Value is in the eye of the buyer

Seth Godin has many fans. Many of those fans would agree that he is popular because he knows how to self promote. You'll get no argument from me there, in my opinion, he is the most successful self-promoter on the Internet. But, for me, Seth is most successful in identifying and debunking the little lies we surround ourselves with in the business world.

While it's not usually my style, I just can't help but reproduce his blog post entitled "No such thing as price pressure," because it cuts straight to the heart of the problem we are having with DóndeEs.com. Here's what Seth has to say about commodity pricing of your products:

"Your sales force and your customers may scream that you need to lower your price.

It's not true.

You need to increase your value. If people don't want to pay, it's because you're not delivering enough value for the money you're charging.

You're not selling a commodity unless you want to."

I think, the crucial point here is the "perception" of value. Especially when the value you are offering is intangible, or worse than intangible, technological. For when it comes to technology, nothing becomes more difficult to perceive for your customer than something they fundamentally don't understand or perceive as a necessary evil, like anything related to computers (unfortunately here in Puerto Rico it's almost always all of the above).

Flickr Creative Commons Contributor: jurvetson

Legal iPhones coming to Puerto Rico

Well sort of. While there are already a few die hard Apple minions using first generation iPhones on the island, the effort they had to go through to accomplish the feat truly shows their obedience to the cult of Steve Jobs. Recently Jobs announced his continued evil-genius plans to the world in the annual Apple World Wide Developers Conference.

As many expected, Jobs announced the second generation iPhone, complete with 3G, GPS, and a new software SDK to promote the development of iPhone applications. In addition, Jobs announced the expansion of the distribution of the iPhone to 77 countries. Unfortunately, while many anticipated Puerto Rico would be among those countries, ultimately it was not. According to AAPLinvestors, a collective of Apple, Inc. investors and traders, while Puerto Rico was originally included in the list, it was removed. While there has been several promises made that the iPhone would be sold through Claro or AT&T, for now, Puerto Ricans will not be able to buy iPhones in Puerto Rico.

But the good news is that we can now legally "use" iPhones in Puerto Rico. Like silly things like laws, rules, or restrictions have stopped us before. Am I right, mi gente? Anyway, now we can buy an iPhone in the United States, but in order for it to work in Puerto Rico without roaming fees, it must be activated with a 787 area code. I'm not sure what are the steps needed to do the activation, so once the new phones become available in July, hopefully the process to activate them in Puerto Rico will become more common knowledge.

The Apple Handheld Juggernaut rolls on...

In anticipation of the new iPhone 3G announcement, The Macintosh News Network reported that:

Apple is likely to sell 45 million iPhones by 2009, according to analysts from research firm Piper Jaffray, who raised their price target on Apple shares a whopping $20 -- from $140 to $160. "We believe Apple can sell 45 million iPhones in calendar year 2009," the analysts said. "While this may seem like a bold prediction, we believe a number in this area is not as far of a reach as some may think."

Is Liberty Cablevision throttling Bit Torrent?

Today I came across a test to see whether an Internet Service Provider (ISP) was throttling Bit Torrent traffic. I thought it would be interesting to test my own ISP and then share this new resource to see if others in Puerto Rico could test their own ISP.

Note: If the preceding paragraph makes no sense to you, if it sounds like techno-babble or gobbly-gook, then I give you my permission to skip this blog post and move onto the next one.

Okay, I assume that if you're still here, then I assume you're already downloading using the Bit Torrent technology. Let's first give some background. Over the past year or so, Internet advocates started learning about efforts by the ISP community to limit or block traffic related to Bit Torrent downloads. The logic given to justify these efforts was that the traffic demands of Bit Torrent downloaders was overwhelming networks and starting to impact ordinary ISP users.

Of course, most Internet aficionados cried foul. The ISP's however, folded these efforts and their defense into the whole debate about network neutrality. What ISP's want and network neutrality is attempting to fight is that some traffic, like downloads and videos, are so network intensive, that the providers of that content should pay more to use the network, as opposed to a "normal" site. Network neutrality claims that all traffic is equal, regardless of the demands it places on the network.

Test Results

So after finally getting through to the test server, I was able to successfully test my ISP, Liberty Cablevision. A quick note on the test site. The site is very, very busy. So be patient. Well, I'm sad to say, but according to my results, it appears that Liberty is constraining Bit Torrent traffic. While the test indicated that Liberty was not impacting the seeding process, it did appear that they were limiting the download rate on the standard Bit Torrent port. Here is a cut and past from the test results:

Is TCP traffic on a well-known BitTorrent port (6881) throttled?

Your ISP possibly rate limits all downloads at port 6881. In our test, a TCP download on a BitTorrent port achieved at least 1 Kbps while a TCP download on a non-BitTorrent port achieved at least 15 Kbps.

