Om Malik theorized in a recent blog post that Google’s new Checkout system is designed to help Google move away from cost per click advertising to cost per conversion advertising, where advertisers are only charged if someone actually buys something. By managing the checkout process, Google has access to the data they need to charge advertisers for this ad format. Malik explains some of the advantages here:
Personally, I doubt Google is planning on ditching their PPC program anytime soon. It seems more likely that they want to diversify their revenue a bit by providing additional advertising formats to their client base. Additionally, CPC advertising doesn’t even work for a large segment of Google’s advertisers who aren’t trying to convert traffic directly into online sales or leads. Conversion based advertising is by no means new, but hasn’t been offered by Google to date.
Online Advertising Formats
Here are four common online advertising formats:
1. Impressions: Pay for the number of times your ad is displayed. Paying a fee per thousand impressions is a common way impression ads are sold.
2. Clicks: Pay for each click on your ad/visitor to your site through the ad. Google and Yahoo dominate this form of online advertising.
3. Conversions: Advertiser/merchant pays publisher a commission or flat fee for every lead or sale generated through ads placed by the publisher. This is the domain of Commission Junction and Linkshare who act as intermediaries between merchants and publishers willing to market merchant’s offers in exchange for a commission on sales or leads.
4. Transactions: Advertiser/merchant pays for completed online sales. Homegain.com charges real estate agents a percentage of their commission on closed transactions.
Google currently offers #1 and #2 through their ad platform. #2 accounts for the vast majority of their revenue. The merchant plan could help them move toward #3 and potentially #4. #3 and #4 both require a shared customer relationship between the merchant (online retailer, real estate agent, etc.) and the intermediary (cj.com, potentially Google).
Does this change the playing field for advertisers? No. Does it really matter whether you’re buying advertising on an impression, click, conversion or transaction basis if you’re measuring the performance of your ad spend?
Which advertising options are most appropriate for your business? Whichever gives you the best return. If you’re risk-averse or prefer fixed advertising costs, conversion or transaction based advertising are likely appropriate models for you. But if you have a great website that converts traffic at a high rate, impressions and pay per click advertising may allow you to generate leads or sales for less than the revenue shares expected conversion and transaction based advertising.
Google calendars are great, but unless I can sync them with my Treo 700p (or 650), they lose a lot of their luster. After messing around for a bit I was finally able to get all of my shared Google calendars to my Treo 700p via hotsyncing through my Mac using Missing Sync and iCal. Any changes I make on the Treo will upload to Google and any changes in Google will download to my Treo. Want to know how? Here are the deets:
Items needed for sync:
1 - A Macintosh running Mac OS X. Version 10.4 would be best.
2 - Missing Sync version 5.1
3 - Apple’s iCal application
4 - A Palm Treo 650 or 700p
5 - A Google Calendar
6 - An active .Mac Account
Based on the above list, you can already tell that this will not be free and is a bit messy. If you happen to have a Mac with .Mac and the Missing Sync, then you’re all set. If you are missing a component, everything but the Mac is very reasonably priced (dropping $600.00 just to sync a calendar seems like a lot to me).
Here’s how to sync everything:
1 - Create a Google Calendar at http://www.google.com/calendar
2 - Share your new calendar. You can do this by going to settings - calendars - select the calendar you want to share - then click on share this calendar. Once you’re in the sharing menu, you will be able to see the private address of the calendar. Copy the URL on the iCal icon.
4 - Make sure you have at least 1 writable calendar in your Apple iCal program. The Google calendars are read only. A writable calendar is needed to sync from the Treo back to Apple iCal which will then ship it to Google Calendars. To create a writable calendar, click on the + symbol in the lower left of the interface. This will create an item named ‘Unnamed Calendar.’ Rename the calendar to whatever you like. I chose ‘Treo 700p’.
