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Ad Server Company ADPUSH
Seeks New Relationships with Sun VARs
Syracuse, NY - March 7, 2002 - ADPUSH, a leading supplier
of banner ad ASP services, is seeking to contact Sun VARs who may be interested
in reselling ad serving software and services based on the ADPUSH technology.
Most leading search-engines and portals use external ad server
technology to deliver advertising, and for many publishers the cost of buying
that kind of software and running ad serving ASPs can be one of their highest
cost factors in running their web business. That's because most ad servers
include a cost per impression as part of their pricing model.
Historically
most of that potentially lucrative business has not benefited the VAR channel
because ad server companies have used a direct selling model. Now for the first
time, ADPUSH will open up its products and services to selected VARs who can
offer this technology to own their customers. The product will suit ISPs who can
offer the services as a ASP on the same server as their customers use, thereby
giving faster performance, or it can be sold installed on rackmount SPARC
servers as a ready-to-run package for publishers who wish to manage their own
servers. The cost savings to such clients can be substantial, making this a
highly attractive value-added service.
The ADPUSH product runs fully optimized under Solaris on SPARC
servers, and has been in use on thousands of publisher sites worldwide. For
example, ACSL, publisher of the
SPARC Product Directory and
STORAGEsearch.com has been using
ADPUSH since 1998.
Sun VARs involved in the publishing, ISP and ASP markets should
contact
Rob Costello at 607-648-8381.
See
also:- article:-
Effective Banner Ad Campaign Management: view from an ad server ASP |
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KPMG Consultants sets up a
knowledge centre on Netmining technology in Belgium
Leuven/Brussels,
Belgium - March 6, 2002 – KPMG Consultants, a firm of management
consultants, has plans to include a new site analyzer tool from Netmining,
a Leuven-based developer of software, in its own international product suite.
With the aid of that software, companies will be able to extract hard facts
about potential customers from the surfing behaviour of visitors to their
website(s). This agreement is a significant step forward in the global expansion
of the Leuven-based start-up Netmining, which was founded in January 2000. In
order to pool implementation know-how about the Netmining products and make it
readily accessible, KPMG Consultants is in the process of setting up an
internationally-operating knowledge centre in Belgium. That location was chosen
because Netmining is headquartered in Leuven and the cooperation and technology
transfer had its origins there.
HitsIntoLeads and
HitsIntoMetrics HitsIntoLeads and HitsIntoMetrics are two software packages for
e-Business Intelligence for which Netmining has patents pending.
When a visitor is referred to a web page from a search engine or
directory, he leaves a detectable, electronic 'footprint' that reveals what
keywords and key phrases he used to search for an organization's site, product
or service. HitsIntoLeads analyses that 'footprint', thereby allowing such
organizations to target prospective customers to their site(s) and maximize
website revenue. HitsIntoLeads was launched in the middle of last year and was
used commercially, for the first time, by the hardware producer Compaq Europe,
with great success. That company identified, with the aid of the software, 30%
new sales leads and has already realized with this project, by their own
account, a return on investment of more than 100% after just a month's use.
HitsIntoLeads also won a silver medal of honour at the international trade fair
'Comdex Fall – 2001', in the 'Best eBusiness Products' category.
...Netmining |
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Many Companies Unprepared
to Meet Revenue Goals for First Half of 2002, So Says Report by VisionEdge
Marketing
AUSTIN,
Texas - March 4, 2002 - New research from VisionEdge Marketing, an
Austin, Texas-based strategic marketing consulting firm, suggests that many
companies will fail to achieve their sales objectives for the first six months
of 2002. The reason for this is not due to the soft economy, but the fact
that sales and marketing executives did not plan adequately to deal with
lengthening sales cycles and shrinking sales lead pipelines. Based on the
findings in the Business Readiness Report: January-June, 2002, VisionEdge
Marketing predicts upwards of 50 percent of the companies surveyed will see
lackluster sales during the first half of the year.
During January VisionEdge Marketing conducted a survey to examine how
companies were aligning sales and marketing initiatives with overall business
objectives. The results show that while companies are significantly increasing
sales targets, most are doing so with limited planning and budgets. Report
highlights include:
- A long sales cycle was the most commonly mentioned obstacle to achieving
business objectives. Half of the companies stated that their pipeline lacked
sufficient leads to support sales goals for January-June 2002.
