It seems that economics is considered some sort of ridiculously evil subject that one should leave others to do, yet in reality it is not that hard. An appreciation of the basics of economic theory for example can go a long way in widening horizons when doing something as simple as watching the news.

No-one on the web seems to go back to basics. I will, and I will start with the pound.

The pound is the currency of the United Kingdom (for now). It is referred to as GBP, Sterling, Pound and so on. Relative to other currencies it is one of the most highly valued (read on).

Essentially, the strength of a currency refers to its value relative to another currency (typically the USD). If £1GBP is worth $1.50, it is weaker than if £1GBP were worth $1.75. Simple right?

Assuming the price of an apple in America were $0.25, a stronger pound would allow the consumer to purchase more. On a larger scale, a strong pound is great for importing (buying commodities from elsewhere).

On the flip side, if you are selling apples at $0.25, a weaker pound is better as you need to sell less to get the same equivalent GBP value. On a large scale this means exporting is better if the pound is weaker.

Example
With the crash of the British economy over the last year and a half, the pound has lost a lot of its value. At one point it was worth less than the Euro… it was extremely weak.
For a consumer to get EUR to spend abroad, they had to pay significantly more GBP than they would have one year ago for example.

Why
Currency works like any other market. It is bought and sold (exchanged with other currencies). The GBP will get stronger if people demand more of it, and weaker if people demand less of it. It is basic ‘Supply and Demand’ !

My interest in currency strength arose from my interest in domain investing: an online business for which most transactions are conducted in USD. At numerous points in time I have had to weigh up whether a purchase was a good or bad deal. In the past i sold a domain for a 5% loss, but in ‘real’ terms sold the domain for more GBP. When I withdrew, and converted my USD balance, I had more pounds to spend.

It pays to appreciate currency strength.

Independent of where you originate from, you will have more than likely heard of Vodafone: the mobile phone carrier originally set up within the UK in the eighties.
Over the years they have gone from strength to strength, last tax year earning a post tax profit in excess of £3 billion. Running businesses within 20 different countries, and employing 79,000 worldwide gives off a general aura of a well run business. Wrong.

Now I appreciate wholly that I am a tiny fish in the grand scheme of things, however a sample of ‘me’ suggested that 100% of Vodafone customers were extremely disappointed. Stats do not lie !

I have been a Vodafone contract customer for the past 18 months. Prior to that, I had previous contracts with them. My family all have mobile contracts, and the majority of them are with Vodafone. We give them a few thousand quid a year, so logically they would want our custom right? Nope.

Having lost my phone, I decided to get a new contract. My previous contract expired in 3 months, so compared to what it could have been, it was a minimal financial loss.
Thus, knowing I could not cancel my contract I went into Vodafone to change my contract to a lower tariff. I.E Rather than spend £35 a month on a phone I did not have, simply spend £15: a saving of £20 monthly for 3 months.
After ‘a period of time which made the effort not worth it’ the woman told me I could only reduce my contract by £5 a month. I stated that with previous contracts we had reduced the contract in one lump, but she was having none of it. Essentially Vodafone wanted to make £30 extra out of me over a 3 month period by making ‘me saving money’ excessively complicated.

What Vodafone in fact did is make me decide that I did not in fact want to take out another contract with them. On the assumption I would have taken out a £30 monthly contract for 18 months, they lost a whopping £510 for having no business sense. Further to this, I have informed all family members to stay away from Vodafone when getting a new contract. We can multiply that number by 5, and state that Vodafone will essentially lose £2,500 bi-anually (minimum), and it is all their fault.

I am ridiculously stubborn, and business acumen influenced. Vodafone have ticked every box for me as a company NEVER to deal with.

It may seem in some respects, and to some people, a waste of time, and money to fly to a foreign country for 8 seconds of freefall, however I kid you not, the exhilaration alone is worth every penny.

We flew directly into Geneva, where we spent 2 days. Here we met some interesting people, experienced to swiss bars, and smoked a bit of shisha (as you do). We then proceeded to get on a train to Locarno (Around 5 hours East). The train ticket cost £80GBP (there and back), however doing it this way still worked out significantly cheaper than flying direct to Locarno. We spent a day in Locarno, then did the bungee jump, and then returned to Geneva. It was awesome.

The worlds biggest bungee jump is at the Verzasca Dam, Locarno, Switzerland. It weighs in at a whopping 220m, boasting 8 seconds of freefall. I wanted to do this jump, as after doing the Nevis Bungee in NZ, I developed a bungee addiction.

