The scammer plagiarized eBay and Paypal’s email designs to try to get me to send the item I was selling all the way to Nigeria.

Here’s what happened. I put my iPod touch on eBay (because I got a new iPhone, yay!) on the 18th of August 2009, with no reserve and a starting price of £0.99. The auction would last 7 days. I monitored a couple of other similar iPods in the meantime to see what they were going for. I was expecting a final auction price of around £150.

As the auction took place, I got a few watchers and eventually a few bidders. As often on eBay, most of bidding occured towards the end of the auction. I got a couple of people to bid just above £100, then someone at £155, and then, someone at £815!!!

I thought, “hang on, who can be stupid enough to pay £815 for a used iPod when their retail price is around £200???”. The person’s username on eBay was “richard.carpentier”, which at first sounded like quite a generic name. I almost immediately got an email from this Richard Carpentier, asking me to transfer them my paypal details so they would be able to proceed with the payment.

I emailed this person through eBay, asking them whether they were a genuine buyer or a scammer. Never got a reply. What I got was a fake email from Paypal, stating that I’d received the funds on my Paypal account and should proceed with shipping the item. If you have a closer look at the image on the right, you’ll see that the email isn’t directly from Paypal, it’s from this “transactionsdetailcentre@europemail.com”… not quite Paypal, huh?

This Richard person (who I suspect is probably more a small organisation) was hoping that I wouldn’t log into my paypal account to verify the money had been sent properly. Instead, they hoped that I would just read this email, trust it, and, hang on, ship the iPod to Nigeria! Who buys iPods in Nigeria on eBay these days? None, from my experience!

Worst even, I got another fake email from eBay threatening me on a strike for the item, if I didn’t pay promptly! This was the best part f it. The design of the email was so convincing, anyone could have been scared and paid the money straight away. Although I must say being threatened usually gives me suspicions on the real intentions of the buyer.

This type of scam is pretty simple. The scammer hooks you by offering you a lot of money. They then use the technique of plagiarising the look and feel of the emails they will send to pretend they are genuine. They divert your attention by offering a very decent amount of money, whereas all they want is the item. You will never see the money in your account, but you’ll happily send them the item, if you don’t check your real account.

In this particular case the scam was quite obvious – no one would pay more than market value for an iPod on eBay! But what if their bid was just over the price for which I sold it for eventually? What if they’d put a bid on for £165, instead of £815? Then it would have been difficult to spot the scam. After all, what they get at the end of the day is just the value of the iPod, nothing else.

Bottom line is, if they’d thought things through, they could easily have scammed me. Luckily they were stupid enough not to! From now on I’ll be very careful with eBay and Paypal. If you’re reading this, you should also be very vigilant. Easy money online is usually fake money, at least that’s what I like to think!

Click here for the full story.

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Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, gives an insight to Spencer Kelly of the BBC’s programme >Click about the differences in opinion in the way things are currently being run at Apple.

One interesting insight is the fact that Woz still considers himself as an engineer and supports the open-source cause, by mentionning that he supports hackers who try to create new and innovative software for the iPhone.

Have a look and feel free to leave some comments

F

The reader comes to the realisation that the accomplishments of young genius Bill Gates were no coïncidence. Coming from a comfortable middle class background, Gates attended one of the most prestigious private schools in the state of Washington, Lakeside School, whilst his dad was an important Seattle lawyer and his mother sat on the board of directors of the First Interstate Bank. The relationships forged through the school and Bill’s parents will turn out to be highly valuable in the development of the future billion-dollar corporation.

As usual, instead of wiriting a long (and boring) summary of the book, I’ll provide with a list of the key and interesting facts I came across in the book. Here it goes:

- In 1972, Gates went to D.C. to work as a page in the U.S. House of Representatives, where he bought 5,000 McGovern-Eagleton buttons for a nickel each ($250 on total). When McGovern dropped Thomas Eagleton from the preseidential ticket, Gates sold the scarce buttons as collector’s items for $25 each, makeing several thousan dollars in profit. He was 17.

- Bill can fall asleep instantaneously. When he flies, it is said he can sleep through the whole flight by putting a blanket over his head.

