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New York City Throws Down Gauntlet Against the Valley?

posted on May 22, 2012

Google is “teaming up” with Ivy League school Cornell. Teaming up may overplay things a bit but Google will provide 22,000 square feet of its New York City headquarters to a new venture that the school is undertaking.

The Wall Street Journal reports

Officials at Google estimated the market value of the space— which will be provided free to CornellNYC Tech, a joint venture between Cornell University and Technion-Israel Institute of Technology—at between $10 million and $12 million. That estimate includes the value of an option the school has to expand to 58,000 square feet during the next 5½ years while work on its permanent campus is completed.

Very generous, wouldn’t you say? Of course that kind of money is small stuff to Google but its effort to boost the presence of New York City vs. the Silicon Valley is an interesting play indeed.

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Interest in Online Banking Shows Rise in Consumer Confidence

posted on May 21, 2012

The internet is changing the way we do everything from shopping, to watching TV and reading the daily news. But as comfortable as we are giving our credit card to a retailer online, we’re still constantly hounded by those two monstrous words – Security and Privacy.

Will my credit card number end up in the hands of thieves? Will I become a victim of identity theft? Will my employer find out things about me I don’t want them to know?

These are legitimate issues and we have a reason to be concerned, but a new study by Rosetta shows that convenience is starting to trump worry.

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YouTube Celebrates Seven Years of User Generated Content

posted on May 21, 2012

May 20th was YouTube’s 7th birthday. Oh, our little baby is growing up fast, isn’t he? Seems like only yesterday he was learning how to walk without falling down, feed the animals without getting attacked. . . ride a bike without hitting a telephone pole.

What’s truly extraordinary about YouTube is that he’s growing at three times the rate of a normal child. Users upload 72 hours of video per minute these days which means you couldn’t watch every minute of every video even if you wanted to. Not that you would want to.

Sure, there are plenty of fun and helpful videos on YouTube but no matter how hard they try to lift their reputation, they’ll always be known as the home of stupid people doing stupid things. And that’s okay, because we all need a good laugh, even if it is at the expense of others.

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Learning LinkedIn from the Experts [Sponsor]

posted on May 21, 2012

Hey did you hear? There’s this social media thing and some company got like really, really rich from an IPO last week. Did ya hear?

Of course you did but hopefully you are now moving on with your regularly scheduled life and looking for the things that will help you do business online that may even include something other than Facebook.

Our Inbound Marketing Channel sponsor, HubSpot, has put together a new (and free) learning resource that does just that. It’s about the ins and outs of LinkedIn.

Learn from social media experts how to get the most from LinkedIn. Get tips and insights from experts who will help you get the most from one of the most important channels for your business’ marketing message!

GET YOUR FREE COPY RIGHT NOW!

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Is Chrome Ready to Really Overtake IE in Browser Wars (By One Account At Least)?

posted on May 21, 2012

Normally we don’t pay too much attention to browser wars. After all, it is practically conventional wisdom that the once dominant Internet Explorer from Microsoft has lost its advantage. Actually that advantage was once a vice like grip on the lead in the browser wars because of Microsoft’s death grip on the desktop PC.

Fast forward to a world that is less about the desktop, more about the cloud and most about the services available in the cloud and you get the chart below that shows one week (based on data from StatCounter and no one else so do with it what you want) and we see Chrome moving ahead of IE.

This moment in time has apparently happened before as reported by The Next Web

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IAB Reveals a Week in the Life of a Mobile Phone Shopper

posted on May 18, 2012

Shopping via a mobile phone isn’t an everyday experience for most people, but already we can see patterns forming around the how, the why and the when.

Last month, IAB asked a group of mobile shoppers to keep a diary of their activity in a two week period. Here are some of the things they found out:

Home Usage

Here we see that almost half of all e-commerce interactions happened at home. They found that purchasing peaked in the late afternoon, early evening. 49% said they shopped while watching TV.

The dollar amounts aren’t too impressive, only 38% reported spending more than $21 a month. Most of the purchases were digital downloads with clothing and entertainment items coming in second.

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Google’s Penguin Update Continues to Smack Small Business

posted on May 18, 2012

Last week, a small business owner talked to me about his new marketing plan. It went something like this: Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, MySpace, blog, blog outreach, YouTube videos, forum posting, SEO articles written and posted to Squidoo, every other article site then promoted on StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit and every other appropriate sharing site.

He figured someone could do this in ten hours a week. I told him he was in over his head. I told him he needed to focus on a few keys areas to start — Facebook and Pinterest since he was selling a very visual and colorful product. I also told him to forget article marketing, it not only wouldn’t help his business but it might actually hurt. I don’t think he liked my advice.