Think You Don’t Need Killer Copywriting Skills For Your Internet

What’s the biggest mistake that people make in their online business? The answer: People pay very little or no attention to their copy. What is copy? The copy consists of the words that are on internet marketer’s websites, ads, etc. They need to know that there are specific copywriting techniques that have proven to be effective. For example, direct response marketing has been around for decades and involves a specific type of copywriting. These copywriting tactics can and should be applied to Internet copy.

If they don’t know about marketing and killer copy then they will fail on the Internet. They have to know how to recognize killer copy. So it is in their best interest to know all there is to know about copywriting. Extensive copywriting mentors and instruction is available for them on the Internet and in home study courses. Learn from the proven copywriting masters to make sure that their copy is the best, and most lucrative, that it can be.

There are three things that they need to have in both offline and online businesses:

1. They have to have a product or service.

2. They need people to sell their product and service to. This is their traffic.

3. They need a way to persuade people to buy their product or service. They can persuade people through their website, emails, etc.

Tip: People never buy anything unless they feel like they are going to get more out of their product than what they pay them for it. For example, if they sell a $100 product, people will buy it because they think that they will get more than a $100 worth of value out of their product.

Tip: Network, network, network. Go to conferences and seminars to not only learn new information, but to network. Networking is a great way to build their Internet business quickly.

Tip: The biggest value on the Internet is to discover products that help they market better. For example, the product Audio Generator is a great product because it lets they create audios that will increase their business.

Tip: When they convey the experience of their product and service closer to the customer, they will convince them more that their product is worth its weight in gold.

Internet Business sees profit 10% below forecasts

LONDON (SHARECAST) - Advertising and e-commerce company Internet Business Group warned that full-year sales and profits will be about 10% below expectations and said it has focus on medium term product development rather than short-term sales.

The group now expects sales to come to about Ј16.5m for the year ending 31 October on normalised profits of around Ј1.4m.

“The group has continued to focus on the medium term goal of creating a substantially larger advertising and media operation,” it said.

“Whilst this resulted in a short term reduction in sales, the group is now better placed to benefit from an improved product portfolio delivered ahead of schedule,” it added.

Internet Business also said that it plans to consider strategic options for its e-Commerce division within the 2008 financial year after having previously focused on its advertising and media operations.

Moratorium on Internet access tax passed

State and local officials looking for some extra scratch by taxing your dial-up, cable or DSL Internet-access services will have to live with a seven-year itch after Congress on Tuesday banned those fees until 2014.

The House unanimously approved a seven-year extension of a moratorium on Internet-access taxes, which the Senate passed last week. The move cleared the way for President Bush to sign it before the current ban expires Thursday.

For consumers, the legislation largely maintains the status quo: No Internet-access taxes except in the nine states that were grandfathered when the ban was first put in place in 1998. California is not among them.

The legislation applies only to Internet-access taxes, not to sales taxes for online purchases. But it addresses a concern by many lawmakers, technology companies and Internet-service providers that consumers could see the same itemized taxes on their Net-access bills that now appear on their phone and TV cable bills. A monthly phone bill can include as much as $10 in taxes.

"This legislation will help keep the cost of Internet access down so that all individuals can continue to use the great informational tool that is the Internet," Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) said. He and other lawmakers said the legislation would give telecommunications companies the certainty they needed to continue investing in the infrastructure to extend high-speed Internet access throughout the country.

In helping push the extension through Congress, the technology industry showed it was learning the art of the deal in Washington: Ask for a lot, but be willing to compromise.

Major technology companies, including Google Inc., Yahoo Inc. and EBay Inc., formed a coalition with powerful allies, particularly phone and cable companies, and pushed hard for a permanent extension. But they said they were happy to settle for seven years, the longest extension yet.

"It's a recognition by members of Congress of the impact of our industry on the economy," said Mike Platt, vice president for government and political affairs at TechNet, an industry trade group that was part of the Don't Tax Our Web coalition.

For the young technology industry, the lengthy extension is a legislative victory that shows its clout has grown in Washington during the last decade. Still, the industry continues to have trouble when facing a formidable lobbying opponent.

In this case, it was state and local governments, which were concerned that they could lose the ability to tax phone and TV services as more consumers get them delivered over the Internet. Governors and local officials, who have strong ties to many members of Congress, successfully derailed the push for a permanent ban and got the definition of Internet access changed to make clear that phone and TV services delivered online are taxable. Many state and local governments depend on money from taxing those services.

Groups such as the National Governors Assn. and the California Assn. of Counties said they knew of no governments planning to tax Internet access, but they argued that a permanent ban would make it difficult to change the definition in the future to avoid exempting other taxable services. They were pushing for a four-year extension instead of seven.

"A shorter amount of time means if a mistake was made in a definition we could have gotten to it quicker," said David Quam, director of federal relations for the National Governors Assn. "The important thing is it remains temporary."

In a change pushed by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), the legislation also clarifies that services related to Internet access, such as instant messaging, e-mail and personal online storage, are not taxable. The move should end continual rumors that Congress was weighing an e-mail tax.

In addition, the bill requires a few states to phase out taxes on wholesale purchases of Internet access. Some companies, including wireless providers, use that access to connect their networks to the Internet backbone. States must stop taxing that access by June 30.

Tuesday's 402-0 vote by the House follows the Senate's unanimous passage of the extension last week. Senators who wanted a permanent ban on Internet taxes succeeded in lengthening a four-year extension passed overwhelmingly by the House on Oct. 16.

This is the third time the ban has been extended. Although the White House has pushed for a permanent extension, Bush is expected to sign the bill.

Rep. Anna G. Eshoo (D-Menlo Park), who represents much of Silicon Valley, said the growing number of technology companies and the role the Internet plays in daily life made it easier than in the past to get a lengthy extension of the ban.

"It's a great contributor to our national economy, and I think that's unquestionable," said Eshoo, who worked to pass the original moratorium in 1998 and was a leading backer of a permanent extension this time. "This is now integrated into the life of every member of Congress, their families and their children and their communities. . . . That experience makes a difference."

Alibaba.com raises 1.5 bln usd from IPO; shares priced at 13.50 hkd

Alibaba.com raised 1.5 billion US dollars from its initial public offering, the biggest ever by a Chinese Internet company, the Wall Street Journal reported Monday.

China's biggest business-to-business website priced the IPO at 13.50 Hong Kong dollars a share, the top end of its indicative range, the report said citing an unidentified source.

The IPO attracted 150 billion US dollars in orders from institutional investors and another 453 billion Hong Kong dollars in orders from individuals, the newspaper said.

Alibaba.com will list on the Hong Kong stock exchange on November 6, it said.

(1 US dollar = 7.80 Hong Kong dollars)

Internet retailers rev up search engines after beating the billion crown barrier

Christmas cannot come too soon for many of the smaller players trying to make a breakthrough in the world of Internet shopping, but the four biggest players on the Czech market are celebrating having broken through the “magic billion” figure—that is, they can now say they are pulling in more than Kč 1 billion (€ 36.85 million) in revenues annually.

It took Internet store Kasa.cz some eight years to leap the 1 billion barrier. When the company entered the as yet undiscovered world of Internet retailing, virtual shops were still mostly being used by only a few computer buffs pursuing products out of the mainstream. Now Kasa.cz—which Oct. 24 launched a Hungarian branch to complement its foreign operations in Germany, Poland and Slovakia—is thinking big.

