Web Development Live

JOB CHANGESTitleOne Corp., a locally owned and operated title and escrow company, has announced that Doug Brigham has joined its team as vice president for finance and strategic growth. Brigham’s background includes 20 years of operations, finance and administrative management in private industry. He has held increasingly responsible positions including treasurer, corporate controller and business unit chief financial officer. Most recently he served as senior vice president for business development for the Infrastructure Business unit at Washington Group International. Brigham is a Meridian High School graduate and earned a BA in Business Administration from The College of Idaho. He went on to get an MBA from Boise State University.George Seybold has accepted the position of project manager with Wirestone LLC. He comes to Wirestone with 14 years experience in online marketing, online community creation, Web analytics and search optimization.Formerly, Seybold held the position of brand marketing e-media manager at Weyerhaeuser’s building materials division, iLevel (formerly Boise-based Trus Joist), where he managed and set the strategic direction of the division’s online properties and online marketing promotional activities. He will maintain his seat on the Metrics and Standards board of Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization.RECOGNITIONThe National Association of Women Business Owners, Boise Area and Southern Idaho Chapter, announced the winners for its Business Women of the Year Awards. This is the sixth year NAWBO has recognized Idaho business women who exemplify excellence in business accomplishments, employee development, achievement, community leadership and advocacy for women professionals. Joan Stephens, CR, of Stronghold Remodeling Inc., won the Business Woman of the Year Award. Kandy Weaver, of Kandy Weaver and Associates LLC, was also nominated. In other categories, Paula Miller, owner of Framed!, won the award for Business Woman of the Year - Up and Coming. The other nominees were Tawni Weaver of ReNu Medispa, Rebecca Evans of Inner Element, and Robin Phipps Woodall of Tone Athletic Club. Irene Deely, owner of the Woman of Steel Gallery, received the Trailblazer Award, given to an inspirational businesswoman whose accomplishments are in a field or industry where relatively few women have made inroads. Melanie Krause, of Cinder/Krause Consulting LLC, was also nominated. And Tamara Brandstetter, president and CEO of Delta Dental, received the Leadership Award, given to a woman who promotes a climate for a healthy business community on a local, regional and state level. Other finalists were Rebecca Poedy, Idaho president and CEO of Planned Parenthood, and Judith Garzolini of Hewlett-Packard.Dr. Carl Thornfeldt, chief executive officer and founder of Boise-based Episciences Inc. and practicing dermatologist, and the Epionce product line are featured in three national publications this month. Thornfeldt was interviewed for and appears in the article “Chemical Peels Today” in the January/February issue of Medesthetics Magazine, a trade publication for physicians and medical spa professionals. The article highlights the Epionce Equalizer Peel, a chemical peel for sensitive skin. He was also interviewed for and appears in Household and Personal Products Industry’s January issue article “Transdermal Delivery: Marketers rely on a variety of ways to deliver active materials to the skin.” Finally, the Epionceproduct line is featured in the January issue of Dermascope Magazine, another skin care trade publication for estheticians, spa owners and the salon industries. Thornfeldt wrote an article, “Skin 101,” that will appear in the February issue of Dermascope as well.

Tags: business development, ceo, chief executive officer, fi, job, metrics, s board, search engine marketing, search optimization, senior vice president, t line, vice president

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The company on Monday is expected to announce that it has acquired an 11-person start-up, Virtual Ubiquity, that has built a free web word processor called “Buzzword”. Financial terms were not disclosed.

The move expands Adobe’s collaborative software services and steps up its competition with Microsoft and a host of other web application providers, including Google.

Adobe also is scheduled to announce a service, code-named “Share”, that allows people to invite others to view and access documents stored by Adobe. Documents can be embedded inside a web page as well. The service, which is still in testing mode, will offer users 1GB of storage for free.

Adobe executives are scheduled to detail these initiatives at its Max 2007 developer and designer conference, which starts on Monday in Chicago.

Microsoft, meanwhile, is expected on Monday to detail its own document collaboration service, Office Live Workspace, a free online tool for viewing, sharing and storing Office documents online.

In other Max announcements, Adobe plans to release the beta version of its desktop video viewer, Adobe Media Player, which is now being used by CBS, PBS and Yahoo to distribute multimedia content with advertising. Adobe Media Player version 1.0 is due in the first half of next year.

The technology underpinning these applications is Adobe’s Flash Player and AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime), software that lets web applications run offline. The programs were written using its Flex development tool.

The company’s strategy is to assemble a series of collaboration products and services on top of its development platform, said Erik Larson, director of marketing and product management at Adobe. Buzzword will complement its existing online services, Adobe Connect and Create PDF, he said.

“Our focus is on document collaboration around a lot of different kinds of documents,” Larson said. “There is a lot that can be done with the Adobe platform, and there are still unrealised promises.”

