The Seattle-Search.com Blog

Can you name seven things the Seattle Central Library has in common with Internet Social Media?

Just ask CollinsWoerman’s sustainable development specialists Steve Moddemeyer, and Lucia Athens who led the city of Seattle’s green building program for 10 years. Your answer is just one of the insights and features you’ll find at the new Northwest hub for sustainable architecture.

At Green Central, you’ll find the future of sustainable architecture is as emerald green as the city of Seattle. Drop by the Green Newsstand for constantly updating headlines from around the world of green architecture and the best of green tweets from the online Twitterverse. Check the latest on the Green Central blog. Bookmark or download one of numerous green guides, features and reports including “Top Ten Trends in Green Building” fresh off the presses from Lucia Athen’s upcoming book.

Explore Seattle’s next green design and construction project at www.collinswoerman.com/green-central.

Are we happy being No. 16?

That was Washington’s ranking among U.S. states (and territories) in a report cited by the Seattle PI based on a study by the Communication Workers of America. The CWA Web site speedmatters.org measures users’ Internet speeds. Washington has the 16th-fastest average Internet speed in the nation.

Would you be surprised to learn that the United States itself is ranked just 28th among all industrialized countries? America’s average download speed was 5.1 megabits per second, according to the report. The world’s leader, South Korea, sends data packets flying a the speed of 20.4 mbps.

The U.S. also ranked 15th in high-speed Internet adoption - countries such as Canada, Britain, Japan, France and Germany have more people with high-speed Internet than the U.S. Washington’s average download speed was 6.2 mbps, according to the report. While our state is ahead of the average U.S. speed, it lags behind leaders Delaware (9.9 mbps), Rhode Island (9.8 mbps), New Jersey (8.9 mbps), Massachusetts (8.6 mbps) and New York (8.4 mbps).

Nearly half of Washingtonians had Internet speeds of 768 kilobits per second (the Federal Communication Commission’s definition of broadband) to 6 mbps, the report states. Fourteen percent had slower Internet (mostly dial-up), 23 percent had screaming-fast (10 to 25 mbps) speeds, and 12 percent had speeds of 6 to 10 mbps. Just 1 percent had Internet faster than 25 mbps.

The full report, including individual state rankings, can be found here. [24x7]

A few choice words may say it best.

Not “B-I-N-G” — “Because It’s Not Google” — but rather…

“And then there were two!”

“Make no mistake, Yahoo’s out of the search game,” confided colleague, search pundit and pioneer, Danny Sullivan. We “know the spin. Better user interface, new ways to innovate, a winning play. Let’s not kid ourselves. They’re done. Not today, not necessarily in a year, but down the line.”

Yahoo was simply spellbound by Google. The Y! leadership couldn’t communicate clearly how it was a strong second place player. The Avis to Google’s Hertz, the Pepsi to their Coke. Yahoo seemed weak, ripe for the picking, and Microsoft went to pluck it last year. Google tried for Yahoo itself through a partnership deal. The US Department Of Justice said “No, no, no.” Do that, and we’ll take anti-trust action against you, Google.

This was not an impulse play, however. CEO Steve Ballmer noted on the conference call that the two sides have a 100-page playbook as opposed to a two-page term sheet and also noted that the negotiations were handled by management as opposed to representatives of the company’s boards. Microsoft did not give Yahoo any up-front payment.

Here are the major deal points:

- Microsoft’s Bing will now be the search engine on all Yahoo sites.
- Microsoft now controls a bit less than 1/3 of the search engine market.
- Yahoo’s search will remain branded by Yahoo.
- Yahoo will provide the relationship sales force for both companies’ premium search advertisers.
- Microsoft will compensate Yahoo through a revenue sharing agreement on traffic generated on Yahoo’s network. Yahoo will receive 88 percent of revenue from search ads on its site, for the first 5 years.
- The term of the agreement is 10 years.