By the second quarter of this year, the Internet, which arrived 15 years ago in this country, had penetrated 32 percent of Czech households, according to the Czech Statistics Office (ČSÚ), and, in the opinion of the Association for Electronic Commerce (APEK), Internet purchases have become an everyday part of life in the Czech Republic.

Like its rival Kasa.cz, operated by Eurocomm Group, Mall.cz, run by Internet Mall, is already present in all of the Czech Republic’s immediate neighboring countries as well as Hungary. Driven by turnover of Kč 1.46 billion in the fiscal year ending March 31, 2007, Mall.cz is set to rival Kasa.cz’s planned Christmas Internet and print advertising expenditure of Kč 4 million with what it describes as a massive seasonal advertising campaign. “It will be a campaign prepared in cooperation with a major partner from the field of telecommunications,” said Ondřej Fryc, chairman of the board of directors at Mall.cz, without specifying how much would be spent on the campaign, but disclosing that the company’s advertising budget amounts to tens of millions of crowns annually.

Core market is tech savvy

Internet stores typically target the more tech-savvy younger generations when advertising their wares. “In general, young people are bigger experimenters when it comes to Internet shopping,” said Šárka Bártová, media research specialist with market research company GfK Praha, adding that the firm’s Online Shopping 2006 survey had confirmed that the biggest Internet retail spenders are people between 20 to 29 years of age.

The commodities most frequently sold via the Internet are books, magazines, consumer electronics and IT components. However, Bártová said there was a constant upward sale trend for clothes and beauty products and mentioned event tickets, photo services, items featuring in e-auctions and various vacation market segments as being popular with e-buyers.

Jan Vetyška, president of APEK, said electronics were outstripping books as the top selling item on the Internet. The large number of well-known retail electronics chains that have launched virtual shops in recent times is evidence of this, he added.

Gift language courses

Demand for online booked tropical vacations as dread of the upcoming winter freeze builds is expected to boost sales of Internet store services, as opposed to products. Travel, language learning and au pairing agency Student Agency said more than half of its turnover now comes through Internet business. The company is currently preparing special prices for language course trips abroad. “Parents may sometimes hesitate over what present they should give to their children. We think a special language course can be both an interesting present and a good investment, too,” said Radim Jančura, owner of Student Agency, adding that the company has not found it necessary to prepare any special campaign to capitalize on the lucrative pre-Christmas period. “Our advertising stays more or less constant all year long. Naturally, most of it is placed on the Internet, with the other two advertising channels being radio and the print media,” Jančura added.

Multiplied demand for winter tires and winter sports equipment is also anticipated by Internet traders, making up for sales of satellite navigation technology, digital cameras and video cameras that decline after the summer months. David Šimoník, communication manager with Kasa.cz—which before making its Kč 1 billion breakthrough, posted turnover of Kč 470 million in the year to Aug. 31, 2005, and Kč 721 million to Aug. 31, 2006—looked at Christmas gift opportunities. Perfumes for women and watches for men would likely be best sellers, he said. “Of course, the gifts that are seen as universal seem to be the most popular with online store customers. This is the case with CDs, DVDs and computer games. And, as usual, we expect increased interest in MP3 players, mobile phones and small electronics,” he added.

Taking on brick-and-mortar

Looking at factors that encourage retail consumers to log on, rather than make the journey to town or an outlying shopping mall, Vetyška said Internet stores’ strategy is to provide such comfortable Web sites and search engines that clients keep coming back for more. “Their inventiveness is the biggest plus that makes them so different from the usually narrow-minded brick-and-mortar stores,” Vetyška added. “On a regular basis, they come up with new customer care improvements,” he said, adding that while some bet on last minute deliveries, others went for enhancing communication with clients by establishing call centers or easing “gift dilemmas” by creating consultant departments that can offer the shopper “a little inspiration.”

Speed of product delivery and item availability are other areas that Internet store business will not neglect. Kasa.cz store, for instance, is strengthening its pre-Christmas team to try to ensure customers receive their orders before Christmas Day.

Broken promises

There is no doubt that at least some people will suffer a sorry e-shopping reality amid the upcoming peak retail period. According to the Consumers’ Defense Association of the Czech Republic (SOS) there is a constant stream of complaints about the practices of Internet sellers. “The most common problem we encounter is sellers that do not respect the right that allows a customer to return a product within two weeks without stating a reason and with no sanctions. Some companies have been breaching this right, obstructing product return by claiming that their sales arrangements mean the product can only be returned in its original packaging, for example,” Jan Šulc, a lawyer employed by SOS, said. “Perhaps the second biggest problem is that many companies simply do not keep to the delivery terms,” Šulc added. Customer rights are also sometimes infringed when the responsibility for damage suffered by a product during delivery is pinned on the post office or courier. The responsibility actually remains with the seller, he said.

SOS provides certification for Internet sellers that it ascertains are reliable. Generally, it said, the bigger Internet stores seem to be much less problematic than the smaller ones in terms of customer treatment.

But a problem arises when a definition of what is actually an “e-shop” must be provided. Vetyška said it is nearly impossible to define what an Internet store actually is. “Is it someone who advertises a few things on his Web site? Or is it simply the stores that only operate in the virtual environment?” he said, adding that there are too many entities that fall in between these two extremes. “I can only say that there are about 300 to 500 operators on the Czech market. I cannot give an exact number since nobody really knows what an e-shop is,” Vetyška said.

Security for payments

Vetyška said that anxieties about the security of Internet payment channels are declining. APEK’s line is that credit and debit card transactions can be made even safer when they are conducted online. Most Internet retailers now use the 3D Secure system. This sends customers’ confidential information directly to a bank. “This is actually much safer than when you pay at a cash desk. No one can record or manipulate the card data,” Vetyška said. However, he added, the majority of e-customers still preferred to pay cash on delivery. “It’s not the most comfortable way of doing things, it’s supposedly the safest approach,” he said.

Rural Indian Internet Exploding, E-Commerce Implications Stunning

Proving the essential power of the Internet to bring a democracy of information and economic opportunities to previously insulated groups, a recent study named the I-Cube 2007 survey, covering 30 Indian metro areas and towns, and 65,000 people shows that while Indian Internet connections have grown by 11 times in just the last seven years, the usage in smaller towns has exploded by almost 70 times. So, if an Indian village had ten residents who were online in the year 2000, they now have seven hundred Web surfers in 2007, on average. While more users come from the cities, the most dynamic growth is happening in the hinterlands, where a connection to the world outside, like the Internet, is most appreciated. The survey was undertaken by the eTechnology Group for Internet and Mobile Association in India on the Consumer E-Commerce Market. This study has opened a fascinating window to the Indian sub-continent, as regarding Internet usage.

Where do Indians access the Net? The fastest growing connection pads are schools and colleges, unsurprising for a country that is still struggling to create a country-wide cable-based Internet, and has a small number of Internet users versus total population, being somewhere between 30-40 million out of a total well over a billion people. The group accessing the Net from a school has grown by 22 times, whereas those connecting from home have increased times 15.  But those accessing from Internet café's are still the leading place for logging on, overall, followed by home, and office is last.

