Maayan's shared items

Maarten Lens-FitzGerald is part of our impressive lineup of speakers at the ReadWriteWeb 2WAY Summit. As part of our ongoing series of interviews with those speakers, we fired off a round of questions at Lens-FitzGerald to learn a little more about who he is, what he does, and what he'll be talking about at the summit.

RWW: When was the first time you really thought you were going to go into augmented reality? Has that always been something for you?

Lens-FitzGerald: I never thought of going into augmented reality, but cyberspace, any form of digital worlds, have always been one of the things I've been thinking about since I found out about science fiction. One of the first books I read of the cyber punk genre was Bruce Sterling's "Mirror Shades." Mirror shades, meaning, of course, AR goggles. And that book came out in 1988 and ever since, this was my world.

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Almost 20 years later, when we started Sparks Mobile - that was the company preceding Layar - augmented reality was on our list of things that we wanted to do - and then I remember Android coming out with the compass and suddenly everybody could get a simple form of AR. And that's what really got it going.

In Verner Vinge's "Rainbow's End", he talks about somebody standing on top of a hill and he's flipping through all these versions of his ARs, or his realities, and that's literally where the name "Layar" came from - we knew that layers were the Web page metaphor for augmented reality. The other side of inspiration early came from Denno Coil. It's a Japanese anime that uses augmented reality in a great way that really is a near future scenario of what is about to come.

RWW: How do you define augmented reality? What's the simple definition?

Lens-FitzGerald: Reality enhanced with digital information, preferably immersive.

RWW: How far off from better image recognition are we are?

Lens-FitzGerald: I think this year, functionally, you'll see everyone coming out with image recognition one way or another. And then the years after that - 2012 and 2013 - you'll really get the big object recognition going. I think the key is not really the technology but what people do with content. I always say, "It's the format that's important."

The first time you guys in the U.S. ever had a TV on, it was a guy in front of a curtain doing a radio show and that was the TV show. Moving from there to American Idol, that's what it's about. It's about finding the right content. And of course you need more than one channel, you need a good remote and eventually color and stereo and HD. Technology will grow as it always does but it's more about finding the right content and format to have the people be engaged.

The good thing about a QR code is that it's sort of a call to action, although I don't have any incentive on average to point my phone at a QR code because I expect to be advertised to. One of the problems for augmented reality with a phone is, "When do I decide to point my phone at something to see if something is there?"

That's the million dollar question. That will be when your mom knows, and that will be because she [sees] some kind of benefit, fun, interestingness - and again there I'm talking content over format. Yes, it's around functionality, but there's something she has to like. That's when it crosses the chasm from a nerd thing. I think we're so much in the beginning. It's about timing and it's about pace, but we'll get there eventually. It's very early days.

RWW: At what point in the grand evolution of augmented reality are we right now? What's the next step? Is it hardware, software, both or none of the above?

Lens-FitzGerald: Suburban people - if Facebook somehow found a way to their life then we'll find a way too. We're not there yet, but that's where it'll go and right now, augmented reality, how many users would you guess it would have? Maybe a million, a million and a half? Layar has a million and a half active users in the last month and we're the biggest, so hardly anybody knows about it yet but it's getting there.

RWW: You're going to be speaking about "Lessons from building a digital layer on top of the world." What is that going to be about? What type of lessons are you talking about?

Lens-FitzGerald: We have thousands of developers - people creating cool AR content - and millions of users and I'll be going through some examples of what we see, what works, what categories we see that work, but I think most important is what we see happening right now.

That's what we call the democratization of augmented reality, meaning, it was very difficult a year and a half ago to make augmented reality. You had to be able to program. You preferably had to know how to do 3D and then you also had to be able to tell a story with that. All of that is pretty difficult. Not everybody can do that. What we see now is that more and more tools are being developed on top of our platform with which it is easier to make augmented reality, or even better it's cheaper.

I'm not a programmer myself. I recently made my own layer about the neighborhood and the water tower that disappeared in 1920. I put it back in 3D and I can do that because there are tools for that. That's a trend. If you think about TV again, TV was the domain of the big producers, the big networks in the U.S., until you started seeing video cameras. Video cameras slowly turned into YouTube.

That is, in the end, the way that augmented reality is heading. It's going from the heavy duty people who can do a lot to everybody augmenting anything they want. Imagine that. I think that's where it's heading somehow. You can create the world that you want and I can create the world that I want.

RWW: Is augmented reality going to just continue to be a visual layer on top of the world? A visual information layer?

