Users of Microsoft’s Bing search engine will soon be able to bring up much more scientific/mathematical information, thanks to Microsoft’s deal with Wolfram Alpha.

In its blog post, the Bing team says it will be “providing access to Wolfram Alpha’s advanced algorithms and expertly curated data within the Bing experience,” and offers a couple specific examples of how that might actually be useful. The first couple are focused on fitness and health — you could bring up charts that allow you to compare nutritional data between different types of food , or you could calculate your body mass index. Through Wolfram Alpha, Bing can also do more complicated math now, such as plotting equations on a graph.

This Wolfram/Bing deal was actually first reported in August, but not announced until today. The two services seem like a good match, since they both like to bill themselves as not-exactly-search-engines — Wolfram calls itself a “computational knowledge engine,” while Bing says it’s a “decision engine.” More concretely, the partnership gives Bing another way it’s different from Google (assuming Google doesn’t strike a similar deal), while also a broader audience, not to mention revenue.

Speaking of Bing, Experian Hitwise is reporting that the site’s traffic grew 7 percent in October.

Original post: Digital Venture Beat

Batch Picture Protector is a powerful and easy-to-use batch image watermarking tool. It protects your digital images and artwork by adding professional transparent watermarks that combine text, illustrations and graphics. When used in conjunction with your favorite image editing software, a watermark can even contain your copyright, website URL or logo image. Batch Picture Protector is the best way to achieve faster and simpler image protection.

This watermarking software is particularly useful to designers, artists and banner makers who send artwork proofs to customers for evaluation. Those who publish images on internet web galleries can also protect image copyright using this watermarking software. By using the software, digital photos can be effectively protected from unauthorized use. This photo watermark software places permanent watermarks that cannot be removed.

The original post is created by: Giveaway of the Day

Who hasn’t sat through a presentation that is utterly boring and has you thinking about what you’re going to eat for lunch. The ability to capture an audience, hold them spell bound and generate a call-to-action has been an elusive art-form. However, there are tools available that can help.

One such company offering these tools is Kaon Interactive, a Boston area company that specializes in 3D interactive sales and marketing solutions. Their v-brief platform gives presentations the extra spark they need to make an impression. The company was founded in 1996 with an undisclosed amount of funding and is quickly becoming an attractive resource to product manufacturers, distributors and retailers looking to deliver interactivity to customers. Some noteworthy customers include: Dell, IBM, Cisco.

While there are plenty of companies offering 3D software for presentations including Dryfork, which allows the presenter to integrate 2D, 3D, and video media in a single presentation, but only Kaon provides the ability to deliver presentations via the web. Today, Kaon announced the launch of Kaon V-Stream, a way for sales and marketing professionals to deliver presentations via the web, independent of the user’s local hardware. In the past, one could only view these presentations via Kaon’s v-OSK, a touch screen appliance, because of the size and complexity of the content. Now, with Kaon V-Stream these presentations can be delivered anytime anywhere as long as there is an Internet connection and access to a web-browser.

For example, a company with a large product portfolio might find it difficult to constantly keep products relevant and timely to customers. With Kaon, the company can produce interactive 3D presentations across their whole product line leveraged by their sales team for both online and offline use. That makes it easier for marketers and sales teams to create captive 3D virtual product demonstrations, interactive flow diagrams, videos, data sheets, slide presentations, and more, which are all needed for today’s elusive audience.

What’s the worst presentation you ever sat through? Bet it wasn’t developed through Kaon.

The original post is created by: Digital Venture Beat

What are the 6 critical steps for launching a successful SEO website? If I had to list them in order, it would go something like this…

6 Steps to Launching a New Website

1 – Having a Reasonable Goal in Mind: This means understanding that depending on your strategy, resources and competency you will either have to spend lots of time fine-tuning your campaign, or pay someone else to.

Managing expectations, understanding competitive thresholds and the degree of trust required for a website to “break loose” and start climbing over competitors takes time, energy and effort. In addition to definitive structure and search engine optimization tactics.With the competitive landscape changing and becoming even more diverse, the range of competitors and websites overlapping online for topical nodes of relevance is rather alarming. For any given keyword there are only tens spots; and depending on if those keywords are candidates for commerce in their undertones, determine their competitiveness.

The idea is to target keywords within your reach initially, but build the more competitive keywords into the site architecture, link structure and off page SEO to brand each page with a purpose,  which leads to the next point.

