Gary Secondino: Biz

New Blog and Tools

Sun, 03 Jan 2010 18:36:26 GMT

After more than 10 years of good Blogging use from Radio Userland 8 I've moved on to MarsEdit, NetNewsWire, and WordPress. Follow this link to my next blog, webstir.com/opmlblog/.

Secret of Googlenomics: Data-Fueled Recipe Brews Profitability

Tue, 26 May 2009 13:12:13 GMT

Wired News 5/26/09 12:00 AM Steven Levy In the midst of financial apocalypse, the gadflies and gurus of the global marketplace are gathered at the San Francisco Hilton for the annual meeting of the American Economics Association. The mood is similar to a seismologist convention in the wake of the Big One. Yet surprisingly, one of the most popular sessions has nothing to do with toxic assets, derivatives, or unemployment curves. "I'm going to talk about online auctions," says Hal Varian, the session's first speaker. Varian is a lanky 62-year-old professor at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business and School of Information, but these days he's best known as Google's chief economist. This morning's crowd hasn't come for predictions about the credit market; they want to hear about Google's secret sauce. Varian is an expert on what may be the most successful business idea in history: AdWords, Google's unique method for selling online advertising. AdWords analyzes every Google search to determine which advertisers get each of up to 11 "sponsored links" on every results page. It's the world's biggest, fastest auction, a never-ending, automated, self-service version of Tokyo's boisterous Tsukiji fish market, and it takes place, Varian says, "every time you search." He never mentions how much revenue advertising brings in. But Google is a public company, so anyone can find the number: It was $21 billion last year. His talk quickly becomes technical. There's the difference between the Generalized Second Price auction model and the Vickrey-Clark-Groves alternative. Game theory takes a turn; so does the Nash Equilibrium. Terms involving the c-word[~]as in clicks[~]get tossed around like beach balls at a summer rock festival. Clickthrough rate. Cost per click. Supply curve of clicks. The audience is enthralled. During the question-and-answer period, a man wearing a camel-colored corduroy blazer raises his hand. "Let me understand this," he begins, half skeptical, half unsure. "You say that an auction happens every time a search takes place? That would mean millions of times a day!" Varian smiles. "Millions," he says, "is actually quite an understatement." Why does Google even need a chief economist? The simplest reason is that the company is an economy unto itself. The ad auction, marinated in that special sauce, is a seething laboratory of fiduciary forensics, with customers ranging from giant multinationals to dorm-room entrepreneurs, all billed by the world's largest micropayment system. Google depends on economic principles to hone what has become the search engine of choice for more than 60 percent of all Internet surfers, and the company uses auction theory to grease the skids of its own operations. All these calculations require an army of math geeks, algorithms of Ramanujanian complexity, and a sales force more comfortable with whiteboard markers than fairway irons. Varian, an upbeat, avuncular presence at the Googleplex in Mountain View, California, serves as the Adam Smith of the new discipline of Googlenomics. His job is to provide a theoretical framework for Google's business practices while leading a team of quants to enforce bottom-line discipline, reining in the more propellerhead propensities of the company's dominant engineering culture. Googlenomics actually comes in two flavors: macro and micro. The macroeconomic side involves some of the company's seemingly altruistic behavior, which often baffles observers. Why does Google give away products like its browser, its apps, and the Android operating system for mobile phones? Anything that increases Internet use ultimately enriches Google, Varian says. And since using the Web without using Google is like dining at In-N-Out without ordering a hamburger, more eyeballs on the Web lead inexorably to more ad sales for Google. The microeconomics of Google is more complicated. Selling ads doesn't generate only profits; it also generates torrents of data about users' tastes and habits, data that Google then sifts and processes in order to predict future consumer behavior, find ways to improve its products, and sell more ads. This is the heart and soul of Googlenomics. It's a system of constant self-analysis: a data-fueled feedback loop that defines not only Google's future but the future of anyone who does business online. When the American Economics Association meets next year, the financial crisis may still be topic A. But one of the keynote speakers has already been chosen: Googlenomist Hal Varian. Ironically, economics was a distant focus in the first days of Google. After Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded the company in 1998, they channeled their energy into its free search product and left much of the business planning to a 22-year-old Stanford graduate named Salar Kamangar, Google's ninth employee. The early assumption was that although ads would be an important source of revenue, licensing search technology and selling servers would be just as lucrative. Page and Brin also believed that ads should be useful and welcome[~]not annoying intrusions. Kamangar and another early Googler, Eric Veach, set out to implement that ideal. Neither had a background in business or economics. Kamangar had been a biology major, and Veach's field of study was computer science. Hal Varian, hight priest of Googlenomics. Photo: Joe Pugliese Google's ads were always plain blocks of text relevant to the search query. But at first, there were two kinds. Ads at the top of the page were sold the old-fashioned way, by a crew of human beings headquartered largely