Does Android Infringe on Microsoft’s Patents?

admin    Web Marketing     Android, Infringe, Microsoft’S, Patents

Late yesterday, Microsoft publicly stated that Google’s mobile operating system, Android, infringes on Microsoft copyrights in everything from the UI to the OS itself. But they’re okay with that—as long as they get paid.

CNET reports on Microsoft’s accusations.:

In a statement to CNET, Microsoft deputy general counsel Horacio Gutierrez said that, although Microsoft prefers to resolve intellectual property licensing issues without resorting to lawsuits, it has a responsibility to make sure that “competitors do not free ride on our innovations.”

His comments came as Microsoft and HTC announced they have inked a new patent deal that specifically provides the Taiwanese cell phone maker with the right to use Microsoft’s patented technologies in phones running Google’s Android operating system. Microsoft said it has been in talks with other phone makers.

Microsoft will receive royalties from the deal for all phones HTC manufactures with the Android OS, including the Nexus One.

Some speculate the deal may actually help HTC in its defense against Apple’s patent infringement suit against the manufacturer. Google can’t be of my help since it doesn’t have as many patents to protect its products (yet?), so it would seem the best deal HTC could get is for Microsoft to not sue and the patent protection of the giant software company, plus getting in on Microsoft’s cross-licensing deal with Apple. No lawsuit? That’s something well worth paying for.

What do you think? Does Microsoft, Apple or HTC come out on top here?

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View full post on Andy Beal’s Marketing Pilgrim

Poll Results: How Aligned Are Your Sales & Marketing Organizations?

admin    Twitter Marketing     Aligned, marketing, Organizations, Poll, Results, Sales.

In January this year, Mark Gibson from Advanced Marketing Concepts and I ran a joint webinar entitled “How Marketing Agencies Can Help Clients Align their Sales & Marketing Messaging, Processes and Goals“. More than 200 attendees answered a series of questions about critical sales and marketing alignment issues. If you work as an inhouse marketer, are a small businesss owner or work at an agency, and you’re trying to improve your sales and marketing performance, these poll results should help you.

Question 1. How Important is your/your clients’ message?

Clearly their client’s “messaging” is extremely important.

Question 2. How well do your/your clients’ websites convey their unique value?

Clarity in messaging is deemed as very important to extremely important by the vast majority of respondents. However, 77% of respondents consider that their website messaging is less than effective. There is plenty of work to be done on creating clarity in messaging unique value.

Question 3. What is your/your clients primary source of lead generation?

The answers to this question indicate that marketing agencies and their clients are generating the majority of new business (62%) from referrals from satisfied clients and from industry contacts. This result is not surprising in the traditional high touch, relationship-based marketing and PR business.

What was surprising to us is that inbound marketing and social networking account for such a small volume of leads. Assuming that these agencies are the companies that are most likely the ones who should be introducing inbound marketing to their clients, it seems we all still have a lot of work to do to help small and mid-sized businesses achieve inbound marketing success.

Free Download: Marketing Data: 50+ Marketing Charts and Graphs

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View full post on HubSpot’s Inbound Internet Marketing Blog

Online Web Marketings Number One Success Method

admin    Website Marketing Companies     Marketings, Method, Number, Online, Success

A familiar challenge with persons who have tried and failed at internet marketing is that they keep on jumping ship, from one product to another, from 1 plan to another. One month it’s PPC the next it’s article marketing. One week it’s list building the following it is social media. You’ve committed to take the 30 Day Challenge – again – and then another “guru” launches another “must have” strategy.

The whole thing changes so quickly in the work of web marketing it’s tricky to keep up and even more difficult to remain focussed for a long enough time to finish the projects you start. It’s hard to develop the right success mindset in other words.

Nevertheless, if you do not develop the habit of finishing what you begin you’re going to be forever frustrated and that IM lifestyle you so desire will forever remain hard to pin down.Chances are, if you’ve been around the internet marketing block a few times, you have already developed the belief that you aren’t proficient at finishing tasks. And right there is a great place to launch.

The easiest way to transform the beliefs you have regarding yourself is to transform the truth about you. And that’s not as tricky as it might seem. You merely need to notice more and pay better attention to what supports you.

