Our site has received the Cybertech 2001 Award. This means that a number of people (probably quite a few of our readers) nominated our site as one that presents valuable information. To those of you who submitted our site, thank you.

Win $10,000! Why don't you tell your friends about our site? Each referral gets you another entry in a contest for $10,000. Just click this link and fill in your friends' email IDs. They will get an email stating that you recommended the site. When they click the link in the email, you will get even more entries into the contest.

Free Epson printer compatible cartridges! Our regular price is $15 for a set of black and color cartridges for most Epson printers. Compare this to Epson's price of over $20 a cartridge and your are saving about 60%. But the deal has gotten even better. If you have any of the following models (and ONLY the following models): 440, 480, 640, 660, 670, 750 or 1200, take advantage of this deal while it lasts. Order one color and one black ink cartridge for $15, get an extra black cartridge for free! Folks have complained that they use up the black ink faster than the color. Here's your chance to make your black ink last longer absolutely free. These cartridges are indistinguishable from the original. They look the same and work the same. Here is your chance to save more than 75% For more information

Digital camera bargains This month's digital camera values: the Casio QV-3000EX, a 3+ megapixel zoom with high quality Canon lens for $400, shipping included. Megapixel.net rated it as one of the best cameras in its class. It has just been discontinued, so the price has crashed as dealers look to unload it before its replacement comes on the market. Hurry before they're gone. The Toshiba PDR-M65 (3+ megapixel zoom for $450, Toshiba PDR-M61 (2.3 megapixel zoom for $300) and Agfa CL20 (1.3 megapixel camera and webcam at $145). We also have the new Kodak DX cameras at competitive prices. We have a number of liquidators and surplus merchants that we contact for closeouts. It is difficult to update the web site because these items come and go.

We have also tracked down the manufacturer of the battery for the Fuji MX series, Toshiba PDR series and Kodak DC4800 and have some in stock at $30 for our label or $33 for the Kodak label (we pay a few dollars more for the name brand labels, though they are all the same battery.)

Charge your battery in your car. We now have chargers that let you charge your digital camera, cellphone, laptop or camcorder battery in your car. Charge any Nicad, Nimh or Li-ion battery including those designed specifically for the Kodak DC4800, Toshiba PDR-M4/M5/M70 and Fuji MX series cameras. Charger for Kodak, Toshiba, Fuji is $38 including car adaptor cable. Universal charger for all batteries is $50 including adaptor. Kodak charger for Kodak, Toshiba, Fuji battery (does not include car adaptor) is $38. With any charger, add a battery (NP-80, BT-2, Klic3000 compatible model) and shipping is free.

Tributes the the World Trade Center Victims and Heroes

These were sent in by readers. They take a while to load but are well worth it. Have a hanky ready. I don't think any civilized person can view these with shedding some tears.

OJC         Addys Lane

Army's Revised Map of Afghanistan Region

New York Plan To Rebuild the World Trade Center

Make A fortune on the Internet

My AuctionBytes article

Paypal Going Public

Despite losses of 231 Million Dollars and more losses expected, Paypal plans to issue an IPO. I wonder if you can pay for your shares with Paypal. If it doesn't perform, you can charge it back and make a "quality of goods" complaint. Since the story was taken down before this letter went out, here is a synopsis:

PayPal Inc. Files IPO Plans by MICHAEL LIEDTKE | AP Business Writer

SAN FRANCISCO -- Popular online payment service PayPal Inc. filed plans Friday to sell its stock in an initial public offering that will try to overcome investors' recent disdain of unprofitable Internet companies. The Palo Alto-based company hopes to raise up to $80.5 million, PayPal said in a prospectus filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. PayPal is pursuing its IPO in a frosty climate. With Wall Street turning a cold shoulder to tech companies, only three Silicon Valley companies have gone public so far this year. Sunnyvale-based Loudcloud, chaired by Web browser pioneer Marc Andreessen, pulled off the last Silicon Valley IPO at $6 per share in March, and its shares are now trading at $1.12.