5 - Once you have a writable calendar, you will want to set it up to sync to .mac. This step is not required but it will allow you to create events on the Treo and get them back to Google calendar. To do this, select your writable calendar in Apple’s iCal, then select Calendar - Publish. A drop down prompt will appear asking for your publishing settings. The settings I used are below:
6 - Now you need to get the Treo 700p calendar from .Mac into Google calendars. Just after you hit publish on your Treo 700p calendar, a prompt will show up asking if you want to visit the site. Click on ‘Visit Page’ to go to the .Mac calendar URL. On the lower left side of the web site you’ll see an option to Suscribe to the calendar. Right-click (control-click) on the download icon and copy the URL of that object.
7 - Go back to your Google Calendar and go to settings - calendars, then click on ‘Add Calendar’. At the top you need to select ‘Public Calendar Address’ and paste the iCal URL from .Mac into the box. Click on OK. This will add your Apple iCal writable calendar into Google. Now any changes that are made on your Treo will be synced to the writable calendar in your Apple iCal application, auto-uploaded to .mac, then Google Calendar will read from .Mac and display it in your Google calendar list. It may take a few minutes for your changes to show up in Google calendar. I think Google only scans the .ics file on the .Mac servers every 30 minutes, so don’t freak out if you don’t see something right away.
8 - Now all that is left is syncing your Treo. Make sure you have Missing Sync installed and also make sure that Missing Sync is set to sync your calendars. Once you sync all of your Google calendars will be taken to your Treo, and your Treo items will be taken to Google calendar.
Like I said, this is not the sexiest solution such as just having a simple app sitting on the Treo that will sync OTA to Google calendar, or a Missing Sync conduit that will auto-sync your Google info, but it does work.
One of the best e-mail clients for any mobile device is about to get a lot better. On June 29, 2006 ChatterEmail will be releasing their new Exchange plugin. This plugin will allow ChatterEmail to access Exchange 2000 SP2 and above servers in real time without any middleware or complex IT changes to Exchange itself. Say goodbye to monthly fees on your Blackberry or GoodLink program, ChatterEmail is where it’s at!
I believe that ChatterEmail is the killer app for the Treo 600/650/700p. With ChatterEmail+ / EX I am able to connect to any Exchange 2000/SP2 or IMAP Idle server and get push e-mail directly to my phone. In my testing I have found that in many cases new e-mail will make it to my Treo before it makes it to my Outlook. That’s fast. Servers that don’t support IMAP Idle or IMAP at all for that matter will still work, however, Chatter will need to connect on a scheduled interval and pull the mail down just like any other e-mail client out there. The protocols supported are IMAP Idle, IMAP, POP3 and Exchange.
There are a couple of great features on the Blackberry, one is push e-mail and the others are calendar/contact sync along with remote device auditing. Chatter takes care of the e-mail aspect but at this time it does not sync calendar or contacts. If you need all of your e-mail, calender and contacts to be in sync over-the-air (OTA) with your mobile device, then you’re still looking at GoodLink or Blackberry. If you need real-time access to your e-mail and can live with calendar/contacts sync when the device is hotsynced to a computer, then Chatter is a great and far less costly alternative. It would be nice to see someone write a GCal plugin for Palm that would allow for OTA read/write access to all of my GCal calendars. I have yet to find a good online contacts manager that I really like, so I’m not sure what to do there, but I’m sure one will come along. Once these items are in place, the number of reasons for purchasing a Blackberry will get smaller and smaller. ChatterEmail getting Exchange support is just the first step in the demise of horrid middleware for smartphones.
If you’re not sure about Chatter or if you would just like to try it, they offer a free 30 day eval. Hit http://www.chatteremail.com for more info, or go to http://www.chatteremail.com/stable on your Palm based Treo to download directly to your phone. If you have a Windows Mobile or Blackberry device, see if you can find a friend who has a Treo to see this application in action. It’s just that good.
