When distribution can kill

Threadwatch covered a story, where a manufacturer of healthcare products expressly forbid it’s distributors from selling the products online.
The initial response is one of disbelief.
After all, the internet is the world’s largest marketplace. How could it possibly make business sense to disallow such a powerful distribution channel?
And there lies the rub - powerful […]

China - closed for business?

If you don’t know Shak, a brief introduction - he’s one of the ecommerce pioneers of the internet with a killer reputation for making killings online.
He’s currently in China, investigating business opportunities - and unless he’s playing bluff, has declared that the internet is closed for business in China.
Of course, he’s dealing with generalisations for […]

Kawasaki on panels

Guy Kawasaki makes a few interesting points about getting the most from speaking on a panel:

Know the subject.
Control your introduction.
Speak up.
Entertain, don’t just inform.
Tell the truth, especially when the truth is obvious.
Answer the question that’s posed, but never limit yourself to the question that’s posed.
Be plain, simple, and short.
Never look […]

A Day in the Life of a SEO

It periodically comes up in forums where someone asks what the daily life of a SEO is like.
As the director of a small limited liability company in the UK, I thought I’d record my own day today, simply out of interest:
08:30

Wake up - damn, slept in. Didn’t get to bed until 01:30, and then a […]

Blogs vs forums

Let’s cut to the chase - blogs as a community medium are over-rated - if it’s community you want to see online, no blog can match the massive readership influence that online forums have.
If blogs are like newspaper columns, then forums are entire newspapers unto themselves.
Even “A-list” bloggers such as John Battelle, Jeremy Zawodny, Robert […]

Shoemoney

There are a lot of big names out there who have proven themselves over the years on the internet as people who know how to do business.
A number of “names” in SEO are listed in my blog roll, to the right - they’re people really worth listening to because they really do know what […]

Fortune 500 blogs

An interesting list of Fortune 500 company blogs are posted here: Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki
.
Interesting to see the companies that have embraced blogging - Amazon, Boeing, Dell, Time Warner, Ford, etc.

Indian spammers

SEO is a business with a poor reputation - but the Indian sub-continent is an entire geographic region with a poor business reputation.
We discussed this issue before in the Platinax forums: Business India.
Although I have limited, but equally good and bad, experiences of outsourcing work to Indian developers, I’m generally appalled at the rank amateur […]

Filing a DMCA

DMCA
It doesn’t seem all that long ago that I was faced an apparent DMCA issue with Yahoo!.
That was prompted after Yahoo! search support repeatedly claimed Platinax had been issueed with a DMCA, and therefore entirely delisted from Yahoo!.
Today I’m on the other side of the fence. Today I filed a DMCA against another company.
In […]

Bizal Group Lead Generation Event

Today I attended a Lead Generation Event hosted by the Bizal Group, which brought together a group of companies with a strong emphasis on generating sales and increasing turnover, in front of a business audience willing to listen.
It’s the first time these companies had tried this together, and mixed together informational presentations with self-promotion […]

Google print fails to honour writers rights

The Google Print project is under threat, as the Author’s Guild sues Google for treating copryright protection as an opt-in process, rather than automatic right.
Google makes a point on the Google blog that they only display a snippet of the author’s work and therefore claim fair use.
There can be few more naive comments. You would […]

Privacy and respect in search marketing

So I asked RCJordan what he worked in…
He told me that at the first SEO Roadshow, everyone who turned up was told to be private about work, and not to reveal anything about their areas of business to one another.
After a while a group of SEO’s were all seated around a big table, when RCJordan’s […]

Useful business & marketing links: August 2005

I’ve been covering so many interesting business and marketing sites over the past couple of weeks that if I leave them only in my favourites folder, I’ll simply forget about them.
A few of the interest sites/pages I’ve encountered recently I’ll list below:
Shak does blogging
Shak has started his own blog.
Shak is a frontiersmen on the […]

Keeping accounts to date and falling for the VAT trap

When you start up a business, you have to do everything to set up the foundations right.
I should guess that most people who have launched themselves into the financial uncertainties of self-employment and desperately want to succeed, will therefore have spent at least their first year doing everything they can to set up secure […]

BT internet problems

When you pay for business services, you expect a certain level of professionalism, respect, and competence from your business service provider. In my experience so far, BT business broadband services completely fail on every count.
I mentioned before that I was having problems with BT Business Broadband services - after they set up an incorrect billing […]

BT Business Broadband: appalling service

I’m currently enjoying an appalling experience with BT Business Broadband services.
The call center departments that are provided to support business customers not only supply conflicting information when faced with problems, but are additionally incapable of addressing problems actually raised with them.
When I recently moved to Scotland, I moved to a newly-built property which had no […]

Israeli companies infect one another with spyware

Industrial espionage has taken on a whole new meaning - at least, according to a report at Viruslist: Trojan tripped in Operation Horse Race:

Tel Aviv police arrested a number of executives from some of the leading companies in Israel. Eight senior executives and eleven private investigators are being held; it’s alleged that they planted a […]

News roundup 1

Economy
The big news during the week was the rejection of the EU constitution by French voters, closely followed by the Dutch rejection of the same treaty. This has led to the UK delaying the implementation of their own referendum on the topic.
The Euro fell both before and after the poll results were known, in a […]

Pointers on moving an internet business home from home

Moving to Scotland had been an idea for a while, but when the actual move came it was all done at very short notice. And I put my business at risk through improper planning of it.
We had been renting in Hull, and looking to rent in Scotland while we looked for that final property we’d […]

Happy Employees vs Unhappy Employees

So get a load of this transcript: Work Relationships Matter
The short of it: Microsoft employee John Porcaro has to spend a period in hospital, after suffering third degree burns. He ends up in a shared room.
At one point, a nine-year old boy with a cracked head is in the other bed - knocked from his […]