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WordPress "Code is Poetry"
On Saturday, March 29, 2008, WordPress 2.5 was released and this release took me by surprise. If you use WordPress then you realize how often plugins are updated and the core itself is so frequent you might as well look to the source before you reuse any code from a previous project because it will have since been outdated. One thing that really impressed me was the new user interface in the admin section which is now starting to look more of a polished over CMS system.
Either way you look at it WordPress is here to stay and will become even more prominent as a CMS and blogging software which remains free, designer and developer supported open source that is extended by people who use it the most. Our Content Management System is based on WordPress and these improvements benefit all of our customers.
Contact us today for more information and get started today with your own WordPress CMS driven website!
Related Links:
The WordPress Podcast Video: Episode 39 Live from WordCamp Dallas
WordPress Version 2.5: http://codex.wordpress.org/Version_2.5
Download WordPress: http://wordpress.org/download/
Free WordPress Themes: http://www.wpthemesfree.com/
Plugins: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/
www.showinabox.tv
As we prepare to release our SAI 25: World’s Most Valuable Startups list, we’re running through some final valuation numbers. One company that is a shoo-in for the list is Craigslist (yes, it has been around a while, but we’re defining "start-up" as private companies founded in recent memory that has yet to go public or sell out).
We’ve struggled to get formal business metrics for Craigslist, but ClickZ has summarized a recent report from Classified Intelligence that should help. CI estimates Craiglist’s numbers, but it has at least gone through the laborious process of counting listings, pageviews, etc.
So here are some metrics:
2007 Est. Revenue: $55 million
2008 Est Revenue: $81 million
Monthly Pageviews: 9 billion
Monthly Job Listings: 2 million
Monthly Ad Listings: 30 million
Employees: 25
Estimated Costs
Let’s assume that each of Craigslist’s 25 employees costs about $125,000 a year, all in. That’s probably high–Craigslist is run like a non-profit–but it should be in the ballpark. This adds up to about $3 million of salary and other HR costs. Let’s assume that Craigslist will grow this year, and let’s assume that it spends another few million on prosaic costs like rent, insurance, travel, etc. Total estimated 2008 operating expenses: $7.5 million.
On the "cost of sales" line, let’s assume that Craiglist spends a boatload on servers and bandwidth to keep the site running smoothly. Craigslist’s content is not at all bandwidth intensive–all light text, no computation or transactive processing like eBay or Google–so this should keep its costs well below those of other huge global sites. Let’s call it $50 million a year. (This is probably high–grateful for any help in refining).
Add all that together and use the CI revenue estimate, and you have a business with about $80 million in revenue and, say, $25 million in operating profit. Apply a 10X revenue multiple and/or 25X operating income multiple, and you would have a company worth about $750 million. But obviously Craigslist is worth a heck of a lot more than that.
Craigslist’s Real Value
Why is Craigslist worth more than meets the eye? Because it’s run like a non-profit. Craig Newmark and co. don’t give a damn about generating revenue or profit, and more power to them. But if Craig ever want to sell Craigslist, he’d probably want to get something closer to true value for it–which means we need to think about the company’s real earning power.
Let’s assume that, instead of charging for job ads in only 11 cities, Craigslist charged for all job ads (currently 2 million a month). Let’s assume that it also charged for another 5 million of the 30 million ads on the site each month. Let’s assume that Craigslist users were so horrified by the outrage of being charged even a de minimus listing fee that two thirds of these listers stormed off in a huff so that the 7 million of paid listings dropped to, say, 2.5 million a month. And let’s assume that Craigslist charged its standard $25 job listing fee for all of them.
What would that generate in revenue? $62.5 million per month, or $750 million a year.
Let’s further assume that this outrageous affront to a minority of users–$25 per listing!–would require huge customer service and processing costs, so that Craigslist’s overall cost base jumped to $250 million a year. Then we’d have a business with $750 million in revenue and $500 million of operating profit.
Let’s put very conservative revenue and operating profit multiples on that–say 7X revenue and 10X operating profit–and we’re conservatively looking at a business worth $5 billion.
Thoughts? Speak now or forever hold your peace.
