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Monday, May 24, 2010
You Can See Yahoo! from City Hall
Sometimes .com companies need bricks and mortar, too.
Yahoo! plans to build a 46-acre campus in the heart of Silicon Valley, and the proposal was approved on May 11th by the Santa Clara city council by a unanimous vote.
Yahoo! representatives told the city council that the new southern California site will eventually include 13 six-story office buildings and three two-story special-use buildings to house cafeterias, fitness centers and possibly child care facilities so the 12,000 employees meant to work there can arrive early and stay late if they want to, according to PCWorld.
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Yahoo! promises to make the project carbon neutral in a number of ways, including keeping the campus green with underground parking lots, building new bike paths, putting in walk ways to promote public transportation, and adding solar panels that will ultimately provide about 8% of the power required by the campus.
It looks like a cool project, and through the magic of the Internet, you can watch the discussion and the city council’s vote. It’s kind of a testament to Internet democracy that anyone can watch both a local city council meeting and Congress with just a few clicks.
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Saturday, May 15, 2010
Track and .Com
Track and field events are some of the oldest sports around dating back to Roman times. But, as evidenced by lagging interest in summer Olympic telecasts in recent years, people are increasingly tuning into “newer” sports like baseball, football and NASCAR. Times are a changin’, however. While track and field events may be losing ground to those Johnny-come-lately sports on traditional media, they are finding traction on the newest media - .com.
According to an article in The Washington Post: “Years of Web-based communication and an emphasis on social media have allowed the sport to foster a strong, under-the-radar connection to a large audience of track geeks while continually welcoming curious Web explorers, some of whom eventually become new fans.”
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During the world indoor championships 17 athletes on the U.S. team sent out live tweets and updated their Facebook pages. World 400-meter champion Sanya Richards-Ross is both a runner and multimedia expert, posting footage of mundane life events among her 38 YouTube videoblogs. Even USATF Chief Executive Officer Doug Logan blogs, often using surprisingly frank language as he ruminates on www.usatf.org, the Post reports.
And it’s not just the athletes. Track and field has Web-savvy fans on sites such as www.letsrun.com and www.flotrak.com. Robert and Weldon Johnson, brothers who began letsrun.com in 2000, told The Post that Web traffic has increased every year -- especially recently. Unique visitors increased 24 percent in 2008, and the first four months of 2010 have shown an even bigger boost: 52 percent since 2008.
The .com presence has helped increase USATF membership by nearly a third since 2001, with a 12 percent leap and a 10,000-member increase between 2008 and 2009. Attendance at the outdoor meets held in the United States is growing or staying steady. The Reebok Grand Prix (now the Adidas Grand Prix) on Randall's Island in New York drew 5,000 fans in 2007, 10,000 in 2008 and more than 11,000 last year.
Attributing all of that to the Internet is probably an exaggeration. While the sport has gone into something of an eclipse in the United States, there is the Bolt Factor. Usain Bolt’s electrifying runs rewrite the record books, and his effervescent personality have contributed to track and field’s surge.
But even Bolt knows the power of .com. He runs, and he tweets. He can also bust a move as he unveils his new steps in nightclubs on YouTube. And he also posts videos and articles on his Facebook page.
While the toga might not be making a comeback, it looks like track and field will clear that hurdle with a little help from .com…..
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Tuesday, May 11, 2010
E-tail Customers are Getting Their Satisfaction
People’s satisfaction with the .com world is on the rise. At least in that portion of the .com world made up of online retailers. According to a ForeSee Results survey, satisfaction levels with the top Web-based retailers was the highest recorded in the index's six-year history.
Read the survey results...
Like its brick-and-mortar cousins, customer satisfaction means sales. According to ForeSee, a single-point increase in customer satisfaction for a top-100 e-retailer typically translates into $89 million in year-over-year online sales. Moreover, the research shows that a highly satisfied online shopper is 73% more likely to purchase online from the retailer than a dissatisfied one.
Netflix continues to lead the field for the sixth year in a row, with a score of 87, increasing two points from last year. Amazon trails by just a single point this year, with a score of 86, also maintaining its position for the sixth year. What is extraordinary is that the field of retailers scoring 80 or higher has swelled from five websites in 2009 to 28 websites in 2010 – more than a four-fold increase. A score of 80 or higher is the benchmark for excellence.
