If you have a web hosting account with cPanel, chances are that you use Fantastico, by Netenberg. Its founder Ilias Moisidis will pass on all donations made via PayPal to the appropriate relief agencies who are looking after the victims of the fires in Greece. Visit http://www.netenberg.com for a donation link.
I was reading a CNET blog post Google deems cost-per-action as the ‘Holy Grail’ by Stephan Spencer. At the Search Engine Strategies (SES) conference in San Jose, Marissa Mayer, Google’s VP of Search Product and User Experience, delivered a keynote in which she talked, inter alia, about the Cost Per Action (CPA) model for advertisers and that it is a long way off.
In a CPA scenario, the advertiser pays only when a pre-agreed action takes place, such as filling out a form, making a purchase, speaking to the advertiser by phone, etc. Google has been testing CPA with select AdWords advertisers in several ways.
For example, in its Click to Call experiment, the advertiser bids, say, $25 as opposed to $2 per click to have a high position (subject to other factors, such as Quality Score) but pays only if someone clicks and speaks to the advertiser via the Google-arranged phone call. The high bid makes it fair to regular PPC advertisers who pay for every click, fraudulent or otherwise, who are also bidding high to be in the higher PPC positions. The CPA bid could be 8 to 12 times higher – I have no idea how it is worked out, but Google has access to the conversion stats of advertisers if they choose to track conversions for online transactions. Where e-commerce is present, it is easy to tell what percentage of clicks end in transactions.
If CPA does catch on, Stephan opines that SEO will become more diversified into helping clients with conversions, perhaps by offering organic search cost-per-click (CPC) which is offered, coincidentally, by his own company. 🙂 Yes, a few SEO companies are already offering similar solutions.
Google apparently uses the example of buying an airline ticket to explain the CPA scenario. As things stand, I don’t think this would happen. For one, affililate commissions on airline tickets are low and probably impractical for cheap fares.
Google Checkout and CPA
Google’s PayPal-like offering is Google Checkout, which I rarely encounter in real life, where PayPal is still king. Over 12 months ago, Om Malik wrote about some connection between Google Checkout and CPA, and a few others linked to his post, but I haven’t seen the obvious killer connection that is staring Google in its face.
There is some unused space on a Google search results page that could be reserved for CPA without making it too expensive. For example the 8 ads on the right could have some CPA ads interspersed, say in the fourth and lower positions. Or they could start below the least attractive 8th PPC ad but be highlighted to draw eyeballs that would not otherwise be looking here. The usability experts can work something out. Or, Google could use something like Peel-Away Ads for CPA advertisers.
The way Google can win at CPA is to leverage Checkout by offering cheap CPA clicks to advertisers who switch to it exclusively for e-commerce. As Checkout transactions are visible to Google, it would be easy to measure the conversions (Actions). How about a tiered price structure:
I am just throwing some numbers there – don’t take them literally. The final numbers should make business sense to the advertiser.
The Sydney Morning Herald reported “MUCH of Sydney’s city centre as it appears in the satellite images on Google Maps Australia has been fuzzed out, just weeks before the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation summit.” Naturally, Google has blamed it on a “commercial issue” with its imagery supplier, just as there was an issue with maps of Washington DC. I believe Google completely and implicitly and so should you.
(I too had “technical issues” with my screenshot above)
It would help everyone henceforth if all conferences requiring top security are held in Davos, Switzerland – a place that seems to have no other useful purpose. This would solve all commercial issues and we could get on with more important matters.
I was cancelling my dedicated server at The Planet (EV1) and noticed that cancellations have to be confirmed by telephone or chat. I tried to reach customer service or technical support, both of whom are advertised as 24×7, but both were offline. Perhaps their definition means “24×7 during business hours”?
I have a Gmail account but I never use it. I have so many domains that I don’t need to rely on Gmail or Hotmail to store my email. Unlike many business owners who use Hotmail or Gmail as their official addresses, I think it is more professional to use one’s business domain for email. For those who use anything that is free, Google has bad news.
Unless you receive a lot of emails with large attachments, you shouldn’t reach these limits, but if you use Google Apps or Picasa Web Albums, you will need extra space before long.
