I’ve spend the last 4 years working for different antivirus vendors (Kaspersky and Trustport) helping consumers to buy and renew their antiviruses online.

The online sales industry of antiviruses is a bit strange. Vendors are still mostly oriented on retail market (well, they’ve build their empires based on brick-and-mortar retail sales). And online shops are basically copies of their retail ones.

But the Internet could give so much more both to vendors and to consumers, then just a virtual shelf.

As a tribute to all the time I’ve spend on antivirus industry I’ve started an information project Antivirus Direct. What are the goals of this project:

• To gather, analyze and visualize information about online sales of antivirus products
• To give customers a piece of mind about what exactly they’re buying and how exactly they’re making their choice
• (may be) to save some money to the customers

Currently I’ve found 53 active antivirus vendors with consumer e-shops,  12 vendors without normal e-shop online and numerous amounts of fake-antivirus brands.

Share on Facebook

The whole range of available Content Management Systems (CMSes) could be spread between two different poles:

• CMSes with  WYSIWYG-editor
• CMSes with just simple HTML-editors.

This division mostly defines how flexible you are in the updates of your content. Free CMSes like Joomla mostly just handle header, footer and menu system and let you anything you want in the content. You have to know some HTML in order to publish in this type of CMS. When I was talking about 3 steps of website management I meant exactly this one.

Most corporate CMSes as well as systems, specifically made for some content, like phpbb (forum engine) or wordpress (blog engine) take care about everything. You just need to enter plain text and pictures and the CMS will do everything for you. It sounds better, then the first type, but be careful! You have to have a strictly defined design, full functioning content department with strict policies and special team of web-developers, doing technical updates to this CMS. If you are talking about start-up, it’s Utopian to think you will be able to use WYSIWYG-style CMS.

Well, if you’re having a website building start-up, then yes, this may be the best solution.

Share on Facebook

You always have to patch!

Even if you finally insert a disk with Heavy Rain and get a message, that a patch of 1.1 gigabyte is available. How many bugs have they made if they need more that a gigabyte patch!! (yes, I know, they have added support of Move, it was a joke!)

The day before yesterday I’ve spend several hours trying to understand why PS3 Media server doesn’t want to fastforward and jump to chapters in the movies. After trying every possible combination of parameters and checking all possible log files I went to the developer website and found out they do have a new version available. And it helped immediately.

Yesterday one of Kaspersky sites was hacked a little bit. No hackers officially disclosure what exactly was done, so we don’t know for sure. But I’m almost positive somebody has’t patched something.

So the answer is – if you see a problem, first look if it’s already solved by the owners

Share on Facebook

Following my old post about the war of antispam v.s. e-mails.

One and a half years later, it looks like the situation is somewhat improved. Almost all the spam-filters know when to block a Viagra sale and when to pass an invitation to a business meeting. The only exception, at least for me, is still the companies, using Barracuda-powered appliances.

Dear Barraduca engineers, yes, in 21st century the following situations are common:

• Several companies could hide behind one ADSL ip-address
• Microsoft Outlook could send automatic meeting requests, which do look a bit formal
• management of DNS-records is available virtually to everybody, so some people could forget some of MAY and SHOULD causes in SMTP RFC
• CRMs tend to send emails, that’s what they’re for!

Well, actually Barracuda is not the worst case, if you kneel in front of it’s robots, it allows you to send some e-mail.

But availability of open-source solution allows small companies to attempt to provide e-mail filtering services with the help of ubuntu, phostfix, ip-tables and a bit of perl-scripting. One Israeli company is offering such services of a modest price all around the world. As an additional feature, they send non-deliverable notifications from different address and with different format. Which prevents some of mailing software (Microsoft Exchange 2007 in this situation) to detect loops.

As a result I know now how an inbox with 500.000 unread email looks like. And how to delete all those e-mails.

Share on Facebook

And the third time I’m importing the same database over and over again. On step 3 of 5 I found some inconsistencies. It looks like we have a lot of contact details with missing data.

The biggest problems is that people don’t want to fill the information. They don’t care about internal structure (well, it’s not their structure, after all, it’s just mine).

So even if you set up some fields as “mandatory” in the forms, people will come with huge XLS-sheets of data to import. Where, of course, there will be no structure and a lot of data missing. You have to implement nazi-style policies in order to keep the information available for analysis

Well, the good thing is that after the migration the data will be clean after all.

Share on Facebook

Today I’ve started another migration of company data from one CRM to another. Last time I did it from Goldmine 6.0 to MS CRM 3.0. This time the task is much easier: from CRM 4.0 to CRM 4.0.

List of Things to migrate:

• customisations and special fields
• account data with all account details, notes and contacts (this one is still running while I’m writing this post)
• accounts hierarchy
• all additional and non-account related contacts
• order history

It’s almost always easier to break all the old data to small pieces and combine them into the new structure. At the same moment you can delete garbage and old data and even analyze, which parts of the CRM structure were more useful than another.

