Including Everything Blog

Want to win 6 months of TeleNav GPS service for free? TeleNav has offered up two 6-month freebies on any mobile device with any carrier if you win. To join the contest, check out everything below.

General rules:

1. **Only for US readers**
2. Contest Starts June 13th 2009 and Ends July 15th 2009
3. Each entrants will get one unique number. The list of all the entrants will be posted at the end of the contest period
4. Two winners will get a 6 month GPS navigator service
5. The winner will be selected using Random.Org and announced here with a specific blog post

Check out the blog contest and enter to win!

Read more About Blog Contests online.

Related Information:

With the various TLDs (top level domains) available today, there’s hardly a shortage of domain names available to consumers and businesses. Or is there?

The .com TLD is has always been the king of domain name extensions. The first search we often check to see if our wanted domain name is available is the .com, then likely .net, .org, .info and anything else (probably in that order).

With that, is there any reasonable expectation that we might consider reviving the .com TLD by opening it up to accepting characters other than A-Z and numbers? Introducing symbols into the domain structure would completely open the various extensions for availability again.

We already have clever domains attempting to push the limit of XXX.com

• del.icio.us
• bubbl.us

But imagine if we could take it a step further and do this:

www.p0dca$t.com

I can’t wait for this functionality, and it may actually never come. Does anyone else share the same desires for this as I do?

Few companies take the time to monitor and review their reputation online and actually respond to the complaints and praises their consumers put out there. They responded within 48 hours of the posting online and handled it beautifully.

I rip on Rackspace specifically because I genuinely care for the brand. If I didn’t care, I would leave and find another vendor. I can think of few companies better-poised to take on the challenge of cloud computing better than Rackspace.

In fact, maybe this is where the disconnect is for consumers right now. Not just with Rackspace, but with all vendors claiming to operate their business on cloud architecture. We call it many things, but the common term is “cloud computing”. Are the public’s assumptions in flawless uptime incorrect in that it’s a “distributed processing” model instead.

Cloud technology has already proven itself as a good model for handling larger scale processing for people that need it. Companies like Slicehost (now owned by Rackspace) and Rackspace’s new Cloud Servers platform based on Slicehost’s backend are perfect for this need and you can scale up as needed within minutes. This was only a dream a couple of years ago.

That said, is the public incorrect in equating services like Cloud Sites to Rackspace’s multi-rack load balancing solutions? Such a solution still has a point of failure, although small. The chances of an outage under such a system with two high end servers, each in separate racks with a load balancer in place are incredibly low, in fact, near non-existent. We haven’t seen stability like that on any level with Mosso, Amazon S3 or Media Temple the best of my recollection.

Working on an application today, I noticed errors posting to Rackspace’s Cloud Files system was spitting back read-only errors. Upon investigation, I noticed it was their service that had the issue and not my application.

The status page Rackspace has put up for Cloud Files has up confirms there’s an issue with the service today. I contacted support and they confirmed that “the backend is experiencing no problems” and that “this was simply an unanticipated load on the system so we’re adding more hardware to handle the increased traffic”.

My thoughts are consistent with my other posts. The entire point of “cloud” is that your data’s receiving the highest level of uptime possible out there. This hasn’t been proven yet. I’m shocked that the response was that of “we didn’t know about the load we would receive”. This service’s sole existence is so that your data can be under heavy load. That’s why we choose a cloud service over a single point of failure.

Instead, Rackspace has in effect created their own single point of failure. They took a service out of  “beta” prior to scaling their systems up to speed to handle “live” traffic. With the media attention they’ve been attempting to drum up against competitor Amazon (AMZN), a wise business owner would be ready to handle a surge of usage traffic upon the successful launch of a competing product.  You don’t launch a system, and then say: “Whoops. We  got our  competition’s business. Time to scale up”. By then you’re positioned to lose those new clients back to your competitor again.

I’ve said it before. I’m a huge fan of Rackspace as a brand, their technical support ideals and values, etc. But these types of performance issues are amaturish for a company of their age and place in this world. They’re a tech leader in their space and better than this.

Their speeds may be twice that of Amazon S3, but I think Amazon has a more stable service. All of the big ones have been hit at one time or another, that’s not the complaint. I have been using Rackspace’s Cloud Sites service for 6+ months and it’s had many issues with their supposedly stable cloud. Every time I think a vendor has nailed it, something like this goes and happens to have me questioning “cloud” and what it means again.

Sadly, I don’t think we’ve made it yet. At best my data is safe. But uptime isn’t something I’d bet my life savings on if you’re shopping for it on Cloud. It’s overpriced data storage and has never proven itself to be as “stable” as any of my cPanel linux builds to this day.