While this is the fourth reincarnation of the Microsoft search engine, make no mistake: this is Microsoft’s best shot yet at beating its arch rival on its home turf. It’s never put so many resources towards that goal.

“And then there were two!”

While fireworks were cancelled this year in downtown Seattle for the Fourth of July, the Seattle Space Needle towered above a minor inferno late Thursday night that created major headaches at one of Seattle’s most modern data centers, located directly across the street.

Seattle’s Fisher Plaza, home to KOMO TV, KOMO Radio, the Internap Data Center, and several other area Internet companies including Seattle Web host provider, Adhost, was the scene of an electrical blaze triggered by a blown transformer at around 11pm July 2nd  that shut down internet access in the East Data Center of the Fisher complex and knocked out dozens, if not hundreds, of area Web sites until the afternoon of July 3rd.

Among the largest sites affected, Authorize.net, and Microsoft’s BING Travel, were laid low, the former a critical link in many e-commerce transactions and the latter among the slowest to be restored because of special configuration requirements. A list of other blacked-out sites, including Big Fish Games, AllRecipes.com, the Pacific Science Center, and this site, Seattle24×7.com, among others, were disabled.

Seattle tech reporter Todd Bishop lamented that this is the second time a fire has created an outage at the  world-class Fisher Plaza facility, and the problem underscores the question of uninterrupted Web services, cloud computing, SaaS and e-commerce in an age where power outages can vanquish whole city blocks.

The early pioneers of Internet design used to point to the Net’s virtuallly indestructible capacity to survive in a catastrophe by routing around an outage. But until such time as the decentralized Web creates a protocol for a global 301 redirect that automatically forwards users to a secondary, off-site server location, a single co-location solution will always be vulnerable.

This isn’t a criticism of any of the companies in Fisher Plaza because the same situation can happen anywhere. Imagine a plane crash, an explosion, or a fire taking place in your Web hosting facility. If you don’t have a duplicate copy of your Website in another building or at another facility you are flamed out, like a spent fuse on the Fifth of July. [24x7]

Previewed at the AllThingsD conference just a few short days ago and being christened at the start of this week’s Search Marketing Expo (SMX Adanced) at the Bell Harbor Conference Center (Jun 2-3) with a keynote presentation by Dr. Qi Lu, the new Microsoft search engine known as Bing debuts this week. The new search experience is something more than the latest “bling” in search fashion, but Microsoft’s “X-factor” in the competitive search marketplace that it hopes will ring in greater numbers of users and ring up more meaningful market share.

Bing has its roots in the acquired technology of Powerset as a “decision” search engine that is well-suited for comparison shopping among other things. The DNA is expressed in a number of domintant traits. The most fundamental trait is that Bing now organizes search results into categories that expand well beyond the Google tabs of Images,Video, Maps, News, Shopping and More… (and contrasts markedly with the more integrated Google Universal Search). There are 20 results on the Bing Engine Results Page (”BERP?”) rather than the 10 results that have become the norm for standard bearers like Google.

Microsoft is drawing on consumer research of the “next steps” searchers take after getting feedback form a search engine. A famous comment from Bill Gates is that “Search is about verbs.” Searcher want actions, not just data — to reserve a table, book a flight, call a support line. Powerset could give Microsoft the edge it has been looking for.

“Info Mother” Esther Dyson took an early look at Bing (formerly code named Kumo) and penned, “It’s great for consumers and for marketers of products/services, but not so good for intermediaries such as Orbitz and all kinds of shopping sites.” In Dyson’s view, Microsoft is bidding to become the intermediary — or partnering with specific agents such as Open Table.

Clearly, positoning the search engine as a digital concierge that can perform actions for you is not something Google could have taken on given its dominance in Search, nor even the recalcitrant Microsoft of years ago. The timing is right for Bing, not only in terms of the ecommerce connections but in terms of the integration of Search and structured data, to take a significant step forward.

