Month: July 2009

Swoopo: It’s Like eBay Designed by Satan

“Imagine for a second that you set out to come up with an online shopping site that would take advantage of everything we’ve come to know about consumer behavior to separate people from their money in as efficient a way as possible. What would you do? Well, you’d probably try to lure buyers with bargain prices. You’d pit them against one another in an auction. You’d ask them to make snap decisions without taking much time to figure out just how much money they’re spending. On top of that, you’d ask them for only very small amounts of money at any one time, letting payments of a few cents build up to hundreds of dollars. Still trying to figure out how you’d put all that together? You can relax. Someone’s already beaten you to it: the folks at Swoopo. It’s an online auction site that fiendishly plays on every irrational impulse buyers have to draw them into what might be the crack cocaine of online shopping sites.”

That’s a quote from an article on MSN Money, and it’s the best article I’ve seen yet on Swoopo. Despite my earlier success with Swoopo, and a successful cheap acquisition of a 16 GB SD card, like any gambler I rolled the dice and lost: I was bidding on a set of pots and pans, and after using 18 bids I didn’t win, so like a degenerate gambler I bought another bid pack for $27 and blew ALL of them and still lost. The most idiotic part? I kept one bid, decided to bid on something else, and when I checked the pots and pans auction, it had ended – exactly one bid after the person who outbid me. So if I had used that last bid, I might have one – or it might have gone on for another hour. Swoopo is just too problematic – avoid it.

Do You Have the “Brain Faster Than Eyes” Problem Too?

brain-faster-than-eyesite

When I first looked at that sign, I thought it said “Ecoli”, which is of course a horrible name for a store. I find that this happens to be fairly often – I’ll glance at a sign and before my eyes can finish reading the letters, my brain flashes an interpretation into existence…and it’s often wrong, with comical results. Does this happen to anyone else?

The Coolest DVD Case Design Ever

watchman-best-buy-special-edition-boxed-set-rorshach-mask

This is what the case for the Watchmen movie looks like if you get the special edition from Best Buy. Sweet eh?

Watchmen Cartoon Spoof

лаптоп

Watchmen comes out on DVD today, so to celebrate the release of this amazing movie, I thought I’d embed this very hilarious spoof video that someone created. If you haven’t seen Watchmen yet, don’t worry, it’s nothing like this cartoon. 😉

Some Thoughts on Facebook and Twitter

I’m a member of a group called Mobius – it’s an invite-only conference that Microsoft holds once or twice a year, and it focuses on mobility. There’s a private mailing list for Mobius, and it’s always full of interesting discussions. Yesterday there was a discussion about Google Wave and it spilled over into talking about Facebook and Twitter. One of the people mentioned the idea that as long as people use social networking in a professional manner, they’re good things. That triggered something I’ve been pondering for a while now, so I thought I’d share here what I wrote on the list.

“Ah, but there’s the catch! There’s no consensus on how tools like Facebook and Twitter are used – it’s like email, how do you decide the “right” way to use it?

You mention professional purposes, but I’m of the exact opposite viewpoint. Facebook for me was great in the beginning because my friends on there were really my friends. Then Facebook got really popular, and suddenly business aquiantences wanted to be added as “friends”, PR people I deal with wanted to be added as “friends”, and visitors from my sites wanted to be my “friends”. It completely changed the dynamic, and even the meaning of the word “friend” in an online sense. Sites like LinkedIn are social networking for businessses, yet most people seem to prefer to use Facebook for that because it has such momentum.

Then there’s the whole issue of person vs. site. It’s not my place to tell peole how to use technology, but when people on my “friend” list started to import their RSS feeds from their technology sites, I un-friend them. Maybe I’m weird, but if I’m friends with someone on Facebook, or following them on Twitter, I want to see what’s going on with them as a PERSON. If I wanted to know what’s going on with their Web sites, I’d open up my RSS reader. Mixing the two just makes a bit of a mess…

Twitter is a whole different ballgame – but it has the same type of problem when you want to follow a person and instead get a news feed from their site. I created Twitter accounts for each of my sites that I feed an RSS feed to, then I have my own personal Twitter account. Twitter for me is really useful and interesting – I was initially very much against it, having seen a lot of what I’d call “Tweetbuse” (haha!) where people would tweet everything they were doing. “Eating dinner”. “Going to the bathroom” (I kid you not, I saw that once). Thankfully, you can easily unfollow people like that.

One thing I really like about Twitter is how I get connected to opinions from people all over the place – I posted about trying to watch the movie “Day Watch” and only getting through 25 minutes of it, and within a few hours I had four strangers sending me messages telling me that the books were much better, and I should check them out. That’s really valuable to me – and I get a lot of interesting feedback about technology as well.”

OutsourcingRoom.com Stole Customer Data From Elance?

One of the reasons I use unique email aliases for my jasondunn.com email is that it enables me to control and track who’s using my email address, who’s sharing it, etc. Once I start getting spam to a certain alias, I block it. It’s not a perfect system; there are still people who take my “real” personal email address and share it with online services (greeting cards, etc.) and people who have virus/spyware problems on their PCs, so I still get spammed now and then. But I get perhaps 3-5 per day, so it’s easy to manage.

I was surprised then when I received an email from a site called “Oroom” and it was addresses to my unique Elance email address. Here’s what I sent to Elance:

“I use unique email aliases, and for Elance the email address on file is *******. Imagine my surprise when I received an unsolicited email message from Oroom, promoting a new service/site. I didn’t give Elance permission to share or sell my email address to any other companies. Please explain how this happened.”

