Tech for Lunch!

I know that this was a few days ago, but since I posted an article about selling domains for profit recently, I thought it was still interesting to mention it here. If you were quick enough to get your hands on a good, catchy and relevant domain name a few years ago, you might want to start being proactive and not just wait for someone to make an offer on it. Putting it up for auction, could be a good way to get rid of it and make some cool cash while you’re at it. This article has the full story on how it all happened.

Chris Clark bought pizza.com in 1994 for the usual reservation price of 20$ and has kept it all these years. He originally bought it for his company to try and get contracts with local pizza businesses but it never worked out. He still held on to it thinking it wouls someday be useful. A couple of years ago, he and a friend used the domain to make it a pizza directory with ads returning about 5000$ a month.

The natural traffic on sites with single words like these is impressive. Without ever having to advertise, sites like tees.com, vodka.com, sex.com and pizza.com get regular monthly traffic just because people are curious and because the domain names match exactly the keywords being typed into search engines.

After earing about the sale of vodka.com for $3 million on the auction site Sedo.com, Chris Clark decided to see what the interest might be for his domain. The auction started slowly but then shot up to the $2 million reserve price that was set and ended a $2.6 million for the final sale price. Sedo keeps 10% for running the auction and running background checks on bidders because of the high numbers being rolled in.

Just as previously reported, Facebook has begun rolling out their IM client on some selected networks. This was the only available information since the complete roll out schedule has not been made public. it is to be released to limited networks first for load testing and bug-hunting, and then rolled out to broader networks.

The new chat bar appears at the bottom of every page and cannot be removed. The client has all the regular functionalities that you would expect such as the ability to show yourself as offline and lets you know who is available for chatting.

The integration is very well done and should prove to be a great addition to Facebook. I know that it will give a good reason to many people for leaving a browser with Facebook open all the time.   You can find a full post about the features with screenshots here if you can’t wait to try if for yourself.  You can “pop-out” the chat windows to allow many chats at the same time and a better visibility and the status window shows your friends letting you know who is active or not.

Mini-feed items will also appear directly in your chat windows for the person you are chatting with if they are related.  So if you are chatting with someone who does something on your profile, you get instantly notified.

I hope the networks I am in get this very anticipated IM Client rolled-out because I am really anxious to try it out. Not that I have that much chatting to do, but I like the technical integration that they have made and I want to try it out even more for myself.

There was a post on Mozilla Lab’s blog to announce that they have partnered with Last.FM to offer a prize package for the “Extend Firefox 3″ contest. They are looking for “the best new music-related Firefox Add-on that demonstrates excellence in user experience, innovativeness, and use of open standards“.

The prize package includes a very cool trip to London and VIP tickets to attend one event presented by Last.FM and, for the gadget lover in all of us, a Logitech Squeezebox network music player.

Of course you need to know a little bit about what you’re doing and code something nice for Firefox 3, but since I’m a confirmed geek and love the technology/music mix, I feel that the more people know about this contest, the better the chances I’ll get a really cool extension for my Firefox!

The panel of judges will include Toby Padilla, Last.FM’s Vice-President of Client and Desktop Software.

Official rules and details on this new addition to Extend Firefox are available at www.extendfirefox.com

It turns out that Spongebob Squarepants isn’t the only one who loves April Fool’s day! Google plants a few interesting pranks on this day every year and if you’re not careful, you can get caught believing them for a moment or two. Here are the reported pranks for this year…

ADsense for Conversations: Google can now place advertisements in your conversations (although that one wouldn’t be all too surprising..). When you sign up, they will send you head gear to wear on which the ads will display, based on your current conversation.

Gmail Custom Time: This “feature” was implemented in Gmail to allow users to select a date on which to send your emails. The great advantage here is that you can send emails in the past, so you never miss a deadline again. The new feature “utilizes an e-flux capacitor to resolve issues of causality“.. they really thought of everything and that one launched a Wikipedia debate.

Virgle: This is a fake collaboration between Virgin’s Richard Branson and Google for an “open-source” Mars expedition. The first users should be able to get to mars by 2014. You can see one of the videos here.

Youtube’s Rickrolling prank: Rickrollin’ is a geek-culture phenomenon in which users send falsified links to others to redirect them to a youtube video of Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give you Up”. For the prank, all the featured videos on Youtube’s page redirected everyone to that video.

Google Wake-up Kit: This one was on Google Calendar(you can see it here), offering users new ways to get a wake-up call. “First it will send an SMS message to your phone. If that fails, more coercive means will be used“

I’m Feeling Lucky Dates: Google Calendar also added the famous “I’m feeling lucky” button to allow users to add random events to their calendars, usually dates involving celebrities.

Future Search: Google Australia joined the fun by adding a button under the search bar allowing users to search the web as it will be tomorrow. See the description for gDay here. The technology behind this revolutionary search method is aptly called MATE (Machine Automated Temporal Extrapolation).

Google Paper Airplane: This one was on Google Docs and was a new option in the file menu labeled as “New Airplane”. It opened up a document with instructions to fold and make your paper airplane. You can get the PDF document here to fold your very own airplane!

We’ll see you next year for the next pranks…

Well, unless you are using a blogging software or looking to start using one, this article may not be very useful to you, but it is still interesting to hear about a great piece of software when it comes along. Techforlunch uses Wordpress, so everything you see is managed and/or generated by wordpress. Wordpress 2.5 was released on March 29th and if you are waiting to upgrade, you shouldn’t…

I ran the upgrade procedure on techforlunch.com following the documentation and it was flawless. The steps are pretty straight-forward and basic:

1. Backup your database and current site files
2. Disable all your plugins
3. Upload the new files to your site (making sure not to overwrite the plugins and themes folders.)
4. Update the database schema (http://yoursite.com/wp-admin/upgrade.php)
5. Enable all your plugins one by one
6. Enjoy!

