Way2Top

A very disturbing security concern over Indian Electronic Voting Machines has emerged recently. VeTA has performed a kind-of sting operation on Indian EVMs and has published a white paper briefing the security flaws in the Voting machines. VeTA is an independant National level citizen’s forum for promoting Verifiability, Transparency and Accountability in Indian Elections. Some of the well known computer experts, political scientists, public activists, legal professionals, academicians have come together to analyze the state of Indian Elections. On Saturday, August 21 2010, Hari Prasad, Chief Technical Coordinator of VeTA was arrested for the possession of Electronic Voting Machine, which apparently was acquired through anonymous insider source! The Anonymity is still not revealed.

VeTA did a very thorough analysis on the EVM Hardware and software and proved in various ways that the EVM can be hacked and the results be easily manipulated. VeTA not just content with the findings went on to publish a white paper based on the findings. Now the whole world knows that Indian EVMs are not tamper-proof and the findings are completely contrary to the claim from Indian Election Commission “totally tamper proof, perfect, fail safe and requiring no improvement”.

I am surprised why Indian government and Election commission would have disallowed any independant security evaluation! This raises a serious integrity concern about ECI. While the cyber-hackers are growing powerful and while the cyber security is always playing a catch up game with cyber attacks, this lack of concern and total underestimation of EVM Hacking from ECI needs to be addressed immediately. I think ’sting’ operations are the only way to reform the Indian government and remove the inefficiency and corruption from it.

You can watch the video below to understand the technical flaws of the voting machines and how naive the security mechanisms are.

References:
http://www.indianevm.com/blogs/?p=402
http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/jhalderm/electronic-voting-researcher-arrested-over-anonymous-source

Early this month, there was a 3-day SEO Training programme conducted by Bruce Clay (One of the Prominent thought leaders in Search Engine optimization industry) in Gurgaon. I decided to attend the training to crystallize my learnings, to learn new techniques and tips and to meet people with Similar Interest. It was quite useful and comprehensive. I would say the 3-day training gave me a structure and discipline towards how we approach SEO. And Bruce Clay did warn everyone of us about the brutally tough SEO world! As he put it, “every monday it’s (SEO) a new industry” (Google apparently makes 500 changes every month and on good day it might make 20 changes!). It’s like solving a 200 variable non-linear equation, which changes every day! It’s like chasing a moving target! Get the drift? Add to this, the new search result pages which google is experimenting with. The new SERPS (Search engine result pages) apparently show more of google content (google maps, google local, google news, google real-time, youtube, images and what not?) than external content. Alright, I am making myself nervous again

There is a Open source conference coming up in chennai next month. If you are interested in open source, PHP, Mysql, web development trends, mobile computing, cloud computing etc., you should try and make it to the event! Checkout more details at www.osidays.com. I am sending my developers to attend the event at company’s expense. Needless to say, they are mighty-excited and looking forward to learn some new things! If they learn, its good for company too

I always wanted to attend a TED Event. But being an super-expensive event and going by the difficulty to get ‘invited’, I was giving up on it. Then came along the concept of TEDX (local TED Clubs). TEDX Chennai is the chennai local chapter for TEDX. I am attending the event and have booked my tickets. Hoping to hear from some great speakers and gather some insight into their minds. Not to forget the opportunity to meet some really interesting attendees!

Western companies pulling their business roots out of china is becoming a hot trend these days. Just few days after Google officially pulls out of china, Godaddy follows suit and closes down its operations in china. Citing the new regulations which requires domain registrars to gather relevant document proofs such as photographs, residence proof, email address, telephone numbers and signed forms (!), godaddy stops offering “.cn” registrations.

The world’s largest registrar of internet domain names said Wednesday that it was pulling out of China in the wake of strict new laws that allegedly will increase government surveillance of web sites…

Jones [Christine Jones, general counsel for Go Daddy] said the new Chinese policies required every website owner to submit photographs, business information and individually signed forms, as well as their physical address, email address and telephone numbers.

‘We didn’t want to act as an agent of the Chinese government,’ Jones said. ‘We can’t let them be strong and us be weak all the time. We just have to stop it, and then we’ll start offering .CN domain names again.’

link

Is china trying to enforce the closed economy even on the internet turf? I guess so..They are not doing directly, but they are doing it through indirect means such as regulations, strict guidelines, tight web monitoring etc., For now, we will have just observe the cyber-war between the western supremacy (read US) and the new rising power China. Who is next in-line to close the operations? Dell (they are already showing some signs)?

It’s been 3 months since Google announced that it would be serving ads from third party ad networks through its own publisher network called adsense. Today, Google has rolled out the feature to all adsense accounts. Currently, Google is accepting ads only from third party adnetworks from North America and Europe. Publishers can opt-out of select adnetworks or can decide to opt-out of all adnetworks completely. I am going to test this by turning on and off adnetworks and see how this impacts my bottomline. As of now, there are 92 ad-networks certified by google adsense. Shown below are the list of 92 ad-networks.

