Glenn Beck’s project 912 project will be celebrating its one year anniversary tomorrow. It was first introduced on March 13, 2009. There are many a locally groups throughout the United States affiliated to this right wing nonsense.

The main purpose of the project is said to be to bring the American people back to the place where they were on September 12, 2001. Beck says that he is not obsessed with red states and blue states and political parties but it is very obvious that he is a Republican and a right wing nut to the core. He successfully incites hatred from ignorant and gullible people. He is sinisterly exploiting September 11 terrorist attacks for political gains.

Supposedly the project’s website lists 9 principles and 12 values. It is obvious that Mr. Glenn Beck has no values whatsoever and they are merely of a sentimental value to him. The fox network which is the right arm of the Republican Party gives a lot of importance and coverage to this movement. In fact they’ve exaggerated the number of participants in the movement to denigrate the government’s policies. 912 members have been known to attend various Tea Party protests.

The comedian Jon Stewart, satirized the movement on November 5, 2009 episode of the daily show.

“Designed by You, Stitched by Us,” is the selling point for new social creation company, Blank Label.
The new e-tailor makes custom men’s dress shirts designed by users. I came upon this business when co-founder Danny Wong pitched it to me several weeks ago and really loved the idea of being able to create my own dress shirt, and better yet, see a visual of what I’m creating.

While I have yet to purchase a custom shirt from Blank Label, I really do like what they have going on here.
Their digital dress shirt application gives a clear visual of the shirt you’re designing. It’s a connection between fashion and technology.

Blank Label is a bootstrapped startup based in Boston, Shanghai and Orange County. It’s very interesting to stumble upon innovation like this and I am excited to see more companies like Blank Label building creative concepts.
Interestingly enough, they also feature other startups in co-creation industry on their blog.

- Robert Worrall, CIO, Sun Microsystems, Inc

Recently CSC has won the best ITO applications title under the Outsourcing excellence award. Let us see what made it possible :

Sun has a strong product line but had been struggling with profitability for years. In addition to growing revenue, the company sought to reduce expenses and align with revenues to return to sustained profitability and bring SG&A costs in line with the competition.

The challenge: Adapting Sun’s cost model to give the technology firm the flexibility to deal with changing business conditions. While Sun had developed an internal competency for applications development and support, in today’s global economy this model was now inflexible and expensive.

To address rapid changes in the business environment, Sun was also open to bringing in an external partner to gain access to best practices that drive operational excellence, including business risk mitigation.

Narayanan Viswanathan, CSC’s Sun global account executive, says Sun felt its core competency was “IT innovation, not IT services and delivery.” Outsourcing allowed it to retain an IT organization focused on strategic functions.

Supplier selection

Robert Worrall, Sun’s CIO, says cost and the ability to ramp up and down to meet changing business needs were key criteria in selecting a supplier. Technical skill, aptitude, and the supplier’s onshore/offshore capabilities were also important considerations. So was cultural fit. “We view CSC as a partner that could come up with creative solutions both companies could deliver to an evolving marketplace,” says the CIO.

CSC included its go-to-market teams, marketing organization, product specialists, and senior executives in the negotiation sessions. “They brought innovative thinking to the table,” he says.

Worrall adds, “even before winning the contract, CSC’s executives were proactive in understanding Sun’s business today and, more importantly, where Sun was headed. They looked at our products, services, and R&D portfolio to see how we could develop a longer-term partnering model that would benefit both companies.”

Transition

During the transition Sun and CSC together succeeded in:

• Moving 55 percent of the application development offshore
• Achieving immediate productivity gains with 42 fewer staff
• Hiring/transferring, equipping, training, and integrating 450 staff in India
• Building two new data centers by the second month of the contract

All this while maintaining service to 35,000 Sun employees and supporting the applications Sun used to run its $11 billion global operation.

“Sun had aggressive goals to reduce costs quickly during as short a transition time as possible. This turned out to be the most substantial challenge for both parties,” Worrall says.

