Sam The Happy Man!

How to Accept Blame when You Deserve It

2008-09-12T11:42:00.002-05:00

I found this on Today's WikiHow, I couldn't resist not posting ;)

Taken from WikiHow: "wikiHow.com - The How-To Manual That Anyone Can Write or Edit"

Things go wrong sometimes. There are times when it's accidental. There are times when it's someone else's fault. But at the times when you know you are at fault for the problem, the mature and responsible thing to do is stand up and own the mistake, accept the consequences, and be part of the solution to the problem resulting from your mistake.

Steps

Step up and confess as soon as you realize what went wrong. Waiting to see how things shake out is a bad idea. As soon as a situation starts going south, step up and point out where the problem started - with you, yourself. The sooner the problem is identified, the sooner a resolution is possible, and that minimizes consequences.
Don't prevaricate or obfuscate. This means you should state the problem directly, clearly and simply rather than beating around the bush or attempting to confuse the issue in order to make you look less responsible. Again, when problems crop up, the quickest way to the solution is simple, direct identification of the problem's origin and details. Trying to skate around an issue is just frustrating, and in the end the problem takes longer to deal with and becomes more complicated the longer it goes on.
Don't try to shift even a part of the blame. This doesn't mean that you should accept blame that you don't deserve. But saying things like, "Well, if he hadn't done this then I wouldn't have done that." is lame. Instead, say, "I am so sorry for this. I had no idea that what I did could cause this type of problem. How can I help fix it?"
Realize that the truth will be discovered eventually. It's been said, and is generally true, that "the truth is just a shortcut to what's going to happen anyway." If you're around when the truth does come out, and you haven't confessed your part in the problem, your credibility for all future situations will be compromised terribly. When others realize that you had the last clear chance to step up and own that mistake, but instead you allowed them to share blame with you, they will not appreciate it at all. When your boss realizes that you allowed others to bear responsibility for your mistake, your days will be numbered, or at the very least, your prospects for advancement will be curtailed significantly.
Trust the other party to help. Hopefully, you have a decent parent, significant other or manager; or if you're in school, your teacher is fair. Assuming your boss is a good boss (or whatever authority figure is in play) is the smartest assumption to make in this case. The reality is that the person who has authority over you can protect you better than anyone else, but if you don't admit you caused a problem, there will be no shield when the truth eventually comes out. If it's a working situation, and you go to your boss as soon as you realize what's happened, s/he can help you more than you may know. Trusting your boss to help you out of a jam can actually pay big dividends later - by confessing to this problem, you've just shown your boss that if a problem is really your responsibility, you'll step up and say so. When problems crop up later and evidence points to you, if you say, "No, that wasn't me," your boss will believe you - s/he knows that you are mature enough to admit your mistakes, because you've done so in the past.
Help solve the problem. Once you've caused a problem, don't wait to be forced or pressured to remedy it - volunteer. Don't ask if you can help - ask how you can help. Watch carefully as those who help the most do their work, and take note of the way they resolve the issue. File this information in your memory and have it handy for later use.
Explain yourself. Once the recovery is underway, you should try to explain what your thought process was, so that your boss, significant other or parent can understand what led you to the point where things went pear-shaped. Many times, once you've explained your thinking, others will say, "Well, that does make sense in a way, however..." By doing this, you are allowing them to help correct the way you think about things, and helping yourself for the future.
Be careful not to justify yourself. Look at the difference in these two statements: "I'm sorry I yelled at you, but I haven't been sleeping well." (justification) versus "I've been on edge because I haven't been getting much sleep lately, but it was wrong of me to yell at you and I'm sorry." Learn how to apologize properly.
Accept consequences. There may be some - that's why it's scary to step forward and admit responsibility. But shouldering blame early and helping in the resolution of the problem will make any punishment or penance less harsh. Take your punishment as courageously as possible, and when it's done, it's really over - you'll have learned your lesson and maintained personal integrity in the process.
Recover gracefully. It isn't mistakes that should define us - it's recovery. Most clients, when asked, will say that their most trusted contractors and vendors have not been perfect, but that when mistakes were made, the contractor made it up to them by admitting their responsibility and offering either a steep discount or replacement free of charge, or offered discounts on future jobs in exchange for the inconvenience caused by their error. It's not the mistake - it's the way you rebound from it that matters to most people.
Hold your head up and move on. Nobody's perfect. We all make mistakes. If we're smart, we learn from those mistakes and take note so that we don't repeat them. Learning experiences that are the most painful are also often the most valuable. Remember that your mistake was just that - it wasn't intentional, you didn't set out to deliberately cause harm or screw someone else up. And as soon as you realized that it was you who caused the problem, you stepped in, ready to help dig everyone out of the hole you put them in. You can hold your head up and feel good knowing that you did your best to help everyone recover with a minimum of pain.

Tips

Don't assume that your boss, parent or teacher will think the worst of you if you make a mistake. Owning up to mistakes early will earn you respect from them, it won't make them think less of you. It's practically guaranteed that they've made a mistake or two along the way.
You don't have to make a big deal out of some things. Small mistakes are easily handled by saying, "Oh. That was my bad. I'm sorry." Then the other party can say, "Oh. Well, that's okay. But in the future, here's how I want you to do that, all right?" If you make a big, hysterical scene, then it becomes all about calming you down and reassuring you, and that takes time away from solving the problem.
Accepting blame and responsibility when you have done something wrong will free you from the effects of guilt. Contrary to what you may have heard, some guilt is actually good - it tells you when you have done a bad thing, and won't leave you alone about it. That's our internal prevention system, and it keeps us all from going about doing stuff that hurts or affects others willy nilly, without a thought to the consequences. But guilt that lingers is no good. It saps your strength and ruins your relationships; if guilt lingers even after you have accepted responsibility and the consequences of your actions, seek out help from family, friends, clergy or a mental health professional.

Warnings

Be prepared to accept negative consequences. Being mature enough to own up means being mature enough to accept punishment if the mistake is bad enough to warrant it. Still, it's better to accept punishment for a mistake that was able to be quickly corrected than it is to accept punishment for something that went so upside down that repercussions will be felt for years - your boss will not appreciate that, so confessing and handling problems before they get to that point is the far better option.

Can you say Google FAST???

2007-05-24T22:19:00.001-05:00

Microsoft Pays $6 billion for aQuantive: Massive Ad Network Consolidation Is Occuring

2007-05-18T10:21:00.000-05:00

Breaking: Microsoft is acquiring advertising network aQuantive the parent company to Avenue A | Razorfish, Atlas and DRIVEpm, for roughly $6 billion in an all-cash transaction, the company said this morning.

aQuantive is a public company (AQNT) and had a market cap of just $2.8 billion as of yesterday. The acquisition price of $6 billion is a roughly 2x premium on yesterday’s closing price, which is a reflection of the fact that this were competing bidders (see notes below). The acquisition comes after recent big acquisitions by Google and Yahoo in this space. Google bought Doubleclick for $3.1 billion in April. Later that same month, Yahoo acquired competitor RightMedia for $680 million. Just yesterday, WPP Group acquired yet another company in this space, 24/7 Real Media, for $649 million.

2006 revenues for aQuantive were $442 million. Net income as about $54 million.

aQuantive’s operating companies include both tools and ad agencies. The company is located in Seattle.

Microsoft is held a media call this morning to discuss the transaction. My notes are below. At about 7 am PST a recording of the call will be available at 1-800-774-9248.

Notes From Media Call:

(see CenterNetworks as well, Allen Stern has taken very complete notes)

Deal brings lots of new relationships with publishers and advertisers

Microsoft is now able to sell display ads on any website

Good tools for rich media ads, including IPTV

aQuantive was founded in 1997.

Microsoft says they are showing they are willing to aggressively grow strategically. Ad market is predicted to grow dramatically over the next few years. Lots of synergies between companies. Will be able to better monetize microsoft inventory, and will now be able to sell display ads on third party sites. Financial implications to MS: deal will close in FY 2008. They do not think it will have a significant impact on MS operating income.

MS expects an antitrust review in the U.S. and maybe in other countries. Probably not EU, but perhaps in Germany.

MS talking about privacy: says aQuantive has high degree of respect for privacy and fits well with Microsoft’s privacy policies.

Bear Stearns question: does this affect MS’s opinion on Google/doubleclick transaction. MS: no, not at all. Says this will promote competition and Google/doubleclick will hurt competition. Microsoft is in none of the businesses that aQuantive is in, whereas Google was already in direct competition with doubleclick and will give Google 80% market share in those markets.

question on how difficult integration will be with MS’s Adcenter platform? MS says online ad market is $40 billion annually and growing 20% per year. Says MS is committed to getting their share of the market, and this deal gives them a more complete end to end solution (paid search, display ads, CPA). MS says the deal will make their time to market much quicker. They are looking to consolidate their inventory from MS sites to create more scale for ad network. Talking about MS’s new software + services model, phones, games, IPTV, etc. and that advertising will drive these businesses.

MS has a long relationship with aQuantive, has been a customer for many years.

question on the size of the premium v. yesterdays closing price for aQuantive. MS says if they can drive growth through acquisition better than through internal growth they will do it. “we have the economic fire power to do more if we wish to”. MS says this was a competitive bidding situation, and “we are delighted to have won”

MS is saying that there is very little overlap between the two companies, the products are highly complementary.

this is largest MS acquisition to date, but this is only 2% of MS market cap, and they have $35 b in cash on had.

TechCrunch

New Stuff At My Yahoo

2007-05-16T23:00:00.000-05:00

The big guys are really starting to focus on personalized home pages, where Yahoo dominates and Google is coming on strong (by adding a link from the Google.com home page). Google says their personalized home page has been their fastest growing product over the last few fiscal quarters. Pageflakes and Netvibes are two notable startups in this space.

Tonight Yahoo is announcing a few enhancements to the recently relaunched My Yahoo: a new calendar module, a My Netflix module that uses the Netflix API and an update to the Yahoo Bookmarks module.

The calendar module has read/write functionality (as it should). My Netflix lets users see what movies have recently been released on DVD, the movies in your queue and movies you have at home. The main addition to the bookmarks module is the ability to add new bookmarks directly from the module.

The new features will be rolled out on Thursday. Screen shots are below. The first one shows the calendar and netflix modules.

eBay, meet YouTube

2007-05-12T19:12:00.000-05:00

Better late then never, as they say, but eBay has finally sanctioned embedded videos, a time-tested practice pretty much everywhere on the interest these days.

Sellers may now include a video right in their ad (let’s be honest, it’s going to be a YouTube video) to provide a level of advertisement beyond mere images and words (here’s a listing for a Lego figure with video embedded).

This is especially good news for sellers with high ASPs since it allows you to really show off your product from many angles (increasing conversion rates, if done right). Real Estate agents have been using online videos for a while and personally it’s starting to look suspicious if you don’t have a video available for your house. I can see this turn into a must-do shortly on eBay Motors (want an example of how NOT to do it? — warning, may make you dizzy).

Here are a few helpful resources to get you started:

Business Week podcast on selling on YouTube
YouTube Marketing Tips (with link to good article on product marketing using YouTube)
Excellent tutorial on getting optimal video results
YouTube tools & more!

Is Your Business Growing? You May Qualify for the Inc. 5,000

2007-05-12T19:01:00.000-05:00

You set out to build a successful company... and you've done it! Now, it's time to make sure the world knows about it.

Inc. magazine is recognizing the 100 fastest-growing private businesses in every major metro area and every major industry in the U.S. Together, these fast-growing private companies will comprise the Inc. 5,000, an editorial award from the most prestigious private-business magazine in the country. The 500 fastest-growing companies will be profiled in the September issue of Inc. magazine and all 5,000 will be profiled online on Inc.com.

Click to Apply for the Inc. 5,000!

For 26 years, Inc. magazine's editorial staff has done extensive research to identify the fastest-growing companies. Many well known companies, such as Microsoft, Timberland, and Domino's Pizza, were recognized by Inc. long before they became household names. But we've also helped gain recognition for thousands of smaller companies looking to raise their profile within their industry or region.

The list is a great way to recognize your company's success - and not only in the pages of Inc. Stories about last year's list in local and national press were seen by more than 25 million people.

Applying for the Inc. 5,000 is free, easy, and takes only minutes.

Go to www.inc5000.com to learn more and apply. The deadline is May 15^th, so apply today!

Vision Experience 28-foot inflatable theater

2007-05-11T14:32:00.000-05:00

Vision Experience 28-foot inflatable theater

Price: $19,999

Sometimes watching a movie indoors just won't cut it. So create your own drive-in with the Vision Experience's complete package, which includes a gigantic blow-up screen, an HD-capable projector and a full sound system. The company suggests playing your Nintendo Wii on this screen. And if you spill your beer or popcorn, don't worry--it's machine-washable.

10 Ripe Areas for Starting Your Business

2007-05-10T15:26:00.000-05:00

Big Dreams, No Cash: 10 Businesses You Can Start Today on a Tight Budget

by S. Tia Brown

Eden Reff dreamed all her life of opening a restaurant. But she couldn’t dream up the money to pay for it.

By 2003, Reff's financial situation still hadn't changed. Her resolve had. She decided to stop letting poor finances stand in her way and her future as a businesswoman.

"I saved money from my tax returns and started out making southern-style pies," she says. "I sold them around the winter holidays."

The pies were a hit. Today Reff, 31, operates Artistic Edibles, a full-service, home-based catering company in Mount Rainier, Md.

Starting a service- or talent-based business out of your home is an ideal choice for first-time entrepreneurs, and for a simple reason: They don’t require a lot of capital.

"If you have a talent that others are willing to pay you for, the business startup phase is usually easy," says Henry J. Turner, executive director of the Small Business Development Center Network at Howard University. "The easiest home businesses to start are janitorial and technological services."

But starting out small doesn't mean it’s cost-free.

"I always recommend a cash-flow analysis for the first 12 months," Turner says. "That will tell the entrepreneur what they need to spend and how much they will need from various sources, such as credit and personal finances."

10 Ripe Areas for Starting Your Business

If you’re hot to get going with a startup, but your finances aren’t, here are some independent businesses – requiring little more than a certificate or license – that you can start today:

Tutoring: The last U.S. Census reports more than 76 million school-age children. Federal laws like “No Child Left Behind” and state requirements that students pass tougher standardized tests before moving to the next grade have led to booming demand for tutors.
Hair Care/Makeup: Women – and men – spend big money on grooming services. Assisted-living homes, nursing homes and senior centers are great places to get started, and sharpen your skills.
Child Care Provider: U.S. Census figures also show that more than 20 million children live in single-parent homes. Many of those working parents need and are looking for childcare – especially outside of regular business hours.
Catering: This is a great first step to opening a restaurant. Home-based catering is an inexpensive way to build clientele, test recipes and find out if you're suited for the rigors of food service.
Cleaning/Lawn Service: With unemployment low, more people have less time – but more money – to spend on taking care of their homes and lawns.
Online Professor: Have an advanced degree or a lot of experience? Selling your services as a virtual instructor can be lucrative. Web-based and traditional colleges and universities offer online courses.
Financial Services/Business Consultant: If you know your stuff and have a proven track record, financial planning and/or business consulting can pay big.
Party Planning: Kids’ birthday, sweet 16 and graduation parties, bat and bar mitzvahs and other celebrations today involve a lot more than just buying a cake and inviting people over. Besides event planning, other niche opportunities include making invitations, decorations and party favors.
Computer Services: Whether you fix the machines, develop software or are able to translate technical jargon into everyday language, this growing field needs experts who make house calls. Many new users, especially older people who once avoided computers, now are giving in to lower prices. This new wave needs help with everything from setting up their new box to using the Web.
Personal Organizer: If you have a knack for neatness, you can turn it into money by starting a service to organize anything from closets to computer desktops.

Now take one last tip: Plan carefully.

"Don't start until you have a business plan," Turner says. "The reason a large number of small businesses don’t survive beyond three years is the lack of financial and marketing planning."

What Would Meg Do?

2007-05-10T13:20:00.000-05:00

On The Cover forbes Magazine

Ebay's Meg Whitman built a retail leviathan without sacrificing her customers, shareholders or ethics. She still has more to prove.

People at Ebay love to tell this story about Margaret (Meg) Whitman, the chief executive. She was on a flight to India with three other Ebay employees when one of them developed a dangerous gastrointestinal problem somewhere over Tehran. Whitman pulled out an atlas and decided Istanbul was the nearest, safest city in which they could land. She called an air emergency service and arranged for an ambulance to be waiting on the tarmac when the plane landed. Whitman rode in the ambulance with the ill executive and stayed with him for hours in the hospital, talking to his wife on the phone. Once the executive was stabilized Whitman took him to a hospital in London in the corporate jet. She and the other Ebay employees flew commercial to India, leaving the jet for the patient to fly home to California. "She will exert herself personally, far and above the call of duty," says Rajiv Dutta, head of Ebay's PayPal business. "She makes you want to do the right thing."

Whitman is indeed a welcome respite in an age littered with corporate shenanigans. Nice is the word usually applied to Whitman personally, and nice she has been to shareholders. She became chief executive of the online auctioneer in March 1998. Six months later she took the company public at an initial market value of $700 million. Now Ebay is worth $46 billion, and shareholders have enjoyed a compound annual return of 40%. Yet Whitman has taken home a quite reasonable paycheck--averaging $1.7 million a year in the last six years. Of course she is sitting on a nice pot of Ebay stock, most of which she was granted upon her hire--her 1.9% stake is worth some $885 million. That, plus cash and other holdings, makes her one of only ten self-made female billionaires on the planet.

And she did it without indulging in accounting tricks or backdated options, as have so many Silicon Valley executives. "I love who we are as a company and what we stand for," says Whitman. "It's fun to have built such a successful company and done it with a nice character, in a way most people would be proud of."

Whitman's performance earns her a top spot on our annual list of Best Bosses, those who delivered superior returns to shareholders while not gorging on outrageous pay packages. She has built Ebay so that today, with $6.3 billion in revenue, it is becoming a full-service Internet retailer--far more than just an auction site selling Hummel figurines and teeny teapots. Ebay runs a site for apartment hunters, a comparison-shopping bot, a place to sell cars, a handful of regional classified businesses and StubHub, a competitor of Ticketmaster. Ebay also helps 143 million people pay for all those purchases. Last quarter Ebay's PayPal unit processed $11.4 billion of payments between individuals and/or businesses. Nearly 200 million people use Ebay's Skype Internet phone service.

Says Whitman, "I'm a better leader, a better manager, a better executive than when I arrived as a youngster. I have learned how to manage a company that reinvents itself every couple of years."

The next reinvention may be the most critical she will face. From 2000 to 2004 Ebay's revenue rose an average 77% a year. But revenue in the first quarter of 2007 was up just 27%. Her quandary: The company's core business, its Ebay marketplace, is lagging. New listings in the U.S. this past quarter were down 2%. Some of that can be attributed to Whitman's recent efforts to improve the quality and profitability of those listings, but the slackening growth hints at saturation.

Buyers and sellers today have options that were not available when Whitman joined Ebay. Yahoo (nasdaq: YHOO - news - people ) now has a more comprehensive retail offering, which includes a place to sell cars online, as well as shopping, real estate and classifieds. Amazon (nasdaq: AMZN - news - people ), no more than a discount bookseller in the late 1990s, now sells everything from iPods to Prada pumps. Google (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ) lets people and businesses buy ads or sell wares such as motorcycle helmets and Hello Kitty boots for free, and its Checkout service is chasing down PayPal.

Ebay has $3.5 billion in cash, feeding rumors of acquisitions or mergers to reinvigorate growth. Travel sites such as Expedia (nasdaq: EXPE - news - people ) or Priceline could be targets, as might Monster Worldwide (nasdaq: MNST - news - people ) or Autobytel (nasdaq: ABTL - news - people ). A megamerger is also a possibility. Over the years a bevy of corporate beaux including AOL, Yahoo and Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ) have reportedly come courting, but Whitman has sent them all away. An Ebay spokesperson said the company "will continue to be opportunistic with acquisitions."

Whitman, 50, was born in Oyster Bay, N.Y. and raised in Cold Spring Harbor, both quaint towns on the North Shore of Long Island. The youngest of three siblings, she earned a bachelor's in economics from Princeton and a master's in business from Harvard. In 1980 she married a brain surgeon; they have two boys, ages 22 and 18.

She did a quick stint at Procter & Gamble (nyse: PG - news - people ) before current Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney hired her as a consultant at Bain & Co. After eight years of telling executives how to manage their brands, Whitman moved on to management roles at Disney, Stride Rite, FTD and Hasbro (nyse: HAS - news - people ) before joining Ebay in 1998, then with 40 employees. The company delivered $47 million in revenue that year. David Beirne, an executive recruiter and partner at Benchmark Capital, an early backer of Ebay, called Whitman to lure her to California. At first she said no, but when she met founder Pierre Omidyar and then president Jeffrey Skoll she saw something special. "The connection between the company and its users was something I had rarely seen," she says.

During the first five years of her tenure she focused on expanding the auction business, then acquiring and building PayPal (bought in 2002 for $1.5 billion). Shareholders were thrilled with the company's trajectory. Ebay shares continued to soar in 2004 as Whitman made a big push into new global markets. She brought Ebay to Malaysia and the Philippines, and purchased online marketplaces in India, the Netherlands, South Korea and Germany. That same year she also picked up a 25% stake in classifieds site Craigslist.

At the close of 2004 Ebay's stock reached a split-adjusted alltime high of $58 a share. But in January 2005 Ebay announced the first quarter in which its revenue rose less than 50% over the year prior. Investors took it as a bad sign and pummeled the shares.

In a desperate effort to bring in new business opportunities, nine months later Whitman paid $2.6 billion for Skype, a Luxembourg Internet phone company. Wall Street thought she overpaid for an asset with no obvious revenue plan. Some board members initially raised concerns, too, that the deal was both expensive and potentially distracting. The board eventually acquiesced but, says director Robert Kagle, a partner at Benchmark Capital, "Meg definitely led the Skype acquisition, there's no doubt about that. There were lots of important and challenging issues."

Skype remains a work in progress, delivering only $240 million in revenue in the past 12 months--a measly $1.20 per user. Though analysts have written down the asset, Whitman insists Skype will prove to be a good deal. "PayPal is a fabulous company, but it took a number of years," she points out. (PayPal contributed $1.5 billion in revenue in the past 12 months.) Whitman hopes Skype calls will be used to conduct business, such as someone in Beijing teaching an American to speak Mandarin. "When the cost of telecom goes to nothing a lot of interesting things happen and new businesses can be built," says Whitman.

Last year Whitman gave William Cobb, president of Ebay North America, an edict to fix the auction marketplace. It turns out many buyers were turned off by bad listings. They would think they scored a digital camera for $1, for example, only to learn they owed $300 in shipping fees. Ebay now exposes the full cost in search results. To reduce fraud, Ebay now requires more information from sellers posting items favored by counterfeiters, and hides the identity of bidders so they do not get targeted by fake "second chance" offers.

Whitman is also building Ebay's global classifieds businesses. This should help bring in new customers who do not like the auction format, as well as help Ebay make money from people buying and selling services, such as hiring a lawyer, a plumber or a nanny, which cannot be closed over the Web because they require face-to-face meetings.

In Asia Ebay has been crushed by Taobao, a Chinese online marketplace owned by Alibaba. Yahoo owns 40% of Alibaba--and that's just one reason some on Wall Street have again been talking up an Ebay-Yahoo deal.

Bear Stearns (nyse: BSC - news - people ) analyst Robert Peck ticks off potential synergies: "Yahoo has advertising, Ebay has a marketplace. Ebay has Skype, which Yahoo could use for its click-to-call and [instant messaging] services. Ebay also has a checkout platform [PayPal] that could be used with advertising."

It's a measure of Ebay's growth--and Yahoo's shakiness--that Ebay is now seen as the potential acquirer, reversing the scenario of past rumors. Yahoo's capitalization, $38 billion, is 20% below Ebay's.

Another possibility for Ebay: a future without Meg Whitman. In 2005 Whitman was rumored to have been considered for the top job at Disney but turned it down. "Meg is on everyone's target list," says Kenneth Virnig, a recruiter in Silicon Valley. She may also be tempted toward politics. Whitman is cochairman of Romney's finance efforts, a path that could lead to a cabinet spot. "People are convinced that I must have something going for me if I have Meg Whitman with me," says Romney.

Kagle's take: "Meg is very committed to leaving a legacy at Ebay that clearly demonstrates it has been one of the biggest business successes over the last decade." The legacy-building period is not over yet.

Cell phone tracking locates heart recipient

2007-05-09T16:52:00.000-05:00

Police located a 10-year-old boy awaiting a heart transplant by asking his mother's cellular provider to locate her cell phone.

John Paul May of Harrisville had the successful surgery at Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh on Saturday night, but came dangerously close to being passed over for the donor heart until police tracked down the boy and his mother at a jazz festival.

The hospital called state police Saturday afternoon because officials couldn't reach the boy's parents to let them know a donor heart had been found. When police couldn't find the boy or reach him by phone, they contacted Sprint Nextel Corp. to get the coordinates of his mother's cell phone.

"The only time you can use it is life or death, or to track someone wanted in a homicide," state police Cpl. James Green said. Otherwise, police must get a warrant from a judge.

Using the coordinates, state police tracked the phone to a Slippery Rock University building. Police stopped the jazz concert that was happening and announced they were looking for the boy and his mother, Sue.

The crowd of some 500 jumped to their feet and gave the boy a standing ovation as he left, said Steve Hawk, a music professor who conducted the concert.

"I've been in the entertainment business for 30 years and never had such an emotional, shocking event happen at something live," Hawk told the Butler Eagle.

Yahoo News

Survey: Office Managers Worth 10 Employees

2007-04-25T16:27:00.001-05:00

April 24, 2007 -- From testing phone lines to picking up the boss's dog, most office managers are doing the work of 10 regular employees, a recent national survey by Staples found.

In a survey of 8,000 office managers at small businesses nationwide, more than half said they were covering customer relations, IT support, human resources, administrative duties, promotions, and accounting, among other workplace duties.

Other tasks cited by respondents included customer service manager, purchasing manager, housekeeping manager, and workplace psychologist.

Although the current median salary for office managers is $53,654.53, a composite salary calculated by Salary.com based on all duties they typically perform is closer to $90,000, the survey said.

"They're performing an extraordinary range of duties to keep their small businesses running," John Giusti, vice president of Staples Business Directory, said in a statement.

Source: Inc.com

Yahoo Mail to offer unlimited storage

2007-03-28T14:06:00.000-05:00

Yahoo will begin offering unlimited storage for its free Web-based e-mail in May, the company announced late Tuesday. The move makes Yahoo the first of the major free e-mail providers to offer unlimited storage, but it likely will not be the last.

