Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Mark Suster (@msuster), a 2x entrepreneur, now VC at GRP Partners. Read more about Suster at his Startup Blog, BothSidesoftheTable.

I haven’t had too many board meetings lately so I want to get this timely post out now lest somebody think I’m talking about their company or board in particular. This is a post about ALL boards.

Back when I ran board meetings as a CEO, the biggest annoyance was Blackberrys. You would always be able to tell what was going on by seeing the unhealthy infatuation board members had with staring at their crotches. Somehow they imagined you didn’t notice that they were glancing beneath the table secretly firing off one-line emails.

Every entrepreneur I know bitched about it and the smartest boards banned Blackberrys.

Fast forward to today. We now have ultra-lightweight laptops (MacBook Airs) or iPads and totally available Wi-Fi connections. So every board meeting I’m at has laptops opened and iPads on. They are just there to “be productive” and review your material. Um, yeah. This is a mistake.

Why a Mistake?
The board meeting is the one time you have as a management team to engage your investors. If you’ve raised money from meaningful people then you really want to maximize every minute of this time. That’s why I advise startups to get the board packs out early (so board members actually read them) and to focus as little of the board meeting as possible on “updates” and as much as possible on “strategic discussions.”

If you want to know how I believe you could run better board meetings you can read my 3 posts on “Running More Effective Board Meetings,” “The Agile Board” and “How to Communicate with Investors Between Meetings.”

But you know in your core that there is no positive gain from investors or management having laptops open. They don’t need to “go through your deck,” “access the financials,” “look at your competitors products” or any of the other BS reasons to have a laptop open. They should be engaged 100% in the meeting. And even they would prefer this. But given the temptations when your laptop is open that are elicited by those little popups of incoming email it’s impossible to not “just quickly read this message and fire off a response.”

We are all guilty. We are all human.

The reality is that over the years I’ve sat in 100′s of board meetings and I see what people do on their laptops. They flip between your presentation and email or the Internet. If any of us have our laptop sopen in any meeting we can’t help it. Which is why I don’t open it. It’s why when I go to a romantic dinner with my wife I leave my Blackberry in the car (at least I intend to ) – because given the temptation we just can’t resist. We’re human. Even your management team members with laptops get sucked into other work.

The only solution to maximize your meeting – no laptops. Period.

What to Do About It?
If you have a 3-hour board meeting I recommend that you take a 20-minute email break 90 minutes in. Tell people in advance. Tell them that you have a “no laptop” policy so that you can maximize your time with them. Send them this post and blame it on me – I don’t care.

But if they know in advance that they’ll have a chance to get to email to “sign off on that important deal they’re supposed to close” there is no excuse for not giving you undivided attention for the time you have together.

Just Say “NO”
Ultimately it’s up to us as VCs to enforce the behavior amongst our peer group. There needs to be collective pressure to really be engaged in our board meetings or why have them at all. If we all agree to leave our laptops in their bags (not even on the table where we’ll be tempted to open them!) in exchange for an Internet time out every 90 minutes then we can all drive better behavior.

Think of it like a smoking break for email addicts.

And … Just say “no” to laptops in board meetings. I’m taking the pledge today.

You?

Image courtesy of Fotolia and the generosity of Ryan Born

Google is mulling purchasing Yahoo and has contacted at least two venture capital firms to help buy the company’s core business, according to a report.

Google and prospective partners have held discussions, but haven’t put forth a formal proposal to buy the search giant, according to The Wall Street Journal, which cited “a person familiar with the matter.”

As the story notes, any such deal is likely to raise red flags among antitrust regulators. Google’s not the only one rumored to be interested in buying the troubled Yahoo. Microsoft, which has a 10-year search deal with Yahoo, is also said to be interested.

What do you think? Would this be good or bad for the Internet economy? Let us know in the comments.

Image courtesy of Flickr, eirikref

The iPad comes with a dozen or so built-in apps. But if you want it to serve as a passable substitute for a Windows or MacOS notebook, you’ll need some additional ones.

Here are some suggestions, based on polling a number of business colleagues and other research. (Disclaimer: I haven’t yet tried all of these yet.) There are about a dozen apps here, give or take; total cost, ignoring monthly service fees, between $60 and $100.

• A password manager. Several colleagues recommend 1Password($9.99), which can also securely store documents.

