Authorize.net Issued Full Refund

After many emails and phone calls ending in a refusal to listen and act, Authorize.net did finally completely refund our setup fees. We applaud them for finally understanding that acting in good faith is more important than “policy”. Perhaps their policy will change?

Here’s a company that does everything they can to get you to sign up. If it doesn’t work out and you end up not using their services at all, they keep $120 signup fee after having done no work, furnished no services. They do this “because they can”, and I find it disgusting. Whatever you end up trying to do with online payments, avoid Authorize.net if possible.

Would it be that much trouble for a company like Authorize.net to examine the case on its merits and see that I am being screwed to the tune of $120? Yes, I signed up for their services, but no, I didn’t not receive any service of any kind. This was not their fault or mine. What is their fault is paying people to simply say “well, you signed this agreement” and not seeing that the agreement was unfair and in this one case, a case where we received zero benefit, needs to result in a full refund. So far, Authorize has deigned to refund two months of useless gateway charges which is better than nothing. The majority of the charge is the setup fee, for which they did nothing, invested no time or work, delivered no service.

Until this changes and they decide to pay me back the $120, I can only say: avoid using Authorize.net for credit card processing.

Authorize.net: “We are recording this call. You can not record it, though”

Authorize did issue a refund of setup fees for an account that did not ever serve.

Authorize.net: “We are recording this call, but YOU CAN’T” by VoIP Users Conference

Thinkup Talks: Gina Trapani, Andy Baio and a Cast of Thousands

The Thinkup Community assembles on the second Wednesday of the month to talk about our favorite project. Join us live sometime!

Thinkup Talks #2 January 12, 2010 by Thinkup

Gina Trapani, Andy Baio and some developers join me to talk about Thinkup App. You should try it soon.

Build “Call Me” Web Widgets for Any Web Page

“Call me” buttons have been around for a long time but still have not taken off. Zingaya enables voice calls through any computer, right from a web page without downloading anything. The button for your page is built on line in a few minutes. Using Zingaya’s user-friendly interface you can leverage some great features:

  • Cost-effective, rapid deployment
  • The button has the text you wish, size and color are adjustable
  • The widget can be limited to use on particular sites (domain names)
  • Call recording can be enabled and automatic
  • Voicemail can be used, playing a file you upload to your account
  • A single widget can call several phone numbers at once
  • A complete call history is available
  • Multiple widgets and multiple lines on an account
  • Calls can be routed via SIP or Skype, or to regular telephones or cellphones worldwide
  • e-commerce sites can implement “Call us now” buttons in minutes

Call me buttons would be a good addition to existing customer support/sales channels for any website doing business on the Internet. They allow you to support customers worldwide, where toll-free and callbacks are usually country/region specific and can be costly and time-consuming to set up.

Zingaya technology is Flash-based, which brings up a few caveats: It will not work on mobiles without Flash (notably iPhone and iPad). Flash sometimes causes problems on Linux and the Flash player must be a recent version. Adobe’s Flash Privacy Settings.

Musicians’ Online Visibility

Internet visibility.

Talent, musicianship, soul, creativity… whatever it is you want to put out there, it has to be visible on the Internet. As I look around at all my creative and talented friends, I see that very few of them are able to easily point to their work on social networks like Twitter and Facebook or even in an email. Here are a couple on concrete free suggestions to fix that. If you read what follows, there’s no excuse for not having a significant online presence.

Your tunes.

Youtube is huge, but unless you have video or a good with slide show-type presentations, it won’t be your best vector to point people to. If you’re a little geeky, you can find a free player to put on a site, like this one. However, I think the best way to go is to stick to your music and find a site that shows it off best. I have used two sites I think are excellent: AudioMicro.com and Soundcloud.com. My current favorite is Soundcloud because it has some cool extra features. For example, people can comment at a specific spot in your song. It’s social so you can actually discover new music and have other creatives discover yours. Let’s say for a moment that you take my advice and join Soundcloud.com free.

