Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Category: Internet

  • Are we coming to the end of spam?

    The BBC reports the results of a US study on the profitability of spam networks. Seven researchers set up a fake pharmacutecal website and used the Storm network to drive traffic to it through spam messages.

    Out of nearly 350 million messages sent 28 people attempted to buy something which the researchers estimate would have returned about $US 100 a day.

    Not bad money, but hardly worth the effort of setting up a fake site, arranging the merchant facilities and getting on to the Storm botnet. 

    The return also assumes all the potential purchases were genuine. There’s a good chance many of them would have been fraudulent which would have further eroded the returns.

    If those returns are typical, then we’re probably seeing the end of the mass spam, although I’m worried that a new breed of 419 type scammers might take advantage of people in financial straits as the economy worsens.

    The full study is available at the UCSD website.

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  • Stupid, stupid man

    I’ve been wondering why the PC Rescue listings in Google Local were performing so badly. Tonight I discovered that sometime in the past I’ve screwed up the keywords.

    This would explain why the site fell off the first page on a number of useful searches.

    Bugger.

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  • Everything old is new again

    It was a funny week last week. It seems everybody wants to announce Software as a Service websites.

    The first SaaS experience I had was over a cup of coffee with Mark from MyWorkSpace on Tuesday. I like to hear what smaller, Australian operations have to offer and this one seems quite good application.

    On the Wednesday I went to the Telstra-Microsoft Joint Venture announcement. This was a strange beast as the current T-Suite services are simply managed Exchange and Sharepoint and in that don’t seem to be anything new over what Telstra was reselling from WebCentral until recently.

    The main thrust of the press conference was that you’d be able to do this on a mobile phone.

    Unfortunately none of the mobile phone manufacturers has had an opportunity to put Telstra’s new application on their Windows Mobile smartphones, which meant we only saw demonstrations and had no opportunity to try it ourselves.

    From a distance it appears the mobile service is just the same synchronisation tool you get with a Windows Mobile device setup to use the Telstra servers.

    On a positive side, both the MyWorkSpace and the T-Suite applications are reasonably priced and a good deal for smaller businesses, particularly those start ups wanting to save cash.

    In my Smart Company column tomorrow l’m explaining what SaaS, cloud computing and Web 2.0 mean.

    The funny thing with all of this is everything is new again. We’re going back to the 1970s way of running computers.

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  • More bundled laptops

    Further to Saturday’s post, I’m researching my story on wireless Broadband for tomorrow’s Smart Company column and I find Telstra are still offering the $0 laptop.

    I thought it had been dropped. It’s amazing this offer gets no mention at all.

    Gee it’s hard to make sense of Telstra’s website.

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  • IP TV arrives

    ABC IP TV logoWe’ve heard the promise of delivering TV over the Internet and now the ABC will follow the BBC with an IP TV service.

    Coupled with the increased downloads we’ll see from the uptake of smart phones, we’re seeing the end of most Australian ISP’s business model of soaking users with excess use fees.

    iiNET has done a deal with the ABC that traffic won’t be counted for their customers using the ABC’s service and you’d have to wonder how long it will be until others offer it.

    The interesting thing with IP TV in Australia is just how badly the commercial TV stations are falling behind.

    A good example is Channel 7 where their tie up with AOL should have made this easy, but they seem to have lost it. The other two networks have nothing.

    Under the current pricing structures it’s difficult to see IP TV taking off in Australia, but this will change. The big question is just how visionary Australian Internet providers are and just how the commercial TV stations will deal with the challenge.

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