But while Apple likes to promote itself as a freedom-loving, innovation above all company, that moniker applies only to the users of its products (and now, it only applies to small pockets of those users).

Apple itself is a company that is closed, exclusive, and protective – all values that don’t blend with the ethos it tries to project, and doesn’t fit well with innovation and development.

Take the recent lawsuit that Apple filed against HTC. They have accused the Taiwanese company of infringing on their patents. They’ve used a careful strategy, filed in two courts, and have addressed tick tack little issues, like sliding a button to unlock a phone.

But what is Apple really after? Well, Apple has found that they like zero competition – it drives profits immensely. So now that the Google Android platform has proven to be a formidable opponent to the iPhone, Apple has decided that instead of fighting the Android on features, price and user interface, they will fight the platform in court.

Rather than going after Google directly, they are starting with the smaller companies that use the Android OS, chipping away at the base. Experts like patent attorneys and intellectual property consultants see Apple filing multiple suits over several years, starting with those that don’t have the money and power to fight back.

Instead of using patents to increase and forward innovation, Apple uses patents as weapons in a war to limit innovation through competition and try to whittle the electronic world down into a one-screen theater, where Apple is all that can play.

The introduction of HP and other Microsoft based tablets at the CES this month, along with the rumors of the new Apple tablet set to debut later in January represent only the latest in the touch world innovations.

HP has a whole line of touch computers, including a line of sleek desktops, as does Gateway. Printers are adding web access with touch technology, and allowing printing directly from the web.

Additionally, you’re looking at faster cell phones with bigger screens, the netbooks, and the tablet PCs.

What does that mean for the web developer and the web commerce company?

More people will have quicker and more portable access to your websites. They’ll have the opportunity to interact with them in quicker, easier, more intuitive ways, if you’re ready to provide that capability.

For the web business concerned with ecommerce, think instant gratification for your touch customers. Is your ecommerce interface smooth and seamless? Will you be able to capture the customer’s purchase easily?

When developing for touch screens, remember that the input is very similar to mouse clicks, with only a few differences. However, you’ll want to make sure you allow for those differences.

For example, design your onscreen buttons slightly larger than you would for mouse clicks to accommodate fingers. You may also need to think about providing your own status feedback (loading, etc.) since the touch screens don’t provide that information.

While it’s useful to keep in mind that previous versions of the “slate” or “tablet” computer has not taken off with consumers, there’s no doubt that innovation in the mobile computing area is the current game.

With the indisputable success of the iPhone and iPod touch, technology companies seem to have the attitude that bigger will be better when it comes to portable touch screens. There’s no doubt that bigger will be better for many kinds of websites, especially those that are graphically and textually heavy like print news websites. Magazines and newspapers could benefit from larger tablet computers, as could many other sites.

Regardless of whether or not the tablet/slate computers take off, the touch technology is here to stay, and will only become more popular. Adjust and plan so that your website has a seamless ride into the touch era of computing.

As we all know, Google is committed to retaining that top billing, and they have responded to Bing and created some innovations of their own. Bottom line for both search engines is more relevant results for their users, and that means that SEO – search engine optimization — is even more important than ever.

While details will be coming forward for the next many months, many bloggers and some other sites have noticed a drop in their SERP rankings with Caffeine and Bing. This doesn’t need to happen, however.

In fact, smaller websites actually have a better chance of raising their rankings, if they use carefully targeted SEO.

Relevant Content
Good content becomes even more important than it has been in the past. If your site can match more precisely what the user wants to find, then you have a better chance of a high ranking.

Be specific in your content pages, and they will have a better chance of rising to the top. Carefully choose your keywords; if anything, specific keywords have become more important.

Be sure to include long tail keywords that get specific about your offerings: red mardi gras beads for parties instead of mardi gras beads or party beads. Think about brands, too: Canon digital cameras instead of digital cameras.

The titles of your pages are important. Each page should have a unique title specifically matched to the content you’re featuring. And you don’t want to ignore the Meta descriptions, even though they still don’t figure into the SEO searches. But if your page lands high up on that SERP, then you want to have an engaging, accurate and catchy Meta description to encourage the click.

