For well over a decade now, the Web, the Internet on which it rides and the various software devices and programs that make it work have been evolving so rapidly–creating so many business opportunities and challenges–that many small and mid-sized businesses have been busy just hanging on.

The good news: Things aren’t going to slow down. The challenging news: Things really aren’t going to slow down. And while envisaging all the incarnations of these technologies is all but impossible, entrepreneurs would be wise to try to anticipate the changes that could truly boost (or upend) their businesses.

Part 1: Where We’ve Been And Where We Are

It’s a mistake to try to label the Web with iterations: Web 1.0, Web 1.4, Web 2.0 and so forth. The Web is too ubiquitous, too constantly in flux, too flexible, too all-things-for-all-people-and-businesses to be comfortably categorized.

Part 2: The Next Web

The essence of the Web for business is the same as the essence of every business undertaking: communication, content, transaction, resolution, and mutual benefit.

For some time now, and from now on, content will be the most essential element. Whether it’s a product description or catalog entry, a price and specifications negotiation, an e-mail dialogue, a Web-based consultancy or Web-marketed hard goods, the ability of your business to deliver the appropriate content to the appropriate recipients is now the name of the business game.

It’s the same as it’s always been — only, as the Web evolves, it’s becoming different.

Maybe very different.

Among the biggest Web 3.0 (and beyond) buzzes right now is the pursuit of the semantic Web.

What the semantic Web’s enthusiasts promise is the transformation of everything on the Web — documents, videos, e-mails, music, images, everything — into elements of a database.

This one database will stretch across, and through, the Web, and will be increasingly searchable in natural language – the language you, and more important, your customers, use.

The goal? Far more effective searches from far more natural queries, generating far more specific and appropriate results from within Web pages, documents, videos, exclusive of the applications in which they were created or housed, rather than the morass of Web sites and pages that searches return now.

Think of it as mashups on steroids. The difference is that the machines — your tools, programs, and software agents — do the mashing for you and your customers.

For this approach to Web 3.0 to work — at least work in the way the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) envisions it — will require the development of “common formats for integration and combination of data drawn from diverse sources” – a true iteration or transformation of the way the Web works.

In short, it will be a Web of data designed — or redesigned — for interpretation by the machines we use to store and access the data. And as the next section shows, that has big implications for the way we’ll do business.

Talking Semantics

Take a look at what Informationweek had to say about the Semantic Web’s business potential back in 2002 … two years before the term Web 2.0 was coined.

Here’s what Web visionary (and the coiner, in 2001, of “Semantic Web”) Tim Berners-Lee told BusinessWeek

about the semantic Web.

And since the semantic Web crosses media types, watch a video of Berners-Lee talking semantic Web at MIT.

Have Your Machine Sell To My Machine

Assuming the Semantic Web (or something like it and its potential capabilities) takes shape — no less risky than any assumption, as plenty of Semantic Web skeptics point out — the underlying common formats will speak more clearly than ever to the machines and applications accessing them.

Couple that with continued advances in both hardware (processing power, storage capacity, high-speed connectivity) and software (near-intelligent agents that “understand” what you do, what your customers want, and what your employees need, and how to bring the various parties together with the right content) and you have not only a transformed Web but a transformation in the way we do business, and other pursuits, across the Web.

Add in the spread of Web-based software as a service (SaaS) and the ongoing dispersal of cloud computing and you start to get a sense of where all of this might be headed and what it could mean for business.

On the mundane side of things, some of what we’ll get are outgrowths of tools we already use, regular reorders, just-in-time supply chain monitoring, etc. Automatic re-ordering of office supplies, for instance, and regularly scheduled maintenance and updates/upgrades — any transaction that’s repetitive, standardized, or commonplace is a prime candidate for being turned over to an automatic agent which will in turn communicate and transact with other auto-agents.

(Sound familiar? Take a look at Alvin Toffler’s The Third Wave — written before the Reagan revolution, much less the Web revolution. It still reads well and is far less quaint than one would imagine.)

Marketing, Selling and Complying on the Next Web

On the core-business side of things, it gets far more interesting. Let’s take a look at some of the possibilities and potentials.

You’ll have far more assurance that your Web-based marketing endeavors are reaching the precise prospects and customers you want them to reach, rather than today’s “craft your keywords and trust you’ll get proper placement” approach. As your customers’ and prospects’ Web tools — browsers, calendars, clipboards — grow more familiar with their owners’ preferences, histories, and needs, they’ll be far likelier to bring your products and services to their attention — flagged and pre-vetted — as opposed to your current dependence upon carefully crafted keywords vying to catch the attention of a search engine.

What goes for your customers will go for your sales force as well. Prospecting for customers will become a far more automated, and far more efficient process, again based on the various systems’ deeper relationships with what you sell and what specific customers — from individual consumers to enterprise purchasing agents — want.

Financial reports, taxes, and compliance regulations are all items ideally suited for content-smart applications and processes. We’re already starting to see some Semantic Web tools applied to compliance matters, and that’s likely to become far more common and also a major business category for both software developers and business service companies.

Imagine, for instance, your company employing software that not only tracks your sales, inventory, costs, etc., but also constantly coordinates and communicates with appropriate regulatory bodies, financial institutions, revenue-collection agencies, counselors to your business, and so on. You’d undoubtedly be no less annoyed by the regulations – but you’d be far less worried about violating them, too.

