Wednesday 15 July 2009 00:00
Patrick Stafford  www.smartcompany.com

With all the talk about upcoming electric cars, some companies have already begun to develop plans for rolling out charging stations across the US and Australia.

But now a new McDonald’s restaurant in the US has beaten them to the punch. The new store will offer free car charging in its parking lot, one of the various ‘green’ features the store will promote.

The store, located in North Carolina, has been built with wood from forests certified by the Forest Stewardship Council and tables and chairs that have been constructed with renewable materials such as wheat board and bamboo, while the store is illuminated by natural light.

The preferred parking spaces will be tailored for hybrid and electric cars, with ChargePoint stations offering free electricity for cars that can ‘plug in’.

While a full charge may take longer than the amount of time it takes to eat a McDonald’s meal, emerging technology will surely improve charging times. Additionally, with the construction of charging stations at Swedish McDonald’s locations, the franchise may be preparing to roll the feature out across a number of countries.

Many are using the professional social networking site LinkedIn. General social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook are also increasingly popular, but surprisingly the micro-blogging services (such as Twitter), forums, wikis and social bookmarking applications are less popular.

In Australia, I would imagine the figures would be even less. But social networks, micro blogging and social bookmarking can have two positive effects for SME’s.

Increase Direct Traffic

You can directly increase your website traffic through using tools such as Twitter. Techcrunch a digital newsletter recently posted their traffic results, stating  “Over the past few months, TechCrunch has experienced the power of this micro-media firsthand as the percentage of traffic we get from Twitter has grown to the point that it is now our second largest source of outside traffic after Google. In the past 30 days, Twitter accounted for 9.7 percent of all traffic to Techcrunch.com, up from 1.8 percent six months ago. This is out of millions of visits.”

Improve Page Rankings and SEO Results

Most Search Engine Optimisation Companies will tell you that off page SEO is probably more important to results than on page SEO. This is generally achieved by having high value page rank sites linking to your website. Well guess what! sites like Twitter, Digg, Stumble Upon and the rest rank well with Google and generating links to your site from these is pretty easy. This is why most websites these days are using social bookmarking icons frequently (like the ones below this post) to make it easy to add these bookmarks so they can have more authority sites linking to their website increasing their page rank.

Free Traffic

Having your website visitors bookmark your site can add traffic and increase page rank in search engines. There is no excuse for all Australian SME’s not to be using this technique.

The concept of writing in the air with your phone has some interesting potential applications. However, unless the gesture size is smaller i think too many may be self conscious to use the application.

Lets go past coloured cases and get onto the the big wins. For me these would include:

• The front facing camera and 3G video calling capabilities.
• Better camera resolution and maybe zoom.
• The ability for applications to run in background.
• A new software / hardware system that is faster in its response.
• Less call drop outs.
• MMS capabilities.

But the big question is will Steve Jobs appear – maybe on a 3G video call. In a few hours we will all know.

NTT prototype phone lets you play the flute, check your blood and read e-papers (video)

How cool is this prototype from NTT in Japan. Full article here.

With the exception of a few providers, Premium Rate SMS services in Australia has been taken over by scammers targetting unspecting mobile users with unfair subscription services.

Subscrition Premium charged SMS services should be banned. There is no valid use for the services other than making money for the service providers and the Telco’s. They should have never been introduced in the first place and still years later are causing the same level of concerns as they did in the past.

The lack of proactive regulation of SMS services is a joke. Proactive consumer protection has dissapered and is no longer important. The regime is focused on reactive management which allows scams to run for months before being acted upon.

Listen to any radio station, they all use 19 numbers to promote feedback from listners, now ask yourself, what is the cost for sending those messages to the station. I bet you don’t know and neither do I, because the listner is not told!

Now if that was a 1900 number you had to call, the cost message would have to be read out on air, but the inconsistency is that with SMS services the consumer protection measures are almost non existant.

We could at least take a leaf out of a proactive UK regulation regime who consistently improve their levels of proactive consumer protection.

Google has a 90% market share for search in Australia with NineMSN and Yahoo the bulk of the remainder. Google is so entrenched as the local search engine of choice it will be difficult to change and any change will be slow and gradual after the initial curiosity wears off. Microsoft claim their engine is different with a focus on Local search, Travel and shopping, some of the features want be released initially released in Australia for several months.

See how Microsoft describe Bing

But Bing could mean a change in SEO strategy for local companies chasing the last ounce from their online efforts. This will be better understood following the launch of the new search engine this week, naturally most businesses will be racing to see how they rank on the keyword phrases they optimise for.

In addition Pay Per Click marketers may be able to purchase search engine advertising clicks at a cheaper rate on the new search engine and profit from the initial curiosity of the Bing service.

The big question that remains unanswered is how Microsoft and Yahoo fit together, if at all. With Yahoo’s new Global CEO announcing that Yahoo is not a search company, does this open the doors for a greater tie up with Microsoft. Only Time will Tell.