This is for those who had already bought the iPhone on the initial launch prices. Rich DeMuro, Senior Editor for CNET tells how.
Category Archives: Market News
Eurostar Goodbye Waterloo, Hello St Pancras
Eurostar in the UK is going to get High Speed rail soon! And that’s very interesting for any frequent intra-Europe traveller. From November 14, 2007 (mark the date please), its going to be faster travel, and at least 30 to 60 minutes shaved-off your UK-Continental Europe train travel times. The 186mph high-speed line from St Pancras International in London to the Channel Tunnel means that the UK will become part of the high-speed rail network that covers much of Europe. Check out their website for more information: http://fortomorrow.eurostar.com/
In fact, Eurostar is joining Europe’s other leading high-speed rail operators to form Railteam, to make your journey even easier. Railteam is being brought to you by a group of rail companies – along with Eurostar they are: Deutsche Bahn (Germany), SNCF (France), NSHispeed (Netherlands), ÖBB (Austria), SBB (Switzerland) and SNCB (Belgium), as well as two of their high-speed subsidiaries Thalys and Lyria. Railteam covers any journey that starts and ends in a Railteam country (see the map on the right), at least part of which involves a high-speed rail journey with a Railteam partner.
Richard Brown, Eurostar CEO, sums it up best: “Railteam will reduce barriers between countries and build confidence in the quality and reliability of international services. It will provide travellers with an integrated network with connections as good as or better than airports, and make high-speed rail a really attractive and effective alternative to the more environmentally damaging, short-haul airlines.”
Photo by Michael Walter/Troika
Google Mobile Search Ads Go-Live
After about a year of trials, Google has announced it will begin including AdWords advertisements within Google Mobile Search results. In an email shared with advertising partners on Tuesday, Google wrote: “We are happy to announce a new feature that will allow you to easily reach additional qualified customers who are searching Google from their mobile phones.
n the next few days, your search ads will be eligible to run on Google Mobile Search pages (like they currently do on Google.com). We are offering this feature – and any resulting clicks – for free through November 18, so you can experiment with the rapidly growing mobile platform while still reaching qualified customers.” For more info on this, read this Search Engine Land article.
Now, Mobile advertising has been predicted to be a big market, and while some businesses have taken their positions, others are still discussing over their white boards, and still others are making power point presentations that may not turn into action for another year.
One thing is for sure: mobile advertising is going to benefit from all the wide screen devices that we have been getting, including this Treo (one of our favourites!) You can receive text and images, like menu cards, driving directions, hotel room pricing lists, and more.
So how can you benefit as a business?
As you can expect, there will be a high demand for services while a person is on the move — related to transport, food, medicines, hotels, finance, etc. If you can deliver a reliable service, then there is an opportunity to advertise on the mobile platform, and sell at a better profit margin because the consumer is usually looking for immediate response, delivery, or action. For these services, he or she most probably won’t sit down to prepare a detailed comparison table, and you can get the order if you can deliver in the short time-frames.
But if you can’t you will have more than your share of irate customers!
Business School for Kids – guess we can learn too
If you thought business plan discussions with teenagers felt strange, think again. Here’s an amazing video by Lindsey Mills in which you can see how primary school students are being trained in business start-ups, and how they start talking about Seed Capital, Venture Capital Rounds, Debt Capital and Income Statements…things which many of us learned sometime during our first or second job! The Start Em Up Business program gives students an introduction to business. Students learn the basic business concepts through playing fun business games, starting a real business, and making money. It feels like training numerous Tiger Woods for business – very interesting. The potential of something like this is immense because in 5-10 years from now, we could see start-ups from kids. You can learn more here: www.simplyoutrageous.org
Google YouTube roadmap converging with MyOrbit
Thanks for visiting MyOrbit.tv – we are in the last leg of our security enhancements and plan to be live again soon. Last week, we got one of the best testaments so far of the path we are taking for MyOrbit.tv
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Here’s a brief from the editor of DailyTech Rag newsletter (it’s got about 50k subscribers worldwide)
When you think of YouTube in the enterprise, you probably think of that common quandary many IT departments face: to block or not to block? However, if Google has its way, the decision organizations may soon have to weigh is whether or not to deploy YouTube. BusinessWeek reports Google “is preparing a corporate version of YouTube to create videos for training and employee communications.
For more on enterprise YouTube: see this BusinessWeek article
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This is my analysis of the planned Google offering. It is a software tool, whereas we offer a business service. My simple analogy is this: Google offering is like a projector with which you can make presentations, and ours is like a projector plus different presenters plus diverse professional audience, so it’s an online business conference. No doubt, Google Youtube Enterprise version will compete on a small front, for some cases of intra-company knowledge sharing, ie., where they only need the projector!
What does it mean for MyOrbit? It means our roadmap for applying new media to business is the way to go. And it also means that we need to increase our efforts to build the community of professionals and businesses using MyOrbit.tv. Stay Tuned!
cheers/ Shankar AVSB for MyOrbit