Google is floating a new CPA (cost per action) model for Adwords advertisers who target US cities and states. If you are one such advertiser, just open up an account with Google Merchant Center and include as much information as possible for your products like accurate descriptions, images and price.

Merchants who have large product inventories now do not need to create ads. Just do your basic keyword research and determine the ones for which you want to show your ad. You pay only for the results and as the ads are charged on a CPA (cost per action) basis rather than CPC (cost per click). Thus, risks are lesser and a lot of time will be saved too as the advertisers can just update the merchant center with relevant information (and possibly keywords).

Currently, product listing ads are available only to a handful of advertisers but should open shortly for all advertisers across USA and may be other countries too. Read more…

INTRODUCTION

A man’s error are his portals of discovery.

What does the above quotation convey? To have a portal, you have to commit mistakes. Isn’t that funny? No not at all. It may be a motivating sentence, but in business it can turn out to be doomsday for small start-ups with little investments.

We have already talked about usability and UI design issues in our previous blog: Usability and UI Design go Hand-in-Hand. This article has been done especially for small start-ups who want to make it in their respective fields and are planning to launch their website or looking for a facelift or adding new functionalities to there existing site or aren’t sure about their design requirements. The blog will offer you an in-depth analysis of how to find the best possible web solution for your idea/company/organization.

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Systems today have evolved from huge bulky awkward looking structures to the sleek and sexy Apple Mac Book Air which is just few centimeters thick at maximum. Blue Ray Disks offer storage spaces from about 1 GB to thousand GB on a disc. And still you were cribbing abour your storage space, then relax! Now you don’t have to worry about the storage capacity of your computer, courtesy Cloud computing. What! Cloud computing? Why it will have a major impact on the storage peripherals of today? Will it affect the software industry as well? Plenty of questions must be hovering around your head just for cloud computing.The condition is akin to the situation when you enter into a restaurant and look at the menu card containing the list of dishes with fancy names. You start wondering what it is, will it satisfy your hunger, how will it taste, so on and so forth.

Companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, IBM and HP have already started work in this regard. Amazon with its Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, popularly called Amazon EC2 and Simple Storage Service or abbreviated as S3, has paved the way for others like Google and Microsoft to improve upon the existing structures and allay the fears and apprehensions vis-à-vis Cloud Computing. Read more…

Just as I thought after doing my last blog on Microsoft deal with Facebook, I was so sure that Google won’t let it go so easy. Soon after the Facebook and the Microsoft deal, Google hits back by providing an open source platform community to Internet social networking leader MySpace and Bebo, a move that may undermine the rapid growth of their common rival, Facebook. Google announced the coup two days after revealing its plans to create a distribution network for open source web applications, known as widgets or web apps. Widgets make it easier to share music, pictures, video and other personal interests on social networking sites
We all knew Google will surely brew some kind of response to the Facebook and Microsoft deal just took place few weeks back. So here’s the thing.

Google lined up Bebo for the UK, MySpace for the UK and Friendster for Asia. That’s the social network API audience sewn up. Developers all over the world can now build widgets from the annoying (vampire battles and food fights) to the very functional (video players and photo galleries) that will work across all these sites with only minor tweakage.

Why did Myspace join Google’s OpenSocial?

With so much competition and so many new platforms opening everyday, limited resources is the major problem faced by most of the app developers these days. There are ample amount of opportunities but not enough people to pursue them all.

But i think MySpace is in itself big enough to require any platform, so why did they join?

It all comes down to competition for app developer’s time and resources. In the last few months since Facebook opened its own platform, a lot of competitors including MySpace have seen its lead fading. Facebook started winning more users day after day, and share more user time, because app developers were adding new features to the Facebook experience much faster than Myspace could do on its own.

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The most substantial improvement to Yahoo! Yahoo photos was a revamp of Yahoo. This photo property of Yahoo launched in the year 2000 was rolled back in few months back .

