SEO Firm Secures $70 Million In First Round
In a press release, Vantage Media has announced that it has concluded a $70 million Series A preferred financing that is led by Montgomery & Co. Scale Venture Partners. Two others who participated in the round were Tudor Ventures and Integral Capital Partners.
Quick Ajax Training
TechNet Ajax web casts have a ton of Ajax related training videos that can help out security folks, and developer folks better yet, it’s all free.If you have never used or taken a TechNet web cast, and if you are interested in Ajax, and what Ajax can do for you, this is a great place to start to get your feet wet. The link is here.
Product (RED): Smart Social Marketing?
In a great post over at PSFK – Piers publishes the content of a conversation he had with Julie Cordua, the VP of Marketing for the often talked about Product (RED) social marketing campaign.
Domain Names & Defensible Traffic
Andy Hagans recently posted about his linkbait marathon strategy to rank his sites at the top of the search results. Brian Provost posted about his love for domaining. Domain names may play a big roll not only in anchor text, but also in overall domain credibility, linkability, and defensibility.
Lycos Top Searches
Lycos, a community destination for broadband entertainment has released The Lycos 50, the most popular search results for the week ending February 24, 2007.
“American Idol” contestant Antonella Barba had a surge in Web users searching for her. Not because of an outstanding performance on the show but because news surfaced that there were nude pictures of her on the Internet.
In a frenzy users flocked online to see for themselves, resulting in a 47,000 percent jump in interest just for being naked.
The Wikipedia Admin Brouhaha
Hardly a month goes by without some new dustup involving Wikipedia — either because someone edited their own entry, or because someone bitched about not being able to edit their own entry, or because someone paid someone else to edit an entry.
The Con in Conversation
The con in conversation is that it often means conversion, at least when marketers say it.
Conversion of opinion and perception, conversion of loyalty and trust and in many cases, hopefully, conversion of dollars and cents.
There’s nothing new here really, conversion through conversation has been around for, well, centuries. It’s the stuff of philosophy, religion, politics, education, and yes, business too.
First Great Windows Vista PowerToy
Microsoft’s Brandon Paddock has independantly written the first amazing PowerToy for Windows Vista, one that takes the search function of the Start menu and tricks it out, called Start++. What Start++ does is extend the search to let you run all these search shortcuts from the Start menu search box. For instance:
Wikipedia search: Type “w washington”, and you will launch Wikipedia, and search for Washington
Skirmish in the Digital Media War
A major kerfuffle has broken out in the UK between Virgin Media and satellite broadcaster BSkyB, with customers of both services losing out as the ham in the metaphorical sandwich.
At midnight last night, a deadline expired for both companies to come to an agreement on licensing rights and fees for Virgin to include some of Sky’s content in the range of TV channels included in Virgin’s cable service.
Developer Workflow – Microsoft Ahead
In reading my 1,331 RSS items (as reported by Google Reader) today I found one by Scott Barnes where he noted that Ryan Stewart, who covers the rich Internet application space better than most anyone, noted that Microsoft was ahead in terms of developer workflow.
Absolutely.