Engagement is all the rage in Internet marketing, especially when companies like MasterCard talk about how to measure it and why it’s important. Engagement is reaching the right people, and motivating them to do something. Today, you have more opportunity than ever before to reach market segments on a micro level.

Geographic Targeting

Targeting users by location is a huge boost for local business, especially those who rely on mobile. Mobile users are more likely to buy, and banner advertising aimed at their location can boost sales. Geo-targeting also helps eliminate a state where your offer may not apply, which is common in affiliate and lead generation campaigns.

Demographic Targeting

Targeting by gender, age, and income level are all possible now thanks to greater amounts of data on users. Companies like Facebook have helped to catalog and crunch data, and those practices have filtered down to many buy-side platforms offering better quality traffic at a fair rate.

Retargeting

Marketers now have a second chance to reach users at a fraction of the cost. Retargeting looks at users who have viewed your website or your display advertising, and reaches out to them specifically. Advertising needs repeat views to sink in, and retargeting allows marketers to reach these segments alone.

Final thoughts

When you micro-target your audience, you remove all of the irrelevant page views your campaigns can accumulate. That immediately cuts spend, and should raise the overall response rates of your campaigns. If you’re unsure of a new segment that you’re targeting, try opening a new campaign to test that variable.

Bio: Ted Dhanik is an Internet marketing thought leader, and CEO of engage:BDR. Ted Dhanik began his work with MySpace.com and LowerMyBills.com, learning the secrets to banner advertising. Find out how to generate leads through Internet marketing tips from Ted Dhanik.

Spinning magnetic Disc-based storage mostly sold by HP, EMC, NetApp and many others are faced with a competition from flash. Toshiba invented the flash technology back in 1984. Chips stored data when the device even turned off and uses less energy, works faster and require less space. Memory cards and USB memory sticks started to use the technology first and around year 2000 much more uses were added to the roster. New chip technology allowed it to produce cheaper chips and allow it to store more data. This paved the way for flash chips to be used even in data centers. Sales of flash chips are expected to rise to $1.6 billion a year by 2016.

Some data centers faced with disc-storage limitations are switching over to flash. The popularity of data centers within last few years creates a steady demand for flash chip makers. This may be why traditional storage makers are acquiring startup flash chip manufacturers to get into the game. The disc-based storage leader EMC acquired three startups within last few years. With the number of flash makers entering the competition, prices of flash are seen lot of pressure and expected to go even further down.

This article was written by Phin Upham

Pierre Omidyar founded AuctionWeb in September of 1995. The company was based out of San Jose, and it was part of a larger group of sites that Omidyar was managing for personal reasons. Omidyar was amazed when his first item sold: a broken laser pointer that went for $14.83. Omidyar even went so far as to ask the bidder if he realized that the laser pointer was broken. The buyer claimed he collected broken lasers, odd, but it was enough to motivate Omidyar to pursue his creation.

Omidyar had the company’s PR team fabricate a rumor that AuctionWeb was created to help his wife sell Pez dispensers. This was an elaborate ruse meant to compensate for the fact that the media didn’t find his actual motives all that interesting.

The site was just a side project until he was asked to upgrade to a business service by his internet service provider. The change in cost is what forced him to seek out a method to monetize the site. Omidyar hired his first employee specifically to process all of the new checks that would come in as the site grew.

Omidyar formally changed the company name to eBay in 1997, after a merger that allowed the company to sell plane tickets. eBay came from Omidyar’s consulting group: Echo Bay, but the name was already taken by a gold mining company. He shortened it to eBay and found the domain was not taken.

When eBay went public in 1998, Omidyar and his partner became instant billionaires.

No one wants to fail at their job, but tons of people start and fail at affiliate marketing every day. Most of these are fly-by-night efforts that were never destined to success, but some affiliates will pour thousands into a campaign hoping to make it work. Stop paying to learn what the experts already know. These obvious flags are guaranteed to turn your campaigns into failures, so avoid them to reap rewards of your work.

Automate Too Quickly

As recently as a few years ago, “set and forget” was the affiliate mantra for display advertising. There was a time when you could tweak your campaigns to get just the right settings before you sat back and watched the numbers roll in. This is not so true today. You can no longer rely on your targeting settings to remain effective, because other advertisers bid for the top spots in your area. You can no longer rely on your bids beating competitors, because advertisers are constantly fighting for the top position and will push your ads further down the page, if not entirely off of it.

