Posted by: srini28 in Untagged on
Mar 19, 2010
Guys at Outlook, Yaho0 - look and learn!! This is my favorite thing about Gmail - if I say the words "is attached" in my email and forget to add the attachment, Gmail shows me a popup asking me if I did indeed forget an attachment. How cool is that? Such a simple feature - I am sure it's like one line of code. But it's awesome. Small wins - low hanging fruit, call it what you want, but this is THE deal in my opinion. A company that thinks like that must have some great people. Ok, may be I am over-reacting because I've sent hundreds of "oops, here's the attachment" emails over the years and this helps me a lot...
A lot of other things about Gmail suck though in my opinion - see this post
I love the new yahoo mail - September 18, 200...
Posted by: srini28 in Untagged on
Mar 15, 2010
Srini Venkataramani: My site is live at razzamatazz.net. Coupons are giving me trouble. The first three worked and there were several redemptions too. But then I tried to add one last night and I kept getting an error "This coupon could be used 0 times" or similar.
Srini Venkataramani: If I raised the coupon usage limit to 100, it would still not take the coupon and produce an error "this coupon could only be used 100 times" but the coupon obviously wasn't used yet at all.
CRE Loaded Support: I highly suggest not using coupons at this time if you can avoid it, the developers are working on quite a few bugs on them at this time, and they are going to update how they work soon in a new patch
Posted by: srini28 in Untagged on
Mar 11, 2010
Yet another Google innovation...and this one has some promise - one of the better releases from Google in the recent past. Buzz was pretty good, but is unlikely to change Facebook or Twitter's domination in my opinion. Anyway, I digress.
The Google Apps Marketplace holds the promise of bringing Enterprise Class apps to customers via Google Apps. More integration is good. There are a million web apps out there. This one will help bring more into the Google Apps framework.
First thoughts were - WOW - this could be a game changer. What a great way for smaller players to enter the Enterprise Software marketplace. Google Apps has over 2 million Corporate customers. And adding your apps here makes your company known to them almost right away. No better way to market to that segment than integrating your web app with Google Apps. And that's enough reason to expect thousands of apps to crop up in no time.
Posted by: srini28 in Untagged on
Mar 10, 2010
I invest in Qualcomm stock so I follow their news - and read this REALLY interesting piece today about them that talks about how BREW - Qualcomm's mobile phone software platform for "NON-smart phones" registered sales of $3B through its applications . But the interesting piece was that there are only 18,000 apps in the BREW platform as of now, and only a small number of these are popular. Assuming 10k successful applications, and averaging the $3 billion across the 10k apps, that's $300,000 business per app. Not bad at all, I would'nt mind being the developer of one of those apps.
I read another piece recently about how Apple-platform App developers are not in as much demand as they used to be just 18 months ago. There are just too many apps out there already and too many app developers too. There is still a TON of demand for new apps, no doubt, but it's a commodity now, whereas, BREW app developers are still in demand, despite the relative lackluster platform. BREW apps carry a regular cell phone archaic interface, but at the end of the day, their developers make more, at least that's what these 2 articles seem to suggest. Now, my conclusion is obviously not based on a lot of research but let me get to the point.
It is almost always more profitable "as a provider" to be in a market with steady low demand with a small number of providers (supply). Your skills are difficult to find and it's easier to charge a higher fee and you are not constantly worried about competition.
Posted by: srini28 in seo, integration on
Mar 10, 2010
Joomla upgrade from 1.0 to 1.5 can be an ordeal. There are tons of sites that provide info on how to do this but very few seem to really nail down the BIG TICKET items - the stuff that is almost guaranteed to give you problems. At least I didn't find any. So here you go. There are still plenty of of 1.0 sites out there so hopefully this will help some:
o. Joomla upgrade from 1.0 to 1.5 is NOT straightforward and something that you can follow a script and complete. I would allocate anywhere from 5 to 40 hours of effort to it depending on the size of your installation, the
Posted by: admin in Untagged on
Jan 28, 2010
According to the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the research and support of entrepreneurship, in the past decade the highest rate of entrepreneurial activity belongs to those between 55 and 64 years old. According to the study, "The 20 to 34 age bracket...which we usually identify with risk-taking youth (think Facebook and Google(GOOG Quote)), has the lowest rate."
http://www.thestreet.com/story/10669129/1/retire-or-start-a-new-business.html?puc=_tscrss
Posted by: admin in Untagged on
Jan 19, 2010
http://www.ecommerce-guide.com/resources/article.php/3656806
This is an EXCELLENT piece - precise and informative on when, why and how to go about collecting sales tax on your ecommerce sales. If you have a website and are selling anything "tangible" on it then most likely you need to pay sales tax in one more more jurisidictions. Even if you sell something intangible such as digital products - ebooks or software, you still need to pay sales taxes in some states.
Read the article. If you are planning to be in Ecommerce as a career or a serious business initiative, it's worth knowing and doing the right thing upfront instead of paying back-taxes or pentalties after an audit 14 years from now.
I've been dabbling with the idea of setting up several 1-800 numbers for customer support for my Ecommerce sites. I am based out of San Diego CA but my staff is all over the world. So that makes that whole process a bit more complicated - at least that's what I used to think.
First thought was to do that with Vonage or other VoIP service. But given the poor Internet bandwidth that my Indian and Phillipine office gets, that was out of the question almost right away. Not worth the constant troubleshooting and mess. Even though my budget was small and call volume was likely to be very small - less than a 1000 calls per month, but I wanted something reliable.
I searched and considered several companies - JetNumbers.com, RingCentral.com, Etc. But none had the features for international call forwarding that I wanted - at a decent price. Until I ran into this provider - Call Me 800. They seem to have a great product out there for international call forwarding.
Five-six years ago, people hadn't still figured out the Google formula as clearly. Good ol' dark ages when SEO was a term not many even knew about. Times when you could rank high with just a few links from random sites via link exchanges. Times that have changed for the better now.
Now, link exchanges are almost a thing of the past. They still work and are beneficial to get direct traffic but getting links from links pages with tons of other links are not really that helpful anymore. From highly relevant pages, OK, may be..
But why am I telling you stuff you already know? Let's get to the point. I know you want to know what works today. Here you go. This is it.
Posted by: admin in seo, scholarships, links, contest on
Sep 25, 2009
Contests make for great SEO! We talked about Hosting Contests to Generate Links earlier and we've seen this work more and more. Here are some ideas to host contests that serve more than one purpose.
1. Caption contest
Put up a funny picture relevant to your website. Then invite your visitors to log in to your site (there you go, more registered users) and write a caption for that image (more content). Have others vote for the best caption (more user interaction) and then give away something super cool for that audience as prizes (this gets proomted on giveaways sites and usually catches on in twitter, digg, etc. - so more buzz and links!). And the best part? You don't have to offer expensive prizes. Just offer them something that's valuable to them and overstocked with you or a service that's not much of an additional cost to you or your staff.
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