This is a guest post by Dinesh V.K.
Fast Company believes that NFC technology for mobile payments is making a stuttering start. Many players are pushing for their share of the pie. However 2012 will see NFC getting a much bigger foothold in everyday commercial transactions.
Hostgator offered a very special deal for Black Friday, that is November 25th on Central Standard Time (CST). If you missed it then, you had an opportunity to grab it on Cyber Monday. During that twenty four hour period, you could arrange Web hosting at 50% of the normal price. A 25% off deal is still available by using the coupon code below.
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As CNN tells us, the outlook for Cyber Monday is for big deals and record sales. Sales for the one-day shopping event are projected to hit a record $1.2 billion this year. Cyber Monday was started by Shop.org, the online face of the National Retail Federation. Cyber Monday is always held on the Monday after the Thanksgiving weekend. Almost every major retailer plans on taking advantage of the hottest day to shop online. That includes Nuance, the best-known company in voice technology.
Our previous post mentioned our new policy to feature suppliers who have been giving us good service for an extended period of time. Hostgator is the company that has been providing web hosting to the SMM online properties for some years. Their web hosting service is most reliable and we could not be more satisfied with the support we receive whenever we are expanding our activities. Hostgator is featured in the left sidebar with an affiliate link that can at all times give you a 25% discount on whatever web hosting service you might require.
These barcodes are not those Google was celebrating back in October. That marked the 57th anniversary of the first patent on the bar code.
Its inventors were Norman Woodland and Bernard Silver, who filed the patent in October 1949, which was granted in October 1952. The original patent suggested encoding data in circles (a bulls eye pattern), so that it could be scanned in any direction.
Now Google has moved on to squaring that circle and is offering stickers bearing Google’s logo and a QR code. QR stands for Quick Response.
What could be easier. Your phone must be able to scan a QR code with its camera, either with an application that you download or via software that’s already installed on your phone.
When you see a QR code, you can then use your phone’s application to scan it. If you’re scanning a QR code on one of the window decals that Google has sent to thousands of U.S. businesses, you’ll quickly be taken to that business’ mobile Place Page on Google.
This is a way in which Google is promoting its local business listings in storefronts around the U.S. with QR codes.
Stickers have been distributed to 100,000 of the most popular businesses in Google’s Local Business Center database. Starting this week consumers will be able to use code-scanning applications on modern phones to look up the Google listing for a particular restaurant, store, or dry cleaner. The stickers will be prominently displayed in store windows of participating businesses, and represent a shot across the bow of companies like Yelp which offer similar branded services.
As Bill Slawski points out there is one question that needs to be asked. Why would Google rely upon stickers for a system like this instead of using something like Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) information, or cell phone triangulation, or some other method that would avoid the need to use your phone’s camera to take an actual picture?
According to a Google patent just filed, GPS systems have some limitations, such as:
Barcodes stickers are not limited to just the windows of businesses. They could also be located on the pavement of parking lots or on signs associated with those lots, near the entrance to an office building, on a traffic light pole, at or near the base of a monument, or in many other places. … and of course they can be of any size. It’s all just another way that mobile world is becoming so very much easier.
Darren Rowse poses an interesting question in asking What are Your Favorite 10 Blogging Tools? It clearly also is a topic that will generate a great deal of comment and discussion given the popularity of his Problogger blog.
It’s time for a little discussion – lets talk blogging tools. Over in the ProBlogger.com forum there’s been a lot of talk about different tools, applications, platforms and plugins that helps to improve blogs. I’m loving the different opinions and experiences and thought it’d be a good question to open up to the wider community – what are your favourite 10 blogging tools? I suspect most of us will probably include our blogging platform (Blogspot, WordPress, TypePad etc) in the list somewhere but other than that anything goes. Perhaps it’s a comments tool, perhaps a desktop editor, perhaps a plugin or widget – anything goes!
I am sure the resulting blog post with all its comments will be very search engine visible and many others will link to it.
However I am not sure that these lists of 10 that are so search-engine friendly are necessarily the most useful to readers. In this case, I can suggest a more user-friendly topic, which will undoubtedly be much less search-engine visible. I hope many will choose to comment since this could collect a host of revelations and new finds for our readers. The question we are asking is:
What is your favorite blogging tool that you believe few others may have found?
I could have nominated Dragon NaturallySpeaking, which is software to create text by dictation, and which is a real productivity help:
Dragon NaturallySpeaking gives small business and advanced PC users the power to create documents, reports and emails three times faster than most people type — with up to 99% accuracy. Most people speak over 120 words per minute, but type less than 40 words a minute. That means you can create documents and emails about three times faster with Dragon NaturallySpeaking. Dragon never makes a spelling mistake, and it actually gets smarter the more you use it!