- Scott Drill recalled of Bill when he went to Harvard: “My perception of Bill’s lifestyle, and it was a lot of people’s perception, was that he spent his time either playing poker or in the computer room.” (p62 in the book).

- Steve Ballmer, who would become Microsoft’s 24th employee in 1980 and first business manager for Bill Gates, lived down the hall from Bill at Currier house in Harvard. He would go on to become the Chief Executive Officer of the Microsoft Corporation in 2000. His wealth is valued at $15 billion.

- Gates’ first attempt to counteract software theft happened in 1976 with an open letter to computer hobbyists in the Altair newsletter entitled Computer Notes. In this letter he would for the first time state his position on piracy, by explaining how difficult (at the time) it was to make a living out of making software.
Letter here

- Ed Roberts, founder of MITS, who commisionned Gates and Paul Allen to write the BASIC for the 8080, lost the deal of the century when he accepted to give away all the rights to the BASIC to Microsoft instead of Pertec, who was acquiring MITS at the time. If Pertec had prevailed, there might not have been a Microsoft today, as BASIC was one of the first successful products Microsoft managed to license out.

- By 1977 Microsoft was established in Albuquerque, New Mexico. In the office employees wore jeans and sport shirts. Free Coca-cola was supplied by the company and still is to this day, for tens of thousands of employees Worldwide.

- Gates got his first Porsche in 1977, a Porsche 911, which had a stick gear shift. Gates and Allen having only driven automatic transmissions, they learned to drive manual gear shift in a parking lot. Shortly after buying his first Porsche, Gates went back to the dealer to complain it would only do 125 Mph.

- QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System) was developed by Seattle Computer in 1980 to compete with Microsoft’s BASIC Operating System. In 1981, Microsoft paid Seattle Computers $25,000 total for licensing QDOS and its source code. The contract stipulated that nothing in this licensing agreement shall require Microsoft to identify its customer to Seattle Computer Products”. The mystery customer Microsoft already had to sublicense QDOS was no less than IBM, with revenues at the time approaching nearly $30 billion. The licensing of QDOS would be the best move so far from Bill Gates.

- Later, Gates bought all rights to QDOS from Seattle Computer Products for $50,000. It was the bargain of the century. IBM also agreed to leave copyright on the operating system to Microsoft, which would make Microsoft a major player in the industry.

- In early 1980s, Gates predicted to a group of software developers that Microsoft expected half its revenues to come from the sale of software for the new Apple II computer. Gates was being nosy at Apple, to the extent that Steve Jobs had to tell his employees to shut up and not reveal Apple’s secrets such as the mouse that would come out soon onto the market. Jobs wanted Gates to know as little as possible about GUIs.

- When Microsoft brought Windows 3.0 out in 1990, they took a bit of the Apple. This wasn’t to the enjoyment of Apple computers, whom, in a statement by Marketing Director Jim Davis, said at the time: “Windows is simply and endorsement of what we’ve been doing all along. [...] Using Windows on a PC is like putting a Rolls Royce front on a Volkswagen Bug – a pretty face, but still a bug…”.

That’s it! Enjoy…

Any other interesting facts of the Microsoft Corporation? Don’t hesitate to share below

I’ll cut to the chase, here are some of the top Apple secrets (at least for me) that are revealed in Inside Steve Jobs:

- The new interface for the Mas OS X was prototyped using Macromedia Director in just 3 weeks. Steve Jobs was so impressed he told the Senior Designer Ratzlaff he believed he had an IQ of over 100.

- Jobs went around Silicon Valley’s top design firms to come up with a new case for the Apple II, which refused to take stock in Apple for doing the work. Jobs gave the work to Jerry Manock, a freelance designer who’d left HP and needed work.

- Pixar, the famous animation studio, was created by Steve Jobs after he left Apple Computers in 1985. In 1995, Pixar released Toy Story, the first fully computer-animated 3D movie. Jobs sold Pixar to Disney in 2006 for the sum of $7.4 billion.

