My Green Corner

Notebook computers are on their way to exponential growth world wide. Owing to its customized configuration, handling conveniences, and enhanced mobility advantages, it is going to change the present scenario very soon.  Market experts have projected that this exponential growth in the production and sale of notebook computers will definitely cross the number of desktop computers in the year 2009.

We are observing oncoming of the ultra-thin, ultra-low cost system options that are being introduced by various manufacturers including the major players like Apple, Sony, HP, Dell, Fujitsu, Acer,  just to name a few. Some of the market analysts however are a little skeptical about this horizon of acceleration in the growth with its probable undercutting of the profit margins.

According to the projected estimations, the notebook shipments are expected to touch a figure of 136 million notebook computer units in the year 2008 itself. This would be a jump of almost 25.6% from the last year’s numbers.  On the other hand, this increase in the number of notebook computers will make negative impacts on the sale of desktop computers. The effect has started showing with declining numbers now .Alex Yang, an analyst at the ‘Lehman Brothers’ says, “Desktop shipments will decline about 1.3 percent from 2007 to reach 143 million units”.

The growth rate graph for both of these products has been showing drastically different trends. Worldwide desktop unit sale demonstrates a single-digit growth while the notebook computers unit sale is enjoying a healthy growth rate of more than 20% per year and this is for several years now. Market specialists also believe that the notebook manufacturing companies will be enjoying the year 2008 as one of the most prosperous year ever in their history. On the contrary the desktop manufacturers will have to shift their attention to a “corporate replacement cycle”. Many of the speculators say that it will begin sometime in the last quarter of this year.”We expect rapid notebook PC price erosion to continue generating new demand, and the narrowing price gap between notebooks and desktop PCs should also help increase the pace at which notebooks replace desktops,” expects Alex Yang.

Low cost notebooks will now have a new phase in the markets. Its growing demand has compelled many of the manufacturers to concentrate their efforts on designing the technologically advanced and affordable notebooks. One of the big unknowns of the notebook market in 2008 is going to be the beginning of a new era with notebooks that will cost below $400. Taiwan’s “Asustek Computer” is now almost ready to be on the shelf with its first such notebook, the “EeePC”. The systems are expected to begin with the “shipping by midyear and be broadly available from a variety of companies by the end of 2008″, according to the company.

This new low cost notebook sub-sector has strong possibilities to change the market standards. This sub-sector is also expected to expand as the demand is abnormally high .This demand will be a pushing factor for the growth engine to meet with the required penetration rate in the markets. Once the sub-sector is entered in to the markets and is established, it will change the face of the existing notebook market also. Alex Yang says, “The latter would be bad for the entire notebook industry but we believe that it is more likely that this new sub-sector will expand the notebook market”.

Latest technological inventions and new development in the hardware technology will bring in new types of machines in near future. The year 2008 will also be witnessing the introducing of new operating systems and processors that will help in boosting the notebook productions .New nano-technology based dual-core notebook processors and the quad-core chips from Intel would be completely changing the notebook outlooks. This is expected to happen by the end of this year only. Similarly, a timely updating of the Microsoft’s ‘Vista’ would certainly indicate the onset of a new era of “corporate replacement cycle” by the time this year will approach an end.

Notebook manufacturers are facing an uncertainty over the supply and pricing of ‘LCD Panels’. This could however, be one of the big risks that the manufacturers would have to face at the same time. Another concern for the non-Chinese manufacturers is the production costs in china. These costs are affecting the world-markets in many ways and new markets are also coming up very fast. Such vitality of these emerging markets is also among the big causes of concern.

Chinese labor laws have recently been amended and this would make an impact on many manufacturers including hardware companies with hike of almost 25% in the labor costs. This rising factor in costs would in turn be an undercutting factor for the point off gross profits. Overall impacts of the slowing down of economy in the United States would also have related reflection in major developing economies like Brazil, India, China, and Russia. These countries are major computer market contributors and therefore could face such tremors.

Taiwan’s other major notebook manufacturers including ‘Wistron’ and ‘Compal’ would be among the top beneficiaries from this market growth, according to several market analysts .Shipments growth rate of both these manufacturing companies is rising at the rate of 60% and 30% respectively. ‘Quanta’ and ‘Compal’ were the big winners in 2007 with unit shipments up 62 and 56 percent, respectively.

Beginning with the “corporate replacement cycle” the notebook computer market will be witnessing sea changes and would also require adapting to new production and marketing strategies for all the manufacturers in near future.

