Amazon Payments Now on Over 25 Major eCommerce Solutions
Amazon announced today that Amazon Payments is now available in over 25 of the leading eCommerce shopping cart providers. These include solutions like CardinalCommerce, Miva Merchant, Magento, ShopVisible, Mercantec, and Zoovy.
"Working with shopping cart and e-commerce solution providers to make sure their solutions seamlessly integrate with Amazon Payments was one of our immediate priorities when we launched Amazon Payments less than a year ago," says Mark Stabingas, General Manager, Amazon Payments.
"Now businesses have an additional option for getting started with Amazon Payments and reaching Amazon’s tens of millions of customers with the easiest way for customers to complete a purchase, while also enjoying the benefits of Amazon’s fraud-detection technologies," adds Stabingas.
Solutions from Amazon Payments are available for merchants, service providers, and non-profits. They include:
- Checkout by Amazon, which is suited best for sites selling physical goods, includes support for tax, shipping, and promotion functionality, as well as post-order management.
- And Simple Pay, which is more for sites selling digital goods, subscriptions or services, or accepting donations. It actually lets customers use their existing Amazon accounts without having to re-enter information when they go to checkout.
Amazon is offering free payment processing through Amazon Payments through September 30th to businesses and organizations that begin accepting Amazon Payments the solutions mentioned above.
Ad Network in the Cards for Facebook Connect?
Facebook is "definitely" going to build an ad network for Facebook Connect that would allow users to sign-in to participating sites using their Facebook accounts, a source "familiar with Facebook’s long-term strategy" told Silicon Alley Insider.

Apparently there aren’t any plans to create such a network in the near future, but it will come eventually.
"Internal tests have shown Facebook isn’t yet capable of paying publishers higher ad rates than they can get with ad networks already on the market, despite Facebook’s wealth of demographic data," says SIA’s Nicholas Carlson. "Because of that, Facebook executives aren’t yet prepared to promise publishers the large guarantees it would take to win their business."
Earlier this week, amid rumors that Facebook was begging for funding, Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg told Bloomberg that was not the case. "We could not be doing better financially," Sandberg is quoted as saying. "We absolutely do not need to take money. We might take money — but it doesn’t mean we need to." She also said Facebook’s confidence for ad sales grows with each week.
User loyalty should be trending upwards as well now that Facebook has opened up to third-party developers. This will spawn a limitless amount of applications drawing new users in and keeping old users around, a problem that despite its rapid growth, has been an issue for rival Twitter.
Newspapers Best Opportunity Is Online
As the newspaper industry continues to struggle its best opportunity is online, according to a new annual survey by the Center for the Digital Future at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication.
The survey found that Internet users read online newspapers for 53 minutes per week, the highest level seen so far. In contrast, Internet users in 2007 spent 41 minutes per week.
The survey also found that 22 percent of Internet users stopped their subscriptions to a printed newspaper or magazine because they could access the same content online.

Jeffrey Cole
"The most significant trend about how Americans are changing their news reading habits may be found in comparing the use of online media by light users vs. heavy users," said Center director Jeffrey I. Cole.
"Heavy Internet users spent 65 more minutes per week reading online newspapers than do light users."
Cole said there are four main reasons for the rapid decline of printed newspapers: the loss of newspaper classified advertising to the digital realm, concerns about the environmental impact of newspapers, the economic downturn, and no prospects for new readers.
"Thirty years ago, teenagers began to read newspapers as they reached their adult years. Today, teenagers don’t read printed newspapers, and research indicates they never will," Cole said. "Yet we’ve found that teens are more interested in news than any generation we’ve seen in a long time, only now online sites are their news sources."
Cole said significant bright spots still remain for newspapers. "Since the beginning of radio, newspapers have not been able to compete with broadcasting for delivery of immediate news," said Cole. "But in a digital world, newspapers can compete at least as effectively for breaking news delivery with broadcast media."
 
"The key to newspapers’ success will be making bold moves entirely into the digital realm, and building business models that allow them to thrive online."
 
Google Granted Patent For Next-Gen Data Centers
The top three things Google seems to consider when building data centers are real estate costs, electricity costs, and, perhaps, privacy.  And the next generation of data centers may do extremely well in all of these respects, as Google’s been granted a patent for water-based data centers. 

