Archive for May, 2009

In recent weeks, the US Justice Department has been taking ever closer looks at Google and, in particular their settlement with publishers and authors over Google’s Book Search. This has once again raised the ever thorny question of whether or not Google is a Monopoly and, if so, what can be done about it?

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Fairly big win for the Apple PR department this week; the New Yorker magazine hit the shelves with a piece of digital art on its front cover. Not just any digital art either, but a portrait of Times square created with just a finger, an iPhone and a $4.99 app. The picture took roughly an hour to create and was done entirely from scratch.

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Finnish company, Nokia may still be the biggest mobile phone company in the world though in recent years they’ve been consistently outperformed in the innovations stakes by their Smart Phone rivals, in particular Apple, whose success with the App Store pretty much caught Nokia napping. This lack of initiative has led to Nokia having to watch on in horror over the last few quarters as their profits and market share erode steadily.

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As those of us who use twitter professionally or, dare I say it, as a prop for their ego will know, followers = power. The more people that are following you, the more people you reach with your tweets. The more people you reach with your tweets, the more effectively you are able to promote yourself/your product and shape the zeitgeist in your favour.

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Wolfram Alpha has now been out for long enough for the backlash against it to have started across the blogs, and what a backlash. It appears that many of my fellow bloggers feel strangely protective of global superpower, Google and have written a deluge treatises on the subject of how Google performs much better at answering questions than WA. The only trouble is that many of them appeared to have missed the point slightly, so I’ve decided to debunk a few Wolfram Alpha Myths.

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Google rightly rates its self as a pretty good place to work, very competitive pay, free lunches and creative freedom when choosing projects has meant that the company has had no worries at all attracting the very cream of the tech sector. For this reason the company grandees don’t much like it when people decide to leave the company. However, their reaction to losing a few (too many in Google’s book) employees to fashionable sites like Twitter recently might be something of an overreaction as well as a little creepy.

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Over the last couple of days a meeting of very influential people has been going on. The attendees have ranged from political figures like Peter Mandelson and Alistair Campbell to media grandees like BBC Director General, Mark Thompson and even royalty, like Prince Charles and the princes of both Norway and Spain. But why? To plan some major conspiracy? For the opening of something? No, to hear what Google have to say.

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Facebook has announced 25 of the 50 finalists for awards from the Facebook Fund, a scheme that aims to provide between £25,000 and £100,000 dollars worth of seed funding for companies that create, in the words of Facebook, ‘Great social experiences that make the world more open and social.’ Essentially what that means, is companies that build apps for new company project Facebook Connect.

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Facebook is booking itself in for yet more negative press this year after refusing to take any action against users who have started or participated in groups that deny the holocaust, unless their country of origin has a specific law against holocaust denial.

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According to a survey carried out by the very capable guys and girls at, Search Engine Marketing blog, seroundtable.com unemployment in the search marketing industry is only 7 percent, that’s 2 percent below the current US (it’s an American blog) national unemployment rate of 9%.

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A survey conducted by Click and Buy has found that many ecommerce site owners are losing out on business through abandoned shopping carts from badly set up payment processes. The survey highlights numerous points that anyone who takes credit card payments over the internet would be do well to note. Details after the jump.

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Contrary to popular belief, Pay Per Click advertising is not really about clicks. As becomes painfully obvious when you look at your company bank statements and see click costs going out but no business coming in, clicks can only get you so far. That’s why pouring your money into keywords with high click-through rates is not always the best idea, unless you can prove that they’re actually making you money.

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Yesterday Microsoft made its latest wave of redundancies. The software giant is declining to specify how many were laid off exactly though it has revealed that half of the cuts were from inside the US with the other half coming from Microsoft offices and interests around the globe. The company also revealed that a further 1,200 staff will be lost within the US thanks to a Worker Adjustment and Retirement Notice (WARN).

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When choosing keywords it can be tempting to go overboard. We get a decent number of clients whose keyword volumes far exceed their budgets and the size of their company simply because they’ve decided that more keywords = better. As a result their campaigns start to sprawl much more than is manageable.

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