Am I the only one out there that feels this way? I’m not mad. I’m disappointed.

It’s inevitable that a web host is going to experience downtime at some point. There’s little in the way of inexpensive options that will deliver true redundancy that wins over all possible failure paths a data center can experience in keeping a website or application online 24/7/365.

However, Mosso has claimed to have accomplished this feat for the past two years. For the most part, this has been true. I’ve pinged and tested websites hosted with Mosso, finding that while they are not necessarily the fastest host out there, I’ve chosen them to be able to withstand nearly any load we can throw at it.

But issues like today I am at a loss for words for. It’s nothing new either. I’ve called in, fully understanding that there’s an issue they’re experiencing, and simply need an “estimated time of resolution”. I’m not asking for anything definitive, but the generic run-around that I typically get reminds me of experiences from early web hosts (who shall be nameless for the time being). This is not typical Rackspace behavior and I think should be treated differently. You don’t put the reseller of your services on the back burner and play the silent game. It sets a bad precedent for your reputation handling customers.

The post from today in the Mosso status area.

So obviously I’m concerned about where Mosso is headed. I was quite literally about to rant about how amazed I am at their Cloud Files offering, however, it’s hard to praise and rant on the same day most of our websites are down. We pay a premium price for shared hosting which is supposed to be redundant enough that these types of embarrasing outages are 

I love the Rackspace brand, company, people, services…everything about it. But Mosso’s starting to test my patience and I’m beginning to doubt if their Cloud Sites service will ever be truly stable and ready for prime time. To compare, I have had a single processor server without issues live at The Planet for nearly a year and a half, not once down. If my little server beats out Mosso’s uptime hands down, why pay the extra buck for a service that hasn’t proven itself?

I’ve ranted about the “cloud” idea for a while in relation to Media Temple and Amazon S3. This post wasn’t originally intended to be a Mosso bashing. I’m a huge Rackspace fan. But they’re not proving themselves bulletproof in terms of uptime so far. Many issues have arisen, and I’m not sold on them as the most stable option for my hosting needs.

Bruce Runyan is the chief uptime officer for Mosso. I’d be interested to get a public statement posted here explaining why things like this happen when the idea behind this type of hosting is so that this doesn’t happen in the first place. To simply avoid calling clients that actually noticed the outage and not provide helpful information other than “We’re working on it” isn’t the answer paying clients are looking for.

So let’s extend this to other hosting situations beyond just Mosso with a few questions.

1. Are you with a host that doesn’t give the full picture?
2. How have you experienced uptime with them?
3. Is uptime or load processing more important?
4. Has the “cloud” idea disappointed you?
5. When will we finally be ready to trust it?

For the record, I’ve been overall blown away with SliceHost (although not Rackspace’s original idea), whome Rackspace aquired recently, and their uptime. I haven’t experienced a single issue with them and I was picky as hell when I contacted the owners out of skepticism a month ago. SliceHost technology will soon become Rackspace’s Cloud Servers offering.

Other related information:
Mosso.com – Information Thread on WebHostingTalk
Rackspace appoints chief uptime officer at Mosso

Recently the United States Postal Service announced that it was considering cutting another delivery day from six down to 5 days per week. This would enable the USPS to maintain staff associated to a more reasonable delivery schedule.

With the widespread use of email and online streaming becoming common use, will this affect businesses in the U.S. severely in this dark economic time? Services like Netflix and Blockbuster run services that rely primarily on the U.S. mail system in order to reach its subscribers and deliver new content. With one less day available for delivery, this could potentially drive the costs of doing business up for these services, translating to higher subscription fees for the consumer.

Or would it? I question whether services like this would be affected as heavily with the new streaming options with iTunes and Netflix. Microsoft Xbox, Sony Playstation and the new Blu-ray and DVD players have cutting edge support for streaming movies and television episodes from these services. Will this ultimately replace the need for the mailed discs when a subscriber could just pull up a movie on-demand…without waiting for something via postal mail?

The streaming services will have lower overhead in the end for the business leasing the content, getting rid of the need for warehouses full of discs, postage fees and lost or damaged discs. The cost of doing business actually goes down by leaving the postal service model.

The next consideration is alienating your subscribers who cannot afford or do not qualify for high speed internet service yet. Not everybody has high speed access yet and that may put people off. So would the loss of another day really hurt these services? Will it annoy the subscribers? Would the ability to pay a slightly higher rate on postage be worth it?

