Archive for October, 2009

Minds and Machines Settles Food Fight with Wolfgang Puck

October 31st, 2009

Consulting company settles fight with Wolfgang and Gelila Puck.

Minds and MachinesNew top level domain name consultancy Minds + Machines has settled its lawsuit brought against restaurateur Wolfgang Puck and his wife Gelila.

Minds + Machines, along with its parent company Top Level Domain Holdings and Frederick Krueger, sued the Pucks last month, alleging that Gelila Puck inserted herself into all of the plaintiff’s business dealings and that Wolfgang Puck had not upheld his end of the agreement to promote .food.

The Pucks, who are engaged in a number of lawsuits, asked the court to extend the deadline for responding multiple times. Today the court issued a stipulation (pdf) that the plaintiffs have dismissed the case with prejudice, meaning they have settled all claims.

The nature of the settlement was not disclosed, but presumably the Pucks gave up many, if not all, of their claims to an interest in top level domain names introduced by Minds + Machines. Perhaps Mrs. Puck realized that she was not going to be the “next Bill Gates”, as she allegedly told her friends.

Inside Demand Media’s Content Machine

October 31st, 2009

A look inside Demand Media’s automated content machine.

Demand MediaEver since Demand Media launched, a lot of people have wondered how it actually makes money (other than through its eNom division). A reader just sent a fascinating article to me from Wired that explains its content machine and money making ability: using algorithms and a freelance army to churn out vast, but low quality content.

It works a lot like how domainers decide which domains to develop and how to outsource content writing for minisites. But it does it on a much, much bigger scale and automatically.

First, an algorithm determines which phrases and answers people on the internet are seeking using data from ISPs, search engines, etc. It then calculates the lifetime value of creating a content page (often including text and video) for that query. If it makes economic sense, that query is then queued up for an army of freelancers to write text, film a video, create a headline, copyedit, and fact check. Think of it as Amazon’s mTurk but just for Demand Media.

The content is then syndicated through YouTube and Demand Media’s own network of sites, such as eHow. Demand cashes in on the ads it shows alongside the content.

Quality is not a concern. One videographer has produced 40,000 short videos. As he describes in the article, it’s about volume. He gets paid about $20 a video. That doesn’t leave time for producing compelling content and its matching professionalism.

By next summer, Demand expects to produce one million items a month.

This all makes me wonder if it’s a house of cards. We’ve all seen business models based on producing low quality content, content spinning, and other schemes that ultimately don’t deliver the requisite value to viewers. They ultimately fail.

If nothing else, the article answers my question, “how come when go to eHow I leave not getting the detailed answer I was looking for?”

Silicon Alley Insider Values GoDaddy at $1.4 Billion, Oversee.net at $1 Billion

October 31st, 2009

A number of domain name companies land on valuable start up lists. But SAI didn’t do its homework.

Silicon Alley Insider has released its latest list of the world’s most valuable startups, which includes a number of domain name companies. But I question the validity of some of its assumptions because of some glaring errors, such as saying that Oversee.net hasn’t taken any outside funding.

The top domain name company on the list is GoDaddy at #9. The valuation is based on estimated 2009 revenue of $700 million with a two times revenue multiple. It’s a very basic valuation technique, but it’s hard to peg revenue and valuation number on private companies. By comparison, Inc. magazine shows GoDaddy’s 2008 revenue at about $500 million.

Coming in right behind GoDaddy is Demand Media and its highly automated content generating system at $1.3 billion. Demand Media also owns domain name registrar eNom. SAI says it has confirmed that about 10% of Demand Media’s revenue comes from domain parking.

Also at a $1.3 billion valuation is Quinstreet, the lead gen company that just bought insurance web site Insure.com for $16 million.

Oversee.net, parent company of Moniker, DomainSponsor, and Snapnames, comes in at #16 with a $1 billion valuation. SAI estimates Oversee will bring in $200 million in revenue this year. But it also says that the company hasn’t taken any outside funding. It has. So I question SAI’s analysis.

WalMart Goes After PeopleofWalMart.com Typo

October 31st, 2009

Walmart files for domain arbitration, but not against the actual web site.

PeopleofWalmart.comRemember how a couple weeks ago I wondered how long it would be before Walmart would file a domain arbitration case against PeopleofWalmart.com?