• Find My iPad (free, from Apple), to remotely locate/lockdown/wipe your iPad.
• “Office productivity” apps/suite. Microsoft doesn’t (yet) offer Office for iOS apps. However, you can create and edit on Office-format documents locally — “as long as you don’t need certain features, like Word’s Revisions Tracking,” cautions Nathan Clevenger, author of the new book iPad in the Enterprise, and chief software architect at management and IT consulting firm ITR Mobility.

  Consider DataViz’s feature-rich Documents to Go Premium ($14.99), Apple’s iOS versions of its MacOS iWork programs: Keynote (presentations), Pages (documents) and Numbers (spreadsheets), $9.99 each.

  For even more PDF-wrangling, hedge your bets with Good.iWare’s very popular GoodReader for iPad ($4.95), which displays, edits and even annotates PDFs and many other formats.

• Remote access. Connect to Internet-accessible computers, for running applications that your iPad can’t handle natively, e.g., accessing Flash sites, running Microsoft Office); accessing data you don’t want residing locally; doing system and network admin, et cetera.
  Daniel Dern is an independent technology and business writer, who has written one Internet user guide, and thousands of features, reviews and other articles for various technology and business publications, and was the founding Editor-in-Chief at Internet World magazine, and editor of Byte.com. His blog can be found at Trying Technology and he can be reached at dern@pair.com.

Picking a remote access app depends on what OSs and versions you will connect to (Windows 7/etc./MacOS/Linux); other features you might want; firewall considerations; and pricing.

• Printing. Look for an app that will let you print directly to WiFi-enabled printers. And, “If you are buying a new printer, buy an iPrint-compatible printer with built-in WiFi,” advises Clevenger.

• Meetingware. There’s iPad clients for popular web conferencing systems, including Citrix GoToMeeting (free) and Cisco WebEx for iPad (free).
• Storage, Backup, and Synching. Like any computer that leaves your office, you’ll want to be able to synch files, retrieve remote data, and backup any new local files or other data. iPad apps are available for DropBox, SugarSync, and others.
• Add more web browsers. Check out , Opera (free), and SkyFire ($4.99).

And, says Clevenger, keep your eyes on Apple’s iCloud, which will offer synching and other features, for example, as an alternative to needing a VPN for some tasks.

You’ll add more apps over time, of course. But this should get you off to a good start.

The revised Net neutrality rules that the FCC approved in December became official on Friday when they entered the Federal Register. They will take effect on November 20.

Net neutrality advocates have long lobbied for laws that prevent Internet providers from blocking competitive content, charging for faster connections to certain sites, and a slew of other tactics that would destroy the “open web.” Meanwhile, broadband and wireless providers have argued that it’s government regulation — not Internet provider discrimination — that threatens the open web.

While the new rules [PDF] do prevent fixed broadband providers (cable, fiber and DSL) from blocking access to sites and applications, they are different for wireless providers and not as clear as advocates on either side would like.

The rules lay out three basic protections:

1. Fixed and mobile broadband providers must disclose the network management practices, performance characteristics and commercial terms of their broadband services.
2. No blocking: fixed broadband providers may not block lawful content, applications, services, or non-harmful devices; mobile broadband providers may not block lawful websites, or block applications that compete with their voice or video telephony services.
3. No unreasonable discrimination: fixed broadband providers may not unreasonably discriminate in transmitting lawful network traffic.

When a draft of the rules came out in December, roughly 80 grassroots organizations signed an open letter avowing their disapproval. The letter complained that the Order “leaves wireless users vulnerable to application blocking and discrimination,” uses “unnecessarily broad definitions,” and claims that specialized services “would create a pay-for-play platform that would destroy today’s level playing field.”

Wireless providers, which are in favor of minimal regulation, also complained. Verizon filed an appeal, Sen. Mitch McConnell said that the rules would “harm investment, stifle innovation and lead to job losses,” and the Republican party reportedly started planning its repeal within an hour of the rules’ approval.

The House of Representatives voted to overturn the rules in April, but the resolution is unlikely to pass in the Democrat-controlled senate. President Obama has threatened to veto it even if it does.

Now that the rules are official, however, all parties are free to launch their legal offensives. Get ready for another round of lobbying, damning public statements and lawsuits.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, enot-poloskun

Rhetoric about the “post-PC age” has ramped up considerably since Apple first launched the iPad in the beginning of 2010, adding a hot-selling tablet device to the smartphone-fueled wireless Internet revolution already underway.