- At San Francisco’s Moscone Center, the Apple Booth is shrouded in a twenty-foot high black curtain. Everything inside the curtain is also wrapped, even the MacWorld Presentation stage. The building is protected 24/7 by guards. Google wants to keep its secrets until the last minute!

- At Apple, everyone is scared of losing their jobs. Steve Jobs is extremely demanding of the people that work for him. This constant state of fear is known as the “hero / asshole rollercoaster”. One day you’re a hero, the other you’re an asshole.

- In recent years, everytime a major product has been completed at Apple, Steve Jobs decides to generously give away one copy to each member of staff. This includes the iPod Shuffles to each employee and the complimentary iPhone in 2007 (21,600 iPhones given away on total).

- Apple employees say “like many people, I tried to avoid him as much as possible” about Steve Jobs. If you walk in front of Steve’s office, who knows what will happen to you, you might even get fired!

- Steve is a militant vegan. One employee even changes from his leather shoes to canvas sneakers to go meet Steve Jobs, as he would not tolerate any form of animal skin in his office.

- The Cube, a beautifully designed, technically advanced Mac G4 machine was one of Steve Job’s technological babies, which he launched in July 2001. It was the wrong machine at the wrong time and the first mistake of Apple’s CEO since he had joined the company. Steve Jobs was stung.

- [Quote from the book, p194] : When it comes to innovation, Jobs is fond of quoting Picasso’s famous dictum: good artists copy, great artists steal. To which Jobs adds: “And we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas”.

That’s it! But there are lots more interesting facts about Apple and Steve Jobs in the book, so I highly recommend investing in a copy to find out more excitings insights on the company and its cofounder.

The top prize is a £250 travel voucher, which can be won simply by playing a game on the faceofglobalsearch website. This game is quite simple but fun and asks you 5 questions about your travel habits. It’s not the easiest game (took me a few attempts before success) but it’s quite fun and worth the chance of winning £250.

If you are a Search Engine Marketing Individual interested in Multilingual SEO, then you might want to get in touch with Oban Multilingual, who will be able to provide you with additional information as to how to increase the visibility of your website for international audiences. Simply go to www.obanmultilingual.com to read more on the subject.

And don’t forget to take part in the competition… after all I was involved in the design of the site

2- The servers used at Google are built by Google engineers and make use of their own Operating System.

3- For each page indexed on the Internet, a copy of that page is stored in 3 different locations worldwide.

4- The Google Chair, Eric Schmidtz, wasn’t initially keen on working for Google as he didn’t really see the potential in it.

5- There were over 20 million searches a day and Google was still not making any revenue.

6- When the group went public at NYSE in 2004, there was a long hesitation over how much should the shares be sold at. They finally agreed on a price of $85 (they are now worth almost $600) .

7- Larry Page and Sergey Brin are big fans of the Burning Man Festival in the Desert of Arizona, that they attend each year at the end of the summer.

8- Google has been facing lawsuits in many different countries due to privacy and IP infringement, including Belgium (Google News Snippets), India and Israël (Google Maps).

9- Google has controversially recruited former employees of Microsoft, including the Kai-Fu Lee, managing director of Google China, who has faced lawsuits by Microsoft for violating terms of his employment contract.

10- Larry Page and Sergey Brin offered to sell the Google algorithm to Yahoo in 1997, proposal Yahoo refused, making it the biggest mistake in its history. Today Google is showing interest in co-operating with Yahoo in an attempt to merge the companies in the future.

If you have any more you can think of, please do comment on this post:)

What I did discover is how Google is secretive about everything it does! I already knew they didn’t reveal details on search and indexing algorithms, but after reading this book, it sounds like working for Google is almost like converting to a new religion. Each and every idea that a Google employee comes up with stays into the Google HQ. Some ideas are even reviewed directly by Larry and Sergey! This chain of commandment is surprising for a company of that size.

This brings me to talk about the type of company Google is proning to have become. Amongst free lunch, travel, and TGIF (Thank God It’s Friday!) Google allows their employees to dedicate one whole day per week to personal projects (or 20% of their working time). This allows employees to allocate a considerable amount of work to potentially successful projects. It works both ways: employees are happy to work on something new and exciting, while Google profits from such innovations in terms of building innovative products. It’s a give / take relationship!

