If you really want to buy a domain off a scummy squatter -- you must have it --
The squatter paid very little for the domain, $10 or so per year. He is also probably making some minimal ad revenue, which you can estimate by digging up page view stats or other similar metrics on the internet. Domain registration sites are particularly helpful in estimating domain traffic and value.
From these, you can construct what you think is his minimum acceptable value, which is low. The value of the domain to you, of course, is much higher. You need to arrive at a number somewhere in between, preferably close to the low end.
Typical negotiating tactics apply. He knows the domain is much more valuable to you. Your goal is to pretend you can't pay much of course to bring the price down. That is, if you would really pay $2000, do not start anywhere near $2000.
I would begin by emailing the owner, asking simply if he might be interested in selling the domain? He'll write back with some ridiculous value, probably ten times what he estimates it might be worth to an interested buyer. Say it's $10,000. Ignore this number. Write back saying, gosh, that's really high! And it's for a personal project, and you might be able to pay a couple hundred dollars. This will not offend the owner; after all, even a couple hundred dollars is a good price for him. He'll write back with a much 'better' offer, as much lower as possible without being comical, like $4,000. Tell him thanks, you thought hard, and can cough up maybe $350 but that's all you can afford. He'll write back with an offer like $1,500.
Then I'd kindly point out that you know the domain is probably earning him about $50 per year at best, and so your offer is really a nice win-win for both of you, and to show you're really interested in doing the deal, you'll offer $400. Tell him you're ready to finish the deal.
At that point the squatter will not walk away from $400 being held out to him -- which is, in reality, a great deal for him, and not so bad, I guess, for you. You paid $400 for what's worth $2000. Don't feel bad, the punk does not deserve the profit anyway.:)... and yes this is about how real negotiations I have been involved in do go down!
It's not "openness" pixie dust, no, that makes the barcode app better on Android v. iPhone. It's a 3MP auto-focus camera and API that actually lets you access the video stream rather than make you wait 8 seconds, such that you can make a usable barcode reader.
The problem with this idea is how long it takes just to transmit the image to a server. Something that size is going to take a couple seconds round-trip. We are decoding 2D barcodes in under a second already on the G1, so, already phones are basically fast enough for this.
One smallish addendum: ShopSavvy does use the zxing library (which I work on) to decode barcodes, and that project is more or less sponsored by Google. But yes it is third-party.
The fixed-focus iPhone camera is a limitation, but in our experience the API is the real problem. You can't, effectively, capture a photo in under about 8 seconds since the only thing you can do is ask the platform for a photo, which forces you to wait while it is written/read from storage. This makes it preeety unusable.
I am from Google and co-operate the "zxing" open-source barcode reader project. (http://code.google.com/p/zxing) Two of us were allowed to devote most of our time for 6 months to this open project, because it made strategic sense for the business.
Why? To be brief, 2D barcodes open up new possibilities for advertising services in print. Our Print Ads business wanted to build services around them. However the market is still developing and while there are some dominant open standards evolving, there are several proprietary formats emerging. We thought it best -- both for the ecosystem but also for our business -- if the open standards won. So we explicitly set out to promote them, and one way of doing that is to release free, open, quality software that uses the open standards.
Contributing to open source can definitely be strategically valuable.
TFA does not say there was a "non-compete" agreement which would be crazy to agree to, since in fact this is easy to duplicate. It talks vaguely of "assurances". The CEO claims their technology was "stolen" but then the article says a competing product was released, not theirs.
Looks like they had the benefit of big-time promotion *for almost a year* before Google had anything else to show. They made quite a bit of money they wouldn't have otherwise I am sorry... sounds like someone was hoping for a payday and is just angry now.
Dude, this post claims Google demoed a phone. Not quite; the linked story merely says the WSJ reports that someone says they did in private. AFAWK this is still rumor. False alarm...
The new vocabulary of HTML 5 is nice. One can argue it's simpler than XHTML 2's equivalents. But, please, why would one want to retain HTML's loose syntax? I don't see why one would want to offer multiple syntaxes; what's so wrong with XML-like well-formedness? Also, HTML 5 shows no consideration of mobile markup (oi, where did accesskey go?) like the XHTML family does (hey, there are two mobile XHTMLs!) We're going to have Yet Another Markup Standard. This idea that XHTML is the product of stuffy irrelevant committees of wonks and HTML 5 is the evolved, lucid way of the future is misguided; it's just the product of a different committee of wonks...
Well, the thing is that an "idea" isn't worth anything by itself; its application in the market is. The internal combustion engine didn't make Ford wealthy; Ford Motor Company did. Ideas are cheap; there are tons of them. Execution on ideas is the important thing.
