ZDNet Must Read:
Overstock dumps affiliates, rants about tax-happy states
Overstock is joining Amazon and Blue Nile in the parade of e-commerce companies dumping affiliates in states that aim to slap a tax on Internet referrals.... Continued »
July 2nd, 2009
Judge's idea to outlaw links won't save newspapers
I continue to be blown away by what I read about how newspapers can be saved. The latest comes from U.S. Appeals Court Judge Richard Posner who, in a blog post last week, suggested that one way to save newspapers from their demise would be “to bar linking to or paraphrasing copyrighted materials without the copyright holder’s consent.”
Are you freakin’ kidding me?
For the record, I did not get the judge’s consent to paraphrase him, quote him or link to his blog post. And because I’m not required by law (yet) to do so, I can still share it with you readers, providing you with information that you otherwise might not have seen. Isn’t that what the news business is all about? Sharing information.
After all, that’s how I stumbled upon the judge’s blog post - through a post on Barron’s Tech Trader Daily that also chimed in on the judge’s post. No, I didn’t obtain the consent of Barron’s or author Eric Savitz to link back to his post - but then again, Eric didn’t obtain permission to link back to the judge’s post either.
The point being: had Eric not linked to it, I might never have seen it. Had I not seen it, I never would have been able to share it with you. If you’re a journalist, what’s more important - sharing your work with the largest audience possible or blocking it from anyone who doesn’t ask for permission or cough up some money?
One other thing about the judge’s post: he writes that “…a newspaper with shrinking revenues can shrink its costs only by reducing the number of reporters, columnists, and editors…”
Hogwash.
July 2nd, 2009
Analyst: Palm Pre supply, demand in balance
Palm Pre inventory at its key stores are in balance with demand with roughly 40,000 devices sold a week, according to a J.P. Morgan report.
In a research note, J.P. Morgan analyst Paul Coster wrote:
We have concluded our 3rd round of channel checks for the Pre. The gap between supply and demand has closed at Sprint and BestBuy stores, waitlists are eliminated or down, and most stores now have Pre devices in stock. We believe, since launch, about 270K units will have shipped by the holiday weekend. Demand at Sprint channels seems to be hovering at 40K per week.
Simply put, Palm has weathered its initial inventory crunch and now we’ll get a better picture of ongoing Pre demand. Coster noted that shipments to retailers is less frequent than two weeks ago. Overall though, demand seems constant.
Coster estimates that 210,000 Pre units shipped in June and that an additional 230,000 will be delivered in July and August.
Also see: Palm shares up after reported loss; upbeat about future with Pre, WebOS
Apple thumbs nose at Palm, reports 1 million iPhone 3G S units sold in 3 days
July 2nd, 2009
What a difference a name makes: What if Live Search did Tweet searches?
The Bing phenomenon continues and one day Microsoft’s search rebranding effort may make a great marketing case study.
Microsoft renamed its search Bing, added some neat logic, focused on important verticals. Microsoft has even snared a bit of search market share and has generated buzz unforeseen among tech’s peanut gallery.
The latest example of Microsoft’s search buzz: Bing has begun to surface Tweets. Talk about Web 2.0 combustion. Twitter plus Bing means blogger euphoria in many parts.
The buzz shows just how far Microsoft has come on the search front (it got me to give it a try as a default option). Google may be looking over its shoulder (if you believe the New York Post) and Yahoo has spent a lot of time downplaying Bing. And now Bing surfaces Tweets and boom!
But let’s play a game. What if Microsoft’s Live Search surfaced Tweets. The headlines would go something like this:
- Live Search stinks, tries to get on Twitter bandwagon
- Live Search goes Twitter: Will anyone notice?
- If a Tweet fell in a search no one used…
You get the idea. What’s in a name? Potentially everything.
July 2nd, 2009
IT lessons from Facebook's user name launch
Facebook has detailed some of the backend moves as it prepared to roll out usernames to 200 million users.