Larson said Adobe will focus on online collaboration of “high fidelity” documents, or those that appear the same on-screen and when printed out.

The plan is to make these applications free for paid premium services to businesses.

Rick Treitman, chief executive of Virtual Ubiquity, said his company decided to use Adobe developer technologies because they were better than other available programming methods. Adobe invested in the company last year as part of a venture fund set up to promote applications on Flash and AIR.

What sets Buzzword apart from other online word processors is the pagination; it allows people to get an accurate view of how a document will print out as the document is edited. It also has the ability to embed graphics, track changes and organise files.

“Flex and Flash were the means to where we want to go. No-one else realised how powerful it was as a virtual machine,” Treitman said.

During the Max keynote address on Monday, Adobe executives are expected to show off other rich internet applications written for Flash or AIR.

One of those will be an AIR version of Pronto, an email application from CommuniGate Systems that is expected to be released next spring when AIR 1.0 is available.

John Doyle, CommuniGate Systems’ vice president of business development, said Adobe has the wherewithal to build a line of compelling and simple-to-use rich internet applications that could lure businesses away from Microsoft Office.

“If anybody has the financial strength, the market reach and the track record of making very good applications, it’s Adobe,” Doyle said. “They’re able to overnight ship applications through Flash to browsers that will be accessible by 96 percent of the users in the world. That’s huge.”

IBM last month introduced a beta version of Lotus Symphony, a set of traditional desktop applications that the company is offering as a standards-based alternative to Office.

Tags: business development, collaboration, complement, different kinds, director of marketing, fi, google, lte, product management, vice president, web applications, web page

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As Cisco grows and enters into new markets, the deals seem to be getting larger and the stakes a bit higher. The challenge for the 39-year-old executive, now the company’s senior vice president of corporate business development, will be to maintain that success rate.

Having served as the number-two man in Cisco’s mergers and acquisitions (M%26amp;A) unit, Hooper has already worked on some key deals, most notably the $6.9bn (?.5bn) acquisition of Scientific Atlanta and the $500m (?53m) acquisition of Linksys.

A few months into his new job, the executive has already pulled off one significant acquisition. In March, Cisco announced it would spend $3.2bn (?.6bn) in cash to acquire WebEx, the number-one web conferencing company. The medium-sized, publicly traded company will help Cisco move into a new market and will also provide the company an entry into the web services business.

Tags: amp, business development, fi, job, senior vice president, uis, vice president

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But some media veterans worry that expectations for online advertising may be getting out-sized.

Increasingly, they say, too much media depends on advertising as the only source of revenue. With new players from software makers to cable operators also

trying to cash in, the dollars simply may not stretch far enough.

“I’m getting to the point where I feel like every answer to every business development pitch is ‘We’re going to be advertiser supported’,” said Beth

Comstock, president of Integrated Media at NBC Universal, which this year set up a fund to invest in media and digital companies.

“It’s just not going to be possible,” she said at a recent advertising conference. “There are not going to be enough advertising dollars in the

marketplace. No matter how clever we are, no matter what the format is.”

NBC Universal’s television networks, cable channels and Web sites compete for advertising dollars with everything from niche blogs to big media peers like

Time Warner Inc and Walt Disney.

In addition fast-growing Internet companies like Google Inc are snatching up advertising budgets.

But new rivals are entering the market. Comcast, the largest U.S. cable operator, expects at least $US1 billion in online advertising in the next five

to

six years.

Verizon Communications and AT%26T are looking at advertising opportunities on their video and wireless services, while startups like social network

Facebook

are seen as a new frontier for Web marketing.

Even Microsoft has made a bold move into advertising with its purchase of Web marketing firm aQuantive.

THE MONEY FLOW

Until recently, the focus was squarely on how much money is moving into online advertising, rather than whether too many companies are making a grab for it.

There is little doubt today that a hefty portion of advertising dollars will shift to the Internet from TV, radio, print and elsewhere in the coming years.

ZenithOptimedia forecasts that online ads worldwide will rise 28 per cent in 2007, while the rest of the market grows at 3.7 per cent.

Next year, ZenithOptimedia forecasts it to rise by 21 per cent, and climb another 13 per cent to $US43 billion in 2009.

At that point, Web advertising would represent almost 10 percent of the $495 billion spent on advertising worldwide - yet would trail spending on

newspapers, magazines, and TV.

“There are billion of dollars that can still move,” said Craig Lambert, Chief Digital Director of Colangelo, an integrated marketing agency.

“Is there enough money flowing to support the businesses out there? I’d guess there is, just because there’s so much money that has always been spent on TV

and print,” he added.

BIG SITES GET BIG DOLLARS

Others also take the position that there should be sufficient advertising money to spread around.

Jeff Brooks, Chief Executive of digital and direct marketing agency Euro RSCG 4D, sees a “huge gap” between the amount of time people spend on digital

media and the amount of advertising money it attracts.