I created four videos of our trip: one of each of our jumps, one of both our jumps, and one of a random squeeky man.
So you dont have to watch a whole minute of video, I will only embed the ‘both’ one, however the others can be seen at Clowestab on Youtube.

Now watching that video, you may be thinking that you have seen that before. That is because you have ! This is the most famous bungee in the world, after it was featured on 007 Goldeneye back in 1998. That is why it is called the Goldeneye jump. It is not very reassuring to hear before doing the jump, but sadly the stunt man who did the jump for Goldeneye actually died. None the less here is the video for your viewing pleasure.

So.. would you do it?

It just so happens that a year or two ago I was offered some adult domain names.
Basically, I had previously purchased some names from a seller. A few months after this initial purchase, I was contacted by him. His wife had found out that he owned these domains, and given him a lowdown.. sell them, or… well… who knows.

Now I dont have much interest in the adult industry, or adult domains, however these were some reasonably popular adult keywords in various cctlds. I jumped on the reasonably low prices. In hindsight I am curious as to whether his scenario was a selling ploy, none the less I felt I had gotten a good deal.

I have since attempted to sell these domains numerous times, never with any success. Eventually I gave up, and took a $200 offer I had received on ‘blowjobs.us’. To my dismay the buyer put it straight on SEDO, and fetched over a grand. This increased my motivation for selling the other domains, however even a Rick Latona auction could not get any bids on these domains.

Now I appreciate that cctlds, are less valuable than faeces nowadays: I sold 5 LLL.us I had bought for $70 each 3 years ago for $1 each on ebay recently ! However one of the names in the .com extension sold for mid $xx,xxx. You’d thus think that the .us would be worth $500? Apparently not.

So, essentially I am in a position where I own 5 or so domains I cannot sell, in a questionable niche which I have little interest in. Furthermore I have no idea as to how to develop them. What to do?

I looked into adult content on popular adult forum GFY.com. The cost of content was extortionate ! No wonder porn is such a profitable business. 10 sets of images cost more than the domains themselves cost (OK That is an exaggeration, none the less it IS expensive). The little motivation I had was diminishing.

Fortunately for me, I stumbled upon a seller who was licensing a large volume of content for a pretty cheap price. It now seemed worthwhile to spend a little cash for a potentially good return. 100GB of downloading later (YES, 100GB ! : (very high definition images) ), and I was in a position to begin development.

This whole exercise has been worthwhile in that it lead me to develop a script to automatically resize images. I managed to convert 2.15GB of images down to 85MB with this script. I could easily make my money back selling the script.
Armed with this, I decided on my development ‘plan of attack’, and have since put it into action.

FAST FORWARD

So, now my various adult websites are online. Anyone can access them, yet no-one can definitively say ‘That website is owned by ‘The Gremlins Umbrella Authority”. Why is that the case? Well simply put, as mentioned numerous times, the adult industry is questionable, and somewhat immoral from my perspective, however my websites are not illegal. On that basis, money is money, and I will gladly accept it, yet I dont really want to be actively associated with it.

If you park a domain name on an adult landing page, you would not go onto the streets and tell your mates that you were in the porn industry (or would you?). Likewise I know what I want to be known for.. a network of great, user, and family friendly websites. In simple there is a stigma associated with the adult industry, and I have no interest in associating myself with that stigma.

Would you?

Admittedly there are also a lot of offline scams. I, however, have never experienced one apart from on the box in the form of TV Show ‘Watchdog’ (here in Britain). That was up until, well, about 2 months ago.

My father received a letter from ACS Law. It went along the lines of ‘We want £500 from you because on random date you downloaded a Scooter song from a P2P Network’. The first clarification that needs to be made here is that no-one in my family has ever used a P2P network. The second clarification is that when we do BUY music through Itunes, nowhere in our playlists would you find ‘Scooter’. Do people actually listen to Scooter?!

I took a look on google, and there are a lot of threads at various problem about this ‘offline spam’. I am unsure how names, and addresses have been acquired, but there does seem to be some serious automation going on here such that in our A4 envelope, we actually had the exact same letter with a different name on it!

Unfortunately it seems people are getting scared, and paying these fines. This seemed absolutely preposterous to me.. why pay for something you did not do. None the less, as the claims were false we simply ignored the letter.

Today we got another letter along the lines of ‘We are still pursuing our false claims, and want to damage any reputation we have left’. We were given a lowdown of 7 days to pay or be taken to court.

Father wanted to reply along the lines of ‘Go away, we didn’t do nothin !’. I, being the diplomat, went on google again, and looked up suggested responses. We downloaded a template letter from Being Threatened, and will pop it in the post tomorrow. Then it is a waiting game to see what happens. Kudos to whoever set that site up as it saved me a lot of time, and effort.

