Agriya

It used to be that you would expect to have an e-mail account or three, you would receive a few messages everyday from work or from your friends, you would sniff when you saw the Spam folder say “100 New Messages”, every week, and you would consider your e-mail existence pretty fulfilling. On the other hand, there is life on the Twitter and Facebook plane that sees your Inbox full with wonderful emptiness every 15 minutes. The social media craze has not gone unnoticed as a potential area to capitalize on, in the search engine war between Bing and Google.

Microsoft’s tested the waters first in this area; there is now a special Twitter search option on Bing. When you search with this service, the results page shows a pretty hysterical cloud of tags of hot Twitter topics, along with a swarm of relevant shared links to them. You can even search among the search results you get.

Google won’t be left behind of course, having put down arrangements with Twitter. It says it plans to show Twitter search results among its regular search results; this innovation could be a few weeks coming though. But there’s not nothing quite like The Google Social Search feature that Google has planned; you could probably guess that it’s a Google Labs project yet again.

Google’s Social Search is for Google account holders only; when an account holder performs a regular search, Google looks up everything that your Twitter pals may have put up on the subject you searched for and gives you that information too. Now this is not exactly an all-new feature the way you might imagine, seeing it appear on Google’s Labs. Search websites like Crowdeye have been letting you search for Twitter results for quite a while now. It’s just that having the major search engines do it helps you do all your searching in one place. Will great new startups like Crowdeye be crowded out of the market they helped create, by the majors? Only time will tell.

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Are you online at all hours, compulsively checking every few minutes to see if you have any new messages? Does your family resort to sending you online messages to get your attention? Do you get very stressed when you are unable to login for a few hours or days? If you answered yes to any of the above, you just might be addicted and you might need to seek help. It is now increasingly being recognized that Social Networking can take over lives and verily turn into an addiction.

The typical reaction is to overreact and decry social media, blaming it for all societal ills. However, for most people social networking is just a handy tool to further one’s business or social goals. Only certain vulnerable people fall prey to social network addiction and for those few that are in the grip of this addiction there are ways to address the affliction.

As with most malaise, recognizing that it exists is the most important aspect of managing it. With children it is easy. All you need to do is to restrict their access. For grownups the strength and resolve to do this has to come from within. The first step is to monitor your time and set a limit. When the time is up, log out immediately with no excuses. Often we go online to avoid work that we just don’t feel like taking up. Being online gives us a feeling of doing something productive when we are in fact wasting time. Make going online a reward for finishing all your work. Don’t forget your friends and family. When you spend too much time online your family and friends get forsaken in favor of your online comrades. Online interactions usually are sanitized, free of the messy emotions that characterize real life and are very easy to get lost in but in the end it is the offline real world bonds that truly enrich your life friends.

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The world’s e-mailing systems were on full throttle even before social networking exploded. At some point, everyone realizes this: that there are more niche social networking presences they subscribe to, than there is room in their generous e-mail capacities for. Here then Mozilla’s new online application for those overwhelmed by social networking, the newly launched Mozilla Raindrop. Raindrop aims to help the socially-networked maintain better control over their e-mail messages, getting to see their personal e-mail, their work e-mail, and other important correspondence apart from the tons of Facebook notifications, RSS feeds, and so on descending on their Inbox. Raindrop is supposed to be installed on your computer, where it will run as a personal web server that compiles all the different messages from all your subscriptions in one place, and shows them to you in a way you can actually use.

Raindrop is an open source API that is intended to be built upon by other third-party developers for better sorting, and better features. To begin with, the application functions through any browser you choose at all: any browser that is compatible with Open Web Foundation projects. There are so far two different versions of Raindrop, and there are more on the way. It isn’t that easy to install it and run it though, as there isn’t a readily available installer yet to make it actually sit on your computer and act like program. There is one on the way though.

