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Yahoo is releasing an upgrade to its Yahoo Widgets platform that accommodates Adobe's Flash multimedia display technology.Widgets are lightweight applications that provide desktop access to various types of content, such as news feeds or reminders. Featured in the upgrade is a new version of the Yahoo Widget Engine, which is a runtime environment that allows the widgets to run on a desktop, and an updated Yahoo Widget Gallery, offering more than 4,000 widgets, Yahoo said.Yahoo Widget Engine 4.5, accessible on Yahoo's widget download page, adds capabilities for developers to write widgets based on Flash; also, HTML support has been extended, said Scott Derringer, director of product management at Yahoo. Specifically, Flex and ActionScript are supported for writing Flash-based applications."What we're seeing is authors are wanting to write movies and video, and that's a new capability that can now add to desktop widgets," Derringer said. A widget can be built that runs assets that already existed in Flash."Video can now be run inside of a widget," said Derringer. Full HTML support, meanwhile, provides capabilities like flow layout and more standard control.While widgets are primarily consumer-focused, there could be business uses, such as running training videos, he said. SAP, for its part, has built enterprise widgets and a plug-in architecture, called SAP Widget Foundation, which could access information like sales data, said Jonathan Strauss, Yahoo senior product manager. SAP's technology extends the Yahoo Widget engine."Using the SAP plug-in, you can query your SAP system to put those sales numbers into your desktop widget," Strauss said. An SAP representative said SAP's platform can use the Yahoo engine but does not rely on it exclusively; other engines, such as Google's, also can be used.Version 4.5 of the Yahoo engine offers an enhanced security model to give users a better understanding of what a widget does. Also new is a reworked document object model so it is compliant with World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards. "The benefit there is really familiarity form the developer's point of view," said Strauss.The new Yahoo Widget Gallery has been revamped to make it easier for consumers to find widgets they want. Top-rated and heavily downloaded widgets are highlighted. A new categorization is featured based on tags.Other improvements in the gallery include more search functionality and a new ratings and reviews system for users."We find people are quite passionate," about the widgets, said Strauss.Yahoo monetizes the widgets through advertising. Yahoo acquired the widget technology when it bought Pixoria and its Konfabulator technology two years ago. |
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When one speaks of the search engine optimization strategies First we must understand and learn how Internet marketing, advertising and... |
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AOL launched a new mobile Web portal for the U.K. on Wednesday, part of an effort to reinvent itself from an Internet service provider into an advertising and content company.AOL hopes to persuade the 6.7 million people who visit its U.K. portal from a PC each month to also view it on their mobile phone, where AOL will serve "unobtrusive" advertisements, said Ariel Eckstein, an AOL vice president, during a launch event in London.The portal offers the same content as AOL's main Web site, including sports, weather, and e-mail, but optimized for the smaller screen on mobile devices.AOL tried to make the portal uncluttered to make it attractive to visitors, said Tim Hussain, head of mobile for AOL U.K. It features lots of white space and a three-tab navigation bar. Web pages returned from a search are transcoded using AOL technology to fit into a mobile browser.But AOL officials acknowleged that the mobile Web faces big barriers. So far, not many people use their phones to access the Internet regularly, and browsing capabilities vary greatly from device to device.The new U.K. portal can be viewed on phones with the most basic browsing capabilities, according to Hussain, including even version 1 of WAP (Wireless Application Protocol).AOL is competing against Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft to stake out a piece of the mobile advertising business, where revenue from the U.K. alone is expected to increase from around £64 million this year to £100 million next year, according to Eckstein.Online advertising has become key to AOL's growth since it sold off its ISP businesses in Europe, although it still depends on selling Internet access for some of its revenue in the U.S. AOL calls its ad sales division "Platform A."The company is trying to be careful about how it displays ads. For example, it found that it's better to put banner ads at the end of a news story rather than at the beginning, since users immediately scroll down past them, Hussain said.The company will introduce other features to the mobile portal over the next year, such as video and premium content. People in the U.K. can't yet use MyAOL, which is currently available in the U.S. and allows people to customize their portal, but it will come to the U.K. eventually.To coordinate its mobile advertising, AOL is starting with technology from Adtech, a German company it bought in May. It plans to integrate technology from another company it acquired, Third Screen Media, into its platform by early next year,AOL is using Google's search engine. It isn't displaying sponsored links yet, although that will likely change next year, said Chris Locke, head of mobile for AOL Europe. |