The letters they sent out are legally binding, it would have been foolish to ignore it once again. Just imagine if somehow, someone was allowed to spam.. and it was legal.

Media companies, fair play to want to defend your rights, but hiring companies like this with their disgusting scare tactics only does you damage, and destroys your credibility. Who on earth will support an industry that threatens the innocent? No-one.

‘Why should I use Moniker over Godaddy for example?’

Dons response involved praise for Godaddy for what they do. He stated that they are the worlds biggest registrar, and thus they must be doing something right. He pointed out that Godaddy are a webhost also whereas Moniker simply focus on domain name management. He stated that Godaddy caters to small businesses, and college students whereas moniker is a ’boutique registrar’.

Now I don’t know about you, but a company that can sell itself praising competitors must know what they are doing.

Don then went on to a 5 minute or so explanation of exactly what Moniker offered. Such was the response that after hearing it, I could not think of any hard questions to ask. I felt like saying.. Wow you are awesome, and hanging up… but.. well.. I couldn’t do that.

Paraphrased, Moniker is slightly more expensive, but has never lost a domain name. Their portfolio manager can handle upwards of 5,000 domains on a single page, and dns changes etc can be registered in bulk in a matter of seconds. Furthermore they are owned by Oversee.net, and thus support, and service is streamlined for Snapnames, Domain Sponsor, and Moniker.

I questioned Dons statement with regards to ‘never losing a domain name’, referencing this post, and was informed that Oversee resolved this by paying out of their own pocket to buy the domain back, and returned it to the owner. This has not been verified, but if so is seriously impressive.

Regarding support, I was curious as to whether Godaddys statements about support were correct. Don was completely honest stating that ‘Moniker is not a hospital’, whereas, as a host Godaddy needs 24/7 support, Moniker does not. None-the-less he stated he is almost always reachable by phone, and has a blackberry for when he is on the move. He also praised the Moniker web based support, and the staff.

My only disagreement is that the web based support is slow, and uninformative at best. Phone, and you’ll always get the answer you want.

Without even asking Don also offered me free 0% interest financing to move my domains to Moniker. I queried how they could provide this, and received ‘$150,000,000 in the bank tends to help’. One thing is for sure Moniker aint going anywhere any time soon. Fill in a simple credit finance form, and you can move all your domains such that you don’t need to prolong the process.

What I loved about Moniker was the honesty. Whereas Godaddy sounded desperate for your business, Moniker were happy to accept your business if you both suited one another. Don would not for example offer free financing if my domains were crap. Why? Because Moniker only wants good domains, such that they can look after all their names and customers, rather than be flooded with spammers and scammers.

Interesting fact of the day: Moniker has over 3,000,000 domain names under its belt, putting it up there as one of the top 10 domain name registrars.

Moniker is by far and away the BEST domain name registrar. Don’t delay, and join at Moniker.com

Essentially what happens is I phone up a support service, and ask ‘unusual’ questions. How well are support staff trained, and can they deal with a difficult customer?

Today I phoned up Godaddy, and was aided by Damien. The first thing to note is that he did not tell me his name until the end of the conversation when I asked. How impersonal !

I begun by disputing their ‘All conversations will be recorded’ process, asking if there was a secure line where such was not true. I did not want my conversation, and details of my domain names to be heard by anyone except Damien. His response was ‘No’. I pushed for an explanation, and was given ‘Training, and Security’. I stated that my request was in the interest of the security of my (made up) portfolio of 30,000 domain names. Nothing.

I went on to question what kind of manager was provided for such large portfolios, and was given a vague description of the portfolio manager that everyone gets. I felt no un-exclusive.

I probed as to whether Godaddy support staff were given a line to tell potential customers, as to why they should choose Godaddy over anyone else. Godaddys’ line is “24 hour support including holidays, free hosting deals, and bulk prices”. I made the point that near all registrars have that, but apparently they do not.. not many do. Damien has spoken.

Question 4 inquired about the ridiculous ‘Administrative Fees’ Godaddy like to charge for absolutely nothing. I for one was charged $200 in 2006. 4 of my Godaddy names were listed at tdnam. I then renewed them, Godaddy didnt remove the names, they sold. I was charged $200 in fees for non-sales of domains which GODADDY listed !
Another similar case, was one whereby a user had a UDRP filed against him, and was charged $29 without his permission for the honor.

