Solid freeform fabrication: DIY, on the cheap, and made of pure sugar
In February we gave a sneak preview of our project to construct a home-built three dimensional fabricator. Our design goals were (1) a low cost design leveraging recycled components (2) large printable volume emphasized over high resolution, and (3) ability to use low-cost printing media including granulated sugar. We are extremely pleased to be able to report that it has been a success: Our three dimensional fabricator is now fully operational and we have used it to print several large, low-resolution, objects out of pure sugar.
The general idea of our build process-- that of stacking solid two-dimensional printed layers-- is actually common to most solid freeform fabrication methods. Our machine employs what we believe is a fairly novel low-cost technology to accomplish this: selective hot air sintering and melting (SHASAM).
The printing process begins with a bed of a granular printing media that has a fairly low melting point. Using a narrow, directed, low-velocity beam of hot air, we selectively fuse together the print media, forming a two-dimensional image out of the fused grains. We then lower the bed by a small amount, add a thin flat layer of media to the top of the bed, and selectively fuse the media in the new layer, forming a two dimensional image that is also fused to any overlapping fused areas in the layer below. By repeating this process, a three-dimensional object is slowly built up. At the end of the build, the bed is raised to its original position, disinterring the fabricated model, while unused media is reclaimed for use in building the next object.
Our process is very much like a low-cost version of Selective Laser Sintering, or Selective Laser Melting, which are commercial processes used for plastic and direct metal printing. Rather than using a high-power CO2 or YAG laser ($5k and up), we use hot air created with the help of a $10 heating element.
Trading off a laser for a heat gun gives us lower resolution but at much lower cost, and is typical of our approach to 3D fabrication. We have taken a very different approach from most other fab projects (e.g., Fab@Home and RepRap) in that we have a comparatively large printable volume, but less need for precision and high resolution. Our fabricator is not designed for prototyping machine parts; it's designed for fun, for large-scale 3D illustration, for sculpting, architectural models, and other applications where resolution isn't the only important factor. We estimate the total cost to build a machine with similar capability to be in the neighborhood of $500. Realistically, the cost of any project like this is not a fixed number, and since recycled components are involved, the actual cost could range up or down by a factor of two depending on how resourceful the builder is.
There are a number of different print media that may be suitable for use with SHASAM fabrication: many types of plastics and waxes have low melting points and are available in granular or powder form. Beyond that, there are a number of interesting foods-- chocolate chips come to mind-- that can be used with the process However, one of the most interesting possibilities is using table sugar.
Granulated Sugar: low cost print media
The price of sugar compares quite favorably to the polycaprolactone (a low melting point polyester) used by the reprap project which costs about $4.00 a pound. As it turns out, even $4.00 per pound is quite inexpensive compared to the media for many other solid freeform fabrication systems.
Beyond just lowering the media cost of a given fabricated object, using a low-cost medium can be leveraged to make large-volume printing both practical and economical. Our fabricator has a maximum printable volume of 24 x 13.5 x 9 inches (61 x 34 x 23 cm)-- 2916 cubic inches, or 1.7 cubic feet, and holds a little more than 100 pounds of sugar, which costs about $37 retail.
For a fun exercise, look up how much it would cost to make a similar model on a prototyping industry standard $20,000 Dimension ABS 3D printer-- if it could print objects anywhere near that big. (Hint: it's more than $0.93.)
Mechanics and Electronics
The big idea of the mechanical system is that we take a hot air gun and move it around a bed of sugar, selectively fusing a set of points before lowering the bed of sugar and adding a new layer.
Our hot air gun is based upon the design of a hot air rework station. However, we have heavily modified it, and learned how to make an equivalent system inexpensively. The heater design now essentially consists of a 500 W, $10 air heating element and a small air pump-- a $5 aquarium air pump works well. At a minimum, use of the heater element requires a housing to be constructed, the air pump and a control system that can provide a the chosen amount of power to the heating element. We have seen that the element can be driven directly from 120 V, with duty cycle controlled by an inexpensive digital relay. The heater element is hardly new technology; it's the baby sister of the one in your hair dryer. None the less, it's well designed and quite suitable for this application.
The original head was not designed to operate at both high temperature and low air flow; it tends to overheat easily. One improvement that we made that has been hugely beneficial is to mount a cooling fan right next to this structure, keeping it cool on the outside while in use.
The X and Y axis motion control systems are based on belt drives and quadrature-encoded motors recycled from two old HP plotters, a large one and a small one. This is one of those places that your resourcefulness can save you a lot of money: The number of old-generation inkjets and plotters out there is truly stunning-- go find a couple, and make them do something useful again.
In order to control the quadrature-encoded motors that came on our printer parts, we designed custom digital servo circuits that cost about $10 each to build. The circuits are based around a high-power analog output stage and an AVR microcontroller that accept position commands. The position commands are sent using a higher precision version of standard hobby servo PWM control code, where the position command is encoded in the width of a positive pulse between one and two milliseconds long. We will be writing up and releasing the hardware design as well as the source code (under the GPL) for these servo controllers in the near future.
The hot air gun is mounted to the belt-driven carriage on the Y axis of the printer. The Y-axis belt-drive system is mounted, on one end, to a linear bearing that slides along a steel rail. That bearing is pushed by the belt-driven carriage on the X axis, through a rubber band low-cost flexible rubber coupling. The other end of the Y-axis belt-drive system is supported by a free-rolling rubber wheel from the hardware store.
Here you can see the model as drawn in Sketchup, and the base that we constructed from that model. If you want to take a closer look, you can download the model here. (144 kB ZIP archive of sketchup .skp document)
Besides the three motion axes, there is also a heater controller that is used to control the power delivered to the hot air heating element. Together, the four controllers (X,Y,Z, Temperature) require four axes of computer control.
Canvas Liner
Wrapped around the wooden base is a flexible canvas liner that prevents sugar from leaking out in strange places and assists in recovering unused media. Canvas is a good choice for this application because it is strong, durable, woven tightly enough to contain granular media like sugar, and washable. We got ours at a fabric store for $7/yard, in 60-inch width, and we needed about five yards. If you're trying to save costs, you might be able to do better elsewhere, e.g., buying canvas drop cloths intended for painting.
