BobbyH

I run Google Ads professionally and this has also happened to me. I was never unable to fix it directly. One time, I had a Wordpress site that Google Ads claimed was a compromised site. I migrated it to a landing page provider (Unbounce), and Google Ads still insisted the site was compromised even though Google's tools said the said was clean.

What I did to fix this was to migrate my landing pages to a new domain. (I believe migrating my landing pages to a different subdomain on the same domain would also work, but I haven't tested this.)

You don't need to run traffic to your full website. All you need is a marketing website to run traffic to. That marketing website doesn't even need database integration, so you can put that marketing website on a totally different server.

So to fix this issue, I wouldn't try to fix it. I'd just create a marketing website somewhere else and direct traffic to that.

This is actually the plot behind Larry Niven's Ringworld! A gigantic civilization has created a Ringworld (a rotating wheel artificial world), until a superconducting plague (https://news.larryniven.net/concordance/main.asp?alpha=S#sup...) destroys the material that enables room-temperature superconductivity, thus reducing the entire Ringworld to the dark ages...

I work in the bankruptcy niche, and I wanted to tweak your statements...

Chapter 13 bankruptcy is deleted from your credit report seven years from the discharge date, which comes 3 to 5 years after you file (because there's a 3 to 5 year payment plan). So if you measure from the filing date, Chapter 13 takes 7 + 3-to-5 years to come off your credit report, which is 10 to 12 years from the filing date.

Similarly, Chapter 7 bankruptcy is deleted 10 years from the discharge date. In a typical Chapter 7 bankruptcy, the debtor receives a discharge 4 months after filing. So your statement is actually quite close, but to be pedantic, it's 10.33 years from the filing date.

In my experience, most Chapter 7 filers can fully recover after about 2 years, provided they are able to make their payments on-time after the bankruptcy.

Taking a step back, it seems like you want to present a perfect solution to your boss that he can just adopt. I mean this in a friendly way, but that's not your job. Your job is to tell your boss what you want. Your boss's job is to figure out how to meet your needs.

Along those lines, I would just tell him politely that you'd like a plan to get your backpay over time, you'd like a raise although you understand that funding may preclude that, and you'd like your non-compete to be altered so at least it doesn't apply to your consulting work, since the scope of the consulting work is so broad that you wouldn't be able to ever get another job. You can mention that given the natural instability of a startup, this fact is stressing you out and making you lose sleep.

I would also ask to "paper" the backpay, so you have more than a verbal commitment on that.

If you talk nicely and respectfully about these issues, it is very likely that he will agree to the one term that doesn't cost him any money. (He will likely stall on all the other terms.)

It sounds like you and the CEO both want something, which is often the basis for a reasonable compromise. You want to be let out of the strict non-compete clause, and you want your back-pay and ideally a raise. Meanwhile, the CEO doesn't want his company to fall apart in the wake of your departure. You could approach your CEO, and ask him to deliver a plan to pay down your backpay. During that discussion, you can tell him that since you're underpaid and haven't gotten a raise for years, you'd like to amend your employment contract so that the non-compete and invention clauses only apply to your corporate work (and not your consulting work). You can explain that this would let you do projects on the weekend that would help you make some more money to compensate for the undermarket salary.

Not tying the reason to your desire to be able to get another job easily also helps the CEO from freaking out as much. Also, limiting the non-compete edits to the consulting work helps him feel that his corporate work isn't threatened, while getting you what you want.

Amending your non-compete would also give you flexibility if you choose to leave, so that would be my primary goal here. To increase your leverage, you can also ask for a raise. Assuming he says that giving you more money is impossible, that increases pressure on him to concede on the only term that is non-monetary.

I take your point. It's just that if those four loans default, you will be down 16%. If that happens, you will lose your principal and also not earn interest on those defaulted loans. So even though you charged an 8.4% APR, you will only earn interest on 84% of your loan balance. So unless a miracle happens, it doesn't seem likely that you will break even.

Here are some details on those four loans:

* Alex made one late partial payment ($1.17) on his $100 loan and is 108 days late on his second payment: https://www.zidisha.org/microfinance/loan/Macbul/3583.html

* Margret hasn't "rescheduled" her loan even though she hasn't made a payment for four months: https://www.zidisha.org/microfinance/loan/margret-muthoni/34...

* Cynthia missed her first four payments, rescheduled her loan, and is now two months behind: https://www.zidisha.org/microfinance/loan/cynthia1988/3090.h...

