Monthly Archives: March 2006

VeriSign certificates + IIS = not good

Posted by on March 30, 2006 Comments Off

After some recent infrastructure changes, many users complained that they were unable to connect to Skweezer with SSL, which our log in page requires. Some phones would just show an unhelpful error like 513 or 503, page cannot be found. My Nokia popped up a strange error though, claiming that the server certificate expired even though the certificate expires next July. However, some browsers and phones had no problem at all establishing SSL. It turns out that there was nothing wrong with the certificate, and that's where it gets really weird.
According to this knowledge base article at Microsoft:

The previous VeriSign 128-bit International (Global) Server Intermediate certification authority certificate expired on January 7, 2004. This may cause problems for clients that try to establish server-authenticated secure socket layer (SSL) connections with Web servers and other SSL/Transport Layer Security (TLS)-enabled applications that do not have up-to-date certificates.

To prevent these problems, Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) operators should contact VeriSign to update the intermediate certification authority certificates for servers that use 128-bit SSL to connect to Web sites with the Secure Hypertext Transfer Protocol.

Impact: Clients cannot establish SSL-protected connections to Web servers that do not have updated certificates.

Recommendation: Install the updated version of the VeriSign intermediate certificate.

Read more »

Money in Mashups

Posted by on March 16, 2006 Comments Off

No successful web property is an island. Skweezer could never have been envisioned and built if that were not so. Once upon a time people were pretty upset about what we were doing: building a service that depended on the content of other websites that wasn’t a search engine. Fast forward to 2006: Web 2.0 is all about the community, the web ecosystem, the blogosphere. If we work together, we can do more than we could apart. You can adjust your business model to make money even while giving things away. Viva la network!

Mashups are cool, but when it comes to capitalizing on those interdependencies in a way that pays the bills, people are already thinking about the new business models that support it. Via Programmable Web I found this article on mashup business models and also a link to a discussion about it at Mashup Camp.

Box.net and Google

Posted by on March 8, 2006 Comments Off

Box.net logoKevin sent me an invite to Box.net (and here’s one for you, from me) which is Yet Another Online Storage Service, but a very cool one. Box.net is cool because (1) they have a nice API, (2) they enable mobile access to your files, (3) the site has a nice clean usable design, and (4) they have a company blog.

It was while checking out the Box.net blog that I read a post called Beating Google, in which Aaron Levie laments about Google and the as-yet hypothetical GDrive, and I felt a great deal of empathy. Replace the words “Box.net” with “Skweezer.net”, and references to saving files with viewing mobilized web pages on your phone and Aaron has captured the way I felt one year ago, more or less. At that time, my daydreams of Greenlight Wireless being bought by Google was somewhat deflated when they rolled their own Skweezer. By “somewhat deflated”, I mean I personally spent the better part of the day hyperventilating into a paper bag while Kevin talked me through it. A year later, the world hasn’t ended and I feel differently about it. Read more »

Your phone as a TiVo remote

Posted by on March 8, 2006 Comments Off

Tivo + VerizonThe announcement yesterday (WSJ, USA Today) that TiVo and Verizon are partnering to enable customers to schedule recording shows from your phone was met with a collective “huh?” and not because it’s a bad idea. It’s a bad execution of a good idea.

According to the WSJ article, TiVo Mobile will be enabled by a small software program that Verizon customers will pay around $5 a month for, on top of their existing TiVo subscription. I guess they’re going for the stupid rich segment, because you can already schedule your recordings for no extra fee via a web interface. Let’s say you already use a mobile optimizing service on your phone, why exactly would you pay another $60/year to do the same thing? To use a specialized application? Michael Parekh calls this “a pointless deal” and adds:

You sometimes wonder why companies like Tivo even bother expending the time, energy and resources to craft such partnerships. Most of these high-priced services are stillborn from the very start for ordinary, mainstream customers. They make for great press releases and little else.

The reason this is so sad for TiVo is that, with 4 million subscribers, they only have a little more than a third of the subscription PVR market and they are fighting tooth and nail fending off competition. They’re clearly not thinking that mobile access, which TiVo’s chief executive Tom Rogers claims users have “hungered” for, is anything more than a tool for extracting more fees from their existing customer base, who are (I shall now forever assume) the stupid rich. If potential subscribers are hungering for mobile TiVo access, then TiVo should give it away. On the other hand, maybe they already have enabled mobile recording by not preventing mobile web access and this is just a way to extract money from Verizon.
Phones are the new universal remote, and the mobile web + SMS is the new infrared.

Goodbye HP PDA, hello HP smart phone

Posted by on March 3, 2006 Comments Off

HP has admitted that the pen-based PDA market is shrinking at a rate of 30% each year, but HP is looking more toward the converged space (meaning smart phones) as their launch this week of the iPAQ rw6800 and hw6900 shows.

HP’s Vice-President for Consumer Products and Mobile Business Group in the Asia-Pacific region, Chin-Teik SEE, told CNET.com.au that “the pen-based [handheld market] is shrinking at a rate of 30 percent year-on-year.” … According to Chin-Teik, HP will continue to look for ways to “redefine the [pen-based PDA] category,” but it’s safe to say that smart phones will be the company’s primary focus — as far as handhelds are concerned — for the foreseeable future.

I picked this up via Slashdot, and some of the comments were interesting because people were saying: I don’t want an all-in-one device. Sorry guys. You can’t stop the convergence train now.