SEO Werkt!

It seems like I am always investigating new SEO leads. I’m constantly digging through sites, looking for SEO-related issues and opportunities. Sometimes I find glaring issues. Some SEO issues are really tough to find. It’s like in that Weird Al movie UHF when the kid has to find a…



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We’ve heard previous reports that North Korea was building their own PCs, but a more recent report out of the South Korean Dong-a Ilbo newspaper suggests that a tablet may also be in the works.

It’s unclear whether or not the tablet was made in North Korea or in China, though previous reports of a North Korean tablet demoed at the Pyongyang International Trade Fair were said to be developed at the Korea Computer Center. Then again, the national media has also said their computers were “designed and developed purely using [their] own expertise,” though a little digging proved otherwise.

There is said to be no camera on the device, and it has no access to the Internet. There is, however, an encyclopedia, games, eBooks and a map service.

They call it the Samjiyeon, which is a district in the Ryanggang province of North Korea that has its own airport, named after a group of three lakes. So essentially, it’s a tablet named after a location named after a lake trio. Very meta.

The translation gets difficult regarding price (any Korean speakers out there, a little help would be very appreciated), but we expect that this tablet, if real, will only get in the hands of an elite few.

Feeling overwhelmed by your inbox, your to-dos, your errands, your to-reads, and so on? Of course you are. We all are. Microsoft-ian and speaker Scott Hanselman delivers a practical and inspiring talk on digging yourself out of the guilt-ridden cycles of distraction and interruption, and it’s full of productivity gems. More »

It’s really beautiful outside. Like so beautiful if San Francisco is like this more often it will become really expensive to live here. Also, Quora is raising money according to the multiple people in the past week who have told me that Quora is raising money.

From what I’ve heard, the startup wants to raise between $30 to $50 million in its Series B, at a $400 million valuation — an amount which strangely enough seems modest in light of the billion dollar rounds being thrown about willy nilly.

While there is some prominent investor interest (and a lead, who I’m still digging on), co-founder Adam D’Angelo will also be investing his own money — Up to $20 million according to one source.

While Quora isn’t as splashy as, lets say, Pinterest, former Facebookers D’Angelo and co-founder Charlie Cheever are super geniuses who are slowly and meticulously building a world-class engineering team and culture — the smartest people want to work for either them or Palantir is something I hear all the time when I’m hanging out in Palo Alto on beautiful days like this.

“Very few realize how ambitious the opportunity is,” power user and TC Contributor Semil Shah tells me, “They are the ultimate outliers, a totally weird product that still in beta and not really fit for generic metrics. If I could put my entire 401K into Quora, I would. No questions.”

Quora (who declined to comment about the funding rumors) is now 30 people strong and currently expanding its offices to further scale and move its mobile app into Android. So at least we know where the new money will be going.

I’m on a privacy tear today so I thought I’d mention this start-up. Officially launching on Wednesday, Spotflux is a browser encryption plug-in for Windows and OS X. Simply put, it protects your Internet connection by encrypting all connections through a VPN. Arguably there are approximately a billion VPN services, but this one looks to be one of the simplest I’ve seen in a while.

To run it you simply download the app and flip a switch. The servers do the rest. A little digging shows us that the service used to be called RaptorVPN but is now rebranded as a simpler, cleaner offering. There is no mention of capacity, however, which is the Achilles heel of many of these VPN offerings. If the servers choke under pressure – and there’s no telling if they will right now – the service is worthless.

There are plenty of ways to keep others from snooping on your Internet traffice. While Spotflux is one, I personally like DNSCrypt coupled with OpenDNS to stop DNS snooping/spoofing and HideMyAss when I’m trying to pretend I’m not where I really am. Services like Spotflux offer a decidedly cheaper but less fully-featured experience for the average web user, ensuring that, on the aggregate, things that need to be kept in the dark (passwords, credit cards, and the like) will be kept in the dark.

The company raised $1 million in seed funding last year and was founded by Dean Mekkawy and Chris Naegelin. They’re based in Brooklyn, NY.

Keeping up on the news items that your friends share on Twitter or Facebook can sometimes be a full-time job—especially if you have a full-time job and can’t afford to stay on top of the interesting items your friends are linking to all day. Sure, you might add a couple to your Instapaper queue for later, but even just the act of digging through mountains of daily-life status updates for news from your friends can be a chore if you actually care about the links that they’re sharing.