Soundcloud

After joining and adding some profile info, you’ll upload a few tunes. Each song has a lot of potential info like exact tempo, key, genre and license. You can choose from a restrictive license to “do whatever you want”. I like to use the creative commons license that specifies credit for use, but who knows if people respect that? You have to realize that there’s a huge amount of music out there and by putting it online, you’re giving some of it away.

Posterous


One dead easy way to put stuff out as an artist is Posterous.com. All you do is join the site, choose a setup and publish. You can publish by sending an email to an address they furnish. The impressive part is that if you send an email with an mp3 song attached, Posterous will publish the text of your email and add a player for the tune automatically. The site I refer to above, http://sugarcane-harris.com is on Posterous is shown.

Posterous will also automatically publish a little gallery of photos you post. If you are a performing band or artist and have gigs and photos of those, this a great way to go, it’s easy and still free. Most importantly, you do not need to pay someone to help you because anyone, even drummers, can use these sites.

There are a lot of free ways to be present online, including Facebook – which I personally abhor – but also Tumblr, WordPress.org and a zillion others for the more or less geeky.

Summing up

If I had one piece of advice, it would be this: go join Soundcloud.com, put up about three songs. That whole thing will take you about 15 minutes, cost nothing and require an average IQ. If you want to go further, get a Posterous site and post stuff there. You can post a link on Facebook to a single tune on Soundcloud.com.

30 Million+ Wine Labels in Circulation Use AVIN code

To find out more about the AVIN please visit http://AVIN.cc

The AVIN code is a unique technology that solves an enormous challenge facing the wine industry, clean data. Andre Ribeirinho, of the website Adegga.com, has been working for 3 years to create an open standard for wine information and has recently achieved the milestone of having 30 million wine bottles labeled with the AVIN.

Like an ISBN for books, each vintage of every wine is assigned a unique number that consists of 13 digits preceded by the letters AVIN (ex: AVIN6452997073019), which includes various data points including wine name, region and varietals. This unique code is currently free for wineries to register and is guaranteed for life. The key benefit to using the AVIN is that there is no longer need to dispute the wine’s origin, spelling of the winery name or various other key factors.

“The AVIN is poised to change the wine world as the ISBN did the publishing world. Ask any book publisher whether they can survive without the ISBN. I highly doubt that you’ll find many people believing they could” says founder Andre Ribeirinho.

By becoming a central repository for information, AVIN helps to address internal wine trade issues as well as having customer marketing benefits. Over 25,000 different wines from around 7,500 wineries have already had an AVIN registered.

Wine retailers, importers, writers and also competition organizers can resolve numerous inventory queries by confirming wine details against the single information source.

The AVIN also has consumer marketing benefits. Wineries can print matrix barcode on the labels to create a dynamic and interactive wine buying experience. For example QRCodes permit smart phones to scan and extract information from the wine label itself, displaying this information on the customer’s phone but also with the possibility to link to awards, articles and stockists.

“Wine buying has always been a confusing process for the consumer. Today with the AVIN and QRCode technologies consumers can access information about the wine they are thinking about buying without having to guess” explains Andre.

The AVIN is currently setting up a Board of Directors to both manage the project and ensure the data remains free and accessible to all users into the future. Currently, any winery can head to http://www.avin.cc/ to create an AVIN code for their wine within minutes. For developers and individuals interested in using the AVIN in their wine related businesses, go here: http://www.avin.cc/api-documentation/ for more information.

“We believed that the AVIN would prove to be a good tool to make it easier for our customers and consumers to search/ to find online information about our wines, in this age of information.” Carrie Jorgenson – Cortes de Cima Winery

Social Media, SEO and the Vegematic

What do social media and the Vegematic have in common?

Ron Popeil would say, “How much would you expect to pay for lessons in social media? $500? $800? More?” More, apparently. I see one about to happen, offered for close to $1,000. So, what do you get for $1,000?, Well, you’ll listen to talks, the content of which is largely available free. You’ll hear pitches for companies presented as “talks” or “tutorials”. You’ll get to hang out with a few people who know what it’s all about, but most of the people there will be the marks, the punters, people who have paid $1,000 to hang out with you.

