Guru Speak: The Science of Search Engine Marketing (Pay-Per-Click)

You are used to seeing Google ads on most websites (including this one) but ever wondered what goes on behind the scenes ?

How do these "Search Engine Marketing" companies shortlist search keywords and phrases for? How do they decide if they are being charged the right cost-per-click amount? Why is Adwords more popular among advertisers than Yahoo Panorama or MSN adCenter? Are Google acquisitions good for the advertising industry?

You will get answers to these questions and more in this very-very useful video interview of Jeff Figueiredo, an SEM guru by Robert Scoble on Scobleshow. This video will get all your basics right about PPC, SEM and how advertisers get the keyword data from Google Analytics and ISPs.

[Do not confuse SEM with SEO - the former is about getting targeted online advertising on search engines while the latter is related to improving your site's natural ranking in organic search results.]

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How Good Are You at Recognizing Fake Websites and Spam Emails ?

Can you tell a fake (phishing) web site from a real one ? Or can you recognize spam emails that request you to verify your eBay or Paypal account credentials.

McAfee has created a very simple quiz with screenshots of websites and emails for you to spot the fake ones from the real site. Do take this 10 question quiz and the results may actually surprise you even when you are a pro-geek - it looks deceptively easy but that's not the reality.

I scored perfect for ebay, amazon and paypal (popular phishing targets) but had trouble identifying the financial websites of Chase, CapitalOne and Bank of America.

Overall Rating: Tightrope Walker - "You avoided some deceptive Web sites that would have put your personal information at risk. But you chose others that pose serious security threats that could lead to identity theft or financial losses". Share your phishing score in the comments.

(1) How to Detect Phishing Websites, (b) Google Phishing Warning Extension

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Photography Tips: Take Better Pictures with a Mobile Phone Camera

You cell phone camera may lack all the great point-and-shoot features that are in your standalone digital camera, but you can still can shoot good photographs with the camera-phone that are more-or-less perfect for sharing over email and the web.

Stuart Headlam shares some simple tricks to help improve your mobile phone photography without asking you to get a Nokia N95.

The best photography tip ever:

They key to a great photo is actually to take as many shots as possible. Taking several shots may help build the confidence of people who are traditionally camera shy. If you explain beforehand that you'll take a few photos and let them pick their favorite, the chances are you'll end up with a picture that you're both happy with.

If you plan to take a print of pictures captured with the cameraphone, Stuart suggests that you need to have taken your pictures with at least a 2, maybe 3 megapixel camera if you want decent quality prints.

While Mobile phone cameras are good for casual photography, if you want to capture those rare once-in-a-lifetime moments like a graduation day, first birthday of your daughter or your grandparents anniversary, always use a standard digital camera. Cameraphones kill Memories.

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The Role of Angel Investors and VCs Explained in Simple English

Ever wanted help while explaining the role of Angel investors and Venture Capitalists to mom ? Read this:

Angel Investors usually invest smaller sums of money ($100,00 to $500,000) and are more interested in working hands-on with innovators. Angel investors are open to high degree of risks, and their decision process is usually quick, with the diligence far less intrusive than that of larger VCs.

Angel investors' value-add, other than money, is their operating experience and hands-on work with founding teams. They also help introductions to larger investors at later stages. [Angel investors are sometimes known as Business Angels]

Early Stage VC Firms focus on taking a significant stake in a company early on, and they resemble angel investors in that they are interested in guiding the company from an early stage. The difference lies in their comprehensive diligence process and timing.

These firms usually invest between $500,000 and $2 million initially, and they have the capacity to invest more at later stages. They also provide invaluable guidance from their own experience and that of their other investments.

Growth-stage VC Firms usually invest larger sums of money primarily in companies that have validated their innovations in the market and are looking for capital to scale.

These firms invest anywhere from $1 million to more than $10 million, depending on the fledgling company's needs. Growth stage VCs add value in networking their portfolio companies together, to their joint benefit.

VCs vs Bank Financing - VCs get much higher return on investments when things go well, but they should an enormous financial risk that often exceeds that of the entrepreneurs seeking the investment.

Reprinted from How Innovators Connect by Rohit Agarwal and Patricia Brown.

Previous excerpt: Time to market, Be a trend spotter

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New York Times & Wall Street Journal Websites Are User-Unfriendly

The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal Online are probably among the most visited websites on the planet but are they user-friendly ? Some instances:

The New York Times: When you are reading an article on NYTimes and happen to double click a single word or a sentence, NYTimes website will automatically open the dictionary definition of that word(s) from Answers.com in a pop-up window - definitely not a good user experience (see screenshot). 

