Internet Content Syndication Council Formed

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Charter members include About.com, Carat, CBS, Mochila, Pheedo and Studio One Networks.

 

New York, NY (PRWEB) October 24, 2007 — The formation of the Internet Content Syndication Council (ICSC), representing some of the leading companies in online content distribution, was announced today.

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The purpose of the ICSC is to promote industry growth by:

– Improving the understanding of what Internet content syndication is and how it works in the advertising, media and consumer communities it serves.
– Increasing the awareness of Internet content syndication as a means of revenue generation for digital publishers, as a mode of marketing for advertisers and as a system of quality content provision to consumers and networks alike.
– Establishing a "fund of knowledge" on quality outcomes, case studies and best practices for industry participants to fortify confidence in the system.
– Providing an objective "third party" point of view on Internet syndication to ensure credibility.

Andrew Susman, CEO of Studio One Networks and the first chairman of the ICSC said, "There have been a number of major developments in advertising and marketing recently that suggest the need of a council to focus on issues that will arise as we enter a period of unparalleled growth."

Other Council charter members include: Andrew Pancer, Chief Operating Officer, About.com; David Verklin, Chief Executive Officer, Carat Americas; Aaron Radin, Senior Vice President, Advertising and Business Development, CBS; Carolyn Bekkedahl, Chief Development Officer, Mochila; Bill Flitter, Founder, Pheedo.

The ICSC plans to perform such duties and projects as research initiatives, topical conferences and trend reporting & forecasting. The ICSC also plans to conduct quarterly meetings with member firms to discuss internal activities and identify and address industry topics.

To visit the ICSC website, go to www.internetcontentsyndication.org.

For further information please contact:
Jeremy Duca – Tel. 212.213.2332 x206
Denise Gonzalez – Tel. 212.213.2332 x202 

Small Businesses Optimistic About 2007 Holiday Season, According To Survey

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Small businesses embrace email marketing to promote holiday season offerings

WALTHAM, Mass. (Business Wire EON) October 24, 2007 — Despite modest consumer spending predictions1, small businesses have a jolly outlook for the 2007 holiday season, according to Constant Contact's 3rd Annual 2007 Small Business Holiday Outlook. The survey of more than 2,000 U.S. small business owners shows that the majority of respondents (53 percent) are concerned about competition from large retailers; yet they’re still optimistic, with 63 percent of them anticipating strong sales this holiday season. Constant Contact®, Inc. (NasdaqGM: CTCT) is a leading provider of email marketing and online surveys for small organizations.

  U.S. small business owner’s confidence in this year’s upcoming holiday sales season is supported by their planned use of online marketing methods. According to the survey, 86 percent of small businesses will use email marketing to promote their holiday season offerings and 38 percent of them will use other online methods including banner ads and paid search, to generate attention. Surveyed businesses noted that email marketing has the greatest impact on driving holiday sales (35 percent).

“In light of modest sales predictions, this optimism from small business owners is great news for the upcoming holiday season and the U.S. economy overall,” said Gail Goodman, CEO, Constant Contact. “Although the David versus Goliath scenario is especially evident during the holiday season, the increased adoption of online marketing tools is helping small businesses feel confident as they pursue a greater share of consumers’ holiday spend.”

Small businesses looking to bridge the gap and compete more effectively against large retailers are planning to begin their holiday marketing efforts several months in advance. According to the survey, 42 percent of respondents will begin their marketing earlier than they did last year, with as many as 63 percent of them beginning their promotions before Halloween.

While most small businesses surveyed anticipate a lucrative holiday season and have an overall positive outlook (54 percent) on the U.S. economy, most of them have no plans to increase staff during or after the holidays. In fact, 81 percent plan to keep the same level of staff through the holidays while more than 60 percent plan to maintain their current staffing levels in 2008.

The full survey can be viewed here: Constant Contact’s 2007 Holiday Outlook. Sample questions and results include the following:

Do you anticipate a strong holiday season in sales for your business?

Yes 63%
No 37%

How concerned are you that competition from large retailers will hurt your holiday sales?

I’m very concerned 10%
I’m moderately concerned 20%
I’m slightly concerned 23%
I’m not concerned 47%

Are you planning any promotional offers for the December holidays?

Yes 63%
No 37%

What marketing methods will you use to promote your holiday season offerings? (check all that apply)

Email marketing 86%
Online marketing 38%
Direct mail 29%
Flyers 30%
Advertising (TV/radio/newspaper) 26%
Other 79%

Will you begin marketing for this holiday season earlier than you did last year?

