"The Uphill Battle"

"When you win your battle, please remember, that the war is not over" - and that it's not only for you important to win this battle Alida Brandenburg originally shared this post: I am 100% (no pun intended) behind Occupy Wall Street (in case it wasn't evident by my numerous posts on the movement since it started), but thank god for this. Keep things in perspective and count your blessings, noodles. ETA: People seem to be missing the point here. Made some clarifying points below: Regarding Priorities Not sure why people are so quick to dismiss this by saying it's false because we need to help ourselves and solve our own problems first. Look at the image more carefully, particularly the message at the bottom of the image. It says, "*When you win your battle*..." No one is suggesting we should just scratch what we're doing and instead throw our limited resources into other countries. That's only going to add to the problem. Regarding Our Current Position I also wasn't making any assertions about welfare economies or the role we have in creating others' suffering. I just think it's important to keep things in perspective. While this is a valid fight and one worth stepping up for, in the grand scheme of things, most of us are incredibly privileged. The fact that you and I are even able to read these words to each other sets us light-years beyond most in the world. As +Joanna Staebler-Kimmel +Joanna Staebler-Kimmel said in the comments: " the text after those images is a useful way of putting it - not 'why are you wasting time on this when children are starving in africa?' but 'your battle is part of a larger war.'" Regarding Aid And that being said, people also seem to jump to the conclusion that this means we should just throw money at the problem (the struggles of other countries) and expect it to magically work out. Who said anything about giving aid? Just like the Occupy movement is pushing us to rethink our economic systems (and now a host of others), perhaps we should rethink our global policies and the ways in which we support- or don't support- developing countries. We live in an incredibly novel era. Why are we still relying on the same tired policies? There are better solutions.

How Visa Plans To Dominate Mobile Payments, Create The Digital Wallet And More by Leana Rao

It’s no secret that credit card companies are shelling out big bucks and aggressively forming partnerships and deals to start cashing in on the mobile and digital payments innovations currently taking place. American Express, which recently debuted its own digital payments product Serve, has been particularly aggressive on the partnerships front, striking recent deals with both Foursquare and Facebook. Mastercard has bet on NFC with a partnership with Google for Google Wallet and bought online payments gateway DataCash for $520 million last fall. And Visa has made a number of major moves in the mobile and digital payments space of late; including making an investment (and taking on an advisory role) in disruptive startup Square, buying virtual goods payments platform PlaySpan for $190 million, and acquiring mobile payments company Fundamo for $110 million. We sat down with Visa’s Global Head of Mobile Product Bill Gadja and the company’s Head of Global Product Strategy, Innovation and eCommerce Jennifer Schulz to discuss how the financial company is planning to compete in both mobile and digital payments.

MOBILE

Gadja explains that there are three prongs to Visa’s mobile payments strategy. One of these is NFC, and focuses on payments using a mobile phone at a physical store. For background, NFC (near field communications) enables people to make transactions, exchange digital content and connect electronic devices with a simple touch. As we’ve seen with Google Wallet, Android phones such as the Nexus S are being built with NFC chips, making your cell phone a mobile wallet. Visa recently joined the ISIS network, a NFC mobile payment network that is a joint venture formed by AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon. ISIS will soon launch in a number of markets, including Utah and Texas.

Gadja explains that Visa is licensing mobile payments applications PayWave for integration with the ISIS wallet and the company is actively looking for other ways to integrate with NFC into the company’s mobile payments structure.

Of course, some aren’t so bullish on NFC, notably eBay (who owns PayPal) CEO John Donohoe, who in a recent earnings call said merchants refer NFC “not for commerce.” And odd statement considering PayPal just dipped its toes in the NFC pool with support for Android.

Gadja tells is, “I think for some people NFC will replace the actual physical credit card but it will be a long time before NFC replaces all payments.” He believes that we are going to start seeing more traction by end of this year but says the capability of “taking credit cards and putting them on mobile phones will represent the long tail” in payments. But he adds, “the pieces are in place for NFC to take off.”

The second part of the Visa’s mobile strategy involves the digital wallet and the mobile web. Gadja says that as e-commerce ramps up on mobile phones, there is a need for one-click, simple username and password checkout experience in a transaction being made on a mobile device. That’s an area where PayPal has been working hard to dominate in but Visa sees room for other players. Should we expect a PayPal-like, one-click mobile payments technology coming from Visa soon? Perhaps, the company hasn’t been afraid to enter PayPal’s territory in the past, launching a peer to peer payments service earlier this year.