in New York City. Salespeople wooed big customers over dinner, explaining what keywords meant and what the prices were. Advertisers were then billed by the number of user views, or impressions, regardless of whether anyone clicked on the ad. Down the right side were other ads that smaller businesses could buy directly online. The first of these, for live mail-order lobsters, was sold in 2000, just minutes after Google deployed a link reading SEE YOUR AD HERE. But as the business grew, Kamangar and Veach decided to price the slots on the side of the page by means of an auction. Not an eBay-style auction that unfolds over days or minutes as bids are raised or abandoned, but a huge marketplace of virtual auctions in which sealed bids are submitted in advance and winners are determined algorithmically in fractions of a second. Google hoped that millions of small and medium companies would take part in the market, so it was essential that the process be self-service. Advertisers bid on search terms, or keywords, but instead of bidding on the price per impression, they were bidding on a price they were willing to pay each time a user clicked on the ad. (The bid would be accompanied by a budget of how many clicks the advertiser was willing to pay for.) The new system was called AdWords Select, while the ads at the top of the page, with prices still set by humans, was renamed AdWords Premium. One key innovation was that all the sidebar slots on the results page were sold off in a single auction. (Compare that to an early pioneer of auction-driven search ads, Overture, which held a separate auction for each slot.) The problem with an all-at-once auction, however, was that advertisers might be inclined to lowball their bids to avoid the sucker's trap of paying a huge amount more than the guy just below them on the page. So the Googlers decided that the winner of each auction would pay the amount (plus a penny) of the bid from the advertiser with the next-highest offer. (If Joe bids $10, Alice bids $9, and Sue bids $6, Joe gets the top slot and pays $9.01. Alice gets the next slot for $6.01, and so on.) Since competitors didn't have to worry about costly overbidding errors, the paradoxical result was that it encouraged higher bids. "Eric Veach did the math independently," Kamangar says. "We found out along the way that second-price auctions had existed in other forms in the past and were used at one time in Treasury auctions." (Another crucial innovation had to do with ad quality, but more on that later.) Google's homemade solution to its ad problem impressed even Paul Milgrom, the Stanford economist who is to auction theory what Letitia Baldridge is to etiquette. "I've begun to realize that Google somehow stumbled on a level of simplification in ad auctions that was not included before," he says. And applying a variation on second-price auctions wasn't just a theoretical advance. "Google immediately started getting higher prices for advertising than Overture was getting." Google hired Varian in May 2002, a few months after implementing the auction- based version of AdWords. The offer came about when Google's then-new CEO, Eric Schmidt, ran into Varian at the Aspen Institute and they struck up a conversation about Internet issues. Schmidt was with Larry Page, who was pushing his own notions about how some of the big problems in business and science could be solved by using computation and analysis on an unprecedented scale. Varian remembers thinking, "Why did Eric bring his high-school nephew?" Schmidt, whose father was an economist, invited Varian to spend a day or two a week at Google. On his first visit, Varian asked Schmidt what he should do. "Why don't you take a look at the ad auction?" Schmidt said. Google had already developed the basics of AdWords, but there was still plenty of tweaking to do, and Varian was uniquely qualified to "take a look." As head of the information school at UC Berkeley and coauthor (with Carl Shapiro) of a popular book called Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy, he was already the go-to economist on ecommerce. At the time, most online companies were still selling advertising the way it was done in the days of Mad Men. But Varian saw immediately that Google's ad business was less like buying traditional spots and more like computer dating. "The theory was Google as yenta[~]matchmaker," he says. He also realized there was another old idea underlying the new approach: A 1983 paper by Harvard economist Herman Leonard described using marketplace mechanisms to assign job candidates to slots in a corporation, or students to dorm rooms. It was called a two-sided matching market. "The mathematical structure of the Google auction," Varian says, "is the same as those two-sided matching markets." Varian tried to understand the process better by applying game theory. "I think I was the first person to do that," he says. After just a few weeks at Google, he went back to Schmidt. "It's amazing!" Varian said. "You've managed to design an auction perfectly." To Schmidt, who had been at Google barely a year, this was an incredible relief. "Remember, this was when the company had 200 employees and no cash," he says. "All of a sudden we realized we were in the auction business." It wasn't long before the success of AdWords Select began to dwarf that of its sister system, the more traditional AdWords Premium. Inevitably, Veach and Kamangar argued that all the ad slots should be auctioned off. In search, Google had already used scale, power, and clever algorithms to change the way people accessed information. By turning over its sales process entirely to an auction-based system, the company could similarly upend the world of advertising, removing human guesswork from the equation. The move was risky. Going ahead with the phaseout[~]nicknamed Premium Sunset[~]meant giving up campaigns that were selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars, for