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Satisfied On-line Shoppers Adding Up
June 1, 2005 
By Susan Kuchinskas

Online sales are booming. But even the top-grossing e-tailers may be leaving money on the table, a study reported on Wednesday.

"You can have strong online revenues but if you're not engaging site visitors in the way they want, you are leaving money on the table -- and for some of these retailers it's worth a lot of money," said Larry Freed, an online satisfaction expert and CEO of ForeSee Results.

ForeSee produced the study of the 40 top-grossing online retailers with FGI Research.

Freed said customer satisfaction is a good indicator of the growth potential for the Internet channel. "When you look at a company's financials, it tells you what has happened," Freed said. "Satisfaction gives an indication of what's going to happen."

ForeSee used the methodology of the University of Michigan's American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) to assess the satisfaction of shoppers using the top sites. It found a gap of nearly 30 points in customer satisfaction between the top-rated sites and the ones at the bottom.

The top-rated company was DVD rental company Netflix (Quote, Chart), with an 85 ACSI score; it ranked 17th in terms of online sales. Tied for second place were bookseller Amazon.com (Quote, Chart), the top seller online, and QVC.com, the Internet arm of the TV-shopping channel, both with ACSI scores of 84.

The worst-rated online retailer was Kmart, with a score of 69; the discount store also was 36th out of 40 in terms of online sales. Costco.com rated only slightly better at 70; it was 26th in terms of sales.

Freed noted that in terms of total retail sales, CostCo (Quote, Chart) is near the top.

"Online satisfaction is quite low in comparison," he said. "This is a company that has a great opportunity in front of them. Consumers love CostCo, but when they go online, they're getting less than average performance."

If CostCo can improve the online experience, he said, it could grow its revenue significantly.

Freed said that, despite predictions that comparison-shopping and price-finding services would slice e-commerce margins razor-thin, price is seldom a very significant factor in whether people like an e-commerce site. Customer-satisfaction issues are accelerated online, he added.

"In an online environment, if I'm not getting what I need, I am going to go to another site at exactly that moment," he said. "If I'm physically at Wal-Mart (Quote, Chart), to go to a Target is somewhat of an effort."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
R G V  N E W S L E T T E R


JUNE 2005

Welcome to the Rockbridge Global Village, Inc. Newsletter. We have selectively found information and articles that may be of interest to our customers.  We hope that you find information and topics within this newsletter interesting and useful.


Topics in this newsletter:

Satisfied Online Shoppers Adding Up
Ask Jeves Zooms in on Relevance
Yahoo Movies Get Personal
Legislation Aims to Stop Muni Wi Fi
McAfee Buys Wireless Security


Ask Jeves Zooms in on Relevance
May 26, 2005  By Susan Kuchinskas

Ask Jeeves (Quote, Chart) unleashed Zoom, a related-search tool to help searchers narrow or expand the topic, and Web Answers, which provides answers to explicit or implicit questions.

Two new features that went live on Ask Jeeves reflect enhancements of the search service's core technology as well as a push to help users find relevant results faster.

Zoom is a navigation tool that appears to the right of search results, letting the user zoom in or out on the concept. When appropriate, it lists topic suggestions appear in three categories: Narrow Your Search, Expand Your Search and Related Names.

"For us, related topics is second-most used product on our site, so it's really important to us to make the product better," said Ask Jeeves product manager Young Mi Chun.

Zoom uses the clustering ability of the company's Teoma search technology, which breaks the Web into "communities" of topics. The technology identifies relationships between the communities, and then groups them conceptually.

For example, when a searcher types in an ambiguous word like Bush, if natural search results relating to the U.S. president aren't what's wanted, Zoom can help narrow the search to information about the band, song lyrics, the White House and something else.

On the other hand, the searcher could widen the topical net to include Iraq, the American flag or the Republican party. Since there is plenty of Web material showing this word is a name, Jeeves also returns related names, in this case including Kerry, Saddam and Clinton.

Other search providers, including Vivisimo and Grokker, also group search results by topic. (Grokker delivers results in graphical maps rather than lists.) In January, AOL revamped its search, licensing Vivisimo's tech to provide a list of topic groups to the side of natural results.

Chun said that Ask Jeeves communities differ from Vivisimo's clusters because Jeeves analyzes the contents of Web pages to identify concepts, while Vivisimo uses keyword frequency to name its clusters.

Search rival Yahoo (Quote, Chart) also offers related topics. In the Raleigh search, Yahoo offers a list of associated topics, such as Raleigh bikes and Raleigh chopper, at the very top of the results, followed by two sponsored results. Google Suggest, still in beta, automatically fills in a list of expanded queries that appear in below the query box, using a predictive text method. Users can scroll down through the list to find the town, the bikes, etc. AOL offers a similar feature in its search.