DNS does of course cost money, so my nomination for the best, least known blogging tool is to use Mind Maps to organize your thoughts before you expand on your ideas. A great free tool to use, which I highly recommend is FreeMind, which is free mind mapping software.
FreeMind is a premier free mind-mapping software written in Java. The recent development has hopefully turned it into high productivity tool. We are proud that the operation and navigation of FreeMind is faster than that of MindManager because of one-click “fold / unfold” and “follow link” operations.
If you have some blogging tool that you are using that you think is not well enough known, why not add a mention in the comments. I’m sure others will appreciate your effort.
If you thought MLM stood for Multi-Level Marketing, then you are a little behind the times. It is the next big thing and according to the Kelsey Blog, Mike Boland and Michelle Moore, director of search engine strategies at Metric Voodoo, were together on a panel at SES San Jose this week and no doubt got into how to get Mobile Local Marketing right.
If you are into this hot subject of MLM, then you should follow the Kelsey Blog. Other recent articles that caught my eye were the following:
Yellix Dials in to Mobile Social Networking
Yellix is a mobile app that identifies incoming calls with Facebook information of the caller (if they happen to be a Facebook friend). The idea is that Facebook status updates add contextual “conversation starter” to phone conversations, possibly driving some sort of location based activity. This will in fact be tied to local business information that is searchable and served when contextually relevant to the content of incoming callers’ status updates.
Pay per Call Moving Into YP Mainstream
There is much chatter in the Yellow Pages business about pay-per-call advertising programs, in print as well as online, moving beyond selective use and into the mainstream. Bill Dinan, president of the call measurement firm Telmetrics, asserts that “Pay for Performance Advertising Shows Dramatic Growth as Local Search Marketers Deal with Economy’s Reduced Budgets.”
YouTube’s ‘News Near You’ Working to Expand Local Media Partners
YouTube’s “News Near You” service has signed deals with 200 local media outlets to post their videos, according to reporting in The New York Times. The Google-owned company will share ad revenue with these outlets, whose numbers are likely to increase. More than 25,000 news sources have been invited to participate.
If you have not yet considered how to tap into this explosive growth for Mobile Local Marketing, then the Kelsey Blog should be on your RSS News Feed reader to get the latest buzz.
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SEO clients may well be aware of the furor that has been going on in the SEO world. Danny Sullivan described why SEO experts were so incensed in signaling that Google Loses “Backwards Compatibility” On Paid Link Blocking & PageRank Sculpting. It is all concerned with the NoFollow tag that can be applied as part of the code for hyperlinks from web pages.
If you want to understand the implications of the changes then an article, PageRank Calculation – Null Hypothesis, will provide a lead-in to the ongoing discussion.
What does all this mean for SEO clients who have paid their consultants fees for Search Engine Optimization. The aimClear Search Marketing Blog has a good account of what they are telling their clients in a post, NoFollow noWorries: An SEO Linking Update.
Though this 180 degree about-face in what Google had been preaching (literally) to webmasters was poorly handled from a public relations perspective, presumably it was made because the tag was overused, abused and had the potential to skew Google’s rankings. No worries. We actually think the change will bring some positive changes to the SEO process, though as always there are tradeoffs.
Of course this has all been going on in a time of recession where companies are trying to make sure they get the maximum bang for whatever bucks they still have in their budgets. Companies paying SEO consultants who have implemented PageRank Sculpting programs are now told that such programs were ineffective. This only came to light when Google decided to spill the beans since it looked as though SEO experts had not spotted that the Google advice was no longer effective.
It is all rather messy but the bottom line is that clients have spent money that produced zero returns. What recourse do they have? Who should they be talking to?
Unfortunately the biggest culprit, Google, will provide the defense that they are providing a free search service. Too much information given away would mean that webmasters could perhaps manipulate the search results so that less relevant web pages nevertheless would appear high in the keyword query listing of results. If any information is given out, then webmasters should do their own checking to be sure that the information works for them. This is somewhat facile reasoning since it is very difficult to do Split A/B testing on anything other than simple changes to web pages.
If Google is off the hook, this leaves only the SEO consultants to listen to the SEO clients. Here again the discussion is difficult. Reputable SEO consultants use their best skills and knowledge to provide maximum search engine visibility to their client’s web pages but without any guarantees on performance. In this case, they were following information put out by Google and which was never withdrawn or modified until very recently. They put in the effort. Google rendered their efforts for naught. It would appear that the SEO consultants are off the hook too.
If companies were doing their own SEO, then they would have paid the salaries and again would have seen no results from the PageRank sculpting. Using SEO consultants or doing SEO in-house would have had comparable effects. Perhaps this is just grin-and-bear-it time. Search engine marketing is on average very powerful, but its mechanisms are sometimes difficult to discern. The NoFollow confusion has just added to those ongoing difficulties.
