Dell switching off BlackBerry, onto own smartphone

Dell Inc will shift thousands of its employees off Research in Motion Ltd's BlackBerry and over to Dell's smartphones, the company said on Thursday.

The money-saving switch affects the roughly 25,000 Dell employees who carry a company-issued BlackBerry. Dell employs around 100,000 people worldwide.

Dell is also launching an effort to convince its business customers to switch to the company's smartphone.

News of the company's plans was first reported by the Wall Street Journal, and confirmed by Dell spokesman David Frink.

Frink said the switch will begin soon, but said it will take some time to complete.

RIM did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Dell's BlackBerry users will be shifted over to use the new Dell Venue Pro, which runs on Microsoft's new Windows Phone 7 software and operates on the network of T-Mobile USA, the US arm of Deutsche Telekom AG.

Dell's decision to move its employees off BlackBerry may come as little surprise, given its aspirations in the mobile device market. The company has frequently talked about using handheld devices as a gateway to sell and promote a broader suite of services.

Dell formally entered the smartphone market only late last year, and launched its first device in the US, the Aero, earlier this year. The Aero runs on Google's Android software, as does Dell's new 5-inch tablet, the Streak.

RIM has long been the dominant player in the corporate smartphone market, but has seen its market share erode as companies such as Apple make gains.

In the third quarter, RIM's global smartphone market share slipped more than 4 percentage points from a year-ago, according to industry tracker IDC

Google staff to get servants as perks

Servants to help in household work, including picking up dinners and cleaning up dog poop, will be given as perks to hardworking employees of Google, the Internet search engine giant has said.

The service is provided by TaskRabbit, which gives users access to an online job board where they can get "runners" to do "almost anything" at a price set by them, The Sydney Morning Herald reported.

"Recently we piloted a new perk in a few offices, providing access to TaskRabbit, a startup that provides runners to perform tasks for employees," Google was quoted as having said in a statement.

Google, particularly its Silicon Valley headquarters, is in a constant battle with other technology firms to attract the best and brightest engineers. Its long list of employee perks - which includes gym memberships, free meals, insurance and snack and games rooms - is designed partly for this purpose.

Some examples of chores listed on the TaskRabbit website are "assemble robot toy", "help decorate our office for a celebration" and "pick-up dinners from Dream Dinners in San Jose". "Poop patrol for small dogs" is one of the odder jobs listed on it.

Microsoft sells one million Kinects in 10 days

Microsoft said it sold one million Kinect motion-sensing controllers for the Xbox 360 videogame console in 10 days and is on pace to sell five million by the end of the year.

"This is a great start to the holiday season," said Don Mattrick, president of Microsoft's Interactive Entertainment Business.

"We will continue to work with our retailer partners to keep pace with high demand and deliver against our plan to sell more than five million Kinect sensors worldwide by the end of this year," Mattrick said in a statement.

Microsoft launched the Kinect in North America on November 4 and in Europe last week. It launches in Asia later this week.

Kinect uses a 3D camera and motion recognition software to let people play videogames using natural body movements and voice commands instead of hand-held controllers.

The standalone Kinect, which works with the 45 million Xbox 360s already sold worldwide, costs 150 dollars. A four-gigabyte Xbox 360 console that includes the Kinect and the "Kinect Adventures" game sells for 299 dollars.

Social network game developer Zynga unveils 'CityVille

Social network game developer Zynga has unveiled "CityVille," the first globally released online game built by the hot startup behind play hits "FarmVille" and "Mafia Wars."

"CityVille is where Monopoly meets Main Street," said the game's general manager Sean Kelly.

The game challenges a player to build his or her dream city from the ground up and incorporates winning aspects of popular Zynga titles "FrontierVille" and "FarmVille."

"Instead of harvesting crops you're harvesting your neighborhood; instead of clearing your friend's frontier you're working on a friend's franchise," Kelly said, referring to the title as Zynga's most social game to date.

Zynga rocketed to success at Facebook, where people recruited friends to join them in online play and shared game accomplishments at the world's leading social network.

More than 320 million people have played Zynga games since the San Francisco-based company was launched in 2007, according to its founder Mark Pincus.

The number of people playing Zynga games each month tops 225 million, according to the firm.

Test, or beta, versions of "CityVille" will be rolled out worldwide in coming weeks in English, French, Italian, German, and Spanish.