Google is planning for the addition of a new technology to its top popular ‘AdSense Program’ sometime during the month of February this year. This technology will facilitate detecting “Domain Kitting”, a common practice among many of the domain marketers and domain registrants. Internet experts across the world have expressed their concern over the practice that is causing problems in many ways.

Numerous Internet marketers and domain registrants are making huge profits in the domain registration space business presently. This tremendous potential of this business has attracted many of the miss-users who find it as a good ‘get rich quick’ idea.

‘Domain kiting’ is extremely common and popular among the domain registrants across the globe. It is a practice to play with the standard five-day grace period at the beginning of the registration of an ICANN-regulated domain. This five-day grace period actually helps the registrants who mistyped domain names they acquired from being stuck with the wrong domain. Basic intention of this facility is to protect the interests of the genuine domain registrants.

The miss-utilization of the beneficial ‘Domain Kitting’ facility is growing at a much faster speed among the people who want to earn money by playing below the margin lines. Registrants repeatedly delete a domain name during the grace period and re-register it without ever paying for it. They perform this ‘registration-deletion-registration ‘operations many times during the grace period of five days. Repeating this again and again in order to make profits and generate good money from the number of advertisement hits the successful domains get, has now become an epidemic almost. It is becoming an irritant for all those who have genuine business interests and want to have a fair website for conducting their business operations.

Such types of successful domains become capable of generating considerable amount of online advertising revenue. The reason behind this revenue generation is simple. All such type of successful domains actually remains active in all the search engines, such as Google for a period of five days at least. This ‘five-day life of a particular domain helps the registrants to makes millions from partners that taste domains with ‘AdSense for Domains’. Expert domainers and registrants who have sufficient expertise in all these popular techniques know the nuts and bolts of this game.

This game of ‘Domain Kitting” spoils the chances of fair deal and transparency for the genuine business owners. The honest registrants who intend to make use of a particular domain name for the legitimate business reasons do not get the desired domain names because these are already tied up with the ‘kitting’. Such a situation not only affects the genuine business interests of many of the business owners but also affects the concurrent business interests of the advertisers, search engines, and lastly the viewers. Imagine the millions of dollars that goes as shear waste as it does not serve the basic purpose of advertising. It never serves the reader or the viewer because it never reaches to them. All advertisements are lost in between on such types of ‘five-dayer- domains’ and the add-revenue drops in wrong pockets. This type of “Kitting” is therefore completely unethical from the fair business point of view.

According to an announcement made by Google, on February 11 this year, the company will install a system for preventing registrants from making ad-revenue from kitted domains using ‘AdSense’ for Domains. Google however, will not disclose the details of this new addition. The exact reasons of not disclosing the details are however not available but it seems that Google intends to maintain a definite level of secrecy in the interests of itself and the domain registrants across the world. This secrecy would perhaps save the system from cyber criminals including hackers.

Google claims that it has always discouraged the practice of ‘Domain Kitting’. “If we determine that a domain is being kited, we will not allow Google ads to appear on the site”, said the official spokesperson of Google. The company anticipates that such a policy in place would make positive impacts both on the users as well as the domain purchasers around the globe. It is clear from this stand of Google that it is taking care of the business interests of its advertisers also.

Quashing the ‘kitting’ business has some business interests of Google involved. There might be some lawsuits filed in near future against the vendors who enable the ‘Domain Kitting’. The company’s objectives regarding this infringement of genuine domain registrant’s interests, if obstructed by any person or vendor by the means of breaching the code of conduct would land up in legal battle.

One should not misunderstand the two related concepts here. Domain Kitting ‘as a matter of fact is quite different from the ‘Domain Tasting’, though seems to be similar. “Tasting” is actually a facility given to a prospective purchaser to ‘taste’ the domain for five days and then buy the domain, according to Danny Sullivan.

Google has clarified that it is not targeting the “Domain Tasting.” But the industry specialists observe that the new system from Google will definitely affect the ‘tasting’ also. The tasters who are earning huge profits and think that this is a perfectly legitimate business process will also create a backlash for Google, many experts feel.

It is going to be the beginning of a new phase in domain business sector. It will also be worthwhile to watch the turns and rounds that the Google and the ill-motive domain game players would be going through in times to come.

Business activities thrive on several concurrent techniques and mechanisms. Internet marketing and web-oriented business is taking new shape and new dimensions are gaining importance. Small and medium businesses (SMBs) across the globe have started experiencing the need for adopting improvised technological strategies and more ‘Information Technology (IT)’ based approaches.