Part 3: Web 3.0–The Risks And Rewards
Between cybercriminals and consolidation, the next Web can get hazardous. In this third of a three-part series, a look at how to cope with the threats and enable your smaller business to survive and thrive in the world of Web 3.0
Tomorrow’s Threat Environment: More Threatening than Ever

Thanks to the constant coordination and communication that the next Web affords, you might be less worried about violating regulations — as long as your smartware maintains your content’s privacy. (See next section.)

Whatever form, shape, or nature Web 3.0 and subsequent evolutions assume, it’s more than a safe bet that the threat community will rise to the challenges.

Here’s just a (speculative) glimpse of what we might need to be afraid of:

But the cybercrime community isn’t the only threat the evolution of the Web faces.

Consolidation and Content: Big Media, Big Government, and Small and Midsize Businesses

Not for nothing is Microsoft working to wrap Yahoo into its fold, even as Google is working to wrap the whole world (or so it seems) into its, even as Amazon is starting to push a variety of online services into the cloud, and on and on – name a big-biz player in the Web space and you’ve named a company that’s trying to get a handle on the next Web and to guide, if not control, its direction.

The risk here – and it’s probably unavoidable, and may have been so for some time – is that as the big search engines become bigger and bigger, and the players become fewer and fewer, we could find ourselves in a content/search/results situation more sophisticated than today, but otherwise little different: Your Web 3.0 efforts may need to march to a Google/Microsoft/Name-Your-Player tune even as the Web offers the promise of more variety.

Or crawl to that tune. While net neutrality — all Internet traffic is treated the same; the Net is a public thoroughfare — has made Webs 1.0 and 2.0 possible, and will be essential for the content-rich, all-talking-all-videoing-all-everything Web of tomorrow, it’s by no means a sure thing.

In addition to the possible resurgence of Net traffic regs as a legislative issue on state and federal levels, there’s a big biz – the telcos in particular and, potentially, the search cos component — that gives pause, and maybe more than pause.

As far as the big search companies, keep an eye on their relationship to traditional telcos and providers. The more bandwidth they eye and buy, the likelier they are to try and slow things down for their competition.

And we’re already seeing some providers slow down users’ content-transfers, most notoriously Comcast’s peer-to-peer blocking controversy but also the access restrictions that satellite Internet providers routinely impose on their users. (Most of those users are, by the way, located in rural areas — much of which remains underserved by high-speed broadband and for which, thus, much of Web 3.0 and beyond may be unobtainable.)

But Let’s Look At The Bright Side

Early on, I promised you a kaleidoscope, and that’s what I’ve tried to provide – but looking at the Web and its possible future(s) even through a kaleidoscope can only give a hint of where we are, much less where we’re headed.

So let’s look, close-up, at some tools and initiatives that can help your business thrive on this Web, that Web, and whatever Webs come our way:

• Think small: Those mobile devices – phones, BlackBerrys, etc. – mentioned in passing early in the piece are likely to be the devices for tomorrow’s Web. Take a hard look at your core marketing and communications materials and if they aren’t optimized for mobile delivery to mobile screens, start doing so now. Those gorgeous pages optimized for desktop flatscreens don’t play well in the palm of a customer’s hand.

• Know your vendors – and know what they know (or don’t) about Web 3.0: Your Web and IT teams, or third-party Web service vendors, had better be on their game as tomorrow’s Web takes shape. Its arrival will be anything but a seamless transition à la a new operating system (and we all know how seamless those are.) Rather, the new Web will emerge piecemeal, with tools deployed, techniques tried, approaches embraced and abandoned. Better make sure your people are up to date with the future.

• Be prepared to move beyond text – and pay for it: Like it or not, the next generation of the Web – and more specifically its users – may be far more video than text oriented. That means increased costs for you, but it could pay off in increased business.

• Customize your content: The more carefully you’ve mounted your current Web content with an eye to individualizing to your own business as well as the business requirements of the various search engines, the better off you’ll be as new approaches to the Web emerge. Optimize your content for your business’s identity as well as for successful searches. Maybe it’s time for a new position in the hierarchy: Chief Content Officer, anyone?

That last point speaks clearly to what the next Web will be, whether the Semantic Web we looked at here, or a 3-D virtual video game-like Web that some foresee, or something as yet unforeseen — the point is going to be an increased transparency of relationship between content and communications and, as a result, increased transparency and ease and efficiency of communicating your content to your customers, partners, employees, and vendors.

And to the world, if you want, or only to the exact members of the world you want to reach.

Know your business — and make sure every member of your team knows it as well.

That’s what the next Web will be about, that sort of deep and thorough knowledge of yourself and your products and services, the ways in which your customers use them, your competitors’ positions, the trends and currents, opportunities and upheavals that you and your customers face, all open and readable by a variety of means, reachable via a variety of devices.

Be on your business game and be sure your IT and Web teams are on theirs, and you’ll be ready for whatever Web comes your way.

Still, it’s convenient to have road markers when you’re tying to map new territory, especially territory as broad as the Web. The following outline gives a sense of the areas of demarcation between different “versions” of the Web.

Web 1.0: Where We Were (1994 to 2004)

–HTML Web pages
–Browsers
–E-mail becomes ubiquitous as a business tool
–Online stores
–Search engines
–Dot-com boom (and bust)

Web 2.0: Where We Are (2004 to present)

–Fast connections enable more vibrant content
–Much of that content is user-generated
–Online sales become a measurable and increasingly important part of the economy
–Keywords enhance search engine position
–Click-through advertising
–Social networking sites–MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, etc.–create online communities and vastly enhance online marketing (including viral marketing)
–Wikis
–Wireless devices

Web 3.0: Where We’re Headed (ca. 2008 onward)

Keep reading:

Take a look at any of the elements listed above–bearing in mind that this list barely scratches the surface of the technologies and trends that comprise the Web–and think about how it affects both your business and the way you do business.

