Amazon to Launch Tablet in October 2011

Review of Toshiba "Thrive" Tablet

Facebook Worth $100 Billion?

Bubbles are fun on the way up; ugly on the way down. Lots of executives are going to grab financing while they can, knowing that in all likelihood a funding "nuclear winter" is coming.

State of the Internet 2011

If you thought that the Internet was just “really big,” you are sadly mistaken. The Internet is colossal, says Online Schools. This is an entertaining infographic.
Created by: Online Schools

State of the Internet 2011

PayPal Allows Androids to "Bump" to Transfer Money

PayPal has launched a peer-to-peer near field communications application that lets people pay and get paid in a matter of seconds by simply tapping together two Samsung Nexus S phones.

Read more here.

Google PageRank is Like the Richter Scale

As part of a well put together evergreen article discussing of Google's "PageRank" algorithms, important to all marketers who hope their online sites will get lots of traffic, Dharmesh Shah points out that the algorithm is believed to be calculated on a logarithmic scale, much as the Richter Scale, used to measure the intensity of earthquakes, is logarithmic.

The big difference between a linear scale and an algorithmic scale is the startling difference in magnitude. The difference between a page rank of one and two is an order of magnitude, or 10 times. as the difference between an earthquake described as four is 10 times the magnitude of an earthquake rated as a five.

The difference between a page ranking of one and three is two orders of magnitude, or at least 100 times different. What does that mean for search engine optimization? Simply that, no matter what you do, only a few "pages," out of all pages available on the Web, ever have the top ranks. On a scale of zero to six, the top sites, ranking "six," represent just 0.1 percent of all websites for example.

The practical impact is a bit like the notion of how many Twitter followers a person attracts. In practice, only a small number of celebrities have "millions of followers." On the web, only a relatively small number of sites, often large media companies, big brands or celebrities, actually have the top page ranks.

That doesn't mean content marketers should be careless about search engine optimization. It just means that such techniques only work, up to a point. "Order of magnitude" changes in page rank are quite difficult. See Read more here.

Sprint Unlimited Strategy Shows One Way "Disruption" Can Play Out

Facing larger and more powerful competitors, contestants in just about any market will cast about for strategies that allow them to survive, and hopefully narrow the gap with the dominant providers.

Attackers frequently employ the "same features, lower price" strategy. It's an easy thing for consumers to understand. Network services providers often try the "get more, pay less" strategy in ways that take advantage of unused capacity (evening hours and weekends for voice, for example). Service providers can offer "unlimited calling" at times when the network has ample surplus capacity, and the incremental cost of such operations is quite low.

Bandwidth providers, whether in the local access markets or in the global undersea business, often will instinctively offer "same features, lower price" products because they can. If your network is brand new, has lots of capacity but you have few customers, that is a rational strategy.

Not all disruption comes from smaller, attacking firms, though. As Apple has shown, sometimes disruption happens best when a strong, financially well-heeled firm decides to disrupt a market. Still, smaller firms in highly-competitive markets, who have lots of capacity but few or fewer paying customers, often can be expected to try the "get more for your money" strategies. Sprint is doing so.