What are Indians doing on the Net? Checking email and seeking information are the top activities, and of the information searchers, 60% want general knowledge, and 45% are seeking to find out about education (there can be a cross-over), with 27% seeking jobs info, 17% financial, 4% dating and marriage sites, and 8% searching for astrology.

Since 2000, the numbers of those going online for games, ringtones, music and video downloads has increased 27 times. But online buying has shot up as well, by 25 times. So for every four people who were going to the Web to make purchase in 2000, there are now a hundred. In fact, in 2006, Google predicted that India will become the biggest online market in the world. There has even been conjecture that Hindi will join Chinese and English as the dominant three Internet languages, pushing aside Spanish.

Now for the hard question: How can non-Indian e-marketers take advantage of the explosion of growth in India, especially in the countryside? This simply depends upon getting an "Indian education," doesn't it?!! Fortunately, much free learning can be done upon the Net. Mastering demographics, such as where people live, their age and sex, and religious affiliation is a start. And some time used to study diet, hobbies, national pastimes and how big and what discretionary incomes are used for, and generally, what the consumer market traffics in. At some point, a trip to Barnes & Noble, for books on the Indian society and business methods, might be in order - or better yet - surf online bookshops for them.

Getting a good look at what indigenous and foreign sites are selling a lot of in India would be helpful. Another aspect to master is the law of India in this area, especially Internet and business law, for which the Internet Business Law Services might come in handy. These are preliminary steps. Finding a way for persons without credit cards to pay online, Indian-style, would also be indispensable information.

The great news for any Web merchant is that India is a wide open marketplace, and where Net use potential has barely been scratched. If one could tap into an unrepresented online market, the rewards might be hard to gauge. India is obviously a place where novel Internet business ideas could be tried, and the payoff might just be massive.

Uruguay buys first $100 laptops

The first official order for the so-called "$100 laptop" has been placed by the government of Uruguay.

The South American country has bought 100,000 of the machines for schoolchildren aged six to 12.

A further 300,000 may be purchased to provide a machine for every child in the country by 2009.

The order will be a boost for the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) organisation behind the project which has admitted difficulties getting concrete orders.

"I have to some degree underestimated the difference between shaking the hand of a head of state and having a cheque written," Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of the organisation, recently told the New York Times.

However, he said he was "delighted" with the first deal.

"We commend Uruguay for being the first country to take concrete actions to provide laptops to all its children and teachers and look forward to other countries following this example," he said.

(http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7068084.stm)

Just a Spoof of the Popular Startup.COM Documentary

Just a bit of fun :)

MultiMe - a New Documentary about Social Networking

Below is a new media documentary about Online Social Networks, namely Bebo, and the way in which they are changing social interactions. Part of a Production thesis by 4 DCU Multimedia students. By Patrick Reilly, Sandra Ryan, Deirdre Reynolds, Mark Watson

Part One

Part Two

Net pioneer to leave oversight agency

In the 1970s, Vint Cerf played a leading role in developing the Internet's technical foundation. For the past seven years, he's faced the more daunting task of leading a key agency that oversees his creation.

After fending off an international rebellion and planting the seeds for streamlining operations, Cerf is stepping down this week as chairman of the Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers.

"My sentence is up," Cerf said with his characteristic sense of humor, which he and others credit for helping him steer the organization through several high-profile battles from which it emerged more stable and stronger.

Cerf, 64, who's also a senior executive at Internet search leader Google Inc., joined ICANN in 1999, a year after its formation to oversee domain names and other Internet addressing policies. Cerf was elected chairman in 2000 and leaves the unpaid position after Friday's board meeting in Los Angeles because of term limits.

When he joined the board, many questioned whether ICANN would survive. Now -- though some people still complain that ICANN is arbitrary, secretive and slow -- the focus is more on improving it than replacing it.

Under Cerf, the organization withstood power struggles and ballooned in size. It also has shown signs of movement on key issues: After years of debate, for instance, it is now beginning to create mechanisms for more easily adding Internet addresses, including domain names in languages besides English.

"In some respects it has gained credibility," Cerf said. "It is now part of the Internet universe as opposed to a thing that was open to some serious debate."

That has been particularly so since ICANN, teaming with the U.S. diplomats, resisted efforts by China, Brazil and other developing countries to replace the group with a more U.N.-like organization over which world governments would have greater control.

Among other things, ICANN critics wanted quicker action on addresses in other languages, saying the current restrictions are akin to requiring all English speakers to type in Chinese. Many foreign governments also resented the U.S. government's veto power over the Marina del Rey, Calif.-based nonprofit agency.

Calls to strip ICANN -- and the United States -- of its oversight of domain names, which are key for computers to find Web sites and route e-mails, grew as world leaders gathered in Geneva for the 2003 U.N. World Summit on the Information Society. The European Union even joined by the time the summit convened again in 2005, in Tunis, Tunisia.

But ICANN ultimately emerged intact.

Credit goes to many people besides Cerf, yet many say he had the gravitas to meet with heads of states and senior ministers -- and tell them, "no."

"He has a certain star quality," said Paul Twomey, ICANN's chief executive since 2003. "He can open a door. He can talk to anybody. He can say, `Me and my colleagues actually invented the Internet and here's how it works.' There was a lot of ignorance, and he was able to say, `It just doesn't work the way you think it works.'"

Cerf tested the first Internet hookups in 1969 when he was a graduate student at UCLA. As a professor at Stanford University in the 1970s, Cerf led a team that invented the protocols, known as TCP/IP, that now serve as the Internet's basic communications tools.

Known since as one of the Internet's founding fathers, Cerf continued working on Internet technology at the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and later developed MCI Mail, the Internet's first commercial e-mail service. Google lured him in 2005 to be its "chief Internet evangelist" and gave him an office a few doors from CEO Eric Schmidt.

In 1997, then-President Clinton presented Cerf and TCP/IP co-inventor Robert Kahn the National Medal of Technology, and in 2005 President Bush gave the pair the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

As ICANN chairman, Cerf has played a hands-on role, attending many committee meetings and workshops in his trademark three-piece suit, often asking questions and contributing his know-how.

Jeffrey Eckhaus, a business development director at domain registration company Register.com Inc., found him "very knowledgeable about every single topic that would go on. He would really know all the ins and outs."

Besides his sense of humor and his technical knowledge, Cerf brought business and administrative acumen, many ICANN participants say. He has a slew of anecdotes ready and has displayed a willingness to listen to concerns and "engage with people from heads of states down to university students," Twomey said.

Now that Cerf has guided ICANN from nearly its inception through a tumultuous adolescence and into early adulthood, many believe it's time for an ICANN driven more by procedures than personality.

"It doesn't demean Cerf's towering legacy to say people are ready for a change," said Milton Mueller, a Syracuse University professor and frequent ICANN critic.

The short list of potential successors includes telecommunications expert Roberto Gaetano and lawyer Peter Dengate Thrush. Both have been active with ICANN, but neither has Cerf's name recognition or long-standing ties to the Internet.

"The bad news is we're not going to find another Vint," said Steve Crocker, a high school classmate of Cerf's and fellow Internet pioneer. "It's equally a form of good news. We're now going to go through a period where ordinary mortals are managing things."