The blog post is the latest in Facebook’s effort to allow us peak behind the scenes a bit. Facebook allowed its 200 million users to pick names while keeping the site running.
Some of the lessons are obvious, but often ignored.
Among the lessons:
- Give the project firepower. Facebook’s infrastructure was expanded to allow users to pick names and block other ones. Facebook dedicated one terabyte of in-memory cache just for the user name launch.
- Cut the perks. To devote processing power to the user name launch, Facebook was prepared to nuke bells and whistles and the user name registration page was stripped down.
- Create contingency plans. Facebook said it had an escalation plan and a nuclear option to cut off features in case the site slowed to a crawl. Little things like chat bars, new item notifications and other fees all consume resources. Facebook was prepared to shut off features to give itself more power.
- Timing is everything. Facebook launched its user name switchover at midnight eastern time on a Friday. Behind the scenes Facebook conducted a dark launch of functionality.
July 2nd, 2009
Top 10 videos of the year (so far)
At Cisco Live in San Francisco this week, CEO John Chambers called video “the killer app.” Here are the videos viewed most often during the first half of 2009 by ZDNet members and visitors:
1) The lightbulb of the future?
2) ‘Desktop diving’ with Google
3) Will there be a digital Pearl Harbor?
4) iPhone satisfaction not guaranteed
5) Ning CEO on how start-ups can hit the ground running
6) Ballmer previews Windows 7
7) A look at high-speed autonomous driving
8) Obama’s Google Moderator stats
9) Kindle’s identity crisis
10) E-motorcycle hits S.F. streets
July 2nd, 2009
Tailoring Web technology to a bespoke dress shirt business
It’s not easy to mix up the monotony of putting on a shirt and a tie every day for work, but what if the shirt was made-to-order, with details of your own choosing?
Fashion startup ShirtsMyWay allows you to spruce up your tired work uniform and customize your own dress shirt from nearly-limitless options — from the color of the stitching around buttonholes to the shape of the breast pocket — and ships it to you for the price of an off-the-rack shirt from Brooks Brothers.
Always liked the look of the white-collar, blue-body banker dress shirt, but preferred the reverse? It can be done in two clicks. Like to keep things on the outside crisp and white, but prefer to have a little private bling on the inside? A few more clicks and you’ll have brown and white “French Rails” lining your collar and cuffs (see image below).
Or better yet, 20 copies of your new favorite shirt.
I spoke with Shanghai, China-based founder Michael Yang on how his startup is addressing the increased demand for custom clothing on the Web.
What gave you the idea for ShirtsMyWay?
Michael Yang: [Co-founder] Peter [Crawfurd] and I both wanted to start a company, and we had both been to Asia and had shirts made there for ourselves. The idea evolved over a very long process: we did some research online and saw that the customization wave was going up and online clothing sales were going up and put two and two together. We looked online and realized that people were only doing online tailoring, and no one was really doing design.
There are so many components to a shirt, and we thought you should be able to customize them all. You have the collar, the cuffs, the contrast fabric inside the cuffs, the sleeve, the placket, the yoke, the pocket, and you can go on. So we made every component customizable, down to the buttonhole thread.
That level of customization sounds daunting. How do you help the average customer choose?
MY: A lot of people simply love the level of customization — and some people are overwhelmed by the amount of options. We have a shirt model on the site that helps a lot with the visualization, so they can see what, say, a placket actually is.
Right now we’re working on a “shirtpedia,” where we try to educate people who don’t know so much about shirts. What kind of customers are we looking for? People who are interested in tailored or custom-fit shirts. We’re aiming for mass customization so that the average person can go in and do this. It’s a trend that’s going to spread to habit – rather than go to JCPenney or another offline store.
Your focus is only on men’s dress shirts. Is there interest in expansion to women’s shirts or pants?
MY: The natural progression that not only would come to mind would be to expand into customizing a whole wardrobe – shoes, pants, shirts, blazers, suits and so on. But it’s difficult to say right now. Originally that was our vision, but right now we see that there are things happening in our market — we’ve shaken it up a bit — and we probably have to take it as it comes.
