Ecommercepartners.net

We’d like to send a quick congratulations to GateWood Floors (http://www.gatewoodfloors.com/) on the release of their brand new Ecommerce storefront. GateWood sells a wide selection of hardwood flooring at great prices. They provide excellent customer service and specialize in working with contractors, architects, builders and the do-it-yourselfers.

So for anyone out there looking to go the route of gorgeous new hardwood floors, please check them out.

I have watched with awed fascination, because I am such an enthusiast for maps, the development of universally available, satellite-aided mapping through the internet.

It came no surprise to see web-users soon exploiting the commercial possibilities of computer-generated mapping. If you can merge into an online map other forms of information – like, say, real estate details and prices, a slide-show of scenic pictures, or a guide to geographically-indexed businesses – you can of course sell this value-added compilation. And that’s exactly what many web-savvy people are now doing.

So many in fact that O’Reilly Media, the 28-year old Sebastapol, California-based company formed by alpha geeks who claim virtually to have invented Open Source networking, were able to hold an e-mapping conference in San Jose this month (June 13-14), wittily titled “Where 2.0″. Everyone there was deeply into “mash-ups”, the mixing of maps from Google (and elsewhere) with other helpful stuff mixed in, that’s been growing so rapidly since it began about a year ago.

It was only in June 2005 that Google began allowing developers to pretty much do whatever they liked with its map data. Microsoft’s Virtual Earth started similar open access in September, and Yahoo! fully opened up its mapping program in recent weeks.

A few operators have proved able to turn such access into profitable businesses, like the real estate startup Zillow.com, which uses Microsoft’s maps. But a lot of others – and they were very evident in the hallways at the conference site at San Jose’s Fairmont Hotel – seem content to invent something clever, and then hope a big outfit (like the service providing the maps in the first place) buys them up.

The dot-com world has long been peopled by such hopefuls – and there are always examples to look to. This mapping mash-up field can offer the case of 3-D graphic artist Paul Rademacher, who has yoked together material from Craigslist and Google Maps to create HousingMaps.com, which enables renters and buyers look for homes by mapped location. Rademacher has been bought up by – guess who? -  Google.

A few brave souls, however, say they are in it to preserve their independence. Di-Ann Eisnor, chief executive of Platial, a map-sharing site for people with mutual interests, said: “We’re thankful that Google opened up their technology so we could build a business off of them. But we have to believe we can compete with them.”

Eisnor, who describes the Platial customer-base as “mostly academic subcultures, like elephant trackers in Africa,” says her company should be profitable within a year.

The life-blood of commercial communications in America seems to be slowing its pump-rate. I mean of course advertising. In the first quarter of 2006 advertising expenditure nationwide has barely kept pace with overall national economic growth.  Doesn’t sound so too bad, does it? Until you recognize that spending on advertisements has conventionally been much higher than the country’s Gross Domestic Product. And that’s disconcerting close watchers of media economics.

The ad-spending tracking company TNS Media Intelligence had at one point been forecasing a 5.5 percent rate of expansion for U.S. ad spending from January through March 2006, but it actually came in at 5.2 percent – chiming eerily with the GDP.  Now it so happens that the GDP is itself up a little on many economists’ predictions, but even so the comparative slump in advertising dollars is worrysome. TNS’s President and CEO Steven Fredericks told

MediaDaily News: “We’ll be very interested to see what happens in the second quarter.” He also speculated, perhaps more in hope than certainty, that “right now it looks like it might be an aberration”.

Meanwhile, nestling deep within overall national statistics, one particular media sector that has been prone to more worry perhaps than any other – the newspaper industry – is actually doing better than expected.  But print workers shouldn’t break out the bunting too soon. The improvement lies with those newspapers who have wholeheartedly developed a web-presence, and along with that aggressively pursued online advertising.

Preliminary estimates from the Newspaper Association of America indicate that advertising expenditures for newspaper Web sites increased by 34.9 percent to $613 million in the first quarter of 2006 compared with 2005.  Print and online expenditures together totaled $11.1 billion in that quarter, meaning a 1.8 percent year-over-year increase. Not too disastrous, I would say, for a supposedly dying dinosaur.

Chief wrangler of the dinosaurs (if I can so call him) is John Sturm, President and CEO of the NAA, and he says “Newspaper publishers are winning on the Web, and their efforts to attract visitors, build leading Internet properties and monetize their online investments are being recognized by advertisers and consumers.”

Ahh.. baby is born and what better to do than wrap him/her up in a cushy new baby blanket.  BabyBlankets.com is dedicated to none other than; baby blankets

A novel idea for a truely great product… These blankets generally last through childhood and often time become a piece of that childs security.  It’s great to see a site dedicated to the art of gift giving for new borns and we highly reccomend all new borns get their own soft, warm, lifelong baby blanket.

