Woody’s One Way

Originally uploaded by Bob.Fornal.

The die has been cast, many strokes have fallen on the keyboard and the moment of truth is here. I’m abandoning ship here and moving to my own domain at Fatalerror.

It has been wonderful being here at WordPress.com, but I needed more bells and whistles (including advertisements) than what the set up would allow me to.

So long Automattic, and thanks for all the good times!

It is weird to see PHP being run on IIS servers these days and it immediately gets my ears up regarding what’s going on. It is now the turn of Indiatimes to do the same, running PHP on IIS to support their new hosted CRM initiative, called Indiatimes SalesCRM. To be fair to them, they’ve credited the open source software that they have used to power it, Vtiger, in the ‘about’ page and that’s a refreshing change. I hope more companies do the same thing.

At a discounted rate of Rs 100 per month per user, it is considerably cheaper than the support that Vtiger is offering on its website. I am assuming that Indiatimes is getting into the reselling business than the development business, as it has done with its Meramail initiative, which sits on top of its outsourced email vendor framework. I am not sure about the positioning and pricing of the deal, it is way too cheap to be sustained in the long run. But as it is with Indiatimes, it is always quite difficult to know what they are getting at.

After opening the website I was wondering why in the world did it have two links, ‘Laptops’ and ‘Laptop’ listed on the left navigation when I realised that it actually was someone else squatting on the domain name. How could Lenovo let this go unnoticed?

Technorati Tags: lenovo, thinkpad, cybersquatting

It has been a while, but I have not disappeared. Somwhere along the way, as it can be seen from the Flickr stream, I decided to shut almost everything down and take a much-needed break for a week. I am back now and will resume posting soon.

The Internet Stock Blog today takes a look at the Myspace issues, from the News Corp point of view and jumps in to the debate on page view inflation and the effects of AJAX on inventory available for ad sales teams. The link trail from the post leads to previous posts by Mike Davidson and Jason Calcanis on the subject.

While Mike argues that Myspace can actually benefit from better user experience, even if it results in reduced pageviews, Jason throws the baby, the bathwater and the entire bath house by saying that AJAX is flat out bad for publishers.

I disagree with that contention. You can very comfortably serve ads in AJAX-heavy websites. Of course, you should not fill up all page transformations and triggers with ads. It is possible to do it sensibly, if you create ad areas in your AJAX interfaces and define when they can change or when they can be counted as an impression.

For instance, a new email being read is technically a page refresh. I don’t understand what stops publishers from inserting an ad there, unless there is some imagined standard that you can’t have advertisements on AJAX pages.

“All machines in the office should have Firefox and Flash installed with no bandwidth caps on them.” When your CEO says something like that to the systems guys, you understand even better why you love to work in the company, even if it is primarily a television-based firm.

The Internet Stock Blog on Comparing the Big Three: Google, eBay and Yahoo

All else being equal, we are bullish on companies with accelerating revenue growth (or at least modest deceleration off of a high base), expanding margins, and high rates of free cash flow generation.

Some seven years after having heard the same “all else being equal” rider in any assumptions that are made about economic/financial models during my graduation years, it still gives me that odd ‘er?’ feeling in my mind to hear it all over again. The thing about human (and market) conditions is that all else is never equal, nor do they remain unchanged over time. I can’t believe that we still stick to the same canard even in this age and time.