We only launched in February, so we don’t have any pre-global economic downtown basis to compare to. Surprisingly, we are doing very well. The amount of sales we’re able to generate actually corresponds to our original goals. How is the economic downturn affecting the online industry? I’ve been looking at reports and some numbers indicate that online commerce hasn’t gone down.
So we’re already looking to expand. Right now we’re still tossing ideas around. We are currently shipping internationally — [North] America, Europe, Australia, Asia — but we pick certain countries because of the shipping costs. We have a policy of free shipping for most countries, so we’re already doing that.
You mentioned a “trend” in online custom clothing and a push away from brick-and-mortar stores. Is that really true?
MY: There are a lot of men who go online to buy clothing, and our initial idea was that men can’t be bothered to go into stores and shop around. There are a lot of men who want to just do it and get the package shipped to their door.
The current discussion right know concerning expansion is if the next step is to target women or to diversify into another product. Women buy practically 90 percent of the items in the household. We have gotten quite a few requests from women to make dress shirts for women. It’s quite a complicated process to diversify into women’s clothing. Peter and I have only have experience in men’s, rather than women’s, clothing. So we’ll possibly stick to what we’re good at. But you never know – my sister’s a clothing designer; maybe I’ll take lessons from her.
You and Peter are based in Shanghai, but you’re both from Denmark. How do you navigate the right channels to keep your business afloat?
I’m of Chinese origin; my parents are Chinese. They moved to Denmark and I was born and raised in Denmark. Peter and I went to high school together in Denmark and then the same university. I studied computer science and business administration and Peter studied international business. He worked in India for some time and I was in Denmark. As we started to itch, that entrepreneurship, we put our heads together in Denmark and moved to Shanghai to do the groundwork.
I speak Shanghainese, the native dialect, and I also have quite a big family here, around 20 family members, and they’re all entrepreneurs themselves. Beyond that, we have a consulting company here that is helping us with legal and accounting issues.
Peter supervises the operations and does the marketing, and I do the IT and supervise the accounting. We work quite differently, Peter and I — he does day-to-day work, while I do project work.
How does ShirtsMyWay function in the background? What happens behind the scenes?
MY: We use open source, which was a relatively natural choice for us. We run on PHP. When we started doing this there was a choice between Flash and AJAX, I picked AJAX. AJAX makes more sense if you want to do SEO — Flash is hard to control. AJAX is sort of like a lego box that you can piece anything together however you like it.
How does it work? People go online, customize their shirt, put in in the shopping cart and click order. We save the details so they can be retrieved later — users will be able to retrieve their own data soon. We have a back-end system that pulls up the order and sends it to the factory. We have an alliance with one factory that we’ve been working very closely with, which has only been getting better and better. They produce the shirt, quality control it and give it to us. We actually go in and quality control it ourselves. If it’s OK, we ship it out. If it’s not, we send it back to the factory.
We source our own fabrics because we don’t want to just put whatever the factory has up on our site. A lot of those fabrics are not so good, so we go out and handpick high-quality and stylish fabrics.
We’ve had around 0.2 percent or even lower return rate. For every 500 shirts we sell, maybe only one is returned. People are pretty happy.
The U.S. is our biggest market, for good reason. I think that in the States, people are quite far ahead on the innovation curve in order to be able to embrace the kinds of things that we’re doing. In terms of customizing your own clothes online, certainly I think that more people in the States do and would love do do these kinds of things than, say, Europe or Australia or other parts of the world. We do have a pretty good market in those other areas, but combined. The factor of embrace in the States is equal to the rest of the world put together. That’s the feeling that we get.
July 2nd, 2009
Video: U.S. CIO Kundra answers questions about new federal IT dashboard
After unveiling the U.S Federal IT Dashboard on Tuesday, U.S. CIO Vivek Kundra did an online chat with citizens to answer their questions about the dashboard as well as other topics that relate to the U.S. IT department. Macon Philips, the White House Director of New Media (I didn’t know they had one of those), fielded the questions from the Web and then Kundra answered them in real time while this 30-minute video 3was filmed.
