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A National Paywall That Works
While the paywall experiment of the New York Times has received a lot of play in various online forums, one place where a working paywall - meaning that it is both making money for publishers and attracting traffic - is less well known, in the eastern European country of Slovakia. There an independent tech vendor called Piano Media has been successfully experimenting with its own paywall-based system of online publishing. Launched in Bratislava last spring, it gives subscribers online access to content from all nine of Slovakia's leading news sites. What's more, it does so for a single flat fee (less than US $4 per month, which is going up in March by 25%) that is paid after visitors have had a chance to sample a certain number of articles for free. Users can pay for their subscriptions by SMS messages.
How to Conduct the Best Webinars
I have done dozens of webinars over the past several years and have learned from the school of hard knocks as well as the best professional speaking experts what to do and what not to do. After seeing a press release from SAP talking about their experiences I thought it might be useful to share some of these with you as well. We last wrote on how to make better webinars last summer.
How Advanced Fraud Detection Services Work
As anyone who has ever had a valid credit card charge questioned knows, there is a lot of fraudulent use of cards, and the Internet has made it even easier for the bad guys to exploit them. According to comScore, last year ecommerce in the U.S. reached record levels of spending with more than $160 billion in transactions. With all this activity, it is like looking for the proverbial needle in a very large haystack to try to track down fraudulent transactions. But a look into a couple of new fraud detection and prevention technologies shows that perhaps the good guys are making some inroads in this war.
Grovo How To Do SEO Video Series
We've written earlier about Grovo, an online video e-learning site that conducts a lot of celebrity interviews. Some of them are more interesting than others. Today they have a new series with Zach Ciperski, the Director of SEO for EliteSEM and also serves as Vice President of CoffeeForLess.com. He has built sites for some major retailers and teaches SEO at New York University, among other places. His series is on How To SEO, and is worth watching if you are still struggling with the basics, or need some help before you go forth and try to hire an SEO specialist. Here is one five-minute segment on making small tweaks to your site.
In 2008, a UK-based Adobe Acrobat engineer remarked, "I believe in striving to minimize the use of paper, but I do believe that we will probably never reach a position where paper is eliminated from our workplaces." This morning, his predictions were clearly confirmed by a study published by the information professionals organization AIIM.
The study shows that while the exchange of PDF files as e-mail attachments has reduced the volume of paperwork traded between IT professionals, that reduction is not only minimal, but quite possibly made up for. Over three-quarters of IT professionals surveyed say one of the first things they do with a PDF-based invoice... is print it out.
While most of us know the results of yesterday's Big Game, the results of the online ad campaigns from the dozens of companies spending multiple millions are less clear. Fortunately, monitoring firm Yottaa is here to lead the way and let us know who scored and who missed serving up online content to complement their TV spots.
Some weeks ago, I happened to drive by an evangelistic church whose outdoor marquis speaks about as well of the present times as any I've come across. "And there followed hail and fire mixed with blood," it read, "and they were cast upon the Earth. Like us on Facebook!"
The initial public offering of Facebook stock, now likely to come in May, is as much a test of faith as any corporation has ever given its prospective shareholders. To Facebook's credit, its prospectus, as given in its Form S-1 filing yesterday, makes its plea completely and carefully. Many companies provide a perfunctory paragraph to investors under the "Risk Factors" heading. Facebook's entry reads like a self-indictment.
Akamai has released the results of its latest "State of the Internet" report covering the third quarter of 2011. What is interesting is how nasty the Internet has become, with increasing attack incidents recorded and changing strategies for hackers looking to exploit systems. Our last post on the first quarter results can be found here.
"Akamai has seen a 2000% increase in the number of attack incidents recorded on our platform over the last three years, including several recent high-profile Web-based DDoS attacks conducted by both hacktivist groups and more traditional online criminal elements," says the report.
While the basic risks of social media are well known to most enterprise security managers, there are many dark corners of social media that can be just as dangerous or even more so. Here are three ways that social media can sneak malware and exploits across your corporate firewalls, and ways that you can pay attention and hopefully prevent their misuse. The biggest issue is that many corporate executives don't really know what is going on across their networks, and don't have any visibility into the traffic patterns and potential exploits.
SaaS backup provider Backupify has recently examined its own customer sample to do some demographic profiling of Google Apps users. The results are somewhat intriguing, as you can see in the infographic below. If you remove .edu domains, Google Apps still has nearly 40% of all of its seats used by businesses with more than 10,000 employees. The company surveyed their customers who have at least 30 users.