To alter your belief about being a bad finisher you need to begin noticing where you in fact you  do complete projects and start to put together a track record of the tasks you do finish off. Buy yourself a note pad and put the date and “Things I’ve Completed” at the top of the sheet. Then, as you go about your day make a note of all the projects you have completed, both for work and outside that. Fill your list with little things to start with, as many as possible, so you are setting yourself up to succeed. For instance, five items on your list could be:

- completed key phrase research for “web marketing strategy” phrase- added a blog post to my web site- wrote an article to submit to ezine article directory- cleaned out 1 drawer in bed room- read 1 chapter of my book

At the end of each day read your list to yourself and record where you’ve succeeded. You will find that the more you become aware of the things you finish, the more confident you will grow to be that you truthfully are a finisher. Then, 1 day, you will observe that the little steps have become a large finished project and your opinion of yourself as someone who begins things but rarely finishes them has been replaced.

Read more of my articles to discover additional internet marketing motivation techniques.

Google Search Offers Way to Easily Find Similar Pages in Results

admin    Web Marketing     Easily, Find, google, Offers, Pages, Results, Search, similar

Google continues to change the face of the SERP’s (search engine results page) by taking more real estate on the first page with information that expands on the traditional “blue text link” results. Yesterday, they took a feature that has been around for a while but, as they put it in the Official Google Blog, “hasn’t been too visible” until now. Simply put, Google is telling its users what pages are similar in specific direct searches and taking out the need for another click to find them.

From the Google blog:

We’ve offered a “Similar” feature on results for a while now as a way to discover new, useful sites, but it hasn’t been too visible. Since we’ve been continuously improving this feature and we think it’s really useful, we’re now going to start showing these alternative sites more prominently. Starting this week, for queries where similar sites are likely to be helpful, we’ll display a list of “Pages similar” at the bottom of the results page. For example, this is the list of sites similar to Direct Relief International:

I first became aware of this from Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Land who posted before the official Google announcement and shared a result he produced below

This kind of a result is much more interesting in many respects because looking for the right charity doesn’t feel like you are doing something competitive. Looking for information on search engine and Internet marketing, however, is truly competitive and most folks won’t be too thrilled about Google “advertising” for the competition when someone is searching for your site directly.

So how this new feature is rolled out by Google should be interesting to follow. Imagine one day if Google would ask each business “Who are you similar to?” and starts to find another way to generate revenue. I would hope this would never happen because then that means that the SERP’s were truly “for sale” rather than on merit. Some would say that’s the case today already but I’ll let you fight that out amongst yourselves.

Your thoughts?

View full post on Andy Beal’s Marketing Pilgrim

Twitter Marketing Secrets – Are You Missing Out on These 3 Hot Trends in Twitter Marketing?

Kenneth Yu    Twitter Marketing    

Twitter now is the hottest social media space in the world. Heck, even Oprah, Ashton, Diddy and a whole range of the Hollywood elite are now on the microblogging platform. What’s more remarkable are the developments happening in the Twitter for Business space. Here are 3 exciting trends that will explode your social media ROI once you implement it into your Twitter marketing efforts.

TREND #1 – CHANNEL CELEBRITYDOM  

You may not be one of those mega-stars, but did you know you can be one of the niche superstars in your Twitter marketing channel? Stephen Pierce, Joel Comm and a whole range of other gurus are saying you can own your field by positioning yourself as an expert, and Twitter solidifies your grip because you can build credibility like crazy.

By using Twitter, you can position yourself as a maven because now you can build yourself a following really rapidly that are eager to hear what you have to say. It’s really the fastest way to amass a loyal tribe.

This trend will not continue for long, because tons of people have come on Twitter to stake their ground. So get first mover advantage while you still can. 

TREND #2 – PARETO MARKETING

This is something the celebrities themselves have been picking up. You see, the Pareto Principle says 20% of the fans will give them 80% of the support (and movie/music sales). Similarly, 20% of your buyers actually give you 80% of the sales.

Twitter attracts that 20% for you because they voluntarily start following you on Twitter. They take the trouble to find you and add you, hence they are more interested in what you have to say and sell compared to the rest of your crowd. Just add some “Follow Me on Twitter” notices to your website and you can filter your red hot buyers from there.

This trend is here to stay. You just need to keep aggressively promoting your Twitter account so your users will flock to where you want them to go.

TREND #3 – PSYCHIC MARKET RESEARCH

This is a trend that even the mighty Google is watching closely. Real-time search is the future. You see, when Google is excellent at what people are searching for at the moment, Twitter is amazing for what people are thinking about at this point.