Even with Cerf's clout, ICANN has had its share of battles. For one, a decision to reverse preliminary support for a proposed ".xxx" domain name for porn sites was criticized as arbitrary and politically influenced.

During Cerf's tenure, ICANN's staff and budget have grown, permitting faster response. Its roughly 100 staff members are paid out of a $41.6 million budget for fiscal 2008, compared with about a dozen employed during fiscal 2001, when ICANN budgeted $3.78 million for operating expenses.

The board and its constituency committees have reorganized numerous times in an effort to better reflect the Internet community, and minutes to private board meetings have been posted more quickly to improve transparency.

Nonetheless, many critics still complain that ICANN has neither opened the decision-making process enough nor acted as quickly as it should on issues like adding domain names -- after several years, it is just now streamlining the approval process.

Few of those complaints, however, are directed at Cerf.

"It would have been a lot more without Vint," said David Farber, former chief technologist for the Federal Communications Commission. "I don't have warm, fuzzy feelings about ICANN, but Vint is not a person you want to get into battles with. He's a nice guy. He's smart. He's reasonable to talk to."

Cerf plans to disengage entirely from ICANN for at least a year, freeing him to write books and devote more time to his Google duties.

"This is a very important test ICANN both must pass and will pass, that it can withstand a change of its senior management," Cerf said. "I have no hesitation at all turning this over to a new team."

A Cautionary Tale for Old Media

Early on, the Mercury News saw the Web threat coming. It's still struggling to survive

On Jan. 19, 1990, Robert D. Ingle, then executive editor of the San Jose Mercury News, wrote a remarkably prescient memo to his bosses at the newspaper chain Knight Ridder. Typing at night in his breakfast nook on an Apple II PC, he envisioned that a global information network would emerge, giving rise to all manner of online communities. And he proposed an online service, Mercury Center, aimed, his memo said, at "extending the life and preserving the franchise of the newspaper."

This was nearly four years before programmers created the first Web browser and long before Google (GOOG) and social networking exploded onto the scene, yet Ingle seemed to anticipate much of what would come. He laid out strategies for the entire chain: Give information to readers however they wanted it, integrate the print and online operations, and dream up new forms of advertising. "I saw the Internet as a great opportunity, but also as a great threat," says Ingle, who retired in 2000.

If Ingle's proposal had been enthusiastically embraced by Knight Ridder's 28 dailies, perhaps the fate of the chain might have been different. As it was, an epic shift of advertising over to the Web would cut the economic legs out from under the Mercury News and other Knight Ridder papers such as the Miami Herald and Philadelphia Inquirer. From 2000 to 2003, help-wanted ads at the Mercury News plummeted from $121.5 million to $17.9 million. Last year, Knight Ridder was forced to sell out. The Mercury News eventually wound up with MediaNews Group, whose chief executive, William Dean Singleton, is reviled by many journalists as a low-cost publisher of second-rate papers.

Today, with advertising weak and readers flocking to the Web, the Mercury News is trying desperately to reinvent itself. Executive editor Carole Leigh Hutton has vowed to "blow up the newspaper" to make it relevant to today's plugged-in readers. The overhaul is coming early next year. "I don't see myself as a savior," says Hutton. "I'm figuring out the answers to daunting questions. What's journalism now? Who do we serve? And how do we make it work financially and journalistically?" Meanwhile, Silicon Valley wits derisively refer to the ailing Mercury News as the "Techtanic."

IN DENIAL

The collapse of Silicon Valley's daily newspaper is in many ways the story of American newspapers in the 21st century. The industry has reached a near-crisis point. Many dailies are losing circulation at an alarming rate, and local newspaper ad spending fell 3.1% last year, to $24.4 billion, while Internet advertising rose 17.3%, to $9.8 billion, according to Advertising Age.

But the shivers rippling through the Mercury News also serve as a dramatic example of what happens when industry leaders get complacent in the face of fundamental shifts. Andy Grove, who helped sow the Internet revolution when CEO of Intel (INTC), says that cross-industry disruptions follow a predictable course: Executives ignore the challenges. Then they try to resist. Only when it's too late do they make radical changes. Grove, who now teaches a strategy course at Stanford University's School of Business, summarizes the newspaper industry's prospects: "Your doctor says you're going to die, but if you don't smoke, you'll live a little longer."

RIDING THE WAVE

The Mercury News seemed perfectly poised to reap the harvest of the New Economy. Indeed, Knight Ridder moved its headquarters to San Jose from Miami in 1998 partly to feed off the Valley's energy. Riding the rapid growth of such local tech giants as Intel, Apple (AAPL), and Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), the Mercury News had emerged from mediocrity during the 1980s and '90s to become one of the most profitable papers in the country. Ads bought by tech outfits paid for a vast news operation that stretched from Washington to Ho Chi Minh City. Staffers won the industry's top recognition, the Pulitzer Prize, for coverage of Philippine tyrant Ferdinand Marcos in 1986 and the Bay Area earthquake in 1989. (Full disclosure: This reporter worked at the Mercury News from 1989 to 1993.)

Thanks to Ingle's foresight, the Mercury News and Knight Ridder executives had the chance to fashion a radically different outcome. Yet they were running with their shoelaces knotted together. Ingle, smart as he was, turned out to be the wrong person to lead the digital initiatives. He didn't have the personality to persuade independent-minded publishers to build up their online businesses aggressively. And the dot-com boom masked fundamental shifts in reading and advertising that came about all at once when the false economy collapsed.

At first, Ingle got plenty of support from top brass. He was one of the group's most respected editors and had learned the tech rope earlier, at the Miami Herald, when he got an assignment to modernize the newsroom computers. A wiry Iowan with a sharp tongue and no patience for tardiness or typos, Ingle used corporate funds supplied by CEO P. Anthony Ridder to launch Mercury Center as a destination on America Online (TWX ) and then as its own separate site on the Web. Ridder then created Knight Ridder New Media Center and put Ingle in charge. His task: to get all 28 papers online quickly. Ingle accomplished that goal in just one year.

But the nimbleness didn't last. For all the angst generated in the 1980s and '90s about corporate consolidation of metro newspapers, Knight Ridder and other chains were remarkably decentralized. As long as the publishers delivered profits, they were left alone. Yet the world was changing. It was clear to Ingle that the chain's newspapers would be far stronger if they pooled content, adopted common technology for their Web sites, and coordinated online advertising. But he didn't have the power to force anybody to do anything. And early on, there was no dramatic shift of readers or advertisers to the Web. So what was the rush? The publishers resisted the call to collaborate. "I felt extremely frustrated. It was like herding cats."

'DIAMETRICALLY OPPOSED'

The same was true of the industry as a whole. In 1995, Ingle managed to persuade eight other companies, including Tribune (TRB), Gannett (GCI), and the New York Times (NYT), to form an alliance, grandly named New Century Network. The idea was to share content and jointly sell national online advertising. But the effort never got traction because of disagreements among its members, and the alliance came to an ignominious end in a New York hotel room in mid-1998. After an intense six hours of debate, representatives from the companies voted 5-4 to disband. Even Ingle turned thumbs down, convinced the project was doomed because of the chauvinism of the partners.

