Category Archives: companies

Microsoft LIVEs!

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Paul Graham is ridiculously suggesting that “Microsoft is Dead“.

I remember back in the 90’s when many where suggesting how IBM was dead, and how obvious it was that the Apples and Microsofts and clever upstarts would make IBM obsolete.

As this chart shows IBM has thrived since that time, and though they hardly make the news much anymore it’s very important to note that IBM is a bigger company (measured by capitalization) than the following “big winners”: Google, Apple, Yahoo.

Also notable is the fact that what is probably the best search algorithm in the world belongs to … IBM. It’s called “WebFountain”. It’s not scalable and therefore not an alternative to Google at this time, but one can’t even count IBM out of the *search wars*, let alone Microsoft.

Microsoft isn’t dead. Not even close. Of course it is suffering from the inertia that naturally springs from huge success and dominance, but like IBM it will find new markets, new niches, and will benefit (eventually) from the innovations of it’s competitors as they were able to benefit – hugely – from Microsoft innovations (e.g. free internet browser software on all PCs).

Don Dodge corrects the foolishness, and Tony is right to suggest that MS has plenty of life left.

It’s even possible that Microsoft will win the big game. With the LIVE project, Microsoft’s neural network approach to search may be more advanced than Google’s and although search result quality continues to lag Google’s by a notch it’s simply not clear how search will evolve over the next few years.

Travelers Advantage is a Traveler’s DIS advantage

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It should be called Traveler’s DisAdvantage

I’ve had really bad results with Travelers Advantage over many years of membership. The only reason I stick with this horrible service are the “bribe” rebate coupons they send each year when I threaten to cancel. These roughly cover the cost of this horrible travel service but it’s time to get rid of it. I think the “hotels at half price” may still be about the same as online pricing if you have the time to mess with it and make a lot of calls but their call in reservations system is scandalously expensive given that you are *paying them* to find deals. I’d like a *single example* of TA beating Hotwire pricing for comparable hotels or a few examples of them beating out a Kayak.com hotel search.

Example: Booking for a specific Days Inn in CA today I was getting many different rates. I called TA and asked them to match the online price. Nope, they said, and suggested deceitfully that they were using “real time” rates and probably I could not get the lower rate. Travelers Advantage had $75 plus taxes where my initial search gave me $67 including taxes. I pulled up their “low price guarantee” and read it to the customer servicer who just kept insisting on the high rate. Although it’s possible they would have eventually refunded the difference I’ve seen such “guarantees” before and they often try to take advantage of loopholes and BS. I didn’t want to book and then hope to get justice months later.

So… back to Days Inn website which had even lower rates than earlier (or I missed an option there), so I went ahead and booked at 204+tax for the 4 nights vs the 300+tax I would have paid Travelers disAdvantage.

But here’s the funny part: After I booked at Days a chat box came up saying ‘hey, would you like to save $30 on today’s reservation? Sure I said. Up came this: “JOIN TRAVELER’S ADVANTAGE!”

I explained I’d already joined and they gave me a higher rate than I’d got -literally- one second ago from this website and asked why.

She never answered me, just disconnected. Sad, but at least I got my good rate in spite of all the wasted time with 1) My existing Travelers Advantage Membership and 2) Another prospective Travelers Advantage Membership.

PT Barnum would be proud of you, Travelers disAdvantage, because you, like he, act on the knowledge that a sucker is born every minute.

Viacom “Austin Powers” to Google: We want ONE BILLION DOLLARS!

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Viacom has sued Google/YouTube for copyright infringement, filing papers today and asking for a billion bucks in damages. The Viacom Press release summarizes their point of view. In short Viacom says of YouTube:

Their business model, which is based on building traffic and selling advertising off of unlicensed content, is clearly illegal and is in obvious conflict with copyright laws.

Here’s the Reuters Story

Mark Cuban warned about this type of legal challenge overwhelming the YouTube deal several months ago.  Here’s his take on the latest news.   It seems possible Google may wind up regretting their purchase of YouTube, proving to be a hornets nest of potential litigation that seems to be increasingly expensive. This while it remains unclear how well YouTube content can be monetized, to the extent there is much left after all this litigation. Google allocated about 400 million of the 1.65 billion purchase price to settle these claims but if the Viacom lawsuit it any indication it may get more expensive than that.

Ultimately I’m guessing it’ll be judges reaction to the new ethos surrounding IP law. Onliners big and small routinely disregard many longstanding content distribution rules so judges may decide that the legal issues have become so universally murky that they’ll start ruling in favor of the new media distributors like YouTube/Google, though I’m guessing the first sets of judgements will seek to penalize them in the name of respecting existing copyright laws. The swirl of legal challenges to YouTube content may be a case where Google’s freewheeling, usually innovative approaches come back to bite them, but it’s too early to know.

