RealXposure

Google Launches Instant Search

lroberts — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 20:34:47 +0000

Google unveiled Google Instant today and it has the community of Web professionals (particularly those involved in online advertising via Adwords) quite concerned. No doubt about it, Google Instant is a significant development in the user search experience. What we don’t yet know (at least not fully) is how it will change the online advertising landscape.

Google Instant is really a “search enhancement” which shows users results as they type. While it’s a little early to determine the greater impact an instant search experience will have on consumers, we do know a little (or at least can make some assumptions) about what could effectively happen in the future as it relates to Adwords advertisers.

Understanding Google Instant
The most visible feature of Google Instant is the “as you type” dynamic search results. The query prediction and “scroll to search” feature (which essentially just means scrolling through the suggested results) are really more “effects” of the new interface. So, anytime a user does anything (types, clicks, scroll to see results for a predicted/suggested keyword) the entire results page is going to change.

Google on the Instant Offensive
Google has really been in front of the Web community regarding how the search enhancement might impact them directly – primarily as it relates Google Adwords as Instant forces everyone in the online advertising community to entirely rethink the notion of impressions. According to Google, “With Google Instant, an impression is counted if a user takes an action to choose a query (for example, presses the Enter key or clicks the Search button), clicks a link on the results page, or stops typing for three or more seconds. It’s possible that this feature may increase or decrease your overall impression levels.”

The Effect on Adwords Advertisers?
If you’re an Adwords advertiser, expect to hear a lot about how Google Instant might change the game in the coming days and weeks. Since what advertisers are charged is based on Quality Score, and since the primary determinant of Quality Score is CTR (click through rate), it’s not much of a stretch to see how increased ad impressions would equal a lower CTR and ultimately a higher CPC. Right in time for the holidays no less!

Google Instant will become the core search experience on Google.com for Chrome, Firefox, Safari and IE 8. We’ll also be offering Google Instant to our users in France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Spain and the U.K. who are signed in and have Instant-capable browsers. Over the coming weeks and months, we’ll work to roll out Google Instant to all geographies and platforms.

Internet Taxes in Florida

lroberts — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 14:25:03 +0000

Are Internet sales subject to sales tax when the merchandise is delivered to a Florida customer?

Answer

Generally, yes. If sale is made by a dealer located in Florida and delivered to a purchaser in Florida, sales tax would apply. If sale is made by a dealer located outside Florida with no other contact with Florida, and goods are delivered in Florida, use tax applies and is due from the purchaser. Florida law provides that each sale is subject to sales tax unless such transaction is specifically exempt. Under Chapter 212, F.S., there are no provisions to provide an exemption on Internet sales of tangible personal property. Persons who make sales to a purchaser in this state are required to register to collect Florida sales tax if there is sufficient nexus with this state. Nexus is created when a dealer has agents in this state who solicit or transact business on behalf of the dealer and as a result receive orders for merchandise to be delivered to the purchaser in this state; or dealer has a physical location in this state; or dealer delivers merchandise into this state in vehicles which are leased or owned by the dealer; or dealer owns land or buildings located in this state; or dealer stores merchandise in this state for sale or use; or dealer rents or leases merchandise that is located in Florida in the possession of a lessee.

If the person selling the property into this State does not have sufficient nexus or is not registered with the Department as a dealer to collect sales tax, the purchaser is obligated to pay use tax.

Instead of collecting all the different taxes in the various counties, you may collect 7% taxes and remit the entire amount to the state and they will pay the local taxes. This simplifies your tax collection and reporting.

Contact the Florida Department of Revenue at : 800 352 3671 to confirm this.

Amazon PayPhrase Tries to Make Paying Online Easier

lroberts — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 03:25:01 +0000

Amazon PayPhrase Tries to Make Paying Online Easier By Brad Stone

Amazon.com is trying to take some pain out of the process of buying stuff online. I’m not sure that the new service it is introducing tonight, PayPhrase, accomplishes that, but it may be an important building block for the future of Amazon’s fledgling subsidiary, Amazon Payments.

