Pixotri Technologies: 2015-04-19

Friday, April 24, 2015

Applying The Principles Of The 2016 Election To Digital Marketing Campaigns

The 2016 presidential campaign season officially kicked off last week when news broke that Hillary Clinton and Marco Rubio were putting in their bids for America’s vote. A spirit of change is in the air — the candidates have already begun to address key issues and to sell their strategies for improvements to the economy, violence, human rights, international relations, education, energy sources, and so on.

In the same spirit, it’s time digital marketers get our heads out of the sand and address issues that we’ve been hiding behind for the past few decades. These issues directly impact a $600 billion industry, and it’s time we step up to the plate and campaign for change. Let’s take a look at some of these issues and how we can best address them.

The Elephant In The Room: Attribution (Or Lack Thereof)

For over two decades, we’ve been using the last-click model to validate and measure the entire efficacy of our industry. It’s about time we face reality and understand the blatant flaws of this strategy.

Let’s look at sandwich boards as an example — you know, those boards that sit outside storefronts and shops exhibiting the special or sale of the day? A brand can spend millions of dollars on marketing, TV spots, digital, mobile, and direct mail elements. But the last-click model is like giving all the credit of driving new customers to your store to just the sandwich boards.

The law of advertising economics says that money follows where there are eyeballs. With mobile usage now surpassing desktop, the ecosystem is making us adopt a new performance model.

We need a new attribution model, and with that, more analytic-focused professionals where marketing budgets are controlled.

Bring It Back To People

It’s time that we all go back to one of the basics of marketing: It’s about understanding consumers’ intent, not about the ad impressions.

Brands need to understand how their users are engaging with the brand across channels and how their behaviors are affecting sales. If you’re an auto brand, your customers will act very differently from customers looking for a new restaurant — from how quickly they’ll react to the brand message, to what channels they’re using, to what actions they’ll take once they engage with the brand.

Once you understand your users and their behaviors, you can then set an appropriate target for your omni-channel strategy.

Deliver Personalized Messages

Everyone loves Super Bowl commercials. Why? Because marketers spend loads of money and time to deliver the perfect and innovative brand message to the highest viewed slots on TV. When time (and sometimes money) is spent on delivering a message to an audience, the effects are huge.

We need to adopt the same principle and discipline for better creative delivery in digital and mobile. Marketers need to get better at personalization and innovation in their creative design.

I cringe anytime I see a static 320×50 ad on mobile, but get giddy when I see a well-done native mobile ad or Mraid (where I can swipe and shake features of the ad). This type of engagement with consumers will help marketers build a personal and emotional connection with the end user, and most likely lead to a bigger sales margin.

Use Data, Intelligence

Mobile and programmatic have been referred to as the “wild, wild West,” but more solutions are in place than ever before.

Even now, marketers aren’t taking full advantage of the data available to them. There’s now intelligible data that can help us determine a bot versus human, identify quality traffic sources, understand what people are searching for in real-time, locate customers based on GPS signals, and tell you where your ad was viewed.

We need to get comfortable with multiple sources of data and determine how to bring them together to make the best of use of it. In the end, using data for intelligence will lead to greater trust, transparency and performance.

The same principles behind a great presidential campaign stand true for great digital campaigns: To gain people’s votes (or interactions in our world), you must be able to deliver the right message to the end user before you’re too far down the campaign trail.

Digital marketing

Digital marketing helps you to find yourself in first place among the other competitors. We help you to strategically plan and execute your,product and services through our online platforms.Pixotri technology is a creative house developing quality web designs, E-Commerce solution. SEO services and Gaming development .

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9xSWDsTYC8

Will Yandex Penalizing Paid Links Affect Other Search Engines’ Ranking Factors?

When a year ago Yandex announced that links would be removed as a ranking factor, they hoped that black-hat SEOs would be discouraged from promoting websites with paid links. Paid links made up more than 70 percent of all links for the most popular commercial queries. These spam sites that buy links do not allocate time or resources for design, functionality of the site, or content and therefore do not provide the site visitor with a good experience.

Yandex is now reporting that since then, the number of paid links has only dropped by 16 percent and at the current rate, it would take an additional five years to see paid links become completely obsolete. Yandex does not believe their prior decision to remove links completely as a ranking factor to be in vain, but rather a step in the right direction.

On April 15, Yandex’s head of search Alexander Sadovsky announced that starting May 15 links will be brought back as a linking factor, but paid links will become a negative factor. Yandex’s machine-learning based algorithm is able to identify the paid versus the organic external links. The update will first affect spam sites that have a long history of buying massive quantities of links. The Russian search engine strongly advises the removal of paid links before the May 15 date to avoid penalization.

