Ego Searches What is an ego search? Find out where your name or company is mentioned, view forum posts or online articles that mention your name or company.

Trademarks The best offense is a good defense. By monitoring newsgroups or search engines for trademarked terms, you often head off a future conflict. As a trademark owner, it is your responsibility to actively protect your mark. Otherwise, you could lose your trademark rights. Monitoring tools send immediate notification should any suspected trademark infringements occur.

Search Position Statistics show that more than 85% of Internet users find web sites with help of search engines. Therefore, a website's search engine position is crucial to its success. Prudent webmasters regularly check their search engine position. Monitoring fluctuations and re-indexing of major search engines affects keyword terms and phrases. Monitoring of positions will alert webmasters to any shifts before sales decline.

Competitor Watch Monitoring newsgroups for mentions of competitors may allow you opportunities to chime in and offer an alternative solution in a helpful, friendly way. Knowing exactly what your online competitors are doing provides a competitive edge that can be used to your advantage.

Website Downtime Accessibility is most critical measure of your website's performance. If customers can't access your site, they can't shop; and if they can't shop, they can't buy. More important, your business could gain a bad reputation among your customers, which translates into negative word of mouth and even worse, if you're highly visible, negative press. So regardless of what else you monitor, you want to monitor websites for downtime.

Take a look at various tools available and how they can be used to keep you current on relevant issues.

So what’s identity theft all about? Identity theft in short is a crime — it might also amount to cyber crime or hacking. In this type of crime, your personal information is wrongfully obtained and used in some way, which involves fraud or deception, typically for economic gain. Unlike your fingerprints, which are unique to you and cannot be given to someone else for their use, your personal data —especially your Social Security number, your bank account or credit card number, your telephone calling card number, email account password, online shopping password and other valuable identifying data can be used, if they fall into wrong hands, to personally profit at your expense.

There have been cases in past where huge amounts of money were transferred from one bank account to another account, just because person committing this crime happened to be victim’s relative and came to know about online banking password of victim. So you see, it’s not just people who don’t know you committing crimes; even your own brother would do that — if he had an urgent need for money.

Types of Identity Theft Identity theft can enter into many areas of our lives. It involves any instance where a person uses someone else's identification documents or other identifiers in order to impersonate that person for whatever reason. According to a survey conducted by Federal Trade Commission, about 10 million people in United States found out they were victims of identity theft in 2002. So, if it’s 10 million in US alone, think about rest of world.