During the bid process, all the suppliers recommended a fairly predictable transition approach. “They were fearful because we were asking them to take on a more accelerated approach to transition,” says Worrall. CSC, like other potential suppliers, “was initially reluctant to make the transition period so abbreviated, but then worked with us to understand where the real risks were and, more importantly, how to mitigate them,” recalls Worrall.

To meet the new expedited transition requirements, CSC modified its standard procedures to fit Sun’s timeline.

Viswanathan recalls the supplier worked hard to select the proper resources in India because at that time “the Indian market was hot.” Three hundred Sun employees transitioned to CSC. CSC then hired 450 people to work in India. The supplier brought key personnel to California for training.

The nine-month transition went relatively smoothly. “It was a race against the clock,” says the CSC executive. “We had to transition 600 business applications, some of them mission critical, in just eight months.”

Viswanathan says Sun was understandably most concerned about the uptime of its applications during quarter-end, when it books most of its revenues. “An outage could potentially result in millions of dollars of losses. This became a focus area, and we have delivered 16 quarters of perfect performance. That’s quite an achievement,” he says proudly.

Worrall is impressed that CSC was able to cut six months out of the transition, “saving everyone time, effort, and agony.”

Differences in the corporate culture of the two firms presented the next big challenge. “At Sun we have a fast-paced culture, meaning that people are accustomed to being able to turn on a dime. In part, this was because we were used to the luxury of having a dedicated staff of developers available to make changes immediately,” says Worrall.

When Sun outsourced the applications work to CSC, its employees now had to incorporate new CMM-aligned processes into their workday life. “It’s something Sun asked for and CSC was intent on delivering,” say Viswanathan.

As the transition occurred, the outsourcing sponsors started to get pushback from Sun users. “We threw in a lot of management time and effort working with end users to understand how we could amalgamate CSC’s requirements with Sun’s need for innovation and speed. We tried to find a win-win solution,” says Worrall.

He says “we didn’t understand the difficulty people would have with that change. In retrospect, we should have spent more time up front understanding the cultural impacts the additional process steps would have and remediating those before we went live,” says Worrall.

Demonstrating flexibility

One week before the contract commenced, Sun requested that CSC cut costs even more quickly by compressing the European roll-out schedule from 12 months to eight. The shorter European schedule was going to save an additional $2 million. Demonstrating the flexibility that has become a hallmark of the working relationship, CSC agreed to the new plan, says Viswanathan.

Another example of the flexibility of the partnership came when Sun deployed a new Oracle ERP system; the deployment provided an opportunity to look at the support model with a fresh lens. “We challenged CSC to come up with some ideas to both save money and provide support differently,” says Worrall.

CSC responded by bringing in subject-matter experts from its Oracle Competency Center. “They explained how other customers are taking advantage of the newer technologies and how we could bring those solutions to the Sun account,” he says. The result: the partners modified the support model, which helped to reduce cost. “CSC’s experience, knowledge, homework, and out-of-the-box thinking were responsible for this change,” says Worrall.

In another instance, Sun needed 200 additional support personnel with very specific Oracle subject-matter expertise. “Rather than renegotiating terms and conditions and service level agreements (SLAs), we simply placed a phone call to our account executive and said, ‘Bring in 200 developers and support people as quickly as you can, and we’ll just consider an addendum to the existing master services contract.’ We did just that without batting an eye or having to get lawyers involved. It was a simple, almost trivial, addition to the contract,” marvels Worrall.

Results

Cost savings: Sun’s number one objective was to save costs, according to Worrall. Through the first three years CSC has delivered savings of more than 22 percent through both productivity improvements and global resourcing. The scope has evolved over time, starting with a new baseline run rate which has provided further cost savings.

Worrall says the savings “certainly put us in a good position in our market.” Second, Sun reinvested some of those savings into other IT components “that desperately needed investment.” The rest of the money went directly to the bottom line.

