100 Fastest-Growing Tech Companies !

1 Akamai Technologies
2 iMergent
3 Palomar Medical Technologies
4 InterDigital Communications
5 CyberSource
6 Perficient (more…)

Email is the key !

As a smart email marketer I’m sure you’ve read articles on how to increase opens, how to write catchy subject lines, and how to create compelling offers. If you’re looking for a powerful way to win over your customers, consider the timing of your email messages. The timing of your email messages is as important as the content. Send too many emails at the wrong time and you run the risk of alienating the customer. Don’t send confirmation or welcome emails on time and you risk confusing the customer. Timing is the essence of great customer service.

Consider the case of email communications pioneer and ClickZ writer Al DiGuido who planned a stay at a Westwood W Hotel. Mr. DiGuido discusses his delight with the hotel’s superb email timing here. The hotel sent a welcoming email two weeks before his trip asking if they could do anything to make his stay extra special. They followed this message with an email a week later that gave a view of his room, then completed the exchange by timing several emails during and after his stay to ensure he was receiving the best service. It’s all in the timing, which is definitely a fine line between being intrusive and establishing a dialogue that shows the customer that you care.

If you’re a Netflix customer you likely enjoy how they time their customer emails. For example I get an email asking me “When did you mail back your movie?” and they list several dates. All I have to do is click on the date and I’m done. They also send an email saying “When did you receive your movie?” Again all I have to do is click on a date. Such ease of communication shows me they care when I get my movies, which is a key component of their service. The best part is that I am not inundated with Netflix monthly newsletters and extraneous email messages that I don’t want. That makes me really happy.

One last point – timing email messages is worth little if the customer service isn’t there to back it up. Westwood W hotels not only engaged Mr. DiGuido in a dialogue, they backed that up by providing outstanding service during his stay. Netflix not only times its emails well, it doesn’t turn a hair if your dog chews up a DVD; they just say “Stuff happens. No problem.” Email can help begin a personal engagement with customers, but it’s the human element that closes the deal.

Easy blogging !

Many of our readers use Wordpress, and frequently run into the common mistake of copying text from Word or some other program, pasting it into Wordpress and finding it has numerous formatting errors and rich text code errors they didn’t know where there.

PureText is a free little utility that allows you to copy and paste items from rich text editors (Word, Outlook, Browsers, etc) and strip all the garbage code off of it.

“PureText only removes rich formatting from text. This includes the font face, font style (bold, italics, etc.), font color, paragraph styles (left/right/center aligned), margins, character spacing, bullets, subscript, superscript, tables, charts, pictures, embedded objects, etc. However, it does not modify the actual text. It will not remove or fix new-lines, carriage returns, tabs, or other white-space. It will not fix word-wrap or clean up your paragraphs. If you copy the source code of a web page to the clipboard, it is not going to remove all the HTML tags. If you copy text from an actual web page (not the source of the page), it will remove the formatting.

PureText is basically equivalent to opening Notepad, doing a PASTE, followed by a SELECT-ALL, and then a COPY. The benefit of PureText is performing all these actions with a single Hot-Key and having the result pasted into the current window automatically.”

To use PureText- simply copy as normal, but when you need to paste the item in Wordpress or your blog platform, use Windows-V (or an assigned hotkey) instead of Ctrl-V. In an instant, now you have some clean text. Check out PureText and streamline your blogging today.

How to suceed in Blogging Business ?

There are simply too many advantages to enabling a web site with fresh, themed content that is well structured for SEO benefits and that also offers a great platform for creative promotion, not to consider it in the online marketing mix. However, the mis-perceptions about what a blog is and is not abound, even with self-described “blogging experts”.

Despite that, I think it’s a perfectly reasonable question for a company to ask: “Why should we have a blog and what will it do for us?” Answering that question in the most effective way possible starts with understanding the business and marketing goals of the company. Too many SEOs and blogging consultants focus on the mechanical capabilities of a blog and not on the business goals that can be met.

Blogs are simply tools and are only as effective as the programs and people put in place to use them. The degree to which company goals can be met with the applications and current/future benefits of a blog are what we use to determine whether a business blog is appropriate or not.