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he classifieds advertising search engine has improved its search functionality and added tools and information to improve the user experience. |
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Online businesses need to create customer leads like any other company. However, using the Internet as the main source for creating leads poses a wide variety of competition for your advertising campaign. The road to An Internet-based advertising campaigns success rate relies on saturating the market with your presence. Identifying your company with the top class in search engine rankings nearly guarantees you good traffic results to your website. Obtaining a spot among the top of search engine ranks requires posting blogs, submitting your website to directories, creating unique, content rich articles and buying in to some of those pay-per-click advertisements. However, most successful online businesses use back linking to shoot to the top of search engine ranks. |
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A blogger is making dormant rumors that Microsoft is looking to buy Yahoo active again after a Microsoft executive outlined plans this week for the company to improve its online search market share from about 10 percent to 30 percent.Former Wall Street analyst Henry Blodget, who writes for the popular liberal blog The Huffington Post, posited Friday that there is no way Microsoft could achieve this goal on its own, so an acquisition may be in the works. His comments come after Microsoft President of Platforms and Services Kevin Johnson outlined the company's online search goal at a UBS investor conference in Seattle on Thursday.In his blog posting, Blodget said Microsoft is no closer to succeeding online than it was when it began 12 years ago, and noted that the company's online division is still losing about $1 billion a year.Seeing as Microsoft still trails both Google and Yahoo for search market share and advertising revenue, and assuming that "Johnson is not a moron," Blodget wrote that the only way company executives think they can achieve the goal is by making a very specific purchase. According to site analytics firm Compete, Microsoft's online search market share was 9.2 percent in September compared to Yahoo's 19 percent and Google's 67 percent."How could Microsoft actually achieve the goals Kevin Johnson laid out?" he asked in his blog. "There's only one answer: Buy Yahoo. Buying Yahoo would give Microsoft 30 percent search share instantly."Yahoo shares closed up nearly 6 percent Friday on renewed speculation about a possible buyout by Microsoft. Company stock opened the day trading at $25.67 and closed at $26.82.Both Microsoft and Yahoo have said they will not comment on rumors or speculation about a deal, gossip that ran rampant in the industry earlier this year. At the height of the rumors, Microsoft purchased digital services agency aQuantive for about $6 billion in May, the largest acquisition the company has ever made.Still, though the aQuantive deal closed in Microsoft's fiscal first quarter, which ended Sept. 30, the revenue for Microsoft's Online Services Division (OSD) grew only 25 percent year over year, and analysts criticized the company for that performance. Even Microsoft CFO Chris Liddell at the time acknowledged that this kind of growth in OSD, despite all of Microsoft's investment to grow its online strategy, was "acceptable, but not stellar."Microsoft began to ramp up its investment in growing online advertising revenue and building out more online services in earnest in November 2005, and since then even overhauled and rebranded its Web search engine, Live Search. The company also has rolled out an entire portfolio of new and revamped online services under the brand Windows Live to compete in this area.If Microsoft does indeed purchase Yahoo, Blodget wrote that it would be a far better deal for the software giant than it would be for the struggling online services company. He said that the deal "would be disastrous for Yahoo, which is having enough trouble competing with Google on its own.""Imagine what would happen if it got swallowed by the Redmond whale," Blodget wrote. "In six months, all the remaining strong people would be gone." |
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Online businesses need to create customer leads like any other company. However, using the Internet as the main source for creating leads poses a wide variety of competition for your advertising campa... |
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Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is often lauded as being one of the more affordable and cost effective forms of online advertising. While this can be true, it is important to remember that an SEO campaign should be an ongoing process to ensure the best results. It is also true that the more competitive the keywords you target, the more costly a campaign will prove and the less cost effective it will be. There are methods to help ensure that an SEO campaign proves both eff... |
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Using search engine optimization to build Web site traffic is one of the most hotly discussed, contested, and popular subjects in online advertising. |
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Using search engine optimization to build Web site traffic is one of the most hotly discussed, contested, and popular subjects in online advertising. |
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