When I was a kid growing up in Iran, one of my favorite places to go was to my grandparents' on weekends. Sometimes they'd would order out Chelo-Kabab (lamb kebab with rice), and while many Iranians like their yoghurt drinks, for us no soft drink could complement Chelo-Kabab quite like an ice-cold Coke, or Koka, — Continue reading »
Amazon Associates Account Suspension
📆 May 16, 2010
The email came at night, but it wasn't completely unexpected. In a terse missive, Amazon accused me of violating their Terms of Service (TOS) and terminated my account. Reasons given: copying pages and links to other sites and search engines. In other words spamming other sites with specific Amazon links tagged with my id to — Continue reading »
eBay Classifieds
📆 April 3, 2010
I just happened to do a drive-by eBay's homepage today and noticed a promotion for their new eBay Classifieds. The first thing that popped into my head was Craigslist competition. I'm not much of an eBayer and I've never used Craigslist, but I do know about the on-going feud between the two companies. eBay has — Continue reading »
Yahoo Publisher Network Ends
📆 March 31, 2010
Can't say I was surprised when today I received an email from Yahoo announcing the end of the Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN). Yahoo introduced YPN a few years ago as a competitive product to Google Adsense. Those are the text and graphic banners you see on many sites (including this page) with a small type — Continue reading »
Microsoft Office on Google Adsense
📆 January 30, 2009
Hard to believe but sometimes even fierce adversaries use each other's services to promote their own products. I was a little incredulous when I saw the banner ad shown on the right on the homepage of this very site. It's from Microsoft advertising its Office 2007 suite on Google Adsense network. Who would have thought? — Continue reading »
Sales, Politics, and Religion
📆 May 23, 2008
For a brief period in my career I was encouraged to try my hand at sales. I was ok at it and made decent commissions but in the end I knew that sales wasn't my calling and I returned to my passion, technology, mainly programming. That brief stint taught me one lesson in salesmanship. When — Continue reading »
Face Cream Gimmick
📆 February 3, 2008
Microsoft's $45 billion offer to buy Yahoo has certainly intensified the online advertising scrutiny. No doubt the entire advertising industry is going through turbulent times. At $20 billion per year, online advertising is still a small fraction of the entire advertising market, but that figure is estimated to rise sharply as more people turn to — Continue reading »
High-Tech Sales Pitches
📆 December 5, 2007
So today I'm at my desk in the office fiddling with a new Web accelerator toy, er appliance, and I get the dreaded call transfer from the front desk. The Web caching box must've had fried my common sense and I took the call. It was a sales pitch. People who call my number at — Continue reading »
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