Effective marketing initiatives have goals and measures of success. Blogs as marketing and PR tools are no different. Some of the measurable effects from business blogging include:

• Media attention
• Speaking requests
• Customer loyalty
• Inbound links to the blog
• Search engine ranking for the corporate site
• Corporate website traffic
• Leads/sales initiated
• Volume of blog traffic
• Technorati and other credible rankings
• Search engine ranking for the blog
• Increased company visibility within the industry
• Increased media coverage
• Improved customer loyalty
• Increased sales leads/revenue/new customers

If the majority of these measures (although each is not equally valuable) can support a company’s online marketing and/or PR objectives, then it makes sense to continue down the blogging path. Other considerations include:

• Hosting platform and limitations
• URL considerations – sub directory, sub domain, different domain
• Client side IT support/requirements/limitations
• Client side blog editorial and strategic ownership
• Client side content sources
• Meshing the blog content schedule with the company/web site marketing plan and communications/messaging objectives
• Client side resource allocation for research, writing, media creation and editorial
• Coordinated promotion of key blog posts
• Coordination of blog posts with offline, search marketing or media relations outreach initiatives
• Blog software, template customization and optimization
• Blog productivity plug-ins and anti SPAM tools
• Third party widgets and tools
• Training on blogging best practices
• Keyword glossaries
• Blogger relations and community outreach
• Developing a social network, profile development and channels of distribution/promotion
• Ongoing blog promotion – RSS, SEO, blog PR, social media
• Blog analytics and monitoring
• Blogging policy, legal considerations and copyright issues
• Trackback and comment policy
• Comment handling
• Quantifying the expense for outside consultants and internal resources for blogging and making estimates for a return on investment

This is a long list and many blogging consultants will tell you how easy it is to throw up a blog and they’re right. It IS easy to go to blogger.com or wordpress.com and create a blog within minutes. So why all the “considerations” you ask?

Things that are easy to get into are typically easy to get out of. The vast majority of blogs started are abandoned. TopRank’s point of view is that it doesn’t make sense to start a blog unless we do so in strategic support of a company’s business goals. With the potential for significant impact on business, marketing and PR goals, it makes sense to do all that you can to ensure success – making sure all bases are covered. Blogging is new territory for most companies and being able to do so with a deeply experienced marketing partner can save a lot of headache, money, resources, time and embarrassment from failure.

Make no mistake, I am personally very biased towards the business building and marketing benefits of business blogs. Using a blog to promote our TopRank brand over the past 3, going on 4 years, has had considerable results that we’re very happy with. When an agency that offers business blog consulting services can successfully implement for themselves the services and consulting offered to clients, it says a lot about the agency’s capabilities.

As it goes with successful visibility on search engines for SEO related terms, the same goes for successful blog marketing programs with the adage, “If you can do it for yourself, you can do it for others”. What I would add to that is that it must be for the right reasons, expectations and measures of success or don’t bother.

Essential Checklist for Starting your Blog

1. Register a domain name with your name and redirect to your blog.
2. Get a “Creative Commons License”
3. Get a feedburner account and direct feeds through feedburner
4. Implement subscription chiclets
5. Enable search
6. Claim your blog at Technorati
7. Allow users to get your blog via email
8. Link to your profile
9. Link to your photo album
10. Announce your blog to the world
11. Provide a way to contact you
12. Link to your bookmarks
13. Create meaningful categories and chunk content
14. Put your photo on the home page
15. Ensure that your RSS feeds are OK
16. Geo-tag your blog at Feedmap
17. Include a blog link in your email signature

Google vs Microsoft offer for Yahoo !

Google Inc. raised the specter of Microsoft Corp. using its proposed $42 billion acquisition of Yahoo Inc. to gain illegal control over the Internet, underscoring the online search leader’s queasiness about its two biggest rivals teaming up.

The critical remarks, posted online Sunday by Google’s top lawyer, represented the Mountain View-based company’s first public reaction to Microsoft’s unsolicited bid for Yahoo since the offer was announced Friday.

“Microsoft’s hostile bid for Yahoo raises troubling questions,” David Drummond, Google’s chief legal officer, wrote. “This is about more than simply a financial transaction, one company taking over another. It’s about preserving the underlying principles of the Internet: openness and innovation.”

Google’s opposition isn’t a surprise, given that Microsoft views Yahoo as a crucial weapon in its battle to gain ground on Google in the Internet’s booming search and advertising markets.

Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft has been trying to depict a Yahoo takeover as a boon for both advertisers and consumers because the two companies together would be able to compete against Google more effectively.

But Google is painting a starkly different picture, asserting that Microsoft will be able to stifle innovation and leverage its dominating Windows operating system to set up personal computers so consumers are automatically steered to online services, such as e-mail and instant messaging, controlled by the world’s largest software maker.

