udutu.com (99 stars)

Udutu.com is a website that provides online course authoring software. If you want to make online courses, eLearning modules or training programs, then Udutu.com can offer you a good answer to your needs. Udutu.com’s main product offering is myUdutu™. It is an easy-to-use online authoring software that can be used by anyone. With this software, you would no longer need to rely on programmers to produce for you good quality online modules. myUdutu™ enables any user to create interactive courses rich with visual media which greatly improves training opportunities for students and employees alike. It can be used in all fields and professions providing human resource managers, trainers, professionals, teachers, etc., the edge in making such courses. With its WSIWYG (What You Is What You Get) feature, myUdutu™ attracts more users; Alexa.com gives it a traffic rank of 792, 079.

Udutu.com is a website that features online course authoring that helps different people and organizations build their courses and activities online. It is composed of four different services namely, course development, multimedia production, graphic design, and customer service. These services help firms and organizations optimize their e-learning platforms from the building part to the design part. The site also furnishes users with different products (most of them are free) such as myUdutu, which is an online course authoring tool, that helps you build branching simulations and case studies, interactive quizzes, and complex assessments. A nice thing about the products that the site offers is that you can use them without any technical expertise; all you need is an internet access and a computer. Collaborations in developing online courses are also made possible without additional fees. Another breakthrough that the site offers is that it ties up with social networking sites such as Facebook to build up a learning network in which productive individuals can work together.

Its simplicity and its customization is also one of its values. You only have to access udutu.com from the internet, build your course by importing PowerPoint presentations, customize your learning windows, and add videos and audios, and then publish it using the site’s server, and you’re done!

Forums about its products and help sites regarding its services are also in the site to help novice learn more about its value and make users solve certain problems whenever they arise. Tips and feedbacks from other users can also be viewed from the site to know and utilize the site more efficiently.

You can also be sure of the contents and the reliability of the site because it provides several resources where its contents are taken or bases. It is also very progressive and creative because they are able to develop different programs and softwares that can be used in the future and can also develop the world of e-learning for the better like the KoolTool, LOGIC, CEDARLearning system, and the MBA Course. These take e-learning to a whole new level.

Udutu.com creates opportunities for the business using it. It can provide training for their employees with minimum cost. The business can provide orientation training for new staff, brief managers on new product launches, create simulations for customers, provide customer or patient training, offer online learning opportunities for customers, or create preparation courses for face to face training, post training support resources, quick reference modules, et. On the other hand, this (udutu.com) website earns money in four ways:

1. Udutu acts a host for the finished courses for users, charging a monthly hosting fee based on the number of screens used by the course.
2. They build or modify courses for certain percentage of the users.
3. They allow users to build and deploy there own courses in udutu’s servers then the users will purchase the entire system to transfer to their own servers.
4. They provide training and support services to their installed base.

www.udutu.com is a website that offers E-learning. This website is very accommodating to all users. How? First, it helps people learn courses through experts themselves who upload these courses and not call center agents who, they themselves do not know the questions being asked of them and are not experts.

Secondly, it makes learning fun through different means, by uploading a video, a flash game, java applet and etc. It makes learning interactive and not boring like your traditional college classroom experience.

Thirdly, it makes the experts, who upload courses, utilize different software like flash, java, Microsoft Power point and other media, which even they do not know how to manipulate, so that they can make their courses interactive and fun. How? Udutu offers templates for them to use. They can also, have online quizzes and games for these courses.

Can we trust udutu.com? It brags that it follows SCROM 2004. What is SCROM 2004? SCORM 2004 introduces a complex idea called sequencing, which is a set of rules that specify the order in which a learner may experience content objects. In simple terms, they constrain a learner to a fixed set of paths through the training material, permit the learner to "bookmark" their progress when taking breaks, and assure the acceptability of test scores achieved by the learner. (WIKIPEDIA) Thus, it can be said that udutu.com is trustworthy.

This is a very affordable alternative to enrolling in universities just to take a specific class to learn new things.

Why would the experts do this? First of all, they can make courses on the fly and do them if and when they have time. They can customize the order or arrangement of the topics in the course easily. Also, they are able to achieve the same thing as when they teach in universities and colleges, they get to educate people in areas they are considered as experts in. It also, doesn’t cost much because to use Udutu is completely free. The experts can either upload their courses through their own server or use the Udutu server for a measly fee of $1.