Research In Motion Ltd. (RIM) Co-CEO Jim Balsillie has denied rumors of a Palm/RIM merger tomorrow (06/29/2006). Today at the C3 conference in New York, Balsillie was quoted as saying, “Our view is there is diversity in handhelds,” and “We don’t have grand ambitions to consolidate the handheld business any more than we have ambitions to exit the handheld business.”
Since the Palm/RIM merger rumors started circulating the web earlier in the week, Palm’s market cap has grown over $100 million.
While this pretty much puts an end to that rumor, the handheld market is still fun and exciting. It will be interesting to see how RIM and Palm deal with the pressure from Windows Mobile 5 devices and any potentially new devices from companies such as Apple.
Did you forget to sign up for Writely before Google bought the program and turned off registrations?
Did the same thing happen to you with Google Analytics?
Fortunately, this time there is a way around the blockade. Simply find someone with a Writely account and ask them to invite you to collaborate on a document. Current Writely users can invite up to 50 non-Writely account holders into the network using this simple workaround.
It’s up to you to figure out how to talk your friends into sharing their invitations.
Writely is useful for:
1. Writing / editing documents from any computer with web access.
2. Blog posts since it generates HTML I can paste into our blogging application.
3. Collaborating on articles. Two people editing a document in real-time from two different locations is pretty amazing.
4. Proof reading content. Working off a single shared document rather than emailing documents is both faster and more efficient.
5. Version control. Mess something up? Just roll back to a previously saved version of the document.
I love Flickr’s photo service in many ways, including the easy ability to upload nearly unlimited photos, easy photo sharing, and the incredible community the site has created around pictures. However, I have a few gripes with the service as it currently exists and thought I’d share. None have been deal breakers for me, but some could be over time if they aren’t eventually addressed.
1. Limited Photo Permissions: Photos can be set to display to the public, your friends, family, or private. That’s great, but there is no way to share photos with only a select group of friends. Some incriminating photos deserve to be shared but only selectively, such as bachelor party photos, or whatever happened in college that you can’t remember without photos.
2. No photo editing. Right now, photo editing is limited to resizing photos at upload and rotating photos 90 degrees. Online photo editing has been possible for years, keeps getting better, but hasn’t made it into Flickr yet. Yahoo offers some photo editing in Yahoo Photos, so maybe that will get integrated into Flickr? For now, sites like PXN8 offer online photo editing and integrate with Flickr, so you can upload a photo first to PXN8.com, then push it to Flickr once you’re satisfied with the edits. By the way, I’d love to hear about other online photo editors like PXN8 in the comments.
3. Marginal Search. This one has already been getting better, but has a way to go before it’s great. Searches using more than one word are often disappointing since they miss content that’s tagged with a Flickr-style conjunction tag. For example, here is a search for the term [minnehaha falls] (a waterfall near my home in Minneapolis). It found a lot of results, but missed results that didn’t use a space between the two words, like this: [minnehahafalls]. I think this requires people to know more about Flickr’s search engine than they should have to in order to find relevant photos. Of course, the even bigger challenge is getting people to add tags, titles, or descriptions to their photos so Flickr has more copy to work with to help index the photos properly.
4. Small Slide Show Photos. Once I find a set of photos on a given topic or from a photographer I like, I really want to see them. Unfortunately, it’s very cumbersome to see LARGE versions of photos in a slide show format. I have a broadband connection and I’m willing to wait, so give me big beautiful photos of things I’ve proven I really want to see by clicking to view slide shows.
What did I miss? Do you have additional Flickr peeves? What enhancements are in the pipeline at Flickr?
I spent last week on vacation with my wife in and around Vancouver, BC, where I picked up on a branding value from a new perspective. Generally, my wife and I prefer shopping with local merchants, checking out local restaurants, and basically experiencing what’s unique about an area whether it’s Vancouver or our own town of Minneapolis. However, we spent a fair amount of time visiting two large chains on an almost daily basis during our vacation: Petro Canada and Starbucks.
