The spokesperson revealed that initially, it was like a reserved work for big giants but soon, company broke the myth. Basically, seogenies.com is a pioneer SEO based company and SEM is not absolutely different from SEO work. SEM aims at the promotion of websites through enhancing the visibility in search engine result pages, search engine optimization, paid placement and paid inclusion as well. E-mail marketing is also an integral part of SEM work. Spokesperson prominently quoted that corporate blogs and forums were proved a very effective SEM work as per its own experiences. Especially in terms of perfectly new venture, SEM work with blog can provide marvelous output. With his extended speech, the spokesperson unlocked the SEM work and quoted that it is promotion sort of stuff for articles, pres release and blog through web directories, industry forums, e-mail campaigns, and so on. More number of links means greater value of trust and authority and hence worthy link is main target of SEM.

SEM services from seogenies.com have successfully covered wide ranges like, health, games, gambling, telecommunication, real estate, software, travel, etc. After providing the glimpse of few successful international projects, the spokesperson quoted that you must have a solid idea of your ability. It is important to make an impressive SEM work but further implementation matters a lot. If, it makes you then don’t forget that an absurd deal can ruin your reputation as well.

TechStars, the mentorship-driven seed stage investment fund, presented twelve lucky startups today in their first showcase in the Valley. Unlike DEMOfall 08, where 72 startups battled it out for everyone’s attention, these dozen services got to show potential new investors what they are all about in a more relaxed atmosphere. Most of the services will sound familiar because they’ve already launched and have begun to gain traction.

TechStars Executive Director David Cohen explains the purpose of this special event. “This is the first time we’ve done a demo day in Silicon Valley. We’re just trying to show the Valley what’s going on with TechStars. Many of the companies have their rounds complete, or very near complete. Certainly, adding new investors is one goal, but building awareness for these startups is the real key.”

Here’s a roundup of the twelve startups that strutted their stuff today:

Ignighter makes it easy to go on group dates, which is becoming a popular trend these days. We recently discussed Ignighter in a post about group dating.

Devver wants to convert desktop developer tools into cloud-based services. The theory is that it will reduce setup and configuration time, enable easy scheduling, display rich reports and make it simple to share data between team members.

Foodzie is an online marketplace where consumers can discover and buy food directly from small artisan producers. Small producers can sell their products online, making it easy for foodies to discover their favorite foods.

Travelfli helps frequent flyers maximize the full potential of their loyalty programs and discover the value in this hidden currency. Users can manage their award programs in one secure centralized place, find ways to get free travel using their miles and book award travel online.

Gyminee is a fitness social network for detailed tracking, online accountability, and motivation. Members can find workout programs and track their progress, food and nutrition, and set goals. On the social side of things, they can find gym buddies to keep them accountable towards their goals and participate in fitness challenges.

IntenseDebate today announced that they have been acquired by Automattic. IntenseDebate replaces the default commenting system found on most blogging systems with one that adds identity, threading, reply by email, and more. IntenseDebate can increases subscriber engagement and repeat visitors. They are similar to Disqus and SezWho.

Filtrbox is a media monitoring service that monitors and filters mainstream media, blogs, Twitter, FriendFeed, and more. It then delivers it all in an easy to consume format that can save a lot of time.

Artist Exploder gives bands a dynamic presence on Facebook and offers a one stop application for managers and artists to connect with their fans.

Brightkite is probably the most well-known service in this roundup. They are a popular location-based social network that enables users to see where their friends are, share their experiences and make new friends based on location. You can access Brightkite by Web, text messaging, e-mail or device specific applications like the iPhone.

Occipital uses artificial intelligence to organize photo streams and enables vivid recollection with innovative visualizations.

App-X (Application Experts) provides software as a service (SaaS) to venture capital and private equity fund managers, pensions, endowments and other parties that invest in venture capital and private equity.