Some technologies–such as social networking and Wikis–may have been tangential to your business so far (and may remain so). But others–like e-mail, Instant Messaging, browser-based communication, search engines like Google (nasdaq: GOOG – news – people ) and Yahoo! (nasdaq: YHOO – news – people ) and online marketing–are by now so central to virtually every type of business that to think of doing business without them is, well, unthinkable.

Just as clearly, many of these technologies and trends have as yet to be fully integrated into business or fully exploited by it. That’s an ongoing process, evolving even as it progresses.

Standing on this admittedly uncertain terrain, the question is: Where do we go next–and what does that mean for your business? For some answers to those questions, read on.

By Keith Ferrell

That’s roughly where the services known collectively as Web 2.0 are today. These are sometimes defined as web activities that get more valuable the more people use them.

Social networks like MySpace and Facebook are the most familiar examples, but new Web 2.0 companies you’ve never heard of emerge almost daily, creating what is, in effect, a continuous stream of interlinked data, some of which may be about your company, your business contacts, or even about you.

How can you get started? We surveyed some executives who use Web 2.0 services every day and came up with a few suggestions.

LinkedIn

This is probably the easiest Web 2.0 tool to integrate into your day-to-day operations, because it’s built around the business résumé. In Silicon Valley it’s become the usual method for finding and filling jobs; Facebook hired many of its early employees through LinkedIn.

To get going, you just enter your curriculum vitae, search for the names of people you know and trust, and invite them to “connect” to you. For $20 per month you get access to premium features, such as the ability to search for people who have worked for a competitor.

There are plenty of other sites that offer business-specific networking tools, but with 20 million registered users, LinkedIn is by far the largest and busiest; it draws five million visitors per month and doubled in size last year. Carter Lusher, a technology consultant based in Menlo Park, Calif., is particularly taken with a feature that allows him to pose questions to anyone in his LinkedIn network. He recently asked his contacts what they thought about analysts and consultants, like him, who blog. (One blunt reply: They’re “talking balderdash.”)

Facebook

With roots on college campuses, this site may be a little harder for busy executives to appreciate. But more and more are climbing aboard, establishing profiles and “friending” people just like their teenage children (who generally revile Mom or Dad for invading their domain). Forrester (FORR) CEO George Colony thinks every marketer should be using Facebook, if only to see what its 67 million members are up to.

Plenty of corporations already have a presence there. Procter & Gamble’s (PG, Fortune 500) network on Facebook has 10,200 members. The Ernst & Young Careers group has 13,400.IBM’s (IBM, Fortune 500) has 33,000; the company uses it for everything from staying in touch with alumni to setting up private groups for online collaboration.

Twitter

A relative of the IM (instant message) and diminutive cousin of the blog, Twitter is a free service that encourages members to broadcast moment-to-moment updates of what they’re doing or thinking in 140 characters or less. It sounds like a recipe for information overload – and it can quickly become just that.

But if you carefully pick which Twitterers you follow, it can be a pipeline into the private thoughts of whatever subculture you zero in on, from coffee aficionados to Rush Limbaugh dittoheads. With a service called Twitterscan you can even search the tweet-stream by company name.

Blip.tv, a New York-based Internet video startup, uses Twitter to eavesdrop on its customers. In January it started hearing complaints there about one part of its service, a problem it quickly corrected.

“You have to know what people are saying about you,” says Dina Kaplan, Blip.tv’s COO. “If we hadn’t seen those Twitters, we might not have fixed that problem for six months.”

Dopplr

J.P. Rangaswami, who oversees 4,000 people as a managing director at BT, has become a heavy user of this tool for sharing travel itineraries. (He also has 500 friends in Facebook and follows 300 on Twitter.) Before Dopplr, which launched last December, it took repeated e-mails to keep contacts informed of his whereabouts. Now his 140 Dopplr contacts know where he is at any moment.

“You can really optimize your time when traveling,” says Rangaswami. One Dopplr friend recently saw he was going to Dublin and out of the blue recommended a good Indian restaurant.

Dick O’Neill, a former Pentagon strategist who now runs a think tank called the Highlands Forum, tracks about 115 mostly professional friends on Dopplr, even when he’s not traveling.

“My business is about new ideas,” he says. “I want to know when colleagues come to town because I need to keep up with what they’re thinking.”

Want more?

There’s plenty. Ning and Basecamp let businesses set up in-house social networks. Jigsaw invites you to upload and publish your collection of business cards. At Jobscore you and other executives can swap the résumés of job candidates you don’t hire.

It’s all about connections. Dive in.

By David Kirkpatrick

Going forward, discovering how the campaigns failed isn’t useful. Charlotte Selles, panelist and global brand manager for Jim Beam, put it this way: “Given a plainly wrong choice upfront, there isn’t a lot to learn in measuring what happened after that.” She suggested instead looking at why they failed, getting clear about exactly what “wrong choice” was made and taking care not to repeat it. There were three specific errors leading to failure for these campaigns:

• Lack of transparency. In this bucket are campaigns like Cisco’s “Human Network” Wikipedia entry and both HP’s and Wal-Mart’s paid blogging programs.

• Poor execution. Here we find Agency.com’s Subway sandwich pitch, a Molson campaign, and Vespa’s Vespaway blog.

• Poor brand identification. This is when you have a great campaign and incredible pass-around, yet it’s not clear what brand paid for it all. The campaign? Carlton’s “Biggest Beer Ad” pushed onto YouTube. Write the name of that beer down.