As a result, you can closely match your marketing angles to the needs of your target market because you know what their dreams, hopes, and fears are without expensive traditional research methods like focus groups and surveys. All you need to do is go to http://search.twitter.com to find out what people are talking about at this point and use it in your marketing.

However, you do need to be selective in what you find out. Spammers are trying game the system, so using 3rd party systems like http://tweetmeme.com could be ideal.

THE WORD ON THE STREET SAYS…

Twitter has opened the door to the revolution of doing business online. By utilizing these trends, the small business owner will find that the playing field is level through twitter marketing So get trendy and start making money now.

And now I would like to invite you to claim your instant free access to my Twitter marketing and psychology videos by going to http://www.DarkSideOfTwitter.com

Plus, you also again access to limited-edition social media tutorials and videos.

~ From “The Puppet Master” Kenneth Yu

Author: Kenneth Yu
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
car rear view camera, back up camera

Why You Should Focus Your Search Engine Optimization Efforts On Google

Gary Ruplinger    Google Optimization    

When optimizing your website for the search engines, you really have three choices on which one to optimize for – Google, Yahoo, or MSN. Each search engine has certain criteria that is emphasized more and the factors that help you rank well differ from search engine to search engine.

For example, do a search for the term “sports” and you’ll find that ESPN holds the top spot in Google, while Yahoo! Sports holds the top spot in Yahoo and Fox Sports holds the top spot in MSN.

Of course, then again, if you do a search for “hotels”, you’ll find that hotels.com has the top spot in all three search engines.

So what’s a person to do when optimizing their websites?

My advice is to focus your attention on optimizing your website to rank well in Google. Yahoo and MSN combined don’t send as much traffic as Google will if you hold the top spot. Since Google gets nearly half (about 49%) of ALL search engine traffic, it’s makes sense that you’d want to focus your efforts on Google.

Also, since Google has the reputation for providing the most relevant results, Yahoo and MSN tend to always be playing catch up. So what’s working well in Google will likely work for both Yahoo and MSN.

However, if you optimize for just Yahoo or MSN, you’re not likely to rank as well in Google.

One thing I also like about Google is how fast they’re currently updating their index. You can get a website up, get a few links, and be indexed in less than a week. Yahoo and MSN tend to be a lot slower in getting your website indexed. Also, the rankings change less often in Yahoo and MSN, which is great if you hold the top ranking, but not so great when you’re trying to climb up in the rankings. With Google’s frequently updating index, you get more feedback on how well your search engine optimization efforts are paying off.

Gary Ruplinger is a search engine optimization expert who shares his expertise at UltimateTrafficBlueprint.com. Get his free SEO videos and if your website needs more traffic, hire Gary for a link building campaign.

Author: Gary Ruplinger
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Gadget reviews

The Google toolbar and search engine optimization.

Shawn Hickman    Google Optimization    

The Google Toolbar has grown significantly in features since inception. It now features several new useful features but the main focus of this article is on those that aid in search engine optimization. So without further ado here’s the Google Toolbar unfolded.

PageRank

Upon installation of the full Google toolbar you will notice a small bar near the center of it that may or may not be partially filled with a green color as displayed in the diagram below.

This is the Google PageRank indicator. PageRank is one of Google’s ways of rating your website and plays a role in the position of your site in their search results. This value is calculated based on several variables including the PageRank value and the number of sites that link to that page. Sites with a higher page rank tend to have better rankings than other sites if all other things are kept equal. I have personally noticed a significant increase in the search engine placement of our Search Engine Optimization (http://www.lilengine.com) site whenever our Google page rank is increased.

The Google toolbar enable you to, at a glance, view the PageRank of your website as well as your competitors’ sites. This helps when looking for sites to engage in with link building as more links coming from sites with a higher PageRank than yours help to increase your site’s PageRank. It is also said that when looking for site to link to yours that you should aim for sites with a PR 4 or higher. LilEngine personally accepts links from any useful and related resources, links from sites with a PageRank of 4 and above are an added bonus. Contact us for an exchange at info@lilengine.com.

A side note

There are times when the Google Toolbar will display your website as having a PageRank of 0 or even no rank at all. If your site previously had a PR greater than 0 and you notice this, watch it for a while or close your browser and reopen it to check as there are times that this feature seems to be a bit buggy possibly due to updates etc at Google.

