Online Net Meeting

OpenX, a software company that makes an open-source ad serving product for online publishers, has launched a platform called OpenX Market to directly connect buyers and sellers.

The model is more or less a standard ad auction format: publishers set a minimum, potential advertisers bid, and the highest bid wins. Plenty of platform-oriented start-ups are turning to the exchange or auction format to simplify and speed up the online ad buying process, but OpenX is worth a second look because of its roots in open-source software.

The OpenX software itself is free, but the platform is a way for the company to make a buck or two off it. Up till this point, the company has made money primarily off of service and consulting fees.

“Historically, the online advertising market has been fractured, opaque, hard to participate in and therefore inefficient.” OpenX CEO Tim Cadogan said in a release. “In particular, mid-sized and smaller publishers lack the ability to reach a broad set of advertisers. Conversely, advertisers see lots of value in niche sites and audiences, but find it very hard to discover and buy those sites and audiences…The OpenX Market is all about making these connections simple, seamless and scalable.”

The company has also issued an update to its ad server software–used by over 150,000 sites that pull in 300 billion monthly ad impressions–so that it integrates with the new OpenX Market.

SOURCE

Open-source ad company OpenX launches platform

By SALVATORE PARISE , PATRICIA J. GUINAN and BRUCE D. WEINBERG

Consumers are flocking to blogs, social-networking sites and virtual worlds. And they are leaving a lot of marketers behind.

For marketers, Web 2.0 offers a remarkable new opportunity to engage consumers.

If only they knew how to do it.

That’s where this article aims to help. We interviewed more than 30 executives and managers in both large and small organizations that are at the forefront of experimenting with Web 2.0 tools. From those conversations and further research, we identified a set of emerging principles for marketing.

But first, a more basic question: What is Web 2.0, anyway? Essentially, it encompasses the set of tools that allow people to build social and business connections, share information and collaborate on projects online. That includes blogs, wikis, social-networking sites and other online communities, and virtual worlds.

Millions of people have become familiar with these tools through sites like Facebook, Wikipedia and Second Life, or by writing their own blogs. And a growing number of marketers are using Web 2.0 tools to collaborate with consumers on product development, service enhancement and promotion. But most companies still don’t appear to be well versed in this area.

So here’s a look at the principles we arrived at — and how marketers can use them to get the best results.

Don’t just talk at consumers — work with them throughout the marketing process.

Recovering From Negative Reviews

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A Web site can be a marketer’s lifeline with its customers, but what happens when it’s marred with negative reviews and comments? Bruce Weinberg, marketing professor at Bentley University, tells WSJ’s Erin White how to address and recover from poor feedback.

Web 2.0 tools can be used to do what traditional advertising does: persuade consumers to buy a company’s products or services. An executive can write a blog, for instance, that regularly talks up the company’s goods. But that kind of approach misses the point of 2.0. Instead, companies should use these tools to get the consumers involved, inviting them to participate in marketing-related activities from product development to feedback to customer service.

How can you do that? A leading greeting-card and gift company that we spoke with is one of many that have set up an online community — a site where it can talk to consumers and the consumers can talk to each other. The company solicits opinions on various aspects of greeting-card design and on ideas for gifts and their pricing. It also asks the consumers to talk about their lifestyles and even upload photos of themselves, so that it can better understand its market.

A marketing manager at the company says that, as a way to obtain consumer feedback and ideas for product development, the online community is much faster and cheaper than the traditional focus groups and surveys used in the past. The conversations consumers have with each other, he adds, result in “some of the most interesting insights,” including gift ideas for specific occasions, such as a college graduation, and the prices consumers are willing to pay for different gifts.

Similarly, a large technology company uses several Web 2.0 tools to improve collaboration with both its business partners and consumers. Among other things, company employees have created wikis — Web sites that allow users to add, delete and edit content — to list answers to frequently asked questions about each product, and consumers have added significant contributions. For instance, within days of the release of a new piece of software by the company, consumers spotted a problem with it and posted a way for users to deal with it. They later proposed a way to fix the problem, which the company adopted. Having those solutions available so quickly showed customers that the company was on top of problems with its products.

Peter & Maria Hoey

Give consumers a reason to participate.

Consumers have to have some incentive to share their thoughts, opinions and experiences on a company Web site.

One lure is to make sure consumers can use the online community to network among themselves on topics of their own choosing. That way the site isn’t all about the company, it’s also about them. For instance, a toy company that created a community of hundreds of mothers to solicit their opinions and ideas on toys also enables them to write their own blogs on the site, a feature that many use to discuss family issues.

Other companies provide more-direct incentives: cash rewards or products, some of which are available only to members of the online community. Still others offer consumers peer recognition by awarding points each time they post comments, answer questions or contribute to a wiki entry. Such recognition not only encourages participation, but also has the benefit of allowing both the company and the other members of the community to identify experts on various topics.

