Archive for the 'Business' category
Friday, May 7th, 2010
In January we helped Mark Levison's Agile Pain Relife consulting make a very successful Typepad to Wordpress transition. Behind the scenes there is a very interesting design case study, we'd like to share.
The main aim was to move the content from Typepad webblog to his new business domain. Mark's company focuses on the business of "relieving software development pain". He came to us with a great domain and a catchy name for this business: Agile Pain Relief Consulting comes from.
Mark chose the WooTuits theme, which we thought was a great fit. He didn't ask any significant modifications. The challenge was to adapt it to Mark's consulting firm's business goals. At Foliovision, when we talk about customising a template it goes far beyond simple changes like background colour or the size of the font. We start with a template but seek to end with a unique site which look like a custom design.
We firmly believe that getting one's logo and branding right is the starting point for a successful design. Mark didn't have a budget for the logo work so we agreed to do a new logo ourselves which Mark would purchase if he liked it.
The original logo
The original logo was saying the company name in simple black bold Times font without any other adjustments. Our concept was to focus on the "pain relief" element of company's business name.
We wanted to create strong, iconic branding capitalising on the billions of dollars already spent by pharmaceutical companies on pain relief imagery.
Here is our first good attempt.
Redesigning the original pill
This logo show the creative way of redesigning existing brand identity. Why to have the pills lying around your logo, when they can help tell the message straight by forming well known sign of the medical cross? Why to use serif font when simple, sans serif, modern looking typeface can communicate your brand values more clearly?
Creative redesign
But we still wanted to get to something stronger. After a trying many things we suddenly realised that AGILE is exactly five letters just like the word BAYER and their famous original pain relief pill: the simple aspirin.
Here's what we came up with:
Bayer aspirin pill idea
Since the logos were done rapidly, to as concepts, we used the existing Bayer aspirin pill. After acceptance we planned to do the 3D imaging necessary to get a convincing scalable version of the pill for both print and web with AGILE instead of BAYER.
Our client Mark liked the Bayer aspirin pill idea.
Unfortunately he was unable to find the resources for redoing the pill and the logo remains a concept only for now. Mark went with a homemade logo:
Self-made solution
Alas, homemade logos are often not as effective at presenting one's brand as a designer version. We are really sad that we were not able to complete this project for Mark.
Mark told us he doesn't think logos or design are a substantial reason that a client would choose a supplier or not. We disagree on that question. A logo is not a substitute for good service or product, but a complement. In our experience, A convincing logo will help with:
- media relations
- getting a better price
- closing the deal
Hopefully a good project will come Mark's way this year and we can finish the job for Agile Pain Relief Consulting.
What are your thoughts on the important of a good logo?
By Michala
Business |
Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010
Whatever happened to the CDDB and to FreeDB?
CDDB evolved into Gracenote. It looked like they were losing their stranglehold when Roxio moved to FreeDB in 2000. A closed settlement resulted in Roxio moving to Gracenote full time. I hope they were clever enough to get free stock in Gracenote for the pleasure.
The next death knell (although no one knew how important it was at the time) for FreeDB was that Apple went with Gracenote and then disabled any ability for users to submit to FreeDB (for a couple of years it was possible to use the FreeDB servers instead by monkeying around in one's hosts file, but it was a pretty techy solution). Without iTunes or Roxio's Toast, FreeDB was cut off from any oxygen in the Apple ecosphere.
Gracenote was recently sold to Sony for $260 million. The venture capitalists and the thugs at Gracenote managed to get something for their trouble.
In the meantime in about 2006, the FreeDB had a melt-down between the project owner and the lead developers. In the meantime, the horribly named Musicbrainz hit the scene with a music recognition algorithm. Terribly complicated, terribly slow. Apparently it works. But there is no easy way to submit data.
MusicBrainz
My inspiration here? There isn't a single tagging client I can find for OS X which will allow me to upload to either FreeDB or Musicbrainz!
There should be a client (free) which will grab the Gracenote/CDDB info which iTunes collects and resubmit it to both FreeDB and Musicbrainz. iTunes can't do something like that as part of its own license but the new client can.
