Editor's note: we offer our long-term sponsors the opportunity to write 'Sponsor Posts' and tell their story. These posts are clearly marked as written by sponsors, but we also want them to be useful and interesting to our readers. We hope you like the posts and we encourage you to support our sponsors by trying out their products. Over the past decade, the Internet has evolved at a rapid pace, and if you didn't jump on the bandwagon in years past you may be feeling like it's a bit too late to establish an online business. That's not the case, however, and 2010 is the perfect time to start doing business online. The underlying technologies of Internet architecture are well-established and are more affordable now than ever to end-users. Sponsor The last several years have also seen a huge increase in the number of available social tools, web utilities and online services that make promoting your business and being visible online easier and more affordable. The number of Internet users continues to grow substantially across the globe, and there are an expansive number of channels you can use to reach potential customers online. From an economic perspective, now is also a good time to consider starting or growing your business. The global economy is showing signs of recovery from recession, and catching an economic upswing when growing a small business is always a good thing. Small business loans from banks and other creditors may still be difficult to come by, however, which makes an online business an even better choice due to low start-up costs. In recent history, a great deal of attention has been paid to the massive growth in large social networks, but now the Internet appears to be shifting towards a more local or hyperlocal focus with smaller communities inside bigger networks becoming more common. As a result, small businesses offering local products or services can find a targeted audience of potential customers to engage with. All these factors make now a great time to start your business online. Follow through on a 2010 resolution to make money from what you enjoy doing by starting a complete business from the ground up, adding an online component to your existing physical business, or just using a website to supplement other income and test the water for your idea. Below are a few steps you can take to get started. 9 Steps to Getting Your Business Online Find a little cash : It's probably going to cost a lot to get started with a business website, right? Not so much. Don't fool yourself into thinking that you can't afford to start a business online just because you see startups with millions of dollars in venture capital funding featured on ReadWriteWeb or other tech blogs. A huge number of successful online small businesses were started out of a home office or garage workspace. The Internet is massive, and if you can find a good niche, you don't have to be everywhere at once to be successful. Costs for getting started with a domain name, hosting, basic website creation and online marketing can easily be kept under $1,000 in your first year of business if you plan well. Get a strong domain name : If you're in the early planning stages of your business, always keep potential domain names in mind when choosing a business name. If you move forward with a great business name only to find the domain name is taken , it could mean back to square one on name planning. Instead, keep a domain search handy as you brainstorm and get creative with names to find a great fit. Your domain name will be your website's permanent address on the web, so it's important to get it right the first time. Get Web hosting : You'd be surprised how many people think the domain name is all they need to build a website. What you need next is a place to store website files online. That could be something as simple as basic web hosting or a more powerful solution such as a virtual private server - both of which we offer at MyDomain. There are many other options as well, including self-hosting on your own server. There's a decent chance you know these basics already, so if that's the case, make sure to share your knowledge with others who are looking to get started online. Build a website : There are a huge number of options when it comes to creating a website in 2010. Most hosting packages come with some a website builder that will create a decent, if not slightly dated looking website from a template. If you're not experienced in web design but want to create a good-looking site yourself, look into content management systems such as Drupal, Joomla, or even WordPress as viable options that are easy to keep updated. The best - and not-surprisingly most costly option - still remains to hire a Web design company or freelancer. But if you're serious about your online business, your website design and usability should be a top priority. Create an e-commerce strategy : Now comes the fun part: figuring out how to let other people pay you. If you want to have an integrated shopping cart solution, you'll be able to sell directly through your site and manage complete product listings. However, this type of solution is the most expensive and complex way to sell online, and a simpler solution may be a better fit for a small business just getting started. A great place to start is simply integrating services such as Paypal or Google Checkout into your website to accept payments. Another viable alternative is to use a website as an informational source for your business, but sell through another online vendor like Amazon, eBay, or Etsy . A final option is to choose to not sell online, but instead establish a website to promote and market your physical business. Secure your site : If you're planning to sell through your website or will even be collecting sensitive information from visitors, you'll want to look into getting an SSL certificate for your website. SSL encrypts data transmissions to and from your website and is most commonly used to protect credit card and financial data. Varying levels of encryption and visible security indicators for your website are available. Network like crazy : Traditional networking can be crucial to the early success of a business, and social media can enable you to network effectively online. Talk about social media for business use is everywhere, and there are a huge number of resources and articles available to help you get started. Make sure that above all else, you go where your customers are. Utilize the tools that will allow you to most effectively communicate with those customers. Track like crazy, too : Make sure you're using website analytics to track your website visitors and sales. Part of the beauty of the web versus a traditional storefront is the ability to easily track, sort and analyze all of the data collected from visitors to your website. Analytics can help you improve your website design, track your sales conversion, see where you're ranking in search engines and much more. Google provides some of the best options available with Analytics , Webmaster Tools and Website Optimizer that all provide invaluable data for any online business. Grow and organize for the future : If you've made it to the point where you have a website set up, sales are coming in and your business is growing, it's the perfect time to make sure you're fully organized online. Use custom email addresses for your business, and make use of powerful collaboration, calendar and task management tools such as Open Xchange , Microsoft Exchange or Google Apps. Stay on top of the latest Internet trends and changes as things will continue to change rapidly for the foreseeable future. From there, carry your 2010 success long into the future as the Web continues to expand as a great place to do business. Discuss