And here is their response:

Dear Jason,
Thanks for contacting us.
In the last day or so, we’ve learned that OutsourcingRoom.com and its parent company CyberBionic Systematics has illegally obtained and posted information about Elance members and sent out unwanted solicitation emails. We have confirmed that no financial information such as credit cards, tax id numbers, or other financial records were compromised. The stolen data was limited to name, city, state, phone number, and email address.
Elance treats the security and privacy of our community members with the utmost seriousness. We have already mobilized an international team to investigate and respond to this issue and have demanded legally that they cease and desist. We have taken immediate steps to remedy the cause of the security breach, and have secured all areas that were discovered to be vulnerable. We are also in contact with the parent company and are pursuing all avenues available to us to have the data removed and destroyed.
Elance has made demands on OutsourcingRoom.com and its overseas hosting services. We have filed an international criminal complaint. And we are contacting the law enforcement officials in the relevant countries presently.
We continue to take this issue very seriously and will update you when we have more relevant details to share. We extend our sincere apologies for any inconvenience or disruption that this has caused anyone. If you have a specific question, please contact Elance by email at [email protected], and we will attempt to answer with whatever information we have.
Best regards,
Steve
Manager, Customer Relations
Elance

“Dear Jason,

Thanks for contacting us. In the last day or so, we’ve learned that OutsourcingRoom.com and its parent company CyberBionic Systematics has illegally obtained and posted information about Elance members and sent out unwanted solicitation emails. We have confirmed that no financial information such as credit cards, tax id numbers, or other financial records were compromised. The stolen data was limited to name, city, state, phone number, and email address.

Elance treats the security and privacy of our community members with the utmost seriousness. We have already mobilized an international team to investigate and respond to this issue and have demanded legally that they cease and desist. We have taken immediate steps to remedy the cause of the security breach, and have secured all areas that were discovered to be vulnerable. We are also in contact with the parent company and are pursuing all avenues available to us to have the data removed and destroyed.

Elance has made demands on OutsourcingRoom.com and its overseas hosting services. We have filed an international criminal complaint. And we are contacting the law enforcement officials in the relevant countries presently.

We continue to take this issue very seriously and will update you when we have more relevant details to share. We extend our sincere apologies for any inconvenience or disruption that this has caused anyone. If you have a specific question, please contact Elance by email at *******, and we will attempt to answer with whatever information we have.

Best regards,

Steve
Manager, Customer Relations
Elance”

Seems that the outsourcing industry is quite competitive if one company is willing to risk getting caught hacking into another company’s customer database.

My Swoopo Experiment: Yes, This is Gambling

Yesterday morning I was questioning the legitimacy of Swoopo, and after reading up on it some more, my curiosity was so strong I decided to invest a bit of money to see if their system actually worked. So here’s how it played out:

  • I bought a “bidpack” for $27 CAD + tax ($27.30) which gave me 40 bids (that’s 68 cents per bid)
  • I picked a product that I wanted (a 32 GB USB Flash drive), and one that I figured there wouldn’t be a great deal of competition on (such as a laptop)
  • I waited until the last 10 seconds to place my first bid (the price was at 8 cents), and when a bid is placed it adds a few seconds onto the countdown clock
  • I spent about four minutes bidding against a handful of other people, and eventually won – the final price being $9.84 CAD
  • I used up 18 bids on this item, which cost me $12.24 CAD – more than the item itself
  • Shipping on this item is $5.90 CAD
  • So my total cost on this item is $27.98 CAD – almost three times the cost of the final bid price
  • The retail cost of this item if Iwere to purchase it from my favourite computer store (Memory Express) would be $89.24 CAD including tax (not counting the rebate – those are always a bit dodgy)
  • So in the end I’m saving $61.26 CAD on this product. Not bad, right?

…but everyone else who bid on this item threw their money away, and that’s the true “evil genius” in Swoopo. Let’s say there were five other people bidding (and there were at least that many), and that each person bidding dumped, on average, of 10 bids into the process. If they had the same basic cost as I did, each of them spent $6.80 bidding on this and in the end they walked away with nothing. Swoopo in the meantime, made $68.80. Assuming they got a good deal on the purchase of the 32 GB Flash drive, they would have made a bit of money on this transaction.

The real action though is on the hot items like Macbooks, where there are thousands of bids – this article has a great breakdown of the process, but the short version is that on hot items like this, Swoopo is making $13,000+ on a laptop that they paid perhaps $1300 for. You have hundreds, if not thousands of people, throwing money at the process and walking away with nothing.

That’s the real catch with Swoopo – it’s basically gambling, with a group of people throwing money into a pool and only one of them can walk away the winner. You have to go “all in” and be prepared to out-bid, and out-last everyone else in order to win the item. If you don’t committ enough money, you “fold” and give up. One person wins, and everyone else loses. It’s like eBay designed by Satan.

Nikola Tesla: The Most Important Person You’ve Probably Never Heard Of

“The life story and work of Nikola Tesla. He invented AC electricity, Neon Lights, Radio transmission, The Electric motor, Wireless electricity transfer, Remote control, Hydraulics, Lasers, Space weapons, Robotics, and many, many more things.”

Today would have been Nikola Tesla’s birthday, and Google has put a spotlight on the work of this very brilliant, but very perculiar man. I read a book about Tesla recently, and while the book was quite awful (here’s my review of it), Tesla remains an interesting figure in history. The 10 minute video above is a good summary of his life, and it certainly shows the dark side of Thomas Edison.