In a move that illustrates just how badly Google wants to torpedo the deal, Google Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt called Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang Friday to offer his help in repelling Microsoft, according to a report Sunday on The Wall Street Journal’s Web site, which cited anonymous people familiar with the matter.

The assistance didn’t include a counterbid, but may have included supporting other potential suitors, or a revenue guarantee in exchange for an ad partnership with Yahoo, the people said, according the newspaper.

AT&T Inc., Time Warner Inc. and News Corp. aren’t planning to enter the bidding, the Journal said, citing the people familiar.

To help make its point, Google pointed to the way Microsoft previously used Windows to help extend the reach of its Web browser and other applications – a strategy that triggered a U.S. Justice Department lawsuit alleging the software maker illegally used its operating system to stifle competition. The dispute ended with a 2002 settlement that required Microsoft to abandon some of its past practices.

“Could Microsoft now attempt to exert the same sort of inappropriate and illegal influence over the Internet that it did with the PC?” Drummond wrote.

Brad Smith, Microsoft’s general counsel, said preventing Microsoft from buying Yahoo would undermine competition by allowing Google to become even more dominant than it already is on the Internet

“Microsoft is committed to openness, innovation, and the protection of privacy on the Internet,” Smith said. “We believe that the combination of Microsoft and Yahoo! will advance these goals.”

If they get together, Microsoft and Yahoo would have about 16 percent of the worldwide Internet search market – still far behind Google’s 62 percent share, according to comScore Media Metrix. But Microsoft and Yahoo already are far bigger in than Google in e-mail and instant messaging, and conceivably would be in a better position to squash rival services if they combined.

Illustrating the enormous stakes involved in a deal that could reshape the technology and media industries, Google and Microsoft are already debating the pros and cons before Yahoo has responded to the offer.

Yahoo so far has little to say except that its board will carefully examine Microsoft’s bid – a process that “can take quite a bit of time,” according to a message posted on the Sunnyvale-based company’s Web site.

The review “will include evaluating all of the company’s strategic alternatives, including maintaining Yahoo as an independent company,” Yahoo said on its Web site.

Most analysts believe Yahoo will have little choice but to sell to Microsoft, with its stock price near a four-year low at the time of the bid and its profits falling since late 2006. When it was first announced, Microsoft’s offer was 62 percent above Yahoo’s market value – a premium analysts doubt any other suitor will be able to top.

If Yahoo accepts, antitrust regulators in both the United States and Europe are expected to begin an exhaustive review that some experts think could last a year. Microsoft believes it could get the necessary approvals to take over Yahoo late this year.

If nothing else, Google probably will try to raise enough alarms about the Microsoft-Yahoo deal to delay its approval for as long as possible. By doing so, Google would have more time to draw up plans to counteract the combination.

Google also is borrowing a page from Microsoft’s book by urging antitrust regulators to take a hard look at the proposed marriage between its two rivals.

Just days after Google struck a $3.1 billion deal to buy online ad service DoubleClick Inc. last year, Microsoft began lobbying regulators to block the transaction. U.S. regulators blessed Google’s DoubleClick acquisition late last year after an eight-month review, but the antitrust inquiry in Europe remains open.

3 blogs you need to read !

I have been trying to think about things to write about these days, and I might even open that up for discussion on another upcoming post. In the meantime, I thought I would challenge myself with something fun for this year. So here’s to the New Year and a little blog fun!One of the things that I mentioned in my last posts was that I was very excited about having more time to read blogs. Below are 3 blogs that you need to read everyday – some are for fun, some are for business. Nonetheless, they are blogs that I think are worth a daily visit.

Freelance Switch
This is a pretty obvious selection, mainly because two weeks ago I threw away my cushy day job to follow some pipe dream of being a freelance website/blog designer and consultant. The amount of quality content on this site is amazing, and I can guarantee that it will be a very good resource for me along the way.

One
ONE is Americans of all beliefs and every walk of life – united as ONE – to help make poverty history. Many of you are aware that I participate in the Breast Cancer 3-Day event, but my heart also goes out to the under-resourced. One of the things that I want to do while spending my life on the web is not to lose track of what’s really important in life, and committing to reading this blog everyday should help keep things in perspective.