Trying to automate your campaigns too quickly is the fastest way to fail. Instead, look for what you can automate, like the time of days your ads run, and try to take the stress off of your own workload.

Advertise Without Researching

Affiliate marketing is built on research. The more data you can assemble for your banner advertising, the more likely you are to hit your target and score a conversion. One of the biggest reasons that affiliates lose money is a lack of research. You need to know your core market for the product you’re selling, and any details you can glean about them. Learn about where they shop, what their income levels are, and what problems they deal with. You should also have a sense of what works in your niche, so you have some copy in mind when you design your ad.

Never Push Boundaries

If you don’t try to change up your advertising content, you’re bound to fail. Content marketing has been around for a while, going all the way back to vintage magazines and pamphlets from the Victorian period and earlier. If you try to rely on the same ideas, or in some cases the same content, you won’t be able to attract new attention. Your landing page should be specific to the buyer’s needs, which automation can’t account for.

Bio: Ted Dhanik is an expert in mobile, video and display advertising. As the co-founder of engage;BDR, Ted Dhanik manages business development and builds leads. Found out how to build successful campaigns with tips from Ted Dhanik.

The development of the modern circuit board really began in the early 20^th century. It was German inventor Albert Hanson who first discovered how to laminate flat foil conductors on an insulated board. Since, circuit boards have become crucial to the operation of electronic devices in the home and workplace. These important components would not be possible without advanced manufacturing techniques.

Mapping Boards

The first step in the creation of a circuit board is to map the wafer and plot out where the circuitry will actually go. There is a process called photolithography that is used to add a kind of roadmap to the board. Next, a sputter deposition system is used to lay the conductive materials onto the board itself.

Conductive Materials

The primary material used in the creation of a circuit board is copper-based. Copper is highly conductive of electricity, and fulfills the requirements a circuit board needs. Copper thickness is usually specified in micrometers, and a square foot usually requires about an ounce of melted down copper. Using a PECVD system, manufacturers can apply three or more layers of copper to the board, creating a heavy copper layer.

Final Thoughts

Circuit boards need to be able to draw in power and then disperse that power to the proper units. The creation of these boards is highly regulated, with safety standards designed to limit flammability and document maximum temperature threshold. These boards are live electrical parts, so they must be able to operate safely without sparking or shorting out.

Denton Vacuum, LLC sells thin film evaporation devices for advanced manufacturing techniques. Find heavy duty manufacturing devices online at Denton Vacuum, LLC.

Digital-image sensors converts optical image into an electronic image. Today’s most used technology types include semiconductor charge-coupled devices (CCD) or complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) or N-type metal-oxide-semiconductor (NMOS). As smartphones and other mobile devices become more popular demand for digital-image sensors are expected to increase. CMOS is widely used in smartphones, tablets and other devices that uses installed cameras. Smartphones alone is expected to demand 1.7 billion units by 2017.

Santa Clara, California based OmniVision Technologies is the world’s largest maker of digital-image sensors. It has helped Apple until iPhone 4S which came out in 2011, supplying with sensors. Today it is helping Apple with their iPads and other makers of smartphone and other device to compete with mainstream stand-alone cameras with tiny cameras embedded in smartphones and other devices such as GoPro cameras. Sony is becoming its main competitor accounting for more than 34 percent of the market share and now supply tiny sensors to Apple for its iPhone 4S and others. Samsung claims it has 13 percent of the market share and another viable main player in the field.

OmniVision makes tiny image sensors for smartphones and other devices that range in cost from 40 cents to about $4 a piece.

Remember the megabyte and the gigabyte era? That was not too long ago. Megabytes and gigabytes may not be enough to count storage capacities by 2016 and the technology world is getting ready for zettabyte as informed by Cisco Systems. What is a zettabyte? It is one trillion gigabytes of data.

Global data traffic is increasing by about 21 percent a year according to a recently published report by Cisco Systems. In 2007, according to the same source global data traffic was around one Exabyte, equal to one billion gigabytes. The next step will be to reach one zettabyte by 2016. What’s after that and when will we reach the next level? According to Cisco Systems beyond zettabyte will be yottabyte, which is 1,000 zettabytes. In other words this equals to 250 trillion DVDs. Cisco estimates that we will reach that capacity soon after 2016. What is fueling this crazy expansion? According to Cisco System it is video. It estimates that video streaming will occupy more than 79 percent of data traffic by 2018, from the current 66 percent. Netflix and YouTube combined are responsible for more than 50 percent of downloads in North America.