Reasons for Failure

Let’s look at what failed, and why.

First, transparency. This was responsible for the bulk of the 10 worst, including both finalists. This isn’t surprising: lying is about the most offensive error a marketer can make. Marketers, long used to being in control of the message, pay little attention to transparency because it’s a given that the message is an ad. On the social Web, however, this distinction must be made clear lest it be confused with genuine conversation. The social Web is incredibly good at shining bright lights into dark corners, and inevitably the marketer-generated conversations are identified. “Sunlight,” as the saying goes, “is the best disinfectant.” Count “transparency” as rule number one on the social Web. Wal-Mart’s “Blogging Across America” and Cisco’s “Human Network” campaigns were hit hard by a lack of basic transparency, an oversight not lost on panelist Jeff Jarvis. It was painful to watch the clip of an ad exec introducing the campaign as he struggled through his delivery with rationalizing phrases like “organic socialization” (a.k.a., “paid blogging”). Even he didn’t appear to buy it.

What would have made these campaigns winners? Being open and honest. At my son’s elementary school, the marquee this month features this thought: “Half of the truth is a whole lie.” Both of these campaigns actually presented truthful content, while obscuring origins and motives. Consider the Wal-Mart campaign: instead of hiding the fact that the campaign was associated with Wal-Mart, it could have made that the central point. It could have featured Wal-Mart and its policy of allowing RVers to stay overnight for free in any Wal-Mart parking lot. It could have built that into a reality-TV-on-the-Web series. Same for Cisco. The Human Network is kind of a cool idea. But a stealth Wikipedia entry? Paid bloggers? We expect more from the firm whose hardware basically runs the Internet.

Under poor execution, we saw a couple of doozies. Agency.com gets credit for trying an innovative approach to pitching Subway. It actually used the tools it sells its clients on. Kudos for eating your own dog food.

Social media can be tough, and it’s great to see a smart agency dig in and try it. The problem was execution: it was limp. I’m not sure if was too cheesy or not cheesy enough. As Steve Hall, Adrants founder and panelist, put it: “The problem was that it was embarrassing to the ad industry, where stuff like what they portrayed really does happen.” A bit more over the top and it might have worked. It could have been hilarious.

Execution is everything. Molson ran a decent social campaign by most accounts, but it failed by inadvertently encouraging (or at least appearing to encourage) binge drinking, something clearly at odds with Molson’s actual policy. The lesson here is to pay attention to current real-world social issues when planning an online social media campaign.

Then there was Vespa, which deserted its campaign-built blog, leaving it to slowly die and giving rise to what panelist and ClickZ Network editor-in-chief Rebecca Lieb called “derelict blog” syndrome. It was shame to see participants, who once powered the blog, slowly lose interest when they realized their efforts weren’t being supported. They turned negative, and the results are now forever captured in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. Preventing derelict blogs is easy: Either craft a plan to continue the campaign if a real community takes hold (always a nice outcome!), or thank everyone, turn the lights out, and lock the doors.

Finally, one of the most basic mistakes of all: an idea so big, so great, so absolutely huge that the actual brand got lost. I’ve seen this ad a dozen times, and I laugh every time. But even in writing this column, I had to confirm the name of the beer it’s designed to promote. Make no mistake: this is great entertainment. But search for this one on YouTube and you’ll find it listed under both Carlton Draught (the actual brand) and Carlson Beer (a competitor). Perhaps that’s actually the brilliance of the campaign. I’m clearly talking about it and spreading the word, and if you look for the competitor’s brand you’ll find Carlton. Maybe “New Coke” was planned from the start to reinforce the Classic audience, too.

Avoid Failure

How do you avoid these errors? Here are my suggestions:

• Think through your disclosure plan ahead of time. There’s nothing wrong with a playful deception. Think about a punch line that’s revealed only after some period, perhaps a week or two. That’s fine. The problem isn’t the deception itself; it’s the intention to permanently deceive. If your campaign doesn’t have a stated disclosure plan at the outset, either rethink it or do something different.

• Pay attention to social norms. Remember, your campaign is likely to be acted on in real life. To the extent you can, be sure that likely real-life extensions are in line with brand standards, as they will (by design) become part of your social media campaign.

• Make sure the brand is clearly positioned. The conversation that results from the ad is the payoff for integrated campaigns’ social components. If the brand is incorrectly identified, it’s a wasted opportunity.

In the end, using social media components in your campaigns requires the same planning as any other campaign, combined with an acute social sensibility. Don’t think about pushing a message to a mass audience; think about having a conversation with one person. Think about that person as if she had all the campaign information in front of her. Because on the social Web, sooner or later she will. What then?

By Dave Evans, The ClickZ Network
http://www.clickz.com/

The thrill of the deal, spreading the word, networking with birds of your feather, getting the scoop — social shopping has all of the trappings, joys and innuendos that fuel commerce.

In 2008, U.S. advertisers are expected to spend nearly $1.6 billion — up 69 percent from the $920 million they will have spent in 2007, according to the report, “Social Network Marketing: Ad Spending and Usage.”  In four years, U.S. ad spend on social-networking sites is expected to reach $2.7 billion.

Social commerce has arrived….so pay attention
Simply put, social commerce is about customers having the means to interact with one another in order to make better buying decisions.

The social aspects of shopping have long been an integral part of our culture first institutionalized and marketed perhaps with the original Tupperware Home Party in 1948. Asking someone where she got that great bag, hearing about the latest sale from a friend or socializing at the mall are all integral parts of our consumer culture.