A List Apart
This is one of those blogs that I have purposely avoided because every time I visit the site, I feel really stupid. Being a self-taught designer, there are a lot of things that I don’t know how to do, and sometimes when I read A List Apart, I feel like I’m in another country trying to read a menu. However, it’s time to stretch yourself, and learn some things that will help you make designs better for you all.

Music Sales Dropped 10 Percent in 2007 !

Sales of music fell at a faster rate in 2007 than 2006 despite digital sales soaring, and the gatekeepers of the Web must act if the industry is to beat piracy, the international trade body said on Thursday.

Global digital sales grew by around 40 percent in 2007, the IFPI group said, but this was not enough to offset the sharp fall in CD sales, meaning the overall market is expected to be down around 10 percent for 2007.

As part of its response, the industry is calling on Internet service providers to take more responsibility for illegal file sharing by either disconnecting those who repeatedly upload music or preventing illegal tracks from being downloaded.

Many ISPs have so far proved reluctant to engage on the matter, but the music industry is hoping this could change following a move by French President Nicolas Sarkozy to block Web access to those frequently downloading music or films illegally.

“It is hard to persuade anyone to be a pioneer but what we have with the French government is a very energetic government understanding how important the French music industry is to French business and culture,” IFPI Chief Executive John Kennedy told Reuters.

“That leadership shows that it’s not as dreadful or as problematic as people think,” he said in an interview.

The industry has also been boosted by a landmark ruling in Belgium which ordered a service provider to block illegal file-sharing — although the company is appealing — while in Britain, the government has said it could impose legislation if an agreed settlement between both sides cannot be found.

A year-long negotiation period expired at the end of 2007.

The music industry says it has been forced to turn to legal remedies after rampant Internet piracy rocked its traditional revenue model.

Physical sales of music have dropped, with total album sales plunging 15 percent in 2007 in the United States, the world’s biggest music market, and falling over 10 percent in Britain.

The IFPI said tens of billions of illegal files were swapped in 2007, with the ratio of unlicensed tracks downloaded to legal tracks sold at about 20 to 1.

“If the ISPs played their role it would have a dramatic effect,” Kennedy said, explaining that research shows people fear having their Internet service disconnected.

A spokesman for the UK body which represents providers of Internet services said his members preferred self regulation and warned that legislation could often be too rigid, but he said they were still holding negotiations on the matter.

Away from the legal disputes, the industry has seen encouraging signs from the growth of legal sales.

Global digital music sales were estimated to be approximately $2.9 billion in 2007, a roughly 40 percent increase on 2006, and single track downloads, the most popular digital music format, grew by 53 percent.

Digital sales now account for an estimated 15 percent of the global music market, up from 11 percent in 2006 and zero in 2003. In the United States, online and mobile sales now account for 30 percent of all revenues.

Yahoo Doesn’t Bode Well for Google !

Until a couple days ago, Google’s stock looked recession proof. Despite mounting talk of an advertising slowdown, shares hit an all-time high in November. Now, it finally seems that recession concerns are catching up with the web giant. Although Google and Yahoo are in different competitive positions (Google could eat Yahoo for a mid-afternoon snack), they are both dependent on advertising for the majority of their income, and as a result, both are poised to take a thunderous hit in the event of a recession.

The key difference between Yahoo and Google is that nobody has high expectations of Yahoo. Its problems have been widely chronicled: Former CEO Terry Semel was sacked last spring; its search business is troubled; and now Yahoo is reportedly planning layoffs to keep its finances in check.

On the other hand, investors and customers alike expect great things of Google. The tight-lipped, overachieving company is notoriously uncommunicative with the financial community, but its silence is usually interpreted to mean that business is growing at mind-blowing rates. Over the last two years, Google’s earnings handily exceeded analysts’ expectations in six of the eight quarters. Now, with a looming recession and nervousness surrounding the online advertising market, at least a couple analysts think that Yahoo’s woes are not unique to the company and could drag on Google, too.

“Advertising is linked to the economic cycle, and the market has come to the conclusion that Google will not be immune to a recession,” says Laura Martin, an analyst with Soleil – Media Metrics. “I think what’s going to happen is [on the earnings conference call,] somebody will ask about the outlook, and I would expect [Google management] to be conservative. And the market is not going to like that.”

The market may already be anticipating the bad news: Over the last two days, Google shares have dropped more than $58, closing at $548.62 on Tuesday. How long before the stock drops below $500? At this rate, it’ll be a day or two.

How ugly will it get ?

