Power Blogging - Blogging For Business Or Pleasure? Posted By : Johny Rider

There has been an enormous growth in blogs over the last few years and people are finding that it is a good way to quickly make their views or products known to a wider audience. Although setting up a blog is easy to do, to make sure it doesn’t become one of the many abandoned blogs there are a number of things to consider.

Episode 42 - Kevin Rose & Gary Vaynerchuk

DIGG THIS!! Josh and I interview Kevin Rose and Gary Vaynerchuk at the Future of Web Apps conference in Miami, FL.

Make sure you follow Kevin and Gary on Twitter. You might as well follow us too while you’re at it: Josh and Adam.

This episode is the first in our Future of Web Apps (FOWA) series, and is proudly sponsored by Engine Yard

Click here for show notes.

Download Podcast

Amazon Argues Against NY State Tax, Claiming It ‘Vague’ and ‘Invalid’

We here at Mashable recently touched briefly upon New York legislators’ consideration of a mandatory sales tax collected automatically by Amazon for purchases made by customers residing within the state. The proposal, a leftover from former governor Eliot Spitzer’s office, recently passed with approval from governor David Paterson, with objections from a number of commentators. Including myself, admittedly.

Most opposition to this measure centers around the basic principle that if a vendor (i.e., Amazon) is without a storefront or some other physical sales channel within the state in question, said vendor should not be required to administer a tax levy on customers within said state.

Well, now that the bill officially turned law, Amazon is trying to overturn its passing, according to Saul Hansell of The New York Times. It is arguing the legislation to be “overly broad and vague” and “invalid, illegal, and unconstitutional.” Chances are that the company will not be granted its wish.

The particularity that drove lawmakers to approve the measure is somewhat of a loose one. It says that, because Amazon operates an Associates program, in which its goods are marketed to visitors of third party sites (some based in the state of NY), that effectively makes for geographic attribution of sales and necessitates Amazon to provide tax revenue to the government. Yet, going by such logic, the law should ideally then require Amazon to gather taxes from customers only when they make purchases through any NY-based Associate. Which, if enough users of Amazon learned of this requirement, would drive consumers to simply ignore links on Associates’ pages and venture to the shopping megasite directly. The negative effect of such changes would be diminished income for site owners garnered through the affiliate program.

Regardless, Amazon will likely be forced to blanket its NY userbase with requests to pay taxes on their purchases. Given the state of American consumerism at the moment, the mandate may not bode well for the site in the short term, even with its commanding presence in the online retail space.

© Paul Glazowski for Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog, 2008. |
Permalink |
No comment |
Add to
del.icio.us
digg

Who’s linking ?
Technorati
BlogPulse
Google

Want more on these topics ? Browse the archive of posts filed under News.

—
Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:

Basis Technology Wins Lawsuit Against Amazon
Europeans: Save Money on Amazon MP3s
Amazon Launches Digital Music Store
Zlio Cut Off by Amazon
Amazon Launches Software Download Store
Amazon Launches Web Startup Contest
Amazon Affiliate Widgets!

Social Gaming Network Buys Facebook Market Share

Consolidation is already beginning in the overcrowded Facebook application market (with 21,800 apps and counting). One of the first sectors to see buyouts of popular apps is in the social gaming sector. Earlier this year, Zynga bought CLZ Concepts and the Superheroes group of apps. Today, competitor Social Gaming Network (SGN) is responding with its own roll-up of Esgut (which created Suplerlatives, Entourage, and Text Twirl), Free Gifts, Nicknames, Oregon Trail and Friend Block. This moves SGN up the rankings in terms of total Facebook users (48.5 million) that have installed one of its apps, which puts it right behind Slide (97.7 million) and RockYou (72.6 million) and one spot ahead of Zynga (34.7 million). Of course, some of the biggest apps that SGN bought aren’t really games (Superlatives and Entourage), and in terms of daily active users, which is a more meaningful measure, Zynga is still ahead with 1.9 million versus 1.1 million.