Well, there was an interesting twist today. Walmart filed a case, not against the actual PeopleofWalmart.com site, but against a typo of it: PeapleofWalmart.com (notice the a instead of o).

It should be a slam dunk case for Walmart, given that the registrant can’t show any legitimate use. He also registered WalMart-Winners.com, and both are parked.

Of course, if Walmart went for the actual PeopleofWalmart.com through the UDRP process, it should lose the case.

As another interesting aside about the web-meme-of-the-moment, when I visited PeopleofWalmart.com today, all of the ads were for Walmart.

Close Cost-Effective Outsourcing in the Philippines

October 31st, 2009

Outsourcing turns out to be every foreigner’s best resort in order for their businesses to survive amidst global recession. It has also proven its huge contribution to the improvement of the Philippine economy.

The increasing quality of foreign employers seeking services in the Philippines simply proves how capable the Filipinos are in delivering high-quality services almost equal to what employers get from their local employees, ONLY CHEAPER.

Check out more of what you can gain, and how you and your business can profit in outsourcing in the Philippines!
Outsourcing – What is it?
Get a brief definition of what Outsourcing really is.
Outsourcing is the subcontracting of an overseas company to perform services such as customer service, back-office tasks like accounting, technical support, programming, virtual assistance and more.

In the recent times, outsourcing has been most commonly defined in instances where an IT company gives the technical and customer service support to a third-party company to do the job. But the main goal why for example, a US company prefer outsourcing their customer service support department to offshore countries like India and Philippines is because of the AFFORDABILITY of services. The comparative quality than of what the local employees can offer, is of course a Big Plus!
Why Outsource?
Are you still in doubt on why you should outsource? Well, here’s why…
These days, the rate per hour for a highly-qualified US employee is $10. So for an 8-hour, 5-days a week work, you’d have to pay $400 a week just to get the weekly job done. Not to say, that this is just the minimal fee.

However, outsourcing allows you to extend your money and save more. Instead of paying $10 minimum per hour, you can already get an employee offshore with an equal amount of work quality at a $5-6 per hour!

This is clearly the major reason why many foreigners invest outsourcing in other countries, preferrably Asian.

When it comes to customer satisfaction or top-class work, not a problem! Many countries may belong in the 3rd world countries but they have a very good English language background, as well as in technical and back-office tasks. They have a quite impressive passion and determination for learning and for working. So rest assured that you’re business is in good hands.
Reasons for Outsourcing
Source: Wikipedia, “Outsourcing”
Organizations that outsource are seeking to realize benefits or address the following issues:

Cost savings – The lowering of the overall cost of the service to the business. This will involve reducing the scope, defining quality levels, re-pricing, re-negotiation, cost re-structuring. Access to lower cost economies through offshoring called “labor arbitrage” generated by the wage gap between industrialized and developing nations.

Focus on Core Business – Resources (for example investment, people, infrastructure) are focused on developing the core business. For example often organizations outsource their IT support to specialised IT services companies.

Cost restructuring – Operating leverage is a measure that compares fixed costs to variable costs. Outsourcing changes the balance of this ratio by offering a move from fixed to variable cost and also by making variable costs more predictable.

Improve quality – Achieve a step change in quality through contracting out the service with a new service level agreement.

Knowledge – Access to intellectual property and wider experience and knowledge.

Contract – Services will be provided to a legally binding contract with financial penalties and legal redress. This is not the case with internal services.

Operational expertise – Access to operational best practice that would be too difficult or time consuming to develop in-house.

Access to talent – Access to a larger talent pool and a sustainable source of skills, in particular in science and engineering.

Capacity management – An improved method of capacity management of services and technology where the risk in providing the excess capacity is borne by the supplier.

Catalyst for change – An organization can use an outsourcing agreement as a catalyst for major step change that can not be achieved alone. The outsourcer becomes a Change agent in the process.

Enhance capacity for innovation – Companies increasingly use external knowledge service providers to supplement limited in-house capacity for product innovation.

Reduce time to market – The acceleration of the development or production of a product through the additional capability brought by the supplier.

Commodification – The trend of standardizing business processes, IT Services, and application services which enable to buy at the right price, allows businesses access to services which were only available to large corporations.

Risk management – An approach to risk management for some types of risks is to partner with an outsourcer who is better able to provide the mitigation.

