Of course, it helps to limit what you use to only the general idea, and helps even more if what you use as inspiration is so old that no one remembers it and the legal protection has expired (case in point: Compare John Williams's Star Wars theme to Gustav Holst's "Mars").
Wow. It would have been so much better for them to write comparisons instead. On a related note, Google AdWords have strict about brand name usage. They have real-time checks to make sure you don't use a well-known brand name in your ads when you don't own that brand.
I knew someone who blatantly tried using the name of a competitor repeatedly in an early draft of one of his pages -- and not in a "we're better than [competitor]" kind of way, but in a blatant SEO kind of way. I promptly admonished him to take those references down, lest he be banned from Google, or even sued.
@Boilingbroke -- I can't give an example off the top of my head, but it's been a subject of discussion on LinkedIn. A site owner was complaining of a sharp drop in traffic after a Google algorthim change, but I stopped her in her tracks when I asked:
"Are you losing conversions, or just extra traffic that didn't convert anyway?"
She didn't know, and didn't know how to define a conversion (her site didn't sell anything). I gave her some suggestions, but asked her to really look at the traffic she had lost to see if it was a concern first.
My theory was that Google's algorithm might not be eliminating key traffic, but rather random traffic that might not have converted anyway. I find too many organizations focus on getting traffic withouth really looking into which kinds of traffic really converted. I think analytics and content-driven SEO go hand-in-hand.
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Businesses often struggle to decide which domain to use. When it comes to purchasing a domain name, you have plenty of extensions to choose from, ranging from .com and .net, to .me, and even .mobi. But which one should you pick?
I've been writing about how the next evolution of the Internet might just be an advertising revolution, and how corporate IT can stay involved as the enablers and providers of the technologies that make this possible.
In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M.
The smartphone market reached a significant milestone, a breakthrough that may cause vendors to celebrate but could strain the capabilities of IT service desks.
New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority is conducting a pilot test of digital kiosks to guide subway users to where they want to go more efficiently and at lower cost.
The whole Amazon.reader debate is a double-stupid. It's stupid to think that there's any e-book buyer who doesn't know Amazon's URL, and it was stupider to let ICANN launch the whole free-form TLD initiative to start with.
While NFC's original goal was to enhance mobile commerce applications, it is finding its way into a number of other uses, which is creating both opportunity as well as challenges for IT departments.
Enterprises would like to move to cloud computing but are hesitant because they are concerned about providers’ ability to secure company data. Here are some tips that help to ensure that if breaches occur, the business is not left holding the bag.
Edmunds separates customers into segments based on the info it collects on its site and from partners, and uses that to push out custom content, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
The automotive website uses propensity modeling to target ads and customer registration forms, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
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M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE
M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE
