What does nano-film deposition technology have to do with Business?

My brother, Kevin Fish, whom just finished up his MBA at Oregon State University could tell you that answer!
Kevin competed in several MBA and entrepreneurship competitions over the last year, touting his nano-film deposition technology concept to the eyeglass industry for improved application of anti-reflective coatings.

If you want to get to know what Kevin can bring to YOUR business, here’s his LinkedIn Profile!

Here’s some highlights from previous years:

2007 SearchFest Speakers:

Eric Facas (Google)
David Roth (Yahoo)
Naga Krothapalli (Microsoft)
Rand Fishkin & Rebecca Kelley (SEOmoz)
Matt McGee (Marchex / Small Business SEM)
Stoney deGeyter (Pole Position Marketing)
Jeffrey Pruitt (SEMPO)

2008 SearchFest Speakers:

Paul Colligan
Jeff Pruitt, SEMPO, iCrossing
Stoney deGeyter, Pole Position
Rand Fishkin, SEOmoz
Matt McGee, Marchex
Dan Harbison, Portland Trailblazers

Preliminary information from the U.S. Geological Survey estimated the quake at magnitude 5.8, centered 29 miles east-southeast of downtown Los Angeles near Chino Hills in San Bernardino County.   Follow the news on Twitter Trends.

Los Angeles Fire Department spokesman Brian Humphrey said there were not immediate reports of damage or injury in Los Angeles.

The quake struck at 11:42 a.m. PDT. Buildings swayed in downtown Los Angeles for several seconds.

The “Thunder,” formerly the Seattle SuperSonics, are in the middle of a full-scale move from the Northwest to Oklahoma. According to KOCO.com, the NBA’s Internet division — through CSC Corporate Domains — secured the domain names of “okcthunderbasketball.com” and “okcthunderbasketball.net” on July 10.

The “Thunder” were officially granted permission to leave Seattle last month, the result of an out-of-court settlement between Sonics majority owner Clay Bennett and the city of Seattle. In return, Seattle gets to retain the “Sonics” name, logo and team colors (green and gold) and could receive up to $45 million in the next several years, as penalty for Bennett breaking the lease agreement with KeyArena, the Sonics’ home for nearly two decades.

The city of Seattle originally wanted to keep the Sonics at KeyArena for two more years. The Sonics’ season-ticket holding base even filed a class-action lawsuit against Bennett and the other team owners at one point.

We propose computing page importance by using a ’user browsing graph’ created from user behavior data. In this graph, vertices represent pages and directed edges represent transitions between pages in the users’ web browsing history. Furthermore, the lengths of staying time spent on the pages by users are also included. The user browsing graph is more reliable than the link graph for inferring page importance.

“… The more visits of the page made by the users and the longer time periods spent by the users on the page, the more likely the page is important.”

- I would think that google doesnt need to shore up this piece, they give Google Analytics away for free and they already have these metrics.

Everyone’s Buzzing about it…

Microsoft’s BrowseRank Aims for Better Results than PageRank
Microsoft Goes After Google’s PageRank With BrowseRank

BrowseRank is worse than PageRank

Can BrowseRank best PageRank?
Microsoft tries to one-up Google PageRank
Microsoft dreams up a new kind of search with BrowseRank

ABSTRACT
This paper proposes a new method for computing page importance,
referred to as BrowseRank. The conventional approach to compute
page importance is to exploit the link graph of the web and
to build a model based on that graph. For instance, PageRank is
such an algorithm, which employs a discrete-time Markov process
as the model. Unfortunately, the link graph might be incomplete
and inaccurate with respect to data for determining page importance,
because links can be easily added and deleted by web content
creators. In this paper, we propose computing page importance
by using a ’user browsing graph’ created from user behavior
data. In this graph, vertices represent pages and directed edges
represent transitions between pages in the users’ web browsing history.
Furthermore, the lengths of staying time spent on the pages
by users are also included. The user browsing graph is more reliable
than the link graph for inferring page importance. This paper
further proposes using the continuous-time Markov process on
the user browsing graph as a model and computing the stationary
probability distribution of the process as page importance. An e-
cient algorithm for this computation has also been devised. In this
way, we can leverage hundreds of millions of users’ implicit voting
on page importance. Experimental results show that BrowseRank
indeed outperforms the baseline methods such as PageRank and
TrustRank in several tasks.

Think about this for a second…

Google has the ability to display text ads on millions of websites that have a reach of millions of vistiors every day.  These sites include well known media outlets, blog networks, and niche communities.  With Google’s content network you have the ability to tap into these sites with targeted and relevant ads.

So why wouldn’t you want to?

Historically Google’s Content network has really had a hard time driving conversions, rather they would drive a lot of clicks, but all of that traffic had a hard time converting.  In the middle of 2007 that all changed, Google started cleaning up the content network and advertisers have been flocking to re-try the advertising medium.  One of the big changes that Google made was allowing you to see which URLs your ads are showing on.

Ok, So How do I Optimize for the Google Content Network?

Daniela Araujo is an expert at optimizing for the Google Content Network and she has some excellent tips on how to drive up conversions within the network.