PC sales have already started to wane, but it won’t be until 2015 that they’ll really take a hit. That’s the year that mobile Internet users will outnumber people accessing the Internet from PCs and other wireline devices, according to new information from International Data Corporation (IDC).

“The impact of smartphone and, especially, media tablet adoption will be so great that the number of users accessing the Internet through PCs will first stagnate and then slowly decline,” reads a statement released by IDC.

By that point, the total number of Internet users worldwide is expected to grow to 2.7 billion, which represents about 40% of the world’s population.

This isn’t the first time this type of prediction has been made, but it lends credence to the significance of tablet computers specifically. For years, we’ve heard about the number of smartphones outselling PCs worldwide, a prediction that became reality at the end of last year, when manufacturers shipped 100.9 million smartphones, compared to 92 million PCs sold.

While the revolution in computing spurred by smartphones is significant, it’s worth noting that the tablet computer only started picking up steam with consumers last year. The device that inspired that was, of course, Apple’s iPad, which launched in January 2010 and has seen explosive growth since, making up 21% of the company’s revenue in the third quarter of this year. Apple is expected to remain dominant in the tablet space for years to come, even as competition from devices running Android heats up and Amazon finalizes plans to launch its own Android-powered tablet at a significantly lower price.

The impact the tablet has had on the growth of the wireless Web is huge, considering how young the market for those devices is. Coupled with smartphones (not to mention smart TVs and a whole range of Internet-connected devices and objects yet to come), they’re paving the way for an age in which the personal computer is no longer dominant and computing shifts to handheld devices and a variety of other devices, objects and even household surfaces.

E-Commerce Spending to Exceed $1 Trillion

This latest survey also includes some numbers that will be of interest to Web marketers and media geeks. As more people connect to the Internet around the world, the amount of revenue generated by online advertising will grow by 61% from 2010 to 2015, IDC predicts. By 2015, online advertisers will make a total of $138 billion and the Web will increase its overall share of ad spending across all media to 17.8%

At the same time, e-commerce spending worldwide is expected to reach $1.2 trillion by 2015, a an 81% increase over 2010.

Rhetoric about the “post-PC age” has ramped up considerably since Apple first launched the iPad in the beginning of 2010, adding a hot-selling tablet device to the smartphone-fueled wireless Internet revolution already underway.

PC sales have already started to wane, but it won’t be until 2015 that they’ll really take a hit. That’s the year that mobile Internet users will outnumber people accessing the Internet from PCs and other wireline devices, according to new information from International Data Corporation (IDC).

“The impact of smartphone and, especially, media tablet adoption will be so great that the number of users accessing the Internet through PCs will first stagnate and then slowly decline,” reads a statement released by IDC.

By that point, the total number of Internet users worldwide is expected to grow to 2.7 billion, which represents about 40% of the world’s population.

This isn’t the first time this type of prediction has been made, but it lends credence to the significance of tablet computers specifically. For years, we’ve heard about the number of smartphones outselling PCs worldwide, a prediction that became reality at the end of last year, when manufacturers shipped 100.9 million smartphones, compared to 92 million PCs sold.

While the revolution in computing spurred by smartphones is significant, it’s worth noting that the tablet computer only started picking up steam with consumers last year. The device that inspired that was, of course, Apple’s iPad, which launched in January 2010 and has seen explosive growth since, making up 21% of the company’s revenue in the third quarter of this year. Apple is expected to remain dominant in the tablet space for years to come, even as competition from devices running Android heats up and Amazon finalizes plans to launch its own Android-powered tablet at a significantly lower price.

The impact the tablet has had on the growth of the wireless Web is huge, considering how young the market for those devices is. Coupled with smartphones (not to mention smart TVs and a whole range of Internet-connected devices and objects yet to come), they’re paving the way for an age in which the personal computer is no longer dominant and computing shifts to handheld devices and a variety of other devices, objects and even household surfaces.

E-Commerce Spending to Exceed $1 Trillion

This latest survey also includes some numbers that will be of interest to Web marketers and media geeks. As more people connect to the Internet around the world, the amount of revenue generated by online advertising will grow by 61% from 2010 to 2015, IDC predicts. By 2015, online advertisers will make a total of $138 billion and the Web will increase its overall share of ad spending across all media to 17.8%

At the same time, e-commerce spending worldwide is expected to reach $1.2 trillion by 2015, a an 81% increase over 2010.