One of the most interesting things mentioned here was that IT departments in the various federal agenies used to report on their progress once a year, but now they are doing it once a month. That is one of the changes that the Obama administration had to implement in order to help drive the kind of transparency and accountability that this dashboard was designed to facilitate.
July 2nd, 2009
Take steps to prevent IT myopia [video]
Most lists for improving IT tend to focus on project management issues. While that’s important, if you get too caught up in the details of project management, you may miss out on the broader, more strategic view that’s critical for successful IT operations. This episode of Sanity Savers for IT executives, shares practical steps you can take to ensure that you’re thinking strategically about business, organizational, and management issues.
The video was based on Michael Krigsman’s 10 steps to prevent IT myopia.
July 2nd, 2009
News to know: Facebook privacy, Windows 7, Kindle, Firefox 3.5
Here are today’s notable headlines. You can get News To Know via email alert and RSS daily. For continuous updates see BNET’s around-the-Web tech coverage.
Ed Bott: Microsoft to offer Family Pack for Windows 7 Home Premium
- Robin Harris: Why Windows 7 should be free
Sam Diaz: Business intelligence comes to Kindle. Will companies care?
- Dan Kusnetzky: FireFox 3.5, Add-ons and Backwards Compatibility
Jason Hiner: Survey: 45% of IT departments will move to Windows 7, eventually; 43% refuse to migrate off Windows XP
Christopher Dawson: So about those illegal downloads
Joe McKendrick: Do we need cloud oriented architecture?
Brian Sommer: NetSuite vs. SAP?? How Newton would see this contest
Larry Dignan: Top 10 galleries of the year (so far)
Andrew Mager: Live: Cisco Live Blogger Meetup
Heather Clancy: Some more Energy Star compatibility updates. This time, from Lenovo and Dell
Tom Foremski: Silicon Valley VCs proposed a plan to save newspapers in 1996
Dennis Howlett: NetSuite + AdaptivePlanning = BPM disruption
Heather Clancy: EPA, Climate Savers to host power management tips seminar
Phil Wainewright: WebEx augurs ill for Cisco’s cloud ambitions
Tom Foremski: Visionary 2009: Jim Clark on the importance of Stanford university to Silicon Valley
Dana Blankenhorn: WellAWARE of watching grandma
July 1st, 2009
Survey: 45% of IT departments will move to Windows 7, eventually; 43% refuse to migrate off Windows XP
A new TechRepublic survey shows that 96% of IT departments are still running Windows XP as their primary operating system, and 43% plan to keep XP indefinitely and avoid migrating to Windows 7. Meanwhile, 45% of the TechRepublic respondents said that their IT department will eventually switch to Windows 7.
The voluntary, self-selecting survey was conducted in June and had over 10,000 participants from among TechRepublic’s audience of 1.4 million IT professionals who regularly visit the site.
July 1st, 2009
Business intelligence comes to Kindle. Will companies care?
Business Intelligence provider MicroStrategy said today that it will make its business reports and dashboards accessible through Amazon’s Kindle DX reader, bringing one of the first business tools to a device that’s been mostly defined by its ability to display electronic books.
The company already has an iPhone/iPod Touch app to allow mobile access to reports and the dashboard.
For iPhone users, the app is just one of thousands that users can tap into to customize how their phones double as work or personal computers. But for the Kindle DX, the MicroStrategy advances the idea that the $489 device could have some legitimate business uses.
It’s too early to say how much of an impact this will have on Kindle sales in the business world. I tend to be a bit of a pessimist about the Kindle as a business document reader, largely because I don’t think it offers enough of a return on the investment, compared to the alternatives.
Plus, I also have issues with the Kindle’s colorless screen. That’s all fine for black-ink-on-a-white-page book but spreadsheets, graphs and other business charts tend to use color. I know it’s not that huge of a deal but, I can’t help it. It’s an issue for me.