Tellme.com : Tell Me What You Think by electronica

TellMe about it.

Tellme.com is a companion site to Microsoft’s Tell, a Voice XML platform for mobile phones in the United States and Canada. It is basically an advertisement and promotional tool used by Microsoft for its Tellme service, which allows voice query for stocks, sports, news, weather, and horoscopes. The main purpose of the site is to inform different users of Tellme and its benefits. The website also allows visitors to download the application for free.

Tellme.com can be considered an e-commerce website. Although the website does not engage in direct e-commerce activity, it indirectly relates to e-commerce by fostering an environment of advertising and marketing.

Nice to know.

Tell me is a voice recognition application that provides mobile users traffic information, maps,

business establishments, movie schedules and weather information.

By using keywords such as movies or bank,

TellMe can get you the information

you are looking for.

TellMe who the visitors are.

As an informative and advertising site, TellMe.com is open to different individuals around the world whether or not their mobile phones support the TellMe platform. However, TellMe.com particularly targets potential customers from the United States and Canada who wish to learn more about their TellMe service.

Tellme.com users come from these countries

United States 47.1%

India 25.2%

United Kingdom 4.7%

Canada 3.4%

Other countries 20.0%

Tellme.com traffic rank in other countries:

India 81,828

United States 134,528

Canada 171,694

United Kingdom 241,695

courtesty of www.alexa.com

It must be noted that while the United States comprise almost half of Tell.com’s visitors, majority of Tellme.com’s visitors come from markets that they do not cater to. It then raises the question, “Is TellMe.com really an effective tool in marketing their TellMe service?”

Furthermore, traffic ranking shows that the said website only ranks as the 134,528^th and the 171,694^th most visited website in the United States and Canada respectively as compared to India’s 81,828^th. With other countries such as India comprising a substantial percentage of Tellme.com’s visitors, perhaps a better question to ask would be, “Is Microsoft’s TellMe service ready to be launched in markets other than their traditional markets?

TellMe more.

According to the data featured below, there has been a substantial decrease in the number of unique page visitors from September 2008 to January 2009. Perhaps this can be attributed to the global economic downturn which has tremendously hit the United States hard.

While it can be pointed out that the number of unique visitors on January 2008 and on January 2009 is quite similar, and hence could mean a traditional period of inactivity, it should be noted that any site that has existed for at least a year should generate higher visits from unique visitors.

In a more micro-level analysis, there are usually more unique visitors from February to May. Perhaps this can be attributed to the fact that this period corresponds to the spring break of the United States. Knowing this information, Tellme.com could perhaps make seasonal modifications to its website to make it more appealing during vacation periods such as the one mentioned above.

TellMe how it works.

In general, Tellme.com is easy to use. Unlike function heavy applications such as facebook, tellme.com is like a prehistoric website with a modern twist. It is prehistoric in the se nse that it does not contain a lot of difficult-to-understand functions. As an informative site, it basically contains texts and illustrations. However, the website deviates from its prehistoric characteristic by employing modern twists such as mouse-over functions and employing a clean and sophisticated look. This distinguishes itself as a website apt for the 21^st century.

In lay man’s terms, tellme.com works by just clicking (on the different links, of course).

TellMe how much it’s worth.

While there seems to be no single estimate of tellme.com’s market value, different websites have poorly ranked tellme.com giving it very low market values. This can be attributed to the fact that this website is not a social networking site and hence caters to a distinct set of customers. As mentioned above, the site particularly caters to mobile phone users in the United States and Canada. Furthermore, not everyone can relate to tellme.com’s offerings since Microsoft’s TellMe service only functions in selected phones such as Blueberry phones.

Yourwebsitevalue.com estimate $3,393

Websiteoutlook.com estimate $11,716.5

Cubestat.com estimate $7,601

For a service that caters to the entire United States and Canada, it’s hard to make sense of the estimated market values mentioned above. Perhaps, Tellme must rethink its marketing strategy.

TellMe what’s nice.

