Serguei Alleko Blog

Following my post about cyberpunk-style satellite communications I’ve found, that we just bought a 4th satellite-technology device in our family – GPS Garmin nuvi 860T.  The other 3 were – GPS-receiver for my old Nokia e61i, GPS in my car and satellite dish for Russian TV for my mother in law.

many years I mostly use TomTom mobile software for Nokia and I was happy about it. Nice clear map and voice from a woman called “Jane”. Except a couple of cases, when Jane for example lead us to impossible Chowchilla Montain Road, it worked just fine.

So I’ve assumed all modern GPS devices should be fine. That was a mistake.

My wife bought this GPS Garmin nuvi 860T (sorry I don’t know where to put a link, there is no easy-to-find description on Garmin site) for €240 (discounted from €400). This device, which I immediately called Susanin, has the following features:

• He speaks a LOT. Even tries to pronounce the names of the streets according to English grammatical rules ( OK, this part could be fun at first, when he tries to pronounce “Diependaalselaan” for example)
• Actually information about name of the street doesn’t help with navigation, it’s seldom clearly written in Belguim or Netherlands. It only divers your attention from driving.
• Susanin can not even pronounce correctly. somehow he doesn’t have enough processor power to generate a simple voice (in 2009!)
• The map is unclear and looks really strange. It may be nice in USA, where the most cities are build in squares, but try to use it in a place like Hilversum, for example. You’ll lose yourself in a sticky web of small gray lines.
• He has very annoying notification about speed control cameras. According to him, all the highways in Belgium are full with cameras (in reality there is may be 1 per 100 km and even those seldom work). But Susanin beeps every 5 minutes with huge stupid warnings.
• Apparently the map from Navteq he’s using is very old. It has made a decision to use old and slow A12 from Brussels to Antwerp instead of fast E19. Really strange, I’ve just updated the map via Internet.

Worst:

• Susanin constantly loses the car in the city. it a crowded area every 3 minutes it founds the car on the next small street, recalculates and gives advices which have nothing to do with the real position of the car. Apparently it doesn’t use SirfStarIII, which almost never has such problems with my TomTom
• And he can not be returned (some strange rules about GPS devices activation). So, we’re stuck with the annoying bastard.

Fro me Garmin is not an option anymore. Why didn’t I stick with TomTom!

As a normal male kid, I hated Russian literature lessons in the school. I just couldn’t understand why people do what do in the books. After the explanation from the teacher it was clearer and I could follow the story.

Even then Dostoevsky was my favorite. May be because the book from the official program was so unlike others – it was filled with killers, prostitutes, rapists and suicides. Boys like this kind of stuff, aggression lets some of the internal pressure of the adolescence off.

Later when I started to be interested in how people operate, what drives them, I found that the actual field of knowledge is not that important. You can put a lot of disciplines in one like around people:

• history – how people operated
• management, psychology – how people are operating now
• marketing – attempts to modulate future operations of people

Fiction novels normally don’t have a lot of information about the internal structure of the people. Either they’re full of action or describing the operations of just one person – the author.

But not Dostoevsky. It’s his characteristics – he delivers in his books enormous amount if information on the subject of people.  Very often I can find typical examples of people around me in those books, written more that 100 years ago. Scene about students coming to demand their money from count Mishkin in Idiot - very typical behavior of any aggressive newbies on an Internet forum, also known as trolling.

Recently I’ve finished 4th of the most known 5 novels form Dostoevsky – The Adolescent. It’s not a very easy reading, which is only expected from a diary of 19-year old kid (well, 100 years ago he was actually a young man already).  The young man has very big problems in understanding how people around him operate (which is also very normal for 19 years old). Almost through the whole book he tries to understand, what adult people around them want and fails to build a structured model of their behaviour. Well, it’s just a kid after all, it’s clear from the name of the book.

The kid is also as bent as the soviet sickle, and as hard as the hammer that crosses it, which is also something to be expected. So may emotions, so many feelins, it makes me jelous. The positive part also is that the kid is not dead or mentally destroyed at the end of the book, like it normally happens with Dostoevsky heroes.

I recommend it to everybody.

One of the most distinguished features of cyberpunk is availability of new advanced technology to the poorest groups of people. In Bladerunner a medical lab could be found in the dirty slums, in Snowcrash an uneducated biker caries nuclear weapon and so on.