Yahoo currently offers 1 gigabyte for its free mail service and 2GB for its premium fee-based service. Google's free Gmail service offers more than 2.5GB of storage, and Windows Live Hotmail offers 2GB for free.

"We are watching the trend lines of how people are using e-mail...and they are sending more photos and videos and rich media," said John Kremer, vice president of Yahoo Mail.

Google began the storage wars in earnest when it launched Gmail in April 2004 with 1GB of storage. Yahoo Mail, which launched in 1997 with 4MB of storage, upgraded to 100MB of storage shortly after Google's Gmail announcement, bumped it up to 250MB in late 2004, and then up to 1GB in 2005.

With 250 million users, Yahoo Mail is the largest global e-mail provider and the largest in the U.S., according to comScore.

The unlimited storage will begin rolling out globally in May, and Yahoo expects to have all of its customers covered within a month, except for China and Japan. "We will continue working with these markets on their storage plans," Kremer said.

CNET News.com

RIM to introduce newest BlackBerry

2007-02-12T12:22:00.000-05:00

NEW YORK - BlackBerry maker Research In Motion Ltd. on Monday will unveil a new version of its top-end e-mail phone for business users, replacing the signature side navigation wheel with a front trackball that first appeared last year on the consumer-oriented BlackBerry Pearl.

The BlackBerry 8800 will be offered in the United States by AT&T Inc.'s Cingular Wireless starting Feb. 21, priced at $300 with a two-year contract commitment.

The new device enters a far more crowded market for multifunction "smart" phones than the 8700 did when it was launched in late 2005. Back then, the main competition was Palm Inc.'s Treo, while lower-priced BlackBerry-like entrants from Motorola Inc.,

Nokia Corp. and Samsung Electronics Co. had not yet arrived.

RIM is billing the 8800 as the thinnest BlackBerry to date, measuring 0.55 inch from front to back. That's just a hair thinner than the Pearl's 0.57-inch thickness, but 0.2 inch thinner than the 8700 model that the 8800 will replace over time. The 8800 is also a shade narrower than the 8700 from right to left, but slightly taller.

Other features include the ability to pick up signals from Global Positioning System, or GPS, satellites for location tracking. The device comes installed with BlackBerry Maps, an application that can use the GPS signal to provide driving directions as well as integrate with other applications to, for example, send a map via e-mail.

The 8800 also comes with a media player and an external storage slot for removable microSD memory cards.

Still missing from the business-oriented device is a digital camera, which RIM says many corporate customers don't want their employees to have for security and other reasons.

"It's not that hard to put one in," RIM co-Chief Executive Jim Balsillie said in an interview. "But it was unambiguous for a dramatic proportion of the mobile professional segment: No camera."

Balsillie said it wasn't a tough decision to switch to the front trackball and ditch the traditional sidewheel — which has been used to scroll through e-mail on every BlackBerry model except the Pearl since the BlackBerry and its predecessors were introduced in the 1990s. The Pearl, which unlike the 8700 and 8800 does not feature a full typewriter keyboard with one key for each letter, was introduced in August.

"The response to the trackball has been universally positive," said Balsillie, noting that 80 percent of the non-phone usage on the Pearl involves multimedia applications rather than traditional BlackBerry e-mail. "If it's just messaging, it's just up-down, left-right. But if you're going to do multimedia, the navigation aspects become more prominent."

Google Checkout and PayPal Continue Shopping-Rebate Wars

2007-02-12T11:49:00.000-05:00

It's hard to keep up with the special offers Google Checkout and PayPal are offering to shoppers. The two companies are continuing to offer rebates to encourage shoppers to sign up for their respective payment services and to encourage retailers to offer the services on their sites.

In November, Google Checkout offered new users $10-off purchases of $30 or more, or $20-off purchases of $50 or more (depending on the merchant) through December 26. The promotion was extended through an offer in which first-time shoppers on Google Checkout receive $10 off a one-time purchase of at least $10 through February 15, 2007.

Similarly, in November PayPal offered a cash rebate of up to $20 for shoppers paying with PayPal on qualifying merchant websites in North America through May 15, 2007. A page at (http://paypal.promotionexpert.com/greatshopping) promotes a $15 rebate to "Jump-Start Your Spring Shopping."

The rebate offers benefit merchants by allowing them to advertise the rebates to their shoppers and to get exposure on the services' lists of participating merchants.

AuctionBytes.com

Windows Mobile 6 unveiled: Mini-Vista

2007-02-08T21:42:00.000-05:00

New Windows Mobile 6 to Be Presented at 3GSM in Barcelona.

First details about Microsoft’s new operating system for mobile phones have emerged on the Web, with analysts saying it is a Vista in miniature.

Windows Mobile 6, code-named Crossbow, brings a new Vista-like interface and a lot of improvements concerning interoperability with other services crafted at Redmond. The new mobile OS will be available in the second half of 2007, and its newest features will be presented next week at the 3GSM conference that takes place in Barcelona, Spain.

Suzan DelBene, vice president for the company’s mobile-device marketing, said that she expects the OS to be installed on smartphones all over the world in the next few months.

Among the new features included in Windows Mobile are:

Email in Rich HTML Format.
Live links to SharePoint sites.
Windows Live for Mobile included in Windows Mobile 6.
New Security features such as remote wiping capabilities if your device is lost or stolen.
Enhanced Windows Vista Synchronization through Windows Mobile Device Center.
Calendar ribbon gives you your important appoints quickly.
Contacts with context – call records now attached to individual contact cards in Windows Mobile 6.
.NET Compact Framework and SQL Server built in to Windows Mobile 6.

According to estimates, Microsoft sold 3 million licenses of Windows Mobile last quarter, up 90 percent from a year earlier, and is now boasting with fruitful partnerships signed with Samsung (for the BlackJack model), T-Mobile (Dash) or Palm’s Treo.

Windows Mobile 6 is built using the same core as the WM5-the Window CE 5- so all applications which run on WM5 should work fine with the new edition. "We hope to be 100 percent compatible," said John O'Rourke, a general manager in Microsoft's Mobile and Embedded devices unit. "If an application works in Windows Mobile 5, it should work on Windows Mobile 6."

Windows CE (sometimes abbreviated WinCE) is a variation of Microsoft's Windows operating system for minimalist computers and embedded systems. Windows CE is a distinctly different kernel, rather than a "trimmed down" version of desktop Windows. Windows CE kernel is built to run even with less than a megabyte of memory. Windows CE 5.0 is the most open Microsoft Operating System to date, though not all of the system is available under shared source agreements.

Since the kernels are similar, users of WM5 will be able to upgrade their OS just like an XP user upgrades for Windows Vista.

All Windows Mobile 6-powered phones will include the previously introduced Direct Push Technology for always up-to-date E-Mail delivery and automatic synchronization of Outlook calendars and contacts through Microsoft Exchange Server.

Windows Mobile 6 will also offer a set of important device security and management features including the ability to remotely wipe all data from a device should it be lost or stolen, ensuring that confidential information remains that way.

Users of Microsoft Office on the PC – of which there are nearly 400 million worldwide – will feel right at home with the new mobile versions of Outlook, Word, Excel and PowerPoint built for all Windows Mobile 6 smartphones. Windows Mobile 6 addresses extensive user feedback and incorporates enhancements from the new Microsoft Office Mobile, making information management easier and more convenient.

The software also offers a new Windows Live search engine that combines Internet search with the ability to find and map nearby locations, DelBene said.

Thus, the Redmond behemoth is trying to surge into Google’s market share, which is about 5 times bigger than Microsoft’s in search engines domain.

The Windows Mobile 6 platform will offer a variety of other security options, giving IT departments the choice of how best to secure a device, from new Exchange Server policies and certificate options, storage card encryption, and continued support for remote and local device wipe.

Organizations using Information Rights Management (IRM) technology to control the viewing, storing and printing of confidential information on PCs will be able to extend those same rights to Windows Mobile 6 devices, a feature not available on any other mobile phone platform.

Powerful, new mobile versions of the .NET Compact Framework and SQL Server are built into Windows Mobile 6 make it even easier to create and access sales tools, inventory tracking, and many other applications from a smartphone.

With another WM6 built-in application users will be able to easily transform their smartphone into a high-speed modem for their laptop ("one-click easy") with either a Bluetooth wireless or cable connection.

Windows Mobile 6 also makes it easier for operators and device makers to integrate a VoIP solution into a device they're building.

playfuls.com

Cell phone offerings set to boom: report

2007-02-01T14:39:00.000-05:00

The market for content and services on cell phones is expected to grow to $150 billion by 2011, as access to the web while on the move becomes easier and faster, research from Informa Telecoms & Media showed.

The research firm said on Thursday that applications such as messaging led by traditional SMS messaging would still account for a lion's share of this market, generating over half of this revenue in 2011.

Informa predicted messaging services comprising SMS, multimedia messaging and instant messaging on cell phones will generate revenues worth $93 billion globally by 2011 from $60 billion last year and an expected $67.4 billion in 2007.

Entertainment services comprising games, music, TV, adult content and gambling would grow to $38 billion by 2011 from around $18.8 billion in 2006, it said.

"Mobile music will be a major contributor to the revenues achieved in the mobile entertainment market in the next five years, although its overall share of the market will fall from 40 percent in 2006 to 36 percent in 2011 as new forms of entertainment such as mobile TV and video services begin to gain consumer interest," Informa said in its report.

Not all of the explosion in new services, although helped by the availability of broadband speeds on cell phones, would go to cell phone operators.

"The introduction of a whole host of new players into the value chain presents new opportunities for growth in the mobile content and services market, whilst simultaneously posing a threat to mobile operators who face losing control of the billing relationship with their customers," Informa said.

It also forecast areas such as user-generated content, the rage of the Internet world in 2006, to come into the cell phone world in the years ahead. Informa forecast user-generated content and communities to be worth $13.2 billion by 2011.

Reuters

Bill Gates Introducing Windows Vista

2007-02-01T14:26:00.000-05:00

From Times Square in New York City, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates hosted the worldwide launch of Windows Vista and the 2007 Microsoft Office System. The celebration paid tribute to the millions of Microsoft customers, partners and product testers around the world who provided input and feedback on these products -- helping Microsoft transform the way people communicate, create and share content, and access information and entertainment in the new digital age.

On-Demand Webcast

Microsto

New eBay Feature Allows Store "Markdowns"

2007-02-01T14:24:00.000-05:00

eBay has introduced a new feature in its Stores product called Markdown Manager. The tool allows sellers to offer discounted pricing on Fixed Price and Store Inventory items. Sale items will display special strike-through pricing on the item page, along with a "Sale" logo, so buyers can easily see the discount offered.

PowerSellers Unite

Developing a Marketing Calendar

2007-01-31T11:36:00.000-05:00

When's the best time to develop a marketing calendar for the year? As they say, there's no time like the present. By Al Lautenslager
January 31, 2007

Just because we're approaching February doesn't mean it's too late to plan your marketing for the year. Jay Levinson, my Guerrilla Marketing in 30 Days co-author says there are two best times to develop a marketing plan: right now and whenever your business started. Since we can’t go back in time, let's focus on right now.

Marketing is complicated. To make effective use of its many strategies and components, you have to first plan them out, then stay organized and consistent in implementing your plan. A marketing calendar is the best way to organize your marketing activity; the calendar also serves as a working document you can revise and update throughout the plan year.

A marketing calendar doesn’t have to be fancy. I recommend a simple spreadsheet matrix. Across the top x-axis, I place column headings representing the months of the year. Down the y-axis, or the first left-hand column, I list each individual marketing initiative, event or activity I'll use during the plan year.

For instance, if I'm going to do a press release every other month starting in February, I would put an X in the February, April, June, August, October and December columns. If I were going to issue a print newsletter once a month, each monthly column would have an X in it for that item.

How do you know which activities to include in your calendar? Brainstorm all the marketing ideas that make sense for your plan year but keep in mind that you can't do everything. Balance your marketing workload with the other things you need to do for your business. Plan for what you can do completely, not halfway. Also plan what you feel comfortable with, emotionally and financially. Prioritize accordingly, then place your ideas in your matrix.

Using a marketing calendar allows you to do four things with your marketing:

It organizes, categorizes and prioritizes your marketing initiatives and activities.
It allows you to spot "bunches" in your marketing activity. Too many X's close together might indicate the need to spread out your activity. It's generally accepted, though, that there are natural bunches that occur as a result of seasonality in your business and your customers' buying habits. Many retail operations market heavily in the third quarter, for instance, and bunch up marketing activity in anticipation for the fourth-quarter holiday season.
It offers a way for you to spot gaps in your marketing activity. Too much time in between the X's in your activities leaves customers and prospects untouched. Your goal with marketing is to achieve top-of-mind awareness. Consistency is key here, as is repetition. Don’t have gaps in your marketing.
It allows you to more easily evaluate your marketing. At the end of the year, the quarter or any other period of time you specify, grade the individual activity and initiative items. You can use a 1 to 10 scale, with 10 being spectacular, or you can use a simple A, B or C grading system. If your particular initiative worked, grade it high. If it was moderately successful, give it a midlevel grade, and if it didn’t work, give it a low rating. Now here's the real value of this activity: When you plan the next period’s marketing, repeat what worked or what you graded highly. Fix, modify or tweak the marketing that kind of worked or that was graded at a midlevel, and eliminate the marketing that didn’t work at all.

That’s all there really is to planning your marketing with a marketing calendar. Do what works for your business. Plan it quarterly if that's easier for you than doing it monthly. Once you establish your marketing plan, keep it up on a regular basis, just like paying your bills. Consistent marketing wins out. Planned consistent marketing with effective implementation wins out even more. And if you didn't start back when you launched your business, start now.

entrepreneur.com

The Real Value Of Vista

2007-01-26T11:19:00.000-05:00

Microsoft's new Windows will allow you to make the most of your digital media.

When Vista finally hits the shelves on Jan. 29, most consumers won't have a clue why they should buy it. Never mind the fanfare it will receive as Microsoft Chairman William H. Gates III formally launches the new Windows from the stage of the Nokia Theater in New York. Or the hundreds of millions of dollars the software giant plans to spend through June to market it. With all of Vista's many new features, Microsoft seems incapable of really zeroing in on the handful that will truly change the way consumers use their PCs.

Not that Vista won't be a step forward. Just think back to what your PC was like five years ago when Windows xp launched. It was still the era of the Blue Screen of Death, that infamous window that popped up to say your PC had just crashed. Windows XP improved PC reliability. But in retrospect, the real breakthrough for consumers (those who didn't already have a Mac, that is) was XP's ability to help digitize their entertainment. Windows XP made it a snap to stash music, photos, and video online.

Windows XP pretty much stopped right there, though. Microsoft Corp. made it easy to rip a CD to your PC's hard drive. But it took Apple Inc., with its iPod, to figure out how to actually take advantage of that digitization and make it easy for consumers to listen to their digital tunes. And forget about photos. Consumers have snapped scads of photos—2 billion in 2006 alone. But they remain trapped on hard drives of PCs running Windows XP. It's not all that different than storing snapshots in shoeboxes under the bed.

Enter Vista. Let's go out on a limb and suggest that for all the knocks against Microsoft and the jokes about how long it took to crank this thing out, Vista will in time be recognized as a leap past XP. And not just because it is far more secure and boots up more quickly. When consumers look back a few years from now, the Vista improvement they may be most likely to cite is the ability to actually use all that digital content they've been accumulating over the years.

The result of Microsoft's efforts is a collection of devices and services that takes Windows a step closer to truly being a digital hub. Think once again about those photos. Microsoft has worked with a handful of partners that have developed digital picture frames that connect to PCs over a wireless network.

Sounds geeky. But Microsoft has made it easy for PCs to recognize the frames on a home network, so all users need to do is turn on the frame to connect with it. Then, from their PC, they can select which pictures to display on the frames scattered around the house. "A lot of the success of Vista will be up to the partners like us to make it dead simple," says Jesse Grindeland, director of sales for i-mate plc, a Dubai company whose $299 Momento 10-inch frame goes on sale when Vista launches.

FREEING THE MUSIC
Another gadget, the Sonos Digital Music System, was wowing gearheads long before Vista came along. The Sonos system lets customers shoot music wirelessly from PCs to speakers throughout the house. And it worked well, except for music purchased online that contains copy protection preventing it from playing on multiple devices. Windows Media 11, the music technology inside Vista, fixes that, letting you stream copy-protected content throughout the house.

None of this was easy for Microsoft, which has always done better with business than consumers. "We're really focused on creating a consumer brand for Microsoft," says Brad Brooks, general manager in the Windows Client group. Microsoft's critics will point out that many Vista features are already in Apple's Mac OS X. Even Vista's new method of recovering old versions of files, with the drab moniker Volume Shadow Copy, trails Apple's much flashier Time Machine technology.

But for most PC users, these improvements will matter regardless of who had them first, says Michael Gartenberg, research director at JupiterKagan Inc. After all, Vista, like its predecessor, will continue to outsell the Mac by 20 to 1.

Businessweek

Mobile Web - A Completely New Ball Game

2007-01-26T11:16:00.000-05:00

Rich Skrenta feels that it's time for the Winner To Take All. Google has won in what he calls the Third Age of Computing.

IBM and Microsoft were in that position in the two prior Computing Ages, but now Google owns the Internet. David Beisel is not convinced and feels a Fourth Age of Computing is on the way where Google will need to get involved in a new ball game. That new ball game is the Mobile Web.

The Mobile Web has even greater economic potential than the traditional Web as visited by desktop PCs. .. and despite the best efforts of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) with its Mobile Web Initiative, it may not end up as they would wish as One Web. There is a fundamental disconnect between agreeing Standards and competing in a fast moving technology where there are mega-bucks at stake. If in addition, the Standards are tough to apply in order to achieve that One Web, then in practice it may not work out even if many would wish to apply the Standards.

The other factor is that many involved have lived through the Internet tidal wave and may see all this from their Desktop PC perspective. That One Web should just spread out so that it becomes the Ubiquitous Web. Doesn't that seem a natural evolution to follow? Well natural evolution is fine provided we don't run into a disruptive technology that changes all the ground rules. It may even be so cataclysmic that it deserves the title, transformational technology. Some observers would apply that description to the whole Mobile world.

That is at the heart of Mobile Persuasion @ Stanford University with its tagline, "Changing people's beliefs & behaviors with mobile technology". Cameron Moll summarizes another very important article by Tomi T Ahonen entitled, "Putting 2.7 billion in context: Mobile phone users". That would certainly confirm that Mobile Phones represent a transformational technology. Ahonen's final paragraph points out the urgency in all this.

Whatever your business or interest, going mobile now will give you a competitive advantage. But going mobile next year will be a desperation move to stay in the game. Don't miss out on this. Mobile is the biggest opportunity going. Where is your business? Where is your mobile strategy?

The fact that Google may have been the winner in the Third Age of Computing is no guarantee of success in a completely changed world. There are already some powerful entities in the Mobile world. Google may already be Celling Out (free subscription required), but that doesn't yet seem to be showing results. Even a Google-positive article, Hooked on Google (free subscription required) showing Google is leaving Microsoft in the dust, had a sting in the tail.

In brand new areas, like mobile devices that connect to the Internet, Microsoft is holding its own against Google. According to Telephia, a research firm, 3.7 percent of U.S. mobile subscribers are visiting Microsoft's mobile Web sites, compared to 3.5 percent for Google.

But even in this area, Microsoft is still No. 2. Kanishka Agarwal, vice president of mobile content for Telephia, said Yahoo is No. 1 with 5.9 percent of subscribers due to the popularity of Yahoo mail.

It will be interesting to see what develops during 2007 in this fast-changing Mobile world.

End of service announcement

2007-01-26T11:12:00.000-05:00

Free SkypeOut™ calls to US and Canadian phones ended December 31st.

After December 31st SkypeOut calls to US and Canada will be charged at the standard SkypeOut rate of ¢2.1 USD (or ¢2.4 CAD) per minute.

You can also get a full year of unlimited calls to any phone in the US and Canada. Get more information.

Skype Means Business - Saving Money is Just the Start

2007-01-25T10:45:00.000-05:00

January 25, 2007 – Skype today announced it has taken Skype for Business one step further in response to continuous demand by businesses all over the world to use Skype™ to communicate with customers and colleagues. Skype for Business has proven to be incredibly popular because firms save both money and time as Skype is so easy to use and a convenient way of keeping in touch.

Business users have always been part of the Skype family and make up over 30% of Skype’s global community, now numbering at 171 million. In a recent survey of 250 businesses using Skype, 95% claimed to have saved money and 80% claimed that using Skype increased employee productivity.

One particular firm, Lewis & Hickey, a group of leading international architects that has recently installed Skype across its offices in the UK and Prague, claims that since making its first Skype call, it has saved up to 7.6 % on its standard call charges and wants to reach a cost reduction of 50% of its total telephony expenditure in the near future.

Benoit Mareschal, Director, Business Development at Lewis & Hickey, comments: “We have clients and teams across the UK and abroad and like many creative businesses we need to share ideas and keep in touch with one another. This can come at a high cost. We wanted to find a way to communicate but pay less for the privilege. Since we started using Skype, the amount we’re spending on international mobile and landline phone calls has dropped significantly. Skype creates a human bridge between technology and personable communication.”

The survey also revealed that 62% of the businesses communicate better with customers on Skype and 76% said they work more closely with colleagues because Skype is so easy to use.

Benoit Mareschal agrees, “Now we have Skype, the ability to talk with one another has increased enormously. People used to rely on email but with Skype you can get an immediate response to a query without disturbing the whole office – especially if you are using the instant chat feature. You can see when people are online, ask your question and carry on with what you were doing.”

With additional new features unveiled today, Skype has also made it easier for businesses to install and manage Skype. Skype can be easily installed on multiple computers using the Windows Installer package (commonly known as MSI), giving IT Administrators greater control over how Skype communications traffic runs across their corporate networks.

An online control panel enables companies to allocate individual users with Skype credits that can be used to make cheap SkypeOut™ calls to traditional landline phones or mobiles and provides a consolidated view of what is being spent.

Meanwhile, Skype is working collaboratively too. Together with its partners it has been working on a range of new business productivity tools, called Extras: these include the Convenos web conference and collaboration service, a package called Unyte which enables users to share the view off their PC desktop and a Skype-enabled call-centre offering from ACD.

Skype

eBay to end controversial practice of "extending" auctions?

2007-01-22T12:32:00.000-05:00

Some very observant sellers noticed this subtle change to the eBay "fee circumvention" policy section that seems to spell the end of Extenders (more on this later)->

Extension of Auctions - eBay listings ('auctions') have a fixed duration. eBay may on rare occasions (for example, as the result of a site outage) extend the duration of an auction. Extension of auction duration by a seller, via either manual actions or the use of automated tools, is not permitted. Extension of auctions by a seller for any reason is not only a form of fee avoidance, but also harms the finding experience for buyers.

Here's a quick background and tutorial on Extenders if this topic is new to you. A now-defunct company, Ethical worked with a large seller to productize an idea he had found to be a winning strategy for improving sell-through rates.

eBay has a way you can manually "extend" an auction if it hasn't had bids and it is less than 12hrs from close, so what Ethical did was automate this. The way it works is you set your auctions (could be fixed price or BIN too) for 1 day. Then at close to 12hrs to the listing's original duration ending (11hrs into a 24hr listing), the software checks the listing and if there are no bids asks eBay to change the duration to 3 days. Then again, this process happens all the way to 7 or 10 days (if the seller is willing to pay the additional 10 day fee).

Why does this help sell-through? Well, the eBay indexing system doesn't really prioritize revised items (its busy handling the millions of fresh new listings every day - correctly so) and thus when you employ the strategy of extension listed above, your item shows up in eBay's search engine (which remember is listed by default as 'ending first") up to 5 times (1/3/5/7/10).

Once Ethical went under, a plethora of these tools hit the market at near-free prices. Nobody but eBay knows how widespread the practice is, but if you were to survey 100 top sellers in each category, I think you would find 15-30 of them utilizing Extenders.

If you want to know what an extended listing looks like, there's typically the word "revised" in parens next to the description as a link. When you click it, you can see that one of the revisions is "listing duration". Here's an example.

eBay's documentation lists extenders now under fee circumvention (I'm guessing the argument is that you receive the same exposure from one listing that others pay for with 4-5) and search manipulation.

This is just starting to ripple through the community and as you would predict, sellers that utilize extenders are a) confused (no official announcement, so is this coming soon or for real now? b) upset that the benefit of Extenders is going away.

Conversely sellers that haven't known about the Extenders are intrigued by the concept and sometimes upset they weren't in the loop.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out over the coming weeks.

eBay Strategies

Notes from the eBay Top Seller Summit

2007-01-21T23:10:00.000-05:00

From Kevin “Sleep is for the Uninspired” Harmon

InflatableMadness.com

Hi guys,

I just returned from the Top Seller Summit in San Francisco. This is eBay's second annual e-comm conference - they invite the top 200 or so sellers on eBay for a 2 day conference.

It's a good event to attend because most of eBays top brass are there and mingling about, so I was able to have many quality conversations with the people at eBay who influence decision and direction.

Here's my main takeaways from the conference:

1. eBay has realized that there are some forces working against them now. They are beginning to acknowledge the level of fraud and to seriously study the growing attrition of buyers. The question is: Can eBay right the ship in time?

2. eBay will be working hard on improving the buying experience - they are rolling out a more detailed feedback 2.0 and working on improvements to the user interface.

3. eBay wants to make eBay fun again. ebay matchups is a good example of this.

I have always said that no matter how I feel about what eBay does as a company, I have never met an eBay employee who I didn't like - to a person they are smart and friendly. The conference was a nice jug of eBay coolade that is appreciated by us sellers.

Now, if the free eBay bag I received just didn't cost $500,000, we'd be in business.

Ha!

Kevin

StartupNation

eBay is introducing Feedback 2.0

2007-01-19T11:13:00.000-05:00

This Wednesday at the EBAY ecommerce forum, Bill Cobb announced Feedback 2.0. Feedback 2.0, which we'll be launching in pilot markets next month, allows buyers to rate transactions on item description, communication, shipping time, and shipping & handling charges. The average of each of the Detailed Seller Ratings is displayed on the seller’s Feedback Profile page. Perhaps it is just me, but this sounds little cumbersome.

In addition, old feedback will be archived. Later this year, EBAY will be archiving all but the last 24 months of feedback history. User's total score will remain, but the percent will be based on just the last 2 years of activity. All comments older than this will be archived. This, on the other hand, is a welcome change.

Only eBay

Cell phone didn't ignite California man

2007-01-19T10:45:00.000-05:00

Fire investigators in California now say a cell phone did not cause a fire that severely burned a man last weekend.

