I don’t usually write about gadgets on this blog, though I use my fair share of them day to day. I get all my email forwarded to my Blackberry, just like every good e-commerce CEO should.
However, I came across this little widget and just thought, “How Cool! I’d actually use that!”

The Ecosol Powerstick is basically a USB device that you plug into your PC or laptop and juice up. However, it doesn’t DO anything. It just holds the juice. It’s got a universal adapter on it (compatible with a ton of portable devices) and when your iPod or cell phone or digital camera runs down, you don’t need to find the adapter, or an outlet, or anything.

You just hook this thing up to your device and hit the button, and it’s just like you plugged into the wall. There’s a little meter on there to tell you how much juice is left, and that’s pretty much all there is to it.

The Powerstick won an Innovation Award at CES 2007, so hopefully they’ll get it out into the marketplace soon to capitalize on that buzz.

It’d make a great stocking stuffer, don’t you think?

I found it via Gizmodo:
http://www.gizmodo.com/gadgets/gadgets/ecosol-powerstick-mystery-solved-217616.php

But Ecosol has a product page for it as well:
http://www.ecosolinc.com/powerstick/

I read a really fascinating blog post from Anne Holland over at Marketing Sherpa and I wanted to share it with you before the holiday.

There was a B2B conference in SanFrancisco and there Holland had a luncheon chat with Matt Ackley, eBay’s VP of Net Marketing. She had some really great questions for him, and he had some interesting answers.

I don’t want to just paraphrase the post here - I suggest you go read it yourself - but it gave me some fascinating insight into the scale at which eBay participates in PPC advertising.

Some juicy bits:

• Did you know that even though their brand is among the mightiest on the face of the earth, they still bid on the phrase “eBay.”
• Google’s OneBox presents a problem for them, since eBay’s stock ticker symbol is “EBAY” and a search for their name brings up stock results first, rather than their preferred organic listing.
• They maintain an in-house database of 250 MILLION possible search terms that they can bid on, of which 5 to 15 MILLION are active at any given time… even the word “dung.” Go to Google and search “dung” and you’ll see that eBay does indeed pay for that word - and they actually have a good reason for it! Apparently, if you’re in the market for petrified dinosaur dung, “You’ll find ‘it’ on eBay!” (to quote their TV advertising slogan).

The full blog post is available here:
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.php?ident=29783

You can also download an mp3 of the whole interview here (includes other panel members Dean DeBiase of Fathom Online and Jack Jia of Baynote):
http://www.norcalbma.org/programs/November-2006-meeting-Moreinfo_html

I probably won’t get to post again before the holiday weekend, so Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Cheesy headline, I know. But this is some pretty big news and I didn’t want to wait until next week to write about it. In an unprecedented alliance, Microsoft AND Yahoo have agreed to adopt Google’s “Sitemaps 0.90″ protocol instead of developing their own submission standards.

If you’re making a sitemap for any of your websites, you can now follow a single set of guidelines that will be suitable for submission to all three of the “Big Three” Search Engines.

For my more advanced readers, you already know all about XML sitemaps, so I won’t get into a ton of detail here, but BloggerDesign.com linked to a few tools to help you create an XML SiteMap. You can find that blog post here:
http://bloggerdesign.com/70/search-engines-agree-on-xml-sitemap-standard/

Google made an official announcement about the alliance on their GoogleBlog here:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/11/search-engines-united.html

And you can find out all about the protocol itself right here:
http://www.sitemaps.org/

The site above actually details the protocol and has a fairly thorough FAQ on the topic. Some of you who have heard me speak or who have watched my videos know that I traditionally haven’t messed with sitemaps much, but in light of this development, I’ll definitely look into whether this will be a worthwhile endeavor for my sites. Even if we decide it’s still not for us, maybe this collaboration between the “Big Three” will lead to more search standards down the road, making life easier for all SEO practicioners.

Hope that helps you all out and have a great weekend!

I’ve been busy this past week with the 1st StomperNet conference here in Atlanta, so I haven’t had time to write or catch up on a lot of things. (In case you were wondering, the conference was amazing!)

But I thought I’d share something I came across before getting my hands full with StomperNet and I’ve only gotten back to reading it now. Akamai, the self-described “leading global service provider for accelerating content and business processes online” commissioned Jupiter Research to do a study on e-commerce. I’m sure I’ve talked about Jupiter Research before and they do a lot of good studies for our industry.

Anyway, the study was entitled “Retail Web Site Performance: Consumer Reaction to a Poor online Shopping Experience”. It’s got a lot of good, FRESH information about what kind of experience today’s users expect from an online store, and some nice demographics about the makeup of the online marketplace. The study was just released on the 6th of November, but the research was conducted starting only back in April of this year.

I think the single most important thing in the report (and Akamai must agree with me because it’s the main point they’re using to promote the report) is that the new acceptable load time for e-commerce pages is down to 4 seconds. In 2001, it was a full 10 seconds. More recently, the target time has been reported as 6-7 seconds. As broadband connections become more widely available, users expect fast sites, and their tolerance for lag is shrinking more and more.

It’s also interesting to me that the kind of optimization that can make a website fast is the kind of optimization that can make it more friendly to search engines: not using unnecessary imagery, avoiding bells-and-whistles that don’t add value, and applying lightweight, standards-compliant code.

Another thing the study notes is that not only do you lose a sale when you don’t meet users’ expectations, but it can actually be damaging to your reputation and brand identity. When you lose a sale, you can actually be strengthening your competition by sending the shopper straight into their arms. This danger of tarnished branding actually extends into the real world, as researchers are noticing that consumers seem to avoid shopping at off-line retail locations when those companies have poor online shopping sites.

Obviously, the report concludes that you need proper website architechture and infrastructure to handle these issues. Of course, this is the actual business that Akamai is in. Convenient!
However, even if you’re not in the market for their solutions, there’s a lot of great, crunchy information in the report, so I thought I’d pass it on.

The press release for the study is available here from Akamai:

http://www.akamai.com/html/about/press/releases/2006/press_110606.html

And the report PDF itself is available on that page towards the bottom.

I hate to keep going on and on about Google’s moving and shaking, but they just won’t stop making newsworthy moves!

Print newspapers have been fairly angry with Google and its imitators for some time now. Why? Because AdWords advertising subverts their business models. Generally speaking, contextual online advertising is not only more successful than print advertising, it’s a lot more measurable.

In spite of this animosity - or maybe because of it - Google is going to roll out a service designed to cozy up to the newspaper publishers, where they offer to take the place of their in-house ad reps. The concept is to basically take AdWords into the print world. In a three-month test, Google has established the same kind of marketplace, where advertisers actively bid for ad space in participating newspapers.

According to the article I read, the newspapers participating (New York Times, Washington Post), and the companies bidding on the space (Netflix, eBags) are all big fish.

If it’s successful, Google will offer that advertising channel to all of its advertisers, and roll out the program to many more newspapers, including those outside the U.S.

Google’s not the first company to try to execute this idea, but unlike other companies, Google already has an army of paying advertisers to bring to the table. I’m really interested to see how this new program works out, and once it opens to all advertisers, we’ll definitely be looking into what it can do for us.

Here’s a Forbes article about the service:
http://www.forbes.com/markets/bonds/2006/11/06/google-ads-newspapers-markets-equity-cx_po_1106markets01.html

StomperNet launched on October 3rd and I’ve been swamped ever since.

This week, Marketing Sherpa published a case study on the launch of the Internet Marketing 2.0 network of Stompers. Like all their case studies, it will be free for a few days: StomperNet Case Study