Other news:
USPS asks for 5-day delivery, office closings
USPS 5-Day Delivery Week Could Hurt E-Commerce
USPS Wants Flexibility to Move to 5-Day Delivery Week

Right now, top lawmakers are predicting that Washington would approve a bailout for U.S. automakers.  The idea was that the automakers (Ford Motor Co, General Motors Corp and Chrysler LLC) would submit survival plans that depicted their strategy for coming out of this financial slump with sales.

Both General Motors Corp and Chrysler LLC said that unless they received an immediate infusion of cash they would fail soon.  It is being said that Washington will have little choice but to offer this help to the U.S. automakers, as they account for 1/10 of American jobs.  Bankruptcy is not an option and an intervention is likely to happen either legislatively or from the administration.

My question to the public is simple.  If the bailout money had not shown its face, what would these automaker executives have done, then?  Just died off?  Hundreds of thousands of jobs lost to the United States?  Where does this responsibility fall onto the U.S. government to “bail out” companies that fail to sell?  Honda, Toyota and Kia seem alive and somewhat well…they’re even good for the economy too.

Should my own business concepts fail, would I be entitled to a reimbursement check from the feds as well?  What makes these companies (other than the fact that they’ve been around for decades) worthy of bailout when the American way is commerce and healthy competition?  By doing this, the U.S. government is enabling immunity from the economy to these larger automakers, yet stifling the ability for younger/smarter companies to move up the ladder in terms of marketshare.

While I understand the impact not helping the automakers would have on jobs, I don’t feel the top executives at the automakers are responsibly planning for the money’s use.  The Big Three automakers asked for a combined $34 billion in loans and credit lines on a day when they reported that in November they suffered a further dramatic slump in sales.  General Motors asked for $18 billion in loans and credit lines from the federal government, saying it urgently needs $4 billion of the money by the end of December to pay its bills.

Chrysler LLC, the smallest and most financially fragile of the Detroit automakers, requested $7 billion by the end of this month, saying that without the aid its cash could fall below the minimum level needed to operate in the first quarter of next year.

To pay its bills.  For one month.  Seriously?  I cannot believe we’re entertaining spending that much money (money we don’t actually have, remember…it’s borrowed) on jobs for americans that would last a period of 30 days.  We’re better off not granting that money to the automakers, and instead using it for reform within our economy to replace the jobs lost from the automakers.  Not only would it strengthen the economy, but it would help replace jobs lost.

The “bailout” money was intended to be a cushion for the financial industry, which are the lifeblood of our economy.  They need the help to stay afloat so that the financial infrastructure does not collapse.  It wasn’t until they announced the bailout options for AIG that I first heard about the automakers asking for hand outs.

One idea a friend of mine had was to allow the American public to “buy out” their mortgages at ten cents on the dollar (or whatever the appropriate fraction is), which would not only help to stabilize the finaicial institutions, but at the same time provide a better safety net for the American homeowners who are losing their pensions, 401K, IRA, etc.  This would give them a bargaining chip for finance management going forward.

Another person I’ve talked to recently stated that the U.S. government would be better off giving each american $100k, as opposed to giving the money to automakers as a band-aid that would only help in the short term.  Once the money is give, then the automakers crumble anyways…the money’s gone and cannot be recovered.  All for a temporary solution.

So what’s going to actually help our economy?  Continuously bailing out companies that do poor business, fly expensive jets with golden parachutes and bonuses galore?  I think not.

Additional insight:

Putting the Brakes on the Automaker Bailout
Deal Journal – WSJ.com : Automaker Bailout? Sure. Bank Bailout
Debating the American automakers bailout | Tampa | News | Word

Recently I’ve had the opportunity to play around with Twitter API and several services/software pieces that integrate with Twitter.  Until recently, I hadn’t run into any issues with the limitations of the Twitter API and how many connections a user is allowed access to in a given window of time.

So why couldn’t Twitter release a premium level of its service that grants paid users a greater level of access to the platform, additional features, more API connections, etc?  This seems the logical next step.  The main service would remain free as it always had (even I didn’t need to upgrade until now), but a handful of the Twitter power users would benefit from near-real-time Twitter updates with applications such as TweetDeck and mobile devices for the iPhone or BlackBerry such as Tweetie, Twitterific and TwitterBerry.

