Look beyond basic listings
Of course it would naive to ignore the search engine completely but there are ways of appearing high on the listings without being at the mercy of changing algorithms. Many, if not all, search engines have sponsored listings and PPC (Pay Per Click) options where good performance can be achieved, at a cost.

In addition to this though, there are services like Google Places which often feed search results. These tend to be centred around locality and could certainly drive traffic should your business operate at a local level.

Social Media
The usual suspects (Facebook, Twittier and Linkedin) can be used to drive traffic to your site. Both Facebook and Linkedin have advertising streams so you can target specific users but you also have the opportunity to engage with customers who are already interested in your product or service. Actively engaging with potential and existing customers gives you the opportunity to offer tailored advice or put right any issues that would have otherwise gone unresolved. Also, don’t forget – their network can see what is going on and with each Facebook user having on average 130 friends, that’s a lot of exposure.

Blogging
Try to share your knowledge with your customers. You will know your industry more than most, so try to position yourself as an authoritative source on it and be the go to site for such information. Make it so people bookmark your page and if they don’t want your products or services now, there will come a time when they do. A well-written and relevant blog post will encourage sharing and a wider range of people will find you.

Traditional Marketing
Get offline! Traditional media still has a part to play. Letters, posters and flyers can push a large amount of traffic and if targeted correctly it ensure so that your marketing material gets under the noses of the correct people. It also allows you to reach non-techy people and they can get physically passed around and filed.

If you have any more ideas taht you would like to share please levae your comments below.

The Scarborough Open Air Theatre needed a high-speed Internet connection in a very short time-frame, as Elton John and his production team needed high-speed internet access and a dedicated IP telephony service to ensure the show, and the logistics behind it all, ran like clockwork. Due to the time frame involved the option of digging up roads to install fibre was a ‘no-go’ so Save9 and NYnet were approached to come up with a solution. Based on previous project experience in supplying high-speed Internet access to businesses, without the civil-engineering headaches, we opted for WiMAX technology (see customer case study):

WiMAX & Wi-Fi: Crown Spa Hotel case study

We basically fire our NYnet fibre Internet connection, using radio data links, from the Woodend Creative Workspace building to a receiver on top of the Crown Spa Hotel, which we have a clear line of sight to. In turn we thought it may be possible to send this signal up the coast to the Scarborough Open Air Theatre that is 1.2 miles away from the Crown Spa Hotel. All we needed was a direct line of sight. After many hair-raising climbs to the top of many of Scarborough’s tallest buildings we were surprised to discover that we had a direct line of site all along (thanks to Google Maps and a pair of binoculars)!

We set about making arrangements and just days before Elton was due to arrive for his show; the relevant antenna radios were installed, the Save9 support team worked through the night until finally, at 1am in the morning, successful connectivity was achieved – reaching speeds of 50Mbps through the air.

The run-up to the show and the show itself went off without a hitch and the Save9 WiMAX network now crosses the whole town – linking the South Bay to the North Bay.

Elton John at the Scarborough Open Air Theatre

The event is organised by the Internet Society – with the aim to try and motivate ISPs, telecoms manufacturers and web companies to prepare their internet services for IPv6.

IPv6 (Internet Protocol version 6) is the successor to IPv4, the Internet addressing protocol which has been used for many years since the very early days of the Internet. The current IPv4 address space only contains 4.3 billion addresses and they are increasingly being rationed. Put simply; the internet will soon run out of capacity to cater for the increasing volume of devices, clients and servers that need to get online.

If you run a website, and want to take part, you will need to verify that your website hosting provider offers IPv6 (of course – Save9 can help you if they don’t) and we can enable the test for you. You will need to be able to configure what are known as ‘Quad A records’ in your DNS zone to enable people to find you by the new internet protocol – IPv6.

For more information on ‘future-proofing’ (a term we are usually hesitant to use – but quite appropriate here) your web server for the next internet protocol version then please get in touch by contacting Steve Bromham at Save9 on 0845 0299999.