2 – Create Pages for Specific Purposes – Just because visitors arrive does not ensure success. You need compelling content infused with overtones of intent. Instead of overwhelming visitors with a bland one-size-fits-all approach, try segmenting your traffic by offering one specific conversion objective per page; unify your message, images & call to action.

Search engines look at singular and plural keywords in a unique fashion. For example, just because you rank for one variation of a keyword does not ensure you will rank automatically for the stemmed or plural or synonymic variant. Most people search in plural format by default “bank accounts vs. bank account” for competitive 2 word key phrases and tend to use modifiers and / or alternate keyword synonyms.

With this in mind, make sure you have a predefined destination page for each variation or create a page for multiple keywords by using the singular, plural and alternative keywords in the title or meta data. For example, a page about pricing could use keywords on the page about SEO rate, rates, fees, fee, costs, cost, SEO pricing, etc…

If that does not work, then try utilizing conversion paths vs. traditional landing pages by offering a selection of 2-3 choice/selections to clarify consumer intent. Example: I am here for (a) SEO Services (b) SEO Consulting or (c) Free Themes and Downloads, then based on which option they click, tailor your message to get to the next layer of engagement.   By segmenting conversion paths instead of pages is an effective way to deliver a targeted message to the right visitors at the right time.

3 – Structure your website to facilitate rankings – Creating a tiered structure of relevance from the onset and matching your keywords to pages created specifically for those keywords is a must.

You can theme and silo (use a series of topical categories) for your website or use flat site architecture and keep all of the naming conventions relevant that incorporate exact match keywords. The idea is to use unified titles, url structure, h1 tags, meta data and internal and external links to define each page with SEO.

4 – Employ Staggered Link Diversity – Different links work better for different stages of your website’s development.  For example, to warm things up, Yahoo Directory, Business.com, Best of the Web and other trusted directories work wonders to escalate trust (here is a great list from SEOCompany.Ca).  Then, invest time and energy looking for niche related links from notable aged sites in addition to fresh editorial links from news, press releases, blogs and social media to balance the mix.

It’s better to get deep links to specific pages with specific anchor text (5-15 links per page) rather than just acquiring random links to the homepage. No one said building links is easy, but it is a mandatory step to distinguish your pages in search engines (and increase your potential exposure for readers).

5- Add Fresh Content Regularly – Industries are competitive, which means you need to offer something worthwhile to search engine spiders and human visitors alike to encourage them to consider your website as an authority on a subject.

The ultimate objective of SEO is to develop authority; from there rankings are produced from the on page and off page synergy of trust, citation and the coherence and / or synergy of the collective content within your website.

6 – Pay Attention to the Long-Tail – Long tail keywords (keyword incorporating 3 or more words and or modifiers) are responsible for 80% of the traffic to most websites.

Rarely do websites start from zero then jump to the top for competitive keywords. First they show signs of traction with one or more keywords then that phenomenon continues to stem as additional keywords cross the tipping point and become buoyant.

The key is to use analytics, referral data to study where that traction occurs, then intersect the intent of those keywords with additional pages within your website that have a related theme. If you pick up on a keyword “breaking lose” then feed it with additional editorial pages using similar titles and / or internal links to polish the ranking factor to create more traction through keyword stemming.

To summarize:

1) define your site in advance, top level keywords, categories, landing pages and on page copy for conversion, 2) add another layer with a blog or CMS (content management system) to add topical content to support your cause, 3) track your results with analytics to gauge the effectiveness of a campaign, 4) build a base level of aged links and then 5) use deep links via editorial linking from articles, blogs & social media while 6) targeting long-tail traffic until your site can devour more market share as a result of agem trust and authority.

The original post is created by: SEO Design Solutions

Password for your own PDF document was lost, forgotten, etc… This can happen to anyone… And now you cannot access your own data anymore. Creating PDF document anew may be an exhausting and time-consuming task. So here is the solution: Recover PDF Password for Windows will recover your lost passwords easily. It doesn’t matter whether your password-protected PDF document is old or new, because Recover PDF Password fully supports all versions of Adobe Acrobat and can recover Unicode passwords for protected Acrobat 9.x files.

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Original post: Giveaway of the Day

Shazam, owner of the application that lets you identify a song by holding your phone up to to a radio, has released a paid ($4.99) version of its iPhone app that makes it easier to share music and discover what’s popular among other users.