Flexibility: Sun’s ability to quickly dial up and dial down resource levels as business dictates is a cost lever that it didn’t have before outsourcing. A quick dial-up of resources came when CSC responded quickly to support the Integrated Business Information System (IBIS) project by providing 80 qualified Oracle resources within two months. A quick dial-down of resource was done when the business needed further cost reduction in the summer of 2006. CSC eliminated an additional 150 staff in a few months, reducing Sun’s costs by $1.2 million, observes Viswanathan.

Service level improvements: The partnership has also delivered service level improvements, such as a substantial reduction in tickets submitted and “an even more substantial reduction” in the ticket backlog, according to Worrall.

Process focus: Worrall says CSC has brought a focus on process and quality delivery with its intellectual property around service management. “Before the outsourcing, we were always pretty anxious at quarter-end,” he reports. “CSC was able to get Sun through the quarter-end and year-end processing with fewer concerns, escalations, and issues than Sun had ever seen before.”

Industry synergy has been key to some fruitful go-to-market initiatives between the two companies. Both Sun and CSC understand their own and each other’s industries. They were able to develop new, innovative products that built on the strength of both companies. “We were able to put together solutions that we might not otherwise have developed without this relationship,” says Worrall.

Worrall says CSC has “met or exceeded our initial objectives in every audit that we’ve undertaken. We are happy with the results.”

Why this relationship works

From the very outset, CSC “focused on not just the outsourcing deal but the broader relationship,” observes Worrall. “The contract and the relationship are based on mutual respect, transparency, honesty, and openness; this led us down a path of long-term success,” he continues. “CSC clearly understands our business and has a consistency in messaging, integrity, honesty, openness, and transparency that very few suppliers I’ve worked with have,” notes the CIO.

Worrall says the contract includes incentives on both sides so everyone involved continues “to look for opportunities to drive down costs and bring forward innovative ideas.” Adds Viswanathan, “Each has helped the other innovate our respective businesses.” In addition, Sun and CSC have become customers for each other’s products and services.

He says the IT staffs of both partners have made a commitment “to help each other in every situation. This commitment made our financial and service delivery successes possible. CSC brought to the table proven rigor, discipline, and process focus, allowing Sun to focus on its strengths in other areas.”

“The fundamental thesis of this relationship is mutual business benefit. CSC brought outsourcing solutions and best practices to meet Sun’s need to provide solutions to business problems more quickly and cheaper,” says Viswanathan.

Worrall points out CSC executives are present at his meetings “every single month;” he reciprocates by participating in their staff meetings, too. He says his team works hard to make CSC “feel like they are part of the bigger family.” He says CSC employees “walk and talk like Sun employees.”

“Year after year after year, this relationship continues to make my job easier. It’s something that’s predictable and reliable,” concludes Worrell.

Lessons from the Outsourcing Journal:

• An outsourcing supplier with proven processes and discipline can provide value to a company known for its innovative spirit.
• Sometimes a buyer’s employees are invested in the old processes and balk at adding another layer when a supplier becomes involved. Buyers need to set expectations before the change.
• Sometimes suppliers have to alter their typical transition plans to fit a buyer’s pressing timetable.

Pole-sitter Sebastian Vettel (Red Bull-Renault) made a crucial error on the first lap by leaving the track and lost the lead to Button. This spoiled the three pit-stop race strategy for Vettel who lost the second place to his teammate Mark Webber. Jarno Trulli finished fourth for Toyota.

Button’s teammate, Rubens Barrichello, had a poor start, damaged his car after several unsuccessful overtaking attempts and later leaved the race as is Giancarlo Fisicella (Force India). Gearbox problem concludes the first retirement of BrawnGP car in this season.

Nico Rosberg finished fifth for Williams as Felipe Massa (Ferrari) and Robert Kubica (BMW Sauber) on his back. Trulli’s teammate Timo Glock closed the top eighth with one point in the race standings.

Jenson Button now owns 61 points of 70 possible after 7 races in the Drivers’ championship with Barrichello 26 and Vettel 32 points behind. Brawn GP still dominates the Constructors’ standings with 96, nearly 40 points ahead of Red Bull and even more ahead other teams.

