Internet Marketing and Social Media Consultants

I can’t remember the last time I actually logged into google.com. Why would anybody, when there is a search bar in the upper right corner of my browser, or a Google Toolbar right below it? The best way by far to get people to use your search engine is to have it in the search bar or toolbar.

Microsoft knows this, and they have just cut a deal with Hewlett Packard to put Microsoft’s Live Search toolbar in all of the PC’s HP produces for 2009. What does that mean? That the world’s largest computer maker will arrive in your home or office with Live Search as the default search engine in your browser.
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While this may be a blog about social media, search engine marketing, etc., I couldn’t help but notice today the dominant position Nintendo and their Wii and DS have taken in the battle against more upscale machines like the XBox 360 and Playstation 3, proving that Nintendo’s decision to maintain their niche was a brilliant one.

When the Wii came out around the same time as the other machines, many expected the high-powered X-Box 360 and Blu-Ray capable Playstation 3 would knock the gimmicky-looking Wii out of the water.
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Henry Blodget at Silicon Alley Insider wrote an article today about the potential of the Amazon Kindle to reach iPod-like status and become one of the cornerstones of Amazon’s revenue going forward.

While the current Kindle is not much to look at and is rather overpriced, it’s winning over skeptics who initially thought it wouldn’t work. Attributes like the ease of downloading books and the relatively low price of the books that are downloaded are convincing people that this could really be a phenomenon in the making.

Of course, like early versions of the iPod, people are waiting to see what the next generation Kindle looks like, and how much use early adopters get out of the product. But a healthy number of sales combined with an iTunes-like purchasing model could bring in as much as $750 million a year to Amazon by 2010, according to Mark Mahaney of Citi.
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Presumably in an effort to penalize serial P2P downloaders, Comcast is considering setting caps on the amount of content customers can download in a given month, and charging overage fees for users that go above the limit.

The preliminary limit would be 250GB per month. Comcast would allow one amnesty month per year, but would charge $15 for each 10GB over the cap customers use.

Comcast, which has a total of 14 million users, plans on testing out the new system in the coming months. According to them, only about 14,000 of their customers would actually be effected by the overage charges.
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Microsoft has announced they will be selling TV shows on their Zune Marketplace, including NBC/Universal series that are no longer sold by Apple.

NBC and Apple couldn’t reach an agreement due to Apple’s insistence on maintaining their own pricing structure. Apparently, Microsoft is more accommodating, so shows like Heroes and Battlestar Galactica will go on sale through Zune.

Zune hasn’t been able to put much of a dent in the iPod/iTunes juggernaut since its initial release in 2006. While Microsoft has sold 2 million Zunes since it launched, over 10 million iPods were sold in the first three months on 2008 alone.
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