Venture Capital – Some countries match government funds venture capital with private venture capital for startups that start businesses in their country.

Tax Benefit – Countries offer tax incentives to move manufacturing operations to counter high corporate taxes within another country.

Google’s Eric Schmidt on What the Web Will Look Like in 5 Years

October 31st, 2009

Highlighted comments include:

* Five years from now the internet will be dominated by Chinese-language content.
* Today’s teenagers are the model of how the web will work in five years – they jump from app to app to app seamlessly.
* Five years is a factor of ten in Moore’s Law, meaning that computers will be capable of far more by that time than they are today.
* Within five years there will be broadband well above 100MB in performance – and distribution distinctions between TV, radio and the web will go away.
* “We’re starting to make signifigant money off of Youtube”, content will move towards more video.
* “Real time information is just as valuable as all the other information, we want it included in our search results.”
* There are many companies beyond Twitter and Facebook doing real time.
* “We can index real-time info now – but how do we rank it?”
* It’s because of this fundamental shift towards user-generated information that people will listen more to other people than to traditional sources. Learning how to rank that “is the great challenge of the age.” Schmidt believes Google can solve that problem.

There’s lots more in the full 45 minutes of Schmidt’s interview, including a statement that a Google OS Netbook will be here in 2010, with HTML5 local caching for offline use.

That’s the roadmap, though, that’s guiding much of what Google is doing today. From Chrome OS to Google Social Search.

Does that sound like a compelling vision of the future? Not discussed were distributed social networking, structured data, recommendations, presence data and other factors that could complicate Google’s plans. What do you think the web will look like in five years?

NBA’s Chris Bosh Wins Right To His Domain Name — And 800 Others

October 31st, 2009

Tortonto Raptor Chris Bosh has almost 74,000 Twitter followers, his own YouTube channel and his own website, chris-bosh.com.

But he wanted chrisbosh.com and now, thanks to an IP lawsuit win, he owns it.

Oh, and nearly 800 others.

The 25-year-old power forward sued “cybersquatter” Luis Zavala, who had the chrisbosh domain name, for wrongfully using his name, the WSJ Law Blog reports. Zavala had the domain names identical to the names of hundreds of other athletes and celebrities as well.

WSJ Law Blog: Bosh’s legal team argued that Zavala was able to garner so many domain names because he kept tabs on highly touted players from a young age, hoping they’d blossom to the point where there’d be demand for a personal website. Indeed, Zavala had several websites that took on the names of high-school basketball players.

Before the incident went to court, Bosh’s lawyers reached out to Zavala, asking him to relinquish the site holding Bosh’s name. He declined. “I have no intentions of handing over my domain. I am not in the business of giving domains away,” he wrote, according to court documents.

A federal judge awarded Bosh $120,000, but believing Zavala wouldn’t pay (Bosh won the case on a default judgment in April when Zavala failed to appear; Zavala failed to show up for court again this month), Bosh’s lawyers asked for the rights to the names Zavala had been using. The Law Blog has the full list, which includes Britney Spears’s sons and Amare Staudemire.

Bosh’s attorneys do not know exactly how much Zavala made on using the celebrities’ and athletes’ names, but said they assume it is a “significant amount.”

Bosh has no intention of using the names, his attorney said, and those whose names are on the list can contact Bosh’s attorneys at Winston & Strawn to get their name back for free.

Web Addresses to Adopt New Alphabets

October 31st, 2009

SEOUL — The World Wide Web is about to start using the languages of the world.

Leaders of the private body that oversees the basic design of the Internet are expected to decide here Friday to let Web addresses be expressed in characters other than those of the Roman alphabet — an issue for the majority of Internet users who use other alphabets in their native language. Already, portions of a Web address can be written in other languages. But the suffix, such as the “com” after the dot, must be typed in Roman letters.

The change will allow the suffix — known as a top-level domain — to be expressed in about 16 other alphabets. They include traditional and simplified Chinese characters, Russian Cyrillic, Korean Hangul and Hebrew. Dozens of other alphabets are likely to be added in coming years.
That means computer users will be able to type or input a full Web address without the need for Roman letters. Web-site designers will be able to use a consistent character set on a Web page without, for instance, having to switch to Roman letters to portray a link to another page.

Authorities who oversee top-level domains in their home countries could begin accepting applications next month.