Excerpt from:
Sponsor Post: MyDomain Shows How to Take Your Business Online in 2010

Demand for cloud-based storage and backup is creating some lucrative opportunities for companies servicing large telecommunications providers. We are seeing a number of carriers offering cloud-based services. Orange Business Services announced today that it will be offering cloud storage and other cloud-based services for its customers. Verizon announced earlier this month that it is offering a number of cloud-related services. Telecommunications companies are partnering with services like Nomadesk to give customers the ability to do their own cloud-based online backups. Sponsor Belgium-based Nomadesk is an online backup and syncing service for small business owners and personal users. It provides unlimited storage and sharing. The company announced this week a partnership with Bell Canada to provide its millions of customers with online back up for their mobile devices. Nomadesk is a virtual hard drive on your desktop. It's very simple. We downloaded the application, made some simple configurations and immediately had the ability to drag and drop files into the virtual hard drive that sits on the desktop.The hard drive is connected to the cloud and syncs when updates are made. Your data is secured and encrypted. It can be shared with any number of users and synced across the community. Applications can be backed up. Access to documents are available online or offline. Nomadesk CEO Filip Tack is touting the service as a better alternative to Box.net and Mozy . We agree that Nomadesk is easy to use, but as a collaboration platform it has some way to go. For example, Nomadesk does not have an advanced search capability like Box.net. We view enterprise search as a key feature for collaboration services. Tack said the company will offer search as a feature in the first part of 2010. Companies in this space are showing big market gains as larger providers seek revenues from the petabytes of data being produced every day. Mozy, for instance, just announced a partnership with Cox Business. Mozy is also partnering with China Telecom, McAfee and Vodafone to deliver cloud-based backup to customers. What is the amount of data that is produced every day in the enterprise? We know this can vary wildly but even small businesses are starting to produce exponential amounts of information compared to just a year ago. As this amount of information continues to grow, services like Nomadesk should stand to do very well as providers for large telecommunications companies. Nomadesk service for small businesses starts at $15 per user, per month. Discuss