It's kind of irritating because people often double click words/sentences on a web page to either drag them to the browser search box or copy-paste text as web clippings in their internet scrapbooks - they are not interested in the meaning of the word. 

There should at least be an easy option to turn off the dictionary feature of NYTimes.

The Wall Street Journal Online: When you select some text on a Wall Street Journal web page and right click, WSJ will automatically show links to related articles in a neat pop-up window - not so unfriendly but you have to become a member of WSJ.com and login in order to turn off that feature.

And this auto-search feature may be a problem for those who are browsing through a slow dial-up connection [see screenshot of WSJ.com below with search in progress]

 

The Wall Street Journal Online: A lot of websites link to external pages with the target="_blank" attribute that will open hyperlinks in new browser windows or tabs. Perfect but the WSJ web pages go a step further when linking to external website content.

Here's a code snippet from a WSJ web page which links to Desktop Tower Defense website:

<a href="JAVASCRIPT:OpenWin('http://www.handdrawngames.com/DesktopTD/',..);void('')">Desktop Tower Defense</a>

Such kind of linking will possibly deny any Google Juice from the trusted WSJ to the linked website because the link is hidden in Javascript which cannot be parsed by search engine bots.

And from the perspective of "human" readers, external websites will always open in a new browser window - you cannot right click the website link and open it in a new tab. Hence even in the age of tabbed browsers, you may end up having multiple browser windows on your desktop originating from a single WSJ web page.

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Open .docx Files Without Word 2007 - Convert .docx to .doc Online

Your client just emailed a Microsoft Word 2007 document ending with a .docx extension but you have no clue about how to open and print  that file.

Not a problem, you can either convert the file from docx to .doc format or use one of the online services to view the content of that file without requiring Microsoft Office Word 2007.

See Guide: How to Convert Files to a Different Format

The DOCX format is the default file extension in Word 2007. It essentially a bunch of zipped XML documents - you can even rename the extension from .docx to .zip and extract the contents using Winzip like any other zip file.

To convert .docx documents to .doc format, all you have to do is download the free Microsoft Office compatibility Pack here and you'll then be able to open, print edit, and save .docx files in Office 2000, Office XP, or Office 2003 [much like an advanced Word 2007 File Viewer].

If you are on Mac, you can get the Microsoft Office Open XML File Format Converter for Mac here - this converts .docx to rtf (rich text format) files which can be viewed in Office for Mac and other Mac word processors.

Alternatively, you can convert .docx to .doc or extract text from .docx files online using Zamzar's email conversion. Unlike the Microsoft compatibility pack, these docx to doc conversion services do not require copy of Microsoft Office.

It is also possible to open and edit a .docx file in OpenOffice or StarOffice using the free Open XML Translator from SourceForge which converts .docx Word documents to .odf and vice versa.

Related: Microsoft Office 2007 FAQ, Office 2007 Fonts Free

The Word 2007 docx format is currently not supported by GMail Word viewer or Google Docs & Spreadsheets.

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Microsoft University in Bangalore, India For Computer Courses

Microsoft is setting up a university in Bangalore, the Silicon valley of India, to impart computer education.

Though Microsoft does fund education and research projects in many universities across the world, this Bangalore based university will be wholly owned by the software giant and it's first-ever independent educational venture in the world.

TOI says that the Microsoft university may train around 1,000 students and it may well be India's first run by a multinational company.

Microsoft has software development centers both in Bangalore and Hyderabad. Recently, they opened shop in Vancouver, Canada after failing to get more workers in their US office on H1-B visa. Maybe the Microsoft University campus in India may be another step in the same direction - train students as per requirements and then absorb the best of the lot.

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Embed YouTube Flash Videos in Facebook with HTML

Facebook users - you can now embed any HTML code in your Facebook profile using the amazing HTML Box app.

That means you can add web images to your profile, embed MP3 files,  CSS formatted text (with hyperlinks, forms, tables) and even external Flash videos from YouTube and other video sharing sites.

While FaceBook doesn't permit the <embed> or <script> tags directly, the HTML box app provides alternate tags to embed these SWF or FLV videos in your profile.

