Business: May 2006 Archives

Just posted this on the company blog

The Irish Internet Association's annual Congress is on next week in the Fitzpatrick Hotel in Killiney. I'll be there all day, so if anyone feels like saying "hi" you'll know where to find me

The Irish domain registry (IEDR) has released details of its finances The press release and report contains some amusing very amusing comments from the IEDR management, but this one really takes the biscuit:

Its offering of a “managed” domain, where, unlike other domain names, entitlement to the .ie name is established and cybersquatting is eliminated, is unique in the current market.

This is echoed again by Curtin:

We are justifiably proud that there is virtually no cybersquatting in the .ie namespace because registrants must authenticate their claim to the domain before registration is completed.

So there is no trademark infringement or cybersquatting in the IE namespace? Watch out for the low flying pigs! I wish they would make up their minds about their stance on trademarks. Either they police them or they don't. The current situation is farcical, with globally recognised brand names being registered to 3rd parties, while genuine agents are expected to jump through hoops.. Curtin's introduction to the report is a little too optimistic:

Through initiatives such as price reductions, the introduction of process automation and other customer service improvements, we have continued to achieve our objectives of making the IEDR better, faster, cheaper and more secure than ever before.

Who is actually passing on the price reductions? From what I've seen the vast majority of Irish hosting companies and domain vendors have not passed on any saving to their clients. They may try to justify this by giving greater discounts to their resellers, but surely the end user should benefit? Further on in the report he suggests that the pricing and automation contribute to the growth:

The growth can be attributed to economic buoyancy, the rollout of broadband, price reductions and IEDR operational improvements which make registration easier, faster and cheaper

Some would have us believe their press releases, but the actual pricing tells a different story. Headline grabbing may be good for raising your profile in the short term, but hypocrisy doesn't pay in the longer term............. Some of the other comments are quite worrying:

It is no coincidence therefore that in the .ie namespace, there are fewer intellectual property disputes over domains, less cybercrime on .ie websites, less incidence of credit card fraud on .ie websites, and very little evidence of illegal, explicit or immoral content appearing on .ie websites

The intellectual property disputes are bound to be fewer as the TLD is so small. More .co.uk domains were registered in April this year than the entire size of IE namespace. The part that concerns me is the reference to "immoral" content. What exactly constitutes immoral? Why shouldn't there be explicit content on .ie websites? Are the IEDR trying to do an ICANN on the IE namespace??

I mentioned MSN adcenter a while back when Microsoft did a "soft launch". At the time I had IE7 beta installed on my windows desktop and found that I couldn't access the signup page. I've since dumped IE7 due to issues with various online services and so I decided to have a look at what all the fuss was about. Signing up costs a one-time activation fee of 5 euro. The signup process is quite painless, though a bit contradictory, as it states that your email address has to be validated, but then does not actually do anything to verify it... The interface is very clean and has nicely tabbed menus: Of course the section I'm most interested in is setting up an actual ad, so as a seasoned adwords user I was pleasantly surprised. They've basically taken all of the positive aspects of Google's adwords and removed all the crud. It's nice and easy and comes with some very interesting options. You can actually choose the time of the day to display your ad - and naturally you can set your timezone. The use of AJAX and other web 2.0 tricks makes for a lot less clicking which can only be a good thing. When you go to actually associate keywords with your ad the real power of the technology is unleashed: And what makes it all the more interesting is that you can extract keywords and phrases from a website in real time (check your logs for the UserAgent "MSNPTC/1.0" ) The other research tools look like they could have a lot of potential, but at present there seem to be some restrictions and bugs with the system (for some odd reason the only languages support are English US, English Singapore and French France). Of course, as luck would have it, the site threw a lovely error while I was writing this, so I'll have to wait until tomorrow to explore it further.

Any regular reader of blogs has probably got used to seeing ads of some kind on most of them.. In many cases the blogger in question uses the ad revenue to finance the hosting or to supplement their income. In other cases blogging is how they actually make their living. Darren Rowse has a nice post today about how Seth Godin makes oodles of cash without running adverts ie. he makes his money from consultancy and other "gigs" that he gets asked to do based on his profile as a blogger and author (though it is debatable which he is better known for). The "indirect" effect can be quite hard to gauge, but it is definitely there.. Over the past few months I have been contacted by journalists from several international publications based on posts that I made to this blog. And of course I have been able to reap the rewards indirectly in my main business... There's a lot to be said for the "indirect effect".. though I won't be able to get away with demanding the fees that Seth does just yet!

Text Link Ads are currently offering $100 of free advertising on all orders over $125. It's a really nice way to test the system out without exposing yourself too heavily ie. you could easily get 5 or 6 link ads for $125 - $160, so you'd only end up spending the non-free value.. looking at the PR on some of the sites on the network it's a very attractive proposition, as most of them have a PR of between 4 and 6

Once upon a time, not so long ago, Amazon UKwas a cool place to shop. For some really odd reason they've changed their terms of service regarding deliveries.

PC & Video Games, Toys & Games and Gift items * Amazon.co.uk: United Kingdom (England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales) only.

while for electronics:

Electronics & Photo and Home & Garden items * Amazon.co.uk and Marketplace: United Kingdom (England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales) only.

I would really love to know why. It's not due to pricing, exchange rates or anything like that, as Dabs will ship to Ireland, as will play.com. What this means is that I can still buy stuff from Amazon US or one of Amazon's many competitors, but I can't buy from the UK store anymore. When you consider that they have only recently announced their intended expansion into Ireland, with the opening of some form of call centre in Cork, it all seems really quite odd. If anyone has an inside track on this I would love to know........

I'm scheduled to give a talk at the ICT Expo this Friday afternoon on "Linux and some of its friends in the enterprise " So what should I be talking about? Of course I have some ideas already formulated, but what kind of images / ideas spring to mind when someone mentions OSS and business? Are we talking about desktops? Servers? Mail? Web? Replacements for proprietary software? Any thoughts welcome