Rev2.org

Great news for online business owners! GoodBusiness from GoodBarry which could probably be the best ever designed solution to assist Online business owners with Website management, Email marketing, Blogging, Shopping and Leads generation is here.

Well, precisely speaking GoodBusiness is a refreshing solution that enables your business to maximize profits and takes care of all your needs.

According to me, the power of GoodBarry goes way beyond the name and the intuitive look-and-feel of its website. The small but extremely proactive unit at GoodBarry is more than happy to answer all kinds of customer queries and is looking to make GoodBarry more value driven for their customers.

Best-of-all GoodBarry’s individual solutions come for free. So its free when you want to try. Access to all the services comes at a small fee but considering that fact you run a business it is effectively very small portion of your IT/Marketing budget.

So its like a win-win situation for you. Imagine receiving an instant SMS alert for a comment on your blog or even a query on your website. You’re connected all the time you know what’s happening with your business. Along with that, I highly recommend its web-analytics feature(see screengrab below) which shows you online queries, sales, page visits and more. That’s the power of GoodBusiness for you.

I had an e-mail discussion with Brett Welch, Co-Founder GoodBarry. Excerpts from the email interview.

What does GoodBarry mean?
Well Barry is the nickname our CEO Bardia Housman uses. Sometimes he’d “go undercover” and answer support emails to stay close to our customers and get a feeling for what things we could improve and what we were doing well. Since he had the power to fix pretty much anything (being the CEO) our customers really loved Barry. Hence… GoodBarry was born!

What really differentiates GoodBusiness, GoodBarry’s flagship product?
Definitely our customer-centric view of the website. Unlike most tools out there, we’ve built our system from scratch to be an integrated, customer focused system. Every single feature is hooked into a central customer database which means we can build customer profiles and track behaviour across the entire site - from email campaigns to contact forms to online shopping! That built-in customer management is a big drawcard for small business owners.

What sort of sites best suit Goodbarry?
Any small business website really! You don’t need to be selling things online. Our web forms that automatically capture leads and then notify you are great for lawyers and accountants. Our secure zones are fantastic for providing high value content to VIP customers. Our Email Marketing functionality is a powerful tool for any business!

Generally we think about 90% of small business websites will be very well served by GoodBusiness, because we’ve got everything they need in one place, with an approach that makes sense to a business owner.

How much do I have to pay for GoodBusiness? Is there a Free Version?
GoodBusiness is $39 per month, which is comparative to business grade webhosting - but don’t forget you’re getting 10,000 email newsletters and online shopping capabilities with that price! We’ve pre-integrated a bunch of payment gateways and solutions like Authorize.net and paypal, too - they don’t cost any extra.

Right now if you sign up for an invite you get to use GoodBusiness for 3 months, free. Also, because we believe so strongly in our all-in-one solution, we’re providing a set of “mini-products” for free! So GoodSite is a free, hosted solution for business websites that includes blogs and so forth, GoodMarketing is a free email marketing solution, GoodShop is a free ecommerce solution and GoodLeads is a free lead management/web form solution.

You’ll be able to upgrade from any of the lead in products to GoodBusiness at any time - while keeping all the work you’ve already built! This is quite exciting I think - you can start basic and as you need more functionality hit a button and you’re ready to go

How many people are on the team at GoodBarry?
We’ve got 10 people here at GoodBarry at the moment.

Future plans?
We’ve got some really exciting things in the works. Because of our customer-centric approach, we’ve got a lot more we can do in terms of providing amazing analytics and data mining.

Microsoft is planning to set its sights on about 20 small - mid-sized acquistions per year in the range of $50 million to $1 billion each. The idea behind this strategy to lessen focus on larger deals. Co-incidentally, it has been in news for its rumoured acquisition plans with social networking giants like Facebook.

At a question and answer session in Web 2.0 summit, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said that the current focus is on “indirect path”. Mr. Ballmer’s comments also hinted that Microsoft could combine forces with others to counter Search engine revelation Google.

Microsoft’s overall acquisition strategy has been a mix of small and big acquisitions. Except the $US 6 billion acquisition of aQuantive this year, Microsoft has been constantly buying out relatively cheaper organizations.

During the last fiscal year which ended in June 2007 Microsoft had purchased about 23 companies. Out of that about more than half of buy-outs were valued cumulatively at $1.34 billion including Tellme Networks buyout at $800 million.

AT&T Inc has filed a lawsuit against Broadband telephone service provider Vonage Holdings. “Infringement of patent” has been cited as the key subject for the lawsuit by AT&T which is apparently the third telecom company to have taken this action Vonage.

