Written on April 11, 2008 – 4:45 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
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A study by Forrester shows that continental European companies are hesitant to outsource work like software engineering to countries like India. Forrester analyst Sudin Apte: “We are seeing only a few large offshore deals from Continental Europe, because companies there are still testing the waters, and the ramp up is very slow.” The United States though, are pretty fond of the Indian outsources. American companies make up for 60 percent of all the revenue made by Indian outsourcing companies.
Yet Indian companies foresee problems now the US economy faces a possible recession. Therefore they try to convince European companies to use their services. This turns out to be quite complicated, since European companies still insist on offering local service, partly due to local languages.
According to Apte, companies from U.K. and US are willing to change their systems and production processes. Even newspapers outsource editorial work. But a French company “would want its vendor to fully adopt French business practices, deliver from a local facility and interact in the local language”. But they do feel the need to start outsourcing on a larger scale, Apte said. “They will start with projects offshore that involve 30 to 40 people on a project, and then ramp up quickly”.
Written on February 24, 2008 – 2:45 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Mike Mann is rethinking domain tasting. He’s the founder of BuyDomains.com and now works as a VC for WashingtonVC. Domain tasting, or front running*, is the act of registering a domain name which you know somebody else is intending to register. Earlier, we reported that Network Solutions automatically registered domain names that people checked for its availability and that Google would make it harder for domain tasting companies to show up in the search results.
So Mann is rethinking a rather touchy subject. In an email he send to his personal mailing list, he said that ‘domain tasting is indiscriminate and buyers end up having their robots purchase other peoples’ clear trademarks, as well as a lot of lewdly suggestive names, or names that once resolved to questionable content. So it’s nothing I’d want my team to take part in’.
Yet that’s where the rethinking begins. And then Mann changes his mind:
In the past I thought nobody should do it. Today I think it should actually be done by others carefully for one simple reason: It’s good for the economy. People are typing in and clicking on legacy domain links for expired domains, and if they get a 404 error it’s a waste of time, energy and bandwidth - and nobody gets paid, however if it lands on a tasting speculators PPC page or monetizable site then someone is getting paid, and they can pay their employees, taxes, and tips at the local restaurant, etc. So domain tasting while lame in most respects is still good for the economy.
At first you might think: he’s right! But then, you hopefully realize that it’s just a justification thing for what his fellow domain traders do. Domain tasting isn’t good for economy, it hurts the ecomony. Why? For a number of reasons:
- Imagine somebody wants to start a new site with a name he absolutely loves, then it turns out that this domain is registered by a domain tasting company. That probably scares him off, so domain tasting actually blocks creativity and entrepreneurship;
- People lose their faith in the Internet, since the domain tasting pages are nothing more than a collection of sponsored links. Some even use pop-ups, automatic bookmark scripts or whatnot. When people don’t trust the web anymore, they will spend less time and less money online;
- Those ‘monetizable sites’ clutter the web and make it harder for users to find what they’re actually looking for.
Please Mr. Mann, start rethinking your thinking on domain tasting again.
* Update: Eric Litman provided some definitions of domain tasting and front running in the comments.
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