Cached Version

When Google spiders your site it records the latest version of your site that it has spidered and this can be viewed using the Google Toolbar by going to the Page Info button and selecting cached version. Your browser must be on the page you would like to see the cached version of at the time you choose to do this.

How can this help you with your SEO campaign?

If you have optimized your website in hopes of increasing your search engine results in Google, this will indicate whether or not Google has updated their database with the new version of your page. If the Googlebot visits your site regularly the cached version of your site will be updated more frequently than otherwise.

Backward Links

The Google Toolbar also has a pretty useful feature that displays all the web pages that link to your web page, which Google counts towards your PageRank. This information isn’t regularly updated and can’t be expected to take between 1 – 3 months before changes can be seen. Backlinks deal with quality and not quantity. A site with 1000 mediocre backlinks may not have as high a Page Rank as a site with 800 high PR backlinks.

Highlighting

You have the option of adding a highlight feature to your Google Toolbar that highlights all instances of your search term on the web page reached from your search. This can help you see how many times your competitors use specific keywords on their pages and you may modify your SEO campaign accordingly. You may also use this to check your own pages and see if you are or are not using enough of your target keywords on your page for optimum search engine placement. Besides those features listed above there are also some other cool tools on the Google Toolbar such as:

Popup Blocker: This only works in IE 5.5 or later but is a great addition as we all know that there are many sites on the web that bombard you with popups. Some of these even go as far as almost preventing you from going anywhere else as more and more windows keep popping up. Annoyance factor 10/10.

Google Web Search: You can easily search the web using the Google Search Engine via the Google Toolbar by typing in your search terms in the search box area and then clicking enter or clicking the ‘Search Web’ button on the toolbar.

Translate: Easily translate sites into English that you may be interested in for one reason or another.

Unfortunately there is no version of the Google Toolbar for browsers other than Internet Explorer 5.0 and greater but hopefully they will be adding this in the near future.

Find more articles at http://www.4cornersflorida.com

Author: Shawn Hickman
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Cool mobile gadgets

SEO For Google: You Need OFFPAGE Optimization

Gian Luigi Ruggeri    Google Optimization    

It is almost sure. Google is the hardest of all the search engines to get top rankings nowadays.

Another sure thing is that Google is the search engine that drives the highest number of visitors to the websites that are at the top of the SERP for important keywords.

Don’t you know what SERP means? It is one of those nice acronyms that are used by computer geeks that are lazy at typing (LOL) and stands for “Search Engine Results Page”, as SEO is the popular acronym of “Search Engine Optimisation”, and SEM stands for “Search Engine Marketing“.

So you want to get those top rankings in Google SERP right?
Sure you want. I want it, and I am ready to work for it.
And so should you be too.

Of course you need to know what to do to have your site top ranked by Google. You must know what this search engine likes and what it dislikes, in order to know what to add or remove from the web pages of your site.

Years ago it was simpler to be liked by search engines, more or less you had to understand how a web page had to be built, and how to optimize it for your keywords, placing the keywords in the title of the page, in the meta tags and in the body of the page, paying attention to the density of the keywords in the whole document.
Then you put some links with nice words to Yahoo and some of the other big sites and you were done. A link exchange page was an optional.

I made tens of top rankings in all the worldwide main search engines including Google of course working like this back in 1999, 2000, 2001 for many different keywords and keyphrases of different topics.
That was the time that the following things did not exist yet: page rank, AdWords and AdSense.
I was a great SEO guy even if my focus was on the domain names goldrush mainly.

This was the old way to make search engine optimization, when it wasn’t yet popular as SEO and the search engines had not yet moved most of the importance to the offpage factors.

This last sentence is an important one. And the end of it is extremely important. It was about 2000 or 2001 I think when the search engines tried to give an end to search engine spam introducing strict offpage factors. A site wouldn’t have been indexed IF it had not already links pointing to it from at least 3 or 4 websites that were already indexed.

That was the start of the OFFPAGE optimization revolution.
Offpage factors rule in the Google algorithm today, and you simply cannot achieve top rankings in Google for competitive keywords if you don’t work a lot on the offpage optimization of your site.

Offpage optimization means you have to work on building links pointing to your website.

Google now takes in consideration factors like these ones:

- how many web sites are linking to you
- which sites are doing so
- which is their page title
- which anchor text is used to link to your site
- the Google page rank of these sites
- and more.

And these factors are extremely relevant in determining the ranking of your website.

