My competitor has one product that is not free and can’t be given away for free. This single product is so profitable that my competitor uses it to fund development of a copy of my main revenue driving product (that they give away for free) just to fuck with me.

My first business model is in a lot of danger. I already make some money from my competitor’s main market, but there aren’t a whole lot of my companies resources dedicated to that market and we spend a bunch of money on other random crazy shit.

My competitor is Google and my company is Microsoft (not really, its a story.)

Microsoft’s complete takeover of Yahoo search business is imminent. The organic listings have already transitioned and paid search results will come shortly.

Big problem for Microsoft, its not a seamless transition. Each Yahoo advertiser will need to manually move their campaigns from their Yahoo account in to Microsoft’s Bing Adcenter. Account limitations and set up on Yahoo are very different than Microsoft’s Adcenter. So different that some people are recommend you take your Google Adwords campaigns and migrate them to Bing! Guess what, a lot of advertisers will not be able to fully make the transition. Some will make it, but with a struggle. In the meantime, Microsoft is not going to make as much as they expect to (hopefully Yahoo got a flat rate guarantee.)

I feel bad for Microsoft. When big industries change, and they have poor leadership, your good employees go work for your competitors and make them better companies. The people that are left aren’t the visionaries. They may be bright, they may be sharp, but they weren’t sharp enough to see bigger opportunities for themselves, and they certainly won’t be able to take advantage of those opportunities for their employer.

I hope I’m wrong. Google needs strong competitors. It means a better environment for advertisers and stronger payouts for web publishers.

One of the topics I have followed closely since the beginning of Web Publishing blog is for profit copyright enforcement.

Lawyers have been using copyright law enforcement for profit for years whether it was Getty Images which has been going after web site owners for years, or Perfect 10 which purchased licenses from photographers for, in my opinion, the sole purpose of suing Google.

Wired Magazine now reports a company from Nevada, RightHaven, is now going after web publishers for republishing newspaper articles on their sites. Similar to Perfect 10′s approach, RightHaven purchases rights to old newspaper articles from newspapers and then takes matters in to their own hands.

Outside of the business context I think this has a chilling effect as most newspapers alter, move, or remove articles from the web over time. For a small website owner when faced with spending a few thousand dollars to make something go away or tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees there is only one easy way out.

How would you feel if you woke up tomorrow and $75,000 or more was missing from your business bank account?

“When consumers lose money due to cyber fraud, retail banks are required by law to refund the money — provided the victim doesn’t wait too long in reporting the unauthorized charges. Commercial banks, however, are under no such obligation, although they usually will work with the victim customer to try to reverse as many of the fraudulent transfers as possible.” — Via Krebs On Security.

So, what can you do about it?

#1 Exclusively do your internet banking on a locked down machine, preferably running off of a recent Linux boot disk. Download Ubuntu, burn it to a CD, and boot from that.

#2 Get a Cybersecurity insurance policy.

#3 Stay the fuck away from small community banks. From what I’ve seen the big boys generally have more robust security policies (which still may not help if you or your secretary’s computer is full of trojans.)

I checked out the iPad at the Apple store for 15 minutes and was not impressed. Was it really more than a giant iPhone?

Then my birthday came along and my business partner bought me one. I’ve been using it or a good month now and have found it indispensable. The iPad is a multiple use device that kills a bunch of birds with one stone.

Who cares about a tablet PC when the iPad can control all of your desktops?

Over the past several years I have gone through a handful of mobile computing devices. There was the Fujitsu U810 which looked so unique I had to get one (screen and keyboard too small to use more than 15 minutes.) Later on I got the Macbook Air with an SSD which was thoroughly usable but went in the closet when I downsized from a 15 pound Alienware to a more modest Asus laptop.

What I think most people are missing about the iPad is its ability to remotely connect to just about any internet connected PC or Mac. Leave your laptop or desktop running 24/7 and remote to it in an instant to pull up a file or check something else out.

You can use LogMeIn Ignition ($30 one time app fee) or any of the numerous apps that use your desktop OS’s native remote connection feature. Try iTap RDP remotely connected to a Windows machine running at 1024×768 resolution (the iPad’s native res) and it will look like you have a PC in your hands.

My 3G iPad’s remoting capabilities have boosted my mobility even more than the almost instant-on Macbook Air SSD. Now I really have an always on internet device (other than on flights I never turn it off.)

The iPad’s ebook capabilities seem adequate to me. I’m about 500 pages in to a 1000 page book. Because Amazon has a Kindle app for the iPad I didn’t have to repurchase any books.

