Competitions, Strategy, Portability & more…

This is just a small update. As you may know I am a graphic designer / communication designer as well as (now) a music producer. While the design side of things is purely commercial I noticed the data portability group got into a little hot water with their logo being too similar to that of Red Hat’s logo (apparently). When I saw they were holding a competition for a new logo i quickly whipped up an entry and I’ve just been informed it’s in the top 15!

You can see the top 15 here:
http://dataportability.techcrunch.com/
(Mine is the first logo). It appears my logo is one of the more favoured logos which is excellent. If you are in a voting mood feel free to vote for my entry

Now on the other side of the coin – Music Production – I take it very seriously but at this stage I’m yet to have any official releases. I prefer to just remix what I like and pick up new techniques along the way. I made an entry into the Foals remix competition and now my remix is live. You can listen (stream & download) here:

http://www.last.fm/music/Foals/_/Electric+Bloom+(Blaze+Tripp+Remix)

The winner is based on the number of plays (scrobbles) to the last.fm system. If you arent registered to last.fm you really should. I personally think it is one of the best social networks around as it brings you closer to the people who like the same music you do. It works better than anything else I have seen anyway.

I dont normally enter competition so I find it funny that I’m in this spot now to try and promote these community based competitions. In any case it will be interesting to see the outcomes.

If you feel like sharing the love your votes will be appreciated very much

Something to think about

“Two years from now, spam will be solved”

Bill Gates – January 24, 2004

I was just reading up on Wired’s 2006 Tech Foot-in-mouth awards. It just really proves tech companies are full of shit (among other things).

UTube, YouTube & Missed Opportunities

It has come to my attention the company who owns utube.com is sueing YouTube!

From here via drmike:

YouTube is being sued by an industrial equipment maker whose domain name is Utube.com. Universal Tube and Rollform Equipment said it has been deluged by confused video searchers causing numerous crashes of its site and costing it business. The company’s site once drew a steady 1,500 unique users monthly, Utube said, but that figure has soared to some 2 million per month in recent weeks.

This almost makes me extremely angry. I honestly dont know what UTube are thinking here. Something tells me they heard Google bought YouTube out for billions of dollars and somehow they saw dollar signs in their own eyes. It’s not hard to see how this could happen, they just don’t know how truly stupid they are – for a number of reasons.

1. Sueing Google for this is… well… Stupid.

Do I really need to explain how big Google is. But it’s not just theie size that’s a worry. Try the fact that they are complete and utter experts in the web AND technology AND law. If you are suing for something like this, I’d almost compare this with trying to sue Russia. No matter how good UTube’s their argument is, Google will get out of this quite easily.

2. Monetising Your Website means money… lots of it.

I don’t think UTube realise how much cash they would make if they did the following 3 simple steps:

• Moved their corporate website to utubellc.com or something
  (Keep in mind they can still keep their emails on utube.com and also even place a banner to redirect existing clients to their new website)
• Place their website on a domain sponsor page
  or actually develop a small video/media website with ads.
  or even place a one page website with a carefully chose ppc (pay per click) or affiliate program

They could make so much damn money.

For instance…. they are claiming to have 2,000,000 visitors a month. Now lets say they found & utilised a targeted video advertising campaign that gave them 10 cents a click. Keep in mind this is a very very conservative number considering I have basic websites on Google Adsense that can earn up to $1 dollar a click.

Ok now lets just say that conservatively 25% of users clicked through. This all depends on how well the ad is targeted & integrated into the website. I personally believe you could achieve 75% with the right advertising but for now lets say 25%.

Based on the above very conservative calculations, utube.com could make $50,000 in the first month. Not to mention traffic could (and WILL) grow, you could (and WILL be able to) find a better affiliate program in time. This is so scalable as well, for instance 50cents/click at 50% click through at the current rate would mean 10 times this amount: $500,000. This is half a million dollars a month if they play their cards right.

Now I don’t know how large this company is, but honestly how important is a website on a particular domain for a TUBING company. I mean c’mon! An extra 6 million dollars/year revenue is nothing to sneeze at. Especially for just being in the right place at the right time. Not to mention I highly doubt they could settle this at court for any amount near the potential yearly income.