This new update is designed to encourage websites to improve the design, content, and functionality, and overall UI (user interface). The Russian search engine also looks at user behavior.

According to Yandex, the acceptable links can be "partner links" that contain more than just one URL but also a relevant description of the website. Yandex also approves of links used by online media to cite your website that contains valuable information. Link catalogs like Yandex.Catalog and dmoz can improve site rankings. An appropriate site catalog must be moderated, convenient to navigate for visitors, be organized thematically with links to reputable sites, advertisement-free, and grammatically correct with no spelling mistakes.

Note that it is the catalog sites that must be free of advertisements - not the site’s link that is provided on the catalog site. Yandex also warns of spam comments containing links that may be published on your site. Similar to Google SEO ranking guidelines, comments should be screened and moderated prior to being posted.

Will Yandex’s decision affect other search engines’ ranking factors? Keep in mind that links are essential to search algorithms and to implement the new ranking factors will definitely require much work. Though Google states that links that are designed to manipulate search rankings will negatively impact a site’s rankings, it does not expressly prohibit paid links. Paid advertisements that pass PageRank, on the other hand, violate Google guidelines.

Baidu is on the other end of the spectrum, with many sites listing "friendly" links in the footer to increase the site’s rankings. One of China’s top online travel markets, Qunar, has a footer with these paid links. Though Baidu does not approve of paid links, its algorithm fails to detect this manipulation of search rankings. Qunar was penalized by being required to post a public apology on their website for 24 hours after a court ruling. Yandex’s new announcement will likely not affect Baidu’s current rankings, as it seems that the first step in solving the paid linking issue is developing algorithms that will actually spot the practice.

Naver’s policy on paid links is even harder to understand. The site portal requires that websites wishing to be ranked by the website must first sign up and create an account. The SERPs are listed much differently from those of Google, with paid listings being on top. Naver SEO rankings don’t seem to be based on links but rather on content. Therefore, the Yandex announcement will also likely not have any effect on Naver’s ranking factors.

The Yandex move in my opinion is a smart one, rewarding great links and penalizing others that appear to be paid. However, the definition between what exactly is paid and what exactly is not, remains to be a bit grey area. For example, if you hire a PR agency to write a press release and they pay a press release service to distribute that content, is it considered paid if you are paying the PR agency to write it and paying the press release service to distribute it? What if someone pays a blogger for their time to write an informative article and posts it on their well-known and relevant website? How is it enforced to capture and punish writers and publishers for making a living with their content?

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We employ a variety of proven recommended techniques to increase your chance for top rankings.These include optimizing your website's page,content,and structure to drive traffic to your site for specific keyword research.Pixotri technology is a creative house developing quality web designs, E-Commerce solution. SEO services and Gaming development .

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9xSWDsTYC8

Redirects for SEO: Soup to Nuts

As any good SEO knows, redirects are a must when you are changing URLs or moving your site to a new location. But why are redirects so important? And what are the best practices for creating redirects? Without further delay, here is the comprehensive guide to redirects for SEO.

Why Redirects?

Redirects of the "301" HTTP status code variety send the message that a resource on the Web has permanently moved. Google (via Matt Cutts) says that when they encounter a 301 redirect, and the content at the new URL is similar to the content at the old URL, they will allocate the old URL ranking signals to the new URL. This is good news for SEOs, as it means they can change URLs without having to start from scratch in terms of links and other ranking signals.

Setting Up Redirects

For small sites doing a redirect plan is straightforward. Just redirect all the old URLs to the best-fit URLs on the new site. Best-fit meaning the content on the two URLs is as similar as possible. In Appache this typically means editing the Htaccess file. On Microsoft IIS it is slightly more complicated. In IIS remember to set the status code to 301 or you may end up with a sub-par for-SEO 302 (resource temporarily moved). If you are using a modern CMS, you can usually set up redirects via their interface as opposed to via the server software.

Creating Redirect Plans for Large Sites

An awesome redirect plan for large sites will include old-to-new URL mappings for several categories of URLs:

However, executing on a plan for sites with thousands or millions of URLs presents a unique set of problems. For example, it may not be wise to add thousands of rows to your htaccess file, as making the file too large could potentially cause problems. I limit my htaccess to 1,000 rows to be on the safe side. If you want to add more, be sure to test to see how well it works.

An alternative for dealing with large numbers of redirects to htaccess is to leave the URLs in place and add meta refresh redirects pointing to the new page. This takes the load off and preserves the search equity of the URLs.