Software
There are several different layers to the software needed to control a three-dimensional fabricator, and they are implemented in our system with a variety of different techniques. We begin with a 3D model generated in (or imported into) POV-Ray, and then render the POV-Ray image as a set of two-dimensional bitmaps of slices through the image. The bitmaps are generated in such a way that they directly represent which points will, or will not, have the printing medium fused. We then take the bitmaps and use them to "draw" with our hot air gun at all of the black points on the bitmap.
Here is one of our 3D models, along with one of the generated 2D bitmap slices through that object:
Operating the 3D fabricator requires precision motion control in three directions, which is potentially difficult. Computer control and interface are provide through a MAKE Controller. Presently we are using an old student version of LabVIEW to control the MAKE Controller-- reading in a 2D bitmap, parsing it into a simple rastered toolpath, and converting that to position commands, sent to the MAKE Controller using UDP packets. Labview is, of course, not free software, and any suggestions about open-source solutions that would do the job nicely are welcome. (PD and Processing seem like possible directions, but we'd like to hear what you think in the comments.)
While the Make Controller has many remarkable capabilities, we are hardly taking advantage of them here; it is strictly acting as a computer-controlled device to output four servo-motor control code signals. Budget conscious builders may want to instead consider using a dedicated servo controller, like this Micro Serial Servo Controller, from Pololu, a precision 8-channel servo interface starting at $17.95.
Making things with the fabricator
Now that we've got all our parts together, let's fab some sugar objects. The effective horizontal resolution of our fabricator is presently limited to around 2 mm by the very one-point-oh design of our hot air nozzles, but can in principle be made much higher even while using granulated sugar as the print medium. The resolution is determined by a number of factors, including the air nozzle size, the air temperature and flow rate, and (obviously) the position step size in the three directions. Printing at a higher resolution takes longer, so we have actually been operating it in a low-resolution mode in order to produce some sample objects-- quickly-- before the Maker Faire. All of the objects on this page were made with pixel (well, voxel) size 2.5 x 2.5 x 2.7 mm (10 x 10 x 9 DPI), where the 3D models have been properly quantized to account for the larger vertical step size. Even at this low resolution setting, the total number of printable points in our fabricator is over 2.6 megavoxels.
Finally, here is a group of three objects that we've made out of pure sugar: A little dodecahedron, the toroidal coil, and the twenty-inch-long wood screw
So how does it taste?
Like praline, no doubt.
While our process has incredible potential for making interesting food, we are still in the early stages of prototyping and we have not yet worked with the sugar under conditions that could be construed as proper food handling procedures. We are instead at this point treating the sugar as a relatively safe (but not edible) industrial chemical and prototyping medium. There is no fundamental obstacle to food-safe 3D fabrication-- however we still need to carefully audit the system and make sure, for example, that the air pump for the hot air does not contain any substances that could contaminate food.
See it at the Maker Faire
Our completed fabricator will make its public debut next week at the 2007 Bay Area Maker Faire. (Our Maker Faire program entry is here.) We will be bringing the machine itself and some of our fabricated sugar objects. We've decided to spend our time at the faire showing off the printer and its parts, rather than actually using it to fabricate objects. One reason is safety; we have discovered that the First Law of Laboratory Work (Hot glass looks exactly the same as cold glass) holds true for molten hot sugar as well.
We made the sign from recycled and scrap acrylic for a total cost of about $20, cutting out the letters and segments on a laser cutter before cementing them in place.
We will continue to document the CandyFab 4000 as time goes on. In the mean time, you can find more pictures of the system in this flickr photoset.
Vonage Appeal Cites Supreme Court Patent Ruling
A new Verizon appeal cites a Supreme Court decision that may make it easier to invalidate patent claims.
Caron Carlson, Network World
Thursday, May 10, 2007 10:00 AM PDT
In its appeal of a jury verdict in the patent infringement case brought against it by Verizon, Vonage has turned to a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision that some analysts see as making it easier to invalidate patent claims.
In a brief filed May 9 with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, Vonage argued that the March jury verdict relied on a standard of analysis that the Supreme Court has since rejected. The jury found that Vonage's service infringed three patents, and the VoIP provider was ordered to pay US$58 million in damages. Vonage asked the appeals court to rule Verizon's patent claims invalid or to at least order a new trial.
Vonage's argument rests on a decision by the Supreme Court in late April in KSR International vs. Teleflex. In that decision, the Supreme Court looked at the standard for determining whether a patent claim is obvious. It ruled that courts should consider whether an alleged improvement to an invention is more than just the predictable use of existing elements. If, for example, at the time of an invention there was a known problem with an obvious solution, a patent claim may not be valid.
Rather than using this functional approach to determine whether Verizon's patent claims were obvious, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia instructed the jury to use a more rigid standard.
"The District Court's erroneous jury instruction on the wrong standard for [obviousness], thus, materially prejudiced Vonage's ability to present its invalidity case, and is strong grounds for vacating the validity finding," Vonage told the appeals court on May 9.
Verizon's patent claims are invalid because they are based on combinations of predictable elements that already exist, Vonage argued. In other words, it would have been obvious to try the solutions in the patent claims.
"Under KSR, [experts] would have found it obvious to try uniting the VocalTec Iphone software on the Harvard wireless laptops talking to the Internet wirelessly," Vonage said about one of the patents. About another patent, it said that experts "would have found it obvious to try using routing control records, or other similar table lookups, to perform the conditional analysis translation . . . "
Verizon is scheduled to file its brief with the appeals court May 23, and Vonage's reply is due May 30. The court is scheduled to hear arguments June 25.
While the appeal is pending, Vonage is permitted to continue signing up new customers, and the company remains determined to increase its business.
The Appeal of User Generated Gaming
As user-created content becomes an integral part of the gaming ecosystem, MTV Networks is getting in on the action
Nickelodeon MTVN Kids and Family Group recently made a series of announcements relating to Shockwave.com and AddictingGames. These two online gaming destinations have experienced major growth of late; during 2006 AddictingGames saw its unique users grow 100 percent, while Shockwave.com grew its users by nearly 50 percent. AddictingGames had 21.3 million unique visitors and 343 million page views in March, while Shockwave.com garnered 19.7 million unique visitors and almost 117 million page views.
"We bought [AddictingGames] from a small team in Canada when it was about the third of the size of what it is now," detailed Dave Williams, the newly named Senior Vice President across both AddictingGames and Shockwave. "It started as a series of links to their favorite sites, then it evolved into a directory before we eventually bought it out. We realized it was much more like a conventional media site, as in users were treating the games like videos, playing things once [and] then looking for new ones. We enhanced it and added our own resources and now they're over 1000 developers.
