Trying out amazon.com zshops

I signed up as an Amazon seller last week to help augment the sales of my main webpage http://cceshop.com. For $39, Amazon sellers can list products for sale on the main Amazon market place website, as a stand alone web zshop, or as an auction site. Signup was very easy and they provide a suite of tools to help you import your products, prices, and inventory into their system.

You can find my zshop at www.amazon.com/shops/cceshop

Live traffic condition for Portland, Oregon on your cell

Google recently announced Google Map Mobile will provide live traffic data for Portland, Oregon and 30 other cities in the US via cell phones. I decided to try it out of my Blackberry and share some of my findings with you.
To download and use Google maps, open the following link on your phone, http://google.com/gmm. If you hate typing on your cell, try sending the link as an email or SMS text to your phone. Otherwise, open your phone’s browser and enter the URL. You should be prompted to confirm installation. If you have trouble with the setup, check the compatibility list at http://www.google.com/gmm/index.html.
Assuming that you have the application installed, you’ll need to start Google maps. On my phone it was installed under the “Applications” folder.

Your first task is to find Portland, Oregon on the map. There are a couple of ways to do this: Panning or “Finding a Business” / “Finding a location”. Each is discussed briefly below.
Panning is best used for when you are performing precise selection or fine tuned movement across a small portion of the Google map.
My phone had the following key mapping for navigation:Key Direction5 Pan up8 Down7 Left9 Right
The screen is updated as you pan and requires your phone to perform more frequent requests to Google to update the screen. Note method may prove costly depending on your service agreement and if you per Kb/MB. I suggest you give panning a try just to get the hang of it. Next try Finding a Location using Google maps.
Finding a Business/location is typically the easiest way to navigate to a specific address on the map. This feature is extremely useful if you get lost going someplace and are too embarrassed to ask or call for directions. To use this feature, you’ll need to select “Find Location” option and select then “Enter an address” from the resulting window. Type a valid street address using the touch pad and press the enter key. If you’ve entered a valid address, the map will center upon it and the address will be stored on your phone for future searches in the “Recent places” menu. I suggest looking up the address of your house so that it can be used in subsequent searches. .
Now that you have found a valid address, it should be displayed on the map. If you’d like to save the address in your favorite places for quick searches later press the 2 key. Scroll to “Save as a favorite”.
Ready to see live traffic conditions? Ok, select “Show Traffic” and wait patiently as the Google Map web service performs its magic.
Now your phone will be annotated will green and red lines indicating update to date traffic conditions. To get a more detailed look try zooming in on the map using the 6 key to Zoom in and the 4 Key to Zoom out
This post just scratches the surface of what you can do with Google maps mobile. For more more details , check out the Google Maps mobile website at
Drop me a line and let me know how accurate the live traffic service is during your commute home on The Sunset. cell driving Google map mobile

Web Hosting, Advertising, Keywords

A friend asked me about how to get his website listed on google and yahoo. I thought I would share a summary of what I wrote .

Submitting URL to search engine for free
http://www.google.com/addurl/
http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request

www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps - Submit a sitemap that allows google to efficiently index your website content. It requires you to create a robot.txt file and verify that you are owner of the site. There are two verification methods, uploading a html files with a provided name or including a meta tag in your header. You site must be verified before you can use the tools mentioned below.

The site also provides statics about your site, how/when its been last "crawled", pages that have been indexed, etc.

Checking keywords.
http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ - Give this one a try and see how many hits your keywords will generate.
Google has another great tool for keywords research. https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal?defaultView=3

Cheap Domains (No web hosting included)
http://order.sbs.yahoo.com/ds/ChooseDomain?d=&.p=YD1&m=dom&.src=sbs&.promo=PASSPORTPLUS Yahoo! Small business. Domains cost $3 for the first year. However, it goes up after that! I bought one domain with them and the service is pretty good
http://godaddy.com domains cost $6.95. I’ve bought a couple of domains with them and they have good customer service.
http://www.ipower.com – Domains cost $2.95 but I’ve heard the customer service is kind of iffy.

Amazon Instant Ecommerce Website

Amazon is offering free Web hosting of your e-commerce bookstore. Or you can sell any other kind of merchandise except the usual prohibited stuff like firearms and pornography. Amazon hasn't announced this program yet. It's still in beta, but you can sign up here.I've got to admit, I never saw this coming. It's a bold move by Amazon, and a huge counterpunch to eBay's Stores program, which costs at least $14.95. The barriers to entry to e-commerce are just about gone now.

The only remaining obstacles for Joe Six-Pack having his own Web store are monthly hosting fees and the hassle of getting your own domain. With this offer, Amazon eliminates both those headaches for you -- you just give them the name of your company and the URL you want to use.And not only that, Amazon will collect the payments for you, so no need for you to fiddle with PayPal or paying a big application fee for your own credit-card merchant account.Believe it or not, it gets even better: Amazon is thinking about offering to warehouse and ship your goods too. My understanding is this part of the program hasn't been finalized, but it's part of the plan.Looks like Amazon is targeting every kind of merchant under the sun, not just booksellers. Here's one of the pilot stores, a Web site that sells waterproof bedding. Other pilot stores are selling coffee, auto accessories, flowers -- a big variety.Now this program won't automatically generate traffic to your e-commerce site -- that's still your job. But here's the great thing about it: Say a visitor to your site buys your item. During the checkout process, they see related merchandise from another Amazon seller. You can get an affiliate commission (probably about 6.5 percent) on that additional sale. To get these additional commission, you'll need to sign up for Amazon's Associates Program separately. One more thing: The word I hear is that Amazon will tie this new program into its plans for pay-per-click advertising. In other words, if you're paying Google to bring in customers using Adwords, Amazon is going to go after that business too. [From slickdeals.net]

Free Hosting, website at Microsoft Office Live Beta

Microsoft Office Live Beta is giving away basic websites, domain name registeration, 5 email addresses for free. See http://officelive.microsoft.com/default.aspx

Cool stuff and random thoughts

You gotta check out my buddy's blog at http://amelabs.blogspot.com/. Tony has some good articles on cool new products available on the web.