When John Donahoe took over eBay, he started a long term plan to kill off small time sellers. The total number of items listed on eBay fell below 8 million and kept dropping because listing fees were getting so expensive and Fewer and fewer items were being listed.

eBay tried to get the numbers back up by offering listing fee discounts time to time but it wasn’t a permanent solution. The next step in Donahoe’s plan was to start cutting deals with large retailers so they could sell on eBay. Buy.com was one of the first large online retailers to flood eBay with more than 100K items all with free shipping. These companies were basically paying no listing fees which was really an unfair advantage over the little guys.

A large number of small power sellers have gone out of business because of these corporate deals. To sum things up, eBay wants to shed its image as a electronic flea market and now want to be seen as a mainstream shopping mall. Not the eBay we used to know. In fact, seems the revolt has been brewing for some time now …

It is clear from their portfolio and testimonials that they do not just produce one graphic style that is then forced on their clients but strive to respect the style of each organization. Search Engine Optimization, E-Commerce, Flash integration and php programming are all available from this team of professionals as well as honed graphic skills.

NGKSoft has produced websites for clients across many fields including services and industries, non-profit and education, e-commerce sites, travel and recreation sites and environmental projects. Among the many resources available from the site, one of the entries is a “Top Reasons Why You Should Engage Our Services” which includes details about their experience, abilities, marketing expertise, client relationships and custom solutions.

NGKSoft also offers a great section of design resources [read here], the history of the internet, web design guides and tutorials and software recommendations. More about NGKSoft including company philosophy and background.

Mailing address: 231 West 29th St., Suite 205. New York, NY 10001 -

Phone: (800) 880-1716

Email: info@ngksoft.com

Flowtown.com is a service that will match an email address with Web 2.0 accounts through a simple search feature. Flowtown also offers an import utility for Gmail accounts, csv files (Outlook Exported contacts) or manual input. When opening your account, you will be provided with your own dashboard for easy management.

Flowtown is also a great tool for social media marketing or Twitter marketing campaigns within your trade or social network. In short, this is a wonderful tool for moving from the lowly email to Web 2.0.

On the web: Flowtown.com

We have a number of clients out of Toronto, Vancouver and Halifax. They require Canadian based web hosting plans or domain hosting. Our favorite reminder is none other than CanadianWebHosting.com: hosting, dedicated, VPS and of course reseller accounts. Some plans offer full root access, choice of operating system, configuration files such as the crucial httpd.conf or php.ini, remote rebooting, unlimited domain hosting.

Depending on your plan, you will have access to a variety of tools and programming systems such FTP, dedicated IP, SSL certificates for security purposes, Cpanel, content management systems, Php 5, MySQL, Python, CGI, SSI, Ruby on Rails … basically all the tools any self respecting Webmaster would want and need.

Other services such as Email Hosting, SEO, PCI Compliance, Google Adwords  Campaigns and Website Transfer services are available at competitive rates. Support also offers tutorials, a full fledged forum and an online ticket system for client specific questions.

The scalability provided by CanadianWebHosting.com is excellent and there is no project too big or too small you cannot host with this company with over 11 years experience.

With datacenters in Toronto and Vancouver, fast and reliable hosting and serious guarantees, our Canadian choice remains CanadianWebHosting.com

We recently learned of a design company based in Honolulu, Hawaii that has a great portfolio with a distinctive style.

Hawaii Web Design is a premier Web Design company with a style well suited for travel, restaurants and real-estate sites.

For more information: www.onewavedesigns.com

One Wave Designs, Inc.
3133 Waialae Ave, #3722
Honolulu, HI  96816
1 808 739-9283

Firebug first off, is a Firefox plugin that provides a wealth of information about any website or page you are currently examining. This tool will provide information about HTML, CSS, Scripts, DOM, Network, Images, Flash etc.

While loading a page, Firebug will give you some valuable network activity item by item and will reveal errors within the compiled code or the various scripts you’ve installed.

YSlow is not another application, but an additional tool for Firebug you can install for even more information and valuable suggestions. YSlow is a Yahoo development tool that will letter grade your site’s HTTP requests, DNS lookups, Javascript, CSS and so much more.

Normally, every time one of our workers finishes a task, he or she takes a 15 minute brain break or does some other Web 2.0 activity that benefits the organization. Some of us prefer Twitter, reading what new trends are out there. Others like to do a little Facebook to see what our friends – and foes – are up to. Reddit is also a definite favorite.

While some at HR might think this is not productive behavior, those of us in the trenches, including the petty officers, know how this kind of activity can be extremely beneficial to the organization. Where does HR think we get our best ideas from? A Ouija board? Anyway, I digress.

So IT installed the latest version of Websense yesterday. Imagine our seething anger when we couldn’t access Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, ImgUr, Blogspot, Tumblr… Great, let’s turn the dial back ten years and have a Web 1.0 only company policy.

This is what happens with the uncreatives, the troglodytes decide what you can or cannot do on line. And we’re not talking inappropriate usage here people, I know it, you know it and the American people know it. Youtube is a bitching source for ideas, for how-to videos and tutorials. Facebook is where we do our best industrial spying, really! FUUUUUUUUUUUUU…

What, even fuuuuu.deviantart.com is blocked?!

Before we hit the road let’s check out some vacation rental homes. We still have a few weeks of blogging before us, as well as a handful of sites to finish, but we’ve already found a couple of places we’d love to rent in Albuquerque or Santa Fe… Time to start counting the days on the calendar.

Mainframe versus decentralized computing was the issue of the 80s and 90s. Increase in computing power ensured users had more and more software packages on their machines. But trends are changing again…

Issues with licensing, ranging from cost to upgrading time and heterogeneous systems throughout the enterprise have created a new push towards centralized computing. Another factor helping with this return to mainframe applications is the ubiquity of high speed Internet.

Providing a virtual hardware environment (pass-through software for USB, serial, parallel devices) over an network means running such application packages as VMware, Hyper-V or XenSource. This can be difficult for a small business, so what better solution is there to using Redapt.com’s virtualized servers? We say none!

So once again, when it comes to services, why run your own hardware when you can use a hosted automatic call distribution service? Seriously, it makes so much more sense to have such services hosted via a professional third party such as USAN.com.

Customizable software gives you the client the opportunity to manage your service management rules, your agent skill sets, service pools without the high costs and the hassle of bulky hardware.

USAN’s Automated Call Distribution provides the ability to unify administration and workflow, manage queuing, prioritization, auto-response and reporting. Using ACD means your business will improve customer satisfaction as well as service agent productivity and decrease call abandonment.