"Shockwave.com has been around for a very long time. It was originally built as a multimedia showcase for all the stuff you can do with Adobe Shockwave. Since then, we've built in all sorts of technologies for games. The site features something for everyone, with puzzle and casual games that really appeal to the women 30+ group and other games for early teens. It has helped build up brands for advertisers, which is very appealing to third-parties. Our daily project and photo sharing results in an amazing amount of sharing that you can't do in any other medium. We're also probably more focused than anyone to try and get [casual games] to work for advertisers."
In yet another sign of the web 2.0/game 3.0 phenomenon, one of the new features of the site is a game upload feature. User-created content is bound to have an increasingly profound effect on this industry. Already, the company has received 200 new game submissions in the past month, empowered by a game sponsorship program, which pays developers of popular games for integration on AddictingGames and provides them with enhanced distribution and marketing.
"One of the challenges for lightweight casual games is that there isn't much of a business model for them," explained Williams. "We worked on solutions for our two different sites. On AddictingGames, we offer to sponsor a creator's game with our brand and that helps create traffic for the site because it might be distributed to other websites. On Shockwave, there's a royalty pool that's based upon the amount of revenue received. I think this is going to drive content going forward because we're willing to pay for their games. We have multiple options for users, but advertising is at least as important as something like subscriptions for us. A couple other sites have mentioned something like this, but I think we've been making more from ad sales than anyone else.
"I think what we're seeing from AddictingGames... is that a lot of these users know Flash, whether for their job or from their school. They're having fun with it and getting their games published using our method. Really, it is a site that is born off its users and it is very much part of the heart of the site."
The announcement also touched on new integrated advertising deals with Nissan and HP. "Shockwave has been known for game customization for advertisers; we helped build some of the original advergames. At the same time, our sphere of online games lend themselves to user generated content. We get dozens of submissions of content users want to see. We try and reconcile these two factors with advertiser sponsored games. It demonstrates a way that we can integrate user content with advertiser needs."
"The Shockwave Mother's Day photo sponsorship offers a more engaging user experience than could be provided through a standard ad banner buy," said Steve Kerho, Director, Media & Interactive Marketing, Nissan North America. "It demonstrates an understanding of how to reach the Quest target through leveraging the strengths of the Shockwave brand, since 65% of Shockwave users share photos with others."
"HP consumer PCs are the preferred choice for casual gamers worldwide," said Tracey Trachta, worldwide director of consumer advertising, Personal Systems Group, HP. "We're excited to be working with Shockwave because they offer us a unique vehicle to reach both parents and children in a safe, casual gaming environment."
"Games like this have been sort of under the radar for something that could be the basis of a business. We have the resources and we can afford to invest more... I think it's going to be a great thing for the consumer," added Williams.
Provided by GameDAILY—Your daily dose of gaming
Investors Pour Funding Into ProVina Whose 2006 WinePod Sold Out
WinePod is a wireless web-connected device that allows wine snobs to mix their own wines. The price is $3,500 per unit plus shipping. WinePod is a 2-foot tall insulated metal egg with a 2-ton metal press and automatic temperature control that ferments your wine. It can take from a few months to a year or more for your wine to distill. Your batch should yield about 6 cases. Your dashboard tells you to adjust pH or temperature, add water, etc. Clearly there is no practical reason to own won but so many people these days are showy with their wine collections, this is the state of the art in keeping up with the Joneses.
Tibco Ponies Up $195M For Analytics' Spotfire
Analysis: The New Math - How Did MySpace Value PhotoBucket
With that in mind, we think the discussions over the valuation of PhotoBucket and other big deals are somewhat important. If the deal is officially confirmed at $300M, that is 50x trailing revenue and over $17 per monthly unique visitor.
Mike Arrington calls the $300M (with earnout) that MySpace paid for PhotoBucket a steal. His logic is that: + Google paid $1.65B for YouTube. By the time the deal closed, the Google stock was worth nearly $1.8B. MySpace paid 1/5 of that. YouTube had little revenue, while PhotoBuckets projects it will make $25M in 2007. Photobucket has 80% of the visitors that YouTube had when it was acquired. + MySpace got a discount when it cut off PhotoBucket's users before the deal to show who wears the pants.
+ In a more recent post, he hedges, however, that PhotoBucket and MySpace might have 100% user overlap, so for $250M its gets no new users.
+ Valleywag accuses TechCrunch of being a shill for PhotoBucket's iBankers Lehman Brothers. We don't have any way of assessing this information.
Henry Blodget takes the case even further, arguing that PhotoBucket could barely give itself away, a dramatic statement he agrees.
Counterpoint is Microsoft's Don Dodge who instructs Blodget and Arrington to come to their senses:
"At some point the end user of all these free services is the same user and they can't be monetized any further no matter how many new services are added. Advertisers will eventually figure this out. Ad rates will drop. Revenues will drop...and stock prices will drop. It is all about the stock price. No one cares about real revenues and earnings as long as the stock price is high.When stock prices drop everyone along the chain starts to rethink their assumptions about value and ROI. The changes ripple all the way back up the food chain. The individual stockholders get more conservative and move out of bubble stocks. The Internet companies stop acquiring because their stock price has deflated. The entrepreneurs stop agreeing to acquisitions because the rewards are less. The VCs stop funding new startups because the risk/reward ratio doesn't work.
We have seen this before. It was the nuclear winter that lasted from 2000 to 2003. It is amazing how quickly we forget. As I always say "fear is temporary...greed is permanent"
HipMojo joins the naysers arguing that PhotoBucket is no YouTube. His point here is that Photobucket is just a utility and does not command attention.
(Over) Counting Widgets
I got an email from a friend the other day.
"Did you see that Clearspring has served 3bn widgets in the past five months?"
I hadn't actually seen that news, but here is the press release my friend was referring to. It's clearly an impressive number and Clearspring is doing some great things in the widget market.
But before we start putting Clearsping in McDonalds territory (billions served), let's get something straight. Serving widgets generates huge numbers quickly.
All you need to do is look at Photobucket, Slide, and RockYou's numbers for their photo/slideshow widgets to see how powerful the widget model is. I don't have access to the actual numbers for these three photo widget services and I'd prefer not to print the rumors I've heard, but I'd venture a guess that their numbers for widgets served each day will make Clearspring's 3bn number look tiny.
I do know the numbers for FeedBurner's widgets and they are well north of what Clearspring is serving. But this post is not about whose you know what is bigger than whose.