Meanwhile, Ingle was still running into stiff resistance internally to his calls to consolidate Knight Ridder's Web initiatives. At a publishers' meeting in late 1998 in San Jose's Fairmont Hotel, he faced withering criticism. Ingle had irritated the publishers with his sometimes caustic style, and, at this meeting, when he chided them again for not going digital fast enough, they blasted back. "Bob felt the publishers were late to get on board, and the publishers felt we were under pressure to make our quarterly numbers. We were diametrically opposed," recalls George Riggs, who then ran Knight Ridder's Contra Costa Times and is now president of the MediaNews Group's Bay Area group, which includes the Mercury News. Within a few weeks, Ridder shifted Ingle into another corporate role.

At this point, it helps to recall Andy Grove's rules of disruptive denial. Knight Ridder executives had their eyes locked on Wall Street, where analysts hounded them for faster growth. They missed what was happening in a garage in Menlo Park, a few miles from the Mercury News building, where a couple of Stanford students had just started search engine Google.

Even a couple of years later, as the economy soured after the September 11 shock and ads began shifting to the Web and to Google, executives were slow to respond. So when Knight Ridder's digital initiative finally began to take off in 2003, it was too late. After Ingle, two executives centralized operations, but the resulting Web sites were beset with technical glitches and lost touch with the local news operations. Knight Ridder hired Hilary Schneider, who had run Red Herring Communications--a startup business magazine and Web site--and she tried a fresh approach. After extensive talks with publishers, Schneider began giving the papers credit for online revenues that came from their sales teams and advertisers. In just three years, Schneider tripled revenues, to $200 million. Ridder says the business made a profit. But that paled next to Google's $6.1 billion in revenues and $1.5 billion in profits that same year.

Perhaps if Ridder had pushed Ingle's plan more forcefully and had put it in the hands of somebody with Schneider's diplomatic and business skills earlier, the outcome would have been different. But in the end, Knight Ridder was killed off by a hedge fund manager who made a bad bet. Bruce S. Sherman of Private Capital Management had plowed 14% of his fund's value into newspaper stocks, including a 19% stake in Knight Ridder. His timing couldn't have been worse. By 2004, most of his newspaper holdings were losing value as big advertising and circulation declines set in. He decided to make some of his money back by forcing Knight Ridder to sell out. Ultimately McClatchy Co. MNI bought it for $4.1 billion. Ridder choked up when he delivered what he calls the company's eulogy at its last shareholders' meeting. On Apr. 26, 2006, employees learned the Mercury News had been sold to Denver-based MediaNews.

Looking back, Ingle concludes that what sank Knight Ridder was, surprisingly, that the Internet didn't change things fast enough. "We got an early start, but we couldn't take advantage of it," he says. "People think the Internet business developed with lightning speed, but it took a long while. Only the newspaper companies with two-tier stock structures [not Knight Ridder] could support those businesses until they could stand on their own feet."

'NO POSITIVE SPIN'

Today, the Mercury News' fate is in the hands of Singleton and its editor, Hutton. A seasoned newswoman who grew up in blue-collar Boston, Hutton had already overseen one round of firings when she gathered 200 newsroom workers in the company auditorium on Friday, Sept. 7, and revealed what became known as the "$6 million surprise." Revenue had slipped $3 million behind expectations, and, shockingly, accountants had made a $3 million error in tallying expenses.

As a result, Hutton said, she would immediately trim costs--including eliminating some sections of the newspaper. "There's no positive spin here. We're cutting," she said. During a Q&A session, staffers asked for assurances their jobs were safe, but Hutton made no promises.

Hutton is less than three months into her plan to reinvent the paper. When she unveiled her "Rethinking the Mercury News" project on Aug. 7, most of the staff quickly fell in step. That was a switch. In past days, some Mercury News staffers seemed just as slow as their bosses to recognize the importance of the Internet. "I suspect that most of my colleagues never even glanced at my blog back in its early days," says Dan Gillmor, a proponent of "citizen journalism" who launched a technology blog in 1999 and left the Mercury News two years ago. The mood is radically different today. More than 120 staffers, including some from the newsroom, are helping with Hutton's rethinking campaign, including trekking into bookstores, delis, and parks with video cameras and notebooks to ask people about what they read and watch.

Some hopeful signs have emerged. At a brainstorming session in September, employees suggested themed versions of the Mercury News online that provide readers with a world view through a lens of their own choosing. There might be a "green" portal for people interested in environmental causes, for instance. The best of the suggestions will be rapidly prototyped and tried out on consumers.

But it's also clear just how hard it will be to remain relevant. In a video made by canvassers from the newsroom, three teen girls sharing a park bench turned up their noses at the idea of a newspaper. Said one: "We're a fast generation. That slows us down."

Newspapering's journalistic and business leaders believe their industry can recover, but they admit it will be difficult. "The newspaper industry needs to move quickly on the Internet and redefine the news and find new ways of presenting it," says Karen Brown Dunlap, president of the Poynter Institute, a leading school for journalists. "The challenge is to try to do everything at once and yet stay grounded in journalism."

From outside the Mercury News' low-slung headquarters along Interstate 880 in San Jose, you wouldn't guess at all the turmoil inside. But, near the turnoff, the vacant two-story brick building where Knight Ridder New Media Center had its offices provides a clue. A cloth banner on the front reads: "Your Name Here." It's sobering testimony to a newspaper, and an industry, that is still groping for a way into the future.

New e-Book Teaches How to Create an Internet Business Empire - PR Web (press release)

Learn how to start up an Internet business in "E-Business? How to Start Your Online Empire," an informative e-book that teaches how to create a successful work at home business.

Elkhart, Indiana (PRWEB) October 24, 2007 -- “Follow your dreams,” touts Clinton Douglas IV, author of the new Internet Business e-book, "E-Business? How to Start Your Online Empire." Douglas’ new e-book demystifies the web and online business planning, offering step-by-step advice on how to create a work at home business and lessons for launching an e-commerce business in seven days.

As founder and CEO of a fast-growing online portal site that doubled traffic and audience visibility during its first six months, Douglas gives readers first-hand accounts and real-world examples. This book provides a tutorial for Internet business planning – from defining an audience to establishing a business structure, creating a realistic budget and developing an online storefront. Douglas also provides exclusive tips acquired through his years of trial, error and experience.

“A successful e-business offers the freedom to work at home, avoid costly commutes, and spend more time with family and travel anywhere in the world. It helps you attain your dreams,” states Clinton Douglas IV, author and entrepreneur. “I want to help everyone find total fulfillment and prosperity. After years of research and development, E-Business? How To Start Your Online Empire shows anyone how to plan, launch and run a work at home business via the Internet, getting it up and running in just one week.”

Robin, a reader in Chicago, states: "This is a fantastic 101 overview for anyone interested in staring their own Internet business! It offers a quick, step-by-step path, from finding the perfect product to setting up shop and attracting mass market appeal. Highly recommended!" Jon Doyle, Success Coach, Mentor and founder of BaseballTrainingSecrets.com, said: “Excellent Book Clinton! Easy to read and understand, great for people who are now coming online wanting to build an online E-Business.”

E-Business? How To Start Your Online Empire is now available for instant download at http://online-empire.vasrue.com For a limited time, customers will also receive two bonus chapters: the Website Startup Guide and the Three Steps to Success Anyone Can Duplicate.