Note that it is hard to detect rate limiting and that there are many explanations why a transfer can observe lower throughput than another transfer. We run the BitTorrent and TCP transfer back-to-back and at least two times to add more confidence to our measurements.

What I'd like to ask is if there are any Dondequiera readers out there who are familiar with Bit Torrent and use another ISP besides Liberty, could you please test your ISP and post the results in the comments? If we can get results from all of the ISPs, then we'll have a better idea of where local ISPs stand in respect to network neutrality. Thanks in advance in helping defend Internet freedom.

WebWare 100 Announced

WebWare.com has announced the third annual, 2008 winners of the best Web 2.0 web applications. Before you check to see if your favorites made the list, I bet your wondering did DóndeEs.com make the list? Well, not this year, but thanks for thinking of us! ;-)

No, I bet you were wondering how they picked the winners. Well they (WebWare editors) first started by whittling down a list of 5000 qualifying nomininees to a more manageable size of 300 finalists. They then opened the list of finalists for voting from the WebWare.com website. Over 1.9 million votes were cast for the 300 finalists this year. So ultimately, the Internet community, or at least the Webware community picked the winners.

The winners were chosen amongst ten different categories. And each category awarded ten top vote getters. I won't repeat all of the categories and winners, but I will share some of the top overall vote getters. If you're curious, they have a nice page with all 100 winners listed. It makes for a quick browse.

Just slightly more than half of all the votes cast in the Webware 100 went to the top 10 vote-getters. Six of these top 10 are no surprise at all: Facebook, Firefox, Google, iTunes, MySpace, and YouTube. But the other four may not be as familiar: DeviantArt, Friendster, Gaia Online, and Maxthon.

I did a little inventory of the applications. Of the 100, I recognized 60 easily. And of those 60, I can claim to use on a regular basis 28. How about you? Of the 40 I didn't recognize or had never heard of, there were only two that I can honestly say pose any interest to me at all: blogtalkradio.com and voicethread.com. These two hold interest for us because we'd like to add more audio/visual content to DóndeEs.com, especially in the area of helping everyone get the most out of our web application.

In case you've never heard of WebWare.com, it is a blog (site) where computer users can learn about new and useful Web applications. Webware.com was coded, and is hosted by, CNET.

Puerto Rico Launches Localized Creative Commons Licenses

Tonight at the University of Puerto Rico Cyberlaw Clinic will host the launch of localized Creative Commons (CC) licenses, marking the forty-fourth jurisdiction worldwide to port the Creative Commons licensing suite. The event will be held at 7:00pm at U.P.R.’s School of Law, featuring an exhibition by local artists, a promotional CD release, and keynote by Creative Commons Chairman Joichi Ito.

I know you're like, so what. Well I'll tell you what. Any of you that might subscribe to Dondequiera or read it occasionally, might be familiar with the Creative Commons. From time to time I'll use the Creative Commons search application to find pictures posted on Flickr that are published using a Creative Commons Attribution Commercial Use license. To put this in simple terms, because of the Creative Commons license I have free access to a royalty free photographic image database. The big difference between a CC license and normal copyright, is that CC claims "some" rights reserved, as opposed to "all" rights reserved. By leaving giving some rights to potential creators, the CC license grants freedoms never before possible with published material. Sweet!

The Creative Commons Puerto Rico team is lead by Hiram A. Meléndez-Juarbe, Carlos González-Yanes, and Chloé Georas, who coordinated the porting process and public consultation with local and international legal experts. In preparation for the public discussion, a memorandum was prepared by the 2006-2007 class of the University of Puerto Cyberlaw Clinic to analyze the role of moral rights in Puerto Rico’s mixed legal tradition. The memorandum is available for download: http://creativecommons.org/international/pr/moral-rights.pdf.

“The Cyberlaw Clinic’s commitment to ‘free culture’ has provided the ideal context for the development of the Creative Commons Puerto Rico Rico (CCPR) project,” notes María L. Jiménez, Director of U.P.R.’s Legal Aid Clinic. “The university has a longstanding tradition as an innovative institution in many legal fields and is deeply committed to the advancement of important social values such as the ones embraced by the Creative Commons project.”

I'd recommend any one that is interested in topics like fair use, copyright protection, and intellectual property read the book linked to above, Free Culture. Written by Lawerence Lessig, who has recently decided to run for congress, the book provides an outstanding historical and common sense analysis of the consider the shrinking domain of public ideas. The website puts it way better than I ever could so here is how they describe the book:

"Lawrence Lessig shows us that while new technologies always lead to new laws, never before have the big cultural monopolists used the fear created by new technologies, specifically the Internet, to shrink the public domain of ideas, even as the same corporations use the same technologies to control more and more what we can and can’t do with culture. As more and more culture becomes digitized, more and more becomes controllable, even as laws are being toughened at the behest of the big media groups. What’s at stake is our freedom—freedom to create, freedom to build, and ultimately, freedom to imagine."

