THE WORD “SOCIAL” in social media says it all. When one participates in SOCIAL media, you’re supposed to be “social” — be sociable or at the very least, ”human”. Being human means having a face, a proper name (or nickname), and not a generic product/service name.

I’m continually amazed by the number of comments posted here that have silly inhuman usernames such as “car dvds”, “security”, “printing”, “jokes”, “teacher”, “attorney”, “liability law”, etc. Many of these commenters also write very inane stuff such as, “nice article thank you for sharing” – which can be posted on any blog and basically says nothing. Haha, very smart and very stupid at the same time. Because this means that you are making zero or even negative impact here, on the blog owner as well as on the other blog visitors. Your so-called “social interaction” or “social presence” neither appeals to the mind nor the heart.

So, HELLO! Please get real and be human here. Otherwise, SHHHHOOOOOO! Go away and good riddance! Inhuman interactions are not welcome here.

See Also: Common Social Media Mistakes

To determine this relationship, the study focused on 100 companies from the 2008 BusinessWeek/Interbrand Best Global Brands survey and the various social media platforms they used like Facebook, Twitter, blogs, wikis, and forums… After examining the companies and their social media activity levels, the brands were ranked on an “engagement scale” where scores ranged from a high of 127 to a low of 1. Those brands that were the most engaged saw their revenue grow over the past year by 18% while the least engaged brands saw losses of negative 6%.

The study grouped the brands into one of four engagement profiles that related to the number of channels they’re involved in and how deep that involvement is. At the top of the list are “mavens,” the brands heavily engaged in seven or more social media channels – like Starbucks and Dell, for instance. “Butterflies” are like wannabe “mavens,” and are also engaged in seven or more channels but are spread too thin, investing in some channels more so than others. “Selectives” focus on six or fewer channels but engage customers deeply in the ones they’ve chosen. Finally, there are “wallflowers,” or brands engaged in six or fewer channels with below-average engagement; these include companies like McDonalds and BP.

Hi jktan,

We’ve noticed that your slideshow on SlideShare has been getting a LOT of views in the last 24 hours. Great job … you must be doing something right.

Why don’t you tweet or blog this? Use the hashtag #bestofslideshare so we can track the conversation.

Congratulations,
-SlideShare Team

Upon checking my slideshow on this blog and on SlideShare.net, I found that the views were 50087 views as of today!

On second thoughts though, to receive a message like this on 1 April… Hmmmm…. What do you think?

1. Event schedule :

• Research - Note what you want to see and get a sense of what you might ask and/or decide what the business value of your interaction at the session might be.

2. Google Blogsearch and Technorati :

• Research - Look for event references to the event, company announcements, signs of business opportunity.

3. Google News and Google searches (in addition to 2. above) :

• Research – Look for industry news around the event, to understand what might be impacting the people you’re mingling with.  

4. Web pages & Site Links :

• Research – of the exhibitors and sponsors for the event. Are they a prospective vendor/client for you? Any business value in meeting any of them?

5. Flickr :

• Research - Look for recent pictures of attendees or other people you hope to meet at the event.

6. Blogs :

• Research - of the prospective attendees or business people for ideas of how things are going in their lives or in their businesses…. It’s free intelligence before a meeting.
• Content Prep - Put up a few post-dated posts and have a great post launch on the day of the event.

Consider writing posts that might help you form conversations at the event. For instance, if you’re looking to work with restaurants, write a blog post about how you’d help restaurants improve sales. Another example: blog about people you know who might be at the event that you hope to connect with and write about what you might want to talk with them about. For other examples, see Brogan’s 100 blog topics. This way, people who might investigate your blog ahead of time can know what you’re thinking about.

Consider making a video about something and posting it to your blog. Videos will give people an even better opportunity to observe you and see what you’re about. It might also help with the people recognition factor, as seeing you in motion might improve their chance of seeing you at an event.

Sometimes an event has a blog. It might be neat to see if you can guest post on it. That might up your chance of meeting folks at the event.

7. Facebook/Twitter Searches & Streams :

• Research – See if anyone’s talking about the event you’re attending, to determine if you want to follow them and start conversations ahead of the event. Look for the personal news top of mind of the people you’ll say hi at the conference.
• Content Prep –  If you’re looking to connect at the event, some of your content should be outreach related, via services like Twitter or Facebook. Message the world using the event’s hash tag (if it has one), and/or the city/state (or province, etc) where the event is held. Thus, people using Twitter Search or poking around via Facebook might catch you in a search and engage you.
• Promo - Send message saying that you’ll be visiting ____ conference in ____ (city) and let people know you’re coming. See if you can strike up friendships ahead of time. Maybe mention some of the stuff you’re looking to do, business-wise.

8. LinkedIn :

• Research – Look for the city where you’ll be attending, and/or for any of the speakers’ or exhibitors’ names to see their professional profile.
• Promo – Send some personal emails to people that you might want to meet in the target city. They don’t necessarily have to meet you at the conference, but you might be able to schedule coffee.

Other Prep

1. Business cards - Order fresh ones. Go to somewhere like Overnight Prints and pick up some new cards. Here’s the thing: make the NAME part very large. Make your primary mode of requested contact come first. Make it VERY clear what you do for business. Make sure you add the kind of offering you’re putting out there for the event (or for the next several events, if that makes sense).
2. Laptop – Backup  before you travel. Consider any extra batteries or power supplies you might need to bring with you.
3. If you’re thinking of liveblogging the event, prepare ahead of time (here’s a great article at Web Worker Daily about that).
4. If you’re going to take lots of photos or videos at the event, check your gear to make sure you’ve got everything (charger, media transfer tools, spare whatevers).
5. If you’ve got a business offer to promote at an event, practice and practice and practice how you’re going to talk about it. Make it crisp, clear and easy to say. Practice believing in yourself.
6. Remember that not meeting someone at an event isn’t always the end of the world. There are other chances, other times. Just the same, if it’s the kind of event where people have traveled to be there, take every opportunity to reach out. It’s harder to recreate an opportunity once everyone’s gone home.
7. Remember to give your family a bit of extra love before leaving for the event. Take them out to dinner, and/or give the little ones some extra fun. Make a game of showing where you’ll be via Google Maps, and switch to Satellite or Street View to show them the visuals instead of just the map. Give everyone a chance to connect while you’re on the trip via Skype video, so they can stay in touch. Easily.

