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Yahoo! begins “Be a Better…” brand campaign

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YahooYahoo! Inc. today unveiled a new integrated brand campaign that demonstrates how Yahoo! can help people be better at whatever they’re into. Whether it’s being a better movie-goer, fashionista, grill master, or marketer, Yahoo! empowers users to connect to their interests and passions and evolve that part of their lives through Yahoo!’s breadth of information, tools, and services.

“From everyday tasks to pie-in-the-sky aspirations, this campaign is really about empowering our customers be to better at whatever is important to them,” said Cammie Dunaway, chief marketing officer at Yahoo! Inc. “It’s not about what Yahoo! does, but what you can do with Yahoo!.”

The “Be a Better …” campaign is Yahoo!’s most integrated and interactive effort to come to life across Yahoo!’s network. The campaign spotlights Yahoo! Answers and Yahoo! oneSearch, a new search service that gives consumers better search results on their mobile phone, to showcase how people can enhance their lives by using Yahoo! to access the world’s knowledge and make informed decisions from anywhere, anytime.

Intel Capital announces $31 million in 6 investments

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Intel Capital, the venture capital arm of Intel Corporation, kicked off its eighth annual CEO Summit with the announcement of six investments totaling $31 million. The deals include: China-based 51.com (social networking) and Phoenix Microelectronics (microelectronics ); Aternity (application management software) and Ceedo (portable computing environment), both based in Israel; and from the United States, Jajah (Internet telephony solutions ) and Tutor.com (education network ).

This year’s CEO Summit is being attended by more than 400 executives from Intel Capital portfolio companies and global 2,000 companies. The event includes keynote presentations, expert panel discussions and more than 500 matchmaking meetings between portfolio company CEOs and industry executives as part of the focus on learning and deal-making.

“With global reach, larger investment stakes and active collaboration, Intel Capital is a leader in company building and becoming engaged with companies beyond our initial investment,” said Arvind Sodhani, president of Intel Capital. “By bringing together savvy business executives, global decision makers and our inspired entrepreneurs, the CEO Summit demonstrates our proactive strategy in helping our portfolio companies succeed. We look forward to welcoming CEOs, executives and entrepreneurs from around the world to this year’s event.”

Blogger, Name Thyself

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Build your blogger brand - brainstormOkay, maybe you don’t think that a blogger needs to build a brand. But in light of the response that the infographic on the You’re Brand One? post received, it’s evident that branding is important for some bloggers. That is, if you plan to either earn a living from your blog professionally or indirectly. (Darren Rowse has a great post about making money because of your blog.) In which case branding is a necessity, be it a cool, memorable brand name, an infographic, or even just a picture of you.

If you want to blog professionally, even if just to promote your consulting or other services, I highly recommend getting a domain name with your name in it, or some variation. Set up a blog and make that your brand, to promote all your online and offline activities. You may even want to use a blog name that isn’t your name. Remember that you have to compete with websites plus 70 million blogs. Or is it 15 million? Who knows. Fact is, you need to stand out, and there are many aspects to building a popular site (promotion, content, posts, etc.), but branding yourself is the glue that ties it all together.

For me, I want to be the geeky diagram/ screencast guy. Hence my brand “Internet UltraGeek”. But here’s something to consider: I didn’t bother registering internetultrageek.com because I don’t like the way it looks. This should be a factor when you decide on a brand name. For example, noted web designer Chris Pearson uses Pearsonified, which I think is great. It’s more than his name, it’s a brand. Be creative when you set up your “brand” blog. And you don’t have to post every day. Each post should be well thought out and relevant to your brand. Once a week is probably sufficient.

If you need some branding pointers, NameWire, a blog about product naming, has a post on personal branding, with links to other relevant articles including, yes, my own. Though have a look at the rest of the blog and you’ll realize how much thought goes into naming a product or service. Or at least, how much effort should go in.

How To Anonymize Your Email Address

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Contactify personal contact formDon’t feel like giving out your email address? How about a URL that anonymizes your email address? Contactify apparently does that, and uses a CAPTCHA to reduce spam. If you have your own blog on a self-hosted domain, however, I’m sure  you can find a free form plugin. In fact, anyone that works online should really consider buying their own “FirstnameLastname.com”, or close variation, and using that on a Moo card. Now set up a contact form on your personal site’s “contact me”, “about”, or “services” page. Then anyone who needs to get hold of you can just use the contact form. What could be simpler? You don’t even need business cards in this case. If you don’t want to go to the trouble, then Contactify is a (supposedly) nice alternative. Of course, if you are ultra popular, you may get too much email disrupting your workflow. In which case, you may need to use an extreme email message classification system.