Exile From the Herd

Apparently today is iPhone-day in Canada, and this is one of the smaller line-ups for them, out near my place on the way into work. Bear in mind it has been raining fairly hard all morning and from what I've heard, the data pricing on the Rogers iPhone isn't the greatest.

Readers of this blog know I've been using a an unlocked iPhone on fido for quite some time now - I have a very old contract with Fido, unlimited data transfers that's been grandfathered in ever since. You can't buy these anymore, which is why I faithfully renew this contract with Fido and just use whatever phone I want on their network by only buying GSM unlocked phones, or in the case of the iPhone, finding out how to unlock them.

My former CIRA-Board colleague Michael Geist has pointed out that if Bill C-61 passes, GSM unlocking your (repeat YOUR) own phone will become unlawful. (I was unaware of this, which is why I recommend everyone subscribe to Michael's blog feed, he keeps on top of this stuff).

Suffice it to say, this is retarded but life is sometimes a tale told by idiots, especially when we implicitly feel like we couldn't get through our daily lives without installing a few of them to govern us.

This morning's post basically comes down to three themes for me:

1. People are lemmings. The ones that really wanted an Iphone waited, and waited, and waited until somebody told them "now is the time but you have to use Carrier X" and they will wait, in the rain, for hours to get it on terms dictated to them by somebody else. A cursory cost/benefit analysis by any of these people would have led them to the conclusion that they would have been further ahead buying one off of Ebay, or even right here in Toronto at a place like Bongo Wireless, already unlocked and able to use under one's own existing cellphone contract.
   
   
2. Apple is making the same mistake again. They originally lost the desktop market to windows because they wouldn't open up the licensing, yes, they've bounced back in recent years but not too long ago, they were on a deathwatch. All it takes is somebody (*cough* google *cough*), it doesn't matter who, to come up with the next "sexy must have wireless device" and release it unlocked and unrestricted and Apple will take it up the nads again. The sheer volume of the "grey market" for iphones should have telegraphed to Apple that there was far more upside to selling the damn phone unlocked to anyone who wanted it with any carrier.
   
   
3. For good or ill, for the right reasons or the wrong reasons, Artificial barriers create opportunities. If Bill C-61 passes, I will not sign some NDP petition, I will not picket in the streets, I will not go egg Jim Prentice's car. I will go into business. I have already been researching GSM unlocked, Wifi-enabled, dual-mode SIP/VOiP smartphones: there are a bunch being manufactured in China, there are a few Linux based ones - I'm going to start selling these things and running my own sip proxy to route the VOIP traffic. I am betting that over the long term, people will choose open access and mobility over lock-in - we built easyDNS on this concept - the telecom landscape is ripe for it.
   

For some reason, PrivateWorld.com, the domain name I recently moved my personal blog to, a domain I've owned since 1997 and used to house the company website from a previous partnership (Private World Communications) was delisted from the Google index. I'm not sure when it happened as I was receiving traffic from google via this domain almost immediately over the cutover.

To avoid a possible penalty for duplicate content I began using a 301 redirect from my previous Mark.Jeftovic.net blog hostname. No good deed goes unpunished, they say. Once PrivateWorld got dropped from the index I was gone completely since the 301 redirect had basically transferred all my pagerank and indexed pages to the now dropped name.

I think way to handle a situation like this is to ask around on the Google webmaster groups and ask about your particular domain, because Google staffers tend to read these and can sometimes address your site's particular circumstances.



Then watch this video and follow the steps therein. If you haven't already used the Google webmaster tools , there really is a wealth of information and diagnostics there about the Search Engine visibility of your website. I added my sitemap there so I could see what Google saw, I've requested reconsideration - which is supposed to take weeks, but after a few days I seem to be tricking back into the google index.

One of things I did notice under the webmaster tools is the keywords associated with my site content looked pretty "spammy" and I think those were old and dated back to a brief time when I just had the domain parked with a commercial domain parking service. If this is what got my domain dropped from the index, it is mildly startling to say the least. I'm used to seeing parked domains not appear in the google index, but I have also routinely "unparked" domains by developing them and found them appearing in the index within reasonable intervals (less than a few weeks) without seeming to be penalized for their past "parked" status.

So it's a mystery, but an unsettling one when it's unknown why it happened. When my personal blog gets dropped from the index, it's not the end of the world. But had it happened to a domain more central to my business interests, like say, easydns.com, it would be a non-trivial event that would really impact my business - and that scares me. So even though I seem to be re-appearing in the index, I'm hoping my reconsideration request produces an explanation on what caused this.

Some time ago Tucows (AMEX:TCX, TSX:TC) issued a press release reminding the world that they hold a sizable portfolio of premium domain names, the subtext to which was ostensibly "look at us, we're undervalued". Jay Westerdal over at DomainTools commented in his blog in essence that the premium domain portfolio of Tucows was not priced into the stock and in his estimation he could see the stock doubling within 2 years. Jay's assessment was an estimate. After looking at this in detail, I personally think Tucows has an intrinsic value between 0.94 and 1.58 per share (currently trading at .60) - Note that everything that follows is based on the CDN listing price.