The Vallejo Fire Department said on Thursday that it has ruled out a malfunctioning cell phone as the cause of a fire that on Saturday night caused second- and third-degree burns on more than 50 percent of Luis Picaso's body.

Earlier this week, fire officials believed that the Nokia 2125i cellular phone found in the right pocket of Picaso, 59, was the cause of the fire. But when engineers from Nokia flew to Vallejo and tested the phone, they discovered that the electronic circuitry in the phone was undamaged and that the battery was still functioning.

William Tweedy, an investigator and public information officer for the Vallejo Fire Department, was present when the phone was tested.

"When we reinstalled the battery, the phone still booted up," Tweedy said. "If the battery had malfunctioned or the phone had short-circuited, it wouldn't have worked anymore. And it did, so we could rule out the phone as an ignition source."

Tweedy said the only other possible way the fire could have started was from some kind of smoking materials such as cigarettes, matches or a lighter. Even though none of these materials were found at the scene of the fire, Tweedy said the fire was so intense, it likely destroyed all evidence.

At the time of the fire, Picaso was wearing nylon and polyester clothing, which is highly flammable and likely would have caused the fire to spread quickly. Picaso had also been sitting in a plastic chair, which also would have intensified the blaze, Tweedy said.

Picaso remains in critical but stable condition at U.C. Davis Medical Center in Sacramento.

Cell phone batteries have been blamed for other fires in the past. In July 2004, a young woman in Ontario, Calif., suffered second-degree burns when her Kyocera cell phone burst into flames while in her back pocket. In December, NTT DoCoMo, one of Japan's largest mobile operators, recalled cell phone batteries used in its third-generation handsets because they could generate excessive heat that could short-circuit the phone.

News.com

Skype Takes One Step Further With New Pricing Strategy

2007-01-18T16:37:00.000-05:00

Disruptive pricing gives Skype users more value and choice.

January 18, 2007 – Skype, the global Internet communications company, today announced its new global pricing structure which offers a simple, convenient and cost-effective way for consumers worldwide to call landlines and mobiles over the Internet. The new pricing structure complements the foundation of Skype’s success in letting anyone in the world talk for free, from one Skype software account to another.

The pricing structure is the latest in a series of new steps Skype is taking to give consumers a choice of easy-to-understand, value-based Internet communications packages. Initially focused on Europe, Skype’s new pricing strategy will roll out worldwide during 2007.

When launched in full, the pricing strategy consists of a premium subscription package (Skype Pro), one feature of which removes per-minute charges for SkypeOut calls to domestic landlines and includes a small connection fee.

“People like using Skype to make free calls from one Skype account to another but more and more they are choosing our paid for products that offer excellent value. As a result of this, we’re introducing a new pricing strategy today that will include a premium package. This premium package builds on the success we’ve had in North America and the UK with subscription-based calling promotions. It offers our users more for less because they can buy additional Skype paid for products but for a smaller cost,” said Stefan Öberg, General Manager, Skype Telecoms.

As a part of Skype’s premium package the global dialing rate to a number of countries is also reduced. The first phase of the SkypeOut pricing structure, effective from 13.00 CET on Thursday January 18th 2007, includes a reduction in global dialing rates to 0.017 € per minute for: Czech Republic (including Prague), Guam, Hungary (including Budapest), Israel (including Jerusalem), Luxembourg, Malaysia (including Kuala Lumpur), Puerto Rico and both Alaska and Hawaii in the United States.

For some countries, this represents a reduction of up to 65 per cent.

Skype also confirmed today that its previously announced connection fee rates, applicable worldwide, are now effective. The connection fee is a straightforward set-up charge per call. The Skype Unlimited Calling plan in the U.S. and Canada and the Talk for Britain campaign in the UK do not include a connection fee for national calls.

The connection fee is 0.039 Euro, excl VAT or the equivalent in local currency.

Today Skype users around the world can make free voice and video calls to any other registered Skype users as well as send instant messages, transfer files and participate in Skypecasts which are live moderated conversations with up to 100 people.

Skype users can also take advantage of Skype’s premium calling features, including SkypeOut™ (calls from Skype to traditional landlines or mobiles), SkypeIn™ (a number which can be called from a normal phone anywhere in the world) and Skype Voicemail (takes calls when users are busy or offline).

As the world’s largest Internet communications community, Skype is committed to giving its users the ability to set their conversations free at home, at work and on the move. It is focused on further developing its ecosystem of more than 50 hardware partners and more than 150 Skype-certified devices to broaden the appeal of Skype to a wider base of users who want to use Skype away from the PC, no matter where they happen to be. This is especially true for Skype users who want to take advantage of the mobile Skype experience, which is already accessible to more than 5 million Skype users on over 120 different Windows Mobile Smartphones and pocket PC devices.

For more information, please go to http://www.skype.com/products/skypepro/

Connection Fee Rates Rates Based on Currency* (excl. VAT)

Australian Dollar (AUD) 0.059
Brazilian Real (BRL) 0.09
British Pound (GBP) 0.029
Canadian Dollar (CAD) 0.059
Danish Krone (DKK) 0.29
Euro (EUR) 0.039
Hong Kong Dollar (HKD) 0.39
Japanese Yen (JPY) 4.9
Norwegian Krone (NOK) 0.29
Polish Zloty (PLN) 0.149
Korean Won (KRW) 49
Swedish Krona (SEK) 0.39
Swiss Franc (CHF) 0.059
Taiwan Dollar (TWD) 1.6
US Dollar (USD) 0.039

*If your currency is not listed, the Euro rate is applicable

About Skype Skype is the world’s fastest-growing Internet communication offering, allowing unlimited free voice, video and instant messaging communication between users of Skype Software. With over 136 million registered users, Skype is available in 28 languages and is used in almost every country around the world. Skype generates revenue through its premium offerings such as making and receiving calls to and from landline and mobile phones, voicemail, call forwarding and personalization including ringtones and avatars. Skype also has relationships with a growing network of hardware and software providers. Visit Skype at www.skype.com.

Skype is an eBay company (NASDAQ: EBAY). To learn more visit skype.com.

Access to a broadband Internet connection is required for Skype and all Skype Certified devices and accessories. Skype is not a replacement for your traditional telephone service and cannot be used for emergency calling.

Skype, SkypeIn, SkypeOut, Skype Me, Skype Certified, Skypecasts, associated logos and the “S” symbol are trademarks of Skype Limited.

Skype

Google Phone To Challenge Apple IPhone?

2007-01-18T16:13:00.000-05:00

Engadget is reporting that they have received information from an inside source with product information about the near-mythical Google branded cellular phone, which has been the topic of much speculation over recent months.

There's nothing like a juicy rumor to get the blood pumping in the cold of winter.

I'm not talking about wild speculation and unsubstantiated hearsay; I'm talking about that sort of gossip that you knew was true all along -- the kind that sends tinges of euphoria up your spine, enveloping you in the delight of a full blown "geekgasm" as the object of your desire edges closer to becoming reality.

Okay. Perhaps that's a bit melodramatic.

Nonetheless, I daresay that as news continues to leak concerning Google's venture into the mobile phone market, the fever-pitch among the masses will exponentially mount in a chorus of wonder and elation that will make the buzz surrounding the iPhone look like little more than after dinner conversation at your local senior citizen's center.

Okay, enough adoration, let's get to the nitty gritty details of the Google phone.

First off, it's rumored to be a collaboration between Google and Samsung, which runs contrary to previous speculation that the Silicon Valley juggernaut would partner with Orange to develop its branded mobile phone.

Tech Digest lays out some of the features that you can expect from the Google Phone:

It'll have built-in GPS, allowing Google Maps based navigation features, with a contact application that's a cross between Gmail, Google Talk and more traditional text messaging.

Engadget, who received the initial tip, lets us in on another interesting aspect of the phone that is leaving many scratching their heads:

According to our tipster, the device doesn't have any on-board storage. That's right, all your applications are served up over the network with new apps "attached" to your account via a web interface.

No onboard storage? If that's true, it tells me that Google plans to employ a massive network in order to support such a feature. Perhaps this explains why the company has been buying up so much dark fiber as of late?

None of this is confirmed; but as you have probably already surmised, I really don't care. Everyone and their sister has fallen all over themselves to heap loving spoonfuls of adoration onto the iPhone, and declare it the undisputed champion of mobile phones -- all before the device has even released. So, I'm just glad to see that there could potentially be another key player in the mobile phone arena.

Always remember, competition is a good thing.

Webpronews

LG's new phone resembles iPhone

2007-01-18T16:04:00.000-05:00

South Korea's LG Electronics Co. said Thursday it will start selling next month a new mobile phone that incorporates a buttonless touch-screen resembling the much-hyped iPhone from Apple Inc.

LG's Prada Phone is being produced in partnership with the Italian fashion brand. It is set to go on sale in late February for 600 euros ($780) at mobile phone dealers and Prada stores in Britain, France, Germany and Italy, and comes to Asia in March.

The company did not announce its U.S. plans.

The no-button interface with the entire phone face covered by a touch-sensitive screen resembles the Apple iPhone, announced by the U.S. company earlier this month to much fanfare as an innovation that could shake up the industry.

Apple's iPhone is set for U.S. release in June and will cost $599 for the high-end model with 8 gigabytes of internal memory — the same as the LG model. Other markets will see the iPhone later this year and in 2008.

The LG phone has a wide-screen display and can play most popular digital music and video formats, and has a 2-megapixel camera like the iPhone. Its memory can be expanded with cards.

The iPhone allows Internet use also through regular wireless Wi-Fi networks, and has a full-featured Web browser.

The LG phone is 12 millimeters (0.47 inches) thick, just 0.4 millimeters (0.016 inches) more than the iPhone.

Being Accountable

2007-01-17T15:58:00.000-05:00

I came across this wonderful post "Risk Management Made Easy…". Don't panic. It’s about ACCOUNTABILITY. I would like share with all of you ‘cause I think it’s very useful, you can definitely apply it to your eBay selling business.

Define accountability. Accountability is all about:
1. Assuming full responsibility for the consequences of one's behavior
2. Following through on commitments to buyers
3. Demonstrating reliability and dependability
4. Keeping the service promise
5. Admitting mistakes and taking responsibility for correcting

In other words, accountability simply means responsibility. Read the great write-up by N2Growth. Apply accountability to your eBay selling, automatically you will build up the trust, the positive ratings, the name and most importantly the sales.

eBay Talk

EEF: Bill Cobb keynote, post 4 (FEEDBACK 2.0!!)

2007-01-17T15:57:00.001-05:00

Feedback is foundation of eBay. Love it or hate it, it has enabled eBay's success.

Explained retaliatory negs. Feedback is mostly right, but going to refine it to better meet needs of online shopper. For 2yrs been working on "Feedback 2.0". Lots of community feedback, etc.

Late next month (Feb), outside US are going to phase in FEEDBACK 2.0:

Granularity/specificity - four new sub-categories.

Item description
Communication
Shipping time
S+H terms

Positive feedback % will be based on last couple of yrs activity

Old negatives/positives will archive
Users see most recent (couple years)
This comes out in Spring
Will be very careful in how this rolls out
Testing Intl first (UK/AU/IT) late Feb

Conclusion
2007 will bring major changes to the buyer side - because eBay has to. More competition, drive more buyers to sellers.

Thanks sellers for all they do. Loves working with entrepreneurial sellers. Thanks to sellers from all at eBay.

eBay Strategies

EEF: Bill Cobb keynote, post 3 (T+S)

2007-01-17T15:56:00.000-05:00

Highlighted how important T+S is at eBay. Bad guys are getting smarter, Pierre's vision is still solid, but the BASICALLY part is getting tougher.

Over 2000 employees in T+S fighting the battle vs. the bad guys. Due to this they are going to more actively protect buyers from fraud/bad experiences.

Safeguarding seller IDs for example (this stops fraudulent SCOs). So far fake SCOs are down 80-90%, may need to take additional steps to protect bidder IDs

Another way reducing bad buyer experience is adjusting the seller standards. Repeated information on excessive shipping, late item, INR, bad customer service - causes majority of bad user experiences on eBay.

Historically have allowed practically anyone to sell on eBay with few restrictions, going forward going to significantly raise the bar on who they allow to sell on eBay.

Not fair to the large % of good sellers that small % of bad sellers are driving away buyers.

Example: cross border trade restrictions they started in Q4.

Beginning this week, any new seller who wants to list in US/CA, must offer a safe payment method - paypal/CC.

In October, eliminated private feedback - used to suspend 60%+ of sellers with private feedback. Now they are transparent again.

In 07 there will be more details on how great sellers are advantaged and bad sellers are further restricted.

Counterfeiters - Bill highlighted the changes that have already been instituted here. They are closely monitoring the results, may do more here.

Last week announced doubling of coverage from Paypal protection program. ($1k-$2k on SNAD and INR, other transactions $200 for unqualified items - no processing fee). Buyers love this and sellers should too - makes a statement in confidence of the marketplace.

Shipping and Handling
Covered why it's bad.

Made some progress in 06 with active enforcement - started in June. Cited cell phone category - S+H is down 25% in that category.

Need to be more proactive - developing some product based solutions - sort by total cost, (editorial note: ebay express does this and best match does too) going forward the approach is going to be to put the right incentives into the product and reduce reliance on manual enforcement. No silver bullet, short of regulating, but they are going to keep at it until contained.

eBay Strategies

EEF: Bill Cobb keynote, post 2 (fun!)

2007-01-17T15:55:00.000-05:00

(Bill Cobb keynote continued - post 2)

2007 initiatives

Taking an aggressive approach at T+S issues (S+H/etc.) Reigniting the core auction business - eBay is the heritage and will always be at the center of the experience. Fixed price sellers - that's less about pricing format and more about the entire site (so don't worry).

Improving buyer consideration is job #1 at eBay. In 06 intro'd IT campaign and it has worked - bringing buyers to eBay. (showed 3 IT commercials - kids getting in door, dollhouse/robot, alarm clock).

Last month made some changes (covered previously here) to the management team at eBay - intro'd Philipp Justus (pronounced you-stus NOT Justice) - focused on core.

Hint: Introducing some new 'fun' ways to interact with eBay.

User interface discussion - eBay has done good job, but bar is raising. Historically put reliability on forefront (backend) and added complexity to front-end UI. This has introduced some buyer frustrations. In 2007 going to address the UI side.

Finding
For 2yrs they have been working on a better finding system. eBay Express has different category layout (Magellan). Smart system based on wisdom of crowds, where makes sense will be testing on eBay.com over several months, monitored closely.

Another advancement, is a new search results page - AJAXy with pop-ups when hovering and with feedback on results page (good results so far) Testing across small % of buyers in US/UK/DE.

Another change that is coming is FUN. In 2007, will reassert the concept of fun. eBay Match ups for example. Showed the Fruit cat helmet vs. Meg page.

eBay Strategies

eBay ecommerce forum - Bill Cobb Keynote

2007-01-17T15:54:00.000-05:00

Following Meg Sloan's talk on the eBay buyer, Bill Cobb took the stage after a good networking break. This is being webcast to be presented later today.

2006 recap

Last year focused on ecommerce for first time - on and off eBay

Announced eBay Express

Happy with results - 9/10 buyers said the experience met/exceeded expectations.

EE on GMV trajectory faster than half.com and eBay Stores

Committed to nurturing and growing over time

Unveiled new plan - SIS in core.

Led to unbalance

Did first stab at controlling high S+H costs.

212m registered users (end of q306)

Lumberton NJ - number one eBay community!

More ebay transactions than any other town in US in November

Q4 - Shopping season was dominated by TMX/wii/ps3

This created 'eBay's finest hour' - eBay loves these scenarios

T+S had to do a lot to make sure that all went off without a hitch

Looking forward: 2007

eBay's buyer traffic and conversion to sale is the big differentiator.

Recapped the 4 segments Meg introduced

eBay faces more competition than ever before

Web 2.0 has changed the way people spend time online (youtube/wiki/myspace/etc.)

eBay's success has drawn in more bad guys.

eBay Strategies

ebay buyer - post3 (final for this session)

2007-01-17T15:53:00.000-05:00

(Post 3 of the Meg Sloan talk)

Given this information, who is NOT a great target buyer for eBay?

buyers that see online as last resort

don't like shopping

want speed above all else

What kind of opportunity does focusing on these four segments leave?

Majority of frequent shoppers

Shopping online 160m times/month

Buy 60m items/month

They shop 2X more than other shoppers

(showed video of some of these segments from their on-site/in-home visits to buyers and comments)

One weird guy Chad that spends all day looking for typos to get a deal

The current eBay buyer experience (October 06 dataset referenced)

eBay comes to mind first (good news)

25% - first choice, 80% in the set of first brands to shop online
eBay's preference is 10 points above the next best competitor

The brand is unique and well loved (good news)

70% - eBay is among my favorite shopping sites
1.3 times more likely to be considered a favorite than other online shopping sites
Buyers give eBay high ratings on price, selection and entertainment
eBay's brand dna (compared to goog/amzn) is shopping+entertainment+tech+inet.

Buying on eBay comes with issues. (bad news)

Some of them have significant implications (real bad news)

Why buyers love eBay?

High ratings on price, selection and entertainment

Top buyer issues

Entertainment/fun factor has worn off to some degree

Buyers that think eBay is fun bid 2x of those that don't

Shipping/deals

2/4 segments are price driven - most sensitive to this
Most buyer attrition is due to 'too high' shipping
Total price matters! (could have told you that in 2004 :) )
Shipping costs kills word of mouth

Based on buyer survey here are the top bad things:

Item was late
S+H too expensive
Not as described
Seller unresponsive

Secondary issues:

Never received
Item was damaged
Poorly packaged
Unddeserved negative feedback
sold as genuine, but was not

Some data was presented showing that when these bad experiences happen, the buyers leave (worst case) or start buying less/take a breather.

Who does the buyer blame? Overwhelmingly they blame the seller. Buyers want eBay to focus on:

Shipping (sense a theme here?)

Feedback

Ease of use

Safety

Buyer/seller conflict resolution

eBay Strategies

eBay buyer - post2

2007-01-17T15:52:00.000-05:00

What defines types of online shoppers?

Four segments:

Shopping driven passionates

Convenience driven enthusiasts

Price driven value finders

Price driven bargain seekers

Passionates:

Shopping is in their DNA

Younger, just completed degree or married

Rated by eBay at 4/5 spend/yr

High eBay affinity

Like auctions

Not overly price sensitive

What should seller do to attract passionates?

Highlight brands/style

Personality in listing

Gifting options

Auctions

Convenience Driven Enthusiasts

5/5 $/yr - very attractive

Love shopping for convenience

More females than males - love pets!

What can seller do for Convenience driven enthusiasts?

Offer BIN

Merchandise with flair for fun

Highlight unique hard to find

Expedited shipping

Price Driven Value Finders and Bargain Sellers

Middle age

Higher income

4/5 $/yr on spend

Think eBay has great prices and hard to find items

Like auctions

Think eBay's shipping is too high

Don't like eBay return policies

How can you draw more of these?

Offer returns

Highlight the "deal"

offer detailed product info

List auctions

Offer free shipping or discounts

eBay Strategies

eBay ecommerce forum - Live Blog - Kick off - the eBay Buyer - Meg Sloan post1

2007-01-17T15:49:00.000-05:00

Opening keynote: Meg Sloan, Director, Consumer Research - In-depth view of the eBay Buyer.

About Meg Sloan
Joined eBay in 2004, 12+ yrs conducting market research. Brand and loyalty research guru. Never shared this externally. Runs team of 6 folks - buyer/brand/seller/site/cust sat/buyer.

What does the Consumer Research Team do?
Research team at eBay charged with maintaining a deep understanding of the market and facilitating "ah-ha" moments of consumer insight and clarity.

Five areas of insight:

quantiative surveys

focus groups

one on one interviews

tracking studies

observational research

Covering lots of topics:

marketing development

buyer/seller studies

site experience

buyer/seller sat

eBay brand equity

Research focus
2004 - brand research
2005 - seller research
2006 - Buyer research (based on seller feedback)

2006 - Know thy buyer

How do they do this? Buyer segmentation/research

eBay Strategies

eBay ecommerce forum - Live Blog update by Scot Wingo

2007-01-17T15:47:00.000-05:00

Last night eBay treated about 250 of it's top sellers to cocktails+dinner and opening remarks by John Donahoe, President eBay Marketplaces. He started with some data on the group. The group represents over 7m items sold last year and $500m in annual GMV. The average feedback was around 42k.

Then John hit on some positives about eBay's brand and the last ten years have been great and sellers have been a great partner, etc. They are stepping up communication with sellers and appreciate all the feedback.

John previewed some of the content of the conference by talking about buyers. It's in both eBay and seller's best interest to improve the buyer experience. The topics he talked about were:

Who is the eBay buyer and what do they want? (a talk will start at 9am about this)

How can they improve the buyer experience?

Finding
Ease of use, flows through site
Fun - how can they keep eBay fun and quirky

Feedback - how can they make this better

Shipping and Handling - this is still a big problem when they talk to buyers

The content today is largely focused on these same areas. We have:

eBay buyer experience - understanding the eBay buyer

Bill Cobb keynote

T+S - making the user experience better (the buzz is we will finally see feedback 2.0 and some more on S+H

Leveraging SEO+shopping.com

Top seller panels

Understanding profitability and your eBay biz (I heard they are going to case study glacierbay as an interesting 'what did they do wrong' kind of thing)

Seller reaction has been 'wait and see' so far. We know S+H items can be painful and some sellers that have seen Feedback 2.0 (the granularization of feedback) are concerned that it will increase workload and buyer blackmailing, others see it as a net positive. One seller said that eBay has been in denial about the buyer problem so it was good to see them recognize it and admit it's a problem, but she worries that it's too late.

eBay Strategies

Online music sales doubled in 2006

2007-01-17T14:40:00.000-05:00

Global online music sales nearly doubled in 2006 to about $2 billion, or 10 percent of all sales, but failed to compensate for an overall decline in sales of CDs, the global music industry trade body said Wednesday.

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, or the IFPI, also said it would move to sue Internet service providers if they continued to allow identified digital music pirates — a costly scourge of the industry — to use their networks.

"We don't have the holy grail of digital (online) offsetting the decline of CDs as yet," IFPI Chairman John Kennedy said in London after the release of the group's 2007 Digital Music Report. Kennedy said overall music sales fell approximately 3 percent in 2006.

The IFPI said early last year that it expected online sales to grow enough to compensate globally for the declines that the industry has recorded over the past five years due to illegal file-sharing, piracy and competition from new media.

However, the report showed that growth in online sales has slowed compared with 2005, when sales nearly tripled to $1.1 billion from $380 million in 2004.

Kennedy said he now hoped online sales would compensate for the decline of CDs sometime this year.

"There's nearly the holy grail in three major markets — the United States, Britain and Japan. Next year I would like to be announcing that is the case for around 10 markets," he said.

Alex Zubillaga, Warner Music's executive vice president for digital strategy and business development, said that music companies in the past were too complacent, and needed to innovate in order to attract customers.

"We as an industry have had it too good for too long," Zubillaga said.

Offering additional services and products with album downloads — rather than simply lower prices — proved to boost online sales, Zubillaga said, citing Madonna's last album release. Warner issued three versions of "Confessions on a Dance Floor" — a straight release at $9.99 and two others with bonus material for $11.99 each.

"Each of the $11.99 offerings sold more than the $9.99," said Zubillaga.

In the meantime, the IFPI said it would continue to pursue illegal music downloaders through the courts.

ISPs have been harder to pursue legally than the individual downloaders the IFPI has so far targeted because they can claim they have no knowledge of any piracy occurring on their networks. However, Denmark's supreme court ruled last year that ISPs were obliged to terminate the connections of customers engaged in music piracy.

Kennedy pointed also to a British government consultation paper, which said ISPs that allow illegal music downloads and uploads would face a "legislative clampdown." The Gowers report said ISPs had until the end of 2007 to deal with illegal activity on their network.

Kennedy urged ISPs to voluntarily shut down music pirates — or face legal action.

The IFPI report predicted that online sales will account for a quarter of all sales worldwide by 2010.

Single-track downloads totaled nearly 795 million in 2006, up 89 percent on the 420 million online singles sold in 2005. The United States accounts for the bulk of those sales, with 582 million single tracks sold online in 2006, up 65 percent on 2005.

The U.K. is the world's second-largest market for online music sales, with 53 million single track downloads sold in 2006, double the number sold in 2005.

Kennedy pointed to mobile music sales as a major area for growth this year, with the launch of Apple's much anticipated iPhone and the development of music phones by Nokia Corp. and Sony Ericsson.

Yahoo News!

Skype, Kazaa founders do a Youtube

2007-01-16T15:35:00.000-05:00

SKYPE FOUNDERS Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, who also miffed the music industry with the popular file-sharing website Kazaa, have named their latest web-telly service Joost.

Naturally, webterpreneurs feel they have to make up new words for their offerings so they can better protect them. Mind you, a quick google (vb) reveals some Joosts oot and aboot already.

Labelled a youtube-alike, the pair's hired hands reckon the video service will offer the "best of TV and the best of the internet" while remaining "piracy-proof".

Joost CEO Fredrik de Wahl, said the service would give film makers a way of distributing their wares over the web. He reckons the service will "marry" consumer desire with the industry's interests.

There's a beta version you can try out on the site here.

INQUIRER

Verizon Wireless joins SMS price increase club

2007-01-16T15:32:00.000-05:00

Sprint Nextel started things off by increasing the amount it charges for SMS messages. Cingular dove in next and angered a lot of customers by sticking to its early termination fee despite a 50% price increase for a central service. This week Verizon Wireless announced a similar move, text messages will cost $.15 instead of $.10. This fee applies to both incoming and outgoing messages. T-Mobile remains the only national carrier to keep $.10 texting.

Verizon Wireless' price increase goes live on March 1st. Customers who subscribe to a messaging plan will not see any increase. The FAQ does not make it clear if customers who do not have a text messaging plan will be able to opt out of their contracts without having to pay an early termination fee. Sprint allowed this for a short period of time, but Cingular did not. Some Verizon Wireless customers have reported that customer service reps are offering to disable text messaging without a fee as that is the only portion of service that has had its pricing change.

The actual language in the contract seems to back up what these customers are reporting. You can read the current price change policies of Verizon Wireless, Cingular, Sprint Nextel and T-Mobile below.

MobileTracker

Man's cell phone apparently sets him ablaze

2007-01-16T15:21:00.001-05:00

VALLEJO, California (AP) -- A cell phone apparently ignited in a man's pocket and started a fire that burned his hotel room and caused severe burns over half his body, fire department officials said.

Luis Picaso, 59, was in stable condition Monday with second- and third-degree burns to his upper body, back, right arm and right leg, Vallejo Fire Department assistant chief Kurt Henke said.