the unproven possibility that the auction process would generate even bigger sums. "We were going to erase a huge part of the company's revenue," says Tim Armstrong, then head of direct sales in the US. (This March, Armstrong left Google to become AOL's new chair and CEO.) "Ninety-nine percent of companies would have said, 'Hold on, don't make that change.' But we had Larry, Sergey, and Eric saying, 'Let's go for it.'" News of the switch jacked up the Maalox consumption among Google's salespeople. Instead of selling to corporate giants, their job would now be to get them to place bids in an auction? "We thought it was a little half-cocked," says Jeff Levick, an early leader of the Google sales team. The young company wasn't getting rid of its sales force (though the system certainly helped Google run with far fewer salespeople than a traditional media company) but was asking them to get geekier, helping big customers shape online strategies as opposed to simply selling ad space. Levick tells a story of visiting three big customers to inform them of the new system: "The guy in California almost threw us out of his office and told us to fuck ourselves. The guy in Chicago said, 'This is going to be the worst business move you ever made.' But the guy in Massachusetts said, 'I trust you.'" That client knew math, says Levick, whose secret weapon was the numbers. When the data was crunched[~]and Google worked hard to give clients the tools needed to run the numbers themselves[~]advertisers saw that the new system paid off for them, too. AdWords was such a hit that Google went auction-crazy. The company used auctions to place ads on other Web sites (that program was dubbed AdSense). "But the really gutsy move," Varian says, "was using it in the IPO." In 2004, Google used a variation of a Dutch auction for its IPO; Brin and Page loved that the process leveled the playing field between small investors and powerful brokerage houses. And in 2008, the company couldn't resist participating in the FCC's auction to reallocate portions of the radio spectrum. Google even uses auctions for internal operations, like allocating servers among its various business units. Since moving a product's storage and computation to a new data center is disruptive, engineers often put it off. "I suggested we run an auction similar to what the airlines do when they oversell a flight. They keep offering bigger vouchers until enough customers give up their seats," Varian says. "In our case, we offer more machines in exchange for moving to new servers. One group might do it for 50 new ones, another for 100, and another won't move unless we give them 300. So we give them to the lowest bidder[~]they get their extra capacity, and we get computation shifted to the new data center." The transition to an all-auction sales model was a milestone for Google, ensuring that its entire revenue engine would run with the same computer-science fervor as its search operation. Now, when Google recruits alpha geeks, it is just as likely to have them focus on AdWords as on search or apps. The across-the-board emphasis on engineering, mathematical formulas, and data-mining has made Google a new kind of company. But to fully understand why, you have to go back and look under AdWords' hood. Most people think of the Google ad auction as a straightforward affair. In fact, there's a key component that few users know about and even sophisticated advertisers don't fully understand. The bids themselves are only a part of what ultimately determines the auction winners. The other major determinant is something called the quality score. This metric strives to ensure that the ads Google shows on its results page are true, high-caliber matches for what users are querying. If they aren't, the whole system suffers and Google makes less money. Google determines quality scores by calculating multiple factors, including the relevance of the ad to the specific keyword or keywords, the quality of the landing page the ad is linked to, and, above all, the percentage of times users actually click on a given ad when it appears on a results page. (Other factors, Google won't even discuss.) There's also a penalty invoked when the ad quality is too low[~]in such cases, the company slaps a minimum bid on the advertiser. Google explains that this practice[~]reviled by many companies affected by it[~]protects users from being exposed to irrelevant or annoying ads that would sour people on sponsored links in general. Several lawsuits have been filed by would-be advertisers who claim that they are victims of an arbitrary process by a quasi monopoly. You can argue about fairness, but arbitrary it ain't. To figure out the quality score, Google needs to estimate in advance how many users will click on an ad. That's very tricky, especially since we're talking about billions of auctions. But since the ad model depends on predicting clickthroughs as perfectly as possible, the company must quantify and analyze every twist and turn of the data. Susan Wojcicki, who oversees Google's advertising, refers to it as "the physics of clicks." During Varian's second summer in Mountain View, when he was still coming in only a day or two a week, he asked a recently hired computer scientist from Stanford named Diane Tang to create the Google equivalent of the Consumer Price Index, called the Keyword Pricing Index. "Instead of a basket of goods like diapers and beer and doughnuts, we have keywords," says Tang, who is known internally as the Queen of Clicks. The Keyword Pricing Index is a reality check. It alerts Google to any anomalous price bubbles, a sure sign that an auction isn't working properly. Categories are ranked by the cost per click that advertisers generally have to pay, weighted by distribution, and then separated into three bundles: high cap, mid cap, and low cap. "The high caps are very competitive keywords, like 'flowers' and 'hotels,'" Tang says. In