The future of online advertising

"The future of online advertising will be about enabling an extreme targeting that incorporates identity, topics, and stated interests from consumers to serve ads," writes Rohit Bhargava, vice president of interactive marketing at olgivy Public relations world wide.


"Brands will no longer buy millions of impressions; they will buy 100 messages targeted to exactly the right people. Customers, in turn, will stop seeing these ads as a nuisance and appreciate the value they offer becuase they are tailored correctly and are relevant. Of course this vision of online advertising and social networks happily coexisting will take time. the good news is there are signs all arounds us tht we are well on our way."



"Profiling for profit - Its no surprise Facebook is selling your secrets" by Andrew Hultkrans, Playboy, March 2008, p 38.

Microsoft offers free tools to univeristy students

In a move theat smells suspicously like the business strategy they used once in a day to win the Internet Browser wars, Microsoft has announced DreamSparks, a new opportunity for univeristy students. Under the new program, Microsoft will donate access to free downloads of their development platform to qualified university students.

From Channel 8 Microsoft Developer Network site:

"Microsoft DreamSpark enables students to download Microsoft developer and design tools at no charge. Now, for the first time, Microsoft is giving its valuable software developer and design tools directly to students worldwide at no charge! This site enables students like you to download professional-level Microsoft developer and design tools to unlock your creative potential and set you on the path to academic and career success, by supporting and advancing your learning and skills through technical design, technology, math, science and engineering activities. In order to get this software from Microsoft at no charge, you will be asked to establish or verify your student status once every 12 months. This process is built into this DreamSpark site itself. Verification of valid student status will enable students from around the globe to download Microsoft developer and design tools at no charge."

Some legal mumbo jumbo, with respect to terms:

"Note: You must be at least 18 years old or have otherwise reached the age
of majority in the place (province, state or country) where you live, or if not,
your parent or legal guardian must accept the Microsoft DreamSpark software
license terms on your behalf, in order for you to download and use the software.
It is our hope that the DreamSpark program will spark your creativity and help
you harness software’s transformative magic to turn your good ideas into
reality, by equipping you with the tools you need to succeed and excel during
your academic experience and skills you will need after graduation. "

If you are a student and you are new to this site, you may want to visit the Frequently Asked Questions (Students) page for more information. If you are a University Administrator and would like to make the DreamSpark site available to your students, you may want to visit the Frequently Asked Questions (University Administrators) page for more information.

The software that will be available for download is....

Microsoft developer tools:

• Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition
• Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition
• XNA Game Studio 2.0
• 12-month free Academic membership in the XNA Creators Club

Microsoft designer tools:

• Expression Studio, including:


• Expression Web, Expression Blend


• Expression Design
  
• Expression Media

Microsoft platform resources:

• SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition


• Windows Server, Standard Edition

I'm not sure if Puerto Rico will qualify as part of the U.S. promotion, but I think any one interested should go ahead an apply and see what happens. I'll be checking with Interamerican University of Puerto Rico to see if they will be able to participate. When I get the answer I'll let everyone know. No matter how you feel about Microsoft, this is a valuable opportunity to get access to great tools, I'd jump on it if I were you.

Facebook Releases Site in Spanish

In an effort to continue their strong growth, popular social network web site Facebook has announced that their web site will now be available in Spanish. The translation of the site was done by enlisting existing spanish speaking users of the site. By creating an application to facilitate the translation, Facebook once again demonstrated the power of community by receiving free translation services from its user base. Nearly 1,500 Spanish-speaking users on Facebook chose to be part of the effort and translated the site from English to Spanish in less than four weeks.

Current users who want to view Facebook in Spanish can change their language preference from their account settings. Beginning on Monday, Feb. 11, any person who goes to www.facebook.com from a Spanish-speaking country will see the site in Spanish. While I'm not 100% certain Facebook will include Puerto Rico, I'll let you know first thing tomorrow. Facebook currently has more than 2.8 million active users in Latin America and Spain.

And don't forget to check out the Facebook DóndeEs.com Events PR application and join the DóndeEs.com Facebook group to show your love for this site!

Update: 02/11/2008 3:07 p.m. - Well I stopped over at Facebook today, but I did not receive, by default, the new Spanish version. To select Spanish, head over to the account tab. Then select the language tab. From the pull-down list, select Spanish, and badda bing badda boom. Ya tiene Fa'Boo' in Español.

Additional Safety Resources

In appreciation of Safer Internet Day, I thought I'd share a couple more safety resources with you. First, loyal Dondequiera reader Gabriel suggested this page for "Internet Safety for Kids". The page, which is sponsored by the Protocol Analysis Institute (PAI). PAI was created by Laura Chappell, industry protocol analyst, lecturer and writer. The Institute focuses on protocol and application research and the development of educational material for network troubleshooters, analysts, engineers and security technicians. Hence, the great selection of safety resources available on the site. From the looks of the materials, anyone looking for resources to teach others about Internet safety would do well using the valuable tools provided by the site. Thanks Gabriel!

