We’ve not run with a story for a while of somebody nearly losing their business by failing to re-new their domain name, so we thought this story last week from the other side of the world was worth repeating.
Last week investmentproperty.com.au was sold at auction for an Australian domain name record of Aus$125,000, a fantastic windfall for the domain name owner who sold, but a sickener for the person who used to own it. That’s because it appears the former owner appears to have let renewal lapse on the domain, leaving it available to the open market and a new owner. Indeed according to this report it appears the former owner wasn’t even aware he no longer owned it, let alone the fact that he had just seen a potential fortune slip from his grasp.
The moral, make sure your domain names are set to auto-renew and make sure suitable payment methods are also registered on your account. With 123-reg you can register several different payment methods as well as use auto-renewal to make sure you won’t miss a vital renewal. Even if you don’t intend to use the domain immediately, it is well worth renewing a domain. If you felt it had a value when you registered it, the chances are others will feel the same now and in the future and with the supply of snappy, easy to read domain names ever limited, that domain may one day form your pension. In relation to the investmentproperty.com.au domain name, even the domain name speculators and experts on web forum DNTrade.com.au only thought that domain would sell for $10,000, so the final price of $125,000 shows just how value of a domain can reach far above expectations.
Do you auto-renew domains? Have you ever let a domain expire and later regretted it?
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The official 123-reg YouTube channel has arrived offering some funky and informative videos aimed at helping people understand domain names.
Built as a series of 5 short animated presentations, our opening batch of videos have been designed as the perfect introduction to domain names, how they work and how to get one for beginners and experts alike.
The first five videos are:
- Understanding domain names
- What is a domain name?
- What are domain name extensions?
- How to choose a domain name?
- How to register a domain name?
We suggest you watch them in that order too as they have been created to build upon the information and knowledge provided by the other videos in the series.
Have a look and please let us know what you think.
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This week, Joomla announced that its open source content management system has passed the 25 million download mark.
Joomla claims some 2.7 percent of the web runs Joomla and it is not just being used by small businesses or start-ups looking for a cheap alternative. The modular appeal and proven stability means it has been used for the backend management of websites for brands including McDonald’s, eBay and Ikea.
The Joomla community has thrived over the years, with apparent competitors offering support, help and technical know-how to one another in traditional internet style. Over 225,000 developers are now registered at the joomlacode.org site where developers are encouraged to contribute directly to the development of the core Joomla codebase. Meanwhile, Joomla developer communities exist in almost every nook and cranny of the web on forums and blogging networks.
Joomla’s announcement included a rider – it may be even more than 25 million downloads. Although first released in 2005, Joomla admits it only started tracking the number of downloads for its CMS system in 2007.
You can of course build your own Joomla-based site with 123-reg web-hosting with Joomla available as one of the free to install 123-apps, 25 million others can’t be wrong.
Have you built your site with Joomla? We’d love to hear from you. Is Joomla capable of running a full corporate site?
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Whether it is an attempt to be down with the kids, or simply identifying the networking and business growth potential of the Twittersphere, a new survey from CNBC entitled Europe’s Mobile Elite 2011, shows more than a third of Europe’s top business leaders are now using Twitter.
61% of the respondents said they believed social media was changing the way they did business and 45% admitted they feared being unable to keep pace with technology as it applies to their industry.
Wanting to stay ever connected to what is going on in their business smartphone usage is up with iPhone leading the way (21%) followed closely by Blackberry (20%) but Android catching up fast at (14%). 15% of those surveyed also now own an iPad, the majority combining it for business and pleasure – 49% claiming their children use it at home.
On the social media front however it is Twitter stealing the headlines. Whilst Facebook remains the most used (down to 77% from 81% last year), Linked-in continues to grow (56%) and Twitter (38% from 30%) is finally being recognised as a high-flying business tool. 18% of the executives surveyed admitted to having accounts for all three of the social networks.
With more and more of business decision makers taking to social networks for themselves, it is hoped that the ‘buy in’ frustrations experienced by many looking for social media investment could begin to decrease.
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News from IMRG who brand themselves as ‘the voice of e-tail’ shows that while online shopping continues to rise, the way people shop online is changing.
Almost aping the traditional high street shopper, online shoppers take longer onsite, browsing, researching and comparing products far more than they did five years ago. The result of which is online conversion rates in the UK have fallen by 55% over the past five years. In 2006, the average online conversion rate for retailers in the IMRG Capgemini e-Retail Sales Index was 8.4%, but that figure has dropped to 3.8% now.
The trend is being labelled as ‘online purchasing’ compared to ‘online shopping’. With the increase in social shopping expected to contine the ability to convert browsers into buyers is possibly the biggest challenge to online marketeers in the months ahead. While gimmicks, offers and products will bring in would-be customers, online shops will have to think far more about their calls to actions and enticements to buy if they are to convert that traffic.
Have your conversion rates fallen? What are you doing to combat this?
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UK Police could find it easier to close down .uk domain names being used for suspected criminal activity if draft recommendations out for discussion are adopted by national Internet registry Nominet.
Under the present system police need a court order before Nominet can act on ‘.co.uk’ domains that are being used for criminal purposes, but the Nominet issue group are seeking comments on ‘Dealing with domain names used in connection with criminal activity‘ which could remove layers of bureaucracy.
Domains used to sell counterfeit goods, fake tickets and pharmaceuticals could soon be shut down in a matter of days, even hours if the new regime is adopted.
Under the ‘expedited’ procedure police will need to provide “a declaration that the suspension is proportionate, necessary, and urgent.” The key deterrent from invoking these sort of procedures previously appears to have been Nominet wanting to ensure they are not forced to make decisions over legality, and the new procedure should eliminate thosse worries.