It is of interest that Dell is now entering the market with a 5″ device that sits somewhere between a smart phone and a tablet. The Dell Streak, or Dell Mini as it will be called in the UK, boasts support for Adobe Flash and includes two cameras. On top of this the Streak will also include a MicroSD slot which means the device is expandable up to 32GB – something which both the iPad and iPhone don’t offer.

This Android based device will arrive in the UK next month so watch this space.

(TechNewsDaily, 19/04/2010)

KPMG anticipates that the ICO will quickly look for big name companies to target with its beefed up powers and has come up with some suggestions to keep the right side of the law on data privacy.

Encrypt your data. While in decline, KPMG points out that 20% of all incidents are caused by a failure to encrypt sensitive data. Organisations should take care to encrypt not just laptops but also desktops.

Check out third parties. KPMG estimated that a third of the 490 million people affected by data losses since 2005 involved cases where the loss was caused by a third party, normally a supplier. However, it is the data owner that will be pursued by the regulators, so it’s vital to look beyond simply having a security clause in a contract and actively confirm what that means in practice. If something then goes wrong, the data owners can prove that they did everything in their power to comply with regulations.

Offshore contracts. Offshoring or outsourcing relationships need to be carefully examined, particularly if data is offshored to countries where data value is not so highly prized. Even if there are processes in place, they may still fail because of this mismatch in appreciation of data value which may result in their response to a problem not being as prompt or thorough as the company or regulator would like.

Deal with data loss quickly. If the worst happens, companies are likely to incur higher fines if they don’t recognise the severity of the loss, are tardy about reporting it, don’t conduct a through investigation, assess the impact on individuals involved or act quickly to correct the weakness.

Beware the regulator. With its new powers, the ICO will be keen to flex its muscles and demonstrate how seriously it takes data breaches. Companies should ensure they have done all they can to identify and correct problems.

Please contact Save9 on telephone 0845 029999 or email info@save9.com for a complimentary data protection session or to request data sheets on our range of data protection solutions.

Maggie Berry, director of womenintechnology.co.uk, said the fact that women try to sort problems out themselves “spoke volumes”.

She suggested that there had been no noticeable improvement as yet in the number of women entering the traditionally male-dominated IT professions, but expressed hope that this will change in the near future.

Ms Berry said she wised to see that “the generation of young people coming through growing up with technology… who are female would consider working in IT”.

The study found that women spend on average 32 per cent longer on the phone than men attempting to find a solution, but males are almost twice as likely to call back having not resolved the issue first time around.

Meanwhile, 64 per cent of men surveyed admitted they had not initially read the instruction manual, compared with just 24 per cent of women.

The release of code, begun last year, continues with the delivery of the fundamental basis of SEP sesam and is now available under the GNU General Public License (GPL). Users now have the added security that they will always have access to their valuable information.

Government IT disaster recovery specialists and military backup software developers in particular will be attracted to the SEP sesam open source model as they will have full access to the underlying code.

SEP is delivering the engine of its Backup and Recovery software, SEP sesam. Thus providing the most powerful backup solution available today without cost, including the valued multi-streaming, multiplexing technology (SMS) to the GPL libraries. SMS along with the SEP Transfer Protocol for Data (STPD) controls the entire flow of data from the SEP client (already available under GPL) assuring rapid, accurate and reliable transfer to the backup medium (disk or tape, SAN, etc.). This important release allows the open source community direct access to critical algorithms and methodology used to store data. Data thus recorded can be converted to source code and be backed up to media for eventual archiving.

“The law in Europe stipulates that all businesses and institutions have the ability, without a third-party, to recover and read their data,” stated Georg Moosreiner, Chairman of SEP AG. “That is why we are providing the open source community with the source code for our Server/Master Server modules. Basically, the STPD is the brain of the software. Our users now have the added security that their backed up data will always be usable.” Moosreiner continued.

In addition to this, SEP is releasing the API and command line interface to the community. These tools enable the direct access to the STPD server and permit users to develop their own management tools and create their own unique backup environment.

“By opening the source code SEP fulfills the decisive requirement for the integration into the Open Source Solution Stack from the Linux Solutions Group e.V. (LiSoG),” reported Thomas Uhl, Director for LiSoG. “For the first time users have a guaranteed method to develop a robust and complete Enterprise Backup/Recovery solution. This software source code now escrowed for everyone to use, is a huge step toward insuring data availability and integrity for the entire community”.