See the rest here:
Nomadesk: Cloud-Based Backup Providers Doing Quite Well

The company behind the much-hyped Layar Augmented Reality browser has decided to withdraw its iPhone app from the iTunes App Store due to repeated crashes reported by users. Layar has been the most eagerly anticipated entrant yet into the field of AR, a class of technologies that place data from the web on top of a camera view of the physical world. AR has been big this year, from Layar's hyped launch to Yelp's sneaking the first AR app into the iTunes store to Lonely Planet and even McDonalds announcing their own AR apps this week. The field has been plagued with technical difficulties and disappointments so far, though. Layar wrote today on its blog that it doesn't know exactly where the problem with its app is but that it's a memory management issue that's been present since the app was built. Resolution will take weeks, not days, the company says. Sponsor Layar remains available and robust in its Android version. Its primary competitor is probably Wikitude . Of course there are countless AR apps that are available on the iPhone, Android, webcam and other platforms - but Layar has been the most publicly visible AR app yet. It symbolizes the popular vision for AR, which in reality often feels more clunky than demo videos suggest. People who believe the leading examples of AR apps are heavy on hype and light on engineering have another data point now. The current crop of Augmented Reality apps, high-profile map overlays for smartphones like the iPhone, are criticized as lightweight and overhyped by many AR pros that have been working on more heavy-duty applications intended for more technical use. Many of those critics haven't shipped products, though, and Layar has done more than any but a few other companies to extend public awareness of the Augmented Reality concept. Blake Callens, an AR software engineer at the company that created the Webcam Social Shopper , has been very critical of the crop of consumer smartphone AR apps popping up. He's called them "innacurate mobile browsers and web based eye candy". Callens comments aren't directly aimed at Layar, but Layar does symbolize the most visible part of the AR market for many people. "Seriously, hand me a 3D model and I can literally throw it in AR in 5 minutes. It's hardly a 'stunning' example at all," Callens writes "And yet, at least once a week, I see someone else pimping their new, 'totally awesome' AR app that's nothing more than a 3D model dancing around." We like Layar, but as the most high-profile AR app on the market, it doesn't reflect well on the state of the industry for the company to have to pull its app from iTunes. Discuss

View post:
Layar Pulled From App Store, Bad News for Augmented Reality

You'd think it was odd if you called me for directions and I told you to go 0.2 miles southeast and make a slight right onto Old Route 17. You'd expect me to say something more like, "Start driving away from the library and take the second right just after the McDonald's." Google Maps India has just launched a hybridized version of directions that give geographically accurate distances and directions as well as landmarks most humans would also recognize. We can imagine this coming to the rural U.S. and Google telling us to "follow that-there little jog in the road where the big oak tree used to be before Jimmy Ray hit it with his daddy's combine, bless his heart, for 2.3 miles." Sponsor Although most urban Americans are comfortable navigating by street signs, in other parts of our country and the rest of the world, landmarks are a necessity in successfully reaching one's destination. Other times, it's simply reassuring to know that you haven't actually missed a turn or your destination because you haven't yet passed a given landmark. How many times has someone told you on the phone to "keep going straight until you pass the shopping center" or something of that sort, and it saved you a missed turn as well as a general sense of anxiety? In the words of UX Googler Olga Khroustaleva , "We found that using landmarks in directions helps for two simple reasons: they are easier to see than street signs and they are easier to remember than street names... Sometimes there are simply too many signs to look at, and the street sign drowns in the visual noise. A good landmark always stands out." The point of the whole experiment was to give drivers a sense of confidence when exploring new territory. Ultimately, the Google team found that a combination of street names and distances as well as landmarks gave the best results and best satisfied users. Sree Unnikrishnan and Manik Gupta wrote on the Google India blog, "This effort was possible thanks to the large amount of landmark data that users like you contributed through Google Map Maker. Our new algorithm determines from available signals, which of these landmarks are most useful for navigation, based on importance and closeness to the turns that you're making." Here's a look at the Google Maps directions design we all know: And here's a version Google Maps India tried that added landmarks to other data to confirm directions: Finally, here's what Indian travellers will see moving forward: Looks pretty sweet to us! What do you folks think? Would you like to see more Map Maker landmark data for driving directions all over the world, too? Let us know in the comments. Discuss