Just about a week ago, Google announced Enhanced Search Snippets and Microformats within its displayed Search Results. Now Microsoft rolls out a category system for managing search in new, structered terms. Isn’t competition sweet?! [24x7]

Judges and audience members at last week’s WTIA Tech Showcase Fast Pitch Forum voted the following three innovators as “Best in Show” of the 23 Seattle-area companies that each had eight minutes to make their case.

AdReady, Inc., a provider of online advertising technology
Swype, Inc., developer of a unique text input solution for mobile touch-screen devices, and TeachStreet, an education-focused online community were the triumphant trio.

Patrick Ennis, one of four panelists asked to judge the candidates, put the showdown in perspective: “It is a hackneyed phrase, but it is true—economic downturns are often the best times to build a startup company. In the chaos and confusion of turbulent times, there always lies opportunity. As industries change and contract, the marketplace is ripe for new solutions. Because despite the negative headlines in the media, people are still going about their daily activities and living their lives, and there will always be opportunities for new products and services, and for new technologies that reduce the cost and increase the efficiency of existing products and services.”

Congratulations to the winners! Each will receive Safeco Field suite tickets courtesy of the Seattle Mariners. Other participating companies included Bonanzle, BuddyTV, Daptiv, Inc., DataSphere Technologies, Inc., Gist, Inc., Konnects, Inc., LiquidPlanner, Inc., Mpire Corporation (WidgetBucks), Ontela, Inc., Pet Holdings, Inc., Picnik.com, Reality Gap, Inc., Redfin, SEOmoz Inc., Talent Spring, Inc., VANTOS, Inc., Visible Technologies, WhitePages, Inc. and Widevine Technologies. [24x7]

Last Tuesday, the Washington state Senate passed ESHB 2075, the digital goods tax bill by a vote of 28-20. What does the bill mean to you?

The bill that requires sellers of digital goods and “digital automated services” to collect sales tax on Washington consumers for such items as ringtones, digital music, digital audio and video, digital books as well as web services such as online expense reporting, online subscriptions of all types and other online services where an end user pays for an item that is a digital product or service.  Nothing changes if an online business receives advertising revenue.

There are a number of exemptions for business use of digital goods, although not complete.

For sellers of digital products, the B&O tax rate drops from 1.5% to .471%, which is about 68% lower.  There are a number of other provisions including an amnesty for uncollected sales tax on sales that were deemed by the Dept. of Revenue to be equivalent to tangible personal property.

The Washington Technology Industry Association (WTIA) announced it will be working with the Dept. of Revenue to help companies comply with the new law. Workshops and seminars are being planned.

The bill as it passed the legislature is online at http://www.washingtontechnology.org/community/blogs/wsagovtaffairs/attachment/514.ashx

Medical students and interns/residents from the American Medical Student Association (AMSA), the nation’s oldest and largest independent association for more than 67,000 physicians-in-training, are now available to answer online health questions from the public for free on Healia Communities (http://communities.healia.com).

Where once people looked to friends and acquaintances for advice on topics such as where to find reputable medical information and what kind of doctor to visit for a particular set of symptoms, a trained group of medical students will now be available to answer many of people’s common health questions. Healia and medical students are working together to make trusted health information available — anywhere, anytime, and at no cost.

“The problem is that many people are rightly hesitant to use the Web for health questions because they have little or no confidence that their questions will be answered by someone who is actually qualified to do so,” said Tom Eng, Founder and President of Healia. “Through this partnership with AMSA, we hope that people will take advantage of this unique opportunity to get trusted information and learned insight from doctors-in-training who are actively studying the latest research and developments in medical science.”

In addition to asking health questions, Healia Communities members can share their experiences and knowledge and make connections with others who have similar health interests and concerns. There are more than 250 active communities including allergy, Alzheimer’s disease, asthma, breast cancer, diabetes, exercise and fitness, heart diseases and weight management.