Article Provided by: WebProNews
List of reasons pretty comprehensive
Twhirl’s service will remain free to users, so onlookers need not look to their wallets. Loic Le Meur presumably did a little digging, however, as the Twitter client has been acquired by his video chat company, Seesmic.
Twhirl’s price remains unknown, but on all other subjects, Le Meur has been extremely forthcoming. Want to know why Seesmic purchased Twhirl, for example? Le Meur lists a total of 20 reasons. "[Twhirl creator] Marco Kaiser is super cool and it is all about people" catches the PR side; "[Twhirl] is the #1 and coolest Twitter client with more than 100,000 downloads and 7% of all tweets posted per day" should convince statisticians.
The addition of video to Twhirl will remain optional, so fans who fear change needn’t worry about that. Also, in terms of what else is to come, we appear to be getting a preview thanks to a conversation on TechCrunch. Le Meur has promised Gabe Rivera a button that will return users to the main timeline, and he should "eliminate delays by getting tweets via XMPP instead of polling," as well.
There are obviously some potential sticking points - Seesmic is still in alpha, and Twitter itself is notorious for suffering untimely outages. Yet on the whole, the deal looks like it could give quite a boost to microblogging.
Article Provided by: WebProNews
29% growth rate over next five years
Streaming video and music will bring in $70 billion in revenue over the next six years according to a new study from Insight Research," Streaming Media, IPTV, and Broadband Transport: Telecommunications Carriers and Entertainment Services 2008-2013."
This covers revenues generated from digital audio and video files over the Internet, an IPTV network and mobile devices. The files can be streamed on-de3mand or in real time, but cannot be stored locally.
Revenues will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 29 percent over the next five years. On-demand audio and video content along with their advertising revenue will drive this growth.
"The outlook for streaming media has never been brighter. Questions surrounding consumers’ willingness to pay for content have been dispelled by the popularity of satellite radio and iTunes," says Robert Rosenberg, Insight Research president.
"The forecasts that we present are conservative, and in-line with current performance. If, however, per-stream costs drop faster than anticipated, we have quicker acceptance of IPTV, or improvements in 3G delivery take place faster than expected, it could blow the doors off of our forecasts, propelling this industry into explosive growth," Rosenberg added.
Related Links:
www.showinabox.tv
Article Provided by: WebProNews
Company could easily top $100 million if desired
The website devouring the classified industry could hit $100 million in revenue in 2009 with a couple of minor changes, with the old-line newspaper industry helplessly watching from the sidelines.
Though the powers that be at Craigslist, founder and customer service rep Craig Newmark and CEO Jim Buckmaster, aren’t commenting on the story from industry analysts Classified Intelligence (CI), they are pulling in an appreciable amount of money on the famously minimalist site. They could do even better.
CI said in its report on Craigslist that the implementation of its $25 job listing fee in three more locations could boost the company’s revenue into nine-digit territory. Through assessment of Craigslist postings in January and March, CI pegs 2008 revenue for Craigslist at $81 million.
Take the job recruiting fee of $25 Craigslist charges in a handful of major metropolitan areas. Kick it up to $75 across the board (that’s the price in San Francisco), and revenue for 2009 should climb to $150 million for a company based in a Victorian-style house that looks like it saw much better days a half-century ago.
The customer service credo of Craigslist, and its modest appointments both in headquarters and in site design, stand in stark contrast to the glassy offices of the newspapers that bore the brunt of the no frills, no fee approach to classifieds that are a hallmark of the site. Craigslist looks like what it is, a site launched years ago as a personal project that never forgot its users.
Some feel like Craigslist should do more, namely the bombastic VP and general manager of eBay’s classifieds competitor, Kijiji, Jacob Aqraou. He doesn’t care for the dated look of Craigslist, or the English-only listings that have only branched out into other languages in recent months.
As CI noted, the sniping comes across as odd, since eBay happens to own a 25 percent stake in Craigslist. The competition is real, however, with Kijiji, Freecycle, and the Village Voice’s Backpage all trying to present themselves as a better classifieds option.
Although some may dispute Craigslist’s real impact on newspaper classified revenue, one publishing professional cited by CI called Craigslist a catalyst that forced newspapers to reconsider their business models.
