Gratis Internet, the company that started with Free Condoms and earned their mark giving away Free Ipods, are closing up shop.

It appears that the lawsuit filed by Elliot Spitzer, New York state Attorney General, affected them tremendously. Being an ex-employee of this company, I saw this coming, primarily due to the fact that they hired a COO from a completely different industry, who after 3 months, still didn't understand how the company generated revenue! Just goes to show, a business model based on breakage, will eventually break.

All of my condolences go out to my ex co-workers, half of which were laid off this week. Peter Martin, one of the co-founders left the company last week.

Another internet saga comes to an end.

Gratis R.I.P.

PS: Here is supporting documentation. Besides the fact that half off the staff has been laid off, and "more cuts coming" whispers are heard through the galley, the lawsuit filled against Gratis request at minumum $500 per New York residents email address in their database. As NYC was one of their top cities in a database of over 150 million email addresses, you do the math.

There have been volumes written on the mysterious formula behind PageRank, so I won't explore that here, but I do believe I've found another piece to this puzzle.

It started about six months back, I began developing a small site for a client. It was not the best setup, for reasons beyond my control, the only development server, was the production server (Ugh!).

For the first 2 months, the only visitors to site to speak of were the client, his staff of eight, and myself. As I was primarily working on the server through Remote Desktop, I used the vanilla server install of Internet Explorer, sans Google toolbar. 3 months after launch, the site still had a PageRank of 0, besides a random stumbler, traffic was to this site was negligeable. Around this time, I was working on another web app for the same client, and the topic of PageRank came up. I instructed the client and his staff to install Google toolbar, with Advanced Features disabled (They work from a low speed DSL line, so I figured every little bit counts). Through work achieved on this project I was finally capable of seting up a somewhat more robust development environment.

As I was able to work remotely from my own workstation, not Remote Desktop, so I began viewing the initial site from my browser, which has the Google Toolbar's Advanced Features turned on. Within 2 weeks, to my surprise, the PageRank value of the site showed (1/10), although the traffic was still nothing to speak of. Out of curiosity, I contacted my clients office and requested that everyone browsing this site enable Advanced Features in their Google Toolbar. Less than 3 weeks later, the sites page rank was (4/10)

Now, I've actually been able to repeat this on 2 other sites, and I'm still paying around with the variables. I'm curious to know if anyone else has come across anything similar.

"The internet has become an ever evolving entity with sublte patterns that emerge if you know where to look."
-Me

moo.fx is a superlightweight, ultratiny, megasmall javascript effects library, written with prototype.js.

It's easy to use, fast, cross-browser, standards compliant, provides controls to modify Height, Width, and Opacity with built-in checks that won't let a user break the effect with multiple crazy clicks. It's also optimized to make you write the lesser code possible.

moo.fx has been successfully tested with: Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer. It should work in most of the gecko browsers too. Only Height and Width will work in Opera, since that browser does not support opacity.

The developers of this library have done it again, an excellent release from Italy, this years World Cup champions!

Get your copy today!

AMD announced plans to purchase Canadian based ATI for $5.4 Billion. Will this venture pose a threat to Intel? I believe so, both companies have consistenly delivered quality products and technological advancements. I'm excited to see the products they've yet to develop.

AMD’s acquisition of ATI will position the new company to deliver innovations that fulfill the increasing demand for more integrated solutions in key market segments while also continuing to develop “best-of-breed” discrete products that empower customers to choose the combination of technologies that best serves their needs. In 2008 and beyond, AMD aims to move beyond current technological configurations to transform processing technologies, with silicon-specific platforms that integrate microprocessors and graphics processors to address the growing need for general-purpose, media-centric, data-centric and graphic-centric performance. Thus, the combined company intends to empower its customers to create their own unique products and solutions within an open-innovation ecosystem free from artificial barriers to customer success.

