Fast Pencil as the Next Generation Publishing

Fast Pencil is the new generation of publishing that changes the way we think, which we name it as innovation because it opens a way that millions of people can publish online and offline easily and efficiently.

So, what does Fast Pencil gain ´´The Writers´´:

• You are able to publish your blog as a book.
• You have the guidance to write with easy to use tools.
• When the layout is chosen, you simply start filling the blanks.
• It is free.
• You can publish either online or also offline with a hard copy.
• Fast Pencil gives you the option to sell your products in major stores as Barnes&Nobles, Amazon, etc.
• You can simply invite contributors or reviewers to review your work. So your work will be proof read by as many people as you want for free before you actually publish it.

Within the next few years, the face of publishing will change as innovations like scribd.com, kindle and fast pencil. Hence, if you want to be a writer or if you already are, then it is much easier and less costly to publish your written products and gain the real potential that you really have.

Fast Pencil Web

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SEO Link Building Tips

One of the biggest keys to success in the world of SEO is differentiation. The reason for this is two-fold:

1. Potential linkers are much more likely to give you a link.
2. It will make a stronger impression on people who visit your site, and is therefore more likely to result in a conversion (i.e., they buy something, fill out a lead form, ask you to contact them, etc.).

The reason these things are true has to do with the intense competitiveness of the environment on the Internet today. Those who understand the basics of how search works are making a lot of money, and more people are investing serious dollars in their Web site marketing strategies. The result: Web sites are getting plentiful in virtually every category and subcategory you can imagine.
A Link Building Example
Imagine that you own a Web site in a market space selling golf clubs. The Web site has all the major brands of clubs, but so do 500 other sites. All 500 of those sites are, more or less, doing the exact same thing. There's no practical difference between them.
Now imagine a popular blog about golfing that writes golfing tips, and often talks about golf equipment in their posts. They aren't going to link to 500 sites selling clubs in their posts. They may pick one or two sites that they like and link to those.
In your link building efforts, you contact the golfing blog to tell them about your great golf club store, and that you have all kinds of clubs on your site. Their eyes will glaze over and they will delete your e-mail even as they label you as a dirty rotten spammer.
Instead, try three other ideas:

1. You implement a neat new widget to help people select the golf club that is right for them. You offer the golf blog the opportunity to put that widget directly on their site.
2. You notice in one of the blogger's posts that they're looking for detailed information on a particular golf club manufacturer. You happen to have it, or you go proactively dig up that information for them, and then you send them the answer to their question.
3. You put together a contest in which a person can win a set of golf clubs. You let the blogger know about it, and ask them if they would be willing to get involved in promoting it. Perhaps you offer them a scoop on announcing the contest.

In all of these scenarios, you've differentiated yourself from the pack. They still may be uninterested in what you're offering, but your chances of getting their attention have gone up significantly.
A Broader Strategic View
While tactical link building success should be a sufficient reason to look for ways to differentiate your Web site, there are broader strategic reasons to do so as well. If you plan on being in your business for the long term, you need to plan on being a leader in your space.
To continue our example, 500 golf club sites can't all survive, and there will be a shakeout where only a few players survive. Here are just some of the things you can expect to happen:

• Consumers will become more Web savvy and more demanding of the Web sites they choose to frequent.
• Social media sites will play a bigger role in helping consumers identify quality businesses (and Web sites).
• Search engine algorithms will evolve. Links will continue to play a big role in search ranking, but social media signals will become more important as their penetration of society increases.
• Web sites owners will also become more demanding in choosing which Web sites to give links.

All these shifting factors lead to an environment where differentiation is essential for survival, so don't limit your vision. Come up with a plan to make your Web site the best Web site in your market area. If you can't lead the space in its entirety, figure out how to lead a subsector of the space. Chances are that the success of your Web strategy depends on it.

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The Future of Search According to Google

Google is the closest tool we use in our daily lives as artificial intelligence. There are great breakthroughs and according to Eric Schmidt, we are in the beginning of 100s of years of search for making the search really smart.

Here are the important quotes in a recent interview regarding his thoughts on the search market in the future:

Search is a science that will develop and advance over hundreds of years. Think of it like biology and physics in the 1500s or 1600s: it’s a new science where we make big and exciting breakthroughs all the time. However, it could be a hundred years or more before we have microscopes and an understanding of the proverbial molecules and atoms of search. Just like biology and physics several hundred years ago, the biggest advances are yet to come. That’s what makes the field of Internet search so exciting.

Now, Sergey argues that the correct thing to do is to just connect it straight to your brain. In other words, you know, wire it into your head. And so we joke about this and said, we have not quite figured out what that problem looks like…But that would solve the problem. In other words, if we just – if you had the thought and we knew what you meant, we could run it and we could run it in parallel.

So to me, the question is sort of, what’s next, is really basically how far does the artificial intelligence technology go here? How many signals can we get from who you are, where you are, what you’ve been, what you’ve done and so forth to refine that querying? And at the same time, you also have this enormous expansion of data sets. I think what people are missing is that the amount of information on the Internet is growing very, very rapidly…Because it gets more open, people put more data on it and so forth and so on and that’s wonderful. Also, you have all these dynamic databases that are now – they basically publish that at web pages and again index them as well.