FOUND THIS INTERESTING LINK ON a Facebook friend’s profile when I was about to post a birthday greeting to her. I agree with the author, Dan York, who wrote:

The only reason I visit a web site these days is generally if either:

1. The website turns up in a search result.
2. I get notified that there’s something interesting there that I should look at.
3. Random times when for some reason I decide to go there, perhaps remembering a URL for a site I wanted to check out.

 
That’s it. (Note that I do get the content of many websites through the ways I mention below, but I don’t actually go to those websites and see their page.)

As I think about it, my consumption of information online really comes down to five ways:

1. E-mail, although I get too much of it to read it all. [Me: Exactly!]
2. Twitter, where I see links from people or services that I follow. [Me: Now, it's the FriendFeed (or NewsFeed) on Facebook.]
3. RSS feeds where my reader pulls it in and I quickly scan through the posts.
4. Skype persistent group chats where I’m connected to several different groups of people on various topics.
5. Searching for data, typically using Google.

 
The key thing is that, with the exception of search:
All the data comes to me!

As quoted by William Taylor in Fast Company:

The biggest problem with mass-market advertising, Godin says, is that it fights for people’s attention by interrupting them. A 30-second spot interrupts a “Seinfeld” episode. A telemarketing call interrupts a family dinner. A print ad interrupts this article. “The interruption model is extremely effective when there’s not an overflow of interruptions,” Godin says. “But there’s too much going on in our lives for us to enjoy being interrupted anymore.”

The new model, he argues, is built around permission. The challenge for marketers is to persuade consumers to volunteer attention – to “raise their hands” (one of Godin’s favorite phrases) – to agree to learn more about a company and its products. “Permission marketing turns strangers into friends and friends into loyal customers,” he says. “It’s not just about entertainment – it’s about education.”

Finally, as Seth Godin put it in his blog:

Permission marketing is the privilege (not the right) of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who actually want to get them… Permission is like dating. You don’t start by asking for the sale at first impression. You earn the right, over time, bit by bit…

In order to get permission, you make a promise. You say, “I will do x, y and z, I hope you will give me permission by listening.” And then, this is the hard part, that’s all you do. You don’t assume you can do more. You don’t sell the list or rent the list or demand more attention. You can promise a newsletter and talk to me for years, you can promise a daily RSS feed and talk to me every three minutes, you can promise a sales pitch every day (the way Woot does). But the promise is the promise until both sides agree to change it. You don’t assume that just because you’re running for President or coming to the end of the quarter or launching a new product that you have the right to break the deal. You don’t.

Do you know that you can turn some (if not all) the notifications off? And that you can also change your privacy settings?

THERE ARE SEVEN THINGS that users like you and I can turn off (or on again) in Facebook:

1. Privacy > Profile: Control who can see your profile and personal information.
2. Privacy > Search: Control who can search for you, and how you can be contacted.
3. Privacy > News Feed and Wall: Control what stories about you get published to your profile and to your friends’ News Feeds.
4. Privacy > Block People: Block specific people (e.g. stalkers) from being able to find you ina Facebook search, see your profile, or interact with you through Facebook channels.
5. Privacy > General Settings for Applications: Control what information is available to applications you use on Facebook.
   
6. Wall Settings for an Application (e.g. Groups): Allow or disallow an app to publish stories automatically on your wall.
7. Profile Settings for an Application (e.g. Groups): Allow only certain people to view specific groups you join on your profile.
   

Which ones do you turn on/off? What do you think are the pros and cons of turning on/off these settings?

(See also: Mari Smith’s “10 Ways to Stay Safe on Facebook“.)

1. Amazon Web Services (AWS): Amazon, which began as a bookseller, has generated such enthusiasm and loyalty in the developer community. Platforms will do well in 2009, though not many will. The platforms market is a race for scale, requiring massively deep pockets.
2. Basecamp: 37Signals, maker of project collaboration app Basecamp, is the favorite start-up of a lot of people (even its competitors). Their “less is more” elegance has become the mantra of developers everywhere. The one issue? It keeps its products separate. You have to choose which one to use.
3. Confluence (Atlassian): RWW expects to see major wiki adoption in the enterprise. Atlassian (and MindTouch below) seems a safe bet for enterprise, having traction and a good breadth of products.
4. DimDim: In a recession, companies travel less, so they use web conferencing more. DimDim’s proposition is incredibly simple: web conferencing for less cost. The one issue? It is still a bit raw, and the company will need deep pockets to satisfy an expected growing demand.
5. Google Apps: The move from PC-based office software to web-based “office tools” accelerated in 2008 and became increasingly mainstream. The one issue? Google’s flagship Gmail is still in beta and suffers from reliability issues, and some modules (such as for spreadsheet) still seem a bit raw compared to those of competitors.
6. Wordpress: RWW expects a big market in the replacement of first-generation content management systems (CMS), with simpler SaaS tools that have blogging at their core. CMS 2.0 will integrate what are currently stand-alone features: social networking, video, and so on. Automattic’s Wordpress is growing in reputation as the platform that delivers this the best, especially in terms of the quality of its continuous innovation.
7. LinkedIn: A controversial pick. RWW sees this as the “contact networking” space, which will be part of next generation CRM. LinkedIn tackled two of the biggest issues for enterprise: acquiring customers and hiring employees. It has a huge networks-effect advantage over its competitors. It could easily create an “internal enterprise LinkedIn.” RWW deliberately avoided the “social networking” label because “Enterprises don’t care about being social: they care about managing contacts to make money.”
8. MindTouch Deki: The other winner in the crowded wiki ++ space. MindTouch and SocialText are banging heads (a close fight). RWW added “++” to “wiki” because the leading vendors are rapidly incorporating micro-blogging, social networking, forums, and other collaboration tools. Integration is key, so RWW sees this market moving towards suites, but with wiki at the core.
9. Force.com (Salesforce): This company defined the SaaS/CRM cloud space with brilliant marketing and relentless focus on making its partner eco-system succeed. The one big issue? Its core CRM market is being undermined by two serious low-cost competors: SugarCRM and Zoho CRM.
10. Zoho: At the beginning of the year, the web office market looked crowded. It now has Zoho (David) vs. Google (Goliath), with Microsoft, as always, not to be counted out. In fact, Zoho has yet another Goliath on its hands because it also competes with Salesforce in the CRM space, which points to its one big issue: it is spread very thin, and some of its products show it from their lack of depth.

