The month of October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, and Bling My Bra is thrilled to be able to raise money for the second year in a row for this great cause! Once again, we will be auctioning off one-of-a-kind themed art bras through Giving Works auctions on eBay. Proceeds will benefit Susan G. Komen For the Cure. Look for eBay seller ID BlingMyBra or do a keyword search for “bling my bra”.

Founder Beth Cherkowsky of DepressionGlassWarehouse has handed over the reins to Kat Simpson of KatsKloset, who is heading up a committee of volunteers. This year’s committee includes Kat Simpson (@KatsKloset); Beth Cherkowsky (@DepressionGlassWarehouse); Danni Ackerman (@Udderlygoodstuff); Cindy Shebley (@CloverCitySells); Melinda Jackson (@GalleriaGifts) ; @eBetsy (TexAnna’s All*Store, The Acquisatory); Marlene Gavens (@TheSavvySeller); Beverly England (@samican2);  Christy Librizzi (@kaycee_studios); Karen Locker (@mommysbazaar); and Lee Mirabal (@sellvoice, co-host of eBay Radio).

Now the fun part: How can you get involved? There are several ways!

1. Make a themed art bra or bras to auction off
2. No time to sew or create but have a great idea? We have someone who will take ideas and run with them!
3. Help spread the word through Facebook, Twitter, and other social media networks
4. BID BID BID!

The featured bras are exquisite one-of-a-kind creations, incorporating fantasy, humor, and — above all — originality. Some will be created by celebrities, including Marsha Collier, bestselling author of the eBay For Dummies series and ecommerce expert. Some will represent hobbies or interests. EBay Radio will also be submitting a bra. There will be additional opportunities to donate to the important cause of breast cancer awareness through listings for related items in the Bling My Bra store.

The eBay auctions will be featured throughout the month of October through eBay seller ID BlingMyBra and keyword search “bling my bra”. Proceeds will benefit Susan G. Komen For the Cure.

Updated information is available at http://www.blingmybra.com. For more details, contact MediaRelations@blingmybra.com.

Many Americans are online and on the cell networks accessing the web, but what are they doing? Did you know that according the Neilson, people spend almost 25% of their time online on social networking sites and blogs, up 43 percent from 1 year earlier! According to new research released today from The Nielsen Company, Americans spend a third their online time (36 percent) communicating and networking across social networks, blogs, personal email and instant messaging.

Check the charts below for some eye-opening information….

Additional findings include:

• Online games overtook personal email to become the second most heavily used activity behind social networks – accounting for 10 percent of all U.S. Internet time. Email dropped from 11.5 percent of time to 8.3 percent. (Source: Nielsen NetView)
• Of the most heavily-used sectors, Videos/Movies (which includes video-specific and movie-related websites only – and is not inclusive of video streaming behavior elsewhere) was the only other to experience a significant growth in share of U.S. activity online. Its share of activity grew relatively by 12 percent from 3.5 to 3.9 percent. (Source: Nielsen NetView)
• June 2010 was a major milestone for U.S. online video as the number of videos streamed passed the 10 billion mark. The average American consumer streaming online video spent 3 hours 15 minutes doing so during the month. (Source: Nielsen VideoCensus)
• Despite some predictions otherwise, the rise of social networking hasn’t pushed email and instant messaging into obscurity just yet. Although both saw double-digit declines in share of time, email remains as the third heaviest activity online (8.3 percent share of time) while instant messaging is fifth, accounting for four percent of Americans online time. (Source: Nielsen NetView)
• Although the major portals also experienced a double digit decline in share, they remained as the fourth heaviest activity, accounting for 4.4 percent of U.S. time online. (Source: Nielsen NetView)

Email Remains Top on Mobile Internet Activities
The way U.S. consumers spend their Internet time on their mobile phones paints a slightly different picture to that of Internet use from computers. In a Nielsen survey of mobile web users, there is a double-digit (28 percent) rise in the prevalence of social networking behavior, but the dominance of email activity on mobile devices continue with an increase from 37.4 percent to 41.6 percent of U.S. mobile Internet time.

This is so cool! The guys over at ZippyCart.com came up with a fun illustration on ecommerce. Using that old game of Operation as a template, they came up with the e-commerce version…check it out!

[Via: ZippyCart.com: The Best Ecommerce Software Reviewed]
View Larger Image and Get the Embed Code to Add This Infographic to Your Site

Morning Coach is the world’s first, and only, personal evolution program, developed by JB Glossinger, MBA, PhD. JB understands that we need to be consistent and spend time every day on personal evolution for lasting change. The power of Morning Coach is the CoachCast audio, the Compass workbooks, and the online personal growth tools that work in synergy with each other, day by day. 