the mid-cap realm you have keywords that may vary seasonally[~]the price to place ads alongside results for "snowboarding" skyrockets during the winter. Low caps like "Massachusetts buggy whips" are the stuff of long tails. Tang's index is just one example of a much broader effort. As the amount of data at the company's disposal grows, the opportunities to exploit it multiply, which ends up further extending the range and scope of the Google economy. So it's utterly essential to calculate correctly the quality scores that prop up AdWords. "The people working for me are generally econometricians[~]sort of a cross between statisticians and economists," says Varian, who moved to Google full-time in 2007 (he's on leave from Berkeley) and leads two teams, one of them focused on analysis. "Google needs mathematical types that have a rich tool set for looking for signals in noise," says statistician Daryl Pregibon, who joined Google in 2003 after 23 years as a top scientist at Bell Labs and AT&T Labs. "The rough rule of thumb is one statistician for every 100 computer scientists." Keywords and click rates are their bread and butter. "We are trying to understand the mechanisms behind the metrics," says Qing Wu, one of Varian's minions. His specialty is forecasting, so now he predicts patterns of queries based on the season, the climate, international holidays, even the time of day. "We have temperature data, weather data, and queries data, so we can do correlation and statistical modeling," Wu says. The results all feed into Google's backend system, helping advertisers devise more-efficient campaigns. To track and test their predictions, Wu and his colleagues use dozens of onscreen dashboards that continuously stream information, a sort of Bloomberg terminal for the Googlesphere. Wu checks obsessively to see whether reality is matching the forecasts: "With a dashboard, you can monitor the queries, the amount of money you make, how many advertisers you have, how many keywords they're bidding on, what the rate of return is for each advertiser." Wu calls Google "the barometer of the world." Indeed, studying the clicks is like looking through a window with a panoramic view of everything. You can see the change of seasons[~]clicks gravitating toward skiing and heavy clothes in winter, bikinis and sunscreen in summer[~]and you can track who's up and down in pop culture. Most of us remember news events from television or newspapers; Googlers recall them as spikes in their graphs. "One of the big things a few years ago was the SARS epidemic," Tang says. Wu didn't even have to read the papers to know about the financial meltdown[~]he saw the jump in people Googling for gold. And since prediction and analysis are so crucial to AdWords, every bit of data, no matter how seemingly trivial, has potential value. Since Google hired Varian, other companies, like Yahoo, have decided that they, too, must have a chief economist heading a division that scrutinizes auctions, dashboards, and econometric models to fine-tune their business plan. In 2007, Harvard economist Susan Athey was surprised to get a summons to Redmond to meet with Steve Ballmer. "That's a call you take," she says. Athey spent last year working in Microsoft's Cambridge, Massachusetts, office. Can the rest of the world be far behind? Although Eric Schmidt doesn't think it will happen as quickly as some believe, he does think that Google-style auctions are applicable to all sorts of transactions. The solution to the glut in auto inventory? Put the entire supply of unsold cars up for bid. That'll clear out the lot. Housing, too: "People use auctions now in cases of distress, like auctioning a house when there are no buyers," Schmidt says. "But you can imagine a situation in which it was a normal and routine way of doing things." Varian believes that a new era is dawning for what you might call the datarati[~]and it's all about harnessing supply and demand. "What's ubiquitous and cheap?" Varian asks. "Data." And what is scarce? The analytic ability to utilize that data. As a result, he believes that the kind of technical person who once would have wound up working for a hedge fund on Wall Street will now work at a firm whose business hinges on making smart, daring choices[~]decisions based on surprising results gleaned from algorithmic spelunking and executed with the confidence that comes from really doing the math. It's a satisfying development for Varian, a guy whose career as an economist was inspired by a sci-fi novel he read in junior high. "In Isaac Asimov's first Foundation Trilogy, there was a character who basically constructed mathematical models of society, and I thought this was a really exciting idea. When I went to college, I looked around for that subject. It turned out to be economics." Varian is telling this story from his pied-è0-Plex, where he sometimes stays during the week to avoid driving the 40-some miles from Google headquarters to his home in the East Bay. It happens to be the ranch-style house, which Google now owns, where Brin and Page started the company. There's a wild contrast between this sparsely furnished residence and what it has spawned[~]dozens of millionaire geeks, billions of auctions, and new ground rules for businesses in a data-driven society that is far weirder than the one Asimov envisioned nearly 60 years ago. What could be more baffling than a capitalist corporation that gives away its best services, doesn't set the prices for the ads that support it, and turns away customers because their ads don't measure up to its complex formulas? Varian, of course, knows that his employer's success is not the result of inspired craziness but of an early recognition that the Internet rewards fanatical focus on scale, speed, data analysis, and customer satisfaction. (A bit of auction theory doesn't hurt, either.) Today we have a name for those rules: Googlenomics. Learn them, or pay the price.