Contact Save9 for info on obtaining the SPE sesam source code libraries.

Emerging super powers and developing nations drive innovation

Due to the rise of mobile technology people in areas that have not been able to get connected now can. For example the growth on Internet usage in Africa over the last decade has grown by over 1, 300%. All the new users have new needs and most exciting of all new ideas. Speaking at a recent conference, Wikipedia co-founder, Jimmy Wales said that the new cultures, languages and ideas would “mix and match in amazing ways.”

Location based social networks

We have seen many location based applications emerge on the iPhone and established ‘Web 2.0′ sites include location based services – for example GeoTagging on Flickr. The beauty of the Internet is that anyone can contribute to any topic but that inevitably means a lot of information that isn’t relevant to a user at a moment in time. Give information a contextual quality, such as a location, means that relevant information should be easier to find and crucially more useful to the user.

As the decade progresses it is thought that this will emerge into a big industry, APIs such as those provided by Google for Google Maps and sites that you wouldn’t necessarily associate with open APIs, such as Trip Advisor enable useful applications and websites to be created.

Real-time search

It could be argued that this has started to progress and take off quite nicely, but it hasn’t quite entered everyday public use. As touched on in a previous blog post, real time search will help provide more relevant search result for users.

Magazine and Newspaper Apps

This topic has also been covered in a previous blog post but I believe we will see a lot more of these in the coming year. They have the ability to provide people with what they want, when they want it and most importantly it gives newspapers and magazines an opportunity to make money.

Someone…somewhere…will find an effective use for Google Wave

Google Wave has many detractors but as it rolls out to more and more users I think people will find it a useful tool, and that’s the point, it is a tool, it will not replace email (at least I hope not)!

Talking of finding a use we have a few ideas so watch this space.

So there you have it, we will check back in twelve months to see what happens!

I will leave you with a few other predictions from my colleagues:

• Simon predicts that the move to ban Google Analytics in Germany will fail
• Steve predicts that cloud computing will take off in a big way

The problems with charging for online content have been debated numerous times and it boils down to this:

News stories are just that :- news. They aren’t owned by anyone and the fact that the BBC report news on their website (that, as license fee payers, we already pay for) means that people can always get news without paying extra.

What about specialist news I hear you shout! Again same problem, news is out there and there will always be someone who will offer it for free or write their own version and post it. How about a group of friends clubbing together and accessing the content with a shared username and passwords?

But it could work

The Internet is successful because it gives people a voice. Anyone can post content and that is never going to change. The sooner online newspapers and magazines can accept that and think of ways they can truly differentiate themselves is the time they can start to make money.

Charge to search and access archives

It’s the data and libraries of information that holds the key for these companies. Don’t charge for accessing up to the minute news information on your website, there is no point. Charge to access old articles and information and maybe even charge on per a search basis. Only major news websites will have the capacity to do this, and the fact that the information cannot be cross-checked and supplemented by what users hear on TV and Radio means they have a greater need to go to a respected source.

Micropayments

The article linked above states that Johnson Press are charging £5 for a three-month subscription. That price is enough for users to think twice when parting with the fee and each user is charged the same regardless of how often the service is used.

A new pricing model may be that of Micropayments. If a user is charged, for the sake of argument, 1p every time they read a news article they will not think twice about parting with that sum of money. The issue of micropayments have been around for a while so if you fancy a little bed-time reading then these links may be of use:

The Case For Micropayments
The Case Against Micropayments

Life beyond the browser
As many sites offer current news stories, as discussed previously, there is little point for charging for the data – on the browser. What about other devices?

Mobile has grown in a big way this year and the massive success of the iPhone means that users can be permanently connected. Online newspapers and magazines could charge for current content as they provide it to the user when they are not at their PC or laptop, by charging for apps. Again the key here is to offer something different, for example a searchable archive.

Many companies online struggle to create revenue, with Twitter being the high-profile case, but it should be possible with a shift in thinking.