Ecommerce

Wondering which languages are popular? You can check out a resource like this.

Knol recently launched. Competes against places like wikipedia. Details are available at this article.

IBM has spoken words being converted into sign language. The sign language can be handled by animated characters.

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While Internet Explorer remains the dominant browser on the market, Firefox is making major inroads around the world, according to a study released by XiTiMonitor.

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Previously in this post we discussed about getting $1,000. If the last idea did not fit your needs, one may still be able to get $400!

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Facebook is very popular now.  This article discusses 5 viral techniques on Facebook.  One can check it out here.

Most people have really not been following what has going on between the FCC, the telecoms and Google. So it is easy to ignore the news about Google’s interest in bidding on the FCC spectrum auction.

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Google has just rolled out it’s “Print Ads” program from a limited test to the general public (the “alpha” test was in November 2006).

What exactly is the “Print Ads” program? It allows Google advertisers to basically buy ads in newspapers. While some newspapers were initially reluctant to adopt it, decreasing newspaper industry profits, have made many eager not to overlook new sources of revenue. Additionally, it is likely to introduce a new class of customers (those with “micro” ad budgets) that are currently only advertising online.

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A previous post talked about virtual goods monetization. Gigaom has an interesting post on Second Life (a popular virtual reality world) called Debunking 5 business myths about Second Life. Techcrunch also covers it in this post.

Google is now introducing mapplets. Allows developers to overlay their own applications called mapplets onto google maps. In the words of the Google map team they had always intended Google Maps to become

a platform for navigating all kinds of location-based information

You can read more about it here.

An earlier post mentioned widget marketing.  One of the important things is to be able to track widget effectiveness.  This venturebeat link talks about tracking widgets.

What web metrics should be important for ads? Should advertisers care about pageviews, visits, relevancy, time spent on a website?  How are different ad/web measurement firms weighing in on this topic? One firm, Nielsen/NetRatings, is now moving away from “pageviews” and toward “time spent” at a website.  Other firms are emphasizing other metrics.  Readwriteweb discusses it in more detail here if you are interested in this topic.

According to this post, feedburner stats PRO and feedburner mybrand are now free. Note: The second option would require access to cname in DNS.

Which social network is popular in the US? Which one in India? in Australia?  Easy visual cues through this color coded global map of social networks. Here is the link.

Myspace is a very popular destination. Currently, the fifth most popular website in English. How did it get there? This post by Brad Greenspan, Myspace’s founder, charts the history of Myspace.

This post discusses Google’s plans for search.  Readwriteweb mentions Google’s Marissa talk about eight topics of search focus at Google.

Marc Andreessen recently posted part four of his guide to startups. Also see part III, part II. His first post was referenced earlier. Marc is more oriented towards VCs (venture capitalists). Not all new businesses qualify for VCs, but one may still find it interesting reading.

Marc Andreessen (of Netscape fame) has written an interesting guide on venture capitalists. If you are interested in that sort of thing, check it out. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.

This post talks about how a company got bought by Google.  Has some interesting tips.

Came across this June coupon code for “Best of the web” listing. If you have a great website/blog and think you might qualify it may be something you might want to consider. Promo Code: BEACHBUM.

The “Ecommerce Well” paperback has a brief introduction to virtual reality and augmented reality.  This is no accident.  These items are still in their infancy and have a tremendous amount of growth ahead of them.  There is a post on Tech Crunch called “Virtual Goods: The next big business model” which makes for interesting reading.

Enormous changes are happening and will to continue to happen (and indeed accelerate) as business and the Internet interact.  Governments can play a positive role or a seriously negative one.  It is no surprise therefore that one of the Internet heavyweights, Google, is beefing up its presence in Washington DC.

So you want to try your hand at an online ebusiness. Thinking about “playing” around with some online advertising for your ebusiness. Wouldn’t it be great if you could get a discount to an online advertising industry leader like Google Adwords?

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