Acro.net – Technology Rants & Raves by Acroplex®

I’ll begin by saying that I’m not an AOL fan.

I never liked their litter-producing mass mailed floppies, CDs and DVDs. I didn’t like their AOL chatrooms and boards that reeked of BBS era community behavior.

TechCrunch was acquired by AOL for allegedly $25 million and I like that, so let me explain why.

There comes a time when one’s project or business venture becomes too large to handle. Especially with technology magazines or communities that rely on a constant flow of content and that rely either on advertising revenue or contributions, problems of technical or financial nature can put a brake or terminate the creative activity.

In other words, how is a free medium going to be sustained indefinitely?

A lot of reaction to the acquisition was negative. People that have no clue about what it takes to run a business started bitching about TechCrunch “selling out”. It’s easy to criticize when one hasn’t lived a day in the shoes of a person who has had the “luxury” of fighting off an army of issues, all while trying to be creative.

Back in January, I too faced server issues with the DomainGang project; productivity dropped while I tried to resolve them as best as I could. For a newcomer to the publishing game, problems can be intimidating. Still, thanks to moral support and a few sponsors I was able to resolve the technical issues and resume being creative and productive.

I’m happy for the sale of TechCrunch to AOL. They deserve the incredible financial and technological infusion. They also seem committed to their reader base with regards to how they will be approaching AOL in the future, in articles and scoops.

Everyone deserves to taste success and happiness in life; it’s part of our human nature to expect and enjoy receiving rewards for our effort.

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It’s not news: a few years ago, RoadRunner and its various allied ISPs around the US decided to parse your typos and instead of the usual 404 page display a RoadRunner portal.

The portal displays – surprise, surprise – ads related to whatever URL you had typed in, plus a search box and a tiny link to a “Preferences” page to turn things on or off.

You can turn the error-trapping on or off, have a filtration system for adult content, etc.

The problem is that no matter how often I encounter that portal page and turn the features off, the portal keeps appearing every couple of days, sometimes once a day.

The solution wasn’t to spend another 30 minutes on the phone with RoadRunner; instead, I started using the OpenDNS IPs for my DNS settings.

For a home-office setup, it’s quite simple.

If you have a router hardware connected to your modem, you need to edit it at that level. If you don’t, you should be editing the networking settings; the Primary and Secondary DNS IPs are as follows:

Primary: 208.67.222.222 and Secondary: 208.67.220.220

Then reboot your router or your PC and you’re good to go.

Connections should generally be faster due to extensive geocaching done by the OpenDNS infrastructure. And most importantly, you won’t be seeing that crappy ISP portal page ever again.

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During the process of engaging into an “offer, counter-offer” exchange about domains, certain behavior is indicative of the direction that the deal is heading to.

While some offers might start low, they soon acquire a certain pacing: the amount or rate of increase.

Usually, the buyer starts low and seller counters at the highest level, willing to negotiate down.

When the buyer engages in a game of trickle increases, increasing his offer by amounts disproportionately small to the initial figure, that’s usually an indication of aggressive bidding.

Very rarely it’s an indication that the buyer has reached their offer ceiling. Buyers that are determined to buy are also able to negotiate well enough in order to bridge the difference of the seller’s counter-offer.

In other words, a buyer that after two or three negotiation exchanges does not bring his offer close enough to the buyer’s counter-offers should be considered a negotiation “gamer”.

The seller’s approach should be flexible enough to engage in a sale, if needed of course. Because on a given day, domain sellers might receive multiple offers for the same domain that differ vastly in the amount offered.

Regardless, it’s never wrong to simply say “no” and cancel the exchange, once it’s clear that the potential buyer is gaming his negotiation instead of moving towards a mutually acceptable price. What might follow would either be another round of negotiations initiated by the potential buyer, hopefully with an offer much closer to the asking price, or at least, peace of mind that the domain was not undersold.

Those moments when the end result was “close, but no cigar” for the seller, are valuable in order to expand and improve on one’s negotiation skills for selling domains, and beyond.

For updates, follow me on Twitter.

Adobe – the makers of a wide range of industry-standard tools for web, graphic and video development announced today its 3rd Quarter results for 2010.