Bottom line: the Kindle is more or less just a reader, a replacement for a folder full of documents. The iPhone, on the other hand, is a device that can be a reader, a phone, a gaming device, a music player and more.
Also see: Amazon Kindle’s $489 price tag makes iPod Touch a better buy
July 1st, 2009
Facebook's privacy settings: users get more control as wall gets torn down
Facebook is preparing to roll out new privacy settings - some of which includes tearing down the closed Facebook wall and opening the data to the general public. (Statement, Techmeme)
But before anyone goes into panic mode, it’s important to note that the company is going to great lengths to be transparent about what it’s doing and is giving users full control - repeat, full control - over who will see what on their profiles. (You might recall that Facebook has taken a PR beating in the past for making some changes and not telling anyone, such as the redesign and Terms of Service fiasco.)
The privacy setting changes won’t happen immediately and Facebook is moving slowly on the rollout to make sure that people understand exactly what they’re doing with their information. That includes testing six different transitional pages - pop-up screens when users log-on to walk them through their old settings and help them pick new ones - to determine which is the easiest for users to understand.
In most cases, Facebook is adding to the site - tools to determine who can see your posts, notes, links, photos and so on. But it’s also taking away one thing - regional networks
.
When the site was opened to the general public, regional networks were created to help group folks under a common umbrella, just as networks had done for schools and workplaces. But that became too unruly and sharing with people in your network meant that the only real thing you had in common with them was where you lived.
As for opening your information to the general public, now that we have vanity URLs on Facebook, it’s easier for anyone - yes, non Facebook members, too - to find a public profile page. In some cases - say you’re in a band or you’re running for office - you might want “everyone” to see your profile, including people outside the wall.
In other cases, users may choose to share only with their confirmed friends - and that’s fine, too. Here’s one better: users can create custom settings so that pictures, for example, can be shared only with certain Facebook friends, maybe family members but not co-workers.
Here’s the thing about sharing with “everyone,” though. Over time, Facebook has plans to make the data indexable and available off-site. Yup, that means information from your Facebook page could someday show up in Google search results.
The company was clear to note that these changes have nothing to do with advertising strategies - for now. Over time, as users either open up or further restrict access to their information, it will create new data points and opportunities for advertisers.
There are two things that people, in general, are very squeamish about: Change and Privacy. From the presentation I tuned in to and the details that Facebook execs provided, I’m convinced - as of now - that this is a good positive step.
As a user, I’m all for simplification as it relates to privacy settings and full control over my information - and I know I’m not the only one. Facebook finally seems to understand that.
July 1st, 2009
Apple forecast: 12% Mac sales growth quarter to quarter
Apple will sell 2.5 million Macs in the second calendar quarter, a 12 percent increase and a marked uptick from the 4 percent decline last quarter, according to a new forecast issued by Morgan Stanley’s Kathryn Huberty.
July 1st, 2009
See why one CIO is migrating all Treos to iPhones
I’ve known Scott Lowe for almost a decade, long before he became a CIO. He is not the kind of IT leader who is susceptible to hype or following what the crowd is doing. So when he told me last week that the iPhone had not only won him over, but that his IT department was in the process of converting his entire organization from Treos to iPhones, I was pretty surprised.
If CIOs like Scott Lowe are doing this, then it’s a pretty good indicator that the iPhone is becoming a very viable and tempting option for a lot of companies out there. Keep in mind that Scott (right) works in the education sector and his organization is an SMB, but it’s still a good story about how the iPhone is starting to win over IT folks. And, fortunately, Scott has now written up the whole story and posted it on TechRepublic.
Here’s a quote from Scott’s article:
“As contracts come up, we’re replacing Treos across the board with iPhones. Quite frankly, even if we were to stick with Treos, we’d have to replace those anyway since they’re not holding up well to the use and abuse at the hands of the people using them (no kidding, either… Treos have started dropping like flies around campus), so one way or the other, we’re buying a new device. Our direction now is to drop all remaining Treos as contracts come up; we’ll be an all iPhone organization within a year.”