You might have a great idea, which you you don't have the time or resources to develop. Unless something changes, it's worth $0 to you and the world doesn't benefit from it because it is never implemented.
Google pays you $4500 to compensate you and give you time to develop your idea. Now, your idea is worth $4500 to you at least. The world benefits from it.
I'm not sure what the terms are, but, on the off chance that one of these ideas greatly benefits Google, I'm not sure you've lost anything (unless you were planning to develop the idea yourself). Remember that again Google has spent and will have to spend a lot to develop any idea -- productionizing and maintaining any service costs money. They've invested in developing a good idea and that's paid off.
It's really not as if you had a $1MM check in your head in the form of an idea and they've tricked you into selling it for $4500.
Now on the other hand, if you think it's such a great idea, so much that you think the expected value of trying to develop it on your own is more than $4500, by all means, don't enter it into the Summer of Code!
What did you do to resolve this with Google, I wonder? On the surface, it's not even clear why you don't think this was some faked bot. The story seems to be "Google does something evil for no discernable reason," which ought to give pause. And then over half of your post goes on to pontificate about why Google is "fulfilling your biggest fear" and how Google must be braindead and then complain about nothing in particular about Google and Usenet. Maybe you are actually on to something, but so far it just looks like you're searching for a reason to be ticked.
If MS is going to send lawyers after you, they're going to send lawyers after you. The system I outlined just tries to help the USPTO make better decisions on patents -- and hopefully that means that valid patents are much more robust to legal challenges, while frivolous ones never make it past review.
If Microsoft wants to challenge your patent, the first step is not litigation, but simply the first review by the USPTO. This is just suggesting that the USPTO wait to initially review a patent until someone cares enough to question it. No lawyers.
This system isn't any better than the current one in protecting small companies from big companies' lawyers, if they want to fight, but hopefully it enables the USPTO to spend its limited resources much more wisely, to make better patent decisions in the first place, and when those patents do go to small companies, to make them more robust to challenge since they are better reviewed in the first place.
The hope is that this all goes through the USPTO first, not the courts. Let's say I think your patent is invalid -- we ask the USPTO to review the patent then. The USPTO doesn't bother reviewing your patent until someone cares about it, that's all -- thereby saving the expense of reviewing the 99% of patents that nobody ever looks at again.
Hopefully the USPTO then has more resources to really make good patent decisions about the "important" patents. Plus, under this system, the challenger can present evidence agains the patent's validity, and cheaply.
It's not going to avoid lawsuits entirely -- if the USPTO thinks your patent is valid but I still don't, I can still throw lawyers at you. But hopefully the USPTO decisions will be more informed, and therefore, more easily upheld in litigation, and therefore reduce the amount of litigation over bad patents.
Not a complete solution, but an intriguing proposal I think!
Today in the US, patents are submitted to the USPTO, where they are researched and approved or rejected. If approved, they are presumed valid, unless/until someone else challenges it and requests a review.
The USPTO is overwhelmed and in no position to accurately judge the validity of every one of these patents.
So why try? why bother reviewing them upfront? The USPTO could accept all patent applications, catalog them, make them public, but do not endorse them as valid until proven otherwise.
When patent conflicts arise, as they do today, companies can ask the USPTO to rule on the existing patents. At that time, all parties have a chance to supply relevant evidence to the USPTO about the patent's validity or invalidity.
The plus side is that the USPTO stops pretending it can deal with all this work effectively. It only spends effort on patents that companies think are worth fighting over (and before litigation).
The downside is that companies must publicly submit information about their patentable ideas without a guarantee that they will receive a patent. But, that is a healthy incentive to avoid spurious patents, which is missing today.
I completely agree. Until someone can posit at least a plausible motivation for doing such a thing, one that trumps the huge expense and downside, this is a non-story.
OK, I'll ask the dumb question: why does the headline proclaim that Google is *censoring* these images? Nobody has cited any official Google position against displaying images of this type. As others have suggested, it's possible these images are just not indexed or aren't ranked highly by Google. Nobody has even suggested a plausible, concrete *motive* for censoring -- what does it gain them? This is not a very good headline, at best.
You are mixing up topcoder.com -- programming competitions -- with software.topcoder.com -- design/development competitions.
The results of the programming competition are ugly; no one would want to use it anyway.
The component design/development competitions have a software engineering process around them and take several weeks. Winners are paid for their work, and everyone knows that this is being marketed -- in fact their is a provision for royalties.