Making it happen has taken six years of discussion by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or Icann, and technical work by the Internet Engineering Task Force, both California-based independent nonprofit organizations that endeavor to preserve the universality of the data network, which got started as an offshoot of a U.S. military network in the 1960s.

“The statistics show that over half of the users of the Internet today don’t use the Roman alphabet in their first language,” says Rod Beckstrom, chief executive of Icann. “It’s an issue of national pride in some cases and cultural identity.”

Several hundred Icann directors and advisers — an international group — are meeting in Seoul this week to wrestle with technical issues. The thorniest is what to do with characters that look the same but mean something different, which is particularly difficult with Chinese, the language that may someday be one of the most heavily used for Internet addresses.

“The program is very likely to get approved as a whole,” Mr. Beckstrom says. “There are simply details that are being negotiated.”

In China, Web sites generally use Roman letters to spell out Chinese words in the Hanyu Pinyin system, the Western alphabet transliteration of Chinese characters. But the system has also led to some domain names that are a series of numbers that rhyme with Chinese words.

Peter Lu, managing director of China IntelliConsulting, said the change will boost Web use in China. Switching from Chinese characters at the start of an address to Roman characters for the “.com” or the “.gov” is cumbersome.

But he added that it would have made a bigger difference 10 years ago when Internet usage was starting out in the country. “Now, more and more Chinese know English, or at least are used to using Pinyin as a substitute,” he said.

Elsewhere, the importance of the change in Web addresses depends on how much people type out an address versus finding it from a search engine or portal service. South Korean Web users, for instance, rely heavily on two portal companies that allow Korean-language searches and present not just Web sites but news, videos and other content from a single request.

“I think the decision is unlikely to bring about huge changes for users,” says Lee Wang-sang, an Internet analyst at Woori Securities in Seoul. “But there will be some competition between companies to obtain popular Korean words for addresses.”
—Sue Feng in Beijing contributed to this article.

NameJet Top 20 Pending Deletion Names for 11/01/2009

October 31st, 2009

*** Top 20 Pending Deletion Names for 11/01/2009 ***

bautechniker.com
birthangels.com
caribedomains.com
cherryvalemall.com
computingmuseum.com
coveschool.com
crossdarts.com
domaingrok.com
duderanch.com
extrabases.com
firstlinux.com
gthy.com
huntbook.com
makinghomespossible.org
project55.com
reputationdefense.com
tippecanoeswcd.org
twittex.com
usedrolexstore.com
wagerus.com

NameJet Top 80 Pre-Release Names for Oct 31, 2009

October 31st, 2009

*** Top 80 Pre-Release Names for Oct 31, 2009 8 PM ***

125.info
24dot.com
36hrs.com
active-leonardo.com
afkha.com
aiji.net
atx.info
audrakubat.com
automationnorthwest.com
bakerstreetirregularstrust.org
berthoudlibrary.org
brooklynrestaurants.net
carolinastore.com
casino-de-luxe.com
chess-tours.com
chicagoboxer.com
chicagodressmakers.com
chicagospanishtutor.com
cinava.com
creativeconversionfactory.com
creativemaze.com
dateranger.com
dharmaroad.com
discofunkmusic.com
ecyclephx.org
enfermeriaaldia.com
exgfvideos.com
exiu.net
feuq.org
floridablind.com
floridapublications.com
floridareporters.com
getyourcopy.com
globalsos.com
guachafita.com
jamabo.com
jigl.com
k-zai.com
kaoku.com
kewen.com
liveclient.com
magiciansupplies.com
malagafm.com
mancinomusic.com
marcomturkiye.com
myarcadefun.com
mypcdeluxe.org
myremodel.com
mythaipussy.com
naplesbeachfrontcondos.com
nativeamericanmyth.com
nmsexoffenders.com
novias.tv
nword.com
oh-do.com
onlyfreeshipping.com
osteuropa.info
panymusica.com
powertires.com
prensai.com
qqzj.com
quebechouses.com
roaringfirefilms.com
rpf.info
ruisul.org
sardiniaevents.com
scar-iasc-ipy2008.org
sh-fengcheng.com
showkikaku.com
siqlo.com
southpunjab.com
sportsbetters.com
spotbb.com
sustainmn.com
svivk.com
syracuselawyer.com
tampabaycondo.com
teethstore.com
xrrr.com
zqnyj.com