It seems like where Google really gets is right is by treating its employees like gold. OK, it might not be the easiest process (at least today) to get a job at Google – but when you get there, they make sure you don’t want to leave! The whole Google environment is built around innovating while having fun. This includes the design of the GooglePlex, as seen here. I believe this is a very strong incentive for young and bright professionals to apply and remain at Google: a forward-thinking and innovative company which treats its employees like gold. So what’s the hidden factor?

The book comes accross as a “praise” to Google. It uses a considerable amount of pages to explain the ethical and fair principles which are behind the whole advertising strategy. Any of the legal issues are dealt with very much care in the book, mentionning very or little downsides to Google’s privacy policies. It attempts to emphasize on the fact that Sergey and Larry are not driven by money, but rather their interests lie within the growing of the improvement and expansion of the company’s range of services.

The Google Story is a very good introduction for non-IT individuals, as it provides with a very good base of knowledge of the web and online advertising. It gives an introduction to the principles of search indexing, quality score, PageRank and PPC. This allows for a strong and relevant understanding of the underlying principles of online marketing.

For IT professionals like myself, the Google Story can come accross as very biased. It praises the fairness of Google methods and the range of free services it provides. I was expecting more information about the future plans for Google such as how it expects to tackle the privacy lawsuits it is facing or the inevitable pursuits for abuse of monopolistic position it will face in the near future. It is difficult to imagine the World without Google these days. It is doing a great job in terms of generating online revenue for many companies. I guess I just get a bit worried about all the information it is gathering about its millions of users. Who knows what could happen if it falls in the wrong hands…

review by Flo Devellennes

His idea is the following: providing Universal (planetary – not Universal Music) polls about any topic that people might be talking about – this goes from films, music, politics, news, etc. Once users have signed up, they can choose their top 5 artists, movies and books (for now, there will be more polls coming) and then find out which other users share the same interests. Pretty cool, huh???

Well, you might think, “OK, I’ve already seen this a milliontimes…” and you might be right. However, Glenn’s idea is to use the current popularity of social networks to make Poll the People a crucial part of any internet media which could potentially use the opinions of users. For example, an artist might want to use the Internet to poll the people about which of his new album’s tracks should become a hit single. If you take this idea further, it might go even as far as deciding who’s gonna be the next participant of Big Brother or who will get fired from the Apprentice. Possibilities are endless!

So there’s huge potential in Poll the People. Of course, being social media, it’s free, and uses money from advertising (for now) to generate revenues. If they manage to nail the current social online trend, they could get blogging widgets, facebook apps, etc. which would surely give them a large share of the market in that specific area.

After all, when was the last time you heard about a reliable, innovative and fun online polling system such as Poll The People? I think it’s worth a try. At least keep an eye out for all those new features Glenn has promised me (and some on which i’ve had the chance of brainstorming with) as there will be more coming soon.

Go ahead and give out your top 5 at www.pollthepeople.com, mine are:

1	Layer Cake (Matthew Vaughn)
why?
2	La Haine (Mathieu Kassovitz)
why?
3	Paris Je T’Aime (Alexander Payne/ Wes Craven/ Ethan Coen/ Alfonso Cuarón/ Isabel Coixet)
why?
4	Once (John Carney)
why?
5	300 (Zack Snyder)
why?

1. KISS – keep it simple stupid! First and most important rule. When you start designing a website or a GUI – sure you want it to look professional and fancy, sometimes with a bit of eye candy. It’s fine, as long as you remember that the interface is built for the user and therefore needs to speak to the user. If yourself find a feature hard to comprehend on the interface, then chances are the user will not understand it at all. Try to make everything obvious, visible and available for use to your target audience.

2. Typography – I see lots of websites breaking the fundamental rules of typography – make sure you allocate concise and straightforward spaces to text and content on the interface. You don’t want your user to bounce off the website because they find it overloaded with information. Make sure paragraphs are short, important words are highlighted and the information is structured with headings and bullet points.