There isn’t one cause for newspaper fortunes to be in decline. Craigslist is a popular target, especially since CI said in 2004 that San Francisco newspapers lost as much as $65 million in recruitment ad revenue alone due to the site.
Craigslist simply found a niche where demand existed, and they make as much money as they care to earn. One can imagine how much they would make if they tossed an AdSense ad unit into their templates. But to Newmark and company, such a prospect looks unfathomable.
Article Provided by: WebProNews
Let’s just start out by saying a phrase I heard a while back, "Everything Google touches turns to gold". I find myself using Google services quite frequently and figured what a good blog post to describe all the great tools I have found and use. This is by no means a complete list but rather the ones that stood out to me and could help you become more popular, well I can’t promise that.
Google Analytics has been re-designed to help you learn even more about where your visitors come from and how they interact with your site.
Create and share your work online
- Create, edit and upload quickly
- Access and edit from anywhere
- Share changes in real time
Gmail is a new kind of webmail, built on the idea that email can be more intuitive, efficient, and useful.
Simply describe your items on Base to make them as easy as possible for people to find when they search. You don’t even need a website to put your stuff online.
Google’s advertising platform offering both cost-per-click and cost-per-impression pricing for advertisements served on Google.com and partner sites. Something I found recently was Audio Ads which seems like a great way to get radio exposure.
Social networking and discussion site operated by Google.
Google AdSense matches ads to your site’s content, and you earn money whenever your visitors click on them.
Shared calendars, quickly add events and see your friends’ and family’s schedules right next to your own.
This new upcoming service seems intriguing, "Your work deserves to be seen. You’ve made a great video. Now who will watch it?". Just make sure you own the rights to it and pending their approval you could have your video on Google. If you are a big shot producer with 1,000 + hours of vide you can sign up for their "Premium Program".
"OpenSocial defines a common API for social applications across multiple websites. Built from standard JavaScript and HTML, developers can create apps with OpenSocial that access a social network’s friends and update feeds. By using a common API, developers can extend the reach of their applications more quickly, yielding more functionality for users."
"According to Google’s statistics, OpenSocial applications are already used by over 200 million users across participating social networks like Engage.com, Friendster, LinkedIn, Six Apart, and more. Next Tuesday, hi5 will be joining the fold, and the OpenSocial Foundation itself should be up and running within the next 90 days."
Remember The Graduate when Benjamin Braddock was advised to go into plastics. The clip is here. It seemed like a safe bet at the time - and it was.
Today the web maybe "the new plastics." It seems like every brand is building a new site or microsite. The Internet feels like Dubai. Some are big, ambitious projects. Others are smaller initiatives like a blog that a small group can manage themselves.
I don’t expect organizations to stop building sites anytime soon. However, the Picture-in-Picture Web (what some would call the web services promise of "Web 3.0") is coming on strong. And I believe most brand web sites may not matter in 2012 - unless they have satellites that make the mother ship stronger. The Attention Crash (or what Iconoculture calls "choice fatigue") is accelerating the pace of change. Fred Wilson has a similar point of view.
The leading players on the web all see the train coming. They are wisely creating APIs and turning themselves into plug-and-play services, not just big destinations. YouTube is just the latest to do so today. Amazon has S3. Google has OpenSocial and an extensive library of APIs. As does Microsoft. Facebook is allowing its applications to live outside the site. Twitter is an API first and (eventually) a business model second. Finally, the booming widget economy shows the promise of small content that can go anywhere.
These are the leaders. But everyone - including marketers - will need to think of their online brands not as sites but as portable services that can go anywhere and everywhere the consumer wants. Without such appendages, no brand will ever be able to break through the online clutter such unlimited choice offers.
source: MicroPersuasion.com
All too often I see companies running Windows platforms and servers in-house and worse yet Microsoft Internet Explorer is set as the default browser. Out of the box, Windows has made this the industry standard without giving the users any options.
Here are some solid options to evaluate:
FireFox
Flock
Opera
Safari (now Mac + PC)
If your computer web browsing has come to a crawl and painful process we highly recommend trying one of the alternatives listed above, you won’t go back we promise.