* Soknya missed three months of payments, rescheduled, and is now 67 days late: https://www.zidisha.org/microfinance/loan/sdndiaye/1908.html

mfheretic, you're counting "active loans" as cash in the bank, but I think you have some active loans that are likely to default and cause losses...

This is the account I looked at: https://www.zidisha.org/microfinance/profile/Jessica.html That account gave a 20% loan to Hellen Festo, made 40 loans, etc., as you mentioned in your blog post.

I took a look at the first ten active loans listed on that profile. Four loans in particular are way behind on payments. If those loans default, you'd be out $160. On $1,000 in principal, that would represent a loss of 16%, instead of breaking even. That's more in line with Zidisha's write-off rate of 18.65%: https://www.zidisha.org/index.php?p=43

It would be awesome if you could "close the loop" between analytics and SERPs!

For instance, say that you return a SERP with 2 results. Using your analytics and some conversion pixels, Swiftype would know that for that search, the first result has an estimated value of $10 and the second result has an estimated value of $20. From using Swiftype on a Wordpress site, I know that you give admins the power to change the order of results on a SERP page manually. Could you also do that automatically?

So for an e-commerce client, you could automatically re-sort the SERP so the $20 link shows up first (and hence gets more clicks). You could even calculate and display the benefit to the customer of doing this, e.g. "You have generated $1,234 in extra revenue this month by using Search Auto-Rejigger".

I think this behavior comes from the webcam, and not Skype. I have actually seen this exact behavior with the Microsoft LifeCam, which often auto-changes the width of the video stream. The larger width will show "people on the sides," and the more narrow width does not.

I believe that the LifeCam looks for movement in the peripheral area. If there is no movement there, the LifeCam will truncate the sides of the image. I have sometimes been able to force the sides to appear by waving my arms off to the side.

When I first noticed this happening, I was surprised that many "people on the side" don't move or talk at all, thus triggering a truncation. But I started looking for this, and most "people on the side" barely move at all.

In my experience, Skype video quality tends to degrade by simply freezing the screen. I have also noticed this behavior when Skype was off entirely, when recording a video of myself. So I'm pretty sure it's the webcam itself auto-controlling the width, and not Skype.

All the famous entrepreneurs mentioned in this story have very light accents. I found YouTube videos with these entrepreneurs speaking, and none of them have "accents so strong that you have to interrupt the conversation to ask what they just said.":

* Vinod Khosla, Sun Microsystems co-founder and now a venture capitalis: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxYVOMj6F2U&t=1m2s

* Adobe’s Shantanu Narayen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TShENN3VVX8&t=0m29s

* Tesla’s Elon Musk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDwzmJpI4io&t=2m33s

* Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vv0NKieCoI&t=5m59s

Good luck! In the spirit of your post, here are four reasons that I think the opportunity you are currently pursuing will fail.

First, you are not making something that people want. The primary customer you have to satisfy here are fashion bloggers (as once you get them, you will get access to end consumers). However, I would speculate that the ability to easily create "outfits" is not the #1 pain for fashion bloggers. In general, customers want to solve their #1 pain. If you solve a problem that is NOT your customers' #1 pain, you will find it very hard to get the attention of those customers.

To address this issue, I would call fashion bloggers and ask them what their problems are. I would speculate that "easily making outfits" is not their #1 problem.

Second, fashion bloggers aren't a very profitable customer to pursue, so a business that targets that market will find it hard to make money. By contrast, if you targeted an industry that makes money, your customers would have more revenue to share with you. On a related note, many fashion bloggers are not making enough to make a full-time living, so they don't think of their fashion blogs as a business. Thus, even if you create a product that makes them money, they may still not adopt your product.

To address this issue, I would find a more profitable customer to pursue that makes at least $50,000 a year. Also, I would make sure that those customers consider what they do to be their main source of income. This would exclude hobbyists.

Third, I would be concerned that it's hard to reach fashion bloggers to market your product to them. Yes, you can pitch them by email or Twitter. However, fashion bloggers are innudated with pitches, and often ignore them.

To address this issue, I would target a market that wants to be reached, so you can easily reach them to pitch your product.

Fourth, fashion bloggers aren't used to paying for software. Thus, you would have a harder time convincing them to pay you for your software. Compare this to, say, a salesperson, who is used to paying for a CRM and all sorts of software.

To address this issue, you would have to find a way to make money without directly charging your user (the fashion blogger). One way to do this is to require your product be linked with your third-party affiliate codes, and then do a revenue-share on those affiliate earnings. However, this would be hard for fashion bloggers to accept, and would require policing on your part.