The Truth About US Unemployment Numbers

Sat, 10 Jan 2009 18:54:01 GMT

The BLS U-3 chart is the official unemployment rate. Shown as a percentage of the civilian labor force. But over the past twenty years the American civilian workforce has undergone significant changes. John Robb outlines the situation. The BLS U-6 chart attempts to include workers who are unemployed and underemployed. Table A-12 Alternative measures of labor under-utilization. The BLS U-6 number for December 2008 is 13.5%.

The Internet ate my business

Sun, 28 Dec 2008 17:40:46 GMT

Matt Asay on CNET posted his view on Internet disruption of retail economics. Heh-heh, I say get used to it! It's inevitable. Personally my career in color print and publishing has downgraded almost nothing over the last ten years. Why? Because digital software technology has incorporated my specialized knowledge which in turn makes color reproduction more widely available to those people who are less skilled than me. Thereby making color into a commodity and consequently devaluing my experience and skill in the marketplace. What to do about it? In the 21st century world of work you re-purpose your existing skills into a different marketplace. Learn new skills. Seek out free advice and help from professionals at state and local career centers. Always make a plan and execute it. Evaluate the result. Adjust your plan and execute again. Repeat until success is achieved. Then keep thinking about the marketplace you are in and what is your value. Make adjustments as needed. It's time consuming and not easy, but if I can do it you can too. Hint - it gets easier after you do it 3 or 4 times. Hang in there!

Organizations Cancel Holiday Party

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 18:45:23 GMT

I recently watched a news interview of a small company CEO who canceled the annual $30 thousand holiday party citing the tough times. In a stroke of real response to reality he then donated one-half of the party money to a local charity. BRAVO SIR! UBS has also done similar. Other companies with canceled holiday party BUT NO DONATION TO THE NEEDY Hearst Viacom Marc Jacobs Morgan Stanley The Pentagon

AIG Bonus renamed Retention pay

Sun, 30 Nov 2008 15:57:44 GMT

Just in case you missed it on Nov. 14, Carol Leonnig of washingtonpost.com reported that a two-sentence paragraph buried inside a quarterly financial report filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission revealed AIG's plans to open its deferred compensation bank for bonus payments for more than 6,000 employees to the tune of... $503 million!

There came push back from watchdog New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo who demanded AIG disclose the company compensation plans. No further news on that request. A forum on politicalgroove.com expressed no-holds-barred thoughts about the AIG bonus.

Then on Nov. 26, Hugh Son of bloomburg.com reported that AIG will still pay 130 managers "cash awards" to stay with the firm, including $3 million to retirement services chief Jay Wintrob.