EventVue builds online communities for conferences that help attendees network and meet the people that matter to them at a conference. EventVue communities can also help conference organizers generate revenue by providing highly measurable sponsorship opportunities and driving more attendee registrations to their event.

Final Thoughts

The concept of presenting a handful of the best startups you’ve supported to potential new partners and investors makes a great deal of sense. If nothing else, as David Cohen stated, it’s good exposure not only for the startups but TechStars themselves.

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:SocialThing Raises $300K in Early-Stage FundingYouTube Gandhi, mDog MySpace, OfferTrax, TechStars, Limelight, BuzzLogic, MTV Virtual Hills, StupidVideosA New Way to Date: 6 Online Resources for Group Dating

Napster, the original peer-to-peer music sharing network that has since transformed itself into a legal subscription service, is being acquired by Best Buy. The electronics retailing giant will be paying $121 million to buy Napster – a more than 85% premium to where Napster’s beleaguered shares were trading as of Friday.

Although Napster was able to sign up more than 700,000 subscribers, the service was never profitable and was on track to run out of cash sometime next year. Under Best Buy’s ownership, that problem is resolved, and the combined companies are confident that they can use Best Buy’s massive reach and distribution to improve the business, in addition to leveraging Napster to sell other digital products to consumers.

In corporate speak, Best Buy says “We can foresee Napster acting as a platform for accelerating our growth in the emerging industry of digital entertainment, beyond music subscriptions. We’re very excited to add these capabilities to leverage our existing relationships with the labels, the studios, and the hardware providers. We believe Napster will be an outstanding addition to our already robust portfolio of partners and offerings in the digital music space.”

While Napster was the first big name in online music (and actually sold its name for $8 million after being shut down by music industry lawsuits in 2002), it has been lapped many times over by Apple’s iTunes, with the pay-per-download model proving far more popular than all-you-can-eat subscriptions.

Napster has recently moved to catch up, launching a web-based version and offering DRM-free downloads. In the end, that wasn’t nearly enough to make Napster a successful standalone business, but Best Buy is certainly one of the more logical places for the company to land.

—Related Articles at Mashable - All That’s New on the Web:Napster Investor Settles Last Lawsuit for $130MNapster to Offer Wireless Downloads on AT&TNapster Launches a New Web-Based Version of Subscription ServiceNapster Loses CFO; Shares Hit a New LowNapster to Offer DRM-Free MP3 DownloadsWill 6 Million DRM-free MP3s Restore Napster’s Former Glory?Napster Raising Prices. Is it Going Out of Business?

Source:Mashable!

Tim Berners-Lee is concerned about the internet. He sees a lot of disinformation out there and he wants to do something about it. Websites, he says, need a label; a badge that says how trustworthy and legit they are.

I agree that the amount of disinformation on the internet is a nasty thing. But, I fail to see how internet is different from the real world. Do you believe everything you hear or see in the real world? Would you believe a total stranger if he told you the Large Hadron Collider will cause the creation of a black hole that will end all life as we know it?

Sure, in the real world, it might be a tad easier to tell which information sources are legitimate and which aren’t. But that, too, is an illusion. Do you believe everything you see on TV? If you do, the legitimacy of the information on the net is the least of your worries.

On the other hand, someone who understands the basics of how internet works can - for the most part - easily tell good from bad online information sources. If you read something on nytimes.com it’s probably more relevant than something you’ve read on some obscure forum. There are many other ways to tell: the number and content of comments, the layout of the page, the number (or absence) of popups; hell, even the HTML code can tell you things.

So, just like in the real world, you can guess with a fair degree of certainty that some source of information is legit; you only need to learn some subtleties of how the online world works.

Could badges/labels that tell you how trustworthy this or that page is? Perhaps. But I don’t see such badges on newspaper stands, and I see a lot of irrelevant, incorrect or just plain untrue crap that they’re selling us. Who’s gonna tell the people what’s really true and what’s not in the real world?

