Tag Archives: websites

Reviews

A review of My Life of Travel

My Life of TravelNo, that’s not my life of travel, it’s My Life of Travel, a site where travelling bloggers can document their adventures. Kiera Bailey of My Life of Travel invited me to write a review.

I love the concept of this site, which is so simple it can be expressed in only a few words, as I just did in my opening paragraph. Perhaps the folks there can take a clue from me, and rephrase their description of the site:

“My Life of Travel is a free web-based travel journal and travel research tool that lets travellers record their journeys, map travel histories, share tips with fellow tourists and keep in touch with friends and family, without the need for mass email communication and photo sharing sites.”

As you can see, this is noticeably longer that what I’ve got. What’s the word I’m looking for… ah, yes, verbose.

The site is built in .NET, which one can tell right away by the .aspx extension of the web pages. I found it interesting – uncommon, but interesting – that they chose to explain the technology that makes the site work.

Their service seems to be a win-win situation for everyone involved. Bloggers can host their journals and photos for free with them and make money from the web traffic by using their Google AdSense accounts, and My Life of Travel gets to be an entertaining source of information for many people, and also gets to sell advertising on its own to support its services. We, the web visitors, get to browse all the locations and see the world vicariously, through the eyes of intrepid travelers.

That’s the main draw of this site – for me, the web surfer. I can stumble on some pretty cool photos from different places in the world, and hopefully find out how that area is – what it’s like to travel through there. I might even pick up some useful advice, right? You could even call this site a travel wiki.

In theory, that’s how things are supposed to work. In practice, stuff gets a little boring. I chose to browse journals, and selected a drop-down menu for a location. I said, gee, wouldn’t it be nice to see photos from Antigua? Three journals came up for that, none of them with photos, and all with very little text, mostly one-line titles. It was like that for most smaller or out of the way places. And I suppose that’s to be expected, right? Until their site builds up to a critical mass of users, the world isn’t going to be well represented. One can’t hold that against them. So I chose bigger places, like Paris, or London. Stuff came up in the searches, but for some search results, even though I was supposed to get photos from those cities, I got photos from the countryside. I think the tagging system needs to be tweaked a bit to reflect locations better.

Then I started looking at photos. Most were group photos of people, or people standing in front of stuff – you know, the usual tourist photos. When there were landscape photos, the mix was about 50/50 between the good photos and the fuzzy or blurry ones. Again, typical. I started reading text, and most was the self-serving kind: I met up with buddies, drank some beer, hey, here’s a photo of me with some Guinness… etc. Typical once more, and that’s the caveat. Most people don’t know how or don’t care about keeping journals. They also don’t know how or don’t care to know how to take photos. So most of the stuff on the site is boring, run-of-the-mill, touristy stuff, the kind that’s good for a chuckle and a smirk, but doesn’t leave you feeling you’ve learned something.

If the entire site was like that, it wouldn’t be worth it. But, thankfully, it isn’t. They’ve done something smart, which is to highlight useful/popular member profiles. It also helps that these people take better photos, and usually write more useful things. Here’s an example of a good journal entry, with good photos. This is what makes this site worthwhile. What they need to do is to focus on these people and encourage them to keep blogging and posting. This sort of quality content is valuable stuff.

Bottom line: good travel site with great promise. They need to focus on building up their user base and encouraging people to post useful entries with great photos. It wouldn’t hurt to reward the valuable members through incentives of some kind, financial or otherwise.

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Thoughts

The story of Comeacross and Doublecross

I did a search for ComeAcross on Google today, and stumbled upon an old folktale printed in Bagdad in the early years of the 20th century. It’s recorded on the website of Allan D. Corre of the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, where it’s part of a collection of popular Arabic literature of the Jews. Read it, it’s nice, and the moral is good. I’m glad to see Comeacross behaved wisely even before it became an informative website! 😀

➡ Updated 2/17/08: ComeAcross was the name of my site from May 2006 to December 2007.