The advent of ecommerce and, more specifically, word-of-mouth vehicles such as reviews on shopping sites and other online platforms is a bold extension of the power of word of mouth and the social joys that accompany shopping. New media communications now provide an even broader, extensible platform to further ignite the social aspect of shopping.

Social shopping online expresses itself in a multitude of different ways, from so-called social shopping sites with features that encourage word of mouth to social networks such as Facebook that are trying to monetize their social fabric with shopping applications.

What does this all mean for marketers? How can they join in the conversation, start the buzz, spread the word without seeming like…well, like they are trying to sell stuff? What is acceptable in this environment? What are the current options, opportunities and challenges?

To begin to answer these questions requires gaining an understanding of how social shopping is being enacted, the environment, the opportunities and challenges.

The environment
From social networks to social shopping sites and site features that encourage and facilitate social commerce, social shopping is evolving. With most teens and nearly 40 percent of adults visiting social networking sites, advertisers are avidly experimenting on Facebook, MySpace and niche online social networks, according to a new eMarketer report. Social networking sites and services designed around shopping such as Stylehive, Kaboodle and CrowdStorm encourage customer feedback, discussion and reviews. They are rooted in encouraging dialogue, chatter and peer-to-peer sharing of information.

Who are the leaders in this market? Where are people socializing? What are the opportunities for marketers?

Despite increases month over month in traffic, social shopping has not yet become as mainstream as other social networks such as MySpace (67,000,000 uniques/month) with only 1.43 percent of MySpace’s traffic. That said, Kaboodle, ThisNext, StyleHive and StyleFeeder are the leaders in the social shopping market. Kaboodle has the most traffic to date (959,000 uniques/month).

Kaboodle is also on the forefront in terms of monetizing social shopping. Recently, Kaboodle partnered with Shopping.com in an effort to increase revenue. When users feature products on their blogs, Shopping.com will post the prices at which the product is sold online by various merchants. If a user clicks through to the merchant’s site, Kaboodle will earn a share of the fee the merchant pays to Shopping.com for that click.

Social networks such as Facebook are trying to monetize their audience with shopping content and features. While wildly popular, these networks are struggling and experimenting with different revenue models. Some sites plan to (if they have not already) form so-called affiliate relationships with merchants, who often pay percent commissions on sales that come as a result of their products being featured on other sites.

Communities that are built around specific products or genres also encourage social commerce. For instance, FashMatch and StyleZone are online communities for the fashionistas to discuss the latest clothing, shoe and accessory trends. Manolo’s Shoe Blog and All Lacquered Up are blogs devoted to shoes and nail polish, respectively. Through these forums and communities, brands can directly engage with consumers with demonstrated interest in their products.

Consumers are also socializing around e-commerce sites. Overstock.com’s traffic rose 122 percent for the week ending December 2, according to Nielsen’s Kate Niederhoffer. Online reviews and recommendations have been increasing in importance and have evolved from simple product reviews to be more social in nature.

Even bloggers are now pointing consumers to social shopping sites. Review sites like Epinions are included in the category and are a channel that should not be ignored. People would rather take the word of another consumer over advertising from the brand itself. It takes word-of-mouth marketing to a new level. Instead of a girlfriend telling you she got an amazing deal on a pair of Stuart Weitzman shoes at Nordstrom, you go to Stylehive.com, find out what the trendiest shoe styles are, and click the link to endless.com where they’re on sale for 30 percent off.

The opportunities
A recent iCrossing study titled “How America Searches: Online Retail,” found that 42 percent of consumers who view information about brands and products on sites like Wikipedia said the information was extremely or very influential to their online purchase decisions. Blog posts, online videos and brand profiles on social networking sites hold significant weight with 18- to 44-year-old shoppers. Use of customer product reviews and evaluations to research online purchases jumped from 40 percent in 2005 to 49 percent in 2007. Seventy percent of all online shoppers said online reviews were extremely or very important factors in their decision-making process.

For advertisers, social shopping is still increasing in popularity; therefore, from a pure media buy perspective many of the sites do not accept all forms of advertising. Those that accept advertising have signed on with rep firms or networks instead of selling the inventory directly. ThisNext, despite ranking number two in terms of traffic, does not accept advertising at this time. Wists is a social shopping site that only accepts Google PPC advertising.

Some social shopping sites offer the unique opportunity for brands to connect with their audiences by integrating with and/or creating shopping communities often with direct communication capabilities within the network. StyleHive is the forerunner in partnering with brands to create brand community pages aka “Nectar Hives.” The Nectar Hive is a landing page that contains all of the bookmarks that StyleHive members have created around the brand that also includes chat features. The brand has complete control over content through access to StyleHive’s Partner Sites interface, and can delete comments at its discretion (although according to the StyleHive rep, there has never been a negative comment on a Nectar Hive).

The challenges
Hurdles that could impede the growth of social shopping include:

1. Users may not be motivated enough to bother posting their favorite products.

2. They may not want to go through the trouble of downloading software in order to grab images of products they like to add to their widgets. Some sites utilize buttons to grab the images. Other sites require the user to cut and paste the html into their webpage. This could be challenging for users who are not computer savvy. Additionally, every site calls the image that is grabbed and put into the display format something different — from tags, to badges to shopcasts. This leads to confusion among users.

3. Users may post images of out-of-stock products, so extra vigilance is required by merchandisers.

4. Privacy issues on social network sites.

The future
Opinions vary on social shopping’s staying power. Merchandisers who are selling their products via user-hype on social shopping sites obviously think social shopping is here to stay. Media analysts, such as Forrester Research, think the low traffic numbers will impede its growth and market value. Shopping engines, such as Shopping.com, see social shopping as being more like venture investments than line extensions.