If you're looking for resources with a Latin flavor and in Spanish, then local boy Ricky Martin as part of his Rickey Martin Foundation is the sponsor for Navega Protegido. The site was launched last year in joint announcement with the Autonomous Municipality of Caguas and Microsoft. With information covering basic security, personal security, and security for your family the site has useful information for children of all ages. One useful resource offered by the site is the "10 suggestions for a more secure instant messenger." With many other tools, including a monthly security message from Ricky himself, this site offers a powerful combination of a popular celebrity along with useful information that is, in my mind, a winning recipe. Wepa!

Safer Internet Day 12 February 2008

Liberty Cablevision recently announced that they would be helping to sponsor and promote "Safer Internet Day". The program, which aims to increase awareness about the importance of Internet safety and to also inform the public about the risks possible by unnecessarily exposing personal information (especially about children) on the Internet. The campaign hopes to help people better recognize and eliminate dangerous activities while using the Internet.

As I mentioned yesterday, if Liberty Cablevision is running some type of campaign, I haven't seen or heard anything locally. I caught wind of this through one of my many feeds otherwise I would have missed it all together. I commend Liberty for picking up this cause, but I criticize them for not working harder (think NFL.com) to make the marketing material they paid for available over the Internet. I'm sure I'm not the only person here who doesn't watch local television and rarely listens to the radio (okay maybe I am, sigh). So if they want to connect with me, they had better re-use their ads on the Internet. And no thank you, I don't want to read what you think about the issue. I mean who wants to read these days? Gimme video baby.......

Safer Internet Day, which is February 12th, is an international event to promote Internet safety all over the world. The organization behind the social awareness day has an informative web site available to support the event. I would recommend for any parent or teenager wanting to know more about Internet safety to visit the frequently asked question (FAQ) page to learn more about the risks associated with popular activities such as blogging, social networks, and chatting. The site and the awareness event are all brought to us by Insafe, a network of national nodes that coordinate Internet safety awareness in Europe.

In general insafe promotes empowerment. As with anything, empowered with knowledge and understanding one can do a lot to protect oneself. What can you do to get the very best out of internet and avoid the pitfalls? Firstly, never give away any private information – don’t tell anyone anything that could help them identify or locate you. Protect your data by installing technical filters, anti-spyware and by using the recommended default safety settings on all your online equipment, from modem to mobile. Below is a promotional video for the event:

Superbowl XLII, NFL.com, and the future of television (with advertising kicking and screaming behind)

Like lightening, the Patriots perfect season came to a flailing end. The New York Giants have beaten, the unbeatable 17-14 and upset the New England Patriots in Super Bowl XLII.

I didn't really intend to blog about the Superbowl at all this year. Since my beloved Colts were not playing, I didn't feel how I could bring myself to care. But this morning as I was checking out the National Football League's web site, I saw something that struck me like a hammer right between the eyes. And I don't mean the pounding headaches from the lasting effects of last nights beers. For while I didn't intend to blog about it, I did head out to watch the big game with my partner and a friend.

So I was checking the nfl.com site, just to confirm that Eli Manning was voted the MVP, which he was. What can anyone say, after a play like this. I wanted to witness again, the miracle play, so I decided to follow a link on the site to see a video of the play. And then it hit me. Not only did they have that video already queued up, but 35 other videos from last nights action, plus most of the advertisements aired during the game.

In less then 12 hours following the big event, they had, for me, shown me a vision of the future of television, media, Internet, and advertising. I extend a huge congratulations to the NFL and the many people who worked on the web site in order to make this happen. I'm sure you are scratching your head, so I'll just lay it out like this (sometimes it's the simplest of things that can inspire, even mundane things that a million people see but you see differently, as if for the first time):

• the time between this bonus coverage and the event ending will decrease until The Internet has more to offer than what the television broadcast can offer;
• need proof? the bar we were watching the game had broadband wireless, so while many were watching the game, a group of guys in front of us were watching ads that had just aired on YouTube;
  
• unless you tivo'd the game, where else are you going to see the biggest plays, on demand, television has nothing similar to offer (if you didn't see it live you'll have to watch the news)
• while it's no secret that many in the super bowl audience care about the ads just as much as the game, and it's no secret that many head to the Internet to watch the ads they missed (especially for those of us who had to watch crappy local ads), I do believe that advertisers will begin to wake up to the fact that if done well, people are willing to (even choose to, up to actually seeking them out) watch ads. So why hasn't this happened more universally across all events and all advertisements? Further why do none of the local advertising agencies seem to get this point? The places to go on the Internet to see local commercials aired on TV are few and far between.