Yahoo users had a number of advantages of the new version. For starters, the information assigned to each photo included tags (comma separated tags no less - my favorite) for easy locating later, ratings to help the better photos rise to the top, sharing at the photo level.

Yahoo Photos’ breakout feature was its browser-based photo editor that handled cropping, resizing, and image adjustments (such as contrast and brightness), and also add borders and perform special effects, such as pixelate. The editing feature in Yahoo Photos was so easy to use that one might forget what a neat trick it was to have this inside a browser. Read more…

Immediate results, instant gratification, instant riches. Today thousands of online marketing products promise the same things and try and make money. And every minute, someone out there purchases a new product right before the price goes up. The new product, which inevitably is going to change the way we do Internet marketing. If you don’t purchase instantly you are going to get left in the dust while early adopters make all of the money.

Internet marketing is like a treasure hunt because the treasure may or may not actually be at the end, depending on whether you believe in it all.

The process needs to be revealed. The process needs to be flexible enough for personal modifications. And the process needs to guide a person through to profits.

The Marketing power of Internet sites

With the rise of individual voices and the eroding effectiveness of mass marketing techniques, it’s no wonder that so many marketing and communications disciplines are enamored with cracking the code on influence, specifically influence among people.

For example to market a book, an old-school form of media, we turn to a couple of the newest: video file sharing and online social networking, create a video spot for YouTube and our own Web site on MySpace.com. YouTube and MySpace, gives us an access to 30 million people, so you can well imagine how many potential customers we can line up with Internet. The reason why this technique is translating into sales is that videos are a lot visible to a large number of people.

Read more…

To many people today Web 2.0 may just seem the latest in the never-ending succession of Internet trend, but just like the Internet I can see Web 2.0 staying for long. It mat be or may not be a bubble of sorts, but after reading on so many social networks and search engines I can say that sites like MySpace and Digg place a perfect lesson to teach corporate establishments.

As per me Web 2.0 is a package of both threats and opportunities, the time to take your head out of the sand is now and realize if we can make use of it or let it fade away.
I would like to discuss Web 2.0 in detail, to start with let me define it for you

What is Web 2.0?

Let’s start by examining what exactly we mean by Web 2.0. In its most basic sense, Web 2.0 refers to any tool or application that’s delivered over the Internet and allows people to interact—by contributing, editing and sharing content. Read more…

Just like me, not many of us would have heard of this new video search engine Truveo. AOL/Time Warner has launched a video search engine called Truveo to crack Google for advertising dollars and search dominance. This is one area where I expected Google to pioneer and excel, but they’ve fading under their own weight. Any attempt to search for video at Google will only return results for Google Video and YouTube, not video on the Internet at large. Read more…

As newspapers, blogs and media are all anxiously propelling out news on the new applications for iPhone, I couldn’t resist writing about it as well.

With the new Internet technology taking over in a big way, iPhone apps have been the most interesting innovations. CRM provider Etelos - which has already gripped some popular platforms like Google Apps, Netvibes, Pageflakes and Windows Live - announced on its blog about an Etelos CRM suite of modularized CRM tools, for use on the iPhone.

Another new application in the iPhone splash is the Clippz.com. This service allows you to download “optimized video clips” from the Internet to a mobile device (a process it calls ’sideloading’). Clippz.com has announced that they are offering more than 500 MySpace, Metacafe and YouTube collections encoded in Apple iPhone’s H.264 file format. What else can one ask for!

Well, its will be too early for me to comment in terms of development. Infact I came across an article on the new development platform for web-based iPhone apps, the first of its kind. And to add to action Adobe AIR and Google Web ToolKit (GWT) are likely to participate in iPhones apps too.

The excitement around iPhone web applications is soaring day by day, and why not? We all are waiting to see some more action by iPhone developers.

So let me know what iPhone apps have you seen that have tickled your interest and you can’t wait to use?

If there is anything on web that can be stated as “fascinating,” it’s creating a Web application. After all, when was the last time you heard someone rave about the interaction design of a product that wasn’t on the Web? All the cool, innovative new projects are online. Read more…