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Search Marketing Expo (SMX) Schwag Bag VideoOctober 7

Today I headed over to the Javits Center for the Search Marketing Expo. Below is a video of what's in their schwag bag. One thing that I left at the conference was the 500-700 page binder of all of the slides and session materials. No idea why they still see a need to print these out - why not stick a printer next to the registration desk and let attendees select which sessions they want to print. Perhaps stick all of the slides on a USB key. The waste of paper and more importantly the weight is just crazy - especially when baggage in flight is getting more expensive every day.

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Hakia Launches Human Powered Credible Search and Topic GalleriesOctober 6

NY-based Hakia has announced a relaunch of their search engine service today. Hakia is a semantic search engine which uses partial human filtered results to help get past the typical search results. Today the company is adding an even stronger human element: the "credible Web sites" index.

What this means is when you complete a search on Hakia, you can select to see only sites that Hakia deems "credible". The credible sites list will be vetted by librarians and informational professionals.

Hakia has also launched "hakia Galleries" which bring together all types of search results (image, text, credible, etc.) on a topic basis. It's an interesting way to provide the data rather than for an absolute specific query.

I like the Hakia team and love that they are in NYC. But they have to start marketing the search engine. Get up to Times Square and setup a corner where you can show tourists why Hakia is better than Google. Let those tourists go back to their countries and spread the word. Sure I am simplifying things, but they have to raise the level of awareness to drive search volume. They don't have a CEO who can push links to tens of thousands of Twitter users for quick traffic boosting. Booths at tradeshows won't cut it alone.

eBay Acquires Bill Me Later for $820 Million in CashOctober 6

Online auction provider eBay has announced that they have acquired Bill Me Later for $820 million in cash plus approximately $125 million worth of outstanding options. The deal is expected to close by year-end.

eBay notes that today's acquisition will be a good complement to PayPal. “Bill Me Later is a perfect complement to our portfolio; PayPal and Bill Me Later belong together,” said John Donahoe, eBay Inc.’s president and chief executive officer. “We now have a powerful combination of the two leading, complementary online payment products, each with proven benefits for consumers and online merchants. At an attractive valuation, our investment in Bill Me Later opens significant long-term growth opportunities."

Bill Me Later will run as a business unit of Paypal and Bill Me Later CEO will report to PayPal president Scott Thompson.

From the release: eBay anticipates that Bill Me Later will generate an estimated $150 million in revenue in 2009.

There is a conference call scheduled for 8:30AM and we will update this post with comments from the call.

 

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Matt Mullenweg Demo of Wordpress 2.7October 6

Earlier today we posted the "State of the Word" presentation by Wordpress co-founder Matt Mullenweg. After his presentation, Matt spent some time demonstrating the upcoming 2.7 release of Wordpress. I've embedded the video below. Wordpress 2.7 will be available in November.

Matt begins by explaining that eventually everything in Wordpress will have an associated API for extending the service. The new interface looks awesome. The posting functionality of Wordpress is one of the things I wish Drupal had. I find that Drupal can be extended further than Wordpress but the posting usability is WAY better in Wordpress than Drupal. The 2.7 admin interface appears to be even more usable than the current version.

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Other CenterNetworks Coverage: Viddler, Twitter, Web Jobs

WordCamp NYC: Matt Mullenweg on the State of Wordpress (video)October 6

Today in NYC WordCamp was held at the Sun Microsystems HQ. A big thanks to Jonathan Dingman for organizing everything... having been to many "camps", this one was better organized than most. Wordpress co-founder Matt Mullenweg provided the keynote address and I was able to capture all of it on video. I've split the videos into three parts: current state of Wordpress, a walkthrough of the upcoming 2.7 release and the future of Wordpress. Below is the first part and the others will be posted over the next 24 hours.

As for the state of Wordpress, on the self-hosted ".org" version, there are currently over 6 million active blogs. Matt discusses the top 10 Wordpress plugins, notes that the average blog has 5 plugins, the most installed is over 1,000. His goal is to make sure Wordpress is always small, fast and light.