Smart surface glass such as Google Glass is in news lately and expected to make a limited release of its wearable eye glass. It is not only Google who is going to benefit from it; glass manufacturers such as Corning that makes Willow Glass can also benefit from the new technology. Corning also makes popular Gorilla Glass 3 used in Apple’s iPhone.

Introduced in June 2013, the bendable thin (0.1 millimeter) and light Willow Glass allows operations such as displays more cost-effectively. Thinness, strength and flexibility allow the glass to be used in wearable such as Google Glass. It also allows the glass to resist high temperatures. It is capable of handling liquid crystal displays (LCD) as well as Organic Light Emitting Diodes (OLED) displays making it more suitable for smartphones, laptops and tablets. Curving flexibility will allow it to be used in non-flat surfaces. Willow Glass is capable of protecting sensitive electronics parts from moisture and heat. This allows it to be rolled and potentially used in solar panels. Commercial manufacturing of Willow Glass is expected this year. It could define entirely new products such as displays that fit the curve of your wrist.

This article was written by Ted Dhanik

Copywriting is not a primary concern for display advertising, but it should be. Effective copywriting can be as simple as choosing two words to adorn your banner, or it can involve more complex messaging. Banner advertising makes this practice tricky because it’s difficult to tell when your writing is too much. With a text ad, you know how many characters to work with, but banner ads rely much more on visual aspects.

Here are some of the basics of copywriting for display advertising. Use them to improve your messaging and increase your conversions.

Headline Tips

Because the headline is the first thing the user is likely to see, it’s important that you pack it full of the essentials. Your headline should, at minimum, include the keywords that you used and a brief proposition or sales pitch. Typically, the pitch comes in the form of a question that is on the user’s mind. If you were gathering leads for a hardware store, for instance, you might want to include a question about reliability or price.

You should also include the keywords that you’re bidding on. The idea is that a customer searching for those keywords would probably be more drawn towards your ad if the text featured that keyword.

Body Copy

Banner advertising also has body copy, although this might be the most minimal effect. On the banner itself, you only have so much space to work with. You must fit only the most important keywords into your ad text, arranging that text around the colors in your image. Design know-how will come in handy as you position your text. Remember that a banner is not a text ad, and too much text can make the picture feel cluttered. Less is more with banners, so don’t scare your users off with a complex sales proposition. If it’s more than a few words, save it for your landing page.

Facts and Figures

If you can, include some facts to bolster your point. A good place to start might be the national average in savings that a new client can expect when using your product. If you have figures handy that suggest that number, you should use them in your ad. You can also quote the number of users you have or some other relevant statistic.

Final Thoughts

The most important thing to remember when you’re practicing good copywriting is to keep it relevant and enticing. You should always try to get your point across in the fewest possible words, but it’s important that you include keywords that entice the user to click your ad for more information.

Bio: Ted Dhanik has helped big brands like MySpace to launch online. With over fifteen years of sales experience, Ted Dhanik understands direct marketing. To learn more about copywriting for direct marketing, contact Ted Dhanik.

Search for the missing Malaysian Airline jet is getting much needed help from satellites covering the globe 24/7. NASA’s dominance of the orbit is fading due to budget issues of the US government and handfuls of private companies are hurrying to fill the gap. Two big companies in the field of imaging the globe for commercial purposes are DigitalGlobe and Airbus Defence & Space (ADS). The infamous Google, Microsoft and many governments worldwide use their services for imaging. While most satellite data are somewhat old, two new companies, California based Skybox Imaging and Planet Labs, are attempting to provide real-time data. They can provide higher as well as lower-resolution images. Their satellites are less costly than those are currently orbiting the planet. Launching their satellites on rockets also cost less due to the smaller size.

Most pictures you find on the Internet are few years old. Real-time pictures may take few more years to come. It will require a network of satellites covering the entire globe at any given time, but the data could be invaluable for many including the missing airliner. Imagine using satellite images to find best planting and harvesting times to maximize profits for farmers?