Read the original:
Turn Right at the Gas Station: Google Maps Gets More Human

BlueKai is an online marketing firm that provides data to marketers, ad networks and publishers. The main purpose of this data, held in a repository called the BlueKai Data Exchange, is to target ads to consumers. BlueKai claims to have now aggregated "intent data" from over 160 million unique users on e-commerce, online travel agency and auto comparison sites. What is "intent data"? Broadly speaking, it's data that purports to show the intent of Web users when they browse a website. For example, a recent report from BlueKai collected and analyzed online shopping data over Black Friday week. In this post we look at that report's findings and then ask some questions about the validity of the data. Sponsor Black Friday Online Shopping: Netbooks & Nintendo Popular BlueKai defined the resulting "shopping intent" data as "search and shopping related activities by consumers on retail and price comparison sites." Specifically these "intents" included price search by auto make and model, travel destination search by airport or city, and activity on price comparison sites. The report analyzed "more than 10 million online shopping intent actions" for PCs and video game consoles through the week ending November 28, 2009. Here's a chart showing that netbooks , rather than the recently released Windows 7 , had the biggest increase in shopping intent actions in the PC category over the Black Friday holiday period. BlueKai explained: "Online intent actions by those shopping for Netbooks surged 81% during the week of Black Friday versus the prior week, with Netbooks reaching 7.1% share of total PC online intent actions for the week ending November 28. Just a month prior, Netbooks comprised only 2.7% of PC-related online intent actions on the BlueKai Exchange." Here's another chart, this time showing that Nintendo game devices, and in particular the Wii, held the most interest amongst online shoppers during Black Friday week. How it Works A New York Times article earlier this year profiled both BlueKai and a similar data house called eXelate . The Times explained how they work: "They both track who is interested in what through a cookie, an invisible bit of code on a Web page. When someone does a search, for example, on Kayak.com for first-class flights to Paris in September, that information can be captured by a cookie, and Kayak.com can sell that cookie using eXelate or BlueKai." As well as intent data, BlueKai recently announced a new service that gives advertisers access to shopper profiles. BlueKai CEO Omar Tawakol claimed that this gives advertisers insight into "actual shopping patterns," as opposed to merely surveying a user base. The problem is, BlueKai is inferring things about a consumer that may not be true . Claire Herminjard of the now defunct Lookery , which tried (and failed) to make a business of capturing explicit user data via a piece of javascript in partner sites, put it well : "[we] make no assumptions about users. If we don't have data on a consumer, we don't pretend that we do (or assume what we think it may be)." Although Herminjard was primarily trying to position Lookery as a better data source, her other point was that BlueKai is essentially a "black box" and its data can't be substantiated when it comes to users - or their intents. Questions Over Data Reliability, But There's a Big Market For It What BlueKai is doing is similar to the methods used by the raft of recommendation engines we've profiled this year . We found in that series that each recommendation engine had its own methods and algorithms; and that it was difficult to judge the accuracy of the data and which company's method worked best. Likewise I'm somewhat skeptical of BlueKai's data claims, especially given how unreliable web data usually is (Alexa anyone?). Nevertheless, BlueKai is attempting to mine a large store of data that up till now has been very difficult to gather and analyze on a large scale online: user patterns on commerce sites. Whether or not the data is reliable is an open question for now, but there is a large market for it - and that will continue as long as online advertising is the main business model on the Web. Discuss

Continue reading here:
BlueKai: Intent Data or Black Box?

Facebook used to be dominated by White and Asian users, but tonight the company announced results of a demographic study of its users concluding that the percentages of Black and Hispanic users of the site are now approaching their percentages of the population in the general US public. Hear that? Facebook scientists have looked at the data and everything is ok now. For months, we've been calling on Facebook to open up user data in an appropriate way for the public at large to study. Sponsor It's an invaluable bird's eye view of the interactions between 350 million people around the world. There are probably a lot of social patterns of interaction between people that could be discovered in that data - some not pretty at all. For now, though, Facebook has analyzed the data in-house and given itself a cheery report card. More analysis appears to be forthcoming, so we'll see what we're told about what really goes on on Facebook - but that data ought to be made available for outside analysis. In this case the data wasn't anonymized, it was analyzed by two in-house staff members and two grad students from Cornell and Princeton. The group compared users' last names on Facebook to US Census data about the percentage of people with those last names who reported particular racial backgrounds. Once a larger number of Facebook users have public profiles, something that's probably happening very rapidly thanks to the radical new privacy settings the company began recommending to users last week , then analyzing things like names, friend lists and associations won't constitute a violation of user privacy anymore. That might not sound like something many users are comfortable with, but one way or another there is a lot of potential for social good (not just advertising) made possible by aggregate user data. Perhaps co-incidentally, perhaps not - the new privacy regime will remove the primary objections to bulk analysis of user data. Presumably something will need to be done to make the data available in bulk and in an appropriate format for outside analysis, though. The example we've offered most commonly in calling for this data to be released is the history of what's called Real Estate Redlining. When in the 1960's both US Census information and real estate mortgage loan information were made available for bulk analysis, it was proven that banks around the US were discriminating against home loan applicants in traditionally African American neighborhoods. That was a big deal and we suspect that there are patterns of comparable importance, both positive and negative, hiding in Facebook's huge store of data. For contrast and illustration, consider the conclusions drawn by popular dating site OK Cupid in an analysis of dating inquiry response rates between its users of different races . In heterosexual pairs, male inquirers on OK Cupid were far more likely to get a response when they were white. Black, Hispanic and Asian men saw terrible response rates from women on the site. White men were least likely to respond to inquiries from Black women and they were by far the most likely to say that they preferred to date people of their same race. Both white men and women were quite unusual in the likelihood of their saying they preferred to date people of their own race. Take that, people who commented on the Facebook study tonight saying that people don't see race any more! It certainly appears that we do. It will be interesting to see if Facebook is willing to publish data that shines a less positive light on its own user base. Most likely, outside parties would be more apt to expose data like that. The world could use some more self-awareness, Facebook, but it's important that such self-awareness not be hand-delivered by scientists on your own staff, with your financial interests as their bottom line. Discuss

