Misses
VOiP – Vonage lost a big lead by spending for advertising instead of service improvement and endorsing as a company to a very unethical set of core values. See vonageproblem.htm.
The Government – Both Executive and Administrative branches rolled over and died. They, like Vonage, were driven by unethical values and money. Congress votes 223 million to build a bridge to nowhere in Alaska. (Read the full article. Congress didn’t vote to build the bridge, but rather voted to give them the money to do it. The Washington Post title is misleading. That doesn’t save anyone’s political neck.) At the same time, Congress can’t build extra lanes for congested Interstates in Oregon. Both of my senators and my representative voted for the bridge to nowhere. Maybe they should move to Alaska. And Bush has a long, long, long list of misses. The Republican party has died.
The Search Engines – CNN advertising, which is driven from Yahoo, leads their advertising with ads for a company that has poor ethics. So they make lots of money for the advertisement; but who wants to advertise with Yahoo when you can’t trust their advertisements? We are pulling our own ads with them.
e-Commerce – currently protects the seller but not the consumer.
Spam - Our spam load continues to increase, even with filters on the host and our own system. The latest is some joker with a site selling watches with a whole colledtion of different domain names making it difficult to block him. The FTC, of course isn’t doing anything with the blokes. In Germany they find them $65,000 a spam. Who will you vote for next fall?
My Motorola cell phone went dead three times this year. I’m on my third phone. The last time it failed all I had to do was reboot (does Microsoft own Motorola?), but the cell phone didn’t tell me that. After it didn’t ring for a few days, a support store showed me how to reboot and find the 12 lost messages that had been left.
Broadband is overpriced. New Orleans is leading the way with free WiFi, but other cities are afraid of the broadband companies and not offering any free WiFI – including my own city of Portland, Oregon.
HDTV - Most of the HDTVs sold now are not really high resolution. The display is tricked down to the lower resolution, more like a DVD quality. It still looks great, but you aren’t getting all the pixels.
Hits
VOiP – If you avoid Vonage, you can save about 30% on your telephone by going to VOiP. There are almost no surcharges and long distance is often free.
With the Government non-functioning, thanks to someone that imported Venezuela gas and was selling it in New Orleans at about 33% of the current retail price. What does this tell you about the oil companies and President Bush? And thanks to many, many people, organizations, and corporations that did take responsibility in helping the people on the Gulf Coast during the Katrina disaster.
Search Engines - In the search engine war between Google, Yahoo, and MSN – the consumer will win. Most people trust the organic (free) listings. Why pay for advertising and compete with unethical companies?
e-Commerce passed the 30 billion mark in sales over the Christmas holidays. That’s a 30% increase from last year.
Stopping SPAM - We load the spamming domains and IPs to an online and uncopyrighted database on one of our web sites at http://www.creatingnewworlds.org/stopspam.cfm. We invite hackers to lanuch viruses, trojans, and DoS at the IPs and domains, destroying them. This has gotten to be a very popular page (PageRank=4) and gets lots of hits. One guy threated to sue, but we sent copies of his email (which violated the CAN-SPAM) to his state attorney general. We haven’t heard from him any more.
My blogs have doubled the traffic on my web sites that last month. There are over 19 million blogs out there now.
HDTV - Some of the newer HDTV sets and a few of the leading HDTV manufacturers (Toshiba is one) use a new and special chip in their televisions that gets the promised HDTV resolution. Be wise if you are purchasing HDTV. Find out who is using the chip and then make your purchase as a wise buyer.