Yahoo! calls Google’s homepage “A Button and a Box”

Last thing you would have ever pondered would be Yahoo! taking over the web and becoming homepage to everyone. Google’s phenomenal success scares a lot of tech companies, Yahoo! esp. as it’s business’s are continuing to be shot down one by one. Yahoo! search has shrunk rapidly and simultaneously Google has grown to take a large part of the Search cake.

Both the companies have different philosophies. Big “G” believes in simplicity and it’s homepage is a mark of it, while at Yahoo! they want the homepage to be your eternal lookout for everything, yes Twitter, Facebook, Search, News, Entertainment, Everything. Yahoo! constantly stresses that Google needs to “diversify” if it wants to retain it’s market, and that’s what Yahoo is doing with multiple partnerships with leading social networks, portals and lot more.

Here’s a piece of Yahoo’s 85 Million Dollar marketing campaign, the commercial is straight from Yahoo!’s heart. BTW i kinda like the tune they’ve used! Video down after.

Mobile Advertising to be reincarnated with Apple’s iAd?

If the next big thing is, it’s got to be Mobile Advertising. If analysis’s seem correct then it’s lucid that the Cell Phone markets, especially the smartphone markets in terms of browsing and downloading content have grown 10 folds in the past 3 years.

Apple too has contributed to the growth of the market immensely with the so called “revolutionary product”, the iPhone. Along with the iPhone came the App Store which has also played crucial role in promoting Application sales and the growth of the market and it now holds more than 150,000 apps. This created opportunities for advertisers to boast their products but till now there wasn’t a proposed model for it, all ideas sprinkled and few organizations using them.

Google acquired AdMob for a price of 750 Million Dollars to get into the Mobile advertising arena starting with a already powerful contender in the game. Followed by that we had the news hitting blogs, Apple had acquired Quattro Wireless for 300 Million Dollars which was also a tough challenger in the advertising market. Smells like growing fight, Google and Apple?

Steve Jobs brazenly once during a townhall meet with his companies employees, that they [Google] got into our [Apple] business of cell phones, we [Apple] did not get into their [Google] search business. Steve pointed out Google’s business strategies more or less could make Apple bankrupt if Google continued. What Now? Now it’s Apple’s turn and this time they decide to join in the advertising bandwagon and challenge the biggest contenders in the business, Google.

MediaPost wrote that Apple could be possible launching a new type of a Mobile Advertising Platform called “iAd” (signifies the i used in almost all major Apple products) and that this platform has been purely built upon the acquired platform, Quattro. The announcement of this platform will be coming up on 7th April, some four days after iPad starts shipping. Apple’s lined up all explosives, ha?

The platform will be unveiled at Madison Avenue (somewhat the heart of advertising industry), and invasion of Apple there, surely means direct shot at Google.  Apart from Mobile Advertising, i think Apple would be more interested in portable advertising which means, iPad is also included. Most companies fail to have their ideas spread and that is where they lose, but in this case Apple has already got a fair amount of means to propagate its platform with couple of millions of iPhone being used and iPod Touches, 150,000 and more apps and the iPad coming which already crossed 200,000 pre orders by now. These figures mean that Apple has got a hell lot of users there and reaching them won’t be difficult for them.

Almost all the top companies of the valley would be finding ways to get into the app store somehow or the other to advertise. Apple might be the one opening floodgates to them and prove to be another huge success.

First iPad Commercial on TV [Video]

As we approach iPads official delivery date, April 3 Apple starts gearing up with it’s advertisements flooding everywhere including TV after the internet.

Apple never fails to deem its product as a “cool gadget” on TV as that’s what most non-techie’s call it. It looks nice, has multitouch and many applications. That’s what all the non-geeks know because that’s what Apple is showing in it’s ads.

History has proven that Apple rocks all the TV commercials, *cough* Apple has loads of Anti-Windows Commercials airing too *cough*, and Apple does it again.

Here’s a neat commercial which gives a flow of features available in the iPad (though it doesn’t tell you which features are missing which it should according to Consumer Rights) and teaches you how to position your iPad while using it :P Video after break.

Apple to enter Mobile Advertising market with acquisition of Quattro Wireless

Google acquired AdMob, silicon valley based startup for a price of $750 Million. This startup was focused on mobile advertising specifically for the growing smartphones, iPods, iPhones, Androids and so on.

Apple is also not behind in the race. Recently there was a cold war between Apple and Google over Google Voice application denial and also the most famous story of 2009, Eric Schimdt, who is Google’s CEO, resigning from Apple as board of director.

