Free translation site Cucumis provides an online community for multi-lingual users to share their linguistical knowledge.

While searching for an online translation tool to convert a Chinese encyclopedia site for a story I did last week, I came across a fascinating site for individuals to share their linguistical knowledge.

Cucumis is a free, Paris-based online community for individual who speak at least one foreign language to share translation services. Creators say Cucumis is a web site where you can submit texts to be translated by the community.

The site's name, Cucumis, which translated from Latin means "watermelon", seems an odd fit for a translation site.

The creators of the community say the site was given its name because the watermelon is "a spherical fruit like the earth, full of vitality and happiness. With about 3000 spoken languages over the world, we hope this website will help us to get to know each other."

To use the free services of the site, a user who speaks at least two languages must gain points by translating the text of others within the community.

In order to have their own queries translated by others, individuals must use the points earned through the services provided to other members.

Insuring that only individuals who actually are multi-lingual utilize the site, all translations are monitored by administrators and experts.

To reach expert status, members must an average translation rating 7/10 on multiple translations.

The creators of the site also say that Cucumis would be useless to a person who did not actually speak more than one foreign language.

The languages available for translation are English, French, Spanish, Catalan, Bosnian, Hebrew, Polish, Swedish, Chinese, German, Portuguese, Swedish, Italian, Latin, Russian, Turkish, Kurdish, Greek, Bulgarian, Persian, Brazilian, Norwegian, Arabic, Slovene, and Thai.

Although the community may be a "one-man project", it has gathered a strong following since it's launch a year ago; about 100 new members join each day and over 40 texts are translated.

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The Department of Commerce reports that online retail sales in the third quarter grew at four times the rate of total retail sales. In total, online retail sales in the third quarter reached $27.5 billion, which represents a 20.9% increase over the third quarter in 2005. In comparison, total offline retail sales for the third quarter 2006 are only up 5.1% from a year ago.

The holiday season is upon us, and with it the inevitable purchasing madness that grips consumers like a narcotic addiction while merchants shout with glee as visions of dollar signs dance in their head.

The familiar "cha-ching" of the cash register and token chit-chat with the check out clerk, however, is being replace by a much more docile shopping method this year.

Point. Click. Checkout.

Online commerce is growing at an exponential rate, and the 2006 holiday rush shows no indication of that trend will slow down. An AOL Shopping/Zogby Poll reports that 80% of American web users plan to buy gifts online this holiday season. The following is an except from the poll's findings:

Several issues factor into why Internet users shop online during the holiday season. Nearly three in five (58%) stated online shopping saves time, while 32% say they enjoy the ease of comparison shopping. Another 29% said they found gift items online that are not available in local stores, while 24% cited the value of free shipping. Online sales promotions and easy last minute shopping also garnered support (17% each). Surprisingly, considering concerns about high gas prices, only 9% stated they shop online to save money at the pump.
"As the internet becomes more accessible and easier to use, increasing numbers of people utilize it to carry out tasks online, including making purchases," said Sarath Samarasekera, CEO of Shopster.com, a web service that powers over 1,500 e-stores across the country.

"Recent years have seen a marked improvement for online sales and we anticipate the upcoming holiday shopping season to reflect that trend"

Of course, online retail does come with its own share of drawbacks. Shoppers will miss out on the exciting opportunity to wake up at 4:30 a.m. and engage in sumo-style wrestling matches with deranged parents over vital-to-life products such as the crock pot that comes with a clock radio and the latest Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers action figures.

Hmm, maybe there's a reason this online retail thing is taking off after all.

Tags: Retail, eCommerce, Cyber Monday

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Now that we're over last year's holiday marketing trickery…Cyber Monday my big toe!…it's time to accept what the marketing gods have lain before us, and make the most of it. Google is leading the charge this year, aggressively pushing its new Google Checkout product with Cyber Monday special promotions.

Last year, in a three-part series, I explored Cyber Monday and the days after. For more information, check out An Online Christmas Carol, Parts I, II, and III.

Google seems to have abandoned the long-standing practice of feeding its own product ADD, whereby the company churns out products on whims and leaves them out there on the Net for feast or famine. Google Checkout, dubbed from its beginnings as the PayPal killer, will be pulled front for everyone to, um, check out.

