Before you do this, your site should be running and ready for visitors. It doesn’t need to be perfect, or completed, but does need to be functional. Before getting started, you also should determine whether or not your site has a sitemap available for spiders and robots to crawl. If not, then you can go to http://www.sitemaps.org/ to find out about them.

The process will go more quickly if you have an easy way to add pages to your site, such as by FTP. It will also help to have some basic info about the site available.

This should take around a half an hour. It should establish a solid foundation, but is should only be the beginning of a regular process of making your site easy for people to find. This also doesn’t get into the area of optimizing for specific search terms, rather is just a starting point.

Search engines provide a substantial portion of traffic to most sites, something in the neighborhood of 25-35% of traffic for the sites that I’ve analyzed. Search engines need to know that a website exists before they can index it and make it available to their audience. If your site is new, it is very likely that they do not know that your site exists. One you have told them to crawl your site, they will build an index of your content, and periodically check back to see if things have changed. The process is very simple, simply enter the URL of your site and the location of your sitemap into their forms. Each is slightly different, but the idea is the same for all of them.
For the US, the top 4 (karmasnack.com as of March 2013) are:

Google 86.3% Google webmaster tools
Bing 7.3% Bing webmaster submit
Yahoo 3.1% Submit your website to Yahoo
Facebook 1.4% Add a page to Facebook
Total 98.1%

Facebook uses Bing as a search partner, so letting three search engines know that your site exists gets you pretty good coverage right off the bat. Adding a Facebook page is quick and easy enough.

Next, I think that you need to exercise a bit of judgement, based upon your needs. Social media, by nature, is about communities, so you should focus your social media efforts on where your customers are. There is no harm in investing time building your own network on Pinterest (if you have visual products) or on LinkedIn (if you are a business professional) but the point is that you have to do the work of building your own network. Twitter is pretty widely used, but is increasingly becoming a media new release kind of channel. If you have cool video content ready, then by all means establish a presence on YouTube.

Directories, Forums, etc.
Directories are great, and an important part of the internet infrastructure. I run a small one, but frankly none of them have enough juice to move the needle much. My own belief is to find the communities or forums that your customers already belong to and build a presence there. Start by learning the community norms, then offer useful help on the subject that you are expert in. Once you establish trust, you can add your website to your signature. My recommendation is to first establish your credibility.
Talk to your customers and ask them what communities they belong to online that are relevant to your business. If I were a plumber, I would expect that Angie’s List is widely used. The main thing is to start a dialog with your own customers about how they look for information and who they trust. Some of them will seem obvious, but I promise you that you will probably be surprised by some as well.

It seems like the choice was made to raise the IPO price to $38 per share which would give the private equity a chance to cash in from the public. To my math, $10 per share times 388M shares offered at the IPO is a pretty big number. ($3,880,000,000) The $5M penalty for undue influence is not much in comparison. The underwriting commission on an extra $3.8 Billion can probably cover the penalty.

The bigger problem to me is that there are really two markets now, the “pre-public” market for insiders, and the “public” market. The choice is really between two losing propositions. Do you invest at the private equity stage with none of the regulatory protection for investors, or do you wait and pay “full retail”, but at least have some laws intended to protect you?

My choice has been “none of the above”. I don’t see any alternative than letting others drive up prices, watching some people overpay, then waiting for the stock to find its real market price. I’d love to hear others opinions, maybe I’m missing something.

My summary is that spectrum (1920-1980 MHz paired with 2110-2170 MHz) that was originally authorized for 3G in 1999, will be allowed to be “refarmed” or used for 4G LTE services. The decision mandates that the spectrum be available by June 30, 2014 within the member states. This decision has the potential to increase the available 4G bandwidth to almost twice the amount available in the United States.

In practice, I expect a couple of different dynamics will be at play. The first is that 3G services are already using up plenty of the spectrum, which strikes me that unless a service provider has paid to license quite a bit of spectrum that they aren’t using, that this will play out over time as end users migrate from 3G to 4G services. The additional efficiencies of 4G should make that worthwhile to service providers.

Another consideration is new spectrum auctions intended to satisfy the carrier demand for 4G. Some countries may look at the ability to refarm spectrum as weakening the value of new spectrum auctions, and accordingly may accelerate plans to auction new spectrum while at the same time delaying the ability to repurpose the spectrum until the mandated deadline.

Overall, my personal opinion is that the EC has done a good job in recognizing the interest of the public and laying out a predictable manageable plan that service providers can build their capital investment plans around.