"CityVille" play involves creating thriving cities while balancing the needs of virtual inhabitants and tending to jobs such as running businesses and harvesting crops.

Players in the roles of city managers will also need to cultivate beneficial relationships with neighboring cities.

Facebook mail

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says the newly launched Facebook messaging system will soon replace the regular mail.

"We spent lot of time building a handful of products to fit what we think the need is in a modern messaging system," said Zuckerberg in his fresh attack on rival Google.

So what is the difference between the newly launched Facebook messaging system and the good old Gmail?

The new Facebook system unifies all your conversations that happen through e-mails, Facebook messages, SMS, other chat clients and puts them as a thread on your new @facebook.com email address.

Your e-mail username will be similar to your profile name and you will be able to send your emails from within your Facebook page.

Facebook's 'Social Inbox'; much like Gmail's 'priority inbox' will sort your personal messages and prioritising notes from Facebook friends. All other messages go in a second inbox. You will be allowed to move people from one folder to other.

Facebook has about 500 million users so this product is a direct threat to Gmail's 170 million users and Yahoo!'s 303 million users.

The new feature is already being rolled out in the US but might take a while to reach your inbox. And you will have to sign up for this service at .

So should you switch from your e-mail to this? Considering Facebook's track record on privacy maybe you should wait and watch.

My Top 5 SEO Tips

Below are my top 5 tips on SEO, for which I feel have helped my websites the most.

1. Content Content and more Content:

Fresh unique content is king. I built some webpages and then never updated them or changed them and focused on building links. Once I realized my site traffic was dropping off I begun to update the content once again and the site traffic returned. Linkbuilding is important, but so is fresh content, especially for a new website or in a highly competitive market.

2. Link Building

You write all you want and keep it fresh, but you need links to get traffic there. Link exchanges are the best. Its my recommendation to build a "feeder" site or two from a different IP address and exchange links from those sites. Pay special attention to building links within your industry. A link from a car dealership when you are selling SEO doesn't help as mush as a link from an SEO website.

3. Meta Tag Optimization

Make sure your Meta Tags are optimized. There are all kinds of free seo tools out there do this. In fact you can find them on the forum right here. Keep your tags short and simple and pick a few keywords to optimize. This is an easy and quick way to increase search results for your site.

4. Forum Posting

If your here your doing the right thing. Forum posting is a great way to build backlinks, and you just might learn something as well. I post at 5 or 6 different forums a few times a week. Most forums relate to my industry.

5. Blogs

Google loves Blogs. I recommend you build a blog on your website. This is an easy way to add fresh content to your website and is also a way to build good internal links. I also Blog from outside my website (you can use wordpress or blogger) which lets me gain good backlinks from my own postings.

Miscellaneous information on search engines

At the beginning of 2004, a new and mysterious term appeared among seo specialists – Google SandBox. This is the name of a new Google spam filter that excludes new sites from search results. The work of the SandBox filter results in new sites being absent from search results for virtually any phrase. This even happens with sites that have high-quality unique content and which are promoted using legitimate techniques.

The SandBox is currently applied only to the English segment of the Internet; sites in other languages are not yet affected by this filter. However, this filter may expand its influence. It is assumed that the aim of the SandBox filter is to exclude spam sites – indeed, no search spammer will be able to wait for months until he gets the necessary results. However, many perfectly valid new sites suffer the consequences. So far, there is no precise information as to what the SandBox filter actually is. Here are some assumptions based on practical seo experience:

- SandBox is a filter that is applied to new sites. A new site is put in the sandbox and is kept there for some time until the search engine starts treating it as a normal site.

- SandBox is a filter applied to new inbound links to new sites. There is a fundamental difference between this and the previous assumption: the filter is not based on the age of the site, but on the age of inbound links to the site. In other words, Google treats the site normally but it refuses to acknowledge any inbound links to it unless they have existed for several months. Since such inbound links are one of the main ranking factors, ignoring inbound links is equivalent to the site being absent from search results. It is difficult to say which of these assumptions is true, it is quite possible that they are both true.

- The site may be kept in the sandbox from 3 months to a year or more. It has also been noticed that sites are released from the sandbox in batches. This means that the time sites are kept in the sandbox is not calculated individually for each site, but for groups of sites. All sites created within a certain time period are put into the same group and they are eventually all released at the same time. Thus, individual sites in a group can spend different times in the sandbox depending where they were in the group capture-release cycle.