Adchemy
http://adchemy.com/
Adchemy: Technology for Relevant Digital Advertising
Adchemy enables marketers to compose, deliver, and optimize millions of highly relevant ads from a single platform at massive scale.

Invite Media
http://www.invitemedia.com/
Invite Media - Next generation platform for display media trading

Specific Media
http://www.specificmedia.com/
Home - Specific Media
Specific Media provides advertisers, marketers, and agencies with multiple distribution channels to reach consumers on the Web.

Turn
http://www.turn.com/
Turn - The Smart Platform for Digital Advertising
Turn’s advanced platform combines predictive targeting, custom behavioral modeling, and powerful analytics to deliver exceptional performance to global agencies, publishers and premium advertisers.

Read the rest of this entry »

JPMorgan Internet Report 2009

Recently Businessweek came up with a very interesting story on Google and how it is planning to stay ahead of the competition and whether it can stay on top of the web. Anyone interested in Search and Google should definitely read these articles. It throws lot of light on how google takes things seriously and why Search is still an unsolved problem and the challenges associated with Search. Worth Reading…

Can Google Stay on Top of the Web?
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_41/b4150044749206_page_2.htm

Interviews with Google Folks
Google’s Udi Manber: Search Is About People, Not Just Data - BusinessWeek

…Udi Manber, Google’s vice-president of technology for core search, joined the company almost four years ago after stints running Amazon.com’s A9 search project and serving as chief scientist at Yahoo. He, like some other leaders on the search quality team,……

Google Search Guru Singhal: We Will Try Outlandish Ideas - BusinessWeek

…Inside Google’s search quality group, Amit Singhal runs the core ranking team, which is responsible for those algorithms you hear so much about. The team ran some 6,000 experiments last year that tried tweaking those mathematical formulas, ultimately producing between……

Matt Cutts: How Google Deals With Web Spam - BusinessWeek

…It’s up to Matt Cutts and his team at Google to keep search results as free as possible from Web spam, those pages full of Viagra ads or even malware. A 10-year veteran of the company, he got into this……

Google’s Scott Huffman: Many More Search Features Coming - BusinessWeek

…Scott Huffman runs one of the least-known units at Google: the evaluation team that measures the impact of every little proposed change to the leading search engine. And with some 6,000 experiments run annually, he’s pretty busy. Not to mention,……

P2W2 is an online marketplace for accountants, writers, graphic designers, software vendors, tutors, researchers and other major professional services. P2W2 stands for “People To Work with”!

Who is the target audience?
Small businesses and Individuals can use p2w2 to post project requirements or to bid for the projects.

How it works?
As a services vendor
1. You can create your detailed profile by describing your service offerings, your capabilities, your portfolio, your testimonials etc., Creating a good profile is very important to successfully win the project bids. As a service provider, you need to pay 13 USD or 500 Rupees to create profile.

2. Once you have created a profile, you can search for projects posted on p2w2 and bid for the projects.

3. Once the client is convinced about your profile and your bidding price, client will give a green signal to start the project. P2W2 provides you great tools to manage the project and client communications. Some of the features are sharing files, project tracking and feedback module.

4. Once the project is complete, P2W2 will ensure that the payment is settled between client and the vendor. P2W2 takes a commission of 4.5% of the project value.

As a Buyer of services:
1.You can create your detailed profile by describing your Company information, your capabilities, your portfolio, your testimonials, your credibility etc., There is no cost to create a profile. FREE!

2. You can search for professionals or vendors. Go through detailed profile and initiate contact with shortlisted vendors. P2W2 maintains a track record of vendor performances. Through this history, P2W2 helps buyers to decide on the software vendors.

3. Once the project is started, buyers can track the progress of the project, review the work and assign requirements through P2W2’s tools.

4. Once the project is complete, P2W2 ensures the payment settlement.

Major Features:

* Reputation management:
* Selection Tools:
* Online Project Tracking:
* Payment facility:

Innovations:

* They have launched a voice-enabled service wherein a client can express his requirements through his own voice by audio recording the requirements/feedback. The Vendor then can go through the audio and gather a very good understanding of the client requirements.

P2W2 is founded by ISB alumni. Chaitanya Sagar from Class of 2005 and Amit Mullerpattan from Class of 2006.

Existing Players [Few examples]
elance [www.elance.com]
ebay [www.ebay.com] yes, ebay has a facility to connect buyers and sellers of services.
Guru [www.guru.com]
rentacoder.com [For software services]
and quite a few freelance exchange sites

My Verdict:
The success of an online marketplace is dependant upon the the familiar network-effect. Unless there are more vendors of high quality, there is no real benefit for buyers of services to use this service and vice versa. This whole cycle of building the userbase takes time and good community building strategies. I am not sure about the current status. But cracking this is of utmost importance.

Moreover, weeding through fake profiles, fraudulent buyers and protecting the interests of both parties (buyers and services) is not an easy task. There are lot of security and trust issues to be taken care of.

