You Can Now Get 50 New Domain Extensions - Web.com Explains Why You Might Want One

Web.com is now offering more than 50 new domain extensions for pre-registration and purchase.  We reached out to Web.com to ask why 50 new domain extensions were even needed.

While most business owners would likely choose a .com extension before something harder to memorize like .technology or .tips, the new options may be cheaper.  Not only that, according to Web.com’s Senior Vice President of Domains, Bob Wiegand, they may be your only option if the .com domain you were looking for has already been taken.

Wiegand said in a phone interview with Small Business Trends that some of the best .com extensions are long since gone:

“If you go to our site and search for a name with a .com extension, you could try five or six times in a row and all the different options you try could be unavailable. The chances are good that someone already owns them.”

If you tried to buy a coveted .com at auction or from an existing seller, you could end up paying thousands of dollars.

The new extensions give more options. But Wiegand said that .com domains remain by far the most popular, and he doesn’t expect to see a massive adoption of the new domains overnight:

“Dot com is not dead. People are very familiar with it and there’s definitely a comfort level there. But over time I think we’ll see the growth rate of .coms slow as the new domains pick up.”

The process of purchasing domains with the new extensions won’t be any different than purchasing a .com domain. Web.com doesn’t actually own any of the domains or extensions. The owner of the domain extension sets a wholesale price, and Web.com then sets a retail price and serves as a storefront for customers to find and purchase domains. They may also be found through other providers.

However, because the new extensions have just been released, most are in pre-registration, meaning you can sign up to purchase them when they go live. If more than one party signs up for the domain during the pre-registration phase, the domain can go to an auction.  Even more extensions will be available in 10 to 12 months.

Prices may vary based on how much interest there is in a particular extension.  Wiegand noted, “Some of the really niche names are not generic enough to have the broad based appeal of a .com, so there won’t be the same number of interested parties.”

For example, sites with a .bike extension might not have as many interested parties as a more general extension.  Small bike shops or similar businesses could be able to find bargains there.

Still, it’s too early for Web.com to say which domains might be bargains or how prices will compare with .coms, Wiegand said. In fact, extensions with wider appeal could attract a higher price tag, he added.

Quite a few of the new extensions are related to small business industries, such as .limo (which could be used for a limo service) or .photography (for a photography studio).  The new domain extensions include:

.academy

.bike

.builders

.cab

.camera

.camp

.careers

.center

.clothing

.company

.computer

.construction

.contractors

.diamonds

.directory

.domains

.education

.email

.enterprises

.equipment

.estate

.gallery

.glass

.graphics

.guru

.holdings

.institute

.kitchen

.land

.lighting

.limo

.luxury

.management

.menu

.photography

.photos

.plumbing

.recipes

.repair

.shoes

.singles

.solutions

.support

.systems

.technology

.tips

.today

.training

.ventures

.voyage

Image: Web.com

Small Businesses Once Again Create More Jobs than Big Businesses, In January

Small businesses created almost double the new jobs in January 2014, compared with large businesses. And when you combine medium-sized businesses to the employment growth in small businesses, the numbers swamp the job growth of large corporations.

The ADP Employment Report showed that private-sector jobs grew by 175,000 during the month.  That’s a considerable drop compared with November and December.  However.  that is “in line with the average monthly growth throughout 2013,” said Carlos Rodriguez, president and chief executive officer of ADP.

ADP defines small businesses as those with under 50 employees.  So it equates to millions of fairly small employers.  Medium sized businesses in ADP’s lexicon are those with 50 to 499 employees.  Some entities, such as the U.S. Small Business Administration, would define those as small businesses, too.  When you consider that, you see that the majority of net new jobs are coming from smaller employers.

And what types of industries are creating these jobs?  Well, it’s not manufacturing. Manufacturing jobs show a loss of 12,000 for the month.

Construction jobs were up.  Don’t get too excited, though. Professor Scott Shane has pointed out that the long term trend in construction startups is actually downward.