Typical indications that your site is in the sandbox include:

- Your site is normally indexed by Google and the search robot regularly visits it.

- Your site has a PageRank; the search engine knows about and correctly displays inbound links to your site.

- A search by site address (www.site.com) displays correct results, with the correct title, snippet (resource description), etc.

- Your site is found by rare and unique word combinations present in the text of its pages.

- Your site is not displayed in the first thousand results for any other queries, even for those for which it was initially created. Sometimes, there are exceptions and the site appears among 500-600 positions for some queries. This does not change the sandbox situation, of course.

There no practical ways to bypass the Sandbox filter. There have been some suggestions about how it may be done, but they are no more than suggestions and are of little use to a regular webmaster. The best course of action is to continue seo work on the site content and structure and wait patiently until the sandbox is disabled after which you can expect a dramatic increase in ratings, up to 400-500 positions.

Common search engine principles

To understand seo you need to be aware of the architecture of search engines. They all contain the following main components:

Spider - a browser-like program that downloads web pages.

Crawler – a program that automatically follows all of the links on each web page.

Indexer - a program that analyzes web pages downloaded by the spider and the crawler.

Database– storage for downloaded and processed pages.

Results engine– extracts search results from the database.

Web server – a server that is responsible for interaction between the user and other search engine components.

Specific implementations of search mechanisms may differ. For example, the Spider+Crawler+Indexer component group might be implemented as a single program that downloads web pages, analyzes them and then uses their links to find new resources. However, the components listed are inherent to all search engines and the seo principles are the same.

Spider. This program downloads web pages just like a web browser. The difference is that a browser displays the information presented on each page (text, graphics, etc.) while a spider does not have any visual components and works directly with the underlying HTML code of the page. You may already know that there is an option in standard web browsers to view source HTML code.

Crawler. This program finds all links on each page. Its task is to determine where the spider should go either by evaluating the links or according to a predefined list of addresses. The crawler follows these links and tries to find documents not already known to the search engine.

Indexer. This component parses each page and analyzes the various elements, such as text, headers, structural or stylistic features, special HTML tags, etc.

Database. This is the storage area for the data that the search engine downloads and analyzes. Sometimes it is called the index of the search engine.

Results Engine. The results engine ranks pages. It determines which pages best match a user's query and in what order the pages should be listed. This is done according to the ranking algorithms of the search engine. It follows that page rank is a valuable and interesting property and any seo specialist is most interested in it when trying to improve his site search results. In this article, we will discuss the seo factors that influence page rank in some detail.

Web server. The search engine web server usually contains a HTML page with an input field where the user can specify the search query he or she is interested in. The web server is also responsible for displaying search results to the user in the form of an HTML page.

Electronic registration mark

Electronic registration mark is a proposed category of trademark that would restrict the use of trademarked words and phrases in online advertising.
The State of Utah proposed this in response to trademark owners' claims that online advertisers have abused trademarked terms. Some online advertisers, particularly search engines, allow trademarked keywords to generate advertisements for a trademark holder’s competitors. Several corporations have sued search engines to stop this practice, claiming that it violates United States trademark law. In most of these cases, courts have ruled that traditional trademark law, as currently written, does not restrict advertisers’ ability to use trademarked terms to trigger advertisements.
The Utah Trademark Protection Act created the electronic registration mark. Under this now defunct law, trademark holders could have restricted the use of its registered trademarks to generate advertisements for products that compete directly with the trademarked product. The owner of the mark could have sought redress from two parties: The competitor that purchased the advertisement, and the website that displayed the keyword-generated advertisement. This law applied only to internet pages viewed within the State of Utah. The law had instructed the state to create a searchable database of electronic registration marks and to provide access to this database free of charge. This became Utah law in 2007 but was repealed in 2008 before implementation.
No other states have established electronic registration mark laws, and the federal government's trademark law does not clearly address how it applies to online keyword searching. Judges in France have consistently upheld rulings that French trademark law bans the sale of trademarked search terms in keyword advertising for any website viewed from within France.

what are the advantages of SEO Services??

SEO refers to the process of increasing your websites position in the search engines results pages of search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN. In today competitive online marketplace, failing to leverage search engines to drive traffic to your website is a big mistake, especially when it is inevitable that your competitors will be doing exactly that. When it comes to deciding how to commit to SEO, some businesses choose to outsource to an SEO company or an SEO consultant however other businesses choose to undergo SEO training as a means of ensuring they have the in-house skills necessary to guide strategy, allot resources and truly represent the long-term goals of their business. Following are reasons why investing in SEO training for your IT or marketing function is better than fully outsourcing SEO to a sub-contractor and leaving your position in the search engines fully in their hands.

