Verecom Web Design Blog

Speaking of social networking website, many people will immediately think of Facebook or MySpace. But in fact In addition to these friend making, entertainment social networking website, there are more professional or commercial orientation websites, which Among them, LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com) is the outstanding one.

Founded in May 2003, LinkedIn is growing rapidly since past few years, and becomes a favourite website for white-collar and business people to connect and make industry friends with similar business background. TechCrunch reported that according to science and technology media, LinkedIn’s rapidly growing number of members and recently has more than 60 million members registered.

As the Business Social is more important for many professional people, including hiring, cooperation and other business acts require a social networking platform for the coordination of inter-personal, hence make LinkedIn becomes popular. In December last year, the number of members is 55 million, but there are 5 million new members registered during January this year, which shows a strong potential in this site!

LinkedIn actively expand its global market, recently it set up two offices in India and Netherlands, and that it will soon expand the business to the world’s major countries.

Edited By Henry Lu

Google announced the launch of the new search features: Near Me Now, for Android browser and iPhone users to use Google Mobile Search and enjoy this feature.

However, the phone users must first be able to use Google Mobile Search page link below to access the location data set. After that, Google Mobile Search page will appear the search button “Near me now” link. When user clicks the link, the page will return a list of a variety of topics of local places, including restaurants, cafes and bars, or the bank or ATM and so on. Click the menu “Explore right here” will show users bunch of the nearby shops. And this option is only available when users provide accurate location of mobile phones.

Google Operations Engineer John Eric Hoffman, and Jussi Myllymaki explained in their blog posting, “Near me now” feature is designed to help users find information on where they lived, making certain common search, such as cafes and ATMs easier.

At that time Google has also announced other technologies, including Google Goggles and the iPhone and Android supported Japanese voice search. With the growth of mobile computing devices and the popularity of portable devices, Google will keep developing more mobile applications for users.

Edited By Henry Lu

Google plan to change the way of web search, and fight back its competitors.

Google will provide computer, iPhone and Android devices the real-time search results page. It also added a new search technology called Google Goggles, which allows users to upload a picture to search, rather than enter a keyword to query.

Google is expected mobile devices will become a transit point for network activity next year, announced by Google engineering vice president, Vic Gundotra, and chief engineer. Amit Singhal. Singhal describes real-time search is “the most exciting thing in my career.”

Marissa Mayer, vice president of Google search products said that this technology is the future of search engine. This new search engine will help users to find the best answer instead bunch of links. Mayer said, the four directions of Google search technology in future: model, media, language and personalization. New search functions such as voice or image search will be the top priority for the search engine advertisement.

Gundotra also shows the Google Mobile Search can accurately identify many language queries, such as English, Chinese and Japanese. Google translator also supports 51 languages, Gundotra said during first quarter of 2010, our real-time translation function will be available for the mobile device. “Our goal is to support all major languages around the world,” he said.

Google is also planning the geographic search for text and voice information services. Google Maps service is available in the Android 1.6 or above It includes “What’s Nearby” which lists closest place for users who look for services. This service will also be available for iPhone and other Android devices.

Google Goggles represents the starting point for Google to enter the computer field. This service is currently only in the Google Labs, and can only identify a few kinds of objects.

Google is able to do facial recognition, but for privacy issues, it decided to defer to promote the service.

Google Instant Search is made from numbers of social network partners. Google recently signed a search cooperation contract with Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku, and Identi.ca, in order to provide public information in real-time search.

Instant Search is currently unavailable, but is expected to be on-line very soon.

Edited By Henry Lu

For many small to median businesses, it is quite expensive to establish an online conference system. However, we collected 3 web online conference services which have very good service price (You can also advance free trial) to help your business grow.

GoToMeeting

This is veteran online meeting service; users can easily interact with global user for real-time sharing of presentations, demonstration videos, online training, or edit documents together. Through GoToMeeting, the user can use the telephone, e-mail or instant message inviting others to attend the meeting.

Free trial period is 30 days, with unlimited web meeting appointments, during the trial period, limited 15 people per meeting. It costs 49 U.S. dollars per month, or 468 U.S. dollars a year.

WebEx

WebEx have being bought by Cisco, but it doesn’t become a Cisco proprietary services. WebEx offer unlimited web meeting appointments, desktop sharing among users, simultaneous recording, playback video, or VoIP calls. Each session can accommodate 25 users. WebEx and even allows a user to temporarily relinquish control to another user.

WebEx offers 14-day free trial period, the monthly fee is 69 U.S. dollars, and 708 U.S. dollars annual fee will receive a complimentary 1 month to use.

Microsoft Office Live Meeting

Developed by the software giant, Microsoft Office Live Meeting is desktop application based software which requires users to maintain it by themselves. It provides an online presentation, notes, sharing, collaboration and other basic functions.

It offers 30 days free service, and only supports Windows platforms after trial period the monthly fee per user is 4.58 U.S.

Edited By Henry Lu

For the booming market of mobile internet, not only hardware industries, but also many online service providers actively try to grab this market. Yahoo, with monthly 500 million unique visitors not only want be a world biggest global internet portal, but also try to be the integrator of online services and make internet users rely on it completely

During April this year, yahoo announced its new personalised mobile homepage with combination of oneSearch, oneConnect and onePlace which these three online services are used as the search engine, social network and LBS (Location Based Service) for the individual.