 

 

China and the Visibility Problem

(Copy of my own post on Wine Brands Blog to check CDN performance on this test site)

According to the luxury lifestyle blog Luxuo, “China is expected to be the world’s seventh largest wine consumer by 2013 as the nation’s thirst for vintages continues to grow amid an economic boom.”

A new challenge has presented itself in the past few months. After over 15 years experience on the web, I though I’d solved a lot of problems, but we have never had a reason to attempt to serve content into China until recently. After a Chinese-language site opened, we were getting reports of loading times so slow the sites were completely unusable. We visited Shanghai in May 2010, and it’s true that almost everything you look at it is abysmally slow from the average DSL connection. A site that uses Flash and video is not likely to load enough to be seen.

Recently, I did some tests in this area and found more complexity than I expected. The Internet in China, I’m told by one Chinese company, is not interconnected in the same way (peering) that most other countries employ. This means that even if you have hosting in Hong Kong (which you know is considered to be outside the mainland Internet) or in a single city like Shanghai, it still does not ensure decent delivery into other Chinese provinces.

Content Delivery Networks (CDN) exist for this reason, so we did more tests with 4 different CDN and found they all worked very well indeed – except in China! We tested Amazon Cloudfront CDN in Singapore and found it was no better than their US-based servers in delivery to China. There are specialized CDN for Mainland China (Akamai, ChinaCache, but these can be very costly. Most of our smaller producers whose wines are distributed in China will not be able to afford a five-digit monthly invoice to be present there. Even the less modest ones gasp when apprised of the costs involved.

We’re currently working on assembling specialized resources as a solution to this very real problem: Getting a wine web site to be not only visible, but usable. Even non-Flash, non-video heavy sites have a serious speed problem in Shanghai and other provinces, even if they show decent performance in, say, Hong Kong. Other complexities include licensing from the Chinese government, Chinese domain names (.cn,.com.cn), Chinese DNS and a presence of some kind at an address in China. We expect prices to drop significantly in the next two years, but until then, getting your web content into China will be tough going.

This is Orange

Orange France is the company whose non toll-free number I called twice a week for six weeks to get the phone line whose bill we were receiving every month connected to the Internet.

Orange France is the company who, week after week, told me “We guarantee you that we will fix this or call you or send an SMS with the staus of your issue within 72 hours.”

This is the company who has a specific support email which auto-responds with a surtaxed phone number to call for support.

This is the company whose support people (at multiple levels) told me “I don’t understand, I’m looking at your record and I see it isn’t connected. Yes, it should have been done. I am submitting an escalation request.”

Orange France is the company whose support person told me after 6 weeks, “You have to go to an Orange store to get the order cancelled and the equipment turned in.”

This is the company whose store, pictured above made me wait an hour while prospective suckers tried iPhones.

This is the company whose employee in the store pictured above told me “We can’t cancel the order.”

This is the company whose employee, when told “Orange support line told me to come here specifically to get you to cancel my order.”  in the store pictured above told me

“Yes, I know they say that on the phone, but it isn’t true. We can’t do it.”

This is the company whose employee showed a Powerpoint at HDComm with smiling children and marketing “We care” language that is 100% false and hypocritical.

Orange France is a company I have no love for at all. Now you have an idea why.

I see I am not alone. A collection of Twitter comments shows they have 100% negative appreciation.

StatusNet Desktop

I did a brief download and evaluation of this tool, StatusNet Desktop a client for Laconica instances like http://identi.ca and got as far as adding my two identities on the main identi.ca site. Something was wrong with the times it was showing, such as “ten minutes ago” for stuff posted in March. It’s my fault for not reading the docs at all but apparently even the army.Twit.tv instance can’t be added because it isn’t secure.

Ok, after some reading I decided to install a server instance, so I did. Now things are a bit more clear, this is the new “Laconica”? Much more fleshed out. Not limited to 140 characters, either. Looks good. Now to figure out what the “secure” part needs.