It’s also a huge task to manually create thousands of old to new URL mappings. Some approaches to managing the scale problem for enterprise sites include the use of mapping rules, only redirecting URLs with identical content on the new or migrated site, and prioritizing redirects based on various factors.

Creating Rule-Based Redirects

If your URLs are changing in a consistent way, you can create a rule that processes them all dynamically. For example, if your press release folders are changing from /press to /newsroom you can create a single rule that automatically processes the mapping.

Prioritizing Based on Content

Most large site redesigns involve consolidation or elimination of content to some degree. This means that old URLs may not have an exact match in terms of content on the new site. Since it appears that redirects that point to completely different content often lose most of their value, it may not make sense to redirect pages that are in reality going away. Google recommends letting URLs that are removed generate 404s (which says somewhat cryptically that the resource was not found), or 410 (which makes it clear the resource is gone).

Prioritizing Redirects Based on Search Equity

Another approach is to pick a few thousand URLs that are especially important and redirect those. But how to choose? One approach is run an inbound link report on your site and redirect any URL with external inbound links. This should be a key consideration for any redirect plan, and many SEOs will stop here. But I advocate for an additional analysis – redirects based on existing rankings. Some SEOs include elements like tweets, G+s, and even user signals like page views, and other factors into the analysis.

Redirects Based on Existing Rankings

It seems that SEOs are in 100 percent universal agreement that ranking reports are bad, bad, bad, so I risk censure by suggesting you use them. My experience shows, however, that an old URL ranking for a competitive keyword should 100 percent be redirected to the best-fit URL on the new site. Even if the URL has no ranking signals to be seen in any of your reports. Why? Because the ranking is almost certain to drop post changeover if you do not explicitly redirect it to the new version of the URL. I have seen it happen again and again, and trust me, clients (and bosses) notice.

Use Visibility Reports to Benchmark Rankings

The key to preserving high-profile rankings in a redesign is to pull an organic visibility report. There are tools that monitor millions of keywords and spit out a report showing all the rankings they have for a given domain. This allows you to know what URLs are ranking even if you do not have a huge strategic keyword list. Just export the list of ranking URLs and map them to the new URLs on your site.

Strategic Mapping of URLs to Content

Another technique to consider is to strategically map multiple URLs, preferably with ranking signals, to a single high-value URL on the new site. This (in theory) has the effect of concentrating search equity from the old site onto a single destination URL.

This technique should only be used when there is an obvious match in terms of content between the old URL, the links pointing to the old URL, and the new URL. If you can’t make this semantic match, then don’t waste the redirects by attempting to consolidate them on a bad URL, point them to the best possible match on the new site.

I have tried the consolidation tactic several times and it seems to work, i.e. the new URL draws more organic traffic than the old URLs, but it is very hard to say definitively that this is due to the redirect strategy and not other changes.

Allowing Requests to 404

Just because you can put in a redirect doesn’t mean you should in every case. While this is a controversial topic, evidence suggests that a redirect pointing to an unrelated page has limited value. For example, a retailer I worked with recently redirected thousands of old product pages URLs (which previously generated 404s) to their home page and saw zero effect on Google. In other words, thousands of product URLs, many with ranking signals, had no effect when redirected to the homepage of the site. The message seems to be if the URL redirects to a page with drastically different content it will pass little to any SEO value. I suspect that the amount of time the URL was 404’ing may be a factor as well.

Conclusion: Redirects Are a Pain

For all but the smallest sites, creating redirects is a hassle. Yes, it’s boring work, and it may be tempting to blow it off, but it’s the kind of work that pays off big time down the road. Instead of feeling blue, find satisfaction when you launch your new site, fully expecting organic traffic to drop, and instead see it remain steady or even (gasp) go up! Then you will know the power of the redirect, my son. And what’s more, you will be man.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9xSWDsTYC8

Silicon Valley Help Sought as Pentagon Fights Cyber-Attacks

The Defense Department is seeking a new collaboration with Silicon Valley to gain access to the latest technology and talent as the U.S. seeks to prevent catastrophic cyber-attacks.

Defense Secretary Ashton Carter made his pitch for cooperation on Thursday, in the first official visit in 20 years by a Pentagon chief to the Northern California region that spawned much of the world’s advanced technology. The effort comes amid warnings by defense officials that the U.S. military is losing its technological edge over potential rivals, including China.

Carter, a trained physicist, may have the intellectual candlepower to meet Silicon Valley’s leaders on equal footing. But his call for closer ties is likely to meet resistance from high-tech executives still fuming over government spying disclosed by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.

“Silicon Valley still thinks it can be Switzerland in any cyberwar,” said Stewart Baker, former assistant secretary of homeland security in President George W. Bush’s administration. “That’s an illusion, but he’s going to have trouble getting folks to enthusiastically partner with DoD.”