While the jury is still out, by its nature social shopping is more likely to impact brand awareness, purchase consideration and maybe even intent, but not necessarily direct sales, at least as measured by the last touchpoint. The shopping engines such as Yahoo Shopping and Google Product Search that are very direct sales-focused will likely integrate social shopping with their current offerings; with others potentially to follow if they believe it will further drive sales for their customers and/or revenue for them.

Undoubtedly, social shopping will continue to weave its way in and around ecommerce and other points of online networking and shopping services. It is part of the fabric of our culture and it is not surprising that the social aspect of shopping is now expanding and finding its voice online — and it is a consumer voice. Just as in other areas of digital marketing, the consumer voice is becoming louder, more clear and ubiquitous. Older advertising and marketing models, even those that have been applied online, may not work. There are new ways for consumers to connect and communicate, and therefore, new ways for marketers to connect to them. We simply (or not-so-simply) have to connect the dots.

By Denise Zimmerman
http://www.imediaconnection.com/

But criminals continue to pose an increasing challenge for merchants, and one-third of retailers experienced a fraud spike within the past 12 months that increase their fraud rate by 100% or more, the study says.

The problem for these merchants is that they fail to take steps to stay ahead of criminals who figured out how to get by merchants’ security measures, says Julie Fergerson, vice president of emerging technologies at security company Debix Inc. and a member of the board of the Merchant Risk Council. “Many retailers are aware of and have deployed new security technology and techniques, but the devil is in the details,” Fergerson says. “Once a month, somebody at a retailer should be looking at overall data and trends, and making sure everything is good,” she says.

For example, one recent trend among criminals is to steal nearly complete information on legitimate credit card accounts, making it difficult to detect a fraudulent transaction until after it’s been completed.

But because criminals will often re-use one particular account attribute, such as an IP address, in multiple fraudulent transactions, retailers can use security software that identifies whenever a single account attribute is appearing frequently in orders. The attribute criminals choose to re-use, however, can change. “But some retailers only configure their system to check for one attribute, when they should check for several,” Fergerson says.

New software and techniques now being developed to enable merchants to simultaneously check for the frequent re-use of account attributes, identify the source location of transactions through geolocation technology, and better compare the addresses tied to potentially fraudulent transactions with authentic addresses in customer databases, Fergerson says.

Source: http://www.internetretailer.com/

Offline, consumers are moving toward debit vs. credit card use as a substitute for using checks. Also driving growth are consumers’ increasing familiarity and comfort level with this payment option, and that fact that debit cards don`t carry finance charges as credit cards do, according to Jupiter.

Offline, a signature is required to authorize a debit transaction – an option that doesn’t exist online. PIN debit transactions, another means of user authentication aren’t typically used online due to security concerns, and security concerns also have so far limited the growth of PIN-less debit transactions.

As a result of those concerns, the predicted increase in the use of debit cards online means that online merchants must be even more rigorous about fraud and risk management, Jupiter analyst Edward Kountz notes. Merchants should increase their use of automated fraud management tools and consider bankcard associations’ online second-level authentication programs, so far little used.

To reduce the risk of online debit transactions while accommodating consumers` desire for online debit transactions, Kountz also encourages merchants and card issues to start exploring investing in platforms for Internet PIN debit.

Source: http://www.internetretailer.com/

“The 73 million people under the age of 18 in the U.S. represent one thing to marketers and sellers: the next generation of spenders,” wrote Forrester analyst Carrie A. Johnson in the report, a copy of which was obtained by E-Commerce Times.

“But those marketers are more ‘American Bandstand’ than ‘American Idol,’ making it hard to understand this connected, gadget-grabbing group,” Johnson added.

Always Online

Young shoppers break into two distinct age groups, the report said, under 18 and 18 to 21 years old. While the over 18 crowd has more money to spend — US$193 a month, compared to $76 — both market segments have one thing in common.

“They’re always online,” Forrester reported. “The majority of both groups have broadband at home and go online daily. The online behavior of older teens illustrates that this is a generation that has hardly known life without the Web.”

When they’re online, what are young shoppers spending their money on? According to the Boston-based research firm, they’re looking for computer hardware, software, music, DVDs and books.

However, the report noted, due to the touch-and-feel nature of soft goods, only a small percentage of younger or older teens shopped online for apparel and accessories, linens and home decor, and footwear.

Word of Mouth

Selling to young shoppers is challenging marketers because the buying segment leans so much on the wired word.

“Just as teens bring along friends to the mall, they find ways to incorporate their friends into online research,” the report said. “They use tools like ‘e-mail a friend’ links on retail sites, wish lists, and IM when shopping to get purchasing help from friends.

“The majority of all teens also seek out social content and shopping tools like consumer ratings on Shopzilla and Shopping.com and reviews and peer-to-peer sales channels like eBay (Nasdaq: EBAY) Latest News about eBay and Craigslist,” the report added.

They also are great users of search engines, according to Vikram Sehgal, research director for JupiterResearch in New York City. “Across the different age groups, they’re the most likely to use search engines,” he told E-Commerce Times. “So search engine marketing would be a very effective tool in reaching this age group.”

Uninterested in the Traditional

The report revealed that older teens were more likely than younger ones to use the Internet to buy products offline, and it recommended that merchants cash in on that tendency.

“Although it would be difficult for many retailers, it’s clear that there are benefits to providing real-time inventory information to sites like Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) Latest News about Google when it comes to capturing young consumers,” it observed.