Lens-FitzGerald: I wouldn't call it information, because that makes it sound boring. It's not just ATMs. It's history, it's me being able to look back in time, it's 3D so you can see the Berlin Wall or the World Trade Center towers.

If you see that then you, in one glimpse, get how big that change was now that those things aren't here anymore. It's about that impact. They always say that if you read a book, you have an idea about how something happened or what happened; if you see the video [you] have an idea of what it looked like. But if you are on location and can look back in time using augmented reality it really hits home. You really get it, you really feel it, you get an insight instantly.

That is the unique thing for this medium. That's with history, also with art, with entertainment - you can come up with all kinds of concepts that are so deep in the experience that you can't do it in any other medium.

RWW: So right now, you have the phone, you have the direction the phone is pointing and you have a video camera and that's the basic medium, that's like the clay you use to build something. Will we see any drastic changes in that? What's the vision beyond the phone?

Lens-FitzGerald: The vision is vision. I mean, the key thing is that the camera will actually be able to see. And that's what everybody's working on. In your room you can see the lines in the room. Now what if the phone sees that and it can stabilize and image on that? And it can actually hang a picture there on the wall? That's where it's headed.

RWW: Any predictions on how far off we are from things like glasses that do this or other devices?

Lens-FitzGerald: Glasses, in a way, are there but they're kind of clunky still. I think they'll definitely come and it could be next year already. I wonder though, if you want glasses. It could be the car with wings, the flying car - we always think that we want it but looking back we can see that loads of version have been developed but nobody really liked them. We just thought we did. I think this could also be the case with the AR glasses. Of course, if you're a fighter plane pilot then you really want them, but for everyday like I think the phone is perfectly suited to do whatever we want.

RWW: Looking backwards, instead of forwards, what's the biggest challenge you've faced at Layar?

Lens-FitzGerald: Growing with the company. I remember in the beginning, when we were like swooped up by this tidal wave of attention and people offering stuff or wanting stuff, staying grounded, free of distractions - that was very difficult. It's about the product. It's about the company. That's always been the challenge.

RWW: One last question - putting aside all the barriers that exist right now, what's the ultimate future of AR?

Lens-FitzGerald: That is when AR is dead, when we don't really know that it's augmented reality anymore. You use it, you can't live without it anymore - maybe by then it's in our lenses. With a flip of a finger we change from the real reality to the bubbly version or with the flip of a finger I go to see your version that you're seeing right now, like a Skype call but through your eyes.

Imagine that - we don't even know it's augmented reality. It's integrated in our everyday life, in our everyday routine. You take it for granted like today you take for granted that all the computers are connected together and you have instant access to everything. It's about the connectivity of people and objects and places and the visualization of that. AR will disappear.

RWW: What is the hardware there? Is the hardware us? Is the hardware the object?

Lens-FitzGerald: In the end, I think the hardware is the object. It could be a phone, it could be glasses, it could be lenses but I think that's beside the point. It's that it works. Of course your car is nice but it's fun that you can go to your parents at Christmas with your car. It's about that latter part, not how you get there.

Want to learn more from Maarten Lens-FitzGerald? Register for the 2WAY Summit using this link and get $200 off select ticket levels.

Interview has been condensed and edited.

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American Express has announced today that it invested in the mobile payment startup Payfone, along with others, to close out a $19 million strategic funding round. The two companies have also formed an alliance to create a new global mobile checkout service where Payfone will combine its mobile authorization and payment services with American Express's recently announced digital payments platform Serve.

With Serve, users can send and receive money from their accounts, which are funded by a bank account, a debit or credit card, or by money from another Serve account. Serve will be accepted online, on mobile phones or with merchants who accept American Express cards.

With this new partnership, Payfone will use AmEx's Serve software platform, allowing consumers to purchase both digital and physical goods using their mobile phone number. The move is expected to help strengthen AmEx's position outside the U.S., where typically Visa and MasterCard dominate.

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The other investors in this $19 million round led by AmEx include Verizon Investments and Rogers Ventures, both venture capital arms of their respective mobile carriers. Payfone's existing shareholders include Opus Capital, BlackBerry Partners (RIM) and RRE Ventures.

Why Payfone is Unique

What makes Payfone unique, is that, unlike traditional payment networks, it leverages the security built into the mobile operator network itself when processing mobile payments. This access allows it to authorize credit and debit cards and mobile operator billed payments (i.e., carrier billing), while also fighting fraud, reducing risk, chargebacks and identity theft.

