Forbes sent me a free Cue Cat, which I immediately trashed because IT DOESN'T SUPPORT MACINTOSH.
Haven't those Dilberts ever heard of USB? Sheesh!
Now, what would be cool is a hack that upgrades my Mac Optical Pro Mouse (or Microsoft Intellimouse) so that it can use the little camera as a barcode scanner as well. More convenient, too, because it would mean one less thing hanging off the laptop.
In the meantime, I think I'll fish the cat out of the trash -- and feed it to my AIBO.
If you're accepting credit cards online, you basically have 3 options:
1) traditional merchant account (about $30 a month) + lower discount (% of each charge, usually 1.5%-3%) + per-charge flat fee ($.25 to.35).
All the major players have decent methods for integrating their system into your site, everything from hosting the whole shopping cart to various flavors of "your cgi page calls our cgi page, we do the transaction, we redirect back to some cgi of yours with the results". The hackery involved is trivial.
After having problems with one provider who had an annoying habit of randomly double-charging customers, I settled on Anacom and they've been flawless. They've also been around a while.
Option 2 - charge without a Merchant Account. You pay about 1% more on the discount, but unless you're doing $3000 a month in sales or more, you still come out ahead. ProPay seems to be the leader here, but I have no personal experience with them [some of my SelfPromotion.com users have recommended them, though.
3) Indirect, using a web-bank service like PayPal, which just announced a business service. The rates seem a little better if memory serves, but the downside is that people have to be paypal users to use it. My advice is that you should offer PayPal as an OPTION along with (1) or (2) above.
For some time, I've been considering creating a site that had an open invitation for cracking attempts, and offered prizes to those who (a) managed to get in and (b) documented their exploit and provided the information needed to seal the hole. Just haven't had the time to get around to it, alas (blame the wife and kids, they chew up altogether too much prime hacking time!) The true hacker ethic, as I learned it back in the dark ages, is that hackers BUILD; never destroy. Thus, a true hacker, assuming he is bored and has absolutely nothing better to do than break into other people's computers, documents the exploit, scrupulously avoids any damage or interference with the target, and informs them of not only the vulnerability but also the solution. It's far more emotionally gratifying. Teaching ethical behavior to the younger generation is an obligation those of us old enough to remember when "hacker" was a badge of honor ought to take very seriously.
I'd point out that you haven't given people enough information to give you a valuation. The amount the site grosses is besides the point -- what's the profit after all expenses, including those of your time to maintain the site?
If you are spending a couple hours a day running the site, selling the ads, etc, then grossing $20K a year means you are probably losing money. It depends on how much your time is worth.
May I humbly suggest you contact Andy Greenberg (mailto:agree@carltonfields.com). Andy is a really good IP lawyer, and a very, very good computer programmer. Way back when, he and I wrote "Wizardry" together.
So he can not only find the bugs in your patent application, but also the bugs in your code.
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Forbes sent me a free Cue Cat, which I immediately trashed because IT DOESN'T SUPPORT MACINTOSH.
Haven't those Dilberts ever heard of USB? Sheesh!
Now, what would be cool is a hack that upgrades my Mac Optical Pro Mouse (or Microsoft Intellimouse) so that it can use the little camera as a barcode scanner as well. More convenient, too, because it would mean one less thing hanging off the laptop.
In the meantime, I think I'll fish the cat out of the trash -- and feed it to my AIBO.
Robert "Grumpy? Damn right!" Woodhead
1) traditional merchant account (about $30 a month) + lower discount (% of each charge, usually 1.5%-3%) + per-charge flat fee ($.25 to .35).
All the major players have decent methods for integrating their system into your site, everything from hosting the whole shopping cart to various flavors of "your cgi page calls our cgi page, we do the transaction, we redirect back to some cgi of yours with the results". The hackery involved is trivial.
After having problems with one provider who had an annoying habit of randomly double-charging customers, I settled on Anacom and they've been flawless. They've also been around a while.
Option 2 - charge without a Merchant Account. You pay about 1% more on the discount, but unless you're doing $3000 a month in sales or more, you still come out ahead. ProPay seems to be the leader here, but I have no personal experience with them [some of my SelfPromotion.com users have recommended them, though.
3) Indirect, using a web-bank service like PayPal, which just announced a business service. The rates seem a little better if memory serves, but the downside is that people have to be paypal users to use it. My advice is that you should offer PayPal as an OPTION along with (1) or (2) above.
Best,R
For some time, I've been considering creating a site that had an open invitation for cracking attempts, and offered prizes to those who (a) managed to get in and (b) documented their exploit and provided the information needed to seal the hole. Just haven't had the time to get around to it, alas (blame the wife and kids, they chew up altogether too much prime hacking time!) The true hacker ethic, as I learned it back in the dark ages, is that hackers BUILD; never destroy. Thus, a true hacker, assuming he is bored and has absolutely nothing better to do than break into other people's computers, documents the exploit, scrupulously avoids any damage or interference with the target, and informs them of not only the vulnerability but also the solution. It's far more emotionally gratifying. Teaching ethical behavior to the younger generation is an obligation those of us old enough to remember when "hacker" was a badge of honor ought to take very seriously.
I'd point out that you haven't given people enough information to give you a valuation. The amount the site grosses is besides the point -- what's the profit after all expenses, including those of your time to maintain the site?
If you are spending a couple hours a day running the site, selling the ads, etc, then grossing $20K a year means you are probably losing money. It depends on how much your time is worth.
May I humbly suggest you contact Andy Greenberg (mailto:agree@carltonfields.com). Andy is a really good IP lawyer, and a very, very good computer programmer. Way back when, he and I wrote "Wizardry" together.
So he can not only find the bugs in your patent application, but also the bugs in your code.
best,R