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We’ve teamed up with Imagine publishing to offer you the chance to win one of 5 subscriptions to Total PC Gaming magazine, worth over £40. More…

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If you’re anything like me, you’ll use your browser’s built-in Google search more than the address bar itself to find websites. The search engine is so pervasive (it’s in my desktop browser, Nintendo Wii Internet channel and the iPhone I’d love to own) that ‘googling’ is often the easiest way.

That’s why this week’s changes to Google’s trademark rules are quite significant. Until 5th May, companies were not permitted to bid against trademarked terms. I commented on this story in the Financial Times a couple of weeks ago (requires free registration), and it’s also been covered in The Times Business Section this weekend.

Google’s trademark rule changes effectively force every company to pay for advertisements as well being listed in natural search, or face losing clicks to competitors.

Here’s how it works: If you enter ‘PlusNet’ into Google, it made sense that you should be shown results that are relevant to your search. This is very different from searching for ‘UK broadband’ for example. New rules have changed all this, and it’s all going to drive extra cash towards Google. Already other companies are starting to bid against PlusNet’s terms. It’s natural that we would want to be the top result - after all, you’re searching for PlusNet, right?

At PlusNet we chose to bid against our own name, but we weren’t obliged to. Since May 5th, to flourish in a competitive market, we’re going to have to start paying more to Google or risk being drowned-out by competitors with bigger budgets. Of course, we’re able to bid against other trademark terms, but our competitors have much deeper pockets and currently pay up to £12 per click to Google for every click on the word ‘broadband’.

How else could this affect you? If you run a small business and use search engine marketing to promote your products then you face the same challenge. The risk grows the more successful you are, because your company name will become more of a target if it generates a high volume of searches. For example, if you run a small business of 3 flower shops across your region and generate lots of leads online, you could find that big national players are able to bid against your company name when previously they may not have been able to. If you generate a significant number of searches, it’s a realistic scenario as there are lots of software tools that let search companies target the ‘long tail’ of related terms. It’s like a competitor sticking a big billboard on the side of your corner store.

What do you think?

• Are you glad that there’s now more opportunity for advertisers to target your search?
• Or would you prefer to have search limited just to the subjects / companies you asked for?

I’d love to hear your opinions.

Phil Sheard, Emarketing manager @ PlusNet
Twitter me: philsheard

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I’m guessing that most people in the tech industry must have been watching the snooker considering there seems to be more green baize related headlines (two 147s in a week) than tech industry news. However, there have been a few interesting things that are noteworthy, so I’ll cue them up now. More…

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You probably already run Anti-Virus and other security tools which prevent threats to your PCs. Kept up-to-date and with regular scanning, these tools provide good protection against most on-line security threats.

However, whether it’s because of cost, apathy, lack of knowledge or all of the above many thousands of our customers don’t have adequate security protection for their PCs and home networks. The consequences of these oversights can range from mildly annoying through to expensive and disastrous. We’re now asking our customers to help us trial one possible solution. More…

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The last few days I’ve been playing around with a service that I discovered some months back, but it only really became a viable option due to a new cellphone plan that I have recently moved to. The name of the service is Qik and the reason why it has become viable is that I no longer have to pay for mobile data, wherever I am in the world (this is a big deal for me, for other reasons - see other blogs of mine).

So, what’s this Qik service all about and how is it going to change the world? Well, Qik is a small application that you can install on your mobile phone (only Nokia S60 Operating systems so far). It then allows you to stream live video direct from your phone and onto a web page. The quality is excellent and the delay is only around 3 seconds.

So, what’s the big deal then? Well, there is a growing Qik community forming already and due to the bottomless-pit of creativity from the users out there we’ve already seen live coverage from all manner of events; a guy running the Boston Marathon strapped his phone to his chest and broadcast his entire run live; we had the aftermath of a shooting at an American school last week streamed live from the campus, we’ve had live feeds of flash-mobs, Olympic torch protests, you name it, it’s been Qik’ed.

What we have here is a new level of immediacy with news reporting. With the likes of Flickr, YouTube, Picassa et al we have documents of history (albeit recent) that are subject to censorship, but Qik allows the user to broadcast live video and audio feeds from wherever they all in the world, cutting out the media corporation middleman. Certainly, with a laptop and webcam and the various “live-cam” services available you can do similar, but ultimately you’re somewhat tethered by the technology; running it off a mobile phone changes the playing field altogether.

Qik is also trying to maximize distribution possibilities for live and on-demand video watchers by building widgets for blogs and Facebook, enabling alert systems on Twitter and Pownce, as well as tying into other video services like YouTube, Mogulus, Seesmic and Justin.tv.

Qik recently received $3m series B funding in order to invest into their software platform, so it will be interesting to see the developments, to both the company and those that use it..

Matt Grest
Head of Future Development
PlusNet

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I’ve only just started these weekly industry news blogs and already I nearly failed to write one this week. Not my fault, you see my 5-month-old boy thought that it would be funny if he took a chunk out of my cornea. Mind you, he did laugh as I was clutching my contorted face so for him I guess it was funny. Having just regained enough vision to sit at a computer for any length of time I’ve just managed to catch-up on some of the news from the last seven days, so let’s get started: More…

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The other day I was playing around with Huddle, a web-based project management and collaboration environment. A friend of mine who works at Huddle asked me what I thought. Their definition of what Huddle is is probably better than mine:

“Huddle combines group collaboration, project management and document sharing using social networking principles.”

More…

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Hi, I’m Luke and I’m one of the Operation Managers in the Customer Support Centre (CSC). My role is to help run the Support Centre for PlusNet. There are two Ops Managers here and we look after a team of 8 Managers who own specific areas, such as Faults, Customer Service, Provisioning, Technical Support etc….

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Some people think that I know what’s going on in the technology and internet industry so I’m about to be found out. That is, unless you can help me! On a weekly basis, normally Thursdays, I’m going to post a roundup of industry news that caught my eye. If you think there’s other equally (or more) interesting technology / industry news then just add a comment to the blog with details and a link to the story. Anyway, let’s get down to business::

• So, perhaps the story that most made my heart run with fear was More…

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9 years and 2 months ago I started on a very exciting journey with PlusNet.

I started off as the sole developer, establishing what is now PlusNet’s Workplace solution. Workplace is the software solution which pretty much controls everything within PlusNet. It includes the customer management, product management, billing engine and internal calendaring functionality amongst other things. It also ties together the network and software pieces of the business so we have a single platform - and not multiple systems that don’t talk to each other. More…

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