If Gracenote wants to shut this client down, it begins as open-source and goes offshore. The client should include a manual option so that not all of the data is polluted. The client should allow itself to identify itself as alternative software (to make sure that the database recipient can't be faulted for accepting the external data).
Personally, I'd resubmit all my music info to Musicbrainz and FreeDB if this app existed. And I know a hundred more who would do so as well. Litigation is likely to drop off at this point, as the aggressive thieves at Gracenote have been paid out now.
I can't imagine Sony wants to go whacking through the bushes, snatching at end users.
The CDDB story is one of the best examples I've seen of how human beings can turn any act of grace (pardon the pun) into loathsome slavery.
This sad saga worries me as it suggests that Apple is more than prepared to turn our computers into corporate property. For the moment, OS X is very free and my data is my own, but frankly the rumours of DRM on the iPad for ebooks worry me.
If Apple thinks its core audience (hey remember us, we're the guys who kept you alive through that huge trough at the time of the clones) will put up with proprietary data formats and heavy DRM, they are very wrong.
In the meantime, I want a client to let me submit track and album info to FreeDB and Musicbrainz.
By Alec
Business, IT |
Thursday, January 21st, 2010
We use primarily use Paypal for our smaller transactions at Foliovision ($1000 and under). Some customers complain. They'd just rather not do business with Paypal. In these cases, we do have bank accounts in three major jurisdictions but it does slow down transactions and increase transaction costs on smaller invoices.
I tell them there is just no other payment service which works well for small international payments.
Precautions we take:
- we don't confirm our bank account numbers which technically means that Paypal can't withdraw funds from our bank accounts.
- they do do it anyway, but in our case it would be illegal and there's a very good chance that the bank would go after Paypal for the money themselves if Paypal did manage to snooker them into giving them cash.
- we run a balance under $2000. Over that and the money gets shunted off to one of our bank accounts.
- we are very good customers. We send lots of sales through and we buy lots of goods too. Occasionally we even have to switch currencies. Paypal makes a fortune off of Foliovision. We even introduce lots of new customers to them as well.
In general, limit liability and make yourself valuable. I recommend you do the same.
But then I go and read a post like this one about how Paypal single-handedly nearly ruined the Macgraphoto graphics bundle (sorry to have missed it Jacob: great idea for a themed bundle!). And I think we haven't done nearly enough and that we are playing with fire.
In the comments over at apparentsoft, someone recommend SWReg. Reasonable fees, big solid company, international operation. A lot to like on paper. But then it turns out SWReg is a shell of the original customer focused company built up by Steve Lee. SWReg is part of Digital River who specialise in two products these days, banes of the shareware world:
- download guarantees (if you lose your license they will give you the code and let you download the software again). Any respectable shareware author does this free of cost.
- reservations clubs. You sign up for $10/month usually unwittingly making you eligible for 10% off of 50% overpriced services and vacations. Great deal. Spend money to be marketed to at rip off rates.
So every time you send a customer to a Digital River company they will take his or her personal data and monetize/abuse it to the limits of the law and beyond. There is no way I'm putting any clients of Foliovision on that boat.
That knocks off RegNow, eSellerate, ShareIt, RegSoft, Reg.net, Emetrix in a single blow.
Someone else recommends Google checkout. Fortunately a more informed soul piped back that you'd be exchanging the frying pan for the fire. No one answers the telephone at Google (well AdWords does, but only AdWords).
PayPal certainly has its problems, but trust me, the alternative is NOT Google. Do not trust Google Checkout. If you think this story is bad, consider the following:
1. The author was able to speak to people.
2. He will eventually get the money.
If you have a similar problem with Google Checkout, your account will be closed automatically, there will be no one to talk to, and you will never, ever, ever be able to receive the money in the account. They keep it.
Here's Amy's full Google checkout horror story. In any case Google checkout is available only in the US and the UK. So much the better.