In May, Visa announced its plans for the digital wallet. We’ll explain this initiative later in the post, but part of this platform would allow you to access your loyalty points, credit cards and more from your mobile phone at the point of sale. And the third pillar of Visa’s mobile strategy is incorporating value-added services like real-time alerts, contextual services, and offers at point of shopping based on where you are.

Visa actually tested a partnership with retailer The Gap earlier this year which alerted customers via SMS of discounts in stores near them. Gadja tells us Visa is working with a number of other retailers and banks on similar deals which will be announced soon.

Gadja says there are a number of other factors at play in the mobile payments place that need to be highlighted when talking about mobile payments. International is a huge growth area in mobile payments. He tells is that outside the U.S., there are a large number of people who have mobile phones but don’t have banking relationship or credit card. In fact, he says there are 2 billion people in world that have phone, but don’t have a bank account or credit card.

In these markets, Visa’s goal is to bring prepaid accounts, purchasing power and other financial services to basic phones. These could include topping up a mobile phone with airtime, buying transit tickets, peer to peer payments. And this goal was the mean reason behind the purchase of behind the $110 million purchase of Fundamo. The company’s platform delivers mobile financial services to unbanked and under-banked consumers around the world, including person-to-person payments, airtime top-up, bill payment and branchless banking services.

Connecting with the small business world that don’t yet use credit cards or are new to the system is another area where Visa feels there is strong potential, especially with mobile payments. That’s why the company invested in disruptive mobile payments company Square and took an advisory role in the company. Gadja says that the power of Square is that it is enabling small businesses and independent workers such as doctors, designer and other merchants to start using credit cards and grow their businesses. It would make sense for Square and Visa would somehow work to harness the power of their partnership (As of April roughly two-thirds of transactions using Square’s payments service were through Visa credit cards.), but it’s unclear what the two companies will reveal any new co-produced products soon.

Gadja tells us that the biggest challenge of mobile payments in the current market the massive amount of fragmentation in the mobile industry. He explains that with all of the various mobile operating systems, specific manufactured phones, applications and more, keeping up with pace of innovation on the development side is a major challenge for Visa.

But he says that there is still so much room for innovation around how we pay with mobile phones. “With the rise of smartphone usage, we are already seeing a lot of innovation around commerce,” he explains. “It’s inevitable that this will extend to the payments around the sales in mobile commerce.”

DIGITAL

Visa’s digital payments guru Schulz outlined her strategy for digital payments at the company, which centralizes around the creation of the digital wallet. Schulz says that because of the fat that e-commerce is being more easy and convenient with customers, especially with m-commerce, the underlying payments infrastructure has to evolve.

And Visa’s answer to this is a new digital wallet initiative. Here’s how it works. Users will have an account, and they can add their credit card numbers (and cards from other credit card companies such as American Express and Mastercard). Visa is partnering with a number of financial institutions to offer this product to their customers.

Users can also load their loyalty points and rewards cards, as well as organize their shopping lists. Schulz describes it as a “wallet in the cloud.” But she says the key to the success of the wallet is a seamless, one-click payments experience for the consumers. So Visa has partnered with a number of large-scale retailers (which will be announced soon) to integrate what Schulz refers to as a ‘new acceptance mark’ on a merchant payments page.

So there will be a button you can click on, which will prompt you to sign-on and then will sync your digital wallet with the purchase in your shopping cart. So for example, imagine you had a camera in your cart, and Visa offered a 20 percent off at camera’s purchased at BestBuy, the wallet would sync and show the discount in your cart. The same works for loyalty points and more.

Schulz explains that the idea behind the wallet is that consumers want control over their wallet and want to have payment information and access available to them at all times. She believes that the digital wallet will click to buy incorporated on retailers’ sites is essential to the future of e-commerce in both the U.S. and emerging markets.

She compares the digital wallet offering to “two-hand clapping.” ” You can have a digital wallet,” Schulz explains, “but you need a merchant solution of click to buy, and Visa’s going to transform that experience.” And Schulz highlights another recent acquisition, Playspan, has helping drive a simplified commerce experience, a.k.a. click to buy, within game or within app.