Tellme.com’s homepage is very pleasing to the eye. It is clutter-free and rather engaging. By clicking on the translucent circular buttons, one can catch a glimpse of some of the services that Tellme can do for you. Afterwards, visitors can click on one of the orange buttons labeled “Tellme for You” and “Tellme for Businesses” to get an introduction on the uses of Tellme.

Furthermore, by clicking on the circular buttons on the homepage, one can glimpse a preview of Tellme's service. Accompanied by a recorded human voice, the interactive experience makes one want to dig more into Tellme.com.

TellMe what’s not nice.

On the homepage, there are also a few other links to click on. However, the navigation bar, which is found on the lower portion of the homepage, isn’t as noticeable. The font colour is dull and the size is too small. The links are very easy to miss out, leaving visitors confused with what to do and where to go next.

The other pages are still not so cluttered, but the feeling of excitement a visitor feels on the homepage fades away just as quickly as it was aroused. The other pages are too text-heavy that it gets boring navigating and reading through the contents of the website.

What’s more, the different pages are also sectioned into different parts, with links connecting subsections to main sections. Just as it is in the site’s navigation bar, the links are inconspicuous. Tellme.com has too many links on different pages. It needs a navigation menu with dropdown boxes so that the website would be easier to explore.

TellMe the real deal.

Although tellme.com is aesthetically pleasing to the eyes: organized, simple and clean, it still has some issues it must resolve: absence of a unified navigation menu, text-heaviness and external issues.

The experience from this site is not at par with the service it advertises. One is most likely to forget about tellme.com

www.paypal.com - one-derful

Classification of the website:
PayPal is an online payment service for individuals and merchants. Allows users to send money and bills to anyone with e-mail. It could be classified as an E-commerce website.
Traffic details:
Paypal has a current traffic rank of 1,208. For the 3 months, internet users who visit the site declined by 11.8 percent making it drop in the traffic ranking by 234. Thirty-seven percent of its users are from United kingdom and 30.2 percent are from United States making these two countries the top two countries using this site. For more information, go to:
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/paypal.com
Target Audience
Its market is the users who want to pay or get paid online. This website could also cater to other e-businesses and people who purchase items through the net.
General features/ functions of the website:
Make secure purchases without revealing your credit card number or financial information, shop using PayPal on eBay, get access on a growing user database and accept credit and debit cards with low transaction fees and allows you to get eBay tools.
Products and services available:
To pay online is the major service provided by paypal.com. Since it is prone to cyber crimes, paypal.com provides its users a purchase protection feature that would help them distinguish those real purchases from the fraudulent ones. Some of these features are:
· 100% protection against unauthorized payments sent from your account
This is to ensure that you are really paying for what you have bought. They do this by sending a confirmation of your transaction through your email. If ever you don’t recognize the said transaction, you can call their customer support team to check its authenticity. And if it is discovered as an unauthorized payment, they can file an unauthorized activity claim
· Dispute resolution on PayPal purchases
Paypal offers a Resolution Center – forum for dispute resolution- for you to directly communicate to the seller. This is if in case you haven’t received the good that you have paid or you got a different good.
· Purchase protection on eBay — PayPal Buyer Protection
PayPal buyer protection offers you a protection up to the full purchase price, including original shipping costs. This is not available for all products sold on eBay. In case the product is not covered by the program you can still access the buyer complaint policy.
Other services offered by PayPal are sending money and shopping online. For the companies it allows them to offer and sell their products online.

Business value of the website:
It lessens transactions costs due to the fact that payments could be made using the web. The privacy of the customer is protected because it does not need a customer’s financial information, it assures 100 percent protection from unauthorized payments and gives businesses and promises a 24/7 monitoring to help prevent fraud. Users will be able to utilize an efficient method of paying or receiving payments.

