However, we must not forget that they are projects that reached the public, so it took months of testing and development. The products that succeed on Google are those who find the balance between revenue generation and utility for users. Therefore, in their unsuccessful projects, one of these elements should be misconceived.

EWeek magazine found in a compilation with the ten Google Audio Failures:

1. Lively: A three-dimensional universe in which users could create an avatar to interact with other avatars. Not find a good host or between companies or between individuals, so Google it closed earlier this year.
2. SearchMash: an application that allowed reorder search results, among other functions. The problem is that Google placed in a separate web, without publicity. He closed the service in autumn 2008, replacing it SearchWijki, where you can also modify the search results.
3. Google Notebook: a kind of notebook that allowed to collect and organize information in a document accessible via the Internet. Rather than suppress it, Google has abandoned this project, betting tools similar but more advanced operations such as Docs, Sites and Tasks.
4. Google Video: a service that became meaningless when buying YouTube, but still operating. Google considering giving other uses, including providing streaming movies.
5. Mashup Editor: A tool has also been deprecated by another project of the house, App Engine. However, there is much competition in the sector of the platforms for building applications, for example, Amazon Web Services, or those offered by Salesforce.com.
6. Google Catalogs: who would ever seek advertisements in the Web? Especially when Google has in hand a much more important to scan books from around the world.
7. Dodgeball: A mobile social network that Google acquired in May 2005, which used the position of the user to locate and send messages to nearby friends. Along with Orkut and Zingku, shows that social networks are not Google’s forte.
8. Google Print Ads: draft print advertisements in newspapers in paper sank like a fish out of water.
9. Google Radio Ads: More of the same: Google overestimated their technological capabilities outside their usual ecosystem (Internet) or encountered disbelief or rejection of traditional media.
10. Shared Staff-an attempt to enter the field of social bookmarking, Delicious style. The low acceptance has come to incorporate the concept to the Google Reader.

The answer to this question was the subject of a presentation by Angel Garcia Butragueno, vice president of American Express Business Travel, spoke during the “Second Meeting with Industry Leaders” organized by Antonio Lopez de Avila, Director of Executive Master in Business Tourist Enterprise Institute, whom I thank for your invitation to participate in it.

Some of the ideas that Angel Garcia and the number of participants presented during this meeting proved to be particularly interesting.

The business travel market: current situation

The Spanish Corporate Travel market (which includes groups and incentive) reached a transaction volume exceeding 3,200 million dollars and is the 5th in size in Europe after Germany, Britain, France and Russia. It is expected that this market will continue to grow thanks to good economic conditions that are experiencing this country.

The tourism business has become a technology business in which we must be able to handle information quickly increasingly abundant and complex.

In general travel expenditures of enterprises engaged in 75% to the purchase of air tickets, 10% hotels, 10% for groups and incentives and 5% for cars.

The corporate tourists stays generally range between 1 and 2 days, which is a hotel for overnight stays between zero and half a night.

In the last 5 years for the sale of airline tickets commission received by travel agents has dropped 6.95 points. It is expected that soon the commission will zero for this type of sale.

Spending on business travel are rising primarily due to rising fuel prices and high hotel occupancy rates being experienced. For this reason, companies tend to focus their recruitment to increase their bargaining power and lower their costs.

For many travel companies represent the largest cost item after salaries and technologies.

The crisis of the traditional business model of travel agents

Contrary to expectations, the Internet has not yet produced the expected disintermediation in tourism. In Spain the number of travel agencies continues to grow.

According to Ángel García Butragueño this phenomenon can persist only temporarily, as the crisis for independent travel agents is inevitable. So what is the force that will cause this crisis? The answer: technology.

Clearly, online booking service available to Internet users are becoming more comprehensive, varied and easy to use. This makes the traditional services of travel agent bookings lose value.

Trying to compete on price has no future. The travel agent has to stop acting like a “teleoperator” and fully transformed into a travel consultant. The role has to shift from commission agent commission agent supplier’s customer is a sales agent of the supplier to customer purchasing agent.

In this sense, information technologies play a fundamental role: to produce a consultancy service with high added value the agent will need increasingly sophisticated technologies, whose costs will be unsustainable for many.

The agencies also have to specialize because companies prefer those agencies that can provide sufficient strength and reliability. No longer goes “do everything”.

American Express’s strategy here is to help businesses maximize the return on investment in the trip. Do not want to be the cheapest, but those that provide the best value for money in terms of services.

This approach is consistent with the change of mentality of the companies now consider travel as a profitable investment rather than a mere game to manage and minimize costs (as happened in the past).