For any Flash video file (.flv)
<fb:flv src="Flash_Video_URL" height="###" width="###"/>

For Audio MP3 files:
<fb:mp3 src="URL HERE" height="###" width="###" artist="artist" title="title" album="picture"/>

Facebook recently added the fb:google-analytics for Facebook app developers to track usage via Google Analytics. If you add an external web image to HTML Box, it will be cached on Facebook servers before serving it on your profile page.


Update: Facebook is no longer support HTML apps. You can however create a standard HTML file and upload it to Google Sites and embed it into Facebook. See how to create custom Facebook Pages.

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Print to PDF Button for Your Blog and Website

PDF Online, a free service that lets you convert any document or image to PDF files, today released a PDF printing widget that will immediately appeal to most bloggers and site owners. 

As mentioned before, visitors to your website can now save your blog articles and web pages as PDF files at the click of a button - the HTML web page will be converted in real time by the PDF Online conversion engine.

Implementation is easy - you just have to insert a small Javascript snippet in your Blog template or web pages. If you are using IE or Firefox, you will be asked to save or open the PDF file. If you are using Safari browser, the PDF will show up inside the browser window.

What makes this service more attractive than the HP PDF Printing Widget is that it will keep a track of all the PDF conversion activities in your site real-time - it can serve as a good metric to measure the importance of your site contents.

My only concern with the Web2PDF widget is that the hyperlinks on the web page are lost in PDF translation. web2.pdfonline.com

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Microsoft Search Appliance In Response to Google Search Appliance

The upcoming Microsoft Search Appliance (picture above) will help enterprise customers enable Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 search capabilities without requiring any complicated set-up.

Mike Pallot of Microsoft says that Microsoft Search Appliance is "not a ploy to go head-to-head" with the Google Search Appliance or the pizza box shaped Google Mini.

Yet, both the Google Search Appliance rack and Microsoft Search Appliance for SharePoint Sever are designed for very similar needs - that is to provide search for common enterprise repositories including file servers, web sites, relational databases, CRM and other business applications.

More on TechNet.com, IT Week and Office Online.

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FaceBook Should Accept PayPal and International Credit Cards

FaceBook is no longer limited to campus students of US universities - there are over 27 million active users on FaceBook now and a good portion of that based may be located outside the US. [I know so many Orkut fans here who are slowly shifting loyalties to FaceBook.]

FaceBook has several paid services like FaceBook Polls, FaceBook Gifts and the more recent FaceBook flyers which require members to pay in order to use them - the only problem is that FaceBook has limited payment options.

FaceBook Flyers looks like a very effective medium for advertising - you can show up an image ad with a good 200 word description on various Facebook profile at the fee of $10 per 5000 impressions which is like $2 CPM - pretty decent rate considering the size of the banner and that it also allows images.

Unfortunately, if you are outside the US, there's no way for you to pay for advertising via the FaceBook Flyers service - it won't accept international credit cards - you have to be residing in US with a Visa, Mastercard and American Express credit or debit card to use this service.

By limiting the payment options, FaceBook may be limiting the number of advertisers. The day they add Paypal or even Google Checkout, the growth in small advertisers will be massive.

FaceBook Flyers | Thanks Orli

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Convert Family Photos into Great Videos with Walmart Movie Maker

Walmart has launched a Mini Movie software that converts your still digital pictures into very impressive movies with music soundtracks and Hollywood style image posters - it's like a mix of Microsoft Photostory, Windows MovieMaker and Muvee Autoproducer.

Mini Movie is a web based service though you need to download a storyboard software to select pictures and the theme of your movie - the movie theme could be a vaction, wedding, family outing and more.

Once a theme is chosen, you have to select six pictures from your hard-drive, and give a title to your movie. It will become immediately available on the Walmart photo center for viewing online or sharing with friends. There's however no option to embed your personal mini movies on web pages.

Going forward, Wal-Mart will launch this in all their stores allowing customers to create DVD movies from their personal pictures using Fuji kiosks. Walmart Movie

Related: Turn Video Clips & Personal Pictures into Stylish Movies

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Blogger Kicked Out of Stadium for Live Blogging the Game

This is unbelievable but true - a blogger had to leave the stadium because he was posting live updates of the NCAA baseball tournament game on his newspaper's website. Even his press credentials were revoked for the crime of "blogging."

The argument was that live reporting of a "game in progress" violated the broadcasting rights which were sold exclusively to ESPN and CBS.