By far, most of the new jobs came from the service industries (160,000).  A large chunk of those were professional and business services. Transportation and utilities also grew.

ADP collects statistics based on actual anonymous payroll data from businesses that use its payroll services.  This data covers nearly 24 million U.S. workers. Then estimates are created for national employment numbers in collaboration with Moody’s Analytics.

Wirelessly hack your enemy\'s car for under £15

February 06, 2014

Research pair to show off car computer hacking kit that costs less than US$ 20 (£12.25)

The commoditisation of hacking continues apace, with two researchers planning to reveal next month how they have built a wireless Electronic Control Unit (ECU) - using components costing under US$ 20 (£12.25) - that can hack into a car's computer network and systems.

The smartphone-sized unit, which researchers Alberto Garcia Illera and Javier Vazquez-Vidal will be showing off at next month's Black Hat Asia event in Singapore, requires physical access to the vehicle in order compromise the car's computer systems. After that, control of the car's computer systems - including steering and brakes - can be carried out wirelessly up to tens of metres away.

Illera is a Spanish pen tester while Vazquez-Vidal is a security consultant working, appropriately enough, for a company called Car-IT.

Both have revealed previous research at other security shows around the world, most notably Illera who gave a presentation entitled `How to Hack All the Transport Networks of a Country" at DEFCON 20 in 2012. Vazquez-Vidal's presentation at Black Hat USA last summer, meanwhile, was along similar lines and talked about an ECU tool for motor vehicles.

The two researchers have pooled their resources and will be revealing how their device bypasses the security of car ECUs - whether using the K-Line protocol (seen on ECUs until a few years ago) or the CAN (Control Area Network) bus system seen on most modern cars.

Plans call for the pair to discuss how the CAN bus is used to interface between the car's ECU and its transmission system, as well as controlling ancillary systems that control door locking mechanisms and AirCon plus seat systems.

Since CAN is a multi-master broadcast serial bus standard for connecting ECUs, each node on the network can exchange messages. The researchers will explain how each message consists of an ID plus signal data in a non-return-to-zero (NRZ) format and is sensed by all nodes.

Generating rogue messages on the car's network is how their device can compromise most features on the vehicle - including power steering and transmission, raising the spectre of causing a car to race to its top speed and disable the brakes, with predictable results, SCMagazineUK.com notes.

Vidal is quoted by Forbes as saying that the kit he and Javier have developed "can take five minutes or less to hook up and then walk away."

Commenting on the researcher's findings, Incoming Thought director and analyst Sarb Sembhi said the problem facing car manufacturers is that their systems consist of a great many components - many of which are supplied by third parties. As a result, he added that little thought is usually given to the security of the individual systems, let alone the car system as a whole.

"All devices are inherently hack-able, but as technology matures, there will be more and more research into the security of car-based systems," he said, adding that the arrival of in-car Android and Apple iOS-based systems also increases the risk that a programmer could hack into hardware controlled by the portable operating systems.

He says that the irony of this particular hack is that, unlike WiFi standards - which are constantly revised upwards to defend against security attacks - the components of a car are rarely upgraded.

"This is because the importance of the complete product is greater than that of the components, and vehicle manufacturers do not regard the security of components as part of their job," he said.

"Computer-based systems in cars are getting increasingly complex. My observations are that they are at a level of complexity that is similar to the technology seen in planes some 15 years ago. And the complexity is only going to increase," he warned.

Encrypted - but fully executable - program code now possible

February 06, 2014

"When you look at [the code], you would have no idea what it's doing" - UCLA lead researcher Professor Amit Sahai

A team of researchers with the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) have developed an encoding technology that effectively hides executable program code in plain sight, and without requiring the code to be decrypted before it is run.

Preliminary details of the peer-reviewed technique, developed by UCLA Computer Science Professor Amit Sahai and his team of researchers, were announced at a conference late last year, but now Sahai has published a paper detailing the methodology used.

The idea behind the obfuscation technology is that the encrypted software can be executed, but not reverse-engineered.