Read the whole story.
I found that Scott’s evaluation and experience with the iPhone was very similar to my own. We both considered the first generation iPhone to be little more than a concept car that looked really cool but had very little usefulness, especially in business (see my 2007 article “Sanity check: How much will the iPhone impact IT and business users?“).
Scott started to become interested in the second generation iPhone because of the strong Microsoft Exchange integration. I still wasn’t convinced yet, mostly because of AT&T and the iPhone’s on-screen keyboard (see my 2008 article “Sanity check: The five reasons I wouldn’t use an iPhone are down to one“).
By the time the third generation iPhone was released on June 19, Scott was already starting to move his entire organization toward iPhones, while I was finally won over by the combination of the iPhone’s Exchange groupware features and the breadth and quality of the third party applications (see my 2009 piece “Palm Pre vs. iPhone 3GS: The choice I made and why“).
See also:
July 1st, 2009
Ubuntu private clouds need more than tools; they need support, too
Canonical, the London company that founded the Ubuntu Project, today announced professional services to support companies who are building “private cloud” infrastructures behind their corporate firewalls.
Earlier this year, the company released a technical preview of Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC), an open-source system that allows companies to build private clouds that match the Amazon EC2 interface.
But the tools to build an open-source cloud behind the wall aren’t enough. Customers also need support. In a statement, Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth said:
Enterprises are realising that building ‘private clouds’ enables them to better manage variable workloads, while reducing the waste of idle servers. Building on open-source technology also avoids the issue of vendor lock-in. Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud enables businesses to do this - and the addition of these services helps them to do it with confidence.
Canonical is partnering with Eucalyptus to provide the support services, but through Canonical’s support team and interface.
Also see: Dana Blankenhorn: Will Ubuntu remain a minor player
July 1st, 2009
Oracle's Fusion middleware master plan starts coming together
Oracle on Wednesday launched its Fusion 11g middleware family and the effort is aimed at linking the technological underpinnings of all of the company’s acquired applications, owning the market, creating one fundamental software stack for the enterprise, laying the foundation for a cloud strategy as well as a few other things we’re probably forgetting.
At this juncture, the big picture behind Fusion has yet to emerge—especially with the cloud computing angle, according to Dana Gardner. To say there are a few moving parts in Oracle’s Fusion day is a bit of an understatement (Techmeme, Twitter). The company launched Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g, Oracle SOA Suite, WebLogic Suite, Web Center Suite and Identity Management.
Gardner has the recap and the statements abound (see all Oracle Fusion content, whitepapers and posts), but let’s zoom out a bit. What does this Fusion fiesta really mean? That question has historically been difficult to answer. I’ve been trying to wrap my head around Fusion for at least four years now and it still doesn’t click most of the time. In a nutshell, Fusion is the glue that ties everything together and perhaps provides a path to some uber suite. In the meantime, Oracle will support your existing software under current licensing arrangements and charge you maintenance forever.
Also see: Get ready for Oracle’s 100 days of press releases aka innovation
Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g: turkeys voting for Christmas?
Gardner argues that the Fusion Middleware 11g will ultimately be about the cloud. Gardner writes:
July 1st, 2009
60% of Americans would give up alcohol for their mobile phones
In a survey indicative of how users interact with their electronic devices, one in three Americans said they would give up television to keep their mobile phone, and a full 60 percent said they would give up alcohol for a week instead.
According to the results of a new survey by Best Buy Mobile — which polled 1,000 Americans over the age of 18 — 47 percent of Americans who don’t already own a smartphone say they are too confused to differentiate smartphones from regular cell phones.
Yet a “large portion” of adults plan on buying a smartphone in the next 12 months, according to the survey.
July 1st, 2009
Lost phone reveals scary truth about mobile Web charges
I knew that mobile data charges - for those without an unlimited usage plan - could add up fast. But this is crazy.