Of course adding another checkout experience to online retailers’ sites can be a complicated and time-consuming process. But that’s where Visa’s $2 billion acquisition of CyberSource comes in. CyberSource is said to process about 25 percent of all e-commerce dollars transacted in the United States, and operates e-commerce for hundreds of thousands of retailers. Schulz says this relationship has helped speed up the pace of implementation.

Creating the digital wallet, both on the mobile and web platforms, is no easy task. Visa has a name for itself in the credit card industry but the fact is that the brand still has to attach innovation to itself in order for people to take these products seriously. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons why Google’s Mobile Wallet news created waves, even though NFC technology is in its early stages.

Visa competitor American Express is also working hard to innovate both at the large retailer level, as well as among smaller retailers, with GoSocial.

While Visa, American Express and others are looking to capitalize on the changes taking place in the payments industry, it is a challenging effort. Local commerce is a big part of this, and everyone is trying to find a way to close the redemption loop. But e-commerce, amongst larger retailers, is also a multi-billion dollar market that Visa hopes to continue to play in with products like a digital wallet. And in-store payments, whether that be through NFC, Square or others, represent another market.

I’ve been talking to a number of executives of payments companies and founders of innovative payments startups, and while their objectives are different, they all seem to agree on one thing. It’s early and there is still much more innovation were going to see in the next few years in the online and mobile payments space.

Do You think Technology Companies like Google and LinkedIn are in a Tech Boom or Bubble

Is there a tech bubble or, is it really a boom? Ask a thousand people and you are going to get a thousand answers. In fact — as noted investor & commentator Paul Kedrosky points out — there is a bubble in bubble-oriented commentary. For our part, we thought it was best to talk to survivors of the last bubble and learn from them — what they did they right and how they made it through the storm. If you missed it, try catching up via our mega-post: How to survive the next bubble.

The debate still hasn’t stopped. And to give you some sort of a historical perspective on the last Internet bubble/boom and the current bubble/boom, Fee Fighters and Kissmetrics created this infographic:

Hewlett-Packard Said to Plan Devices That Make Wireless Payments The company is considering introducing phones and tablets based on near field communication technology By Olga Kharif

(Bloomberg) — Hewlett-Packard Co. is developing mobile devices that will help consumers make purchases wirelessly, two people familiar with the company's plans said.

The company is considering introducing phones and tablets based on near field communication technology, which lets users pay for items and receive coupons and loyalty points by tapping the gadgets on posters and grocery store cash registers, said one of the people, who requested anonymity because the plans haven't been made public. The first NFC devices may be available by year-end, the person said.

Hewlett-Packard, which bought Palm Inc. for $1.2 billion in 2010, is adding the feature to help keep alive a brand that's losing ground in the market for smartphones. Palm's share dropped to 2.6 percent in the three months that ended in April, from 3.2 percent in the previous period, researcher ComScore Inc. says. The company won't release a new device that can vie with Apple Inc.'s iPad tablet until July.

"Other folks are going to build this capability into devices, so, competitively, HP needs to do that," said Ed Finkler, an independent programmer who has created an application for devices that run Palm's WebOS operating system.

Third-party developers will be able to build apps and services using the capability, one of the people said.

Leslie Letts, a spokeswoman for Palo Alto, California-based Hewlett-Packard, declined to comment.

Hewlett-Packard said this week it will start selling its TouchPad in the U.S. in July. The tablet will compete with rival products from Apple and machines that feature Google Inc.'s operating system.

LOSING SHARE
Gartner Inc. projected in April that devices featuring Palm's WebOS software, such as the TouchPad, will hold 3 percent share of the global tablet market in 2015, from 4 percent this year.

NFC is emerging as a must-have feature for mobile devices. Google and ISIS, a joint venture among wireless carriers AT&T Inc., Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile USA Inc., will soon begin testing NFC-based payment and coupon services in select cities. Global NFC-based transactions will reach almost $50 billion by 2014, according to consulting firm Juniper Research.

Rival handset maker Samsung Electronics Co. debuted its Nexus S phone, featuring NFC capabilities, in December. T-Mobile USA began selling Nokia Astound with NFC capabilities in March. Research In Motion Ltd. has said future versions of the BlackBerry will offer built-in NFC support. Users will be able to pair the BlackBerry Bold to an accessory or read information such as a Web link from smart tags by simply tapping the phone to an NFC tag in a poster.