JB founded Morning Coach in 2007 as a daily podcast. JB is an international coach and consultant, a well-regarded keynote speaker, and the author of Get Out Of Neutral, who saw a need for a place where people could get daily motivation for personal development. Since 2007, the daily podcast that was Morning Coach has consistently rated at the top of iTunes Self-Help, and has evolved into the CoachCast and Morning Coach 3.0.

Q. What is a personal evolution program?

A. A personal evolution program evolves personal development into a new system, in which you work daily on yourself to grow, develop, and generate the lifestyle that you want and to live the dynamic life that you want. It is a new way to use technology combined with traditional and esoteric wisdom to get the lifestyle that you want. 

Q. What is Morning Coach’s philosophy?

A. Open the mind, reach the deeper, spiritual connection so you can find what you truly want to have in your life. Then use tools such as goal setting, Sacred Six, and more to manifest experiences that you are looking for. We believe that we are here to experience life, and it should be a dynamic life. We give the energy on a daily basis, the 1% improvement a day, so that you can move closer to the goals and dreams that you are looking to manifest.

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Today we’re talking about ecommerce pages, specifically how to make them unique, interesting, great content, and something that will draw in natural links. I know that a lot of folks out there who run ecommerce websites — it doesn’t matter what you’re selling consumer products, B-to-B products,
in this case, I am doing an office supplies example — you’ve got a big problem in that people just don’t want to naturally link to those pages.

The content of them is not naturally interesting. But there are ways to change that. There are ways to make sure that even though you sell the same product that 5, 10, 50, 100 other stores on the web do, your product, your offering of that product is unique and interesting, draws search
traffic, draws conversions, and makes more exciting things happen. I think this can be a big, big positive.

SEOmoz – SEO Software

According to Google, 9 of the top 20 requests from Google Apps customers are for their accounts to work with more services from Google, not just for the core suite of messaging and collaboration applications.

Later this year Google will dramatically accelerate customer access to innovation, and give users the convenience of using any Google service allowed by their administrator from a single account affiliated with their organization.

For example, coworkers will be able to publish their organization’s blog on Blogger, share project images with Picasa Web Albums, track industry news in Google Reader, advertise online with AdWords and much more, all without switching back and forth between multiple accounts. While these additional applications won’t initially be covered by the core suite’s support and service level agreement, this change will open up the spectrum of Google’s functionality to businesses, schools and organizations using Google Apps.

Goggle intends to have all Standard, Premier and Education Edition customers moved to the new infrastructure that enables this change in the fall, and customers who would like more control over the timing of this change will be able to make the switch voluntarily prior to roll out.

This will be a significant overhaul to the underlying systems and of course, Google wants to make this transition as seamless as possible for customers.  Stay tuned here for further updates in the coming weeks and months.

Miss Philippines 2010 Venus Raj Top 5 Question And Answer

HEY! Did you hear some dumb sh*t this week? I want to know, so paste it in the comments

Now, you can visit google.com/accounts and click the link next to "Multiple sign-in." After you sign into your first account, you can sign in with up to two additional accounts from the new accounts menu in the upper right hand corner of Gmail, then easily toggle back and forth between them. You can even open multiple Gmail tabs — one for each of your accounts.

Please keep in mind that this is a feature for advanced users, and there are a couple things to watch out for:

1) Not all Google services support multiple account sign-in yet. For the services that don’t support it (like Blogger and Picasa Web Albums), you’ll be defaulted to the first account you signed in with during that browser session. So if you click a link from Gmail to Blogger, for example, you’ll be logged into Blogger with the first account you signed in with, even if you clicked the link to Blogger from your second Gmail account.

2) We’re still working on making Gmail and Calendar work offline with multiple sign-in. If you rely on offline access, you probably don’t want to enable this feature quite yet.

3) Multiple account sign-in only works on desktop browsers for now, so if you use Gmail on your phone’s browser you won’t see this option yet.

HONG KONG, August 24, 2010 – Alibaba.com (HKSE: 1688.HK) (HK.1688), the world’s leading e-commerce company for small business, has entered into an agreement to acquire Auctiva, the leading third-party developer of tools for eBay (NASDAQ: EBAY) sellers. With more than 170,000 active users, Auctiva provides a variety of listing, marketing and management tools as well as image hosting and online storefronts that make it easy for small businesses to sell successfully via e-commerce on sites like eBay.