As far as I know, TopCoder retains the rights to the winning design and development solutions -- the winners are compensated with an upfront payment and possible royalty payments later. They don't give winners free or discounted access to other components, though these are made available on an as-needed basis if they are being incorporated into a new component's design.
I believe that clients get the source code, and can purchase a license to use it in commercial products.
TopCoder Software is already doing this
on
The Open Code Market
·
· Score: 5, Informative
TopCoder Software has being doing what this article describes for over a year:
http://software.topcoder.com/
In short they are trying to put a structured, process-oriented community development model into a design / development competition format (with cash incentives, both upfront and as royalties) for creating new software. The resulting work is marketed as a component library, and the community itself is marketed as a "no-shore" development resource.
Check it out, it is a pretty good system -- the results are surprisingly good. I regularly participate in these projects.
Just food for thought -- is this really just the online version of "Special Advertising Sections" in magazines and newspapers (advertisements that look like real magazine articles except for a tiny disclaimer)?
These ads are more potent becaues there is no disclaimer (though some sites do point out which areas are for advertising) and seems to be tailored to the user ("*your* computer is messed up!")
Has there ever be a similar suit against a magazine or newspaper?
Also, is there precedent that would indicate that the advertiser (company that made the misleading ad) or the publisher (company running the ad) is responsible? Because here they are going after the latter only, which seems a little odd. Heh, maybe DoubleClick just looks like an easier target than these tiny, shifty advertisers.
No, I very much agree! Right now it's typically the software developer that really holds projects together, in spite of "management". So companies that are now putting thousands of miles between their "managers" and third-party developers are really shooting themselves in the foot; they've really outsourced everything that is important.
I guess what I should say is, if management got its act together and actually created complete, reasonable requirements, etc., then they'd have done most of what developers do today! What would be left would be mostly filling in the blanks... and why do we need teams of people in any location to do this? Surely over time this is increasingly done by tools, or at least by fewer people.
Slashdot Mirror
If you really want to buy a domain off a scummy squatter -- you must have it --
The squatter paid very little for the domain, $10 or so per year. He is also probably making some minimal ad revenue, which you can estimate by digging up page view stats or other similar metrics on the internet. Domain registration sites are particularly helpful in estimating domain traffic and value.
From these, you can construct what you think is his minimum acceptable value, which is low. The value of the domain to you, of course, is much higher. You need to arrive at a number somewhere in between, preferably close to the low end.
Typical negotiating tactics apply. He knows the domain is much more valuable to you. Your goal is to pretend you can't pay much of course to bring the price down. That is, if you would really pay $2000, do not start anywhere near $2000.
I would begin by emailing the owner, asking simply if he might be interested in selling the domain? He'll write back with some ridiculous value, probably ten times what he estimates it might be worth to an interested buyer. Say it's $10,000. Ignore this number. Write back saying, gosh, that's really high! And it's for a personal project, and you might be able to pay a couple hundred dollars. This will not offend the owner; after all, even a couple hundred dollars is a good price for him. He'll write back with a much 'better' offer, as much lower as possible without being comical, like $4,000. Tell him thanks, you thought hard, and can cough up maybe $350 but that's all you can afford. He'll write back with an offer like $1,500.
Then I'd kindly point out that you know the domain is probably earning him about $50 per year at best, and so your offer is really a nice win-win for both of you, and to show you're really interested in doing the deal, you'll offer $400. Tell him you're ready to finish the deal.
At that point the squatter will not walk away from $400 being held out to him -- which is, in reality, a great deal for him, and not so bad, I guess, for you. You paid $400 for what's worth $2000. Don't feel bad, the punk does not deserve the profit anyway. :) ... and yes this is about how real negotiations I have been involved in do go down!
It's not "openness" pixie dust, no, that makes the barcode app better on Android v. iPhone. It's a 3MP auto-focus camera and API that actually lets you access the video stream rather than make you wait 8 seconds, such that you can make a usable barcode reader.
The problem with this idea is how long it takes just to transmit the image to a server. Something that size is going to take a couple seconds round-trip. We are decoding 2D barcodes in under a second already on the G1, so, already phones are basically fast enough for this.
One smallish addendum: ShopSavvy does use the zxing library (which I work on) to decode barcodes, and that project is more or less sponsored by Google. But yes it is third-party.
The fixed-focus iPhone camera is a limitation, but in our experience the API is the real problem. You can't, effectively, capture a photo in under about 8 seconds since the only thing you can do is ask the platform for a photo, which forces you to wait while it is written/read from storage. This makes it preeety unusable.