Part of this could also be found in our lives. In Europe satellite communications are a distinguished characteristics of poor Turkish, Russian or Moroccan districts. People use satellite dishes to watch free TV in their native languages.

The future is now!

Yesterday we had a visit from our European director of eCommerce. This is this the aproximate list of topics under discussion:

• Sales statistics and analyse
• agencies cooperation
• Reporting
• User interaction
• Other online shops
• Electronic distributors relationships
• Co-operations
• Illegal products
• Marketing

After coming to the end of this list, I was wondering, what kind of job this is? Which department should it belong to – Consumer Sales, Marketing or may be IT (looking at the number of technical issues). Currently it’s considered as a part of Sales team and we have sales benefits and responsibilities, such as target revenues. But is it the best place.

I guess the position of “eCommerce manager” is something like “webmaster” 10 years ago. A person who can manage all aspects of a website – system administration, application configuration, content publishing, copyrighting, design.

This position doesn’t exist anymore, different people fulfill the parts of this “webmaster”.

May be 10 years later there will be no “online sales” or e-commerce department, the responsibilities will be splitted between Marketing, Sales, IT and Security people.

Lets talk about selling computer software for consumer market.

Two major ways to do it are – retail and online (there are more, but lets take the big ones).

Retail – in this case I mean just simply boxes in the stores.

Online – obvious.

The biggest difference is in the approach to your customer. With retail it’s almost always indirect. You’re selling to distributors, they’re selling to resellers, resellers are selling to the actual clients. It’s a big field for so called “sales” people. People in nice suits with inborn capacity to speak all  day long. They can pursue another sales people to start selling. At the end the product appears on the shelves of the stores and if its there – it could be bought. In retail you have to push hard in order to let customers to pull your product from the shelf.

Online is a bit different. You are always in direct communication with the client. Banners, affiliates, google – they can only bring the customer to you, they will not sell him anything. It’s only you and your client. Online you don’t have to push hard, you just need to make customer to pull the product.

And this is not even “sales” anymore, it’s more “marketing” – fight in the head of the customer.

URLs are the connections between different sites and businesses. If you plan an action with your online partner for promotion of a specified product via a specified landing page, you’ll come at the end to the URL.

In the URL normally you can find all this information:

• what product is promoted
• who is the partner
• is there any special discount

which makes an URL a big deal.

There is even more: URLs, toothpaste and freedom have something in common – once they are let out, its very hard to put them in! If you send it to your partner or branded on a CD-Rom or simply let Google robot find it – you can not change it later.

This may sound a bit too obvoius, but many our online partners came to this decision independently and it was not very obvious for them – you need to be able to control your URLs.  Everybody understands that they need some kind of a redirection service.

If you made an URL like http://yourwebsite.com/buy_now.php?product=123&affiliate=345 don’t give it to your partner!

Make another one, like http://yourwebsite.com/redirect.php?redirect=12345 and use some redirection technology to send it to the real one.

Examples of technology can be used for that:

• simple HTML with Refresh META tag (very old, I know)
• URL cloaking services, like tiny url (although you outsource part of your system to an external party, which is not always great)
• mod_rewrite from your Apache (for hardcore coders, who manage their services via ssh only!)
• your own custom solution (if you have a custom web-shop,you can also build your own URL redirection service)

I just came back from the long weekend (4 days) near Basel.

Just north of Basel lays Baden - the most known region for german white wine

And this is Basel itself (they do understand what BIG cappuchino means)

Soon more photo’s and not from telephone

We’ve got again a number of products, bought via our e-store with stolen credit cards.

Sins we’re sending our products – activation codes electronically per email, customers can supply bogus delivery address an still receive their code via a temporary gmail account.

At this moment we have the following limits on our e-store:

• no credit cards from countries except Europa are allowed (our e-shop officially sells only in Benelux)
• IP of the user must belong to the same country as the card issues (sorry, problems for Dutch guys, who went on “caravans” to Spain and decided to buy antivirus there)
• There are strict limits on number of purchases and amounts

And still they’re coming through! Some Dutch credit cards were stolen and used from the Netherlands (or via a Dutch proxy)

We’re sending all the money back, of course, we don’t want to be a bad e-shop. And when I was 3 days too late to do it, I had a visit from a fraud controller form our MasterCard/Visa acquirer. Better to be neat next time.

And of course, we don’t have any protection and virtually no fraude with iDEAL