identity becomes more important, it’s a valuable race for the players involved to win.
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Perhaps Facebook’s biggest competitor is now Google+. With 90 million users, it is still significantly smaller than Facebook, which boasts more than 800 million active users. But as Google integrates Google+ into more of its services, that number should grow. Facebook should easily beat Google+ to 1 billion users, but with Google’s reach in search, mobile services like Android, and YouTube, the race to 2 billion could be closer.
Twitter, too, is a worthy competitor in the online identity race. The company famously doesn’t verify real names — mainly for celebrities and brand partners — and it’s hard to imagine a time when Twitter would require your real name.
But Twitter does seem to be favoring real names these days: They are now displayed by default — when available — on its website and in its official apps.
Twitter may have other reasons for that — the number of “pretty” usernames without numbers will eventually run out. But Twitter also clearly has interest in serving as an identity tool — its co-founder Jack Dorsey, also a founder of mobile payments company Square, even speaks of using your Twitter account as one way to justify your financial trustworthiness. So if Twitter can serve as a reliable source of your consistent online identity — even if it’s not your official, real name — that seems valuable.
Other large companies, such as Apple, Amazon, AT&T, and Verizon, boast tens of millions of real-name accounts, many with credit cards attached to them. That is incredibly valuable to those companies, as it permits frictionless authentication and commerce for new services and devices, such as Apple’s App Store and Amazon’s ever-growing digital marketplace.
But with high public sensitivity over financial information and the idea of identity theft — plus the competitive advantage of keeping that data in-house — it seems unlikely that Apple, Amazon, or the others would simply open their identity services to developers. So for now, inherently “social” services like Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and LinkedIn — each with many millions of users — seem most useful as web identity-verification services.
This all begs a bigger question, though: Whether real, birth names are actually the best way to identify ourselves in an increasingly digital society.
To varying degrees, governments and financial-type companies mostly require you to have and use a name, as they have for centuries. The digital revolution, however, started within our lifetimes, and may eventually dictate new identity norms. In many online communities, anonymity — or at least the ability to use pseudonyms — is expected and sometimes demanded. If that becomes more common, who knows what offline human naming conventions will look like in a few decades.
Google, for one, recently announced an interesting new policy change for Google+: In addition to real names, it will also start allowing individuals to use consistent, established “alternate names.” These range from established offline pseudonyms like Madonna to online nicknames “with a meaningful following.” It still seems to prefer real names — see Google’s naming policy — but there’s some wiggle room now.
For now, it seems the more formal a digital community, the more your real, proper name matters — or at least a provable, consistent alternate. And as long as that’s the case, the race to hold, secure, and pass along your identity will be a valuable one.
Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, speaking at the DLD conference in Munich this week, attributed the trend “from anonymity to authentic identity” on the Web as one of the main reasons that social media has become such an important part of daily life. “What we do online is increasingly about who we are,” she said. “We are our real identities online.”
You can be confident that Facebook enjoys its status as the top identity gatekeeper, and is very protective over it — it’s worth a lot.
Meanwhile, Mixel — the company that got flack for its Facebook/real-name login requirement — has been integrating Google+ authentication support into its product, and it eventually plans to support the new “alternate” names feature.
“We like what Google+ is doing for alternate names — an ‘authenticated’ or ‘established’ name is good for us too,” founder Khoi Vinh says.
Photo: Paulo Brandão via Flickr (cc)
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Revvim Launches the First Revenue Maximization Service for Natural Search – MarketWatch (press release)
Jan 25th
 Brafton (blog) |
Revvim Launches the First Revenue Maximization Service for Natural Search
MarketWatch (press release) "Our goal at Revvim is to empower website marketers and small business executives to rapidly improve their SEO efforts to deliver provable ROI (return on investment)," stated Matthew LeBaron, CEO and founder of Revvim. In today's economy companies are … Finding killer SEO keywords for content marketing: Part 1 |
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New Open Group Cloud Standard Introduces “XaaS” – Something as a Service
Jan 19th
As prominent as cloud computing has already become in today’s enterprises, it’s amazing to realize that the world’s reference standards are only now catching up with the concept. On Tuesday, the consortium of industry stakeholders known as The Open Group updated its reference standards for Service-Oriented Architecture. You remember SOA, don’t you?
Well, if you’ve been following along with the SOA story, you know that cloud computing platforms have catapulted the service concept onto a huge and growing platform. Now, the consortium – led by software giants IBM, Oracle, and SAP, along with HP, and business consultancy CapGemini – has produced a formal interpretation of the role services play in the cloud, by offering a new term for the concept. Say it with me (if you can): XaaS.
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If a component delivers a service over a network using a service-oriented infrastructure, the Open Group now explains, in whatever form that takes, the concept will be referred to as XaaS. Literally, the X stands for… anything.
“This is the essence of cloud computing,” reads the Open Group’s new Service-Oriented Cloud Computing Infrastructure (SOCCI) framework. “It refers to an increasing number of services that are delivered over a network. Anything as a service requires an understanding of the service objectives and the accounting of service use and quality. The objectives, use, and quality can be determined from the underlying reference model for SOI: Broad network access (cloud) + resource pooling (cloud) + business-driven infrastructure on-demand (SOI) + service-orientation (SOI) = XaaS.”
SOCCI is a necessary adaptation to the OG’s existing SOI concept, mainly because certain aspects of cloud services had become incongruous with the formal framework for SOI even up until last week. The expectation for SOI was built around software contained within the fixed space of server hardware (note: no virtualization) in an enterprise data center, or perhaps (begrudgingly) through cohosting services. Resources were provisioned directly and manually by administrators, and financing was often expected to be handled as capital expenditures.
The new SOCCI framework embraces the modern understanding of cloud services as spelled out by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. There are three principal divisions – SaaS, IaaS, and PaaS – and usually anything else that vendors may attach to an “-aaS” is arbitrary and often self-serving. Open Group leaves the door open for something else to fit there later, but makes clear that these three pillars are the only ones that need to hold up the cloud for now.
Previously, the SOI framework helped organizations to understand how to design, using architecture, the hardware foundations for their services. With cloud computing, much of that architectural process is rendered moot. You provision the basic characteristics of the virtual systems you need to deliver services. And if they don’t work well or properly, you change those characteristics. SOCCI has adopted this concept now, and is advancing it up until the time it needs to be completely redefined all over again.
Quoting from the newly revised framework:
Cloud computing puts new demands on the IT infrastructure and management thereof. It requires an abstract approach to the operational environment. A cloud computing provider cannot any longer tailor its environment for each subscriber. It means that instead of a physical device, cloud computing offers an abstraction of a server, file system, storage, network, database, etc. Moreover, increasing providers’ profitability and maximizing the utilization of resources requires multi-tenancy, dynamic allocation of resources, and metering with charge-back.
At the same time, subscribers expect to see implementation of a utility model since they want to allocate resources on-demand and pay exactly for their usage while being able to sustain their operations, much like the electric bill. Hence, new infrastructure should be agile and elastic and create an illusion of infinite computing resources available on-demand. While SOI did not offer the whole spectrum of the characteristics desired, it became an enabler for what came to be known as Service-Oriented Cloud Computing Infrastructure (SOCCI). SOCCI can be defined as service-oriented, utility-based, manageable, scalable on-demand infrastructure that supports essential cloud characteristics, service, and deployment models. In other words, SOCCI describes the essentials for implementing and managing an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) environment.
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