The Web Design Usability Series is supported by join.me, an easy way to instantly share your screen with anyone. join.me lets you collaborate on-the-fly, put your heads together super-fast and even just show off.

There are very few, if any, websites on the Internet that don’t undergo at least a minor facelift at some point in their lifecycle. If you own a business with a web presence, at some point, that site will need to be redesigned, whether it’s due to the changing nature of your business, or purely for aesthetic reasons.

Redesigning your company site can be a major undertaking, so we’ve put together a helpful list of things to keep in mind when considering a redesign.

1. Why Are You Redesigning?

This is perhaps the most deceptively complex, yet obvious question of all. Before undergoing any redesign, however, it’s important to understand what it is you wish to accomplish. Are you unhappy with the way your site functions? Do you simply want a better-looking site? Do you need to improve search engine rankings and sales conversions? Maybe the focus of your business has shifted and it’s time for new content.

These are all important factors to consider, so before you start, make a detailed list of what it is you wish to accomplish during the redesign. This will help guide you through the rest of the process and make sure you stay focused on the end goal.

2. What Type of Redesign Do You Need?

Now that you’ve decided exactly why you want to redesign your site, it’s time to decide just how far down the rabbit hole you need to go. Perhaps a small change in visuals and content is all that’s necessary. On the other hand, you may need to add new features or completely redo your underlying code base. Depending on your needs and budget, a large overhaul may be out of the question, or it may be the most cost-effective long-term solution, so take a moment to think about your needs going forward and work with your developer to strike a balance that best meets them.

3. What Does and Doesn’t Work Currently?

No matter how large or small the redesign, chances are there will be some elements of your existing site that work very well and some that don’t work at all. Now is the time to go through your site and identify these elements. Maybe your content is too verbose or your sales page isn’t very user-friendly. On the other hand, that photo gallery and the blog may be big-ticket items that do really well for your image and bring in lots of traffic. Some elements will need to remain (though possibly given a makeover), some will need to be cleaned up and some will have to go. Break your site down into its key components and then compare those with the goals you decided on in step one and the overall vision for your web site. If something doesn’t fit, it’s out.

4. How Is Your Site Being Used?

Along these same lines, don’t forget to take a look at how users are currently interacting with your site. This will help you identify great content and problem areas. Study your traffic statistics and site analytics for information on things such as entry and exit pages, sales conversions, and search engine keywords. This will help you to understand how visitors find your site and what they do once they get there. While you’re studying those statistics, also have a look at details like screen resolution and browser usage. This will help your developer determine what technical specifications your site should meet and whether a separate mobile version of your site is recommended, among other things.

5. Has Your Brand or Company Image Changed?

If you’ve undergone changes to your brand and company image, those changes need to be reflected in your site, even if the only updates are visual. Keep your logos updated and consider a color-overhaul if the corporate image or philosophy has shifted. Your website is often the first impression people get of your business, so it should grow and mature right along with the rest of your brand identity.

6. When and How Should You Launch Your Redesign?

When and how you launch your redesign can have a big impact on your traffic and in generating buzz about your new site and your product. Maybe you’re simply making improvements and want to slowly roll out changes over time and unannounced. This unobtrusive rollout won’t give you a lot of buzz, but it will still accomplish your goals of improving the site’s performance and the user’s experience. On the other hand, a big relaunch around the holidays or at the start of a big promotion, or when announcing a major change in the way your business operates can both draw traffic and generate more interest.

7. How Do I Make the Transition Smoother?

Most people are a little intimidated by change. If you have a site that gets a lot of repeat traffic, a sudden, drastic change in form and function can be a bit off-putting to some users. Further, you don’t want this drastic shift to damage search engine rankings and suddenly destroy any and all backlinks you may have gathered over the years.

Try and keep vital elements of your site similar to their existing counterparts, such as the main navigation and header. Usually, your redesign should strive to be an evolution of your existing site, not a dramatic replacement. If the change is dramatic, make sure it’s clear and give your users a blog post or news announcement discussing the changes.

Similarly, you want to make things easy for the search engine spiders, as well. Moved content should be redirected via 301 redirects, for instance, and error pages should be helpful and transmit the correct header information and meta data. For human visitors, make sure those error pages contain helpful information that is, where possible, relevant to the content the user was trying to access.

