BeSeenCafe

After a couple of months of apparently very successful 'viral' marketing of BeSeenCafe and, recently, the associated Ready Set Launch website the products and affiliate programme fees have been announced. All of the early search engine references have been comments from people who have encouraged others to join their free downline and get on board with this "next big thing". It will be interesting to see how the comments develop as people learn more about the video products and services.

Yahoo Search Marketing

We welcome the decision by Yahoo Search Marketing (previously Overture) to reduce the initial account minimum payment and - more importantly - the minimum monthly spend. This will enable many small website owners to start campaigns through the Yahoo network.

Click here for more details.

Adsense Videos

You can't knock success and in the world of pay-per-click marketing, Michael Cheney seems to have struck gold. Not only has he made the leap from earning a few cents a day on his own websites through to hundreds of dollars a day, he has now shared his knowledge through a series of videos.

Michael Cheney's Adsense videos have become an amazing success over this last couple of weeks and we recommend them to you.

Podcasts

Less than a year ago, most people had never heard of podcasting. Yet, according to online researcher eMarketer, the podcasting audience will reach 10 million this year and 50 million by 2010.

If you want to get on the bandwagon or simply understand what Podcasts are all about, here are a couple of articles that will help:

Podcasting: a great way to share media files

Small Business Podcasting Demystified (A very detailed article)

Security Warning to O2 Users

O2 mobile phone users will be familiar with the monthly email that informs that of the charge that will be deducted from the credit/debit cards at the normal month end. There is a current wave of messages being sent randomly (and therefore catching O2 users) which is identical in wording and structure to the official notice, but it states a very high charge.

Most users inevitably click on the link to the O2 billing page to investigate. This link does not go to the O2 website, but to another one where a virus download is triggered.

This type of message is referred to a ‘Phising’ and you will find articles explaining them within the Wrinklies website http://www.wrinklies.co.uk/. The virus (actually a ‘Trojan’ which transmits information such as bank details) is called PWsteal.Metafisher.

We offer 4 bits of advice:

First of all always make sure that you have anti-virus software installed and set to update automatically.

Don’t panic if you have a virus alert. Either refer to your virus software vendors website for information and instructions or ask a computer-savvy person to help you. The website will have information on that specific virus/Trojan.

Perform a full system scan using the anti-virus software. (You should do this regularly anyway!)

Finally, here is a useful way to guard against being fooled to click on a link that isn’t what it appears – the visible link and the actual link can be different.

If you are using MS Outlook place the cursor in the body of the message near – but not over the link – and click the right mouse button once and select View Source. You will see the code that makes up the message and you will see the place where you placed the cursor. If the link does not go where you expect e.g. http://www.O2.co.uk/shop, close the View Source window and delete the message. (Other email programs might have slight different procedures.)

We tried to report this matter to O2, but has anyone ever had an answer on their phone line?

Financial Regulatory Requirements

The UK Financial Services Authority (FSA) has launched an online training course designed to help small financial adviser firms and mortgage intermediaries work out what resources are needed to meet their financial regulatory requirements. The course, neatly entitled (not) 'Financial resources: calculating own funds and capital resources e-learning package' is available from the FSA website for £30 and supposedly takes an hour to complete.

If anyone uses it, please let us know what you think.

ASP: A Lost Opportunity?

The concept of business processing outsourcing is familiar to most companies. Less familiar may be the notion of online business processing outsourcing, also known as e-outsourcing or application service provision (ASP). Using such an approach, an organisation accesses its information systems applications via a web browser with the data and applications running at the remotely hosted site of an external party, known as an application service provider. The organisation is thus in theory freed from the effort of managing its own in-house applications, information technology staff and resources.

With a wide availability of ‘off-the-shelf’ online business processes offering a comprehensive range of functionality, it might be expected that businesses would readily have adopted this concept. However as identified by Scottish Enterprise (2003, 2004) this is evidently not the case. The uptake seems greater in larger companies than in smaller ones despite the fact that, in theory at least, an ASP approach appears to offer significant benefits to smaller companies.

ASP based applications have established a significant base in the USA but in Europe, including the UK, the market penetration of ASPs is low. Many of the barriers to uptake appear to be based on emotional considerations, rather than reasoned evaluation. If businesses can overcome initial barriers and evaluate the business case they may be able to gain potentially significant benefits.

This paper explains the pros and cons of the ASP model, discusses ways of overcoming initial barriers and highlights possible opportunities. The focus is more on smaller businesses than larger ones although some of the points discussed are also of relevance to large organisations.