- Only 25.7 percent of surveyed companies had an approved 2002 marketing
budget early enough in 2001 to be able to plan and implement effective marketing
programs. Forty percent of the companies received budget approval in December
and/or January—too late for strategies and programs to be launched to
impact revenue during the first four to five months of year. Nearly 33 percent
of the companies were operating without an approved marketing budget as late as
January 31, 2002.
- Companies appear to be hoping for miracles in 2002. Fifty-two
percent of the companies surveyed are attempting to achieve higher revenue goals
with the same or less marketing budget than last year. Of equal concern is how
companies are planning to generate sales leads. The two most frequently
mentioned methods were cold calling by field sales force and trade shows—both
of which are costly and time consuming.
"The focus after the middle of last year was on reducing expenses
– which meant slashing marketing budgets and headcount – and closing
the deals already in the pipeline," said Laura Patterson, president,
VisionEdge Marketing. "For many companies, the marketing engine is fairly
cold. Revving up the engines will require time that many companies haven't
factored into their forecasts. This also means that there is an even heavier
burden on a product's value proposition to help reduce the sales cycle.
Companies with a customer- and value-centric approach to the market, stand the
best chance of success. It's not too late to establish strategies that move the
company closer to the customer and therefore gain ground in the market place."
...VisionEdge
Marketing |
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GartnerG2 Says 2001 Online
Fraud Losses Were 19 Times as High as Offline Fraud Losses
STAMFORD,
Conn. - March 4, 2002 - More than $700 million in online sales were lost to
fraud in 2001, representing 1.14 percent of total annual online sales of $61.8
billion, according to GartnerG2, a research service from Gartner, Inc..
Online fraud losses for 2001 were 19 times as high, dollar for dollar, as
fraud losses resulting from offline sales. A new survey by GartnerG2 showed that
adult consumers in the United States are beginning to adopt credit card company
solutions designed to protect against online fraud.
A Gartner Internet survey of more than 1,000 adult U.S. online
consumers, conducted in January 2002, showed that 5.2 percent of respondents
were victimized by credit card fraud in 2001 and 1.9 percent were victimized by
identity theft (although respondents do not know whether the theft occurred
online or offline).
More than 18 percent of respondents are attempting to fight fraud by
embracing two new credit card protection systems: Visa's Verified by Visa and
MasterCard's Universal Cardholder Authentication Field (UCAF) standard and
Secure Payment Application (SPA).
Gartner will provide additional
analysis on online fraud during Gartner's upcoming conference, Information
Security: Combating Enterprise Espionage and Protecting Corporate Assets, which
will be held May 15-17, 2002, at the Sheraton Chicago Hotel and Towers in
Chicago.
...GartnerGroup profile |
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Deep Linking is Good
Linking
March
3, 2002 - a new article on Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox discusses deep
linking. Links that go directly to a site's interior pages enhance usability
because, unlike generic links, they specifically relate to users' goals.
Websites should encourage deep linking and follow three guidelines to support
its users. ...Useit.com/alertbox
Editor's
comments:- as a publisher, we started doing deep linking to advertiser web sites
many years ago. The benefit to readers is that if they see a product in our
directories and want more information, then in one click on "more info"
they can go straight to the fuller information on the advertiser's web site,
thereby saving 4 or 5 levels of navigation.
We also do the same with
press releases, so if readers want to see the full original text of a release,
and not just the truncated version, they can easily do so. Sometimes this
strategy isn't possible, if for example, we run a release before it appears on
the target site, or if the data on the product isn't available on the target
site (or if the web designer is working for the enemy). In those situations
we'll default to the home page or maybe the product pdf on our site. ButI agree
with the author that companies lose out by making deep linking difficult. |
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Email Miner from InfoLeaf
Software
Kelowna,
British Wollongong, NSW, Australia - March 2 2002 - "Email Miner"
from from InfoLeaf Software allows email marketers to extract email
addresses from the Internet and automatically email them. The product
allows the user to specify which words that the web page, where the email is
extracted from, must and must not contain. This allows the marketer to only
target people who will be interested in what they have to say, instead of
emailing a millionaire about reducing their debt.
Once the emails are extracted, the user hits the send emails button,
enters the content of the email, and the program sends off the email one by one.