Coupons have been sighted beneath the Google search bar, an appearance that may be more reoccurring as the Christmas holiday nears. These coupons began appearing today, the same day Google announced that Checkout users would receive $10 off purchases of $30 or more, and $20 off purchases of $50 or more through December 26. This happens just after Google made Checkout transactions free until December 31.

A Google-commissioned Harris Interactive poll reveals that 40 percent of employed US adults will be doing some of their shopping online. Twenty-five percent will be perusing the virtual aisle on the so-called Cyber Monday (there were four of these last year), the Monday after Black Friday. Up to 57 percent of these said they'd be shopping during coffee breaks and lunch hours.

Google says its online payment service eliminates an average of 15 steps from the online checkout process, and sometimes reduces the process to a simple login, saving shoppers time as they explore an average of 5.5 websites each. Since its launch in June, Google has forged partnerships with Buy.com, Starbucks, The Sports Authority, Ace Hardware, Timberland and others.

"We understand that more and more holiday shoppers are looking to beat the crowds by heading online to cross items off their list," said Troy Brown, senior director of e-commerce at Timberland.com. "That's why we've partnered with Google Checkout to offer our customers another fast, easy, and secure checkout process to help them take advantage of our online holiday offers."

On Cyber Monday, Google will launch a holiday site listing participating merchants, special promotions, and gift ideas from the most sought-after categories. These include clothing, gift certificates, toys, electronics, DVDs, and music.

But don't expect eBay to accept it. eBay's recently instituted policy, a policy that mysteriously appeared when Google Checkout was just a gleam in Google's eye, bars the use of payment services without a longstanding history of customer service.

Until the holidays are virtually thrust upon us, let's not forget the interim Thanksgiving, or the cornucopia of keywords that may be good to remember for driving traffic. Let's not forget the turducken (a gluttonous flaunting of affluence and abundance, which makes it almost as greedily wonderful as the Krispy Kreme bacon cheeseburger), and of course, last year's search champion, the butternut squash.

Tag: Google Checkout, Cyber Monday

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Urban Mapping, a company that "prides itself on broad domain expertise," has been around for a while - its maps have actually won several awards. It's getting fresh attention, though, for what one person has termed its "natural local search."

At first, I thought Greg Sterling's story was about another would-be Google Earth killer. But as Sterling describes it, "Urban Mapping is a technology and B2B data provider that is collecting and normalizing huge amounts of local data of varying types and stripes." And the company's best-known product - a paper map of the Manhattan area - isn't really in competition with Google Earth at all.

Urban Mapping's latest work involves making sure "that consumers can use their normal and natural language to find local information," Sterling writes. "For example: colloquial terms about neighborhoods and locations that may not be official geographic designations."

Sterling interviewed Ian White, the founder of Urban Mapping, and the two addressed the issue. "White was . . . highly sensitive to different use cases based on familiarity with an area - a local resident vs. a tourist for example - and discussed how that impacts the presentation and depth of information," Sterling wrote.

The company appears to see a "unique opportunity to increase the value to user, advertiser and publisher," and as its site is quick to point out, "local search has quickly become online advertising's new darling."

And so, even if it's not a competitor, it seems possible that Urban Mapping could bump into Google - or any number of other companies - at some point. A statement on its site makes this even more likely: Urban Mapping claims to "value intellectual creativity and agility over any particular body of knowledge," and "our passion lies between disciplines and across domains."

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Tag: Urban Mapping

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Google has added 3 new features to their Google Page Creator. They are image editing, multiple sites and pages for mobile. The image-editing feature allows users to customize their photos.

Users have the options of cropping, rotating, adding color or reducing color and adding their own special effects. This should be a good feature when users have photos that may not need Photoshop.

The multiple sites feature allows users to create up to 5 sites with different URLs. In Google's blog a post by Justin Rosenstein gives this example "But because not every site is a personal site, starting today, you can create up to five sites with different URLs. For example, you can have justinspizza.googlepages.com in addition to justin.rosenstein.googlepages.com."
The Google Page Creator will now have a mobile edition. Rosenstein writes," So when people visit your site from their mobile browser, they will see it optimized for their particular phone."

