Business are constantly trying to generate additional revenue from their ecommerce websites.  They are optimizing their homepages by putting up the most relevant products to their user. They use referral tactics on product detail pages and category pages with  “if you like this, you’ll also like this” by using related and recommended products placement.

But what about optimizing the thank you page?  You know, the last page the customer goes to before leaving your site.  Why not optimize that page and serve up add on products or services before they leave your site?  For example, if your customer purchased a Bluray DVD player from you, shouldn’t a product offering for HDMI cables or the latest BLURAY DVDs be served to the consumer?  This is called up-selling and should be considered in digital stores just like retailers do in store.

We have seen a lot of thank you and confirmation pages that follow a similar standard and are not capitalizing on opportunities for additional revenue.  They only provide the customer a receipt of what they just purchased.  Usually the real estate of the thank you page is underutilized and there is plenty of space for additional content and products.  So use it, and get the most out of your eCommerce site.

Imagine a world where code used by the [largest,biggest] clouds is freely available to any developer, anywhere.  A world where that code was a standard used to build private clouds as well as a variety of new service offers.  In this world, workloads could be moved around these clouds easily – you could fire your cloud provider for bad service or lack of features, but not have to rewrite the software to do it.  Imagine an open source cloud operating system that lifts IT to the next level of innovation, just as Linux drove the web to new heights.

Today, we at Rackspace launched an ambitious project called OpenStack that aims to make this new world a reality.

I want to lay out the thinking that got us here and why we think this moment will change computing forever.

“The cloud” at its most fundamental level is all about a massive supply increase in computing power.  The PC era was all about putting a computer on every desk.  The cloud era goes a step further, putting the power of supercomputing at the literal fingertips of every individual at anytime.   Whether it’s enabling a youth soccer coach to schedule practice across the online calendars of 18 families, or helping a scientist fold proteins to design new cancer drugs, or encouraging a frontline employee to instantly and cheaply test a new marketing campaign, the exponential growth in computing power and applications is changing every corner of our economy and society.  And, this era is truly just beginning.  We have seen only a tiny fraction of the potential gains that arise from cheap, ubiquitous computing power.

As this landscape has evolved, some have dismissed cloud computing as just a return to the mainframe era. This view is fundamentally wrong.  Mainframes were available to only the smartest employees at the richest companies.  The cloud is accessible to all, and usable by anyone, at low cost.  Its ubiquity is the source of its power.

However, there is one area where mainframe concepts are intruding into the cloud – the vertically integrated technology stack.  As hardware and software merge into services, the danger of locked down proprietary software stacks are emerging in the cloud space.  The cloud world changes everything, and that is not good to many entrenched interests of the old guard.  Core technologies from operating systems to hypervisors to databases are being used to tie cloud customers into an integrated view of the world.

If the web has taught us anything, it is that open systems, portability, and choice drive innovation.  The open Linux system brought us a mountain of software and tools to help accomplish almost any task.  And, each component, whether a database or a widget could be moved in and out freely based on the job getting done.

We at Rackspace have long talked about an “open” cloud.  And as a service provider built on our Fanatical Support difference, we have never had an interest in creating technical walls around our service.  But, given that no standards tools have emerged to build massively scalable clouds, we too have had to build custom software that creates some level of wall around our cloud offerings.  For months we have debated how to drive greater standards and increase the velocity of cloud technologies in general.  We finally converged on the obvious answer:  open source our cloud technology.

Today, we announced a new open source project that includes those core technologies: OpenStack.  And, we are not alone.  As we looked at all the projects that already existed to drive standards we saw that other efforts were underway that complemented what we have done.  We saw a ton of promise in the Nebula computing project built by NASA and are making it a core part of the project.   Taking the contributions of Rackspace and NASA as a starting point, OpenStack forms a powerful foundation of technologies including, a scalable compute provisioning engine – OpenStack Compute – and a fully distributed storage engine – OpenStack Object Storage.

The community, which we plan to actively support and drive, is live today at openstack.org with code available for download.

Last week we assembled a strong group of cloud community leaders and developers to meet and review the architecture, engage on technology direction and contribute code.  The effort attracted more than 100 participants from 25 companies including hosting companies, telecom providers, hardware manufacturers, cloud ecosystem companies and beyond.  This enthusiasm and collaboration around OpenStack has laid the foundation for a vibrant and innovative approach to building the core software to power the future cloud world.