The draft recommendations can be downloaded and viewed here with comments invited before 20th September 2011 to policy@nominet.org.uk. The Issue will then meet the next day and discuss any suggestions. The final proposals will then be put before the Nominet board and could feasibly be adopted as early as October.
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Wave after wave of reports indicate to us that the UK population are using their mobile phone to access the web an every increasing amount. Now however official government figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) prove it too.
Nearly half (45 per cent) of Internet users accessed the Internet via a mobile phone in 2011, according to new data released by ONS this week, and the figures keep rising. That figure is already up from 31 per cent last year and 23 per cent in 2009. Younger users are leading tha push with 71 per cent of 16-24 year old Internet users having accessed the internet via a mobile.
Despite some mobile providers clamping down on mobile data usage, the availability of public WiFi means more and more data is being used on the move. The report estimates 4.9 million people (13% of internet users) conncected via WiFi hotspots this year, double on the previous year.
Don’t believe the reports of social media losing its appeal either. The report shows 57 per cent of adult Internet users used online social networks in 2011, up from 43 per cent in 2010. Again the 16-24 age group dominates the sector with 91 per cent of 16-24 year old Internet users now using social networking sites.
Yet there does appear to be a digital divide. 77 per cent of households report having access to the Internet, up from 73 per cent last year, with 93 per cent of these accessing via a broadband connection. Interestingly, half of those without a household Internet connection said they didn’t have one because they ‘don’t need the Internet’.
Other government dats shows that in the second quarter of 2011, 8.73 million UK adults had never used the Internet. That is down 12,000 people since quarter one with the over 75s least likely to have been online. Interestingly, over one-third of disabled people (36.8 per cent) also say they have never been online.
Are you accessing more than before? How do you most often access the web?
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In Florence, Italy they have spoken… and a computer noted it down….
These last few days have seen Interspeech 2011, the 12th annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association being held in Florence, Italy, and news coming from it suggests a bunch of Microsoft boffins may have finally cracked the science of speech recognition.
Dong Yu, a researcher at Microsoft claims his research improves the potential of real-time, speaker-independent, automatic speech recognition. Yu and other members of the Speech group at Microsoft Research Redmond have been looking at Artificial neural networks (ANNs) – mathematical models of the low-level circuits in the human brain. Such studies have been around since the 1950s but when the Microsoft team linked the research with more complex deep neural networks (DNN) research they began to make considerable progress into understanding how to improve large-vocabulary speech recognition.
The resulting research paper is probably too academic for most of us to really understand, but the fact that the speech recognition community is so excited about the findings, suggests that we are much nearer to fluent speech recognition applications that work without hours of ‘training’ or stressful mistakes.
How many years away is yet to be seen, this is after all, an academic paper, but imagine how much easier it would be to simply talk your blog every day. However fast your touch-typing, speech recognition is one tool that few would turn down, if its ease of use and accuracy could be better trusted.
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With the summer all but over, so is the festival season that has kept social networks busy in recent months with photo postings, check-ins or simple profile updates. Those active in social media like to show off where they are and what they are doing and those not so lucky to be there like to make comments back, while others in the vicinity often pipe up to say hi, come and meet me. Big ticketing events like these are immensely social but so far it has been more an informal use of social tools and not one businesses have been that great at capitalising upon. Until now.
Ticketmaster last week launched a new feature in it’s Facebook strategy. Seat tagging means now when you book your tickets for your event, your friends can immediately see when and where they will be attending. Either that will make them extremely jealous, or as Ticketmaster hope, it will inspire them to book with you. An article on the changes at FastCompany quotes Ticketmaster CEO Nathan Hubbard “Each time a ticket buyer shared with Facebook friends that he was attending an event, that alert generated $5.30 in additional ticket revenue.” So already, the customers were using Facebook to inspire each other to make similar purchases, but now Ticketmaster have made that easier.
It really is an example of social commerce. Via the new application, just as you might visit a site and see the faces of your friends pop up, as other people who have liked the site via Facebook, so now when you go to book your tickets on the venue seat map, you will see what friends have already booked and where they are sitting. It is enhanced Facebook connectivity that could change the way people spend their leisure time.
Unfortunately, for those in the UK, it is a US-based application for the ticketmaster.com website powering it, but don’t expect it to be too long before the UK follows suit. As a nation entertainment ticket buying is a business sector not apparently affected by the current economic slowdown, we like to have treats like this to look forward too.
The Facebook integration feature Work on the interactive seat map that launched in the US last year and is now used in more than 300 venues allowing fans to choose their exact seats instead of relying on Ticketmaster’s “best available” option, another feature us in the UK will have to wait a little while for yet.
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For some of us they probably already do rule our worlds, but if you needed some statistics to back up the importance of smartphones in the years to come, a new study from research firm IHS iSuppli forecasts the global shipment of smartphones will pass 1 billion by 2015 – that’s more than double the amount shipped this year.
The prediction is 1.03 billion units in 2015,compared to 478 million in 2011. The study suggests that by 2015, 54.5 per cent of the mobile phone market will be held by smartphones, compared to the 32.5 per cent currently reported. The future dominance of Android is further propelled by the findings that suggest the majority of the growth will come at the low-end of the market where the open-source Android is likely to have considerable success against its rivals.
On the back of the same, it will be interesting to see whether Apple will look to break away from brand in order to compete and offer a budget version of the iPhone to reach out to the growth area of the market.
Certainly, if you are not yet designing for mobile phones you certainly need to be soon.
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