The new angle is to peddle seemingly genuine and useful (I use this term loosely) products that magically reduce costs, solve problems or in some other way resonate with mainstream worries or fears.

The latest fad seems to be Green Energy.  I’m a firm advocate of reducing our insatiable appetite for energy and there are many ways we can contribute individually. In recent months I have been getting more Spam advertising miracle solutions that will reduce your personal energy dependence.  What caught my attention is the level of sophistication with which these schemes are orchestrated.

One particular example is an unsolicited email from an organization called Earth4Energy which boasts the following headline:

Don’t pay for your electricity any longer…

Instead, the power company will pay YOU!

The email links to a website that is offering a $50 e-book, which will teach you how to “generate your own electricity for less than $200”. Truth is, you can generate electricity for less than that, but it is not going to get you “off the grid” or the power company paying you for your electricity any day soon.

What makes this scam different is how it is leveraging Google search with a clever strategy of multiple domain names / web sites and affiliate marketing.  If you search for Earth4Energy you’ll get thousands of hits, many with negative titles and descriptions such as “earth4energySCAM.com”.

HOWEVER – all of these sites are actually promoting this scam through an expansive affiliate network.  This method is called “Internet Saturation Marketing”. The idea is to basically drown-out any legitimate reviews or commentary that would reveal the truth.
I’ve found one website that is exposing this particular scheme and many others and has managed to stay on top of all the Google noise.  http://www.nlcpr.com/Deceptions6.php

GoogleBait: Scam4Energy Earth4Spam Earth4Scam Energy4Fraud Fraud4Earth Earth4EnergyFraud Scam4Energy WTF4Energy

So remember the old adage: “If it sounds too good to be true … it probably is.”

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Amidst all the bad economic news that keeps flooding the media every day, we decided to show the lighter side of how everyone can help cutting company costs to survive these tough economic times.

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Permessa is exhibiting, of course, and I am very excited about the product announcements we will be making. Stay tuned…

If you happen to be at Lotusphere, please make sure to stop by the Permessa booth #232.

Technorati Tags: Lotusphere 2008, Permessa, Lotus

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When I got my coffee later this morning the news was all over town. There had been a small earthquake. I had never thought of New England as a region with seismic activity, but according to the news, small quakes aren’t that uncommon here.

“Small earthquakes have hit Littleton in January 1990, July 1993, May 1996, June 2000 and October 2004, according to records. The 1990 quake was the strongest at 3.6 magnitude, or 10 times stronger than Friday morning’s event.”

I never experienced an earthquake before, but this insignificant event made me better appreciate the fear and confusion people must feel when enduring a “real” quake.

Technorati Tags: littleton earthquake

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Here is what I recommend:

• leave your laptop and Blackberry at home
• clean-up any unfinished correspondence before you leave
• tell co-workers and customers that you are on vacation and don’t plan on checking email
• configure your out-of-office auto responder with different rules and responses – beware of simply replying to all incoming messages as some maybe Spam
• plan on spending a few hours triaging your inbox on your return
• use the delete key relentlessly when reviewing accumulated messages

Technorati Tags: email management, email vacation

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Advertisement in ComputerWorld, November 16, 1981.

For an amusing stroll down memory lane see the entire article.

Technorati Tags: computerworld, honeywell advertisement

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Some of the world’s largest organizations rely on our products to manage their messaging infrastructure on a daily basis to:

• monitor resource utilization and usage patterns,
• load balance servers and networks,
• forecast and visualize trends,
• monitor service levels,
• implement business level charge-back,
• execute strategic projects such as domain or server consolidations, and
• perform detailed root cause analysis to identify and resolve systemic problems often buried deep within the environment.

Over the past few years our product direction has evolved beyond pure analysis and reporting. We are now also providing real-time messaging management that enables our customers to implement and enforce workflow driven email and IM policies to comply with today’s regulatory and cost control demands. The combination of detailed analysis and pro-active policy enforcement allows for a highly granular approach to messaging management. It completely takes the guesswork out of messaging policy implementations as companies can model the impact of particular rules before the deployment and, once implemented, monitor their effectiveness. I think this makes for a very unique and powerful combination.

Given our expanded solution set, we eventually decided to look for a new name that does not paint us so squarely into the analytics corner. What I didn’t realize at the time was that finding a company name that sounds good, is meaningful, preferably cool and available as dot com domain, has become an almost insurmountable task in this day and age of interconnected global commerce and domain squatting. What an experience…

The new name and logo is:

A word mix of permission and messaging while also sharing the Italian meaning of “permitted”.

Check out our new website at www.permessa.com

Technorati Tags: dys analytics, permessa

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This Sunday however, I was pleasantly surprised to see that the mainstream media was focusing primarily on energy preservation. Having grown up in Europe, recycling and saving energy was omnipresent. Paying $5-6 for a gallon of gasoline and incurring similar costs for electricity, water, etc. is a great motivator to control personal energy use. The market dynamics of supply and demand will eventually adjust the energy cost basis in the US as well, as we are already observing at the pump. What people need to realize is that old habits don’t constitute necessity and that small personal changes can have a big impact on overall energy use patterns. One example cited this weekend was the big net impact of replacing old incandescent light bulbs with new energy efficient fluorescent ones.

My personal pet peeve is the energy wasted by unused electronics. In a high-tech world of information junkies, we surround ourselves with more and more energy consuming technology.

What I don’t understand is, why we can’t turn off the stuff we don’t use? There is really no need keep desktop computers and monitors running on screen savers during nights and weekends when wake-on-lan and suspend/resume technology exists to allow remote maintenance and faster boot-up. Keep in mind, even on standby many of these devices are burning some juice.

So next time you leave your home or office think about what can be switched off! It may seem tedious, but the overall impact is big.

Technorati Tags: earth day, computer energy waste, energy preservation, environmental awareness

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