In conclusion, I would urge you to switch your focus to (1) solving the #1 pain for (2) a lucrative market that (3) you can reach easily and (4) that is used to buying software.

Good luck!

This email was likely unearthed during pre-trial discovery (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_(law)) when Macy's sued Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia (MSLO) for breach of contract when MSLO decided to start selling its formerly-exclusive-to-Macy's products to JCPenney. It was probably found by searching for the keyword "Martha" in the emails of certain top JCPenney executives. That trial has already revealed many important emails about the Martha/JCPenney deal.

I also grew up in Northern Virginia. I now live in NYC.

I hadn't considered the broader effects of this sort of migration, until I recently read "The Big Sort", a brilliant book written in 2009 that describes how like-minded people are "sorting" themselves through migration. One way to quantify this effect is to look at the number of "landslide counties", i.e. the number of counties in the US that preferred a presidential candidate by more than 20%.

You can see a map showing how these landslide counties have sharply increased here (the top map is from 1976, and the bottom map is from 2004): http://www.thebigsort.com/maps.php

What's happening is that voters are moving with their feet to be with more like-minded people. This skews many counties towards a particular direction (either Republican or Democrat). Further, as counties tip one way, the minority viewpoint gets suppressed in just the way you described (e.g. if you're a Democrat, why bother voting for Governor in Texas).

One thing that surprised me in the book is that not every state is homogenous. The author lives in Austin, so he spends a lot of time talking about how all the liberals move to Austin (and conservatives move out). So even in the bastion of Republican Texas, there is a liberal enclave.

Looking at Des Moines, it seems that Des Moines is a similar liberal enclave. For instance, in 2008, Des Moines, Iowa voted for Obama over McCain with a 23% margin: http://www.city-data.com/elec08/DES-MOINES-IOWA.html

So it seems like there are a fair number of liberal enclaves in conservative states. To give another example,"The urban core of Kansas City consistently votes Democratic in Presidential elections": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kansas_City,_Missouri#National_...

So even if it's true that "Silicon X'es can only happen in liberal pro-intellectual areas", there seem to be enough liberal enclaves in conservative states that Silicon X'es could possibly arise.

Yes, enterprise value (EV) is equity market capitalization (stock price times # of shares) plus the market value of debt (this can be lower than the book value of debt). Financial analysts often prefer to calculate something called "Net Enterprise Value", which is EV minus "excess cash" (total cash minus "required cash", where required cash is usually calculated as a certain % of sales). Net Enterprise Value gives you the present value of all future cash flows to the firm (you are ignoring the value of today's excess cash, which doesn't come from future cash flows). This is particularly useful when looking at companies like AAPL with tons of cash.

I think what georgie is saying is that employers don't care about your skill set and knowledge, per se. They only care about what your skill set and knowledge can do for them.

Also, I second georgie's recommendation of How to Win Friends and Influence People. You can see a relevant section of the book here: http://books.google.com/books?id=yxfJDVXClucC&lpg=PP1...

Click through to the next page too...

Yeah, that's it! I just read Little Bets today. Actually, I was talking to somebody about lean startups this afternoon and I found that "make little bets" is a better way of expressing the lean startup approach than "test your assumptions".

The book itself doesn't break new ground, so much as it synthesizes a lot of lean startup principles and gives some good anecdotes, some of which I hadn't read before (e.g. Gehry's architecture approach). It's a good read, I enjoyed it. Until Eric Ries' book comes out, it's actually the book I'd give people to teach them what a lean startup is.

One clue is that a 404 page (e.g. http://color.com/asdf) says the webserver is "powered by Jetty": http://jetty.codehaus.org/jetty/

Jetty "provides an HTTP server, HTTP client, and javax.servlet container". Here is the wikipedia page for Java Servlet: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_Servlet So the answer seems to be Java.

Can't he use lean startup principles to launch with his existing device that offers an improvement over a cane, instead of raising $15 MM to offer a perfect product that lets blind people play tennis? If I were blind, I would surely pay thousands of dollars for the K-Sonar device if it could enhance my sensory input beyond "what I feel with my cane within 2 feet" to "everything around me within 15 feet".

If he got the K-Sonar approved as a medical device, I think he'd be able to get paid from deep-pocketed insurance companies too.

Improving the range (and doing research on inner-ear microphone implants) could be done in later versions (if mainstream blind customers really are interested in playing tennis, which I am skeptical about). If v1 makes people more independent, that's a huge deal already!