For the research, Sahai, who specialises in cryptography at UCLA's Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science, collaborated with IBM Research's Sanjam Garg, Craig Gentry, Shai Halevi and Mariana Raykova as well as Brent Waters, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Texas at Austin.  

According to Sahai, previous code obfuscation techniques forced an attacker to spend several days trying to reverse-engineer the software. He claims that the new system makes it impossible to reverse-engineer the software without solving complex mathematical problems that would take hundreds of years to work through, even on modern PCs.

"You write your software in a nice, reasonable, human-understandable way and then feed that software to our system," he says. "It will output this mathematically transformed piece of software that would be equivalent in functionality, but when you look at it, you would have no idea what it's doing."

The key to the encoding is functional encryption. Sahai says that, instead of sending an encrypted message, an encrypted function is sent in its place, creating a much more secure way to protect the underlying data.

Sahai claims that a single message could be sent to a group of people so that each receiver would obtain different information, depending on characteristics of that particular receiver.

Visiting Professor John Walker, of Nottingham Trent University and CTO of Xssurance, is enthusiastic about the program encoding technology, noting that the system could be an excellent way of delivering security in a cloud computing environment.

This could, he told SCMagazineUK.com, be the first successful security methodology to use an approach to segregating - and compartmentalising - partial data objects, and only granting access of the complete picture to the authorised person or process.

"I believe we are seeing [here] the future of what cyber security looks like - and a methodology which will drive security to a much safer place," he said.

Clearswift senior VP of products Guy Bunker however warned that even if the encoding system would be useful for preventing reverse engineering of program code in near future, it could also make malware disassembly just as difficult once cybercriminals get their hands on the technology.

Bunker, a security industry veteran and co-author of the 2009 book `Data Leaks For Dummies', also warned that the encoding mechanism would eventually be beaten, especially if it is widely adopted.

He says that it is interesting to draw parallels with polymorphic viruses and malware, which change their code on a rotating basis.

"Having said that, code obfuscation is an interesting approach to keeping the way a program executes hidden," he said, adding that the more widely such a system is used means the  faster it is likely to be eventually cracked.

You have to remember, he explained, that there is no silver bullet in security matters, even in encryption.

Professor Peter Sommer, a Visiting Professor at de Montfort University, said he remains to be convinced that the encoding process will be truly useful to security practitioners.

"What is the real-world problem this solution is meant to address? There is currently no problem in rendering files as impenetrable - but it does require significant management discipline among those using - and sharing - the file, as well as the careful deployment of one of the obvious existing tough encryption systems such as AES, Twofish or Cascades," he said.

"And you must never forget that the management interface must be usable by those with the real secrets to hide, not just computer geeks," he added.

9 Qualities a Good Call Center Should Have

If you try to be everywhere at once, your business will eventually pay the price. Call centers are great for handling tasks that you just don’t have the time for. But how do you know who to turn to for the assistance you need? How can you find a good call center?

In order to figure out just that, we asked a panel of nine entrepreneurs from the Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) the following question:

“What is one important factor to use when comparing call center services for your business?”

Here’s what YEC community members had to say:

1. Hourly Wages

“You can usually pay for call center services in different ways â€" hourly, commission only, project-based, seat license and more. But, you can almost always figure out the underlying model based on the hourly wage the company pays. Take the wage and multiply twice for operating costs and profit. With this model, you can overlay the payable metric, and then compare the services.” ~ JT Allen, myFootpath LLC

2. Customer Service

“The experience you deliver to customers is absolutely critical as a startup. Nothing creates more value â€" or destroys it â€" than customer service. Find out which brands use each of your competing call centers, and make a dozen phone calls to each. Wait until you say, “Wow, I love working with this person on the phone,” then hire that call center service ASAP.” ~ Aaron Schwartz, Modify Watches

3. English Proficiency

“Nothing further frustrates an irate caller than being attended to by a person who is not sufficiently proficient in the caller’s language. I understand cost can be an issue, but if it is, you may want to try email-only or online chat as well. Often, writing is easier than speaking for many outsourced operators.” ~ Nicolas Gremion, Free-eBooks.net