Services like elance.com is generally considered good for buyers and bad for seller of services. Because sellers compete fiercely on prices and sometimes the prices are close to nothing. This makes it a place to find cheap sellers or service vendors rather than a quality and reliability-based hunting ground. So, P2W2 should focus on quality, reliability, trust and security if they need to create a niche and success. Will have to wait to see how it all pans out…But they have all the right elements in place…Wishing them lot of success

What is your take on P2W2?

Was curious to check the websites that have pagerank 10…

* validator.w3.org Downgraded to PR9
* web.mit.edu
* www.adobe.com
* www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/index.html New on the list
* www.adobe.com/downloads/ New on the list
* www.adobe.com/products/index.html New on the list
* www.adobe.com/downloads/ New on the list
* www.apple.com/quicktime/download Downgraded to PR9
* www.doe.gov New on the list
* www.energy.gov
* www.google.com
* www.keio.ac.jp Downgraded to PR9
* www.mac.com Downgraded to PR9
* www.macromedia.com (redirected to adobe.com)
* www.microsoft.com Downgraded to PR9
* www.nasa.gov
* www.nsf.gov
* www.real.com
* www.usa.gov/index.shtml New on the list
* www.w3.org
* www.whitehouse.gov
* www.yahoo.com Downgraded to PR9

Both Microsoft and Yahoo have lost their Page rank of 10!

I came across the story of Kevin Ham, while I was researching some facts. Kevin Ham, is the most powerful domainer in the world with over 300,000 domains under his belt!

* He is earning around $70 million in revenue from the domains that he owns (primarily through ads served on the domains that he has parked)! A small example: He owns a domain name called “weddingshoes.com” and he earns around $9,100 per year through that domain. He incurred $8 to register the domain and spends $7 per year to maintain it!

* He is the man behind a very smart domain scheme - Many people mistakenly type “.cm” instead of “.com” in the browser URL bar. “.cm” is TLD for the country Cameroon. He stuck a deal with the prime-minister of Cameroon, wherein, he received rights to redirect all “.cm” domains to a website called Agoga.com. The site is filled with ads from Yahoo!

* His team installed a line of code called “wildcard” to redirect all unregistered “.cm” domains to “agoga.com”. The code is installed in the servers owned by Camtel, Cameroon’s domain registry. Revenue generated from “agoga.com” is shared with Cameroor government!

* He is in the process of extending the same scheme to countries like Columbia (.co), oman (.om), Niger (.ne) and Ethiopia (.et). These TLDs have spelling variation of “.com” and “.net” respectively! He is fighting out the legal suits relating to the idea..nevertheless, he exploited the loophole very well!

* Agoga.com receives 8 million unique visitors every month!

* He exploited the concept called “Domain tasting”. Most domain booking sites offer a free trial period (to protect the customers who mistakenly purchase a wrong domain name). He used this mechanism to book more domains and to see which ones are bringing traffic and which one’s aren’t!

* Ham, figured out that revenue based on CPC model may not be sustainable in the long run. So, he is converting some of his best “domain names” to mini-media companies. He is hiring more than 150 designers, engineers, salespeople and editorial folks!

Other learnings:

* Verisign publishes a “root zone” file, a file containing a list of millions of registered domain names.

* Typo-squatting: A term referring to the act of grabbing domain names with typographical variations of established trademarks

* Lots of people type keywords that they are looking for in the URL Bar of the browser and combine them with “.com” or “.net”. This is called as “Direction Navigation”. There are other lots of people, who prefer typing the actual url/website address in google search box/bar and navigate to the actual website from there on. Those are called as “Navigational Searches”!

* Some browsers are capable of fixing url typos! (Curious how this is done?)

* Internet explorer catches unregistered domains and redirects to a microsoft page

Read the actual story here:

How many times you typed a query in google and landed up in Parked domain/site (a site filled with text-ads with words related to your keyword)? I am sure many of you are annoyed by such domains…But such domains are slowly becoming a force to reckon with! There are so many millions of people on the planet who are not immune to text-ads yet and they do click on the ads invariably….

Some Facts!

Domaining industry is at estimated $2 billion, as people buy and sell domain names similar to stocks and property.

Domain industry to reach $4 billion by 2010, as people and businesses continue to purchase about 90,000 domain names every day.

As of April 2007, more than 128 million domain names registered worldwide!

Total Ad revenues from Parked domains was $800 million in 2006.

Combined Ad-revenue for Google and Yahoo in 2006 is $7.88 billion.

Combining the above two facts, and assuming that most of the parked domains are filled with text-ads from google and yahoo, Parked domains are contributing almost 10% of ad-revenues to google and yahoo!

Verisign has indicated that 23% of all registered domains are parked!

We can split ad channels into content channel (contextual ads on content pages) and domain channels (contextual ads on parked domains!). The domain channel has been growing at 37.5% and is fast cannibalizing the content channel.

Combining the above two facts, it’s evident that domain channel is gaining bargaining power and domain channel is something that google and yahoo needs to careful with. As of now the domain channel is largely fragmented, but just a question of time before it gets organized and proves to be a significant chunk of page views