The media giant is the owner of the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun, Orlando Sentinel, Hartford Courant and several other papers. It also operates 23 television stations.

“…factors beyond our control have created a perfect storm — a precipitous decline in revenue and a tough economy coupled with a credit crisis that makes it extremely difficult to support our debt.”

“Like many US newspapers, the Tribune has been grappling with declining circulation, a loss of readership to online media, and a steep drop in print advertising revenue.

“The New York Times reported last week that another debt-ridden major US newspaper chain, the McClatchy Co., is seeking to sell one of its flagship newspapers, The Miami Herald.

“And the New York Times itself has not been immune to the crisis gripping the newspaper industry. The paper reported Monday that the New York Times Co. plans to borrow up to 225 million dollars against its mid-Manhattan headquarters building to ease a potential cash flow squeeze.”

September Update: See also “Dow Jones shutting down FEER” and “Journalists Losing Jobs at Three Times Rate of Average Workers“.

In particular, the growth in China is the most impressive, growing by 53% (an addition of 73,000 users) since 2007 and yet its penetration rate is only 16 percent. For the others:

• Brazil grew by 17% (7,400) with a penetration rate of 26%. 
• Pakistan grew by 46% (5,500) with a penetration rate of only 11%. 
• Columbia grew by 80% (5,395) with a penetration rate of 25%. 
• India grew by 7% (5,000) with a penetration rate of only 7%. 
• Iran grew by 28% (5,000) with a penetration rate of 32%. 
• Russia grew by 17% (4,311) with a penetration rate of 21%. 
• Germany grew by 10% (3,900) with a penetration rate of 52%.
• France grew by 12% (3,553) with a penetration rate of 55%.
• Vietnam grew by 22% (3,188) with a penetration rate of 21%.

Over the next few weeks, Web 2.0 analyst Dion Hinchcliffe will be posting a series of articles that deeply explore a strategy for using the power of Web 2.0 ideas to move businesses into the 21st century. He’ll begin exploring each quadrant in this diagram (below, taken from Hinchcliffe’s blog), looking at how to use 2.0 to dramatically create growth, transform the customer relationship to drive revenue, drive operational costs down, improve productivity, safely restructure our business models, effect change, and leverage/harnessing innovation.

Among the many useful tips is a post entitled “8 reasons why interviews will spice up your content”. The eight benefits cited are:

1. Interviews can offer a different perspective.
2. Interviews can demonstrate a practical implementation. 
3. Interviews allow you borrow trust and reinforce your argument. 
4. Interviews allow you to borrow brand recognition. 
5. Interviews are a practical solution to your needs. 
6. Interviews inspire you to think more too. 
7. Interviews build contacts and make you smarter. 
8. Interviews enhance the quality of content you deliver. 

For more details, check out his blog.

Lead SiTF members like MediaCorp Pte Ltd, Microsoft, SingTel and ST Electronics (Training & Simulation Systems) have already expressed their interest in project domains such as interactive media, mobile digital media, broadcast, IPTV and open source development etc. SiTF will continue to market this program to gain greater interest from more corporations who see opportunity to partner with start ups. Through support from the industry, the mentorship programme hopes to make available up to $10m worth of project funding and support over a period of five years.

With SiTF, the IDMPO now has a network of 10 incubators to create support structures for the start-ups, including the platforms for regular pitching sessions and finding industry partners. Collectively, the incubators will nurture some 450 start-ups over the next few years. The existing incubators have facilitated the funding of some 90 projects to date, out of which 15 were completed. Thirty per cent of the completed projects have successfully received private investment.

How do these Internet users select their shopping sites? Nielsen’s statistics reveal some interesting facts. Over 30 percent actually bought on sites that they found through “General Surfing”, “Search Engines” and “Special offer I saw”:


MORE KEY FINDINGS: “Globally, more than half of Internet users have made at least one purchase online in the past month… Internet is no longer a niche technology – it is mass media and an utterly integral part of modern life. Almost no aspect of life remains untouched by online media. As our lives become more fractured and cluttered, it isn’t surprising that consumers turn to the unrivalled convenience of the Internet when it comes to researching and buying products,” said Jonathan Carson, President, International, Nielsen Online.

“… Among Internet users, the highest percentage shopping online is found in South Korea, where 99 percent of those with Internet access have used it to shop, followed by the UK (97%), Germany (97%), Japan (97%) with the U.S. eighth, at 94 percent. Additionally, in South Korea, 79 percent of these Internet users have shopped in the past month, followed by the UK (76%) and Switzerland (67%) with the U.S. at 57 percent.

“Globally, the most popular and purchased items over the Internet are Books (41% purchased in the past three months), Clothing/Accessories/Shoes (36%), Videos / DVDs / Games (24%), Airline Tickets (24%) and Electronic Equipment (23%).”

Oct 17 update from reported by TODAYonline.com: “ABOUT SIX IN 10 PEOPLE in Singapore now use the Internet daily and weekly, according to the latest Nielsen Media Index 2008 out yesterday. A fifth of the population used the Internet to listen to music and play online games, while one in 10 said they participated in social networking sites, it added.”

For some reason though, I didn’t manage to install or run Chrome on my desktop PC yesterday. Still wondering whether that has anything to do a coincidental Windows update on the PC just before that. Anyway, I’m intrigued by what Keso has written about Chrome, in particular:

I think the real reason for Google to join the browsers bandwagon two years ago are this: Google needs control of a browser that has sufficient influence. It also needs to set up de facto standards through something that can be controlled and demonstrated.

Therefore, what’s important about Chrome are these two things: A new JavaScript engine V8 and a “Webified” version of the desktop app Gears. Both are part of Google’s key strategy to expand browser functions to better support future Web apps.

We often naively assume that Desktop battles are waged for the purpose of establishing Trojan horse pipelines. Actually, the smarter purpose of such battles is not for thievery or user base, but for the establishment of de facto standards that are advantageous to one’s future plans. For Google, this standard will enable its apps to run perfectly regardless of the platform or terminal that anyone may use. In order to better release its “cloud of accumulated energy”, Google needs a well-supported standard and a popular browser.