Still, SGN is obviously serious about scaling up its business by hiring, acquiring, or partnering with the best Facebook app developers out there. The developers behind Free Gifts, Esgut, and Nicknames have now joined SGN as co-founders. “We are building a brain-trust of leading app talent,” says CEO Shervin Pishevar. He recently spun off SGN from Webs.com and moved his entire team from the East Coast to Palo Alto. And this morning it just released the sequal to its popular Warbook game on Facebook—Warbook:Rise of the Infernals.

The company has also launched its own cross-promotional advertising network for other gaming apps and is in the process of raising $10 million. There are now 70 games and other apps on its Gaming Hub.

One of them, Free Gifts, is now part of SGN. More than 70 million virtual gifts have been exchanged between Facebook members so far. Brands sponsor the gifts, and there is a potential for direct consumer purchase of gifts as well within a gaming context. Pishevar is almost as excited about the prospect of virtual gifts as he is about social games:

It is real, it is happening, it is underground. I think it has a potential to become as important or more important than the advertising revenue.

The race between SGN and Zynga to become the biggest social gaming network is a race for talent, a race for active users, and most importantly, a race to see who can make money first. But while they keep elbowing each other for position, they shouldn’t forget that newer entrants with social-gaming platform ambitions are always trying to close in behind them.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Forget Paper and Sign Contracts Online With Tractis

Tractis, which recently came out of private beta, allows you to negotiate and execute worldwide legally binding contracts online. Tractis’ focus is making e-commerce more safe by providing not only digital signing of contracts, but conflict resolution and micro-insurance services. Today, they officially open their doors for Spain and plan to eventually make their service available worldwide. Tractis is useful for all types of contracts, whether you’re selling an item on eBay, providing creative services over the Internet, or sending a non-disclosure agreement. It allows anyone to easily organize, collaborate, and sign contracts online, all in one place. Digital signing of contracts is a very interesting space with only a handful of companies in it. EchoSign is one company offering the digital signing of documents online which I have used numerous times with excellent results. DocuSign is another company which recently received $12.4 million in funding for its electronic signature service.

Aside from signing contracts, Tractis also provides a database of contract templates which anyone can save to their account and use for free. Right now you’ll find non-disclosure agreements, design service agreements, and contracts for the selling of goods. (Goodbye lawyers!) But where do these contacts come from? The answer is other Tractis users. In your account, you can create contract templates and make them publicly available for others to use. This is a great idea and I definitely see the value in it, however, I can’t help but feel uneasy knowing they are from users that are likely not lawyers. (Lawyers, come back!) On the plus side, templates are open for all to edit, rate, and comment on. Also, Tractis plans to roll out a reputation system in the next few months that would allow users to rank other Tractis users, according to Business 2.0 Magazine.

Additionally, Tractis is a collaborative environment for your contracts. Invite your whole team and the people you are sending contacts to. Start a contract from scratch or from a template, make changes, revert to older versions, and add comments. When you’re done preparing the contract, invite your client to review and digitally sign. If the client isn’t in agreement, you can discuss and edit the contract right then and there with them. One thing to keep in mind is the person signing the contract will need a Tractis account. This is said to be for identity protection reasons, but I’d personally prefer sending a contract to anyone, whether they have an account or not. Also, as of now, each digital signature will cost you 1 Euro, so be sure to increase your balance before sending off a contract to a client.

What’s more important, are contracts sent using Tractis legally binding? Even now I have clients questioning the legality of signing a document over EchoSign, even though E-Signatures were legalized in the year 2000 (see, E-Signature Act). I will admit the concept does seem questionable, but Tractis does guarantee that contracts are not only legally binding, but valid worldwide. At the same time, it’s hard to trust a guarantee when pages like contact, about, and terms of use are missing from the website. (I believe the content did exist during the private beta, but seem to have disappeared at public launch - oops!) Let’s hope they get that fixed quick! (Update: I’ve spoken with David Blanco, founder of Tractis, and have been told that they are working on new content and translated versions for the website.)