The bottom line – although it will take more months to really see how Caffeine and Bing are going to respond, SEO continues to be highly important to web design. Money spent on SEO is money well invested, with the new search engines as much as the old.

In today’s business world, however, a having a web presence is a primary consideration for any business of any size, and should be a top priority.

Cost Effective Advertising

By using good search engine optimized copy and a great graphic design, you can attract people to your site, and keep them there. If you have an informative, useful site, other sites will link to it, giving you more free advertising. You can utilize a variety of different online tools such as videos, graphics, interactive games, calculators and photo collections that will help your customers and those who happen upon your site get to know your company and your products.

Building Community Connections

An effective website will help you make connections, both in your online business community and your offline community. When people can find your site easily, quickly learn about your company and what you do, and find a way to contact you, you have made great strides toward becoming integrated into the lives and lifestyle of virtual and actual neighborhoods.

New Means of Communicating with Customers

With a website, you have a simple way to gather information about your clients, such as their email address. Through utilizing this resource, you can direct promotional emails to your clients, run “web only” sales, and send them informational e-newsletters that provide information and promote your products.

Control Over the Message

With a website, you are in complete control over what image your business presents. Particularly for online businesses, you are able to create and preserve and image of your own making in a way that is difficult to do with traditional print advertising. A traditional brick and mortar business can use a website to extend and expand the business image they have tried to form in their store. The consistency will attract and keep customers.

If you aren’t satisfied with your business’s online presence, contact Webdatamation for ideas to fully utilize the online advantage of a business website.

Here is a little bit about the project:

“The Life Raft Group (LRG) launched this website, What does a cure mean for you? to find out exactly that…

We want to know what a cure actually means to those people who are dealing with cancer every day.  Unfortunately, cancer has touched us all in some way – whether you’re just concerned about it, you or someone you love has cancer, or you have lost someone to cancer.

We also want to show the scientific world that their work REALLY means something. We want to remind them that we are here, we are counting on them and we are real people.”

In anticipation of Cyber Monday and in preparation for the few weeks of consumer frenzy that follow, here are some of the global brand marketers strategies for making sure that ecommerce environments are ready to make the most out of the smaller opportunities that this season will inevitably afford.

Holiday specials content: launch it now. Although I cringe every time I get hit before Halloween by an ad for holiday shopping, now is the time to be launching your seasonal content. It is important to get your calls to action properly indexed and ranking in search results in anticipation of the interests of potential shoppers. Look back over last year’s analytics to see the seasonal search phrases that were driving high-conversion traffic to the site and build content to target that behavior. Get ready with your “holiday gift ideas” and plan ahead for people seeking “last minute holiday gifts” or looking for “gift ideas for mom.” Get this content featured on your home page so that you can contribute maximum link popularity to these specials as quickly as you can.

Offer free anything. Regardless of the economy, shoppers love to get something for free. Adjust your pricing, messaging and infrastructure now to put a little free shipping or holiday perk into the mix to sweeten the deal. Online shoppers are not just price sensitive, they are total-cost sensitive. If you can put together a better total deal than the competitor a notch down in the search results, you will have a better opportunity to make the sale.

Get ready to pay more for search marketing. Seems a bit of a no-brainer, but it is important to understand that from this point forward this year you will need to be paying more for search. For even the largest retailers, holiday shopping time is when they earn their bread, so it makes sense for online marketers to spend more in the hopes of making more. Just be sure that you are not spending blindly, and that your paid campaigns are tied into your ecommerce back end so that you can see what spending makes sense.

Optimize XML for feed-based shopping engines. If you have not jumped into comparison shopping, now is the time. Using your data feed (unfortunately only a few of the engines accept XML feeds) get into comparison shopping engines to compete for the cost-conscious consumer. As household budgets shrink, people are looking for the best deal they can find, and comparison shopping is projected to be one of the bright spots in the ecommerce mix this year.