As of Sept. 1, PayPal had 10 million registered users and processed online transactions totaling $747 million in the three months ended June 30, according to its prospectus. The system doesn't require PayPal to spend much to attract business. In the first half of this year, for instance, PayPal spent just $48,000 on marketing and promotion. The service is particularly popular among small businesses and sellers on eBay's auction site because it guarantees that they will be paid (comment: someone should check their facts) for merchandise, frequently at a lower cost than the merchant fees imposed by major credit cards (comment: someone should check their facts again. 2.9% + 30 cents is not much of a bargain). PayPal typically charges transaction fees ranging from 2.2 percent to 2.9 percent of the sale, plus 30 cents. That hasn't been enough to make PayPal profitable. The company has lost $231 million since its inception and management warned in the prospectus that the red ink is expected to continue at least through the rest of this year. But the company is narrowing its losses as its revenues climb. During the first six months of this year, PayPal lost $56.9 million on revenue of $34.2 million compared with a loss of $70.6 million on revenue of $3.3 million at the same time last year. (comment: Now there's a great slogan: "Invest with us because we'll lose less money this year than last.")

PayPal is run by one of its co-founders, Peter Thiel, 33, a former securities lawyer. Other major shareholders in the company include another co-founder, Elon Musk (who abandoned the company or was driven out), and Silicon Valley venture capital firms Sequoia Capital, Nokia Ventures and Clearstone Venture Partners. The IPO is being underwritten by investment bankers Salomon Smith Barney, Robertson Stephens and William Blair & Co.

So there you have it. A company with a $231 million dollar loss and millions more in losses expected, wants to raise $80 million. No mention of the X.com Internet bank, which Paypal abandoned. Now my company has been solvent for 15 years. We have steady profits and expect to remain profitable. Anybody want to buy me out for only $50 million?

Paypal Discloses High Rate of Chargebacks

The Banking Channel Article

In case the article gets taken down, here it is:

Oct 03 2001 : PayPal's move to file for an IPO at this time, has mystified analysts, but may be a result of its USD 8.9 million in chargebacks from unauthorized credit card use in 2000, which led to an unspecified fine from MasterCard. In its filing, PayPal states that its liability for chargebacks from fraudulent transactions could cost it the right to accept credit card payments, which comprised 50.5 per cent of its business in the quarter to June 30. Since the firm has enough funds to remain in business for two years without new funding, Avivah Litan, of Gartner, notes, "they have cash, so this doesn't compute. This is the worst possible time for an IPO".

Apart from the risk of online fraud, PayPal faces competition from Citigroup, which is co-marketing its C2it service with AOL Time Warner and Microsoft, and can quickly gain substantial market share. IDC analyst, Ian Rubin, expects further competition to emerge, as "eventually some of the incumbents like American Express, Visa and MasterCard will either create their own products, or evolve their credit cards to do something that will compete head-to-head with PayPal". Rubin also notes, "P2P online payments are kind of in vogue right now, but I don't see them necessarily having a long shelf life".

PayPal's filing also indicates that its undefined status under state, federal and global financial regulations, especially in light of US, and international, regulation of Internet transactions, could lead to penalties. For this reason, Gartner analyst, Avivah Litan, questions PayPal's filing for an IPO, since "they're not likely to raise very much money, and now they subject themselves to public reporting and the whole overhead of being a public company". PayPal itself refused to comment on the filing, due to being in an official "quiet period" with the SEC, but is known to have had USD 134.6 million of cash and short-term securities, at June 30, 2001.

Free books and free shipping! Our book sale has just become twice as good as we slash prices by 50%. Hardcover books are now under $1, paperbacks are under 50 cents and shipping is free. Use your credit card with Citibank's C2it and get $10 back on your first payment. Visit Book Sale

17-year-old hacker caused 1.7 billion in damage

Cnet/Reuters Story
In case the story gets taken down before this is published, here is a synopsis:
MONTREAL--A Canadian teenage hacker nicknamed Mafiaboy was sentenced to eight months in a youth detention center Wednesday, a move welcomed by prosecutors as a strong message against the world's hacking community. Judge Gilles Ouellet ruled that the 17-year-old Montreal teenager committed a criminal act when he crippled Internet sites such as Buy.com, eBay and Yahoo last year, causing an estimated $1.7 billion in damages. The boy, who pleaded guilty in January to 55 charges of mischief, cannot be identified under a Canadian law protecting young offenders. He showed no emotion at the sentencing hearing.