Personally, I don't care how AIG spins and renames their BONUS, DEFERRED COMPENSATION, RETENTION PAY after a quarterly loss of $25 BILLION and then a restructured US government BAILOUT of $152.5 BILLION it is plainly WRONG every way you look at it. I suggest that to save AIG the company must slash spending to the absolute minimum necessary to conduct business. Pay to keep the doors open, lights on and employees employed. Involve the employees in rebuilding AIG. If some employees leave, good riddance. Hire new people who want to make AIG into a new and better company. This is a history making opportunity to DO THE RIGHT THING.

Resources for this post:

money.cnn.com

blownmortgage.com

boston.com

UPDATE:

Unknown to me when I wrote my post on Nov. 30, Jonathan Tasini on Nov 28, posted a similar post titled AIG Pulls Fast One -- Cash Awards Going To Managers on huffingtonpost.com. Another voice pointing out the hypocrisy of AIG and also the collusion of the big news media in not reporting the story.

President Elect Obama - 2.5 million new jobs by 2011

Sat, 22 Nov 2008 15:55:34 GMT

His best statement "What is not negotiable is the need for immediate action". I couldn't agree more.

Don't Be Fooled

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 14:30:56 GMT

I just received a very official looking domain name extension email for a TLD (.us) that I have nothing to do with. When it's about domain names please read all your email and paper mail carefully. Call a friend or your web hosting provider if you have any questions. Here's an easy tip: I pay $7.95 for a one year domain name rental the email I received wanted $75.95 for one year! Expect to see many more of these scams during a down economy. Be careful.

The Fed. Out of Answers On Failed U.S. Economy

Sun, 06 Jul 2008 16:53:21 GMT

The U.S. lost 62,000 jobs in June. That's SIX consecutive months of job losses. Just because the government refuses to call it a recession does not mean it is not a recession. I'll say it, WE ARE IN ECONOMIC RECESSION. Now get busy and deal with it!

Fri, 30 May 2008 13:48:56 GMT

A new all-in-one server.

Almost exactly seven years ago, I reviewed four different "All-in-One" Internet appliances that included file, e-mail, and Web servers and some other workgroup type utilities. A purple cube, eight inches on each side, called the Qube 3 from Cobalt (purchased by Sun) won the comparison. The review is here, but alas, none of the products are. The All-in-One market is tough, and many small businesses go with the flow and buy Microsoft's Small Business Server, which includes most of the All-in-One features.

Jumping into the fray is a new product from a fairly young company near Vancouver called Sutus. The system includes basic file server, e-mail server, Web server, and routing and firewall functions. Being modern, Wi-Fi adds to the network options along with Power over Ethernet (PoE) connections. Being very modern, Sutus also includes a small company phone system, running VoIP along with a gateway supporting three lines to the traditional telephone system. Any Polycom IP telephone, from the high-priced ones down to the affordable ones, will automatically work with the system.

Security issues make me wary of small businesses supporting their own e-mail and Web servers, especially when Microsoft servers are used since they attract so many attacks. Sutus avoids these issues by using a hardened version of Gentoo Linux with all non-essential services stripped out.

Sutus uses a managed service model, with all server functions managed by the Sutus reseller or other managed service provider, which also aids security. The level of support will be critical because Sutus aims its products at the 25 employees and under business market, and darn few of those companies have any full time technical support on the payroll. Of course, if the box crashes, phone service, e-mail, Web, and Internet access all disappear.

Officially, I tested the Sutus Business Central 200 which came largely preconfigured, the way almost all units will arrive at their new homes. While this level of hand-holding isn't always the norm in file servers, it is in telephone systems, and that's the primary foundation for the Sutus box. Functionally, you can't tell if it's a phone system with file services built on, or a file server with phone support added, but the Sutus folks have telephone backgrounds. More than that, the feature list leans toward more phone goodies than network and server goodies, although the goodies list is fairly even.

Pricing makes sense for this market: $3,995 for nine and fewer users, and $5,445 for 10 or more. There are no user license fees like with Microsoft. Phones are not included in the base price.

My test system arrived with 250GB of disk space configured as RAID 1 (two redundant disks to protect against disk failure), eight 10/100 PoE ports, one 10/100/1000 GigE port, and 802.11b/g wireless, the most common Wi-Fi option today. The router and firewall came configured intelligently, meaning insecure network access is blocked while allowing normal connections. Client connections worked flawlessly from Windows XP, Windows 2000, Apple OS X, and Ubuntu 8.04 Linux.

