Encouraging Hackers - Great Idea :-(

I was just reading the lastest Mashable article called iPhone, Firefox, Safari, IE8 Hacked at Pwn2Own Contest they say 

"Vincenzo Iozzo and Ralf Philipp Weinmann sent an iPhone to a web site they’d set up, crashing its browser and then stealing its entire SMS database (including some erased messages). It is possible, however, to set up a similar attack to work without crashing the browser, hackers claim, and set up different attack payloads. Iozzo and Weinmann won a $15,000 prize for successfully demonstrating the attack. Details about the attack will be released once Apple is notified and the security hole is patched."

"Charlie Miller, principal security analyst at Independent Security Evaluators, managed to hack Safari on a MacBook Pro without physical access, which won him $10,000. Nils (no last name given), head of research at UK-based MWR InfoSecurity, won $10,000 for hacking Firefox, and independent security researcher Peter Vreugdenhil won the same amount for hacking IE8. All the browser attacks were done by having the browser visit a malicious web site; although full details aren’t disclosed, Cnet has some more technical info on the attacks."

Now seriously why are they being encouraged!? And on even more of a rant what do hackers get out of breaking things!? I know that these guys are obviously very talented but surely they can better use their talents?? There seems to have been a huge increase in the amount of viruses and spammers recently, and especially with the viruses - what do their creators get from it!? Of the sites that I know that have been infected recently none of them hold databases of customer information or anything else that may been seen as valuable. I genuinely don't get it!! Is this the modern version of mindless violence? 

Seriously spammers and virus wielding low lives - GET A JOB!!

Rant over - I feel much better now ;-) 

Posted via email from Grow Sales Online's Posterous

Y Combinator presents 26 new startups

Startup incubator Y Combinator is hosting its semi-annual Demo Day today. Twice a year, the Mountain View, Calif.-based incubator parades its latest batch of companies onstage to present before potential investors.

This afternoon, 26 companies will pitch their business plans. Approximately half of them have not yet launched. We’ll be in Mountain View to cover the ones that catch our fancy.

Y Combinator companies generally receive about $5,000 plus an additional $5,000 per founder and are relocated to Y Combinator’s Mountain View destination for three months, in return for a 2-10% ownership. The program’s alumni include Loopt, Justin.tv, Weebly and Scribd.

Below are 21 of the companies presenting today that agreed to be mentioned, along with descriptions that they provided. Five others are still in stealth mode, and requested to go unnamed.

LaunchHear
Founders: Alex Krupp, Allan Young
LaunchHear is a platform for introducing new & unreleased products to digital influencers. We reduce the cost of sending free products to bloggers and tweeters by 10x. We also host Swagapalooza, the first invitation-only event for only the most-followed bloggers and tweeters from across the country.

NewsLabs
Founders: Paul Biggar, Nathan Chong
NewsLabs turns an experienced offline journalist into VentureBeat or TechCrunch for their niche. We provide tools, traffic, monetization and community to allow journalists to succeed as personal brands online, while allowing them to focus on the writing and reporting.

Seeing Interactive
Founders: Lloyd Armbrust, Jason Novek
A white-label Yelp for newspapers: Think Yellow Pages + Cars + Homes + Craigslist all launched as one package for small US markets. We work through local newspapers, TV or Radio stations to brand the product as their own and make money through monthly fees and upsells.

Notifo
Founder: Chad Etzel
Creating a mobile phone push notification platform which allows any service/business/app/website/anyone to send instant notifications to their users’ mobile phones without the need to develop applications for specific hardware models.

Zencoder
Founders: Jon Dahl, Brandon Arbini, Steve Heffernan
Cloud services for video encoding, delivery, and monetization (AWS for video)

Nowmov
Founders: Thomas Pun, James Black, David Kelso
Nowmov shows you the hottest videos on Twitter RIGHT NOW. We discover the most talked about videos well before our competitors do (YouTube, Redux and Bitly.tv). Our user experience intentionally mimics TV watching — discovery is passive, rather than requiring the user to click around. Videos are presented continuously in an elegant user interface. Users can skip and replay clips at any time just like surfing TV channels.

