I’ve got to say that my stomach has been in a knot for the last few weeks as I have started to understand the implications of the new Michigan Business Tax. The MBT of course replaces the SBT (Single Business Tax) which itself was an outdated kludge of a tax.
What is astounding is that for a State that advertises itself as offering “The Upper Hand” to business, Michigan has given a huge handout to traditional manufacturing businesses to be paid for out of the pockets of service businesses…the very types of businesses that Michigan wants to attract and retain!
My oh my, it has been over six months since I have written here…
So…what to report? Well, I just got back from a BOSSdevils softball game. Not too often that you come from being down 19-4 to winning 22-20!
And yesterday I went to the Red Bull Air Races…my that was fun. I don’t think I saw a single person without their jaw hitting the floor as those planes burned through 230 mph doing knife-edges 15 feet above the water. It was a fine day for Detroit, for once!
When Ebay bought Skype for 2.6B 2 years ago I wrote and wrote about what a loser of deal it was. Now apparently Ebay has come to the same conclusion. Yesterday Ebay took a 900 million dollar write down of the value of Skype on its books.
Ouch!
An eBay spokesman said: “Skype has not performed as well as we would have hoped. And we are disappointed about the impairment charge. But we still believe Skype to be an extremely valuable asset.”
Well….Skype could have been something revolutionary were it integrated directly Outlook, had MS bought it…but for now I believe that the relationship with Ebay will keep it from really changing things.
“Leaky PBX” was a name given to companies that tried to back door long distance into countries without paying the associated fees and tariffs. So for example in the mid 90s people would buy a datapipe into India and connect it to a call center. Then they would terminate the calls locally in India and make a fortune…often 20-30 cents per minute profit over several million minutes per month. Until they got shut down.
Getting shut down was almost guaranteed, given the lost profits by the incumbent monopoly.
Well, tonight it is another Episode of “Cue the Music, the Fat Lady is Already Singing” for Vonage.
With this recent judgment Vonage has to pay well over $100 M in damages to Verizon and Sprint for patent infringement. As a public company….while heavily burdensome, this isn’t insurmountable. What will kill Vonage is that Vonage now has to pay over 10% of their gross revenue ongoing to Verizon and Sprint. For a company struggling to show any operating profit at all….well….put a fork in them; they are done.
For a while now I’ve been meaning to write about the silliness going on in the naming of companies. Most of the new ones I have heard recently sound like characters from Willy Wonka. Apparently that is a plus!
Anyway, most decent-sounding .com domain names are already taken. So either we need to get used to unpronounceable business names, or find another solution.
One that I have been privately betting on is an emergent use of foreign Top Level Domains. Put it this way, if the domain “www.creditcheck.com” just sold for 3m, and all other obvious names are taken, would you consider “www.checkmycred.it” as an option, for $30?
Well, after maturing for years and years, you know I wouldn’t be talking about software bugs….no, this one is a new twist. Apparently, with some SIP VOIP phones “it is possible to automatically call a SIP device from that vendor and have it silently accept the call, even if it is still on the hook - instantly turning it into a classic bugged phone.”
Some people have asked me to upload some video showing how rough the water was over the site of the wreck of the Verelst, a lost “treasure ship” I dove on earlier in the year….so here you go.
Jeremy Allison, Google employee and DRM anti-pundit, recently wrote a great blog article called Why DRM Won’t Ever Work.
The major tenet of the article was that DRM simply won’t work because any DRM’d file–be it an HD DVD, BluRay DVD, or iTunes music–has to already have all of the information necessary to play the file. That fact coupled with the army of hackers vying for notoriety means that any DRM standard will be short lived.