What do we expect OpenStack to mean for the cloud community?  Some pretty major things.  One, anyone will be able to run this cloud and do it anywhere.  Enterprises and governments will be able to build private clouds.  Service providers will have the same technology used by Rackspace and NASA to build new offers.  Choice and portability are inevitable in this world.  Two, the whole tech ecosystem can build around this foundation.  With wide adoption, there will be a market for new services all around this core engine.  From storage systems to monitoring tools to management systems, there is no end to what can be attached to the core project.  Three, the cloud will advance faster than ever.  Between just NASA and Rackspace, an army of developers are committed to the continued advancement of OpenStack.  With our emerging supporters in the project, we expect to dramatically expand that army.  Finally, a core set of standards will be freely available and totally open.  New technologies can be attached.  Better solutions will be driven into the product.  And, the use of this powerful technology will not tie you to the use of any other technologies.

For our customers, we think there are many benefits that flow from these community gains.  Not only will this help our offers develop faster and more transparently, but our customers can run private editions of our core systems in house or in our managed hosting operation.

We could not be more excited about the launch of this project and the enthusiasm around it.  As a company that has invested a great deal in the development of cloud technologies, we did not take the decision to open source lightly.  We think this decision will serve our interests and those of our customers.  While we at Rackspace hire top developers and engineers to make sure our technology is second to none, seeking a technology advantage has never been our approach.    We have our own vision about how to deploy this technology and serve customers – by giving them seamless access to scalable computing with the trusting partnership that comes through Fanatical Support.  But, there will be many approaches and winning formulas.  We think by welcoming those approaches and driving standards and more rapid innovation we will all win.

We hope you join us in this cause.  We know there are many parties who might want to join us in the effort, please reach out to us on this blog or through openstack.org.

We look forward to updating you as we make progress. Stay updated by following OpenStack on Twitter, joining the IRC channel #openstack, joining the OpenStack mailing list or following the OpenStack blog.

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How Ad.ly Works?

Brand X wants to promote a new product. They’re targeting “Millennials” (aka, the MTV Generation) who are male, so they want to associate themselves with popular television influencers. They select relevant Twitter publishers: Dr. Drew, LaVar Burton, Greg Grunberg, Joel McHale and Brody Jenner.

Once they select their publishers and write a tweet as their creative, Ad.ly connects them with the publishers. The publishers look at the creative and get to approve it. Once the publishers have approved the creative, the campaign goes live. The message gets tweeted – clearly labeled as advertising – during the flight of the campaign.

Fans and followers of the Twitter publishers see the campaign and associate the product with the publishers.

View Ad.ly Publisher List to see who could advertise your campaign

Information on Payleap

PayLeap is a PCI compliant payment processing company that offers adaptive electronic payment services aimed at keeping online merchants safe and secure in the world of e-commerce.  As a bold new payment service provider, PayLeap has successfully simplified payment acceptance by bundling a single all-in-one payment gateway and merchant account solution.  PayLeap’s dynamic and rich API toolbox is easy to use and caters to any e-commerce merchant or developer needs.   Priding itself on core values of providing merchants and strategic partners with outstanding value, simplicity and service, PayLeap is leading the evolution of online payment processing.

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Salesforce has just launched a WordPress-to-Lead plug-in that allows you to place a sign-up form on any WordPress post or page, which then automatically puts that data into your Salesforce account. No more email required. It’s the first “Consumerprise” play that Salesforce has attempted.

Like all WordPress plug-ins, it requires a little bit of work to install WordPress-to-Lead, but it’s relatively simple. You download the plug-in here, upload the files to your server through FTP, then go into your WordPress set up to activate it. You then need to enter your Salesforce.com Organization ID, and then you’re all set. You can use the [salesforce] WordPress shortcode to display the form anywhere on your site. And yes, the form is customizable with different fields.

Browse through WordPress to find if they have a plugin for the CRM you are looking for

As we become more digitally inclined and technology begins to catch up, American consumers will watch more and more video online. According to comScore American’s watched 28.1 Billion videos in February 2010. That is a lot of video watching. The great thing for advertisers is we get to take advantage of these eyeballs in a rich interactive medium.

Here are some more stats to back up reasons for engaging your audience through online video. 74% of the total U.S. internet audience viewed online video. Consumers prefer online video ads by a wide margin. Video ads have higher general recall, brand recall and message recall than traditional TV ads according to this study. They also mention that message recall has the greatest lift when utilizing both TV and Online video advertising. There are several types of advertising units available such as expanding video banners, page roll, pre-roll, video overlay and post roll. Take a look here for some examples and make sure you don’t use Auto-Start in your videos as this actually can harm you more than help you. Consumers want to choose when video starts and not have it distract them from the content they engage with.

So how can you capture a portion of the 28 billion that watched online video in February? Start with video ad networks. Companies such as Brightroll and Tremor offer creative solutions to engage your audience online. And if that doesn’t work you can always fall back on a creative solution that has legs such as the Serenading Unicorn from Juicy Fruit. Oh and don’t forget to optimizes your videos for search because this is one of the best ways you can garner traffic and awareness from your videos.

I would love to hear your comments on successful video campaigns you have launched or just plain good video ads you have seen online.