Stock Spam Messages: SEC study suggests you should follow their bogus advice for profit?

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The SEC is cracking down on stock price manipulations where spammers send out millions of email messages implying a stock is going to rise. Presumably the spammers have bought calls on the stock or own shares and then reap benefits if the price goes up from the fake interest created by the bogus emails.

But this raises a darn interesting question. If these manipulations really are working to inflate the price of certain stocks artificially – and they appear to be working – then the best course of action for Joe average investor may be to…wait for it…. BUY those darn spam STOCKS!

Some caveats would obviously apply here – you’d want to make sure you are 1) Not doing anything illegal yourself, so you’d never send out the spams or hype the stock yourself. 2) Buy early in the process before the price spike happens. Heavy internet users probably are the first to get the spam, though you can also check this interesting site, Spamnation, for details about the latest spam scams.

I’m testing this hypothesis without buying anything by following some of the stocks listed at Spamnation. Heres the COB.F chart which suggests the spam may have worked wonders on the price.

However CAU, with less spam and more recent activity, is up only a penny today and appears to have been falling recently, suggesting the spam did not work or didn’t work yet.

If, as the SEC crackdown suggests, stock spam scams are artificially inflating the prices of stocks, it may actually be to your advantage to *follow* the bogus advice even though it’s a bunch of illegal lies and deceptions.

Isn’t that … funny?

Global community spirit

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Over at Techmeme I’m struck by three stories that nicely showcase the importance of *community* to dot commers and to the expanding online universe.

The most interesting is that Yahoo Answers is going social, offering social networking as part of the answers concept.  I was bullish on Yahoo Answers a year ago and it appears they’ve done a great job at growing this project.   Incredibly the number of answers users is comparable to the number of Myspace people. This is not entirely apples to apples comparison because I’m guessing the Myspacers spend a lot more time online at Myspace, but if Answers can get the community ball rolling there is huge potential to become something of a “thinking persons” (or at least a “questioning person’s”?) Myspace.

The second item is Kevin Rose reporting that Digg has a *million* users. That is quite a milestone (though a long way from the approximately 60-100 million users claimed by Yahoo Answers and Myspace. I’ve never really understood the appeal of Digg as more than a superficial way to identify oddball news, feeling that dedicated diggers tend to prefer goofy stories rather than substantive ones, but the concept is brilliant and provocative.

Third, and perhaps most significant, is SONY’s Playstation 3 virtual world that launches this spring. Critics are raving about SONY’s brave new world, some suggesting it’s superior to the top virtual world “Second Life” which suffers from technical complexity, a steep learning curve, and a lot of skeptics who think second lifers are just escaping their first lives. It seems to me the Playstation world could become the “Myspace” of virtual worlds and captivate the teen crowd that already is practically living online ( WI or XBOX could also get smart super fast and get their own virtual world going. Both appear to be on the road for more widespread adoption as gaming systems than Sony’s PS3, though this can all change quickly).

WordPress blog = open ID. Brilliant!

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Matt M, Simon, and the WordPress gang strike again with a simple yet extremely intuitive and useful solution to OpenID challenges. They are allowing WP blogs to pass ID info to other applications. For the WordPress gang I guess it’s just another day at the office but this really is a great development that will help a lot of folks who don’t want to hear about standards and technical issues and just want a simple solution to online ID issues. Other applications are doing this as well, which will make the OpenID transition a lot easier.

This seems so simple compared to the recent developments with Yahoo’s BBAuth and other OpenID approaches – I think these have focused heavily on ways for developers to build on, for example,Yahoo’s ID and bring it into applications. Good, but better to first establish a bunch of simple OpenID implementations for people’s Google, Yahoo, blog info.

I would like Yahoo to just establish a simple system like WP has that allows me to authorize Yahoo to release my Yahoo info to others as I’m doing with the WP solution. (did they do this and I missed it?).

I think we may all be surprised how registrations have been more of a barrier to entry than it would seem they should be by just requiring a few minutes of sign up. It’s a brave new world of short attention spans and attention deficits and as OpenID becomes ubiquitous and easy we can roam the wild online range even more quickly and superficially than before.

OpenID info at Word Press 

USA Today goes social – good for USA Today and good for US

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Props to USA Today for going social with their online edition, now complete with blogs, comments profiles, and more.  Here’s the USA Today explanation.

I just set up a profile and it was fairly easy, though it’ll sure be nice when this type of information is portable and one click will sign you up for such things.

Tech folks are currently wrapped up in fairly obscure and/or proprietary issues about how transferable ID information will best move around the web and I hope this gets resolved soon.

