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New Media News Every Morning

10 Lessons Miller’s 300 Teaches You About Successful Online Business

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Fuzzy Future has a great article that adapts 10 elements you whiteness in Frank Miller’s 300, and applies them to a successful online business.

  1. Know your surroundings, and choose the battleground that most suits your strengths
  2. A handful of well trained soldiers can out-perform thousands of weak ones.
  3. A few good friends is better then an army of acquaintances.
  4. The gods aren’t always right, do what’s best for yourself, above all else.
  5. Keep your skill set sharp, cause you never know when you might have to defend yourself.
  6. Never retreat, never surrender.
  7. Constantly adapt to your changing situation, it’s the only way to survive.
  8. Never be satisfied with your past accomplishments, it might just get you kicked down a bottomless pit.
  9. Even a man-god can bleed.
  10. Even if you’re a hideous, misshapen troll, the right networking can get you riches and women.

Learn more about how you can/should use these principles for your online business.

Amsterdam, Sold! For $50,000!

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Amsterdam, one of the landmark business in Second life, modeled on the city’s red light district, and specializing in adult content, was sold for $50,000.

The previous owner, whose avatar is called “Stroker Serpentine”, says he sold the iconic virtual destination “to focus on a new, bigger adult business”. Little is known about the city’s new custodian, except that he is — perhaps appropriately — from the Netherlands.

Amsterdam is one of the first places that most first-time players visit in Second Life, mostly due to the ‘titillation factor’.

InformationWeek has more on this titilating development.

Google Pay-Per-Action Beta — Your Questions Answered

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I mentioned Google’s new pay-per-action scheme about a week ago. Since then, the announcement raised more questions than it answered, and so Google ventures to answer some of them for you.

  1. Do pay-per-action ads show on Google.com or on sites in the search network?
  2. I am an advertiser using My Client Center (MCC) and am interested in the pay-per-action beta test for my clients, as well as for my own business. What are my sign up options?
  3. Is it possible to set a cost-per-action (CPA) value (i.e. the amount I’d like to pay for a specific action) as a percentage of the amount of the purchase rather than as a fixed amount per purchase?
  4. I am also an AdSense publisher and would like to participate in this test. How can I sign up?
  5. I am not a US advertiser, and wonder when pay-per-action will be available in my country?
  6. Although I am not a US advertiser, my campaigns do target US customers. Can I participate in the beta?

And then of course there is the official pay-per-action advertising FAQ.

ICANN Says ‘No’ To Internet Red Light District

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The ICANN Board today rejected a proposal to create web addresses ending in .xxx in a vote ending 9-5 (1 abstention), and sent a broader message that ICANN will not accept the role of content regulator on the Internet.

ICANN, had been asked to allow the creation of web addresses ending in .xxx to specifically indicate sources of pornography and adult entertainment, and in effect create a virtual red light district on the internet.

Vint Cerf, the Google Inc. senior executive who is also chairman of ICANN, said the board’s decision had nothing to do with the actual content of the sites in question. Rather, the rejection came because the proposal could be seen as ICANN creating rules effecting Internet content, which is at odds with its mandate to oversee the way Internet operates in order to ensure open and fair participation by all.

MarketWatch has more.

The Patents That Killed the VoIP Star

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Ardent fans of the patent system are fond of legitimizing the system based on the mantra that ‘patents encourage innovation’. However, evidence continues to mount that patents are accomplishing exactly the opposite and are one of many reasons that innovative technologies fail to succeed.

The latest example, covers VoIP patents.

The problem, of course, is that tons of companies (some big, some small) all claim patents on various aspects of VoIP — creating the very definition of the “patent thicket.” That is, there are so many patents around the very concept of VoIP that no one company can actually afford to offer a VoIP service, since the cost to license all the patents is simply too prohibitive.

Read the entire dirt.