European Parliament logo

Monday, June 8, 2009

People across the European Union have been taking to the polls over the course of the previous four days. They were electing Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) as part of the European Parliament election, 2009. Voting began on Thursday in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and parts of Ireland. It continued on Friday across the rest of Ireland and parts of the Czech Republic. On Saturday the countries of Cyprus, France (for part of Outre-mer), Italy (day 1), Latvia, Malta, Slovakia and the Czech Republic all voted. Yesterday, the final day of polling, the remaing countries of Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Germany, Denmark, Spain, Estonia, Finland, France, Greece, Hungary, Italy (day 2), Lithuania, Luxembourg, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia and Sweden will be voting. Votes were released last night and will be continued to released over the course of today with the exception of Netherlands, which has broken rules and partialy released them on Friday.

The current President of the European Parliament, Hans-Gert Pöttering

The European Parliament is divided into constituencies, which have a group of representatives (the MEPs). Each constituency elects them proportionaly. The amount of MEPs representing a political party depends on the percentage of votes they gain. For example, if 50% of the electorate of a constituency vote for the x party then 50% of the MEPs in that constituency will be from the x party. In total there are 736 MEPs up for election by approximately 500,000,000 Europeans across 27 member states making it the largest transnational election in history.

The elections didn’t quite go to plan across the Netherlands, as the European Commission have asked that Dutch officials give an explanation to results they released. As countries across Europe vote on different days, the results of the election can only be released on the last day (Sunday), so that the results in other countries will not influence the decission made by people in countries that are still voting. Despite this, the Netherlands released some of their results on Friday: 92% of the votes have currently been counted. Further controversy arose from the results themselves. Results so far show that far-right Dutch Member of Parliament, Geert Wilders’s party the Party for Freedom (PVV), appears to have come second behind the Christian Democratic Appeal. Wilders is facing prosecution in the Netherlands for an anti Islamic statement and was refused entry to the United Kingdom on grounds of the intent to incite hatred.

It had initially been foreseen that the Treaty of Lisbon would have entered into force by the time of these elections, making them the first to be held under its provisions. However, primarily because of the failure of the referendum in Ireland, the framework established by the Treaty of Nice will be used again. Amongst other differences, the number of MEPs to be returned depends upon which rules are in effect: while 736 MEPs will be elected under the Nice rules, this number would have increased to 751 if the Lisbon Treaty were in force. A further change that Lisbon would have brought was an increase to the powers of Parliament, including powers over the appointment of the President of the European Commission.

In the previous election, German Hans-Gert Pöttering of the centre-right EPP-ED won with 34% and Martin Schulz of the Socialists came second with 26%. Despite this, during the last term the two leaders shared, each serving approximately two years in office.

Jim Waldron, owner of Waldron Pontiac, Buick and GMC in Davison, is leading the is behind the push to save Pontiac. He made the announcement in a taping of ABC12’s Newsmaker Program on May 1. He indicated that another auto dealer and five other investors are involved and have been in talks for months after the high probability that General Motors would end the Pontiac brand. Waldron expect to meet with GM next week for talks.

Waldron indicated that the group was interest in purchasing the brand name and product licensing only. The new Pontiac under Waldron would purchase vacant factories in Michigan to build cars. His goal for Pontiac is to help out Michigan’s people and its economy and keep the brand viable.

Several GM divisions spokesperson have previously indicated that the Pontiac brand is not for sale. GM Vice President of North American Communications Tom Pyden indicated that the viability plan send to the USA National Government has the Pontiac brand shut down at the end of 2010 with no plans for sale. Waldron said he submitted the plan and the plan is being reviewed by GM legal department, so the GM communication personnel may not know about the proposed purchased. With only about 40 standalone Pontiac dealerships nationwide and franchise agreements restricting dealers from showing other brands in the same showroom, Jim Hopson, a spokesman for the Pontiac brand, indicates that an independent Pontiac might have problems with the dealer network.

Joe Serra of the Serra Automotive Group indicated that his corporation is not involved in Waldron’s Pontiac offer. Serra Automotive Group is multi-state multi-brand auto dealer group headquartered in Grand Blanc Township, Genesee County, Michigan.