“With its search ubiquity, local tools, and integrated maps, Google captures the majority of local product search with both [older and younger teen] groups,” it disclosed.

“Here once again young consumers show their general disinterest in traditional media,” the report continued. “They’re three times more likely to use Google to find local businesses than online yellow pages from a phone company.”

Viral Marketing

One way to reach Generation N shoppers is through viral marketing E-Mail Marketing Software – Free Trial. Click Here. campaigns. “For the most part, it works,” the report said. “Teens are active users of viral marketing tools like forwarding video clips to friends, using ‘e-mail a friend’ links, and sending e-greetings.”

Because teens are especially adept at avoiding advertising through the use of pop-up blockers and digital video recorders, marketers have gotten more creative in their delivery of their messages to this younger audience, Forrester’s analysis maintained.

Promotions that work with teens, it said, include advergames, instant-win games, online coupons, streaming video ads and cell phone promotions.

Loyal … to a Point

“Seen as the next frontier, mobile marketing appears to infiltrate teens at a rate much higher than adults,” the report said.

“Mobile phones are one of the most effective marketing vehicles for teenagers,” Deborah Patton, vice president for corporate communications for New York City-based VNU Business Media, which has organized an annual conference on marketing to teens for several years, told the E-Commerce Times.

Forrester’s analysts also disparaged the notion that most young shoppers are fickle.

“Although they admit to shopping around before making a purchase, more than half of both younger and older teens agree that when they find a brand they like, they stick with it,” the report said.

That’s true, but only up to a point, according to Patton. “You can develop their loyalty, if you get in quickly enough, for long term things — household products and stuff like that,” she opined. “But in the trendy stuff, they’re not that loyal.”

By John P. Mello Jr.
http://www.ecommercetimes.com/

Defects-per-board and Yield
It is possible to estimate a PCB’s process yield using historical defects per million opportunities (DPMO) data for the components specified on the bill of materials (BOM). DPMO is a normalized assessment of the defects generated in the PCB manufacturing process. The estimated PCB defects per board is the sum of individual DPMO numbers associated with all the components fitted to the board, divided by 1,000,000.

The DPMO values for each component may consist of an element that is associated with the component and another part that is associated with each pin of the component. Alternatively there may just be an overall figure that considers the total DPMO contribution of the component.

For example, a simple PCB may have three components with 1,500, 3,500, and 5,000 DPMO values. The total DPMO for this board will be 1,500 + 3,500 + 5,000 = 10,000. To obtain the defects per board, this figure would be divided by 1,000,000.

Statistically, we can convert this to a process yield, or an estimate of the probable manufacturing yield for the PCB without any process verification to address defects.

Process Yield = e-Defects per Board

In this example, we get e-0.01 or 99% yield.

Using a more typical example, where 1,000 components have an average DPMO value of 100, would give a process yield of 90%. Therefore, 10% of the boards produced will likely not work unless an appropriate test-and-inspection strategy is used.

If the board costs $10 to produce and 10,000 are manufactured each day, then over a year the bad boards will cost $3.6 million. If $1 million is invested in a DfT system that could detect 95% of the defects produced, only 18,000 bad boards would remain. This would cost the manufacturer $180,000, a net saving of $2.42 million. In this case, we have improved the yield from 90% to 99.5%, generating a healthy return on investment (ROI).

Defect-detection Equipment
Before considering any DfT measures, consider the types of process verification equipment available. There are two fundamental types of defect-detection equipment: physical inspection and electrical test machines. Within the first type, there are four main categories: paste automated optical inspection (AOI), pre-reflow AOI, post-reflow AOI, and automated X-ray inspection (AXI). Considering electrical test, four main types of defect-detection equipment exist: ICT, flying probe test (FPT), boundary scan test (BST), and manufacturing defects analysis (MDA). Functional test (FT) systems primarily are for product verification as opposed to defect detection. Though they are used for the latter, poor fault diagnostics capability makes them more suited to confirming product performance than process verification.

On modern, varied PCBs, implementing a single test or inspection system may not produce acceptable results. Lack of bed of nails access will reduce coverage on MDA and ICT machines; longer test times at FPT and AXI may not be acceptable for higher production volumes; obscured joints and lack of electrical test coverage may rule out AOI machines. The solution is implementing some combination of test-and-inspection machines depending on the topology of the circuit board, the PCB application, and production volumes.

For example, high density interconnect (HDI) PCBs have no external traces that could be picked up with traditional bed of nails testers, or even newer fixture techniques such as bead probe.* With HDI, a combination of BST and optical inspection balances electrical defect detection (BST) with speed and structural defect detection (AOI). If enough joints are visually obscured, AXI could replace AOI.

Improving Testability at Design Time
Trying to improve testability coverage once a board is completed usually results in sub-optimal conditions. Incorporating some simple DfT options can improve the overall testability of the board significantly, with little or no overhead in the PCB.

Boundary scan support can provide opportunities for increasing testability coverage provided the test access ports (TAPs) are configured correctly. Generally, the various boundary scan parts are correctly chained together, namely a connector to the first TDI, TDO to subsequent TDI pins, and ultimately a TDO pin that also goes to an edge connector. Then TMS, TCK, and optional TRST pins are all connected together in parallel (Figure 1).

Providing a mechanism to disable clocks, tri-stateable integrated circuits (ICs) using separate pull-up or pull-down resistors can reduce noise significantly during the test phase and eliminate back-driving components to a required state (Figure 2). However, adding pull-up or pull-down resistors alone is insufficient. This does not allow the state of the pin to be controlled without an additional test point on the net between the resistor and IC pin. Disabling on-board clocks allows much lower test frequencies, resulting in more reliable tests and reducing false failures. Incorporating tri-stateable buffers or resistor pairs in feedback loops can also increase the board’s testability by making tests run more reliably with less noise.