The acquisition of Auctiva, as well as Alibaba.com’s purchase of Vendio in June, combined with Alibaba.com’s strength in sourcing, will create a significant source of tools and resources for U.S. small businesses looking to leverage e-commerce. The combination of both the Auctiva and Vendio acquisitions brings more than 250,000 new customers to the Alibaba.com family of products, and significantly expands the size of Alibaba.com’s U.S. operations.

Through its recent acquisitions, Alibaba.com is building the world’s first global e-commerce supply chain. This end-to-end network connecting manufacturers and wholesalers with e-tailers and consumers will allow small businesses to easily source from suppliers all over the world, then conveniently manage and sell those products through popular online channels like eBay, Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN), their own online storefronts and more. 

“Time and money are the two most important things to me as a small business owner,” said Don Pinard, owner of www.peggsbargains.net, an Auctiva and AliExpress customer. “I spend a lot of time online looking for products I can sell. I used to use liquidation sites, but AliExpress is much better, and more reliable. If I can trim the cost of purchasing items by just 7% that will cover all store fees and shipping costs, which will really increase my profit.”

The online merchants who use both Auctiva and Vendio will have direct access to almost 1.5 million supplier storefronts on Alibaba.com’s sourcing platform andAliExpress (www.aliexpress.com), a wholesale transaction platform operated by Alibaba.com. This new connection from supplier to online merchant represents significant potential cost savings to customers. By sourcing their products directly from the manufacturer, reducing travel and taking advantage of global markets, Alibaba.com hopes to help small merchants increase their profit margin in the long term. For example, a jewelry retailer can sell a silver bracelet with black agate stones for US$12 on eBay and make a profit of US$7.09 if he/she originally purchased their inventory on AliExpress for US$4.91 per piece. These savings combined with the additional efficiencies of sourcing online will represent significant savings for the average online merchant.

With the acquisition, Auctiva’s platform will be integrated with AliExpress, allowing Auctiva users to connect to AliExpress via a tab on the Auctiva Web-based platform. This will enable customers to easily search for suppliers, acquire merchandise and list those products on eBay through their Auctiva accounts. Exclusive promotions and special deals on AliExpress products will be available to Auctiva users.

“Small online retailers are just starting to see how they can use international sourcing to their advantage, and we have seen the significant opportunity through customer reaction to our initial integration with Vendio,” said David Wei, chief executive officer of Alibaba.com. “Many small business owners never even thought that they would be able to source their products from overseas, as they didn’t have the staff or technological resources to do so. We are bringing both sides of the equation together to make international sourcing as easy as possible for any business.”

“Our mission has always been to help users sell more successfully online, particularly through the eBay channel,” said Jeff Schlicht, founder and CEO of Auctiva. “With more than 10,000 new users joining Auctiva each month, we are constantly looking for new ways to serve our customers and drive value for them. Joining Alibaba.com and connecting our buyers to the vast supplier base on Alibaba.com and AliExpress.com is the perfect way to help them grow and thrive in an increasingly competitive environment.”

The acquisition closed on Aug. 18, 2010, and is part of the US$100 million investment plan for AliExpress that Alibaba.com announced in April 2010. Auctiva will operate as a new business unit within Alibaba.com and will retain its own brand name and operations.

Rothschild was the financial adviser to Alibaba.com for this transaction and Morgan Joseph was the adviser to Auctiva for this transaction. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Yesterday eBay laid out their date for the ending of 3rd party checkout on its systems. No more will you have to use services to facilitate checkout, eBay will do that….

As you know, checkout is a crucial part of every eBay transaction. A consistent checkout experience helps buyers complete their purchases in confidence. For sellers, checkout touches critical business processes including payment collection, shipping, and tax reporting.

That’s why I’m writing today-well in advance-to let you know that as of June 30, 2011, eBay Checkout will be the only checkout process on eBay.

We’re now working closely with ChannelAdvisor to make your transition smooth and seamless. We’re also making significant enhancements to eBay Checkout to provide the key features and services you expect:

• More credit/debit card processing services
• Enhanced shipping support including support for more carriers, standardized services, and more control over shipping to Alaska, Hawaii, U.S. protectorates, and APO/FPO addresses
• An advanced sales tax calculator
• and more

— Todd Lutwak, eBay
Vice President, Seller Experience

eBay Moves on 3rd Party Checkout and Alibaba buys Auctiva (ColderICE.com)