Therefore, Google has chosen not to integrate many of its own products and services into Chrome. Some people complain that one can easily install Google Toolbar on IE, but not on Chrome. Actually, there’re many more things that one cannot do on Chrome: visit Gmail with one click, publish easily from Blogger, upload video to YouTube, and even customize the default search engine…

Like Chrome, V8 and Gears are released as open-source projects. This will undoubtedly enhance their neutrality and therefore appeal to developers. It doesn’t matter how much market share Chrome will claim eventually. The key is whether it can provide the best demonstration of Gears and V8, thereby enabling them to become de facto standards.

Some people say that the target of Chrome is neither IE nor Firefox but Windows. Considering the line of “cloud”, apps and browser, I basically agree with this judgement.

The reason? McKinsey’s findings suggest that companies are coming to understand the difficulty of realizing some of Web 2.0’s benefits. “However, fundamental changes are beginning to take place among the satisfied companies… [They] are not only using more technologies but also leveraging them to change management practices and organizational structures. Some are taking steps to open their corporate “ecosystems” by encouraging customers to join them in developing products and by using new tools to tap distributed knowledge.”

Mix of technologies used is changing: Blogs, RSS, wikis, and podcasts are becoming more common, perhaps because companies have a greater understanding of their value for business (Exhibit 1).

More technologies are in use: Overall, the respondents say that their companies are using 3.4 technologies from an expanded list, versus 2.2 in 2007. Companies use Web 2.0 technologies more frequently for internal than for external purposes, and the rate of deployment remains high for almost all kinds of uses (Exhibit 2).

Web services remains highest used: Respondents rate Web services (software that makes it easier to exchange information and conduct transactions) as the most important tool, with Europeans providing the highest marks. Companies in all regions perceive wikis and blogs as fairly important, and the use of both tools has increased over the past year.

Satisfaction varies markedly by geography: The developed countries of the Asia-Pacific region had the largest percentage of respondents expressing the highest level of overall satisfaction with Web 2.0 tools, and Latin America had the lowest (Exhibit 4).

When I gave a talk on Web 2.0 & Its Business Impacts at COM1, NUS last month, I cited various real-life examples of how the blogosphere “chatter” could affect a company’s corporate image positively or negatively. Also discussed briefly the people (how they get younger and younger!) and the milestones behind successful Web 2.0 apps such as Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, etc. This slideshow provides a quick overview, featuring famous Web entrepreneurs such as Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia), Kevin Rose (Digg), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook)… and Ping.sg celebrity Uzyn Chua (slide 19) :

Related Articles:

• Top Posts in Ping.sg & Tomorrow.sg Reveal That…
• Alexa Ranks Ping.sg Above Tomorrow.sg!
• Live Coverage of Flea Mart On Ping.sg
• A video guide to the Ping.sg celebration – by an absentee …

This slideshow provides a quick overview. Also features a Ping.sg celebrity towards the end (slide 19).

Note: The slideshow is now featured on a similar post with a different title and intro.

• The Inc. 500 companies know far more about social media than one might predict,
• Social media have arrived in American colleges, and
• The use of social in the ivory tower is outpacing even the business world.

Sixty-one percent of the academic respondents use at least one form of social media. Four of the six social media have similar adoption rates to those of corporations. Blogging is the most common form among academia, at a 33% usage rate — 14% higher than that of the Inc. 500 respondents! Wikis, on the other hand, are used by only 3% of admissions departments compared with 17% of responding businesses in the Inc. 500. (See figure below.)

INTERESTINGLY, “ADMISSIONS DEPARTMENTS feel that social media is “very important” to their future strategy in almost a 2:1 ratio to Inc. 500 businesses that feel the same way (51% compared to 26%).” Nevertheless, it’s significant to note as much as 66 percent of Inc. 500 businesses consider social media important to their marketing/recruiting strategy! (See figure below.)

It’s such a pity that I cannot conduct similar studies among academia and businesses in Singapore and/or Asia. Still, my gut feel, since the beginning of this year has been: The statistics are likely to be similar.

Notes:

• The first study was based on detailed interviews with 121 companies from the Inc. 500, an elite group of the fastest-growing companies within the United States. The respondents are diverse in industry, size and location. They include 4 of the top 10, 7 of the top 25, and 22 of the top 100 companies from the Inc. 500 list.
• The second study was also based on detailed interviews in the US, this time among 453 admissions departments. The responding institutions are diverse in student size (from under 50 students to over 50,000), annual tuition (from less than $1,000 to over $40,000), funding (69% private, 31% public) and location (49 states are represented). The sample includes well-known private schools like Duke, Carnegie Mellon, Vassar and Wesleyan as well as many large public universities from states like Arizona, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Massachusetts.

Afternote 7 Aug 2007: According to a page on the CATLS site (Consortium for the Advancement of Teaching, Learning and Scholarship, apparently part of University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth), Dr Nora Barnes is Chancellor Professor, Department of Marketing and Business Systems, Director, Center for Business Research. She also received the President’s Award for Public Service in 2000 for contributing to a strengthening of the southeastern Massachusetts region’s business climate by providing timely and customized responses to the problems and issues faced by employers and employees.

“R” is for “Renaissance”. On June 11, I suggested to the leader of BNI Renaissance, to hold its weekly meetings at the Geek Terminal. The chapter did so the very next Wednesday.

“C” is for “Crescendo”. As a result, a few days later, Renaissance’s mentor (also a founding member of BNI Crescendo) advised Crescendo to hold their weekly meetings there too. They did so the following Thursday.

“G” is for “Global”. Shortly after, some BNI Global members apparently visited Crescendo at the Geek Terminal and decided to hold their meetings at the cafe too — on Tuesdays.

How did I know of (or rather started noticing) Geek Terminal in the first place? It was through blogs! Many bloggers in Ping.sg (such Ben Koe, DK, Keropokman and many others) had been writing about the Geek Terminal, how customers can surf wirelessly and connect their PCs to power points anywhere within this cafe! And so this was how the “R-C-G” fire started. All because of blogs, and partially thanks to me, three BNI chapters (and thus around 60-80 people) are now having business breakfast at the Geek Terminal every week!

Afternote: BNI, by the way, stands for Business Network International. There are over 20 chapters in Singapore alone. I joined the Renaissance chapter as a member a few weeks ago. The Global chapter, for some reason, has disappeared from the listing.