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For most of the life of the Internet the United States has played the biggest role in the development and managing of it. At one point all the data that flowed on the Internet went through the US and US companies. I don’t there are very many companies involved with the Internet infrastructure ever imagined a day would come where this wasn’t the case. That day however may very soon be upon us; if it already hasn’t started happening.

In the past week we have heard that Comcast is going to be introducing download caps which follows on the heels of Time Warner announcing trial runs of the same idea. Not that long ago universities in Canada were seriously considering moving the US based servers they were using for research for more localized options.

Their concerns revolved around the US Patriot Act and the immense powers for surveillance of activity within the US Internet infrastructure. It was also suggested that if this became more of a trend than just a couple of Canadian universities could the Patriot Act end up hurting business like Google.

Then today we have John Markoff from the New York Times writing a post about how Internet traffic is starting to bypass the US. It is his point that companies are more interested in their profit margins instead of creating technological advances regarding the Internet.

While companies like Comcast or Time Warner are trying to boost their bottom lines by any means possible without improving or advancing Internet connectivity the US is; quite rapidly in some cases, being surpassed by foreign countries. As John points out in his post:

Internet technologists say that the global data network that was once a competitive advantage for the United States is now increasingly outside the control of American companies. They decided not to invest in lower-cost optical fiber lines, which have rapidly become a commodity business.

He also ties in the fact that other countries are beginning to realize that the Internet is an integral part of their economic development. This means that they are wanting to start gaining control of how the Internet enters and leaves their countries.

Along with that there are growing concerns outside of the US about how it’s intelligence agencies believe that they need to have access to all the data that flows through the Internet. This doesn’t sit well with a lot of countries and as a result we are beginning to see a lot of the Internet traffic being routed around the US

Ms. Claffy said that the shift away from the United States was not limited to developing countries. The Japanese “are on a rampage to build out across India and China so they have alternative routes and so they don’t have to route through the U.S.”

Andrew M. Odlyzko, a professor at the University of Minnesota who tracks the growth of the global Internet, added, “We discovered the Internet, but we couldn’t keep it a secret.” While the United States carried 70 percent of the world’s Internet traffic a decade ago, he estimates that portion has fallen to about 25 percent.

This has to lead one to wonder what is going to happen to the US in the large global Internet scheme of things. When you consider that it is being run by companies who don’t appear to be interested in advancing the technology anymore and you have countries going around them for various reasons it doesn’t bode well for the country. More importantly where does this leave the US people as the Internet is obviously starting to leave them behind.

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Multimedia search provider blinkx has announced a distribution partnership with Getty Images today. The partnership brings blinkx search technology to the Getty Images database. Apparently it’s easier to search for images on Getty using the blinkx search rather than the search on the Getty Images site.

blinkx will use their ad platform, AdHoc, to serve ads next to the images from the Getty Images library. Revenue will be shared between both companies.

Last month blinkx made an offer to acquire Miva and this year they have formed a variety of partnerships with Revision3 and the BBC.

More CN Coverage:
– Docstoc
– Scribd
– Twitter

Source:CenterNetworks

comScore has released new stats for European Internet usage based on their World Metrix audience measurement service today. The report shows that Russia is leading Europe in Internet audience growth followed by France, Spain and Ireland. Russia’s Internet audience grew 27% from June 2007-June 2008.

As for Internet penetration in Europe, The Netherlands leads with 82% of the total population online. The Netherlands is followed by Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland and Switzerland. Based on what I am seeing, Switzerland appears to be pushing out the most new startups out of the top 5 European Internet penetration countries.

Tonight I’d like to share with ya’all 9 things I am done with online. Rather than sharing them in text, check out the video below. Please add your suggestions to the list in the comments below.

More CN Coverage:
– Docstoc
– Scribd
– Twitter

Olympics programming is off to an incredible start.  According to the Wall Street Journal, Friday night’s opening ceremony attracted 34.2 million people, while 24.1 million viewers tuned in to see Michael Phelps capture his first gold medal of the games on his way to an Olympic record of eight gold medals.