The following sites round out the top:
Avon.com and Store.Apple.com with a score of 83; BN.com (Barnes and Noble), Keurig.com, LLBean.com, QVC.com, and Vitacoast.com with 82s; BassPro.com, Cabelas.com, and DisneyStore.com with 81s.
At least in the e-tail world you can get satisfaction if you try, and try and try…
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Wednesday, May 05, 2010
Web Professionals Day
The work of Web professionals sometimes gets overlooked, forgotten until something goes wrong. But those unsung heroes are the ones who keep the .com world spinning.
To bring recognition to their work, GoDaddy, the American Marketing Association and the City of Phoenix celebrated the third annual Web Professionals' Day.
"Having a talented Web professional can make all the difference in business these days," said GoDaddy CEO and Founder Bob Parsons. "For all the holidays on the Hallmark calendar, it just seemed to us that Web professionals deserved a special day for all the great work they do!"
On April 29th, the American Marketing Association pronounced the holiday to its chapters across the nation, recognizing the vital contributions Web Professionals make to their industry. In a 2009 study, the group found marketers are exhibiting a steady, year-over-year spending increase for online development, and Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon formally recognized the holiday with an official Mayoral Proclamation.
While we can have fun with Web Pro Day, the “holiday” underscores what is becoming a serious profession. According to IDC, two-thirds of small to medium-sized businesses have their own Web professionals in-house, elevating the importance of a company's Web pro. The Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts the profession will grow faster than average over the next decade.
So go ahead and show your Web pro a little love. Flowers would be nice, but an extra-large caffeinated beverage may be more welcomed.
www.webprofessional.org
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Wednesday, May 05, 2010
Tying the Web Together
The Web is a huge, ever expanding place, and sometimes it seems like you can’t get there from here. Not unlike driving, an Internet map could be a useful tool at times, and that appears to be one of the growing trends in the .com world. Social media sites are trying to define ways for people to get to their “there” from their “here.”
Facebook calls its method to connect different web locations Open Graph, which CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled at its F8 conference on April 21, CNET reports. Read the full article...
"Yelp is mapping out the part of the graph that relates to small businesses. Pandora is mapping out the part of the graph that relates to music," Zuckerberg said. "If we can take these separate maps of the graph and pull them all together, then we can create a Web that's smarter, more social, more personalized, and more semantically aware."
Farhad Manjoo described Facebook in Slate last year as “becoming part of the infrastructure of the Web, every bit as indispensible to our daily wanderings as Google or e-mail.” Read the full article...
Of course, wherever Facebook goes other .coms are not far behind. Google’s Friend Connect is making a run, and then there’s Twitter. All these services that have become a part of our everyday lives are scattered, and whoever comes up with a way to make it less so may well have the next .com hit.
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Thursday, April 22, 2010
Giving the Internet an MRI
While Internet doesn’t have flesh and blood, it does seem to act like an organism. The Internet lives on information, and if you could see a picture of what information is flowing to and from what Web sites, you’d have a pretty good idea of what it actually looks like.
Several companies including Digg, Microsoft and Trendrr have developed new Web sites that do just that. They give people a look at the living, breathing Internet. These new Web sites act like some sort of early version of an X-ray machine or MRI device that allows people to follow the flow of information as ebbs and flows across the Internet.
(http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/04/13/graphing-internet-digg-google-trends/)
"As the amount of information on the Web grows, the need for new ways to parse that information grows too," Dylan Casey, product manager at Google told Fox News as he explained Google Trends, which allows people to compare terms such as "Barack Obama" and "Sarah Palin" to see who is more popular on the Web. Using Google Trends, it's possible to see a graph over a historical period too -- say, for three years -- to see if the topic is becoming more popular.
On the other hand, Digg Labs let you tap into real-time information as it people Digg the information. If it’s happening right now, then the half dozen “labs” allow you to follow the trend-de-minute.
"People can use graphed Web info as a tool for business intelligence, to gain deeper market insights, for research or to keep tabs on an industry, product, and term," says Mark Ghuneim, the CEO at Wiredset, the marketing and strategic planning company that created Trendrr. "By visualizing Web data in graphical ways we can glean more important insights, faster."
The Internet is all about information, and as the it grows the desire to know what information is being sought, who is seeking it, where it is being sought and sent, and why it is being looked for become more important. Whether or not we’ll ever get a real picture of what the inner working of the Internet look like is an open question, but there’s no doubt that sophisticated analysis of it will only grow as it matures.
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