The NCAA says bloggers can write about the game before it starts or after it's over. In between, they can blog about "the atmosphere, crowd and other details," but not about the game itself.

What's the next restriction for such college sporting events ? No carrying cameras or cellphones inside the stadium. No calling friends from the stadium for giving ball-by-ball updates. Wonder if the sporting associations can control the dozen mediums through which information can flow out of the stadium in real-time. 

"If I buy a ticket to a game and my brother calls my cell phone and asks what the score is, should I tell him that it would infringe on the NCAA's rights? "

Source: Chicago Tribune [behind registration firewall]

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Upload Large Files to YouSendIt from Desktop, Resume Broken Uploads

Sharing large files on the internet just got more convenient. Popular file sharing service YouSendIt now comes with a desktop uploader software that will allow you to upload large files from the desktop without using the web browser.

What's exciting about the new YouSendIt software is that it can resume uploads - you know the frustration when you are uploading a 100 MB file from the web uploader when suddenly the internet connection breaks or the browser crashes for some reason.

With the new YouSendIt uploader, that problem may be a thing of the past as it will resume file upload from the exact point where it broke earlier. Once the file is successfully uploaded and sent to the intended recipients, you get an email confirmation automatically.

For free YouSendIt accounts, the download link will expire in 7 days and the file will be available for 100 number of downloads. The max file size that you can upload is 100 MB while the limit is 2 GB for paid accounts.

YouSendit earlier released an Outlook add-in to help you email large file attachments directly from Microsoft Outlook.

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Your Email Address Is Also Your Phone Number with Yoomba

Yoomba is a new web service that lets you call or text chat with anyone in the world who has an email address (that means practically everyone) - no registrations or complicated setup required.

When Yoomba spots an email address on your screen, it will add two icons - one for making voice phone calls and the other one for instant messaging. (see a screenshot from my GMail inbox below) - this works for Outlook, GMail, Yahoo and other web pages.

Here's how Yoomba works - you provide your email to Yoomba and download a small client which is pre-activated and won't ask you to setup an account or login. When you click the Yoomba button near any email address, an invitation request is sent to the other person - he or she can download Yoomba and connect with you almost instantly over voice or text messaging.

Yoomba is based on P2P technology very similar to Skype. The one very advantage here is the ease of use and it bypasses the need of creating a separate id for chatting / web calling - the email address is id of you and your online friends.

Currently there's option to import contacts from other IMs like Yahoo, Skype or Gtalk but you can add your Microsoft Outlook / Outlook Express contact in a click. You can also see the online status of your contacts inside Outlook. A promising service for sure.

www.yoomba.com [via email Press Release]

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A Great Day for Blogger Users Or Those Who Migrated to WordPress

Ex-blogspot users have a reason to rejoice - if you have migrated from Blogger to another platform like WordPress or TypePad, you no longer have to worry about your lost feed subscriber base.

Blogger now lets you redirect your Blogspot feeds ^# to any other feed service ^# in one simple step. Goto Blogger Settings -> Site Feed and type the new feed address. That makes this popular tutorial more or less irrelevant.

Basically if someone is subscribed to your old feed address, he'll automatically be redirected to your new feed which could be on WordPress, Feedburner, etc. Therefore your move from Blogger to Wordpress will be transparent to the subscriber base.

Positive Effect on Feed Count:

If you are using Feedburner, expect the Feedburner Chicklet to show higher numbers very soon. [Related: Count The RSS Subscribers Of Any Blog]

Blogger vs WordPress:

Google owned Blogger is fighting back to remain the top blogging platform. Here are some amazing things they have done recently to fend off competition from the excellent Wordpress.

1. Blogger Users can add polls which is impossible to do in Wordpress without the help of external plug-ins or widgets.

2. You can directly upload video clips from the web based editor of Blogger and that goes straight to Google Video - again not possible in WordPress.

3. Like WordPress, Blogger also provides comments feed per blog post or the entire blog.

4. Blogger can parse XML files directly - that means you can have Text Link Ads or RSS feeds on Blogger without installing any plugins or sidebar widgets.

5. The new search box of Blogger will help visitors search across all blogs / websites that you have ever linked to from your blog posts. Internally this uses the Google Custom Search engine but you can integrated this with Blogger in a click so anyone can make use of the Google Custom Search engine without having to worry about HTML code.

6. Google Adsense in also tightly integrated with Blogger dashboard making it easy for not-so-geeky users to add adunits if they using the default blogger templates. [Don't think WP allows advertising yet.]

