▼ Online Banking Increases 47 Percent Since 2002
By Rob McGann
Source: ClickZ Network
 
Online banking has been the fastest growing Internet activity in the U.S. over the last five years, with 53 million Americans, or 44 percent of all U.S. Internet users, now using some form of online banking service as of November 2004, according to a survey conducted by Pew Internet & American Life.

That current U.S. online banking population is more than 3.5 times the number of online bankers Pew measured in March 2000. At that time, only 14 million Americans (17 percent of U.S. Internet users) did banking chores online. (Read more...) 0205

▼ USA: Your Number One Source For Spam in 2004
By: Jeremy L. Muncy
Source: SecurityProNews

….The majority of spam mailings received around the world originates from the United States according to software company Sophos. In order to compile their list, company researchers monitored all spam messages that were sent to their network during 2004.

Topping this list was the United States, which is responsible for 42.11% of spam mailings received worldwide. Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos, had these comments, "When we first reported on the top spamming countries back in February 2004, the USA had the excuse that the CAN-SPAM act had been in existence for a couple of months. Almost a year and millions of spam messages later, it is quite evident that that the CAN-SPAM legislation has made very little headway in damming the flood of spam."

According to Sophos, the top spam producing countries are as follows:

1.) United States - 42.11%
2.) South Korea - 13.43%
3.) China (incl Hong Kong) - 8.44%
4.) Canada - 5.71%
5.) Brazil - 3.34%
6.) Japan - 2.57%
7.) France - 1.37%
8.) Spain - 1.18%
9.) United Kingdom - 1.13%
10.) Germany - 1.03%
11.) Taiwan - 1.00%
12.) Mexico - 0.89%
13.) Others - 17.8% (Read more...) 0105
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▼ Top 10 E-Business Trends For 2005
By Jim Nash
Source: InformationWeek

Research aggregator eMarketer sees a big year for RSS, VoIP, and a few other acronyms.

Research analysts at eMarketer have created a list of the top 10 E-business trends for this year, and most of them define changes in how information is distributed.

Near the top of the list is RSS, defined variously, such as Rich Site Summary and Real Simple Syndication....

Also, wireless broadband service and content will find its legs, even as it challenges telecommunications companies to handle the heavy loads, senior analyst Noah Elkin says. Streaming video will bring television content. Whether there's consumer demand for this can't be known yet, but Elkin says telcos won't pass up another opportunity to keep buyers glued to their phones. (Read more...) 0105
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▼Online Ad Spend Up $45 Million in October
By Rob McGann
Source: ClickZ

Internet advertising increased by $45 million in October to reaching a total $741.2 million for the month, according to AdZone's Internet Advertising Report.

The 6.5 percent gain marked the second consecutive month-over-month increase, and the highest monthly total since April, when online ad spending reached $746.0 million. For the first 10 months of the year, total online ad spend was approximately $7.0 billion. (Read more...) 1204
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▼ Desktop search tools a virus writers' best friend
By Munir Kotadia
Source: ZDNet Australia

Companies should not deploy a desktop search tool without first considering the security implications because they could end up helping virus writers, say security experts.

Desktop search tools, such as those recently announced by Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, are designed to make it easier for users to find information stored on their hard drives. However, security experts are warning that virus writers could use the new tools to make their malware more efficient.

Foad Fadaghi, senior industry analyst at Frost & Sullivan Australia, said that most viruses are designed to harvest e-mail addresses and other personal information from an infected system. He warns that, because desktop search tools can index and categorise that information, virus writers are likely to start exploiting the technology. (Read more...)
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▼ Ballmer to Google: 'We Will Compete
By Elizabeth Montalbano, CRN
Source: CRN

Microsoft demonstrates new search technology that spans Web, PC hard drives

Microsoft upped the ante in its search-engine challenge to Google by demonstrating new technology that allows a user to search both the Web and a PC's hard drive.  

At the annual Microsoft financial analyst meeting, Microsoft Chairman and CEO Steve Ballmer vowed that Microsoft was determined to beat Google in creating the best and most popular search-engine technology.  

"There's a lot of Google fascination out there and we share it, and we're going to compete," Ballmer said with characteristic bluster. "We're going to compete very, very hard."  (Read more...)
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▼ Number and Use of Domain Names
Source: VeriSign 

Renewal Rates Reach All-Time High

A report released by VeriSign, highlighting key quarterly market data for domain name activity around the world, shows more than 4.7 million new domain names were registered during the first quarter of 2004-the highest quarterly figure for new domain registrations in the history of the Internet.  

