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Git - Fast Version Control System
Advanced File Downloader: increase your download speed!
This morning, I attempted to download a program for use with Firefox. It wasn’t anything complex, yet I was faced with a download time of several minutes. I honestly don’t have available an extra five minutes or so for every download I make.
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Quick Sequence Diagram Editor - Summary
Quick Sequence Diagram Editor - Summary
Book of Screed " Basic Samba Setup on Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron
Did the “Enron of Norway†Pull a Fast One On Microsoft? More Details About the Mess at Fast Search & Transfer
Even back in January when Microsoft agreed to pay $1.2 billion for enterprise search company Fast Search & Transfer, it was mired in an accounting scandal and trading in its stock had been suspended. Its aggressive accounting for phantom deals that never materialized earned it the moniker the “Enron of Norway.” But more sordid details keep coming out from some tenacious reporting by the Norwegian press.
The latest account comes in the June 28 issue of the Norwegian magazine Dagens Næringsliv. In an article (in Norwegian) by Trond Sundnes, Dagens Næringsliv, Gøran Skaalmo, the magazine details how the Norwegian company booked free software trials as revenues, and how its executives set up shell corporations for allegedly self-dealing purposes. A translated version of the article (embedded below) is making the rounds among Fast’s competitors and inside Microsoft itself.
The problems at Fast were financial in nature and tied to an overly aggressive sales culture, which arguably Microsoft can fix. But it does point to a certain blindness on the part of Microsoft, or at least a willingness to look the other way, in its obsessive quest to become a player in search (see Yahoo and Powerset). It also raises questions about Fast’s underlying search technology. If Fast was having trouble closing deals for its products, how good can its technology really be?
According to the article, Fast had booked $50 million in fake revenue, $20 million in fictional contracts, and former top executives closely linked to CEO Markus Lervik siphoned off $6 million to shell companies they controlled. Lervik continues to lead the business and is currently the vice president for enterprise search at Microsoft.
Some of the details from the article include:
—The company had an aggressive practice of giving enterprise customers free trial periods and marking them down as tentative deals.
—One of these was a large $18 million deal with Australian Telecom company Telstra that the company recognized as revenues in late 2006. But the deal then failed to materialize.
—A second deal for which Fast never got paid was with Accoona, another shady search company.
—An audit uncovered unauthorized payments to a shell company in Fort Myers, Florida called Archtech that is owned by a former Fast VP, Peter Bauert and Fasts’s former CFO Ali Riaz (through yet another company he controls called Bluebird Collabo). That’s Riaz in the Audi pictured above.
Lervik never responded to repeated requests for comment, but Microsoft did. It sent adjusted annual reports for 2006 and 2007 which noted that over 30 million Norwegian Kroner ($6 million) was “irregularly†paid and “wrongly approved” to:
. . . companies owned or controlled by persons who at the time of the transactions were closely related parties.
That is an apparent reference to Archtech and other shell companies that were supposedly reselling Fast software. The problem, according to the the documents Microsoft provided, was that these related companies “purchased” $3.5 million worth of software licenses for which Fast was never actually paid.
I always wondered what the “transfer” part of Fast Search & Transfer referred to.
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
Benefits In Marketing Over The Internet
Advantages came ready made with internet marketing. These original advantages have continued to increase as the state of the internet has improved. Everybody has had a never satisfied wish for more, better, and faster access to products and service across the entire area of internet marketing. There is no indication that this will ever change, and so the number of online customers, as well as the number of advantages, for online sales will continue to grow.
One of the unarguable advantages of the internet is its convenience. If you have a computer and internet access, you can conduct business anytime and anywhere you please. Now that many people have laptop computers, this becomes even truer.
On the seller’s end, advertising costs are greatly reduced with the number of methods available. An example of this would be email. You can send costly postcards to thousands of people and may realize some success a week or two later. With email, however, you can send out emails to the same thousand people and realize an increase in sales an hour from now-all for no cost.
Just imagine that one of your products will be discontinued and your business is running without [http://www.thousanddollarprofits.com/87475 online marketing], you may think to conduct a clearance sale; but it will be surely a few days late for the new to reach your customers. And another person, across your store also has this same product with the same news. But, he markets online. He must have surely made up his mind to have a line in front of his store by just sending a mass mail. While your competitor moves along with his new and improved product or service, then even you have to be stuck with your old product, which doesn’t get sold.
By starting a business over the internet you’ll certainly gain an advantage as you can literally sell your product to the world. Indeed this increases your number of customers, as internet reaches ever corner of this world. You can access and interact to millions of people all around the world and satisfy the need of them who approach you, only if you have your store online. More and more people are registering online each day. While they are added to the internet, they are also added to your customer database. This definitely provides you a wide array of advantages.
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