The new business model

According to Garcia, soon we will see the implementation of zero commission for selling airline tickets. The agents have to go to charge a transaction fee directly to customers.

In the future we will commission / transaction fee to the commission / fee for consulting. But will customers be willing to pay?

If businesses are willing to pay, the agents must be able to:

* To help enterprises optimize management and travel costs.
* Provide an adequate level of supply of service providers.
* Provide an efficient service through the appropriate use of technology.
* Provide quality service at the right price.

Change adaptation and innovation, together with the training of human resources in this context will be critical to success.

Since its launch in April 2007 Expedia.es is offering its customers the service to purchase airline tickets free of charge. Travelprice.com, the white mark of Lastminute.com, in some periods also apply this policy of no fees and always try to charge less transaction fees than other online travel agencies. Priceline.com and AvionExpress.com (belonging to Viajar.com) are other examples of companies that use this type of timely promotion.

It seems clear that the charges for transactions with low value added, as is the case of airline tickets between major cities in the world, is something that tends to disappear in the future. The income of travel agents in the future will depend mainly on the services “as”.

Travel agents need to realize the low value they bring to their customers for certain transactions.

According to Angel, another possible scenario is the variable commission payments by airlines to the agencies. A few days ago I read that Aireuropa, in order to encourage ticket sales of higher value, is considering paying a commission to agencies dynamics, instead of 1% fixed for 2008.

The hotel industry, tourists and business travel agents.

The hotel industry, unlike the airline industry is very fragmented. It is likely therefore that the current commission levels experienced by hotels continue unchanged for the coming years.

For the agents maintain the information and services necessary to provide a valuable service to businesses, hotels information (availability, price, service, etc..) Must be integrated into the systems of the same agents.

In Spain 60% of the corporate market is in the hands of the 4 main groups: Amex, Carlson, and Marsans English Court. It is likely that in coming years to grow its market share further.

This implies that those individual hotels can not afford to be part of computer systems and commercial of these groups are very likely to fall outside of this market.

While the goal of agent-consultant will be to offer your client the best solution in terms of money, the running time of this operation must be minimized so that this service can be profitable.

To be effective agents will then see the options of their own system. The hotels that appear on the screen, depending on your criteria, are those which propose to their customers. The agent will then offer the best under a bond of time / productivity, always more important to the profitability of your business.

The hotels belonging to major chains in this context will be advantaged. By contrast, independent hotels have to develop other marketing strategies to attract those tourists who are organizing business trips independently.

The search service hotels that provide travel agents will also depend on the agreements that companies have with the hotel chains.

In the case of contracted rates between companies and hotels, travel agents from American Express process the transaction as quickly as possible because, in this case, everything will be fixed and linked. This operation will then be a transaction with little added value.

Sevices low-cost business and tourism

The entry of low-cost airlines in the business market has covered a market gap that traditional companies were not attending.

According to Garcia ’s low-cost airlines are serving well to companies who want to travel to destinations that their side but market penetration is likely to grow slightly in coming years due mainly to limited and sometimes nonexistent, differences in prices with the companies traditional, such as Iberia, if purchase in advance.

Significantly, according to a study by Accenture, the tourist business in the U.S. after having set a trend towards services for hotels and low-cost in recent years, are now returning to traditional companies in search of better services and guarantees ( such as punctuality in the case of flights). It is possible that this phenomenon is present also in Europe.

Travel agents must take into account the 2 types of carriers when advising their clients, still the best solution for companies to find the optimal combination of use of the 2 services.

Similarly, the new travel agents also have to offer its customers an optimal combination of using low-cost hotels and traditional hotels.

Future scenarios and service autoreserva

Travel agents will stop using their traditional inplants, which will replace the outsourcing of their service to call centers and online services on their websites.

The strategy for success begins with customer knowledge and technologies today allow us to know all data, customer preferences and needs without requiring a dedicated Implants to a number of accounts.

In addition, the website of the agencies that will enable business customers to directly manage those services with low added value “transactions commodity.

Then be developed autoreserva services for travel agents can devote their time to value transactions, and limit your involvement in the most basic and common transactions.

Customers will then be able to develop standard transactions for its own account in the Web environment from the agency or through automated telephone services.

Therefore, although the technologies play a fundamental role for travel agents tourism oriented business, savings and management control are the other pillars are essential for success.

A consumer has sixty days to make the balance transfer once they are accepted.  Once the deal has run its course the interest rate will be back to 18.6 percent.  It is a high interest rate; therefore, it behooves the consumer to pay the entire balance off in the nine months.  There are other deals that last for twelve to sixteen months.  These cards charge fees.  By determining realistically how fast you can pay the card off you can decide if the Virgin Money card is right for you and your family.