Firefighters arrived at the residential hotel Saturday night to find Picaso lying on the bathroom floor after a malfunctioning cell phone in his pants pocket set fire to his nylon and polyester clothes, Henke said.

The flames spread to a plastic chair, setting off a sprinkler that held the fire in check, he said.

Authorities declined to name the phone's manufacturer and model.

The fire and water caused $75,000 damage to the room and a business on the ground floor, Henke said.

http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/01/15/cell.phone.fire.ap/index.html?eref=rss_tech

eBay Members Fear New Policy Will Inhibit Buyer Bids

2007-01-16T15:16:00.000-05:00

eBay's new "Safeguarding Member IDs" (SMI) policy is coming under scrutiny from users who are concerned it will decrease bidding activity on the site. In recent days, members began noticing that when they looked at an eBay auction, they were unable to see bidder User IDs once the bidding had reached $200. Some fear eBay's new policy will have the unintended consequence of increased shill bidding by dishonest sellers, as well as decreasing bidding by buyers concerned about the lack of transparency.

Laurie Farnam, who buys and sells antique furniture on eBay, said, "No way will I get involved if I can't review a bidding history." Farnam said she has never gotten involved in eBay politics, "but I am now. I'm anxious, I'm angry."

eBay launched the SMI policy in an attempt to reduce fake "Second Chance Offers." eBay's Senior Vice President of Global Trust & Safety Rob Chesnut stated that the policy was a "significant step forward in protecting eBay's bidders, who have increasingly become targets for unwanted commercial and malicious spam, such as phishing, spoof, and fake Second Chance Offers." But eBay users like Farnam have questioned why eBay has kept the Second Chance Offer feature given its usage by scammers.

Farnam is an avid clock collector. Her most expensive eBay acquisition was a mantel clock she purchased for over $600 - "a mistake," she said laughingly. She sells some of her collection during lean times - her highest price for a clock sale was over $900. "I still miss it."

Farnam, who has studied the new information eBay provides in place of Bidder IDs, said it's not enough. "You can pick up a scent if someone that's not righteous participates in the auction. I've been burned, and you get an antenna that goes up when you've been burned."

Farnam, who joined eBay in March 2000, said she is also concerned about the message eBay is sending by applying the policy to high-value items only - the policy hides bidder IDs once bidding reaches $200. "So a $1.00 difference in price at $199 doesn't require protection from the bad guys?"

Some users are skeptical that eBay's shill-bidding detection system is adequate, and many rely on their own research to make bidding decisions.

Ken Walton, author of "Fake: Forgery, Lies, & eBay," said he believes eBay's fraud detection is more stringent than when he was selling artwork on the auction site. His book chronicles his exploits as a participant in the biggest known shill-bidding ring on eBay. Walton said masking the identities of bidders would have made it easier for him, and said, "we might have fallen under the radar." Instead, Walton and his cohorts were exposed by their eBay trading partners. Walton pled guilty to fraud in 2001.

Walton said that while ultimately the new feature may not lead to an increase in shill bidding, it will make it easier for those sellers who do use shills to escape detection.

eBay's Chesnut said in his board announcement that eBay has invested heavily in shill detection systems. "We can proactively detect and investigate possible shill bidding scenarios with a higher rate of accuracy than ever before. These backend systems collect more information on selling and bidding activity than our Community has access to, so we can detect patterns and ascertain identities much more accurately" (http://www2.ebay.com/aw/core/200701081004422.html).

eBay is hosting top sellers at its annual Ecommerce Forum this week in San Jose, where eBay North America President Bill Cobb is scheduled to webcast his keynote address in which he may reveal additional initiatives.

http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y07/m01/i16/s01

Google And Growing Security Risks

2007-01-16T14:58:00.000-05:00

A couple of security vulnerabilities with Google lately illustrated how serious HTML injection, cross-site scripting and cookie theft can be... when the cookie is the Google cookie. This got some of us thinking.

Let me start out by saying that I think Google's security, past and present, is very good. HTML injections are very common on many websites, but very rare on Google's server. (Plus, all of this is not a Google-specific problem; it's the problem of any future web office, or "web operating system" - nevermind who's implementing it.)

However, it starts to show that Google, by integrating more and more services on Google.com*, all able to share the same Google Account sign-in, is also exposing its users to growing risks. (The exploits mostly require us to visit a specific URL - but who really checks every Google URL they visit, only "trusting" whatever they bookmarked?) And no security team is perfect; if we'd hypothetically assume a 95% security on average web applications, and a top-notch 99.99% perfect security on Google web applications, that still leaves us with that remaining 0.01% chance people can inject code into Google to get hold of your Google cookie, and then access some of your Google data.

At this moment, much of the data Google stores for us seems trivial. Who's really using Google Docs & Spreadsheets for important data? Well, I know some of us are, but not that many yet. Also, many Google services only expose rather non-sensitive data on you in the first place; your Google Reader reading habits, or which modules you included on the personalized Google homepage, are probably nothing top secret. Some services, on the other hand, contain very private information - like Gmail, which interestingly enough was seemingly successful in providing cookie theft counter-measurements. Or your Google search history.

What I think may be more important than single security incidents though (except for their ability to educate us on the problem) is the general architecture of the "Google Office" - its potential future risks, once more of our data is contained within it, and once more of its services are cross-integrated (for example, the integration of Gmail onto the personalized homepage resulted in an additional privacy problem when someone was able to reproduce your Google Account cookie). In fact, now may be the last good time to discuss these things before the Google Office goes into production full steam.

Today, it almost seems as if every single product team in the Googleplex has the "power" to accidentally introduce a Google Account risk with an HTML injection hole, or another kind of cross-site scripting issue. An exotic Blogger bug was able to reveal your Google Docs, even if you're not blogging with Blogger - an improbable Google Base bug was able to reveal your personalized homepage, even when you've never worked with Google Base**. I would argue: these things happen, individual developers and developer teams make errors. It's impossible not to. There are ways to automatically test against HTML injections, but such tools too need to be handled by humans.

The real problem, and solution, might be on the higher level of the system architecture - the way Google integrates its services and handles cookie data. Right now, the Google Office product partly resembles a mighty convenient & long chain... a chain which is only as strong as its weakest link. Is this a trade-off we'll just have to make with future web apps, or are there ways to improve on the situation... either by users, or those building browsers, or those developing web apps?

What are your thoughts?

*For example, when you enter www.gmail.com, you'll be redirected to gmail.google.com. This way, Google is able to better cross-integrate their services; they can always access the same cookie if they want to. On a side-note, Google's architecture also often allows you to just replace the sub-domain you're on, and the application will still work; you can simply change news.google.com/news to gmail.google.com/news and still view Google News. Google's websites are very much "integrated," and they often share data: as an example, you can enable a feature that lets you view the Google Talk chat history from within Gmail. Or, you can show off your search history trends on the personalized homepage. Naturally, these features are intended to bring advantages to users, and they're all used by us voluntarily.

**This (see previous post) was at least the second XSS hole found with Google Base - I saw the full exploit posted in a by-the-way comment on Digg (while it was still unfixed), among other places -, another one dates back to 2005. Jim Ley argued, "I can't understand why Google don't have at least some security testing", but I believe you also need to consider that Google Inc needs to manage thousands of developers. Jim demanded from Google to "host the Beta on a seperate domain."

http://www.webpronews.com/blogtalk/blogtalk/wpn-58-20070116GoogleandGrowingSecurityRisks.html

NRF predicts 4.8% retail sales increase in '07

2007-01-16T14:55:00.000-05:00

CHICAGO (MarketWatch) - Consumers are expected to keep their spending in check this year, leaving U.S. retail sales 4.8% higher, the slowest year-over-year gain in five years, the National Retail Federation said Tuesday.

The Washington trade association expects the economy to slow in the first half before revving up in the second half. That's the reverse of what happened in 2006, when retail sales climbed 6.3% amid an economic slowdown in the second half. That reflected slower new-home building and home resales combined with higher energy costs and tepid employment growth.

"This year, slow economic growth will be reflected in moderate consumer spending and retail-sales gains," said Rosalind Wells, NRF's chief economist. Her projections do not include sales of autos or receipts at gas stations and restaurants.

She's expecting the retail trends most prevalent in recent years -- luxury retailers doing well compared with those catering to low- and middle-income consumers - to repeat themselves this year.

Online shopping will snare even more customers, the NRF said. ComScore Media Metrix reported Tuesday that December's online spending surged 26% to a record $24.6 billion.

For the first quarter, the NRF is projecting a 3.8% gain followed by a 4.6% increase in the second quarter. That should tick up to a 5.2% rise in the third quarter and a 5.7% hike in the fourth.

The sharpest decline will show up in sales of building materials and at garden-equipment stores, owing to the housing slump and last year's pattern: Strong 20% gains at the beginning of the year plunged to minus-4.3% by the end of the year.

http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/story.aspx?guid=%7B3CAEA672%2DE128%2D4D3C%2DB11A%2D6302F11B55E4%7D&dist=rss

Beer cooler inspired waterproof MP3

2007-01-16T14:50:00.000-05:00

Ask those who ride the waves, and they'll tell you surfing and music are like searing sun rays and cold beverages, wet suits and wakeboards, sand and sandwiches. They just go together.

But until recently, they couldn't be used together, most electronic music players being no match for crushing, soggy waves. But Freestyle Audio is among those shooting to change that, with its signature waterproof MP3 player.

Created by electrical engineer and surfing aficionado Lance Fried in 2004, the San Diego, California-based company has partnered with leading adventure sports firms and retailers, consciously avoiding alliances with big-box retailers. Fried's aim is to create a product that is small, durable, simple and a staple for surfers, wakeboarders, snowboarders, swimmers, and anyone participating in "any type of activity that you either get wet; or sweat."

"We've gotten tons of testimonials from professional athletes and just general consumers that this little unit fits a great need in the market," said Fried. "So we are pretty stoked about it."

Weighing 35 grams and with four buttons (and no screen), the Freestyle MP3 fits snugly into most wet suits or on a small armband. Retailing nationwide at local water-sports shops (and sometimes under the guise of other brands, such as Liquid Tunes) for $150 and up, the player reportedly turns out tunes even when up to 10-feet below water. (Read about other inventors' rush to stay ahead)

Freestyle doesn't offer the only waterproof MP3 player on the market, but surfer and surf industry insider Toby Ogden says that this device's size, durability, and sound quality set it apart.

Regardless of the precise player, surfers say music is integral to their lives -- and an ideal background when they're out on the waves.

"To be able to listen to music in the water is an incredible thing," said Ryan Ragan, a pro surfer the last eight years who is sponsored by Freestyle Audio. "It really gets me amped when I'm [doing] crazy turns and just having a blast. It brought my surfing to a whole new level."

Party player

One other thing that goes with good music and good surfing: A party. Appropriately, that is where Freestyle's waterproof player was born in late 2003.

"I was actually reaching into a cooler to grab a beer, and my MP3 player slipped off my hip and fell in and fizzled," Fried recalled.

The Southern California resident's initial frustration, however, gave way to innovation.

"Living here on the beach and looking out on the surfers everyday, it dawned on me that there was a niche," he said.

With no software required, consumers can charge and install songs onto their Freestyle MP3 via their computer by plugging in their USB port and then dragging-and-dropping songs onto the external drive.

The MP3 player "can take a pretty good beating" on the waves or the slopes, according to Fried and some of his surfer friends. Julia Christian lauds the device's "super small" size and easy-to-use interface, while fellow long-time professional surfer Ryan Ragan (who is sponsored by Freestyle Audio) said he doesn't "go surfing without [the MP3 player]: It's my favorite tool."

"The unit is awesome," added Kassia Meadow, who says she thinks about surfing morning, noon and night. "It's super light, which is killer. And it fits perfectly in your wetsuit or on the little armband [and] you don't have to worry about it getting all jacked up."

javascript:cnnVideo('play','/video/bestoftv/2007/01/15/pioneers.mp3.player.cnn','2007/10/11');

Using Neighbor's Wireless Link: Probation

2007-01-16T14:42:00.001-05:00

SINGAPORE -- A Singaporean teenager who illegally tapped into a neighbor's wireless Internet network -- an offense the city-state deems punishable by jail -- was placed on 18 months' probation by a district court Tuesday.

The court also ordered Garyl Tan Jia Luo, 17, to carry out 80 hours of community service after he admitted linking his computer to his neighbor's wireless router to access the Internet without permission.

Tan could have been jailed up to three years and fined 10,000 Singapore dollars (US$6,500).

Senior District Judge Bala Reddy cited a probation report as saying Tan had been addicted to Internet gaming at the time of the offense, adding the teenager had "few friends, if not none."

Reddy said Tan should seek "disciplined and structured psychiatric and psychological intervention" to cure his addiction.

Tan is the first Singaporean to have been prosecuted and convicted for tapping illegally into a wireless Internet network, an offense under the Computer Misuse Act, according to Tan's lawyer, Sam Koh.

A second Singaporean is currently facing 60 charges of illegally accessing wireless Internet networks.

http://www.newsday.com/technology/wire/sns-ap-internet-charges,0,1835483.story?coll=sns-ap-technology-headlines

Netflix to Be Delivered on the Internet

2007-01-16T14:40:00.001-05:00

LOS GATOS, Calif. -- Netflix Inc. will start showing movies and TV episodes over the Internet this week, providing its subscribers with more instant gratification as the DVD-by-mail service prepares for a looming technology shift threatening its survival.

The Los Gatos-based company plans to unveil the new "Watch Now" feature Tuesday, but only a small number of its more than 6 million subscribers will get immediate access to the service, which is being offered at no additional charge.
Netflix expects to introduce the instant viewing system to about 250,000 more subscribers each week through June to ensure its computers can cope with the increased demand.

After accepting a computer applet that takes less than a minute to install, subscribers will be able to watch anywhere from six hours to 48 hours of material per month on an Internet streaming service that is supposed to prevent piracy.

The allotted viewing time will be tied to how much customers already pay for their DVD rentals. Under Netflix's most popular $17.99 monthly package, subscribers will receive 18 hours of Internet viewing time.

The company has budgeted about $40 million this year to expand its data centers and cover the licensing fees for the roughly 1,000 movies and TV shows that will be initially available for online delivery.

Netflix's DVD library, by comparison, spans more than 70,000 titles, one of the main reasons why the mail is expected to remain the preferred delivery option for most subscribers.

Another major drawback: the instant viewing system only works on personal computers and laptops equipped with a high-speed Internet connection and Microsoft Corp.'s Windows operating system. That means the movies can't be watched on cell phones, TVs or video iPods, let alone computers that run on Apple Inc.'s operating system.

Despite its limitations, the online delivery system represents a significant step for Netflix as it tries to avoid obsolescence after the Internet becomes the preferred method for piping movies into homes.

"This is a big moment for us," Netflix Chief Executive Reed Hastings as he clicked a computer mouse to quickly call up "The World's Fastest Indian" on the instant viewing service. "I have always envisioned us heading in this direction. In fact, I imagined we already would be there by now."

Besides preparing Netflix for the future, the instant viewing system also gives the company a potential weapon in its battle with Blockbuster Inc. As part of an aggressive marketing campaign, Blockbuster has been giving its online subscribers the option of bypassing the mail and returning DVDs to a store so they can obtain another movie more quickly.

Since its 1999 debut, Netflix has revolutionized movie-watching habits by melding the convenience of the Web and mail delivery with a flat-fee system that appealed to consumers weary of paying the penalties imposed by Blockbuster for late returns to its stores.

After first brushing off Netflix as a nettlesome novelty, Blockbuster has spent the past few years expanding a similar online rental service that provoked a legal spat over alleged patent infringement.

Netflix has been able to maintain its leadership so far, building so much momentum that the world's largest retailer, Wal-Mart Stores Inc., abandoned its efforts to build an online DVD rental service in 2005.

In the last three years, Netflix has signed up nearly 5 million more subscribers to become increasingly profitable. Although Netflix won't report its 2006 earnings until later this month, analysts believe the company made about $44 million last year, up from $6.5 million in 2003.

Despite the company's growth, Netflix's stock price has dropped by more than 40 percent over the past three years, shriveling to $22.71 at the end of last week.

The erosion largely reflects investor misgivings about Netflix's long-term prospects.

Once it becomes more practical to buy and rent movies within a few minutes on high-speed Internet connections, few consumers presumably will want to wait a day or two to receive a DVD in the mail. If that happens, Netflix could go the way of the horse and buggy.

Online movie delivery already is available through services like CinemaNow, MovieFlix, Movielink, Vongo and Amazon.com Inc.'s recently launched Unbox. Apple Inc. also is emerging as major player, with hundreds of movies and TV shows on sale at its iTunes store and a new device that promises to transport media from a computer to a TV screen.

But none of those online services have caught on like Netflix's mail-delivery system, partly because movie and TV studios generally release their best material on DVDs first. The studios have had little incentive to change their ways because DVDs still generate about $16 billion of highly profitable sales.

Like already existing online delivery services, Netflix's "Watch Now" option offers a lot of "B" movies such as "Kickboxer's Tears." But the mix also includes critically acclaimed selections like "Network," "Amadeus," "Chinatown" and "The Bridge On the River Kwai."

The studios contributing to Netflix's new service include NBC Universal, Sony Pictures, MGM, 20th Century Fox, Paramount Pictures, Warner Brothers, Lion's Gate and New Line Cinema.

"We are going into this with the knowledge that consumers want to watch (media) in various ways and we want to be there for them," said Frances Manfred, a senior vice president for NBC Universal. "For now, though, we know television is the vastly preferred option."

With its eight-year-old service on the verge of mailing out its billionth DVD, Netflix has been in no rush to change the status quo either.

But Hastings realizes Internet delivery eventually will supplant DVD rentals shipped through the mail, although he thinks it will take another three to five years before technological advances and changing studio sentiment finally tip the scales.

By then, he hopes to have 20 million Netflix subscribers ready to evolve with the service.

http://www.newsday.com/technology/ats-ap_technology11jan16,0,1832964.story?coll=ny-technology-headlines

Skype Founders Unveil TV Service Details

2007-01-16T14:38:00.000-05:00

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands -- The co-founders of the Internet telephone service Skype unveiled the brand name and details of their latest project Tuesday: a new Internet-based television service called Joost.

Entrepreneurs Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, who sold Skype for $2.6 billion to eBay Inc. in 2005, said the new project combines aspects of file-sharing software and regular broadcast television.
oost -- pronounced "juiced" -- may eventually try to move onto television sets, but it will initially focus on making it easier and more fun to watch TV on a computer.

Joost, like Skype, requires users to download free software. In this case, the program will help them browse the Internet for channels and clips they're interested in, rather than make phone calls.

"We're currently in a test phase with a limited 'beta' release, so we have content matching our base," Chief Executive Fredrik de Wahl said in a telephone interview. "Comedy, sports, music, documentaries."

He said the company has deals with Warner Music, "Bridezillas" producer September Films and "Big Brother" creator Endemol NV, among others, but plans to make content deals globally as the service grows.

Joost is owned by Luxembourg-based TVP Holdings SA, but it has offices in New York, London and Leiden, Netherlands, and expects to incorporate under the Joost name.

The Joost browser will be open for other software developers to create their own features. "They may be able to make interactive plug-ins we can't even think of," de Wahl said.

The service will be ad-supported, but advertising will be briefer and less frequent than on regular TV. Viewers will have a broader selection of programming and will be able to watch whenever they want.

Daiwa Securities telecom analyst James Enck said that Joost's biggest challenge will be competition it faces from a host of rival products and services, but with Zennstrom and Friis behind it, it has to be seen as a serious player.

"I would be tempted to back them as people who will do well," Enck said.

Zennstrom and Friis succeeded under similar circumstances with Skype, and earlier built and sold the file-sharing program Kazaa.

"History suggests, they introduced two of the most revolutionary -- disruptive -- products in the history of the Internet, and the most viral. Possibly this is a hat trick," Enck said.

Enck, who has tested Joost, said that at the moment, so-so video quality was a potential problem. But overall, the product is noteworthy for "ease of use, a nice interface, and intuitive design" he said. The same ingredients played a key role in Skype's success.

CEO de Wahl said that unlike the original Kazaa, Joost will be seeking to work with content owners to prevent piracy. He said he hoped telecommunications companies wouldn't see it as a potential threat the way that Skype is.

Many telecoms hope to sell services streaming video onto television sets using the technology known as IPTV, or Internet Protocol TV.

Joost faces stiff competition from many other corners. The Internet is already crowded with free online channels, file sharing programs like BitTorrent, and video download services such as Google Inc.'s YouTube.

And then there's plain old television, and devices that piggyback off of it like VCRs, digital video recorders such as TiVo or more recently, gadgets like Slingbox that send TV shows elsewhere.

Friis said that Joost was the logical successor to Kazaa and Skype.

"Peer-to-peer technology is perfect for delivering broadcast in a very scalable way on the Internet," Friis said in a videotaped interview on the company's Web site.

Translation: Joost's users will contribute some of their bandwidth to sharing video streams at the same time they download them for viewing, making it possible for the company to broadcast to a large audience from just a few computer servers distributed around the world.

The company is accepting applications for a limited number of people who want to try out the service, and said it intends to "rapidly expand." It did not set a date for an official product launch.

Friis said the pair began building the company under the code name "The Venice Project" immediately after selling Skype and it now has around 150 employees.

http://www.newsday.com/technology/wire/sns-ap-netherlands-internet-television,0,4754870.story

Google Has 'Ambitious Plans' to Improve Google Base in New Year

2007-01-15T10:33:00.000-05:00

An Associate Product Manager posting on the Official Google Base blog on Friday said that the company has ambitious plans to make Base even better for providers and searchers in 2007. He listed four items on the company's agenda:

Helping you format and describe your items better so they're easier for searchers to find on Google
Providing more data about your items with expanded stats and reporting
Improving the bulk upload creation process with better error messages, faster processing times, and more options to give us data
Making it easier to develop applications and mashups with the Base API

Google Base includes online merchants' catalog feeds as well as diverse offerings such as job listings and recipes. Google Base items have a chance of showing up on search results pages on Froogle, Google Maps and on the main Google web search pages. The service turned one year old in November.

http://googlebase.blogspot.com/2007/01/big-plans-for-2007.html

Wall Street Divided Over eBay's Q4 results

2007-01-11T09:24:00.000-05:00

In the last week as the dust has settled on Q4, an interesting divide has started to become apparent amongst the Wall St. analysts that follow eBay. I spent some time this weekend reading most of the preview reports and it seems the main area where the firms differ in their viewpoint is not on the listing counts which they all admit were not as robust as they hoped (anywhere from 5-15% below expectations), but in the revenue generated from those listings.

The mid-point of eBay's transaction revenue guidance is $1.052b and this is the part Wall St. is watching very closely. Of course the performance of PayPal and Skype will play a factor, but all eyes are on the core business and it's corresponding revenue.

This is oddly similar to the 2004 Q4 season when signs of eBay's slowing first came to light when Q4 results failed to delight and the company's stock was hit very hard and hasn't really recovered since. Given the significance of that historical data point, I thought it would be useful to readers to dig into this because as a seller, you have "hitched your wagon" to the eBay star, so understanding how the financial world looks at the company can be important.

The Bulls would argue that while the listings were a little light, due to improved conversions and ASPs, eBay's revenue/listing will be significantly higher thus making up for any gap from listing revenues and potentially generating net positive results ahead of expectations.

Bears don't see it that way. they argue that in order to cover the listings miss, eBay needs to have increased revenue/listing 5-10%. Revenue per listing has been trending down since Q104 so this seems unlikely.

In the Bull camp, you have a sampling:

Justin Post (Merrill) - BUY - listings good, $20-30m upside
Bob Peck (Bear Stearns) - Outperform - $33 price target - Listings at 646m met target.
Imran Kahn (JP Morgan) - overweight - Listings targets were met.

In the Bear camp, you have:

Jeetil Patel (DB) - HOLD - $29 target - 640m listings in Q4, represents 10% y/y core growth. GMV growth at 14% y/y for the Q is below the 18% they wanted to see. The UK has slowed and DE is not growing at all.
Safa Rashtchy (Piper Jaffray) - Under perform - $25 target. Listings 10% below expectations, 07/08 too aggressive, need to come down. Q4 revenue miss of $33-53m possible.

I have to admit to being somewhere in the middle. Amongst eBay's largest sellers, this was a great holiday season. We definitely saw a stronger y/y listing increase than the aggregate numbers are showing and that was due to definitely increased conversions during Q4. On ASPS, we saw an increase there, but it's due to the mix of goods sold not due to consumers willing to pay more. This is an important distinction. It's assumed when someone says that ASPs on eBay are up, that sellers+Wall St. frequently view this as an indication that buyers are willing to may for goods. That's not the case and as long as I've been following eBay, prices have been on the decline for like goods year over year. So when ASPs are going up, what we see happening is a mix shift of goods. For example, if you have 50% of GMV from the video game ($20 ASP) and 50% GMV from the golf category ($120 ASP), and that switches to 25%/75%, the ASP will move up significantly. This mix change happens within the total ebay world at a Macro level and even at a micro-level (the individual seller level). We frequently see sellers abandon lower price items because the amount of work and small margins on a < $20 item are no longer worth the hassle on eBay. Thus those sellers tend to only put on eBay items over $20. This moves the ASP up, but it's not necessarily a positive for eBay because the selection of the good < $20 items has been degraded.

In any case, I think eBay still has a tough road ahead. In 07 it will become apparent that eBay Express isn't solving any problems, Skype is not going to be generating high-margin dollars any day soon, Europe is slowing and Asia is pretty much done. eBay has two places to turn for growth: core US/Europe and acquisitions. I don't think the markets would look favorably on another big acquisition (e.g. facebook for $Xb), so that leaves really one option. A healthy eBay core is good for the entire market so I'm actually viewing that eBay is being somewhat forced to address core's issues as a long-term positive. The biggest risks are:

a. Is it fixable?
b. Can it be fixed quickly
c. Will eBay make the hard decisions that it takes to fix core?

We'll know the answer to the Q4 question on Jan 24th when eBay reports.

What do you think eBay Strategies' readers - will eBay come out of Q4 with a 20-50m beat on revenue or 20-50m miss? Are the core issues fixable and will eBay do what it takes to make the changes? This is your time to make your 2007 predictions.

Note: Due to the high rate of comment spam, I had to turn on comment approval, it may take 24-48hrs for your comment to appear now, but I will get to it and only filter out irrelevant spam.

http://ebaystrategies.blogs.com/ebay_strategies/2007/01/wall_street_div.html

Skype says time is not ripe for cell phone version

2007-01-11T09:19:00.000-05:00

LAS VEGAS--eBay's Skype believes the cell phone world is not ready for a version of its Internet telephone service that can be downloaded on any mobile phone, because of high carrier charges, the company's hardware and software business development chief said on Wednesday.