To do this, Payfone ties the phone's SIM card, device ID and location to each customer's account. That means it knows when a different phone is used, or when a phone is used in a different location. It also ties into the global SS7 signaling network for connected payment authorization and processing.

In short, says Payfone's CEO Rodger Desai, the company's goal is to make the mobile phone number "the new accepted way to pay."

AmEx's Foray into Mobile Payments: Online, Mobile and NFC?

AmEx's choice to partner with a startup of this kind is a change for the company, which has traditionally used its own proprietary payment network. It hopes, of course, that this will allow it to expand to other markets, by way of its Serve digital wallet service. As Desai says, there are "over 5 billion people worldwide currently have mobile phones, however less than 2 billion have credit cards." With Serve's rollout, AmEx is attempting to reach that untapped market.

Although not mentioned in the press releases put out today by Payfone and American Express, one aspect of Payfone's plans involve the use of NFC technology. According to the company's own website, it says that, in two years, it plans to be "a payment option for all goods and services, even when you pay by waving your phone in front of a reader at the checkout line."

Waving your phone at checkout is precisely how you perform an NFC-based transaction. For those unaware, NFC, or near field communication, is a wireless technology that enables data exchange between short distances - for example, between a mobile phone and a terminal at point-of-sale.

Many other businesses are diving into experiments with NFC lately, including American mobile operators Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile who, alongside Discover card, are launching an NFC-based mobile payments service called Isis, as well as Google, which is (reportedly) launching a mobile payments service with Citibank and MasterCard. Several banks have also been testing NFC-enabled mobile wallets, including Bank of America, Chase, U.S. Bank and Wells Fargo.

To learn more about NFC, you can follow our ongoing series on ReadWriteMobile here.

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A bipartisan bill limiting what companies can do with online user activity and profile data may be introduced tomorrow by Senators John McCain and John Kerry, according to reporting first in the Wall St. Journal and then today on marketing news site Clickz. The Journal's Julia Angwin, citing anonymous sources, reports that the bill will require that sharing of user data between companies be opted-into by users and that users be able to see what data about them is being shared.

That might not sound so bad on the surface, but in a new world of fast-developing technology - it's good to think hard before making laws based on what might seem like common sense. The internet is a young thing and legislation like this could cut deep. Leadership on the issue from John McCain, who less than 3 years ago thought it appropriate to run for the Presidency without ever having used the internet before, seems particularly inappropriate. This is an issue that needs to be looked at from a pro-technology perspective, at least in part.

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Data flying from point to point, out of your sight, only somewhat under your control, until magic happens - isn't that the nature of the Internet? And isn't using it at all opting-in to redistribution of data? That might be too philosophical. There's a practical story here of old-fashioned invention, too.

Requiring opt-in, instead of opt-out, for data sharing would likely greatly reduce the amount of user data available for sharing, analysis and use in creating new software and services. While unpoliced data sharing clearly frightens many people (where are the victims of these crimes?) - the consequences of stifling data sharing by industry are more tangible. [Note that data privacy violations can harm real people but there's a difference between showing private info to other individual people and machines processing personal info in bulk. It's not the mysterious machines to be afraid of, it's the real-live creeps you actually know.]

"These regulations," says leading social network data hacker and ReadWriteWeb contributor Pete Warden, "will deter startups from building new tools like Mint.com or Rapportive, while the big corporations can devote whole departments to working around any new rules."

Handling a Tidal Wave

The consequences of such legal action are hard to foresee. "The tricky question is, what is Personally Identifiable Information?" says Warden. "Everyone wants to just regulate names, addresses, etc. but since you can deanonymize almost any user-generated data set, and derive that information...any regulations will end up affecting far more applications than you might expect."

Indeed, data is widely expected to become one of the key factors in the future of economic and social development. And so much data is personal. (There's a whole lot of personal data about all of us collected and shared off-line too, at the grocery store for example, or in direct marketing databases - but that's not the subject of so much ire.)

This is a common theme here on this blog. The example I've offered most commonly in calling for data to flow as freely as possible is the history of what's called real estate redlining. In the 1960s, when both U.S. Census information and real estate mortgage loan information were made available for bulk analysis, it was proven that banks around the U.S. were discriminating against home loan applicants in traditionally African American neighborhoods.

That was a big deal and I suspect that there are patterns of comparable importance, both positive and negative, hiding in the huge flowing river of online user data.

Dr. Dirk Helbing, of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, chairs the team building a project called the Living Earth Simulator (LES), a massive data project aiming to simulate as much natural and social activity on earth as possible. Those simulations, to be carried out on a scale inspired by the Large Hadron Collider, would aim to discover all kinds of patterns hidden in the mass of human and ecological data, including social network data.