I bet he could get pretty far just by reallocating his existing $200k/year budget to commercializing the technology, which has the potential to be embraced by a lot more people than the blind people he is introduced to (only 10% of whom even get good at echolocation-through-clicking).

Have you tried contacting the competitor and asking them nicely to stop? In my experience with this sort of thing, a polite call or email is most effective. If you email, make sure that what you wrote won't be embarrassing if they publish your email.

If they are intransigent, explain that you understand but, just so they know, you will be pursuing a Tit for Tat strategy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tit_for_tat Communication really helps when you're tit-for-tatting, so contacting them will help on that front. If you are all relatively small, there are no antitrust issues at all.

If you are nervous about contacting them, you can pursue a tit for tat strategy anyway. To make it clear what you're doing, use the exact same copy that they do. If you want to be really direct, write a message to them in the ad copy.

In any case, you said they're bigger than you, so you'll actually get more leads from doing this than they get from keywords on your brand.

You likely ran afoul of "voter ring detection": http://twitter.com/#!/paulg/status/22551773068

I think it works something like this. Say you and I are buddies and only upvote each other's articles. The voting ring algorithm thus flags us both as being part of a voting ring. Votes on our articles are then penalized by some amount to reverse this gaming. Detecting voter rings is important as failing to do so has really hurt communities like Digg.

On a related note, if most of the votes on your articles comes from readers on your site that only upvote your articles, those users will probably all be flagged as part of a voting ring.

I would not mess around with CDs or Money Market Accounts to chase yield, because the returns from doing so are very low and it can be a distraction from the real business. This is particularly true now because rates are so low. For example, the average CD Rate for a 6 month CD is 0.38% (http://www.cdrate.com/?term=13).

* A CD requires you to lock your money up in the CD for a certain amount of time, e.g. 6 months

* You can get the money out early only by paying a early withdrawal penalty, which is typically 30-90 days worth of interest for a CD with a term less than a year (http://banking.about.com/od/cds/a/cdpenalty.htm)

* This is not applicable to you, but FDIC insurance typically covers up to $250k per CD, so you may need multiple CDs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_of_deposit#Deposit_...)

Money Market Account rates can be as high as 1.10% (http://www.cdrate.com/money-market/). However, they are not like checking accounts and you'll have to plan out when you withdraw what amount.

* Because of "Regulation Q", MMAs allow only 6 withdrawals a month, which sometimes includes ATM transactions, and only 3 may withdrawals may be checks (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_market_account)

* FDIC insurance is up to $100k per account

A $200k deposit in a CD earning 3.8% would make around $7.6k over a year. The same deposit in an MMA earning 1.1% would net around $2.2k over a full year.

My personal view is that a CD or MMA requires extra effort and management time and reduces flexibility, so I don't use CDs or MMAs for my businesses unless there are very large amounts involved and a lot of stability in the business. I also don't chase rates from different banks, because of the convenience of having a single bank provide all my accounts.

> For some entrepreneurs, the toughest part of a pivot may be setting aside their personal convictions-and egos. "It's very hard as an entrepreneur to move away from your core idea," says Phumbhra, of Chegg. "But if your customers are telling you to, you have to learn to be flexible."

My experience has been that many founders are contrarians with a grand vision, which can make a pivot towards a mainstream/less-grandiose direction particularly hard to decide to embrace. Has anybody else noticed that a founder is often the last person at a company to embrace a pivot?

Krugman's article seemed to be a relatively unbiased summary of an academic area called Optimal Currency Area: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimum_currency_area

A "Currency Area" has benefits and drawbacks. The benefits are mostly microeconomic in nature. For instance, if I can contract to buy something from you in the future without having to hedge currency risk or change money, that's a benefit.

The drawbacks are mostly macroeconomic in nature. For instance, Germany is doing OK now while Greece is suffering. However, they share one currency (the euro). If they had two currencies, Greece could devalue its currency, which would boost its economy.

The drawbacks can be mitigated by things like labor mobility, e.g. Greeks fleeing Greece to go to Germany where the economy is better. This happens in the US all the time. However, Greeks and Germans don't share a language, so this limits labor mobility.

Similarly, price/wage flexibility is important, but again, Europe does poorly on this test because its unions and work rules.

Another way to mitigate currency area drawbacks is for the region to have a "transfer union" that can use fiscal policy to spend more money in struggling regions. However, Germans don't like the idea of giving money to profligate Greeks who waste it (this is their view).

All in all, most economists don't think that Europe is an Optimal Currency Area and that weak countries will be kicked out of the Eurozone.