But the Journal also mentioned that NBColympics.com saw 4.8 million viewers stream 3.1 million videos in a showing that has eclipsed any previous Olympics and has seen an extreme shift in the way most studios think people watch television.

For years, studios were concerned that the Web would ruin ratings and if they embraced it too much, they would undoubtedly see revenue drop as more people would choose to watch television illegally online and fail to watch where the studios could make some money.

But as the Journal points out, 90 percent of all viewers have watched the Olympics on television alone, while 10 percent have watched the games both online and on television, and a mere 0.2 percent have watched them online only.

“The streaming will not diminish the ratings,” Neal Pilson, a sports-media consultant who advised the International Olympic Committee in negotiations for broadcast rights, told the Journal. “It encourages viewers and provides them with information. There will be no dilution or fragmentation of the national audience.”

Realizing that, why has this cult of ignorance become such an integral part of the studios’ decision-making?  The Web isn’t something to be feared, these studios should embrace it as the next frontier in their dominance over the entertainment industry.  And as the Olympics have shown quite well, the Internet won’t make them lose ratings and could actually see some increased revenue if the online versions are monetized properly.

But I digress.  The fact of the matter is that both Hulu and now, the Olympics, have shown that putting programming online is not only a major benefit to all parties involved, but has practically become a necessity.  The real value of placing programming online can go much further than this.  Why not simulcast shows both on TV and online?  By doing so, studios can prove to advertisers that there is really no loss in ratings and they can be reassured that the revenue potential would be greater if they properly monetize the online component.

Some Olympics programming is 12 hours behind the actual time the games are played and all the while, people are more than willing to watch them on TV even though the results are readily available online.  And if the Web isn’t ruining the ratings of that kind of programming, can you imagine what the benefits would be if studios finally embraced simulcasts to the Web?

The idea has been bandied about quite a bit over the past few years, but with the success of the Olympics programming, there leaves little doubt that television will not die out to the Web and the Web won’t lose out to television.  And if the studios believe in that premise and endorse it, we’ll all win.

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:NBC Extends Olympic Downloads to Vista Media CenterMicrosoft, NBC Join for Olympics Coverage OnlineBlogs are Going to the OlympicsNBC Chooses TVTonic to Provide Downloadable Olympics CoverageContemplating Microsoft Silverlight’s Post-Olympic Fortunes (Poll)25 Sites to Experience the Beijing Summer OlympicsOnce Olympics are Over, NBC Plans Stateside Simulcasts Of NFL Games

Editor’s Note: This post is part of an ongoing series at Mashable - The Startup Review, Sponsored by Sun Microsystems Startup Essentials. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

STARTUP DETAILS:

Company Name: Smynx

20 word description: Find new ideas for having fun, and arrange to try them with friends and people near you.

CEO’s Pitch: Smynx is a website for people who need more variety in their lives. Get inspiration for active, worthwhile, or just unusual new ideas to try and things to do. You can also arrange to try them, either privately between friends, or publicly with new people, making friends in the process. And if you have a good idea, add your own!

In keeping with the idea of having more fun in your life, you can rate ideas by interestingness, comment and tag them, and even add your own little sketches!

Mashable’s Take: If you have friends in driving distance and the lot of you can’t think of anything to do, Smynx may be just the thing for you. This site lets you post and search for activity ideas you can do with your friends. Some of them you can even do by yourself, such as watch all the episodes of a season (or 3) of your favorite television series in one night, but the purpose of Smynx is to help you find activities on a local level.

Any ideas that are public and are in your neck of the woods will appear as recommendations for things you may want to do yourself. Any ideas that you’d like to try out through the site involve some basic event-planning tools that let you pick a time and date, and post the event on Smynx’s site.

This event-planning process could be greatly expanded to include import and export options so you can post the event on your Facebook events profile, import friends from email or various social networks, or sync up local events with your iCal. This would also be a prime area for any additional event-planning resources or further details surrounding a particular idea, which could be used for marketing or advertising purposes or for recommendations for products that are related to the idea being tried out. For instance, in planning my dog party, I could receive recommendations on pet treats and party favors for the willing pet owners.