According to the company’s press release, Adobe achieved record revenue of $990.3 million, compared to $697.5 million reported for the third quarter of fiscal 2009 and $943.0 million reported in the second quarter of fiscal 2010.  This represents a 42% year-over-year revenue growth.  Adobe’s third quarter revenue target range was $950 million to $1 billion.

“Strong performance in each of our major businesses contributed to record revenue and strong earnings in Q3,” said Shantanu Narayen, president and CEO of Adobe.  “We remain bullish about Adobe’s long-term role in enabling the transformation of content and applications across industries.”

Adobe, the powerhorse of the image and video processing software industry is the absolute king of the market. Any developer worth their salt is using one or more Adobe applications for the PC or the mac to produce, create and process digital imagery and motion video.

While the world of art can still utilize analog media such as paint, celluloid or the humble drawing board, the world of creative has turned digital and there is no turning back from this change to the all-Digital Era that we live in.

The massive earnings of Adobe also signify great sales for Creative Suite 5 (CS5) that brought a plethora of updates to a series of established tools. New versions of Photoshop, Illustrator and Dreamweaver, InDesign and Flash, and rewritten Adobe Premiere and After Effects entered the 64bit application market; there is no-one else that gets even close to the Adobe products.

For updates, follow me on Twitter.

A well-known domain blogger apparently faced a family situation of serious proportions yesterday and he made an announcement of “Pausing” his posts.

Despite having encountered some recent and unnecessary friction with the guy, I emailed him with my sympathy and condolences. Also, out of respect for his family situation I removed a recent post that although it was not directly addressed to him, it somehow involved him further into the argument.

Now, it’s unfortunate that despite that apparent family situation, the same blogger continues his attempts to badmouth, belittle, discredit and misrepresent the role and function of my two blogs, through his not-naming names but insinuating posts that “may or may not be” about me etc.

It’s a silly game, if you ask me and thus I follow his own footsteps with this post. I have already spoken on the phone with the guy and I am quite disappointed by the current line of exchanges and attitude towards me and my companies.

Acro.net is my personal and professional blog where I openly discuss my views, opinions, personal experiences and engage in conversations with others, including the use of objective or constructive criticism of technological and social events and happenings. I have a name and a registered corporate entity and even though I am known as “Acro” due to my domain forum activity, I don’t believe I am that popular as e.g. big Rick to be known as “Theo”. So most domainers call me “Acro”.

My second blog, is not a secret that it’s operated by me, again in the form of a corporate entity.

DomainGang started a year ago as an outlet of personal thoughts, jokes, parodies and sometimes outrageous stories that stretch domaining reality beyond its usual shape. While some fail to either understand or appreciate its function and role, many others praise it and appreciate its existence. It has taken on the role of being the Onion of domaining for some, although I prefer MAD Magazine as a more precise definition.

When established domainers such as David Castello openly praise the DomainGang role and its value in the domain industry, one must realize that something is done right. When corporate sponsors include DomainTools, the .CO Registry, Latona’s Auctions, DNForum, DNCruise etc. then these companies appreciate the role of DomainGang also.

I don’t mind criticism but apparently the guy who “paused” was actually “rewinding”.

I will only say that freedom of speech is an established right and the expression of opinions through dialogue or analysis is also protected; particularly when I am a qualified developer both by degree, profession and experience – an industry expert, if you must, in what constitutes development and domaining.

Parody is also protected speech, especially when it utilizes humor to both exaggerate circumstances in order to describe their flaws or overall features. It’s the same way that a caricature artist paints not an accurate portrait but one that is out of proportions to emphasize or bring to light its intricate functions and appeal.

Therefore, no-one is writing under a “guise” or hides their identity. If I wanted to play the game of being anonymous I would never openly cross-post between my two blogs and I wouldn’t have taken the podium at TRAFFIC Las Vegas 2010 to announce and describe what is DomainGang and what it stands for!

Back then, I also gave an interview to Morgan Linton, if you are interested to watch here’s the link.

Most importantly, I never have and never will resort to the lowly behavior of impersonating someone else in order to say what I have to say via comments on someone else’s forum or blog. Just like Rick Schwartz or Mike Mann, I sign my comments with my signature – but I will pause this post right now.