Yes, according to an official document filed with the United States Patent and Trademark Office, "A system includes a floating platform-mounted computer data center comprising a plurality of computing units, a sea-based electrical generator in electrical connection with the plurality of computing units, and one or more sea-water cooling units for providing cooling to the plurality of computing units."
The patent application also specifies that these systems might be located between three and seven miles offshore.
So if Google follows through with the idea now that a patent’s been granted, it would solve almost all traditional data center problems in one fell swoop.  Although new issues related to connectivity and maintenance costs would almost certainly arise.
There is the possibility that Google will stop short of dotting the seas with data centers, then.  The patent application explained, "[A] data center may be located on shore, close to a body of water."  Or "other power mechanisms, such as wind power (e.g., from sea-based wind generator farms) and river current power may also be used," which would open up more land-related possibilities.
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|Computer Analysis Slow To Pick Up Swine Flu Search Trends
John Connor would be relieved to learn that we don’t yet have to worry about oursuper-computers rising up against us–apparently, they’re still only as smart as the humans operating them.
Case in point, Wired reports that despite the thousands of computers at Google’s disposal–and over 10 years of data analysis–it wasn’t able to identify an increasing trend in searches that suggested the Swine Flu outbreak was beginning.
…Google Flu Trends team, which aggregates and analyzes search queries to estimate how many people are sick, wasn’t watching Mexican flu data until after the outbreak had already begun. That highlights the problem with tech-heavy disease-detection systems: Often, we don’t know what internet data to look at until after a problem starts.
The chart below shows the up tick in “flu” related searches happened over a number of days in April–which you would think would be long enough for a super-computer to recognize a trend, right?

Unfortunately, this reminds me of the 9/11 attack. I seem to recall that our intelligence agencies where able to piece together data after the fact, but didn’t actually see it coming.
Google Links AdSense Accounts with Google Analytics
Google is now offering wide availability of Google Analytics and AdSense integration. AdSense publishers who wish to make their site more profitable are going to want to link their AdSense accounts with a Google Analytics account.
To do so, you simply need to log in to AdSense, click the link that says "Integrate your AdSense account with Google Analytics" on the Reports > Overview tab, and follow the on-screen instructions as illustrated in this clip:
The video you’ll really want to pay attention to however is the following one, which provides a nice walkthrough explaining how to read reports for your AdSense account in Google Analytics:
When the accounts are linked, users will find an AdSense menu under the "content" section in Analytics. Here you can find the "Top AdSense Content" report, which lets you view details about specific pages and analyze ad performance. You will also find the "Top AdSense Referrers" report, which shows you how different incoming traffic sources contribute to your revenue, and the "AdSense Trading" report, which lets you analyze how your site generates revenue during different times of the day or days of the week.
The linking of AdSense and Analytics accounts should be a big step in the direction of convenience for analyzing important data regarding the profitability of AdSense publishers’ sites. There is plenty of potential for increasing said profitability if publishers choose to act on their findings.
Craigslist To Meet With Illinois Attorney General
Craigslist is not on law enforcement’s good side at the moment; its erotic services section has come under fire from all sorts of people following the attacks in Boston.  But it looks like the lines of communication are still open, at least, as Craigslist representatives will soon meet with Illinois’s attorney general.
This won’t be the first time the two sides have gotten together.  In November, 43 attorneys general (including Illinois’s Lisa Madigan) released a joint statement with Craigslist about its new telephone and credit card verification systems.  They were pleased to announce that the phone feature alone had reduced the volume of erotic services ads by 80 percent.

  Lisa Madigan
Now, a post on the Craigslist Blog states, "We look forward to meeting with Attorney General Madigan to discuss progress made . . . and to hear any and all ideas she and others may have that could help reach our shared goal of eliminating illegal activity from craigslist, while preserving all of the functionality and positive attributes that are currently enjoyed by the overwhelmingly law-abiding craigslist community of users."
It may be that some significant changes will result.  Craigslist would rather look cooperative than have legislation drawn up against it, after all.  Or, since that possibility doesn’t appear to be an immediate threat, perhaps everyone will just argue about accountability a bit more.
Both sides are likely to feel less pressure to do something as the media turns its attention to swine flu, after all.
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|YouTube Highlights Global Leaders Response To The Swine Flu
YouTube is highlighting on its homepage today what global leaders are saying about the swine flu outbreak.
The YouTube blog offers more details. "The Center for Disease Control’s YouTube channel, which we featured a few days ago, has come out with a new video from Dr. Joe Bresee - this one outlines how to recognize the symptoms of swine flu. The Mexican Government is working hard to educate citizens as well, with PSAs like this one that help citizens understand how to prevent the spreading of the virus."
"In the UK, Prime Minister Gordon Brown has been joining the international conversation, as has Ban Ki Moon, the Secretary General of the United Nations, who delivered this statement on the United Nation’s YouTube channel, outlining the UN’s work to fight the flu."
For more information about the outbreak you can visit Google.org’s experimental flu trends tool for Mexico. The tool works by tracking flu based search queries within Mexico.
You can also check out this swine flu PSA from the last outbreak in the U.S. in 1976 on YouTube. The video has been viewed more than 186,000 times.
 