And don’t forget the flavor of the month: social shopping. Although it accounts for a very small percentage of total ecommerce revenue, social shopping is emerging as a way for certain kinds of consumer products to accelerate into high-touch communities of influencers.

Take fullest advantage of that XML feed by creating a seasonal shopping widget or Facebook application or other externalization of your catalog so that you can give your customers and advocates the best possible opportunity to carry your proposition into their communities.

Do a thorough analytics review. Make sure that your site is ready to handle the increased number of visitors. Check your shopping cart and conversion funnels for holes and work to be sure that you get the most out of every customer. Remove barriers to transactions and increase the visibility of the calls to action.

Tweak your merchandising and cross-selling. If you are selling a printer, include an offer to buy replacement cartridges. If you are selling running shoes, why not merchandise a warm-up jacket in the same color? Perhaps the purchaser of that particular fragrance will also like to buy a scented candle? You have them in your shopping aisle, why not try to get another item or two into their shopping cart! Embed a layer of social shopping into your cart so that you can cross-sell by showing the other items that people have purchased in conjunction with the item that is currently being viewed.

Optimize for promo codes and coupons. Any large brand has a segment of their customer base searching for promo codes for use in an online store or for coupons to be transacted offline. Build a page specifically targeted to this search behavior and extend your ability to connect with brand loyalists that are just looking for a bit of a discount.

Santa has already taken the reindeer out on some training flights, and you too should be tuning up your ecommerce strategy to make the most out of the holiday shopping period. This year, more shoppers will be looking online for better deals and for ways to save the incremental costs like the fuel it takes to drive from mall to mall. Advance preparation will ensure you get the most out of this holiday shopping season.

Red Flags

However, the advantages are now accompanied by growing concerns over data privacy, regulation and interoperability issues.

A number of vendors have announced cloud computing offerings in recent weeks, notably Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN) , Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) and Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL) , and this was closely followed by IBM’s (NYSE: IBM) launch of new social networking tools called “Bluehouse.”

The launches have spurred warnings from analyst firms which advise businesses to adopt such offerings with care.

Consultancy Global Secure Systems (GSS) said that organizations should review their IT security arrangements before jumping, even on a trial basis, into the world of cloud computing.

GSS managing director David Hobson pointed to provisions in the Data Protection Act that oblige companies to state clearly where they are storing customer data. The legislation also means that companies cannot store their data outside the European Union.

No Boundaries

The problem with signing up to a cloud computing vendor is that company data could be stored almost anywhere in the world, particularly because vendors need to replicate the data around the world to maintain their own disaster recovery and backup plans, said Hobson.

“Our caution here at GSS doesn’t reflect on the integrity of these new cloud computing services in any way,” he said. “It merely reflects the fact that corporate governance rules and, of course, data protection legislation needs to play catch-up with the real world.”

Richard Stallman, founder of the GNU project and the Free Software Foundation, voiced more grave concerns about allowing a third party to host private data. He advised organizations to keep private documents in their own hands “for your freedom’s sake”.

Stallman also noted flexibility issues stemming from organizations being locked-in to a particular cloud vendor. “If you do your computing using someone else’s server, the server operator has control over it,” he told vnunet.com.

“It’s just as bad as running a proprietary program, and worse, because even the painful option of patching the binary is impossible.”

Under Construction

Deeper technical problems exist with cloud computing, noted Butler Group analyst Roy Illsley.

“We are still working on the model for cloud computing and in reality we are still at the infrastructure layer,” he said.

Illsley brought up a number of interoperability areas that need to be addressed before organizations should invest too heavily in a cloud storage infrastructure.

He gave the example of VMware’s VMotion product that allows a live migration of running virtual machines from one physical server to another with no downtime.

If this is to work in the cloud, the cloud provider will have to have the same chip generation and the same supplier as the customer.

“Although you can now move between generations of Intel (Nasdaq: INTC) chips, you still cannot interchange between Intel and AMD,” he said.

Meanwhile, Butler Group’s Richard Edwards advised organizations to consider their export strategy when taking to the cloud.