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Reviews

Caveat emptor: Davison Inventegration will just take your money

I’d forgotten about my bad experience with these people until they sent me some spam a couple of weeks ago. To return the favor, I’m going to tell you what I know of them, and believe me, it’s not pretty…

These days, they’ve got a new domain (davisongetresults.com) which acts as a forward to their old domain (davison54.com). They’re billing themselves as the inventor’s helper, and say they can “get your idea to market”. They’re still brandishing their “Inventegration” process, and they’re still puffing up their feathers about their proven experience of getting products to market. Check out the products they have gotten to market, and you be the judge of whether you’d call that experience. I have to chuckle at their marketing language: “Davison is fast becoming the industry leader when it comes to preparing and presenting new product ideas to corporations for possible licensing.” Compared to whom? By the way, surf the site to find out more about this Davison fellow, but you won’t find his full name or photograph anywhere. Does that begin to tell you something?

I’ll let you discover their website and judge it by yourselves. Let me not waste time and tell you about my experience. In ’03, I had an idea for a new faucet and fell for one of their spam emails. I contacted them, got their information package, and, not knowing any better, decided to go ahead and try to use them. The first step was their “confidential and professional” evaluation of my idea’s marketability – in other words, they would let me know whether my idea was worth pursuing. Hey, sounds good, right? I decided to go forward. In a couple of days, they contacted me and told me in no uncertain terms that they thought my idea was wonderful, and that they’d love to help me sell it to companies. I notice now they’ve gotten away from that nowadays. On their site, they say: “Davison does not perform analysis of the potential feasibility, marketability, patentability or profitability of ideas submitted to it.” But they WERE doing this when I dealt with them. So I guess they discovered it got them into too much hot water and decided it wasn’t worth it…

After telling me how good my idea was, the fellow with whom I dealt, possibly Davison himself, proceeded to give me the hard sell. They wouldn’t go ahead without a professional market study. After all, how could they gauge my idea’s marketability without one? No matter that they had just performed a professional analysis of my idea, a market study was still needed before we got to the good part, where they prepared my idea and marketed it to companies through their “exclusive contacts”. The cost, you ask? Oh, a mere $800, or a little less than that. For me, since I was cash strapped at the time, Davison would be able to take $100 off. What a nice guy, right? So I waited, and waited, and waited, after putting the bill on my credit card, and finally got my “professional market study”. I still have it, as a memento of my foolishness. It’s a bunch of web pages, printed out and stuck in a cheap binder, some from retail websites, and some from the US Patent Office database, where did a simple query on faucets. Basically, it’s all stuff marginally related to my idea, that they searched hastily and printed out. I could have done this myself in about 1-2 hours, but I ended up paying about $700 for it instead, because my powers of judgment must have been sleeping then.

So I figured okay, this sucks, but let me see what the next step is. I called them – they didn’t call me anymore this time. Davison probably figured that if I’m moronic enough to want to go forward after that botched up job they called a market study, then I deserve to lose my money… So I called him, and asked him how we’d proceed. I expressed my disappointment with the “market study”, and he said, nonchalantly, that that’s how they’re done… Ahem… Then he said all the preliminary steps were done, and and all we’d need to go forward with right now was the preparation of my product, and that he had the facilities to help me with that. I asked, what about presenting my idea to companies? No such thing yet, he said. We don’t want to risk rejection of your idea. First we need to prepare a model of your idea, so they have something in front of them. I knew I shouldn’t ask, but I did anyway… How much would it cost? Only $10,000-12,000, he said. (!)

It was then I realized I’d been strung along and pumped for cash, because I’d been a fool. But I figured, hey, let me do my homework, right? So I told him I needed to think about it, and I hung up the phone. Then I did my homework, which I should have done months before, and learned my lesson the hard way. Davison is part of a group of many inventor helper companies that have sprung up recently, that will pump naive inventors like me for money. The fools that we are, we believe they’re really interested in helping us, when all they care about is getting our money to supposedly “package our product for the market”. Their fees are ridiculous, and they don’t care if our ideas are good or not, but we fall for it, because we don’t know any better. If you don’t believe, do a search on the internet for “davison inventegration” or “davison idea” and see what you’ll find. Here is a sample of what’s there. Even the FTC has a published brief that was filed against these crooks, for “deceptive practices”.