Yes 42%
No 58%

When do you typically begin your holiday marketing efforts?

Three months or more before Christmas 33%
Two months or more before Christmas 30%
One month before Christmas 11%
Less than one month before Christmas 2%
I do not do holiday-specific marketing 24%

(a)The 2007 Small Business Holiday Outlook survey was conducted from September 17 – October 1, 2007 through targeted online distribution to U.S. small businesses who are current customers of Constant Contact. Results were recorded from more than 2,000 respondents.

About Constant Contact, Inc.

Constant Contact, Inc. is a leading provider of email marketing and online survey tools for small organizations, including small businesses, associations, and nonprofits. Launched in 1998, Constant Contact has more than 130,000 customers worldwide today. To learn more, please visit www.constantcontact.com or call (781) 472-8100.

This press release contains "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements are made as of the date they were first issued and were based on current expectations, estimates, forecasts and projections as well as the beliefs and assumptions of our management. Words such as "expect," "anticipate," "should," "believe," "hope," "target," "project," "goals," "estimate," "potential," "predict," "may," "will," "might," "could," "intend," variations of these terms or the negative of these terms and similar expressions are intended to identify these forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties, many of which involve factors or circumstances that are beyond our control. Our actual results could differ materially from those stated or implied in forward-looking statements due to a number of factors, including those factors contained in our final prospectus dated October 2, 2007 for our initial public offering as well as other documents that may be filed by us from time to time with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results. We undertake no intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

1 Resources:

National Retail Federation, 2007 Holiday Consumer Intentions and Actions Survey. October 16, 2007.

Retail Forward, TNS Retail Forward Holiday Forecast, September 2007.

 

Constant Contact and the Constant Contact Logo are registered trademarks of Constant Contact, Inc. All Constant Contact product names and other brand names mentioned herein are trademarks or registered trademarks of Constant Contact, Inc. All other company and product names may be trademarks or service marks of their respective owners.

 

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Network Monitoring With Linux

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    Ever wonder what kind of traffic is flying around on your network? Which machines or what protocols are using the most bandwidth? What your network throughput is? There is a very simple way to find out and all it involves is an old PC that you are not using, a simple hub, and an hour or two of your time.

    We've all been there: Users are complaining about a slow network and you have no idea where to begin looking for the cause. Perhaps there is an infected machine on the network that is making multiple connections to an outside address. Maybe you have a user that you suspect is sucking up bandwidth by downloading movies or listening to streaming audio.  The best way to obtain a good picture of what's going on is to install some type of device that can see all the traffic to and from all of the machines on your network and then present that information in an easy to understand format.

    One of the best tools for doing this is an application called “ntop”. Ntop is an open source tool that will show you all of the traffic on your network, broken down by IP address, protocol, throughput, etc. All of the data collected by the application is presented in an easy to use web interface. Although ntop has been ported to Windows I will explain how to get this application up and running using Linux. The main advantage of using Linux is that ntop itself can be quite resource intensive (depending upon the size of your network) and Linux allows us to install the bare minimum of an operating system therefore allowing most of the hardware resources to be available to the application.

    The first step is to procure a donor machine. This doesn't have to be anything fancy, an old PIII with 512Mb of ram and a 20Gb hard drive will suffice. You will also need a hub (NOT a switch!) so that you can plug your new ntop box into a network segment where it can see all of the traffic. Lastly you'll need a copy of my favorite Linux distribution, Debian.     

    Begin by downloading and burning a copy of Debian. I recommend getting the network install image, it's very small, and you only need a very few basic packages anyway. Go here: Debian and download the appropriate “netinst” image (i386 for most of you). Make sure you burn this as an ISO “image” and then boot your selected PC to this CD. Go ahead and install Debian, making sure that you are plugged into the network and the internet is accessible. Debian has a reputation for being difficult to install but you can safely accept the defaults most of the way through, with the following exceptions:

1.    If your PC grabs a DHCP address, use the tab key to choose “back”, then choose “configure network manually”, and then assign an appropriate static IP.
2.    When you get to the “Software selection” screen, unselect everything (trust me). This is done by using the space bar to toggle your selection and the “down” arrow key to move through the menu. Once you have deselected all options, use the “tab” key to choose continue and hit “enter”.

