PayPal

PayPal is one of the most common ways to trade online. The site acts as both your merchant account and a payment service. Its beauty is in the simplicity. PayPal accept payments on your behalf and store them in an online account that you can put into your bank account. The service also gives you a checkout service which doesn't require much programming knowledge to get up on your website.

Given its proliferation across the internet, many of your potential customers will already have a PayPal account. Initially, funds can be held, normally for 21 days, until you provide tracking showing delivery or the buyer leaves feedback. Any negative feedback from a buyer can also cause problems with funds being held. Use a tracking number from your shipping service to show the item has been delivered and avoid any undue hassle.

The company accepts all major credit cards and charges a standard commission of 3.4 per cent and €0.35 per transaction. There are options available to tailor the service to you needs. If you receive more than €2,500 per month, you will be eligible to apply for PayPal's Merchant Rate. The site then lowers your fees as your sales volume increases.

eBay

If you are using PayPal, eBay could be a useful way to sell your goods online without the need to draw traffic to your website. The main advantage of eBay is having your items listed on the internet's biggest marketplace.

Once you set up an account you can then list your items for auction or sale. Once your item is sold, eBay will notify you by email. Fees depend on the price of the item sold, and if it is auctioned or sold as a "buy-it-now" item. PayPal will still take their percentage for handling the transaction so you will be charged for the sale twice.

You will need to register as a business seller under the EU Unfair Commercial Practices Directive. You can set up your own eBay shop, the basic fee is €19.99 per month. The basic insertion fee is €0.13. This can rise depending on your use and how prominent you want your shop to be on the site. A featured site will cost you €59.99 but cost you less in insertion fees. The site charges a final value fee of ten percent on most products, although there are lower percentages if you are selling media or tech. After a certain amount of sales you can also qualify as a powerseller to receive discounts, starting at 20 per cent.

World-pay

Similarly to PayPal, WorldPay acts as both your merchant account and a payment service. The company's Business Gateway Plus option will give you the all-in-one package for setting you up online.

Prices depend on the sector you are trading in, but typically an account will cost you around €145 to set up. The monthly fee will be €20 with a 3.95 per cent transaction fee. Your money could be held for up to four weeks until you have become a trusted seller. Additional fees are charged for using different currencies.

One of the main advantages of WorldPay is that it normally accepts laser transactions.

Amazon

To sell on Amazon you will need to set up an Amazon Europe Marketplaces Account. This enables you to sell on all of Amazon's European sites. One of the main catches is that you need a British (or Austrian, French, German) bank account to trade with.

Amazon is one of the internet's biggest online stores and a listing can boost sales. If you are selling fewer than 35 items per month there is no monthly commitment. The site will charge you £0.75 per transaction. A 15 per cent commission is charged on books, music and video, with 10 per cent commission charged on everything else.

If you plan on selling quite a lot on the site a pro-account costs £25. The commission is the same for books, music and films but lower for everything else at seven per cent. Amazon also charges a closing fee which varies depending on the category.

Skrill (Moneybookers)

Skrill is the relaunched version of moneybookers.com. The new service doesn't charge a set up fee but has a monthly charge of €19.95. A €0.25 cent transaction fee and 2.9 per cent commission are charged on every sale. The level of commission gets incrementally smaller if you pass €2,500 worth of sales.

Two methods of payment are offered. Skrill offers a merchant service where a customer pays money onto the sites servers. It also has an email pay option where the transaction is directed to a registered email address. One of the downsides to Skrill is that a customer needs to have an account to pay through the site.

Merchant accounts

In the long term, getting a merchant account may not be a bad idea. Getting a merchant service agreement with your bank may save you money in the long run. The following are options are available if you have secured an account:

1. Tracking Cookies

When you are online you are being watched. In fact, it is likely that the computer you are reading this on has many hundreds (or thousands) of cookies operating in your PC’s background.

Cookies are text files that are stored on your computer. Websites read and write these files to store personalisation details or user preferences. Most web pages contain these, often in the form of ads, so you may receive cookies from several sources per page.