Denise Zheng, a former government cybersecurity specialist and now a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said Silicon Valley is home to “the loudest dissenting voices on what our intelligence and national security agencies are doing.”

Facebook Visit

Carter’s cooperation plea came in a speech at Stanford University, beginning a two-day visit that will also include stops at the headquarters of Facebook Inc. and venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.

The defense secretary plans to establish a full-time office in Silicon Valley, staffed with personnel who will scout emerging technologies that the military could use. The Pentagon also plans to set up its own branch of the U.S. Digital Service, which overhauled the flawed healthcare.gov website last year.

His initiative reflects a turnaround for a government institution that once served as a principal incubator of breakthrough technologies, including a forerunner of the Internet.

Today, innovations in microelectronics, global positioning systems and software applications are more likely to emerge from a West Coast office park than from a government lab.

That’s why the Pentagon must shift from its traditional role of technology exporter to becoming a technology importer, said a department official who briefed reporters on condition of anonymity in advance of Carter’s presentation.

Pentagon Hacked

Obama administration officials have increasingly been sounding the alarm about the risk of cyber-assaults on government and commercial networks.

In the prepared text for his Stanford speech, Carter disclosed that Russian hackers intruded into one of the Pentagon’s unclassified computer networks. The penetration was detected and “a crack team of incident responders” began hunting the Russians within 24 hours, Carter said.

The Russians had entered the Defense Department network through “an old vulnerability in one of our legacy networks that hadn’t been patched,” he added.

‘Urgent’ Concern

Pentagon cybersecurity personnel evicted the Russian hackers “in a way that minimized their chances of returning,” Carter said, calling the episode an example of the department’s ability to protect itself.

John Brennan, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, last month called cyberthreats “an urgent national security priority” and announced formation of a new digital innovation unit.

Pentagon officials said their new strategy grew in part from concern over increasingly severe and sophisticated cyber-attacks. Carter said in his prepared remarks that the approach includes providing “offensive cyber options that, if directed by the president, can augment our other defense systems.”

Since the department’s previous strategy was released in 2011, institutions from Sony Pictures Entertainment to the White House have been victimized.

Hackers, including from more than 100 foreign intelligence agencies, probe Pentagon computer networks millions of times each day, Eric Rosenbach, Carter’s top adviser on cybersecurity, told the Senate Armed Services Committee this month.

“These cyberthreats continue to increase and evolve, posing greater risks to the networks and systems of the Department of Defense our national critical infrastructure and U.S. companies and interests,” Rosenbach said.

Approach ‘Ineffective’

Baker, now an attorney with Steptoe & Johnson LLP, said efforts to deter attacks are insufficient.

“I’ve yet to see indications that DoD is writing a cyberstrategy to win,” he said. “Instead, we’re talking about ’deterring’ them, which we’ve been remarkably ineffective at.”

The Pentagon also has struggled to retain cybersecurity specialists in an era when the private sector can offer even relatively junior personnel big paychecks.

The military will have a hard time capitalizing on commercial breakthroughs with “a procurement cycle designed to buy aircraft in the World War II era,” said Fred Kagan, a defense specialist at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington.

Facebook Visit

At Facebook in Menlo Park on Thursday, Carter was to meet with Sheryl Sandberg, the company’s chief operating officer who served as chief of staff to Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers in the Clinton administration.

On Friday, he will hold a roundtable with participants including Ben Horowitz, a co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz on Sand Hill Road alongside the Stanford campus. The company holds stakes in businesses specializing in data management virtualization, robotics, drones and “big data.”

Since taking office in January, Carter has made cybersecurity policy a priority. His first public event with troops took place March 13 at the U.S. Cyber Command at Ford Meade, Maryland.

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Pixotri technology is a creative house developing quality web designs, E-Commerce solution. SEO services and Gaming development .

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9xSWDsTYC8

Thursday, April 23, 2015

Japan's Wantedly CEO Wants IPO After Dropping Finance for Social Media

With experience at Facebook Inc. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Akiko Naka’s resume at 26 already read like that of a corporate veteran. Then she decided to add entrepreneur to the mix.

Wantedly Inc., the recruiting and social networking platform she started in 2010, now has 600,000 active members who use it to expand their contact list and find jobs. The company has made a profit over the past two years, Naka said in a April 21 interview. With continued growth, an initial public offering may come in four years, she said.

“Going public is not that hard and making pre-tax profit of several hundreds of million yen isn’t difficult either,” she said. “The hardest thing for a company is to increase its profit to more than tens of billion yen.”