Did we need fuel every day? No. Were we looking for a highly caffeinated vacation? No. So what brought us to those two stores over and over again? Clean bathrooms. We generally left our hotel early each day and didn’t return until we were ready to call it a day, but let’s face it: when you have to go you have to go. Of course, whenever we stopped into one of the establishments we picked up a few things, so they made back well more than their flush-worth by providing public restrooms (um, I mean washrooms in Canada-speak).
So the Petro Canada and Starbucks brands drew us in day after day not based on the cleanliness of their fuel or quality of their dark roast. We simply associated them with well-needed relief.
Astonishingly, most local businesses in certain neighborhoods like Gas Town took the opposite approach of the local Starbucks: They posted signs explicitly stating that they offered, “No public washrooms.” This particular neighborhood to the East of downtown Vancouver is only blocks from Vancouver’s skid row so having public washrooms may not be the easiest thing to offer. But Starbucks manages to do it so they reap the reward.
Okay, what does this have to do with technology? Good question. Here are a few ideas:
A strong brand creates a sense of security. With Petro Canada, this gives me confidence that the bathrooms won’t be a mess when we stop to pick up some Gatorade before a hike. We never visited the same Starbucks twice, but knew what to expect at every one we visited. Online, a strong brand tells people that you won’t spam them, sell their personal data, or abuse their credit card. It also gives people confidence that presents will show up in time for birthdays or holidays.
The core service isn’t always the main draw. I NEVER go to Starbucks in my home town because I’ve had time to compare it to other coffee shops in this market. However, we weren’t really shopping for coffee. I believe we happened to pull into a Petro Canada first, then stuck with the brand after that since there was no perceived upside benefit from switching brands in the future. Amazon.com is a good example of a company providing a lot of services beyond their core service of shipping products. Free online reviews, recommendations, rankings, etc., differentiate them from other retailers just as capable of shipping a book, but consumers are more likely to spend time researching books on Amazon, so Amazon has a better chance of closing the sale.
Check this out: I just remembered that Paco Underhill mentioned something in his book, “Why We Buy?” about clean gas stations, so I went to Amazon, searched for the book, then searched within the book for the phrase “gas stations” and immediately found the quote on page 127:
Amazon’s book search just helped them market a six year old book. Just think what would happen if Amazon figured out a way to offer bathrooms to needy travelers?
A few interesting rumors are starting to circulate on a Palm and Research In Motion (RIM) merger this Thursday (06/29/2006). There are a couple of good points here but I think there’s a bit more to this.
Looking at this from a pure technology perspective for a moment, this could actually be a great thing. RIM does not have a product as good as the Treo, but Palm does not have server software as good as RIM. Very soon we will see the BlackBerry Connect software released for the Treo in the US which will help bring the Treo into the enterprise, but it’s not quite enough. Palm won’t have the end-to-end solution, it will require RIM for Palm to break into the enterprise. If Palm can get their hands on RIM server software allowing for push e-mail, calendar, contacts, remote device security and policy auditing, it will create a very powerful solution. Third parties offer this now in the form of GoodLink and whatnot but these solutions are still not as good as what RIM has to offer in their turn-key package.
RIM is suffering right now from a long and drawn out lawsuit. RIM made a lot of mistakes from the beginning and it’s the perfect time for a larger or more stable company to come to the rescue. I see two possible companies that would be a good fit: Apple and Palm. Since I don’t think Apple is quite ready to enter the smartphone market this leaves the much smaller Palm. Palm and RIM have already been working together on the BlackBerry Connect software for Treos so I think this is a great fit. I do believe that Apple will eventually enter the smartphone market and if Palm does not partner with Apple on this then they better have a much more solid product line to compete. Apple is very, very good at making compelling product and I do believe that Apple would be able to blow the Treo line out of the water if they tried. The area that Apple really falls down in is the enterprise, and with a Palm/RIM merger it would give the resulting company a much more powerful stance to compete against Apple.