Also don’t forget this will solve their problem with bandwidth issues yet they can still have a reputable website & their email addresses need not change.

Conclusion

I think the best way to look at this would be to compare it to having a Fish & Chip shop on a quiet area of town. Then all of a sudden that part of town gets extremely busy & everyone in the town all of a sudden needs Gummi Bears, and you get lots of people coming into the Fish & Chip store asking for Gummi Bears because you now have the best location in town. You have the option to move out of the busy suburb & keep your current store (being able to convert it into a Gummi bear store or at least refer people to a good gummi bear store for kickbacks). What would you do? What… would you do?

Hosting Madness

Purchasing website/file hosting is sometimes like gambling. You win some, you lose some. (And in fact, some lose the lot) .

A few months ago I took a gamble and signed up to DreamHost, one of the most popular and widely used web hosting companies on the internet. I didn’t really know why they were so widely used and popular – they had a bad webpage and it all looked to good to be true.

I ended up signing up with a promo code and paying something incredibly low like $50 for a whole year of hosting with a free domain name thrown in. That price included 20gig of space and 1000gb of bandwidth! Insane. Not to mention every single week it goes up in gigabytes of space & bandwidth! Even crazier!

Now you wont believe what they did last week. Try: “Hey lets double everyones bandwidth” and “Hey lets give every 10 times more space.” No Kidding. I now have 200gig of space and 2000gig of bandwidth each month. Storage grows by 1gb a week and Bandwidth grows by 16gb a week. What’s going on here! These guys must be mad but it has happened. Some customers are even using this service as an offline backup hosting solution and just tranferring everything to their DreamHost account.

What now? Well I reccomend DreamHost if you truly want to host anything and everything you want on the web without having to worry about limits (this service is practically no limits with the amount they give you) & if you want a reliable large web/file host. They are even releasing new products such as files forever which enables you to store you files forever with a price that is practically for free! It’s just too good to be true – sign up before they raise their prices.

For those who are interested I have a promo code you can use to get yourself $50 off instantly. It just makes it even cheaper. Just enter the code: BLAZE50 when prompted on the signup screen and they will honour the discount for you.

Also if you can refer people in the future, you end up with cash in your back pocket or completely free hosting. So it helps to spread the word.

When SEO Fails & The Importance of Impressing Real People

Flash isn’t dead. In fact, Flash could well be growing in more of a niche than we realised. A lot of people may already know this but STOP PRESS: 1. SEO is great, but it’s strategies & implementation tend to spoil a website (gasp, ooh ahhh!). 2. Flash is great, for multimedia style presentations with fantastic creative displays of information & visual elements – when you don’t need to index a million pages & be number one for everything and top 10 google and ppc and adsense and paid links and ctrs and arrrrrrrgh! . . . . . Brain Explode!

My point here is simple: talk to more REAL people (not search engines). The best way to do this is to draw them in with creativity & good flash.

Don’t get me wrong, SEO is important.

…But there are so many people on the bandwagon. It’s gone to the extent of a large number of people using SEO practices as the basis for building websites.

Why not engage & use real life principles.

Be Creative

Be Spontaneous

& most of all

Be Intersting

Also I have found a good site with some good visual flash FX (effects) for those interested after the jump.

How’s that for Scalability

WordPress has really proven itself to be one of the most functional, best looking, easy to use and now scalable blogging applications out there. Here on wordpress.com they have superceeded 200,000 blogs.

Some interesting stats they have posted:

In the past 10 days, WordPress.com bloggers have….

• Created 14,100 blogs
• Added 30,300 static pages
• Tagged 188,259 tags on posts
• Gotten 267,490 comments
• Written 291,000 posts
• Have 779,325 feed subscribers
• Had 6,832,322 pageviews!

That's simply amazing to think that wordpress.com would recieve over 20million hits a month and still manages to handle 200,000 blogs.

Congratulations to Matt & the team for keeping the whole process here easy & painless.

I would reccomend anyone to get a blog here over blogger or any other service.