The Web Design Usability Series is supported by join.me, an easy way to instantly share your screen with anyone. join.me lets you collaborate on-the-fly, put your heads together super-fast and even just show off. The possibilities are endless. How will you use join.me? Try it today.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, Kontrec

Editor’s note: James Altucher is an investor, programmer, author, and entrepreneur. He is Managing Director of Formula Capital and has written 6 books on investing. His latest book he’s giving away free. He built and sold Reset, Inc in 1998 and Stockpickr.com in 2007, among others. You can follow him@jaltucher.

I’m a pretty good salesman, but I’m the worst negotiator. If I say, “buy my car for $10,000” and someone says “$8,000,” I’d just shrug my shoulders and say “ok”. In fact, that happened.

Some people could be good at both. But I think it’s very hard. By definition. When you’re a salesman you want the other guy to say “yes.” When you’re a negotiator you have to be willing to say “no”, regardless of what the other side says.

So although they aren’t total opposites, the goals are completely different. But big picture:

Negotiation is worthless. Sales is everything.

Why? Because when someone says “yes” to you, you are in the door. Eventually then, you’ll get the girl in bed (or guy, whatever). If you negotiate right at the door, then you might have to walk away and try the next house. That takes time, energy, and still might not work out.

Some examples of my bad “negotiation” that have worked out for me.

A) I sold my first business for much less than other Internet businesses were going for at the same time. But it was 1998, the Internet was about to go bust, but first all the stocks went up.  Many businesses in the same category held out for more and ended up going bust. Even the guys who sold for a lot more, went broke when they didn’t sell their stock.

B) I gave 50% of my second company, Stockpickr, to thestreet.com for no money. Blog posts were written about how bad my deal was. But when someone owns 50% of your business, they care about what happens. They had to buy my company four months later rather than risk someone else owning 50% of it. For companies they only owned 10% of, they gave up on them. I was able to sell about four months before the market peaked. After that, it never would’ve happened. My one employee quit on me because he was so disgusted with the deal I did. [See, How I Sold Stockpickr, Osama Bin Laden, and the Art of Negotiation]

C) I sold my wife Claudia’s car for $1000 less than she wanted to. But now the car was gone. We didn’t have to worry about it. That was worth $1000 to me.

D) I got my old company to do websites for New Line Cinema for $1000 a movie. That was 1/200 what we got for doing “The Matrix” even though some of the sites were the same size. Why did I do that? The best designers wanted to be hired by us to work on those movies. Meanwhile, they stayed late on Saturday night to work on Con Edison sites that paid a lot better. I didn’t negotiate at all.

E) I gave away my last book for free and also sold it on the Kindle for $0.99 instead of a higher price. But this got my ideas out more and 20,000+ people have downloaded the book. See the above link for how to get the book for free.

F) I get offers every day to advertise on my blog. I say “no” to every one of them. Not my big picture.

The key is, only negotiate with people you really want to sell to. Else it boils down to money. Someone recently wrote to me that they wanted me to speak in Copenhagen. I didn’t want to go. So I said, “50,000 dollars.” I priced it so far out of a reasonable range that if they said, “yes”, I would’ve been happy to take it. I never heard back from them. That was fine for me. But if I really wanted to do it I would’ve done it for much less without even negotiating. Sometimes when you are selling to someone you don’t love and you price yourself way out of range, sometimes they say “yes”. That’s fine also. That’s the only thing I know about negotiation.

You don’t want to be stupid. Only sell something you love to someone you love. Always think “what is the bigger picture here?” In many cases in the bigger picture, the negotiation is not as important as the “sale”. Hence, the rise of models like “freemium”.

Ten Keys to selling:

1) Ask what’s the lifetime value of the customer? When I give away a book for free. It gets my name out there. That has lifelong value for me that goes way beyond the few dollars I could maybe charge.

2) Ask, what are the ancillary benefits of having this customer? When we did Miramax.com for $1000, we became the GUYS THAT DID MIRAMAX.COM! All of that helped get 20 other customers that were worth a lot more. I would’ve paid them money to do that site.

3) Learn the entire history of your client. You need to love your client. Love all of their products. Infuse yourself with knowledge of their product. I wanted to work at HBO because I loved all of their shows and I studied their history back to the 70s before I applied for a job there in the 90s.

