SEO, Website Content Optimization
& Software Development

In what increasingly appears to be a quest for global domination, Google has recently announced a foray into providing satellite navigation services and is also rumoured to be eyeing the UK property market.

The news stories of Google’s latest product launches saw the share prices of leading companies in these sectors tumble; SatNav firm TomTom lost a third of its market value overnight, while property website RightMove suffered an initial 13% slide in value.

The message from the financial markets seems to be clear - if Google move on to your patch using their “free” services model, you’re as good as dead.

OK, Google is a massively successful company - in the space of a decade they’ve grown from nothing to become arguably the most powerful online business in the world - but should their competitors really just roll over and give up?

Of course not.

Google do enjoy great success, but they are not the great innovators or invincible combatants they are commonly believed to be.  To illustrate the point, take a look at how some of their ventures outside natural web search have fared: (more…)

Backbone IT Group attended the EU - China summit yesterday in Nanjing, attended by the country’s premier, Wen Jiabao.

The premier captured headlines as he spoke of the increasing number of states putting pressure on the Chinese government to strengthen its currency.  Although European representatives had attempted to persuade China to let the renminbi appreciate, Wen Jiabao made it clear that little progress had been made and labelled as unfair the stance of protectionism by some countries in light of demands for the renminbi to increase in value. (more…)

With the success story of the Chinese economy retuning quite dramatically to growth, the world’s eyes remain fixed upon China. With the country being such an economic powerhouse and remaining a “holy grail” for Western businesses, it’s easy to forget that China is not a democratic nation and that differences in culture and law are not only significant, can often appear draconian or unaccountable.

The companies who have fallen on entering or in doing business in China are many. Plenty of corporate giants litter the path to successful domestic Chinese business activity.

The latest of these is Microsoft. The US giant has recently announced the launch of Windows 7. However, a Chinese court has now ruled that Microsoft must stop selling versions of their Windows operating system which include fonts designed in China by a Chinese company. (more…)

We were surprised yesterday to receive a letter entitled “Notice of class Action Settlement.  It appears that some time in the past 10 years, (and it will now be nearly 10 years ago) we may have purchased text pay per click advertising on go to.com which then became overture.com and later Yahoo!. A settlement has been entered into by parties in action called “In re Yahoo litigation”.  We are informed that a class has been certified in the action and also of the terms of settlement.

We were very puzzled to receive this a class action - taking place against a company we have rarely had any dealings with directly, also in a different country to us, and relating to a time long ago.  Nevertheless, there are former Yahoo! (overture etc) pay per click search advertising customers who brought this class action back in 2006, alleging that the “Sponsored Search” and “Content Match” products provided by Yahoo! (overture etc) were in breach of contract because adverts were also displayed in spyware, domain name parking sites, sites are available under common misspellings known as “typo squatting” sites amongst other things. This was seen as unfair business practice. (more…)

Currently, there is a lot of consternation amongst local IT businesses here in Lancaster.  In fact, they are extremely angry.  They have realised that the local university is actually in direct competition with them. The programme is called ISIS and it offers help to businesses for software development, websites and web-based applications, amongst other things. http://www.infolab21.lancs.ac.uk/business/isis/

Clearly, as businesses, we have competitors and competition from many places.  So one more competitor, why worry?

Well, in this case, the anger of the local digital and IT business community has been awoken due to two key factors.  Firstly, the university has a high profile in the local business community, has worked in conjunction with local IT businesses as a facilitator for many years and has benefited from funding with a clear remit to involve local businesses in its IT strategy.  For companies previously involved with the University they see this as a betrayal. (more…)

In a landmark move, internet regulator ICANN has approved the use of non-Latin characters in top-level domains, with the first expected to appear some time next year.

Genuine Arabic, Chinese and Cyrillic domains will now become possible rather than the imperfect system of internationalized domains (IDNA) relying on character conversion which has already been in limited use.

Given the global nature of the internet, the real question is What took them so long?

(more…)

A piece of internet history will be consigned to the Recycle Bin in the sky today as Yahoo delete the GeoCities web hosting network. Although long-since defunct, GeoCities was outrageously popular in the late 90s and was synonymous with amateur websites, playing a significant part in the democratisation of the internet.

Established in 1995, GeoCities allowed users to set up free websites within its online communities or “neighborhoods”. (more…)

There is a lot of talk at the moment about a new music service Google will be launching soon, but little is actually known at this stage about the finer details of what they have been developing.

The original belief that Google would be serving and retailing music themselves has been forgotten, and the general idea now is that they will be providing an enhanced music search incorporating streamed recordings into the search results.

Google have reportedly teamed up with Lala and iLike who will be providing the streaming, and will also be retailing the songs. (more…)

Google PageRank (or at least the visible Toolbar representation we see in our browsers) has long been on borrowed time. Although Toolbar PageRank (PR) is still with us, a report by Search Engine Roundtable late last week confirmed that PageRank values have indeed been removed from Webmaster Tools.

Google has been threatening to take away the already crippled link-based importance indicator (Toolbar PR scores are purposefully outdated and often unavailable) since at least 2007, arguing that they are a distraction for webmasters and fuel the link buying industry.

“We’ve been telling people for a long time that they shouldn’t focus on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think it’s the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true,” explained Google’s Susan Moskwa, adding “We removed it because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to show them the data, implying that they should look at it.” (more…)

If you haven’t already noticed for yourself, Google UK’s results have been pretty poor of late. Since June 2009, around the time of Vince update, the UK results have featured significant numbers of non-UK websites.

In amongst the regular co.uk and UK .com sites, those from other English-language websites like Australia, South Africa, Canada and (most frequently) the United States have been appearing. Even the odd Italian one has crept in.

Although websites from outside the UK can be relevant to local users, more often than not these sites are worse than useless. Not only are they usually completely irrelevant to UK users, their presence prevents the sites that are relevant from being found. (more…)