GM revealed that the Saturn brand along with Saab and Hummer were up for sale when unveiling their restructuring plans to Congress for governmental loans. While the Pontiac brand was originally to be a niche brand, GM had changed plans recently to eliminate the brand. Pontiac is currently GM’s third best selling brand.

Both optimism and hope for the Palestinian situation was expressed. Foreign Minister Støre underlined the importance of continues aid, but stated that he understood that most country still had problems because of the economical crisis. As for the unstable political situation in Palestine, MP Fayyad explained that “the political instability is also a reason why we need more aid.” June 8 Foreign Minister Støre will have a breakfast meeting with the American special envoy to the Middle East, George J. Mitchell to discuss further the situation

On June 6, two male bodies and pieces of debris from the flight were recovered approximately 700 miles off the coast of Brazil. A ticket, oxygen mask and suitcase were also among the items recovered on June 6. Flight 447 disappeared over the Atlantic ocean on June 1, and so far authorities have yet to determine the cause of the crash. 228 people were ob board the plane.

Although the number of votes cast for the BNP in the North West England region in the 2009 election (132,094) was lower than the number of votes cast for the BNP (134,959) in the previous election in 2004, the percentage of the popular vote achieved by the BNP rose, from 6.4% to 8.0%, because of a lower overall voter turnout.

Similarly, in the Yorkshire and the Humber region, the number of votes cast for the party fell from 126,538 in the 2004 elections to 120,139 in the 2009 elections, but a lower turnout resulted in the party’s percentage share in the popular vote rising from 8.0% to 9.8%.

The BNP will now receive EU funding, in the form of MEP expenses and office and staff allowances. What it will receive will be governed by the Statute for Members of the European Parliament, new rules for MEP expenses introduced for the newly elected 2009 parliament. Mr Griffin and Mr Brons will each receive a €7,000 per month salary (formally, 38.5% of the basic salary of a judge at the European Court of Justice), paid from the EU budget, and a pension when they leave office. They will also be entitled to employ personal staff, whose salaries are also paid from the EU budget.

The election of BNP MEPs has caused protests. Mr Griffin was accosted by political protestors when he attended the vote counting on the night of June the 7th, and was forced to enter the building via a rear entrance. When he stepped forward to make his victory speech, after the result had been declared, all other parties’ candidates took the unusual step of leaving the stage.

The best part is that the people who contribute to the site are very knowledgeable in the field of e-commerce and so you know for sure that you are going to get some solid advice.  I checked out a few of their articles and I am very impressed about the wealth of information coming from this site.  Everything regarding e-commerce and wholesale goods trading are addressed in this site.

You have absolutely nothing to lose, simply join their newsletter, for free, and be in touch with the latest buzz.

The main deal with this site is to give an eagle’s view of the wholesale market, e-trading, while at the same time feeling the pulse of the market. The site has regular updates and so, we can be sure to know of new things as they happen across the internet landscape.

A note of caution though, the information found in this site has to be taken with a pinch of salt. Some times, a few of the articles are indeed a bit opinionated, which is not surprising, as the contributors have a wealth of knowledge and business experience and so they make statements which they feel are absolutely true. Other than that, this is a pretty good site and has a lot of potential to make it big in being useful to internet entrepreneurs.

Personally, I feel that a lot of these are decent articles targeting a unique market. For instance, this article on drop shipping, was very helpful. Drop shipping is a smart way to earn money. You don’t have to keep inventory with you. You just transfer order details to a wholesale dealer, who does the rest.  But how to determine if a shop dropper who will help you sell your inventory is legitimate or not?  Read more about wholesale sources here.

