technozid

Scientists from my hometown’s university have found out that eBay-auctions, which end during the day achieve higher profits compared to auctions ending in the evening. Popular belief is that evening-endings are more profitable since more surfers are online. However one needs to take into account that the number of auctions ending after 6pm is significantly higher due to the same reason. During daytime, there is a shortage of auction-endings and therefore higher bids might be achieved.
Of course this will only work as long as this does not lead to a paradigm shift with more sellers shifting to during-the-day acution endings. The results might be interesting though for (pseudo-)commercial Powersellers offering larger volumes. They can both test the theory and shift a partion of their stock to end-time-endings and another portion to evening-time-endings.
Via heise.de

Scientists from my hometown's university have found out that eBay-auctions, which end during the day achieve higher profits compared to auctions ending in the evening. Popular belief is that evening-endings are more profitable since more surfers are online. However one needs to take into account that the number of auctions ending after 6pm is ...

Philip has managed to reverse-engineer the Google PageRank algorithm and confirmed the fears of all professional webmasters.

Though this is satire of course, the interesting point is that there has to be such a piece of code, and that it most likely will look rather similar to the one Philip made up. It would be really interesting to have a look at it.

Philip has managed to reverse-engineer the Google PageRank algorithm and confirmed the fears of all professional webmasters. Though this is satire of course, the interesting point is that there has to be such a piece of code, and that it most likely will look rather similar to the one Philip made up. It would be ...

Via Gadgetopia: Peter Stevens found out that his neighbours used his wireless network without his permission. Though he should have properly secured it in the first place, he implemented some funny ways to annoy the bandwidth thieves.

Via Gadgetopia: Peter Stevens found out that his neighbours used his wireless network without his permission. Though he should have properly secured it in the first place, he implemented some funny ways to annoy the bandwidth thieves.

Surprisingly offline media can still deliver genuine news to me. The recent issue of Internet World Business contained an article that the renowned German E-Mail Marketing specialist Agnitas has releas their email- and dialog-marketing software package as Open Source (see press release) .

Since 1999 Agnitas is among the leading companies worldwide to provide email marketing services and solutions. Agnitas CEO Martin Aschoff is a highly valued expert on all aspects of email marketing. He is panelist on many conferences and gets quite a lot of press coverage. I was able to see the Agnitas software on many shows. In a market which is under massive scrutiny and has a public perception of being slightly “shady”, Agnitas is clearly among the “good guys” of that industry, taking an active part in the legislative process and working with ISP’s and anti-spam activist on whitelisting projects and spam avoidance mechanisms.

Due to the pretty high price ticket on their services I never used them for my company. So I am pretty thrilled that I can now use their system as Open Source. From their point it is clearly a smart move: they probably get quite a lot of marketshare. Competition might very well get drained to a certain extent. And they will most likely have some users of the open source software move to a premium service sooner or later. Of course there is also the danger that they will cannibalize their charged services a bit.

Nevertheless I am looking forward to install the software soon. The product is called OpenEMM (Open E-Mail Marekting Manager), runs on any LAMP-system and can be found at OpenEMM.org.

Surprisingly offline media can still deliver genuine news to me. The recent issue of Internet World Business contained an article that the renowned German E-Mail Marketing specialist Agnitas has releas their email- and dialog-marketing software package as Open Source (see press release) . Since 1999 Agnitas is among the leading companies worldwide to provide ...

By DrDave:

If you are running WordPress as your blogging platform and if you have been trusting enough to leave User registration enabled for guests, DISABLE IT IMMEDIATELY (in wp-admin >> options: make sure “Anyone can register” is not checked).

Thanks Jona.

By DrDave: If you are running Wordpress as your blogging platform and if you have been trusting enough to leave User registration enabled for guests, DISABLE IT IMMEDIATELY (in wp-admin >> options: make sure “Anyone can register” is not checked). Thanks Jona.

Today was the last day of Jona’s internship at my company. In order to make that last day a bit special we made a field-trip to our ISP. Their building is rather unspectacular and I think I saw a little disappointment on Jona’s face upon entering the slightly worn-out apartment-like building residing in a backyard off the main road. He brightened up a bit when our guide showed us the bunch of bundles of fibre cables – each several inches in thickness – entering the premises. Any doubt that this ISP is indeed a “real” ISP vanished when we entered the inner sanctum – the server hosting room. Multiple rows of 19″ racks – each equipped with an UPS and stuffed with server boxes and switches – produced together with the A/C a deafening noise.
Only thanks to our decade-long business relationship we were allowed into this room, and we were specifically reminded not to look too closely at the owners name tags attached to the servers, and if we did, to forget them immediately. Two huge racks consisted solely of the servers of a well known TV station (that much I was allowed to disclose), and one had as the topmost device the azure blue Google Mini. It looked surprisingly normal. As a matter of fact it looked pretty much like our firewall, only in blue. Nevertheless I was quite surprised to actually see one “in the wild”. I wonder how many of those devices are out there. Anybody using one willing to give a report on how it works?

Today was the last day of Jona's internship at my company. In order to make that last day a bit special we made a field-trip to our ISP. Their building is rather unspectacular and I think I saw a little disappointment on Jona's face upon entering the slightly worn-out apartment-like building residing in a ...

I was browsing some Japanese sites with the help of the Google translation tool, when this rather reassuring message appeared on screen. I don’t like the way they belittle it, but otherwise they are right with the statement. I’m only wondering how they found out…

I was browsing some Japanese sites with the help of the Google translation tool, when this rather reassuring message appeared on screen. I don't like the way they belittle it, but otherwise they are right with the statement. I'm only wondering how they found out...