What Vertical portal is
A portal that caters to consumers within a particular industry (sometimes called a "vertical industry"). Vertical portals, also called "vortals," use Internet technology to offer the same kind of personalization tools that portals do. Another kind of vortal caters solely to other businesses rather than to an industry's consumers. The B2C portal gave the B2B industry a model to work from, and now, most business-to-business sites bill themselves as portals. We like to define business-to-business sites as vertical portals because they deliver content and services focused on their particular niche. The term "portal" is getting muddied because although many sites call themselves portals they are, in fact, simply Web sites that use cookie and/or personalization technology (see: personalize).
The two essential components of a vertical portal are that it uses this kind of technology and caters to a specific industry. The two essential components of a regular portal are that it uses this kind of technology and provides a variety of news, media, and services.
The meaning of FTP (File Transfer Protocol)
The standard method for downloading and uploading files over the Internet. With FTP, you can login to a server and transfer files (meaning you can "send" or "receive" files). Some sites have public file archives that you can access by using FTP with the account name "anonymous" and your e-mail address as the password. This type of access is called anonymous FTP. Macintosh owners use a program called Fetch; one of the best FTP programs for Windows is called WS-FTP. Knowing FTP is necessary (and easy) if you want to create your own Web site.
Note: You may also hear this noun used as a verb. For example, "I just finished FTP'ing the last of the files." Or, "I FTP'ed the new images to the site last night."