The bottom line here is this, if it's not on the Internet it doesn't exist. And everyone WILL go looking for it to consume it at THEIR convenience, and they will SEARCH FOR IT to find it. So if you want your event, your ads, your business to be seen it has to be on the Internet in easily found bite-size nuggets. And if you don't provide what people are looking for your event, your ad, and your business doesn't exist and Internet users WILL find your competitor. Are you feeling me?

Puerto Rico Portal

I was researching a new post I came across a new section on Wikipedia, well although it's not new, I've never seen it before so it's new to me. It's called the Puerto Rico Portal. It is kind of an index or starting page that organizes Puerto Rico-related entries together.

First, the the portal includes information about Puerto Rico organized by these categories History, Politics, Geography, Economy, Society, Culture, Ecology, and a catch all Other. But it also has some additional areas that provide a nice glimpse into Puerto Rico. In these areas you'll find featured content, what's in the news, selected anniversaries, selected quotes, selected pictures, and a selected article.

As always in Wikipedia-land the portal is maintained by volunteers. So if you'd like to see something added to the portal than snag yourself a Wikipedia registration and start editing. Most of the editing has been done by Wikipedia user Mtmelendez (Cool job dude!), but according to his profile page he is now without an Internet connection, thanks to PRTC, so let's pitch in and keep the portal up to date. There is a Spanish version of the portal, but it features less content.

All digital marketing in 10 years! Really?

Leave it to a nutcase like Steve Ballmer to take it too far. I mean what is this guys problem? I guess he just can't get himself out of the shadow of Bill Gates. I mean it's got to burn his britches pretty bad to be only the 33rd richest person in the world, instead of dueling Carlos Slim Helu for first. Hehe, it probably even makes his blood boil to know that the young upstarts from Google Sergey Brin and Larry Page have also passed him. But I digress.

A lot of the computer fanatics in the world blame Bill Gates for all of the evil Microsoft has wrought. I personally blame Steve-o. In my book, I place him just below Dick Cheney and Larry Ellison on the "Evil Dick" list. And it's quite often that when old Steve-o opens his mouth a putrid smell erupts, and is often accompanied by crazy talk. Want to see an example of what many trained psychiatrists called schizophrenia? Hello, am I the only one who thinks that his clock is wound too tight? Anyway, onto the point of this whole rant.

In a recent media event in Paris, Microsoft CE-O Steve-o proclaimed that "All marketing will be digital sometime in the next 10 years." Now for a simple computer programmer like me, I can see myself going off the deep-end and making a prediction like that, but a CE-O of one of the world's largest and most successful businesses? Pleeeeaaassse! I mean, I remember when I caught the open source bug, I thought that commercial software would disappear from the face of the planet. But I quickly came back to my senses and remembered that technology is defiantly difficult to eradicate. While we think that newspapers, magazines, and billboards do not represent technology, we merely indicate how spoiled we are to be living in the early 21st century. Lest we forget that there was a time when the printing press was the cutting edge of new technology.

While I'm the biggest pollito predicting that the local advertising sky is falling in a maelstrom of change, I'm not so dense to believe that over 54% of local advertising will transition to digital, or over 41% in the United States. That my friends, is plain and simple wishful thinking aimed at rationalizing Microsoft's recent acquisitions and emerging online advertising aspirations. While it makes for a good sound bite or "pull-out quote" in a newspaper article, let's say maybe even a pull out quote in a recent article in El Nuevo Dia, it simply will not happen in 10 years. Don't get me wrong though, I DO agree with Steve-o, he's just got the wrong time period.

Update: 3 out of 4 Internet users watched a video in September

As I mentioned in the last post, here is some corroborating information from a respected source. I was browsing through a recent issue of Time magazine, the November 26, 2007 issue. In this particular issue the cover story was: America by the numbers. Essentially the cover article provides a statistical analysis of life in America, which used as source data a variety of sources.

In the section entitled "At Play", where they lead with a subtitle "We have plenty of free time - we just fill it with television", there is a hidden story. One which they fail to even draw attention. In general they state, the average amount of television watched by a women with young children is 1 hr. 28 min. The most television watched is by men without children, 4 hr. 38 mins.

However, in the part where they discuss Internet usage they fail to recognize how close the Internet is to overall television usage. According to the story we spend 2 hr. 36 min. using the Internet at work and 1 hr. 7 min. at home. That means that, in total, we spend 3 hr. 43 min. using the Internet, compared to relatively the same amount of time watching television.

Disclaimer: Remember how I've always warned how you can twist statistics anyway you want to support your claims, so take this with a a grain of salt. But also take this to the bank, because it really, really is going to be a huge deal over the next 10 to 20 years.