“Personalization” is one such aspect that has witnessed sea changes during past many years. Maintaining constant contacts with the customers, visitors, and viewers has become a vital factor in maintaining the profitability of the business. Sometimes, it becomes obvious and necessary to resell a product or service and make the previous customers understand that why they were offered the first chance in first place. Repeated orders and re-orders are quite often much more profitable in comparison to beginning a new business activity. This strategy helps in reducing the acquisition costs and advantages the discount offers.

Some of the best websites and blogs are what Buzz Bruggeman describes as ‘intelligence agents’. These information media generally have constant updating of contents and current posts that would be of beneficial interests to their target audience, in their understanding.

For such websites and blogs, the golden rule applies, “Try to put yourself in your reader’s and customer’s shoes and figure out how you would want to be treated”, says Edward Craine. It is a “Top to Bottom” approach. “If you don’t do proper things, you’re bound to fail,” he says.

Benedict J.frederick, President of ‘Frederick Realty’ in Baltimore has positive believes about this. In his views it is really helpful to develop “some unique knowledge”. A good blogger must find its niche and should go deep in to that niche and then he can become an invaluable resource to people.

Personalization is one such aspect for any web based business in which taking a few extra steps would always be beneficial for both the business as well as the reader. It helps a reader to remain in constant touch with the business owner.”My goal is always to leave clients with more than they expected. It is not just that I do the job but that they really get value from what I do”, says Deborah E. Harry, CCIM, President of Deborah Harry & Associates in Elverson, Pa. “I believe in building relationships. It is for the long time, not for just once”, she says.

Personalization strategies ensure build up the reputation of a website or a blog. Next step would be to advertise this reputation. Future readers and visitors are more likely to believe certain reputation advertising through the “word of mouth” if they happen to know that somebody just like them has already experienced it. A website always grows exponentially with the help of such reputation and experience stories.

Referrals, testimonials, and recommendations are some of the other important tools for the success of a website that helps in ensuring the coming back of a visitor. “when I asked people to write them for me, a trend was established. The writers felt that I made them look good to their clients”, says Harry. She now asks for a letter of recommendation. “I’ve found my readers are very supportive and happy to help me”, Harry Comments.

For bloggers, no matter how glowing a word of mouth recommendation is, it is still necessary to keep the blog and blogger’s name in front of past and future visitors. A nice combination of well planned marketing activities and updated informative posts would definitely of much help. Craine explains this concept lucidly,” people have an understanding that when you’re just freely giving information, you’re a person they want to stay in touch with. People love them. They want to know when the next story is coming”.

‘Feedback Surveys’ from the readers are of immense help in improving a website. Constant feedbacks keep the business owner always on its toes. An online survey is one of the easiest, fastest, most convenient, and almost inexpensive mode of gathering information about the reader’s choices and the changing trends.’ A Note of Thanks’ in response is as mandatory as anything else. It will further strengthen the inter-personal bonds between the website and the reader. A feedback always makes a customer feel special for its contribution.

A blog is the true reflection of its creator. It demonstrates the creator’s concepts thoughts, vision, and communications, to the entire internet world. Bloggers often reveal so many things about themselves without opening even a single word about them.

A good blog and a well organized website tell the whole story in itself. We find many websites having just a jumble of images and text imposed as momentos. But a well designed, well conceptualized and well managed website will always be more beneficial to the business objectives. Just a collection of links, ads, banners, and some irrelevant text posts would lead to nowhere in web-based business.

Updating the website therefore becomes a key factor. All links on the website should be properly placed and comfortably opening for the visitors else the visitor will just move on. A neglected website or a blog would never be a profitable or popular concept.

“Create the best website that you can with the knowledge that you have. You will never be finished, as there will always be more to say and show”, says Richard Lowe, Jr.

There are varieties of means to ensure continual updating of a website. You could place a message board to start virtual conversations with your visitors. You can also adopt a weekly column or an associated ‘eZine’ as an innovative idea in order to get people to come back. Even if you’ve said everything there is to say, perhaps you can add few pictures, sound and videos or change the layout or presentation. “What’s New” section on a website will definitely serve visitors and customers and they will come back again and again just to see what you have added new.