“Think about what strategy you will take if you need to move the operations back in-house,” he said. “Does the software maker make it easy for you and how costly will it be?”

The Flexibility Advantage

If organizations decide that the cloud is for them, Software as a Service provider Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM) is keen to make known the benefits.

“Ease of use, flexibility, scalability and a reduction of management and infrastructure overheads are beneficial to businesses of all sizes. With cloud computing businesses can use whatever they need and only need pay for what they use,” said Woodson Martin, vice president of strategy at Salesforce.

Martin said concerns about a loss of control of data are unfounded because many companies lack a control over their data on-premise.

“Many companies don’t even know how many PCs they have connected to their network at any time, let alone what data resides on those PCs and how it is being accessed, used and transported,” he said.

“Companies’ own IT teams are already stretched to breaking point and simply cannot do everything themselves to the same high level as specialist companies.”

If you want to see some excellent graphics and analysis explaining Web 2.0, subscribe to Ross Dawson’s blog, Trends in the Living Networks.

A New Conversation

Social networking has removed many of the obstacles that got in the way of better understanding prospects and customers, and serving them. Here are a few insights from trying to stay up with how Web 2.0 is changing how companies interact with prospects and customers:

• Overbalance the scales with offers of knowledge, not sales hype. Instead of blasting out PDFs that tell prospects how great your company is, think about setting up weekly webinars where you invite in an industry expert that freely shares their knowledge of what’s working in the area your products, services or software deliver value. Before you dismiss this as just for the Fortune 1,000 realize that industry experts need PR coverage too and often you can get them do these in exchange for promoting their practice.
• Define a Web 2.0 strategy now for your company and start executing on it fast. The two best bloggers in this area are Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li of Forrester who write Groundswell. These two authors, through their analysis of social networking and the Web 2.0 landscape, continually show how transparent and more connected previously isolated social networks, both in private and commercial areas, have become. What also emerges from their analysis is that when Web 2.0 technologies are used for connecting with customers, sales hype is dead. Informative, knowledgeable content that solves a complex question or problem for a customer is all that matters. Blogging to deliver solutions to customers in the form of knowledge generates real leads. It takes some companies a year or so to see any sales from this, yet it is hardly time wasted. These companies have changed how relevant they are to customers by delivering significant value without first asking for an order. Sales follow knowledge.
• Consider your own YouTube University. Getting a channel on YouTube to upload videos that can be inexpensively produced is another approach to gaining a reputation as a company willing to share knowledge with potential and present customers. The development of your own YouTube University also needs to have periodic updates, fueling new traffic in the process. It’s a fairly large resource commitment to make, yet getting your best product experts onto your own YouTube channel can increase your company’s credibility across the industry and with prospects.
• Work with any channel, technology or services providers to offer them participation in your trade shows and events, and vice versa. This works well as many partnerships have overlapping customer bases, yet have their own unique market segments as well. Developing this type of partnership significantly reduces the costs of trade shows and increases face-time with prospects, a critical part of lead generation.
• Understand that Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) AdWords is only as effective as your landing pages, lead management process and continual managing of keywords. Google has delivered some exceptional tools in this area during 2008, including the ability to optimize a landing page design by testing it iteratively before its launched. This is the largest lead generation strategy for many technology companies, and their continually improving of landing pages and key words generates significant results.

Knowledge Is Power

I’ve not spent years studying lead generation, yet what I have seen is that many companies are still doing very well with leads despite news about the economy this year.I’m convinced it’s because they have worked very hard using the strategies discussed here to get and stay relevant to prospects and customers. They’re delivering more knowledge, value, insight and intelligence than anyone else.

As a result, they’re trusted more and sales happen. Lead generation cannot be reduced to a series of causal factors; it all begins with trust in your company. In a Web 2.0 World, earning and retaining that trust is much more about offering insight and knowledge first.

The three entities involved in PPC advertising are the visitor, the host that carries the advertisement and the advertiser, who has advertised a product or service on the host website, usually a leading search engine. In this form of advertising, advertisers have to bid on keywords and phrases. Whenever someone searches a product or service using certain keywords, the search result page will feature those advertisements which contain the keywords using which the visitor actually searched in the first place.

