Software views

A few times a year someone asks me to break copyright laws. From there I do my best to suggest getting the proper agreements to prevent having to make a court appearance.
Most of these requests come from people who see a site and really want a feature added to the site which in its self would be a money maker. The money is in the data mining of the data on the other persons company or site. Expect often if someone does not want their data to be copied a screen scrape is needed. This is where it gets tricky.

Here is a few links to copyright Myths and related info.

An article by Brad Templeton 10 Copyright myths

An article by Eric Sink Copyrights, Trademarks and patents

For Canadians, there is copyrightwatch.ca. This blog is supported by a team of academics, public interest advocates, and creators concerned that copyright serve the interests of ordinary Canadians. CopyrightWatch.ca

For real life example - Westjet vs Air Canada
http://www.macleans.ca/topstories/business/article.jsp?content=20040920_88645_88645
It ended up costing them 15 million...
http://www.cbc.ca/calgary/story/ca-westjet-settlement-20060529.html

While going threw technorati.com blog's search I stumbled on to techeast.ca

A good site on east coast tech news.

Chalk gaming, based in Halifax has a blog a http://chalkgaming.com/chalk-blog.php it is wrote by Scott Neil, President of Chalk.

The rental listings market is all bits and pieces. There are many small web site and large ones which have rental listings.

There are Rental specific,
GoRent.ca
viewit.ca
rentboard.ca
rentalmonster.ca
rentalshalifax.com

The herald, hfx4sale.com and craigslist all have rental sections.

On top of all that, most rental companies with more then a few units all have their own listings sites.

The Halifax local paper has Wheels Press and Jobs Press both appear to of done well. The news paper has command of the local market and has done well of creating a web site to carry its print ads online. The web sites do not need to be pretty or have lots of functionality.

The paid alternatives are Canada Auto Trader and the free alternatives are hfx4sale.com, hfx.forsale and halifax.craigslist.com.

Canada Auto has a local office and its web site looks much better then wheels press.

Today, wheels press has 564 listings and autotrader for Nova Scotia has 301. As competitors I bet they have close to the same users and traffic. Trying to work your way into general online classifieds for cars would appear to be difficult for the province of Nova Scotia. The only way I see getting a good market would to create more of niche.

AOL has made some fireworks with their release of search engine data. What they wanted to do with this data was provide something researchers could work with. The data its self only confirms what I have seen for many years in web logs. That is searches that are done are not very complex, which is why the power options like - / + really are not useful. Why build something no one is going to use ?

Other things that the data made me realize is there is lots of opportunity for keywords to be associated to a certain web site or brand.

thechronicleherald.ca The Herald has a fairly standard local news site. The paper has a viewer ship of just under 300 000 daily and the web site 170,000 unique visitors monthly.

The paper its self does fairly we, expect as an all ready established business I do not see it adapting to the modern trends on the Internet fast enough.

This in my eyes means that eventually someone will grab the market share for the local news online from the Herald at one point or another. Of course there is some of these sites already in development.

YouTube.com has made a splash in the Internet world taking what all ready existed and fine tuning it for the masses. Sense Napster has made the waves before in copyright issues chances are that YouTube.com can avoid being killed by lawsuits. Reality is that Tv is turnning into a video segement rather then a clear Tv only.

They have the big names helping them out http://www.sequoiacap.com/scpartner.asp?pid=4406 Roelof Botha, Past CEO of paypal.

The founders are Chad Hurley, 29, and Steve Chen, 27 which from reading this article they used a illertivate model where they started small to see if it would work then listened to people.

Though their domain was created in feb 2005 and funding by nov 2005, 7 to 8 months to venture capital funding.

http://www.redherring.com/Article.aspx?a=14376&hed=YouTube+Scores+%243.5+Million

blockbuster store / day in nov 2005 , 8 terabytes. So if they had thousands of stores that would be one hell of data.

A client of mine was playing with google ads and amazon ads, one thing they noticed is that google's bot came by less often with amazon ads are in place with no google ads. Is google pushing out the competition ?

live.com is microsofts attempt to take some of googles search market. Currently its results are just like googles expect with a fancy Interface. The site looks good in a IE browser and works fine. My guess is that they will follow the usual, copy a good product, obtain customers, modify to keep them hooked so they can not go back.

In the past I have had access to a number of communities web logs with traffic in the 1 to 25 million hits / month. After looking at the logs then I came to the same conclusion, the top sites have the same small group of active users. Two of them where competitors with all most the same offerings. Between the two competitors there was around 30000 core users.

When the traffic was compared to other very unrelated sites with similar volume traffic there was limited shared users.

The end result is if you try to copy youtube, you will have the same core users. The same result if you make a site like digg which attracts the same kinda user which would use youtube. Making yet another techie web site will not yield a new audience.

The conclusion I came to a number of years ago by the raw data is copies of sites don't attract more Mainstreet USA let alone more users.

The the data for calculating revenue per hit was found in an article on youtube's law suit. At the end it mentions that Fritz Grobe and Stephen Voltz made a hit movie. They posted it on http://www.revver.com only to have it pirated on sites like youtube. The word is they made 30 000 on 5.5 million hits while posted on
Revver. They figure another 30 000 was lost due to the copies.

Some simple calculations of their hit movie shows they made a little over
a half of penny per hit. From various businesses I have worked with which
are not splash hits like this clip was I can guess at the per hit
earnings is one eighth to one quarter of a cent. Which goes to show that
video is a high earner on the net.

http://yahoo.businessweek.com/technology/content/jul2006/tc20060726_601698.htm

I was comparing the shimano and campy designs for fsa 220 hubs,

http://www.fullspeedahead.com/downloads/copy_RD220S%20drawing.pdf
and
http://www.fullspeedahead.com/downloads/copy_RD220C%20drawing.pdf

It looks like the campy version does not have the 2nd nuts on them, which means it would require regular adjustment + faster wear due to the time the wheel is road out of adjustment. Then again this really only matters if you use the wheels for 1000's of km.

Wow, you have to love it when someone puts Tweenland.com :: Owned and Operated by Paperless Commerce, Inc. < adz@paperlesscommerce.com>

In their from feild for email. Looking at http://www.paperlesscommerce.com , it appears to be a bit low budget on the graphics side.

As for tweenland the web site does not look that pretty as well, on the other side it is functional.

It came to my attention from a comment by a user at mediapost.com about walmarts teen web site.

No idea how well they will do, first is not always best or most successful...

Ok, this site is very limited in functions and is very much trying to push their targets. The made up fake profiles they have are not very creative. Though interesting to see they have real users who ie like pink so they make pink font on pink background. Kids are smarter then this, the only complex thing about it was the signup page where everyone give up their demographics.

I really don't see this going that far, with walmarts budget I am sure lots of people will signup in the end.