Naka, now 30, said Wantedly doesn’t disclose earnings figures. She aims to increase the site’s number of active monthly users to 10 million, partly through expansion in Southeast Asia, before considering an IPO.

Still, a delay may risk missing one of the hottest period for Japanese IPOs in almost a decade. Last year, 83 companies completed initial public offerings in Japan, raising a combined 1.24 trillion yen ($10.3 billion), the most by deal count since 2007, according to Bloomberg data. Thirty-five companies have already held IPOs this year, for a combined value of 143.4 billion yen.

Wantedly now gets revenue from posting job ads from among the 8,000 clients, including Accenture Plc and Suntory Beverage & Food Ltd., that are looking for employees or contractors to hire. About half of the customers are fellow startups, and many are looking for engineers, Naka said. The company also has funding from investors such as Shogo Kawada, co-founder of Japanese Internet technology firm DeNA Co., and Internet advertising firm CyberAgent Inc.

New Zealand, Kyoto

Naka, who attended high school in New Zealand, can trace the roots of her entrepreneurship to her time as a student at Kyoto University. There she started a free campus newspaper that sold ad space to area shops and restaurant.

Naka’s switch from investment banking to social media was a result of attending the kind of event her platform now promotes. While at a seminar for startups in the northern city of Sapporo, she met the then country manager of Facebook and eventually joined the company’s Japan office.

With Wantedly’s slogan, ‘Find jobs that will set your heart on fire,’’ Naka said she encourages clients to emulate her experience in seeking job satisfaction.

“We don’t allow our clients to describe salary or job conditions on their job listings,” she said. “It sounds crazy, right? But we want our clients to focus on the vision of the companies.”

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9xSWDsTYC8

Microsoft Beats Analysts' Expectations as Cloud Revenue Jumps

Microsoft Corp., in its second year under Satya Nadella, reported profit that exceeded analysts’ estimates as growth in cloud software sales and more expensive versions of server programs made up for slowing demand for personal-computer products.

Profit, excluding costs related to restructuring and integration, was 62 cents a share on sales of $21.7 billion in the fiscal third quarter ended March 31, the company said Thursday in a statement. Analysts had estimated 53 cents on sales of $21.1 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Nadella has been shifting strategy at the world’s largest software maker to focus on cloud and mobile software, including products that work with rival’s offerings. While cloud revenue is growing, a cycle in which companies upgraded computers has run out of steam and Microsoft’s overseas sales have been hurt by a strong dollar and geopolitical concerns in China and Russia.

“They’ve got a growing cloud number that isn’t stopping,” said Mark Moerdler, an analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. who rates the shares the equivalent of a buy.

Net income fell to $4.99 billion, or 61 cents a share, from $5.66 billion, or 68 cents, a year earlier.

Microsoft rose as much as 3.9 percent in extended trading after closing at $43.34. The shares fell 12 percent in the quarter, while the S&P’s 500 Index rose less than 1 percent in the period.

Cloud Products

Under Nadella, Microsoft has released new services for the company’s Azure and Office 365 cloud programs and brought out versions of its mobile applications for Apple Inc.’s and Google Inc.’s systems.

Microsoft reported that commercial cloud revenue more than doubled for the seventh quarter in a row. Sales in the commercial unit that includes cloud programs was $2.76 billion, compared with a $2.66 billion average estimate of analysts.

Sales of server products and services increased 12 percent with a 25 percent rise in the priciest versions of products such as Windows Server and the SQL database server.

“As our products have improved and you add value at the high end, customers move to the high end,” Chief Financial Officer Amy Hood said in an interview.

The results eased investor concerns raised by a shortfall in the previous quarter.

Bounce Back

“The company beat across the board after a jaw dropper last quarter,” said Daniel Ives, an analyst at FBR Capital Markets & Co. in New York. “Despite PC headwinds, the company is doing a good job stabilizing the ship on the Windows front while cloud continues to be a major pillar of strength.”

Still difficulties that began last year with a strong U.S. dollar, weaker sales in Japan and geopolitical concerns in Russia and China will continue in the current quarter, Hood said.

With investor and analyst expectations at a “very negative” level, the company managed to surprise, Ives said.

Revenue in the Commercial Licensing division, which includes copies of Windows and Office sold to corporate customers were $10 billion. That compares with a $9.78 billion estimate of analysts polled by Bloomberg.

Sales of Windows to PC makers to install on their machines dropped 19 percent for the Pro version and 26 percent for other versions.

Device and Consumer Licensing sales, which include consumer versions of Windows, were $3.48 billion. Analysts had expected $3.45 billion.