My expectation is that by gen 3 the iPad is going to be a must have device. Competition should start to show up from Google Chrome/Android making things real interesting.
Don’t bother waiting for a Windows tablet unless you are waiting to be disappointed.

So is the iPad most than a giant iPhone? Not really. What it does have is a bigger screen that won’t make you go blind. If you don’t have a iPhone or iPod, especially if you’ve never had one, the iPad is a must. Just make sure you can budget a few hundred more $ for the apps in order to fully push its potential.

As for web business owners, never before have you been so close to being able to lay out on a beach and do business (Apple just needs to make a bright sun friendly screen.)

As a percentage of all advertising revenue in the United States, newspapers have been steadily shrinking for the past 50 years. It was only recently that things tipped to the point where newspapers were losing money instead of turning a profit.

An old hierarchy wants the newspaper industry to survive. Whether from personal business interests, nostalgia, or an inability to use the internet, there is a subset of individuals who want things to stay the same. In fact, the FTC is holding preliminary discussions on how to put the industry in to cryostasis.

The web has been the best thing to happen to investigative journalism. While critics regularly claim that bloggers just regurgitate and repost articles from traditional news organizations it is bloggers and web publishers who regularly have their stories jacked without any citation or credit. No longer are stories “sat on” by editors for weeks or months, stories are released instantly for people to make up their own minds about.

Here are some of the “considerations” the FTC is currently looking at:
- Restricting news aggregators. Good bye, Google News.
- Preventing others from republishing facts from a news story until after an extended amount of time. Good bye, live search results from Twitter.
- Limiting copyright fair use. Good bye Google Image Search (FTC specifically notes the Perfect 10 case.)
- Surcharges added on to all monthly ISP bills.
- Exempting news organizations from anti trust laws. Hey, if we all block Google in robots.txt then no one will go there when they want news, right?
- Government subsidies.
- Tax breaks.

In the FTC’s defense, they give pretty strong counterpoints to everything but additional government subsidies & tax breaks. Whats scary is that someone at a government regulatory agency which is supposed to protect consumers would take any of these ideas more seriously than cracking down on abductions by aliens in flying saucers.

Can someone tell me whats wrong with this:

URL: http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/05/07/wikipedia-purges-porn/

Final paragraph of Article: “Still, as of Friday afternoon, dozens of categories of explicit sexual images remained on Wikimedia with no indication that they had been marked for deletion.”

If you are a blogger, please re-post this story from SecondShares.

“The second thing the Dodd Bill proposes is to eliminate the existing federal pre-emption over state regulation of “accredited offerings.” This means that venture and angel financings would be regulated state by state, creating a ton of rules and regulations that each financing would need to be subject to. Each financing would require startups to register with the SEC, which could take up to 120 days to review the filing. This may in itself kill most angel investments, since angels like to react quickly to the market, and most technology investments are clearly time sensitive.”

http://www.secondshares.com/2010/04/27/how-the-dodd-bill-may-impact-the-secondary-market/

Who the hell writes these bills? Wasn’t the whole point of finance reform to stop banks from being reckless?

I might be wrong, may be this SF Post article is inadequately describing what actually happened — “The men created computer programs that bombarded online ticket vendors including Ticketmaster.com and purchased tickets automatically by impersonating individual visitors, investigators said.”

The result? “Stevenson, along with Kenneth Lowson, 40, Kristofer Kirsch, 37, and Faisal Nahdi, 36, all of Los Angeles, were charged with wire fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud and unauthorized computer access.”

Problems with your forum, blog, or e-commerce website being spammed by impersonated users for commercial means? The FBI is on your side.

Wow. This guy didn’t even do it, he sold software that did it.

“On Tuesday, US Federal authorities filed criminal charges against Christopher Kennedy, a developer of cookie stuffing software. While the developer claims to have never engaged in cookie stuffing for his own benefit, he is being charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud. These charges carry a maximum fine of $250K and 5 years in prison. ”

Does this mean that affiliate networks who tweak pixels to fire only 90% of the time, scrub conversions, or under report sales conversions to their affiliates are committing wire fraud?

Its no secret that this is an industry standard — not an exception. Just sign up for an affiliate network back end and learn all about how affiliate fraud is facilitated.

Great post by Aaron Wall over at digitalbookworld.

It is very rare that someone gives out detailed sales and revenue numbers about their online business. When I see these types of posts I bookmark them or even save them to my hard drive (they have a tendency to disappear.)

SEOBook’s forum is definitely one of the few webmaster boards around which I would describe as healthy.