4) Give extra features. Do the first project cheap. And whatever was in the spec, add at least two new cool features. This blows away the client. Don’t forget the client is a human, not a company. That human has a boss. And they want to look good in front of their boss. If you give them a way to get promoted, then they will love you and always hire you back.

5) Give away the kitchen sink. One of my biggest investors in my fund of hedge funds had just been ripped off in Ponzi scheme. They almost went out of business. I introduced them to reporters at every newspaper to help them get the word out about the Ponzi scheme. They were infinitely grateful and even put more money in my fund. Whenever the main guy was depressed about what had happened I would talk to him for an hour trying to cheer him up. I wasn’t just an investment for him but a PR person and therapist. Go the extra mile.

6) Recommend your competition. Think about it this way: what are two of the most popular sites on the Internet: Yahoo and Google. What do they do? They just link to their competition: other websites. If you become a reliable source then everyone comes back to you because your knowledge has value and they can only get that by having access to you. They get access by buying your product or services. [See, 10 Unusual Things I Didn't Know About Google, Plus my Worst VC Experience Ever]

7) Idea machine. There’s that phrase “always be closing”. The way that’s true is if you are always putting yourself in the shoes of your client and thinking of ways that can help them. When I sold stockpickr.com to thestreet.com the superficial reason was that they wanted the traffic, community, and ads my site generated. The real reason was that they needed help coming up with ideas for their company. I was always generating new ideas and talking to them about it. Often the real reason someone buys from you is not for your product but for you.

Show up. When I wanted to manage some of Victor Niederhoffer’s money I read all his favorite books. I wrote articles for him. At the drop of a dime I would show up for dinner wherever and whenever he asked me to. If he needed a study done that required some programming beyond what he or his staff was capable of doing, I would offer to do it and would do it fast. Nobody was paying me, but ultimately he put money with me (at ridiculously low fees but I did not negotiate), which I was able to leverage into raising money from others. Plus, I really liked him. I thought he was an amazing person.

9) Knowledge. When I was building a trading business I must’ve read over 200 books on trading and talked to another 200 traders. No style of trading was off limits. This helped me in not only building a trading business, but building a fund of hedge funds, and ultimately building stockpickr.com. I knew more about trading and the top investors out there than anyone else in the world, I felt. Creating value was almost an afterthought. When I was building websites I knew everything about programming for the web. There was nothing I couldn’t do. And the competition, usually run by businessmen and not programmers knew that about me. And knew that I would always come in cheaper than them.

10) Love it. You can only make money doing what you love. If you work a nine to five job that you hate then you’re on a leash and you’ll only make enough to get by and you won’t behappy. If you love something, you’ll get the knowledge, you’ll get the contacts, you’ll build the site with the features nobody else has, you’ll scare the competition, you’ll wow the customers.

I didn’t enjoy writing finance articles. I’d write a finance article for some random finance site and then repost this on jamesaltucher.com. I had zero traffic.

Then I decided to write articles I enjoyed. To get back to my true roots where I loved writing and reading. I also lwanted to really explore all of my failures, my miseries, my pain. In public. I love being honest and intimate with people. I love building community. I love emailing with readers. That was about 10 months ago I decided to make the shift where I was just going to open the kimono at jamesaltucher.com and say everything I wanted to say, and at the same time indulge in my love of writing, art, creativity, and reading. 2.5mm+ “customers” later I’m enjoying more than ever doing what I love.

This post reflects the opinions of the author and not necessarily those of Mashable as a publication.

Hamilton Chan is CEO and founder of Paperlinks. With the free Paperlinks iPhone app, featured previously by Apple as the #1 New & Noteworthy app, consumers can scan and view QR code content with a native app experience. Paperlinks also provides a powerful platform for generating QR codes, hosting content and tracking their performance.

If you raise the subject of QR codes among tech early adopters, you are likely to elicit a passionate response. Some people think QR codes, those scanable black and white squares on everything from billboards to product packaging, are on an unstoppable growth trajectory, while skeptics are quick to dismiss them as a fad.

This reaction is common whenever new technology formats or standards are being decided upon. Pundits want to exhibit their knack for predicting the future and stakeholders (of which I am undeniably one) want to make sure their format wins out. The general public, meanwhile, tends to lay in wait for a particular format to show dominance.

QR codes, in particular, make great fodder for debate because the codes are inherently big and ugly. So far, they have not experienced the same popularity in North America as they have enjoyed abroad, in part because many consumers are still getting used to seeing these codes and figuring out what to do with them.