My mother-in-law lost her phone - at the grocery store on Monday morning, she thinks - but didn’t notice until she went to make a call on Tuesday morning that it was missing. So she did what any of us would do - she called her cell phone number from her house phone, hoping she’d hear it ringing from the bottom of her purse. Instead, someone answered it. (Idiots!)
Instead of turning the phone in to the store manager or something honest like that, this person went on a Web surfing binge and, in less than 24 hours, managed to use 56.67 megabytes worth of data. Is that a lot? I gotta be honest: that didn’t sound like a lot of usage to me - until I heard how AT&T (her service provider) charges for it.
Let’s do the math: AT&T charges 1 cent for every kilobyte that’s used. (Again, that doesn’t sound so bad initially). If there are 1024 kilobytes in a megabyte and this person used 56.67 megabytes, that means he used - gulp! - 58,030 kilobytes of data. At 1 cent each, that added up to $580.30 on her bill.
Luckily, AT&T was sympathetic to her situation and said it will reverse the charges. But, I can only imagine the shock that some parents must go through when they hand over a Web-capable phone to a teenager and don’t realize how quickly these charges can add up. This person who used my mother-in-law’s phone racked up $580 worth of charges in less than 24 hours. I can only imagine what sort of damage would have been done over a period of 30 days.
July 1st, 2009
U.S. federal IT dashboard is a great example of how to promote IT
U.S. CIO Vivek Kundra unveiled the new U.S. Federal IT Dashboard on Tuesday at the Personal Democracy Forum 2009 in New York City. The dashboard provides transparency into the U.S. government’s $74 billion budget, allowing citizens to drill down into specific departments, view status information on projects, and compare spending over time and between departments.
Kunda said, “Now, for the first time, the entire country can look at how we’re spending money and give us feedback… We’re going to tap into some of the best ideas and the best thinking.”
One of the most impressive things about this new site was that it was built in about six weeks. Before becoming federal CIO, Kundra led IT for Washington, D.C. and was known for using mashups and publicly available technologies to quickly and inexpensively get things accomplished. It’s good to see that the federal bureaucracy hasn’t bogged him down — at least not yet.
July 1st, 2009
Overstock dumps affiliates, rants about tax-happy states
Overstock is joining Amazon and Blue Nile in the parade of e-commerce companies dumping affiliates in states that aim to slap a tax on Internet referrals.
On Wednesday, Overstock said that it will drop its affiliate advertisers in California, Hawaii, North Carolina and Rhode Island—four states looking to tax referrals.
In a statement, Overstock called these state tax laws “anti-internet advertising laws.” Overstock and Amazon have lawsuits pending against the state of New York. The states want tax revenue and e-commerce companies argue that taxing referrals is unconstitutional. The question: Are people that collect commissions for pointing to an e-commerce site the same as physical assets?
Also see: Amazon vs. tax happy states: E-tailer could nuke Associates program and still win
Overstock said that it will sever affiliate ad relations in any state that appears to be close to pass tax-happy laws. You can expect other e-commerce companies beyond Overstock, Amazon and Blue Nile to do the same. Overstock president Jonathan Johnson said:
Internet advertising is a tidy little business that can be done by just about anyone, anywhere on the globe. When states unwisely and unconstitutionally pass these laws, their local internet ad business will quickly go dark, and that business will simply migrate to states more friendly to internet commerce.
While Amazon is the big e-commerce dog on the block, Overstock is likely to become the most vocal about the referral tax issue. If Amazon is a Saint Bernard (or any other big dog you can think of) Overstock is the yapping terrier that won’t shut up. After all, the company is quite chatty and will beat the issue to death—something that needs to happen. Overstock’s war of words with short sellers in recent years has been entertaining to say the least.
Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of ZDNet and Editorial Director of ZDNet sister site TechRepublic. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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- Google missed a marketing turn with the 'decision engine' thing+14 votes
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