Skype uses a broadband Internet connection to place a voice call, cutting out the telephony network for which telecoms operators charge by the minute. Skype calls to other broadband-connected Skype users are free, and Skype calls to normal phones are inexpensive.

If a cell phone customer had an inexpensive data connection, then using Skype to make long distance calls, especially, could be at substantial savings--but so far there are few such cheap data plans.

The company recently unveiled a version of Skype, running on a Nokia phone, that works on the third-generation wireless broadband network that is owned by 3, heightening anticipation that Skype would soon become available for more mobile phones. 3 is the Hutchison Whampoa-owned network in Britain.

But Eric Lagier, in an interview at the Consumer Electronics Show here, said that while development work is being carried out, most of the other telecoms network operators had not yet created attractive flat-fee wireless broadband packages that are needed to take full advantage of Internet calls.

In fact, most carriers charge significant amounts of money per megabyte downloaded and sent to a mobile phone.

"We don't want to be in a situation where we say: 'Skype is free' and then at the end of the month the user gets this huge broadband bill," Lagier said.

Wireless operator 3 is a rare case of a mobile network carrier which has opened up its fast network at relatively low prices. For 5 pounds ($9.69) per month, a subscriber gets unlimited Skype calls, as well as unlimited Internet access, Podcasts and Windows Live Messenger.

"You can now make Skype calls at home, at work or on the move," said Lagier, adding that moves by operators like 3 put pressure on other mobile operators to rethink their wireless broadband pricing strategies.

Even if consumers would want to use Skype on another telecommunications network, the software would not work on it. The reason is that it was developed to run on a specific part of the 3 network which requires cooperation from the carrier, Lagier said. "We use a voice channel as the bearer of the call."

Other companies are already jumping in the gap Skype is leaving open. British start-up Truphone, which operates from an organic farm south of London, is offering Internet calling software as a free download, initially designed for Nokia phone.

It targets phones that also have a Wi-Fi wireless broadband connection, such as the N-Series models from Nokia. When phone users are in a Wi-Fi hotspot, which can be their home, office or public hotspot, they can use it to make free calls to other Truphone users, or at low costs, to normal landline phones.

When they are outside the hotspot area, they can use the phone as a normal cell phone.

Skype software is also available on Wi-Fi phones, which have been designed specifically for Skype, but these phones cannot make calls on a cell phone network.

Skype, which has more than 5 million users online at any given time, was acquired by eBay for up to $4.1 billion last year.

http://news.com.com/Skype+says+time+is+not+ripe+for+cell+phone+version/2100-7352_3-6149309.html?tag=html.alert

eBay to buy StubHub for $310 million

2007-01-11T09:18:00.000-05:00

Online auctioneer eBay has agreed to buy sports ticket reseller StubHub for $310 million in cash, the companies said on Wednesday, confirming an earlier report the deal was imminent.

In a statement, eBay said the agreement has an estimated total price of $310 million, which will include StubHub's net cash at the time of the deal's closing. The final amount will be determined based on a formula at the time the deal closes.

The acquisition is expected to close in the first quarter of this year, subject to pending approvals by regulators and StubHub shareholders. More details will be revealed at the time of eBay's fourth-quarter conference call on January 24, it said.

StubHub, which was founded in 2000, had more than $400 million in gross ticket sales last year. It has emerged as the leading independent player in the online resale market for sports tickets. Fans using the service can avoid the perils of scalping unused tickets.

eBay is StubHub's biggest competitor. Other major rivals include InterActiveCorp's Ticketmaster and Craigslist, along with gray-market stadium scalpers.

"StubHub has been extremely successful in the online tickets segment, and it's a perfect complement to eBay's tickets business," Bill Cobb, president, eBay North America Marketplaces, said in a statement announcing the deal.

In 2002, San Jose, Calif.-based eBay had come close to acquiring StubHub of San Francisco for $20 million, but that tentative agreement fell apart at the last minute over price, a source familiar with that deal said.

eBay shares closed down 45 cents, or 1.51 percent, at $29.30 on Nasdaq on Wednesday following reports eBay was ready to buy StubHub for a figure in the "low $300 millions."

StubHub offers a secure way to connect buyers and sellers of tickets, with a money-back guarantee to insure that buyers are not cheated out of tickets. Sellers send tickets via overnight delivery to buyers and StubHub acts as middleman to ensure the privacy of buyers.

StubHub boasts resale relationships with 30 big name professional and college sports teams, Fluhr said in an interview last month. It has begun to expand into the resale market for music concerts, theater tickets and other events.

"The strategic merits are fairly obvious: eBay, while being one of the largest ticket resellers is not the best known in the market. The company is picking up the best known brand and solidifying its position as the dominant online market place," said RBC Capital analyst Jordan Rohan.

The U.S. secondary ticket market had a turnover around $10 billion a year. This is in addition to the $25 billion primary ticket market not just for sports, but for music and other entertainment, Fluhr said.

The company first raised $2.1 million in funding in 2001 and has received an undisclosed amount of funding in additional rounds since then. Its last funding round was in 2005.

Investors include Allen & Co., Frank Biondi, Sandy Robertson of Francisco Partners and Steve Young, the ex-quarterback of the San Francisco 49ers, Fluhr said.

http://news.com.com/eBay+to+buy+StubHub+for+310+million/2100-1038_3-6149314.html?tag=html.alert

A Closer Look At The iPhone

2007-01-10T17:17:00.000-05:00

New Skype Internet Phones Enable Internet Calling Without a PC

2007-01-09T19:36:00.000-05:00

LAS VEGAS (CES BOOTH #35974), January 8, 2007 – Skype, the global Internet communications company, is setting Internet conversations free at the 2007 International Consumer Electronics Show with today’s debut of the first available Skype™ desktop Internet phones, bringing more flexibility in how users place Skype Internet calls at home or at work.

This new class of devices enables consumers and small business users to call other Skype users, mobile phones or landlines via broadband Internet connections, without needing to be directly connected to computers.

“Skype users tell us that they want to put Skype to use in multiple ways, both at home and at work,” said Eric Lagier, Director, Business Development, Hardware and Mobile. “With these new desktop Internet phones, consumers and small business users will have more flexibility to make Internet calls and enjoy the great Skype cost savings and sound quality without needing a computer to fire up Skype.”

The two new desktop Internet phones announced today are IPEVO’s Solo.1 and TOPCOM’s Webt@lker 5000 with Skype.

The user interface on these new desktop Internet phones is familiar to anyone who has used Skype on a computer and includes exactly the same calling features. With built-in Skype software and large 2.4-inch color screens, these devices let users select, manage or add new contacts, as well as perform other contact list operations. Users without Skype accounts can also register for Skype through their device.

Skype Certified desktop Internet phones are perfect for use in home offices and small business settings. In addition to free Skype-to-Skype calls, these devices bring Skype’s premium features, including SkypeOut™ (cheap calls from Skype to traditional landlines or mobiles), SkypeIn™ (a number that lets users receive calls from landlines and mobiles on Skype) and Skype Voicemail right to users’ fingertips.

Please note, just as with Skype running on a computer, Skype embedded in a desktop Internet phone or other handset is not a replacement for your traditional telephone service and cannot be used for emergency calling.

Combining the powerful communications functions of Skype with the flexibility to access Skype without a PC, the new Skype desktop Internet phones will both be available from the Skype web store at skype.com/store beginning in March 2007.

http://about.skype.com/2007/01/new_skype_desktop_internet_pho.html

Health Insurance Lingo - A Glossary of Terms for Small Business Owners

2007-01-09T13:30:00.000-05:00

Navigating the health-insurance maze is a little easier if you understand the terminology. Here’s a guide to most of the important terms you’ll need to know as a small business owner:

Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association: The national trade organization that links 38 independent regional health insurance companies in the United States. Some of the BCBS companies are not-for-profit. The association operates through a series of administratively independent franchises offering insurance plans within defined regions.

Catastrophic health insurance: It protects you against the high cost of treating severe injury or long illness. These policies usually cover some, if not all, of your medical expenses above the maximum liability limit of another insurance policy.

Co-pay: This is your out-of-pocket cost per doctor visit under the terms of your policy, often $5 to $25 for each visit.

Co-insurance: Ever hear of an 80/20 or 50/50 policy? It’s a policy with a “co-insurance” provision, and is typically less expensive than other policies.

Essentially, you pay an annual deductible, then your insurance company pays a percentage of your expenses after that (e.g. 80 percent in an 80/20 policy). You pay the difference (20 percent in an 80/20 policy). This type of policy also has a lifetime maximum, which limits the amount the insurance company pays toward health-care expenses in your lifetime.

Deductible: The amount you agree to pay out-of-pocket toward health care expenses each year. It’s usually true that a higher deductible means a lower insurance premium.

Drug coverage: Most policies have some prescription drug coverage, but don’t assume it’s there. Ask about it, and be sure you understand how the coverage works (e.g. Is there a co-pay, does it cover brand-name drugs, etc.).

Evidence of insurability: Proof of a person’s physical condition that affects acceptability for insurance or a health-care contract.

First-dollar coverage: Insurance with no “front-end” deductible. Your coverage begins immediately for any covered benefit. It’s common for many plans to provide first-dollar coverage for preventive care such as annual physical exams and immunization for children.

Guaranteed renewability: Be sure that your health insurance cannot be cancelled after you become sick. You need “guaranteed renewability” in your policy.

Health Maintenance Organization (HMO): A plan that covers visits to doctors in a network defined by the HMO. If you need to see a specialist or doctor outside of the network, you need a referral or approval from the HMO.

High-risk pools: Thirty states operate these groups for the uninsurable. They guarantee to issue a health insurance plan, although at a higher cost.

HIPAA: Primarily affecting the small-group and individual markets, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) was designed to allow portability of health insurance between jobs. It also required the passage of a federal law to protect personally identifiable health information.

Medical underwriting: Most individual policies are written against the specific medical status of an insured individual, while group policies (usually 10 or more employees) typically are not. Under this type of coverage, someone with a pre-existing condition or illness may not get coverage, or their coverage may be more expensive.

Out-of-pocket expenses: Your portion of health-care costs that are not reimbursed by the insurer, including deductibles, co-payments and co-insurance.

Preferred Provider Organization (PPO): A plan that covers visits to doctors in a network. If you go to a doctor outside the network, a smaller portion of your expenses are covered. The advantage of a PPO is the ability to choose doctors without referrals or approval, which isn’t the case with an HMO.

Pre-existing conditions: For insurance purposes, a pre-existing condition exclusion must relate to a condition for which medical advice, diagnosis, care or treatment was recommended or received during the six-month period before an individual's enrollment in a new policy plan.

Portability: A requirement that health plans provide you continuous coverage without waiting periods if you move from one plan to another. Portability requirements vary by state. In some, you get no credit for prior coverage and must wait, uninsured, during the entire pre-existing condition exclusion period.

Report card: An accounting of the quality of services rendered by comparable providers over time. You can use report cards to choose a health plan or doctor, or check up on the overall effectiveness of your current plan or provider.

Risk pool: A legislatively created program that groups together individuals – sometimes including entrepreneurs – who can’t get coverage in the private sector.

Waiting periods: The time an individual must wait to become eligible for benefits for a specific condition after overall coverage has begun.

http://www.startupnation.com/pages/articles/health-insurance-lingo.asp?src=nw

eBay's China Competitor Alibaba Launches Ecommerce Software

2007-01-09T13:26:00.000-05:00

Alibaba Group has launched Alisoft, an online business-software provider serving small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) in China. Alibaba named Oliver Wang General Manager of the new company and said Alisoft will also assume responsibility for Alibaba's instant messaging services.

Alibaba competes with eBay and PayPal in China with its TaoBao online auction site and Alipay, its online-payment service. Alibaba also operates Alibaba.com, an online B2B marketplace for global and domestic China trade, and Yahoo China, a leading search engine and portal acquired from Yahoo Inc. in October 2005.

Alisoft came out of a project founded in 2004 to create products tailored to SMEs engaged in ecommerce, and will initially target Alibaba's reported 18 million SME customers. Jack Ma, CEO of the Alibaba Group, said in a press releae, "E-commerce is changing the way companies do business, from communications, to customer relationship management, to after sales services. Alisoft will provide easy solutions for customers to integrate e-commerce with their back-end systems." The Wall Street Journal reported that Alibaba plans to expand overseas and more than triple the size of its staff beyond mainland China (paid subscription required to view: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB116826159650470136.html).

Alisoft's online, on-demand business services can be accessed through its website (Alisoft.com). It is currently offering five different on-demand applications:

Customer relationship management (CRM)
Inventory management
Sales force management
Financial tools
Marketing information management

Alisoft's business software services come in three editions: global trade, domestic China trade and individual (C2C) trade. The company said that in less than one year of free testing, Alisoft's web based software services have attracted more than 500,000 active users and more than three million registered users. Alisoft will begin to charge a fee for some of its business software services in the first half of 2007.

In the U.S., many eBay sellers have relied for years on software - often custom-built or provided by third-party vendors - to manage their eBay listings. Some have migrated to sophisticated multi-channel software solutions. By providing Chinese companies with ecommerce software to improve efficiencies, Alibaba could potentially increase listings on its B2B and C2C websites.

And by controlling inventory management through a web-hosted solution, it may also give Alibaba influence over selling channels. Alibaba's Vice President of International Marketing Porter Erisman said the company will be make Alisoft available for use on multiple channels - Alisoft customers will not be locked into Alibaba and Taobao. When asked if that specifically includes eBay's new Chinese venture with Tom Online, Erisman said yes, "so long as their platform remains open for services like ours."

Alisoft will also assume responsibility for the Alibaba Group's real-time business communications tools. The Group's B2B and C2C instant messaging services will be merged into one service, under the name "Ali Wang Wang."

Alibaba estimates that among China's more than 40 million SMEs, less than 10 percent have adopted advanced software applications, far lower than the average of 60 percent in more mature western markets. Alibaba said Alisoft's web-based software model overcomes the challenges of software piracy, providing a sustainable business model while fostering innovation in the business software industry.

http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y07/m01/i09/s03

Alibaba's Software Strategy Could Hurt eBay in China

2007-01-09T13:25:00.000-05:00

Any eBay seller can tell you the value of software to manage inventory, schedule listings and streamline customer service. eBay's Chinese competitor is paying attention, and has launched software for its customers. Online auction firm Alibaba launched a new software division, Alisoft, to provide its Chinese customers with ecommerce software to manage inventory, customer relationship management, sales force management, and also provides financial tools and marketing information management.

A critical function of ecommerce software is the ability to sell on multiple channels, something eBay software does not provide (but third-party vendor solutions do provide). Alibaba said it will allow customers to sell on multiple marketplaces through Alisoft, as long as those marketplaces remain open to Alisoft.

eBay would typically be reluctant to allow a competitor access to its API (Application Programming Interface) - the technology that helps third-parties launch listings to eBay, for example. But China is anything but typical, and it will be interesting to see if the new joint venture between eBay and Tom Online will support Alisoft as a developer while its parent remains a competitor. The fact that the joint venture will not be integrated with the eBay global platform may make it easier for eBay to cooperate with Alisoft.

Alibaba's software is a hosted system, making customers more reliant on Alibaba since information resides on Alibaba's servers, not the customer's own computers. While there are other advantages to a web-hosted service for both Alibaba and its customers, it clearly gives Alibaba an advantage over its competitors.

Cell Phone Advertising is Taking the Leap

2007-01-09T13:24:00.000-05:00

The next major competitive arena for advertisers is clearly cell phones and they seem to be leaping into the fray with enthusiasm.

Sprint was the first to offer this but others such as Verizon and AT&T are not far behind. Even Google is teaming up with Orange on a new cell phone that will undoubtedly have its share of advertising.

Naturally the marketing world has been abuzz on these developments, with much of the commentary negative. Rather surprisingly a major Montreal marketing agency has also come out against this new channel for advertising. Of course they're now sporting a new name (Sid Lee) and a new philosophy so perhaps that's the explanation. As they explain on their Conversational Capital blog:

We'd like to argue against unrestrained mobile advertising from another perspective. We're against networks selling unsolicited exposure on the networks consumers are paying to build and maintain.

Unless this is a clever campaign to generate extra conversational capital, it would seem to be a somewhat simple view of the situation.

Clearly the most effective advertising is acceptable to its targeted audience. That was the truism that the J. Walter Thompson Company enunciated early in 2005 when it was reborn as JWT. Their ideas were set out in a JWT Trendletter in May 2005 (PDF). That included the following message:

We create ideas for our clients that people want to spend time with. We believe Time is the new currency. The more people who spend time with a brand the better.

They were picking up a theme that had then been around for at least five years. A variety of phrases have been coined to describe it but Permission Marketing or Pull Marketing are particularly apt. It all links in with the notion started by the Cluetrain Manifesto and culminating in Time Magazine nominating us all ("You") as Person of the Year in 2006. In other words we the consumers are in control. Advertisers must be smarter to attract our interest rather than triggering our irritation. Anyone proposing old-fashioned Push Marketing that just pushes the ads 'in your face' should be laughed out of court.

If advertisers can be smart and create ads that we 'want to spend time with' and the cell phone service is thereby cheaper, then we are all the winners.

http://www.webpronews.com/blogtalk/blogtalk/wpn-58-20070109CellPhoneAdvertisingisTakingtheLeap.html

Bad Customer Service Goes a Long Way in the Wrong Direction

2007-01-08T22:58:00.001-05:00

This happens only once in a great while, but when it does it really especially stands out – in a terribly bad way.

I actually boldly announced in a small business establishment this past weekend to anyone within earshot that I will never ever return to that particular place of business again because of the way they treated me as a customer.

Now, I’m generally pretty tolerant, especially when dealing with entrepreneurs. But in this case I was just totally shocked and blown away at how little this business cared about me. Here’s what happened:

The gas pump I was using was pumping very slowly. So slowly that I considered stopping at 2 gallons & going to another gas station. But I decided to stick it out since the time it would have taken to drive somewhere else may not have been worth it. Well, the pump was going so slowly, that I was watching the numbers crawl on the pump & didn’t notice that the pump did not automatically shut off once my tank was full. Gasoline was dripping down the side of my car onto the ground. It may have been a couple gallons of gas.

I went inside the convenience store to let them know about the gas on the ground and I was attacked for not attending the pump. I explained that I stood right next to the pump the entire time (watching the numbers slowly move on the pump) but I was still rudely treated.

It got worse from there and I’ll spare you the details but I really truly did announce to the 8-10 customers in the store my intention of never ever returning to do my business here. The rest of the day I told everyone I know in the neighborhood (this station is the closest one to my house) about my experience and received commitments from all that they will join in my boycott.

It’s been a few days and I’ve calmed down about it, but I will stand by my personal boycott and mentally count the $30 per fill up that I am spending elsewhere. Let’s see, that’s $30 per week for 52 weeks/ year – that’s over $1,500 I won’t spend at that station during 2007.

http://www.startupnation.com/blog/entry.asp?ENTRY_ID=429

With lead slipping, Yahoo focuses on wireless

2007-01-08T15:30:00.000-05:00

Yahoo Inc. and rival Google Inc. both announced new cell-phone initiatives on Monday, highlighting how these two major Internet players have shifted their battle to the mobile sector.

Yahoo unveiled a new search engine and portal designed exclusively for mobile phones. In addition, both Yahoo and Google Inc. announced Monday that they've reached deals to distribute their software on cell phones made by Samsung.

The battle to win the hearts and minds of cell-phone users is intensifying, as the amount of money spent to advertise within these features keeps soaring. This year, there will be $1.5 billion spent on ads that show up on mobile phones, according to various estimates, and that tally will double by 2010.

"There are several reasons why 2007 could be a watershed year for this market," said Andy Castonguay, a wireless analyst at the Yankee Group, a technology research firm.

What's more, the amount of growth associated with Internet search and other mainstays on the wired Web, while continuing at a healthy clip, has shown signs of slowing as the numbers of users is beginning to approach saturation levels.

The importance of Yahoo's mobile push is heightened because of its struggles on the wired side. In November, some Net traffic monitors concluded that MySpace, the upstart social network owned by News Corp. , supplanted Yahoo in the rankings, something that's expected to have a negative impact.

Arguably the most important of the new wrinkles from Yahoo is oneSearch, an engine designed for mobile phones that recognizes the "intent" of a search to better streamline results in a format better suited for mobile phones, according to Yahoo.

For instance, entering just the name of a sports team can generate scores and schedules, rather than just a listing of Web pages with the teams name on them.

Yahoo also said Monday that it has expanded relationships with two major handset makers.

The company's features will now be available to owners of BlackBerry devices made by Research In Motion Ltd., which has partnered with Yahoo since 2005 to distribute other mobile versions of its services. Yahoo also reached similar deals with Nokia Corp., the world's leading handset maker, to add its software to Nokia's wireless tablet.

Along these lines, Yahoo's search engine for phones will be the exclusive provider of mobile search via Opera Software's popular Internet browser for handsets.

Samsung said Monday that it plans to expand the number of its handsets that come preloaded with Yahoo features this year, and already has launched its first such mobile handset, the SGH-E570.

Not to be undone, Google announced a deal with Samsung, which Google describes as a "global cooperation" to provide mobile-phone users with access to Google's e-mail, search and mapping features.

"Google is dedicated to providing users around the world with easier access information and services when they are mobile," Google wireless products and strategy director Deep Nishar said in a statement.

http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/story.aspx?guid=%7B0CE05779%2D7F5B%2D491A%2D86C0%2DF6A712EE7232%7D&dist=rss

Google and Samsung team up to streamline mobile Internet link

2007-01-08T15:28:00.000-05:00

Google and Samsung announced an alliance to make it easier to access the search engine's Internet services from the South Korean electronic giant's mobile telephones.

Samsung mobile telephones equipped with Google software applications will enable users worldwide to search the Internet, check email, and map routes, according to the companies.

The mobile telephones will be designed with a Google icon on the option menu to allow single click connection to Google search, G-mail, and maps, the Mountain View, California, search colossus said.

Samsung has already launched, the Ultra Edition 13.8, a camera mobile telephone with Google mobile search and G-mail.

Samsung's alliance with Google represented a commitment to "a ubiquitous world where mobile enables our consumers to access information about anything, anywhere, anytime," president of Samsung's Telecommunication Network Business president Kitae Lee said in a release.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070108/tc_afp/usskoreainternet

"Good year" ahead for U.S. economy

2007-01-08T15:17:00.000-05:00

The U.S. economy should experience a "good year" in 2007 with moderate growth and lower inflation, said an influential Federal Reserve official on Monday.

"Conditions appear to be in place for a good year for the U.S. economy, one market by growth that is moderate and sustainable and by inflation that will be lower than last year's," said Donald Kohn, the Fed's vice-chairman.

Kohn's views on the economic outlook are considered important by other top Fed officials. Kohn has spent his entire career at the central bank, rising to become a top Fed staffer under former chairman Alan Greenspan before he was appointed to the board.

In October, Kohn first said a soft landing appeared likely, even though it "seems too good to be true." See full story.

With two months more economic data in hand, Kohn stuck to his soft-landing forecast.

"The economy appears to be weathering the downturn in housing with limited collateral effects and inflation appears to be easing with the aid of lower energy prices, well-anchored inflation expectations, and competitive labor and product markets," Kohn said in a speech prepared for delivery to the Atlanta Rotary Club.

Kohn stressed it was too early for the Fed to lower its guard against inflation, suggesting the central bank will retain its hawkish inflation language after its next meeting on Jan. 30-31.

"Despite the recent favorable price data, I believe it is still too early to relax our concerns about whether the run-up in price pressures in the spring and summer of last year is truly unwinding and whether it is unwinding rapidly enough to forestall a pickup in inflation expectations," Kohn said.

Kohn said he expects a very gradual decline in inflation, but cautioned that this outcome was "by no means assured."

Economic outlook

In his outlook for the economy, Kohn said that economic weakness in the second half of 2006 was largely due to housing and autos and forecast that these dampening effects would dissipate over the first half of the year.

"When this process is completed, the rate of economic growth should pick up to something in the neighborhood of the growth rate of the economy's potential," Kohn said. Economists generally put the economy's potential growth rate around 3 percent real GDP growth.

Kohn said he saw some "very tentative signs" that the decline in housing activity will not spill over and reduce other forms of consumer spending.

But Kohn acknowledged that uncertainty about "where we stand in the housing cycle remains considerable."

"In my own judgment, housing starts may be not very far from their trough, but the risks around this outlook still are largely to the downside," Kohn said.

Kohn dismissed fears that recent weakness in the factory sector was the leading edge of a recession.

"In my view...what we are seeing in the recent information on factory output and capital spending is not the leading edge of general economic weakness but instead an adjustment to a sustained pace of expansion, that, necessarily is less rapid than that from mid-2003 to mid-2006," Kohn said.

http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/story.aspx?guid=%7BDBC6B5D3%2DC018%2D4ED6%2DB3A9%2D8A817873F0C3%7D&dist=rss

Anyone who has ever dressed a child will love this one!

2007-01-06T21:55:00.000-05:00

Did you hear about the Texas teacher who was helping one of her kindergarten students put on his cowboy boots? He asked for help and she could see why. Even with her pulling and him pushing, the little boots still didn't want to go on.
Finally, when the 2nd boot was on, she had worked up a sweat. She almost cried when the little boy said, "Teacher, they're on the wrong feet." She looked and sure enough, they were.

It wasn't any easier pulling the boots off than it was putting them on. She managed to keep her cool as together they worked to get the boots back on, this time on the right feet.
He then announced, "These aren't my boots." She bit her tongue rather than get right in his face and scream, "Why didn't you say so?" like she wanted to. And, once again she struggled to help him pull the ill-fitting boots off his little feet.
No sooner had they got the boots off and he said, "They're my brother's boots. My Mom made me wear 'em."
Now she didn't know if she should laugh or cry. But, she mustered up the grace and courage she had left to wrestle the boots on his feet again.
Helping him into his coat, she asked, "Now, where are your mittens?"
He said, "I stuffed 'em in the toes of my boots."

U.S. consumer electronics sales to hit record in 2007

2007-01-06T19:37:00.001-05:00

U.S. consumer electronics sales are expected to hit a record $155 billion in 2007, fueled by consumers' fascination with video games, digital music, and flat-screen displays, an industry group said on Saturday.

Wholesale sales of consumer electronics -- including everything from iPods and audio cables to mobile phones and personal computers -- will grow about 8 percent, up from $145 billion in 2006, when sales climbed 13 percent, the Consumer Electronics Association said in its annual report on the eve of the 2007 Consumer Electronics Show.