About The Author:
Having survived the Internet boom and crash, Clinton Douglas IV learned how to cultivate an Internet business through mere trial and error. His business, Vasrue.com, pronounced vahs • roo meaning ‘journey to your dreams’, realized more than 1.2 million page hits and astounding first-year gross sales using aggressive marketing and promotional efforts. Since this time, the company has grown and expanded its offerings, staying true to its goal of simplifying its customer’s life and offering an exceptional shopping experience. It aims to become one of the worlds’ largest Internet search portals.

'Naughty' Facebook App Throws Real-World Parties

It turned the real-life sex-toy trade into a popular virtual diversion; now it's turning it back again. Naughty Gifts, one of the most used Facebook applications, is throwing a series of adult parties in the real world this week.

Some 2.6 million Facebook users have sent 33 million naughty gifts -- including thongs, whips and condoms -- to their friends since the app joined the social network's platform in August.

Like the site's own gifts feature, the items are merely iconic online representations of the real thing. But now Naughty Gifts' developers are hosting bicoastal bashes for app users to party in all their fleshy, costume-wearing glory. Events take place at New York and Chicago this Friday and in San Francisco next Wednesday.

"People like getting naughty online and offline," said Natasha Chatilo, 26, who developed the widget with Adam Gries. "We'll have lots of awesome physical incarnations of the naughty gift icons -- think whipped cream, pearl necklace, joy stick -- and we also have some T-shirts and cute little undies."

The pair began developing Naughty Gifts when they started working at Going.com, a Boston social events listings startup, which is a financial backer.

"The first day I saw the platform, I realized that every type of social activity was going to take on some manifestation on Facebook," said Gries, who last month sold his first app, I Am Hungry, on eBay for $20,100. "Therefore, sexuality and flirtation would obviously have a large role."

Chatilo and Gries flirted with building apps to test users' purity and to offer daily sexual positions but quickly saw those ideas get taken by rival developers. Hotornot and Facebook had already let users buy each other non-existent virtual goodies like flowers and teddies, so Chatilo and Gries settled on making a kinkier alternative.

Users get a virtual budget of $200, refreshed daily, to send gifts. They can choose from 60 items, ranging from conservative ice cubes, boots and lotion to racier handcuffs, pearl necklaces and others that might give pause to those reading at work. Images of items can be proudly displayed on members' profiles, given privately between users or sent anonymously.

The plan was to inject some sauce in to Facebook's particular user base, where the majority of members are now over 35.

"The kids of MySpace appeared to be more deviant than their Pottery Barn Facebook counterparts," said the St. Petersburg-born developer, a member of several women's advocacy groups including the Massachusetts Women's Political Caucus. "Facebook users, much like Southern senators, kept their naughty sides under wraps and it made sense to make an app to bring out the naughtiness."

The app's blow-up doll ranks as the most popular virtual gift. Demographically, Canadians and New Yorkers are amongst the biggest users of Naughty Gifts.

Two of the party venues are being kept secret until the last minute to ensure attendees are over the legal age, but the New York event will take place at Webster Hall.

Chatilo promised "no illegal stuff" at the party. "Granted, during Halloween people get really naughty, but everyone will be over 21, so its up to the guests to see just how naughty they are willing to get."

(http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/news/2007/10/naughty_party)

Recession? Brick and Mortar Business Out, Internet Business In

Why starting an on-line business can help protect those during a recession and who can teach them how to build it.

Irvine, CA (PRWEB) October 25, 2007 -- With the current state of the declining housing market and mortgage industry, talks of a recession have been on the minds of many U.S. citizens. If talks hold to be true, one way to protect yourself from being impacted from a recession is to start an on-line business. Unlike brick and mortar businesses where there customer base can be limited only to their local community; an on-line business can allow a person to reach a consumer base internationally, thus expanding their customer base exponentially.

Don't know where or how to start?

Jermaine Griggs, CEO and founder of NittyGrittyMarketingClub.com has launched a private access club that will teach its members from A to Z how he, as a 17-year old inner city kid with $70 in hand built a $3 million dollar Internet company from the ground up teaching people how to play piano by ear and how they can pick their niche and do it too.

According to Jermaine, "The number one question I'm asked is, 'How the heck are you making 7-figures as a piano teacher?' No one can figure this out because most people have to sell high-priced items in order to get into the 7-figure territory, but in my market, I'm not trying to force $247 out of the 58-year old grandma with a limited income, who just wants to sit at her upright piano and play a song."

Jermaine Griggs is a minister, musician, entrepreneur, and motivational speaker. He's been ministering since the tender age of 12, playing the piano since 8, and speaking publicly since early childhood.

In 1999, Jermaine started Hear and Play Music Group and the GospelKeys Learning Dvds, which has since touched the lives of millions of students around the world. He has also been blessed with the opportunity to speak around the country, teaching thousands of entrepreneurs how to build their businesses from scratch.

Jermaine is married to his high school sweetheart, Sarah, and has a beautiful daughter named Jadyn Olivia.

(www.prweb.com)

What it Takes to Operate a Successful Internet Business

Have you ever heard of the 80-20 rule? It is a ratio that is quite common in business, particularly in sales. There are many applications of this ratio:

1. 80% of your business will come from the top 20% of your clients.
2. 80% of a business’s sales will be generated by the top 20% of its sales people.
3. 80% of all business ventures will fail. Only 20% will succeed.

In this article, I will focus on item #3 above, specifically, why do only 20% of the Internet Marketing businesses succeed? It might be easier to ask why 80% of these businesses fail? Most people fail for one or more of the following reasons:

1. They fail to gain the knowledge of what is needed to operate a profitable business.
2. Although they are aware of what needs to be done, they fail to do the necessary work.
3. They get bored with it and stop working completely or only work sporadically.
4. Because they want immediate results and aren’t seeing them, they quit working just before their efforts begin to pay off.

Of course, there are many more reasons why businesses fail, but we cannot develop a complete list in an article this size. However, these are some of the main reasons. To avoid failure in your business and be among the 20% that succeed, follow a few basic steps for success:

• Acquire the knowledge necessary to operate a successful business. That includes reading how to’s, buying ebooks, talking to experienced entrepreneurs, etc. Do whatever is necessary to learn how to operate a successful business and then do it!
• Almost all successful businesses require that certain jobs be performed on a daily basis (at least in the beginning). Develop a daily plan of action and commit the time to complete those required tasks.
• Very few jobs are fun and even fewer are exciting. Do the necessary work on a daily basis, even if it is dull and boring. Putting up with a little boredom now can pay you big dividends in the future.
• Don’t expect instant gratification if you are starting your own business. Any worthwhile business is going to require a good deal of care, a great deal of time, and an incredible amount of work. Give your business plenty of all three and it may provide you with a lifetime of benefits worth ten times your efforts.

An Internet business can increase sales by 15-20% using a simple technique

Up sell testing is very important when it relates to the Internet business.