Enter News.me, an online service that combs through your social network feeds and filters out the cruft to bring you a list of the most important news stories shared by the people you follow. Its genesis in 2011 was an idea out of the New York Times R&D lab that eventually bloomed into a full-on service. And on Thursday, News.me launched its first iPhone app along with a few new service improvements in hopes of capturing the attention of the news-consuming smartphone crowd.

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Several months back, times were feeling tough for me and my business. I had made lots of decisions that didn’t play out the way I wanted them to go. I bit off more than I could chew. As a way to start digging back out, I accepted some deals and offers that weren’t my typical arrangement, because I needed to do something to fix the problem I was in, and that required finding revenue – any revenue – to be able to fight another day.

The problem was this: I said yes while deep in the hurt, but the deals weren’t very good for me. Because of this, I affixed a kind of mental “chip on my shoulder” to the experience. I pretended with some part of my mind like this wasn’t going to happen at all. And then barring that, I just felt I could move through it quickly to the other side. Of course, that’s not how it went down. Suffice to say, no one was all that pleased with the results, least of all me.

Don’t Take a Bad Deal

Barring impending homelessness or a rush to get a kid an operation paid for, there’s probably no great time to take a deal that you don’t want. Regret is a really tricky emotion. It breeds all kinds of other emotions that aren’t very useful. It brings up contempt and generally doesn’t put you in a good state.

What I Learned

What I took away from that experience was something much larger than the sting of realizing my mistake. I learned that I would rather not compromise my business for any short term benefit, because it never translates into a better product in the longer term. I learned that I must stick to my plan, lest I deliver a less-than-quality experience to my buyer. I learned that I have much more work to do in the coming months to make sure I never take a bad deal again.

Look for The Right Fit

The key word is “settling.” Never settle. Compromise is a term that is often used by mistake when one means that they are going to take something less than wonderful. There’s a bit of thinking that has to go into that.

Will you take the new job, even if there’s a pay cut? Yes, if the new job positions you for a better chance at success in the longer term. Should you sit by and let someone else take that job you tried out for but didn’t get? I’d say it depends on what was said to you, whether you can jump ship and go somewhere else, and whether you really felt ready for the job.

Should you let your prospective buyer haggle on price? Oh, that’s a whole other story, my friend. One that I’m going to share with people who subscribe to my free newsletter. That information goes out in a few days. Want it? (Won’t be available after March 3rd, 2012.)

What do you think? How are you with bad deals? Taken any lately?

It’s cold comfort to folks in China who want to pick up an iPad on Amazon.cn, but some digging has led us to discover that Amazon was never an authorized iPad retailer and, as such, should have taken down all the iPads on its site long before the Proview/Apple lawsuits popped up on the tech radar.

Although the timing was fishy, our source informed us that there has been an ongoing dialogue with Amazon to remove the iPad from its shelves and that there are no iPads being pulled from stores in China except in isolated increments of 12 and 15 by overzealous enforcement officials. In short, Proview’s efforts are currently stymied and the case is still pending.

It looks like Amazon Web Services may be launching a new workflow manager called SWF. First spotted by TechCrunch reader Michael Hood, SWF is listed as a service under AWS’ Free Usage Tier. Unfortunately, clicking on SWF takes you to a ’404′ page.

Upon further digging, it looks like SWF stands for ‘Amazon Simple Workflow Service.’ It basically starts, runs, and retains workflow executions, as well as schedules tasks, adds markers, receives signals, and starts timers for those workflow executions. According to the information listed, with the free usage tier, “1,000 Amazon SWF executions can be initiated for free. A total of 10,000 activity tasks, signals, timers and markers and 30,000 workflow-days can also be used for free.”

Amazon’s free usage tier allows users to run a free Amazon EC2 Micro Instance for a year, and use Amazon S3, Amazon Elastic Block Store, Amazon Elastic Load Balancing, and AWS data transfer for free as well. AWS’s free usage tier can be used to run an application in the cloud, including launching new applications, testing existing applications in the cloud, or more. SWF would be included for free in this package.

Obviously, with so little information, it’s hard to determine the exact details of what SWF does or who it will compete with at this point, but it appears to be new. We’ve reached out to Amazon for comment and will update when we hear back.

We’ve embedded screenshots below:

iOS (Jailbroken): One of the quirks of the iPhone is that apps can access your personal information, including your contacts, without you knowing about it. If this bothers you, ContactPrivacy is a tweak that sends an alert when apps start digging through your address book. More »