The profile reveals that more than 63 million domain names have now been registered, approximately one for every 100 people living in the world today. This number is greater than at any time in the Internet's history, surpassing even the heights that were seen during the Internet "bubble." Moreover, data reveal that the current base of domain names is being utilized more actively than ever before, as measured by renewal rates, look-up rates, and the percentage of domain names tied to live sites. (Read more...)
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Google's pop-up blocker, included as part of the Web search engine's popular browser plug-in, "worked fantastically well for about two months, blocking everything," said Haigh, a photographer from the United Kingdom. "Then the odd pop-up started to appear, mainly on highly ad-displaying sites based in the United States." 

"I know they are on the increase because they are annoying me again," he said, adding that he's received three this week. 

Pop-up purveyors are finding ways around popular new filters that aim to stomp them out, the latest sign of an Internet arms race over one of the most controversial online ad formats around.

At stake is the future of a lucrative form of online advertising that many ad executives say is among the highest performers for Internet marketers — despite severe negative reactions from a majority of Web users. (Read more...)
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The people noshing mini-sandwiches, sipping wine and mingling at Case Western Reserve University's Peter B. Lewis Building knew one another by sight. They knew what they did for a living, their goals and hobbies. They even knew many fellow mixers' birthdays.  

But most of them had never met.

This was an offline get-together of Clevelanders who use the online networking site Ryze (www.Ryze.com).

People have sought the love of their life online for the last decade. But Ryze is one of numerous networking sites that have risen in the last year for those looking for more: business connections, a best friend, a better job, fellow hobbyists, even a pal for their pooch. Some, like Ryze, have offline meet-ups. Others keep the socializing in cyberspace.  

The five largest social networking sites now have around 8.2 million registered users, says Nate Elliot, an analyst at Jupiter Research, a New York-based Internet research firm. (Read more...)
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'Brand spoof' spam scams increased nearly 500 percent since January, and by 51 times since May 2003, SurfControl (London: SRF), the world's number one Web and e-mail filtering company, reported today. The company also warned individuals and companies to beware of a new dirty trick employed by brand spoof spammers -- a fake address bar that appears in an e-mail recipients' Web browser -- that makes these e-mail scams look even more legitimate. (Read more...)
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Google Inc. announced the availability of its next-generation Google Search Appliance, an integrated hardware/software search product that enables corporations, universities, and government agencies to deliver Google-quality search results on their intranets and public websites. 

This latest version of the Google Search Appliance, available in three models, is designed to offer better search performance, including increased capacity for more than 300 queries per minute and expanded collections that scale from 150,000 to 15 million or more documents. In addition, the new Google Search Appliance features a continuous crawl that is designed to automatically maintain the freshness of document collections as they deliver relevant results based on Google's latest search algorithms. (Read more...)
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▼ 3D Search a Think of the Future
By Jason Lopez
Source: NewsFactor Network

"Can [visual-based search] analyze the Mona Lisa?" asks Apostolous Gerasoulis, creator of the Teoma search engine employed by Ask Jeeves. "No, the accuracy is not high enough.... It would return too many errors. That's way off in the future. But it might be able to look at a street and tell you where you are." 

Yes, image-based search is in the cards, but it is a long way off as a ubiquitous usable search tool. For that you will still have to rely on your own noggin.

Search researchers say the hardest job of a search engine  is not in the finding of data. It is in the delivery of highly customized results that have been pared down based on the user's context. Still, while search engines like Google , Yahoo  and Ask Jeeves  inch closer to returning word-based context-oriented results, image-based tools are in development that appear to have promise. (Read more...)
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▼ Study: Users Know They're Being Watched
Source: Marketing VOX News

A Burst and MediaPost survey shows that the average web surfer knows that there are several types of technologies and companies involved in delivering ads. About three quarters reported knowing that it was likely information was being harvested on how they interact with sites. (Read more...)
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Though e-mail is an accepted, proven form of delivering marketing messages, professional marketers are looking for better ways to build customer loyalty and generate greater return on their investments.

The future of online marketing is using dynamic content — matching messaging and offers to recipients’ demographic data. Though this approach is much more involved than standard e-mail marketing practices, it yields much higher results as well as longer-term and more value-added relationships. (Read more...)