Business customers as well as consumers may flock to NFC technology. Train and bus conductors can use it to check riders' tickets. Warehouse staff can use NFC-enabled devices for inventory tracking, and cashiers can use NFC-enabled tablets to accept payments in retail stores.

"Business could use this capability internally for many purposes," Charlie Bess, a Hewlett-Packard Fellow, wrote in a blog in January. "This can be attached to just about anything and read from nearby

Google+ Vs. Twitter: A Personal View

As Google+ goes into its second week of life, how’s the service doing? I could quote some numbers. I will, below! But I wanted to do a personal take contrasting it against another social site that I find essential. Not Facebook. Twitter.

Me & Facebook
Yes, I have a personal Facebook account. But I do very little there. For whatever reason, I never started using an application-based interface to Facebook, as I do with Twitter. That means I have to go over to Facebook and look through my news stream, and it’s too much of a bother.

Also, Facebook largely lost my personal attention back at the end of 2009, when yet the latest in privacy changes made me consider closing my account entirely. In the end, I created a like page for myself, as I explained more in my post from last year, Why I’m Not Deleting My Facebook Account (Yet).

Occasionally, I post links to things I’ve written to on that page. But for the most part, I just don’t attend to it as much as I probably should.

Me & Twitter
In contrast to Facebook, I’m constantly sharing through my Twitter account. Maybe it’s that the things I want to share fit the “short burst” mentality of Twitter. Maybe it just fits me better. Perhaps because I started using it quickly on through an app, I like it better. An app means I can have Twitter constantly open on one side of my screen, distinct from my browser.

(Yes, I know that I could have Facebook stream into many of the same apps that handle Twitter. Personally, I find that distracting).

Whatever the reason, Twitter is my main social network. So with Google+ now in the mix, it’s Twitter that I’m measuring it up against. How’s that going?

I thought I’d start with a visual. Here’s a snapshot of the last ten things I saw on Twitter when I looked at 1:07pm Pacific Time today, versus the last ten items I saw on Google Plus:



You can click to enlarge that image. What I’ve tried to is shown Google+ if it were to be exactly like my Twitter stream, to understand some of the diversity I might (or might not) be getting. In reality, a typical screen “page” of my Google+ stream will only show about three or four items, because with comments and other material such as image embeds, each individual item gets very long.

Diversity Of Content
For me, getting a diverse mix of content is a sign of a healthy social network. As I wrote before in One Week In, Google+ Users Are Growing Followers, Getting Traffic, if all I’m seeing is Robert Scoble, something’s not right!

Maybe that something is me. After all, Twitter is a mature social network that anyone can join, including major news outlets. Over the years, I’ve grown to following nearly 2,000 people, companies and news sources. I’m following far fewer on Google+, especially because there are far fewer there.

It’s true. Fewer sources do mean less activity and diversity. But then again, I am following over 400 people already. So, there should be some activity in my Google+ stream. How’s it looking?

Measuring Up
On Twitter, my top ten items all came within one minute — and there were more within that same minute, if I’d gone down further.On Google+, the top ten items stretched across a seven minute period.

For me, Google+ is currently less active that Twitter. My gut feeling is that this is due to there still being less activity on Google+ as a new network than because I’m not following enough people.

Another sign of this is that when I did this test, my own post on Google+ about a Panda image on Bing was still showing for me. I’d tweeted a similar item to Twitter at the same time. That had long dropped out of my Twitter feed.

It’s not all about activity, however. What’s the quality of what I’m seeing?

In my Twitter sample, there was nothing that I’d felt was particularly essential or that would have made me click through. On my Google+ side, the first two items did capture my attention. The post from Matt Cutts even got me to click and read the story.

So Google+ is better on quality? It’s not so easy as that. I’m used to having my Twitter feed flow by constantly on the side of my screen. While there’s plenty of “noise,” I’m also constantly finding plenty of “signal” there, as well. Meanwhile, Google+ produces some of its own noise.

Sharing & Quoting & Repeating
I’d previously seen Matt’s post earlier in the day. Because I’d commented on it, that caused it to get kicked back up into my Google+ stream.

This wouldn’t have happened with Twitter. If I’d made a comment — effectively by doing an @reply to Matt — that wouldn’t kick his original tweet back up.

That’s probably for the best, because that type of thing can get annoying fast. It’s already annoying when a similar thing happens, when people “Share” an item.