It's about the challenge of understanding what is what in the widget market.
Max Levchin, Slide's founder and CEO, is one of the most thoughtful people in the widget market and I've had some conversations with him about the challenges of measuring widgets. He's frustrated that there isn't good third party data on the widget market. I've also talked to the team at comScore about this issue because it's starting to become an issue everyone is paying attention to and there just isn't good data yet.
You can get unique visitor counts from comScore on widgets like Photobucket, Slide, and RockYou, but what does it mean? Here is the comScore data on the photo widget sector (the top three players).
Are those 18mm uniques that are attributed to Photobucket being seen on Photobucket.com? Or are those 18mm uniques the number of people that are being exposed to the Photobucket widget wherever it is being embedded (MySpace, Beebo, etc). I don't know the answer to that simple question, but it's an important one.
And what's the right number to look at? Should Photobucket get credit for having an audience that sees its widget on other services pages? When that page includes five to ten other widgets? Or should it just get credit for those who interact with the widget in some way?
The bottom line is we need better numbers on widgets, we need some standards, and we need them now.
Wednesday, May 09, 2007
17 ways to beat Google - Search innovations and who is doing them
Nitin Karandikar sent me a link to his post on "Top 17 Search Innovations outside of Google" which reviews 17 different approaches to web search innovation. He also lists some of the companies leading the way in each area. Web search is a very popular topic for writers and bloggers. Charles Knight maintains a list of the Top 100 Alternative Search Engines and updates it monthly.
Web search is big business. Microsoft's Live Search is third in market share with about 10% of all web searches and it generates hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. It is no wonder that VCs and entrepreneurs are investing lots of time and money to discover The Next Big Thing in search.
Of all the approaches described by Nitin and listed by Charles Knight, I think three are promising; Natural Language Processing, Local Search, and Cell Phone Voice Search.
Natural Language Processing (NLP) has been around for a while. The idea is to get users to ask questions in conversational style, and then parse that question using NLP techniques to divine meaning and context. The problem is that most users only enter two words in a search...sometimes three words. No matter how sophisticated your NLP technology is you aren't going to gain a lot more context from two or three words. The real secret power of NLP is realized by applying it to the search index...not the search term. Meaning, analyze all the web pages in the index with the NLP and add lots of meta tags, meaning, and context to the index. Then when search queries come in you can match the keywords to the much richer index. Powerset is doing some ground breaking work in this area.
Local Search is a huge market. The easy part of local search has already been done. The big search engines have developed crawlers to crawl all web pages, parse and extract local identifying information, and cross reference it to other online data. The problem is that over 50% of small local businesses don't have web sites. A great local search experience requires that ALL local businesses are included and that the index be updated regularly. CitySquares Online is a Boston based startup attacking this problem.
Cell phone voice based search is an obvious opportunity, but very hard to do. It requires great voice recognition technology, a well organized local search index, a high quality voice response system, and special screen rendering technology to display the results on the cell phone screen. Parts of the technology exist today, but no one has combined all the pieces into a great user experience. This is a huge opportunity with no clear leader.
OK, now back to Nitin's list of 17 search innovation areas. Please go to his site to get more detail on each one. Unless you are a search geek like me you may find this stuff boring, but here are the categories;
- Natural Language Processing
- Personalization
- Vertical Search
- Multimedia Search
- Restricted Data Sources
- Domain Specific Search
- Parametric Search
- Social network filtering
- Human directed search
- Semantic search
- Discovery linked search
- Classification, Tags, Clustering approaches
- Results visualization
- Results refinement and filters
- Specialized search platforms
- Related searches
- Search agents
What do you think? Who will be the next Google? Which approach to search will provide the most value? Place your bets and you could be the next search billionaire.
Writings on Starbucks Cup Upsets Customer
Controversy is brewing around a religious quote printed on a Starbucks cup, which has turned at least one customer off from the brand.
An Ohio woman was offended by one of hundreds of comments submitted by customers and celebrities that appear on the cups as part of Starbuck’s The Way I See It program. The program is meant to spark discussion and get people thinking about a variety of topics, including religion, the company said.
The offending quote reads, "Why in moments of crisis do we ask God for strength and help? As cognitive beings, why would we ask something that may well be a figment of our imaginations for guidance? Why not search inside ourselves for the power to overcome? After all, we are strong enough to cause most of the catastrophes we need to endure."
The comment was made by Bill Scheel, a Starbucks customer from London, Ontario, who describes himself as a "modern day nobody."
The Ohio woman, Michelle Incanno, told news outlets that she would not return to Starbucks.
Starbucks has been printing comments from celebrities, notable figures and customers on its cups since 2005. It has collected more than 250 writings since the initiative launched. By yearend, the company expects to feature about 300 different comments.
"Our goal with The Way I See It is to promote a free and open exchange of ideas and thoughts on a wide variety of topics," Starbucks spokesperson Tricia Moriarty said. "We think this tradition of dialogue and discussion is an important facet of the coffeehouse experience."
The fact that Scheel's comments are sparking dialogue "is the original intent of the program," she added.
A disclaimer on Starbucks.com/WayISeeIt says the authors' opinions do not necessary reflect those of the company.
"Starbucks frequently receives feedback on many of the quotes as people express their thoughts and views on the different quotes and contributors," Moriarty said. "We highly value all of our customers and never wish to offend anyone. The objective of the program is to encourage open and thoughtful discussion."
This particular quote may have gained a head of steam because numerous media outlets picked up on it.
Despite the negative feedback, Starbucks has no plans to remove any of the writings from its cups, Moriarty said.
Only a few comments cover religion. But those that do have different points of view, Moriarty said.
For instance, musician Mike Doughty, wrote, "It's tragic that extremists co-opt the notion of God, and that hipsters and artists reject spirituality out of hand. I don't have a fixed idea of God. But I feel that it's us—the messed-up, the half-crazy, the burning, the questing—that need God, a lot more than the goody-two-shoes do."
Others have a humorous tone. A quote from Joseph Palm, a Starbucks customer from Oshkosh, Wisconsin, said, "Scientists tell us we only use 5% of our brains. But if they only used 5% of their brains to reach that conclusion, then why should we believe them?"
Customers can share their thoughts about the cups or submit a quote of their own to Starbucks.com/Retail/TheWayISeeIt_Comments.asp. Starbucks said its posts responses on its letters to the editors section on the Web site.