Critique of the website:
Located in San Jose, California, PayPal was founded in 1998 and was acquired by eBay in 2002.PayPal claims that it is a safer and easier way to pay and get paid online. The service enables global commerce by making payments feasible across different countries, currencies and locations. PayPal boasts that its’ service could provide a way to pay in any way whether it be credit cards, bank accounts, buyer credit and account balances without revealing financial information. The service became a global leader in online payment solutions having 153 million accounts worldwide. PayPal is available in 190 markets and 18 currencies around the world. And if its market will continuously grow, the available currencies will increase fostering a more efficient way of paying.
In early 2007, PayPal introduced an optional security key as an additional precaution against fraud. A user account tied to a security key has a modified login process: the account holder enters their login ID and password, as normal, but is then prompted to press the button on the security key and enter the six-digit number generated by it. This two-factor authentication is intended to prevent an account from being compromised by a malicious third party without access to the physical security key. If a user loses their key, they can alternatively authenticate by providing the credit card or bank account number listed on their account.(Wikipedia)
The key comes free with business accounts, but currently costs US$5.00 for personal users, with no ongoing fees The option of using a security key with one's account is currently available only to users registered in the United States, Germany and Australia. (Wikipedia)
This scheme that was introduced help the costumers to trust the site more and helped the site to gain more users. Not only this showed that a more secured site for money transactions but it also showed that they value the welfare costumers.

PayPal has won awards such as the 2007 Webware Awards for productivity, 2006 Webby Awards for best finance service site and People’s Voice Award and the 2002 SIIA Codie Awards for best e-commerce solution to name a few.
PayPal is a great service provider for its’ main purpose is to make payments be possible globally. Garnering a traffic rank of 1,208 in alexa.com, it is clear that PayPal has caught the attention of a lot of users that might be interested in the online payment services done by the website. One of the key features that attracted so many people around the world is the ability of the service to provide payment solutions without consolidating the users’ financial information. Another key factor that PayPal has tapped is the flexibility of the methods of payment that customers could use to make their payments. The website itself is simple, elegant and not that hard to navigate enabling easy access to information, easy online payments and non-threatening online procedures. The tabs at the top of the webpage are very accessible and it navigates to the different needs of users and it provides good accessibility on what PayPal has to offer. The site also posted Top Questions on their website to address popular questions that might be asked by first-time users. This is extremely helpful in the side of the users for it gives them an idea of what the site is and the prerequisites of availing the service that the site provides.

For the past 3 months, its users dropped significantly. Since it is an E-commerce site, the global recession that is experienced may be associated to this decline.

PayPal is a great website offering a simple yet effective solution for e-commerce and e-business transactions. Costumers can save time and effort by not having to go to places to pay certain bills. The service it provides not only gives a cost-efficient solution for businesses today but a much faster and reliable way of conducting payments and transactions through the net.

ReviewMe.com : Money Thru Blogging (The Determinants)

*Funny thought: I'm writing a review on a website that utilizes reviews.

Part of the MediaWhiz Advertising Network, ReviewMe.com is one of its websites that utilizes the Display Advertising approach in online advertising. Though it has never received even 1% of the global traffic (courtesy of alexa.com), it still proves to be a promising e-business for the common blogger, and a marketing platform for the aspiring company.

According to Jeremy Schoemaker, who is quoted at the front page of the site,

"ReviewMe has allowed me to generate great revenue reviewing products I find interesting."

This is what ReviewMe.com is in the fewest words.

Bloggers all over the world love to write for things they're interested in; that's why they're blogging in the first place. So why not give them more reason to write: Make a review about something you like, and get paid for it! Seems like the perfect deal, right?

For the company on the other hand, they would like to promote their product, get feedback as soon as possible to improve on it when they can, and get people to go their website to get more traffic, and do all these with minimal cost. So why not give them a solution: Hire someone to write stuff about them, and make sure they're compensated if they do a good job! Again, it seems like a good deal.

ReviewMe.com acts as the middleman between these two entities, an intermediary, if you will. Bloggers go to their site and signup, afterwhich they get to choose which products would they like to review. After choosing ones that they like, and make a review about them, they get paid from $20.00 to $200.00, depending on how much their review has impacted the company.

The concept proves to be very profitable on the part of the blogger. As for the website itself, I can only assume that they're making money through cuts from the money received (so the company pays a bit more extra). If this is so, then it is a bit risky on their part, because you wouldn't know when will a blogger pull enough traffic for the company to generate traffic.