4. Success Metrics

“Make sure your expectations and success metrics are aligned with the call center’s. You want to make sure your success is tied to theirs and that you both agree on what success means.” ~ Sarah Schupp, UniversityParent

5. Conversation Skills

“Do your research, and shop around. We have found that there is a huge difference in the way call centers handle their calls. Some read word-for-word from a script and some use more of a roadmap to steer the conversation in a general direction while relying on their employees to make judgement calls and ask probing questions. We have had much more success with that second model. “ ~ Phil Laboon, Clear Sky SEO

6. Integration Between Systems

“Lead generation is an important piece of any company and call centers are a good tool to increase the number of leads that come into your pipeline. However, your pipe can get clogged if there isn’t a good hand-off between the call center and those individuals/tools that may be essential in closing the sale. Therefore, it is important to choose a call center that works with your tech and people. “ ~ Lawrence Watkins, Great Black Speakers

7. Calling Statistics

“The most important numbers to track are calls answered (out of all placed), average ring time (needs to be less than 20 seconds), average hold time to answer (needs to be less than 30 seconds) and lost calls (part of calls answered). When call centers miss calls, take too long to answer them or leave people on long holds, they kill your business.” ~ Roger Bryan, Enfusen Digital Marketing

8. Relationships

“Most call centers are good and will deliver what they say they are going to deliver, but all campaigns are different. Some are harder to deliver than others. That is why it is so important to have some kind of pre-existing relationship with the center or know someone who has. This way, you can be assured that you will get what you are paying for.” ~ Louis Lautman, Supreme Outsourcing

9. Customer Semantics

“Price should come second to quality when considering call centers. When customers call a sales department CSR, they will immediately judge your company by the tone and skill of the rep. Consider the impact the CSR’s culture will have on the customer. Will the CSR be able to relate to the customer? Although you may save a few dollars by outsourcing, you may lose thousands from lost conversions.” ~ Gideon Kimbrell, InList Inc

Call Center Photo via Shutterstock

Facebook Won’t Change Name of Product Used By Smaller Company

It’s the nightmare of every company that comes out with a product, and it is one that Microsoft fell victim to on two occasions.

The nightmare is when you find out that another company has a similar product with the same name - and they won’t relinquish it. That is what a company called FiftyThree is going through at the moment, after getting entangled with Facebook. This has forced the company to trademark the name “Paper” to “keep its options open“.

FiftyThree makes an iOS drawing app called Paper.  According to iTunes, it has nearly 14,000 ratings averaging 4 stars out of 5. So this is not a small insignificant product. Apple named it App Of The Year 2012, and Time Magazine named it one of the top ten tech apps of 2012.

However, it may end up losing the coveted number one spot in Google search results by the newly released Facebook product of the same name.

FiftyThree asked Facebook to change the name of its app â€" and Facebook has refused. According to FiftyThree’s public statement asking for the name change, they claim that a Facebook board member is also an investor in FiftyThree. If that is true, why was FiftyThree not notified sooner about the upcoming new Facebook app? In the public statement, the FiftyThree CEO, Georg Petschnigg, was forced to clarify that his company was not being sold to Facebook.

“It came as a surprise” he said, “when we learned on January 30th … that Facebook was announcing an app with the same name. Not only were we confused but so were our customers and press. Was this the same Paper? Nope. Had FiftyThree been acquired? Definitely not. Then, what’s going on? Facebook … apologized for not contacting us sooner. But an earnest apology should come with a remedy.”

According to the New York Times, the US Patent and Trademark Office office has a trademark patent for the name “Paper by FiftyThree” on May 11, 2012. Techcrunch speculates that this may be the legal loophole that Facebook crawls through in order to win and keep the “Paper” name.

However, although it could be argued that both apps have different purposes, Petschnigg told Mashable that he sees an important overlap.  ”You really have to look at the nature of the app,” he said. “Facebook is positioning Paper as a mobile creativity app, and we’re a mobile creativity app. That’s where we see room for confusion.”