3. Consistency – hugely important! You want your users to understand the interface you provide them with. Color codes must be respected throughout the site, as well as page layout, font-sizes and graphical elements. If you have links in underline dotted blue, make sure that rule is enforced on the whole interface. Same principle goes for headings, image captions, etc. In terms of graphics, try to keep the same style of imagery on your site – don’t include vector illustrations on one page and artistic photography on another. Sure a bit of variety is always good, but keep in mind the images should respect a global theme throughout the site.

4. Menu hierarchy – You have 20 items to include in your menu, but not sure whether to use a rollout menu, split the items into separate menus, use different color styles… Before you make a decision, take some time to think about which items in your menu need to be the most visible and which are more generic items (sitemap, contact, info, etc.). Ensure the menu items which are the most important are strikingly visible to the user. If necessary, you might want to consider having an additional call-to-action for those important links somewhere else on the page. For more generic items, ensure they are located in a typical spot on the interface (home, about, contact) towards the top of the website, or in a sidebar. Finally, always make sure you include a full list of links in the footer of your website, as this is also good for helping search engines crawl your website.

5. Start from the beginning – If you feel confused about where to start and have millions of ideas popping up in your brain about how your interface could look like, then sit down and write a simple list of inital requirements: what’s the title of the website, does it need a logo, what/how many links need to be included, how much content does the site require, are there any special features to be included (contact form, widgets, blog…), do you need to find a colour code… You will find that writing down (on paper, on screen is useless) will make much more sense once you sit down in front of your computer. Plus it gives you a nice screen break to think about it in all tranquility. It also enables you to think about how you can make the elements interact the best on the interface.

6. Technologies – Once you’ve decided what your website requirements are, start thinking about what technologies you are going to use to implement it. You might need a blog, some animations, videos, sounds, etc. It might be a good idea to opt for a CMS (Content Management System), which allows you (and your client) to easily make changes on the website. My favourite is Wordpress, which is by far one of the most customizable and user-friendly blogging platforms available out there, and it’s completely free!! Also think about Javascript functions, cookies, Flash, etc. in terms of accessibility. If you are targeting users which do not necessarily have access to modern computers, you might want to keep your website in plain HTML with CSS, to ensure its worldwide accessibility.

7. Search Engine Optimisation – indeed, this is related to usability. I believe that a great majority of the algorithms used by search engines to index and rank webpages can be perceived on a usability-level. For instance, a search algorithm might look at the quality of your content according to its hierarchy, the keyword density, the technology used, etc. These factors are deeply related to usability principles. Search engines will rank websites in a higher position just like users will rank usable websites higher than complex and unintuitive ones. Apply SEO theories to your websites and you will be on your way. I suggest www.seomoz.org to get started, probably one of the best online SEO resources out there.

8. Prototyping – You don’t want to spend days designing a system to then realise that it is completely unusable. Respect the progression of low-mid-high fidely prototypes. If you follow this progression and ensure for each step of the process that you perform some usability debugging then you’ll be on the right path. I suggest using a list of heuristics (rule-based method of identifying new issues) as a checklist to proceed to the next prototyping level. There are a few out there, including Jakob Nielsen’s famous list of heuristics.

9. User Testing – I used to hate this part of the usability process: building scenarios and personas to theoretically determine the issues of a graphical interface. Until I got to a level at which I had resources to test my GUIs on real people, and I must admit, IT WORKS. As a designer / developer, you end up spending so much time on a project you become unable to have any sort of objective (or subjective) judgement on your work. Testing it on other people is the best way to improve your interface. User testing will provide you with a list of problems you would never have come up with on your own. Submit your work to a new pair of eyes (friend, partner, colleague) and trust me you won’t regret it!

10. Believe in yourself – in usability, there are dozens of different ways of improving interfaces, but no universale method or sets of rules. The first achievement when attempting to design usable graphics interfaces is thinking with a usability mindset: ask yourself if the interface is good at what it’s supposed to do, are you happy with the way it looks and do you think others would be appealed by the idea of playing around with it. If you believe you have achieved all three, then you’re good to go beta-testing, and learn from the first batch of users.

That’s it, I’ll soon post some more about usability and marketing and especially how they can be used to improve your Return on Investment.