The technology makes sense, the relationship makes sense it all looks good on paper. I have yet to see any hard evidence that this will actually happen, but if it did I think it would be a good thing for all sides.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Impression that Palm is larger than RIM has been edited.
A lot of users have asked me to compare the Treo 700p with the 650, 700w and Audiovox 6700. Recently the Motorola Q has been added into the mix, however, I have not yet had a chance to get my hands on one yet. I’m going to throw these smartphones into two categories: Palm and Windows Mobile. I did a technical comparison of these phones a while back and that’s great, but a technical grid does not show how one will use the device in real life. While one device may have better specs on paper, once we get it into the field it may completely suck. This review is moistly subjective based on my experiences with each device. Your mileage may vary.
Windows Mobile devices:
The biggest problem with Windows Mobile devices is Windows Mobile 5 itself. Anyone who knows me or reads my articles will know that I’m not a fan of either the Palm OS or Windows Mobile 5, but I would take Palm over anything else. Windows Mobile’s e-mail and web browsing are sub-par with notification screens for no reason yet important notifications are buried or go missed. The GUI is slow and clunky. The phone is not user oriented like the Palm’s Treo line (simple on-screen answer button and whatnot). The e-mail application needs to dial and disconnect EVDO every time it checks mail and I have yet to find any e-mail program on WM5 that does 1/2 of what ChatterEmail does. I believe that someday Windows Mobile will take over Palm, but that day is not today.
PPC-6700 - My least favorite device is the PPC-6700. While this device actually looks amazing on paper, in real life it just falls short. The PPC-6700 has this nifty side sliding keyboard that I thought I would love. Turns out that the keyboard takes away from the experience. Rather than being able to one-hand the phone I am required to use two hands for simple things like e-mail and whatnot. This is not an issue on the Treo line. The battery life for what I was doing was very, very poor. WiFi sounded great but in real life it was not much faster than EVDO. The keyguard was iffy at best and I placed a number of calls that I did not intent to place while the phone was in my pocket. I’m not sure if this was a failure of the 6700 or Windows Mobile 5. The device as a whole feels too big and cumbersome in my hand, even though it’s not that much larger than a Treo. All in all I didn’t like the 6700 at all.
Palm Treo 700w - The Treo 700w looks a lot worse than the PPC-6700 on paper as it has a slower processor, no WiFi and a bunch of other lower specs, but once I started using it I was much happier with my Windows Mobile experience. This device has a great image based speed dial, the speed was nice and while the keyboard is always out and takes up a lot of room, it’s very easy to type on even with one hand. The biggest gripes I had here was the lack of integration of the 5-way navigation. While some apps were aware and honored the navigation, others did not. This made the interaction with the device different on a per-program basis and that ends up being annoying.
Palm devices:
I’m not a Palm fan either. I think the Palm multitasking (if you can call it that) sucks, I can’t get some great apps on the Palm such as SlingBox, LogMeIn and I have to pay for VPN access which comes free on WM5 devices. I do believe it’s the lesser of two evils, seems to behave better than WM5 and with the Treo line is able to integrate phone functionality much better than any other smartphone out there to date, Symbian phones included.
Palm Treo 650 - I used the Treo 650 for a long time. My primary use is e-mail and phone with web being a distant third. By using ChatterEmail I was able to get e-mail in real time to my phone without the use of a middleware server (eliminating monthly charges). The biggest problem with the device is that it is a 1xRTT data connection on CDMA networks and when I have an open data connection I can not receive an incoming call. The camera is mediocre at best and there’s no WiFi, but the device is stable and works well as a phone and e-mail client. I am able to access my network through third party VPN software, but that does cost more. Oddly enough the included Documents To Go application works with Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents better than the software included in Windows Moble devices, which I find odd to say the least. This device has hardly any on-board memory at all so a SD card is almost required.