Raindrop is not a Firefox extension or add-on; it is a standalone application that can one day hold its own add-ons. Seen one way, Raindrop seems to take a cue from the kind of direction that Google and Gmail have been taking off late, where users bring in widgets for RSS, or chat. If it lives up to what is promised, Raindrop seems to be a great idea by the sound of it: a program that not only brings all of your online messages to one place, but also sorts the personal ones that really need your attention from masses of automated ones. Lets see how well it goes.

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With the rising dominance of Social Media in the lives of consumers marketers are jumping on to the bandwagon and coming up with countless new ideas and strategies to target the supposedly transformed consumer behavior. However, social commerce strategies to drive sales and increase customer loyalty, once implemented have rarely performed as expected or produced measurable results. Unlimited targetability was the premise of both B2B and B2C social media marketing, but consumers turned out to be too unpredictable for such strategies to succeed.
Apparently, consumer behavior can only be best understood and acted upon in scale by grouping similar consumers together. Human behavior is fairly simple and simple models of behavior almost always outperform complex models. One-on-one marketing is good in theory but almost impossible to implement.

This is the golden age of data. Nearly any media metric can be measured and data mining produces quantities of data, however, without substantive data knowledge and proper modeling the data is mostly worthless. As, Eric T. Bradlow, co-director of UPenn’s Wharton Interactive Media Initiative, says, “Many social commerce problems have been addressed previously, and massive amounts of data will not change the continuing need for the understanding of basic and primitive customer behavior which provides the correct lens to view social media data.”

Mass marketing has lost favor in the face of social media marketing and viral marketing. However, mass marketing is still the most effective technique available though it is important, considering the proliferation of media channels, to ensure that the right media channels are selected. Social media marketing requires that very huge numbers of social media users share product recommendations for any significant impact and the same goes for viral marketing. These techniques may be effective for B2B marketers who have concentrated markets but rarely have much impact on B2C marketing. Rarely does the buzz created by such strategies translate in to product purchases.

Content is important but it has impact only if it reaches consumers. Traffic driving strategies such as referral programs must be the cornerstone of marketing policy. Many people try using the “Long Tail” (items which individually sell only in small quantities) niche driven marketing as one way to boost sales but such investment should be made only if justified by volumes.

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Viruses and Trojans are no longer malicious attacks perpetrated by pimply faced geek hackers for giggles and thrills. Malware has become a big business. Most malware is now written for the explicit purpose of capturing and selling the personal and financial data of the millions of users on the Internet and is becoming increasingly sophisticated.

Emails with links to infected files are old hat, most infections these days occur when malicious software is automatically downloaded to user computers without their knowledge while browsing infected websites. Often malware is disguised as legitimate software / security updates and people are misled by messages via Facebook, etc into downloading them. These techniques are causing an exponential growth in infection according to RSA, a leading security company. The security firm detected 19,102 Trojan infections in August 2009 as against only 613 Trojan infections in August 2008.

As the complexity of design increases most criminals find that they do not have the technical skills to write their own malware and turn to Do-It-Yourself kits that contain everything needed for writing Viruses and Trojans for those who don’t have the know how to write their own.

A top notch malware kit can be worth a lot of money. The Limbo Trojan kit sold for about $350 at the peak of its popularity and the Zeus Trojan kit, which currently dominates the market sells for anywhere between $1,000 to $3,000. However, the dominance and popularity of a kit rarely lasts long as security companies soon fight back by trying to decipher the code and create general heuristic detection routines for anything created using the kit.

Some of the kit makers with waning popularity are trying to stay alive by releasing their source code. By giving free access to criminal developers to their code they can get a huge pool of talent working on their code and adding and improving features. Of course, the flip side is that the security companies also get their hands on the code making it easier for them to create detection routines.

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The Internet is big business and every day, stories pour in of how people can make a killing off the Net. One way you can cash is through Affiliate Marketing. Affiliate Marketing is a marketing practice in which a business pays for each visitor or customer referred by the affiliate. Affiliate Marketing has four core players: the Merchant, the Network, the Affiliate and the Customer. As affiliate marketing has become more and more dominant as a marketing strategy many companies find it too complex to manage their own affiliate programs and sign up with third parties to manage their program for them. The company that manages an affiliate program is called a Network. An Affiliate Network manages the relationship between businesses and affiliates. Since a Network manages several businesses an affiliate who signs up with a Network gets access to all those businesses.