The move is part of the company’s efforts to make serious dough, now that it has a massive base of 50 million users — but it is also part of the company’s efforts to make its offerings fairer to users across multiple phones. (Shazam and the phone carriers it partnered with used to charge for its service on many phones, but Shazam decided to move to free when it launched on the iPhone. This meant that some users of other phones on the AT&T network were paying $2.99 a month, while iPhone users were getting it for free. Just not fair. Thus the scramble to realign offerings.)

It also is an attempt to expands upon Shazam’s profitable business model. Unlike many music companies, it isn’t losing money, and now that it has taken on serious backers, it wants to make a whole lot more.

Called Shazam Encore, the new Shazam iphone app costs $4.99 in the U.S., and offers the following:

• improved speed performance: making it even quicker for users to tag tracks and learn more about their music.
• music recommendations: users can discover other music similar to the track that’s been “tagged,” or recognized, to enhance their music collection and knowledge.
• find what’s hot and popular: Shazam music charts generated by other users can be accessed to help users keep up to date with latest tastes.
• search music: easily find music by artist, album or track from over 8 million songs.
• drive and tag: Shazam automatically enters into car mode when the iPhone is placed in an in-car dock to make it simple to discover what’s playing on the radio even when driving.

The free app, which lets users tag up to five songs per month, will remain, but it also gets some more features:

• the ability to share tags, or recognized songs, onto a Facebook mini-feed.
• users can send their tags as a tweet to followers.
• tags now appear on maps inside Shazam, along with the tag history, to remind users where they were when they captured the moment.

The company is seeing tremendous traction, saying it has 10 million users on the iPhone and the rest distributed across other phones such as Blackberries, Nokias and Androids. Notably, the only platform Shazam hasn’t built an application for is the Palm. The Palm users just aren’t there yet, chief executive Andrew Fisher told us.

The existing free version of Shazam seeks to make money off of ads, and things like affiliate fees from sales of iTunes.

I wrote more about the company’s background here.

Post written by: Digital Venture Beat

EBay has settled with the founders of Skype, clearing up some nasty lawsuits that now allows the Internet phone company to be sold to a consortium of investors that also includes the Skype co-founders.

Private equity firm Silver Lake Partners leads the investor group, and is joined by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, as well as Skype founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis.

As part of the deal, Index Ventures, a very early original investor Skype, is being jettisoned from the investor syndicate. Very bad blood had developed between Mike Volpi, a partner at Index Ventures, and the Skype founders after it emerged that he’d try to go behind their back to arrange the deal without including them (not great diplomacy, because he was working for the co-founders at the time, as chief executive of video company Joost). Separately, Friis and Zennström had accused eBay of breaching a licensing deal concerning the Joltid technology, and had sued the entire investor consortium.

Marc Andreessen, partner of Andreessen Horowitz, confirmed the deal with VentureBeat this morning: “Everything is settled,” he said. All of the intellectual property disputes — a long saga that centered around the core peer-to-peer technology underneath Skype, owned by Joltid — have also been cleaned up, he said. Joltid has been transferred to Skype, he said.

Andreessen said the company is now free to build for the future, and he predicted Skype will become a tremendous company — and he citied significant unrealized potential. One is the exploding smartphone market, where an increasing number of smartphones now have the ability to run Skype. Another is creating a robust set of enterprise offerings: Businesses are using Skype, but almost entirely on an ad hoc basis. Skype can do a lot more to help businesses integrate itself into their current technology infrastructure, he said.

Under the terms, the Skype co-founders get 14 percent of Skype, partly in exchange for capital, but also as credit for their transfer of the rights to Joltid, an entity the co-founders controlled. Friis and Zennström also get a board seat at the new Skype.

The rest of the investor group (Silver Lake, the Canadian pension, and Andreessen Horowitz) together will get 56 percent of Skype. eBay will own 30 percent. The deal values the whole company at $2.75 billion. EBay is expected to get about $1.9 billion in cash as well as a $125 million note.

The deal is expected to close by the end of the year.

Andreessen said had been two possibilities to the legal tussling. One: continued, really messy litigation (indeed, the failure of Joost had led to lots of acrimony, and we’ve heard there were many facts that hadn’t even leaked yet, as if the court documents hadn’t revealed enough of the ugliness). Or two: Clearing things up, and letting the company realize its upside.