“ATI shares our passion and complements our strengths: technology leadership and customer centric innovation,” said AMD Chairman and CEO Hector Ruiz. “Bringing these two great companies together will allow us to transcend what we have accomplished as individual businesses and reinvent our industry as the technology leader and partner of choice. We believe AMD and ATI will drive growth and innovation for the entire industry, enabling our partners to create differentiated solutions and empowering our customers to choose what is best for them.”

Under the terms of the transaction, AMD will acquire all of the outstanding common shares of ATI for a combination of $4.2 billion in cash and 57 million shares of AMD common stock, based on the number of shares of ATI common stock outstanding on July 21, 2006. All outstanding options and RSUs of ATI will be assumed. Based upon the closing price of AMD common stock on July 21, 2006 of $18.26 a share, the consideration for each outstanding share of ATI common stock would be $20.47, comprised of $16.40 of cash and 0.2229 shares of AMD common stock.

AMD anticipates it will finance the cash portion of the transaction with a combination of cash and new debt. AMD has obtained a $2.5 billion term loan commitment from Morgan Stanley Senior Funding, Inc. which, together with combined existing cash, cash equivalents, and short term investments balances of approximately $3.0 billion, provides full funding for the transaction.

ATI has received an opinion from its financial advisors that the transaction from a financial point of view is fair to its shareholders. The transaction was unanimously approved by the board of directors of each company. The transaction is subject to ATI shareholder approval, Canadian court supervision of a Plan of Arrangement, and other regulatory approvals including merger notification filings in the United States, Canada and other jurisdictions, as well as customary closing conditions. In the event that the transaction does not close, ATI has agreed to pay AMD a termination fee of $162.0 million under circumstances specified in the acquisition agreement. The transaction is expected to be completed in the fourth quarter of 2006.

Vonage has had a pretty bad couple of months.

There was the botched IPO leading to plenty of pissed off shareholder customers (myself incuded), combined with a few new patent lawsuits. The stock hasn't done well at all -- something many predicted well before the IPO in the first place. Now, spyware researcher Ben Edelman has released his latest article, noting that Vonage ads seem to show up in an awful lot of spyware -- including every one of the major spyware providers. And you wondered why the customer acquisition costs were so high? Now you know that a large chunk of that money was going directly into the bank accounts of some awfully questionable companies.

On Thursday July 13th, Japan's Ricoh Co. announced it will ship an optical component that reads both Blu-ray and HD DVD. This should prevent a repeat of the 1980's VHS versus Beta battle. Both HD DVD and Blu-ray delivers dazzling high-definition video and can store several times more than conventional DVDs.

Initially the component will only be capable of reading discs, although Ricoh intends to improve its laser to write in all formats.

MusicBrainz is a non-profit foundation developed to hold information for music heard around the world. This community driven effort is one that I applaud, it is my solid belief that it is foundations and businesses models after the empowerment of the individual will drive the true evolution of the internets' impact on society. It is also my opinion that this site will endure for generations to come!

Blinklist.com (beta)

"BlinkList is a social bookmarking service built on ajax. It is very buttoned up and has some excellent features. It also has an all-star team with deep experience." - TechCrunch 07/2005

Being an application developer, I pride myself on a deeper understanding that I have with web applications that I interact with daily. To a certain degree, I catch myself making assumptions about web apps and their implementation, overall due to the fact that I have witnessed major growth and advancement over the past decade. One point on which I expect from any decent sized membership based app, is that my password be encrypted. Simple MD5 will do, so long as it is not clear text.  When developing any membership system, encryption should be one of the first considerations.

Unfortunately, today I was saddened to find that a site I frequent BlinkList(beta), did not feel the need to encrypt my password:

Not only do they not encrypt a users password, they are displaying in a debug statement. Not my idea of a solid application.

They also still tag on "Beta" to their name, I know some development shops have some drawn out development lifecycles, but a year, and still in beta?

Another major flaw which is quite glaring, is the fact that they are calling in-line SQL query from inside of code, stored procedures are there for a reason, use them!

I'll have to admit, although LAMP based web apps have become quite popular in the last few years, there is nothing like building applications using OOP in a managed environment like Microsoft.NET or J2EE.