Here's how he explains the importance of data analysis for pattern recognition. "Many problems we have today - including social and economic instabilities, wars, disease spreading - are related to human behavior, but there is apparently a serious lack of understanding regarding how society and the economy work," he says. "Revealing the hidden laws and processes underlying societies constitutes the most pressing scientific grand challenge of our century."

Data analysis uncovered systematic racial discrimination in housing loans in the 1960's. In the future, analysis of the incredible living census that is our internet data could be used to discover patterns and opportunities relevant to global warming, overpopulation, the spread of disease and the fact that the world today is an awful, unfair mess.

Setting the Tone

The US Federal Government, in discussing the issues around online data and privacy, always mentions the need when taking government action regarding privacy to safeguard the incredible potential for innovation in all this data.

The Wall St. Journal's extensive reports on these matters make no such effort. It's remarkable that the paper of record for capitalism makes no serious gesture in its reporting on data privacy to recognize the incredible economic engine that is online data. Instead, the publication's tone is fear-mongering and self-congratulatory. (A code on Ashley's computer knows that she likes the movie The Princess Bride and that information is sold to other companies for 1/10 of 1 cent...'Well, I like to think I have some mystery left to me," Ashley says, "but apparently not!" Poor woman! No mystery left!)

I hope that McCain and Kerry don't introduce a bill requiring online user data sharing to be opt-in only. If they do, I hope there's a lot more conversation and learning than there is legislating.

No one puts it better than the US Department of Commerce. That body said the following in its announcement of the new Federal Privacy Policy Office in December:

Strong commercial data privacy protections are critical to ensuring that
the Internet fulfills its social and economic potential. Our increasing use of the Internet generates voluminous and detailed flows of personal information from an expanding array of devices.

Some uses of personal information are essential to delivering services and applications over the Internet. Others support the digital economy, as is the case with personalized advertising.

Some commercial data practices, however, may fail to meet consumers' expectations of privacy; and there is evidence that consumers may lack adequate information about these practices to make informed choices. This misalignment can undermine consumer
trust and inhibit the adoption of new services. It can also create legal and practical uncertainty for companies. Strengthening the commercial data privacy framework is thus a widely shared interest.

However, it is important that we examine whether the existing policy framework has resulted in rules that are clear and sufficient to protect personal data in the commercial context.

The government can coordinate this process, not necessarily by acting as a regulator, but rather as a convener of the many stakeholders--industry, civil society, academia--that share our interest in strengthening commercial data privacy protections. The Department of Commerce has successfully convened multi-stakeholder groups to develop and
implement other aspects of Internet policy. Domain Name System (DNS) governance provides a prominent example of the Department's ability to implement policy using this model.

Convening multi-stakeholder conversations between diverse industry and other experts. That sounds like a much better idea than passing laws that cut so deep, here so close to the dawn of the internet.

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Sony Computer Entertainment America has just announced that it has reached a settlement with George Hotz, putting an end to the legal battle over Hotz - better known as Geohot - and his jailbreaking of Sony's Playstation 3.

Details of the settlement were not released, but according to Sony, the two parties reached an "agreement in principle" on March 31. As part of the settlement, Hotz agreed to a permanent injunction against publishing any further code.

Sony's statement declares the settlement a "win" for anti-piracy efforts, but in it Hotz repeats what he has long claimed about his jailbreaking project: "It was never my intention to cause any users trouble or to make piracy easier."

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Sony's lawsuit against Hotz claimed that the hacker's jailbreak of the Sony PS3 violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act as well as the Computer Fraud Abuse Act. Furthermore, Sony argued that the jailbreak released by Hotz would enable users to play pirated video games on their consoles. As part of Hotz's legal defense, he contended that the Playstation should be viewed no differently than a mobile phone, which under DMCA regulations, is legal to jailbreak.

With an out-of-court settlement rather than a trial, these issues of whether or not DMCA regulations cover gaming consoles appear unsettled.

While Sony might paint this as a win, the company did come under fire for what Electronista calls a "scorched earth attitude" to the lawsuit, in which the company's pretrial demands included gaining access to the records of anyone who had viewed or commented on the jailbreak video on YouTube. Sony also requested that Twitter provide the identities of those who revealed the hack.

While Sony's statement doesn't really exonerate Hotz from a connection to piracy, it does make it clear that he isn't involved in the recent attacks by Anonymous on various Sony websites.