400th post: 3 out of 4 Internet users watched a video in September

According to the recently released comScore Video Metrix report for September 2007, nearly 75 percent of U.S. Internet users watched a video online (including both streaming video and progressive downloads), averaging three hours of video per person during the month. Google Sites, which includes YouTube.com, topped the September rankings with both the most unique video viewers and most videos viewed.

In total, nearly 136 million Americans, or approximately three in four U.S Internet users, viewed online video in September. Google Sites also captured the largest online video audience with 71.6 million unique viewers, followed by Fox Interactive Media with 41.2 million and Yahoo! Sites with 39.6 million.

September saw Americans view more than 9 billion videos online, with Google Sites once again ranking as the top U.S. video property with 2.6 billion videos viewed (28.3 percent share of videos), 2.5 billion of which occurred at YouTube.com (27.6 percent). Fox Interactive Media ranked second with 387 million (4.2 percent), followed by Yahoo! Sites with 381 million (4.1 percent) and Viacom Digital with 304 million (3.3 percent).

Implications

With the continued growth of online video on the Internet, television will soon begin losing its importance as a media channel. I've already reported that users of the Internet spend the same amount of time on the Internet as people watching television. While television currently receives more ad dollars, when the the balance tips towards people spending more time on the Internet, the ad spending on television will decrease. The Internet will benefit as the share of ad spending lost by televsion decreases, and it shifts to the Internet.

Flickr Creative Commons Contributor Today: qousqous

Entrepreneur magazine predicts extinction of newspapers in 10 years

I've been blabbing my head off recently about how the Internet is going to lay waste to some very cherished and iconic industries. Among them I include magazines, television, and yellow pages. But one in particular is bleeding out a little faster than the others that I mentioned, that is newspapers.

So when I cam across this article from Entrepreneur magazine that annually predicts the best and worst businesses for the future. So in the related article, entitled "10 Businesses Facing Extinction in 10 Years", I am not surprised to see newspapers appear for the first time on the list. According to the article "the Audit Bureau of Circulations twice has posted drops averaging 2.1 and 2.8 percent over six-month periods". The quick summary of the future of newspapers does, however, predict that newspapers will not disappear completely, they'll just transfer completely over to the Internet.

There are two big questions this prediction raises. First, why are newspapers going to drop like flies trapped inside for too long? And second, will Puerto Rican newspapers fair a different fate? We know that the Internet is placing incredible pressure on newspapers, but just exactly why? Well here are the main reasons:

• Classified advertising used to be a cash cow for newspapers. Charging customers by the word and line, these popular sections for buyers and sellers are now pointless. Hello, anyone ever heard of a site called Ebay? But there are also sites like Craigslist and ClasificadosOnline.com which are eating the candy of newspapers everywhere, even here. When you are looking for that elusive trinket or collectible, why search line by line in the newspaper, when you can conduct power searches over the Internet?
• It's very cost inefficient to run a newspaper. Want to know how to predict the future of business? Stay on the lookout for any brick and mortar (atom-based) business that is competing against a rival that is predominantly electronic (computerized). It costs newspapers a lot of money to operate a printing plant (paper, ink, maintenance of the printing press) and distribute those newspapers to all of their subscribers.
• I wonder, do you think that we, as a society, value instant gratification? You think? It takes newspapers 24 hours to refresh the news. It takes the television news about 6 hours, unless the news is worthy of interrupting normal broadcasts for special breaking news. The Internet is refreshed constantly 24 by 7.

While there are some other potential factors, such as the ineffectiveness of advertising and the use of alternative media for news (think Internet on the computer, on the cellphone, on the BlackBerry) the prognosis is very clear most newspapers will disappear very soon. However, I don't agree with the time frame. To quote Arthur C. Clarke "We tend to overestimate technology in the short term and underestimate it in the long term." Technology, and yes newspapers are technology (just a very old one...), tends to be very stubborn to get rid of. It will be a while until it is as easy and convenient to take the Internet to the bathroom.

As far Puerto Rico is concerned, then we will see the usual delays. It will take longer here for any technology to displace newspapers. If you factor in that newspapers are the number 1 advertising media channel in Puerto Rico, then that delay will take even longer. That said, I don't foresee the Vocero, nor the San Juan Star, will be with us too much longer. I'm not sure what to think about the future of the regional newspapers. My guess is that they will be the last to go. With a very niche market, a predominantly disconnected niche market, they provide a service the Internet can not match.

Caribbean Business publishes Adver-news for WebResponse

Immediately prior to watching a documentary about Fox News, I had begun noticing how many of the local papers include "news" articles that were nothing more than opinion, or even worse advertisements. Once I had seen the documentary "Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism" however, I was certain that there was an alarming amount of opinion and advertising being passed off as "news". Let's call them adver-news.