Palm Treo 700p - This is my device of choice right now. It’s a good form factor, has EVDO so I can get an incoming phone call while in a data connection and the extra memory is nice, but not enough. There’s still no WiFi but I’m OK with that as long as my EVDO connection is fast enough. I have noticed that the phone is a bit more flaky than the Treo 650, but not as bad as a Treo 700w or PPC-6700. With ChatterEmail added I’m able to get push e-mail to my phone and not miss a single call. The 1.2MP camera is nice, but it’s still a cell-phone camera and if you’re serious about taking pictures you’ll want a real digital camera. I was a bit disappointed that the images based speed dial from the Treo 700w was not included, but the added ’send SMS to caller’ and ‘Add Phone Number to Exsisting Contact’ options are a nice addon. Anyone one a Treo 600 should dump it now and move to a 700p. Anyone on a 650 may want to examine how they use their phone and see if the upgrade is really required. If you’re a heavy data user, the 700p should be an easy sell.
I know these are just a few points boiled down. Each phone has its plusses and minuses, but I would say that in my world the 700p is the hands down winner. If you’re really liking the idea of WM5 or if you’re a MS zealot that refuses to use Palm then I would stay with the Treo 700w as opposed to the PPC-6700 as it’s just a better designed device. Everyone uses their phone differently, and some may disagree with what I have said. What are your thoughts on each phone? If you could pick any device and it was free, which would you pick?
I took the leap today and migrated all of my business apps to my MacBook Pro. 90% of my work can be done on my Macintosh and now the other 10% can also be done on my Macintosh. What do I mean by that? I mean my Mac is running both Mac OS X and Windows XP at the same time!
There are two options for running Windows on a Mac: Boot Camp and Parallels. While Boot Camp is nice, it requires me to reboot every time I want to switch to Windows XP. Not very fun. Parallels is a bit slower than Boot Camp, but when used in combination with VirtueDesktops and ShadowBook, I am able to easily and seamlessly switch between my Mac and PC counterparts.
The only things I need to do on the Windows side are maintain the Active Directory settings and Exchange server. Everything else from E-mail, browsing the web, editing video/audio, monitoring servers and maintaining our Cisco-based network can not only be done on the Mac OS X side, but they can be done better than in Windows XP. This is what makes the MacBook Pro so powerful in the workplace. I don’t have to worry about my primary OS getting a virus (although the Windows side can still get infected with a Windows virus), I get a stylish and elegant BSD Unix (Darwin) operating system and I get one great looking/fast laptop running it all.
I first started my adventure with 1GB RAM in the MacBook Pro allocating 512MB to Parallels. This was a bad thing and both the host and guest OS slowed to a crawl. I then scrounged around and grabbed another 1GB RAM for the MacBook Pro leaving the 512MB RAM for Parallels but giving the Mac OS X side 1.5GB to work with. Both operating systems benefited from this as everything became much, much faster.
To make it easy to switch to the Windows side, I have also installed VirtueDesktop which gives me virtual desktops in Mac OS X. When Mac OS X boots I switch to a desktop I call ‘Windows XP’ and run Parallels. I have that virtual machine set up to auto-run Windows XP and then go full-screen at the native resolution of the LCD monitor. I can then switch between desktops in two ways: I can hit my key combo of alt-arrow to have the Windows or Mac side slide into view or, if I’m running ShadowBook, I can wave my hand over the laptop and the operating systems will switch (feel the power of my Jedi force).
All in all the process took several hours over the course of the last few days. Finding the right hot-key combos along with performance settings for my machine was just a bit of an adventure, but now I have everything set up the way I like it. If you have been thinking about switching to a Mac, but are afraid of losing your investment in your Windows programs, I think this solution will work very well for most people. This is a great way to get the elegance of Mac OS X while maintaining the work flow some companies require with Windows XP. I may not be a fan of Intel processors, but Apple’s move to Intel seems to have really paid off. This is simply awesome!