Big-screen televisions will continue be the star in the market, CEA said, as consumers take advantage of falling prices to upgrade to plasma and LCD TVs. CEA said display technologies will account for $26 billion in revenues for 2007, when some 19 million of those two types of flat panel TVs will ship.

"The TV market is setting all-time revenue records," said Todd Thibodeaux, a vice president at CEA. "(Traditional) CRT-based sets are giving way to flat panel displays. The successful ongoing transition to digital television is driving demand."

Consumer electronics makers have benefited from the rapid change to digital media, a technological step that made it simpler to move audio and video to myriad devices. A rise to $150 billion would represent a 50 percent increase from 2003, when the flat panel market was still in its infancy and overall growth was limited by a decline in stand-alone audio products.

Those stand-alone devices, such as CD players and cassette tape decks, were nudged aside in the advent of digital music players, such as Apple Computer Inc.'s (Nasdaq:AAPL - news) top-selling iPod and competing models by Sandisk Corp. (Nasdaq:SNDK - news), Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq:MSFT - news) and others.

Pocket-sized digital music players, many of which also can display snapshots, movies or TV shows, will remain in high demand in 2007, CEA said, noting that 41 million MP3 players are expected to ship in 2007, up from 34 million in 2006.

"It continues to ship at large volumes and 2007 will be no different as the market shifts into a replacement mode," said Thibodeaux. "Many consumers will be replacing their first-generation players with new players offering video playback capability."

Next generation video game consoles, digital cameras, personal computers, portable navigation and global positioning system (GPS) devices, are among the other products expected to sell well in 2007, CEA said.

The Consumer Electronics Association's estimates cover factory-to-dealer shipments, or wholesale figures. While the 2007 growth outlook represents a slowdown from last year, CEA noted that its original projection for 2006 was 8 percent.

"Consumers started the year investing in innovative consumer electronics products and seemingly never stopped," said Thibodeaux of CEA. "With the 2007 forecast, we see the consumer love affair with technology continuing at a healthy clip."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070106/tc_nm/electronics_show_forecast_dc

Toyota creating alcohol detection system

2007-01-03T14:27:00.000-05:00

Toyota Motor Corp. is developing a fail-safe system for cars that detects drunken drivers and automatically shuts the vehicle down if sensors pick up signs of excessive alcohol consumption, a news report said Wednesday.

Cars fitted with the detection system will not start if sweat sensors in the driving wheel detect high levels of alcohol in the driver's bloodstream, according to a report carried by the mass-circulation daily, Asahi Shimbun.

The system could also kick in if the sensors detect abnormal steering, or if a special camera shows that the driver's pupils are not in focus. The car is then slowed to a halt, the report said.

The world's No. 2 automaker hopes to fit cars with the system by the end of 2009, according to the report. Calls to Toyota's headquarters in Nagoya rang unanswered on Wednesday, a public holiday.

Nissan Motor Co., another Japanese car manufacturer, has already been experimenting with breathalyzer-like devices that could detect if a driver was drunken. Similar technologies, such as alcohol ignition interlocks, are in use in the U.S. and elsewhere.

Concerns over drunken driving have surged in Japan following a series of alcohol-related accidents last year. In August, a drunken driver collided with another vehicle carrying a family of five, plunging them off a bridge and killing three children.

The incident prompted stepped-up roadside spot checks by police, who also plan to stiffen penalties for drunken driving.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070103/ap_on_hi_te/japan_toyota_drunken_driving

Man Develops GPS Shoes

2007-01-02T14:32:00.000-05:00

Global Positioning System technology is turning up in more and more devices, like watches and cellphones.
But a Miami company has used the technology to develop shoes that can be located anywhere in the world.

The shoes' developer Sayo Isaac Daniel said people can forget to carry their phones, but they can't leave the house without their shoes. The design allows wearers to press a hidden button to send a distress signal.

The Quantum Satellite Technology shoes are planned to hit stores in March at a price of $325 to $350.

Finding an eBay Wholesale Source

2007-01-02T14:23:00.000-05:00

If you are looking for a real wholesale eBay source, you can pretty much forget about buying one of those crazy eBay wholesale lists that suggest you can buy PS3's and Wii's at wholesale prices.

When it comes to product sourcing, I suggest starting with a product that you know something about.

If your work or hobby has to do with a particular type of product, start with that and see if there is a market for that type of item on eBay. You can easily do some product research by using eBay's search function, but if you are looking to make eBay a long term part of your online business strategy, I recommend signing up for Terapeak.

Terapeak gives you a ton of research information into keywords and product names, a bit of a crystal ball when it comes to selling price and sell through rates.

eBay Offers 5th Year Employees One Month Paid Time Off

2007-01-02T14:19:00.000-05:00

If your eBay business is in the toilet, you might want to think about getting a job at the online acution hosue. According to Cindy from Tsunami Alert in the Great Salt Lake, a frequent blogger, your 5th year gift from eBay is a one month paid vacation, called a sabaticle.

Cindy will reportedly be sipping cocktails in her bikini on a warm, sandy beach.

Meanwhile the rest of us civilians are trying to calculate whether it is worth 15 cents to list the stuff we have that wouldn't sell on eBay in the first place.

http://www.powersellerking.com/2006/12/ebay_offers_5th_year_employees.html

Clean Up Your Books for a Killer ’07

2007-01-02T11:27:00.000-05:00

You want to make your business a big success, right? Well, if you’re serious about cleaning up in business, the first thing we recommend is cleaning up your books. Whether you’ve just started up or you’ve had the “Open for Business” sign over your door for years, it’s never too late to get your finances in order.

Lift your head up from the day-to-day tasks of your business and take a pause. Specifically, take a moment to find areas where you’re mixing business and personal finances - something you should always avoid. Today, the temptation to mix your finances is huge, especially given the trend toward more home-based sole proprietorships. Over half of all U.S. businesses are now home-based and the vast majority of businesses are solo acts launched with credit cards, home equity lines, and other personal financial resources. But this isn’t justification to be sloppy or lazy about distinguishing your personal from business finances - on the contrary, it’s all the more reason to be very disciplined about keeping things separate.

When you commingle funds, the true performance of your business quickly becomes hard to pin down. It’s a challenge to establish hard numbers for expenditures and revenues. Your accounting and tax filing becomes more complex (and expensive due to added hours required). What’s worse, future financing opportunities are negatively impacted - lenders and most equity investors will ask to review the financial performance of your business in previous years. If they can’t make sense of your books, they’ll be less confident and less inclined to provide you the financing you seek.

On the flipside, keeping clean books has many benefits - for example, there are potential tax advantages such as deductions. Keeping clean books can also keep you off the “radar screen” of the IRS, thus avoiding “distracting” IRS audits. Clean books are a key asset in the eyes of financiers—they’ll see that you’re organized and responsible. Bankers, in particular, will be able to create a clear picture of your financial performance when considering providing you a loan. At a strategic level, well-organized books provide clarity about the true performance of your business so you’re better equipped to make important decisions. And if you ever want to sell your business or bring in partners down the road, having a crystal clear set of books will be a fundamental tool for valuation as the new parties become involved.

There are many real-world circumstances where you’ll be confronted with choices to make about mixing personal and business finances. For example, you might have to use personal credit to secure assets, or you might have to move money from a personal account to a business account to cover a shortfall. Perhaps you’ll need some extra cash personally and will want to take that cash out of the business. The key is making sure that you do this in a completely organized and well-documented way to minimize any negative impact.

Our Bottom Line

It’s important to act like a business even if your board room is in your basement. Whether you’re in full gear and taking orders, or just starting up a business, tackle those business finance issues - there’s no time like the present to clean up your books so you can clean up in business!

http://www.startupnation.com/pages/articles/startup-business-finances.asp?src=nw

Can You, Should You, Tap Your 401k?

2007-01-02T11:24:00.002-05:00

Of all the ways you can bootstrap your startup business into existence, the very last one you should consider is digging into your 401(k) or other tax-favored retirement plan. There are good reasons why government tax penalties are so stiff on such withdrawals.

First, drain every other financial asset you own. Beg, plead and borrow from family and friends. Rack up credit-card debt to the stratosphere. Then and only then, if you’ve exhausted every creative business financing option available and you still need funds, consider the one way that you can access your 401(k) both legally and safely: borrow from it. But there are stringent laws covering repayment and how it must be done. If you don’t follow them, you can easily lose enough of your retirement savings to force you to work for the rest of your life.

Beware the negatives of simply withdrawing funds

The one thing you don’t want to do unless it’s your last resort (many financial planners say it should never be done, whatever the circumstances) is just withdraw money straightaway from your 401(k) account. Whatever you take out of your 401(k) is subject to regular income taxes, and if you’re younger than 59-1/2 you’ll fork over an additional 10 percent tax penalty.

“Using those assets is a pretty risky proposition because you’re taking away from your safety net for retirement,” says Tim Swartley, a trust officer at Univest, a bank-holding company based in Souderton, Pa. “All the benefits you’ve accrued by saving pre-tax dollars and tax-deferred compounding over the years – maybe over a lifetime of employment -- go away if you tap these funds. Of course, very often when you talk about an entrepreneur, you’re talking about a risk taker.”

Just remember, what you’re risking is any reasonable chance to retire.

Still have to have it? Take a personal loan from your 401(k)

Instead of withdrawing funds outright, you could take a loan from your retirement plan as a way of getting some startup capital and business financing. There are two ways of doing this.

One is to take a personal loan from your 401(k) plan. Under this approach, you’ll need to incorporate your business and then buy all of the stock in it with a loan from the plan. Typically, you’ll also need to roll over your remaining 401(k) assets from your previous employer’s plan into a new 401(k) plan with your startup business; most companies won’t administer the assets of a 401(k) plan for former employees.

While this is the simpler of the two approaches, there are some significant drawbacks. Most typically, your loan is limited by law to 50 percent of the vested balance in your retirement plan or $50,000 – whichever is less. And all of it must be repaid to your 401(k) plan within five years, amortized quarterly. In other words, you can’t wait until the end of the five-year period to pay it back all at once. You have to make quarterly payments. And that alone still leaves your nest egg at risk. You should also continue to make your customary contributions to the 401(k).

For this type of loan, a typical interest rate would be the bank’s prime lending rate – that which it charges its best corporate customers – plus maybe 1 percent. The good news is that you’re paying this interest rate to yourself by paying it back into your 401(k). The bad news is that, had you left your nest egg untouched, it would likely have been earning far more interest during the five years it will take you to pay it back.

Make a business loan from your 401(k) to your startup business

This second approach is the best way to tap into your retirement plan if you absolutely must do it, financial advisors say. “The law specifically permits people to use IRAs and 401(k)s to invest in a business with no taxes, no penalties and no need for loan repayments,” says Leonard Fischer, CEO of BeneTrends, a company that has developed a system for doing so. “What we do is purely add another investment option in your retirement plan. You invest in your own company.”

The cheaper but riskier way is to ask a conventional investment outfit, such as a mutual fund company, to set up the documentation for you. “Many of them will do it because they’re interested in getting the assets,” says Susan Daley, attorney for Perkins Coie, a Chicago law firm that specializes in employee benefits and executive compensation.

But both Daley and Fischer note that this type of plan is complex. Fischer says you should have at least $30,000 in your retirement account to justify the costs of setting up a BeneTrends plan, for which he’ll charge you as much as $4,500, including a thorough third-party valuation of your small business.Another wrinkle with this approach is that you should make just one loan to your business from your 401(k) plan, because any time you do it, you’re required to get and pay for another costly third-party evaluation of your business. And, Daley explains, “you should really only do something like this if you’re the only employee of the company. Once you have (other) employees, you have to offer shares in the company to all of them” under the same terms by which your retirement plan bought stock in your company.

Use your retirement plan as a backup

Even if you don’t touch your 401(k) funds, they can still have benefits beyond providing retirement income. One of them is the fact that bank officers will count them as part of your household net worth in determining whether you and your startup business are loan-worthy.

And for C. David Gammel, who launched High Context, a Web-consulting business in Silver Spring, Md., in 2005, 12 years of 401(k) contributions he made while in the corporate work force “made it possible for me to feel comfortable taking the risk of starting my own business without having to actually cash them in and taking the tax hit and penalties.”

Our Bottom Line

Tapping into retirement funds as a creative means of financing your startup business is never a good idea. If you have nowhere else to turn, at least take the time to ask for the advice and counsel of a certified financial planner. Although it will cost, scrimping there could be penny wise but…you know the rest.

http://click.icptrack.com/icp/relay.php?r=1019928704&msgid=4778298&act=QG53&c=49712&admin=0&destination=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.startupnation.com%2Fpages%2Farticles%2Fcreative-business-financing-401k.asp%3Fsrc%3Dnw

Protect Your eBay Business from Audits

2007-01-01T00:46:00.000-05:00

By Marsha Collier
From Cool eBay Tools

You know that eBay's not exempt from government regulations, so get the lowdown on what you need to know to keep your business on the up and up.

I'm not going to waste this column space telling you to shred your old paperwork, clear up your shipping area or, better yet, get your inventory organized so it's no longer the hellacious mess it became soon after you started your eBay business. What I am going to tell you about are your government responsibilities.

When you have a small business, Uncle Sam and his state affiliate cousins knock at your door on a regular basis. Filing all your forms and paying your taxes correctly and on time will hopefully keep you off of the master audit list. But even more important is keeping good records for your business. When you keep your books current, filling out your tax forms takes a lot less time--and if you do get audited, you'll have everything at the ready.

Beyond keeping track of your gross sales and expenses for your end-of-year returns, there are a few other state-mandated responsibilities you need to take seriously: your state sales tax (if applicable), employee data recording and your quarterly payroll taxes.

State Sales Tax
First, know that you only have to charge sales tax if you're selling to a customer in the same state your business is located in and if your state has a sales tax to begin with. If you don't have to bother with this, consider yourself lucky. Otherwise, there's a simple step you can take to ease the burden.

My primary recommendation is that you keep the sales tax you collect in a separate bank account so the money's available when the time comes to send it in. The seller who collects sales tax gets another bonus--the tax ID number issued by the state is also usually a reseller or sales permit. This number will magically open the doors to buying wholesale merchandise to sell on eBay.

Since the state sales tax issue varies so much by state and I can't outline it all in detail here, check your state's official website to get more information.

Employee Data
Many small eBay sellers may only have one or two employees--others may have 15. In either case, the drill's the same. You can run your business with your own Social Security number, but once you get employees, you need to get an Employer Identification Number.

To obtain an EIN, call the IRS Business & Specialty Tax Line at (800) 829-4933. An IRS representative will take your information and assign you a number over the phone. Or if you're the online type (and what eBay seller isn't?), you can go to https://sa.www4.irs.gov/sa_vign/newFormSS4.do to access the application, IRS Form SS-4. You'll get your EIN as soon as your online form is successfully submitted.

When hiring a new employee, you must get their Social Security number and have them fill out a W-4 form to indicate the number of deductions to take from their paycheck. When you get an employee's Social Security number, it's always a good idea to go to Social Security Business Services Online to confirm that the number is valid.

Another important piece of paperwork to fill out is Form I-9. The Immigration Reform and Control Act requires employers to have their employees fill out this form to confirm that they're legally eligible to work in the U.S. A new employee must show you their Social Security or Green Card to confirm their eligibility--and you should make a copy of it. You don't file this form with the government, but you must keep it on file for three years after the hire or for one year after the employee is terminated. You can find out more about Form I-9 at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration website.

Automating Taxes
You don't want to make mistakes on your taxes, so using a program such as QuickBooks, and subscribing to their payroll updates, will give you all you need to keep up with the frequent changes to the U.S. tax code. For instance, I can automatically fill out and print my quarterly federal payroll reports (Form 941) right out of QuickBooks--the program calculates everything based on my posted payroll. Also, the program's sales tax report takes all the pain out of filing that form. You can generate a report that includes all the pertinent data you need for any period of time selected.

Forgetting the part Uncle Sam plays in your business can be an expensive mistake. Penalties add up quickly, and, not surprisingly, the government rarely accepts I didn't know as a legitimate excuse.

Drop Ship and Wholesale Sourcing changed forever with OneSource

2007-01-01T00:23:00.000-05:00

Worldwide Brands (www.WorldwideBrands.com ), Official Product Sourcing Editor of eBay Radio, launches a new product sourcing tool today that combines detailed wholesale supplier information with instant market research results.

Publishers of the largest Internet database of pre-qualified wholesale suppliers, Worldwide Brands has long been known as a highly trusted authority on Wholesale Product Sourcing for online entrepreneurs. Their revolutionary new tool, OneSource, combines their extensive Drop Ship, Light Bulk, Volume Wholesale, Liquidation and Import Wholesaler contact information with instant analyses of how well each product searched will SELL online.

“We know that the most successful online sellers use multiple wholesale sourcing methods. OneSource gives users immediate access to thousands of legitimate Wholesalers of every kind, representing millions of Wholesale products you can sell in your eBiz!” said Robin Cowie, President of Worldwide Brands, a regular speaker at eBay’s Live National Convention each year.

“It goes far beyond that, though.” said Cowie. “OneSource automatically performs hours worth of critical market research in just seconds, every time a user searches for a wholesale product! Knowing where to get wholesale products you’re interested in AND knowing whether or not they will sell online BEFORE you invest time and money in them is information every eBay seller needs.”

A OneSource market analysis instantly shows the demand for a product, the competition in the marketplace, how it’s being advertised, variations of the product that are selling well online, the keywords people are using to both find and market the product, and a 0% to 100% scale as to whether the product is selling well at any given time. OneSource also allows users to save Preferred Suppliers, Sort and Save market research results, and print or export all that information to better understand their product market.

“This is the next evolution in product sourcing technology, and it’s all web-based and accessible from any computer.” says Chris Malta, Worldwide Brands CEO, and Host of The Entrepreneur Magazine Product Sourcing Radio Show. “There is nothing else like it on the market. We work with some of the biggest names in ECommerce; they’ve seen OneSource, and every last one of them is as excited about it as we are! We’re looking forward to watching our OneSource customers succeed wildly online!”

http://ecommwire.com/?id=1147

Start the New Year Off Right

2006-12-31T20:16:00.000-05:00

Here are 10 “commandments” to help you make 2007 a better year for your business than 2006 was. Don’t hesitate--do them now! Then you can enjoy the rest of the year without guilt. Let's start from the bottom and work backwards:

10. As soon as you finish reading this column, get in your car and drive directly to your local IRS office (it’s usually in the same government building as your county courthouse). Pick up as many copies of IRS Form 1099 as you can carry, and make sure you send one to every human being--except employees and partners, who get different forms--you paid more than $600 to in 2006. The deadline for sending these is January 31, but the IRS runs out of forms well before then and you can't download them from the internet. Be sure to send copies to the IRS and your accountant.

9. Review your list of employees, identify the two worst performers or biggest “time vampires,” and fire them. Advertise for their replacements. (I told you I was taking a tough stand!)

8. If you own a retail business and you don't have an eBay Store online, open one now. For information and advice, go to www.storessuccessvideo.com. If you have an eBay Store already, go to that website anyway and find out all the things you--and thousands of others--are probably doing wrong.

7. If you're a consultant or professional, print out all the pages of your website and update them. Make sure your fee schedule is current--or post your fee schedule if you haven't already done so--add any articles you wrote last year, and post at least five new testimonials from satisfied clients along with their photos and e-mail addresses. Mark up the pages, and give them to your webmaster.

6. Take your accountant or bookkeeper to lunch, and get them to tell you all the stupid things you did last year that need to be fixed now. Don’t wait until February because then they’ll be too busy doing people’s tax returns.

5. If you pay estimated taxes, open an interest-bearing savings account, deduct 30 percent of your gross sales from your checking account each week, and deposit it into that savings account. Then you'll have the funds available to pay your estimated taxes when they come due.

4. Go to your office computer, look at all the software programs you have, and delete all those that are personal (like video games) or that don’t relate to your business. If you have an instant messenger program on your computer, delete it, too. You don’t need the distractions.

3. If you have a home office, call a local contractor and have him take a professional measurement of your home office. Make sure he sends you a letter stating the exact square footage of your home office. That letter will save your life if the IRS ever audits you. And don’t wait until spring to call someone because then they’ll be too busy with home repairs and remodeling projects.

2. If you have a corporation or limited liability company (LLC), call your attorney and offer to pay them an annual retainer to do all your corporate and LLC paperwork this year and act as the registered agent for your business. You'll never find the time to do the paperwork yourself.

1. It’s all about entertainment these days. People just want to have fun no matter what they’re doing. So find three ways you can inject a little fun into your business so your customers look at you as an “experience” rather than just a place to buy stuff.

Happy New Year! And that’s an order.

http://www.entrepreneur.com/management/article172346.html

Improve Your Online Customer Service

2006-12-31T14:51:00.000-05:00

If you're wondering why customers aren't coming back to your e-business, maybe you should take a long, hard look at your customer service.

Even if you master each and every one of the internet marketing strategies out there--sales copywriting, search engine optimization, e-mail marketing and the rest--they're not worth a dime if you forget about customer service. It's a strategy that all truly successful business owners understand and pay careful attention to because the one thing all successful businesses have in common is satisfied customers.

There's an old saying in business: A happy customer will tell one or two people; an unhappy one will tell 10! So it pays to keep your customers happy--especially when doing business online.

Online, a seriously ticked-off customer might not just tell 10 people; they might also write a lengthy rant on their blog, post comments on other people's blogs, write a negative review of your site on a shopping website, or criticize you on forums and message boards. Or all of the above.

And worse, once something's been written about you online, it's very difficult to get it removed. This means that any prospective customer who decides to do a search on your business name could come across it.

So while good customer service might cost a bit of time and money, bad customer service online could cost you dozens of prospective customers. Think how much losing even just 10 sales would cost you, and compare it to the extra sales you'll gain from making your customers happy.

What’s really interesting is that many case studies show that building good customer service into the operation of a business increases a company’s efficiency as well as its sales. Here are some simple strategies to help you improve your customer service:

Step #1: Automate your sales process to keep customers in the loop.
Use autoresponders to thank your customers for their order, welcome them to your opt-in e-mail list, and send them order confirmations and other transactional emails like "your item has shipped" notices. Customers have come to expect these courtesies, but not everyone online bothers.

You can even add an element of surprise to these customer-service e-mails by including a coupon for money off their next purchase or some extra information they'll find relevant to the product they've just bought. You may also want to ask if everything is all right with your customers' purchase or if there's anything further you can do.

This kind of follow-up can relieve any possible feelings of buyer's remorse and reinforce the positive feelings about your business your customers had when they originally bought from you.

Step #2: Create a comprehensive FAQ page.
An FAQ page answers most of the questions people might have about your products or services. You should also create an FAQ e-mail address, such as info@mysite.com, and keep track of the questions that customers or site visitors actually ask, then answer them and put the answers on your FAQ page.

With those common questions taken care of, you'll be freed up to spend time giving personal attention to the visitors who need it. The more quickly you handle their concerns the more impressed they'll be. And you'll also stand out in the crowd--a recent Pelorus Group study found that a shocking 42 percent of retail sites take five days or longer to respond to customers.

It's often the times when you respond to a customer's concerns promptly and personally that generate a huge amount of goodwill for your business--and referrals. Even angry customers can be turned into devoted fans if you pay attention to them, acknowledge your mistake if you’ve made one and fix their problem.

Step #3: Make it easy for people to contact you.
There will always be times when a customer needs to talk to or e-mail someone directly, so don't hide your contact details away in a dark corner of your website, and always provide contact information on every message you send out.

You may also want to create a customer service page on your site that includes your FAQs, the names and e-mail addresses or phone numbers of people who can help, and other relevant information.

I’m often surprised at how many people with small e-businesses really don’t want to talk to customers and actually make it hard for people to get in touch. But the worst thing you can do is look like you’re hiding or just don’t care.

Step #4: Personalize and segment your e-mail messages.
I can't say this often enough: Use your customers' names in your e-mail subject lines and in your messages. Only 4 percent of marketers personalize and segment their messages, according to Jupiter Research, and yet personalized messages have almost twice the click-through rate of bulk e-mail.

As an e-business owner, you can personalize and segment your communications with customers in many ways, including:

Personalizing emails with names and other pieces of information you collect
Sending customers personalized birthday, anniversary or special occasion offers
Sending customers details of new products you know they'll be interested in (in its recent "Consumer E-Mail" study, DoubleClick reported that 43 percent of the respondents would respond to "purchasing recommendations based on past purchase behavior")

The more details you can collect about your customers, the better you can serve them with laser-targeted offers, thank-you messages and information that’s relevant to their needs and wants.

This is where your e-mail management software makes your life easier. It can do the segmenting and personalizing for you, so you can spend your time thinking of more ways to target your marketing.

Step #5: Ask your customers how you can serve them better.
People love taking short surveys, and it's been shown that customer satisfaction is rated higher among people who've been asked what they want, even if their answers haven't been acted upon. Just asking what your customers want and how you can make your service better makes them feel listened to.

Actually acting on their suggestions and improving your service is gravy!

Remember, good customer service doesn't have to cost much. You don't have to spend a fortune giving away free products or large discounts. Even a small gesture like thanking customers for their business can help maintain a positive vibe around your business. And automating your everyday customer service tasks frees you up to respond to real concerns or complaints--making your overall customer service even faster and better.

http://www.entrepreneur.com/ebusiness/ebusinesscolumnist/article172294.html

3 Keys for Making the Most of a Home-Based Business

2006-12-31T12:17:00.001-05:00

If you operate your business in the friendly confines of your home, you may still be padding around in your slippers at lunchtime and darting out mid-afternoon to pick the kids up from school. But you also know how difficult it can be to live and work effectively in the same place, and you’re looking for every possible edge to help you succeed in your home-based business.

Three tactics can make a huge difference for your home-based startup business. They’re not going to rescue you from a poorly thought-out business model, or turn your company from a five-figure to a seven-figure affair. But fully leveraging these three tactics can ensure that how you actually operate is giving your home-based business strategy every possible chance of succeeding.

Outsource everything but the core functions in your home-based business

You started up a home-based business because you wanted to do something unique, or perhaps better than the competition. So you need to keep your eye on that ball, continually clearing the way for you and your company to focus on this “core competency” – just like larger companies do.

The difference, of course, is that as a home-based business owner, you’re just one person. Just to do business, your startup must handle lots of things beyond focusing on your founding idea, especially if you have larger competition.

“But you should do what you’re good at, and you can’t be good at everything,” says Barbara Weltman, a small-business expert based in Millwood, N.Y., and author of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Starting a Home-Based Business. “Small businesses have so many different responsibilities that you should outsource whatever you can so that you can make the most money doing what you do best.”