The other search enhancement is Web Answers, which aims to provide direct answers to questions contained in queries, rather than supplying lists of links to pages on which the answer might be found. Jeeves already offers Smart Answers, which are pulled from third-party structured data sources. Web Answers are culled from the Web itself.

"With our Smart Answer technology, we're finding partners and content that is very structured," said product manager Ryan Massie. "Web Answers uses our knowledge of the Web to find answers from the communities Teoma is building and from Web content. It identifies that a snippet is the mostly answer to the question and brings you back the answer to the query."

In addition to the Web Answer the technology identifies as most relevant, a link to more Web Answers is included directly to the right.

Web Answers may be triggered by questions or words such as who or where, as well as by superlatives such as longest or deadliest. Like Smart Answers, when the automated technology identifies a potential Web Answer, it's labeled as such and presented as the top organic search result. In company tests, Web Answers improved the click-through rate on the top search result by over 200 percent, indicating that the top result was the most relevant.

"They started off with the promise that you could ask a question and get an answer," said Chris Sherman, editor of SearchDay, which is owned by the same corporation as internetnews.com. "They've finally realized that vision in a true technical sense."

It's unclear, however, how big a role search technology plays in attracting users. According to Internet market research company Nielsen NetRatings, in March 2005 Ask Jeeves was a distant fifth in share of total searches, handling just 1.8 percent.

"I think Jeeves users are a lot like Apple (Quote, Chart) users," Sherman said. "They're not in the majority, but they tend to be very loyal." Still, he said, the new functions are genuinely useful. "Google doesn't offer this; Yahoo doesn't offer this. It might encourage some people to try Jeeves."

There's another reason Jeeves needs to highlight concepts: Often, natural search results are all but obscured by sponsored links, which appear at the head, sometimes pushing all organic result off the screen.

"They've acknowledged the problem, and they're grappling with it," Sherman said, adding that the pending acquisition of the search provider by IAC/InterActive Corp. could lead to more changes. Said Sherman, "I think the intent is to build Jeeves into a true contender."

 


Legislation Aims to Stop Muni Wi Fi
June 3, 2005  By Roy Mark

U.S. Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Texas) wants to take state and local governments out of the broadband business. It's for their own good, the former Southwestern Bell executive said.

Under the terms of the Preserving Innovation in Telecom Act (H.R. 2726) introduced by Sessions, state and local governments would be prohibited from offering telecommunications, telecommunications services, information services or cable service in any geographic area in which a private entity is already offering a substantially similar service.

Governments already offering telecom services would be grandfathered under Sessions' legislation. The bill also provides that in markets where private entities fail to offer service, municipal governments would be permitted to build networks and offer service.

"Rather than investing in vital public works projects, some local and state governments are investing their limited funds into telecommunications projects and putting taxpayer dollars at risk," the five-term congressman from Dallas said in a statement. "By choosing to invest their limited resources in telecommunications infrastructures, municipal governments often duplicate services already provided by a private entity."

Gina Vaughn, Sessions' communications director, told internetnews.com in an e-mail response, "We believe ... that under normal circumstances private providers are the ones with resources at their disposal to make the upgrades that come with continually evolving technology."

She added, "Municipal governments, with the many public works demands they face, are not in an ideal situation to be pouring money into continued telecom infrastructure updates."

Over the last several years, numerous cities, most notably Philadelphia, have considered launching their own wireless networks in direct competition with local providers. Republicans in particular are opposed to cities competing with private enterprise.

Earlier this week, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush signed a law similar to Sessions' national proposal prohibiting Florida cities from offering broadband if competitive services already exist.

Pennsylvania pushed through laws in December restricting municipal-backed broadband services, with Philadelphia receiving an exemption from the new law. The city plans to sell its wireless broadband service to homes and businesses, while providing free access in public spaces.

"My goal in introducing this legislation is to discourage municipal governments from wasting taxpayer funds on building duplicative infrastructure, while at the same time encouraging private companies to offer continually innovating service in underserved areas by removing the specter of government competition," Sessions said.

Before winning election to Congress, Sessions spent more than 16 years at the Bell Labs in New Jersey, and served as a Southwestern Bell district manager for marketing in Dallas.


McAfee Buys Wireless Security
June 2, 2005  By Tim Gray

Security software vendor McAfee (Quote, Chart) gave its credentials in the Wi-Fi security market a boost on Thursday with the acquisition of Wireless Security.

The Calif.-based Wireless Security already provides McAfee with the scanning technology it offers free to consumers. The service allows users to check their wireless connections and hardware to see if intruders have tried to breach their wireless connection points.