When Google launched Page Creator their goal was to have a user-friendly site. They seem to be achieving this goal. Rosenstein writes When we launched Google Page Creator on Labs earlier this year, we had one overriding goal: take making a website -- traditionally a complex process involving HTML, CSS, FTP, and $$$ -- and make it drop-dead easy. Since then, the feedback we're received has been loud and clear: thank you for making simple web publishing simple; now, go make more powerful things possible."
These 3 new features should make users of Google Page Creator a better experience for all to enjoy.

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The rapidly approaching Thanksgiving holiday in the United States will be swiftly followed by "Black Friday," with shoppers heading out to begin dispersing parts of their credit card limits to retailers.

Your site should be among those receiving generous servings of dollars on Friday. Getting from sadly watching log files to rapidly processing orders may be a matter of following seven steps recommended by direct marketing organization SendTec.

First, it is not too late to jump in to the mix with search engine marketing. Skillful bids for the right keywords can draw traffic to you. These next few weeks will require you to keep an eye on which keywords perform for you and make on the fly adjustments as needed.

Shoppers who abandon shopping carts tend to do so for a couple of reasons: shipping charges and a higher total than anticipated. Build the cost of shipping into product pricing and offer shipping for free. It's also a good idea to implement a running total of the cost of items in the shopping cart where visitors can always see it.

Track where visitors come from with your analytics program. It's important to know where visitors arrive from as this can suggest more effective keywords to draw them to the site. But stay within your ad budget, and use targeting options like demographic, geographic, and time-of-day to make the best use of your dollars.

Search engine optimization, the process of crafting your site for better organic results, won't help in the short term. That will help next year, where SEM for pay-per-click ads will pay off much faster. Save the SEO refurbishing for after New Year's Day.

SendTec suggested lastly that TV needs to be part of the equation. For many sites today, TV is probably not a viable option, but could become one as search advertising companies like Google begin to sell ad space on certain channels.

We'll disagree with SendTec on the TV concept for now, but not on video advertising in general. Some online ad networks offer video options, and choices for advertising on video or audio podcasts exist today. Those can offer a very targeted niche audience for certain sites that may justify the cost.

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Tag: Online Shopping

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A new feature is coming to AdSense, and it's called "ad placements." Only a handful of advertisers have been allowed to take a look at the service - it appears to be in a beta testing phase - but the potential market seems excited.

John Chow was one of the "select few" who were given access to the ad placements feature, and on his site (which displays pictures of a beautiful red Corvette), Chow posted an e-mail he'd received from the search engine giant.

Ad placements, as described by Google, "are groups of ad units that you can define and highlight to advertisers. Creating an ad placement is as easy as creating a custom channel," according to the company, "and ad placements will help you generate more revenue by increasing the visibility of your ad spaces to advertisers."

Chow was duly impressed by Google's latest tweak. "This is a big improvement over the current setup where a SiteMatch campaign can show up on any ad units," he wrote. "Now advertisers can target a single publisher defined ad spot."

The ‘Vette fan also agreed with Google in regards to the potential financial impact of ad placements. "This higher level of targeting should result in higher ad rates for publishers," Chow stated.

It seems as if a number of publishers are eager to use the new feature. The Blog Herald's Thord Hedengren referred to Chow as "lucky," and wrote, "This sounds great, and I can't wait to use it myself. Let's hope all is well and that Google will release this soon."

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Tag: Google, Ad placements

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Advertising.com announced a deal yesterday that it will collaborate with Japanese company Mitsui and Co. Ltd. to serve the Japanese online advertising market.

Under the moniker Advertising.com Japan, the duo will operate the leading online advertising site in Japan, which is the world's second largest market. Advertising.com, a subsidiary of AOL LLC, announced the partnership with Mitsui yesterday at an AOL press conference.

"By combining Advertising.com's exceptional technology and our deep experience and established presence in this market, we are able to provide the Japanese market with a more accountable, more impactful approach to online advertising," says Katsuhiko Oizumi, General Manager of Media Business Division at Mitsui.

Advertising.com representatives say the site "conducts strategic direct-response and brand marketing campaigns that guarantee bottom-line results for our clients". They offer tactical tools, web ads, search engines, and as a subsidiary of AOL they have the most expansive reach in the industry.