According to AT&T spokesman they had been looking to settle issues with Vonage for quite sometime since the last couple of years. However, AT&T failed to negotiate with Vonage over reasonable licensing agreement.

On the other hand Vonage mentioned that they were on the lookout for negotiations as according to them litigation is not a solution for dispute settlement.

The incident happened on Wednesday when AT&T had approached Wisconsin federal court with claims of enabling users access an Internet phone system through a normal telephone.

The lawsuit filing is definitely come across as a big shock for Vonage and its stock had gone down by 13 cents to $1.54 the following afternoon. The biggest problem for Vonage is that it has lost two major patent lawsuits before this lawsuit. Last time Verizon was involved and Vonage was ordered to pay $66 million and a 5.5% royalty fee. The initial appeals which barred Vonage from using Verizon patents have been upheld. However, one of them has been sent back for a detailed review.

The other lawsuit in question is with Sprint Nextel, where Vonage paid about $80 million for agreements involving use of past and future patents regarding connection of phone calls over Internet.

The series of recent events have badly tarnished Vonage’s image and has effected its customer base. Perhaps that’s why Vonage spokesman mentioned that improvement in quality of customer service and maximization of shareholder value is the key for them.

Google has released its earnings report for the third quarter of 2007. According to report, Google’s revenues of $4.23 billion have shown an increase of 57% when compared to the third quarter of 2006 and 9% increase when compared to the second quarter of 2007.

However, earnings per share (EPS) remained at $3.38, which is a marginal increase at 12 cents per share above estimates. Soon after the report was released Google’s shares dwindled to close at a price of $639.62.

Google has total cash amounting to $13.1 billion. Overall, the websites owned by Google generated $2.73 billion i.e. 65 percent of total revenues which again is a 68 percent increase over third quarter last year. Google’s network revenues, generated via AdSense generated about $1.45 billion i.e. 34 percent of total revenues with a 40 percent increase over last year’s third quarter.

Google’s CEO expressed happiness with Google’s impressive growth. In a statement Eric said,”Our core search advertising business experienced continued momentum driven by growth in monetization and traffic, and we are creating a wider and deeper ads system through our focus on innovation, bringing more ad formats to our advertisers.

[Via]

The big daddy of VOIP, Skype, is all set to give sleepless nights to Apple and the futuristic Google phone with the launch of its mobile handset. Bruce Meyerson from BusinessWeek reports that Skype will be offering its handset in alliance with 3 Mobile towards the end of October.

The mobile handset will be launched simultaneously in Britain, Hong Kong, Italy, Australia and would be followed soon in remaining mobile territories. Surprisingly, United States of America does not figure in the initial list of countries.

There are speculations about this being a bold move by “3 Mobile” as the wireless industry is experiencing tough days. The development of the mobile handset is being done by iSkoot. iSkoot’s concept is quite similar to Fring as it enables mobile users to access Skype on the go.

The intuitive handset is powered with a one-touch button which makes it easy for users to activate Skype’s service for long-distance and international calls. Moreover, cellphone users will not be required to shell out extra bucks for Skype usage. However, they are supposed to spend a minimum amount per month for regular services such as ringtones, calls and text messaging.

I think there are strong chances that Skype phone would a carve a special position for itself in the mobile industry primarily, because its strength lies in providing cheap calls. So it might turn out to be a winner despite missing out on intuitive feature set.

Skype is currently available on instruments like Philips cordless phone (it has been used by President of USA) and Net Gear’s special Wi-Fi phone which enables users to make unlimited domestic and international calls to other Skype users without the requirement of a computer.

It would be interesting to see the difference, Skype brings with its Mobile Phone and the impact it would have on other popular companies.

Skype has been a revelation in the Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) industry with its popular free and cheap internet telephony calls. Very recently, Skype has been in news for the resignation of its CEO. You never know the launch of Mobile phone might be an effort from Skype to recapture its users once again.

The world’s largest book publisher Random House is thinking about a joint book-search project with its old time arch rival Google. According to Reuters, the two giants are in talks with each other about Google’s book-scanning project.

Apparently, Google has agreements with over 10,000 small and large publishers who have submitted their books to Google for scanning. Once scanned, these books are made available for partial reading online according to publisher agreements. Google also works with about 27 academic and reference library partners for access to out-of-print works.

German media group, Bertelsmann’s unit Random House has been reluctant to join publisher partner program so far. Publisher partner program is known over for boosting book sales especially of older titles.

Both the parties showed different reactions on being contacted. A Random House spokesman said: “Random House continues to have periodic constructive conversations with Google on issues of mutual relevance.” On the other hand Google declined to comment.

Offlate, Google has been put into legal dispute with American publishers over part of library project. It is because Google scans copyrighted works from U.S. library partners without publisher’s permission.