For his part, Hotz has updated his blog, Geohot Got Sued, to announce that "As of 4/11/11, I am joining the SONY boycott. I will never purchase another SONY product. I encourage you to do the same."

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The Antikythera Mechanism, built in the 2nd century B.C. and recovered in 1900, is the most complex machine to survive from ancient times. Looking like a sophisticated time piece, it turned out to be just that. The device apparently calculated the positions of the moon, sun and known planets. But recent work has revealed an additional element of sophistication: it tracks the sun's relative speeds at different times of the year.

The Hellenic device, thought by many to have been used as a calculator for religious festivals. is widely considered to be the oldest extant analog computer. It has between 30 and 70 gears and a host of other parts. The two concentric rings on the face contain the Greek zodiac and the Egyptian months.

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To describe the relative speed of the sun (based on the elipitical route of the Earth around it), the mechanism's makers have increased the distance of the zodiac sections on the device to reflect the apparent difference in the sun's pace across the sky.

Wired quotes University of Puget Sound physics professor James Evans, who led the investigations of the latest team, on why the makers did not gear the difference, as they did the change of the moon's speed. The difference in the speed of the sun is much more slight than the moon. Gearing such a difference, said Evans, would be exceedingly complex.

"Evans and colleagues suggested a simpler way to make the sun dial appear to change speed: Stretch the zodiac. If the spaces on the front wheel of the mechanism were of different widths, Evans reasoned, then the hand representing the sun would take longer to travel through the part of the year lumped under the zodiac sign of Taurus than through Libra."

The original find was a corroded lump. Since then, the device has been scanned using a number of technologies, the most recent a 3D x-ray scan. The scans have shown the constituent parts, most of which would have remained unknown otherwise.

This additional element of the Antikythera mechanism does not make the favorite theory of its use any more or less likely to be true. Nor does it answer the questions of where such complex engineering came from and where it went. It does hint that the mechanism may hold additional secrets and that is exciting for its own sake, quite apart from what it might teach us about our past.

Difference engine photo by Liz Henry | Antikythera image from Wikipedia | other sources: A Blog About History

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As we reported earlier, Facebook open-sourced its data center specifications and practices today. The infrastructural details of Facebook's new Prineville, OR data center can now be found on the Open Compute Project website.

The first thing that came to mind while reading Facebook's announcement (where you can find a general overview of what Facebook is doing) today is that this officially signals the commodification of infrastructure design. I'd like to point you again to RedMonk analyst Stephen O'Grady's blog post "How Important is Software?" Generational Differences Between Software Producers." O'Grady writes "With rare exceptions, it will be increasingly difficult to justify high margin infrastructure software products as they will be providing less competitive advantage over time."

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O'Grady was writing about infrastructural software, such as databases and operating systems, but the same applies to data center design. It could be argued that data center design has long been commodified, with companies like HP going so far as to manufacture and ship data centers in shipping containers. But compare Facebook's data center policy to Google's.

Google's data center in The Dalles, OR has been compared to Area 51. It's super-secretive. Even though there are well established best practices for data centers, the work companies like Facebook, Google and Rackspace put into infrastructural innovation are a competitive advantage. Facebook is blowing the lid off this, though Rackspace and the other members of OpenStack have been driving this as well.

This won't have much effect on most companies. But for infrastructure-heavy companies like Amazon.com, Google and Yahoo, this is a game changer. Now anyone can look to Open Compute to learn how to build a Web-scale data center.

Why can Facebook do this? Because, as O'Grady points out:

For Facebook, the value is not in the infrastructure - though Hip-Hop demonstrates the value of even marginal improvements in performance for high scale players - it is in the users and the data they generate. As Tim O'Reilly famously put it, "data is the Intel Inside."

As we think about what this means moving forward, I'll leave you with another quote from O'Grady: "When you look to differentiate, you should focus on the personnel side over infrastructure technology. In analytics, for example, the competitive advantage may not be answering the question marginally faster than a competitor, but asking a better question."

Facebook is also a member of the Open Networking Foundation organization, which we covered here.

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Last week, Google unveiled a new feature in search results, +1. Described as analagous to Facebook's "like," Google's +1 will be a way of signalling social recommendations in a Google search. As such, the introduction of +1 has been described as another step by Google towards including social elements as part of its algorithmic approach to search, and another way for Google to help improve the quality of its search results.

