Industry News

There's no doubt left that Pinterest is a big player in social networks when it comes to generating revenue for online retailers. It has become a top source of referring traffic, surpassing both Google+ and Twitter in the amount of traffic sent to websites (Source: Shareaholic). Understanding its own importance, Pinterest has unveiled changes that will improve the connections between businesses and users. What's New? In terms of...

How does one get involved with innovative new online products such as Spotify? Day 2 of PubCon launched with an exclusive interview with UK entrepreneur and principal contributor to Spotify, Shakil Khanv, where he shared how he came to be where is today. Since Shakil was young, he always believed that in order to do something extraordinary, he needed to break out of his comfort zone. He considered himself a...

Breaking news from Pubcon: Head of Google's Webspam Team, Matt Cutts, has just announced during his Keynote Speech at Pubcon that Google has launched a new 'disavow links' feature to its Webmaster Tools suite (you can access it here). This apparently gives webmasters the ability to communicate to Google any spammy or low quality backlinks that reflect badly on their website, and suggest that they not...

Google has released a new feature which automatically calculates the "Bacon number" for any celebrity. What's a Bacon number? If you've ever heard of the "six degrees of separation" (the idea that everyone is on average approximately six steps away, by way of introduction, from any other person in the world) then this will be easier to understand. "The Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" was a game started by college students in...

Ah, Bing vs. Google - a battle that will probably never end. In the latest round, Bing recently rolled out a campaign they call "Bing it On!" which very similar to the "Pepsi Challenge" of the 80's. For those not in the know, the Pepsi Challenge was a taste test that took place in the US inside shopping centres and other public locations throughout. A Pepsi rep...

Google has been creating "Doodles" - altered versions of its logo that match a theme or event - for a good long while now. Throughout the London Olympics, Google released daily interactive Doodles which allowed users to play very challenging yet addictive games. The Doodles were themed after popular Olympic sports such as archery, diving and fencing. After playing, users were able post their scores on...

A few weeks ago, I started noticing large pictures of people come up in Google searches, often replacing PPC ads for certain keywords like "music", "seo", "social media", and "food". We even talked about it at our recent Online Business Mastery seminar in Sydney. A day or two later the feature disappeared and only returned today, along with an official blog post by Google on the feature...

iGoogle is set retire on November 1, 2013 with the mobile version already turned off at the end of last month (mobile first, right?!). Needless to say this has left many people unhappy but Google  is sticking by its decision to close the service since announcing it last month - regardless of what the community thinks. Now, even though I'm an avid iGoogle user myself, I tend to agree with. Google's...

  Marissa Mayer, a 13 year veteran of Google, has joined Yahoo! as President and CEO. In a press release issued on Yahoo!'s News Center website today,  Mayer is stated to be, "honoured and delighted to lead Yahoo!, one of the Internet's premier destinations for more than 700 million users". Through her time as Vice President of Local, Maps and Location Services at Google, Mayer championed many...