High school students capture assault on video
A group of Toronto high school students on a field trip captured footage of an auto driver attacking a bicyclist who reportedly stopped in front of him at a yellow light. The interesting thing is that the students were out with videocameras investigating the notion of "public and private space" in their city. Toronto CityNews has the video online.
Link (Thanks, Jess Hemerly!)
(notice the amateur footage taken by video cameras, to be captured by videocameraphones soon)
Hollywood is burning (yet again) - UPDATED, video.
5:06pm: Helicopters are circling overhead where I am right now, not too far from an ongoing 200+ acre fire in Griffith Park, a little bit east of the Hollywood Sign in Los Angeles. Flames are still live, and there's an arson suspect in custody.
Image courtesy of Flickr user Swingsha. Bear in mind that this was shot from a number of miles away, over the hill, in Burbank. You can see the fire/smoke plumes from just about anywhere in LA right now.
LATIMES blog has good updates.
It started as a small brush fire in the park, at about 120pm. I could see the smoke plume all the way from the NPR studios in Culver City a few hours ago. Driving from there towards this site, north on Western through Koreatown (a few miles away), I could see very large flames and clumps of black and brown smoke above the chaparral hills. It's huge. And it's crazy hot (100 F), gusty-windy, and dry out today, unseasonably so.
Humans have been evacuated from the LA Zoo and the Autry Museum (both inside the park), but I understand the more fragile critters inside the zoo (about 1,000 of 'em!) are instead staying put, under protection. No word on the ponies and the carousel, and the teeny tiny steam engine ride.
The guys at blogging.la have a number of related items up. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.
BoingBoing pal Michael P. points to more photos on Flickr, and says,
We must go free the animals at the zoo NOW.
(Thanks also, Ape Lad and others)
UPDATE: Sean Bonner just called, out riding around the area on his bicycle -- he's roaming near the fire site, phonecamming what he encounters: Flickr stream, and one of the shots is below.
And eecue just uploaded this HDR shot...
UPDATE, 745pm: OK, there are a hell of a lot more helicopters, flying even lower and more frequently now. I guess some of these are news choppers, but some may be first responders, too? All I can hear are sirens and roaring helicopters overhead. I think we're about a quarter mile or less from the center of the burn area (though not in any immediate path of harm). They're saying it's 20-25% under control now. The numbers don't feel too comforting at the moment.
The power is out in much of our neighborhood now. Our DSL has been down for a while, and I'm using my EVDO card to blog this.
7:53: Someone just called me from a few blocks away via mobile, even closer to the burn site, and says the fire is coming closer to where we are, moving down the hill, towards houses, spreading out and covering an even larger area. The hills are glowing red, much ash in the air, heavy smoke smell. Lots of people in the streets looking up at the burn. Small planes circling. We're packing up a few essentials now, just in case the wind gets super hinky and we receive an evacuation order.
Local TV news is reporting the fire was started by a golfer who tossed a cigarette aside while playing golf in the course nearby.
8:30pm: Friend shot this photo a few blocks away, an hour ago. The air is extremely thick with smoke and ash. More homes now without power, increasingly. Officers going door to door instructing people of mandatory evacuation orders a few blocks way. All the newscasts I'm watching are covering the immediate area outside our house, which is weird. Windows and doors all closed here, neighbors doing the same. Sky overhead at night now is dark orange-red, hills look like lava flowing down. Hot Santa Ana winds, gusty, fast, from the northwest. I've lived here for years, through many fires, never seen anything this big.
8:50pm: Cops shutting down Los Feliz boulevard (big street here) now, to minimize incoming traffic from gawkers. Unclear if the shutdown order will make it more difficult to get out. Police on bullhorns giving mandatory evacuation orders about 5 blocks from here. They're closing more streets by the minute, and placing evacuees in a nearby high school shelter.
9:01pm: They're describing the fire's movement as having "exploded" over the past hour. No homes burned yet, but lots in imminent danger, and evacuations under way. 250 acres burned now. Landmark "Dante's View" destroyed, bird refuge in immediate danger. "Deer and coyotes here are running for their lives," a councilman at the burn site is saying on local news right now. Some animals who live in the park are running into the street now.
9:08pm: Cops going door to door evacuating people nearby now. Fire appears to be spreading via embers? New spots of burn now, burn area obviously growing, even from our distance. Guy on TV: "How did the firefighters not see this coming and plan for contingency? It's moved all over the place now."
9:19pm: 300 acres estimated burned now. Here's a cameraphone video shot a few blocks away, at 7:55pm, by M.D. Video Link.
Winds close to the fire are very hot and very strong now, which may be Venturi effect.
Outside my window, it looks like a giant SRL show on the hill. Big flame tornado shapes reaching up into the sky.
We're packing stuff up now. Homes close to us are being given evacuation orders and we might need to get out if things change once again for the worse. Ash and live embers are floating in the air, eyes burn, throat itchy when you step outside.
Policeman on TV saying lots of homeless people who live inside the park, up in the chaparral hills, are evacuating onto the street.
Electricity outages and mobile phone problems are resulting from the destruction of (or damage to) towers inside the park.
Lots more videos now at Blogging.la, and more updates: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.
Reader comment: David says,
Hey, I live a mile under the fire. We've been watching the new flare up for the past few hours. Thought I'd share photos from it: Link. This is also where the Greek Theatre is as well -- and we think its gone!
Tuesday, May 08, 2007
Microsoft-Yahoo? Don't Bet On It
On paper, a merger of Microsoft and Yahoo! looks like the perfect foil to the seemingly unstoppable momentum of Google. Combined, the software giant and the online media titan would have easily the largest audience on the Web, a far more potent advertising engine, and finally, a credible position in the all-important Internet search market.
For those reasons, reports on May 4 that Microsoft (MSFT) and Yahoo (YHOO) are discussing a merger or wide-ranging deal made some sense, especially to the investors who swarmed over Yahoo's shares early in the day. But as was the case with repeated rumors of a Microsoft-Yahoo merger over the past few years, the prospects of a deal look unlikely. It now appears that the reports in the New York Post and The Wall Street Journal were based on talks that happened months ago.
Both Microsoft and Yahoo declined to comment publicly. But a Microsoft source in a position to know about talks told BusinessWeek that there are no current discussions of any significance. Another source close to the situation also indicates that talks are not current.