The payment provider to whom Apparent Software moved was often mentioned in the thread with Dan Engel, the FastSpring CEO even coming doing a drivethrough carrying a welcome sign. Unfortunately when you go to checkout the FastSpring site, you see that all that friendliness comes at a very high price: 8.9%. Ouch. That's triple Paypal and quadruple Google checkout rates. I'm afraid our accountancy firm and taxes already get a big slice of our revenue straight off the top. I'm not looking to lose another 10%. Thanks anyway Dan. While highway robbery with a smile may be better than a knife in the back it's still brigandry.
Kagi and Plimus are the same with 10% fees on sample $50/orders with Plimus scraping down to 9%.
kagi fees 10 per cent
Curiously Plimus likes big value sales, so we'd be in better shape with our larger value transactions at 4.5%. Plimus is also open to international businesses.
So where does the absence of customer service and extortionate fees leave us now?
We've implemented e-Junkie for clients and like it but e-Junkie only provides the shopping cart and delivery. They don't actually run the transaction for you. You're back to Google Checkout and Paypal.
There's just Avangate who gets high customer satisfaction rates. One independent provider in the world! But fortunately Avangate is international so they will accept us.
What are the rates like?
A bit confusing as there are two packages: 4.9% plus €1.95 or 8%.
On $50 transactions they both work out to $4.50 or 9%.
On a $300 transaction the 4.9% plus $2.50 fee costs $17.20 per transaction or 5.7%.
So for the international software or services seller who would like to break free of Paypal and Google and have a payment gateway, there are really two options. Plimus or Avangate.
Their existing customer base like Avangate much better: Avangate outscored Plimus on both ease of use and reliability. On the customer side, I don't like buying via Plimus as they are always holding up my orders for fraud verification. If I have to spend half an hour wheedling my $25 software out of the payment provider, I've just paid about $100 in hidden costs. I'm sure many of my clients would feel the same way.
Avangate as a buyer has been quick and painless.
My vote goes Avangate. Those clever Romanians, naming their company as if it were Stonehenge and somewhere in Britain. Who would guess that Avangate is headquartered in Their CEO Radu Georgescu is one of the few companies to best Microsoft in business, selling RAV anti-virus to Microsoft at an enormous profit and managing to keep his independence, retaining his company and his team in Romania. If Georgescu is smart enough to protect his software company from Microsoft, I expect he's clever enough to protect his merchant clients from fraud.
Avangate also shows enormous transparency, displaying names and photos of all their top management on their website, including links to their LinkedIn profiles. Elsewhere Avangate tell the whole story of their company, including products which they sold off. That kind of accessibility and transparency also earns heavy respect from me.
Avangate for the win by two full lengths.
avangate's Radu Georgescu: the man who outsmarted Microsoft and got his money and kept his life
Footnote:
Why not run our own merchant services?
- Heavy setup and monthly fees.
- Not compatible with Freshbooks (Avangate isn't now but I'll see what I can do about that.
- Not compatible with the supplier of our hosting so we wouldn't be able to automate our rebilling there either.
So at the end of the day, running online payment ourselves would be a whole lot of hassle and a lot of costs with very few discernible benefits.
By Alec
Business |
Thursday, October 15th, 2009
One of our clients was recently lured into paying to pitch to a group of investors.
Their product is a good one. I can't say much, but it's in the financial servies industry. Instead of spending their time and money to get the product really into action, they decided to go the angel route.
Madness. The finished product langours instead of making them the money they should be paying. They asked me if they should pay to pitch. I said no, make your company pay each day.
It turns out that the venture capital shark pool is even worse than I expected. There are dozens of these organizations out there looking to suck the blood of the innocent or hapless entrepreneur. These bastards are out for as much US$25K of your money to pitch to disinterested middle-level brokers and junior bankers.
Jason Calcanis catalogues the various groups of which he's heard. Even better than his VC manifesto (a bit rabid) is his second post with insider information about the the actual organisations themselves.
The Keiretsu forum has already threatened to sue Jason Calcanis with a $2000 legal letter sent out to him. Here's how the Keretsu's fabled screening process works:
The goal, in any given month, was to have five entrepreneurs pitch, yet it was a rare month where we could dig up that many who were willing to pay Keiretsu's fees ($7,500 to pitch at all four regional locations). So, in reality, we were essentially accepting anyone who was willing to pay. Most months, we ended up letting in multiple entrepreneurs at discounted rates, just to keep the investors happy. Keiretsu has a screening process, but at least in the region where I was employed, it was a formality. Once again, anyone who was willing to pay the full price made it through essentially by default. My memory's far from perfect, so take that for what it's worth, but I don't remember a paying applicant ever being turned down.