Before you start SEO training, you should first understand what SEO is. SEO basically means optimizing the results of a persons search on the web to lead to your website. SEO is a specialized search engine optimization which is a process to increase your website rank against specific keywords or search terms which are used by many visitors on Internet.

Advantages of SEO Services

Most of people on Internet like to use search engines to search of a specific product or service. You product listing should be on top pages in major search engines. You can take services from SEO service providers to achieve specific target. SEO advantages includes targeting traffic, increase brand visibility, increase in sales etc. Keywords optimization plays significant role in making your best choice. SEO is very much cost effective method of marketing. Other advantages of SEO include best usability, browser compatibility and accessibility. Better SEO services will increase in sales and to increase your business services, affiliate business and credibility. SEO services can also increase your confidence and authority as well. Many search engines list websites for free however some of them extra top listings. SEO service providers can help you to get in top listings. If SEO services are implemented effectively then it can increase target traffic to your site and rank your site for long term basis as well. There are many SEO techniques are there and you can choose one best service from them. Any of these methods can be used to rank your website. However an ongoing SEO campaign must be used to get target result from your website.

SEO Major Benefits:

* You can increase daily and unique visitors on your website by offering information related to their needs.

* You can target visitors who are looking for items which are exactly related to your company and increase brand recognition and identity.

* Writing contents which are exactly relevant to your product becomes to increase public exposure.

* To achieve your organization's goals SEO is necessary if you are doing online business.

* It is possible to divide your number of target visitors towards specific products which are highly related to them.

* We can get measurable results using some marketing strategies by making analysis of search engine reports, website statistics and visitor's conversion rates and key indicators.

Top 25 seo blog

The Top 25 SEO Blogs list, instead, ranks the blogs according to their Google Pagerank, Alexa rank, number of Bloglines subscribers and Technorati authority. Each factor has a score from 0 to 10, and the maximum score for each blog is 40. Details about the algorithm can be found below the table.

#1	Search Engine Land	7	10	9	10	36
#2	SEOBook	6	10	10	10	36
#3	SEO Moz	5	10	10	10	35
#4	Matt Cutts	7	10	8	10	35
#5	Search Engine Watch	7	10	10	7	34
#6	Search Engine Roundtable	7	10	8	8	33
#7	Search Engine Journal	7	8	9	8	32
#8	Online Marketing Blog	6	7	7	10	30
#9	Pronet Advertising	7	7	5	10	29
#10	Marketing Pilgrim	7	8	6	8	29
#11	SEO Chat	6	10	4	6	26
#12	Search Engine Guide	7	8	4	6	25
#13	SEO Blackhat	6	8	6	5	25
#14	Stuntdubl	6	6	6	6	24
#15	Graywolf’s SEO	6	7	4	7	24
#16	SEO by the SEA	6	4	5	5	20
#17	Link Building Blog	5	5	5	4	19
#18	Jim Boykin	5	6	4	4	19
#19	SEOpedia	6	5	4	4	19
#20	DaveN	6	5	4	4	19
#21	Bruce Clay	5	7	3	3	18
#22	Blue Hat SEO	4	6	3	4	17
#23	Tropical SEO	5	5	3	4	17
#24	SEO Refugee	5	6	1	3	15
#25	Small Business SEM	5	4	3	3	15

Blogs considered: the list considers only blogs that have a high percentage of SEO-related content. Topics might range from SEO news coverage to general SEO discussion and link building.

Google Pagerank (0 to 10): the actual Pagerank was used on the algorithm.

Alexa Rank (0 to 10): Ranges were determined based on the Alexa Rank (i.e., 100k and up, 80k-100k, 60k-80k, 40k-60k) and each range was assigned a number (1 to 10).

Bloglines Subscribers (0 to 10): Subscriber ranges were determined (i.e., 1-50, 50-100, 100-150, 150-300) and each range was assigned a number (1 to 10).

Technorati Authority (0 to 10): Ranges were determined based on Technorati’s Authority rank (i.e., 1-125, 125-250, 500-750,750-1000) and each range was assigned a number (1 to 10)..