A Real Alternative
So why all the new excitement about a potential deal? Mainly because a merger or even an extensive partnership would touch off an epic battle for the top position on the Internet. Microsoft and Yahoo together would present the only real alternative to Google in an online world that increasingly resembles the Microsoft-dominated computer software business.
For the past couple of years, Google has romped across the Internet. It has used an increasingly dominant position in search, and the diminutive text ads that appear with search results, to rocket to $10.6 billion in sales last year, up 73% from 2005. And with an estimated quarter of all online advertising already in its pocket, Google has begun experimenting with ads in print, radio, and television.
All that has left many people from media moguls to big advertisers fearful that the company, with a market value of $147 billion, would usurp their businesses and exert outsize control of the rapidly evolving advertising world. Especially with last October's $1.7 billion acquisition of the video-sharing site YouTube and last month's $3.1 billion DoubleClick purchase, advertisers, agencies, and rival Internet outfits have worried that Google would become all powerful online (see BusinessWeek.com, 4/9/07, "Is Google Too Powerful?").
Appealing Ad Alternative
So no small number of players in the industry are rooting for the counterbalance that a Microsoft-Yahoo alliance would create. "It would create a new gorilla in the advertising arena, a super-portal," says Jim Lanzone, CEO of Ask, the search unit of IAC/InterActiveCorp (IACI).
Some Microsoft businesses would benefit from a combination with Yahoo. Neither Microsoft's MSN Web portal, which commands only 10% of online display ad impressions to Yahoo's 48%, nor its AdCenter search ad system, has caught fire. Yahoo's dominance in online display ads, as well as its well-received Panama search advertising system, introduced in February, would give Microsoft's ad efforts a leg up.
For its part, Yahoo has also been struggling to contend with the Google juggernaut. Despite its dominance in display ads, Yahoo now has only 22% of the search market to Google's 54%. And search ads count for nearly all the growth in the online ad business in recent years. The combined entities' search service might attract both more consumers and more advertisers. "Microsoft and Yahoo combined would be a more formidable force against Google," says Ryan Jacob, portfolio manager with Jacob Internet Fund, which counts Yahoo shares as 4.3% of its portfolio.
Fearsome Management Challenge
The biggest prize for the combined companies might be just the thing that sets Google apart: more data on customer intentions. Much of Google's success with search ads stems from its ability to divine customers' buying intentions, so it can show them the most relevant ads and then charge advertisers more for the service. Combining customer data from both Microsoft and Yahoo potentially could close some of the gap with Google.
For all that, the reasons not to do a deal remain stronger than the reasons to do it, according to some observers. For one, combining the companies would be a fearsome management challenge. They're in different states, they have many overlapping services bound to spur turf battles, and Yahoo's Silicon Valley culture retains some enmity toward Microsoft.
Consolidating those operations could take two years or more, by several accounts. "It will cause them to fall behind 18 to 24 months," says Samir Patel, CEO of SearchForce, a search marketing software firm in San Mateo, Calif. "I don't see a compelling reason for Yahoo to do it," adds Charlene Li, an analyst with Forrester Research (FORR). "It would be a nightmare. The memories of Time Warner-AOL (TWX) come to mind."
Slight Savings and Synergy
What's more, the imperative of a deal doesn't appear quite as urgent for Yahoo in particular. Company officials and some others in the company, in fact, have been more optimistic of late, thanks to Panama and some recent wins, such as a deal last month to provide ads for Viacom's (VIA) Web sites and the Apr. 30 purchase of online ad exchange Right Media. "You wouldn't have done that if you were going to sell the company in three or four days," notes Ellen Siminoff, CEO of search marketing firm Efficient Frontier and a former Yahoo executive.
Even for Microsoft, the reasons for a deal look iffy on a closer inspection. To keep Yahoo users, Microsoft wouldn't want to change the branding, but that means savings and synergy could be slight. What's more, there's "almost 100% overlap" in their respective online services, says Charles Di Bona II, senior research analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein, from search services and search ad systems to e-mail and news. "The Googleplex visitor parking lot would be full the day after this deal closes," Di Bona says. "There are all sorts of ways these guys don't fit together."
That said, a less sweeping deal, combining search or advertising efforts, might benefit both companies without unduly burdening them with massive integration issues. "I see partnerships happening more than a merger," says Li.
For what it's worth, Yahoo executives also have indicated they prefer to set their own course. "We're not going to compete with Google by trying to be Google," Jeff Weiner, executive vice-president of Yahoo's Network Div., which comprises its consumer Web properties, told BusinessWeek in mid-April. "We'll compete by being Yahoo." The right price might change those intentions, of course. But for the time being, Yahoo apparently will remain just Yahoo.
Hof is BusinessWeek's Silicon Valley bureau chief. Greene is BusinessWeek's Seattle bureau chief.
Let the Phone Pick Up the Tab
Cheryl Bussani's son was grown up enough to move out of their Daly City (Calif.) home into his own place. But he still needed the occasional quick infusion of cash, and his new home in Pacifica, Calif., was far enough away that it wasn't convenient for Bussani to just drive over and drop off a few dollars. "It wasn't worth the gas," she explains.
So Bussani makes loans to her son via cell phone. She uses a service provided by Obopay, in Redwood City, Calif., that lets her transfer funds by dialing a few numbers on her wireless handset. The professional housecleaner also collects her own payments and pays bills with the service.
Bussani is part of the vanguard of U.S. mobile-phone subscribers who are doing their banking with wireless handsets. The practice is expected to gain traction in a matter of months when the likes of bigger, more established companies including banking powerhouse Citigroup (C) and wireless behemoth AT&T (T) kick off ad campaigns extolling the low cost and high convenience of paying over a mobile phone.
Following the Money
They may have a point on price. EBay's (EBAY) PayPal Mobile, which lets people wire funds and donate to charity through a phone, is free for many transactions. Obopay charges 10¢ to send money (see BusinessWeek.com, 5/14/07, "Souping Up Your Cell Phone"); contrast that with Western Union (WU), which charges 11% for transfers within the U.S.
And there's reason to expect mobile-phone payments will become easier. While some early versions require a software download onto a phone, AT&T will begin including software on devices in the fourth quarter. Cell-phone makers like Nokia (NOK) and Kyocera, along with Visa and MasterCard (MA), are trialing phones with embedded chips that allow for contactless payments. Simply wave your phone in front of a reader to pay for purchases. That should cut checkout time by 50% to 70%, studies have found.