The new service aims to replace the user names, passwords and the multiple clicks needed to purchase an item online today with a unique, simple-to-remember catch phrase – say, “Brad’s Home.” Beginning tonight, any Amazon user can visit amazon.com/payphrase and create up to 20 of these phrases, then associate them with a four-digit PIN, a shipping address and credit card.

Then, people primed to buy items on Amazon.com and on sites that use Amazon Checkout, such as DKNY and Buy.com, can enter in their PayPhrase for a relatively easy, three-click checkout.

“They do not have to share credit card with another third-party Web site, they do not to have to be signed in, and they get this consistent experience wherever they checkout,” said Matthew Williams, general manager of consumer payments at Amazon Payments.

The challenge for Amazon, as I see it, is that it requires a bit of effort to set up PayPhrases. And then it gives people’s already password-swamped brains a new set of stuff to remember. Only one Amazon user can grab a given PayPhrase, so when the obvious ones are gone, people may resort to some wacky combinations. (Amazon itself recommends some odd phrases, such as “relentless dentist.” Will people who use the word “password” as their password really remember that?) There’s also the PIN to remember, although people can use the same PIN for all their phrases.

But this may all be about setting up Amazon Payments for the future. Typing in a PayPhrase on Amazon.com doesn’t seem that much of a short cut. But how about saying it out loud, when a keyboard is not available? The coming wave of smartphones and Internet appliances will all have some kind of voice recognition built in. Although Amazon is not integrating PayPhrase into its mobile shopping tools right away, it certainly will at some point. With PayPhrase, Jeff Bezos and his crew may be looking into the future, and preparing to seize a cut of the mobile payments business.

Promotions

lroberts — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 20:24:42 +0000

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lroberts — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 05:19:19 +0000

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Sidebar ads

lroberts — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 01:10:30 +0000

Ronin Defense – Self Defense and Surveillance Devices Website

New Websites Designed by Real Xposure

lroberts — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 17:28:06 +0000

New Websites From Real Xposure

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Website for self defense and surveillance devices.

Dr. Jamie Alexander DDS – Dentistry

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lroberts — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 11:16:43 +0000

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New Website Design Promotion

lroberts — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 10:25:27 +0000

Real Xposure is offering new e-commerce website design and development at only $995. This promotion ends on August 21. Call now to find out how you can start selling products online for only $995. This website design promotion gives you custom designed website (no flash) your shopping cart and payment integration. We will add up to 50 products to your cart. Call now – 954-237-8084