See the rest here:
Facebook Becomes More Racially Diverse, Ought To Release Data for Outside Analysis

In a chat today lasting over an hour, we got to talk to a person claiming to be the infamous hacker behind RockYou 's latest data security woes. While he claimed to have no animosity toward users, he had one clear message for websites: Take better care of your customers' data. RockYou isn't the only hacked site storing plain text login information, either. Sponsor What Happened To bring us all up to date, here's the gist of the story so far: The hacker, who we'll call Tom (not his real name) for brevity's sake, tells us that he used an SQL injection to gain direct access to RockYou's database, where he found login information for more than 32 million user accounts. The data was all in plain text and contained third-party site logins, as well. Tom sat on this information for a while. Although he's posted about similar hacks in the past, he also claims to have exposed the same vulnerabilities and gained access to the same kind of data for many major U.S. sites. Tom wouldn't reveal which sites he'd hacked, but he did say that he has no intention of using or publishing the data he's unearthed. But yesterday, incensed by this warning from an Internet security company and RockYou's claims that only some accounts had been compromised by the security breach, Tom posted about the hack on his blog . We (along with several of our peers) were tipped off to the situation via Twitter , and TechCrunch has since written two posts about the data breach. Why This Is a Bad Thing One of the more interesting facets of the story is RockYou's failure to appropriately protect user's login credentials. The hacker showed us an image containing the last few lines of a 32,603,388-line, seven-column dataset weighing in at 276 MB. All the data we saw was in plain text; any grade schooler could have used this information to log in to users' accounts. "If you don't store passwords for accounts, if somebody hacks you, what can he do? Deface your site. The end," said Tom. "That's nothing against 32 million emails with passwords. Count how many of them have PayPal. If I check every one, and only 10 percent of them have it, and I take only $10, it's a pretty nice amount, don't you think?" The hacker makes an excellent point with this object lesson, and he clearly holds RockYou and its ilk squarely at fault. Tom, who says he's employed in a good security-related job, believes there should be laws requiring companies to encrypt user data. He said, "They are now hunting for me, but why? I didn't do anything wrong. They should now be in jail because they put all of these people at risk. This was just for illustration." What We Can All Do Tom says that one out of every three sites he's gained access to store user data in plain text databases. "Server owners can use third-party sites for authentications, like Facebook, Google, OpenID or OAuth." he said. "Why the [redacted] would they want user passwords? I don't understand that." For websites, the hacker recommends using hashes with salt or PCI DSS to protect user data. He said that message-digest algorithm-5 (MD5) was an inadequate solution. "If you're storing it in MD5, it's nothing... It's no problem to use a GPU cracker, or better, a botnet of PS3s. I've got three at home." As far as users are concerned, Tom said, "Companies are putting people at risk by storing their data that way. [Users] should use their brains and generate a strong password for each site. He noted that Roboform , PassPack and KeePass are all good tools for storing and maintaining passwords. Discuss

See the article here:
RockYou Hacker: 30% of Sites Store Plain Text Passwords