Cookies can also be used by a company to build a picture of who is using its site and what they are interacting with on that site. Tracking users and building up profiles using cookies is one of the internet's most contentious areas. If you are planning on doing this be aware of a new EU Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications which has been effective since July 2011.

“One of the most contentious and interesting aspects of that is the so called like to be forgotten function,” said Paul Lambert, an IT and IP lawyer with Merrion Legal Solicitors. “How, technically, companies will deal with that in terms of deleting what they have and finding what they have will be interesting. Companies now have a multitude of databases and locations where that have information which falls within personal data.”

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2. Privacy Statements

Most websites will have a privacy statement that states their terms and conditions. Privacy statements are required where the website is collecting personal data. It doesn't apply to a website that only gives out information. But if you are collecting data with forms of any type it does require one.

One of the key points here is to be honest and upfront about exactly what you are planning to do with the data you collect. Facebook and Google have both been in hot water about how they use the information they collect. Be as explicit as possible in your statement to avoid any confusion which could cause a problem down the line.

“One of the bedrocks of consumer legislation and data protection legislation is transparency,” said Lambert. “It is no use having terms and conditions if they are too small or if people don't or can’t see them. If they are written with too much jargon or legalese, people cannot understand what they are signing up to.”

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3. Consumer legislation

There is an increasing discussion about the application of consumer legislation online. While you may be in line with data protection rules, it is important to consider if any of your online work would raise an eyebrow regarding consumer rights. If you are profiling or analysing data for potential targeted marketing, it is worth bearing a consumer's rights in mind.

“There was always an issue there but it is an increasing area of concern from a consumer rights perspective,” said Lambert. “For example, you may think that as long as you get consent, it is okay to do X, Y and Z. You may then think that that might include examining the communications people are having. But there is an increasing consumer rights argument about how valid such implied consent is.”

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4. Consent

Email can be a great way to get the word out about your business. However, there are a number of issues regarding how you can get your message out via email. One of the most important is having explicit consent.

“Marketing is a big issue because anyone who breaches the law in terms of marketing using electronic marketing may be committing a criminal offence,” said Tony Delaney, an assistant commissioner at the Data Protection Commission. “Anything that is promotional in nature, that is sent out electronically, must have consent. If you have an email address or a telephone number you must have obtained it from the person. You also need their consent to send them a marketing or a promotional message.”

Normally, when gathering information, there is a tick-box which is there to indicate whether you want to receive marketing amterial or not. This is vital in any information you want to gather, as breaches can incur fines up to €5,000.

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5. Be specific in how you plan to use information

If you are trading online you may end up with a large database of email addresses. While many of these contacts will be perfectly valid, the recipients must have agreed to receive a specific type of communication if you want to send them marketing material.

What this means is that if you have an email address on file from a previous transaction it may not be valid, despite their consent. “If you walked into a hardware store today to buy something, they may take your details to organise delivery,” said Delaney. “They can't use them for marketing purposes, they can only use them to facilitate the delivery of a product.”

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6. Opt-Out

Once you have consent, direct mails and newsletters can be great for keeping customs up to date on offers and news from your business. In any promotional communication, you must include the option for a cessation of contact.

This is normally done via an opt-out point in the mail, where a link will cease the communication or send an email. “You need something at the top or the bottom which indicates that you may unsubscribe by clicking on a link,” said Delaney. “If you fail to have that and if you fail to have consent to have sent it in the first place, you could potentially be committing two offences. You could be fined €10,000.”

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7. Twelve month limit

Any data you collect is valid for use for a year. If you don’t make contact within a twelve month period the consent lapses and you need to start the process again.

The consent is, however, renewable. “If you send a message eleven months later and a person does not avail of the opt-out, it is considered that your consent remains for a further twelve months,” said Delaney. “If a company waited fourteen months to send you the first message they would be breaking the law.”

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8. Only use data you have collected yourself

Unless a third party has specific and written consent that you can send a message, you could leave yourself open to potential legal breaches.