The game is on. Blogger team have launched a Draft Blogger website to showcase more upcoming features in Blogger.

Disclaimer: I am a big fan of WordPress [site 1, site 2]  but still find Blogger more convenient to use and easy to maintain - atleast I don't have to worry about security issues or installing frequent upgrades.

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Simple Tweaks to Improve the Performance of your Windows PC

Here are four simple tweaks for your PC that will help improve your overall computing and internet browsing experience.

Step 1: Change the IE Concurrent Download Limit - Internet Explorer's default settings only enable you to download up to two downloads at the same time. Optimizing the download settings enables you to download up to 16 files concurrently from the same server.

Method - Open registry editor and navigate to the following key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings

Right click the right pane and select New->DWORD Value. Type MaxConnectionsPer1_0Server and give it a value of 16. Add another DWORD using the same process - call it MaxConnectionsPerServer with the same value - 16.

Step 2: Disable Windows Indexing Service - The indexing feature consumes system resources, and may adversely affect your system's performance. By disabling the indexing feature, you free up disk space on your computer and may improve its performance.

Method - Goto Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Services. Find the Indexing Service, right click and select "Disable".

Step 3: Resize your Internet Explorer Cache - The default cache settings of IE are configured to hold a large number of cached temporary Internet files. However, storing many small files on your hard disk consumes valuable disk space and can cause disk  fragmentation. Reduce the maximum size of IE cache to 128MB for optimal performance.

Method - Start Internet Explorer, Select Tools -> Internet Options ->General. Under Temporary Internet Files click the Settings button and type the amount of disk space to use.

Step 4: Windows Menu Display Speed - Menus are displayed on your computer according to Windows' default settings. By optimizing these settings, you speed up your computer's ability to display (and hide) these menus.

Method - Goto Start -> Control Panel -> System. Click the Advanced tab, and under Performance, click the Settings button. Clear the Fade or slide menus into view check box, and then click OK.

These excellent suggestions are based on a local optimization report generated by a tuneup utility that's available for Dell machines.

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Digital Still Cameras for Capturing YouTube Video from Casio

Camera manufacturers have found a smart way to get people to notice their new camera models - make them compatible with YouTube Video - atleast that's what Casio is doing to market their new range of EXILIM Digital Cameras.

Casio has introduced two new digital cameras (they are still cameras with movie mode, not digital camcorders) that record movies in Quicktime format (mov/H.264) ready for uploading to YouTube or any other video sharing website.

Like the standard Portrait, Night, Beach mode in normal cameras, these cameras have a unique YouTube Best Shot mode that captures and saves video in a format which is most optimized for sharing on YouTube.

The YouTube cameras from Casio will also ship with a YouTube uploading software that makes it easy to upload captured videos to YouTube especially when you have to upload multiple video clips in one go.

Detailed Specs for Casio EXILIM Card EX-S880 & Casio EXILIM Zoom EX-Z77 are available in the Press Release at Casio's official website.

Related: No-Frills YouTube Video Camcorder [Flip Video]

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Software Piracy Prevents Global Warming

This is a funny poster advocating software piracy to help prevent global warming. The logic is that you waste fuel when driving to the nearest computer store to buy software.

Instead of driving to get CDs, buying pre-packaged software from mega-corporations and wasting energy, you can help fight Global Warming by using P2P.

Most software companies now offer a download version of their software packages or you can order them by postal mail, why should you drive down to get the CDs. But do turn off the computer screen at night to combat global warming.

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Decrease the Boot Time of your Window PC

Does your Windows computer takes ages to boot up ? Here are some very simple "speeding tips" to reduce the Windows startup time:

Step 1: Remove program entries from your start-up programs list that no longer exist. Occasionally, uninstalling a program from the system does not remove its entry in the startup list, so that when the computer starts -up, it tries to load a program that does not exist.

Step 2: Defrag your hard-drive - When you start up your computer, Windows automatically starts up a number of applications. If these startup applications are fragmented, your computer's startup process will be slower. Therefore you may improve your computer's startup time with the regular use of disk defragmenter.

Step 3: Get Soluto for Windows. During the bootup process, Windows may try to load all programs listed in the startup folder simultaneously which could adversely affect the startup time. Soluto lets you decide the load order of various programs in the startup menu and you may also delay the loading of individual programs.

See: Make your Windows Start-up Faster

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