“The thrust of ad spending online, while dramatic in its growth quarter over quarter, still represents a disproportionately small percentage of total

advertising dollars,” he said.

The catch, according to some, is that much of the money flowing toward the Internet is concentrated on a few dozen of the most popular sites.

That has left smaller, less well-known sites at a severe disadvantage when it comes to attracting advertising money and surviving.

In the United States, the top 50 Web sites accounted for more than 90 percent of the revenue from online ads in the first half of 2007, according to the

Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers. The top 10 sites accounted for 70 percent of the revenue.

All the while, the number of Web sites continues to grow, creating more competition for audiences - and advertisers - who can also choose among video games,

movies, TV, portable music and every other type of media entertainment.

“It’s not like the old days, when it was ‘if you build it, they will come,’” said Jonathan Sackett, Chief Digital Officer at Arnold Worldwide, a

Boston-based advertising agency. “Now if you build it, they probably won’t.”

One alternative for Web sites would be to bank on subscriptions rather than advertising revenue, but few existing outlets have been successful with that

model.

The reason is that unless the site offers extraordinary content, people simply refuse to pay for it, said Mark Miller, president of RMG Connect, an

advertising and marketing agency.

“If Warren Buffett wanted to put out his own subscription newsletter online, well, I’m sure he’d get a bucketful of people to subscribe to it,” Miller

said.

Tags: audience, budget, business development, cra, facebook, fi, google, google inc, growin, lte, newspapers, vet

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The internet has already brought the worldTs shopping malls into the bedroom but now Australian shopaholics can satisfy their impulses with a few button presses while walking home or riding a bus - as long as they have a PayPal account.
PayPal Australia product director Dinuke Ranasinghe said people had long been able to surf the web on their handsets but there had never been an easy way to make payments.
Keying credit card and other details into websites manually was cumbersome using a mobile keypad, while shopping via the mobile providers walled garden portal, which charged purchases to the customers phone bill, was largely limited to ringtones and wallpapers.
Ranasinghe said merchants had largely avoided mobile commerce to date because of the telcos prohibitive fees, which added as much as 50 per cent to the product prices.
With the PayPal system merchants setup their own mobile website, bypassing the telcos, and are charged up to 2.4 per cent of the sale price and a flat fee of 30 cents per transaction.
On the consumers side, the safety that we provide in not sharing financial information with third parties allays their fears of having their [credit card and bank account] details compromised over the phone, Ranasinghe said.
A Galaxy Survey of 1100 Australian mobile phone users, commissioned by PayPal, found 64 per cent wanted to purchase products via their mobile but 72 per cent were concerned about the security of their personal information.
PayPal is inviting Australian merchants looking to sell their wares via mobile phone-optimised websites to adopt Mobile Checkout as a payment method, but it has already signed up several partners including Hoyts, Warner Music, Deals Direct, Ready Flowers and Mobile Wine Club.
Hoyts and Warner Music are expected to start selling tickets and music via mobile phones before Christmas, while the others have launched their offerings.
The process is simply navigating to the WAP homepage, finding the movie and session times that youre after, making the purchase - going through checkout on the phone - and then once thats completed Hoyts will provide a reference number through SMS back to your phone, Ranasinghe said of the upcoming Hoyts Mobile Ticketing site.
Once you have the reference number that unique code you will use to claim your ticket once you get to the cinema.
Daniel Feiler, a spokesman for PayPals parent, eBay, said early next year users of the auction site would be able to buy things without touching a computer.
At the moment people can bid and buy [using their mobile] but they just have to wait until they get home to their computer to pay for the purchase via PayPal, he said.
Jason Nealon, vice president of business development at Warner Music Australia, said mobile phones were increasingly becoming mini-computers and commerce activity was growing.
This is an obvious area of focus for us as were all about providing consumers with easy access to our artists music, greater choice in how they consume and pay for it - ultimately maximising the returns for both our artists and Warner Music, Nealon said.
Anthony Thiessen, head of marketing at Hoyts, said Hoyts Mobile Ticketing would provide an easy, convenient and secure way to buy tickets at any time.
Once launched, it will be much easier for movie-goers to purchase last-minute tickets for themselves and for their friends, he said.
PayPal launched in Australia at the beginning of 2005 and has just surpassed 5 million registered users.
Ranasinghe said early in the new year PayPal would expand its mobile payment products to let users transfer money peer-to-peer and buy products or give money to charity via text message.
I could be in a restaurant and I can send my friend money over the phone to their PayPal account, he said.
Imagine that youre sitting on a bus and youre reading a magazine and it says text 123 CD, and you buy the latest CD from Guy Sebastian.

Tags: business development, cern, consumers, ebay, fi, growin, mobile web, thies, vice president, walled garden

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