Here are some tips from Daniela:

* Include in an ad group, not only very specific keywords, but also generic keywords that describe the specific industry or field for each product or service;
* Run separate campaigns on Google content and search, because a keyword may not have equal success in both channels. Also, budgets and bidding can be managed more efficiently when content and search campaigns are running separately;
* Ensure that your ads average positions remain above position three (3), as most sites publish only three Google ads per page;

There are 3 more tips over at Daniela’s site!

A community in Canada has an unusual form of solar power that can provide over 90% of the annual heating and hot water needs for the homes, despite being situated in a cold Alberta location where winter temperatures can reach -33 degrees C (-27 F).

The Drake Landing Solar Community collects solar energy in a heat storage fluid through an array of solar panels on the roof of each home and covering all of the garages at the back of each home. The heated fluid is transferred to a neighborhood energy center, and then into the ground beneath an insulated layer, where the heat is stored in the earth.

Combined together, the 52 home community is able to collect and store enough energy from the sun during the summer that the ground storage temperatures reach 80 degrees C (176 F). This heat is sufficiently insulated beneath the ground that it can be drawn from throughout the winter to provide heat and hot water.

The homes in the community are moderately sized, ranging from 1,492 to 1,664 square feet, and are insulated to a level 30% higher than the average home in Canada in order to keep the energy needs low enough to work with the system. The homes are also closely located to one another. This provides a more walkable neighborhood, as well as reducing the lengths that the fluid for the solar heating system needs to travel.

Entire Neighborhood Has Shared Solar Heating

The system works in part due to the scale of the project utilizing the combined capacity of the entire community. A similar system scaled down to a single family home version would not work as efficiently simply because too much heat would be lost. But the scale of a system for 52 households makes this a feasible project.

While the technology is similar to a ground source heat pump, which relies on a relatively stable, constant temperature of the ground, the Drake Landing Community is actually storing heat throughout the summer and then relying on that banked heat during the winter.

Solar heating is a more exciting prospect than solar generation of electricity because heating is a much larger percentage of a home’s total energy use (60% for space heating, 20% for water heating, and 20% for appliances, lights, and other electrical loads).

Miserably Failure isn’t only being used to describe the old-school “google bomb” any more.

Here’s the home page of Propeller.com right now:

So what are others saying?

Top Story on New Propeller Says it All - There aren’t a whole lot of things that you can say.  While there seems to be some pretty nifty features available now, this just isn’t what everyone was waiting for.  Some people we’ve spoken to about it are downright angry.

Propeller Takes on Digg and Other Social News Portal - By all means, Propeller has the making of great social news portal.However, it is not free of spammers and users who will try to make the site as undesirable as they can with their nasty and objectionable comments. Hence, to prevent these people from polluting the site, Propeller is a fully moderated site by its editorial team as well as some help from the Propeller community members as well.

Propeller 2.0 Launches: Ditching The Vote Count, Adding A Mascot - Propeller, AOL’s Digg-like news site, launches version 2.0 later this morning. The site sports a new design and logo and now has a mascot - described as “part professor, part citizen journalist” (see image below).

But the biggest feature change is the removal of a pure Digg-like vote count. In its place is an algorithm based popularity ranking of 1-10, which takes into account “many more aspects of participation” when determining popularity. Voting on a story is now called the more nebulous “prop it.” The service has also cut down the number of news categories. Those remaining include Arts & Entertainment, Business & Finance, Family, Humor, News, Science & Technology, Sports and Style.

Moniker has released their list of domains that will be listed for sale at the Affiliate Summit in Boston August 10 through Thursday, August 21.  As always, you can check out the full inventory here.

Clients.com
AffiliateForum.com
CreditCheck.us
FindALender.com
MortgageBanking.com
PriceComparison.usSuperSaving.com
RealEstateListed.com
SaleFinder.com
FinancePlan.com
Made-In-The-Usa.com
RealEstateMortgages.com
Warrantied.com
PcBuy.com
WirelessStore.com
AutoRebates.com
SmartPhoneGadgets.com
Trades.net
OnlineDiscounts.com
SellingTips.com
OnlineRegistry.com
QualifyMe.com
SpeakerStore.com
FindBestJobs.com
LongDistanceProvider.com
QuickBusinessCredit.com
OrlandoHotelGuide.com
TicketSavers.com
NewCarPreview.com
SpamClear.com
ThinkAffiliate.com
SearchAffiliate.com
VacationDiscount.com
CareerHelpers.com
TricksToSave.com
GreatRepairs.com
LowDownPayments.com
247Flower.com
TrafficForLease.com
AffiliateForex.com
RestaurantAffiliates.com
SportAffiliates.net
SalesLeadProvider.com
WallStreetAffiliate.com

Google is reportedly in talks with Digg (again) to acquire the social news site.  Google would be adding a very nice addition to their Google News property that was recently touted as being worth nearly $100 million by Google’s VP, Marissa Mayer.  Currently Google news shows no ads, will that change with a digg integration? Maybe, and that would be a big blog to Microsoft, whom has an advertising deal with digg.

One of Google’s philosophies is to build properties that tie into the larger model of selling advertising on their site.  If you give away enough products, people will come back over and over, and at some point there is an opportunity to display ads or sell through your channel.  Digg would be a good fit for Google’s model right now.