Periodic ‘eZine’ helps maintaining contacts with the readers and communicating them about new happenings. Similarly, the ‘newsgroups’ and ‘email discussion lists’ such as ‘egroups’ and ‘topica’ are also gaining popularity among the internet marketers and readers both. Posting pertinent information at such communicative platforms helps people to visit back to the website for further exploration of their interests.

“If you want people to come back to your website, you had better be keeping it up-to-date, accurate and adding new content all of the time. Otherwise, your readers will grow and move on to greener pastures”, says Richard Lowe Jr.

‘Personalization’ is therefore an extremely beneficial technique that helps making a visitor come back. If a website or a blog welcomes with smile each time a visitor or reader comes back, a friendly positive tone is automatically established between the two. It is one of the most customer-pleasing features that can be added to the web -business and above all, it costs nothing but the efforts only.

People have become almost immune with most of the conventional websites that are present on the internet today. They all look alike. An element of surprise may hit anyone’s eyes and prompt saying “Wow, This is unbelievable!”. This would help any webmaster cutting through the clutter and make people generate “word of mouth” and say “You need to see this, it is incredible indeed”. Among the big shifts that you can select for your unique website would be shifting the website-marketing from a “riding-shotgun” approach to a well planned strategically designed surprise oriented campaign.

An interesting ‘surprise twist’ has recently been offered by ‘Disney’ with its “The Year of a Million Dreams”. This brilliant twist says,” imagine walking through one of the ‘Walt Disney Theme Parks’ when a cast member taps you on the shoulder to offer you a dream come true. Right now, over a million extra-special dreams, some thought impossible, are being randomly awarded to people just like you”.

Surprise web-marketing need to follow generally the golden oldie “giveaway” thumb-rule. We are observing that many of the web-marketers are shifting their attention to this thumb rule, though slowly. Giving away of ‘eBooks’ is one such helpful tool that certainly attracts people. One more innovative concept has slipped in these days. Some of the popular websites and many of the blog marketers also have started giving away “concept papers” and “white papers” to their viewers and customers for no cost. These kinds of free offers are becoming very popular among the websites that are focused on information sharing concepts. Subject and field specific websites are also adopting these new techniques in order to enhance their reach to the common readers. Recently we are observing a sudden rush in the news specific websites also. These kinds of giveaways are actually ‘knowledge enhancers’ and many people love to have them.

A simple surprise element on any website has very high chances of kicking away the annoyance of a viewer on an average. It helps him forgetting and forgiving the wasteful clicks .An element of surprise will always keep a website alive and fresh as it would attract many new and come back visitors to have a feel of the surprise.

Website marketing has full potential if combined with surprises. It’s the key to great entertainment. Surprise fuels great marketing, creates innovative opportunities and generates revenue. Website generally thrives on updating of its contents regularly and the advertisements pushing in the revenues. There exists a large gap in creative conceptualization and marketing of a website. This large gap contains immense potential for creating multiple opportunities with creativity. Montreal entrepreneur Andy Nullman, an authority on surprise marketing says,” small businesses have a great chance to make a difference in their marketplace by using the power of surprise to delight and astound their customers”.

Internet marketers and website marketers need to remember always the golden guiding principle, “little things make a huge difference”. In this world where people tell their friends and believe what their own friends tell them. It is the “word of mouth” that drives sales up to great extent and “not ads for the umpteenth surprise sale that is not a surprise at all”, according to Rogers Wirelesses’ initiative “Share  the Joy”.

Website marketers must also understand how to start with surprise marketing. Think what you did last month and try exploring new ideas in order to see if you can do something different. “Ask you, what we could do that we never dared to do?” says Andy Nullman. He further advises, “Marketing is about a relationship, and like all relationships, you have to keep it fresh”.

Surprise web-marketing is not a massive investment proposal in itself. Its cost effectiveness is also a surprising fact. Internet marketers are always leveraged with tactics. If one tactic does not click, try another one. Create one more buzz .After all the website marketers are their own masters. They can opt for more risks and do not require permissions for that. The risks involved in such type of ‘surprise oriented website marketing’ are comparatively very light and a webmaster practically has nothing to loose much. A contest, for instance, may cost a few dollars more to the webmaster but the amount of website traffic that would be generated with such contests would be almost unimaginable. Surprise web-marketing thus proved to be a cost-effective technique to enhance the web traffic, page rankings, revenue, and of course the popularity among the viewers.