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ReTweets Are The New Currency Of The Web as Michael Arrington noted. That makes the launch of a new search engine Topsy, which had been in stealth development for three years, particularly propititious.
Links are sorted by those that Twitter users are sending around the most, weighted in favor of links sent by more influential Twitter users. You can sort results over all time (going back to September 2008), last month, week, day or hour. Results show popular links and also the most influential users tweeting about that topic. Click on that user and you’ll see all their tweets about the topic.
Topsy isn’t looking at the number of followers in determining Influence. Rather, Influence is gained when others retweet links you’ve sent out. And when you retweet others, you lose a little Influence. So the more people retweet you, the more Influence you gain. So, yes indeed, retweets are the new currency on the web.
If your topic is particularly newsworthy or appeals to the masses, then getting a large number of ReTweets is not very surprising. If you are writing on something that has a limited appeal, how do you get your readers to tell others via Twitter about it. What tweaked my interest was that a recent tweet about a blog post got 30 ReTweets at this time when checking via a Topsy search for ‘PageRank Null Hypothesis’ (note – some of these had different short URLs). The Tweet was as follows:
Topsy even indicates that there were 16 associated ReTweets of the corresponding Sphinn entry. Others may find the reasons for this good performance of interest and value.
If your blogging software is set up to automatically send a tweet to Twitter when the blog is published, then you should make sure that the Titles ReTweet Well.
You may wish to add appropriate hashtags to your post title as well, although we have more to say on that below. Chris Brogan also had some related tips on how to Spread Your Wings And Get More Retweet Action.
There is no harm in letting the software do its job, but it may well be appropriate to take its output and make a more twitter-visible tweet. Louise Doherty has a formula for getting retweeted and that is a good start. However there are some further tips that are worth mentioning.
The most important is of course to make sure the title has words that are likely to draw your readers interest. In the above example, it is probable that the phrase ‘Null Hypothesis’ tweaked the interest of all those who have struggled through their statistics courses and wondered how it could possibly come up here. If you can find a short catchy phrase like that, you are a lot farther ahead.
A hashtag such as #google ensures that all those who watch out for tweets that have been labeled with the google hashtag are likely to see your tweet. It is a way of targeting a particular audience. Which hashtags are worth using? Clearly popular hashtags are the only ones. You can get an idea on this by doing a Twitter search for say #google.
Check out how old the tweet is at the bottom of the search results page. Currently for #google it is about 2 hours ago, which is fairly good. You will get the same result for #seo. #pagerank on the other hand is about 7 days ago, so it is still worth considering but is less popular. Just to give a point of comparison, a search for a current trending topic such as “Swine Flu” shows tweets at the bottom of the page that are only from 2 minutes ago.
The other point that is worth mentioning is that the addition of hashtags does not seem to influence twitter searches so that a search for Google will include entries with #google as well. In other words the ‘#’ is ignored in the Twitter search for the non-tagged version of the word.
Having crafted the best ReTweet-able Tweet you can, all that is left to do is to seek a little help from your friends. If you have done your work well, they will probably be delighted to do their bit.
… or perhaps that will soon be Frozen Fish and Data Chips. This month marks the 35th anniversary of the universal product code (UPC) and the associated bar code, that we are all accustomed to see on every item we purchase in a grocery store. A bar code was officially swiped for the first time on June 26, 1974, at a supermarket in Ohio and brought to Canada a year later.
The bar code has been recognized by the Smithsonian as one of the great breakthrough technologies in history. Such bar codes are now scanned more than 10 billion times a day. However UPCs will shortly be replaced by electronic product codes (EPCs), which will become the new industry standard. They can hold much more data and can be stored on radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, which don’t require direct scanning but can be read by a sensor.
GS1 Canada, is the not-for-profit organization that manages this technology. Here is how they describe the new EPC:
EPC is designed to provide a unique serial number for each item in the supply chain. In contrast, bar codes only identify a group of products. For instance all Coke cans have the same bar code whereas with the EPC technology, every single Coke can would have a one-of-a-kind identifier.
This one-of-a-kind identifier will provide greater visibility of items in the supply chain. Having more detailed and accurate information on products will improve movement of goods in real-time, inventory management and replenishment practices, resulting in a reduction of lost sales due to out-of-stocks. It could help reduce theft and prevent counterfeit goods. Readers could also capture the EPC number stored in a radio frequency identification (RFID) tag and transmit and report the item’s location, condition and status to an on-site information system or to a remote database via the internet.
The advantages and benefits of this EPC/RFID technology are so striking that its take-up should be rapid. If they do put one of these tags on your frozen fish and chips pack, then you can be assured that it has been handled correctly all along the supply chain until it reaches you.
It may have taken 35 years for the bar code to get the wide acceptance it has but it seems clear that over the next 10 years the EPC/RFID will likely become the accepted standard.
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