For the website's advantages, I can say that it is indeed a great and very innovative way for someone to make money, even in small amounts. To review something you'd love to talk about will beneficial in the sense that you as a blogger get to continue your passion for writing, and will also allow you to improve your technique as a writer. And get paid for it.

Its disadvantages on the other hand would be the lack of people who know about it. Most of it's traffic comes from India, Indonesia, and the United States, but the total number of users doesn't even reach 1% of the global population. (The Philippines was listed; I bet that's our group browsing the site.)

In closing, ReviewMe.com is a great way for you to write about what you like, and then get paid for it. Signup, write, and get rich.

BrainStorm is an educational website used for e-business at the same time as a resource provider. The website provides software training services with certain attached costs. Although it is not a very frequently visited sites by most internet users (not included in top 100,000 according to Alexa), it is a very unique and useful website to big businesses and organizations. Their target users are organizations who wish to upgrade their users. Industries such as automotive, business to business, computer and technology, education, arts and entertainment, financial and government are the major users of this website.

The prime objective of BrainStorm is to offer the best software training courses with master instructors, training materials, hands-on training and customized curriculum that are designed to fit the needs of the organization.

a) Increasing the eagerness of users and learners- Things that the training does are to increase eagerness of end-users, make them actually remember what they have learned and personalize their experience. BrainStorm's master instructors know every aspect of the programs they teach, their excitement about the new features will influence users thus users will be eager for the software roll-out.

b) Follow up computer training- Under traditional training, students only remember a little more than half of what they learned. A day after training, retention levels fall even lower. However, users remember more of what they learned using BrainStorm’s on-site, hands-on corporate computer training because they actually performed tasks that they would be performing in reality.

c) proper topic selection- To make on-site training even more efficient for the users, BrainStorm lets the organization decide what the end-users need to learn. The organization will choose topics it wants for the trainer to focus on and which ones it wants him to leave out completely.

d) software education - There are different types of software training products that the website offers designed for all types of customers and software providers. These training products and services can teach the organization and its users how to get the most out of their Microsoft, Novell, Corel, OpenOffice.org, or other custom software.

The website gives software and on-site training programs for enterprises. The hands-on computer training provided by BrainStorm enables people who have undergone training to increase productivity by having the capacity to maximize the utility of the software they have at work. After the training, the employee may already be aware of the advantages and be able to perform the task in a more efficient and productive manner. Besides the increase in productivity, the opportunity cost of training the employees decreases because of the reduced time that is needed for training. This could be allotted for other activities such as their main work or other projects. The two reasons we have indicated above may contribute greatly to the increase in productivity and further increase revenues of a company. Some of the life examples are United States Pharmacopeia, New York State Education Department, and US Department of Justice.

Aside from providing IT training and creating efficient work force for interested companies and individuals, BrainStorm also is a place for employment. It currently seeks individuals for various positions such as IT Systems Engineer, Internet Marketing Analyst, and Sales Associates. It has unique descriptions for the qualifications for the said positions but it all boils down to the need of forming the best team of employees because having excellent employees leads to having an excellent company.

Pros:
§ It is organized enough and it really caters to the need of the end-users by making available of materials that will cater to the learning of a user. This includes training, e-materials, workbooks and quick start card.
§ It has abundant application for end-users to choose.
§ Productivity of employees will be further enhanced and they may develop a faster way of working to save time and effort
§ In addition, contact information is disclosed in case there are questions needed to be entertained.

Cons:
§ The software and applications are expensive. Everything has a price. An employee for example may just want to ask for assistance from his/her co-employee instead of utilizing this service. Besides, workbooks can also be generated from online document sharing websites (ex. Scribd) wherein it’s free to download them.
§ The website itself does not contain a feedback portion where comments and questions of end-users should be written. This is very important since they are self-acclaimed providers therefore, opinions of users should be disclosed too.
§ Advertisement should be improved. The users of the website usually come from developed countries like USA and Australia but very few from Asia.
§ Moreover, high-class institutions (i.e. New York Education Department and the US Department of Justice While) were the only ones who made positive comments. We notice that at least very few of institutions that aren’t highly recognized made comments or used this training program. This is maybe because of its expensive features and services. IT may also because of digital divide. Not everybody has access to internet and not everybody has an extra budget to sustain this service.