In my opinion, there is little question that these real-world hyperlinks are increasingly going to be part of our reality and everyday life. Although QR codes won’t be the only technological option for hyperlinking in the real world, I believe they’ll soon be recognized as one of the best-suited options to connect items in the physical world to the Internet.

Why Real World Hyperlinking Is on the Rise

If there is one thing that can be counted on in our technological future, it’s that information will continue to become more widespread, available and relevant. The Internet will expand from a network of computers to a network of everything, with interactivity pre-programmed into nearly every object we use.

There’s no doubt that QR code traction in the U.S. is on the rise. Evidence has been shown in a number of recent market reports, including a study by Mobio Technologies Inc., which reported a 9,840% increase in QR code use for the second quarter of 2011 (compared to the same time last year).

Even a recent annual report from Gartner, a market research firm, puts QR codes on the “slope of enlightenment” when it comes to mainstream adoption of the technology. Further adding to the evidence, comScore reported that in June of this year, more than 14 million Americans scanned a QR code, representing more than 6% of the U.S. mobile population.

It may take some time before we switch to scanning objects for information, but this direct relationship between an object’s online persona and the consumer will ultimately make life easier. Run out of razor blades for your shaver? Scan a real world hyperlink on your can of shaving cream and order more blades.

What Skeptics are Saying

Despite the mounting evidence that QR codes are here to stay, many skeptics still believe this technology is no more than a shiny new marketing tool with no future. These are the three arguments I’ve seen repeatedly:

• QR Codes are just a transient technology: It’s true that there are many alternatives to QR codes and, as our world increasingly becomes interconnected, there will be a variety of technology options for businesses to choose from. This assumes that one technology will take over the market. It’s more likely that a suite of options will be available to businesses and marketers seeking to leverage the mobile web. Different applications will demand different technologies, and no single hyperlinking technology will be suitable for every marketing application. The main advantages of the QR code are cost, simplicity and ease of implementation. QR codes provide no incremental cost to an agency already printing or selling ads. QR codes, however, deliver greater engagement, quantifiability and potential mobile commerce opportunities. Alternate technology options (such as Near Field Communication chips) are still a ways off from being as widespread and accessible as QR codes.
• More work with little to no payback: Yes, in order to read a QR code, consumers first need to be able to identify what a QR code is and how it works. They then need to download a QR reader app, if they do not already have one, in order to read the code. Once the code is scanned, however, the potential payback for consumers is vast and limited only by one’s imagination. Whether it’s access to exclusive content, deals, promotions or discounts, companies have a number of options to reward their consumers for scanning.
• It doesn’t solve consumer problems: There are two types of technological innovations: Those that solve consumer pain points in an existing market and those that provide an entirely new approach toward everyday life. QR codes are a new approach that ultimately simplifies the way mobile users can get information. While it’s just as simple to look up information on the mobile web, savvy businesses are realizing that one of the main benefits of a QR code campaign is to provide their mobile customers with instantaneous access to something that is unique and can’t be accessed in another way.

Conclusion

Whether you are a fan or critic of QR codes, one thing is certain: Real world hyperlinks are here to stay. QR codes are just one of the many linking possibilities, but they are popping up everywhere – across all verticals and businesses of all sizes. The popularity of QR codes will continue to gain momentum. Moving forward, the catalyst for their success will ultimately lie in the creative ways they are implemented.

Marketers have the ability to reach their mobile customer base in a way that wasn’t possible before. They need to reward consumers for helping blaze this new trail. The results will be captivating.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, youngvet

About one-fifth of global Internet users visited Amazon‘s various websites during June, according to a report from comScore.

Amazon led online retailers with 282.2 million visitors that month out of a total Internet audience of 1.4 billion, comScore estimates. That’s a 27% jump from June 2010, when Amazon got 221.8 million visitors — which was 17.7% of all Internet users. In the new report, Amazon was followed by eBay with 223.5 million, or 16.2% of all Internet users. China’s Alibaba.com got 156.8 million (11.8%).

The report also found that Amazon has an impressive global reach. Just 35.4% of its visitors came from North America in June. Europe was Amazon’s number two market with 31.8% and Asia Pacific produced 24.1%. In contrast, 83.4% of Walmart.com’s visitors came from North America.

Image courtesy of Flickr, Brave New Traveler