Andreessen recounted what he thinks is Skype’s enormous potential. First, the company is already successful, with a $740 million annualized run rate, and on track to hit $1 billion soon. It is one of the core Internet franchises, and is going mainstream in a “major way,” he said, adding 40 million registered users in the last three months alone. He said Skype is the main way people are doing voice and video calls today. The international long distance voice market is worth $40 billion, and Skype is “all set to go after that,” he said. Next, he said mobile is a brand new opportunity due to the explosive success of the iPhone. Mobile phones have only become “smart enough” to run applications like Skype within the last 12 to 18 months, he said, suggesting that Skype will spread from successful adoption on the iPhone to a host of other phones. Finally, elaborating on Skype’s opportunity to sell to businesses, he said that while businesses are using Skype, they still no have no controls, auditing, metering or connections to other existing infrastructure, such as integration into Blackberry or other business offerings when using Skype. That all will change, he said, when Skype offers businesses something they can “buy.”

Go here to see the original: Digital Venture Beat

Today’s SEO tip is about using citation and search modifiers to find creative solutions for link building. Citation (a websites footprint or popularity matrix) is a prominent principle used by search engine algorithms to assess importance.

SEO Tips to Find and Qualify Directories

Hence, authoritative links in to the quantity or percentage of links out a domain has, determines how much link flow a domain can produce in tandem with its contained volume of content.

Popular websites with user generated content are always ahead of the supply and demand curve, because they always have something new for search engine spiders to dig into, which keeps them coming back for more in addition that they also receive a healthy flux of inbound links.

Wikipedia is a prime example of a website with a 94% deep link percentage and all user generated content with millions of relevant themed pages and subjects.

Directories of that magnitude may not exist, but you can find smaller more potent themed directories to acquire links to your homepage or more importantly deep links to individual pages with keyword-rich anchor text that pass just as much value.

On the contrary, websites that constantly link out, offer bleak editorial value or are dripping with commerce laden jargon often do not make the grade when it comes to developing an authoritative domain.  When picking potential directories to submit your site, you should focus on quality and relevance rather than bulk submissions.

There are only a handful of directories that have kept a clean link profile as a result of a human review editorial process. In addition to the neighborhood of a website, you can also use off page citation as a measurement of if that directory is worthwhile for submission.

Search engines scan their index for duplicate, so vary your title and descriptions for more impact. Use other websites as a yardstick to assess how authoritative a domain might be.For example, using Alexa ranking as an indicator could signify what type of imprint that domain has. Another great website you can use as a yardstick is DMOZ.

If a site appears there, in most cases you know it has passed a stringent editorial review and has been around for some time. You can also visit DMOZ and just use their search box and type in keywords (topic) directories such as legal directories, shopping directories, etc. and find dozens or hundreds of hard to find pre-qualified directories for consideration.

Another method is to use the *wildcard technique in a Google search such as:

furniture * directories
legal * directories
blog * directories
rss * directories

Google will fill in the blanks based on authority and return a list of top domains that feature related searches based on the shingles (words) used in the query.

Or you can even search for

www directories or
www AND legal directories (just replace the word legal with your category).

If you just typed www into a Google search box, it would list the most powerful sites online in chronological order based on citation. By adding the word “directories” to it you are adding a modifier for the information retrieval parameter to lock on to and return relevant results.

Cut down scrolling time by using http://www.google.com/ie?&num=100 first to view 100 results at a time or just click your advanced options in Google and switch results to 100 (to view descriptions and meta snippets in addition to titles).

Then by context alone you can skim for relevant directories to add your website. Age, trust and authority are crucial elements here, not the submit your website to 1000 directories wild west approach.

Quality is the cornerstone of search engine result page longevity and combining this with deep links (links to specific pages) you can create buoyancy for pages nested deep under the surface in your website.

Another method is to add a modifier to the category such a:

legal directories AND deep links

*See example http://www.google.com/ie?q=legal+directories+AND+deep+links&hl=en&num=100&btnG=Search

Once again, replace your category in front of the word directories and see what the spiders have crawled and what is in the index as a potential link candidate.

Just replace the legal category with the one you are targeting to find the directories you are considering.

Next check to see if they are in Dmoz, Yahoo or Alexa and then check the PageRank of the homepage and sub category you are considering to determine crawl frequency and indexing.

If it hasn’t been crawled for a while, then it is more than likely penalized or the page suffers from link attrition and is not a good candidate for providing a link.

