IT Milk

The Google Online Marketing Challenge involves thousands of schools competing against each other from all over the world. These participating schools can register their teams at the Google Online Marketing Challenge Network to meet and discuss progress/strategies with their competition.

The shortened word for the Google Online Marketing Challenge is Gomcha. Gomcha is an academic event, so a team’s focus should not be ranking in the top 3. Rather, Gomcha is a learning opportunity and the Gomcha Network connects all the participating students together to improve the learning experience.

The Gomcha Network is based on the Ning social network platform. Which means members can create individual groups for their schools, make use of a state-of-the-art forum system, and make friends with competitors from different universities and countries.

Get started and register for a free account on the Gomcha Network.

We met with a panel from Lion Launch Pad to pitch our business idea. If we qualify, we will either become a full member and get desk space at Lion Launch Pad, or we will become an associate member. An associate member has all the benefits of association with Lion Launch Pad (which is mainly about connecting with mentors) but without the office space.

Groups get 5 minutes for a pitch presentation followed by a 10 minute Q & A session. This is the first time I’ve tried to formally pitch an idea, and I thought we did a decent job at it. I prepared a powerpoint presentation that introduces the company and its members and explains our prospective product. Regretfully, I failed to prepare the financial and demand forecasts, and instead presented rough estimates with no concrete basis. One of the panel members drilled me into the ground for that.

The results will be announced after the winter break. But even if we do not make it into Lion Launch Pad, the pitch session was a great opportunity to brainstorm more ideas for our product. Our Q & A sessions went over 20 minutes where the panel members straightened a few things out and suggested some very good ideas.

Lion Launch Pad Scorecard

The following is a list of items that Lion Launch Pad used to score our pitch. I wish that I had this in my hands beforehand, but I will definitely refer back to this list for preparing future presentations.

• Clearly describe the target problem/pain or market need.
• Clearly and succinctly describe the product/service/new venture concept and how it meets the market need
• Answer questions related to IP (patents, trademarks, copyright, etc.).
• Does your business model have any legal or regulatory impediments (regulatory prohibitions, IP entanglements, product approvals, required licenses)?
• Present solid competitive analysis and competitive advantage.
• Know the size of the market along with solid knowledge about the market.
• Understand the barriers to entry and possible work-arounds.
• Explain a pricing strategy.
• Have reasonable idea of the likely CoGS, margins, and SG&A expenses.
• Explain a distribution method (if applicable)
• Answer this question: “Overall, how will the product/service make money.”
• Estimate how much investment and time is needed until either proof of concept or break even
• Can you develop the company and handle the risk associated with the venture?

I have a Citi Diamond Preferred Card (I’m only telling you this because I do not recommend it), which I’ve been using as my main credit card since I opened it in July. I’ve been using it to rack up Adwords charges on it as well as pay my monthly rent.

Recently, Citi sent me a set of balance transfer checks. Naturally, I suspiciously scanned these checks for any sign of deception, but all I saw was the 7.99% APR. Which didn’t matter to me because I pay off my entire balance at the end of every month. So I decided to try out the balance transfer check to pay my rent for last month.

Citi was right! It worked just like a real check.

But then I received my credit card statement today and there was a charge for $31.80 that said “BALANCE TRANSFER FEE.” There was the following message at the footer of the statement:

Each Balance Transfer is subject to a one-time transaction fee. This fee may
cause your Annual Percentage Rate to exceed the nominal Annual Percentage Rate
listed on this statement.

I was pissed because Citi was trying to scam me. There was no mention of a “Balance Transfer Fee” on the check. So I immediately called Citi’s hotline for account problems.

I managed to get my call transferred to an account manager, who thankfully was not a stubborn Indian like the one before. I explained my problem and, without hesitation, he said he would remove the charges from my account. A true sign that he understands that his company is deceiving its customers.

But the problem is not finished. I’ve checked my statement hours after the phone call, and still Citi has not followed up with its promises. The charges are still there. And now I may have to call in again, only to work my way up the food chain again to speak to a manager.

I plan on closing my credit card with Citi. I do not recommend them because of their deceptive practices and their horrible, outsourced customer service.

As I was brainstorming a new website concept, I started to research possible names. I thought of many good names, but the .com domain names were already taken for all of them. Not surprised? It’s getting to a point where even ridiculous combinations of words and random combinations of characters are registered by people for no other reason than to own the domain names. Who wants to settle for an inferior domain name when you could be using this one?