So to keep it as simple as possible you need to get many links to your site trying to have them from sites with a high page rank. The more you get the better will be.

You must pay a lot of attention on using the right anchor text, with the most important keywords for your site there.

You mainly have to find sites that are related to the topic of your own websites, and that are considered authority web sites by Google.

This is just an introduction to SEO offpage factors, but can already put you on the right path.

The search engine optimization for Google really requires a lot of efforts and is extremely time consuming.
You have to make a lot of researches to find the right sites that can provide good and useful links, you have to contact them and convince them to link to your site (usually offering a link back), you have to monitor that these sites continue to link to your site.

Yes, it definitely is harder than it can seem from these short description, and you already know it if you already tried to get links to your website.

Luckily I found a great software that can make a lot of work for me, and could do the same for you.
I call it my SEO Secret Weapon and can be yours too.

Please see my signature to find a link to the SEO section of my site with a link to it, it is the sofware named SEO Elite.

I strongly recommend you this software if you are serious about search engine optimization for your online business.
This software can automate or semi automate very important and time consuming tasks.
It can even find and email high page rank link partners for you with a touch of a button.

Think about it.
You can try to learn for free all the stuff you need to become enough experienced in SEO for Google and spend countless hours reading articles like this one and forum posts and working on building links back to your sites or you can follow my advice and have a professional SEO secret weapon that makes most of the hard work for you and brings better results in less time.
It is your choice.

Gian L. Ruggeri teamed up with Michael Crownley to run a site dedicated to Earn With Google. You will find useful info and resources related to AdSense, AdWords and SEO. http://EarnWithGoogle.com To find the SEO Secret Weapon presented in this article go to http://EarnWithGoogle.com/seo

Author: Gian Luigi Ruggeri
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
eCommerce solution, service provider

Inbox Insider: Hotels.com takes advantage of Cinco de Mayo

admin    Web Marketing     Advantage, Cinco, Hotels.com, Inbox, Insider, Mayo, Takes

May is just around the corner, and marketers are taking advantage by launching e-mail campaigns promoting the month’s holidays. For one, Hotels.com has launched a push for Cinco de Mayo, featuring sales at Mexican hotels.

View full post on Latest articles from DMNews News

Web Marketing Strategy #8: Pay Per Click Marketing For Your Home Internet Business Opportunity

admin    Website Marketing Companies     Business, Click, Home, Internet, marketing, Opportunity, Strategy

PPC may also be the most expensive marketing strategy if done incorrectly. Google can go through a $5,000 credit card in about an hour.  The strength of the campaign is totally depended on how you set it up.  Google is not concern with whether your campaign works as long as the information seeker clicks on your ads.  When you invest a possible $5,000 obviously you are looking for a great return.  What if this campaign does not net you any leads at all.  The effectiveness of your PPC campaign to produce targeted leads is dependent on a number of factors.

Pay Per Click (PPC) is the most popular lead generation method used by most internet marketer. The goal of PPC marketing is to capture your prospect contact information initially.  Once a prospect opts in to your marketing list then you may start to build a relationship through personal contact or auto responder. The Law of Value states your true worth is determined by how much more you give value, than take in payment.  The better your content value the better possibility that you will convert your opt in to paying customers for a very long time. The way you set up your PPC campaign is the single most determining factor in whether you are results are futile or not.

Google’s campaigns tend to be more expensive while campaigns on Yahoo and MSN tend to be more inexpensive.  The most critical initial step is determining your target market. Your target market will determine all of your web marketing strategies whether you are using PPC, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) or any other marketing tactics. Research the keywords that you will bid on for your campaign.

You must think carefully about your marketing budget and how much you are willing to pay for a click.  The minimum is always the easier to figure because everyone would love to pay the least amount as possible for a click.  Your maximum that you would be willing to pay is critical especially the more competitive the keyword.  The ultimate goal is to be on page one of Google, Yahoo or MSN.    Impressions are how many times your ad is seen which is determined by a number of factors such as bidding the right amount, writing a good ad that is relevant to your keywords and page.

The foundation of your marketing is built on your target market and knowing what they are looking for. The better you are at getting into the mind set of your target market the greater chance that your campaign will succeed.  PPC as a web marketing strategy will help you generate some targeted leads to your website.  It is an art to getting the right people to click your ad, one of the best resources to learn advance PPC is Perry Marshall’s Definitive Guide to Google Adwords.