Universal Voice Translators are almost here
One of the neat futuristic gadgets in Star Trek was the universal translator, a device that would take in any language and output English.
Engadget reports that NEC says they are close to having one of these.
the firm has developed a system that can understand around 50,000 Japanese words and translate them to English text on the mobile’s display in just a second or two.
Now this is not quite Star Trek because you’d need to convert the text to voice, but that technology is here already. This is close, and it’s just another in the long line of technological improvements we all call … home.
I see this as very fertile ground for the open handset alliance. Just think how positively travel would be affected if the language barrier was stripped away! Perhaps even less conflict as people would find it harder to keep from communicating during crises.
Who is clicking at your online business door?
Back in July I missed this great post by Dave Morgan at AOL but thanks to Danah Boyd’s post it has surfaced again. The findings are very surprising and very relevant to anybody running click or online advertising campaigns. Dave summarizes the findings very concisely as follows:
We learned that most people do not click on ads, and those that do are by no means representative of Web users at large.
Ninety-nine percent of Web users do not click on ads on a monthly basis. Of the 1% that do, most only click once a month. Less than two tenths of one percent click more often. That tiny percentage makes up the vast majority of banner ad clicks.
Who are these “heavy clickers”? They are predominantly female, indexing at a rate almost double the male population. They are older. They are predominantly Midwesterners, with some concentrations in Mid-Atlantic States and in New England. What kinds of content do they like to view when they are on the Web? Not surprisingly, they look at sweepstakes far more than any other kind of content. Yes, these are the same people that tend to open direct mail and love to talk to telemarketers.
What does all of this mean? It means that while clickers may be valuable audiences, they are by no means representative of the Web at large
Indeed, this means that many online marketing campaigns may need to dig a lot deeper to obtain a positive ROI, and for some campaigns positive ROI is not attainable. If, for example, irrelevant clickers (not to be confused with click abuse) mean you’ll have to spend a few dollars to reach a single prospect, and your margin on your product is only a few dollars, you may be fighting a losing PPC battle for online hearts, minds, and pocketbooks. On the other hand if your target audience is, say, midwestern stay at home soccer moms, you may want to up your PPC spend dramatically because your nickel or dime per click could be worth many times that in prospective sales.
Obviously Dave’s post is only the beginning of the big story which has yet to be written, and I’m not clear how representative this sample was of all PPC activity (I think it was broadly representative though - they looked at billions of data items). However this helps me understand why some of my PPC experiments have failed to yield much of a return. A good travel experiment given these findings would be to look at midwestern travel patterns and try to advertise popular packages to Mexico or other commonly travelled points south in the winter. Since women are the main travel planners this match could work well to increase the normally very low conversion I have seen on travel related PPC spends.
Oban Scotch for Christmas
I owed a friend a pretty good bottle of Scotch for a favor, and knew he liked Oban Scotch. Unfortunately I had not checked the local price which is consistently $69.95. Not bad, but I was shooting for a $50 “thank you” gift. Enter the internet shopping thingie at Google which offered up Turnpike spirits way out east as having the best price by far on Oban - $42 plus shipping. Unfortunately the website showed “not available” so I called them and got excellent help. He had some bottles and I managed to order 4 of them. With shipping I’m going to be under $50, and have a few more nice gifts to give. Hey Dad - don’t read this post!
Shopping for scotch shows that the internet has not stabilized pricing at all - at least for Oban Scotch. This single product has dozens of different online prices, which is especially interesting given that locally the price seems almost “fixed”. I’m guessing few people buy liquor online - perhaps it is an impulse or very-close-to-Christmas purchase usually and therefore people go local? However it would seem this price inefficiency could be monetized somehow by matching low online pricing to high priced areas. I’m guessing that our local liquore store paid more for the bottle they are selling at $69.95 than I just paid Turnpike, so somewhere in here there is a business.
Paid Links and SEO - game over dudes
It has now been over two years since Google started their crusade against paid links. I first understood this crusade back in 2005. It was the first time I’d met Matt Cutts, and we were sitting at the hotel bar during the New Orleans WebmasterWorld PubCon with a handful of SEO folks. I asked about the practice of paid links. “Don’t buy links”, he said. Matt was a bit vague about the consequences and other details, and the the Google guidelines back then were not very clear on this point. In fact a substantial paid link economy had developed and continues today. However over time Google has become very clear about paid linking.
In my opinion this this recent post from Matt Cutts, Google’s uberMeister of spam tricks and SEO, should sound the death knell for this strategy even for those willing to take the risks that have been associated with paid linking strategies for some time. Clearly Google is dedicated about this, and will continue to crack down severely enough that the risk outweighs any likely gains. Certainly any of the sites and folks I’m familiar with in Travel and Tourism should *not* use this practice to raise their pagerank. I’ve been advising this for some time, but I knew the practice was still fairly common among some elites in the SEO community which meant it was still working. I’m sure there are some exceptional cases but the basic advice here is easy - don’t buy links.
Like Graywolf, one of the most vocal critics of the Google anti-paid-link jihad, I have a lot of concerns about fairness, best practices, and how much pleasing Google has come to distort the production of good content. But jousting at Google’s windmill has probably become a waste of time, especially given that many of their concerns about buying and selling links are legitimate. That practice certainly did distort the relevancy of rankings in a significant way. In fact Google’s core brilliancy - the pagerank algorithm - put in motion a variety of online linking practices that have reshaped web content in dramatic, mostly negative ways. People used to link freely and often as a matter of course because links are the heart of the web and commercial concerns were not in play. Now, free links are doled out by many very sparingly in an effort to preserve pagerank at their own websites and to deny others a competitive advantage. I hope Google is considering this factor as they revise the algorithm. e.g. linking out to other sites should tend to *boost* ranks for a given term more than it lowers the rank due to leaked pagerank.
-
-
Recent Comments
L.R. on Travelers Advantage is a Trave… Kitty on Home Again Pet ID System? Y… Las Vegas Flights on American Airlines to pull all … FoolsGold on Samsung Bright Panel Display a… JoeDuck on CES 2009 glenn on Live from CES Las Vegas C… Wendy Burns on Outlook Express Spell Check Di… Bill Sautter on CES 2009 glenn on Guest Essay: Bjorn Lomborg on… JoeDuck on The best 2008 investment advic… Nate on Fareed Zakaria’s GPS on… FoolsGold on The best 2008 investment advic… Mary on Home Again Pet ID System? Y… FoolsGold on Twidiots of the World, Un… Bobby Mucic on Twidiots of the World, Un…
Please subscribe to the feed