Video Games

Devices and Consumer Other, which is made up of products including video games and Internet advertising, was $2.28 billion, while analysts had expected $2.03 billion. That area benefited from a 21 percent increase in Internet search advertising. Microsoft remains committed to profitability for its Bing search engine next fiscal year, said Hood.

Unearned revenue, a measure of future sales, was $20.2 billion, compared with the $20.95 billion average estimate of four analysts surveyed by Bloomberg.

The currency fluctuations crimped Microsoft’s sales as they have for other U.S. technology companies. The Bloomberg Dollar Spot Index, which tracks the U.S. dollar against 10 major peers, gained about 17 percent over the past 12 months. Microsoft said quarterly revenue, which increased 6 percent from a year earlier, would have increased 9 percent excluding the effect of currency rates.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9xSWDsTYC8

Amazon, Microsoft Get Profit From Cloud as Nasdaq Reaches Record

Minutes after the Nasdaq Composite closed at a record, three of the biggest bellwethers in technology reminded the market precisely why investors are so bullish on companies that do business through the Web.

Amazon.com Inc. for the first time broke out sales from its division that sells computing power and software via the Internet, reporting a 49 percent jump last quarter. Microsoft Corp. posted profit that topped analysts’ estimates, also underscoring healthy demand for software delivered through the cloud. Google Inc. benefited from rising volume of online ads.

The numbers are a testament not only to the endurance of the Internet as a conduit of commerce and information, but also to the ways it has revolutionized how the world’s biggest corporations operate.

All three companies have been at the heart of these changes since the Web’s inception as a business tool, and are now vying for a bigger slice of the still-fledgling market for cloud computing.
Google is seeking to extend its lead in online search and advertising, Amazon is spending billions of dollars to expand in e-commerce and data centers, and Microsoft is building on its dominance of the business-software market.

“We are innings one or two of the cloud,” said Kim Forrest, an analyst at Fort Pitt Capital Group Inc., which oversees about $1.8 billion in Pittsburgh.

The Nasdaq Composite climbed 0.4 percent on Thursday to the highest level in 15 years, topping its dot-com era high.

Amazon’s Growth

“Right now people feel good about technology,” said Sarah Kunst, a partner at Fortis Partners, an executive search firm. “We’re starting to believe in Elon Musk and moonshots, and we feel that technology can do anything.”

Amazon shares jumped as much as 8 percent in extended trading after the company reported first-quarter sales that beat analysts’ estimates. Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos has been investing in speedy delivery services, data centers and original video programming to woo customers and to keep those users spending more time on the site.

Sales jumped 15 percent to $22.7 billion, the company said Thursday in a statement. Analysts on average projected $22.4 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Revenue from Amazon Web Services, which provides data storage and computing power to other businesses, surged to $1.57 billion. AWS helps Amazon benefit from growth in traffic to the websites of other companies, including Pinterest Inc. and Netflix Inc. The unit generated first-quarter profit of $265 million, helping to make up for losses in other parts of the company’s business.

“Amazon has been stealthy,” Forrest said. “I didn’t think they were a technology company. I thought they were a retailer that used technology.”
The Seattle-based company said it intends to keep investing in new businesses that will expand its reach with customers, including data centers, one-hour delivery in certain cities, and streaming video content.

Nadella’s Microsoft

Now in its second year under CEO Satya Nadella, Microsoft reported profit that exceeded analysts’ estimates as growth in cloud software sales and more expensive versions of server programs made up for slowing demand for personal-computer products. The stock gained 3.4 percent in late trading.

Nadella, who took over in February 2014, has been shifting strategy at the world’s largest software maker to focus on cloud and mobile software, including products that work with rival offerings.
“They’ve got a growing cloud number that isn’t stopping,” said Mark Moerdler, an analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. who rates the shares the equivalent of a buy.

Profit, excluding costs related to restructuring and integration, was 62 cents a share on sales of $21.7 billion in the third quarter, which ended March 31, the Redmond, Washington-based company said Thursday. Analysts had estimated 53 cents on sales of $21.1 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Search Leader

Google’s results showed that its strategy of stepping up investments to lure more users and advertisers is paying off, fueling gains in the number of ads it sold in the first quarter.
While profit and sales came in just shy of estimates, costs were kept well under control, boosting investor confidence and sending Google’s shares up 3.5 percent in extended trading.

CEO Larry Page is pouring money into new initiatives to make sure that people continue to use Google’s search, video and other Internet services instead of going to Facebook Inc., Amazon and other Web destinations. As a result, Google’s advertising volume grew 13 percent, making up for a 7 percent decline in ad prices.