Often we are forced to pay an unfair to use them.

The truth is that although we think not, and there are fines are very high. “Stealing” an image and display it on your site can be a fine of up to sink. They say that there are crawlers that seek commonalities in the information of the pixels, when the overlap exceeded by x%, the alarm goes off and checked carefully, the rest you can imagine.

There is also an “urban legend” that if you modify an image and can not push yourself right, but I assure you I have lived in a previous work, how we get fined for using a photograph that had been treated and subsequently amended.

Anyway, there are very good free images with sufficient quality for our web designs, Dzineblog shows a list of 30 sites where we can download photos for free.

* 30 sites for downloading free images, royalty free

NOTE: As of today the web has been classified as “web attacker” so I put you below the links to the 30 recommended names:

1. StockXchange
2. StockVault
3. Photocase
4. Dreamstime
5. Open Photo
6. MorgueFile
7. Every Stock Photo
8. Studio 25
9. Woophy
10. DexHaus
11. Photogen
12. About Pixels
13. FreeFoto
14. Free Photos Bank
15. Bancoimagenes
16. Pixel Perfect Digital
17. Pixelio
18. Pixel Galerie
19. Illustrated Nations
20. Vintage Pixels
21. Free Picture Click
22. 9 × 13
23. Design Packs
24. Image * After
25. MIcro Shots
26. Turbo Photo
27. Free Digital Photos
28. Bluevertigo
29. FontPlay
30. Digital Dreamer

Usability is an empirical value, since results are obtained through a test conducted on a sample of users. These values obtained are neither good nor bad, but depend on the purpose that we have set or what you’re comparing. It is therefore to assess whether the web design is valid for the purpose for which it was constructed.

Does your web design usable?, To answer this question we must evaluate several factors, separately and together, since each and every one of them must be taken into account if we really want our website to be usable. To evaluate the usability of a website, we verify the accessibility, identity, navigability and content.
ACCESSIBILITY

Accessibility is the degree to which everyone can use an object, visit a location or access a service, regardless of their technical or physical.

When we measure the accessibility of a website, we measured:

* Charge Time’s website: obviously not all have the same connection speeds, a website can make endless heavy load with a corresponding neglect of the user.
The weight of a page consists of images, html code and the files it calls, such as CSS or JS.
Try it maximizes the size of our images (gif and jpg as appropriate), use a good code XHTML, CSS fully optimize the JS and use only necessary for the page.
The ideal is to bring the weight to 100kb, anyway depends on the type of website that we designed. The charging time must be reasonable to the content type we are showing, and in any case not exceed 10 seconds.
It is also very important in the case of the pages in flash, use good preloads do not suffer for the user and above all not to lose.
* Make a readable web page: the contrast is very important when making a page readable. It is not only a stylish design make has to be functional. I use a lower contrast for a headline, but what I can do is put a low contrast text, because this will mean even on some monitors, the user can not read, and generally cause fatigue to read.
The font size and line spacing are also equally important. Ideally, it is also able to offer the possibility to scale the font size, but if well designed, it is not essential.
Whitespace favor us, help us steer a course of reading and allow us to “air” and the page to promote their reading and consultation.
And of course, nothing “fair”, there is nothing more stressful than trying to read a website where everything wants to stand out from the rest.
* Plug-in, bad thing: we can not force our user to download an application to view our content, first, because many times not to trust, and second because that will make you lose much time. Unless it’s something very specific and desired by the user, the vast majority choose to leave the site.
If you have no choice, we should at least give the option to skip that item and continue browsing.

* Tags on images: All images on our website must be labeled “Alt” with a text description of what they represent. Besides helping the user, we will help Google to find us better.
* We use a 404: when a page does not exist, the server shows a page of type “404 Not Found”, this is a quick way to lose to a user. The ideal is to design a good and attractive 404 page, inviting the user to browse through our website.
* No pop-ups or new windows: there is considerable evidence that the use of pop-horror to the user, there are many ways to get those files without the need for desktop full of open windows. The user uses the “back or back” to navigate, open new windows is the only thing that causes that are hidden on each other. Do not worry, if you like your content back to back.

IDENTITY

At all times it is necessary that you know who we are. This provides confidence in our content.

* The logo: the brand that say about us, always in a prominent place and visible.
* Describe the site: in terse sentences, what is this and what you can do and find here?
* Home in a click: the home is a reference to the user, anytime, quickly, should be able to access it.
* Contact: sometimes the user wants to be able to contact you, facilítaselo as possible.