Just to clarify a quick point, there is nothing wrong with media channels sharing people's opinions, these are called editorials and should be clearly identified as such. But that is a lot different from a news source offering up news that is really someone's opinion. Which is why the mainstream media news channels fear the Internet so greatly. It is the great equalizer. Since is it loosely organized and distributed amongst the billion or so users, the many powerful search engines available can help us find more information about news topics and permit us obtain many different viewpoints, research facts, and come to our own conclusions. That's the way the news used to work. Present the facts and let the audience decide.

Caribbean Business Found Guilty

There is no better example of this than a recent article in the Caribbean Business written by Dennis Costa Pacheco entitled "Website abandonment a key worry for online businesses." I found the headline intriguing, so I had to take a peak. The hook of this article, briefly, is that 42% of consumers abandon a site or switch to a competitor when they experience problems such as lack of content or technical glitches. Therefore it is important to engage in an interaction with those consumers by using popular Web 2.0 tools. Awesome, we here at DóndeEs.com couldn't agree more.

Unfortunately, that's about as awesome as the article gets. First, let's cut right to the chase. It's not really until the second paragraph from the end that Pacheco delivers his real payload for the article, an unabashed advertisement for WebResponse, the Internet division of Casiano Communications. An article of this nature is an insult to journalism!

Clueless about Web 2.0

Second, it is painfully evident that Pacheco doesn't understand what Web 2.0 is all about. "Flash animations and advanced database protocols like MySQL and PHP" have absolutely nothing to do with Web2.0, and are really more representative of Web 1.0.

Of course how would he know the difference when Casiano Communications itself has absolutely no clue about what Web2.0 or the Internet is all about. None of their websites offers anything closely resembling Web2.0 functionality. There are no blogs, no RSS, and nowhere to add comments to anything. Further none of their sites consume any web services made available by anyone.

According to Jorge R. Elguera, vice president & general manager of WebResponse and PRWOW.com, "Most of them [sites which haven't properly updated their contents to reflect the times] were set up during the first boom period of the Internet, which happened in the mid- to late-‘90s, and it was very different back then.”

Funny how one of the "Samples of our work" from WebResponse lists a site for Green Coffee Cigarettes, which is done entirely in Adobe Flash and features exactly nothing that could be characterized as Web 2.0. I wonder when that site originally was available, probably in the late 1990's? Oh how embarrassing for Mr. Elguera and WebResponse, according to the Network Solutions Whois record lookup, the domain www.greencoffeecigarettes.com wasn't even created until '2006-08-25'.

What not talk about this?

Finally, since, in the end the article is nothing but a advertisement for Casiano Communications, the premise of the article is completely pointless. It's kind of ironic, because Pacheco actually zeros in on some of the most pressing problems with nearly all local websites, however he skirts the issue and doesn't nail the owners of those sites to the wall. Nearly none of the websites locally available offer any e-commerce capability. Therefore, why would anyone be interested?

The most pressing problems that should be discussed are:

• As quoted from Roberto Sotto, vice president of sales for WebResponse and PRWOW.com, "Most of these websites [local] act more as an electronic brochure than the bona fide net presence they should be.”
• And as also pointed out by Sotto, "They [web customers] are used to a level of interactivity that is very different from the passive stance they take with other media like television or print; ..., the website must make an effort to actively engage the potential customer,”

No Te Duermas and Telemundo Join YouTube

Well, well, well. It seems that someone locally has finally coped a clue about what we've talking about. Or not to take too much credit, what has been happening all over the place, the merging (or converging, if you prefer) between television and the Internet. It seems that about a month ago, as best as I can tell by the 97 videos already available, No Te Duermas and Telemundo launched a YouTube channel for the popular television show.

I applaud the producers of NTD and the leadership they have shown, have you seen their MySpace page? This is a perfect example of understanding that releasing your content (your product) into the zillions of ways your target audience can connect with and bond with your brand, is the only way to stay relevant in today's hyperactive market. Throwing up walls around your products, your company, your leaders is just plain stupid! Markets are conversations! If you're conversing with your customers (past, present, & future) then you have a chance to survive (even yes, possibly, thrive). If you stay silent, everyone will continue to converse, the only difference is that they will be talking about you, not to you.

It seems that NTD has really committed to this fully. As an example, here is a show, only two days old that is already available:

October Traffic for DóndeEs.com

Here's something to think about. If traffic is the evidence that a website is valuable, then why don't any local (all?) websites publish their traffic numbers? Consider some of the following analogies... If DóndeEs.com was a band, it would be common knowledge how many copies of our latest CD we had sold. If we were an author (which we are, of course ;-D) of books, then we would be ecstatic to be listed among the New York Times bestsellers, and the number of books we had sold would also be public knowledge. It would be the same if we were professional athletes of any kind, our "value" would be expressed through our statistics. Finally, publicly owned companies have their books exposed quarterly in their reports to the Security Exchange Commission and their stock price is freely available. So why not website traffic numbers? It seems to me, that if a companies' success (read significant revenue streams) is dependent upon traffic, they should have to disclose their traffic statistics.