Wireless Service

Google’s sales, minus revenue passed to partners, rose 14 percent to $13.9 billion in the first quarter, the company said in a statement Thursday. That compared with analysts’ average projection for $14 billion.

Earlier this week, Google unveiled a new wireless service called Project Fi. The company also plans to offer a subscriber version of its YouTube video-sharing site as soon as this year, letting viewers see clips without having to sit through ads. The company also is trying to improve its search experience on smartphones, updating its search service to favor websites that are tailored to mobile devices.

Digital marketing

Digital marketing helps you to find yourself in first place among the other competitors. We help you to strategically plan and execute your,product and services through our online platforms.Pixotri technology is a creative house developing quality web designs, E-Commerce solution. SEO services and Gaming development .

Contact us for your Digital marketing requirements.email- info@pixotritechnologies.com. Visit our website: www.pixotritechnologies.com
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9xSWDsTYC8

The Changing Faces of Tech Exuberance

The Nasdaq has just passed the record it set 15 years ago, on March 10, 2000, before plummeting 78 percent when the Internet bubble burst.

Back then, Mark Zuckerberg was in high school and the tech boom was fueled by companies that were dubbed "The Four Horsemen of the New Economy"—Sun Microsystems, Oracle, Cisco Systems, and EMC. This time, the tech sector is riding on the backs of such companies as Facebook, Amazon.com, Google, and Apple, a struggling computer maker in 2000 that has since transformed itself into the world's most valuable company.

And while some things seem eerily similar to 2000—venture capital is flowing again and tech companies are plying workers with free food, booze, massages, and splashy parties to keep them from leaving—the faces of this tech boom are mostly different.

Here's a look at the personalities and companies behind the tech exuberance then and now. Here's hoping this time has a much happier ending.

Heading the Hottest IPO

Then: Carl Yankowski dressed for success during Palm's initial public offering. On the day that shares of the personal digital assistant maker began trading, the chief executive reportedly wore a pinstriped suit embroidered with threads of real gold. Gaudy? Yes. But his garb matched the occasion: Palm raised $874 million ($1.2 billion in today's dollars), making it the biggest tech IPO in the runup to the Nasdaq's record high. Yankowski, a former Sony executive who joined just months before the IPO, left the company less than two years later.

Now: $1.2 billion? Don't make Alibaba founder Jack Ma laugh. In September, the Chinese e-commerce giant raised a record $25 billion in its IPO (he wore a plain dark suit on the first day of trading). The company's market cap is now above Amazon's, and Ma is ranked among the 20 richest people in the world.

The Hottest Startup Chief

Then: Sergey Brin and Larry Page were graduate students at Stanford University when they founded Google in 1998 with $100,000 in funding from Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim. The following year, the search engine caught the attention of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital—two of the biggest venture capital firms—which put in $25 million. They made billions of dollars from that investment.

Now: Travis Kalanick runs car-booking and taxi replacement startup Uber, a company whose $40 billion valuation is the highest for a U.S. startup. Kalanick, who just raised $1.2 billion in financing in December, is now finishing up raising another $1 billion in funding. Coincidentally, one of Uber's biggest investors is Google, which led a $258 million investment in the hot startup. That relationship, however, is starting to look more adversarial.

The Biggest Startup Nonstarter

Then: Pity the sock puppet. Pets.com became the poster child (poster puppet?) for the dot-com boom and bust after the startup quickly raised $110 million in funding, went public, and then shut down over the span of roughly two years. Not even having Amazon as a backer and Merrill Lynch as an underwriter could save the company. CEO Julie Wainwright emerged from the wreckage and went on to be founder and CEO of a luxury consignment company, the RealReal.

Now: Clinkle has also been a clunker, so far. The mobile payments app that raised $25 million from high-profile investors, such as Peter Thiel, in 2013 burned a great deal of that money a year later with no sales and no public sightings of the app. During that time, the company, founded by Lucas Duplan, held pirate dress-up days at work and a night of carousing on a party bus stocked with booze. As Bloomberg's Adam Satariano wrote, "everything about Clinkle seems right out of Silicon Valley central casting." The app has finally seen the light of day, but it has pivoted from a grand vision of a payment product to a reward system built around a debit card, as TechCrunch reported in January.

The Inventor

Then: "Golden geek" Marc Andreessen helped bring the Internet to the masses by co-authoring Mosaic, the first widely used Web browser. Netscape, the company he co-founded, also sparked the dot-com boom with its initial public offering in 1995. Shares ended the first day of trading up a startling 108 percent.