NAVIGATION

We often think that everything is clear, then we are surprised that when we teach the web, our friends Blog can not reach the site we want to see, this is because the web is not well designed. It is not nice to have a final result, dramatic, good design is also and above all, is capable of making Web content to be easily viewed by the user, ie to be able to navigate smoothly to discover the web. This could also be called the information architecture.
There can be no airworthiness manual, each page is a world, so if we can is to try to follow these guidelines:

* Logo with link to the homepage: the user usually always looks like instead of heading home.
* Navigation menu visibly: usually the best place is the horizontal bar at the top of the web. If we realize this is the place where we learned to use any program (Word, …) and is where we find it easier to navigate.
If the menu has submenus, it is easy to distinguish.
* Clear messages: the holders of the menus must be clear and concise. In general also recommended not to over 7 main links in a menu, number in principle more than enough for any website.
* Links easy to identify: do not forget that the role of a link is pressed it, let us try to always see clearly, underline for text and text to the button.

CONTENT

Obviously the most important part of the web is the most we spoil you. The way to show you’ve already seen in the preceding paragraphs, but in regard to its composition must not forget:

* Use the right labels: to define the headings, subheadings, paragraphs … In addition to helping the reading we are defining a time all SEO work.
* Use CSS for ranking: by colors, font sizes, backgrounds of layers, we make everything more readable. If good content hierarchy greatly facilitate the work of the user to choose when he wants to consult the texts. A very common use but not very helpful is to put up the pictures.
Using bold, emphasis, all these figures help the reading of a content.
* Use url’s “friendly” easy to remember and descriptive of the content.

Well, ultimately these are the points that I as a designer take into account when making my website designs, as I always say, the best ally is the common sense and something that usually comes well is take to your friends @ sy teach anywhere. Observe how they move through it and give you the answer to whether your site is usable or not.

To illustrate these dilemmas, the paper uses the experience of Banco Solidario SA (BancoSol) in Bolivia. For the formalization as a bank BancoSol brought the prospect of faster growth and, consequently, a number of challenges, unexpected problems, new sources of costs and adjustments of the second generation. From this experience you can learn lessons very interesting, because few microfinance organizations in Latin America have grown so much and so fast.

The objectives of this paper are to analyze how growth has occurred in the case of BancoSol, considering the challenges that this growth creates for any microfinance organization and identify conditions that must be met for prudent management of growth. Given the history of the creation of BancoSol, would be impossible to understand the lessons of this experience if the analysis does not consider, where appropriate, the first steps taken during the PRODEM.

The growth has at least three positive implications for a microfinance organization. First, growth is the central mechanism to increase the reach of the institution, which is one of the main indicators of its success. A growing number of customers improved amplitude range. Given that in developing countries there are large numbers of family businesses that may be subject poor credit but who lack access to financial services, microfinance organizations should always searchan growth.

If you qualify for one of the programs for housing loans of OHFA, may decide to take advantage of the benefit program tax credit.

* The OHFA will issue a loan in the form of second mortgage for up to 3% of the purchase price of the house.
* You can use the loan for the down payment for closing costs or other expenses to be paid in advance prior to closing. Note that although the loan will considerably reduce their expenses, you may still need to pay some costs of its pocket if they are not covered by the loan.
* If you take advantage of the loan, the interest rate on the second mortgage is set at 1% higher than the current mortgage rates of OHFA and you begin to pay the August 1, 2010.
* You may be eligible for a new federal tax credit for buyers of their first home of up to $ 8,000. You can claim the credit on your federal tax return for 2008 to be submitted no later than April 15, 2009, or the tax return for 2009 to present in 2010. You can find more information about the tax credit for buyers of their first home on the website of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).
* There are incentives available if you decide to prepay the loan for the benefit of tax credit for purchasers of homes before June 30, 2010. Otherwise, your mortgage payments will increase slightly due to the additional payment of the second mortgage.

Do I qualify?

To qualify for the benefit of tax credit, you must meet the program requirements of OHFA loans for buyers of homes and closing the transaction of his house before November 30, 2009. You can also claim a federal tax credit of up to $ 8,000 in their federal tax return, 2008 to be submitted before April 15, 2009, or the tax return for 2009 to be presented in 2010. Check the requirements for the program to buyers of their first home and the heroes of Ohio.

In addition, you must:

* Take an educational course for purchasers of housing provided by a housing counseling agency approved by HUD, or
* Use the instructional program for buyers of homes in the OHFA online.

Learn more about the educational options for buyers of homes.
Download Information

You can download information about our loan programs from our download center.