Here’s a close-up of one of the items from Google+ in my comparison above:



Here, Kate Gardiner has shared an item originally shared by Mark Glaser. If this were Twitter — and she was using Twitter’s native retweet feature — this wouldn’t have carried her name at all. It would have been shown to me as if it was coming from Mark.

Google+ has no retweet concept like this. Sharing an item is effectively sharing an entirely new item. It creates a new post, which can have its own comments — and turns into a mess.

Several people might share the same original item. If you follow all the same people, that means you see it over and over again in your stream. Each of those items may have their own comments, so it’s hard to follow what everyone is saying about the subject in general.

In some cases, you might want to share an item in a way to add your own thoughts (similar to how “quoting” works with Twitter). But I suspect that Google+ might be better if “Share” worked as “Retweet” does on Twitter, with maybe an option when you click share to get either “Share Original” or “Share As New Post” choices.

The Commenting, Oh My!
Where Google+ has been downright amazing to me is the speed and volume of commenting that some posts can get. I can post something on Twitter and get a few replies. A post on Google+ often pulls 10, 20 or more comments within minutes of it going live.

Indeed, one of the biggest problems now is that there are so many comments on some posts that Google really needs to provide a threading option, plus it needs to “collapse” them more in your stream where there are many of them.

Keeps Me Going Back
When I used Google Buzz, I quickly found that it took too much time to be active in both places. And I also found that Google Buzz itself quickly lost activity. So, I routed my Twitter posts over to Google Buzz, and that was that.

So far with Google+, I’ve continued to be active there (my account is here). In part, that’s because unlike with Buzz, there’s enough activity to keep me going back. It’s also activity that I’m not finding on Twitter. Of course, that’s also because a lot of the activity is about Google+. People seem to be posting about Google+ on Google+ itself, which makes a lot of sense.

Certainly, I know I’m doing that. I’m not sharing some Google+ specific items on Twitter, because it doesn’t make sense to when so many on Twitter either don’t have access to Google+ or may not care about it.

I’m also aware that people may be following me in both places. That means I’m trying to think about what makes the most sense to share in both places, rather than one versus another. I don’t worry about this too much, but I do give it some thought.

Google+ & The Middle Ground
The self-referential nature of Google+ is slowly but surely dying down, however. One thing I’ve been using it for, that Twitter isn’t helpful for, are those times when I want to make a comment about something, perhaps spark a discussion, and those 140 characters simply aren’t enough.

It’s a nice middle ground between the micro-blogging that Twitter offers and the more time consuming effort of creating a formal blog post — and it has the benefit of potentially generating tons of feedback and consolidating that feedback for future reference.

That’s one reason why I can see it being compelling to people like Kevin Rose, who has declared Google+ will be his new blog. While my reaction to that was that no one should see Google+ as a blog replacement, as an in-between for Twitter and blogging, it’s compelling.

Of course, it would be even more compelling if it had Facebook’s question feature, but it’s early days yet.

Circles Are Exhausting
As for the Google+ Circles feature, which lets you can organize people into particular groups, that’s now become work to me.

When I first saw Google+ in testing months ago, I though the idea of a new network using the circles concept would be a great “reset” for me and others who felt they’d “done it wrong” in friending on Facebook. Since its launch, I’ve seen many people remark that it is indeed a good reset.

But you know, what I follow on Twitter is a nice collection of people and sources I trust, that I’ve built up over the years. I don’t have the time or energy to try and match that manually on Google+, nor are they all there.

When I go into the Find & Invite feature in Google+, I find plenty of relevant people to add. But what circles to put them in? I have about 15 circles that I created on my first day with Google Plus. Now they’re actually working as a barrier to adding new people. What if I put someone in the wrong circle, in case I want to share circles like Twitter lists to the public in the future, if this is allowed?

Should I just toss everyone into “Other” so that I’ve got them, and then I can organize them if I want to later?

Something that was supposed to help me is turning out to be a pain in the ass. I probably will just start dumping everyone into an “Other” circle thinking that if I need to make smaller circles, I can do that later. But, of course, I never will. It’s not like I did that on Facebook when lists came out.

On Twitter, I do still use lists. But the difference is that I’m not trying to create a new social network from scratch. Instead, because I already follow so many people, I tend to add new people when I see someone else retweeting something interesting by them, or if they call out to me with something interesting, or occasionally if one of Twitter’s suggestions at the site catches my eye.