Here is some simple math that I’ve worked out.  The numbers seem fairly reasonable so far and I welcome comments on this model.  TwitDir reports 3,328,420 twitterers that they know as of today.  I’ll use this as the base number for my calculation.  If we estimate that there are 3.3 million Twitterers out there sharing ideas, and only 5% of them are power users that require a more powerful level of Twitter power (166,421), paying only $2.99/mo…

Users:	3,328,420
5% paying:	166,421
$2.99/mo	$497,598.79
$4.99/mo	$830,440.79

That’s almost a half a million dollars of revenue for Twitter and all they had to do was scale up a few servers and spend a few hours coding the management/login area for users.  Hardly anything else needs to change.  The infrastructure has already been layed out and is operational.  If they wanted to, they could charge $4.99/mo for a different tier of service and offer other incentives to those users that required even more.

I’ve found myself leaving TweetDeck open on both my Mac (home) and Windows PC (work) and constantly use Tweetie on my iPhone.  There go all my API connections for the hour…they’re used up in about 30 minutes even with moderate usage.

The bottom line, would we pay for this service?  Is it so necessary to the way that we network now that users would jump into paying for it, or do we only use it now because it’s free?  My vote is for the same level of service to remain free, but offer additional options to their already-ginormous user base.

Comments welcome.

Newegg, Inc. has a new (new to me, anyways) area called Newegg Mall that sells things non-tech.  It’s almost Amazon or Buy.com like.  I purchased a Bulova watch from Newegg Mall out of curiosity the other day and it was received very quickly.  I paid for rush shipping, but Newegg still processed the order same day, even though I had an issue with my shipping address not being on file correctly with American Express.  I resolved the issue with American Express in the morning Tuesday, and Newegg still processed the order on Tuesday with time to have the order ship for receipt on Thursday.  Not bad!

I noticed through correspondence that it was Newegg that placed the order, but the fullfillment was actually through World of  Watches.  It’s interesting to see how they’re leveraging third parties to handle the completion of the orders and expanding their inventory in the process.  Amazon pioneered this model years ago and it seems other companies are following this business model today.  If it works, why deviate, right?

The pricing was the bottom line.  I received a $595 watch for $100.  When taken to the local Fred Meyer jewler to have it sized, I was told that no jewler in the area could possibly have done better in their pricing and that the watch I received was “among the best”.

What’s even more impressive is that Newegg’s re-sold rate for the watch that Word of Watches was fullfilling from its inventory was better than the pricing on World of Watches’ own website.  You can’t beat that!

I would rate their service level at Newegg Mall a 9/10 simple because of their call center having to dispatch my request or call to a customer service rep when I call in, then the rep calls me back.  They’re quick to call back, but it would be less irritating and tedious if I were able to reach a customer service representative at the time of calling in the first time.

Check out Newegg Mall today.  They rival companies like Overstock.com, Buy.com and Amazon.com and were polite when contacted for customer service.

After much talk, Apple is finally considering the tethering option with AT&T to allow connection to the internet on computers using the iPhone as its source of Internet connection.  An interview at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco confirms that this is on the horizon, as AT&T Wireless CEO Ralph de la Vega said Apple and the wireless carrier are working on an official tethering application that will be coming “soon.”  No official timeframe for this has been given.

I’ve witnessed the speed of the internet on a laptop using a jailbroken iPhone lately, and I must say…it’s fast.  The iPhone 3G is connected to one of the quickest carrier networks out there (second only to Sprint’s WiMax I believe), and I’ve seen DSL rivaling speeds.

It’s been said that the carrier will also be likely to charge additional fees for the service or to use the application to cover costs.  I’m sensing this idea of “double dipping” starting to pop up again.  I posted about this a week ago with Verizon trying to do this with SMS messaging not originating from mobile devices.

Read:  Verizon to stunt mobile growth for a few bucks?

I mean, they’re already billing you for so-called “unlimited” data.  This has been discussed for many months in relation to various carriers (not just AT&T) and is starting to irritate the hell out of consumers.  You have a sales guy in the retail store telling you it’s “unlimited data” and signage all over the store also stating the term “unlimited”, yet we have the carrier’s terms and conditions for service stating something like this…

If you are on a data plan that does not include a monthly megabyte allowance and additional data usage rates, the parties agree that AT&T has the right to impose additional charges if you use more than 5 GB in a month.  Prior to the imposition of any additional charges, AT&T shall provide you with notice and you shall have the right to terminate your service.

Increasingly, Internet providers across the country are placing such limits on the amount of data users can upload and download each month, as a way to curb a small number of “bandwidth hogs” who use a lot of the network capacity. For instance, 5 percent of AT&T’s subscribers take up 50 percent of the capacity, spokesman Michael Coe said Tuesday.

To that I say:  ”Why did you say it was unlimited, then?”.  This screams false advertising, doesn’t it?  Let’s just call it what it is.  I sense a class action lawsuit coming of many.