Partner Mitsui is one of the largest general trading companies in all of Japan and "trades in a diverse range of goods with business partners in every region of the world, and also engages in major international infrastructure and other projects", according to representatives. Mitsui also deals in importing and exporting, sales and marketing, as well as international trading and manufacturing.

Together the partnership will create a centralized network to connect advertisers and Internet publishers on which ads are automatically served in real-time based upon performance metrics.

The venture hopes to conquer the $3.4 billion online advertising market in Japan, which according to data from Mizuho Corporation Bank Research, is expected to reach $4.9 billion by 2009.

Advertising.com expects that the partnership with Mitsui, which already has an established industry reputation with online advertisers, will gain the venture a following.

President of Advertising.com Linda Clarizio says, "Partnering with a leader like Mitsui is the key to successfully entering this vibrant market. Mitsui gives this venture the advantages of an established market foothold, a globally respected reputation, and a successful track record of launching Internet/media joint ventures with US companies."

While the Advertising.com headquarters are in the United States, the site also has operations in England, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Spain, France, Sweden, and Germany.

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The agreement between Novell and Microsoft that will have salespeople offering Windows and Linux to customers had triggered substantial criticism, to which Novell has responded.

Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian placed an open letter to the Linux community online, as an answer to angry suggestions that Novell had admitted Linux infringed on Microsoft patents.

"Our agreement with Microsoft is in no way an acknowledgment that Linux infringes upon any Microsoft intellectual property," said Hovsepian. "When we entered the patent cooperation agreement with Microsoft, Novell did not agree or admit that Linux or any other Novell offering violates Microsoft patents."

Microsoft also concurred with this in a statement the company issued. "Microsoft and Novell have agreed to disagree on whether certain open source offerings infringe Microsoft patents and whether certain Microsoft offerings infringe Novell patents," the company said, and also noted Novell was "absolutely right" in its assertion that admission or acknowledgment of patent issues was not part of the agreement.

"Our interest in signing this agreement was to secure interoperability and joint sales agreements, but Microsoft asked that we cooperate on patents as well, and so a patent cooperation agreement was included as a part of the deal," Hovsepian said.

The CEO also listed several ways he feels Novell has supported the open source community with its patent practices. Those included indemnifying its Linux customers from accusations of patent infringement, and efforts at helping reform the USPTO process that has resulted in the issuance of hundreds of "bad patents" of obvious, non-original creations.

Microsoft will have to earn some trust among the open source community. If the company were to act against free/open source software developers where they would not be permitted to distribute their work due to potential infringement, Microsoft will have a full-scale riot on its hands in answer to that.

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Tags: Novell, Linux, Microsoft

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One of the people behind the original deal that placed MySpace in the Fox Interactive Media collection of websites has reacquired most of the parts of Intermix from MySpace's new ownership.

Richard Rosenblatt, the mastermind behind the $580 million sale of Intermix to Fox, purchased back most of the Intermix pieces via his firm, Demand Media. This runs counter to Fox's contentions that all of the pieces would be unified.

Staci Kramer at PaidContent disclosed the revelation that Demand Media picked up a number of assets it owned before Fox shelled out for Intermix. Although the price had been criticized, MySpace inked a deal with Google that will send $900 million its way in exchange for search and advertising rights.

Kramer noted how Demand Media ended up with Social Labs LLC, the former Intermix subsidiary that owned MySpace; twenty "web assets" including assorted websites like Grab.com; and a lead generator at Focalex.com.

Fox is keeping some of the Grab.com technology, which is being used to power the social networking aspects of properties like FoxSports.com and AmericanIdol.com. But Demand Media has a license to the Grab.com code as part of its deal.

Not everyone was surprised by this new deal. Andrew Teman blogged this was the "least shocking deal ever." The former Focalex worker considers that component "the most under-rated" of the repurchase.

And what about the contentious relationship between Intermix and its former CEO? Ashkan Karbasfrooshan wrote at HipMojo that "Somewhere, Intermix founder Brad Greenspan is foaming at the mouth." Greenspan has previous sued over the MySpace deal, claiming it was undervalued.

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Tags: Fox, MySpace, Intermix, Demand Media, Richard Rosenblatt

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