The Magnolia Ventures
Technology Business Report
Facebook Adds Business Listings
Tuesday, July 01, 2008
One aspect of Facebook's new platform includes the ability to create a business listing. Categories include Local and Brand/Product. Here's a screen capture...
The link, which reads "Create a Page for My Business" can be found on the bottom of a some but not all pages. Here's a screen shot:
 Labels: marketing
About the Author
Michael Taus is the Managing Director of Magnolia Ventures a technology incubator and venture business consultancy, and Aquo Interactive, a software development and Internet marketing firm . He has been involved in the growth and development of network-related technology companies since 1996, including Rent.com (acquired by eBay) and BigLinx, a proprietary search engine marketing service. He currently is an advisor to a number of early-stage technology companies.
Reprint Permissions
You have permission to publish this article electronically or in print, free of charge, as long as you leave the article title, author name, body and resource box in tact (that means NO changes) with the links made active and you agree to our posted Terms of Use.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
EFF Takes On ATT and Bush
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
Below is the contents of an email sent from the Electronic Frontier Foundation to its membership:
At a packed San Francisco hearing today, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) defended your Fourth Amendment rights and urged the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to let our class-action lawsuit against AT&T go forward. The case demands that AT&T stop illegally assisting the National Security Agency to snoop on its customers' telephone and Internet communications.
There's much more at stake here than stopping the Bush Administration's illegal spying and holding the telco giant accountable, though. The President is arguing that thin claims of "state secrets" can trump the courts' constitutional duty to uphold the rule of law.
Without judicial review, there's no way to protect ordinary citizens against government abuses of power. No president, now or in the future, should be allowed unfettered authority to evade the courts and trample on your freedom. As Judge Vaughn Walker wrote in rejecting the government's claims at the lower court, "The compromise between liberty and security remains a difficult one. But dismissing this case at the outset would sacrifice liberty for no apparent enhancement of security."
For the past 17 years, EFF has been proud to take on the hard cases to ensure that your liberty is not sacrificed unnecessarily. Please support us in this critical case by donating to EFF at http://secure.eff.org/att .
And please spread the word to your friends and family.
Join EFF today! http://secure.eff.org/att
For a News.com story from the hearing:
http://news.com.com/Appeals+court+may+let+NSA+lawsuits+proceed/2100-1028_3-6202865.html
For more about the case: http://www.eff.org/legal/cases/att
Tell Congress to stop the illegal spying: http://action.eff.org/fisaLabels: advocacy, ATT, privacy, telecommunications
About the Author
Michael Taus is the Managing Director of Magnolia Ventures a technology incubator and venture business consultancy, and Aquo Interactive, a software development and Internet marketing firm . He has been involved in the growth and development of network-related technology companies since 1996, including Rent.com (acquired by eBay) and BigLinx, a proprietary search engine marketing service. He currently is an advisor to a number of early-stage technology companies.
Reprint Permissions
You have permission to publish this article electronically or in print, free of charge, as long as you leave the article title, author name, body and resource box in tact (that means NO changes) with the links made active and you agree to our posted Terms of Use.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Search Engine Optimization: Marketing and Technology
Friday, May 25, 2007
This is a tale of two cities -- no make that universes. In one universe, you have traditional marketers, whose purpose in life it is to create content shaped to a customer's needs and behaviors. In the other universe, you have programmers, whose existence is dedicated to building efficient, flexible and reliable platforms for delivering that very content.
This is not a new tale. Anyone who has worked in a technology environment has probably observed the clash of marketing and product development. But today, the setting has changed. Today, the "rise of search" has compelled these two groups to cooperate at an ever-increasing depth and frequency. Search engine optimization or search marketing has become central to the success of both groups and, therefore, has become the a new fertile ground for breeding success (and waging war).
The world of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be quite a mystery to your average marketer. More often than not, search marketing consultants are vague about the techniques they employ. Often, this is for a good reason. After all, how many traditional marketers are equipped to understand the SEO implications of a simple website decision like using Flash or graphics.
And, while programmers have a deep understanding of the technology distinctions -- say, client-side versus server side scripting -- they are rarely concerned with the nature and quality of the content displayed.
Fortunately for both groups, the SEM community has a new bible of sorts at its disposal. Search Engine Optimization with PHP (and the soon to be released ASP version) is designed to be a bridge between these two communities. The book is a collaboration between Jaimie Sirovich, a search marketing consultant, and Christian Darie, a software engineer.
It seems unlikely that an experienced marketer will learn much about marketing. Nor will a good programmer learn much about programming. But with this book, each group has the opportunity to learn about the other's area of expertise.
So, who should read this book? Well, if you are a search marketing consultant, you probably (hopefully) are quite familiar with the concepts covered. You may benefit from the fairly comprehensive coverage of systems or foreign language SEO. But in general, if you've been at this for a while, you will most of this book to be light reading.
Overachieving programmers, will certainly have more to benefit here. This is especially true in areas such as site planning, content relocation and inadvertent black hat mishaps.
Marketers will benefit the most from this reading. This is true even if they avoid all the sample code and acronyms. Ultimately, marketers are responsible for the search-engine rankings of their sites. And therefore, having a solid, yet high-level, understanding of SEO is critical to their success. It also helps to ensure that there is less feuding and more collaboration.Labels: marketing, search engines, seo, software, technology
About the Author
Michael Taus is the Managing Director of Magnolia Ventures a technology incubator and venture business consultancy, and Aquo Interactive, a software development and Internet marketing firm . He has been involved in the growth and development of network-related technology companies since 1996, including Rent.com (acquired by eBay) and BigLinx, a proprietary search engine marketing service. He currently is an advisor to a number of early-stage technology companies.
Reprint Permissions
You have permission to publish this article electronically or in print, free of charge, as long as you leave the article title, author name, body and resource box in tact (that means NO changes) with the links made active and you agree to our posted Terms of Use.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
To learn more about Magnolia Ventures and its portfolio companies, click here.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.5 License.
|