Farmington MI --- Understanding the profound importance of testing is crucial. Test various parts of your business to find out how it's doing. However, more testing advice is needed. A common item that can and should be tested in your Internet business is the up selling techniques. Too often people are afraid to ask people for money. They avoid the up sell. However, with the up sell the owner can make a significant amount of income. Test different up sell techniques in your order form. One technique is to have check boxes to up sell more products. Customers simply check the box of additional products that they want to purchase at the time they buy their initial purchase. In fact, some Internet businesses have been able to successfully convert 30-50% through these check boxes alone. Customers already have their credit card out to purchase the initial product. This makes it easier and more tempting to order additional products in their order that they hadn't considered in the first place. Also up sell additional products on the thank you page. This can increase the overall sales by up to 15-20% with this technique alone.

Another item to test is the price of the product. Don't be afraid to increase the price. In fact, increase your price. Often times this can turn into more sales with a higher price because people now view the higher priced product as having a higher value. Test it out.
Don't think that an eBook should top out at $20. An Internet millionaire sells their eBooks for $97. They know that the information inside of the eBook is worth the $97. People will perceive a $97 eBook as having higher quality content than a $20. Increase the price gradually. Make sure to start off at a price point that is not too low. If it is too low, people will go in shock when you significantly increase the price. These are a few more testing techniques to add to your arsenal. 'Find people who have successfully created wealth and learn from them. Matt Bacak, the powerful promoter is the person who has done just that in business and is a leading expert on how to achieve quick and easy success- says Mark Maupin Jr. co-founder of National Real Estate Network and PrEasy.com LLC. Learn from someone who is more successful. Learn tricks of the trade and from someone that has actually built wealth. Everyone deserves to be a millionaire.

PayPal and eBay partner with Yahoo! to enhance anti-phishing protection

PayPal, a secure online payments system from online auction company eBay, and eBay Inc (Nasdaq:EBAY) have announced a collaborative effort with Internet company Yahoo! to use the firm's anti-phishing technology.

Under the partnership, the firms will introduce a new e-mail authentication, DomainKeys. The authentication technology reportedly enables Internet service providers to determine if messages are real and should be delivered to a customer's inbox. The collaborative effort between Yahoo!, eBay and PayPal is expected to result in the blocking of unauthenticated e-mail, reducing the volume of fraudulent e-mail received by consumers and lowering their risk of falling for phishing attacks.

Yahoo!, eBay and PayPal are in the process of transitioning their systems from DomainKeys to the proposed standard DomainKeys Identified Mail. The implementation is expected to be completed in the coming months.

CAPTCHAs For Social Good?

Researchers at the University of California at San Diego have a plan to meld the brains of Internet users into a vast human grid that would make use of the seconds wasted on solving CAPTCHAs (define) to enact social change.

Likely familiar to any frequent Web user, CAPTCHAs are those difficult-to-see images comprised of squiggly letters and lines designed to confound blog spam bots and the like. Blogs and online forums typically use codes hidden in CAPTCHAs to prove that a poster is a human, rather than an automated program; ideally, a human user can see and enter a CAPTCHA's hidden code, while an automated program cannot.

While finding a hidden CAPTCHA code may take only a couple of seconds, when multiplied by the millions of other Internet users also responding to CAPTCHAs, those seconds can add up to hundreds of wasted hours.

The Soylent Grid project wants to apply those wasted seconds to identifying images for assistive technology applications.

The project, named in reference to the 1973 Charlton Heston film Soylent Green and its famous phrase, "Soylent Green is people!", is already well on its way toward developing ways to make use of time that would normally be spent on CAPTCHAs.

Soylent Grid's first application to harness tiny bits of Internet users' attention is GroZi Shopping Assistant, a program that helps visually impaired people with the difficult task of locating objects in stores.

A joint mission between the California Institute of Telecommunications and Information Technology (CalIT2) and UCSD's Computer Science and Engineering departments, GroZi would use the Soylent Grid project to funnel to Web users images taken by visually impaired people, who can then identify the objects in those images.

GroZi relies on a wearable system with a camera and tactile/haptic feedback, a blind-accessible interface and computer vision-based object recognition software.

GroZi's human need

But without Soylent Grid's human factor, GroZi faces difficult technical hurdles. Recognizing content in digital images has long been a nut difficult for computer science to crack. The human brain, on the other hand, is superb at recognizing content in images, knowing immediately which object in a family photo is Uncle Sean and which is the family dog.

For the GroZi prototype, it took developer Michele Merler, now at Columbia University, weeks to input the 120 products found in a single 45-minute video. To make the system truly useful, however, GroZi would need to be able to decipher the staggering array of items available in modern stores within seconds.

Enter Soylent Grid. Instead of building an image database item by item, the project could take advantage of time spent identifying CAPTCHAs. In such a scenario, the system could test a user attempting trying to post on a blog by asking them to decipher a GroZi photo instead of a traditional CAPTCHA.

The idea is to do this in real time, so that a visually impaired person at a grocery store could use GroZi to tell the corn niblets from the creamed corn.

"The currently used types of CAPTCHAs are a complete waste once they go stale," said Stephen Belongie, the UCSD professor who heads the project. "They're totally artificial, and when hackers crack them, their approach is invariably 'hacky' and neither reveals any insight into human object recognition nor does it do any good for society as a whole."

While efforts in other industries are being made to improve image recognition -- search engines, for example, are interested in image-recognition technology to improve their search results -- a human-powered system like the GroZi-Soylent Grid effort could vastly improve the lives of the blind and vision-impaired.

Researchers outlined the benefits (PDF file) of Soylent Grid earlier this week in a paper presented at the Interactive Computer Vision 2007 conference in Rio de Janeiro.

Soylent Grid, GroZi, and CAPTCHAs

For a Soylent Grid/GroZi combination to make an impact, however, the service would need to partner with one or more online entities that make heavy use of CAPTCHAs, such as blogging platforms or social media sites.

For example, the Soylent Grid team estimates that Digg users could identify an image approximately every 17 seconds. That's far from fast enough for someone hurrying through their shopping. Belongie estimates that five seconds would be an acceptable turnaround time, so GroZi would need 25 times the CAPTCHA-producing power of Digg.

Image-recognition as part of a live video feed is an even more remote possibility.

"The idea of doing real-time object recognition on a live video stream is at the fantasy end of the Soylent Grid spectrum," Belongie said in an e-mail interview. "In reality, we expect it will be more likely to have an increased role for the computational processing component, so that the available human cycles are employed more opportunistically.

Ideally, every product identified would go into a standalone database, eventually enabling quicker lookups for GroZi that wouldn't require the input of Web users. This ultimately could allow the Soylent Grid project to be harnessed for other endeavors.

"If the initial GroZi box had some amount of computational power ... it could be pulled off the grid and run locally on the GroZi box in the user's hand, or run remotely on a private-GroZi-only computational system of much smaller scale," said Stephan Steinbach, another Soylent Grid project member.

Soylent Grid is an example of crowdsourcing, the notion of bringing together masses of users to accomplish what no individual or company could.

HumanGrid, launched in December 2005, is another example of applying crowdsourcing to labor-intensive tasks. The HumanGrid marketplace, in private beta, aims to introduce businesses and researchers to individuals willing to perform micro-tasks for micro-payments, such as data enhancement, text classification, transcription and picture classification.

Amazon's Mechanical Turk service is another example; It's a similar automated marketplace where businesses can offer to pay humans to do tasks like tagging objects found in images or selecting the best photos of a product from a set of images.

The e-tailing giant developed the technology to help sort out the 20 million photos of storefronts to be used in its A9 Yellow Pages local search product.