Surprise web-marketing will definitely add new tools to the existing approaches with low cost, high speed, flexibility and other components. Success depends much on the use of maneuver, surprise, and speed to find an opportunity. It is more like the fighter pilots who understand the importance of “getting inside” in a dogfight by turning and maneuvering quicker than the enemy to fix their guns on the enemy plane well before it comes to know the intentions. This clearly means that such type of web-marketing means knocks with fast and unpredictable tactics giving out surprises. Business with surprises is thus no less than the fighter’s war.

Yong Guan’s laboratory may be the driving engine for the future marketing safeguards for internet advertisers. With his five long formulas deriving various variants and constants would be the future guidelines for all those who are looking eagerly to make a fortune with internet marketing and advertizing business.Yong Guan’s formulas contain all bad news for present and future cyber criminals. Yong Guan and his team of students at the ‘Iowa state University’ are working on the development of  technologies for fighting the cyber crimes and making shopping more secure for common people around the world.

Yong Guan is Litton Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and in collaboration with the ‘Iowa State University Research Foundation’ has also applied for a patent on this new technology that detects frauds.

“Click Fraud”, the new technology of Yong Guan, deals with the problem of false drives and campaigns for hitting the advertisements that are posted on millions of websites. Yong Guan says,” The invention will help online advertising companies such as Google and Yahoo reduce click fraud”.

Guan’s research is expected to facilitate millions of the computer and internet users across the globe. Most of these users do not have enough time and expertise to protect their machines from the growing frauds. They often do not have enough access to the recent security technologies and safeguard measures.

Security issues have multiple faces and the researchers are fighting on this front to solve the complex puzzles for past several decades.”And 30 years later we’re still working on them”, says Yong Guan.

Cyber crimes have many aspects and they are changing constantly. During the late nineties it used to be the hackers attacking computer systems. Since then things have taken a different track now. Trade and commerce is now becoming more online oriented and this online money transaction has attracted the cyber criminals for adopting new and advanced techniques for making frauds. To address the problem, Guan and his co-researchers are working on multiple projects in order to make computing more secure and hold cyber criminals accountable:

Yong Guan is on the verge of developing new technology and techniques that will extract the criminal evidences directly from the computers, network hardware, cell phones and other electronic devices. Guan has three projects in his hands right now. Each of these projects has a specific focus;

•  Network attack attribution to help investigators find the real origins of cyber   criminals and attackers.
•  Click fraud detection to protect Internet advertising.
•  Auction fraud technology to quickly identify the people and their accomplices who run bogus Internet auctions.

These projects on which Yong Guan is working, also aim to improvise the security and working of the wireless communication networks.

The first project has an objective of finding out how a new secure network coding model can be generated and protected from attacks during its transmitting the network traffic. The conventional system used to send each individual message hop by hop until it reached its destination.

The new technology has made it differently now. It is based on network coding and cooperative relaying schemes. With this new set up the system sends and combines all messages in different groups. Guan said it’s like loading up a freight train and sending big loads down the line together. It’s a way to increase capacity and save energy. But this also becomes more vulnerable as putting all that network traffic together makes it easier for attackers to hit more targets with a single attack.

The second project of Young Guan intends to develop an exclusively location-based security system that would help almost all existing wireless technology. That means a person would have to be working in a specific place prior to having an access to documents over a wireless network. Such a system in place would be immensely useful for the government employees who are generally required handle the classified documents over wireless connections. Guan’s security system would only allow those documents to be viewed in designated secure rooms.

Yong Guan’s third project will help secure wired and wireless multicasts over the Internet. This will help in protecting and managing multiple lists of Internet accounts. For a software company it would serve many potential purposes. Such a company, for instance, would be able to limit the delivery of security patches to paying customers. Webcasters would also be benefiting with this technology. It will help them manage and limit access to their content.

Yong Guan is also making attempts to develop techniques for protecting the individual’s identity on the internet. Such technology will be immensely helpful for the internet users. Guan intends to develop a set of secure applications. One application, for instance will protect the individual’s medical record using online pharmacies while the other set of application will be preserving the identity of people who are taking part in some online voting system.

Yong Guan is definitely going to trouble the criminals. His technologies would detect the criminals and their bogus accomplices who intend to run bogus internet auctions on the internet. Future may be witnessing major developments and these technologies could develop as a tool that can be used in the courts also.

Yong Guan and his associates are spending long hours with cross-hatched lines on their laboratory whiteboard, struggling with their analyses, calculations and formula. They are sure working for all of us and we must thank them for their sincere efforts and wish them good luck.