In posting or viewing others’ ideas, you can rate them, or even add a sketch (think the graffiti app), which is fun and helpful for search and filtering purposes, but uploading your own image or even performing a Web search for importing a Flickr image may have a broader appeal to users as opposed to the sketch option. While ideas are currently broken down into categories like “social” and “active” I think Smynx has the potential to dig deeper into various niche groups, such as dating ideas, children’s parties ideas, or even housewarmings or weddings.

Sponsored by Sun Startup Essentials

Source:Mashable!

Companies from all over the globe are making their way to the Web to try their hand at online advertising.  And according to the latest comScore report, American Apparel leads the pack, delivering 483 million display ad views in April, reaching 49 million Internet users an average of 9.9 times during the month.

And while it easily outpaced the second place firm, UnderArmour, I can’t help but wonder if American Apparel should run for the hills and hope against hope that things can turn around.

For all the money it spent on advertising online, the company’s profit slumped to just over $1 million in the last quarter, $11 million less than the previous quarter.  Granted, those quarters didn’t include the advertising the company spent during April, but American Apparel has consistently had an online presence in advertising and seemingly, to no avail.

Some will say that the economy may be causing the downturn in American Apparel’s revenue, but I think it may go far beyond that.  Let’s face it – if you’re spending that much money online in an attempt to bring more people to your site and buy clothing, wouldn’t you hope that it actually bears some real progress?

But the story doesn’t quite end there.  According to comScore, most of these ads were displayed on social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, and others.  Does this say something about advertising on social networks?

Social networking users are notoriously fickle and usually interact with the services for as long as their “cool” or until they’ve grown out of them.  And although there is little evidence to prove the point, I’m wondering if social networking users also couldn’t care less about advertising and vendors would do better to spend money on more traditional sites where viability of advertising is easier to measure.

At this point, this is all conjecture and American Apparel’s poor performance may be the result of other factors that have nothing to do with social networks.  But it begs an important question: Should companies be advertising on social networks to target young adults?

I’m starting to think they shouldn’t.

Should companies be advertising on social networks to target young adults? ( surveys)

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:American Airlines Sues Google for Selling AdWordsStagr - Killer Custom T-Shirt ServiceReminder: Design a T-Shirt and Win an iPhoneAmerican Greetings Nabs PhotoWorks for $26.5MCBS and Dogster.com Partner for Summer TV SeriesTakkle Launches America’s Best Branded GroupGlam Media Steals Executive Talent from MySpace

Source:Mashable!

This is a guest post written by Mark Dykeman. Mark broadcasts from his brain about communications, social media, and technology several times per week at Broadcasting Brain. He enjoys participating in several social media sites, including Twitter, FriendFeed, and StumbleUpon.

Oil and broadband Internet access are the twin fuels of both brick and mortar businesses and Internet based businesses. When oil prices are low, economies can zoom at light speed. When prices are high, many businesses can barely put one foot in front of another. A look at the history of oil might serve to help us understand the importance of ubiquitous, low cost Internet access, which is currently growing at a snail’s pace in North America.

Cheap oil was one of the drivers of recent global economic booms. Cheap oil helps keep transportation, electricity generation, and manufacturing costs low - all three types of work normally require huge quantities of refined petroleum products. When the price of oil rises, ballooning as it has since the 9/11 tragedy in New York City, it tends to cause the global economy to slow down because of the compounding effects of widespread oil usage.

Cheap oil was a hallmark of recent economic boom periods, permitting stable, continued economic development. Today, more expensive oil (not withstanding any recent price fluctuations) is leading to price increases in many sectors of the global economy, slowing growth by making it more expensive to travel, manufacture goods, heat our homes, and so on. While businesses that specialize in extracting, refining, and distributing petroleum products are reaping record revenues and profits, increasing demand coupled with supply challenges has resulted in increased costs for virtually all other sectors of the global economy.