]]> http://www.bharatentrepreneurs.com/2009/06/07/wholesale-newsletter/feed/ 1 http://www.bharatentrepreneurs.com/2009/06/06/google-does-not-recognize-bing/ http://www.bharatentrepreneurs.com/2009/06/06/google-does-not-recognize-bing/#comments Sat, 06 Jun 2009 03:17:39 +0000 kartik http://www.bharatentrepreneurs.com/?p=485 Bing the “decision engine” is at present the 2nd biggest search engine. It has an incredible 16% of the search share, only behind the 800 pound gorilla of search, Google. Bing was launched a full todays ahead of schedule on June 1st, 2009, instead of June 3rd.

Now, all this is beside the point. The thing is that Google suggest is not recognizing Bing as an important keyword! Bing search also does not figure in the Google suggest.

As I type Bing in the google suggest the following keywords came up.

binghamton university

bingo

bingham mccutchen

bing crosby

binghamton ny

binge drinking

bingo cards

binghamton shooting

binge eating

binghamton news

More insultingly, even after entering the keyword Bing with space, even then nothing related to Bing search turns up!

bing crosby

bing bong brothers

bing crosby restaurant

bing bong brothers lyrics

bing crosby movies etc

If we check out Bing’s auto suggest, we get the following terms for bing

bing

bing search

bing search maps

and then a similar list comparable to google turns up.

Lets see how long it would take before google does recognize bing. Just goes to show that Google suggest needs time to pick up new keywords!

A staggering 23 million people tuned in to watch Britains Got Talent Grand-finale … the final results reached a peak of 26 million viewers !

Susan Boyle, who came in 2nd is already in talks with Simon Cowell’s music company Syco for a record deal.

Also, you guys can check out Diversity’s first performance here :

And you can check out their brilliant Semi-Final performance here :

Dance act Diversity’s brilliant + mind-blowing performance … one of the best choreographed dances ever ! The other dance group Flawless had no chance to even come close.

*** Update 4 ***

Susan Boyle very graciously accepted the runner’s up position by saying “The best people won”. She had vowed audiences with her audition performance of Les Miserables (watch here on youtube).

Diversity, an awesome bunch of break dancers from ages 13 -- 24 won the hearts of the British people by winning the 3rd Series in a much fought after grand-finale. They will perform live, in front of the Queen, in the Royal Variety. They won 100,000 in British pounds. (Around approximately, $160,000)

Susan Boyle (my personal favorite) unfortunately for her fans, stood second in the 2009 edition of Britain’s Got Talent. Boyle was gracious, even though she lost. She said ,”Lads, I wish you all the best.” This result, widely regarded as an upset, put Susan Boyle in the second place.

In Britains Got Talent, the participants are expected to repeat their best performance from their earlier rounds and Susan Boyle chose, “I Dreamed a Dream.”
Simon Cowell gave a big compliment to the Diversity Dance group. He said that it was the only act that deserved a perfect 10 and that it was, “sheer and perfect.”

For Susan Boyle, Simon Cowell added, “You had the nerve to come back here tonight, face your critics and beat them. You did it.”

Susan Boyle comes 2nd. More information as it comes in…

*** Update 1 ***

You can watch Britains Got Talent winner Diversity being announced Series 3 winners:

*** Update 2 ***

Runner’s up Susan Boyle performing in the Britain’s Got Talent Series 3

[ The page was getting too heavy to load ... because of all those youtube videos.. so we decided to split it into 3 parts for ease of access. You can access Part 2 and Part 3 here ]

There is a cool website Numion.com where you can check how much time it takes for websites to load completely on your browser. I googled some more stopwatches but this is to my knowledge the easiest to use.

You can see from the above image, BE.com took 3.688 seconds to load. The main reason it was that long was because we have 9 blogs show up on our home page .. so it takes time to load all the 9 blogs.

One of the reasons web surfers were attracted to Google in the initial years (compared to msn, yahoo, ask jeeves etc…)  was because Google’s home page loaded so quickly and had such a simple interface.

One of the best ways to reduce load time for your website is to reduce the number of images or minimize the sizes of the images that the browser has to download while visiting the page.

For most of our articles we have started uploading GIF images rather than JPG because they are so much more smaller (sometimes by over 50 %). There is some loss of quality no doubt but if it takes 3 seconds to load a page compared to 6 I am totally up for it.

