Ebay has plans to close its site in China and partner with Tom Online Inc. an Internet company based in Beijing. Ebay will have a 49 percent stake in the new venture while Tom Online will have a 51 percent share in the deal. The unnamed site is scheduled to open sometime in 2007.

I must admit, I’ve been tempted to experiment with adding images next to Google AdSense ads.

Mention Second Life to some people and you open a door to skepticism and dismissive opinions. It reminds me of similar reactions about blogging just a couple of years ago.

The term “work in progress” applies to almost everything in eBusiness, but it might be especially applicable to image search. Some big advances may come in the near future, however, courtesy of a Swedish company named Polar Rose. It has announced that it’s capable of “computing 3D portraits from 2D photos,” and that its software will be able to recognize the people in those photos.

Instead of dolling out thousands of dollars worth of gifts that high-end customers will never use, Yahoo! has taken a philanthropic approach to holiday gift giving.

The US government, via its revamped FirstGov platform, has plenty of suggestions on how people can handle all that the holidays throw their way.

Today, Apollo caught my undivided attention when I saw the post from a Rich Inter Application Mountaineer, Ryan Stewart.

Let’s just get this out of the way first: when someone says cron is not working, it almost always is, and they have just misunderstood something basic.

After you have set up your opt in list and started collecting leads you need to decide whether to use HTML or plain text for your follow up and broadcast messages.

You have to get up pretty darn early, if you want to try and game Digg.

Triggers are stored procedures which are fired when data is modified in an underlying table.

In a report published today, comScore went into further detail into its earlier announcement that MySpace had passed Yahoo in terms of page views for the 2006 calendar year. In reviewing the numbers, the statistics firm admitted that due to the progressive nature of Web 2.0 technology, analytical methods for determining site traffic would need to be updated in 2007.

Despite being incredibly sick of always hearing about “the new google”, and not believing it can happen due to the extremely high barrier to entry, I think there *IS* still opportunity for someone to gain significant share of the stagnating search marketplace.

Author Rogers Cadenhead has owned Wargames.com for eight years, but faces the prospect of losing the domain to MGM Studios in arbitration.

It’s often refreshing to see a bit of goofiness at the corporate level, and Google, much more than some other companies, seems to have a good sense of humor. Philipp Lenssen collected photos of some Google-related gags, and posted them for all to see.

So you’ve landed the client and their branding project. Congratulations! Now you’ve got to get down to the business of creating their marketing collateral-everything from the logo on the letterhead to the tri-fold brochure and interactive web site.

Can a cool, sleek new design garner enough buzz to cause an upheaval in the search engine popularity ranks? Keep in mind that we do live in a society where the general public WILL respond to the way something looks if it’s compelling enough (cars, iPods, mobile phones, clothes, celebrities).

At the Chicago Search Engine Strategies conference held earlier this month, two themes were repeated in various ways by different panels of speakers that I felt were strong messages to keep in mind.

Sure, Google searchers like to keep abreast on world events, as long as those world events happen near Paris. Ahem, Paris Hilton that is. Like jewelry, we like our celebrities, and news about our celebrities, shiny, dumb and useless

I’m an advocate of the “combined trips” way of moving around town; it saves time and gas, both of which appear to be in short supply. Planning these excursions just got easier, because Google Maps now allows for multiple destinations within its driving directions.

As I noted a couple of weeks ago, I was a panelist on one of the sessions in the 2006 MIT Venture Capital Conference in Cambridge, MA.

Americans are spending an increasing amount of time-consuming media. The variety ranges from TV, radio, Internet, newspapers and magazine. According to the Census Bureau’s Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2007 half of our lives will be spent consuming some form of media.

Most organizations do not properly understand or manage content. They fail to realize that quality content is now key to productivity, cost effectiveness, sales, and customer satisfaction.

A few months ago I blogged (How ColdFusion can save your business) about how you can use the onSessionEnd feature of Application.cfc to track the success of your ecommerce site.