Facebook hit by apps scam on tenth birthday

February 06, 2014

Facebook had unwanted visitors on its tenth birthday - scammers that established a Facebook Apps page to phish for user credentials.

Malwarebytes researcher Chris Boyd came across the scam after being given a heads up by a friend, and gave SCMagazineUK.com a detailed breakdown.

The scam essentially sees the scammer “frame” a phish page as a genuine Facebook Apps page with its own Facebook URL. But the page is actually hosted elsewhere and, as such, delivers all entered data - which includes email addresses, phone numbers, passwords, security question answer to the scammer via email or form.

Once all the information has been entered, the user hits “Log in” on the Verify Your Page App but the scammer - in a bid to get enough time to exfilitrate the user credentials - issues the following message:

"Thank you for contact Facebook verification team. Your reconfirm of the page will be processed within 24 hours. Please don't change your password and other security information until you received an e-mail from us." 

Boyd told SCMagazineUK.com that this type of attack, while used by spammers since 2009, is rare.

“This particular scam dates back to 2009 - but it's not that common. I've seen instances of this in 2009, 2011, once in 2012 and 2013 - which was the Facebook appeal verification. Scammers don't really go for this as much as they could.”

Boyd added that as soon as scammers have harvested Facebook credentials, they could go on to attack email and other services by trying the same passwords (“this could very quickly spiral out of control”), but praised Facebook - which has now removed the application - for making improving security measures.

“Facebook do remove a lot of scam pages; it is hugely popular for hoaxes and fake apps,” he said.

“Social networks are an awful lot better [for security] than they were six to seven years ago. Back then, we security researchers didn't have contact with them - they didn't want to speak to us.” Boyd added that spam attacks on Google+ and LinkedIn are relatively small by comparison, and said that Twitter scams are more obvious to end users.

“For cyber criminals, there are more things to do on Facebook. There are always more potential threats and scams.”

Facebook, which offers bounties to developers to fix bugs, has had more serious scares in the past, not least when six million members were infected by a bug which sent private information onto profiles of those using the Download My Information Tool. This, though, appears to be the latest examples that most scammers are attacking the social network from inside the perimeter.

“Social media channels are a big potential target for phishing and information theft - creating a fake Facebook App landing page is a new approach to tricking people out of giving up their credentials,” said OneLogin EMEA sales director Dan Power on hearing the news.

“The risk around this is that many people are now using Facebook as their credential in to other social services as well. People should steer clear of logging into Facebook through any link in their email - open the mobile app or webpage instead manually.

Sian John, security strategist at Symantec, told SC that phishers are experimenting with social media websites, and are often looking to seek financial gain.

“Social media is a common target for phishers for the purposes of identity theft. They are trying everything they can to improve their chances of harvesting user credentials and are known for experimenting with a variety of fake social media applications in a move to lure users.

“We're also seeing that phishers are now seeking financial gain from social networking phishing sites, for example requesting financial information as a requirement to improving user security.”

How To Get Your Content Shared On Twitter

Creating good content? That is important. Getting it shared on Twitter? That is crucial. While primarily what you create is going to take the most time and energy, getting it seen is a big thing to consider. Social media is the driving force behind visibility and marketing, and one of your best tools.

Twitter in particular is a useful platform for its open nature, ease of use and popularity. Not to mention how many third party apps and services exist to measure the results of your marketing.

But how do you get your content shared on Twitter? How can you up the efficiency of your marketing on that particular platform? There are a number of ways.

1. Keep Content Quality High

You should always aim to make your content the very best. Being consistent will also gain your followers, which means more future posts could be shared.

Actionable tip: Tweets with attached images (visual tweets) tend to get shared more.

Featured tool: Keep an eye on your Twitter analytics (inside Twitter ads) for the type of content your followers seem to enjoy more.

2. Hashtags: Optimize Your Content For Sharing

Sometimes content is good, but it isn’t really shareable. You have to try and optimize your content to be shared by your target audience.