Affiliate Networks offer various strategies to their affiliates to make money. CPA Networks offers information gathering and lead generation strategies to businesses where the affiliate gets people to fill out forms or complete surveys and gets paid for it. It costs companies much less to get data through these means than hiring staff to go out and get data and the selection of customers is also much wider and often of better quality.

Clickbank gives affiliates generated links which pay the affiliate per click. The affiliate can try many strategies to promote the affiliate program. An easy way is through online classified ad websites. Unfortunately, because most of these ads are free, there are hordes of other affiliates also doing the same thing so unless you can find a way to stand out your conversion percentage is likely to be low. You must also ensure that you track each ad. so that when you get sales you know where they come from and where you should focus your efforts.

If you are can write, then article marketing can supercharge your affiliate program. Well written articles that attract attention and have useful content always get good click through rates (estimated at 7% on an average). Good content alone is no use. The content must be read in the first place which means it must be widely distributed. You should use blogging and social networking tools to help you disseminate content to targeted users.

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Google Docs is Google’s multi-lingual SaaS (software as a service) office suite. Google Docs works on most modern operating systems and browsers and allows its users to create and edit documents, spreadsheets, presentations and forms online with real-time collaboration between multiple users. Items are created within the application itself, imported through the web interface, or sent via email and can be saved to computer in a variety of formats such as RTF, TXT, PDF, DOC, ODF, XLS, etc.

Google Docs also offers Autosave and version control features. Google Docs items can have various levels of access, Private, Shared with specified users or Published to the Web. Published items again can have various access levels: they can be viewed only by the user, or by a specified group or by the whole world.

While Google Docs offers users the features of a modern office suite for free there are issues of privacy that worry experts. Though Google has promised to protect the privacy and security of users’ content, certain problems exist. For example, each image included in a document has a public address, even if the document itself is private and the image continues to be publicly available even after the document is deleted.

Recently, Google announced a change in its policy regarding published documents which will allow published docs that are linked to from a public Web site to be crawled and indexed, which means they can appear in search results. This is potentially a very exciting change as the published docs will reach a much wider audience of people. Unfortunately, many users who may have linked published documents intended for a limited audience to public Web sites for various reasons of convenience will be now taken unawares by this change in policy.

It is not immediately obvious from the Google Docs master listing which documents are likely to be affected, as there is no easy way to tell if a published document has been linked to by a Web site. For now, users will just have to go through all their documents and “unpublish” all documents that are intended to be private.

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Bing, Microsoft’s decision search engine, has been chipping away at the market share of its competitors since its official launch on May 28th this year. On an average, Bing has gained about half a percent a month and an overall 1.3% (9.3% in August, 8.9% in July, 8.4% in June and 8% in May) gain in the three months succeeding its launch. In about the same period Google, the market leader registered a fall of 0.3% to 64.7% while Yahoo came down by the same amount to 19.3% (source: ComScore). In August, Bing grew faster than Google for the first time, with a 31.9 percent annual increase in search queries compared to 21.6 percent growth for Google and 16.8 percent for Yahoo. So the rise in the market share of this Microsoft search engine does seem to be at the expense of the other two.

Some experts consider these early gains in the Bing market share the result of superior technology from its recent acquisitions and better algorithms for seeking the context underlying a search. Many users feel aerial photos available via Bing are more up to date and have better clarity than the corresponding Google photos. The eye-catching design too is bound to have helped Bing made inroads with viewers.