Biggest surprise? The router function automatically configured my AT&T DSL connection. No router I've tested has done that; usually I have to provide name, password, and other details. Clients connected immediately through the BC 200 to the Internet.

The browser-based administration screens are all done in Flash and take longer to load and change than any other comparable admin utilities on similar systems. Sutus executive vice president Shawn Chute admitted the laggard screens and said internal discussions were long and detailed, but the company decided to use Flash because of workflow and usability. The company will soon move to the newer Flex architecture to speed things up.

Private workspace folders, created for departments and users, aren't the most refined structure, but at least they give companies a workable folder system to start with. Public workspaces support different departments, and include features such as group addressed e-mails and phone services.

The world can find your server by routing through Sutus using an address like YourCompany.SutusCentral.com, or you can work with your reseller to point your own domain name to the Web and e-mail servers. The Web server works well enough for basic Web sites, but e-commerce players will need more.

One sales outlet for Sutus will be large telephone companies and ISPs that want to serve more small businesses but can't afford to send techs out for initial installation and support. Sutus handles those issues by shipping preconfigured models and by making the administration wizards simple enough for any power user. Remote management capabilities should carry remote support the rest of the way, meaning only hardware failures require personal visits by technicians.

While computer support calls have a reputation for high fees, phone vendors tend to be worse. Moving, adding or changing extension phones and numbers within companies can cost well over a hundred bucks per phone. The intelligent VoIP system included with the Sutus BC200 makes all of that disappear. Want to move your extension? Unplug it from the Ethernet connection, then plug it in at your new location. Done.

The Sutus Business Central 200 looks to include just about everything a small company needs, supplying both computer and telephone services. And if you look at it just the right way, you get a free file server system with your new telephones, or free telephones with your server system. Either way, you get more services than with just about any other product around today.

[InfoWorld RSS Feed]

The new rules for buying a Mac

Sat, 17 May 2008 14:32:25 GMT

To MacWorld: Thanks! You saved me some research time.

Now playing everywhere in the U.S.

Thu, 27 Mar 2008 20:18:54 GMT

How to gently end procrastination

Sat, 15 Mar 2008 17:24:27 GMT

For schedule reminders and such this may be of benefit. But I'm not sure this will work for someone like myself who has spent years putting off what one doesn't want to do. Procrastination is a flag that something is not right in one's life and self examination is needed. If one procrastinates on the examination that is an infinite loop and outside help will be needed to break through.

What's Goin' On

Fri, 07 Mar 2008 16:34:12 GMT

It's a two fer Friday, with a Los Lobos double video. Plus some info about what's goin' on with me. And now, Los Lobos: Tonight I will be performing with The Austin Torpedoes at The Lyceum Bar and Grill, 30 Church St. Salem, MA. No cover charge. Come on down. Last week I started a new part-time gig with Ditto Editions where I'll be doing large format digital photography, color management, and fine art printing. Plenty of opportunities here to grow, have some fun and I have short 15 minute commute. Nice! Aw, let's close out with one of my favorite Los Lobo tunes. Wicked Rain. Enjoy!

Top 10 Startups Worth Watching in 2008

Fri, 28 Dec 2007 00:25:17 GMT

According to Wired. Too which I do pay attention because we usually agree, and yes, I am that smart. ;-) And humble also.

Sat, 04 Aug 2007 13:59:23 GMT

How to Create a Great Autoresponder Letter Series. An autoresponder letter series, if written properly, can make you some serious money on the Internet. Studies have proven that most consumers buy only after repeated exposure to a product. This repeated exposure helps you to gain their trust enough to buy from you. By Debbie Drucker. [WebReference News]

Apple iPhone Introduced

Tue, 09 Jan 2007 18:16:01 GMT

A few moments ago at the Macworld 2007 keynote Steve Jobs presented the new mobile Apple iPhone to the world. It uses a revolutionary multi-touch screen, run Mac os X, plays wide screen video, syncs with iTunes, internet browser, iPod connector, headset jack, 2 megapixel camera, sensors for light,-proximity,-movement, can determine orientation, wifi, bluetooth 2.0, quad band worldphone+EDGE, visual voicemail, conference calling, SMS, Photos, Safari, Calendar, Address Book, IMAP & POP3, widgets, Google maps, Rich html email, Cingular service in US. Price: 4GB $499.00, 8GB $599.00 Available June 2007 I'll believe it when it ships. And maybe even buy one at version #3. Yawn

My New Years Message

Tue, 02 Jan 2007 13:44:38 GMT

Tomorrow Never Knows: Lyrics, AMG, Wikipedia Whithin You Without You: Lyrics, AMG, Wikipedia

Buh-bye EPSON

Tue, 28 Nov 2006 19:06:19 GMT

Printer ink makers, vendors settle with Epson.