The best way to do that is to take a look at what is being shared the most. Is it posts written in list form? Is it on a particular topic? How many photos does it have? Narrow things down to establish patterns, and then exploit those patterns to write content that is made to be linked.

Featured tool: Hashtagify has their own chart of trending hashtags. Each hashtag in it has a “breakout date” and a “breakout score.” You can see hashtags trending last month, last week or just now.

Twitter chats are also a very effective way to get your content shared using hashtags.

3. Ask People To Share

This is the simplest way to get a share, and an amazing number of people don’t do it. When you tweet your content, ask people to retweet it.

Social media expert Dan Zarrella did an experiment in retweeting, and he found that when he specifically asked “Please Retweet” he saw a 51% increase in RTs. When he wrote “Please RT” he got a 39% increase. Others have reported similar results when they have asked for their content to be shared.

Featured tool: ViralContentBuzz (of which I am a co-founder) is a non-intrusive way to put your content in front of power social media users for more retweets and shares.

4. Embed Your Tweets

You may have noticed lately that a lot of blog posts will have embedded tweets sitting in the middle of them. This is an interesting way of breaking up a post using an image, but it is more than that.

It also offers people a chance to go to the original post on Twitter, find your Twitter profile, and share a post that has the additional benefit of a social tie in.

Featured tool: JM Twitter Cards lets you make much more of embed tweets by enabling Twitter cards on your blog posts.

5. Share More Than Once

Not all of your followers are going to be online when you post a link to your content. Even those who are might miss the link in the constantly updating stream of their follower’s updates. You should be posting links to your content multiple times on the day that you publish it.

Set a schedule that lets the link be sent out at least once every few hours. Ideally, it should be sent out once an hour. Don’t write them all as the same tweet, or it looks like spam. Instead, write different versions with the same link every time.

You will get more chances to catch the eye of your followers, and more retweets are inevitable.

Featured tool: Inline Tweet Sharer lets you create in-line “Tweet this.”

Read for more ways to re-package tweets for more shares.

Have a tip for getting more content shared on Twitter?

Bird Photo via Shutterstock

37 Signals Changes Name to Basecamp to Focus on Signature Product

Software company 37 Signals â€" long the poster child of “Web development company turned product company” -  is changing its company name to match its flagship product name.

Company founder and CEO Jason Fried announced the company would be changing its name to Basecamp, in an announcement posted on the 37 Signals site.

The idea behind the name change is to create better parity with the developer’s signature product of the same name. Fried claims that Basecamp has better name recognition than 37 Signals.

Started back in 2004, Basecamp has grown to over 15 million users, and Fried claims that over 6,500 new users signed on in the last week alone. The software has been used by 285,000 companies to manage 2,000,000 projects. But despite this extraordinary growth, Fried was not happy. His dream of a small company was becoming yet another big tech company. While other tech companies would be delighted at this situation, Fried wanted the opposite.

“We’ve always enjoyed being a small company… today we’re bigger than we’ve ever been, but we’re still relatively small at 43 people. So while we could hire a bunch more people to do a bunch more things, that kind of rapid expansion is at odds with our culture. We want to maintain the kind of company where everyone knows everyone’s name.”

So with that in mind, the name 37 Signals is consigned to the history books, and the company is now called Basecamp. Everyone will work on, and focus on, Basecamp. As Fried says in his online letter, and Forbes also says, 37 Signals has produced some remarkable work over the years, including several books, and creating (and later open-sourcing) the popular programming language Ruby on Rails.

But what of the other two products that bring in money for the company - Highrise and Campfire? In the online letter, Fried outlined three possible scenarios:

• spin them off into separate companies with partial ownership,
• sell them outright, or
• keep them on without signing up any new customers.

Fried has revealed that he is speaking to “a few interested parties” and has said that anyone is free to approach him with offers. But he made it very clear that “Campfire will sell in the single digit millions, and Highrise will sell in the tens of millions.”

Image: Basecamp screenshot