Curiously, another Internet marketer 23-year-old Adam Wong apparently listed six telltale signs on Ewen Chia’s website (in a post entitled “How to Smell a Scam” and dated August 26, 2006) as follows:

1. Overall Bad Design
2. Fake Clickbank Screenshots
3. Doctored Clickbank Cheques
4. Poor Alexa Ranking: 1,170,697
5. Stock Photos (used to indicate the car and house that he bought with the money earned on the Internet)
6. Teenage Web Counter
7. No Contact Info
8. No Opt-in box (a must for any Internet marketer)

.

UPON CHECKING EwenChia.com on the Internet Archive’s WayBackMachine, however, I somehow could not find the problems mentioned above on the archived versions of EwenChia.com. The site’s Alexa ranking is currently 30,187. (Yes, we have all heard how Alexa rankings can be manipulated.) The last archived version (left) was on Jun 3, 2006. It looked almost identical to today’s version (right) — with an Opt-in box on the left column (about one post down):

There were no signs of the bad Web design or the Teenage Web Counter, as illustrated on Adam Wong’s post. Neither could I find any Clickbank screenshots or photos of houses or cars. However, I’m very puzzled as to how the the June 3, 2006 archived version (left) of the “Personal Consultation” page looked almost idential like today’s version (right) of the same page, even with a date like “Thursday, June 14, 2007″!

Questions:

• Did Ewen Chia really make millions on the Internet? Did The Sunday Times reporter verify the facts that she reported? If so, how and to what extent?
• Was Adam Wong referring to EwenChia.com or some other site? Was Adam Wong’s post a scam?
• Just what has happened?

Related Posts:

• Internet Marketing: Successes or Scams?
• Insight#4: Of Alexa, Dmoz & Technorati

There were 10 speakers: Brett McFall, Tom Hua, Jay Abraham, Mark Joyner, Armand Morin, David Cavanagh, Ewen Chia, Stephen Peirce, Mike Filsaime, and John Childers. Each internet marketing guru on the stage spoke persuasively of having a simple easy-to-follow system which guaranteed success. Some qualified by adding, “lots of hard work over a period of time”. Somehow though, with the possible exception of Jay Abraham and Mark Joyner, their systems all looked and sounded the same:

Basically, each guru suggested offering a freebie to lure prospects to a site and into giving their email addresses. Then the hardsell process begins in earnest: A one-time irresistible offer is made online and the specially designed website starts to sell in almost all possible ways (upsell, downsell, cross-sell, etc.) until the prospect yields to temptation and pays up.

AT THE END OF EACH GURU’S TALK during the WIMS 2007 seminar was invariably a sales pitch, whereby the guru would show what looked like an endless list of over-priced products/services. Then he would slash the prices to about a tenth or more, and tell the audience to buy NOW. Many people actually did as told.

I did a quick estimation. Some of the speakers charge each attendee $5,000++ for attending his program which includes one day of training, two days of coaching and monthly meetings for one year. If 100 people sign up for the program, he’d have made $500,000 (half a million!) per program.

I also ran some checks on the PageRanks (using the multiple PageRank checker) and the estimated traffic (using AttentionMeter.com) on the speakers’ websites and found the following:

Fig. 1: Google PageRanks for the 10 speakers.

Fig. 2: Google PageRank for some of the speakers’ sites

Fig. 3: Compete.com Graph for ArmandMorin.com, BizSuccessOnline.com, BrettMcFall.com & StephenLive.com

Fig. 4: Compete.com Graph for Abraham.com, Aesop.com, EwenChia.com, MarkJoyner.name, MikeFilsaime.com

Fig. 5: Compete.com Graph for Aesop.com, ArticleCity.com, AutoPilotProfits.com, eBookWholesaler.net, Simpleology.com

Notes:

• AutoPilotProfits.com belongs to Ewen Chia, Aesop.com and Simple-ology.com belongs to Mark Joyner, ebookwholesaler.net belongs to Tom Hua.
• With rampant link exchanges on the Net, PageRanks are increasingly being manipulated.
• Traffick, a search engine blog, wrote (”On Alexa, Compete.com, Quantcast, et al.”, February 06, 2007):

“People who don’t know too much about web stats love to quote Alexa ranks way too much… that’s seen as a silly thing to do by those “in the know”. But still, darned tempting. You can buy better data, but Alexa is free.

“More recently, upstarts that don’t seem too dissimilar to Alexa have come along: Compete.com, Quantcast, etc…. Based on the evidence I’ve sifted through, there’s not a shred to suggest that Compete.com is better at this stage, and some to suggest it’s actually worse.”

I remember from experience that hardsell also happens in face-to-face sessions. And how I hate being subject to it! These guys are shrewd marketers. These techniques probably really work well. Perhaps consumers need to beware! How many times have we bought things that we don’t need but thought we need at that moment of buying? Still, what are the right things to do when one really needs to make a living and so sell well on the Net (or elsewhere)? And just who (if any) have achieved real successes?

Related Posts:

• Scam? Ewen Chia, Adam Wong, Both or Neither?
• Insight#4: Of Alexa, Dmoz & Technorati

• January: Xunlei, a Chinese P2P file-sharing network that allows users to download music and videos. Similar to BitTorrent?
• February: Adscape (video game advertising) — offers advertising with plot and storyline integration, demographic and geographic targeting, and a reporting interface for marketers.”
• March: Trendalyzer — software which converts statistics into interactive animations.
• April:
  Tonic Systems — presentation and document management products expected to be a strong fit with Google Docs & Spreadsheets.
  Marratech (video conferencing software) — “e-meeting and web conferencing for effective collaboration tele-working with remote staff, customers and clients.”
  DoubleClick (online advertising) — “enables agencies, marketers and publishers to work together and profit from their digital marketing investments.”
• May: GreenBorder Technologies (desktop enterprise security)
• June:
  Panoramio (geospatial photo-sharing service) — “Map your photos”
  FeedBurner (online RSS feed and blog-to-email) — an extensive feed and blog advertising network where publishers can promote, deliver and monetize their Web-based content, and end-users can access and manage feed-based content.

I TRULY LOOK FORWARD TO MORE FREEBIES soon, in particular, Web conferencing and PowerPoint-equivalent on Google Docs & Spreadsheets. Perhaps Google is looking forward too to more revenues from AdSense and AdWords? As Josh Catone wrote on ReadWriteWeb:

This is a great deal for both Feedburner and Google. For Google it gives them access to over 720,000 feeds including, 111,000 podcast or videocast feeds, many of which can now be added into the Adsense network. It also gives Google access to a wealth of data and information about how people consume blogs and information across the greater blogosphere.