According with their own personal preferences and needs, users can add various internet services (including services not belong to Yahoo) into their own homepage, and this service is able to support more than 300 kinds of devices.

Support hundreds of different devices

Marc Davis, Yahoo Chief live action Scientist explains its core strategy of mobile communication:

“We will not focus on hardware or operating system development, but to create a platform, a layer to provide services for thousands business and industries.”

For Yahoo, the “size” is obviously the focus of considerations, and through the strategy of use universal platform to achieve the purpose of provide services for global users. Davis said that Yahoo’s software will be covered by the mobile browser and application software (client) to support for hundreds of different devices.

Yahoo said: through the centralized management strategy by the new executive director Carol Barts, we greatly reduce the time for new product development. And for Asian market, Barts is full of confidence:

“The next five years, there will be masses of users come from Asia this emerging market.”

Now this area is either on the turning point of pc based internet to mobile based internet, or have the low rate of computer penetration. In comparison to Europe and the United States, Many Asia industries still not ready to transfer their advertising budget from traditional media to the internet, which also represents the great potential of the Internet advertising market to be developed in future.

Edited By Henry Lu

Apple has launched the latest version of Safari 4 beta, the industry claimed that the implementation speed of JavaScript commands is 4.2 times faster than Safari 3, and its JavaScript and HTML page loading performance is far better than Microsoft’s IE 7 and Mozilla FireFox 3.

Apple said, Safari 4 contains the world’s most advanced browser technology, including new Nitro JavaScript engine, the implementation of JavaScript is 30 times faster than IE 7, 3 times faster than Firefox 3; Safari displays HTML pages 3 times faster than both IE 7 and Firefox 3.

Apple Safari 4 also joined with all the software that has Cover Flow interface, which allows users to recall browsing history like reading the album cover. According to Net Applications statistics, Safari currently has about 8% market share, still falls behind Microsoft IE and Firefox.

The new beta version of Safari is available for download in Apple’s web site. Mac users need Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.6 and the latest Apple security updates, or Intel Mac pair up with Mac OS X Tiger 10.4.11, or Mac with G3 and above. For Microsoft users, there has to be Microsoft Windows XP SP 2 or Vista.

Edited By Dan Li

MSN robot, a messenger written by computer programming, not only send messages to a real person, but also even capable to talk with the users. MSN Robot is also a popular advertising method this year. The general manager of MSN online group in Asia pointed out that McDonald’s MSN robots in Hong Kong already have 600,000 users to set it as friends, which is the world’s second-largest robot.

When an enterprise has 600,000 loyal clients who recognize its brand name, there are lots of marketing opportunities. For example, a questionnaire coupon, limited time promotions and many more, and today’s Internet technology is capable to limit users with certain age range to receive particular message.

In addition, MSN Robot can also be a good media for exchange of uses’ opinions, the customers’ data and use behaviors can be recorded in the background as valuable information for future development and amendment of e-business.

The prospects of Internet advertising are brightening, and it is an inevitable trend in 2010. Experts said “Internet advertising is one of integrated marketing, although it still can’t replace other types of ads, but it will gradually become the main advertisement trend.”

Edited By Henry Lu

Reach Media advertising applications bring lots of fun to the window ads, and its features are suitable for style marketing, because they can customize a wide variety of advertising space. Even bring the big ads show to the entire webpage without bothering the web browsers.

As Taiwan has eight million users of WLM instant messaging (Windows Live Messenger, commonly known as MSN instant messaging, and during 2003 SARS outbreak, occupy the lower right corner of the desktop of many users. by 2009 world economic crisis, it is expected to have more users to see the ads. Therefore, published ads in instant messaging, also has a huge exposure opportunities.

The difference from other web ads is that instant messaging provide real-time platform to users, it developed the functions such as playing games, watching movie trailers and find maps to allow users to communicate with each other, and these all are the idea place to place ads.

Edited By Henry Lu

Compared to traditional advertising, what are the characteristics of Internet advertising?

The most important thing is “interactive”, which is benefited by todays internet technology. The broadband internet and advanced platforms bring the people closer to the online advertisement. At present, the more popular types of Internet advertising including: keyword advertising, instant messaging advertising and pop up window advertising. The development of these 3 types of advertising has been for many years, in 2009, these advertising have developed their own new method respectively.

“Keyword advertising” is suitable for small and medium business due to its low barriers and less limitation. According to statistics from IAMA, in 2008 the keyword advertising grows 30.64% and reached 80 millions dollars. It also is the fastest growing advertising method and reached 35% of the total amount of Internet marketing.

Keyword advertising is flourishing for a few years, and there are new changes. Over the past, delivery method of keyword advertising is for business owners to purchase a set of keywords, and when users use one of keywords to do search, his website or related links will appear on the search results page.

But this year, MSN online market development manager pointed out that “a picture can express things better than 1000 words!” In the search results page, in addition to the text but also add photos and pics to show and demonstrate the creativity of ads content. And business owners pay for advertising costs according to the clicks amount.

Since 2007, MSN launched these advertisement ideas; its clients increased the advertising budget by more than 100% for this advertises method. We can see the results are satisfactory. In deeper level, the database can record users’ past search behaviours, and delivers advertisement more precisely.

Edited By Henry Lu