SEO, Website Content Optimization
& Software Development

China and the U..S increased their war of words this week, locking horns over the Internet,  24th January. The Chinese Communist Party’s main newspaper, The People’s Daily, commented that America is allegedly seeking “control” of the Internet.

Comments made previously by Hillary Clinton, the U.S. Secretary of State, had pulled no punches. She alleged that governments use Internet and communications technologies to “repress people, naturally with China inferred in this comment. As a result of Google threatening to pull out of China in the previous week claiming that sophisticated hacking attacks targeting Google mail accounts had originated in the People’s Republic of China, Clinton stated further that “Chinese authorities need to provide an explanation for the cyberattacks originating on Chinese soil that led Google to this decision”. As she criticized states such as China for continued censorship of internet content, the article in the People’s Daily is seen to be a direct rebuttal of these remarks.

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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: Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »

Rupert Murdoch isn’t happy with the cut of revenue the traditional news providers are getting online, and he intends to do something about it.

Thanks to the internet, the content of the old-school media powerhouses (the likes of Reuters, Associated Press and Murdoch’s News Corporation) is now available to the world for free.

Many of the same articles you buy in a newspaper can easily be found online; a quick search on a service like Google News returns literally thousands of articles.

For several years, all of the major news organisations have been wondering how they can make money online, but it’s old warhorse (and self-styled “catalyst for change”) Rupert Murdoch who has decided to take a stand.

“Should we be allowing Google to steal all our copyright?” - Rupert Murdoch

These were Murdoch’s confrontational words earlier this year, and now he’s ramped up the rhetoric by suggesting News Corp. content could be pulled from the search engines altogether. Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »

Page load times (how fast a website is displayed to users) have influenced Quality Scores in Adwords for quite a while now; if your site loads quickly you are rewarded (in theory) with cheaper, better placed ads.

The reasoning behind the Quality Score is that Google wants to improve the experience of its users, because if users aren’t happy they are less likely to use Google in future and their advertising revenue suffers.

Presumably working on the same logic, Google’s Matt Cutts confirmed at last week’s PubCon event that load times will soon be a ranking factor for the organic listings. If your website loads too slowly, there is a chance your rankings will fall as a result.

The confirmation caused a bit of a stir in the SEO community, even though it will be only one of hundreds of ranking factors in Google’s algorithm, and probably not a hugely influential one at that. Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »

Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt recently gave an interview at Gartner’s Expo in Orlando, USA. In front of thousands of IT Directors Schmidt outlined his vision of exactly how he thinks the internet will look in 5 years time.

To most people, 5 years may not seem like a very long time but in technology terms it is an eon. In 5 years time computers (and other technology devices) will likely be much more powerful with more than quadruple the power of today, according to Moore’s Law.

Moore’s Law describes long-term trends in computer power and (so far accurately) predicts that the number of transistors  that can be placed on an intergrated circuit board will double every 2 years. This means that processor power, memory and even digital camera capability doubles every 2 years. Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »

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?

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