Make as much as $10!
If you live in the US and have access to a PC and a digital camera, you could make as much as $10 by becoming a Google Business Referral Representative. To earn this, you will have to be accepted by Google and then you will visit local businesses, get their details and pass them on to Google. At this point you will get $2. When the business confirms the accuracy of the details, you get another $8. No, you cannot claim any expenses. This is really cheap data collection for Google. Comment below if you plan to sign up.
Norton 360 is billed as an all-in-one security solution from Symantec. Peter Norton’s famous crossed-arms image is nowhere to be seen, let alone his full name. In fact, the Symantec corporate name is underplayed in this product.
Certified for Windows Vista, Norton 360 will require a minimum of Windows XP Home or better
and a fairly modern PC, say bought in the last five years. So what is it? It is a suite of products that covers:
You can install Norton 360 on three computers. Each has its own serial number.
PC Security
PC Security is the heart of the application suite. It covers the following essential tasks:
Transaction Security
Transaction security refers to warning you if you try to go to Web sites that have been marked as conducting fraudulent activities such as phishing. It also authenticates genuine Web sites. This protects you when you shop online or do your banking.
Backup & Restore
You can back up your files to a CD, DVD, USB drive or an external hard disk, including mapped network drives. You can even back up to Symantec’s Web-based drive, with a limit of 2 GB. Trust me, you will not want to do that with the kind of bandwidth we get in Australia. Needless to say, you can restore from those locations should the need arise.
PC Tuneup
The PC Tuneup routine covers the following tasks:
Norton Add-on Pack for Norton 360
Buried in the Tasks & Settings menu is a link to Norton Add-on Pack for Norton 360, which is downloadable from the Symantec Web site. It also works with Norton Internet Security 2007. Curiously (because these features are expected in an “all-in-one” security solution), it is not mentioned in the packaging. Its features include:
In Use
I uninstalled Trend Micro PC-cillin, which I reviewed some months ago. It was doing a good job but it used to take over my PC to perform its tasks and slowed down my work. I wanted to see how Norton 360 behaved in this regard.
The installation and fetching updates procedure was very quick, compared to PC-cillin. Norton 360 seems to be perpetually scanning my email but it has not hogged system resources so far. This is usually the irritation that other products cause – you want to be protected without being constantly reminded about it. While Norton 360 isn’t totally invisible, it is not unduly intrusive.
I keep my Outlook data file on a separate Data drive, not the default location. The backup wizard found the original, unused outlook.pst file and my Outlook Express newsgroup .dbx files, but not my real file. I had to select Add A File to ensure that the required files were selected. It correctly identified my external backup drive.
Once configured, Norton 360 can be left to its own devices. It sends me an email at the desired interval to remind me to clean up my disk or to perform a backup and so on. I have entrusted one of my home PCs to Norton 360.
Availability
You will get the Norton 360 3-user pack from various outlets around the AU$100 – $110 mark including GST. You can also get it from Amazon.
My contact got the system-generated email to collect my jaxtr voicemail, but when she tried to collect it, it presented an error to the effect that there was no message. Megan from jaxtr wrote to me from a Stanford.edu address, which bounced when I replied:
    host mx3.stanford.edu[171.67.20.23] said: 550
   <deleted@stanford.edu>: Recipient address rejected: User unknown in local
   recipient table (in reply to RCPT TO command)
A friend in the US and I have been trying separately to call each other to test Jaxtr, but we always get the message that all lines are busy. I have since managed to leave a voicemail, so that’s progress.
I upgraded from 512/128 to 1500/256 at Netspace and their customer service says that the upgrade took place on 3 August. Upon checking the speed with the ozspeedtest.com tool at its Netspace mirror, I got what I did with the old connection. The modem is an Alcatel Speedtouch Home (rated to 8 Mbit/s) and there is a Netgear MR314 router in the network (which should not affect the WAN connection).
Solved!
All I had to do to solve this problem was to power down the modem and router and switch them on again. The new connection was at a higher speed (varies between 900 and 1000 Kbit/s).