Working with Tractis is much like typing a document in a web-based word processor, or a contract focused Writeboard with basic contact management. You create and edit contracts in a WYSIWYG editor, invite users to collaborate, and eventually save for signing. And this works great, except my biggest complaint is that you cannot upload existing contracts that you might have, something that EchoSign does very well. Tractis also lets you create groups of people, find new people on Tractis, download vCards, and add people to your team. And what would a collaborative application be without being able to customize your interface to match your company? Nothing too fancy - you can change colors and replace the Tractis logo with your company logo.

As I brought up earlier, Tractis also allows you to create templates which can be used to start off new contracts. You can browse the public database of templates, edit as needed, and add them to your account for easy access. Very helpful, but they are no more than basic documents of legal agreement containing filler spaces and strings like “(Your Company Name).” They work fairly well, but one slight annoyance is having to replace thirty or so “(Your Company Name)” tags in a template by hand. The templates would be much more useful if there was a way to somehow mass replace a string with a new value, or perhaps create a custom markup or generate a form that fills in the information for you. Either way, the templates do save a lot of time, not to mention possible lawyer fees.

Signing a contract with Tractis is a bit more involved than using a service like EchoSign, but Tractis has decided to take extra measures to verify the identity of a signer. When signing a contract with Tractis, you are to provide a digital certificate. Now, to be honest, I don’t expect the average person to have a digital certificate, let alone know what one is. So, for those of you who don’t know what a digital certificate is, it’s an electronic document issued by a certificate authority that basically contains some data proving you are who you say you are. As of now, Tractis is only accepting digital certificates issued by a group of pre-selected Spanish certificate authorities, but plan to connect with more authorities wordwide as they go. (Current accepted authorities - translated by Google) Because of these measures, Tractis can confirm the identity of you and the signer and offer their planned services of micro-insurance and dispute resolution. (Certainly a huge task) Once you’ve got a certificate, you’re set to continue to the next hurdle of having Java 1.6 installed on your machine which allows Tractis to upload and verify your certificate. Sorry Mac users, you can’t sign because Mac’s latest Java version is 1.42 - unfortunate, I know.

Once you get passed having a digital certificate and Java 1.6 on your machine, you can finally sign a contract. It’s all simple from here on and you just have to check the box stating that you agree and click sign. It verifies the form and submits your signature and lets contract participants know. I feel the whole process of signing a contract may be a bit much for the average person, but it certainly does add a sense of trust and security to the signing, which is exactly what Tractis was aiming to do in making e-commerce more safe. Although, I’m not sure I’d want a client of mine to go through all of that. Fortunately, I’ve been told that there are plans for additional methods of authentication and signing, including “Accept/Clickwrap” agreements, but will strongly recommend the use of digital certificates.

Even though Tractis is out of private beta and officially launched for Spain today, they still have a ton of work ahead of them. I expect it will be a while until Tractis is available for U.S. users, but I definitely look forward to using Tractis when it becomes available. What I like most is the public database of templates and the ability to collaboratively edit a contract before making an agreement, features Tractis’ competitors do not have. I don’t necessarily trust the public templates just yet, but they are nice to have around as reference and to act as a starting point. I also found the signing process to be a bit much for my line of work (creative services), although my opinion on that would change if “Accept/Clickwrap” agreements are implemented. I just wouldn’t want to have my clients create an account on Tractis just to sign a contract and then have to deal with providing a digital certificate. I do, however, see the value in requiring digital certificates when handling large transactions, such as buying a car from a random user on eBay. In all, I feel Tractis is building an impressive service and I hope to use it when it’s ready worldwide. Until then, I’ll stick with EchoSign and the old-fashioned way of signing contracts (pen and paper).

Tags: tractis, contracts, digital, signature, esignature