Many companies told us that a moderator plays a critical role in keeping conversations going, highlighting information that’s important to a discussion and maintaining order. That’s important because consumers are likely to drift away if conversations peter out or if they feel that their voices are lost in a chaotic flood of comments. The moderator can also see to it that consumer input is seen and responded to by the right people within the company.

And, of course, it’s important to make a site as easy to use as possible. For instance, there should be clear, simple instructions for consumers to set up a blog or contribute to a wiki.

Listen to — and join — the conversation outside your site.

Consumers tend to trust one another’s opinions more than a company’s marketing pitch. And there is no shortage of opinions online.

The managers we interviewed accept that this type of content is here to stay and are aware of its potential impact — positive or negative — on consumers’ buying decisions. So they monitor relevant online conversations among consumers and, when appropriate, look for opportunities to inject themselves into a conversation or initiate a potential collaboration.

For example, a marketing manager of a leading consumer-electronics company monitors blogs immediately after a new-product launch in order to understand “how customers are actually reacting to the product.” Other managers keep an eye on sites like Digg.com and Del.icio.us that track the most popular topics on the Web, to see if there’s any buzz around their new products, and whether they should be adjusting, say, features or prices.

In one case, a company found a popular blogger who had spoken highly of the company’s brand. Just prior to launching a new product, the company sent the blogger a free sample, inviting him to review it with no strings attached. The end result: The blogger wrote a favorable review and generated a flood of comments. So the company got nearly free publicity and feedback.

Peter & Maria Hoey

Resist the temptation to sell, sell, sell.

Many marketers have been trained to bludgeon consumers with advertising — to sell, sell, sell anytime and anywhere consumers can be found. In an online community, it pays to resist that temptation.

When consumers are invited to participate in online communities, they expect marketers to listen and to consider their ideas. They don’t want to feel like they’re simply a captive audience for advertising, and if they do they’re likely to abandon the community.

The head of consumer research for a leading consumer-electronics organization created an online community of nearly 50,000 consumers to discuss product-development and marketing issues. One of the key principles of the community, she says, was “not to do anything about marketing, because we weren’t about selling; we were about conversing.”

In short order, community members not only identified what it was they were looking for in the company’s products, but also suggested innovations to satisfy those needs. The company quickly developed prototypes based on those suggestions, and got an enthusiastic response: Community members asked when they would be able to buy the products and if they would get the first opportunity to buy them. They didn’t have to be sold on anything.

Don’t control, let it go.

In an online community, every company needs to find an effective balance between trying to steer the conversation about its products and allowing the conversation to flow freely. In general, though, the managers we interviewed believe that companies are better off giving consumers the opportunity to say whatever is on their minds, positive or negative. Moderators can keep things running smoothly and coherently, but they shouldn’t always keep the conversation on a predetermined track. The more that consumers talk freely, the more a company can learn about how it can improve its products and its marketing.

One marketing executive recalled the first time she let an online community created for a client interact with very little control or moderation, resulting in an animated discussion about the look of the company’s product. The client, with great concern, asked. “Who told them [the consumers] they could do this, that they could go this far?” Of course, when this process resulted in totally new packaging that helped boost sales, the client was ecstatic.

As another executive of a company that creates online communities for clients told us: “You have to let the members drive. When community members feel controlled, told how to respond and how to act, the community shuts down.”

Find a ‘marketing technopologist.’

So who should direct a company’s forays into Web 2.0 marketing? A number of managers identified an ideal set of skills for an executive that go beyond those of a typical M.B.A. holder or tech expert. We coined the term marketing technopologist for a person who brings together strengths in marketing, technology and social interaction. A manager said, “I’d want to see someone with the usual M.B.A. consultant’s background, strong interest in psychology and sociology, and good social-networking skills throughout the organization.”

Foot soldiers need to be carefully selected as well. One large technology company weighs employees’ proven skills to choose writers for blogs that are read by consumers. The company has long used blogs internally to help employees discuss technical issues, products, and company and industry topics. When it decided to use blogs to raise its profile online, it recruited those who had shown the most skill at blogging within the company. The company currently has about 15 employees who blog publicly, mostly on technology trends, and is recruiting more the same way. Meanwhile, the bloggers plan to meet occasionally to share the lessons learned from their experiences.

Embrace experimentation.

One Web 2.0 strategy does not fit all, and sometimes the best way to find out what’s best for a given company is to try some things out and see what happens.

