In this post I give my point of view about the different types of customers that can be used by marketers, I also adress the problem of defining metrics to qualify these customers. Customer Profile A person with whom the company/website is in contact can be: A Potential Customer (Also called Prospect): This is, typically, a person who is the target for a publicity campaign and who has responded positively (i.e. who has actively looked for further information). A First-time Buyer:  He has just made a purchase unaware that things are about to snowball! A New Customer:  This customer has […]

I find this one on a french blog (http://www.chrogeek.com), but I don’t know where the guy find it. Anyway, a short history of hacking (I know, the term is not the good one).

It is often difficult to choose the correct indicators to use when we have to decide on how to measure the efficiency of a SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) mission, or when we want to know where our website stands, also when we want to trace the effects of any modifications that we make to it.  It is clear though that some indicators are totally useless and can even be misleading.  Let’s take a hard look at some of these devils: « Public » Metrics What I call a Public metric is an indicator given by an external tool and which can be […]

I am involved in this new conference so here is the call for papers… The management of large-scale complex industrial systems has a considerable strategic importance for an important number of enterprises (most notably in Europe and North America). This spawned the relatively new academic field of « system architecture & engineering », producing a body of research that allows engineers to manage the increasing complexity of the technical systems they design. By its very nature, this field is at the interface between industry and academia, and requires its practitioners to be well versed in industrial application-related as well as theoretical knowledge. […]

When a website editor wants to make money from online advertising he can choose from several operational modes: the CPM, the CPC or a fixed contract.  This choice is also a problem for the advertiser, which method would be best?  Should he pay for each prospective customer interested in his ad or should he pay for every hit?  Although these are frequent questions, the answers are never too difficult to find. Firstly, Let me introduce some vocabulary: CPC: Cost per click, this is the adsense advertising model. Every time a user clicks on an ad, the advertiser pays the editor. […]

A nice infographic from http://www.visualeconomics.com, the original is here. Pay attention to the fact that reading is the smallest item in the list!

Electronic Commerce (EC for short) is one of these conferences that mix algorithmic together with business oriented problems (bidding strategies for instance). The call for for EC 2010 is out, you can find it here. Here is a copy… PAPER SUBMISSION The conference is soliciting full papers (as well as workshop and tutorial proposals; see below) on all aspects of electronic commerce. Submitted papers will be evaluated on significance, originality, technical quality, and exposition. They should clearly establish the research contribution, its relevance to electronic commerce, and its relation to prior research. Submissions to be considered for publication in the […]

I don’t know about you, but there are several blogs that I like to read to keep abreast of web/SEO/etc developments.  Amongst these, there is one that shouldn’t be missed: it is Stanford’s CS department blog. It has many assets: it is a blog written by a star team of researchers specialising in website algorithmics, and from which most Google, Yahoo (and others) brains emerge.  In short, their postings are always interesting and there’s no « useless-post-about-a-boring-life »… All this to say that, a few months ago, Bobji Mungamuru posted about a very interesting article in which he discusses about Click Fraud. […]

Sometimes writing a paper can be a real pain in the neck, but the worst is when it is a pain to actually submit a paper. Sometimes conference management systems are really strict. This is for instance the case of EDAS. If you submit a paper using EDAS, maybe you will read this: The PDF file uses PDF version 1.4, however only 1.5, 1.6, 1.7 is allowed. it means that you hve to convert your PDF file to a more recent version of PDF. It took me half an hour to find a way to do that, so here is […]

Here in France, we had this morning a funny surprise during our first request to Google France. Indeed, the homepage presents this small sentence under the search box « Nouveau! Le téléphone HTC Magic est disponible. En savoir Plus ». This litterally means  « New! The telephone HTC Magic is available. To know more about it « , with a link to this this page of google.fr. On the target page, a cool picture of the HTC Magic Android, and 2 links to a SFR (the third  French mobile phone company – 19 million clients, including over 3 million using 3G technology, according to […]