“They should steer well clear of anything to do with refer a friend,” said Delaney. “You do see those promotional things on a website. I have yet to see any of those offers being used legitimately. If we were to get a complaint and investigate it, we would ask the company where they got the consent. If they say they got it from a friend that wouldn't wash at all.”

The law states that in proceedings when the question of whether or not a user consented is in issue, the onus is on the defendant to show that there was unambiguous consent. “There can be no doubt about the matter,” said Delaney.

This also includes any companies who offer to do your online promotion for you. A degree of due diligence is required as you will also be held liable for any breaches.

“A lot of companies buy into packages where you can buy bulk messaging,” said Delaney. “It is all well and good if it is done legally. The law covers not just the sender of the message but the case can also be against the company involved in the provision of the technical platform. We have, in the past, successfully prosecuted the sender of the message as well as the company they used for the technical platform.”

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9. Intellectual Property

With such a wealth of information and photography online, it is tempting to see the internet as a treasure trove of content for your website. It is important to bear in mind that all of this information may be covered by intellectual property laws. That beautiful photo you found on flickr may be perfect for your masthead. But unless you have permission from the photographer, it might not be usable.

“A lot of businesses don't know the difference between forms of intellectual property protection.” said Karen Murray, a barrister and lecturer on IT law at the National College of Ireland. “There is a tendency to think that while information useful, it is protected by copyright and is somebody else's work. If you do want to use someone else's work you need to get permission. Copyright arises automatically, so if you write something or take a photograph it is going to be protected by the laws of copyright.”

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10. Follow Data Protection Principles

If you are going to collect information for the purposes of marketing goods and services then you need to comply with the Data Protection Acts 1988 and 2003.

Does your business collect information on any living person? If so, you are considered a data controller and inherit all the legal responsibilities that come with it.

The data protection commissioner's office states the key responsibilities in relation to the information which you keep about individuals as follows:

Obtain and process the information fairly

Keep it only for one or more specified and lawful purposes

Process it only in ways compatible with the purposes for which it was given to you initially

Keep it safe and secure

Keep it accurate and up-to-date

Ensure that it is adequate, relevant and not excessive

Retain it no longer than is necessary for the specified purpose or purposes

Give a copy of his/her personal data to any individual, on request

While at first glance these guidelines may seem at bit vague, it is worth looking at them in more detail on the data commission website before you start collecting data.

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Note: this article was written as an aid to understanding the legal principles generally associated with a website. It should not be construed as legal advice.

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Here's a question that just poped into my head, as I was reading some study notes about databases and concurrency in databases and I jut thought how big is google database, it must be unbelievable huge with some amazing resources to be able to communicate between all there servers.

Here's some of my findings and I will try to simplify some of it's findings.

 The Terabyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information. The prefix tera means 1012 in the International System of Units (SI), and therefore 1 terabyte is 1000000000000bytes, or 1 trillion (short scale) bytes, or 1000 gigabytes. 1 terabyte in binary prefixes is 0.9095 tebibytes, or 931.32 gibibytes. The unit symbol for the terabyte is TB or TByte, but not Tb (lower case b) 

Google search crawler uses 850 TB of information, so that’s the amount of raw data from the web.

Google Analytics uses 220 TB stored in two tables: 200 TB for the raw data and 20 TB for the summaries.

Google Earth uses 70.5 TB: 70 TB for the raw imagery and 500 GB for the index data.

The second table “is relatively small (500 GB), but it must serve tens of thousands of queries per second per datacenter with low latency”.

Personalized Search doesn’t need too much data: only 4 TB.

Personalized Search stores each user’s data in Big table.

Each user has a unique user id and is assigned a row named by that user id.

All user actions are stored in a table.

Google Base uses 2 TB and Orkut only 9 TB of data.

If we take into account that all this information is compressed. For example, the crawled data has compression rate of 11%, so 800 TB become 88 TB, Google uses for all the services mentioned before 220 TB.

It’s also interesting to note that the size of the raw imagery from Google Earth is almost equal to the size of the compressed web pages crawled by Google.