For Feedburner, which has raised around $10 million from Mobius Venture Capital, Portage Venture Partners, Sutter Hill Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Union Square Ventures, it gives them access to Google’s muscle and resources (not to mention a nice exit).

The price itself seems like a steal to me. Feedburner’s 422,000 publishers may not seem like a lot for a $100 million investment, but that 422,000 publishers actually translates into access to many millions of readers that Google can push advertising to.

Is this where “community service” and “commercial profitability” could intersect? Is this really possible, feasible, desirable, etc.?

According to a New York Times report in September 2006 (quoting Bloomberg stats), Baidu is the leading Chinese language site, with a market share of around 57 percent for search engines and around 50 percent for advertising revenue. Google, the closest second, only has around 33 percent market share for search engines and 16 percent for advertising revenue. Baidu is reportedly very strong in Chinese MP3 music content and the first to offer WAP and PDA-based mobile search in China.

Going by Alexa’s Traffic Rankings, Baidu is within the Top 10 worldwide and Number 1 in China. The other top 9 sites in China are (details extracted and summarized from Wikipedia):

1. Tencent QQ 腾讯网: The most popular free instant messaging software in Asia, and the world’s third most popular IM service. Over 160 million QQ users in China alone. Offers many subfeatures including games, pets, ringtone downloads, etc.
2. Sina.com.cn 新浪新闻中心: The largest Chinese-language infotainment web portal, with over 30 channels covering various aspects, including news, sports, technology, finance, advertising, entertainment, fashion, travel and more.
3. Sohu.com 搜狐: Offers advertising, a search engine, and other services.
4. NetEase 163.com 网易新闻: Search engine technology and massively multiplayer online gaming.
5. Taobao.com 淘宝网: A consumer-to-consumer trade site for Chinese customers. The main competitor to eBay in China for online auctions. Currently captures over 65% of the e-auction market. Part of the Alibaba 阿里巴巴 e-commerce conglomerate.
6. Yahoo! China 雅虎中国: News, information, email, and a search engine
7. Google China 谷歌中国: Enables users to search the Web, Usenet, and images. Features include PageRank, caching and translation of results, and an option to find similar pages.
8. TOM Online: A mobile Internet company, offering a variety of online and mobile services, including wireless internet and online advertising.
9. Microsoft Network (MSN): Dialup access and content provider.

WITH THIS BACKGROUND INFO, plus more details from Google Finance (added via links on the company names after this point), Keso’s articles on Baidu (NASDAQ: BIDU) now make much more sense:

In Baidu & Google China 《谷歌篇》, Keso considers Google China as Baidu’s strongest competitor. Both have very similar business models. Their main source of income is advertisements. However, Google is restrained by its headquarters while Baidu is constrained by the sentiments of its stock investors. In addition [taken from "Baidu & Alibaba"], Google, with its ever-expanding portfolio of productivity tools (such as Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Analytics, Webmaster Central, Apps for Your Domain), has been positioning itself as an economical search engine. Baidu, with its strong entertainment orientation, risk lowering its brand image, might raise costs for its advertisers and thereby lowering its value as a commercial “spine”.

In Baidu & Sina 《新浪篇》, Keso explains that Sina, with its recent launch of a music library, looks ready to compete with Baidu in the MP3 Search market. Sina, however, has quite fragile media relations. The whole situation is also likely to change with Baidu’s newly acquired news publisher license.

In Baidu & Tencent QQ 《腾讯篇》, Keso explains that Baidu and QQ (Tencent Holding) are very likely to top the charts if there’s ever a popularity contest among Internet youths in China. Interestingly, the nett value of QQ is larger than Baidu by 1.8 times. Baidu, with its huge in successes MP3 Search and Baidu Post Bar, has been expanding aggressively into social networking — moving closer and closer to QQ’s business model. The two companies look set to have a battle soon.

In Baidu & Alibaba 《阿里巴巴篇》, Keso explains that Alibaba, with its strong B2B business model, basically links suppliers to buyers. Thus it was originally not a competitor of Baidu. However, in August 2005, Alibaba acquired Yahoo! China. And once its estimated value of over 4 billions USD (超过40亿美元) was announced around the same period, people started comparing Alibaba with Baidu. In addition, more and more people are using search engines to find business partners. With increasing breadth and depth of search engine applications, the entire Internet has now been transformed into a gigantic trading platform!

Although I’ve been a LinkedIn member since August 2006, I’ve not published my LinkedIn profile to the Web NOR tried to connect with anyone there. That is, until Lunar New Year’s eve three days ago. Now that I’m running a business, professional networking has become important. Furthermore, my curiosity was piqued (again) upon reading Hinchliffe’s “Best of Web 2.0 in 2006″ article, where LinkedIn was highlighted for the “Professional Social Network” category. So, on Feb 17, I really tried connecting to people whom I know via LinkedIn.

After 3 Days of “connecting”, this is what I get on LinkedIn:

• Structured Data: RSS integrated into Microsoft’s new Vista OS, Yahoo Mail, Google Base. Interesting RSS services. More e-commerce and multimedia widgets expected. Google forging ahead with its own standards, largely ignoring microformats (the Web community’s open standards).
• Enterprise: Web Office battle expected between Google and Microsoft. Small startups may be acquired by the big Internet companies. Consumerization of the enterprise IT in the form of web-based office apps and more collaborative systems.
• Web Development: Rich Internet Apps, a continuation of the hybrid web/desktop apps theme, expected (notably Adobe Apollo and OpenLazlo). Browser-based apps extended, possibly Vector Graphics (VML/SVG) + Ajax. More Semantic Web products (E.g. RadarNetworks and Metaweb). More Amazon-like Web services (WebOS), especially from Google and Microsoft, e.g. Windows Live services vs a Google-optimized Linux.
• Search and Online Advertising: AdSense will have competition, especially from MSN AdCenter and Yahoo. Better, more robust online ad model than CPA (CPC/PPC issues). Search 2.0 in the form of vertical search engines (e.g. Google Health) and SearchMash (e.g. search result returns not only homepage of company but also some semantic meaning).
• Multimedia: More Internet-based TV (e.g. Brightcove, Google Vide/YouTube), more Interactive TV (e.g. Skype’s Venice Project), more IPTV with P2P (e.g. DemocracyPlayer). More virtual worlds (e.g. SecondLife, Habbo) and virtual money (e.g. Second LindeX, Microsoft points).
• Consumer Apps: Online real estate market ramps up, disruptive business models persists, data portability needed among social networks.
• International Web: One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) may increase the adoption of thin-client PC, web apps and Linux for the mainstream.
• Mobile: More VoIP competitors for Skype. Online/Offline mobile technologies (e.g. Smartpox). Emerging Webphone market. More user-generated content, mobile search, mobile ads, QR codes (retail), image recognition, card swapping, download hotspots, “smart client” solutions.