So if you came up with a product to manufacture, but the key to your business model lies in sales and marketing, farm out production. If you’re a consultant whose magic lies in your vision and your interaction with clients, outsource your accounting and other “back-office” functions. If you’re a web retailer who is drawing customers because of your product selection and brand buzz, outsource fulfillment and shipping.

Your home-based business should fully leverage the internet

Taking advantage of the internet can help you operate your home-based business with far more efficiency than was possible five years ago.

In fact, the biggest challenge for home-based operators is to keep up with the many new ways they can make the internet work for them. These days home-based businesses can send out e-mail blasts to their customer database – announcing a promotion or a new product – just as easily as any huge company. They can obtain merchant-bank authorization to accept credit cards online so they can conduct e-commerce; that wasn’t always the case.

And even home-based businesses can make themselves seem bigger than their local niche by setting up a website that positions themselves as an information resource on leaky faucets, or canine care.

Maybe Donna Maria Coles Johnson has found the ultimate application of the internet for her home-based business: getting away from her Washington, D.C.-area home and working from someplace that has a wi-fi hotspot. “I go to the local coffee shop a lot, and that’s where my daughter thinks that mommy works,” says Johnson, who is, among other things, author of several books on how people can make their own natural cosmetics. “Because of the internet, I can work anywhere and not be interrupted.”

Take greatest possible advantage of home-based business tax breaks

For many years, federal tax policy wasn’t very helpful to home-based business owners; for example, only very recently have individual business owners been able to deduct the entire cost of their health-insurance premiums.

And nowadays the biggest problem most home-based business owners have with taxes is that they leave too much money on the table by not availing themselves of many fully legal deductions.

The biggest of these, tax experts say, is that they don’t claim depreciation or the full extent of their expenses that are attributable to taking up part of their home with their office, or manufacturing operation, or warehouse space – or some combination of all three.

And while many home-based business owners take a deduction for the utility bills and other expenses that are attributable to their home-based business offices, they don’t always optimize these deductions. For example, you should consider claiming a “time percentage” of your heating costs rather than a “space percentage,” says Eva Rosenberg, a tax expert and author of Small Business Taxes Made Easy.

“It’s a matter of calculating how much more electricity and gas you’re using to heat the place in winter because you’re there working, compared with what you would use otherwise,” Rosenberg advises. “That’s normally going to come out to a lot more than just taking a percentage of the overall bill that matches the square footage occupied by your office.”

Our Bottom Line

Getting a home-based business idea off the ground can be challenging enough in itself. But by maximizing outsourcing, the internet, and your tax advantages, you can quickly add momentum and sales that will elevate your home-based business into a force in your marketplace.

http://www.startupnation.com/pages/articles/keys-home-based-business.asp

8 Steps to Win at Blogging for Dollars

2006-12-31T12:14:00.000-05:00

by Lynne Meredith Schreiber

“When Patty Briguglio took a “bone-crushing fall,” people stopped her on the street to ask how she was doing. She looked at them quizzically, wondering, “How did you know about my fall?” The answer: They read her blog.

As the head of MMI Associates, Inc., a North Carolina public relations outfit with 50 clients, Briguglio didn’t even know what a blog was when senior account executive Kipp Bodnar suggested she start one. He said blogging would be a business boon, so she did it.

Briguglio and her employees upload as many as 10 posts a day to their blog. The result: greater visibility and search-engine optimization. That’s what business blogging is all about – getting your business name in front of as many people as possible, as often as you can.

“It’s a way of creating a brand for yourself,” says Nancy Shenker, founder and principal of Thornwood, N.Y.-based theONswitch, which guides startups and business transformations. Shenker started her company three years ago, with blogging on her own startup to-do list.

“It’s a way to express your business philosophy,” she says. “It’s about cultivating a relationship.”

Blogging puts a personal face on business in a world increasingly focused on impersonal Internet advice and e-mail. “If I can’t spend as much time with someone as I’d like,” Shenker says, the blog “creates the impetus for dialogue.

“It forces a business owner to focus on their philosophy. It’s like when you were in elementary school and the teacher said you have to write about an experience that changed your life.” Maintaining a blog keeps business owners sharp, “making them articulate on a regular basis what it is that they do. It keeps them very, very focused, very sharp and hopefully very compelling.”

Learning the Steps to Dance the Blogging Boogie

Once you decide to jump in, take these tips and use them well:

Choose a host. Bodnar says outside hosts like TypePad, WordPress and Blogger are easy and cheap, “but you’re limited to storage size and features.” You get what you pay for, he says, when it comes to adding audio, video, links and content other than text.
Hire a dedicated blogger. “Find someone who’s interested in it and will oversee it,” Briguglio says.
Collect links up the wazoo. Both inbound and outbound links are vital - collect some "link karma" by directing your traffic to relevant sites, and you'll see it coming around in the form of inbound links to your blog. The more inbound links, the more traffic and visibility you get. Briguglio recently blogged about Hershey’s Kisses and linked to the Hershey site.
Set up an RSS feed. Really Simple Syndication is a code-based system that allows Web users to “subscribe” to their favorite sites – including your blog – for up-to-the-minute action and updates. On that note…
Update constantly. A blog’s success depends on the regularity of its posts. “We have so much information on our blog that we rank very high on search engines,” Bodnar says. Searches find frequently refreshed, keyword-rich sites first.
Read other blogs and comment on the posts. Get involved in the blogsphere to learn what makes a good one. A great way to start: enter “entrepreneur” at Technorati, a search engine now tracking 56 million blogs. You’ll find more than 200,000 examples of how it’s been done.
Collect images, links, statistics and other sources to include on your blog. Think of it as your personal online magazine and make it as visually appealing as possible. Spend some time at a heavily stocked magazine rack and mine it for what works – and what doesn’t.

It’s a Wide, Wide, Web, Web World

While any company can benefit in big ways from blogging, Web businesses are especially ripe for it, says Mitch Free, CEO of “global manufacturing marketplace” MFG.com, whose blog generates a lot of user registrations for his e-comm site.

“Web businesses can seem impersonal,” Free says. “What operators really want is to form [an] emotional bond with their community.”

Mark Stevens, CEO of MSCO, a White Plains, N.Y.-based marketing firm, seconds that emotion. He says customers connect with the blogger’s philosophy or personality – and trust him or her enough to do business together. Blogs, much more freeform than a proper business site, give creative license to you and your readers, allowing you to just chat, be who you are and integrate that with your business.

“One of my blogs, ‘Why Microsoft Hates Google,’ led a major technology firm to see that their traditional focus on standard media needed evaluation,” says Stevens, who updates his blog weekly.

When you get right down to it, a blog is another marketing tool. In an era of explosive Web use, it may well be the key to success. DL Byron, co-author of Publish & Prosper: Blogging for Your Business (New Riders Press, 2006, $21.99), has built blogs for Fortune 100 companies including Boeing and Intel.

“The biggest benefit is findability,” he says. “NASA, Pfizer, Merck, the U.S. Navy have all found our products via Google. We market exclusively with blogs.

“Blogs are about conversations, immediacy and frankness.”

eBay Business Startup Tips

2006-12-31T12:12:00.000-05:00

Get eBay Business Startup Tips from eBay Titanium PowerSeller Kevin Harmon on StartupNation
Own an online business in 2007 with advice from StartupNation Radio experts January 6, 2007

What:
Kevin Harmon joins StartupNation Radio to discuss how to start and grow a successful eBay business.

Who:
In 2002, Kevin Harmon started Inflatable Madness, http://inflatablemadness.com, selling media online such as DVD’s, CD’s, video games, and books. Kevin lists over 400,000 items on his eBay store every month and has the third largest store on the largest e-commerce site in the world. With first-year revenues at $300,000 and 2005 revenues at around $3.5 million, Kevin provides valuable, eBay business information on his StartupNation blog at http://www.startupnation.com/blog/category.asp?CATEGORY_ID=6.

When:
Saturday, January 6, 2007
Listen live (radio or online) or call in 866-557-8278
(7-8 p.m. EST/4-5 p.m. PST)
Podcast available at StartupNation Radio, www.startupnation.com/pages/radio, starting Monday, January 8th

Why:
Get valuable tips from entrepreneurial experts and StartupNation Radio hosts Jeff and Rich Sloan, and start your eBay business now!

To meet other entrepreneurs, get free startup advice and voice your opinion:

• Join the StartupNation entrepreneur community at http://www.startupnation.com/pages/community/index.asp.

• Listen live to StartupNation Radio Saturdays (7-8 p.m. EST/4-5 p.m. PST) or log into the StartupNation Radio podcast at http://www.startupnation.com/pages/radio.

Be on the air and get expert advice for your startup!

You can also visit StartupNation Radio online (http://www.startupnation.com/pages/radio/index.asp) or call-in 866-557-8278 (7-8 p.m. EST/4–5 p.m. PST) to ask the Sloan brothers your questions on the air. If chosen, you’ll have the opportunity to promote your new business to a nationwide audience and get valuable startup advice!

eBay's Annual Post-Christmas Promotion Lifts Listings

2006-12-29T09:56:00.000-05:00

The number of eBay.com auction listings rose over 56 percent in 1 day this week due to a post-Christmas promotion for sellers. According to MedVed data, there were fewer than 9 million listings (derived by counting auction category totals on eBay.com) at the start of day December 27, 2006, and by the end of the day, there were 14 million auction listings, with listings continuing to rise the following day. MedVed has tracked eBay auction listing data since 1999. It does not track sales, nor does it track eBay Store listings.

eBay ran a 15-cent 1-day listing promotion on December 27 to boost listings. The question for some is whether the slump in listings in the days around Christmas is due to sellers' belief in a sales slow-down or whether sellers hold back in anticipation of eBay's annual post-Christmas listing sale.

Here's a look back at eBay post-holiday promotions for the past five years:

December 26, 2002: Free listing day
December 26, 2003: Free listing day
December 27, 2004: 10-cent listing day
December 27, 2005: 10-cent listing day
December 27, 2006: 15-cent listing day

As noted by an eBay seller on the Vendio discussion boards, it appears last year's promotion gave a larger boost to listings than this year's holiday promotion (http://www.vendio.com/mesg/read.html?num=2&thread=653717).

On December 27, 2005, eBay auction listings rose from 9 million at the start of the day to 16 million by the end of the day, a 78 percent increase.

http://www.medved.net/cgi-bin/cal.exe?EIND

http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y06/m12/i29/s01

Yahoo + AOL + Microsoft = Google Killer?

2006-12-28T16:40:00.000-05:00

How do you get three giants out of quicksand? The biggest giant eats the other two and makes a boat from their bones.

That seems to be Wall Street's approach to building an apt competitor to Google. Shortly after analysts dreamed of a Microsoft-owned Yahoo, they've amended their solution to include AOL.

Last week, Merrill Lynch analyst Jessica Reif Cohen told reporters that an AOL Yahoo merger was possible in 2007. Cohen said an AOL Yahoo merger was "one of the more logical combinations" to take on Google, cut costs, and combine audiences, and that Time Warner was open to it.

This caused quite the buzz, spawning charts with potential combinations of companies that could merge with or be acquired by another company for strategic reasons.

A Yahoo AOL combination is considered among the most likely, as is a Microsoft buy out of AOL and/or Yahoo.

Or, if we get out our pie-in-the-sky caps, the ideal scenario is Yahoo merges with AOL and Microsoft buys them both. MSN is sinking in the search market. Yahoo is stagnant. And AOL is ready to be sold for parts. But, theoretically, the high profile threesome could make one hell of a Mighty Morphin' Power Ranger.

This is GEMAYA revisited, that too big of a darn acronym symbolic of too big of a darn theoretical super conglomerate consisting of Google, eBay, Microsoft, Amazon, Yahoo, AOL. And Wall Street gets so hot when people get all cyber-orgiastic.

On paper, it is potentially the only way Microsoft and Yahoo will catch Google. But since competition is key, making GEMAYA a ready target for trustbusters, maybe we should restructure that super conglomerate, add some, and divide it all into two mega-super-conglomerates.

It's worked for the telcos, right?

How about DAMMIT (Disney, Amazon, Microsoft, Motorola, Interactive, Time Warner) vs. E-GANGS (eBay, Google, Apple, News Corp., General Electric, Sun Microsystems)?

Now we're just being silly, aren't we?

Something tells me we haven't even seen silly yet. We just don't know, at this point, what level or direction of silly it will be. It would seem silly for there not to be major collaborations to maximize the online market. The size of these potential super-companies isn't just silly, it's down right ridiculous. But it also seems silly to drive from the end-user seat, without any concrete confirmation from the players involved.

But it is fun to do, especially at the end of year when there's little going on and you can't think of anything to say.

http://www.webproworld.com/viewtopic.php?t=70805

Google Checkout's No PayPal Killer

2006-12-28T02:30:00.000-05:00

How unsurprising: Bribe people heavily, and they'll use your service. That's the upshot of a NYT article on Google Checkout, the supposed PayPal killer. Google is subsidizing $10-off discounts for merchants who adopt Google Checkout, a payment mechanism which lets users register their credit or debit cards with Google.

But Google (GOOG) doesn't really threaten eBay's (EBAY) PayPal unit. Here's why.

Google says it will continue to provide Checkout for free through the end of 2007. That's a big savings for merchants, since credit-card processing can cost about 3% of a sale. But in the long term, Google will have to charge - and it will never be as profitable as PayPal.

Why? PayPal breaks even, at best, on credit-card transactions. But it makes a ton of money on sales where it transfers money directly from bank or PayPal accounts. PayPal charges merchants the same fee to process those transactions but pays much, much less to banks to execute them. (If you thought PayPal lived off the interest on money sitting in PayPal accounts, wake up - that's not how it makes a serious profit.)

Google, on the other hand, only deals with debit or credit cards, which are expensive to process. Ultimately, as with every other unprofitable Google venture, Checkout is subsidized by sales of advertising.

And that's why it's worth it for Google to offer Checkout for free: If the Checkout logo increases click-through rates, then Google and advertisers both benefit, whether or not customers end up using Checkout. In fact, given the subsidy, Google's better off if shoppers decide not to use Checkout after they click on an ad.

eBay itself, not PayPal, faces the bigger threat from Checkout. E-commerce ads with the Checkout logo could prove more cost-effective for merchants than selling on eBay, allowing Google to draw some merchants away. Added to an existing trend of shoppers buying less on eBay, that could make a bad situation worse.

Ultimately, of course, PayPal's health depends on eBay, right? Maybe not: PayPal grows less dependent on eBay every quarter. As the Times noted:

In the most recent quarter, PayPal processed $9.1 billion in transactions, up 37 percent from a year earlier. While most of those were payments between eBay buyers and sellers, the number of PayPal transactions outside eBay rose 59 percent, to $3.3 billion.

So let's stop talking about Checkout as a PayPal killer - and start talking about PayPal as an eBay savior.

http://blogs.business2.com/beta/2006/12/google_checkout.html

How to pull yourself out of holiday debt

2006-12-28T01:44:00.000-05:00

Dec 28, 2006

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) -- Now that the holidays are over many Americans are beginning the climb out of staggering holiday debt that often looms long and large after the season is gone.

Former New Jersey state consumer affairs director and Credit.com founder Adam Levin says that the most important step in digging yourself out of debt is to create a plan.

"Look at the different interest rates on your credit cards," he advises. "Pay off the ones that have higher rates first." If you can transfer a balance to a card with a lower rate, go for it. However, when you transfer certain balances, keep in mind that the existing balance on the card will likely stay at a higher rate.

Do not under any circumstances, warns Levin, take a cash advance from a credit card to pay off debt on another. Cash advance rates are very high and cards also typically charge fees for the advance.

If you received a Christmas bonus, dedicate that to paying down the holiday debt. Whatever bills you ran up during the holiday season, pay them off on time. It's best to make more than the minimum payment, but if you can't at least pay the minimum. A late payment can trigger a universal default which causes rates on other cards to rise. But remember: "Minimum payments will keep you in debt forever."

You can also negotiate with your creditors for lower interest rates. But if you do get a better rate, Levin says you have to follow through. "You can't make a deal with someone and then have late payments."

If you find yourself in serious debt trouble, take advantage of confidential debt consultation. There are a number of debt consultation and negotiation companies that will help you negotiate down your debt. Read more on consumer debt at http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/edcams/credit/coninfo_debt.htm. See the site.

http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/story.aspx?guid=%7B62EE88FA%2D4D93%2D4497%2DA0E7%2D186593B99E1B%7D&dist=rss

Good Samaritan makes up for stolen bikes

2006-12-27T21:16:00.001-05:00

PENSACOLA, Fla. - When the bikes Dennis and Tamie Leporin bought themselves for Christmas to ride with their young son disappeared from their front lawn, the couple posted a sign to let the thieves know their disappointment. "I hope U crooks enjoy our bikes U stole; Merry X-Mas," the sign read.

The next evening the couple heard a knock at their door and found an envelop with $200 inside. A pickup truck was driving away.

"Inside was a note that read, 'For every crook, there are 1,000 good people'," Dennis Leporin told the Pensacola News Journal.

"I thought it was awesome. We moved here from St. Louis, and folks just don't do that in St. Louis," he said.

Tamie Leporin said she and her husband were concentrating so much on the theft that they forgot about the true meaning of Christmas, until they were reminded by the kindness of strangers.

"We just wish there was some way we could thank them," she said.

Skype to Target Businesses

2006-12-27T21:11:00.001-05:00

Skype will continue to aim at the business market, adding functions for specific business needs, executives said last week at the company's development center in Tallinn, Estonia.

The company's most recent 3.0 version of its software allows system administrators to configure and control Skype use across an enterprise and Skype will build on that. Its software provides Internet telephony service as well as messaging, video conferencing, and file transfer.

Skype for Business

In the short to medium term, Skype will rely on the growth of an "ecosystem" of third parties to adapt and integrate Skype for specific enterprise uses, executives said. "My opinion is that it is better to provide good information and let [other] people build the Skype ecosystem," said Chief Security Officer Kurt Sauer, adding that "the best ideas are somewhere else."

Vice President, Mobile & Telecom Services Michael Jackson joked that "we will not, in the short-term, be having installers in Skype trucks visiting businesses," but added that independent "Skype integrators may come along."

He said "Skype for business" will evolve as a set of functions that can be switched on or off and fine-tuned according to the needs of the enterprise or organization.

Jackson pointed to a set of features for system administrators in Skype 3.0 that allows extensive control, making Skype "more suitable" for company use. The features include the ability to implement a usage policy and allocate prepaid service credits and accounts.

About 30 percent of Skype use is currently for business, mainly by small businesses, but there is increasing interest from larger companies, he said. He cited the integration of a Skype click-to-call feature at the USRobotics Web site as one example of "mainstream business" adopting a technology that was first designed for home use.

Skype 'Worm,' Bandwidth Concerns

Speaking to journalists at Skype's development center, Sauer also addressed the issue of an alleged worm recently said to have propagated in the Skype network as well as claims that corporate networks using Skype could become overloaded "supernodes."

"We have done reverse engineering on this so-called worm, and it is not a worm, but a real piece of malware, using Skype to send an instant message to users which contains a Web URL that allows the download of other malware that was apparently targeted at Pay Pal," he said, adding that the offending site had been shut down. Pay Pal is the payment system owned by Skype parent eBay.

Supernodes were used to track 300 Skype users in a kind of distributed directory of all users to form a "global index" for Skype. "Supernode traffic is just short query traffic that uses little bandwidth, supernodes are not involved in speech traffic," he explained.

Skype May Penetrate Firewalls

The Skype executives were somewhat evasive when asked whether Skype penetrated company and personal firewalls. He said that when both parties to a Skype call have firewalls, it is impossible to form a peer-to-peer link, so a system of "relays" using other nodes is used. "This relaying is what is understood as punching holes in firewalls," Sauer said.

Jackson added that Skype 3.0 allows system administrators to "specify the port to be used by Skype" rather than letting Skype find a port that works, implying that Skype searches for any open, suitable port when linking a call to a network.

Jackson and Sauer's meeting with Baltic IT journalists also provided a rare look at Skype's low-profile Estonian development center, where more than 200 programmers from 32 countries work on three floors of an open-office environment. The small number of separate conference rooms and cubicles all have Estonian names so that "employees learn a little of the language" according to Skype spokesman Villu Arak.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/pcworld/20061226/tc_pcworld/128325

International airline to allow cell phone chatter on planes

2006-12-27T21:08:00.000-05:00

From cell phone use to high-speed Internet access, the connected life is spreading to the skies.

In January, Emirates airline plans to launch mobile phone usage in its planes, making it the first airline to allow passengers to make cell phone calls on its flights.

And Australian carrier Qantas plans to start evaluating technology that lets fliers use their cell phones and PDAs during flight early next year.

Fliers have long been able to keep in touch with those on the ground by using phones built into the backs of airplane seats. But the costs of those seatback phones can be upwards of $10 a minute, plus a connection fee.

In contrast, the cost of calls made in-flight on Emirates will be in line with international roaming rates, the airline said. Those rates vary by mobile carrier and by location but can be as low as $1 to $2 a minute.

But while some upscale, long-haul airlines are installing equipment onboard that will allow for cell phone use, it may be a while before the service makes its way to the U.S.

U.S. carriers don't allow in-flight cell phone calls, although the FAA is reviewing the safety concerns associated with mobile calls made in the air.

The regulatory agency has asked a committee to conduct a study looking at whether portable electronic devices like cell phones interfere with aircraft navigation systems. Findings of the study are due at the end of December.

Furthermore, airlines in the troubled U.S. industry are struggling to survive and new in-flight services may not attract new customers, analysts say.

"There's no economic incentive for them to do it. Domestically they're not going to bring anyone extra on to their airplane with that service," said airline industry consultant Michael Boyd.

A majority of business travelers (61 percent) oppose the idea of being able to use their phones in the sky, according to a global survey conducted by travel management company Carlson Wagonlit Travel early this year.

But if the technology is there, the service will eventually make its way to the skies, said Chris McGinnis, editor of Expedia Travel Trendwatch.

"Whether people like it or not, in-flight cell phone use is going to become a reality," he said.

Airlines are also exploring less intrusive ways to keep in-step with the increasingly connected lifestyle of their passengers.

According to the annual Airline IT Trends Survey conducted by industry group SITA and Airline Business magazine, 59 percent of airlines plan to offer in-flight Internet access by the end of 2008.

One company helping U.S. carriers make that leap is Louisville, Colorado-based AirCell, which won a license earlier this year to provide exclusive broadband connectivity to U.S. airlines starting in 2008.

Companies have attempted to tap the market for in-flight Internet access before -- the most notable being Boeing, which launched its Connexion high-speed broadband business in 2000.

Several international airlines installed Boeing's system, which cost travelers from $10 to $30 a flight. But in August, Boeing said it was closing Connexion because the market for it hadn't materialized as expected.

AirCell CEO Jack Blumenstein said Connexion's fate doesn't spell doom for the future of onboard Internet access.

For one, Boeing's system was expensive -- it cost about $1 million to outfit a single plane. In contrast, airlines can equip a plane with AirCell's technology for about one-tenth of that cost, Blumenstein said.

Expedia's McGinnis thinks people will take advantage of onboard Internet access as long as it is cheap enough.

"If you can sit there and stream movies and read your email or do research -- it's absolutely something people would use," he said.

Blumenstein said the price of in-flight Internet access offered by AirCell should be comparable to or slightly higher than what users pay to access "hot spots" on the ground.

Accessing a Wi-Fi hot spot at a cafe can run anywhere from $8 for a single day of access to around $30 a month for unlimited access, depending on the service operator.

http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/12/21/wired.airlines/index.html

Amazon.com has 'best ever' sales

2006-12-27T21:05:00.000-05:00

Amazon.com Inc.'s 2006 holiday season peaked with more than 4 million orders placed on December 11, the Web retailer said Tuesday.

That broke last year's single-day record of more than 3.6 million orders set on December 12.

In its 12th holiday season, Amazon.com said it again had its "best ever" sales and that it shipped more than 99 percent of orders in time to meet holiday deadlines around the globe. As many as 3.4 million units went out in a single day.

The company said it sold 1,000 Xbox 360 game consoles in 29 seconds as part of a promotion that slashed two-thirds off the regular retail price.

Demand for the Microsoft Corp. machines was so high that Amazon.com's site bogged down briefly on Thanksgiving Day, generating bitter complaints from shoppers and forcing the retailer to change procedures for subsequent promotions.

Apple Computer Inc.'s iPods, Canon Inc.'s Powershot Digital Elph cameras and Garmin Ltd.'s navigational devices using Global Positioning System technology were among the best-selling consumer electronics items.

Amazon.com also sold the most expensive digital music player to date, for $19,999.

Among the top-selling DVD titles was "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest," starring Johnny Depp. Best-selling books included Barack Obama's "The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream" and "You: On a Diet" by Mehmet C. Oz and Michael F. Roizen.

http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/biztech/12/27/amazon.sales.ap/index.html

Clicking into the Future: Predictions for 2007

2006-12-27T13:04:00.000-05:00

While 2006 was a great year for webmasters it was a time of great change and challenge in the search engine sector. The most notable trend from 2006 was the continued advancement of Google against natural rivals Yahoo, MSN and Ask, as well as its persistent movement towards other, less obvious advertising venues. Next week we will look back at the ghosts of 2006 but as the New Year approaches, thoughts turn towards the spirits of things to come.

Predictions for 2007

1/ Google's early entry to radio advertising will bear fruit prompting Google to start examining television advertising.

When it comes to the allocation of advertising dollars, Google fundamentally altered the rules of the game. In the past, mass market advertisers would gamble on a shotgun approach to ad-spending. The options consisted of newspaper, magazine, telephone directory, radio or television. While each medium could provide statistics showing their print-run and audience, tracking the success or failure of these types of advertising has always posed a problem for manufacturers and retailers. When Google popularized the pay-per-click model in which advertisers only pay when a person actually views the ad, a new model was born.

Google's billing model will have to alter slightly to meet the radio and video formats however, as digital radio and television becomes the norm, tracking will become far easier. Google will be able to charge by the listener or viewer though it remains to be seen if listeners or viewers will actually listen to or view advertisements on digital radio or television.

2/ A consortium of major newspapers and publishers will form a consolidated advertising group to combat Google. The initiative will fail.

In 2006, Google literally sucked much of the money out of the pool of resources shared by publishers on or offline. With its venture into newspaper advertising, Google has threatened the classic golden goose of traditional news publishing, the classified ad section. News gathering organizations, already reeling from a loss of advertising income to other facets of the online marketplace should band together much as several airlines have to reduce cost and difficulties booking tickets. The newspapers and magazines could easily promote local, regional, national and even international advertising opportunities at a much lower cost than they could individually. If they can band together to undercut Google's costs is another question however they will either figure out how to collectively raise advertising income or they will become Google advertising affiliates.