Skeptics, however, contend that this so-called increase in market share is driven by any number of factors such as the curiosity engendered by a new launch, the publicity and media hype that a hundred million dollar marketing drive is likely to generate, the fact that Bing is the default search engine on the latest versions of IE and Microsoft’s cash back offer for Bing users and is highly unlikely to last. Some of the skeptics also are casting doubts on the veracity of the statistics by stigmatizing the sources as unreliable.

A strong competitor to Google in the search market can only be good news for users. Google has for too long been almost a monopoly. The more choices that consumers get the more likely it is that necessity will drive more and more innovations in the search engine market.

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For hundreds of businesses outsourcing work has traditionally been the panacea for the problem of rising overheads; since their business has always been to save on costs for clients, the outsourcing industry have believed themselves recession-proof. But corporations that specialize in accepting outsourced work have seen business fade nevertheless, and are beginning to uncover a few flaws in their belief system. When businesses overseas are faced with unpredictable changes in the economic climate, the knee-jerk response is to quickly shut down a lot of expenses and downsize the workforce before these can affect the bottom line; companies try to focus on efficiency, on getting the most done with less.

The traditional belief that expects outsourcing companies to thrive in a downturn only makes sense for the final stages, when an uptick is widely foreseen. India’s outsourcing giants do not expect these effects to become visible for a few months yet. As it stands today, there is such competition for what little business there is to go around that even customers with one-off jobs are fought over with concessions. The larger accounts find that they suddenly have much more leverage.

An example of the kind of concessions expected of outsourcing service providers is the demand seen for more cost-effective billing methods. Outsourcing projects have traditionally been billed by the job and not by the hour. If an outsourcing firm found a way to deliver results in half the time it still got paid as much as it originally asked for. Outcome-based payment is in favor in today’s recessive environment. This is when companies pay for billable hours, and not for the job itself. While this may not actually save much over the routine month, it gives the buying company more control in an unpredictable environment; if their business happens to plummet from the recession, they will not find themselves locked into paying the outsourcing company overseas a bill for work they no longer need.

While business has picked up for India’s largest outsourcing providers like IBM and Infosys, revenues are not expected to return to former levels soon. The outsourcing economy is seen to be a bellwether for the economy in general. When this picks up everything else will too.

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Software makers, ones that may be as established as Sun Microsystems or as fresh as a small startup, can tend to frequent the same catalog of mistakes when it comes to running their businesses. Microsoft or Sun, owing to their size, will live to tell the tale; a startup may not. By all accounts software companies direct most of their budget to sales and marketing. And yet there is no real acknowledgment of how important it is to identify an audience, to acquire them and to retain them. Selling to software customers is not what it used to be. Corporate spending on information technology is no longer directed at large upfront purchases; what is favored instead is the ability to make smaller purchases spread over several years. Additionally, smaller vendors are seen today to be able to deliver a great deal of value and customer satisfaction; large software vendors no longer have it all over their little competitors. Why are these changes ignored?

Makers of software are often deeply invested in the concept of the informal business environment. Loosely organized company structures can obviously lead to poor coordination and missed signals from the sales front. An informal hand at the helm can also place the company at risk of being run on one person’s whim or vision. Sun Microsystems was always committed to pushing its own line of poorly received custom hardware to go with its well-received software. This weighed the software side of the company down and caused internal tensions. Small companies sometimes also insist on the custom-made over the generic. Sun Microsystems’ market share in server software has suffered because it is tethered to the fortunes of its hardware platform. The important lesson to learn here is to have the advantages of vision-based leadership, but to make sure that it is tempered with hard-nosed business vision.

Many software vendors large and small have tried to raise their stature or solidify their position in the market with acquisitions. Microsoft famously had its failed takeover of Yahoo recently, and Sun spent $1 billion on acquiring the database software company MySQL. Acquisitions are an important way to inject new blood into a software business; but it is possible to overestimate the benefits from such a move. The basic tendency here too is to base the company’s moves not on sound business principles but on the vision of a founder or stakeholder. It keeps coming back to this: creative types running a business on principles of creativity and personal vision over plain undeniable fact, can be one of the most common problems that can weigh a software business down.

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