The response to this was that Godaddy do not charge administrative fees without reason, and that fees are only charged for WIPO claims after GoDaddy have done an investigation. I.E Godaddy gives themselves a right they do not have to charge you based on their opinion. That is reason enough to avoid Godaddy.

He completely avoided my question about the seclists.org fiasco.

Fortunately for me, If I were to move my 30,000 domains over, they ‘might’ be able to get me an account manager.. Oh dear oh dear.

Check out Nodaddy for more reasons to avoid Godaddy.

I am officially the first to blog about this.

The .CM Go Live period which was meant to begin at 00.01pm UTC tomorrow morning will NOT be happening.

The registry are still having dns difficulties. Given the amount of money, they could potentially make, you’d think they would have this sorted after a months delay already ! Apparently not.

The word came from Moniker. Apparently a very vague message was received.

I just sold 3 domains at a loss to free up a bit of cash for this, so it is a little annoying to say the least. None the less, at least Ill now have the time to do some proper research.

Cheers

‘boo hoo’ is written by Ernst Malmsten, one of the founders of boo.com back in 1999/2000. The book outlines how the company began: the idea, the development, the situation, the investments, and then goes on to outline how it crashed and died under its own weight.
It is an interesting read, and well worth reading if you want to know what not to do.

The book outlines how hundred of millions of dollars of investment from some extremely infamous names were obtained.
This money was spent on developing the technology, and infrastructure to run an online fashion, and sportswear retailer, as well as for advertising, staff salaries, contractors etc

Some extremely interesting bits include:

The server which they bought from Sun Microsytems. It cost a measly $1.3 million dollars, and housed 64 processors. Amusingly the biggest worry was that it would crash through the floor of the data center under its own weight !

The fact that they spent millions of dollars on their website which I could have developed for a few thousand bucks !

The fact that they bought boo.com in 1999 for $3,500 !

What I found stunning about this book is the apparent ‘by-the-book’ attitude of companies within the corporate world. If you have an idea, you do not need to get significant investment from banks. boo hoo outlines how their first big trial was getting millions of dollars of investment based on an idea. In reality you do not need this. Some of the most well known start ups in the world started with nothing, and crucially flourished: see facebook !

The book essentially portrays a story of 3 somewhat naive businessmen/women who wanted to build a global brand the easy way. They got lucky with an early investment but failed because they wasted their money. Rather than develop their website in house for a small amount, they outsourced to Ericsson at a cost of tens of millions of dollars. What a waste.
Furthermore the attitude the book portrays is that when something small needed fixing, they would hire a new employee. After all they did have the money. Only once all the money was gone did they have to fire most of their staff, and concede defeat.

Success, and arrogance will never be found in the same sentence. Success, and easy will never be found in the same sentence. This book outlines this perfectly, and is well worth the read.

The best thing about this book is the fact that it was written by one of the founders, who in hindsight realized their mistakes. An honest, and informative insight into the logistics of running a business. 7/10

There are some things which you can only buy on the Internet. The reasons are vast, and varied but certain products in certain niches simply cannot be bought on the high street.

When I see something I want/need, I often will go out and buy it from a shop simply because although the Internet may be a little cheaper.. it also takes a little longer. The problem is, that as happened today, I ended up wasting time looking for a product which now I will order online anyway

I have thus made it my prerogative to highlight products that I believe are only available online.

N.B I am English, I live in England, and these are my findings in my local area. I am sure if you look hard enough, and in the right places these products can be found offline BUT who wants to put effort in?! Feel free to let me know of any products you believe can only be bought on the net.

Body Fat Calipers: These things basically pinch your body fat, and give you a reading in mm. This can then be used to calculate your body fat percentage. I thought you could find these in any pharmacist, or sports shop. You cant ! I asked in JJB Sports, and the guy clearly had no idea what I was on about, yet pretended he did. “Any Idea where I could get them from?”… response “Yes, from the protein store” (I think he thought it was some sort of mass gaining supplement).

The logic behind such products is obvious… they don’t sell many, so it is not profitable. Why use storage space with something you are not going to sell.
This got be thinking: What happened if you wanted these before the Internet? Mail order catalog I guess.

If you know of any items which simply cannot be bought on the high street, then let me know. I will go an have a look, and If I cant… Ill give you absolutel nothing.

Addition One 15/08/2009 19:37
Thanks to Acroplex for this.. not sure how I missed it.

Domain Names
Domain Names cannot be bought in any way, shape, or form offline. It would however be extremely cool if you could: “I’d like a 20 pack of Malboro lights, and www.shopping.com please.” Response “That will be $100,005.99″.

Cheers