To top it off, Google is currently experiencing record expansion rates by assimilating into various realms of the internet including digital media (Google Video, YouTube), advertising (Google Ads), email (GMail), and more.  Essentially, the more Google expands, the more information their databases will be subjected to.

In terms of internet databases, Google is king.

I don't tend to change my computers too often so over the past 5 years I have bee gaining more and more data on my drives and what was a 320GB drive now is only a drive with 40GB left so I think its time for a spring clean and try to regain some more space. I know I could just get another external hard drive but  I want to my drive to hold the the minimal amount of data as in my own theory the less files that the heads of the hard drive have to find the less wear and tear will be on the hardrive so possibly a longer life to the drive

WARNING: Proceed with caution and if unsure of any steps below, don't do it and make sure you have a backup available.

Joomla 2.5 is now in full swing and from being a user of Joomla since Mambo and joomla 1.1, it has made huge strives in the last couple of years. Joomla truely is one of the great opensource projects in the world and where other open source projects has lost it momentum joomla is still striving ahead.

Along with new features such as advanced search and automatic notification of Joomla core and extension updates, the Joomla CMS for the first time includes multi-database support with the addition of Microsoft SQL Server. Previous versions of Joomla were compatible exclusively with MySQL databases.

“Multi-database support is a huge step forward for Joomla, which is already powering more than 1.6 million websites worldwide. It ensures companies and organization, both large and small, will save even more money and time by adopting Joomla,” said Ryan Ozimek, president of Open Source Matters, a non-profit created to provide organization, legal and financial support to the Joomla project. “No longer will Joomla developers be tied down to a particular database or have to spend more money and time integrating other software to get Joomla to communicate with their database. This enhances Joomla’s scalability immensely.”

Other key features in Joomla 2.5 includes:

Automatic notification when a Joomla or extension update is available. When logged into the control panel, site administrators will instantly have access to new notification buttons that allows them to see and act on the latest updates. In addition to updates for the Joomla CMS, a second button offers third party extension notification updates.

A better natural language search engine to the Joomla core. Complete with auto-completion and stemming (for example if you type “running” in a search field you also see run), it is faster and more versatile than the standard search.

“We literally received thousands of pieces of input at ideas.joomla.org into what functionality should be added to Joomla 2.5, and overwhelmingly enhanced notifications and more elegant search topped the list,” said Mark Dexter of the Joomla Production Leadership Team. “In fact, the automatic notification for core and extension updates received the most votes for a feature that people wanted in 2.5. But we didn’t stop with just those two. Joomla 2.5 is a major overhaul with more than 24 new features that we have highlighted at joom.la/25features.”

Joomla 2.5 adheres to Joomla’s newly-adopted six-month release cycle that began with the previous  Joomla CMS release of Joomla 1.7 in July, 2011. Downloading the latest version of Joomla is the best way to ensure organizational and personal security needs are being met since it will have the most recent updates to protect against the latest security threats.

Joomla 2.5 is truly a collaborative community-driven software project developed with the feedback gathered from more than 2.5 million Joomla forum posts, 540,000 Joomla forum members and data from more than 8,800 Joomla extensions.  To download Joomla 2.5, go to http://www.joomla.org/download.html.

Tampa, FL (PRWEB)Feb 03, 2012

BlueGlass Interactive, Inc. an innovative Internet marketing company specializing in social media marketing and search engine optimization, today announced the acquisition of Voltier Digital, a digital agency specializing in content marketing, infographic creation and data visualization. As part of the agreement, all Voltier Digital employees will join BlueGlass and Voltier’s three founders will hold senior roles on BlueGlass' production and marketing teams.

"It's hard to express how excited our team is about joining BlueGlass," said Nicholas Santillo, CEO of Voltier Digital. "We have watched the impressive trajectory BlueGlass has taken since it's inception and we are eager to add our team's experience to an already stellar group of Internet marketing visionaries.”

Read more: BlueGlass Interactive Acquires Voltier Digital to Boost Content Marketing Offerings