What annoys me is that most of these great potential domain names are parked at the registrar doing nothing. Domain name squatters are just waiting for desperate buyers to show up and hand over large sums of money for their catch. Owning a domain name should not be a right but a privilege. Why should you be able to own a domain name without adding some value to the internet?

Yesterday I posted a Youtube music video about the inevitable burst of the web 2.0 bubble. Parked domain names, adsense arbitrage websites, and scammy affiliate landing pages are what we will see crashing down in the near future. By the theory of darwinism, these sites should naturally drop out of sight because their value to the internet is negative.

Greedy domainers are taking over all the property on the internet and we have to put a stop to it. We can do this in two ways. The current domain name system of blahblah.com resolving to a server somewhere can be improved with a totally new approach. However, a new system would flip the entire internet infrastructure on its head and would be time-consuming and expensive to implement. So we can start cleaning up the internet by placing stricter rules on buying and owning domain names.

Why don’t we start by forming an international regulatory commission that monitors the domain name marketplace? Or we could relegate the responsibility to each country for their respective domain name extensions. There would be rules that penalize domain names that are left latent without content for over a certain period of time. Also, domain name owners would be held accountable for their actions by enforcing stricter registration rules with higher transaction costs for the registration process. Although it sure is convenient, it is pretty absurd that I can register a domain name within 3 minutes on a site like GoDaddy. How about actually checking my identity to see if it is valid before it goes on the WHOIS information?

Domain names are certain to experience a market correction along with the web 2.0 bubble burst. A site’s name is an important factor to its success, and too many domain names are being held hostage by professional buyers and traders. Let’s hope that this issue is fixed soon for the next generation of the internet

A friend just notified me of the Idea Pitch Competition at Penn State. This event is hosted by the Smeal College of Business and the Farrell Center for Corporate Innovation and Entrepreneurship.

Not only is the Idea Pitch Competition great practice for courting investors about a groundbreaking business idea, but there are also cash prizes. Unlike many on-campus competitions, there won’t just be faculty members judging the event. Nittany Lion Venture Capital and several angel investors from across Pennsylvania will be present to offer real-world judgment. Meanwhile, the three best business ideas will win $1,000, $500, and $250. Following the competition, referring back to the Lion Launch Pad, the winning team can then move right into an office space at the Lion Launch Pad to work on their idea.

Learn more about the Idea Pitch Competition at its official website or the Penn State Live article.

I’m not old enough to remember the devastation of the dot com crash. But everything that goes up must come down, and the same must apply to the soaring height of the internet right now.

As someone who has invested considerable time and energy (for my age) in this rapidly dominating industry, I would hate to see it come crashing down. But this bursting bubble is inevitable by the laws of economics. The following music video sums it up in a hilarious way so that we can get some giggles along our path to an unholy mess.

With my statements above, I am not trying to be pessimistic about the future. Like I said, everything has its ups and downs. So after a crash, the web is certain to go up again. It’s just the natural way that things grow, and the next time we will experience an even greater “high.”

On December 3rd, Tad Frank, the casting director of the upcoming show Tontine, said:

I SEE EVERYTHING. I have a staff of people that monitor this site 24/7. They keep me updated on what is going on. Frank you are perfect for Tontine. I HOPE to see you soon. We will see soon TAD

See the rest of this thread on Tontine Nation.

This seems to be an official endorsement by Tontine Productions, LLC for the first contestant who will be on the show. Since Tad had created an account on Tontine Nation, there have only been two mentions of names. One is Frank Lopez mentioned above, and the other is David Abreu. But Tad’s language above is clearly announcing his selection of Frank for the show.

This brings us to the question of whether Tontine will continue to announce its contestants before they even begin filming. It would not be a surprise, because Tontine started out with an untraditional approach to reality TV casting.

First, Tontine used a Youtube video contest to generate a heap of buzz among auditioners. Whoever conceived this plan must be a student of viral marketing because this campaign worked beautifully in spreading the word-of-mouth across the nation and building up hype.

Then the social network called Tontine Nation also accomplished what no other reality show has ever done before. The website made the auditioning process much more transparent by connecting the auditioners and the production office. It’s a site where both auditioners and fans speculate about the upcoming show and receive communications from the official production crew.

With Tad’s endorsement of Frank Lopez yesterday, does this mark another revolutionary approach by Tontine Productions, LLC? Reality TV shows generally do not release information about their contestants until after the filming is complete, going so far as having all the contestants and related parties sign strict confidentiality statements. This is especially true for lengthy shows like Tontine, which will span 100 days. But now we are seeing Tontine possibly announcing all of the contestants on Tontine Nation before those lucky candidates even leave their homes.