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Although the impetus behind the launch of +1 may be "better search," for small businesses who try to optimize their sites for Google search, the advent of what seems to be yet another tweak in the game may be frustrating. But in the long run, Google says +1 will help users find relevant content, and that's good news if, indeed, your site delivers. Google also says that "as with any new ranking signal, we'll be starting carefully and learning how those signals affect search quality."

Eventually there will be +1 buttons to sit alongside your Facebook and Twitter buttons on your website, but those are not yet widely available for site owners (although you can sign up here). Currently it's available in search results (which you can enable here but requires you have a Goole profile). +1 will also appear on AdWords, although clicking that you like (or rather +1) an ad will not count as a paid click on an ad.

Google says you don't need to change your advertising strategy due to +1. But as a URL for a site that is +1ed on an organic link will also benefit in the paid search ads, there may be incentive to use that URL as a destination in your ads, rather than creating ad-specific landing pages and creating content that is narrowly optimized to paid campaigns that you run.

Ray Grieselhuber, founder and CEO of the SEO software startup Ginzametrics has written a post on his blog about the impact +1 will have on site owners. He advises that people "start thinking about how they can integrate their paid and organic search marketing efforts with the same or similar content so they will be better prepared if +1 takes hold (a good idea even if it doesn't)."

Grieselhuber also notes that Google's move to create a +1 button - for sites and for search results - demonstrates the increasing importance that sharing and social will play in SEO in the next few years. So if nothing else, it's as good as a time as any to make sure your content is shareable.

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Amazon may integrate the emerging technology known as NFC (near field communication) into its mobile applications, allowing customers to pay for items at point-of-sale using only their mobile phone. The technology is currently being explored by the company's Amazon Payments unit, BusinessWeek recently reported, citing unnamed sources familiar with the project.

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NFC is a wireless communication technology that allows for data exchanges between short distances and is the backbone of many upcoming mobile wallet initiatives. There are three ways NFC can be implemented on phones: either fully integrated into the handset, such as is the case with new phones like Google's flagship device, the Nexus S; it can also exist on the SIM card or on a microSD card inserted into a card slot.

Note: You can learn more about NFC on ReadWriteMobile, where we're running a series of articles exploring the technology and its uses. The first of those articles is here.

Amazon Thinking About NFC

If the BusinessWeek report is accurate, this news means Amazon is throwing its hat into the ring as yet another company moving into the NFC space. Last week, we reported how Google was ditching barcodes for NFC in its business listings service Places. The company is also reportedly working on its own mobile wallet service in conjunction with Citigroup and MasterCard.

Apple, RIM and Isis, a coalition of U.S. operators, are also working on mobile wallet programs, the former two only reportedly, but the latter very publicly via www.paywithisis.com.

The benefit of a mobile wallet service, such as the one Amazon may be building, is that it not only replaces plastic credit cards with a mobile phone, but it also allows retailers to immediately transfer rewards in the form of coupons, discounts, loyalty points and more to the handset used during the payment transaction.

Using NFC for Price Comparisons

Amazon's program, the report says, may also introduce a price-comparison feature which allows consumers to tap their phone on an item's NFC-enabled retail tag in the store in order to locate the item on Amazon.com. This is essentially how Amazon's mobile application works today, except that it allows users to snap photos and scan barcodes, not use NFC.

More news about the project, which is being researched by the Amazon Payments unit, will be revealed in the next three to five months.

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I have a mail system totally separate from my inbox to use when I’m testing signup forms. Some of them are client, some of them are vendors my clients are thinking about using. In any case, it’s mail I’m seriously concerned won’t stop just by me opting out of it.

The server hosting that mail system has been flakey lately, and needs to be hard power cycled to make it come back. We had a major power glitch this morning and so ended up down at the colo and power cycled that box while we were there.

This box was last working February 4th. It’s been off the internet for almost 2 months now. It wasn’t answering on port 25. It was dead. No mail here. And, yet, a bunch of legitimate email marketers are still attempting to send those addresses mail.

Really. Dead for 2 months and the senders keep trying to mail to those addresses. The server came back about 2 1/2 hours ago. I already have 6 emails from two different senders.

Seriously. If you can’t deliver a mail to someone for TWO MONTHS just give it up already. I am sad that even companies that get the best advice I can give them still can’t get the simple things right.

And, really, don’t argue “but it came back! Clearly we should keep trying!” Yes, it came back. But in all the years I’ve had this disposable email system I have not opened a single image. I’ve not purchased a single thing. I’ve never shown any sign of life on any of those addresses. The mailserver has been down for months at a time. There is no value to continuing to send mail to those addresses. And, yet, people still do it.

Why? WHY!?