This makes the email appear as if the user clicked on the email link on the
persons website and sent the email to them personally. The only difference is
that email is being sent to thousands of people regarding a topic they are
interested in. The product costs $169.95 and a free trial download is
available. ...InfoLeaf Software
Editor's
comment:- used responsibly, this type of tool could be useful, but let's call a
spade a spade. In the wrong hands this is an automatic SPAM list generator.
Unlike most publishers I rarely use email as a promotion tool. In fact I just
checked... My ratio of sent emails divided by incoming emails (excluding SPAM)
is 95%. That means I send less emails than I receive. I don't have time to
reply to all the relevant emails I get (sorry about that).
However
much anyone may try to convince you otherwise, the only true internet based "permission
marketing" is web advertising. Readers come to a web site because they want
to. If your promotion activities rely on email lists, other than sending emails
back to people who have contacted you, they're probably not going to work.
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Other news on this page
Ad
Server Company ADPUSH Seeks New Relationships with Sun VARs
KPMG Consultants sets up a knowledge centre on Netmining technology
in Belgium
Many Companies Unprepared to Meet Revenue Goals for First Half of
2002, So Says Report by VisionEdge Marketing
GartnerG2 Says 2001 Online
Fraud Losses Were 19 Times as High as Offline Fraud Losses
Deep Linking
is Good Linking
Email Miner from InfoLeaf Software
earlier news (archive) |
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View from the Hill:-
What If?... Speculation
About Mergers Which Might Have Been
Although the official
count for the HP-Compaq merger could take weeks, it's likely that both companies
will do better this year, regardless of the outcome, because of the IT recovery
that's already started. Maybe it's the Spring weather, or maybe when a market
has already been in recession for a year, the quarterly comparisons with the
year before don't look so bad any more. And even PCs do start to look a bit
tired and need replacing if you hang onto them for a third or fourth year. If
the options are to replace old systems or decomputerise, then eventually
companies will have to buy some new stuff.
There have been over 100
mergers and acquisitions in the storage market since January 2000, and this got
me speculating about matches which, unlike the HP-Compaq merger, wouldn't be so
synergistic.
In the mid 1990's there was strong speculation that Sun
Microsystems was planning to buy Apple Computer. Imagine what the results would
be now, if that had gone ahead. When a customer buys a iMac they have to go on a
two week systems administration course on the SunMacOS operating system before
they're allowed to turn it on. Or when you order your next SPARC mainframe for
the datacenter there's a four week delay before delivery, because the color you
wanted (to match your carpet) is not in stock, and you don't want to risk the
faster delivery but tatty appearance offered by a gray Sun VAR of an ex-stock
model with a garage respray.
Then there are those other possible
mergers, which even their managements haven't considered yet, and I want a
percentage of the proceeds if this article gives them ideas.
Suppose
EMC were to merge with Palm? You'd get the amazing PalmBack, a PDA with 10
Terabytes of data including all your favorite DVDs, CDs and business reports etc
(much more than 4 hours of music!) connected to your neat little hand sized
device connected via a BlueTooth wireless interface to a backpack weighing 60
pounds which straps to your shoulders. The PalmBack standard model would run for
30 minutes with its built in power source, but you could get an optional UPS
based on ten car batteries strapped together which you pull along on a little
trolley behind you.
Then there's the merger between Microsoft and the
entertainment industry which we've been waiting to really happen for the last
ten years or so. Only let's give it the proper name, the Content Delivery
Industry. If Microsoft merged with Lucas Films, you'd be half way through
watching the next episode of Star Wars, delivered down your broadband pipe,
when, fifteen minutes from the end, the screen would go blue with a message
saying "There is a fault with this system, please press control-alt-delete
to restart, and contact your software vendor." You reset the system, but
like Groundhog Day, it doesn't resume from where it crashed, instead you have to
start watching the movie all over again from the beginning... That's what you
get for being a beta site, and buying the new content delivery system in the
first year after it came out. You should have known better. Version 4.3 will fix
that problem.
OK maybe those later mergers might never happen, so I
won't get any credit for proposing them. But you never know, if the Nasdaq heats
up again we're going to see some crazy things again. (I'm going to watch CNBC
tonight to see if my suggestions get a mention, just in case.) And maybe the
HP-Compaq merger doesn't look so strange now that we've had enough time to get
used to it. | | |