If boundary scan components are available on the board, there may be unused cells that can be routed to specific nets to improve test coverage. These boundary scan cells act as virtual test points without the overhead of a bed of nails fixture probe.

Reduced Bed of Nails Access
With challenging accessibility on PCBs, deploying multiple test-and-inspection methods on a line helps keep production yields at acceptable levels. To achieve this, other DfT practices optimize overall coverage by taking advantage of disparate capabilities.

Often, a reasonable level of bed of nails access is available, provided it is intelligently designed into the board’s layout. For example, a PCB may not have the real estate to incorporate 100% net accessibility, but 75% of the nets could be made bed-of-nails accessible. The question then is which nets should make up this 75% access to achieve best possible coverage.

If a digital net has a bi-directional boundary scan cell associated with it, any short of this net can be detected with any other accessible net. If all digital pins have either drive and/or sense capability on the net, the pins can be tested additionally for stuck-at faults indicating open pin defects. Here, a bed of nails probe does not increase test coverage; it does not require a probe to be assigned and the test point can be saved.

If non-boundary-scan components lie between boundary scan parts, it may be possible to perform a cluster test of the non-boundary-scan parts using the boundary scan cells. Depending on the cluster’s complexity, diagnostic resolution may be reduced; however, a passed test would confirm that circuitry is performing correctly. Additional diagnosis may be required if the test fails.

Bundled components — resistor arrays, diode arrays, multiple element gates like 7400s — can be tested with a sampling technique. Adding test access to one element of the component for electrical verification can ensure that the correct value or functional gate is connected to the board. The addition of AOI or AXI to inspect all the joints on the component then ensures that all the pins are electrically connected to the PCB, giving a high level of confidence in the component with significantly reduced test points.

Conclusion
There is no doubt that current PCBs are pushing the boundaries of existing test-and-inspection technologies. However, there are solutions to many of these issues. Good DfT practices used early in the design process enable a good test-and-inspection strategy in the final layout. SMT

* Agilent Technologies

By Mark Laing, Mentor Graphics Corporation

ICs account for the greatest amount of power dissipated on a PCB electronic design. Board designers are plagued with trying to distribute power throughout the PCB for a steadily increasing number of voltages, and concerns over heat generated by wide traces have also increased. However, such issues are a distant concern compared to the power dissipated by the ICs on the board. For that reason, proactive thermal planning must begin with the package.

Microprocessors pose a large thermal concern because they dissipate more power than any other IC on the PCB. However, it is not the power itself which causes the problem, but the power-per-unit-area of the package. A small IC that dissipates a moderate amount power creates more of a thermal concern than a large IC that dissipates a large amount of power (Figure 1). The small ICs on the left hand side of the board dissipate only one fourth, or less, of the power of the larger components on the right side, yet they get much hotter, as seen by the large yellow and amber segment surrounding that segment of the board. Their package temperatures approach 100°C and, as a consequence, make the left side of the board quite hot. On the other hand, while the IC in the bottom right has a die temperature approaching 100°C, its large package allows it to stay cool.

Techniques to Control Thermal Issues
The most obvious method to control thermal issues in ICs is to use the largest package possible. Of course, there are other factors such as cost and system integration that need to be considered when choosing a package design, and such factors also play a part in the overall system design. To properly control thermal issues, use all heat transfer mechanisms. That includes conduction, convection, and radiation.

Conduction is an effective method for dissipating heat in an IC. The greater number of pins, the less thermal resistance there is between the package and the board, and the easier heat can be conducted away by the board. This can be taken a step further by applying thermal glue between the IC and the board, or even by attaching a metal slug to the base of the IC package to increase its conductivity.

Changing package material to one with greater emissivity maximizes heat transfer due to radiation: black surfaces will typically exhibit an emissivity close to 1; organics and oxide metals will have lower emissivities ranging from 0.5 to 0.9.

And of course convection, more specifically forced convection, can be used to dissipate power by placing a heatsink on the package. A heat sink is typically the most common way to control heat on a package, but incorporating conduction and radiation can also be very effective (Figure 2). Small components on the left side now have a metal slug included with their package, which has been modified to use a material with an emissivity of 0.9. The result is that the small components dissipate their heat more effectively, and drop in temperature from 100°C to about 65°C. Consequently, the board temperature in the area of those components also drops.

Board-Level Solutions
That is not to say thermal issues cannot also be controlled at the board level. By simply adding more ground planes to the board, thermal conductivity can be dramatically increased to help conduct heat way from hotter components. Adding screws or standoffs to the board also conduct heat into the chassis. Similarly, the high thermal conductivity of existing screws and other board mounting mechanisms can be exploited by moving components closer to these heat conductors. These are very cost-effective methods for controlling thermal issues. Such board changes will result in reduction of component temperatures similar in scale to the effects of packaging changes.

Thermal Planning is Critical
By addressing thermal issues at both the package and board level, the arsenal of possible solutions is greatly expanded beyond mechanical solutions, such as adding more fans to the chassis.
No longer does the burden of cooling the system fall solely on the mechanical engineer at the end of the design cycle, where solutions are limited and design changes can be costly and risk time to market. Worse yet, such design changes may not even be implemented and thermal issues ignored, reducing component lifespan and creating quality and reliability issues in the product. Such design disasters can be avoided with proactive thermal planning.

By Patrick Carrier, Mentor Graphics