Business

The Ghost of Michael Arrington Past

There's some fun stuff in TechCrunch publisher Michael Arrington's old personal blog, which he published for eight months in 2005 before becoming the Ron Popeil of Web 2.0. A Nov. 12, 2005, entry in which he raises a little capital: Selling my copy of The Search by John Battelle. $10 obo. An Aug. 1, 2005, post declaring that he has deleted his PayPal account and would no longer be selling items on EBay: I broke up with PayPal today, using their handy 12-step account termination procedure. I ... (read more)

2007/08/13

Jerome Armstrong Settles SEC Stock-Tout Suit

I filed a story this morning on Watching the Watchers about blogger Jerome Armstrong settling his stock-tout suit with the SEC: Influential liberal blogger Jerome Armstrong, the founder of MyDD and an originator of the netroots movement, has agreed to pay $29,000 in fines and penalties to settle a 2003 SEC suit accusing him of touting a stock on Internet message boards without disclosing his financial interest in the company. Some of my fellow liberals threw me under the bus for digging into ... (read more)

2007/08/09

Google Works in Mysterious Ways

When things are slow on Workbench, activity on this weblog falls to the five subjects of enduring interest to visitors who make comments: Whether lottery winners should be able to hide their identities Whether Best Buy sucks Whether Target sucks Whether Art Bell sucks Whether Orlando Bloom dates outside his race On the first subject, people who support secrecy for lottery winners will enjoy a story from Canada this morning: A guy was caught planning to kidnap, rob and murder a couple who won ... (read more)

2007/06/20

Marc Andreesen: 'Web 2.0' is an Empty Buzzword

Netscape founder Marc Andreesen, an investor in startups such as Meebo, thinks "Web 2.0" has become a meaningless term that makes dumb investors bankroll dumb companies: As a result of the widespread adoption of language like "Web 2.0 companies" and the "Web 2.0 space" -- and startups referring to themselves as such, most of which will fail -- you get a predictably cynical backlash from people who then dismiss the whole category as trendy marketing hype full of me-too wannabes and in the ... (read more)

2007/06/05

Most People are Above Average

There's some interesting math in a commentary by Hal Becker, a motivational speaker and salesman who sounds like the Xerox Corporation's Bill Brasky: Here's a scary statistic: There are approximately 14 million salespeople in the U.S. today, and studies show that 98 percent are average or below. ... (read more)

2007/05/17

NBC Buys RSS-to-Email Service R-Mail

The largest email-based RSS service was sold to NBC Universal this week, an event that's curiously absent from the tech press. Randy Charles Morin's R-Mail was purchased by the entertainment network for an undisclosed amount. The service has 50,000 users, 100,000 subscriptions and sends out more than 50,000 e-mails per day, according to DMW Daily, though I suspect a zero's missing from the last figure. When I wrote about R-Mail last August, it had 20,000 users. R-Mail makes it possible to ... (read more)

2007/04/27

Toronto Star: Only 100 Blogs Make Money

A story on the business side of blogging in today's Toronto Star makes a wildly inaccurate claim -- only the top 100 blogs make money. Many blogs do make money but a vast majority of them don't, according to Derek Gordon, vice-president of marketing for Technorati, a San Francisco-based Internet search engine for blogs. The site tracks about 65 million blogs. It also ranks them. "Typically, the top 100 blogs do some form of monetization," says Gordon. There's money being made in blogging beyond ... (read more)

2007/02/26

Domain Owner Keeps Pig.Com in UDRP Dispute

In a UDRP dispute decided Monday, the New Pig Corporation failed to take away the generic domain name pig.com after previously trying to buy it for $21,000. I'm hoping that the National Arbitration Forum decision bodes well for my own generic use of Wargames.Com. New Pig owns a Pig trademark registered in 1987 for industrial absorbents used to clean oil spills. The decision sheds some light on the money involved in parked pay-per-click search domains like the one currently at pig.com. Domain ... (read more)

2007/02/01

Dell: Master of 4,264 Domain Names

Nathan J. Hole, the Loeb & Loeb attorney representing MGM in the effort to grab Wargames.Com, has won four more UDRP arbitrations the past eight weeks: Dell Inc. v. Gail Wright for the domains dellcart.com and dellpccart.com The National Collegiate Athletic Association v. Namia Limited for the domain frozenfour.com Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. v. fslc wf-b for the domain thepinkpanther.com Dell Inc. v. Oguz Ozdemir for the domain dellpc.net In all four cases, domain owners didn't file a ... (read more)

2007/01/30

UDRP Response Filed to Save Wargames.Com

My attorney Wade Duchene has filed our response to the Uniform Domain-Name Dispute Resolution (UDRP) complaint made by MGM Studios over Wargames.Com. We're getting closer to the day where a panel of three arbitrators decides whether to give the domain to MGM, which owns a trademark registered in 2003 for the 1983 film WarGames. UDRP arbitration is an increasingly popular tool for intellectual property lawyers trying to acquire domains for clients, as MGM's firm is attempting here. If they lose, ... (read more)

2007/01/11

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