Right now, what I need more than anything from Google is for it to automagically recreate all the people I already follow on Twitter. Since that’s not going to happen, I really need it to let me easily find people by subject areas. People in technology, in search, in other areas – I want to browse and easily select these groups. Maybe it will come, and certainly if we could publicly share circles, it would help. But I really need it now.

Watch & See
Overall, as I keep saying, it’s still very early days for Google Plus. I’m pretty cynical by nature, plus I watched Google Buzz rise and then fall despite the initial attention. Google+ does feel like it has way more legs. Google says it has millions of users so far. It’s even got me going back to the site because there’s no desktop app despite the fact I don’t do this with Facebook. I’m forming new habits, and some that will benefit Google’s time-on-site goals.

But there’s so much more that still needs to come. The hookup of Google +1 to Google+ is feeling overdue. How long is it going to take for that iPhone app to get approved. When will I be able to reshare an item or share a link using the mobile app? Can’t the name please be changed to Google Plus, at least, so we don’t have all these absurd punctuation collisions.

I want more, more more — which, I suppose, is a good thing for the future of Google+.

By the way, want to follow me on Google+? You’ll find me here (and here for Twitter, here for Facebook).

Search Engine Land itself can be found on social media sites, too. Our accounts: Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and Twitter. We even welcomed a new community editor, Monica Wright, to help oversee them today.

Insert Coin: Prosthetic eye digital camera (video) By Zach Honig

In Insert Coin, we look at an exciting new tech project that requires funding before it can hit production. If you'd like to pitch a project, please send us a tip with "Insert Coin" as the subject line.

Nobody with binocular vision would consider replacing a functional natural eye with a digital camera. But Tanya Vlach's vision is monocular, after losing one of her eyes in a car accident. A matching ocular prosthesis gives the San Francisco native a normal appearance, but it's unable to provide vision -- in its current state, at least. Vlach turned to Kickstarter for donations that would allow her to install a unique, waterproof in-eye camera, theoretically capable of transmitting 720p HD video wirelessly to a mobile app, and zooming and capturing still images using a blink-activated sensor. Features also on the wish list: facial recognition, a dilating pupil that changes based on light, infrared / UV capture, and geotagging, just to name a few.

The embedded camera obviously can't replace a natural eye, but it certainly brings more life to an otherwise useless cosmetic shell. Vlach needs to raise $15,000 by August 3rd in order to achieve her funding goal and commission an engineer to design the new optic. Donations of less than $5,000 will be rewarded with a variety of small-ticket items, while a pledge greater than that amount will net the donor their very own "souvenir eye camera" -- whatever that means. You can jump past the break for a video explanation from Tanya, who may very well be on her way to being the first human to use a digital pseudo-bionic eye.

Previous project update: The Triggertrap open source automatic camera release featured in last week's Insert Coin has exceeded its funding goal of $25,000. There are still three weeks left to claim your own ready-built Triggertrap for $75.

Servers are like money, you’ll always need more By Stacey Higginbotham

We give Intel a lot of flack here at GigaOM for not being mobile enough or low power enough for scale out computing, but the chipmaker is doing all right in the server category. Jason Waxman, the general manager of Intel’s high density compute business says the growth rate of servers is on a roll– growing about 7 percent and that growth rate will double in the next five years.

In the video below I spoke with Waxman, about the ever-growing need for servers and how we can sustain that kind of demand for compute. He didn’t spend much time on power efficiency but he did predict a coming era of facial recognition and video search driven by more compute power. We also discussed the server architecture debate that has led to the creation of startups such as SeaMicro, Calxeda and Tilera, which are rethinking the ways servers and chips for servers are built.

"What's Your Marketing Objective?"

by Jess Gill

Marketing objective is a statement of the objective that can either be short term or long term effect that is designed to achieve. If you are going to create a marketing plan, you need to consider these objectives:

1. Awareness
This is the very first step to bring in new customers. They must know your existence, your product and services type, your price, your location and what is the benefit of your product or services. If the potential customers know nothing about you, eventually your business is going to fail in a short period. In fact, many big companies now focused more on building awareness and educate their potential customers before they actually ask for that sale!

2. Building a database of customers.
This involves collecting the contact information such as name and email address of your potential customers. In fact, experts said that it takes 7 promotions to actually convert the potential customers into buyers. When they visit your website for the first time, you need to have a mechanism integrated into your marketing to collect their information. Once they go away from your website, they aren’t going to come back again! How many of us do actually come back to the site that we did not give our information to? By building a database of customers, you are able to follow-up with them on future promotions even if they don’t buy from you from the first time.