Note: Found this video because someone from Harro left a note on the shoutbox on one of my websites. So I checked out his/her website. It happened to be Harro Channels which has a link to ping.sg, a community meta blog for Singapore bloggers. There was a listing of popular posts. So, I clicked on the topmost one… and voila!

What would you do, and why? Just tick one of the options/boxes below. You can also add a new option (by clicking here (scroll to the bottom to enter a new and preferred option — remember to click the box to cast your vote!), or add a comment (by clicking the “Discuss this Poll” link below).

FOR A LONG TIME, I’ve believed in the free culture espoused by Lawrence Lessig and the open sharing of ideas, theories, studies, research advocated by Terry Vessels (above). I’ve therefore downloaded and consumed (installed, used, read, watched, listened…) lots of free software, ebooks, video, podcasts, news reports, in-depth analyses, research studies, etc. on the Internet over the past few years.

Recently, however, I’m beginning to ask myself, “Do I really believe in free culture and free exchange of ideas? Have I’ve been more the taker than the giver?” Granted that I’m normally a frank and open person. Yes, my work has been almost invariably very demanding. And yes, I’ve been blogging from time to time, sharing new things that I’ve learnt. Still, there were times when I’ve hesitated and held back. For example, I’ve kept my research study (begun in 2005) under wraps on the Net until a few days ago. Another example, I’ve been adding lots of useful information to a wiki on a sub-domain for almost two years now. Yet so far, I have chosen not to link them from my blog.

PERHAPS MISTRUST FIRST set in when a Masters program classmate asked quite pertinently some time ago, “But how could we share our research ideas, especially in a public domain? What if someone else were to steal our ideas and claim them as his/her own?”

Our eminent Trade Minister George Yeo probably spoke for many among us when he said on BlogTV (Episode 12: Big Boys Blogging) a few days ago:

“If they expect me to say things which I’d only say very privately, then they will be very disappointed because the blogosphere is not private space… There are things which you will say to your wife which you would not say to your friends, there are things that you would confide in your teacher which you would not confide even in your classmates. That’s part of life, we all have circles of trust…”

The minister was answering young blogger Gayle Goh’s very frank comments that (1) people who read blogs want fresh new perspectives and a strong, personal voice; and (2) people might find it very difficult to trust what politicians have to say especially when they won’t deviate from the party line at all.

Gayle’s response? She looked quite skeptical, even a little disapproving.

At first, I smiled at her youthful audacity and seeming naivete. Upon reflection however, I think Gayle raised an excellent point. Yes, indeed. Just who, in their leisure, would be interested to read a party manifesto? Even though it comes in blog postings?

Jeremy Wright, in his book Blog Marketing, wrote (paraphrased initially, words in brackets below are mine):

“Most blogs are expected to have these qualities — an authentic voice, honesty, and authority… this holds true even more so for the corporate blog…. This presents unique challenges for business leaders who want to understand blogging (connect with readers), as the concepts of transparency and authencity are not often associated with corporate communications practices….

“Blogging is really about three things:

• Information: Telling your customers what you’re doing and finding out what they are thinking.
• Relationships: Building a solid base of positive experiences with your customers that changes them from plain-old consumers to evangelists for your company and products.
• Knowledge management: Having the vast stores of knowledge within your company available to the right people at the right time.

“Without blogs, company messages can get so filtered by public relations or the media that CEOs and other senior management have decided to talk directly with customers — whether it be in the company’s stores, on the company’s airplanes, or at special events set up specifically for communicating with customers. The value of direct customer feedback is obvious, and blogs provide that [one-to-one and daily] on a global scale.”

In “Chapter 3: The Power of Blogs for Business”, Wright wrote:

Be Real: The Scoble Story

“…sometimes the most important person to be blogging in your company may not be an executive. For Microsoft… the most important blogger is arguably Robert Scoble… Scober started blogging before he joined Microsoft — his existing blog was actually a major force in landing him the job. In his role as a technical evangelist, Scoble has to be both authoritative and honest.

“One of Scoble’s rules is to tell the truth, even if it means admitting that a competitor’s product is better or if it means Microsoft is doing something wrong. This can be scary for an executive to do — though Sun’s Schwartz does it quite successfully (another story in the book). For Scoble, this comes naturally, and the net effect is that he has become one of the most influential people in a company with more than 55,000 employees. The external effect is that Microsoft now has a trusted voice who will give the straight and passionate answer to even the hardest questions.”

Finally, BG Yeo himself had observed in the first part of the BlogTV show:

“It’s strange. The emotion connected with blogging is very different from that connected with say, giving a speech or addressing an audience. For some reason, there’s an intimacy associated with going into the blogosphere which you don’t associate with a public meeting.”

Hmmm…. Can BG Yeo really maintain a public, party-line stance and yet achieve that “intimacy” with young people in Singapore? What do you think?

Curious about who’s listening to podcasts in general, or do you need to know who your particular audience is so that you can attract the right sponsors? The panel fields questions such as: Who are the listeners in categories of age, education, gender, and location? How much are podcasts being used for learning? How much for corporate purposes? These panelists discuss the latest metrics on who’s listening and who’s producing podcasts, plus offer creative ways of getting to the numbers behind your podcast.

According to Nielsen BuzzMetrics, Consumer-Generated Media (CGM) encompasses the millions of consumer-generated comments, opinions and personal experiences posted in publicly available online sources (such as blogs, message boards, forums, Usenet newsgroups, discussions and forums on large email portals, online opinion/review sites and online feedback/complaint sites) on a wide range of issues, topics, products and brands, using media such as photos, images, videos, even podcasts and webcasts… and who knows what’s next? In other words, “CGM is also referred to as Online Consumer Word-of-Mouth or Online Consumer Buzz.”

Why is CGM important?