In the year 2005, Random House had participated in a lawsuit against Google with expectations to stop the scanning of copyrighted material without publisher’s explicit content. It has been over 2 years since then but till today Random House, a member of the American Association of Publishers, continues to support that copyright case filed against Google.

We put together a terrific list of the Top 25 Web Apps for iPhone way back in July, a day after iPhone’s launch. Apple has now stretched that further with the launch of its online directory of more than 200 Web Apps for iPhone.

The directory containing over 200 third-party applications has been divided into eleven major categories. These categories include Calculate, Entertainment, Games, News, Productivity, Search Tools, Social Networking, Sports, Travel, Utilities, and Weather. Users also have the flexibility to organize applications by recently viewed, popularity, alphabetical order, and staff’s picks.

Amongst the featured web applications is a Facebook application that connects iPhone with popular social networking allowing users to view friend’s pages, send messages and share photos.Then there are various games listed under staff picks. Some of these applications are Sudoku,Fandango and mobile dictionaries.

MovieTickets.com is a cool application for buying motive tickets. For checking weather conditions anywhere in the world there is an application called WeatherBug.Coin Flip as the name suggest flips a coin. All the services in the directory can be accessed by a URL for each web application.

I think this is going to be a single place for most iPhone users searching for additional utilities. So what are you waiting for? To access the web apps directory point your Safari browser to www.apple.com/webapps.

The JV (joint venture) between Yahoo and Australia’s 7 network, Yahoo7 seems to have run into a bit of problem with personal moves, decline in traffic and bad advertising results.

Some of the major change in roles includes Mr. Markus Barnikel (head of strategy now) and Willie Pang who will now take over the business in Australia and Newzealand. In addition, Craig Wax has announced that he will head back to US after having a good stint in Yahoo Search Marketing.

News report by Australian IT says that there has been decrease in Yahoo7’s traffic from 5.5 million in January to 4.7 million in August. Similarly the advertising results have remained static inspite of the huge growth observed in sector.

It is believed the company’s estimated 10 per cent share of the online advertising market is not achieving expected growth. For the last year NineMSN has 26 per cent and Fairfax Digital has 17 per cent based on estimates.

Down-under has been dominated by Google which accounts for 80-85% share of the local market for the last couple of years. Apart from Google, Australia seems to be a good hunting ground for Microsoft. As stated above, Microsoft’s local arm NineMSN holds a 26% share in adbuying market place, way ahead of FairFax Digital.

Intel has launched a new site called Cool Software, which is an online community that consists of people who are passionate about software. The website members can post information about cool and new software company, more importantly the software company receives votes from the entire community on how cool it is. The more votes a company receives, the better are its chances of reaching the top of home page. This makes it easy for a site visitor to find out interesting software. According to reports by VentureBeat, the development cost of website was around $40,000 and its testing was done internally by Intel employees who provided views on top software companies.

The screenshot above shows popular software on Cool Software. The software can be sorted by daily, weekly, monthly of yearly listings. The software submission can be tagged with a name which makes it easy to find popular software. For submitting software, users need to register at the Intel Developer Network. The site also lists popular users under the category ‘ Coolest Users’. Cool Software does remind me of another popular website Wakoopa which tracks software being used by its members. Although there is a slight difference in the way Wakoopa works, the concept seems to have been borrowed from Wakoopa. Infact it is a good combination of Digg and Wakoopa.

At the outset, Cool Software has a long way to go as it is still very early days. Cool Software needs something very unique & special in-order to differentiate it from one of those many bookmarking services.

Google Desktop is one of the best utilities for searching files stored in desktop. Since its inception Google Desktop has evolved from desktop search engine to a personal agent for displaying information from desktop and information from web like news, weather etc.

iGoogle is a customized start page like PageFlakes, NetVibes etc. and allows users to add news from their favorite websites and applications that collect information from internet. Google desktop allows running capabilities for iGoogle gadgets, however vice-versa was not true so far. The reason behind that was incompability between a web-application and software without the use of a plugin.

The new version of Google Desktop that is Google Desktop 5.5 (Windows-only, beta) enables users to add desktop gadgets to iGoogle page. Users can select gadgets from a directory, install a plug-in that establishes connection between desktop and browser and put gadgets for interaction with computer on iGoogle page.

A typical example is that of a music player which enables users to search music on computer and play it. There is another interesting system stats gadget which shows interesting statistics about RAM,CPU, battery usage.

I installed the new version of Google Desktop to see how this works out. Although, I was able to use gadgets from Google desktop on iGoogle, there was a display issue due to browser incompatibility.

Here is a screenshot showing iGoogle page with four desktop gadgets from googlesystemblog.