3. Generating traffic
Traffic is important to any businesses. Traffic simply means attracting people to come over to your site and see your products or services. Even if you have a site but nobody visits them, you are not able to do anything. There are so many businesses that have a site but do not do anything to generate traffic to their site. And they are not even ranking anywhere.

4. Increasing sales
Every business wants to increase to a higher profit per customer. Businesses can choose either selling add-on services or selling up to higher-priced products or services. McDonald actually increases their sales by asking you to buy their add-on services like upgrade to large meal or adding the sundae cone. In fact, add-on services are a very good strategy to increase sales.

5. Community goodwill
No matter how small or large your business could be, this is the creation of a positive image of your business in your community. You may put up an image that reflects you positively or negatively.

The Most Important Question Peter Thiel Asks Any Startup Looking For Money

AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND – Peter Thiel is the first outside investor in Facebook, the guy who sold PayPal to eBay for billions, and a Founders Fund partner.
He told today's Ice Ideas conference audience that there is one question he asks entrepreneur looking to begin a startup.
He asks: Why will employee number 20 join your company?
Thiel says it's easy to figure out why someone wants to be a CEO or another very early employee in a startup; they'd like to run a company and get rich doing it.
He says its also easy to know why employee number 1,000 joins; the company is clearly on its way to growing into something huge, and will provide a nice, stable living.
Employee number 20, he says, will have to join for different reasons.
By then, the big equity stakes will have already been handed out.
Also, a company with only 19 employees won't have "made it" yet; it won't be a place someone looking for a stable income will join.
So what's the right answer?
According to Thiel: for the only companies worth starting – perhaps the only companies he'd invest in – the right answer is that employee number 20 will join because you are doing something nobody else has done – "something fundamentally new, fundamentally different."


Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/the-most-important-question-peter-thiel-asks-any-startup-looking-for-money-2011-7#ixzz1Rk61D2yf

I Seen This Coming Did You?

http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-smartphone-platforms-2011-7

Google will continue to muscle their way around the market with there innovative thinking.

I See You Bro

Why Can't We Stay Ahead of the Curve and Save Money?

http://www.linkedin.com/news?aag=&actionBar=&articleID=613949920&ids=c38VejgVcP4S&freq=1&trk=sgnl-0-wstl-title

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I like How Google move.

They are really trying to make sure they are around for a while. Check the article out here Redworc Technologies will be there one day soon.

Do Your Thing Bro!!

Blogger: Redworc Technologies - Create Post

Blogger: Redworc Technologies - Create Post

Music is entertaining

Food for Thought

http://www.inc.com/articles/201105/7-tips-your-business-can-learn-from-oprah.html

Michele Shaw: Sometimes, It's Good to Be Dumb

Michele Shaw: Sometimes, It's Good to Be Dumb: "Last Saturday, I went with my family to see some fireworks on a last minute invitation. We figured, 'Why not? Sounds fun.' These firework..."

Add me to your collection on linked In

http://www.linkedin.com/pub/robert-crowder/2b/825/415

RedworC Technologies

http://www.facebook.com/pages/RedworC-Technologies/159466774121455

facebook link

http://www.facebook.com/pages/RedworC-Technologies/159466774121455

Pisces

Pisces

February 19 - March 20

You may be indecisive today, Pisces. You may not be able to find solutions you can live with. You don't need to finalize anything now. Use this day to lay low and gather data. People may seem rather insensitive and erratic. Go with the flow. You have a great deal of warmth and passion to share. You may find that a strong, unpredictable force is affecting your emotions.

Social Networking sites are big business

http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2011/0718/technology-jive-software-facebook-linkedin-social-business.html

I think that social networking sites are good for business.  But I disagree that they are the business.  These Social  sites are just tools for marketing and you are to utilize them for that.  Now once you use them for this they are useless.  Now for the social media site it is business but for the rest of the world it is a meet a greet...  To turn your audience that you on the social networking site to money, now that is business.

Redworc Tech Hosting is up just go to www.redworctechs.com and click on hosting tab... Redworc Tech Hosting taking care of all you internet needs domain registration, hosting, website design, and search engine optimization to get traffic to your site.

Let Me Get Your Internet Presence Together

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