Oldest trick in the book. I hear it from the internet marketing gurus all the time, as a great sales strategy. "We screen all applicants and only the most qualified will be allowed into the program." Primary qualification being a fool and his money.
I usually disagree with Jason Fried - most particularly on attitude toward customers - but on funding yourself, he's right on the money. 37signals got to where they are through hard work and innovation. They paid for their own development via their very good usability redesigns. Trust me, when you are paying your own bills you don't waste time when it comes to application development.
Mark Cuban puts a sharp point on seeking funding:
Taking money from someone else kills more start-ups than anything else does. Do everything you can to avoid taking money. If you must, your best prospects are potential customers. You have something they want, so if they invest in you, it can be a win-win situation.
Foliovision has also done everything on our own resources. It keeps you focused.
We are now at the point where we can develop full applications on our own nickel. We have products and services which keep the wheels turning while some part of the team focus on application development.
I usually disagree with Patricio Robles over at Econsultancy but here is one time we agree: raising money is a huge resource burner.
At some point, trying to raise money is likely to take up most of your time and effort. That means that you'll be spending less time building your business, which is what you ought to be doing. In other words, pitching investors can easily become a harmful distraction.
Save your strength to get profitable. Wayne McVicker's medical supplies company Neoforma went the VC route and a billion dollar IPO. End result: he owned nothing of the company and almost killed himself and his marriage working five years flat out. The VC's made money and he got to write a book: Starting Something: An Entrepreneur's Tale of Control, Confrontation & Corporate Culture.
It's a great book, but that's a hell of a way to lose five years of your life. The sad thing is Neoforma was profitable a couple of times on its way to expanding itself out of business.
But even McVicker didn't have to pay the sharks up front.
The sad truth is that if the banks or your friends won't give you any money and you can't make the business pay on its own, you're probably better off not doing it. Businesses are built one brick at a time. For every YouTube success, there are thousands of failures. Among other issues, is management experience. If you haven't managed a five person company, how can you expect to be able to manage a twenty person company. And if how do you expect to be able to manage a twenty person company how can you manage a 200 person company.
People who have already built successful companies can and often do get VC funding to accelerate the process on round two. The VC's are eager to meet them and will fly at their own expense to sink their fangs into another success story. If you already know what you are doing and VC are eager to meet you, then you might be ready to go into shark-infested waters.
Paying to meet VC's is stupid. Just don't do it
Amazon is the one notable counter-indicator. Amazon lost money for nearly a decade before turning a profit. That would be a lot of venture capital. But Amazon were on venture capital for only the first three years and were a public company from 1997 on.
By Alec
Business |
Thursday, March 26th, 2009
I've been reading Jack Welch's Winning.
Though Jack Welch is one mean and selfish man, Winning is a challenging and rewarding testament to Neutron Jack's way of doing business. Welch's philosophy of promoting the top 20% and firing the bottom 10% in a large company is unbelievably Darwinian, even cruel. Welch even runs his personal life the same way - at sixty years of age he writes about co-author and third Suzy "having taught me the meaning of love". Frankly, Welch has grown up children - it's a bit late to be discovering love. Rediscovering would have been far more tactful.
But let's leave the man behind and return to Welch's Spartan philosophy of leaving the crippled employees on the mountaintop to perish in the night.
Jack Welch implementing his Spartan strategies for
HR management and work-life balance
When you read his book, however, you can see how this would work in a company which hires just extremely competitive types. Such people enjoy seeing others thrown down the well. It's a bit of the mob waiting for the witch to be drowned. Welch is appealing to primal nature here, the law of the jungle. The hunter who cannot run fast enough is culled from the tribe and the tribe is stronger as the weakest members can neither survive nor reproduce.
