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For those who haven’t been keeping a score tally lately, or don’t own any Google stock; and moreover like the author, merely know Google as a friendly, familiar search-engine service, enter the subtle peculiarities of its NASDAQ portfolio.

Since the announcement of its inclusion into the S&P 500 last week, Google’s shares jumped by a whopping 6%, only to slip again by 2% on Thursday, on the strength of its announced plans to sell an additional $2 billion in stock –5.3 million shares. The proceeds from the sale will be used for “general corporate purposes, including working capital and possible acquisitions of complimentary businesses, technologies and other assets, “according to Google’s registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission

That sounds cryptic enough, and experts expect a major acquisition is looming. Already brimming with 8 billion, what’s next? Will it purchase Facebook? Will it invest in Asian Internet companies, or other sources of information technology?

Characteristically tight-lipped, Google’s making nothing clear or certain. And despite its recent share slide, it’s a robust force bound to molt.

Beatlejuice, Beatlejuice, Beatlejuice… was the last time i’d heard of consequences for saying a word 3 times in a row. But that was in a movie (Beatlejuice is the name of the movie in case anyone didn’t know). Well, mark March 27th, 2006 as the new ‘last time’… but this is in real life, not a movie. It seems in some far off places saying certain words 3 times in a row actually does have consequences.

Poor Sohela Ansari was lying in bed one night when she overheard her deep in sleep husband say the word “talaq” 3 times. Turns out, talaq translates to divorce.. and if said 3 times in a row the marriage is over.. Unconscious or not.

Here’s the full story

Some interesting quotes for those not wanting to read the whole article:

“When local Islamic leaders heard of the sleep talking, they said Aftab’s words constituted a divorce under an Islamic procedure known as “triple talaq.â€?”

“The religious leaders ruled that if the couple wanted to remarry they would have to wait at least 100 days. Sohela would also have to spend a night with another man and be divorced by him in turn.”

The following is a quote in the man’s defense…

“The law clearly says any action under compulsion or in a state of intoxication has no effect. The case of someone uttering something while asleep falls under this category and will have no impact whatsoever,�

The funniest part about the last quote is that it shows that “triple talaq” is actually a real thing.. just not when one is sound asleep saying it.

Battle lines are deepening in the online world between strict, traditionally-minded information “protectionists?, if we can so label them, and those who cleave closer to the philosophy of Open Sourcing.

The Open Sourcers can sometimes sound the more extreme of the two camps. Even in an environment as devoted to the free flow of information as the South By South West Interactive Conference (SXSW), from which I reported earlier (March 15, 2006), I was startled to hear the position struck by one platform speaker.

It was Carrie Bickner, hardly a dangerous radical, since her position is Web Developer for that august institution, the New York Public Library. All the same, she made an arresting assertion during a panel discussion on archiving: “We at SXSW tend to think of copyright as a block to creativity?.

But you don’t have to occupy Bickner’s unusually strong and generalizing stance to regard the over-zealous application of copyright laws as capable of hampering creative communication. The same can be said – and is currently being shown dramatically – of another business application of the copyright principle, the invoking of patent law.

It’s not been very fully reported that the online auction behemoth eBay faces a challenge in court over its “Buy it Now? button function by which customers can immediately pay for an item at a fixed price (rather than engaging in bidding). The technology through which the feature operates was patented by another company – MercExchange, who are suing eBay.

There are merits, as there often are, in both sides’ legal arguments, but currently MercExchange is pushing for an injunction to simply shut down eBay’s “Buy it Now? service. It’s a tactic that I feel right-thinking free traders ought to oppose – even though I usually have an instinctual drive to sympathize with “the little guy? – which would normally mean opposing what in this confrontation is the hundred megabyte gorilla, eBay.

Here eBay deserves our support. The internet – indeed all technical innovation – requires some protection from frivolous or vendetta-like litigation which has as its result the cramping of both entrepreneurship and the inventive spirit.