Crocodoc
Founders: Ryan Damico, Bennett Rogers, Peter Lai, Matt Long
Crocodoc makes it easy to collaboratively mark up and share documents online. Our goal is to do to Adobe Acrobat what Gmail did to Outlook: replace a popular desktop application with a better online version.

Gamador
Founders: Kevin Lacker, Dan Silberman
We make social games. We launch faster, iterate faster, and use metrics better.

Cardpool
Founders: Anson Tsai, Tim Wong
Secondary market for the $100 billion / year gift card market.

Tweetflow
Founders: Troy Kruthoff, Robert Bagley, Josh Unfried
Replace your twitter profile page with a custom website. Crowd source and engage content from the tweet stream with language processing technology to automatically identify questions, praise and complaints mentioning your brand. Collaborate with team members, site visitors and twitter users with our embedded multi-account twitter client and CRM. Track results and tweet smarter with built-in analytics and dashboards.

CHROMAom, Inc.
Founders: Darius Monsef, Aaron Epstein, Chris Williams
Profitable and reaching over 1 million visitors per month with the largest color community on the web, we’re positioned to turn our online dominance into a global color authority. In the near future, we see a world where every color – in the products we buy, brands we trust or spaces we live in – will be influenced by CHROMAom.

Answerly.com
Founders: Joe Fahrner, Jason Konrad
Answerly has developed a technology and methodology to identify under-served, high value segments of the web search market and rapidly prototype vertical search engines to address these opportunities. Our first product, Answerly.com, is a Q&A search engine that receives nearly 1MM questions per month which we monetize through targeted advertising and referrals to online experts and local service providers.

Zenedy
Founders: Dan Morin, Jeff Morin
The current practice of creating content around a perceived audience interest and attempting to monetize it through potentially unrelated advertising is an inefficient business model. Zenedy is taking the opposite approach by first determining algorithmically what content people are searching for, then identifying what portion of that content could effectively be monetized through targeted advertising, and finally contracting out the creation of that content to qualified freelance writers. This model minimizes the risks associated with creating content based on little or no data, and results in content which quickly pays for itself, and then continues to generate revenue into the foreseeable future.

Data Marketplace
Founders: Matt Hodan, Steve DeWald
Data Marketplace helps people find, buy and sell data online. We are like Amazon.com, but for data. Sellers publish data to Data Marketplace for buyers to purchase and download. We reduce friction between buyers and sellers by (a) making it easier for buyers to find and access the data they need, and (b) offering sellers a more efficient sales and distribution channel than is currently available. In addition to the marketplace, we are developing a number of new technologies that facilitate paid information exchange, including a social data request and fulfillment system and payment gateway for third-party APIs and data feeds.

Embedster
Founders: Denis Mars, Arend Naylor
Imagine if you as the site owner could make money every time someone played a video (such as YouTube, Vimeo, etc) on your website or blog. Embedster makes this possible.

Etacts
Founers: Howie Liu, Evan Beard
Etacts is Salesforce for everyone–an individual CRM that keeps track of people and relationships (instead of deals). We also fix the email overload problem by adding social data and previous communication history to your emails and filtering emails by the importance of the sender.

Embedly
Founders: Sean Creeley, Arthur Gibson
Embedly is a single source solution for embeddable any piece of content on the web.

500Friends
Founders: Justin Yoshimura, Hong Hu
500Friends enables online retailers to dramatically increase their brand image, traffic, and sales by effectively leveraging social media. Merchants use our technologies to identify active social networkers and offer them rewards such as discounts, loyalty points, and charitable contributions in exchange for sharing the site with their friends. We’re already generating sales for our existing clients!

Infoharmoni
Founders: Kovas Boguta, Paulius Jurgutis
Infoharmoni visualizes the real-time social web. We aggregate content, aggregate people, aggregate relationships and then express those visually, in real-time and over time. Our tools visually slice and dice the stream and put that into actionable context by correlating it with business data. This lets marketers demonstrate ROI on today’s most relevant platforms: Twitter, Bit.ly, Gowalla and Foursquare.