(Above, the page load times for some popular websites I visit. Google definitely is on top of it .. Microsoft, well they have a ton of images on theirs so I guess it kinda makes sense)

Of course all of this is relative to the internet connection you use. I use Broadband 7 Mbps … but if you are using the phone line it will be longer .. if you are using Gigabit Ethernet, it will be faster.

[ I know in my previous post Part - 5 I talked about uploading our articles at midnight rather than during the day. We ran into a bit of a problem last night .. so we are uploading our articles at 3 in the afternoon .. But I swear we will continue with our experiment more rigorously from now on and upload articles only at night time ]

You can check out our previous posts in this series where we experiment with increasing web traffic to blogs, using adsense and optimizing our chances of earning money through adsense.

The last few days we have been experimenting with 3 factors in particular.

• How many posts/articles we post on our blogs ?
• What time of the day do we post the articles on our blog ?
• How is it affecting web traffic ?

The image below… you can see the results of our experiment. We started this experiment about a week ago .. on May 24th. The Google Analytics record shows our count was 99 visits on May 24th. Since then it has jumped up to 223 page visits as of yesterday, May 29th.

(Right click on the image, select view image and see the larger image .. this current image had to be resized to fit the width of our blog)

As mentioned above, there are 2 reasons why we have seen this growth from 99 page visits to 223 page visits in a span of 1 week ( a jump of about  125 %) . One, we have started posting more original content on our blog .. i.e., more posts and articles.

In our Part 2 of the series, we talk about how more original content brings in more web traffic because Google realizes this blog or website is more active hence more relevant.

But lets talk about the other factor, when to post content on your website. We have noticed this “unnoticed and unmentioned trend …almost never mentioned in other blogs” …  is how your web traffic can react to when you actually post content on your blog.

Since our target audience is the US (and then followed by India and other countries because after all it is a Business Blog with an Indian perspective) …  we have tried posting content around midnight and early morning hours.

As some of my more knowledgeable techy friends pointed out that although that slightly could help … what could be more helpful to boost your google rankings is publishing at regular intervals instead.

The reason ? What Google likes to see is healthy steady activity .. of course bursts of activity is appreciated but only if there is a steady activity of new material being posted regularly to back it up.

So the bottom line : If you can say post 4 articles in a day.. then time yourself and post them at regular intervals through out. Of course its impossible to do it at night all the time .. but try to have rhythm as much as possible. Of course as we mentioned before… there is nothing like producing a lot of original content.

Remember, don’t get caught too much in the giddy winds of producing original content. Writing 4 quality articles a day is tough. It involves research, proof-reading, thinking of concept and actually writing it down. If you copy stuff from other places and pass it as your own, Google crawlers will recognize it and stop indexing your site totally.

Over the next few days and weeks we will be posting more such trends from our data. So keep checking !

GM, the global automaker which was founded way back in 1908, has it’s headquarters in Detroit. From 1931 till 2007, an incredible 77 consecutive years, GM was the leader in car sales. According to a report in 2008, it was the second largest automaker after Toyota.

It had many brands, each with its own disctinctive quality and appeal, such as Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet, GMC, GM Daewoo, Holden, Hummer, Opel, Pontiac, Saab, Saturn, Vauxhall and Wuling.

GM is a key component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. It slid below the 98 cents, reached way back in 1933.

The government report hinted that the recession was decreasing, last Friday. Corporate profits rebounded, which is a very good and a positive signal, coming from the report.

Effect of GDP:

GDP or Gross domestic product can be defined as the total number of goods and services in a specific country. As such, the GDP can be assumed to be the broadest measurement of economic activity and it serves as a good indicator of the economy.

The government predicted a drop of 6.1 percent, while the actual drop was 5.7, which is quite significant.

Interestingly, the drop in the economic activity is considered bad, going by the market expectation which predicted 5.5%  However the data shows clearly that the recession will be all but over by the end of this year, 2009, and we can expect recovery to begin, albeit slowly from the beginning of next year.