For years something has been missing from Google’s world of information… Considering its venture into the land of IPO’s and ever increasing stock price, one might think the big guy would have a finance area to compete with rival Yahoo. Yahoo Finance has had a stranglehold on the financial information sector (as far as search engines are concerned) with no real competition otherwise from MSN or Google. That all changed yesterday with the announcement of the aptly named Google Finance.

From the looks of things, Google has easily blown Yahoo out of the water.

Some features include:

• dragable charts that show exact numbers per day/hour/minute.
• Rollover informational boxes for each significant company head
• News (but not just any news) if you drag the chart to 1 year ago, the news updates to that date, 1 year ago
• Blog integration
• RSS support
• Discussion groups

Google finance is a great tool which has taken into account just about every useful feature a source like this could/should have. Once again, a big congratulations goes out to the big guy Google.

For all the event’s echoes of hippy counter-culture, SXSW is hardly anti-business. Far from it. And its commercial chops have only increased with time.

Since beginning twenty years ago as purely a music festival, SXSW soon embraced film as well, and under the extra heading of �Interactive� it has also catered to the online universe for the last 13 years.

On hitting its teens, Interactive has – a bit anthropomorphically – displayed some characteristics of puberty (one session was called “Bloggers in Love: Intimacy, Technology and Mask-makingâ€?) but all along the way it has gotten decidedly more interested in the commerce part of e-commerce.

Session titles were always a giveaway. In 1997 delegates flocked to “Making Money on the Web�, by 2001 they were concerned with “How to Survive Takeovers, Acquisitions, Layoffs, Mergers etc�, and by last year they seemed to be asserting predominance over the entire nation’s business, pronouncing it “The New New Economy�.

This year the congregating geeks have reached what may be an ultimate question (at least for those attending an especially telltale session): “Cashing in or Selling Out?�

With his trademark mixture of humility and masterfulness, Craig held court in Austin, Texas.

I speak of course of Craig from Craigslist – a.k.a. Craig Newmark, whose phenomenally growing empire of online small-ad sites began with helpful emails about jobs and apartments circulating among his San Francisco friends and neighbors 11 years ago.

Newmark’s keynote appearance at Austin’s South By South West Interactive Conference (SXSW) was a chance for him to wallow snugly in the admiration of his followers, but also to sound some warning notes to the mainstream media. He was interviewed, comfortably, by Jimmy Wales the founder of Wikipedia, on the day – aptly enough – that the once-mighty Knight Ridder chain of newspapers was humiliatingly bought by much smaller publishers, the McClatchy Company. The room, and Craig himself, were amused to hear that broadcast pundits had been blaming Craigslist for the demise of print dinosaurs like Knight-Ridder.

Craig chose to minimize the effect of his online forum on city newspapers, saying that his draining effect on corporate advertising revenue had been “overstated�. But there was no mistaking his rallying cry (and the woops of agreement from his largely geeky audience) in support of TiVO, because it offers a way for viewers to avoid traditional TV advertising. He appealed for the 30-second “skip� feature to be made available to all DVR users, and clearly relished the idea of making Madison Avenue think and work harder on ways to present its wares to an increasingly less passive audience.

The Craigslist ethos was woven through his entire presentation, unsurprisingly. Much was made of “the culture of trust� upon which the service is inevitably built. Jimmy Wales, whose own online encyclopedia has notoriously fallen victim to fraud, mentioned that “criminals are early adaptors� of online innovations – and Newmark himself stressed his own job-title, only possible now that the company has created a separate CEO. He’s officially “Customer Service Rep and Founder� and much of his time is spent policing difficult situations and warning off “bad guys�. He hinted he often did so with the aid of individual cops who went further than their official duties to be helpful.

When it comes to Internet Solutions, Big is No Longer Better

If you are doing business on the Internet you soon learn that the only constant is change. For a long time, companies that were making big investments in their e-commerce infrastructures only felt comfortable dealing with big established companies. They felt that there was too much at stake to take a chance with smaller vendors who offer more customized solutions.