(InfoWorld) - Seiko Epson has won assurances from a number of manufacturers and importers of ink cartridges that the companies will end their business with Epson-compatible cartridges, it said Tuesday.

In February this year Epson filed a complaint with the U.S. International Trade Commission against 24 companies that manufacture, import, or distribute after-market ink cartridges for sale in the U.S. The complaint sought to ban the companies from importing or selling the cartridges in the U.S. At the same time Epson filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court in Portland against the same companies seeking damages for the alleged intellectual property infringement.

Of the 24 companies, five have agreed to settle with Epson at both the ITC and district court. A further three companies have agreed with the ITC to stop importing cartridges, but will have their cases heard at the district court. Another eight companies have had default judgements filed against them at the ITC because they failed to respond to the complaint with the time allowed, said Epson. Trials against the remaining companies at the ITC will begin in January.

The settlements and judgments are the latest in a line of legal victories by Epson against third-party ink-cartridge makers, distributors, and vendors.

In June this year a court in Taiwan barred a local manufacturer of continuous ink supply systems from producing models for Seiko Epson printers after receiving a petition from the Japanese company. A month Epson earlier succeeded in getting four German online retailers of printer ink cartridges to stop selling a number of third-party ink cartridges designed for use in Epson printers.

Printer makers like Epson typically rely on a business model that sees them selling printers at little or no profit, then making money down the line on ink cartridges and other consumable items. Epson sells its own replacement cartridges and licenses a number of companies to make and sell Epson-compatible products. The third-party vendors targeted by Epson have no relationship with the printer-maker and so it doesn't directly gain from any of their business.

By Martyn_Williams@idg.com (Martyn Williams). [InfoWorld: Top News] I've owned two EPSON ink jet printers and will not own another. I just acquired an HP Photosmart and I am so far quite pleased with the speed and quality of the prints. HP ink and paper are better on my wallet too.

Wed, 13 Sep 2006 22:43:42 GMT

News: WiebeTech intros new SilverSATA dual bay drives. WiebeTech is offering two new dual-bay external drive enclosures that accept Serial ATA (SATA) drive mechanisms -- one has FireWire 800 ports on it.

[Macworld]

Wed, 13 Sep 2006 22:42:47 GMT

News: MegaDisk 1.5TB RAID drive features FireWire 800. The new MegaDisk 1.5TB is a 1.5 terabyte RAID Level 0 desktop drive with FireWire 800, FireWire 400 and USB 2.0 interfaces.

[Macworld]

A Sales View of The Inside

Tue, 27 Jun 2006 03:39:54 GMT

Salesforce.com offers companies a way to manage their partners as efficiently as they manage their sales force. [internetnews.com]

What are they thinking?

Tue, 21 Feb 2006 04:50:10 GMT

Making a Living in Second Life. Players are quitting their day jobs to make real money in the world of Second Life. Is it a good investment, or a bubble economy waiting for a virtual pin? By Kathleen Craig. [Wired News: Top Stories]

Adobe Lightroom

Wed, 11 Jan 2006 14:57:09 GMT

Adobe has announced a new application aimed squarely at the digital photographer. Lightroom is a workflow and editting application which takes all of the useful photography related stuff from Photoshop and combines this with a sophisticated importation, browsing and organizational front-end. Lightroom is clearly aimed at taking on Apple Aperture as well as a few other high end workflow tools. At the moment Lightroom is available as a Mac OS X only Beta. Looking at Lightroom

"HELIOS Software Ships New Unbreakable Server Solutions"

Sat, 19 Nov 2005 14:09:46 GMT

The HELIOS UB Next Generation Server Family Includes New Performance Optimization and Over 80 New Features Including Authentication Server, Multi-Platform Server Administration, AFP 3.1, Windows File Streams, PDF-native OPI and PDF Preflight, In-RIP Separations, Cross Platform Unicode, and JPEG-2000 Support. I'm testing some of this software now.