• Mar282008

    Conflict of Interest

    Posted by Gene in Business

    Hmmm, looks like Google’s acquisition of DoublClick has been finalized. Which as it turns out includes the company Performics, which is DoubleClick’s SEO division. Check out their website. Is it just me or is this a huge conflict of interest for Google?

  • Mar262008

    mintemail.com

    Posted by Gene in Software

    mintemail.comThis is kind of nuts, mintemail.com. You just go to the site and it throws an email address into your clipboard then you just watch the page and it’ll automatically load your message. Great for signing up for random stuff on the web that you just want to check out and don’t necessarily want to get spammed from.

  • Mar172008

    AOL making a play with Bebo?

    Posted by Gene in Uncategorized

    bebo time on siteAOL just paid $850 million for bebo.com, who cares right? Well it just caught my eye that AOL made this play when all you seem to hear about these days is Yahoo and Microsoft or what Facebook and MySpace has done recently… AOL silently has one of the largest shares of instant messenger users on the internet with it’s AOL messaging platform and (I didn’t know this until just now) ICQ. Facebook and MySpace blow bebo.com out of the arena with their sheer number of visitors (though Bebo had 22.4 million unique visitors worldwide in January), but if you break down the numbers people spend more time on bebo.com than it’s competitors.

    What’s my point, not much really, other than with all these stories of Yahoo, Google, Facebook and MySpace all the time, just don’t forget AOL. The last time I heard from them they were killing the Netscape project, which seemed like a good business move but still sad at the same time. Sounds like they are making pretty strong moves to me these days.

  • Mar102008

    Calacanis and 37signals different perspectives on workaholics

    Posted by Gene in Business

    Here are some pretty interesting diverging opinions on the “how to run your business and treat your employees” or as I like to look at it “how to squeeze the most or best production out of your employees” blog post(s) battle. Both Calacanis and 37signals have dueling posts on the issue.

    From Calacanis.com:

    • If you do meetings, have them over lunch, because you shouldn’t let your employees eat alone
    • Don’t provide people with phones, they can always use their own cellphones, and this saves money
    • Buy a decent espresso machine and provide food in the office, because you don’t want your staff to ever stop working, this way you keep them in the office every minute of every day
    • Buy people who work hard a computer for home, so they can work after hours, on weekends and public holidays
    • Fire people who are not workaholics…. come on folks, this is startup life, it’s not a game. go work at the post office or stabucks if you want balance in your life.

    From 37signals/svn blog:

    • People who are workaholics are likely to attempt to fix problems by throwing sheer hours at the problem.
    • People who always work late makes the people who don’t feel inadequate for merely working reasonable hours.
    • If all you do is work, your value judgements are unlikely to be sound.
    • Working with interesting people is more interesting than just working.

    Both of these look pretty naive to me, Calacanis certainly comes off as a pretty big “fill-in-the-blank” but 37signals comes off as really utopian at the same time. They both certainly come off as neither running businesses with employees that have kids or of running a typical small business or startup company (even though they are both couched as such.) People need to be told what’s involved when they join up to work with your startup so everyone can be adults when things go bad. At the same time, no one who 37signals is hiring isn’t going to be taken care of, it’s been pretty loudly touted how well their company is doing, which is certainly not typical in the industry. Where’s the reality?

  • Mar072008

    Network Solutions - wrong any way you slice it

    Posted by Gene in Business

    evilI know this isn’t exactly new news to some of you, hey i’ve been busy here at Period Three since January, but I just personally got hit in the face with what I believe is probably one of the most unethical things in my corner of the professional world. Network Solutions, apparently “front-running” locked down a particular domain name one of my business partners was looking at. After a really exciting discussion one evening on a new business venture my buddy went out on the web and performed a “whois lookup” on a domain name idea, the name of the new business venture to be exact and it turns out that they, Network Solutions, the place he did the lookup at immediately locked the domain up. They couch this in the vein of “customer protection“, they say they are protecting their customers from front-running.

    1. By holding the searched domains at Network Solutions for a short period, it allows our customers time to decide whether this is the domain name that they really want to register.
    2. Although the domain name isn’t specifically held for the initial customer who searched for it, this reserve period helps to protect our customers against domain front running.

    Who said we were your clients yet?

    They also don’t seem to have a problem with locking up others’ copyrighted names, like microsoft-dell.com to name one…

    I’m not normally an all is black or white kind of guy, but in this case i’d have to say front-running is front-running no matter how you present it, the facts are thus; I’m effectively locked out of gaining the intellectual property i’ve created in the name of my new business - unless I get it from Network Solutions.

    I sincerely hope they wind up paying a huge price for this practice. Go get ‘em Go Daddy, take ‘em down!

    Sources:
    TechCrunch
    circleid
    Domain Name News

  • Mar032008

    Noted: Cars do not have dashboards, they have interfaces.

    Posted by Jay in Business, Design, Branding, Usability

    The new for 2009 Dodge Ram Truck, is by all respects, a handsome truck, if you like things like that. The interior, especially, especially looks like something out of a Mercedes or Lincoln or something. I can’t imagine getting my greasy paws all over that nice thing after working all day, but lets face it, most of these things are daily drivers, not all around utility vehicles.

    Anyway, the main point of this post is that one of the features of the 2009 Dodge Ram is the “Driver Interface“, previously known to me as the “Dashboard”.

    It seems we have come full circle. Cars once had dashboards, and web designers took the dashboard metaphor into the realm of interface design, and now cars have taken interface design into the realm of the actual, physical dashboard.

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