Heres a picture of what I got from them today:

Im pretty sure there is a claim for False Advertising here.

Karen asked you a question. View the question(LINK REMOVED) and answer it.

FanBox.com is the web-based desktop that instantly turns every computer into your computer. It includes over 10,000 web applications and games to choose from, including the Question It application.

This email was sent by Karen while using the Question It application on FanBox. Go here(LINK REMOVED) to learn more or stop receiving emails from friends using Question It. FanBox: 255 G Street #723, San Diego, CA 92101, USA

I’m not an anti-spam nut. I don’t go nuts every time something that’s trying to get me to sign up or sell me something comes into my inbox. What I do expect though is a way for me to say don’t send this stuff to me anymore. And this fails miserably at that. Notice the link for unsubscribing isn’t an unsubscribe link. It says go here to find out how to stop receiving emails. I assumed there’d be an attempt to get me to stay with them, but that wasn’t it at all. Instead the page simply wont load. It keeps saying we are preparing your Fanbox experience. I don’t want a fucking fanbox experience. That’s why I clicked the link to remove myself from it.

Astonishingly the page where you can go and answer the question loads pretty much immediately.

I keep seeing sms.ac links, and remember that the company had the same kind of issues. To have the same kind of issues twice means they no longer get the benefit of the doubt like plaxo, who had problems with email notifications, but cleaned their act up(By the way I love Plaxo now).

It is disappointing, cause it seemed like a while back they hit on a good idea, where they were going to create an international payment system for mobile application developers. I guess that out the window now as sms(dot)ac redirects to fanbox(dot)com.

I’ve found only 2 people talking about this on the net Here and Here. Steve Riley suggest blocking the domains on your email black lists.

Today I found out what happens when the tickets are not easily available. And how much the web experience sucks when that’s the case.

Inox has a pretty good system, but a few limitations. One thing I don’t like is that they don’t release most of their seat inventory for online booking. But I can live with that. What drove me nuts today was how it kept telling me there was an error in processing, but gave me no clue as to what that error was. And funnier still the number of tickets available kept changing from 3 to 1 to 5 to 3. It was crazy.

Metro Adlabs has much more severe issues, with their interface. I’ve bought tickets online for Metro several times, but as I mentioned above, since I rarely go for movies, that tickets are difficult to come by, I never realised how annoying their process could be. 1. On the heavy duty flash page, you need to select how many people, what movie, which theatre etc.to check availability. So far so good. Now here’s where the utter moronicness of the system comes in. Before they will tell you whether or not a particular shows tickets are available, you need to sign in or login. Its pretty stupid to ask someone to register on your site before you will tell them if tickets are available, but we are still not at the limit of the stupidity involved.

Now if tickets arent available they pop an error which looks like this:

If you dont want to click through the image this is the error message:

Error in Booking seats!!! : Exception = Error in Adding Seats

Nice. Very sensible. Perfectly explains what happened. Also there’s no way to go back to a search page from here. so you need to type in the main url again, or go back a couple of times or whatever

Thought I was done? Hah!

Now I search again for the same movie time, cause the error tells me that there was a problem in adding seats, and hey its the internet, shit happens you know. Now heres where we see the utter lack of anything resembling thought going into this system. Before they will show me the result of the search, I have to log in again. Even though I JUST DID THAT LESS THAN 2 MINUTES AGO!!!!

Its ridiculous that they make you log in to see whether or not tickets are available for a particular show, and they make you log in EVERY TIME you check, even in the SAME session. This is not making you login to pull your credit card details or some other security issue. You have to enter that stuff whenever you order. You have to enter your email id when you login, so the only thing they pull out is conceivably your cell number to send an sms notification.

To be fair though Adlabs has a fantastic Mobile Booking Application, though Ive never tried to buy a ticket of that and had a problem with availibilty, so dont know if the flow is different there. I’ll run through it this weekend and see what comes up.

BigShoeBazaar is a zappos ripoff concept arbitrage, and i liked the site when i saw it the first time. I wanted a new pair of sneakers so thought why not? This is what I found today. Astounding. If you ran a retail store would you let your cashier or accountant piss on the door? This is the same thing, and a big part of what drives me nuts about how badly many Indian sites are done. How difficult would it be to just put up a simple under maintenance page?

’twas an abaonded anchor that cut all those Middle East undersea Internet cables. The 5.5 ton (!) anchor is owned by one of the companies (FLAG Telecom) whose cables were cut. No one knows exactly how the anchor cut the cables—have you seen how complicated those things are?—but FLAG is repairing its broken ones now, a process that should be finished by Sunday.

via CrunchGear

So turns out it was Reliance Communications  owned FLAG that was responsible for the internet outages. If you thought the earlier conspiracy theories were nuts, imagine the theories now that a Reliance connection has been found.