Blogs, wikis and online communities are among the tools that companies are most commonly using for marketing, but there are other ways to reach consumers. Some of the companies we talked with have gotten their feet wet in the online virtual world Second Life, where millions of users interact with each other through avatars. Companies can sell their goods and services and sponsor events in Second Life just as they do in the real world; one sponsored a contest for the best avatar.

Others are considering new ways to use more-familiar tools. For instance, many companies have long used instant messaging on their Web sites to allow shoppers to chat with customer-service representatives. One executive we spoke with said he would like to experiment with allowing consumers to chat with each other as they shop on his company’s site.

—Dr. Parise is an assistant professor of technology, operations and information management at Babson College in Wellesley, Mass. Dr. Guinan is an associate professor of technology, operations and information management at Babson College. Dr. Weinberg is chairman of the marketing department and an associate professor of marketing and e-commerce at Bentley University in Waltham, Mass. They can be reached at reports@wsj.com.

From the WSJ Online

More:
The Secrets of Marketing in a Web 2.0 World

On Monday, Microsoft launched Oxite, an open-source blogging platform.

However, the software maker was quick to underline that the product is aimed at developers and not intended to directly compete with popular blogging software such as WordPress or Movable Type.

Microsoft posted the Oxite code on its CodePlex Web site on Friday and made an official announcement on Monday. The software, described as an alpha release, is available under the Microsoft Public License, one of Microsoft’s OSI-certified open-source licenses.

Oxite is a standards-compliant, extensible content-management system designed to support either blogs or larger Web sites, Microsoft said. The platform includes support for features such as pingbacks, trackbacks, anonymous or authenticated commenting, gravatars (globally recognized avatars), and RSS feeds at any page level, the company said.

Users can create and edit a set of pages on a site, add customized HTML into pages, and support multiple blogs on a single site.

Oxite is also able to integrate with Microsoft developer software such as ASP.Net MVC, Visual Studio Team Suite, and Background Services Architecture. The project began as a way of demonstrating the capabilities of ASP.Net MVC to developers, Microsoft said.

The Web site for Mix Online was built using Oxite, and Microsoft is providing the Mix Online Web site code for developers to learn from. Mix Online is the online community centered on Microsoft’s Mix Web developer conference.

Oxite is not a direct competitor to existing, established blogging systems, nor is it intended to challenge Microsoft’s own SharePoint, which includes content-management-system capabilities, according to Oxite project coordinator Erik Porter.

The software is intended for developers but could eventually be made suitable for the general public, Porter wrote in an Oxite discussion forum.

“We have no plans to make this anything but a really good developer sample that should be able to run any site you want,” he wrote. “That said, this is a community project now and, if the community decides to take it a different direction, we won’t stop it.”

Matthew Broersma of ZDNet.co.uk reported from London.

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Microsoft launches open-source blogging platform

November 13, 2008 Dell has just introduced an integrated disk-to-disk (D2D) based backup and recovery solution called the Dell PowerVault DL2000 that helps customers simplify data protection processes while slashing backup times by up to 52 percent and restore times by up to 77 percent compared to tape. An integrated hardware and software platform that can be set up in less than 30 minutes, the DL2000 automates and simplifies the setup and management of disk-to-disk backup allowing customers to optimize resources through a tiered storage strategy. The solution comes with a choice of CommVault or Symantec Backup Exec software pre-installed and verified. The turnkey solution is designed to provide automated storage setup and centralized management to ease all aspects of backup, recovery and de-duplication. Advanced add-on features, such as archive and replication capabilities, can be integrated seamlessly to scale and increase functionality as business demands dictate.

Program Agenda

All times are in Eastern Standard Time. 11:00am – Doors Open 11:05am – 11:50am – Dell/CommVault Presentation

11:50am – 12:00pm – Live Q&A Chat 12:00pm – 12:45pm – Dell/Symantec Presentation

12:45pm – 12:55pm – Live Q&A Chat 1:00pm – Doors Close THEN my eye caught this :

PC Requirements:

To interact with the online show requires a Windows PC with Internet Explorer 6.0 minimum or Firefox 1.5 or higher. Mac with Firefox 1.5 or higher is also supported. Access to the internet using high speed access (Cable, DSL, Network) is highly recommended for the overall show and is required for all Education Sessions and Presentations. Pop-up blockers must also be disabled. On entering the show, a system check is run which will identify PC requirements that need to be addressed to interact with the online show. more here Ed Note : I have long been an advocate of saving, time, space, cost and increasing convenience via straight to PC / Desktop information ( data, content ) and advertisement delivery, its heartening to see DELL go for it in such a big way ( the chances of a mess up on a product demo are always cause for sleepless nights to say the very least ) , I hope that the Virtual Trade Show is a hit and companies start to buy into the idea that you can have a BETTER and MORE PRODUCTIVE TradeShow this way You can Sign Up for the Virtual Trade Show here.