There’s a lot of heated argument about whether watching online video is the same as TV or not. I’ve heard enthusiasts come almost to blows about the difference (or not) between “forward-leaning” watching – as toward a computer screen – and laid-back watching, as with couch potatoes lounging in front of a boob-tube.

And even with what appears to be “regular” television, it’s perhaps hard to remember – except when it takes forever to boot up – that modern-day set-top boxes have essentially turned our familiar TV set into a form of computer.

Now the market leader in at least one kind of media “convergence”, TiVo, is launching a new service that offers internet video. But it’s coming in such a way as it can be viewed on a normal TV.

TiVo’s Chief Executive Tom Rogers put it very clearly and simply when he said: “For an awful lot of viewers, video doesn’t become real TV until you can watch it on the television”. And so we have TiVoCast, the company’s new add-on service.

Subscribers who have TiVo’s Series2 digital video recorder with its inbuilt  broadband connection will (from June 7,2006) be able to access, at no extra charge above their TV connection fee, video clips from the National Basketball Association, the women-skewing Web firm iVillage Inc., the New York Times’ video services, and others.

Adding this new internet-delivery capacity is a perhaps overdue response by TiVo to the feisty outfit’s getting a lot of competitive pressure from big cable-providers like Time Warner and Cablevision, and from satellite services like DirecTV. For a while now these giants, stung by TiVo’s success, have been pushing onto customers their own versions of digital video recorders combined with their set-top or delivery boxes.

TiVo clearly wants to differentiate itself from its big conglomerate rivals, and if it can also hasten the day when the computer and the TV screen start fully to merge in our minds, so much the better (perhaps?) for everyone.

There’s been a recent craze of people looking to register .st domains… is there any value in them? Sure, same as there is value in all top level TLD’s. It just depends how you use them. For instance, if you were able to register Arizona.st that might be pretty valuable in the sense that Arizona State University might want to get their hands on it or the owner could build an ASU-centric site around it. One route takes much more effort than the other though. That being said, there seems to be a common misconception that .st stands for the word STATE when in fact in stands for the wor SiTe.. as in website. All in all, .st means nothing more than .us .cc .bz, etc.. The worth is in how you use it.

Take for instance Del.icio.us

The service itself actually IS revolutionary in classic Web 2.0 style but the buzz was created through the very clever use of the TLD .us — .st is no different

Kevin Martin, the Bush-appointed Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission has finally got his way.  The US Senate has confirmed Robert McDowell, a communications company lobbyist (and Martin’s fellow-member of the Bush-Cheney Recount Team in Florida in November 2000) to fill the long-vacant fifth seat on the Commission.

Martin now has a safe Republican majority over the two Democrat members, Michael Copps and Jonathan Adelstein.  The log-jam on the Commission over several contentious issues is now likely to be broken. Important among them is Martin’s effort, begun by his predecessor Michael Powell but stymied by the a federal appeals court, lift the general ban on cross-ownership of TV stations and newspapers in the same city or community, and ease the limits on how many stations a single company can own in one market. Media conglomerates who want to grow bigger have already put the champagne on ice.

And big phone companies are licking their lips too. Chances are now that FCC approval of AT&T’s merger with BellSouth, and Time Warner’s break-up of Adelphi’s assets will be swift, and condition-free. Under the previous FCC, Verizon’s merger with MCI and the then A&T’s merger with SBC gained approval only on condition that the telcom giants would be blocked for two years from trying to block or otherwise interfere with voice or data traffic on their networks – the preciously valued concept of “net neutrality”. That concept may be at further risk now.

Like Goldman, Wall Street securities firm Merrill Lynch is – at the core of its business as an investment bank – supposed to serve its clients with the best, most sober advice about where to sink their capital. It’s of course a serious responsibility, so it was a bit arresting to see Merrill give their recent report (May 26) on the outlook for the US newspaper industry the emotional title, “Deep Depressing Dive”.

Merrill’s team, led by analyst Lauren Rich Fine, had obviously been considering the same evidence, about the migration of advertising revenue from newspapers to online sites, that led the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PriceWaterhouseCoopers accountants to announce (May 30) that the first quarter of 2006 produced a record $3.9 billion in web-advertisement spending, a striking 38% increase on the same three months last year.

Merrill’s gloomy forecast for newspapers is that they will see more ad revenue next year, but only by a rise of 1.1%, down from the 1.4% they had previously expected. “We remain concerned regarding the newspaper industry’s outlook”, Merrill concludes, “as the dual impact of changing media consumption habits and the migration of highly lucrative

classified ads to the Internet are squeezing margins and hampering growth.”

Oddly, in the online world the newspaper industry is making an effort to claw back advertising. I say oddly, because it’s downright peculiar. In online sites of media interest it has placed a banner ad that carries a picture of the Founding Fathers. Its text asks: “What made the freedom of the press so important to the Founders?” And it answers: “Maybe it was the coupons”. For a punchline it proclaims: “Newspaper advertising – a destination not a distraction”.

Do you think this works? Could anyone?