140Bets
Founders: Jason Wilk, Paras Chitakar
140Bets makes social sports (and soon pop culture) betting applications for Twitter, Facebook and Mobile platforms.

Greplin
Founder: Daniel Gross
Greplin is a search engine that runs through all of your cloud data. Much like Google indexes webpages, Greplin indexes your Facebook, Gmail, Twitter, Basecamp etc data and provides a fast, cross-service full-text search.

via venturebeat.com

Some really great ideas here, some rather naff ones too though! I love the idea of the 500Friends one, really simple and everyone gets something out of it. Tweetflow also sounds good, though I fear that there may already be tools out there that do the same, they say 'and CRM' - if its integrated with the social media channels then Brilliant!

Posted via web from Grow Sales Online's Posterous

Title Tags and Nothern Ireland Web Designers!

What is it about Title Tags?

Title Tags are very important in the world of serch engine optimisation. Anything you read about search engine optimisation (SEO) tells you that title tags are right up there as one of the most important things that website should have. Yet, many clinets I go to see already have been through one or two website designers and yet have not heard of the term "title tag" - I know that website designers in Northern Ireland know about title tags so why the reluctance to talk to clients about their importance?

Simply put - no good relevant title tags = no meaningful place in organic search engine results

I have been out with clients recently who have moved to me from other website designers simply because the notion of keywords was never discussed with the client and their use in title tags and other relevant places was non-exisitent - and the client was wondering why they were not appearing in search engine pages for relevant searches!

Not sure what title tags are??? Well, do a very simple test - go to your website and look at the very top left hand corner of the screen (the blue bar in Explorer) - whatever it says there is your title tag - if it says anything like "Home", " Untitled", "HomePage", "Welcome" then please drop me an email and lets talk!!!

Your title should reflect the words for which you would like to be found. For example, if you owned a site selling grease traps in Ireland - then your title should say something like ....

"Grease Traps Ireland, Grease Trapping Ireland, Grease Removal Unit Ireland"

Title tags are basic, so simple to fix and so important that it is a crime if your title tags are not what they should be - so get fixing!!

Invest NI Online Marketing Event 3rd March 2009

Well now I am really glad that I took the time to attend the event today - I feel really positive about my plans for Grow Sales Online and very motivated to get my own online marketing sorted rather than just worrying about everyone else!! Thought I'd just bring you up to speed on what you missed:

Key Note Address: George Wright, Blendtec
Despite the sound system letting him down George gave a very entertaining, engaging and informative address. He was really able to demonstrate that small regional / 'isolated' businesses are now able to reach global markets through the use of the internet. Blendtec's initial investment in their first online marketing strategy was only $50 - I think that we could all stretch to that size of a marketing budget!!
The points that really hit home with me in this address were that-
1. Just because the online marketing tools are out there, is doesn't mean you have to use them all. You should only use those that are best suited to your business.
2. Whether you are using Facebook, Twitter or Youtube the content MUST be real and honest, the online community is ruthless when it comes to authenticity and it can do real damage to your brand if (more likely when) you are caught out.
3. Content is the biggest cost - This is the thing that I think small businesses overlook is the value in the information that they have about their product, sector or industry. Nowadays, online sharing the expertise that you have is a very valuable commodity in terms of attracting business.

Susan Hallam - Hallam Communications
Susan covered SEO and Pay Per Click advertising.
She covered the basic's of SEO that I covered in the Craigavon seminars. She was very straight forward, and showed up some of our local 'big web design' companies that were in the audience - LOL!! She suggested the Yahoo Site Explorer tool - not one I have used but give it a go and see what you think. Something else that I wasn't aware of is that Google prefers older domain names than newer ones, and if you prepay your domain for a longer period than the standard Google will like this - I am definitely going to try this! On the Pay Per Click issue - I am generally not a big fan of PPC BUT after hearing Susan talking about it's uses especially in export markets, I could be convinced! For example if you want to market in France, we cannot buy a .fr domain name so SEO becomes a little difficult - you can however in the shorter term use a PPC to get you going. It gives an instant result where SEO can take time. She also suggested using a PPC to help you to pinpoint the key words you should be trying to optimise your site for - i.e the more fruitful the PPC for the key word the more likely it is that should be your key word or words. She said that searchers prefer 3-4 word phrases when searching in the likes of Google - so keep that in mind.