After it installs grub, it will spit the CD out at you and you simply hit “enter” to continue and boot into your new Debian system.

    At this point, you should be staring at a login prompt (yes, it's all text based, no “point and click” here). Simply type “root”, hit “enter”, and then the password you chose for root when you installed the OS. Now, we're going to do some basic setup:

1.    Type “nano -w /etc/apt/sources.list” (without the quotation marks). This will open a file up in an editor.
2.    Using your arrow keys to move around, put a “#” sign in front of the line that starts with “deb cdrom” (this is called a “comment” and it means the line will be ignored). Then move the cursor to the end of the first line that starts with “deb http” and add “contrib” and “non-free”. It should look like this:
“deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ etch main contrib non-free”
3.    Do the same for the remaining 3 lines.
4.    Hit “ctrl O” (the ctrl button and the letter “o” at the same time), “enter”, and then “ctrl X”.
5.    Type the command “apt-get update”.
6.    Type the command “apt-get install openssh-server” (just hit enter when it asks you if you want to continue).

    From here on, we can have some fun and finish the install remotely from our desktop by simply cutting and pasting commands into a terminal window connected to the Debian box. This ntop server is designed to be headless anyway, so there is no need to have a monitor and keyboard connected during normal operation.

    Linux users can simply open a terminal and connect to the Debian box using SSH. Windows users will need to download a small program that will allow terminal connections to a Linux box. This program, called “putty”, allows a Windows box to use SSH (the secure shell protocol) and can be found here: putty (just grab “putty.exe" and save it to your desktop). Open up putty, punch in the IP address of your Debian box, log in as “root”, and then cut and paste the following commands into the terminal window (one line at a time, hitting enter after each line):

    apt-get install ntop graphviz gsfonts-x11
    ntop –set-admin-password
    reboot

    That's it, now you have a working network management box! There are a few basic parameters you will want to set, so open up your web browser and point it to:

    http://IP_address_of_ntop_box:3000

    You should see the ntop summary page. We should set up a secure means of talking to this box, so choose “admin > configure > startup options” from the menu at the top of the page and enter the user name (admin) and the password you just created for the ntop admin. Change the “HTTP Server” value to 0 and the “HTTPS Server” value to 3000, then click “save preferences” (bottom of page). Next, choose “admin > configure > preferences” and in the blank boxes at the bottom of the table, enter “dot.path” in the first box and “/usr/bin/dot” in the second box, then click the “add” button. Reboot the ntop box one more time and make sure that you can access it using https, not http. (As a side note, the previous 2 reboots are not necessary; normally I would just restart the ntop service via the command line but I'm trying to keep this simple. I should also advise the Windows users that you do NOT need to log in to the box to make it work, in fact it's a bad idea to remain logged in as root.)

    In order to see more than just traffic to the ntop box itself, you must plug it into a network segment that carries all the traffic for your network. This is where the hub comes in: Pick a spot on the back bone of your network, plug the hub in there, and connect the ntop server to the hub. For example, you can place the hub between your firewall and the core switch to see all the traffic in and out of your network. Of course you can always mirror a port on the core switch to the port that your external connection plugs into (if you have a managed switch in place).

    I would strongly recommend one last security related configuration; it is a very bad idea to allow root logins via SSH. While allowing this makes the above install very easy, now that the box is up and running it's time to change this parameter. Log into the ntop box via a terminal (as root) and follow these instructions:

1.    Enter the command “nano -w /etc/ssh/sshd_config”, this will open up a file in an editor. Using the same method you used earlier to edit the “apt” file, look for the line that reads “PermitRootLogin Yes”, change “yes” to “no”, and save your changes.
2.    Enter the command “/etc/init.d/ssh restart”.

(After you have completed the above configuration the login procedure via SSH changes a little bit: you will no longer be able to log in directly as “root”. You must log in as the regular user that you created when you initially installed Debian and then issue the command “su” to change to the root user)

    As always, if you have any questions, comments, problems, or monetary contributions, please direct them to me at thughes@fwpm.com.

RESOURCES:
Debian: http://www.debian.org/

ntop: http://www.ntop.org/

putty: http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/

Burning CD images: http://www.petri.co.il/how_to_write_iso_files_to_cd.htm

Todd Hughes is a Network Security Analyst and long time Linux fan in the Upstate New York area. Send your Questions, comments or feedback to: thughes@fwpm.com.

Copyright  Todd Hughes  2007. Printed by permission.

 

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