Read the rest of this entry »
By Alec
Business |
Tuesday, October 28th, 2008
Gary Vaynerchuk success - photo vinama
Online wine guru Gary Vaynerchuk is really getting around. I've seen him collaborating with internet marketers in the last few months on some relatively dodgy campaigns.
Lately I caught him in somewhat better company. Vaynerchuk was recently interviewed over at e-consultancy and he let fly what I think is the key to his success.
Who should be in charge of this sort of participation [in social media]? Do any rules of engagement need to be established?
It's really like the person who is wearing the underwear... who is controlling the game? That person needs to establish the rules for how you approach it and ultimately rules are hard to control in social media. You are better off letting the world run wild. You cannot completely control your message any more. Be as authentic and awesome as possible or you will fall like the Berlin Wall.
Vaynerchuk's absolutely right. For two years, one of my clients was always very uptight about stating his real opinion. The website languished. Since the last six months, he's been more and more willing to go out on a (at least partway) limb. And since he turned the page so to speak on his corporate persona his website and his sales are going through the roof.
What people are seeking on the internet is authenticity.
How to do change your corporate voice for a real voice?
- Sit down and think about what's special about you.
- Ask your friends about what they love about you.
- Put that personality into your marketing.
If after careful reflection you don't think your personality will bear marketing - some don't, some people are just not cut out to expose themselves in any way - find someone else to be the front person for your organization. And support them fully in their endeavours.
Who would you rather buy from? A person you like or faceless corporation hiding behind marketingspeak and safe publicity material? Makes it pretty clear doesn't it?
Otherwise, go for it. Jump right in. The water's perfect!
By Alec
Business, Internet Marketing |
Sunday, September 28th, 2008
Sift CEO Ben Heald
So these guys over at Sift Media are heading for £3 million of advertising revenue this year. Probably worth hearing what their CEO has to say about online publishing. The first question is a bit silly:
What levels of participation inequality do you see from forum and community users? What can publishers do to tackle that more effectively?
Ben Heald takes a valiant stab at it:
You probably get about 10% of the audience that you are sending your emails to, contributing to the content in some way.
I don't think usage levels have changed that much. It matches the dynamics of a conference, where out of an audience of 100 people, you will get ten asking a questions and one or two people speaking to you after the presentation. I don't think that will change. We won't all become avid contributors to forums. Some people just want to take stuff.
His answer is basically right - participation will not be level - but at the end he goes seriously astray: "Some people just want to take stuff."
That may be true of some people but even more often, people are at different points of the cycle. There have been many communities where I have been a passive observer and then gone on to contribute substantially. Then there have been communities where I was very active and then dropped back to just a monitoring position.
If you cut off the people observing, you are eliminating a huge portion of future participants.
On the other hand Ben Heald's has some brilliant ideas on how to:
- create engaging online content in a business context
- remunerate the people writing and promoting that content
Here's what he has to say:
Writing to engage, rather than to inform, is a big switch. These worthy articles that quote all and sundry are fine and they have their place. But you don't feel like commenting on them at the end. You don't feel like engaging with it. You're informed but you feel a bit exhausted by it.
We are trying to be a ringmaster or a coordinator or a facilitator. The job of the editor is to seed audiences, stimulate and provoke on behalf of the whole site. All our editors are rewarded through the success of the sites in terms of the page impressions and users their articles generate, not how many words they write. They have a basic salary and the commission is based on the page impressions and the number of reads of their stories.
It's about engendering the right behaviours. Do you really need to write 1,000 words, or do 500 words that are more provoking? They become active on other forums, promoting their websites. You can't be successful when you're running your own walled garden.
Bingo! The problem is solved. The writer/promoter is not rewarded for a long dull article. The writer/promoter is rewarded for a successful article on objectively measured criteria.
How to transfer those terms into a smaller environment like Foliovision is a challenge, but it's certainly the right direction for online publishing.
The other issues is to hire engaging writers in the first place. If a writer has a history of penning dull work, publishable but somniforic, the odds are that writer isn't going to set the world on fire writing for you on business themes.
Still, it's a great way to force motivation for those who have the talent but perhaps not the will.