By 2012, 292 million phones sold worldwide will contain these so-called near-field communications chips, according to consultancy ABI Research. "Consumers tell us they are ready," says Pam Zuercher, vice-president of product innovation and coordination for Visa USA. The credit card association's March survey of 800 U.S. consumers showed that 57% would be interested in buying such a phone. And among 18- to 42-year-olds, 64% said they'd switch wireless carriers for it. "We believe mobile banking will be one of the bigger applications," says Greg Latour, senior vice-president of technology development at wireless carrier Cellular South, which, like carriers Amp'd Mobile and Helio, already offers Obopay.
Fee-for-All
If optimists like Latour are right—and considering the success of contactless payments in places such as Korea, there's reason to think they will be—the increased reliance on mobile payments is likely to have a ripple effect on financial services. Wireless service providers will demand their cut of financial transaction fees. Mobile payments are also expected to crimp demand for cash and checks, which still account for more than half of all consumer purchases.
At stake is $1.4 trillion in small payments of under $25 made in the U.S. each year. By 2010, about 10%, or $140 billion, of all payments under $25 will be made with contactless cards, estimates Dan Schatt, an analyst with consultancy Celent. Of those, 10% could be paid with mobile phones, he estimates.
Established players such as Visa, MasterCard, and First Data (FDC) will continue to angle for the business of processing payments and the right to collect the fees that amount to as much as 2% of purchases. But use of checks, printed by companies such as John H. Harland, could be affected. So could demand for ATMs, run by companies like First Data, recently purchased by an affiliate of private equity firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts for $29 billion, Schatt says.
Plenty of Players
A number of upstarts stand to benefit. Schatt lists companies like Gemalto, which makes Smart Cards for contactless payments. Companies such as Atlanta-based Firethorn and Sausalito (Calif.)-based mFoundry, which power mobile banking and payments applications could profit from this move. So could outfits like ViVOtech, which sell related hardware such as in-store scanners. "We can get a bank up and running [on mobile phones] in six weeks," says Drew Sievers, co-founder and CEO of mFoundry.
Wireless service providers tend to keep tight reins on the applications they give users access to, and they will want a share of the transaction fees. Yet, unlike such carriers as Japan's NTT DoCoMo, U.S. wireless service providers are expected to stop short of offering financial services on their own. "We don't see any operators we deal with even considering this strategy," says Tripp Rackley, CEO of Firethorn.
And, of course, the service providers themselves could gain handsomely. Obopay is making a push with funding from investors like wireless powerhouse Qualcomm (QCOM). Web giants like Google (GOOG), already offering payment services online through Google Checkout, could potentially enter the fray. Cell-phone makers like Nokia could step into the market as well.
Spend-shifters
To prevent any business disruptions, processors have been among the first to jump into mobile payments. First Data doesn't see mobile payments as a threat: "We see it more as an extension of consumer choice," says Brian Friedman, vice-president of innovation for First Data financial institution services. It's not taking chances, though, and is ramping up mobile efforts. On May 2, First Data invested in ViVOtech and has committed to using the startup's hardware in offering contactless payments.
Visa and MasterCard are conducting near-field communications trials. Visa, for one, has developed its own mobile payments software. "Today, $17 of every $100 of spend is spent on a Visa card," says Visa USA's Zuercher. "We are looking at mobile as a way to shift [even more of this] spend." To that end, the company will be adding more capabilities, such as person-to-person money transfers and ticket purchases, later this year. Visa is also trying to address issues such as ease-of-use and security, which plague contactless payments in other countries (see BusinessWeek.com, 11/21/06, "Contactless Payment Comes to Cell Phones").
And banks aren't sitting still. Citibank, for instance, is piloting Obopay with select customers. It's also trialing near-field communications in New York with Nokia and Cingular/AT&T. And then there's Citi Mobile, launched in April in California and expected to roll out nationwide by the end of May. Based on software from mFoundry, the service lets users search for ATM and branch locations, reach customer service, and check balances. "The uptake is within our expectations," says Steve Keitz, Citi Mobile Director. "We think this is the next step."
Kharif is a reporter for BusinessWeek.com in Portland, Ore.
'Brandjacking' on the Web
A new study by MarkMonitor finds that cybersquatting and other abuses against big companies with well-known brands are on the rise
If ever there were two companies with more different lines of business, they would have to be InterContinental Hotel Group and World Wrestling Entertainment.
Both are the corporate parent of household names. WWE (WWE) is the $400 million (fiscal 2006 sales) producer of professional wrestling exhibitions and TV shows like Smackdown whose stable of stars includes Undertaker, Chris Benoit, and Rey Mysterio. InterContinental (IHG) is the Britain-based $1.9 billion (2006 sales) hotelier, which owns such storied brands as Holiday Inn and Crowne Plaza.
What these two markedly different companies have in common is a problem protecting their brands from abuse on the Web. From domain names that use trademarked words and phrases to direct users to sites with no connection to the company, to selling counterfeit goods on auction sites like eBay (EBAY), the cases of WWE and InterContinental illustrate how widely well-known brands are being exploited online, and how combating the problem is turning out to be a huge challenge.
A new study released Apr. 30 from MarkMonitor, a privately held firm that alerts companies if their brand is being abused online, has put some hard numbers on the scale of the problem. Using the top 25 companies on the Interbrand 100 list of most valuable brands, which includes names like Coca-Cola (KO), Microsoft (MSFT), Disney (DIS), Citibank (C), Google (GOOG), and Dell (DELL) (see BusinessWeek.com, "The 100 Top Brands 2006"), the San Francisco outfit found that brand abuse on the Web is greater than previously thought.
Microsoft on the Warpath
The biggest problem for the companies, at least given the overall number of incidents, is cybersquatting. It's the unauthorized use of a trademarked name or phrase in a Web domain pointing to a Web site that isn't owned by the trademark holder. MarkMonitor found more than 286,000 instances of cybersquatting for the 25 brands it studied—an average of 11,400 instances each. The data was collected during a four-week period starting Mar. 9 and ending Apr. 6 and was averaged over that period. If MarkMonitor's numbers, collected in what it has dubbed "The Brandjacking Index," are on the money, the scale of the problem alone is astonishing.