Cheap broadband Internet access has worked the same as cheap oil, powering the expansion of e-commerce, Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. At one time people were limited to dial up access for either Internet or other private online services (e.g. the original America Online, CompuServe, the Well, etc.) As telecos and other technology companies gradually built a high speed communications infrastructure –- first in major centers across the world and then expanding to wider areas of coverage -– applications gradually began appearing that could take advantage of increasing communications bandwidth. Images, audio, and video applications grew tremendously as broadband Internet access became available.

These days, can you imagine using services like Amazon.com, eBay, YouTube, Facebook, or Flickr at speeds of 14,400 baud? Can you imagine podcasting or videoblogging ever happening without some form of high speed Internet connection? Would digital photography have ever become as popular as it did if you had to wait 5 - 10 minutes to upload or download a single photo?

Fortunately for many of us, broadband Internet access is affordable, giving us access to these kinds of services. Likewise, many newer e-business models would not be feasible without affordable broadband Internet access.

Unfortunately, that high speed Internet is still not universally available across the world, nor do we have 100% coverage in developed countries like Canada and the US. Even New York City, one of the largest developed cities in the world, has less than 50% broadband Internet access in its homes, according the city’s Broadband Advisory Committee report of July 30, 2008. According to a New York Times article on the report, “the use of broadband in New York lagged behind Boston, San Francisco and Atlanta, but was more common than in Miami, Chicago and Los Angeles. Broadband connections were also notably more expensive in New York than in Paris, Tokyo, Hong Kong and London.”

A July 2008 Pew Research Center study on home broadband adoption in the United States provided some interesting insights. Although broadband Internet connections are continuing to increase across the US, broadband adoption is stalling amongst lower income Americans. Moreover, while 54% of Americans have broadband Internet access, that number isn’t growing much - cost (and availability) is definitely a factor.

Average broadband Internet costs are decreasing slightly across North America, but not enough to make some users switch from dial-up Internet connections. Worse still, the Pew study reveals that dial up Internet costs are increasing, making an inferior service even less desirable. Considering the growing advantages, if not needs, for E-Mail, search engines, online databases like Wikipedia.org, financial services, and government information/services that are available via the Web, lack of affordable Internet access widens the divide between the “haves” and the “have nots.”

Mashable’s Steven Hodson recently wrote about US Internet access being marginalized through caps on broadband usage and potential tiered usage pricing. If these initiatives go through, they will have the same effect as rising oil prices. Many Web 2.0 services and e-commerce services are like the vacations, air travel, gas guzzling cars, and other luxury items of the “bricks and mortar” economy. As oil prices have risen, the global economy has responded through slowing economic growth. Lack of affordable access to services will constrain revenue and profit growth for companies both online and offline.

We are currently seeing the economic impact of rising oil prices. While there are multiple factors in play with oil prices, including finite oil supplies and environmental concerns, many would agree that current prices provide hardships to many people. Unless broadband capability increases over time, it may become a scarce resource subject to the laws of supply and demand. If demand comes to outstrip supply like we see with oil, broadband Internet access could become more expensive. Furthermore, the compounding effects of broadband cost increases from producer to consumer might lead to sluggish growth.

Despite the costs involved, the advantages of inexpensive broadband Internet access are potentially much greater. Suppliers should work to ensure that this increasingly important service, the oil of the online economy, increases its penetration into the global economy at affordable prices. Broadband Internet access is becoming an important driver of economic welfare, just like cheap oil.

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:Comcast Not Net NeutralIndian ISP Airtel Taps Google To Provide Apps Via New Web PortalBSkyB Creating YouTube Rival Using YouTube’s TechnologyGoogle SketchUp Now Free, User-Generated Content Goes 3D!MySpace Emmy AwardsIs US Internet Access Being Marginalized?Motorola Splits in Two