This attitude is now changing. Companies are slowly realizing that a large entrenched provider may not provide the best solutions. Yes, standardized solutions work but because they have been designed to meet the needs of a broad range of companies, without really focusing on the specific needs of any one client.

This is what happened with Essential Apparel (www.essentialapparel.com) a big online provider of women’s and men’s underwear and active wear. They started out using a big enterprise solution called Market Live (www.marketlive.com) but soon discovered that the company which was reluctant to use unified code in their site was not providing them with the bottom line results they needed.

So essential turned to Tribeca (NYC)-based E-commerce Partners, a shop that has earned a reputation as an effective marketing street fighter for its clients. With their eye on the company’s bottom line, E-commerce partners re-designed the Essential Apparel site to make it much more search engine friendly, thereby boosting rankings and significantly increasing traffic to the site. They also added enhanced e-commerce functionalities to the site.

But the key to providing the best solution for Essential Apparel and the reason they dumped Market Live for a small more active provider, is to benefit from the ongoing attention of an experienced, flexible, knowledgeable e-commerce specialist. Search engines change algorithms and companies who want the best ROI on their websites need to work with vendors who are willing to make the extra effort to provide customized, high end solutions.

Asi Erenberg is CEO Ecommerce Partners &
Dr. Roni Horowitz Chief Consultant for Ecommerce Partners

The preliminary stage for building Internet-based sales systems is an initial marketing test in which we try to evaluate (even roughly) the income and profits.

In this article I’ll demonstrate the process. I’ll choose a product and check its initial sales potential on the Internet. You can check the sales potential of products or services offered by you in a similar way.

The product I’ll check is called Backlife. The function of this product is to ease back pain. You can find information about this product on the website http://www.backlife.com

The price of the product is approximately $340
We start the test by checking the popularity of the relevant search words for the product as well as their costs (that’s the cost for each click if your ad appears at the top of the Overture list).

Here are the relevant keywords for Backlife and their prices:
Every line contains three words. The search word or phrase appears on the left, in the middle is the number of searchers per month per click, and on the right is the cost of the ad.

Back pain 59512 $0.10

Lower back pain 22802 $0.10

Low back pain 7387 $0.10

Back pain relief 6050 $1.30

Back pain exercise 2148 $0.49

Cause of lower back pain 2034 $0.10

Chronic back pain 2017 $0.96

Lower back pain exercise 1921 $0.16

By the way, take note that search words connected to treating back pain, such as back pain relief are much more expensive than the general ones such as back pain.
There are approximately 100,000 searchers for relevant phrases on Overture. To proceed and check the sales potential we need to make two estimates:

1. What will the clickthrough of your ads be? (Meaning, what will be the rate at which surfers will click on the ad once exposed to it?)
Of course this data influences the quality of the advertisement.

2. What will your conversion rate be, meaning which part of the visitors on the website will indeed purchase the product? This data is influenced from the quality of the sale process on the website.

Because we don’t have all this data at this stage, we don’t have any other choice but to use the general data about those two numbers.

A reasonable assumption regarding ad click through is that approximately 2% of those exposed to the ad will click on it, and 2% of those entering the website will actually purchase the product.

According to this, the number of purchases through Overture only is 40 per month. And because the price of the product is $340 our sales will be $13,600 per month.

The cost of the campaign will be approximately $400 (simply add the cost of each phrase, that is itself a multiplication of the cost of the phrase, the number of searchers and Click through).

Let’s assume that the profit from selling Backlife is half the price to the customer (a reasonable assumption), the expected profit from our campaign in Overture is therefore approximately $6400 per month.

Of course Overture is only one channel. The sales on Google Adwords may be much larger

The overall sales through the Internet may be much bigger if we add to it the traffic from affiliate programs, viral marketing, net public relations and other channels.