By Alec
Business |
Sunday, June 1st, 2008
From the European Outsourcing Conference last week: it's difficult to do large scale outsourcing in Easter Europe:
The delegates realised that Eastern European nations do not have the scale of staff to resource huge outsourcing deals, with the majority (58 per cent) believing that different geographies are suited to different types of outsourcing projects. Only 17 per cent believed that Indian providers are leaps and bounds ahead of all other geographies.
Absolutely. There are just not the numbers here necessary to be able to do it efficiently.
What you can get are a few good programmers on a project.
Or a lot of reasonably multilingual (we're not talking about the Netherlands or Austria here) customer service bodies.
The very high euro - which seems to be carrying the local currencies with it - does make European outsourcing pretty much a local sport at this point. But there is no shortage of European companies and divisions looking to cut costs without transcontinental travel.
By Alec
Business, IT |
Friday, May 30th, 2008
Have tech companies gone blue chip: no risk, little reward?
Over at purveyor of dubious business advice The Wall Street Journal, Mean Street says it is so:
The good news: Tech stocks are the blue chips of today’s economy. The companies are bigger and better run than ever before.
Still not convinced this sector has matured? Today, there are eight U.S. tech companies with market caps greater than $100 billion. Only three U.S. financial institutions are worth that much. Three. Last week, technology surpassed financials as the biggest component of the S&P 500.
The bad news: Tech stocks are the blue chips. Lower risk means lower reward. Are tech investors mentally prepared for the 10% equity return including a 2% dividend
Those are amazing numbers. Tech companies are bigger than banks. Curiously tech - and entertainment and weapon systems - seem to be the only products in which the US is a world leader these days.
Despite the huge market cap of the top tech companies, I think Evan Newmark is off base on the future of tech.
The Google IPO only took place in 2004. The tech market is as dynamic as ever. But there have been changes:
- The movement is away from hardware to software as a service.
- The movement is to profitable online models.
- Online advertising is about to really grow again.
- It's not that there aren't big rewards still out there in tech. It's just that it won't be in selling hardware.
The same thing happened when IBM released the PC, those cute old 286's. I owned one. Suddenly big iron and dumb terminals were of limited use. Companies like DEC hawking terminals and mainframes slowly just disappeared.
We are at the start of a new era of opportunity. The keywords here are:
- linux - open source
- flexibility
- interface
- availability
- low-cost
Anyone who gets those right - and we are multi year clients at least five of these companies (37signals Basecamp, Statcounter, Freshbooks, iContact, all highly recommended plus one legacy with poor service to remain nameless) with the average bill over $50/month - is in for ongoing paycheques. Web applications and commercial refinement for Linux may not be as exciting as multibillion dollar investments in new Silicon factories, Plasma screens or brand new OS's.
But the oceans are a lot deeper here. The opportunites are vast. The plays will be smaller - but clever VC's will have the opportunity to own half of a whole revenue stream which could be tens of millions of dollars per year.
For the moment, the VC's are making their money on acquisitions - and doing very well with the biggest sharks Yahoo, Microsoft and Google - circling in the water at all times. Some acquisitions are huge: YouTube at $1.6 billion (Google), del.icio.us at $7 million (Yahoo). But the current acquisition frenzy is just the top of the iceberg.
We are at the beginning of a paradigm change, of a real tech business renaissance, akin to the launch of MS-DOS in 1981 or the Apple Macintosh in 1984.
Note: This is not to say this tech-media renaissanceis without risk. Those who blow the pricing-access model can lose big in this new era, like the New York Times.
By Alec
Business |
Sunday, June 24th, 2007
What is an idea worth?
What is the value of consulting services?
If you say nothing and everything - you'd be exactly right.
One of Paul Graham's startup essays explains the difference:
Suppose YouTube's founders had gone to Google in 2005 and told them "Google Video is badly designed. Give us $10 million and we'll tell you all the mistakes you made." They would have gotten the royal raspberry. Eighteen months later Google paid $1.6 billion for the same lesson, partly because they could then tell themselves that they were buying a phenomenon, or a community, or some vague thing like that.
The significance here is that they went and created and shipped and evangelised the idea.
On the other hand, had Google had their finger close enough on the pulse, they could have made that acquisition many months earlier for a tiny fraction of the valuation.