Apple is also rumored to be making a new map application which would challenge it’s rival Google Maps , currently used on all iPhones. Apple has challenged Google in nearly all fields and this step could be another challenge.

Quattro Wireless is also another startup which concentrates on advertising on Smartphones. It is supposed to be acquired for a price of $275 Million and the news is expected to arrive today.

Thanks AllThingsD

Transfer Huge files over internet for free with superb speed!

If you’ve faced a lot of problems sending over huge presentation files to your friends over the internet to your friends on the other side of the globe, or sharing holiday videos with your friends then you’ve come to the right place.

WeTransfer is smart service that makes it uploading and sharing files, as easy as peeling a banana. The benefits of this service is that you can upload files with sizes upto 2GB! Along with that, WeTransfer’s servers have a Virus filter which keeps the infected files away so its 100% safe.

The upload speed is just too awesome and i could upload 60Mb of Data within 5 Minutes with a internet speed of  3 Mbps. The interface is neat. The service is completely free and it supports multiple files, so you don’t need to upload a single file everytime, just select all of them and hit “transfer”.

Uploading

Uploading

You don’t need to sign up either. Just select files, type in your email id and type in your friends email id’s (upto 20 friends at a time) and then once your done with uploading you will get a confirmation mail about the upload and all your friends will be emailed a link to download the files and you could feed in a optional message if you wanted.

If was thinking real hard, as to how the service makes money, and found out that these guys make money by serving branded backgrounds on their service pages? Check out WeTransfer and there you will observe that the background changes, somewhat like Bing and everytime the background changes you see the link on bottom left also changes.  That’s how this works. Atlast, someone in the world did come out with a better way of advertising!

Bigger Profits with .com Domain : True?

If you are in SEO or have done some research on Google Search you might know that there used to be this myth earlier that links from .edu and .gov domains were of more value than general links. So, People spent huge sums of money to buy links from those domains. And later it was proved wrong. What? Waste of Money.

Recently i spotted some VeriSign ads at Ahemdabad, India at the Airport. I also found more such ads at many places. An Online campaign has also been put up.

Here is what it said,

Bigger Profits Possible with a .com Website

This Raised many questions in my Mind. Are they Bluffing? What is this possible? Does it Affect Search Rankings? So i go ahead to check out the their website – www.bealeaderwith.com

As far as what i know, Google treats all Domains extensions as the same (Please Correct me if I am wrong) and so, how could this be?

I dugg into their website and found the reviews,

“While it may not be possible to precisely measure the return on investment from the use of VeriSign .com and .net Domain Name Registry service, it has certainly enhanced our global visibility. It therefore made sense to go with a .com domain name for our new joint venture Company- OrschelnRemsons – as well.”

Mr. Rahul Kejriwal, Vice President – Marketing, Remsons Industries Ltd.

It Mentions that .com helped enhance their Global Visibility. But i don’t think so. If you are aiming for marketing your website, why just .com? Country domains are a better choice as they already do the work of showing the Companies Origin and also users a better experience, for example – There is a Indian user. If you compare his experience on a .com domain and .in domain, he would prefer going to a .in domain than the .com one because he would be interested in something more regional.

Well, Frankly Speaking today users are too lazy to type in the full address of websites (Me Included) and .com would be 4 characters including the “.” and if you are using “.in” or  ”.us” or “.ca” or “.cn” etc.. There are 3 Characters and so direct hits from such domains could affect your traffic in a positive manner. Although this may be applicable in some cases only.

Also, Uniqueness is something interesting. If thousand .com domains and one .ca domain. You would be somewhat curious to see whats behind that .ca domain. Again, you may have a different point of view.

What do you think? Do you Agree? No? Express your views in the Comments.

Breaking : Google Pagerank update is in Progress! Good or Bad for webmasters?

Seems like Googles Pagerank update is in progress (Thanks Binoy who pinged me on Gtalk with this news, showing that his blog showed a change in Google Pagerank!).

Thanks Binoy For Reporting

Google updates it’s pagerank quite often, but according Google’s Marissa Mayer google has 2 Pageranks. First one is Internal which updates on Daily Basis while the second is External, the one you see on Toolbars and pagerank checkers. But, as few sources claim mostly Internal pagerank is taken into consideration for various purposes. 

Frankly Speaking, i have had experiences when websites with pagerank 0 have got onto the first page for top ranking keywords, which prove the myth of more pagerank=more vists wrong.

Dont Blame me Because i used Bing's Twitter Search

Dont Blame me for using Bing's Twitter Search