I'm not sure I would call the G1 decoder "slow":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LkNlTNHZzE
Half-second or so not good enough for you? :)
(I work on the zxing project which powers the ShopSavvy barcode reading)
Pixel count is not the issue, yes. You only need a clear, say, 320x240 shot to decode a 2D barcode.
Focus is a much bigger issue, all the more so for 1D.
The G1 has a solid auto-focus camera (and yes plenty of resolution) which makes 1D scanning quite a snap:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LkNlTNHZzE
I am from Google and co-operate the "zxing" open-source barcode reader project. (http://code.google.com/p/zxing) Two of us were allowed to devote most of our time for 6 months to this open project, because it made strategic sense for the business.
Why? To be brief, 2D barcodes open up new possibilities for advertising services in print. Our Print Ads business wanted to build services around them. However the market is still developing and while there are some dominant open standards evolving, there are several proprietary formats emerging. We thought it best -- both for the ecosystem but also for our business -- if the open standards won. So we explicitly set out to promote them, and one way of doing that is to release free, open, quality software that uses the open standards.
Contributing to open source can definitely be strategically valuable.
TFA does not say there was a "non-compete" agreement which would be crazy to agree to, since in fact this is easy to duplicate. It talks vaguely of "assurances". The CEO claims their technology was "stolen" but then the article says a competing product was released, not theirs.
Looks like they had the benefit of big-time promotion *for almost a year* before Google had anything else to show. They made quite a bit of money they wouldn't have otherwise I am sorry... sounds like someone was hoping for a payday and is just angry now.
Dude, this post claims Google demoed a phone. Not quite; the linked story merely says the WSJ reports that someone says they did in private. AFAWK this is still rumor. False alarm...
The new vocabulary of HTML 5 is nice. One can argue it's simpler than XHTML 2's equivalents. But, please, why would one want to retain HTML's loose syntax? I don't see why one would want to offer multiple syntaxes; what's so wrong with XML-like well-formedness? Also, HTML 5 shows no consideration of mobile markup (oi, where did accesskey go?) like the XHTML family does (hey, there are two mobile XHTMLs!) We're going to have Yet Another Markup Standard. This idea that XHTML is the product of stuffy irrelevant committees of wonks and HTML 5 is the evolved, lucid way of the future is misguided; it's just the product of a different committee of wonks...
Well, the thing is that an "idea" isn't worth anything by itself; its application in the market is. The internal combustion engine didn't make Ford wealthy; Ford Motor Company did. Ideas are cheap; there are tons of them. Execution on ideas is the important thing.
You might have a great idea, which you you don't have the time or resources to develop. Unless something changes, it's worth $0 to you and the world doesn't benefit from it because it is never implemented.
Google pays you $4500 to compensate you and give you time to develop your idea. Now, your idea is worth $4500 to you at least. The world benefits from it.
I'm not sure what the terms are, but, on the off chance that one of these ideas greatly benefits Google, I'm not sure you've lost anything (unless you were planning to develop the idea yourself). Remember that again Google has spent and will have to spend a lot to develop any idea -- productionizing and maintaining any service costs money. They've invested in developing a good idea and that's paid off.
It's really not as if you had a $1MM check in your head in the form of an idea and they've tricked you into selling it for $4500.
Now on the other hand, if you think it's such a great idea, so much that you think the expected value of trying to develop it on your own is more than $4500, by all means, don't enter it into the Summer of Code!
What did you do to resolve this with Google, I wonder? On the surface, it's not even clear why you don't think this was some faked bot. The story seems to be "Google does something evil for no discernable reason," which ought to give pause. And then over half of your post goes on to pontificate about why Google is "fulfilling your biggest fear" and how Google must be braindead and then complain about nothing in particular about Google and Usenet. Maybe you are actually on to something, but so far it just looks like you're searching for a reason to be ticked.
If MS is going to send lawyers after you, they're going to send lawyers after you. The system I outlined just tries to help the USPTO make better decisions on patents -- and hopefully that means that valid patents are much more robust to legal challenges, while frivolous ones never make it past review.
... a more precise analogy might be "neither innocent nor guilty until someone cares enough to press charges"!
If Microsoft wants to challenge your patent, the first step is not litigation, but simply the first review by the USPTO. This is just suggesting that the USPTO wait to initially review a patent until someone cares enough to question it. No lawyers.
This system isn't any better than the current one in protecting small companies from big companies' lawyers, if they want to fight, but hopefully it enables the USPTO to spend its limited resources much more wisely, to make better patent decisions in the first place, and when those patents do go to small companies, to make them more robust to challenge since they are better reviewed in the first place.