Shed experience, hire young fools

lroberts — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 02:59:20 +0000

From The TimesJune 16, 2009 Shed experience, hire young fools Companies have stooped to delivering thank-you notes to young staff just for turning up on time Stefanie Marsh I’ve become morbidly fascinated by young people of late. Specifically, young people in offices. There seem to be so many of them about all of a sudden, elevated to quite startling positions of responsibility on the basis of a breezy manner and zero merit. They are cocking things up in the workplace, these young folk, having replaced all the middle-aged people who, until recently, used to do the same jobs with some degree of competence; employees who, unlike their teenage replacements, never sign off work e-mails with a smiley face or think that Madeleine Albright and the toddler who was abducted in Portugal were just, like, the same person and, who cares, nobody will notice the difference anyway The reason this proliferation of young people has become particularly noticeable to me is because I’ve been away, locked in my home office for ten months in the total hell and despair of writing a book. In that time I read no newspapers and the only television I watched was reruns of Columbo, in which a middle-aged policeman solves crimes in Los Angeles. Conceptually, Columbo would have failed had they cast Peter Falk when he was 12, as his credibility as a character rests on the fact that years of experience have led him to develop some unfailingly accurate crime-busting antennae. Anyway, when I eventually emerged, blinkingly, last month I was fully prepared to find the world a changed place. Disappointingly, however, only three things seem to have altered: a networking site called Twitter has been invented; we are in some sort of economic recession; and, as a result of the two aforementioned, all the good people who used to work, especially in the “creative industries”, have been replaced by children who cost less and who, in the old days, no sane employer would take on to do much more than clean the loos — this last because it was then generally still recognised that anyone under 25 was a liability in the workplace. Take me, for example. I look back on my early twenties as a time of unprecedented idiocy and serious, though inadvertent, professional misconduct. In my inexperienced hands, attempts to carry out even the simplest tasks were likely to end in some sort of Armageddon scenario, which is why, in my first job, at an averagely poncey contemporary arts magazine, the only thing they let me do was pick up lunch from the Italian deli across the street: I was given the choice between buying mortadella or salami and, on several occasions, I would fail at even this menial task by having it sliced too thick. Because it was taken for granted that, as a person with no experience of either life or work, I was utterly useless, all I was allowed to do the rest of the time was watch older people talk about Jay Jopling. They didn’t even let me answer the phone. At my next job, “working” for another magazine, I moved up a step: I was permitted to make written appeals to Westminster council about the parking tickets my boss had picked up over the weekend. After about a year of this, the boss in question conceded that it would be fun to allow me to write a piece about Far Eastern childrearing techniques, for which I spent three days in Edgware in what was then the Japan Centre when I could have done all my research on the phone in an hour. A few months later, some fool of an editor asked me to stand in for whoever was supposed to be interviewing the author of The Horse Whisperer but was off sick: I excitedly wrote the most incompetent and possibly most damaging piece of Nicholas Evans’s career. Not long after that I was dispatched to interview “Dennis Wise”. Halfway into my second question about his off-the-pitch anger issues, he interrupted me and said, rather sternly: “My name is Greg Wise. I am an actor and married to Emma Thompson. I have never played for Chelsea.” Thinking back, the only thing I did achieve in a professional sense was commissioning Hunter S. Thompson to write an article on polo, but I was too young to comprehend the nature of my achievement and let the man I then called my mentor take the credit. As a result, Giles Coren has a signed letter from Thompson hanging in his loo and I do not. This was the (self-) sabotaging nature of moronic youth in the workplace. It is only now, aged 35, that I’m starting to get the hang of things. And this is in line, I discover, with what a YouGov survey of more than 2,000 people suggested recently. It is only when you turn 37, once you have amassed about 30,000 hours of work, that you reach the point where you consider yourself to be “competent”. You then have to wait another 13 years to start feeling “fulfilled”. It follows that people who are really good at their jobs tend to be somewhere between their early forties and fifties. I’m looking forward to it. But it’s more than likely that I’ll be sacked and replaced by a pubescent child instead. When the numbskull child messes up, there’s a slim I chance that I’ll be rehired in a consultancy role to sort things out. Not that you can blame the young. The problem lies with employers who are in awe of anything technological that they don’t understand — such as Twitter — and mistake computer proficiency with intelligence, initiative and even wit. A new book, Not Everyone Gets a Trophy, concludes that employers should be in no doubt that, for those born after 1979, unlike previous generations, “their personal life comes first” and they have a “short-term and transactional” mindset. Managers, says the author, Bruce Tulgan, should effectively practise “in loco parentis management”, holding the young to high standards and “helping them every step of the way to reach those high standards”. This, of course, goes against all the received wisdom about the young at work. Some companies have actually stooped to delivering thank-you notes to Generation Y employees just for showing up on time. Others have turned offices into “fun” spaces , rearranging training so that it revolves around interactive computer gaming; encouraging young workers to find a “best friend” at work and teaching managers to soft-pedal their authority in these hard economic times. All this, claims Tulgan, is wrong. “Generation Y is the most high-maintenance workforce in history.” They take their problems to the office, don’t observe the same respect for boundaries as their elders and, unless they are disciplined by their substitute parents (their employers), tend to float along happily from job to job, causing low-level mayhem. Couldn’t we just hang on to our fortysomethings?