Also consider that the more links that are on the page, the smaller the percentage your site receives. Although you may not consider PageRank important, in this way, using it to assess crawl frequency and how much authority and citation a page has is not a bad idea.

Personally, I prefer using Majestic SEO to conduct a page level analysis of the AC rank (which is a much more straight forward metric), but to each their own.

Remember, as you develop your link profile, quality is better than quantity, so think before you link and remember, everything leaves a trail…

Happy directory hunting.

Here is the original: SEO Design Solutions

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The original post: Giveaway of the Day

Offerpal Media founder Anu Shukla was hit with a lawsuit this summer over alleged shenanigans over the company’s founding, VentureBeat has learned.

In August, Kevin Halpern filed a breach of contract lawsuit against Shukla. He alleges that he helped start the company in 2006 with Shukla but was cut out of promised stock ownership after a third founder, Michael Liu, joined the startup, according to the suit filed in Superior Court in Alameda County.

Offerpal declined comment. The lawsuit does not name Offerpal itself. Shukla declined to comment, and Halpern’s attorney did not respond to a request for comment.

Shukla has been in the limelight this week because of a public battle with Techcrunch editor Michael Arrington over the ethics of offers, which are special ad deals that users of social games can accept in lieu of paying for items in a game. She also stepped down as CEO yesterday as the company hired George Garrick to replace her. In an interview, she said she will remain at the company.

This lawsuit is another headache that will keep the company in the limelight. In Silicon Valley, where the stakes in founding startups are so high, such disputes among founders are common. Facebook recently settled a founder dispute over the beginnings of the company and restored the name of Eduardo Saverin as a co-founder of the company — presumably along with a large settlement fee.

Shukla has said that the idea for Offerpal arose after she signed up for an Amazon.com credit card in exchange for an offer for $30 off her Amazon purchases. But in the lawsuit, Halpern paints the company’s beginnings differently. He says that Shukla and he formed a close professional relationship between 2003 and 2006. She even invited him to her parents’ 50th wedding anniversary. Shukla, who had founded Rubric, contacted Halpern in April, 2006, to tell him she was moving on from her latest startup, mybuys.com. She wanted to start a social network and wanted to know from Halpern what the latest trends among youths were.

Halpern said he began researching ideas. In May, 2006, they met for lunch at the Sofitel Hotel in Redwood City, Calif., where Halpern alleges that Shukla promised he would get 15 percent to 20 percent ownership in the new startup, although they had no idea what they were going to do yet. In June, Shukla invited Liu, a successful entrepreneur, to join them. Halpern found that the social networking market was getting too crowded, as Friendster and Facebook were already off to a head start. Then he set up a meeting with Jonathan Abrams, a major thinker on social networks who had a lot of knowledge of MySpace, Facebook and Friendster. Abrams suggested that they set up a business to feed offers, trials and surveys to social networking users as an alternative way to pay for goods in social networks.

After that meeting, Halpern, Shukla and Liu spent several weeks conceiving the Offerpal offers platform. In July, 2006, they agreed to create a company called Offerpal. They tried to get the web address but had to settle for myofferpal.com. They met again with Abrams on Aug. 1, 2006, to seek his feedback. After that, Halpern alleges, the monetization engine concept for Offerpal was solidified. By September, 2006, Halpern says he had attended more than 50 meetings on the subject. But as they incorporated and divided up the stock, Liu told Halpern that he would not be considered a founder and was only a “friend of the company.” Halpern demanded his stock from Shukla, but she allegedly told him he would get no equity and threatened legal action against him. The company was incorporated as Offerpal Media in October, 2006. The suit alleges that Abrams was promised advisory shares but did not receive them.

If Halpern wins the suit, the damages could be lucrative, since Offerpal has since registered more than 160 million users in the past two years.

Update: Jonathan Abrams sent this comment via email: I often take meetings with entrepreneurs who want my advice, as a favor to a mutual friend.  I’m a bit hazy on the details, since it was three years ago, but I believe in 2006 I met with Anu Shukla as a favor to Kevin Halpern, and helped them with some early ideas that may have evolved into OfferPal.  I didn’t receive any compensation, and I don’t expect to get stock for just some advice and a couple of meetings.  It was just a favor from my perspective.  You are correct that I’m not a party to any lawsuit involving OfferPal, and I don’t really know much about this company or these lawsuits.

Author: Digital Venture Beat