The improvements are not as visible on the user’s side so that is why practically no one will notice the version upgrade on the frontend. For the administrators though, it’s a different story. The interface is much cleaner, faster and less cluttered than before and adds many new features.

I strongly recommend this upgrade and can vouch for its ease of installation. The one click plugin upgrade feature is worth the upgrade by itself!

The internet is certainly not what it used to be and that’s a good thing. It’s not just a geeky network that uses obscure Unix commands to function. The internet is getting to a point where it is as diversified as the world we live in. Poetic, isn’t it? Women represent a very large portion of the online presence and it is no surprise that there are more and more sites tailored to their needs and interests.

Here comes Yahoo! Shine. After introducing Yahoo! Tech and Yahoo! Food in 2006, the company is now adding a new site aimed primarily at women 25 to 54. There are roughly 40 million women in that age demographic surfing the web and that is a category that is very appealing to advertisers. Yahoo! has hired a team of publishers to write fresh content and articles everyday on topics including fashion, beauty, gossip and parenting. You can also find items from other Yahoo sites such as Food or Health.

I think we will see more and more sites aimed at specific demographics like this one because they are a great way of getting a huge audience and sell advertising. This is a part of Yahoo’s Media Strategy. Even though the targeted audience is women, I bet we can still find something interesting to read on there too ;-)

Techforlunch is pretty far from reaching that many articles, but Wikipedia has reached this incredible number this wednesday.  This is my second post on Wikipedia in a very short while and it’s no surprise because it is one of the most visited sites on the internet these days.  I find that Wikipedia is just like Youtube in the sense that there are so many links that it gets addictive - You just can’t stop reading once you start.

The 10 millionth article is a short biography of 16th century English goldsmith and painter Nicholas Hilliard and was created by a user called Pataki Marta.  Of course the article is in hungarian and so, the 10 million count is only because it takes into account all the available languages of Wikipedia.

English is the most popular and largest language for the articles found on the site with 2.3 million entries.  German and French come in second and third place in importance, but neither has reached one million articles yet.  You can see all the available languages and their numbers directly on the site.

Perhaps, one day, Tech for Lunch! will have its own entry on Wikipedia but, until then, we’ll just have to keep reading about Nicholas Hilliard and everything else we can find on there!

These days, I’m wasting/spending a lot of time looking around for a bunch of applications and components built with Adobe Flex. I have been reading up quite a bit on this very promising framework and talked about the release of the most recent version of the builder. It’s not very surprising to find some of the most amazing applications built by the company who created the framework, Adobe Inc.

Adobe Photoshop Express has now entered the public beta phase which means anyone can go ahead and give it a try to see what this application is all about. “Photoshop Express allows users to store up to 2 gigabytes of images online for free, make edits to their photos, and share them online in creative ways, including downloading and uploading photos from popular social networking sites like Facebook.“

Although Photoshop Express is marketed towards the “photoshop impaired”, it still has much to offer for experienced users as well. It’s a great way to share photos without using your own bandwidth and enables advanced effects in just a few clicks. I like the interface but I did hit a couple of bugs(keep in mind this is still in beta) and the application and the effects respond well and pretty quickly.

I have not had time to give this a complete look, such as uploading many pictures to manage an album, but what I was able to do with the sample albums is a good indication that Photoshop Express might be a neat application for many users to enjoy. Give it a try!

Ever since the internet became a part of the mainstream, there have been people buying a whole bunch of domain names and holding on to them in the hopes of selling them for a profit. If you have ever tried to get a domain name, you already know that there’s a pretty good chance it’s already reserved. This is mostly true for dot coms, but it’s also increasingly true for .net, .org etc… If you’ve ever wondered why most startups on the internet have weird made-up names, you have your answer.

Systematic.com was sold this week for a tiny $400,000! In this case, it’s a company that held the name and ran two separate websites on their domains. They decided to sell that one to eliminate confusion for users. You can find the press release on their new site.

A domain name’s price is based on traffic, popularity and just plain “how cool” it is. The Alexa ranking is usually a good indication of this because most of the domains that are bought for resale have nothing on them except ads, so if it still generates traffic, it means people are actually landing there for different reasons.

This is not really “news” but I though it’s a pretty cool thing (or just insane, perhaps) that a domain gets sold for a good price once in a while.

By now, most of you probably know that all TV broadcasters will have to switch to digital signals instead of analog by 2009. This means that all of this broadcasting space would become available to use by other services. Until now, regulations prevented anyone else than broadcasters to use this so-called “white-space”. By February 2009, this broadcasting space would be available for other kinds of service providers and Google and Microsoft have their eyes on it.

The idea is to use these networks for Wireless broadcasting of all sorts, including Internet-ready mobile phones and many devices which can benefit from constant internet connections. Dell, HP, Intel, Google, Microsoft and Philips are part of a group which has been working on getting the approval to use the airwaves.

I think this could be a good thing in terms of user experience since internet availability isn’t always as fast as we’d like or costs too much for data transfers. An opportunity like this would certainly open up the way and get more and more applications to use these services. Google currently has the most complete, open and free mobile platform, called Android,  being developed by the Open Handset Alliance. This is a big part of their interest in the use of these airwaves. Google has dubbed this as Wi-Fi 2.0 because it would mark the start of a new era in accessibility and convenience.