Vinny Lingham’s Blog

I’ve recently been appointed to the Society of Industry Leaders, part of Vista Research, of Standard & Poor (S&P 500) fame.

Here are some links to the press releases:

ITWeb

Biz-Community

Google today launched their widely expected, Google Finance.

This move opens up a direct attack on Microsoft Money & Yahoo Finance, the top 2 finance portals operated by Google’s chief competitors in the search space.

As you can expect, it’s very clean and very nice - well done to Google! Best of all, no ads - for now…

incuBeta Intelligent Marketing originally developed synthaSite™ as a proprietary application to produce affiliate websites. Our in-house success with synthaSite™ lead to the realization that synthaSite™ would be a valuable tool to affiliate marketers. We thus developed a public version of the application and proceeded with a beta testing program. Apart from the valuable feedback we received from our beta users, we also determined that we need to reconsider some architecture issues to address the unexpected high usage of synthaSite™.

Suspension of synthaSite™ Beta Program
We have decided to suspend the current beta program, while we address issues of scalability and server capacity. As this process will not be able to facilitate a proper support structure to public users, we have decided to discontinue the current beta program with effect from 2006-04-28. We do not have a launch date for our next round of Beta testing as yet.
Access to the synthaSite™ will be available until 2006-04-28. We advise you to finalize all sites before the above mentioned date. All deployed websites will still be functional after access to synthaSite™ has been closed. The feeds will not be editable after closure and this may affect the quality of feeds when they are updated on our server.

We shall continue to develop in-house sites that use our affiliate partner feeds, such as ThatShoe.com.

Thank you for your participation in our beta program. We will keep you updated on any further progress made on our public service offering over the next few months.

For those of you who don’t know, I have a background in Project Management and a formal qualification in that field. I also have worked with everything from Xplanner to Microsoft Project. I was amazed to recently come across (and begin using) a new type of project managment product, called Basecamp. I rarely, if ever, give software reviews on this blog, but I must say that this tool is incredible - and it’s free (for a basic subscription!). I’m only using an affiliate link to track how many people actually sign up to test response rates on this blog (I’m going to donate the money that I earn off it to charity!). So please click the link above in order to sign up.

I’ve turned this tool into a life management product. I look at every major or minor “To Do” which is not a once off item, as a project, especially when it involves other people. This way less things will slip through the cracks due to miscommunication. I’m so overburdened with emails at the moment, that having a collaboration tool like Basecamp reduces my reliance on checking my unread mails! I’m most impressed with it - I suggest that you all try it!

Google has finally spoken out about Click Fraud, after their $90m settlement today. From the analysis, it seems that Google estimated their click fraud to be no more than 1% of their total revenues - in my experience, that’s a very conservative estimate.