Archive for November 9th, 2006
Letters to God Create Outrage on eBay
Public outcry has led an Atlantic City, N.J., man to remove a bag of letters to God he found on the beach from the online eBay auction Web site. Bill Lacovara said bidding had reached $550, but outrage was higher that he would auction intimate documents written as long ago as 1973, the Newark (N.J.) [...]
Skype today announced a Beta version of its free VoIP software that sports a more streamlined user interface along with Click to Call and Skypecasting features. The Skype 3.0 Beta for Windows announcement was made on the Skype Beta blog and warns users that it is only recommended for experienced users. According to Jaanus on [...]
Google Checkout Still Trying to Compete with PayPal
Google Inc. has begun making its Google Checkout online-payment feature available for free to merchants that choose to make it a payment option on their Web sites. The Checkout-for-free promotion runs between Wednesday and Dec. 31, taking in the holiday-shopping season, according to Google spokeswoman Megan Lamb. Typically, Google charges a fee of 20 cents [...]
Just when you think you’ve heard it all, there is a new email version of an old Internet scam. “Scam artists have now gravitated from the mails to the Internet,” said FBI Director Robert Mueller. <SCRIPT LANGUAGE=’JavaScript1.1′>if (document.layers) {document.write(‘<SCR’ + ‘IPT language=JavaScript1.1 SRC=/Global/ad.asp?type=single&cls1=News&src1=loc&spct1=100&sz1=wnsz_20&callType=script />’); document.close();}</SCRIPT>coreAdsCreate(\\’wnsz_20\\’, \\’loc\\’, \\’100\\’); Mueller was in Indianapolis just last week, warning [...]
eBay Partners with Baidu For Chinese Market
CHINESE web search leader Baidu and Eachnet, the Chinese auction site of eBay, said they had expanded their partnership, one of three such alliances in the world’s second biggest internet market. Under the agreement, Baidu will promote PayPal Beibao, the online payments service of eBay in China, and will become the exclusive provider of text-based [...]
InfoWorld: In a move that could be viewed as an early holiday gift for online merchants and a heaping lump of coal for eBay, Google announced that it will process payments for free through Google Checkout, its rival service to PayPal, until the end of the year. Google’s free online-payment-processing ploy is presumably an attempt [...]
Entrepreneur Caters To Teens’ Rental Needs
Los Angeles Times: Ben Bennani knows the risks and rewards of niche marketing. Find a niche — either by creating a demand or serving an overlooked clientele — and exploit it. That philosophy came in handy a couple of years ago when Bennani was trying to revive the small car-rental firm he had acquired. Casting [...]
Create An Online Entertainment Empire…On No Budget
Los Angeles Times: Rory Scherer was a bored office drone working for a software company in Canada. “You know the movie ‘Office Space’?” he asked. “That was me.” These days however, Scherer is the proud, (if exhausted) writer, producer, project manager and publicist of “Mystery at Mansfield Manor,” a live-action, choose-your-own-adventure, murder mystery game available [...]
Inventor’s Idea Goes Through The Roof
Hardin County News: During the recent floods, Paul Kotlarich, a local inventor and builder, had the same uneasy feeling he had during last year’s hurricane season. When water begins to rise, people become trapped in their homes. But Instead of sitting idly by, Kotlarich is trying to make a difference in the lives of people [...]
ECommerce-Guide.com: You’ve got the killer keyword campaign. Your site is easy to navigate. Promotions are prominent and pertinent. Check-out is down to a few clicks. So why the low conversion rate? It could be that your pages are loading too slowly. Four seconds is the maximum length of time an average online shopper will wait [...]
San Francisco Chronicle: Fourteen percent of the nation’s population — nearly 40 million people — changed addresses last year, according to the Census Bureau. But as nearly of all them can attest, moving out of a house is one thing and moving into one is something else entirely. Johanna Luther of Family Packers, an Oakland [...]
Jim Blasingame: An ancient proverb proposes that “Lean liberty is better than fat slavery.” Many small business owners would say it this way, “The worst day in my own business is better than the best day as an employee.” Photo by antigone78.