If a figure equal to more than 11,000 incidents per company on average seems high, then consider the case of Microsoft, one of the companies in MarkMonitor's sample group. It has been particularly active in suing people it says have been using domain squatting to infringe on its trademarks. It currently has four federal lawsuits pending and recently settled two others in the U.S. against companies it says have registered domain names that are close to Microsoft trademarks, such as 1microsoft67.info or freehotmail.net. In recent months it has reclaimed more than 1,000 different domain names. In Britain, it has five similar legal actions pending and recently settled another with a company that had registered as many as 6,000 different domain names that contained variations on Microsoft trademarks.
Clearly, cybersquatting is on the rise, and so are the number of domain-name registration disputes. The World Intellectual Property Organization, the global body that arbitrates such disputes, says its caseload jumped by 25% in 2006. Even so, it received only 1,823 complaints last year, the highest since 2000. That number suggests that WIPO in an entire year is likely to receive complaints on less than 1% of the domains hijacked in a single four-week span tracked by MarkMonitor. Certainly many disputes can be resolved without going to WIPO. Lawyers can often shut down a site using a hijacked name by sending a cease-and-desist letter, while other parties may not even know their trademarks are being used.
The Fans Weigh In
MarkMonitor gathered the data for the study in the course of monitoring Internet brand abuse as a service. Among other things, it checks 134 million domain-name records every day using its own software and search algorithms, and closely watches filings with the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office for evidence of trademark abuse. (The company declined to disclose how much it charges for that service.)
Cybersquatting is just one of the problems that faced Stacy Papachristos, a lawyer at WWE's headquarters in Stamford, Conn. "We first heard about it from our fans," Papachristos says. "They'd write us pointing out Web sites that weren't affiliated with us, but which were using our names to make money on their own products."
In one recent decision from WIPO issued on Mar. 5, WWE was able to shut down several Web sites using its trademarks with domain names like smackdownmagazine.com, wwemagazine.com, and wwebackstage.com. They pointed not to Web sites produced by the company but to sites operated by a company called DIR Enterprises, which was giving tips about how to get backstage at pro wrestling events and plans for building a wrestling ring.
Other Headaches for Companies
DIR had registered the domain names days or weeks before WWE had formally changed its name from World Wrestling Federation to World Wrestling Entertainment and registered all the required trademarks (see BusinessWeek.com, 2/2/04, "Is the WWE Rousing Itself from the Mat?"). "They were using our trademarks to draw wrestling fans to their sites," Papachristos says. In a case argued before WIPO, the domain names were reassigned to WWE. DIR Enterprises did not respond to an e-mail seeking comment.
Cybersquatting is only the biggest in a huge array of trademark abuses that MarkMonitor says is growing into big business. The study found more than 300,000 separate instances of brand abuse online (including cybersquatting and other offenses) against the 25 companies in the sample group.
Next on the list after cybersquatting is domain "kiting." This practice exploits a loophole in rules set down by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names & Numbers (ICANN), which oversees domain-name registrations. Computer software can automate the process of registering a domain for the five-day trial period allowed under ICANN policies. The registration can then be renewed for another five days over and over again, usually under some cover of anonymity, making resolution of the problem difficult. This has created an environment that gives corporations with lots of trademarks to protect a huge headache. In a statement on the problem issued in March, WIPO's deputy director general, Francis Gurry, warned that the current environment of easy domain registrations has "fostered practices which threaten the interests of trademark owners and cause consumer confusion."
No Real Overhead Cost
Shifts in the news and in the time of year can have a big effect on what domains are hijacked. When a lot of media attention was being given to the possibility of an avian flu epidemic, there was a huge upsurge in domain registrations using Tamiflu, the trademarked name of an anti-flu treatment owned by Roche Laboratories. WIPO heard 34 cases involving 64 different domain names related to some variation of the Tamiflu name.
MarkMonitor's study found more than 11,000 cases of domain kiting carried out against the 25 companies in the sample group. One big target of kiting efforts is financial institutions, which accounted for 980 incidents of kiting attacks carried out among the sample group.
Why is kiting suddenly popular? MarkMonitor Chief Marketing Officer Fred Felman says it makes money for those engaging in the abuse. Since the five-day trial period for a Web site registration is free, there's no real overhead cost. At least 1 million hijacked sites are reregistered every day, used to create "pay-per-click" sites that can yield as little as $25 per year. But take that million sites and pretty soon you're looking at a business model that could potentially generate $125 million per year. "We think kiting and domain 'tasting' represent more than 90% of the new Internet domain registrations on a daily basis," he says. "We're talking about people who exist out on the fringe of the legitimate business world," Felman says. "But they're people making real money off of exploiting these brands, probably enough to pay the rent and get a nice car."
Not Just a Problem for Consumers
And then there's e-mail phishing. This is the practice of using e-mail to entice unsuspecting consumers to click through a link to a Web site that may look as if it's operated by their bank or another financial institution. Typically, a phishing e-mail informs the consumer that his bank needs him to "change your password right away." Thinking the message is legitimate, consumers click through, type in their account information and password, and soon learn the hard way that the message they received didn't really come from their bank at all.
While it's a big problem for consumers, it can also be a major problem for the banks or brokerage firms whose brands are used to carry out the crime. Phishing e-mails accounted for 16 million e-mails sent per day during MarkMonitor's sample period, up 104% in the first quarter of 2007, vs. the same period in 2006. Felman says 229 companies were the targets of phishing, and more than half of those were targeted for the first time. Banks, credit unions, PayPal (eBay's payment service), and even the Internal Revenue Service have seen their names used in phishing campaigns.
Capitalizing on Consumer Confusion
Phishing is clearly on the rise. A study by the Anti-Phishing Working Group found that the number of unique Web sites devoted to phishing jumped to just more than 16,000 by February, 2007, from 10,091 in August, 2006. "The problem is definitely not getting better," says Dan Hubbard, vice-president of security research at Websense (WBSN), which shares its phishing data with the anti-phishing group.
Another reason for the surge in phishing comes from simple consumer confusion. "We believe a lot of it is due to the confusion people have over the introduction of new security methods that banks introduce," he says. "Plus, there's been a lot of mergers and acquisitions of different banks. The customer is dealing with a new entity and that creates some confusion that phishers can use to their advantage."
Keeping a close watch on your brand is something every company with online operations has to do, says Del Ross, head of brand distribution and marketing for InterContinental, the hotel chain. "It's cheaper to spend the money to protect your brands than not to protect them," says Ross. "Just about everyone with a brand to protect has or will have this problem, and it's going to get worse."
Hesseldahl is a reporter for BusinessWeek.com.
U.S. Agency Revenue Jumps 8.8% to $28.2 Billion
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