3/ Congress will initiate an open investigation of pay-per-click advertising models.

We already know of closed-door congressional inquiries into the PPC market. Stemming from the AIT vs. Google case, we have learned of FBI and Secret Service investigations, and in-camera hearings before congressional committees. We also know of at least two republican and one democratic senators interested in opening further investigations.

How this one plays out is a mystery, but it will likely play out this year. Thus far, the investigations have been kept behind closed doors, a silent testimony to the strength of Google's lobby effort in Washington DC. No matter how talented and strenuous the lobby, an investigation of Click Fraud will be made public sometime this year.

4/ An investigation of pay-per-click advertising models will threaten Google's stock values.

Hence the strong lobby effort. If common sense doesn't threaten Google's stock values, the threat of congressional oversight will.

5/ Google will drop below $450 before the end of first quarter 2007. If Google drops below $425, watch for a major landslide in California.

The market is softening. With expected slowdowns in the housing, building, manufacturing and retail sectors, tech investors are showing signs of skittishness going into 2007. The first part of January is traditionally a time when the market readjusts to decisions made by investors in the last weeks of December. Many sell shares towards the end of the year in order to clarify their incomes for tax time. This year, a number of analysts have advised clients to unload some of their Google shares as a hedge against an expected downturn in share values.

While Google remains far above the $450 range, expect it to drop to around $450 by mid-March. It's earnings to assets ratios are way too extended and though it has better prospects than any of its competitors, the search advertising market is changing rapidly. The only thing that saves Google from dropping is rapid entry into the television advertising market. The first signs of a weakening AdWords market will be the catalyst of the first round of a Goog landslide. If the share prices hit $425, watch for major selling. If it goes below $400, buy a boat.

6/ Yahoo will find focus and direction.

Having freed itself from the sticky peanut butter mess it found itself in late 2006, Yahoo has made the first steps towards reorganizing their messy organization. The battle between Hollywood and Sunnyvale has been settled with the geeks coming out on top of the agents. This year is Yahoo's year to stage a serious comeback or to languish into obscurity. I suspect the former. However, all the major algorithmic search engines will face a new challenger this year.

7/ The major search engines will face a new and socially adept competitor this year.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has hooked up with Amazon to produce a human-powered search engine that will be released sometime in 2007. This collaborative effort to dethrone Google will be moderately successful. Wikisari will quickly become one of the biggies, but Google will still be king.

8/ 2007 will be the year Internet marketers discover the power of online video.

The use of video will become a standard component of online communication. Advertisements, long-distance conferencing and public relations in general will be affected. The advancement of video online will set the stage for a major realignment in the traditional entertainment industry.

9/ DIY Infotainment Distribution for fun and profit.

Using tools like the Yahoo Publisher Network, YouTube, Flickr and distributed podcasts, webmasters and private websites will start to replace professionally developed network broadcasts as an information and entertainment source.

Add efficient monetization to the mix through Yahoo Search Marketing ads and you have an effective enticement for adventurous webmasters to try entering the market.

10/ YPN will see challengers this year.

While the Yahoo Publisher Network is by far the most advanced program of its kind, expect to see other search entities introducing their own webmaster friendly monetized information and entertainment distribution programs.

11/ The search marketing environment will further fragment with the following sectors seeing;

stronger gains: Video, Social Networking, Niche marketing, Vertical search
weaker margins: Traditional domain-driven SEO, Small-scale PPC

12/ Changes to the SEO Billing Model

Many traditional SEOs will be forced to adopt PPC style billing. Fees will be charged based on the success of a campaign as opposed to flat fees charged up front or on a monthly basis. Greg Boser has written and commented on this several times, most recently in a conversation with WebmasterRadio's Daron Babin on the last Rainmaker show of 2006.

13/ Consolidation in the Search Marketing Sector

In 2007, financial pressures faced by firms in the SEO part of the search marketing industry will produce a sector that looks very different from the one we work in now. Watch for consolidation between allied SEO, SEM, Public Relations and link-building firms as clients demand full-service vendors.

14/ Hasty La Vista

Early Microsoft Vista users will eat a number of worms, catch a bunch of viruses and end up as Zombies. As a result, savvy IT departments put off the update until Microsoft can prove it has created a master-patch.

15/ Patch This Microsoft

That big patch will be ready for download in 2008, effectively delaying the rollout of Vista for another year.

2 Bonus Predictions

16/ Duke Nukem Forever

Duke Nukem Forever will be noted as the greatest game that never was.

17/ Planet Fortune

Webmasters will have more rewarding opportunities this year than ever. 2007 will see the fruition of several major initiatives started in 2005 or 2006 such as the YPN, online video advertising, and the combination of on and offline advertising. With the largest public relations and marketing firms in the world taking serious note of search, the search marketing industry will be truly considered part of the mainstream ad industry. This will empower webmasters as more attention, energy and assistance is directed towards helping webmasters present interesting content framed by increasingly expensive advertising. There is a lot of fortune to be found online this year and much of it will trickle down to the grassroots.

2007 is going to be an intense and interesting year. Next week, we'll take a look at how I did in my 2006 predictions.

http://www.sitepronews.com/

What do eBay Listings Mean Anyway?

2006-12-27T13:00:00.001-05:00

All EBAY research analysts report listings as the metric with which to follow the health of EBAY’s marketplaces business week to week. They do this simply because listings are the only public piece of information that can be continuously monitored simply by looking up figures on the EBAY website. However, are listings really the key metric? The answer is obviously no.

The key metric of EBAY’s health is GMV (Gross Merchandise Volume) which captures the value of all goods and services that trade hands on EBAY. GMV drives the bulk of EBAY Marketplace and PayPal fees. GMV is a function of consummated listings and their average selling price. Consummated listings are complicated to calculate. They depend of the absolute number of listings (how many items are on the shelf), the trade velocity (how long items are on the shelf), and the average conversion rate (how likely an item is to sell).

Therefore, the absolute listings data we get every week is only part of the story. There could be a scenario where consummated listings are actually growing while the absolute number of items on the shelf remains constant. This would occur is either the conversion rate or the trade velocity were to increase.

Week 12 eBay Listings Down on Holiday Break

2006-12-27T12:59:00.001-05:00

As is common every year around the time of the holiday break, week 12 listings suffered a major decline W/W, with core listings down over 33% from last week. Y/Y growth rates remained constant at around 15% for total listings. Analysts now expect a marked rebound in the final week
of the year due to the practice of listing unwanted gifts.

Listings data for this week, according to Merrill Lynch, came in with total listings QTD (to 22 Dec) of 544.4 million (versus 472.4 million QTD in 2005) representing 15.2% Y/Y growth. Corresponding core listings stood at 457.0 million QTD (versus 409.9 million QTD in 2005) representing 11.5% Y/Y growth.

Increased Sales Through Custom “Her” Service

2006-12-26T16:20:00.001-05:00

If you’re in business, most any business, chances are that you count women among your customer base. There are the obvious examples, such as Spanx, where women clearly are the target customers, as well as the businesses that consciously court women, like Overstock.com, because they see the opportunity for increased revenue and growth.

But what about products like insurance, computer software, hardware or home loans? It might surprise you to learn that women influence a majority of these purchases and if you’re not actively soliciting their business, you’re leaving money on the table. We call this female-friendly approach, Custom “Her” Service, and it’s not nearly as time-intensive as it sounds. In fact, it’s a smart way to earn business from your male customers too.

Throw out gender assumptions

The first time we purchased a home, my husband and I were referred to a banker by a trusted business associate. We scheduled a meeting and I compiled an expandable folder full of everything we might need.

In our home we divide work based on talent, which means my husband cooks and I handle the finances. But the lender was determined to remain tradition-bound in his approach. The first and only time he looked at me was when he offered us each a chair. From that point forward he directed all of his questions to my husband, who would then look to me for a response. I would provide the lender with an answer and he would then question my husband further. After about ten minutes of this dance we decided to leave. By refusing to see the customer sitting right in front of him, that lender lost a fat commission.

Are you treating everyone who comes into contact with your business with the same level of interest and respect, or are you making some assumptions that might be adversely affecting your sales?

Make comparison shopping easy

If you offer products or services from several brands, interactive tools or literature can help your customers make an informed decision. Even if you represent one product line or service, you should know how it stacks up against that of your competitors, and create your own comparison sheet. Best Buy has a convenient tool on its site that allows you to select similar products, such as laptops or digital cameras, to compare side-by-side. Progressive provides car insurance quotes from three of their top competitors. Yes, women are busy, but the vast majority will invest the time necessary to make the right choice. Help make that process faster and easier and you’ll walk away with the sale.

Keep in touch with relevant information (even – especially - when there’s not a direct sales opportunity)

After my lending fiasco I was referred to a mortgage broker who provides me with such wonderful service that I’m happy to pay a bit more for it. Not only does she keep in touch when rates change enough that refinancing might be in order, but she forwards me relevant articles on general financial topics, like identity theft or end of year tax tips.

Recently I responded to an email she sent about my home equity line. After discussing my situation further she suggested I call the lender directly to see if I could lock in a rate. I ended up staying with what I have, but I appreciated having a professional at my disposal with whom I could discuss ideas. Gayle makes me feel like there’s another set of eyes looking out for our interests, which is why I’ve referred at least five friends to her, and why I won’t do business with a lender directly just to save a few bucks.

For ideas that translate to a retail environment, REI offers free triathlon training and paddling seminars that build community and trust, inspiring their customers to get out and play. Where do you think these women are going to go when it’s time to outfit themselves for their next outdoor adventure.

Ask for feedback

This one is so easy and takes minimal effort, yet so few businesses take advantage of the huge opportunity to be gained just by asking their customers what they want. Comment cards under the counter or a feedback tab hidden at the bottom of your website don’t count.

Select a few times a year when you actively invite customers to tell you how you could serve them better. Email a survey about your business to your list, perhaps with an incentive attached. Solicit business-to-business success stories or host an informal gathering of customers and potential customers to float ideas about new product lines.

When asked, women are often more than happy to share their opinion. When not asked, they may share it anyway, just not with you. Be open to hearing the good, the bad and the ugly about what you provide and then thank them for the opportunity to make it better. Even if some changes can’t be implemented right away or exactly as recommended they’ll appreciate the interest and effort. From a business standpoint, you may uncover your next great marketing opportunity. Samsung came up with its DuoCam, the first two-lens digital camera and camcorder, based on the feedback of female customers who didn’t want to lug two cameras around to record “life events.” Don’t pressure yourself or your staff to come up with your next great idea. Let your custom-hers do it for you.

http://www.startupnation.com/pages/articles/increased-sales-service.asp?src=nw

Home-Based Business Tax Write-Offs

2006-12-26T16:17:00.000-05:00

If you’re running a home-based business, have we got some good tax news for you! By popular demand, here are even more tax write-offs that are especially suited to home-based businesses.

Employing your kids

Being around your children can be one of the biggest lifestyle advantages of a home-based business, of course. And if you hire them to help you with your work, having your kids just upstairs from your office also can yield significant tax benefits.

Whether they do internet research for you or comprise your focus group for the toy you’ve invented, paying your kids a wage can represent a legitimate expense. “You just have to keep really good logs of what they’re doing, and when they’re working, to prove that they’re actually performing a function,” Rosenberg says.

And, of course, you can’t pay them any more than what the market wage would be for their tasks.

Processing your expenses

Both to keep financial tabs on your home-based business and to maximize write-offs, you should organize your records in two ways.

First, thoroughly document expenses while you’re making the outlays. Don’t lose track of a single penny. Get receipts for everything, every day, and stuff them in an envelope; or at least jot your expense and date on a piece of note paper.

Second, organize a thorough record of your disbursements. Microsoft Office Accounting software (a StartupNation sponsor) or another off-the-shelf program works marvelously for this. And some home-based business owners hire a bookkeeper just for this and other mundane financial chores that they can’t or don’t want to handle.

You should consider obtaining a separate credit card just for business use and running all your expenditures through that card. “It’s a great organizational tool to make sure that everything related to your business is on your books, and you can maneuver the information however you need to,” says Stephanie Schank, a home-based corporate-meeting planner through her company SpotOn Events, in San Francisco.

And for tax time, most credit-card companies will give you a print-out categorizing your expenses over the course of they year, which you can then happily hand to your accountant.

Getting expert help

Hire a competent accountant to optimize your tax preparation. There’s just no substitute for a professional who can size up you, your company, and your particular situation to make sure no write-off goes unexamined – whether the accountant thinks you should claim it or is protecting you from yourself!

Our Bottom Line

Tax write-offs can be a fertile area for realizing some advantages in operating a home-based business. It takes planning, discipline, organization – and expert help – to make the most of the possibilities.

http://www.startupnation.com/pages/articles/more-home-based-business-writeoffs.asp?src=nw

Help Yourself to Happiness

2006-12-24T16:58:00.000-05:00

Everybody, everywhere
Seeks happiness, it's true
but finding it and keeping it
Seems difficult to do.
Difficult because we think that happiness is found
Only in places where
Fame and wealth abound.
And so we go on searching
In places of pleasure
Seeking recognition
And momentary treasure,
Unaware that happiness
Is just a state of mind
Withing the reach of everyone
Who takes time to be kind.
For in making others happy
You will be happy too,
For the happiness you give away
Returns to shine on you!!

http://lessonsfrommishlei.blogspot.com/2006/12/help-yourself-to-happiness_20.html

eBay Seller Sentenced to 6.5 Years for Superbowl Ticket Scam

2006-12-24T03:18:00.000-05:00

A Massachusetts man was sentenced in federal court on Thursday on wire and mail fraud charges for a scheme in which he advertised Superbowl tickets over the Internet, collected approximately $255,000 from customers, and then never provided either the tickets or refunds, according to a press release issued by U.S. Attorney.

United States Attorney Michael J. Sullivan and Peter Zegarac, Postal Inspector in Charge of the U.S. Postal Inspection Service in New England, announced that MICHAEL R. DEPPE, age 20, of Hudson, Massachusetts, was sentenced by U.S. District Judge F. Dennis Saylor, IV, to 6 years and 6 months in prison, to be followed by 3 years of supervised release. DEPPE was also ordered to pay a $12,500 fine as well as $520,000 in restitution to his victims. The Court also ordered DEPPE to forfeit $370,000, including the $11,000 in cash that was found in his residence at the time of his arrest. Following a seven-day trial, on May 2, 2006, a jury convicted DEPPE of 3 counts of Wire Fraud and 2 counts of Mail Fraud.

According to the press release, evidence presented at trial proved that DEPPE's Superbowl ticket scam began approximately two weeks before the February 6, 2005 Superbowl, when DEPPE suggested to his business partner that they sell Superbowl tickets over online auction site eBay. DEPPE falsely told his partner that he had a contact at a reputable ticket agency in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and that this person was willing to let him sell Superbowl tickets on commission.

Google Maps - Multiple Destinations

2006-12-24T02:50:00.000-05:00

Google added a new advanced feature to Google Maps: multiple destinations. Now, if you need to go to more than one place, you can enter more than one destination (by hitting the new "Add destination" link) and get directions to each place in order.

Not only that, but you can drag and drop the various destinations, optimizing your route and watching as your trip time gets shorter with each change.

This is a great new feature, one that brings Google closer to the options available at some of its more advanced competitors. Google still makes it harder to add destinations than most of the other Web 2.0 maps, by requiring text input for destinations that must fit a perfect, exact, specific syntax. I can't tell you how many times I've had trouble getting directions because I entered "137-15″, which is the syntax used on all the homes in my neighborhood, when Google required me to enter "13715″. Google fixed that one very recently, but now they've got an even dumber syntax requirement: I have to enter "71st Ave.", instead of "71 Ave.". Seriously, if all your PhDs can't program that one right, you've got a problem.

There's a reason I stick to Microsoft's Windows Live Local is that if I know where something is, Live Local doesn't make me feel like I'm using DOS again. I find the place I'm looking for, and right-click on it, and click to add a placemark and get directions. Its that damn easy, and the fact that Microsoft isn't even the first to do that, and has been doing it for a while, pisses me off about Google Maps and prevents me from counting on it for directions.

Source: http://www.webpronews.com/blogtalk/blogtalk/wpn-58-20061222GoogleMapsMultipleDestinations.html

Think before you speak...

2006-12-21T15:57:00.000-05:00

Here are six reasons why you should think before you speak -

the last one is great!

Have you ever spoken and wished that you could immediately take the words back...or that you could crawl into a hole?

Here are the Testimonials of a few people who did....

FIRST TESTIMONY:

I walked into a hair salon with my husband and three kids in tow and asked loudly,

"How much do you charge for a shampoo and a blow job?"

I turned around and walked back out and never went back

My husband didn't say a word...he knew better.

SECOND TESTIMONY:

I was at the golf store comparing different kinds of golf balls.

I was unhappy with the women's type I had been using.

After browsing for several minutes, I was approached by one of the good-looking gentlemen who works at the store. He asked if he could help me.

Without thinking, I looked at him and said, "I think I like playing with men's balls."

THIRD TESTIMONY:

My sister and I were at the mall and passed by a store that sold a variety of candy and nuts.

As we were looking at the display case, the boy behind the counter asked if we needed any help.

I replied, "No, I'm just looking at your nuts."

My sister started to laugh hysterically.

The boy grinned, and I turned beet-red and walked away.

To this day, my sister has never let me forget.

FOURTH TESTIMONY:

While in line at the bank one afternoon, my toddler decided to release some pent-up energy and ran amok.

I was finally able to grab hold of her after receiving looks of disgust and annoyance from other patrons.

I told her that if she did not start behaving "right now" she would be punished.

To my horror, she looked me in the eye and said in a voice just as threatening,"If you don't let me go right now, I will tell Grandma that I saw you kissing Daddy's pee-pee last night!"

The silence was deafening after this enlightening exchange. Even the tellers stopped what they were doing.

I mustered up the last of my dignity and walked out of the bank with my daughter in tow.

The last thing I heard when the door closed behind me, were screams of laughter.

FIFTH TESTIMONY:

Have you ever asked your child a question too many times?

My three-year-old son had a lot of problems with potty training and I was on him constantly.

One day we stopped at Taco Bell for a quick lunch in between errands.

It was very busy, with a full dining room. While enjoying my taco, I smelled something funny, so of course I checked my seven-month-old daughter, she was clean.

Then realized that Danny had not asked to go potty in a while. I asked him if he needed to go,

and he said "No".

I kept thinking "Oh Lord, that child has had an accident, and I don't have any clothes with me."

Then I said, "Danny, are you SURE you didn't have an accident?"

"No," he replied.

I just KNEW that he must have had an accident, because the smell was getting worse.

Soooooo, I asked one more time, "Danny, did you have an accident?"

This time he jumped up, yanked down his pants, bent over, spread his cheeks and yelled "SEE MOM, IT'S JUST FARTS!!"

While 30 people nearly choked to death on their tacos laughing, he calmly pulled up his pants and sat down.

An old couple made me feel better, thanking me for the best laugh they'd ever had!

LAST BUT NOT LEAST TESTIMONY:

This had most of the state of Michigan laughing for 2 days and a very embarrassed female news anchor who will, in the future, likely think before she speaks.

What happens when you predict snow but don't get any!

We had a female news anchor that, the day after it was supposed to have snowed and didn't, turned to the weatherman and asked:

"So Bob, where's that 8 inches you promised me last night?"

Not only did HE have to leave the set, but half the crew did too they were laughing so hard!

Now, didn't that feel good?

Pass it on to someone you know who needs a laugh and remember

We all say things we don't really mean, so think before you speak.

eBay Survey Reveals 57 Percent of Americans Receive Unwanted Gifts for the Holidays

2006-12-21T11:43:00.000-05:00

Attention gift givers: according to the third annual Holiday Re-Gifting Survey commissioned by eBay (Nasdaq:EBAY - News), the vast majority of Americans -- more than 57 percent -- say they normally receive holiday presents they don't like.

Sixty-nine percent of Americans now believe "re-gifting" is socially acceptable -- a significant increase over last year, when only 49 percent felt it was acceptable to secretly unload unwanted gifts. In fact, 34 percent said they are likely to do it themselves this year, versus the reported 21 percent from last year.

Of those respondents who said they plan to dispose of an unwanted present this year, 40 percent said they would sell it on eBay to help offset their holiday expenses.

One key reason disposing of unwanted gifts is popular: people are getting away with it. The survey found that 85 percent say they have never been caught in the act. However, about one-third of all respondents admitted they have knowingly received a re-gifted item.

The survey also revealed:

Of the 55 percent of respondents who admitted to re-gifting, the recipients are most often friends (62 percent) and co-workers (42 percent).
Only a tiny percentage (5 percent) of people say they've re-gifted to Grandma or Grandpa, but even Mom and Dad may not be spared, as 18 percent say they've re-gifted to their parents.
Most popular re-gifted items include: knick-knacks (32 percent), bottles of wine or spirits (26 percent), DVDs, CDs or books (23 percent), bath products (22 percent) and fruitcake (17 percent).
Some presents are resistant to re-gifting. Safe bets include technology and electronics items, as only 3 percent of respondents were likely to re-gift these; and jewelry and handmade gifts, as only 5 percent said they'd want to unload these items on someone else.

Survey Methodology:

This national survey was conducted by Survey.com in November 2006. Five hundred respondents over the age of 18 completed the survey. The margin of error was +/- 4.4% (95% confidence interval).

http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/061221/20061221005154.html?.v=1

Holiday Web Shopping Hits $20.65B

2006-12-21T10:12:00.000-05:00

NEW YORK (AP) -- Holiday online spending reached $20.65 billion in the U.S. as of Monday night, a 25 percent rise over 2005, according to data released Wednesday from comScore Networks.

Shoppers spent more than $643 million last weekend, 34 percent higher than the corresponding weekend last year, the Reston, Va.-based research group reported.

"The strategy of luring holiday shopping procrastinators with extended shipping guarantees paid off handsomely for online retailers," Gian Fulgoni, chairman of comScore Networks, said in a statement.

ComScore raised its forecast for total spending this holiday season by $300 million to $24.6 billion.

ComScore reported Web traffic data for the month of November Tuesday evening.
In terms of unique visitors, Yahoo Inc. sites still topped the list at 129.9 million.

Time Warner Inc. sites, which include AOL, followed, then Microsoft Corp.'s MSN and other sites, Google Inc., and eBay Inc.

News Corp.'s Fox Interactive Media, which includes the popular social hangout MySpace, came in sixth, even though MySpace received more total page views last month than Yahoo.

ComScore also reported that 9 of the top 10 growing categories of Web sites were retail-related, thanks to holiday shopping pressure. Online department stores saw visitors climb 24 percent over October. In that category, Wal-Mart Stores Inc.'s site saw a 64 percent gain in visitors month-over-month and Target Corp.'s traffic rose 37 percent. The research group said Wal-Mart's gain was helped by traffic to its electronics section, which more than doubled.

Best Buy Co. and Circuit City Stores Inc. both saw traffic rise steeply, as did specialty gifts retailer RedEnvelope Inc.

Creating a Sustainable Competitive Advantage for Your Small Business

2006-12-21T02:19:00.000-05:00

Getting a leg up on the competition — and keeping it there — takes more than a solid product, smart marketing and savvy management. You also need a way to achieve a long-term advantage, a strategy that will provide a sustainable edge over rivals.

“The experts often talk about the importance for large companies to win a sustainable competitive advantage,” says Sarah Gerdes, CEO of Business Marketing Group, a San Francisco-based firm specializing in management and partnership consulting. “But, it’s important for other businesses, too.”

How do you pull it off? Try these tactics:

A long-term contract

Signing a deal with customers that allows you to be their regular vendor makes it nearly impossible for competitors to take business away from you. That’s what Doc Parghi, vice president of worldwide sales and business development at five-year-old AppLabs has done.

From the beginning, the Philadelphia-based software testing company strategically inked one-year contracts, focusing on startups that are more likely than bigger companies to go for such deals. At first, AppLab’s approach was to spend three to six months proving itself to customers, then asking for a long-term deal.

But when it became more established, AppLabs took a different tack, proposing a one-year agreement during initial negotiations, with the understanding that clients would sign on after a few months if they were satisfied with the service. More recently, AppLabs has nailed down four such agreements with Fortune 50 companies, two of which renew automatically. The tactic has helped AppLabs double revenues every year.

Exclusive distribution rights

If you can arrange to become the only company distributing someone’s products, you’ll have a nearly impregnable line of defense. Just look at Travis Schneider, CEO of StarBrand Media.

The three-year-old Los Angeles-based company has a Web site — www.starbrand.tv — where fans can order fashions and other products featured on popular TV shows and movies. To make it happen, Schneider has locked up exclusive deals with movie studios and networks allowing him not only to feature the items, but get word on what the actors will wear before a TV show airs, so he can be ready at the jump.

Exclusive geographic rights

Arrange to be the sole vendor of a service or product in a specific area, which AppLabs has also tried.

It signed an agreement with a software company to be the only provider of testing services for that firm’s overseas clients. It also made a deal with an association to be its exclusive partner in India. While the tactic hasn’t been as central to AppLab’s success as its long-term contracts, there’s been a handsome payoff.

Exclusive access to a resource

You might be able to win the right to use a technology that gives you a significant edge in the market. In this case, you don’t own the actual patent. But, by locking up exclusive use under certain circumstances, you can still gain a tasty advantage over rival businesses.

Even if you’re not the only one with access to the resource, you’ll still be ahead of the game if it’s something that’s hard for others to lay hands on.

That’s what Eric Ling figured when he started Bubbles Tea and Juice Co., in Columbus, Ohio, a year-and-a-half ago. He uses a special machine that seals plastic cups airtight and prevents leaks. Ling doesn’t have exclusive rights to the device, which is made in Taiwan, where he grew up. But he thinks it’s unlikely to be used by local competitors. “It’s not that easy to find unless you have a connection back in Taiwan,” Ling says.

Go for the gold: a patent

Of course, the piece de resistance is to win a patent for your own technology or product, giving you a legal monopoly on its use. Take Fortius One, a one-year-old firm in Washington, D.C., that provides geography-based business intelligence.

Its patented mapping and analysis tools “provide us with an invaluable advantage,” says CEO Daniel Abraham. Better yet, because the technology was developed by the company’s founders as part of their doctoral dissertations, Fortius One has been able to get around the usual restrictions on intellectual property ownership.

While the university where researchers develop their inventions generally owns the patents, that’s not always true for technology developed as part of a dissertation, Abraham says: “It’s been clearly vetted legally just who the rights belong to.”

Our bottom line

The more you can lock up the use, distribution or sale of a product or service, the better off you’ll be — and the more likely it is that competitors will eat your dust.

http://www.startupnation.com/pages/articles/competitive-advantage-small-business.asp?src=nw