First, consumers place far more trust in their fellow consumers than they do in traditional marketers and advertisers, according to research… Secondly, CGM is prolific and increasingly easy and inexpensive to create… [Finally,] because CGM data is easy to find on search engines, marketers and advertisers no longer “control” the message or the medium.

Apparently when Google founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, first knew each other in their undergrad days in Stanford, they clashed incessantly, debating over many things. Jokingly, Page said he thought Brin was arrogant. Brin retorted that Page was obnoxious, “We had a kind of bantering thing going.” In the reporter’s words, “they were clearly drawn together – two swords sharpening one another.” Later however, it was their shared obsession with backlinks that started something big.

When Page and Brin began searching for topics for their doctoral theses, they kicked around 10 or so intriguing ideas, but found themselves attracted to the burgeoning World Wide Web.

“Page found the Web interesting primarily for its mathematical characteristics. Each computer was a node, and each link on a Web page was a connection between nodes – a classic graph structure… The World Wide Web, Page theorized, may have been the largest graph ever created, and it was growing at a breakneck pace. Many useful insights lurked in its vertices, awaiting discovery by inquiring graduate students… Page noticed that while it was trivial to follow links from one page to another, it was nontrivial to discover links back. In other words, when you looked at a Web page, you had no idea what pages were linking back to it…

“Academics build their papers on a carefully constructed foundation of citation: Each paper reaches a conclusion by citing previously published papers as proof points that advance the author’s argument. Papers are judged not only on their original thinking, but also on the number of papers they cite, the number of papers that subsequently cite them back, and the perceived importance of each citation. Citations are so important that there’s even a branch of science devoted to their study: bibliometrics.

“…it was Tim Berners-Lee’s desire to improve this system that led him to create the World Wide Web. And it was Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s attempts to reverse engineer Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web that led to Google. The needle that threads these efforts together is citation – the practice of pointing to other people’s work in order to build up your own.”

This is interesting, but very, very counter intuitive:

“In their book Moral Intelligence (Wharton School Publishing, May 2005), Doug Lennick and Fred Kiel say there’s a correlation between moral principles and business success. The companies that perform best, they believe, have leaders with not only a strong moral compass, but also the good sense to follow it.”

Actually, I’m NOT surprised by this.

YES, WORLDLY INTELLIGENCE often suggests that one needs to strategize (or plot), position (or present) oneself and manage (or manipulate) others.

However, the importance of moral intelligence IS intuitive to people who believe strongly in God (or karma) and ethical behavior (or cause-and-effect). On a non-religious note, as customers, wouldn’t (and don’t) we patronize repeatedly those who give good honest value and avoid those who don’t?

N.R. Narayana Murthy (chairman of Infosys Technologies), by the way, had spoken on the correlation between good business and moral principles when he gave a talk at NUS one or two years ago. This article, dated June 1999, gave a glimpse of this and reported how “Leading Indian business houses are witnessing a resurgence of values and ethics that may, in the long run, help turn the tide of recession.”

Another article from Strategic Marketing, dated Oct 2004, also highlighted the importance of moral intelligence. Smart companies, it says, “have a long-term approach to business. Customer retention is the purpose of their business. Profit is just the by-product… In business context, building lifelong relationship between the supplier and the customer means creating a strong bond – a strong bond of love and trust that cannot be broken by any competitor; a strong bond that grows stronger everyday.”

A key difference between Lennick & Kiel and the other writers is perhaps credibility (or authority)?

According to editorial notes at Amazon.com, “Doug Lennick led 14,000 professionals and support teams at American Express Financial Advisors to unparalleled success. Today, in addition to his work as managing partner of the Lennick Aberman Group, he continues to work directly with American Express Company’s CEO, retaining the title of EVP and focusing on workforce culture and performance. He is known worldwide for his expertise in driving business results by improving managers’ emotional competence.

“Fred Kiel, Ph.D., co-founder of KRW International, Inc., brings over 30 years of experience to his work with Fortune 500 CEOs and senior executives on building organizational effectiveness through leadership excellence and aligning organization with mission. Kiel is often called the “father of executive coaching” for his pioneering work in this field. Before founding KRW, Kiel worked with senior executives in private practice, developing a rigorous data-gathering and customized development process designed to provide executives with transformative feedback.”

“VISIONS ARE EXTREME HALLUCINATORY daydreaming, too-good-to-be-true ideals with high impact but no measurable probability — because they can’t happen. They’re fantasy. No one believes in them. Not even you. They’re fiction…

“If you have ever heard a truly compelling vision of what the world could be “if only…” from anyone else in your life, this is the place to finally write it down. Anonymity is best since you may hold back if others know your name. A good vision would contain fantasy elements from all utopias you ever believed in, and several that you laughed at, and riduculed other people for.

“If you are describing something that you consider a reasonable goal, that you believe can ever actually happen to any substantial degree, or has a measurable probability, it is a best case and not a “vision”. Be very careful with this distinction — best cases are something we allocate real w:human capital and (indirectly) w:natural resources to get done… a single good vision, however, would break us, were we even to really attempt it.”

WAS A VICTIM OF “extreme hallucinatory daydreaming” while working on a be-all do-all elearning project at a MNC a few years ago.

Our target audience included teaching staff, students and business partners across all educational sectors (K-12, tertiary, adult and corporate) in Asia Pacific countries. The super-duper system was touted to have all the features available in existing competitor systems (which were each targetting only specific sectors) and much more. For example, courseware of many subjects across all levels; on-the-fly personalizable learning, assessment and tracking; on-the-fly booking of virtual classrooms with audio and video streaming; on-the-fly XML data exchange with all types of e-services that might be provided by industry partners such as e-libraries, e-printers, e-publishers, e-translation, online payment gateways…

Surely, with such fantastic features, marketing should be a breeze, sales would boom, customers would be happy and everyone would have cause to smile?

However, we had just half a year and a very lean team to achieve all these from scratch. Still, the business folks thought of themselves as great visionaries and assumed that so long as some programmers and analysts got onboard, anything technical or editorial (a “black box” to them) could be produced (almost like magic!). This was supposed to be the easy part.

The reality was: there were too many dreams, promises and requirements; yet too little time (left from the endless meetings), manpower and resources. Plus XML was a new technology and elearning standards were not quite there yet (not even today). The dreams soon turned into nightmares. Eventually, the super-duper project joined the ranks of hundreds (or was it thousands?) of other dot.coms (or dot.cons) and went bust.