The hope is that this all goes through the USPTO first, not the courts. Let's say I think your patent is invalid -- we ask the USPTO to review the patent then. The USPTO doesn't bother reviewing your patent until someone cares about it, that's all -- thereby saving the expense of reviewing the 99% of patents that nobody ever looks at again.
Hopefully the USPTO then has more resources to really make good patent decisions about the "important" patents. Plus, under this system, the challenger can present evidence agains the patent's validity, and cheaply.
It's not going to avoid lawsuits entirely -- if the USPTO thinks your patent is valid but I still don't, I can still throw lawyers at you. But hopefully the USPTO decisions will be more informed, and therefore, more easily upheld in litigation, and therefore reduce the amount of litigation over bad patents.
Not a complete solution, but an intriguing proposal I think!
I'm not the first to propose this idea, but...
Today in the US, patents are submitted to the USPTO, where they are researched and approved or rejected. If approved, they are presumed valid, unless/until someone else challenges it and requests a review.
The USPTO is overwhelmed and in no position to accurately judge the validity of every one of these patents.
So why try? why bother reviewing them upfront? The USPTO could accept all patent applications, catalog them, make them public, but do not endorse them as valid until proven otherwise.
When patent conflicts arise, as they do today, companies can ask the USPTO to rule on the existing patents. At that time, all parties have a chance to supply relevant evidence to the USPTO about the patent's validity or invalidity.
The plus side is that the USPTO stops pretending it can deal with all this work effectively. It only spends effort on patents that companies think are worth fighting over (and before litigation).
The downside is that companies must publicly submit information about their patentable ideas without a guarantee that they will receive a patent. But, that is a healthy incentive to avoid spurious patents, which is missing today.
What do you guys think?
I completely agree. Until someone can posit at least a plausible motivation for doing such a thing, one that trumps the huge expense and downside, this is a non-story.
OK, I'll ask the dumb question: why does the headline proclaim that Google is *censoring* these images? Nobody has cited any official Google position against displaying images of this type. As others have suggested, it's possible these images are just not indexed or aren't ranked highly by Google. Nobody has even suggested a plausible, concrete *motive* for censoring -- what does it gain them? This is not a very good headline, at best.
You are mixing up topcoder.com -- programming competitions -- with software.topcoder.com -- design/development competitions.
The results of the programming competition are ugly; no one would want to use it anyway.
The component design/development competitions have a software engineering process around them and take several weeks. Winners are paid for their work, and everyone knows that this is being marketed -- in fact their is a provision for royalties.
As far as I know, TopCoder retains the rights to the winning design and development solutions -- the winners are compensated with an upfront payment and possible royalty payments later. They don't give winners free or discounted access to other components, though these are made available on an as-needed basis if they are being incorporated into a new component's design.
I believe that clients get the source code, and can purchase a license to use it in commercial products.
TopCoder Software has being doing what this article describes for over a year:
http://software.topcoder.com/
In short they are trying to put a structured, process-oriented community development model into a design / development competition format (with cash incentives, both upfront and as royalties) for creating new software. The resulting work is marketed as a component library, and the community itself is marketed as a "no-shore" development resource.
Check it out, it is a pretty good system -- the results are surprisingly good. I regularly participate in these projects.
Just food for thought -- is this really just the online version of "Special Advertising Sections" in magazines and newspapers (advertisements that look like real magazine articles except for a tiny disclaimer)?
These ads are more potent becaues there is no disclaimer (though some sites do point out which areas are for advertising) and seems to be tailored to the user ("*your* computer is messed up!")
Has there ever be a similar suit against a magazine or newspaper?
Also, is there precedent that would indicate that the advertiser (company that made the misleading ad) or the publisher (company running the ad) is responsible? Because here they are going after the latter only, which seems a little odd. Heh, maybe DoubleClick just looks like an easier target than these tiny, shifty advertisers.
But, DoubleClick does not create the ads, right? They are just serving them. So why is the suit not against the actual advertisers?
No, I very much agree! Right now it's typically the software developer that really holds projects together, in spite of "management". So companies that are now putting thousands of miles between their "managers" and third-party developers are really shooting themselves in the foot; they've really outsourced everything that is important.
I guess what I should say is, if management got its act together and actually created complete, reasonable requirements, etc., then they'd have done most of what developers do today! What would be left would be mostly filling in the blanks... and why do we need teams of people in any location to do this? Surely over time this is increasingly done by tools, or at least by fewer people.
Brilliant, I completely agree -- people continue to draw on the textile industry as a historical parallel, but it makes little sense to do so.