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Dell Simplifies Disk-Based Backup and Recovery with an Integrated Data Protection Solution

SAN FRANCISCO — In her two years at Google, Anna Patterson helped design and build some of the pillars of the company’s search engine, including its large index of Web pages and some of the formulas it uses for ranking search results.

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The makers of the Cuil search engine say it should provide better results and show them in a more attractive manner.

Now, along with her husband, Tom Costello, and a few other Google alumni, she is trying to upstage her former employer.

On Monday, their company, Cuil, is unveiling a search engine that they promise will be more comprehensive than Google’s and that they hope will give its users more relevant results.

“I think it will be better,” Mr. Costello said in an interview. “But there is no question that the public has to decide.”

Cuil, pronounced “cool,” is only the latest in a long string of start-up companies that have been founded and financed with the goal of competing with Google, as well as Yahoo and Microsoft. (In June, Google accounted for 61.5 percent of search queries in the United States, while Yahoo held 20.9 percent and Microsoft had 9.2 percent, according to comScore.) Some of the most prominent include Powerset, which Microsoft recently bought, and Wikia, which was founded by Jimmy Wales, one of the creators of Wikipedia. So far, none have managed to make a dent in the search market.

But some analysts say Cuil has potential, in part because of the pedigree of its founders.

“This is the most promising thing I’ve seen in a while,” said Danny Sullivan, who has followed the online search business for more than a decade and is the editor of Search Engine Land. “Whether they are going to threaten Microsoft, much less Google, that’s another story.”

Mr. Costello, a former researcher at Stanford, said that with 120 billion Web pages, Cuil’s search index is larger than any other. The company uses a form of data mining to group Web pages by content, which makes the search engine more efficient, he said. Instead of showing results as short snippets of text and images with links, it displays longer entries and uses more pictures. It also provides tools to help users further refine their queries.

Google would not comment on Cuil and would not disclose the size of its own index. But in an e-mail statement, Google said that it maintained “the largest collection of documents searchable on the Web” and welcomed competition.

Mr. Sullivan said he was unimpressed by Cuil’s claim that its index includes more Web pages, noting that that could mean users are “overwhelmed by a whole bunch of junk.” But he said that Cuil’s new approach to ranking pages and presenting results could prove to be a hit with some users.

“If it turns out that they have good relevancy, I could see that the word of mouth” would bring Cuil some popularity, he said.

Ms. Patterson left Google in 2006 to found Cuil. The new company has other prominent ex-Google employees, including Russell Power, who worked with Ms. Patterson on the large Google index, and Louis Monier, a former chief technology officer at AltaVista, a pioneering search engine. Cuil, which has about 30 employees and is in Menlo Park, Calif., has raised $33 million from venture investors.

Continued here:
Former Employees of Google Prepare Rival Search Engine

There are two technologies that are making a revolution in intra-organizational communications: They are telephone conferencing and web conferencing. Using either web or telephone conferencing, companies and non-profit organizations are now able to hold many more meetings than ever before. The newest web conferencing systems incorporate both online and telephone conferencing and this will surely speed up the growth of virtual conferencing.

Most online conferencing systems allow participants to see one another using web cams and monitors, and to speak and hear one another via Voice over Internet Protocol (VOiP) using a headset or a microphone and speakers.

But what happens if one of the would-be participants does not have the right kind of headset or microphone? And what happens if one of the would-be participants does not have a high speed Internet connection or is away from his/her computer? In previous conferencing set-ups, the person who didn’t have the right equipment might miss the audio or even the whole conference entirely.

This particular problem has now been overcome by integrating telephone conferencing along with video conferencing. For example, if participants do not have the right kind of headset or microphone, in addition to everyone being able to watch the conference online, a teleconference can be used that will allow all participants to hear and talk to each other via standard telephone connections. With some systems, the call-in number and security code for the conference call are even posted within the video/web conference meeting room.

Similarly, when a company holds a combined telephone and web conference, an employee or staff member can take part in the audio portion using the telephone conference connection even if they are away from their computer or away from a broadband Internet connection.

The combined service will make it easier for companies that are already accustomed to telephone conference calling but have not yet made the jump to online web conferencing.

Online web conferencing adds many more features to a normal telephone conference call such as Powerpoint presentations, instant polling and surveys, application sharing and real time notepads for online brainstorming, but some organizations may be holding back from going to web conferencing due to the possibility of leaving behind some of their participants. The new combined teleconferencing and web conferencing systems solve this particular problem and will probably help to accelerate the already rapid growth of web conferencing around the world.

Please visit http://www.MegaMeeting.com or call (818) 783-4311.

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How to Use Integrated Audio Conference Calling to Enhance Your Video & Web Conference Meetings