Or had Google put the right people on their project - Google Video - they could have stolen YouTube's fire before it lit.
Unfortunately normally we don't know the failures, only the success stories. Kiko, the eBay auctioned calendar software, lost to Google Calendar (a fine invention and one you should try if you haven't used it before - we run our entire office schedule on it, and it's a huge improvement over maintaining phpCalendar ourselves or trying to WebDav sync iCal).
So does one aim to be the ones advising Google for a few hundred k/per year - the dilemma with consulting services, is that it's still your life against the clock, whatever the payoff. Effectually, you are a mercenary. When you tire of fighting the Punic wars, you go home and all you take is what you can carry away on your back and your armour.
Obviously startups are the way to go. But it's damn hard work.
Creating a startup is the hardest thing I've ever done in my life and it's cost me dearly.
Am I ready to give up?
No.
When trying to pick what idea to go after, Paul Graham writes:
It seems like the best problems to solve are ones that affect you personally. Apple happened because Steve Wozniak wanted a computer, Google because Larry and Sergey couldn't find stuff online, Hotmail because Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith couldn't exchange email at work.
I agree wholeheartedly with that. The issue which I am trying to solve is one which causes me stress everyday.
By Alec
Business |
Thursday, May 31st, 2007
Is it possible for the medium sized guys to make money?
You bet.
Network Solutions, bought for $20 million in 2003, was just sold for $800 million three years later.
And amazingly enough, this deal was done by a Persian - Iranian American Jahm Najafi.
So do the Iranians know how to play a poker hand?
It certainly looks like yes. No wonder the Israelis want the Americans to bomb the Iranians to smithereens. Competition isn't fun.
Anyway here's Najafi's story:
Read the rest of this entry »
By Alec
Business |
Wednesday, May 30th, 2007
Philip Dow's Journler
Philip Dow is the developer of the very well received Mac PIM (personal information manager) Journler about donationware. His application Journler had an open donation policy for personal use. Contribute whatever you like. A single commercial use license was/is $25.
Phil is going full-time as a developer now and is starting to feel the pain - lots of downloads and good press, but not a lot of revenue rolling in.
Out of 580 registered users, Phil had received an average donation of $17. That makes a total of about $9800. But in the end, Phil feels that some are abusing the donation system.
Read the rest of this entry »
By Alec
Business, WordPress |
Monday, May 21st, 2007
Some gentlemen search colleagues are thunderstruck by the acquisition of 24/7 Real Media by advertising holding company WPP for $649 million (a tidy sum it is - congratulations 24/7 - although I've always hated your technology). Raycam wonders why more ad agencies aren't snapping up the smaller search houses.
It's simple. All the assets go down the elevator every night (David Ogilvy is reputed the first to coin this phrase).
Read the rest of this entry »
By Alec
Business, SEO |
Tuesday, April 17th, 2007
The web is undergoing another major shift right now.
The first shift was from direct navigation and directories to search.
SEO was all the rage and we are Foliovision were and are very good at it.
The next stage now is Online Communities or The Social Web.
Manifestations of online communities:
- social websites like MySpace and LiveJournal (perhaps the more exotic AdultFriendFinder could be included in this group)
- forums (countless, for every industry there are usually a few big ones: one of the originals was slashdot)
- social bookmarking sites (delicious and digg spring to mind)
- specialty topic sites like WikiPedia or Squidoo
What's bad about this is that all the black hat search guys are coming up with ways to pollute these communities. At one webmaster forum there are hundreds of paid forum posters available to go out and sign up accounts and start spewing out whatever you want in mainly broken English for literally pennies per post. These guys are harder to catch than the black hat forum and comment bots so the human version must be considered worse.
Read the rest of this entry »
By Alec
Business, Internet Marketing |
Friday, April 6th, 2007
A very interesting discussion on Aaron Wall's SEOBook about whether Google is contributing to web spam. The best part is in the comments (sorry Aaron!) where two readers to the numbers on AdWords for relatively high priced PPC words.
Basically they just don't add up.
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By Alec
Business, Internet Marketing, SEO |