"The world we live in has become increasingly wireless, yet most users do not have the proper security enabled and additional protection installed to secure their wireless networks," George Samenuk, Chairman and CEO of McAfee, said in a statement. "This acquisition builds on our existing security technology and enables us to further protect the growing wireless environment."

Wireless Security's technology will be bundled with McAfee's core products, including its Internet Security Suite, VirusScan and Personal Firewall, according to McAfee.

The move is also expected to increase the number of security services that McAfee can now offer through its reseller channel.

"McAfee is committed to providing innovative, comprehensive solutions that protect customers from security threats at all access points," Samenuk said.

Research firm IDC has predicted the worldwide adoption of wireless access points will continue to increase. In the next four years, IDC researchers say, these access points will get a 36 percent bounce annually.

The prime factors credited with this growth include a higher share of households with multiple computers, increased broadband access, and more users adopting notebook computers rather than desktops.

McAfee said a round of internal McAfee testing showed that, of 60,000 opt-in wireless networks, 47.9 percent were unprotected.

Wireless Security's technology already supports WEP and WPA-PSK, as well as nearly 100 percent of network cards, said McAfee. It also supports the most popular routers from the large vendors such as Linksys, D-Link and Netgear, the company said.

The technology, which will be developed by McAfee, is expected to launch as a consumer product in the fall. The company also plans to integrate the technology into the small business Managed VirusScan solution to provide comprehensive protection for the business user that is automatically delivered and managed to protect against evolving threats.

McAfee also announced a partnership with Bitfone to deliver security protection for mobile phones over the air.

According to McAfee, Bitfone will offer an embedded McAfee scanning engine as part of its device management solution, allowing mobile operators to detect, recover from and prevent security threats to mobile phone software from viruses, worms, auto-dialers and spyware.

"There is no doubt that mobile security will become a real issue with monetary consequences for operators and enterprises alike," Victor Kouznetsov, senior vice president of mobile security solutions at McAfee, said in a statement.

"By partnering with Bitfone, we can embed our scanning engine into a broad base of OTA-enabled devices, laying the groundwork for operators to implement an active threat-management strategy using our proven security engine with Bitfone's leading mobile device-management solutions," he said.


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Yahoo Movies
 


Yahoo Movies Get Personal

May 25, 2005
By Susan Kuchinskas

Yahoo Movies went wide on Wednesday with a personal recommendation service designed to help fans learn about titles that suit them.

Beginning today, visitors to Yahoo (Quote, Chart) Movies who click on "My Movies" will see a "My Recommendations" tab leading to listings powered by ChoiceStream. Users can rate movies they've seen -- or banish them permanently from sight. They also can compare how the critics and Yahoo users rated them.

"In looking at ways to build out Yahoo Movies and make it more helpful, recommendations was the logical next step," said Jed Rosenzweig, director of production for Yahoo Movies, which already provided tools that let users rate and review movies. "This new service takes movie guidance to the next level."

The site lets visitors browse movies showing in theaters, those playing on local television and new releases on DVD or video. The site also pulls up reviews from "Fans Like You," that is, people whose preferences seem to match the user's.

"We'll go to the users that have opted in and allowed themselves to be included in the community feature. It searches for folks with profiles similar to yours, like-minded users. It's a great discovery tool," said Steven Johnson, CEO of ChoiceStream.

E-commerce opportunities abound, thanks to integration with Yahoo Shopping. Yahoo Movies users can quickly find show times and click to buy theater tickets online or order a DVD. They can watch trailers and clips, read news and even keep an eye on the box office gross, all content that's monetized by advertising.

ChoiceStream specializes in exposing more of a customer's content, in this case, Yahoo's database of more than 100,000 feature film and television titles. The company also powers Yahoo Shopping Gift Finder, which was launched in April.

Cambridge, Mass.-based ChoiceStream tapped into the local academic community to build its technology using "choice modeling," a different statistical approach to inferring information from a set of attributes, such as which movies someone likes.

When it comes to movies and television shows, the software automatically analyzes program descriptions, reviews and several third-party data sources to set up the lists of attributes that predict people's preferences.

"Our understanding of what drives your interest is quite potent when deciding what kinds of shows to promote," Johnson said. Users typically need to rate only three to five movies to begin getting recommendations that seem right, he added.

The movie recommendation service has been in public beta since early April. Rosenzweig said that Yahoo hasn't tracked usage of the movie recommendation technology during the beta period, but user comments show that the recommendations are more accurate and useful than those of other services.

"We've been able to recommend movies that users really want to watch," he said, "instead of offering recommendations that offer more of the same."