Period Three Blog » Business

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?

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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?

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Mar072008

Network Solutions - wrong any way you slice it

Posted by Gene in Business

I 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

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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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Jan162008

How not to handle your customer service

Posted by Gene in Business

I love the way the guys at Dreamhost are open and fun about their company and the way the run it is neat. But this is just ridiculous and not the way you handle a screw up of this magnitude. (they have gotten some crunch-press out of it too.)

Here’s what happened:

Scripts are still running to correct the original problem. Last night, this guy ran a standard billing cycle to clean up stragglers from 2007. Unfortunately, the biller was run for 2008 (December 31st, 2008 to be exact). This caused everyone to be billed as if today was 2008-12-31, wreaking the havoc that we are so sorry you had to be put through.

Needless to say, if you read through the blog comments, there are some none-too-happy campers on there.

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Oct262007

Tune into South Carolina Business Review on October 31, 2007

Posted by Gene in Business

Recently Period Three was interviewed for SC Business Review 91.3. Here’s some background on the interview schedule. The show is on at 07:52 AM.

Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Narrative: A Midlands-SC based company was recently featured in a local publication as one of the top web development firms in the region.
Description: Mike Switzer interviews Gene Crawford, founder of Period Three in Columbia, SC. www.period-three.com is our SC Web Site of the Week.

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Sep272007

If you build it, they will not come

Posted by Gene in Business, Marketing

Midlandsbiz.com recently asked me to write a “business advice” article for their online magazine. Hopefully it can help someone out there understand online marketing a little better.

“I often ask my clients when we are starting a new website project, what are your plans to let people know about your website? Almost every time they have never thought about it”. Gene Crawford, President and co-founder of Period Three, a full-service web-design agency in Columbia, discusses practical ways to improve traffic to your website.

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Sep122007

Apple = Cool

Posted by Gene in Business

As if launching the iPhone wasn’t the single coolest thing the people at Apple could do this year, Steve Jobs rolls this out on us… Apple is absolutely the coolest company on the planet… If you were ever on the fence about that, what more do you need?

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Sep042007

Video interview with Jason Fried…

Posted by Gene in Business

This is a pretty good interview with Jason Fried, I’ve read/heard a lot of interviews with all the guys at 37signals and this one just kind of hit home with me. The stuff he starts off with “proximity” hurting vs. helping productivity absolutely makes sense. Check it out here.

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Sep012007

Design Interact Interview

Posted by Gene in Random Stuff, Business

Take a look at the latest designinteract.com interview… it’s one of us, err me… Anyways, check it out.

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