Also it’s getting ridiculous to set up a new blog at every Tom, Dick, Harry, and USAToday site you want to post at rather than do what Facebook has done which is allow you to bring your own blog content into Facebook effortlessly. This allows them the benefits of your content without forcing the user to post at several different places.

I should also say that although I’m glad “old” media like USA Today is “getting” the social networks part of the Web 2.0 online revolution, I’m rooting for “pure” online news sites like NewsVine and TechMeme because I think they do a better job of democritizing the news process than legacy media can ever do. In fact I learned about the USA Today changes from Techmeme since I’m not a regular USA Today reader.

Steve Rubel as a nice post about the social networking implications of USA Today’s changes while Matthew Ingram‘s wondering if mom and pop really even care about this stuff.

China’s Mega Dam – Three Gorges Dam Project

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Don’t miss the Discovery Channel’s fascinating inside look into the history and construction of the Three Gorges Dam project on China’s Yangze River.     This massive project is the largest public works project in human history.   It will create a 400 mile long reservoir so massive that it may actually affect (very slightly but measurably) the rotation of the earth.    Three Gorges Dam is displacing over a million Chinese who live upriver from the Dam, though it appears that in many cases they’ll be relocated to better housing at higher ground.   36,000 square miles will be inundated as the river above the dam slowly rises.    Although some measures are being taken to preserve historical monuments an incalculable degree of historical and human emotional treasure will be lost from this dam.

The Mega Dam special gives some incredible insider looks into the control rooms of the power generation and shipping lock facilities as well as a brief look at some of the computer controls, which appear to have  very intuitive graphic interfaces.

A critic quoted in the film suggested that the benefits of the dam are effectively shipped off to big cities and larger farmers at the expense of the million plus Chinese who are getting displaced.     However other aspects of the story do not seem to support this vision because it appears that the relocated cities are generally of higher quality than those they are replacing.  One advocate suggested that this would be hard on the old relocated folks, but for the children the relocation would bring better health, education, and opportunity.

Discovery Channel Mega Dam Web page

My Enhance.com PPC advertising experiment reveals very questionable incoming clicks.

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In 2005 I started experimenting with Enhance.com pay per click advertising. I deposited 1500 into an account, set the daily limits low, and directed all traffic to an affiliate travel site I set up for the experiment. RoadTripsUSA.net. I’m now analyzing the results which suggest almost all the activity from enhance was worthless, and some may have been fraudulent. This is especially frustrating because I’d had similar bad experiences with Enhance’s previous incarnation – “ah-ha.com” but thought I’d give the new Enhance a chance.

I can’t be sure yet of anything other than the extremely low return on the $500 spent, but I’ll be posting more over the next few weeks from my logs about the sites that sent traffic.

I just sent this to Enhance Customer Support:

PLEASE ESCALATE THIS IMMEDIATELY or REFUND MY MONEY IMMEDIATELY.

I’ve had no responses to my request to refund the 1500 I invested in Enhance advertising in 2005 as part of an experiment in using PPC to send traffic to a Travel affiliate website I set up for this purpose.

$1000 remains in my account.

I’ve been examining my log files and it appears that most of the clicks I’ve had from Enhance were from very questionable, possibly fraudulent sources. I’m happy to share this information with you.

What is *certain* is that I’ve had effectively no business come in from my $500 investment in Enhance Clicks.

This Washington Post Article explains the approach taken by “pay to click” schemes. I suspect much of my traffic came from this type of scam, though all that really matters is that the clicks were effectively worthless.

I’d also like your permission to publish your responses to me at my blog: https://joeduck.wordpress.com

Thank you. Please contact me immediately at 800-872-3266 or by email.

Ringtone Scams are about 99% of that business … so beware!

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I  *hate* the ringtones business because it represents so much of what is wrong with the internet and wrong with people.   Here’s one post about some of the millions of problems that plague the Ringtones Scam industry – a very sad excuse for a business enterprise.

However, with Apple jumping in to the Ringtones biz I’m hoping Apple may bring some standards because they don’t seem like a company that would do the Ringtones “business as usual” scam which is to offer what looks like a free ringtone and then hook unsuspecting or stupid teens into  a “contract” that dings their parents cell phone bill indefinitely.

I’m ranting about this after running into a banner I clicked on out of curiousity which led to a “Zoltar Ringtones” scam with the fine print below the fold that, to the extent I could figure out what the heck it was saying, was going to bill me 5.99 per *week* plus other charges.

This is a dispicable industry, and it’s amazing to me that it has not yet been regulated appropriately.    The solution is simple – nobody can enter into these contracts without a *written* signature from the credit card holder.