Apple has not only the best tech support, it also has the best customer loyalty engagement, according to independent reports by Consumer Reports and BrandKeys that each place Apple at the top of the list.

According to cnet’s Jim Dalrymple, Consumer Reports rated Apple’s laptop support 86 out of a possible 100, twenty-three points higher than the next best, Lenovo.

Apple scored an 87 for desktop support. The separation between the Cupertino-based company and followers in this category was even wider: the next best was Dell, with 55 points.

Apple was also tops in brand loyalty for several categories on Brandkey’s 2010 Customer Loyalty Engagement Index. Apple was named the top brand in laptops and smartphones, and the Apple Air was ranked seventh in the netbook category.

The iPhone was BrandKey’s Customer Loyalty Leader in 2009, topping a list of 440 brands. In 2008, the leader was Google, whose brand has become a few shades darker in the past two years.

Obviously, topping Brandkeys and Consumer Reports’ lists is interrelated. Apple has long been lauded for its tech support, and while Apple’s reliability might not be as important part of the brand’s image as it was in the pre-iPod/iPhone days, it is still one of the core drivers of brand engagement.

A survey by Guardian Analytics and the Ponemon Institute of over 500 U.S. executives and business owners from small and medium businesses (SMBs) finds that banks are failing to protect this segment from online fraud.

“The survey data proves that financial institutions are failing to protect the small and medium businesses that are at the heart of our economic recovery,” said Terry Austin, CEO, Guardian Analytics.

Guardian Analytics sells fraud-protection software, so the numbers have to be taken with a grain of salt. But they’re still an interesting benchmark of small-businesses’ level of confidence in online banking.

Fifty-five percent of respondents experienced fraud attacks in the last 12 months, and 58 percent of those were due to online banking. In 87 percent of the fraud cases, banks were not able to fully recover the funds.

In 57 percent of the cases, small businesses were not fully compensated for their losses, and 26 percent of the time they weren’t compensated at all. In 80 percent of the cases, banks were not able to identify the fraud until after the funds had left the bank.

These numbers need to be improved to retain small-business customers, forty percent of whom change banking institutions after a fraud incident.

“MBs are fed up with the banks that are leaving them vulnerable to fraud and not reimbursing them when they are attacked,” Austin said. “Banks that do not improve their fraud prevention practices will lose customers and hurt their own recovery.”

The study also says that banks are not being transparent enough with their small-business customers about their security policies.

“Ultimately the data points to the need for banks to evolve their definition of reasonable security and proactively invest in process and technology to better protect their online banking customers,” said Dr. Larry Ponemon, chairman and founder, Ponemon Institute.

U.S. e-commerce will reach nearly $249 billion in revenue by 2014 at an annual compound annual growth rate of 10 percent, Forrester predicts.

2009’s U.S. e-commerce sales totaled $130 billion. Analysts predict between 8 and 15 percent growth for 2010.

Forrester predicts that, while has e-commerce matured, it will continue to drive overall retail growth.

“Much of the overall retail sector’s growth in both the US and the EU over the next five years will come from the Internet,” said Forrester Research Vice President and Principal Analyst Sucharita Mulpuru.

“To maximize that growth, eBusiness professionals will have to help enable a multichannel strategy that responds to consumers’ increased desire to hop between the offline and online worlds and their increasing mobile and social behaviors. The retail innovators over the next five years will demonstrate customer enablement across all touchpoints, not just via a PC-based Web browser.”

The top categories for U.S. online retail, accounting for 40 percent of total sales, are apparel, footwear, and accessories; consumer electronics; and consumer hardware, software, and peripherals.

Forrester predicts that e-commerce will account for 8 percent of overall retail sales by 2014, and that 53 percent of all retail sales will be influenced by online research.

What would be interesting to see is the difference in growth between mobile and PC-based e-commerce. While consumers are slowly adopting mobile shopping, many are taking advantage of smartphones to comparison shop within brick-and-mortar stores. Forrester notes that shoppers who begin shopping online and finish in the store are less satisfied than those who do both in the store. Wonder how smartphones play into that equation?

Entrepreneurs and VCs are in Washington DC this week to promote the StartUp Visa Act.

The Act, introduced February 24th by Senators John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), would make it easier for foreign entrepreneurs to start their business in the U.S.

The Act would create a new visa, the EB-6, which would grant a two-year green card to foreign entrepreneurs who can secure $250,000 in U.S. VC funding.

The EB-6 Visa is a modified version of the current EB-5 Visa, with requirements that are easier to meet than the current one. The EB-5 grants a green card to foreign nationals who invest $1 million in the U.S. and create ten jobs here.

Under the EB-6 Visa, after the initial two-year green card, entrepreneurs would become permanent U.S. residents if they have either created five full-time jobs in the U.S., raised an additional $1 million from investors or have earned $1 million in revenue.

The Act’s goal is to keep U.S. startup activity globally competitive.

“I think this is mandatory for the U.S.,” said Stéphane Delbecque, CEO and co-founder of Footbalistic, a French startup based in San Francisco. “If you rely on only local people that’s great, but if you bring people in from around the world, that’s better.”

“It’s one of the best ideas of the last ten years,” Delbecque said.

Waze is crowsourced navigation and real-time traffic app. In addition to updating information on things like traffic congestion and police activity, users build the map itself.

Waze starts with a Tiger map (a visualization of U.S. Census data) as a base map that users build the navigation map on top of by running Waze’s free app while driving.

“What we’re doing is building an entire geostack, from the base map itself – of which traditionally there are only a couple of providers – all the way up to the levels of social information,” explained Waze’s Di-Ann Eisnor while presenting the company at last week’s TechRadar.

