You may have heard from economists that the world’s economy is undergoing globalization. Imports and exports are now important part of every major countries’s business. One country’s economy, such as the one in the US, is highly depended on the economy of another (e.g., Middle East countries and China). What you may not aware is that globalization is also hitting the Internet.
Spam 2.0 is a new wave of spam technology that outsmarts the traditional antispam software techniques. Unlike the previous generation of spam messages, which were mainly text-based and sent from the spammers’ desktops, Spam 2.0 messages are image-based and sent from a network computers that have been hijacked by the spammers (aka. botnets).
Spammers have effectively foiled the first strategy — analyzing the reputation of the sender — by conscripting vast networks of computers belonging to users who unknowingly downloaded viruses and other rogue programs. The infected computers begin sending out spam without the knowledge of their owners.
… 250,000 new computers are captured and added to these spam “botnets” each day.
Microsoft now offers free web hosting services for small business owners. This new web site called Office Live comes with free services such as free domain name hosting, 30 MB of web-site storage space, 10 GB/month data transfer, 5 email accounts (2 GB storage each) and daily backups.
If you’re willing to pay for a monthly fee, Office Live will also provide you with application services for managing customers, employees, projects and the ability to synchronize data with your desktop applications (full feature comparison).
I think this is an exciting new business model for Microsoft. In the age of the new Web, a key is to enable users to personalize information and gradually migrate part of their desktop-centric computing tasks to a Web-centric environment. Given that Microsoft has been a desktop-application company, pushing highly customizable business applications for small businesses will help the company to gain foothold in the new Web 2.0 market.
Source: A Web Site to Call Your Own, The New York Times.
The latest statistics show the World Internet penetration is now at 16% — that’s about 1,032,580,000 Internet users if we do the math.
You can read more about this subject at Read/Write Web.
When it comes marketing and commercial, sex sells. The Internet is flooded with marketing campaign and commercial ads. If a business wants to make known its products and services, it must be innovative.
Try marketing your products with French Maid TV.
French Maid TV is a Video Podcast of How To’s taught by Sexy French Maids. It’s where we teach men the important things in life.
This is how the show works, I think. Companies have products they want to market on the Internet. They pay French Maid TV to produce shows based on the products. For example, BarterBee.com pays the French Maid TV to make a show about bartering, and the show features French maids using BarterBee.com. For men who are attracted to watch the French maids, it’s likely that they will also go visit those websites visited by the Frend maids.
People are excited about Web 2.0. People are excited about Ajax, Flash, tagging, social network, and web services. From a business point of view, is Web 2.0 really that much different from Web 1.0?
In his article “Web 2.0: Is It Really Different?“, Win Treese overviews the key components of Web 2.0 (i.e., Ajax, Flash, tagging, social network, and web services). Like many others, Treese believes that it’s difficult to define exactly what Web 2.0 is, but certainly we can talk about its properties.
Pinning down Web 2.0 is like trying to scoop up water with your hands. You can’t really hold onto all of it, but after most of the water runs through your fingers, there’s still something left.
I’m fluent in two different languages, Chinese and English. Tim Finin’s recent blog post on “China predicted to have 60,000,000 bloggers by year’s end” got me to think about the benefits of being bilingual (or multi-lingual) on the Internet.
Skype announced a new service that allows up to 100 people to chat over the Internet. This service called Skypecast targets the growing social network phenomenon on the Internet. It will provide a virtual space for people to chat about computers, blogs, and other “stuff”.
If you’re worried about some people not going to shut up during a community chat, Skypecast has built-in functions that solve this problem.
“The service is moderated by a designated host who passes a virtual microphone to participants when they wish to speak. To keep conversations on track, the software allows the moderator to silence or eject detractors.”
Source: ‘Skypecast’ to bring 100 people in for a chat, IHT, May 3, 2006.
I think Skypecast is a really good idea. An application that I can immediately benefit is using it for my neighborhood’s Home Association meetings. Many people in the neighborhood don’t attend those meetings because they are lazy, which I don’t blame them. If we allow people to call in with Skypecast, I think more people will attend the meetings. Maybe I will bring up this issue the next time I go.