When leading tech companies offer their earnings numbers this week, Wall Street’s focus won’t be on how healthy their overseas businesses are, or how strong sales were during the holiday season. Instead, with global financial markets in turmoil, analysts will be sensitive to hints that executives are losing their sunny optimism.

Indeed, as the fallout from the subprime mortgage crisis rippled across the U.S. economy in recent months, tech CEOs sounded immune, trumpeting the idea that their businesses no longer rise and fall with the spending habits of big U.S. customers. Booming economies in Europe, Asia and South America would continue growing despite any U.S. slowdown, their argument went — so even if the U.S. economy stumbles, the tech industry would prosper.

But then global markets tanked Monday on fears of a U.S. recession, and the Federal Reserve cut a key interest rate by three quarters of a point to stabilize things. That signaled that investors in Europe, Asia and elsewhere aren’t convinced that their growth will zip along without help from free-spending Americans. So with their old prosperity story looking less plausible, tech executives will have to tweak their stump speeches.

What will they say now?

If history is any guide, not much. When Apple (AAPL), Microsoft (MSFT), eBay (EBAY), Sun Microsystems (JAVA) and others report earnings this week, they’re likely to emphasize their positive momentum and simply say they’re closely monitoring global markets. Jittery analysts, who so far have been slow to trim their 2008 earnings forecasts for the companies, may respond to the caution by ratcheting down their earnings projections.

Just look at Wall Street’s response to the results Intel (INTC) announced last week. The chip giant has as much of an international story as any company out there; the PC boom in Europe and Asia helped fuel its recovery in 2007. But Intel disappointed analysts with sales numbers that came in on the low side of the range they’d been told to expect. Intel blamed weakness in flash memory prices, though realistically, even if flash prices had held up, analysts probably wouldn’t have been thrilled by results that merely hit the midpoint of Intel’s projections.

So investors, viewing this as a sign that Intel executives have limited insight into troubles ahead in 2008, immediately shaved more than 15 percent off the stock’s value in after-hours trading. Analysts cut their 2008 revenue and earnings targets for the company.

CEO Paul Otellini clearly saw this as an overreaction. “You hear all of the pundits saying that the world is going to go to a trash basket, and you worry — it may be a self-fulfilling prophecy,” Otellini said after the earnings report. “At this point though, we don’t see anything on the horizon. Our customers don’t see anything on the horizon.”

Such comments might be reassuring, except that CEOs hardly ever admit to seeing trouble on the horizon. Part of their jobs as visionaries and motivators is to view every glass as half full. In a CEO’s world, customers are always excited about his upcoming product line. The new growth markets he or she has identified always show unlimited potential. And if the economy should turn sour, the company is always positioned to fare better than its competitors.

Alas, things rarely turn out so well. And that’s probably why down the hall from the C-suites, vice presidents and division heads in tech companies are prepping for a trying year. In conversations with industry watchers over the past few weeks, many have begun putting more emphasis on how their offerings will save enterprise customers money during tough times.

“I think there’s going to be a general downturn in the economy, and that’s going to cause a tightening in budgets,” said Anne Thomas Manes, vice president and research director at Burton Group, who has been talking to companies about their outlook for 2008. “That means that people are going to have to make do with what they have. So my expectations for this next year are kind of grim for the tech market.”

When budgets shrink, said Rick Becker, vice president of solutions at Dell (DELL), “what customers struggle with is, how do they maximize their IT investment in these trying times?”

Business customers aren’t the only ones struggling; investors are having a difficult time, too. In this market, stocks like Apple and Research in Motion (RIMM), which trade at price/earnings multiples above 40, are very much emotional plays. That makes them especially subject to the market’s wild mood swings — Apple stock for instance lost $35 billion in value last November, gained it back by January, and has since lost much of it again. Google (GOOG) has seen similar fluctuations.

It doesn’t look like many folks expect things to perk up soon — at least not in a sustainable way. With the White House and Federal Reserve scrambling to find ways to give the U.S. economy a shot in the arm, the question isn’t whether the U.S. economy will sag this year, it’s whether it can bounce back in the second half of 2008.

So should you bet that tech stocks will hold up despite the economic gloom? That depends on whether you believe the CEOs who say the rest of the world will keep growing no matter what happens with the spending habits of American consumers and businesses. Here’s the danger, though: If U.S. spending slows, that could mean less money in the pockets of overseas businesses. And if they have less money, it stands to reason that overseas businesses might just slow down on buying lots of things — including Apple iPhones, Cisco routers and Google ads.