Andrew Maat - Tradedoubler
I was really looking forward to hearing Andrew talk today but was a little disappointed - maybe he didn't quite hit the right note for this particular audience - maybe we were all just starving by that time! I have heard really good things about him in the past and love what he does. The basics of Affiliate Marketing from a small businesses perspective are that you let other people act as sales men online for your business and you just pay them a commission. Tradedoubler and others like them are the agents in the middle co-ordinating the whole thing. The publishers advertise your business for you, through PPC, their blog or forum etc pushing traffic to your site. The agent company monitors where the traffic is coming from and the value of the sale, they invoice you for the commission and then pay the publisher their cut - Simple and worth considering.

Lunch - well you didn't really miss anything there, there was no where to sit down or even put your plate down. Eating lunch was so much hassle that networking was nearly impossible! Also just on the hotel issue - should Invest NI not be supporting a local hotelier rather than the Hilton? I know they may be stuck location and size - wise but I think they should really try harder on this front.

Then the 2 speakers I had been really looking forward to - and they were both worth the wait!
Niall McKeown - Ion
Niall had the hardest slot of the day - just after lunch when everyone is sleepy, but he was really entertaining. He talked about the Obama campaign online and how he raised 86% of his funding online, how he gave his subscribers all the tools they needed to market his campaign and how they all became a part of Team Obama. I think this is a brilliant idea - giving your customers the chance to get involved with your marketing - blendtec used this idea too letting fans suggest what should be blended next, Dell also do it asking people to suggest improvements or new product ideas. Niall talked about E-Mail marketing, the importance of the landing page, and also a 3 email rolling campaign for new subscribers - which is a brilliant idea. He feels that an effective campaign should be getting around a 30% click through rate. He said that conversations drive sales now not the old school marketing media, suggesting that people will listen to others peoples recommendations, even though they don't know them rather than our 'marketing material' i.e places like Tripadvisor. He also suggested that whatever you spent on your website should be 1/3 of the marketing budget with the other 2/3 being spent on promotion.

Tom Nixon Nixon McInnes - Social Networking for Business
Only 14% of people trust advertisements but 78% people trust other peoples recommendations. He talked about a shoe company called Zappos who actively encourage all their employee's to use twitter and engage with their customers. It is also a great place to find out what your customers want - what would improve your service? He gave an example of a coffee shop that used twitter to ask those lived locally to them what they would want from a coffee shop, and found that by simply twittering what the daily specials were they would get more people in through the door. So when thinking about how does twitter apply to your business don't just be thinking about making the sale, it has to go far deeper than that - Companies that provide really good products or services, customer service and are genuinely passionate about what they do will be rewarded online.

That has to be good news for all of us that run our own businesses and genuinely want to provide the best service that we possibly can and not just make the most money in the shortest possible time.

The event was filmed by Invest NI and they will be posting it on their website, so as soon as they do I will let you all know - it is definitely worth watching.

Marketing in a Slowing Economy - EWN Jan Event

The network event last night was called 'Marketing in a Slowing Economy'. One of the first things the guy said was 'Well marketing in a slowing economy is no different to marketing any other time' !!!! Then why on earth did he call it Marketing in a Slowing Economy!?

Of course it's different for two reasons:

1. Our customers are going to be fewer and more selective in a slowing economy so we have to work harder and smarter to win their business; and
2. The funds we have available during the slowing economy are more restricted.

The biggest issue for me that was never even touched on was the opportunities for free marketing online, such as Google local business centre, using Facebook, Twitter, Blogging, Linkedin as well as getting involved in the forums that are relevant to your product.

The other thing that I find amazing is that businesses that don't market to their current client base, this no longer has to be expensive or time consuming - email marketing is sooooo easy and cost effective.