The long term goal of Google search, he says, is to give the user one exactly right answer to a query:

So I don’t know how to characterize the next 10 years except to say that we’ll get to the point – the long-term goal is to be able to give you one answer, which is exactly the right answer over time. Okay, you know, the question I’ll ask today, how many Americans have – what percentage of Americans have passports?…The Google’s answer was a site, which was somebody who had attempted to answer that question and had multiple answers. It’s quite interesting actually to read…So you go to a very good definitive site. And what I’d like to do is to get to the point where we could read his site and then summarize what it says, and answer the question…Along with the citation and so forth and so on.

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A New Search Market with Twitter?

In a way we are all virtual stock holders in Twitter. We all have a vested interest in its success. Facebook is soon to monopolize the social stream to the same extent that Google has done with search. That is not good for anyone, including Facebook. I have had many discussions with people in recent weeks about the face-off between twitter and Facebook and also about the high probability of Twitter cutting a deal with Google.

When I was asked by Erick Schonfeld at the Real Tiime Stream Crunchup (Video) event about my opinion on Twitter giving Google their firehose feed, I responded that they could do that if they don?t plan to sell their company in the future. In other words, it is my humble opinion that if Twitter was a publicly traded stock its value would drop by 75% the second that deal was announced and for good reason.


Twitter is important. How often does a company come along that really changes consumer behavior? That creates a new form of media consumption and connectivity? For all the thousands of startups covered on Techcrunch only a few have a profound impact on the arc of internet history. Twitter has earned its spot in that pantheon and now it remains to be seen if it can play a bigger role in how to monetize the stream and in the process build a real business.


At this moment in time, Twitter has such a stronghold on this new form of real-time consumption that it has the potential to dominate the category. But its window of opportunity is closing fast as Facebook and others hurl themselves at that prize. The experience of real-time communication and search, that sense you get of unfolding streams of relevant information to your interests and queries flowing in a digital river has arrived with Twitter coursing first through the rapids. But now that we have arrived at this new medium, what next? Does Twitter become an example of a utility that is emulated by others that already have a monetization engine, leaving Twitter to ultimately drift to a respected place in Wikipedia like Netscape? Or does it continue to push the boundaries and create a sustainable and growing business that will allow it to continue to ride the whitewater?


If twitter is to confine itself to being a communications medium, or even worse, a news distribution engine, it will surely perish. By analogy, Google as a business is not a search engine but an advertising business that is printing money at unprecedented rates. Google does this by owning the equivalent of distribution in the digital age. Its just that the meaning of the word ?distribution? in the digital age has shifted. Google, as the entry point for such a vast audience, effectively owns the distribution on the Internet as a business leader and brand. Its lead continues to grow as the audience grows.


Google's economics lay in the economy of intent. The intent of users to purchase a product or service when they use Google's search is what drives its money presses. The context of the users' actions and interests map to an intention which advertisers are eager to pay for. The ability to automate the placement of advertising next to relevant content and map consumer queries to useful advertising stands at the heart of Google's success.


This is something that has been notoriously missing on communication platforms. See AIM as an example. What was once an omnipresent juggernaut of a product is inching towards being a footnote in internet history. One that has always struggled to monetize its vast audience. The same is true for other communications platforms such as Hotmail and Gmail. They have become strategic traffic drivers in companies with a broader monetization engine. Look further into innovative news aggregation platforms such as Digg, Google News, and Techmeme and you see that it's pretty tough to generate significant revenues in news, certainly not Google-scale revenues. Even for pillars of the industry such as the New York Times, big online profits are elusive. So there are not many prospects for building a sustainable multi-billion dollar business for Twitter either as a communications platform or a news discovery engine.


The way to make Twitter into a sustainable business is to tap into the economy of intent. God knows Twitter has that potential, but it has a narrow window of opportunity in which to execute. The business promise is to create a new type of useful advertising for people that is consumed in the context of a new form of discovery?one that for the moment is unique to Twitter but, alas, not for long. If Twitter doesn't pick up the pace at this moment in time and take the path leading to building a business, it will begin to destroy its value. By doing a deal that will give Google unfettered access to real-time results from Twitter in Google search, Twitter will effectively be giving up the fight and losing the war. For if consumers can get the same experience that is currently unique to Twitter on Google, why would they need to go to Twitter to search? If they don?t bring their intentions to Twitter search, then Twitter is not participating in the Economy of Intent and as such will diminish its value to the single-digit millions.