I suspect that this could lead to another novel approach by Tontine. They may decide to broadcast the show close to real-time. This could be something like filming for a week at a time and then releasing those tapes as rolling footage. This would continue for the 100 days of competition where possession is everything.

Over 1,000 teams are already registered in the Google Online Marketing Challenge that will take place in Spring 2008. The following is a list of competing teams, their members, and their selected client businesses.

Why should you add your team here?

Along with displaying your team information, this list will also link to your client’s website or landing page. There is an important factor called Quality Score used in Google Adwords. The fastest way to skyrocket your Quality Score is to spread incoming links to your landing page. Get some link love, pay less for your clicks, and conserve your precious $200 budget.

Add your Google Online Marketing Challenge team to this list by emailing me at daehee (at) itmilk (dot) com or by posting a comment at the bottom.

United States

Florida State University

Members: TBA
Client: TBA

Penn State University

Members: TBA
Client: TBA

Australia

University of Western Australia

Members: TBA
Client: TBA

Germany

University Koblenz-Landau, Germany

Members: TBA
Client: TBA

Malaysia

Multimedia University

Members: TBA
Client: TBA

There is active research being done at Penn State on the topic of search engines. You may not be surprised that a large university is pursuing an obvious topic like internet search, but I am amused to find it right under my nose in the College of IST.

I stumbled upon this interesting discovery totally by chance. First, I heard about the Google Online Marketing Challenge in the weekly IST2U email newsletter that David Horne of Gamma Tau Phi sends out. I’ve been discarding those emails as junk, but I skimmed through it and it’s more useful than I had thought.

Then in order to find out more information about the Google Online Marketing Challenge at PSU, I looked up more information on Dr. Jim Jansen who is organizing it. Before I go on, in the Google Search results for “Jim Jansen,” it’s odd that Professor Jansen is running a Google Adwords campaign on his own name. There is no reason to run a pay-per-click ad when a) your destination URL for the ad is already ranking #1 in the natural results for the target keyword and b) a keyword like “Jim Jansen” has no competition. He must be playing around with Adwords in preparation for the spring event.

Professor Jansen’s personal page shows that his main field of research is search engines, which is awesome. Here is an excerpt from his Recent Publications:

Jansen, B. J. (Forthcoming) Searching for digital Images on the Web, Journal of Documentation.

Jansen, B. J., Booth, D., and Spink, A. (Forthcoming) Determining the informational, navigational, and transactional intent of Web queries, Information Processing & Management.

Reddy, M. and Jansen, B. J. (Forthcoming) A model for understanding collaborative information behavior in context: A study of two healthcare teams, Information Processing & Management.

Jansen, B. J. and Spink, A. (2007) Sponsored search: Is money a motivator for providing relevant results?, IEEE Computer. 40(8), 50-55. View in PDF.

Jansen, B. J. (2007) Click fraud, IEEE Computer. 40(7), 85-86 View in PDF

Jansen, B. J. (2007) The Comparative Effectiveness of Sponsored and Non-sponsored Results for Web Ecommerce Queries. ACM Transactions on the Web. 1(1), Article 3. View in PDF.

Jansen, B. J., Spink, A., Blakely, C., and Koshman, S. (2007) Defining a session on Web search engines. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. 58(6), 862-871. View in PDF.

Jansen, B. J., Spink, A., and Koshman, S. (2007) Web searcher interactions with the Dogpile.com meta-search engine. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. 58(5), 744-755. View in PDF.

Check out this video where Professor Jansen talks about web queries:

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

In the process, I found another IST professor who seems to be concentrating on search in his research and publications.

Take a look at both of these professors’ websites to see the impressive breadth of their research.

Ning just announced its new Wordpress plugin to integrate a Wordpress blog with a Ning social network.

This is great news for social networks that have sprung from blogs, such as NewCadet.com and Get Into Academy. Because now members on the Ning can comment with a synchronized profile on the Wordpress blog. Meanwhile, the Ning member’s activity on the Wordpress blog will be reflected on the social network’s Recent Activity feed.

I haven’t tested out the Ning Wordpress plugin yet, but I hope that in the future it will offer an option to allow Ning members to post entries to the Wordpress blog. Better yet, it would be cool if you could set a Blogger class on Ning where blog posts from these members on Ning also get published onto Wordpress. This would truly be a fully integrated Ning-Wordpress experience!

This new plugin is a smart move on Ning’s part because it makes creating a Ning an even more logical choice for blogs that have medium to large reader communities.

Learn how to integrate your Ning with Wordpress