Robert gave Andrew Warner of Mixergy some more details about his interview of pg in a 12/30/09 interview: http://mixergy.com/robert-greene-power-interview/

You can click through to read more, but the highlight for me was: "So, Paul Graham, what I liked about him was he’s always been a complete non-conformist and has gotten away with it, not because his parents had money or he was privileged, but because he didn’t care and he took risks and he just followed what he wanted to do. And that’s sort of the end of this book. That’s like the ultimate thing."

Their revenue model is: (A) one AdSense ad per page, and (B) rewriting URLs to append their own affiliate link (if an affiliate code does not currently exist).

For the record, Delicious alternative Pinboard also has a revenue model, whereby they charge each new user a certain amount, and then also have a premium offering whereby bookmarked links are archived.

DFP for Small Business is what was formerly known as Google Ad Manager. The first 90MM non-AdSense monthly impressions are free, and then you have to pay. To clarify, say you have 200 MM monthly pageviews, and you serve 3 ad impressions per page. You would have 600 MM ad impressions. Say that Google serves AdSense ads to 2/3rds of these ad impressions, leaving you with 200 MM non-AdSense monthly impressions. You'd be over the 90 MM quota and you'd have to pay a hosting fee of around 2 cents per thousand impressions (impressions, not pageviews).

A newish self-service site to check out is http://www.isocket.com. They charge a fixed fee (and don't take a percent of revenues).

> "I told him that if he did not go my way, I’d stop doing the programming work. He said if I did not go his way, he’d stop the staff from working."

This quote struck me because it's a surefire sign that a project is probably going to fail. Every time I've seen people holding a project hostage by threatening to withhold their skills, those projects have either ended in failure, or even when successful, the people on the projects had very low morale.

In my experience, it's very important to create a culture where people do not use unique skills to hold a company hostage. For instance, a designer should be willing to implement a design that is (to her) sub-optimal from a design perspective, e.g. when A/B tests indicate that this design generates more money.

Here is the text of the link:

Newsgroups: comp.sys.next.announce Followup-To: poster From: ti...@nxoc01.cern.ch (Tim Berners-Lee) Date: 20 Aug 91 01:54:41 GMT Local: Mon, Aug 19 1991 9:54 pm Subject: WorldWideWeb wide-area hypertext app available

The WorldWideWeb application is now available as an alpha release in source and binary form from info.cern.ch.

WorldWideWeb is a hypertext browser/editor which allows one to read information from local files and remote servers. It allows hypertext links to be made and traversed, and also remote indexes to be interrogated for lists of useful documents. Local files may be edited, and links made from areas of text to other files, remote files, remote indexes, remote index searches, internet news groups and articles. All these sources of information are presented in a consistent way to the reader. For example, an index search returns a hypertext document with pointers to documents matching the query. Internet news articles are displayed with hypertext links to other referenced articles and groups.

The code is not strictly public domain: it is copyright CERN (see copyright notice is in the .tar), but is free to collaborating institutes.

Also available is a portable line mode browser which allows hypertext to be browsed by anyone with a dumb ascii terminal emulator. Hypertext may be made public by putting on an anonymous FTP server, or by using a HTTP daemon. A skeleton HTTP daemon is also available in source form. A server may be written to make other existing data readable by WWW browsers. Files are

    /pub/WWWNeXTStepEditor_0.12.tar.Z    NeXT application + sources
    /pub/WWWLineMode_0.11.tar.Z          Portable Line Mode Browser
    /pub/WWWDaemon_0.1.tar.Z             Simple server

Basic documentation is enclosed. Details about our project and about hypertext in general are available in hypertext form on our servers, as are lists of known bugs and features.

This project is experimental and of course comes without any warranty whatsoever. However, it could start a revolution in information access. We are currently using WWW for user support at CERN. We would be very interested in comments from anyone trying WWW, and especially those making other data available, as part of a truly world-wide web.

Tim BL ___________________________________________________________________________ Tim Berners-Lee ti...@info.cern.ch World Wide Web project Tel: +41(22)767 3755 CERN Fax: +41(22)767 7155 1211 Geneva 23, Switzerland

pg: "There's a background process that runs every 45 seconds and picks a random loaded user to update the average of. Empirically, not more than every couple days, at best."

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1875635

Also, pg posted the code to calculate karma/comment average. It doesn't include the karma of your last 5 posts or your highest ranked comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1853688

To clarify, $24.5 billion was Amazon's revenue in 2009. Net income was only 3.7% of that, or $902 million.