I was a gentleman with him back then. I called him a couple of days later, and told him I was disappointed with the so called market study, and that I wouldn’t go forward with their “inventegration” process. This whole dirty matter would have stayed safely in my past if they hadn’t spammed me. Well, if they’re so thoughtless that they won’t let sleeping dogs lie, I hope this teaches them a lesson, and it teaches you, the reader with an idea, NOT to use them.

Updated 5/26/10: The FTC has gotten involved with Davison, due to all the claims people have filed against them, and Davison has settled and mailed checks to the people whose money they took under false pretenses. I received two letters (with checks enclosed), one in 2009, and one in 2010, mentioning the FTC lawsuit settlements. I’m posting them below for you. If you didn’t receive a settlement check and you’ve lost a lot of money with Davison, my advice to you is that you look into your legal options — talk with a trustworthy, knowledgeable lawyer and see what’s to be done.

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Reviews

New Hotmail shows Microsoft still playing catchup

I’ve been a user of Hotmail for several years, probably since 1998. I can’t remember the date very well, but it’s been a long time. The point is, I had a Hotmail account long before Gmail came out. Why do I say this? Because I stuck with Hotmail through the years. That’s not to say I wasn’t fed up with the service before – I had it up to my neck with the never-ending ads that overwhelmed the page.

What the Hotmail folks did recently is to move the service to the Live platform without regard for the users. While Hotmail worked fine on different browsers before, now it just doesn’t. Unless I use IE and only IE, the site doesn’t work properly. The functionality is stunted. I can choose between two modes, Classic and Live, and no matter which one I choose, unless I use IE, it just won’t work right. Just a few examples of the shortcomings: I can’t select multiple emails to designate them as Spam, I can’t empty my Junk Mail folder with one click, the site looks weird… The Live portal seems to do okay, but not Hotmail.

And while the Microsoft folks made a big deal about doing away with one of the ads on the page inside Hotmail, I still see two, and it’s still very annoying.

What’s worse, I can’t help playing the comparison game with Gmail. I love my Gmail account. I get barely any spam, and when I do, it’s sorted nicely in my Spam folder. Once in a while, a random message makes it to my inbox, only to be dispatched to its cyberspace grave. In Hotmail, unless I set my Spam filter to exclusive, spammers make it to my Inbox most every day. And if the filter’s set to exclusive, I run the risk of having legitimate emails end up in the Junk Email folder. I have to constantly check it and be barraged with ads for erectile dysfunction or penile enlargement and other such things. And the volume of spam that makes it to my Hotmail account is… voluminous, whereas at Gmail, it’s just a few every day. Hotmail obviously doesn’t have a very good spam filtering system, no matter what Bill Gates may say.

I also can’t help looking at my Gmail account’s size limit (now over 2GB), and Hotmail is still at 250MB. Let’s not forget that before Gmail came out, Hotmail was at 2MB. Not 20MB, not even 10MB, but 2MB! Pathetic… I had to constantly delete emails from my Inbox. If I hadn’t been able to POP into my Hotmail account with Outlook Express and download my messages, I’d have had to delete years’ worth of emails. That just wasn’t right.

While I’m on the subject, let me not forget that Gmail has worked cross-browser from the start. That includes IE, Firefox, Netscape, Mozilla, Camino, Safari, and I believe Konqueror. With Hotmail, and now with Live Mail, it’s IE or you’re guaranteed a less than full functionality experience. You’d think Microsoft, with all of its talent, could come up with something better, but no, they can’t… or won’t.

So, let’s see, Vista disappointed, Hotmail disappoints… Is there any other conclusion to draw, other than Microsoft is still playing catchup?

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Just designed two new websites

My wife teaches piano lessons to children and adults, and has also started to do primer music camps for children, so I designed two websites for her. The first is Fun Piano Lessons and the other is Fun Music Camps.

I want to point them out because I’m using the WordPress CMS to drive the sites, yet you won’t be able to tell that at first look. I designed completely custom templates for each that hide the usual WordPress functionality, so the sites look like normal websites, yet everything on them can be updated on the fly. Of course, I used pure CSS to drive the layout, styles, colors and graphics.

The other cool thing is that it only took me a day to do each site. That’s the power of leveraging the WordPress CMS platform! One can focus on the design aspects and the content, and leave the back end to WordPress. Why reinvent the wheel, right?

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