Seventymm is an online video rental company. Modeled after Netflix, for a monthly charge, you can get either 4 DVD’s a month or an unlimited number of DVDs a month. There are no late fees, when your done, ask them to collect what you have at home, and they’ll send you the next movies in your queue. The queue can be setup on their website.

Though I love the concept( I remember one year when I ran through a 500 movie rental subscription, I rented maybe a 100 movies, but lost 400 in late charges)

This weekend I got the movie Heyy Babyy but the DVD was defective. That happens sometimes, not much anyone can do about it and I dont blame seventymm at all for that. The problem is what happened afterwards. One gets 2 movies at a time, and i hadnt seen the other movie(The Fifth Element if your interested) that was sent. But seventymm policy is that they wont send just one movie, even to replace a defective disc. This strikes me as foolish.

Another problem I had, was I tried to watch Lost. They sent me the first 2 dvd’s no problem I asked for a pickup. They sent me Lost DVD5 and some other random dvd. I called, but once again nothing can be done. Seems like it should be a simple enough fix.

Its annoying when a service that really has potential craps out on issues like these. They should have better processes in place to handle it.

I wish there were some more features on their website, though with the recent changes its become tolerable, a couple of months ago it was unusable.

All in all a pretty good service with some service issues they need to get under control. Especially this one movie at a time thing.

He quotes a Sucheta Dalal article about an email forwarded by the editor of the Economic Times.

At ET, we are carving out a separate team to look into the needs of Private Treaty clients. Every large centre will have a senior editorial person to interface with Treaty clients. In turn, the senior edit person will be responsible, along with the existing team, for edit delivery.

This is obviously unethical. ET should most definitely not be in the business of selling editorial coverage. I dont think any marginally intelligent person would argue otherwise.

My point about Private Treaties is that if its an advertising ONLY deal, I dont see an ethical issue. Instead of paying in cash the company is paying in equity. Equity has a value, and the stake divested is based on that.

If there is an editorial coverage component to the Private Equity deal its no different from the reprehensible practice that Bennett Coleman has with Medianet. It is however an ethical failing of that particular company. I do not believe that invalidates the potential benefits of Private Treaties to both, a hopefully ethical Media Company, and the company gaining ad inventory for stake.

My latest Vodafone bill says I need topay 25 bucks for 2 downloads:
a) Callertune from Onmobile – Rs 15
b) Wallpaper from Hungama – Rs 10
Exact download dates and times have been given. Which is great except that I have not made these downloads. I’ve had the same caller tune – ‘California Dreaming’ for many months now. And neither am I into wallpapers!

Ridiculous right? How dare the operator scam people in this way. Except that the callertune is clearly a subscription service, that she acknowledges using.

Heres a screenshot from the Vodafone site:

I have huge issues with Mobile Operators. But a complaint like this does nothing and serves no purpose, other than venting  frustration. The operators track record is such that most people will believe anything about them no matter how bad.

What this does do is obscure legitimate issues with the operators practices. Such as the disaster that is the Do Not Disturb list.

This is a recent phenomenon in Indian business, where companies give up stake to major media companies in exchange for Ad Inventory. I first heard about this a year and a half ago or so, when a friend was considering this. He never went ahead with the whole thing for many reasons.

I really don’t see anything fundamentally wrong with the concept. If anything its an innovative way for Bennett Coleman, HT Media, or any other media group for that matter, to book ads well in advance. For companies that need to build a brand through advertising, its a fantastic deal. You give up a little stakes for a minority investor, who doesn’t try and get involved in your business. As mentioned in this article, its a win win for both.

And it is not difficult to see why. Share swaps for ad space is a win-win deal for both sides. For a start, it is almost a zero-cash transaction.

What this neglects is the 3rd stakeholder implicit in the arrangement, the reader or viewer or listener. And that is the objection most people have to this kind of arrangement. Disclosure is the most obvious solution.

But here’s my question: Do newspapers or TV channels disclose every bulk advertising deal they do? What’s the difference between stake and cash when it comes down to it?

As usual the devil is in the details, its not about the ways in which the Times Group or anyone else sells their advertising, the issue is the separation between advertising and content. I think that’s pretty much the only issue. Bombay Times with their Medianet, pay for publicity, model, has destroyed the Times of India’s credibility amongst many readers. And those readers see this Private Treaty business as an extension of that.

Once the slime is introduced it covers everything. Even an interesting idea is tarred with the same brush.

Update: Saw a post by Govindraj Ethiraj, on a similar subject