GMail Web Clips are SO useful!

Take a look at this picture:

Google has made its millions upon millions upon millions of dollars providing relevant content. Why is it then when you click on "Spam" in GMail, that you get an array of recipies to make spam sandwiches, spam bakes and spam tortilla sandwiches (among other things).

Congrats Google, that is not only incredibly relevant but also amazingly useful!

Finally trying out Last.fm Radio

Note: Disregard the following links and just try and use the links on my profile. WordPress can't seem to sort out the linking issue to last.fm.
Well I seem to have been upgraded to a last.fm subscriber (my profile) for now which is great. I get access to a few more feature which are good. Features that have always been free though are listening to radio. I fancy myself as a bit of a DJ or "good music chooser" might be the better choice for now, so why don't you sign up and then click some of the following links to fire up a 128kbits mp3 stream from last.fm of some good tracks.

• Blaze's Personal Radio plays a lot of the music I do, so check that one for some good tracks. It's quite a good match they have there of the stuff I get into, well done lastfm.
• Here's a radio station I made up combining a bunch of my favourite artists at the moment. Quite a disco house style, some french touch and a bit of electro in there too. This seems to play a lot of semi older tracks (80s and 90s style) but it's fantastic.
• I have a bunch of neighbours that like similar music to them, so why not listen to some of Blaze's Neighbours? They surely have some interesting stuff.

I normally wouldn't make a post about something like this but last.fm suprised me with the kind of tracks they were playing. Admittedly I dont listen to very much commercial music but they seem to be getting a lot of it down well.

If you're not on lastfm yet, sign up now and start saving your music history, you never know what you will find in the future. It is truly an exciting place to be.

NetVibes Rocks

I have just switched from Google Home to Netvibes and let me tell you, it's really really good. I like having a custom homepage with all of my favourite feeds and Google Home worked for me quite ok up until now. I had actually tried Netvibes when I made the choice to Google back in the day and it wasnt quite polished enough for my liking. The interface was clunky and hardly worked. Now they really have got it together and the service works great.

I currently have my homepage split up into:

• General (24)
• Blogs / Tech (49)
• Blogs / Business (19)
• Blogs / Music (73)
• Blog / Design (21)

It's working a treat . These guys really know how to put together an easy to use homepage and you have just won some business from a previous google user. Well done.

Free VOIP Phone Calls?

I haven't made a post in a while because I am extremely busy with new business but I thought this warranted a quick post.

In the light of Skype now offering free calls to USA and Canada it had made everyone think about phone calls a little bit differently. Phone calls just got a whole lot cheaper and Skype have set a benchmark. Skype is of course the most popular VOIP provider and actually one of the cheapest. It's not until you dig deeper and look at the companies without such a large front that you actually start to see real VOIP value.

I dont know how they do it but VOIPStunt seem to be pulling a stunt by offering 300 minutes of free calls to a number of destinations around the world.

They offer Free calls to any regular landline in:

Andorra Argentina Australia Austria Belgium Canada Chile China Colombia Denmark Finland France Georgia Germany Gibraltar

Hong Kong Hungary Iceland Ireland Italy Japan Latvia Liechtenstein Luxembourg Malaysia Monaco Mongolia Netherlands New Zealand Norway

Panama Peru Portugal Singapore Slovenia South Korea Spain Sweden Taiwan Thailand United Kingdom United States Venezuela

Looking at the software its just like skype but a little less bloated. I typed in my number and it was calling 2 seconds later. I was amazed.

There truly is such a thing as a free lunch.

Of course there is going to be some fine print but it's nothing too unexpected:

* Max 300 minutes per week of free calls, measured over the last 7 days. Unused free minutes cannot be taken to the following week(s). If limit is exceeded, a minimal rate of 1ct/min will be charged (as shown in the VoipStunt software).

So i's obvious here that they want people to use the service so much that they exceed 300mins and buy some credit. 1c/min is actually cheaper than Skypes global rate anyway so I think we have a real contender here.

Moral of the Story: Just when the big guys release something amazing and great, don't forget the little guys could already have something that kills it