With crowdsourcing, it’s hard to reach critical mass at the scale that’s going to give you good information; typically in a crowdsourced endeavor, one percent of users actually contribute.

“That’s not going to cut it for the kind of work we are engaging in,” Eisnor said.

Waze is able to generate participation among 25 percent of its users by incorporating gaming features into the app.

For example, when users go down a road that hasn’t been mapped, their icon turns into a Pac-Man-like character that gobbles up the route for points, thus mapping the data for Waze.

“This kind of playfulness has never been available in navigation before,” Eisnor said.

This gaming element helped scale Waze’s usage very quickly. Users like this function so much that they ask for Waze to recommend the route that will give them the maximum points.

Users also get major points by fixing map errors. The Tiger maps that Waze builds off are non-navigable, display only. “There could be a one-pixel disconnect in the map, and we won’t know whether you take a right turn or a left turn,” Eisnor said.

In order to encourage the community to correct these map errors, geocaches of points (“road goodies”) are placed where there are problems with the map. Waze has also started giving away prizes from local sponsors, as well.

Right now, accumulating points gives users more editing control over the map

The app’s social element not only meets expectations of today’s user, “It creates a sense that it’s not just you out there creating this information, but that there’s a community around you, working on it,” Eisnor said.

For example of how well Waze’s crowdsourcing model works, look at its first implementation:

Waze launched in Israel in January 2009, but had no base map to start with.

“Our users built the entire map, including the road names, including the address numbers, the parks, landmarks, everything,” Eisnor said.

“Now we have one of the best maps in the country, and hands-down the best traffic source in the country,” Eisnor said. “We’re already being able to monetize it. It’s being used by all the naysers who said, ‘Oh, you can’t crowdsource a map,’ like the Ministry of Transportation [which is] now using our traffic data.’”

Waze currently has 570,000 users in 85 countries. The service launched in the U.S. in August 2009 and rolled out globally that November.

Waze’s business model is a combination of map licensing, geo-ads and coupons, and global map partnerships.

“We see [these partnerships] as a global alliance and the days of only a couple of people owning our map data really being over,” Eisnor said.

Waze plans to release its API in the next few months. The app is currently available for the iPhone, Android, Symbian and Windows Mobile OS’s and others.

Yesterday was the day Yahoo! decided to take part in the great real-time battle.

The company, which has more than 600 million people in its network, signed a partnership with the social network, Twitter. We don’t yet know the financial agreement behind the deal.

Yahoo! properties such as Yahoo!search, Yahoo!mail, Yahoo!homepage or Yahoo!sports will carry Twitter feeds, and Twitter users will be able to update their status from Yahoo!.

This partnership is a great thing for Twitter, which will benefit from Yahoo!’s extensive network, and probably reach new internet users. 
This kind of agreement is not something new for Yahoo!, as they reached a similar agreement with Facebook in December.

Yahoo! is trying to be close to social networking users, whose number is growing every day. By doing so, it attempts to challenge the all mighty leader, Google. 


This agreement is not one-of-a-kind. Google and Microsoft have already made similar deals.

Your TV network and entertainment company is now on the main social networks. You have a dedicated page on Facebook, an active account on Twitter. On YouTube your clients watch selected videos. You might be present on MySpace or Last.fm, Amazon, Craigslist or eBay. Your community manager brings content to your social network accounts on a regular basis and you constantly monitor your online brand reputation.

The point is now to give a sense to this global strategy and have the best tools to analyze it.

Trendrr is a new company that focuses on helping entertainment companies manage their online community and reputation. The goal of the application is to provide managers the best information in order to give them a global view of what happens and how successful their strategy is.

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SecondMarket, a site that allows you to trade stock in private companies like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Zynga and Tesla, announced today that it received $15 million in funding.

The New York and Bay Area-based company allows people to sell startup stock as if the company has gone public.

“We have monitored this market closely, and SecondMarket has clearly emerged as the industry expert,” said Mark Heesen, President of the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA). “We believe that SecondMarket has the right model to help fill the gap that exists in the capital formation process as a result of the systemic issues that have arisen in the public markets over the past decade.”

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Intel and a group of corporations and VCs are investing $3.5 billion in U.S. technology companies. The Invest in America Alliance, announced today in Washington D.C. is an effort to make U.S. businesses more competitive on a global level.

“Strong, enduring economies grow out of a culture of investment and a commitment to innovation,” said Intel President and CEO Paul Otellini.

The Alliance will complement state and federal job-creation programs. It will focus on current segments in IT, clean technology and biotechnology, but will also target newer markets like molecular diagnostics, bioinformatics, electric vehicle ecosystem and wireless infrastructure

“We simply must have a clear, consistent strategy to promote innovation, investment and start-up companies,” Otellini said.

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Cyberattacks cost businesses an average of $2 million per year, according to Symantec’s 2010 State of Enterprise Security (PDF) study. For large companies, the average loss was $2.8 million a year.

Seventy-five percent of surveyed companies had experienced cyber attacks in the last 12 months. Forty-one percent of these attacks were “somewhat/highly effective.”

Twenty-nine percent of companies saw an increase in cyberattacks in 2009, and every single one of the 2,100 companies surveyed by Symantec experienced cyber losses in 2009.

The most common attacks were theft of customers’ personally identifiable information, downtime of environment, theft of intellectual property and theft of costumer credit card information. In 92 percent of the cases, this led most commonly to loss of productivity, lost revenue and loss of company trust.

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