At the risk of stating the obvious let me throw out some constructs. There has been much speculation about how Twitter will make money. From #pastryto #diabetes, the world of Twitter is self-organizing in a highly effective folksonomy that is vibrant and useful. Today, Twitter users are left to their own devices when it comes to unearthing these gems in the stream. As Twitter further develops its discovery(taxonomy) and search engine, the valuable content streams will be unearthed. Think of the simple impact of auto-complete in the search box to # tags. This is but one simple move which could start to drive traffic to focused streams of information, which could also map to useful advertising, just like on Google. Start with creating a marketplace for advertisers around the #tags, then search queries, and see how valuable the experience Twitter created really is. Throw in the recent evolution in geo-tagging and you add another layer of usefulness. Typing in "amazing restaurant" when you are in Soho should show a fresh stream of nearby locations, recommendations, and warnings. As Twitter make these changes, users will start focusing more on discovery, and it will become a self-fulfilling prophesy. Users will alter their behavior to capture the search queries. The notions of surfacing more advanced trends and audience recirculation present further opportunities. There is so much that can be done in this domain once Twitter has the critical mass of audience and data.


Twitter has a unique opportunity to innovate and create new forms of useful advertising that will truly help both users and advertisers. This was the key to Google's success and is the key to Twitter's future. It takes time for advertising to become useful as it requires a significant liquidity of ads. Twitter has to start soon to build up that liquidity in time for the face-off competition for the advertisers. They need for buyers to know they are the go-to place for in-stream advertising. Google is at a big disadvantage at this junction in time. One only needs to set a Google alert to see how latent their Twitter discovery is (I have seen alerts come in for tweets that are 3 days old). Google has not made it a secret that the strategic importance of the real-time web registers with them.


For Twitter to give away the farm (its firehose of Tweets) at this stage is tantamount to suicide and can only be defined as a form of creative laziness. Twitter, you got this far don?t get too comfortable with all that money in the bank. Get off your asses and push, you owe it to history. There are so many things you could be doing short of giving up and serving yourself up on a silver platter. If you must do it, if you do sell your data or yourself to Google ? make ?em pay, they can afford it. If you give away your data to the majors, they wont need to buy you anyway and if you don?t create a solid way to make money, you can't survive on your own.


Ref. Washington Post by Guest Author, Edo Segal

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Innovation as Google´s Future

The search engine giant debuted on Aug. 19, 2004 at $85 a share. Today, the stock trades at about $445. That's a nearly 420% return during a time when the Nasdaq is up only 8%. And shares of top rival Yahoo! have been nearly cut in half during the past five years.

Yet, it doesn't look like all those Googleaires are too interested in celebrating their 5-year anniversary as a public company. Check out the Google (GOOG, Fortune 500) homepage and you don't see one of its usually witty cartoon renditions of the logo like you do on other "holidays."

I was hoping it would look like a tree carving or maybe a set of spoons, forks and knives since wood and silverware are the traditional five-year wedding anniversary gifts. (And yes, I Googled "wedding anniversary gifts" to find this out.)

Nonetheless, it's been an interesting five years for the search giant to say the least.

The company has used its strong stock price and mountain of cash reserves as currency to scoop up the likes of YouTube, DoubleClick and Postini to name a few.

It has watched Yahoo! (YHOO, Fortune 500) try (and fail) repeatedly to gain more market share in the lucrative world of search. It's weathered numerous challenges by Microsoft (MSFT, Fortune 500) to do the same. And it's continued to be innovative, rolling out a slew of products such as Gmail, Google Maps and Google Docs.

All the while, Google has also remained relatively focused its core search business, resisting the temptation to go overboard in the glitzy, but not all that profitable, social networking business. And that's a good thing.

News Corp. (NWS, Fortune 500)-owned MySpace and Silicon Valley darlings Facebook and Twitter have all generated a googol of hype but none has figured out a way to make gobs of money from their users as Google has.

Of course, remaining on top in a business as dynamic as technology is not easy. Online pioneer AOL, which is set to soon split from my parent company Time Warner (TWX,Fortune 500), is now a distant also ran in the world of Internet advertising. (Although it will be interesting to see if former Google sales guru Tim Armstrong, who is now running AOL, can turn that company around.)

So Google is probably too busy trying to figure out how to stay ahead of the competition to look back.

Google is facing perhaps its most significant threat yet from Microsoft now that it has launched the new search engine Bing and finally inked a search partnership with The Purple One (Yahoo!, that is, not Prince or new Minnesota Vikings quarterback Brett Favre).

According to the most recent online search rankings from comScore, Microsoft did gain ground against Google in July. But its market share of 8.9% pales in comparison to Google's whopping 64.7%. And even if you add Yahoo's market share to Microsoft's, they have a combined share of just 28.2%

Steve Weinstein, an analyst with Pacific Crest Securities, said that the Microsoft-Yahoo alliance bears watching. But he believes that Google shouldn't be that worried. In fact, he thinks Google could take advantage of any turmoil that takes place while Microsoft and Yahoo! join forces.

"Google is still in a very strong position in search and they should continue to gain market share in the U.S.," he said. The Yahoo-Bing partnership will take a couple of years to implement, so there is plenty of risk of disruption for them during that time."

Still, Google's growth has slowed in recent years. Sure, part of that is simply the so-called law of large numbers, i.e. the bigger a company gets, the more difficult it is to keep posting gaudy percentage increases in sales and earnings.

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