One of the things I love about going to conferences is the chance to sit down with service providers and learn about new stuff. I presented a marketing workshop at eBay Live today then had some great meetings with a number of providers exhibiting at this very large trade show of eBay sellers. (Those eBay folks are a fun bunch!)

Some random discoveries:

Pitney Bowes Marketing Services has launched an online small business printing and mailing center that makes it easy to upload mailing lists and print and mail postcards, letters, and self-mailers of your own design or one of their designs. Others have this service but PB says it has plans to integrate this offering with local TV, Radio and online advertising services. Could be a good one to watch.

Paypal and Yahoo! Search Marketing are offering Free PayPal processing through the end of February 2008 and $100 Credit towards Yahoo! Sponsored Search when you use PayPal Checkout in your search marketing ads. Go to searchmarketing.yahoo.com/paypal and find out more.

And speaking of PayPal, I'm increasingly impressed with their shopping cart and ecommerce offerings. PayPal recently took over the VeriSign gateway product and now offers something called PayFlow Gateway for those who want to use PayPal as a secure gateway and real time processor. To me this makes PayPal a very viable option for the entire ecommerce play.

Constant Contact, a leading email marketing provider, introduced a new survey feature tool called ListenUp! Survey that integrates into their HTML email product. Users can easily create, send, and track the results of surveys. What do you think you could do with this kind of data!

Lastly, PayPal and Verisign introduced cool security application aimed initially at helping protect eBay and PayPal accounts. The feature is a PayPal security key. It's a little device that you carry around with you that displays a changing 6 digit number. When you log into your account you use your user ID and password and the current 6 digit code. The code automatically changes every 30 seconds. Big Cos have used this as a network security type tools for years but Verisign wants to take this to all your passwords so that one device can house your changing code for all your passwords.

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