Archive for February, 2010
3G Cell Phones Explained
Many of the new phones being offered by the big carriers are being advertised as being “3G” ready. The average mobile phone consumer often will not know what 3G is or why it’s important to them. To be a better informed consumer lets investigate exactly what 3G is.
What Is It?
3G stands for Third Generation and refers to the third generation of technology in the mobile industry. 3G follows 1G and 2G technology.
1G
The first real cell phones are considered to be 1G (First Generation). The networks for these early cell phones used analog signals. The phones used on the networks were big and clunky, with no abilities aside from voice.
2G
The technology categorized as 1G was in place up until the early 1990’s, when it was then replaced by the 2G technology features. With 2G came a break away from the analog signals and a move towards the digital spectrum. 2G brought with it the introduction to providing multimedia content and increased bandwidth. A lot of the technologies classified as 2G are still being used in cell phones today.
2.5G
Before the complete rollout of 3G technologies, 2.5G was introduced. Primarily used as a marketing term, 2.5G is not an officially recognized technology; but it can be used to refer to the “in between” stage of moving away from 2G and moving completely into the 3G realm. 2.5G uses the existing 2G infrastructure while enabling some of the benefits of the 3G technologies, including increased multimedia abilities and improved data transfer speeds.
3G
The technologies that now qualify as 3G include increased functionality of mobile phones; with increased speeds and bandwidth being the biggest appealing factors. Multimedia functionality on the networks also improves, by leaps and bounds, with the move to 3G technologies.
While 3G capable phones are incredibly appealing to cell phone buyers they may find that not all of the functionality their phones are capable of available to them. Carriers in the US have yet to fully roll out their 3G networks in all markets. AT&T is leading the market right now, with their 3G networks being available in most major metropolitan markets; however the biggest AT&T seller, the iPhone, is not 3G capable. Apple has stated that a 3G version might be possible in the future when 3G is more widely available in the US.
T-Mobile is trailing behind AT&T when it comes to their 3G network. Until recently, none of the 3G capable phones T-Mobile sold could have their full functionality used; simply because the 3G infrastructure is not yet fully in place across the T-Mobile markets. T-Mobile has recently launched their 3G network in New York, allowing New York customers the ability to take advantage of the full functionality of their 3G capable phones.
3G will, soon, become the standard technology in the mobile industry; it is just up to the wireless carriers to ensure that they quickly meet the demands of their users who want to take advantage of the 3G technologies as soon as possible.
What is E-commerce?
Over the past few decades international trade and e-commerce have grown at a phenomenal rate combined with rising import/export and global sourcing policies. International trade also took place long time back even when there were not advanced telecommunications or other networks and goods were exchanged in import/export in those days. With the advancement of technology the impetus given to import/export of trade and global sourcing was tremendous and one of the latest tools in the armour is that of e-commerce. Basically e-commerce refers to the carrying out of trade by use of electronic media mainly the internet for doing international trade, import/export and global sourcing. Obviously the advantages of this are many and will be discussed separately in a different article but it should be sufficient to know at this stage that various activities related to import/export, global sourcing, international trade and procurement and sales of goods and services comes under the purview of e-commerce mainly because of the ease of communication and the wide and extensive reach it provides, combined with huge savings both in terms of time as well as money, which together constitute one of the biggest factors in the life of any business or organisation.
The range of businesses which are involved in active utilisation of e-commerce is quite broad and includes those of e-banking, e-logistics, offshore manufacturing to name a few. It can be noticed that the common factor amongst most of these is the ‘e’ which stands as an acronym for the word ‘electronic’. Nevertheless it must be kept in mind that more often than not, the word electronic refers to the medium of internet and other networks, when the current times of e-commerce, import/export, global sourcing and international trade are considered. In fact the term has become so popular now that even small scale individual entrepreneurs are utilising the technology of e-commerce to carry out international trade, import/export and global sourcing targets.
Last but not least it can be concluded that e-commerce has made the world a global village where tasks like import/export, global sourcing and international trade which were hitherto quite tedious, costly and time consuming to carry out, are not done within the flick of an eye at relatively much lower costs. It is hoped that in the times to come the technology of e-commerce will prosper even more and will contribute much more to the carrying out of international trade between various nations, global sourcing to find out the best suited commodity or service at the most reasonable price and import/export of goods and services freely across the border making the earth a single unit at least commercially speaking if not politically.
Maximizing your Advertising Budget
You are selling a great product or set of products. Maybe you offer a great service online that if people knew about it, you know they would like it.
Ok so step one for you is complete, and that is finding your niche as to what your business is all about. Step 2 is getting the word out there, and to do so in a cost effective manner.
Welcome to the Internet. The place where anything is possible and the medium that levels the playing field, or so you would think, to the point where the super stars such as Walmart look no bigger online then you.
Obviously being a startup business and on a tight budget you want to be able to reach as many people in your target market as possible, and at the least amount of cost.
So how about getting your advetising in front of 112 million people and more? How about exposing what it is you sell and offer to nearly a billion people world wide and do so for just pennies?
Sounds crazy and unrealistic right? Well it is not. With the formation of Web 2.0, which is really just a fancy tech term describing the way the Internet has evolved into a medium where people connect, the estimated, according to Technorati, 112 million bloggers may be the best way to go these days.
There are literally thousands of blog hosting companies out there. These companies have customers who do nothing more than post their reviews and opinions on a subject, in what they call their Blogs.
Our company has written dozens of articles on blogging to educate, not only our customers, but the Internet community in general. If you would like to learn more about blogging, check out our articles on our website. For now, in this multi-part series, we are going to concentrate on how to use bloggers as your means of advertising.
Bloggers are always looking for ways to fill up that “white” space they have on their blogs. A great way to do that is to place some type of advertising there. It fills a need they are looking for. It also allows them to make some extra money, and you as the advertiser, get to put your product or service in front of literally millions, for pennies.
There are two ways you can go about this. You can contact every blog related to what you are offering and ask them to advertise. With 112 million blogs to choose from, you should start immediately right? Well option two is signing on with a company whose main focus is handling advertising on Blogs. These companies, such as ours, focus in on having bloggers post small snippets of code on their blogs that will display a series of different advertisements that their blog readers can look further into by clicking on the link.
Your advertisement will appear on blog websites and when a reader clicks on your ad, will be taken to further information on what you are offering. What you need to look for in an ad program such as this is hidden costs.
You want to stay away from programs that charge you a fee each time someone clicks your ad. When you participate in, what is called, a pay per click program, that then leads into bidding for the ad space. Basically, whoever is willing to pay more, will appear more often. That concept basically defeates the entire purpose of the level playing field, now doesn`t it?
We will continue this discussion in part two of our article segments on how to maximize your advertising spending with minimal output and at the same time reach your target market.
By: Bruce A. Tucker