Belongie said that Soylent Grid has a better chance of succeeding because its strategy of distributing the work via third-party sites creates an ecosystem.

"For all three main parties involved -- the researchers, the Web sites, and the users -- there's something in it for them," he said. Researchers, whether academic or commercial, "have data they need labeled, for which one assumes they'd be willing to pay ... for example, someone wanting to spot pizza storefronts or real estate posters in Google Street views footage."

"Web site owners want a fresh source of CAPTCHAs, since the ones they use routinely go stale, meaning they get cracked by hackers in the Ukraine," he added. "And the users simply want to get to whatever content lies behind the CAPTCHA."

Internet News

AOL to Cut Work Force 20 Percent

NEW YORK (AP) -- AOL is eliminating another 2,000 jobs worldwide as it tries to cut costs and make room to grow in online advertising.

The 20 percent slice from AOL's work force comes after several rounds of layoffs in recent years, including a cut of 5,000 jobs last fall. The latest cuts would give AOL more flexibility to expand ad-related businesses through acquisitions and potentially new hires, company officials said.

"This realignment will allow us to increase investment in high-growth areas of the company - as an example, we added hundreds of people this year through acquisitions - while scaling back in areas with less growth potential or those that aren't core to our business," AOL Chief Executive Randy Falco told employees Monday.

AOL believes it is now best at developing Web sites such as its Moviefone and MapQuest properties to attract people in some 30 countries, Falco said. Its goal, he said, is to build "the largest and most sophisticated global advertising network" for marketers to reach that online audience.

AOL, once the leading seller of Internet access subscriptions, has struggled in recent years as Internet users have ditched their AOL accounts for high-speed services offered by cable and telephone companies.

To make up for declines in subscription revenues, the company has been trying to boost traffic to its ad-supported Web sites and last year began giving away AOL.com e-mail accounts, software and other features once reserved for paying subscribers.

Last year's job reductions were mostly in customer-service and marketing personnel as AOL opted to stop producing and distributing its notorious trial discs aimed at luring new subscribers.

The latest cuts are expected to affect employees across the board.

Last month, AOL announced that it was consolidating its advertising operations to share innovations across the company and help potential advertisers more easily buy ads.

The idea is to help marketers reach Internet users not only across AOL properties but also at outside sites for which AOL now brokers ad sales.

In a memo to employees obtained by The Associated Press, Falco described the latest cuts as difficult but necessary.

AOL has acquired a number of companies in recent months and added to its payroll each time. The purchase of ad-targeting technology specialist Tacoda Inc., for example, brought in about 100 employees.

The latest reductions would allow AOL to keep making such purchases and perhaps expand its advertising sales team while keeping payroll costs steady.

The cuts affect about 1,200 positions in the United States, including 750 in northern Virginia, where AOL has long had its headquarters.

Most of the affected employees in the U.S. were to be informed and terminated Tuesday, while reductions abroad were expected by year's end. Severance packages are to include at least four months' pay.

None of the reductions is directly related to AOL's recent announcement that it was moving its headquarters to New York to be closer to the media advertising industry. Most of those employees already work in New York. Senior executives like Falco, meanwhile, are expected to keep offices at both locations.

AOL has been counting on ad growth to offset declines in subscription revenue, which continued to plummet, as expected, following its strategy shift in August 2006. AOL had 10.9 million paying U.S. subscribers for Internet access as of June 30, a 60 percent drop from its peak of 26.7 million in September 2002.

After four quarters of at least 40 percent growth, though, AOL ad revenues increased by only 16 percent in the quarter that included April through June.

Workers at AOL's Dulles, Va., campus had speculated for weeks that big layoffs were coming. Speculation intensified last week, when workers reported seeing large pallets of empty cardboard shipping boxes arrive at an AOL warehouse, presumably for laid-off workers to empty their desks.

Shares in AOL LLC's parent company, Time Warner Inc., dropped 19 cents, or 1 percent, to $18.79 in Monday trading.

Wired.com

Internet Stars of 2001: Where Are They Now?

Six years is something like a millennium in internet time. It's even hard to remember what websites we browsed in 2001. So when web analytics firm Compete issued a list of the 50 most popular websites of August 2001 -- comparing their traffic to the top sites in August 2007 -- we were intrigued.

Yes, the list has a lot of dated companies and most have a much smaller market share than they once did. But whether their startups succeed or fail, tech entrepreneurs have a curious habit of resurfacing elsewhere. What happened to the founders of these companies? We decided to track down this Class of 2001 for a little six-year reunion.

Not surprisingly, many on the list of 2001's best and brightest went on to create new startups. Michael Merhej, founder of now-defunct Audiogalaxy (#16), created an online file-sharing service FolderShare and sold it in 2005 to Microsoft, for whom he works today. Classmates.com (#47) founder Randy Conrads, meanwhile, has also started a new company, time-share site RedWeek.com.

By 2001, online card company BlueMountain.com (#46) had already been sold to Excite@Home, and its cofounder, Jared Polis, was on to his next venture, ProFlowers.com. Today Polis is more civic-minded: He's founded several charter schools and is running for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives as a Colorado Democrat.

Farhad Mohit, founder of #30 Bizrate (now called Shopzilla), recently set out on a sort of midlife vision quest. After leaving the company this past February -- he'd sold it to E.W. Scripps for $525 million in 2005 -- Mohit spent two months in Iran, where he was born but hadn't visited in 29 years. He hoped to take stock of his life and figure out what was next.

"Regular people there are fantastic, as they are here," says Mohit, 38. "Iranians are embarrassed by their leadership as much as we are. How do you bring people together and show them that their differences are worth appreciating and that in fundamental things they are quite the same?"

Out of that dilemma comes DotSpots, a company Mohit founded in August. It's so new that Mohit's not sure whether it'll be for profit or not. (He's calling it "for change.") He declines to give details, but says that the company will offer a way for people to share their thoughts on any website, not just those that explicitly enable comments.

Vanchau Nguyen, founder of ezboard, also took time off after leaving his company in 2004. The following year, an old colleague approached him about joining Next Internet, a company Nguyen describes in an e-mail as "a sort of platform for entrepreneurs to do their thing." Nguyen grudgingly agreed to give it a try, and got hooked. Within six months, he'd sold his new creation, a group of marketing services now called NextClick Media, to another group of entrepreneurs within Next Internet and started JustSayHi.com, a free dating site.

Omar Wasow, of No. 23 BlackPlanet.com, is currently getting a PhD in African American Studies at Harvard with the occasional gig as a technology pundit for TV and radio. BlackPlanet itself was launched by corporate parent Community Connect, which was also behind #49 AsianAvenue.com, which has since lost three letters to become AsianAve. Community Connect's own cofounder, Benjamin Sun, has been its CEO for the duration.

And in a twist of irony, Idealab founder Bill Gross, who spawned #5 GoTo.com, later created Compete, the company that made this list in the first place.

It just goes to show the importance of being nice to your colleagues and competitors: You may want to join their next venture. There's almost always a next venture.

( Wired.com )

What This Blog Is All About

This blog is about news of internet business and marketing. Problems and benefits of internet commerce; advertising in google and PPC systems. If you have news to share, make sure you submit your story to enews@itage.biz