In keeping with our dedication to transparency, I'd like to share our latest statistics. During the month of October, www.dondees.com received 27,856 unique visitors. That averages out to 899 unique visitors daily, a 23.9% increase over September's traffic. Each of those visitors accessed an average of 5.16 pages per visit for a total number of 143,612 page views. That averages out to 4,633 page views per day, a 10.2% increase from September. We are extremely pleased and proud of this achievement. It even makes most people go "Whaaaattt!" when we share that we accomplished this level of success with little or nothing spent on advertising or promotion. Not even one little crappy sign posted along our visually polluted roads.

How does stack up to other websites in Puerto Rico. Uhh,,, who knows? Since more websites don't publish their traffic, we are left using the only means of comparison available to us, Alexa.com. Here is a graph comparing www.dondees.com to some other popular websites in Puerto Rico:

New comScore study "Search Marketing Vital for Brand Building and Driving Offline Sales..."

Isn't it funny how studies released by companies usually support the business plans of those companies? I mean have you ever seen a news article from a company stating that a study they had sponsored turned out to discredit one of their most popular products? Just imagine "Tonkoyta Motors has announced that a startling new study about hybrid cars shows that they actually consume more gasoline than regular cars and actually produce more hydrocarbons.." Call me a cynic, but I'm guessing studies with those types of results never see the light of day. Well, thanks to Gord Hotchkiss and his post about "Search And the Digital CPG Shelf" from Media Post's Search Insider Blog, we've got a new study to dissect.

Search Marketing Vital for Brand Building and Driving Offline Sales...

So, take this with a little grain of salt, but a new study conducted by comScore, Inc. in partnership with Procter & Gamble, Yahoo!, and the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization, has shown that: "Search Marketing Vital for Brand Building and Driving Offline Sales for Consumer Packaged Goods Companies". At least one of the participants in the study, Procter & Gamble, doesn't really care which way the study turned out, they were obviously just looking to determine how to spend future advertising investments. Well, unless there is a group within P&G that handles search engine marketing and is hoping to get a bump in their budget......nah, I'm sure that's not the case.

I find this study interesting for two reasons. First, it shows that even in the United States, where search engine marketing is driving Google's stock price ever upward, there still exists resistance and a lack of progress in accepting search engine marketing. And second, it provides excellent analysis and advice for local advertising professionals and companies to see the value of search engine advertising. I'll briefly explore both of these points

Search Engine Marketing...Still in its infancy

Real quick! Let's not forget that search engine marketing, as an alternative for the advertiser, has only been around for about a decade. And the dominant search engine marketing platform, Google, has only been available for 5 years. If you also consider that the Internet has only been available publicly and for commercial use since 1994, I think that it is easy to conclude that Internet advertising has a long ways to grow. Finally, you may not be ready to hear this, but before too long, the Internet will become the dominant media device. According to a recent survey by IBM, "personal Internet time rivals TV time." However, even though time in front of a monitor instead of a television is roughly the same, the amount of advertising purchased on the two differ drastically, with the Internet lagging behind television by more than $13.2 billion. By the way, I'll be digging into this issue, very soon. Warning: the forecast indicates a category 5 hurricane of change approaching the advertising industry!

Imagine that!

Of course, I'm not ashamed to agree with Gordy's overall assessment of the study, you see that is the luxury of us study opportunists; when the conclusion fits our agenda, well, we want to make sure you know what the "experts" have to say. According to Gordy:

"In fact, I have yet to see a study done on any product category where search didn’t blow the doors off the competition in its effectiveness in connecting with customers. So perhaps the biggest question left unanswered by the study is this: Why are all those branding dollars still going everywhere but search?"

Yes indeed, why are all those advertising dollars going to less effective methods?

Here are some of my favorite conclusions from the study:

• “Our deeper understanding of the motivations around search behavior underscores the opportunity to leverage search for more than just direct response marketing,” said Randy Peterson, Search Innovation Manager from Procter & Gamble. “Search may be one of the most effective means of reaching qualified consumers when and where they are most receptive to learning about our brands. Ultimately this drives offline sales.” Well there you have it, straight from the Search Innovation Manager from Procter & Gamble, you see how indifferent P&G is in the study....erggh, wait a minute!
• Search appears to represent a significant marketing opportunity for CPG brands. The study found that a majority of U.S. consumers visited Web sites for CPG product categories during the three months ending April 2007, with search driving a significant percentage of visitors in all the categories.
• The study also found that a substantial percentage of the visitors to category Web sites arrived as a result of a search query. Among visitors to baby products sites, 60 percent arrived via search, followed by 47 percent in food products, 27 percent in personal care products, and 23 percent in household products.