Business: August 2005 Archives

We're currently seeking applicants for a technical support/ sysadmin role. Full details here

I am always amazed at the number of "e-commerce" sites that forget the basics. What are the basics?

Brody Sweeney's Making Bread: The Real Way to Start Up and Stay Up in Business is a fantastic read for anybody either thinking of starting a business or who already runs one. Running a business is not easy. Anybody who tells you otherwise is probably lying. Sweeney knows this and is not afraid to share some of the problems he faced along the road to success. He offers insight into how you can cope with issues and overcome them and make your business stronger. It's not a "how to" book or a textbook, but more a collection of ideas and reflections based on his own experiences with O'Briens and elsewhere.

There are a number of technologies currently being developed to help combat spam, phishing fraud and other email related abuse. One which has received a considerable amount of attention in recent months is SPF. Another, which may not have attracted quite as much attention, is Yahoo's domain keys. In both instances the technology is designed to help verify who is authorised to send mail from a particular server, hostname or IP address. The problem, if you aren't a diehard geek, is actually identifying potential fraud in your email client. Server-side (at the MTA level) implementation comes in a number of forms, but at the client level (desktop) the number of email clients that actually check for valid SPF records (or domain keys) is thin on the ground. For Thunderbird you can install Joshua Tauberer's handy little extension which checks both SPF and Yahoo Domain Keys I'd love to hear of other email clients that support these kind of checks.

I've always been fascinated by spammers. They send millions of emails out in the hope that enough people will be duped into clicking on the link and visiting whichever site they are promoting or buying into whichever service they are selling. The phishing emails vary in their complexity, but you would have thought that the majority of people would have learnt to be more cautious by now. Unfortunately that is not always the case. I still see people offering to send me their credit card details via email. We still see credit card fraud. We sometimes see paypal fraud. How much money the fraudsters are making and how many scams are committed is hard to say, especially as people are unlikely to notice or report small amounts (scam a few thousand people for a euro - it's a lot of money, but I doubt if the victims would notice it immediately) In the last month I've seen the usual number of credit card scammers, with the hapless victims contacting us in some cases looking for more information. Apart from an IP address (belonging to a major ISP) there isn't that much information that you can provide.

Some people's efforts at SEO are simply annoying. Spamming people after grabbing email addresses using some badly written bit of software is not the way to win friends online. Unfortunately some people obviously missed that message:

Hi, I took a look at your site a couple of hours ago... and I want to tell you that I'd really love to trade links with you. I think your site has some really good stuff related to my site's topic of car rental and would be a great resource for my visitors as it deals with some great aspects of car rental that I'd like to give my visitors more information about. In fact, I went ahead and added your site to my Car Rentals i Resource Directory at http://xxxxxx.com/carrentalsinireland Is that OK with you? Can I ask a favor? Will you give me a link back on your site? I'd really appreciate you returning the favor. Thanks and feel free to drop me an email if you'd like to chat more about this. Best wishes, XXXX xxxxx.com info@xxxxx.com P.S. When you do link back, there's some suggested code to use at http://xxxxxx.com/addurl //

(Links removed to stop them gaining from this post) Would somebody please explain what the connection between car rentals and hosting is? I can't see it. Any suggestions would be welcome. I am tempted to reply along the lines of: "Dear Muppet If you'd actually visited our site I would have to question your sanity. Love Michele"

The issue of data retention in Europe has been raising its ugly head with increasing frequency over the last 12 months.

Eurid's clarification on resellers came as a shock to many in the industry, but nobody seems overly concerned.

Tom follows up on Damien and I on his blog

Not so long ago I mentioned my experiences with 3 and also mentioned Tom's suggestion of them setting up a blog

Damien has an interesting post about how you can get bloggers to mention your products or services.

Remember the dot com boom? All you had to do was get a domain and you were guaranteed to make a million... or so they had all believe

Quantifying the size of the hosting business, be it on a national, European or international scale, is something that fascinates people in the business and its observers.

I mentioned recently that the Netvisionaries had been launched officially. It transpires that the Golden Spiders intend to run their "awards" on the same evening. Although I would like to think that the Irish 'net industry is vibrant I would be either naive or foolish to think that you could run two award ceremonies on the same night. Then again the Golden Spiders aren't exactly in the same league as the IIA awards. Whereas the IIA awards are open, transparent and democratic you would have to be forgiven for thinking that the Golden Spiders were some kind of dinosaur that the great freeze forgot. I already posted last year on the merits, or lack thereof, associated with some of these awards. However, whether they hold any merit or not, how can they possibly gain from running their award ceremony on the same night as the Netvisionary ones? Take it from a pure business perspective. Both awards rely on their sponsors to make the event viable. Last year the Golden Spiders were unable to find sponsors for all award categories until shortly before the event. The Net Visionaries, on the other hand, had already secured sponsors for most of the categories prior to the press launch. In terms of quality, which is quite subjective in some areas, the entrants in the two awards last year were at two different extremes of the quality spectrum. NetVisionaries awarded innovative entrepeneurs such as Aodhan Cullen who runs Statcounter, which is probably the most popular free stat service on the web at present. The fact that it is actually Irish owned and run is probably ignored by a lot of its users, but it is and should be lauded by the Irish 'net community. So who stands to gain from this kind of move?