After already 3rd generation of the same business model I can see that some of the features of CRM are used by sales people and which aren’t. The most important for them by far are contact details and notes. Sales love notes, it allows them to store information without thinking about business intelligence models. Of course, sometimes they ask questions like “which resellers perform better in 2009, than in 2008″. For such questions you should have all order history stored in a neat structured way. Even if nobody is enjoying it every day.

Share on Facebook

The first question after buying a TV was: what exactly am I supposed to watch? I’ve never actually watched any broadcast TV-channels in by life. Of course, I love TV-shows and movies, I just don’t like the channels itself. Too many commercials, not enough choice. I prefer to get the content via the Internet.

This makes the problem  a bit easier : how to transfer different audio/video content from a hard disk of a desktop to a TV?

There is, of course, technology, especially created for that – HTPC – Home Theater Personal Computer. It’s a Wintel-based computer, sitting next to the TV and using the TV as a big monitor. Only HTPC guaranties, that all the movies with different codecs and subtitles could be watched without glitches or delays. But it jas a disadvantage  - you need a separate device.

However, the TV itself and, for example, a game console like Sony PlayStation have a possibility to play audio-video content via DLNA protocol directly from a PC. At least you get this solution for free. You must be able to install the DLNA-server and connect it to your TV. The Media Player on Windows 7 actually could do it, but I was not able to install it properly. Free solutions from Internet were not very stable: they crashed and gave strange error messages.

The solution with PlayStation looks much better. First of all, the software, which can stream video to the game station – PS3 Media Server looks much more stable.  At least I was able to watch an episode of Fringe yesterday. Second , it’s possible to send the 5.1 sound not to the TV-speakers, but to an external 5.1 amplifier. The disadvantage is – you have to use a game controller to watch movies (or buy a special remote control for it).

All the solutions have their advantages and disadvantages. Probably I’ll have to try them all before choosing the best one.

Share on Facebook

Today I’ve spend half of the day meeting with a web development company. They use a very nice way to convert from MRD (Marketing Requirements Document, which is basically list of features, which sales and marketing want to have implemented in the product) to TRD (Technical Requirements Document, which is a description of functions, procedures and interfaces of the product, written especially for programmers).

The project manager basically creates a wiki-database with functional description of all the technical features. At the beginning this wikipedia contains only the list, which could be printed and signed by the client. Later, all functions, data structures and interfaces find place in the same database, hyperlinked to each other.

They spend more time on building this wiki, than on actuall coding at the end. Simply Brilliant!

Share on Facebook

The situation with domain name registration should follow the same rules, as with the web SSL-certificates. Why should they charge a lot of money for the job, which is actually is just a query to a database. Like, for example,  storing and changing a DNS name. Especially when there is a competition. Prices must inevitably drop.

1. Just yesterday I’ve tried to move a number of domains to our new account byNXS.  They’ve asked €12.50 per domain.
2. Then I found that by Trans-IP you got the same for €4.95 per name.
3. At the end, when I made a free account by Trans-IP, I even got those for €0 (nil, or zero).

That’s the right direction. I think domain registration will simply became free addition to hosting services or something like that.

Share on Facebook

The prices of SSL-certificates is going to change. The server certificates will be cheaper, much cheaper. Currently you can spend from $10 (ten) up to $2500  for a certificate. Very interesting question, why such big difference?

Some time ago I worked for a company, which positioned itself on a paranoid academic level of security. The way we viewed certificates came straight from Bruce Schneier “Applied Cryptography”. If you want to secured public-key cryphographical exchange with your bank, you must have a 3rd party, the Certificate Authority, which knows both you and the bank.

This Authority must be very authoritative, obviously. It’s located something above all the banks and the users and provides insurance of the security.  One of the reasons why the websites pay so much for certificates.

Who is this authority nowdays? Actually, it’s Microsoft Internet Explorer (together with his brothers – Firefox, Chrome and others)! When you connect to a bank or to a e-shop, check your SSL-certificate and enjoy reassuring icon of a lock, you trust the CA-certificates, which are currently hard-coded in your Internet Explorer (for the IE actually they’re in the Windows itself, but it’s not important at that moment).

If you want your web-server to be available for secured connections to the whole world, you have to buy a certificate from one of guys in the list. Doesn’t matter actually, who. I’m not saying it’s insecure, it’s basically OK. Bruce Schneier may not like it, but the system works.

Now the funny thing.  The production of actuall certificate cost nothing, it’s just genaration of  numbers and files.  And you see how many Trusted Root Certification Authorities are in the list. There famous “invisible hand” must start to work. The prices should go down, dramatically.

Well, last month I’ve received notices from two different CAs about renewal of my certificates (Thawte and GlobalSign). Both gave discounted offers for ~150 and 200 euro’s. Minimum. If I’d wanted a nice green URL by my e-shop, I’d have to pay more that 1000!  However, on another website http://www.namecheap.com/ I was able to buy the same service for $10.95.  Yes, they started it! One of the “Authorities” (GlobalSign in this case )  has dropped the price. Dramatically.

Now we should just wait, the whole market must follow.

Share on Facebook