In any case, using a “per click�? advertising channel is an excellent way to start the sales process and it’s therefore better to check that this process is profitable.

Asi Erenberg is CEO Ecommerce Partners &
Dr. Roni Horowitz Chief consultant for Ecommerce Partners

Subscription to a mailing list, must it be on a website?

Repeat after me… “The objective of my internet business is to create a real relationship built on strong foundations of trust and long term commitment with my existing and potential customers, all with the intention of constantly increasing the lifetime value of each visitor to the website.

Relationship is the key word to business on the Internet. You need to check each marketing action to see if it contributes to or damages the relationship with your customers.

Relationship with customers is now a very fashionable topic in the business community and you may therefore wonder why I’m raising such a worn subject.

The Internet is different from the old business world at some point. On the Internet you first create a relationship with the visitors and only afterwards do you sell. In the old business world a person first becomes a customer and only afterwards (maybe) a relationship is formed.

In my Internet business, for example, I have a weekly newsletter with over 10,000 subscribers. The objective of the newsletter is to promote sales of my e-books. Some people purchase e-books from me only after reading my weekly newsletters over a fairly long period of time – one person subscribed for two years before purchasing from me.

A necessary condition for having a relationship with visitors and customers is to collect their e-mail addresses. The trick is that you have to provide a very good reason for people to willingly provide you with their e-mail address – everyone is very sensitive about their privacy and their time.

It’s necessary to do whatever possible (and sometimes creativity is required too), to persuade visitors to give you the thing that is most precious to them – “their time (that’s how the majority of people view providing their e-mail address).

Let’s assume that you have a hair salon. You have a website and you want to encourage your customers to provide you with their e-mail addresses.

Do you expect them to go into your website and register after a visit to the hair salon? That would be hard to believe. Even if you promise them significant benefits, chances are that they’ll simply forget to do it.

You therefore need to use a totally different tactic in this case:

An example would be to provide the customers waiting in the hair salon with Internet access in return for providing their e-mail addresses. Another possibility would be to offer a discount on the next visit to those who agree to provide their e-mail address on the spot.

One other way would be for a few hair salons to unite and produce electronic newsletters on the subject of lifestyle that will be sent free to the customers who provided their e-mail addresses.

There’s a need to break the fixation that subscribing to a mailing list must be on a website. This can be anywhere, even outside the Internet, in a hair salon – notices on the board, etc.

When you have the list in your hands, you have the gold in your hands. And if you use it correctly, you’ll increase your sales significantly.

Using the list, the hair salon can invite customers for an inexpensive haircut on slow days. It can also sell other products, for example cosmetics.There’s no limit to the possibilities.

I may be getting to be the tiresome Ancient Mariner at the party, endless going on about the same topic. But my repeated insistence that mobile media-consumption is key to the future of communications, keeps being borne out by each new industry development.

Under Rupert Murdoch’s lead, News Corporation executives have digested the projected numbers for cellphone users (five billion worldwide by 2010) and they don’t want to be left behind, as Murdoch himself has acknowledged happened in the Internet’s earliest days. Their new venture Mobizzo is both a mobile entertainment store and a new studio producing nothing but material for transmission to cellphones. Almost simultaneously the broadcasting giant CBS Corporation, recently spun off from its parent, the even bigger giant Viacom, has launched its service of cellphone “alertsâ€? about news – be it general news, called CBS News To Go, or showbiz buzz from the Entertainment Tonight team. The alerts will include video clips – and of course advertising.

CBS is also developing, with some faith in the mobile viewer that’s significant for the whole industry, a series of special cellphone-aimed soap operas, divided into episodes lasting from three to five minutes. News Corp have already been offering 24: Conspiracy, scenes derived from 24, the Fox TV series – but they don’t push the attention span beyond what observers feel will be most phone-viewers’ limit. The scenes have so far lasted just one minute.