Now: 21st century industrialist Elon Musk is racing to bring electric cars to the masses with Tesla and make space travel more accessible with SpaceX. In his spare time, the PayPal co-founder is also chairman of solar-panel company SolarCity and wants to build a high-speed mass transit system called Hyperloop.

The Mobile God

Then: In 2000, Nokia was the world's biggest cellphone maker and Europe's most valuable company. Headed by Jorma Ollila, Nokia in February 2000 announced a 4-for-1 stock split, the second split in 11 months, during which time the stock had more than tripled in value.

Now: Apple may not have the biggest share of the smartphone market—that distinction belongs to Google's Android—but Tim Cook's company is the one raking in the dough on its mobile devices. The company posted a record profit of $18 billion for the first quarter and has built up a massive $178 billion cash pile. As for Nokia? With its market share plummeting to the single digits, Nokia sold its handset business to Microsoft after betting on that company's Windows Phone.

The Most Popular VC

Then: If your startup was in need of venture capital, Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers was the firm you wanted backing you, and General Partner John Doerr was the guy you wanted on your board. Kleiner was an early investor in such companies as Amazon, AOL, Google, and Netscape. Doerr joined the boards of the last two, plus Martha Stewart Living and Drugstore.com.

Now: Today it's Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen who's at the top of the list for many startups. His firm, Andreessen Horowitz, counts Twitter, Airbnb, Lyft, and Pinterest as investments. Andreessen himself serves on the boards of Facebook and Hewlett-Packard. As for Doerr, he recently had to defend Kleiner Perkins against allegations of gender discrimination made by his former chief of staff, Ellen Pao. While the jury ruled against her on all counts, the trial became a flash point in the discussion about how women are treated in Silicon Valley.

The All-Star Analyst

Then: In 1998, CIBC Oppenheimer analyst Henry Blodget hit it big when he predicted Amazon shares would reach $400 within a year—they did so in a month. Blodget rode the wave of publicity to a bigger job at Merrill Lynch and the No. 1 rating for Internet analysts in Institutional Investor's annual ranking. Then it all came crashing down. He wound up barred for life from the securities industry and paid $4 million in 2003 to settle allegations he published "materially misleading" research. He resurrected his career as CEO and editor-in-chief of Business Insider and raised funding from the likes of Jeff Bezos.

Now: While many talented folk still ply their trade in stock picking, the age of the highly compensated rock-star analyst ended with the fines for Blodget and Citigroup's telecom analyst, Jack Grubman.

King of E-commerce

Then: Amazon was the planet's biggest e-commerce vendor by revenue.

Now: What's changed? Nothing, except that Bezos, the company's CEO, has also made Amazon the biggest cloud infrastructure services company and is trying to expand into home and mobile devices.

Captain of the Enterprise

Then: Scott McNealy's Sun Microsystems was the fastest-growing seller of servers, and his company's sales were rising faster than those of Microsoft, Intel, and Dell. The company's growth mirrored that of Internet companies as they stocked up on pricey Sun servers, as well as on databases from Oracle, which was led by his partner-in-crime, Larry Ellison. When the crash came, so did the reckoning for Sun. In 2006, McNealy stepped down as CEO, and in 2010, Oracle bought the company.

Now: Marc Benioff, once a protégé of Ellison, has expanded Salesforce.com into the world's largest cloud enterprise software company. The cloud is now regarded as the future of the market.

The Competition Crusher

Then: It was in 2000 that Microsoft, under newly appointed CEO Steve Ballmer, was found by a U.S. district court judge to have illegally tried to extend its Windows monopoly and was ordered to be broken up.

Now: The world's largest software maker has moved past its antitrust woes in the U.S. and Europe (though not in China), and now it's Google that's in the hot seat. The European Union has accused the Internet giant of abusing its dominance of the search-engine market and started a new investigation into its Android mobile-phone software.

Comeback Story

Then: For a salary of $1, Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997 to resuscitate the company he co-founded. It was quite the task, with Apple losing money and being forced to turn to archrival Bill Gates's Microsoft for an investment to stay afloat. By early 2000, sales and market share were increasing again, thanks to the iMac, and Jobs had dropped the word "interim" from his CEO title. Few would have predicted the massive successes that followed and the way Jobs turned the tables on Microsoft.

Now: For the magnitude of the challenge and the uncertainty of the outcome, one need only look to Marissa Mayer's Yahoo for the comeback story everyone is watching now. Whether the ex-Googler who joined the ailing Yahoo in 2012 will achieve even a fraction of the success that Jobs attained is an open question. Sales at Yahoo are roughly the same as they were when Mayer took over, but she does have one important thing going for her: Yahoo's stake in Alibaba, which will be spun off into a new firm.

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