The internet is fast becoming the battle ground for business to garner their share of the market. With increasing internet usage, people around the world are searching for all sorts of products and services online these days. It has therefore become important for almost every business to have a significant online presence. Merely having an online presence though will not guarantee business. Websites need to attract traffic and this is where PPC advertising steps in.

PPC advertising is growing rapidly at a mind boggling pace. Its popularity can be gauged from the fact that out of the total amount of money that is spent on search engine advertising, a whopping 81% is spent on PPC advertising. These figures do not come as a surprise to those businesses that have benefited from PPC advertising. There are several success stories of businesses that have been able to make the most out of PPC advertising campaigns.

The key reasons for the popularity of PPC advertising include:

1. The risk involved is low since the investment is minimal.
2. These advertising programs are fast to implement when compared to other media.
3. Advertisers can manipulate ad positions and also control costs with them.
4. Instantaneous results are a good possibility with PPC advertising.
5. PPC advertisements give an opportunity for businesses to test their products for online marketing feasibility.

PPC: A Brief History

Contrary to popular perception PPC advertisements are not a recent phenomenon. They have been in existence for well over a decade now. The term was increasingly heard during the mid 1990s when the dotcom boom happened. One of the companies that pioneered the concept was goto.com which later on was rechristened Overture. In 2003 Yahoo took over Overture. The actual PPC scene began to see hectic activities once Google launched its ‘Ad Words solution to PPC. Almost every major search engine is into this form of advertising these days.

The minimum price for click which is popularly referred to as ‘cost per click’ varies from one search engine to another. It also depends on the competition involved for a particular keyword list or phrase. It is for this reason that particular keywords and phrases are known to cost more on leading search engines.

Steps Involved in an Effective PPC Advertising Campaign

Although PPC advertising can look a relatively simple process, there are several issues that you will need to deal with once you decide on an advertising campaign. From choosing the right keywords to designing an attractive landing page, you will need to take care of several aspects.

A PPC Ad.
Several businesses have taken advantage of PPC advertising to make profits. With proper planning, you can implement a meaningful PPC advertising campaign, which can in turn mean more profits to your business. Let us look at the steps involved in making an effective PPC advertising campaign.

1. Selection of the appropriate keywords or phrases is the first step involved in PPC advertising. Remember, keywords and phrases are the cornerstones of success in a PPC advertising campaign. They are the foundation on which the entire campaign is built upon and developed. If you are already advertising on other media, then you also need to ensure that your PPC advertising campaign also complements them too.
2. Before you implement your PPC advertising campaign, you must first of all decide your budget. Proper planning will ensure that you do not overspend, while at the same time get effective results from your advertising campaign.
3. You must be clear as to who your target consumers are. This way you will ensure that you reach potential consumers through effective advertisements.
4. One way to target your target consumers would be to decide on a niche. Even if your niche market were to be small, a well directed and created PPC advertising campaigns can work wonders for your niche business area.
5. It is not enough if you just advertise and then assume that it would be effective in getting more business. You should constantly monitor your PPC advertising campaign. Always remember that the internet is a dynamic place, where things change very fast. You therefore need to make sure that your PPC campaign is in tune with the changing trends.
6. You must have a close look at statistical reports that are associated with your online advertising campaign. This will help you gauge the effectiveness of your PPC advertising campaign.
7. The best way to go about creating a PPC advertising campaign would be to hire the services of professionals. This is so because they will be experienced in creating the right copy or content for your PPC advertisement. A well written and concise copy can make the difference between success and failure in a PPC advertising campaign.
8. Along with working on your PPC advertisement, you should also simultaneously make sure that your website is attractive and easy to navigate, since your PPC advertisement will be leading web visitors to your website.

This form of advertising ensures a win-win situation of all the parties involved and it is no wonder that it is growing at a rapid rate. With increasing internet connections, the future holds immense possibilities for PPC advertising.