Ouellet also ordered the teenager to face one year of probation after his detention ends and fined him $160 (C$250). He will be allowed occasional visits to family and friends during his time in detention. Most of the charges against Mafiaboy were for unauthorized access to a computer. The prosecutor in the case, Louis Miville-Deschenes, withdrew the remaining charges last winter and said Wednesday he was pleased with the ruling. Defense lawyer Yan Romanowski said he was disappointed and surprised by the judgment and was considering an appeal.

The case stretches back to February 2000 when several Web sites were crippled after being bombarded by thousands of messages over a short period of time. Known as a denial-of-service attack and launched by a hacker who called himself Mafiaboy, the Internet invasion also jammed sites such as Excite and Amazon.com , preventing legitimate users from gaining access. Other sites, such as CNN.com--owned by AOL Time Warner--were also affected.

The Mounties, working in cooperation with the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, arrested the youth in April 2000 after a probe that included taps on phone and computer communications and the help of informants. Investigators said Mafiaboy bragged about his cyberattack in Internet chat rooms.

Rating the Rebates

There are a lot of great deals available on the net that include rebates. Often we wonder why they don't just reduce the price. The answer is simple. A significant percentage of customers buy the item with the intention of sending in the rebate and then forget about it. But some companies take this a step further. They simply don't pay. Without that rebate, the great deal is no longer so great. What appears to be one of the great Ponzi schemes of this decade (Charles Ponzi was a con man who came up with a scheme where the early investors received profits paid from the money the later investors provided. Eventually there were more payments to be made than there were funds and the whole scheme collapsed.) was a company called Cyberrebate. They "sold" items for about 5 times their true value but offered a 100% rebate. How did they make money? When I called and spoke to one of the principals, possibly the owner, he told me that they got these items from closeouts for pennies of the dollar. He first explained that they made their money on the float (the interest they earned between the time they received the money and the time they paid out the rebate). I pointed out that since customers were paying by credit card, Cyberrebate was paying an immediate processing fee of about 2.5%. On top of that they paid for their web site, employees, advertising, offices and so on. A conservative estimate would put their costs at 4%. Then they had to return 100% of the purchase price about 3 months later. So they were paying 4% for a 90 day loan, or an annual rate of 16%. He then told me that Cyberrebate was also paid to do some sort of demographic research. It made no sense to me but then again, very little about how most Dot-Coms work does. All I knew was that I sent in my rebates and received payment. Now it appears that the site actually worked like this:

Cyberrebate ordered merchandise on credit. They then sold it on their site for about 500% of retail value, promising rebates. As sales increased, they used the money that came in to pay the rebates sent in three months earlier and to pay their vendors just enough to maintain a good credit rating. As sales increased, they received more credit from their vendors. Eventually it reached the point where they owed more to their vendors and in rebates than there was money in the account and they declared bankruptcy, leaving vendors awaiting payment and customers awaiting rebates. Lawsuits are pending.

That is the problem with the Internet business model. You can't rate a company based on how much business they have done and how much money passes through their hands. I heard that Webvan burned through a billion dollars before going broke. Paypal claims ten million customers and processes millions a day yet all they have to show for it is a $231 million dollar loss. I hope that their operating expenses are coming from investors and that they are not using the payments coming in today to pay off the the ones from a few days before (not to mention the thousands of dollars held in restricted accounts). But there are no guarantees that Paypal isn't a house of cards about to collapse.

I have gotten prompt rebate payments from Panasonic, Epson, Toshiba, Staples and the Learning Company. My first set of rebates from Circuit City arrived promptly. My second set was a disappointment. I mailed three rebates on the same day. Because they were going to three different departments, I had to send them in three separate envelopes. About 6 weeks later I received a letter saying that one of my rebates was rejected because the UPC code I had enclosed was illegible. This was rather strange since I had sent the original one from the box. I had a photocopy and it was legible as well. I called the company and was told that upon further review, it would be processed promptly. Eight weeks later, I had not received any of the rebates. I called back and was told that 1) the rebate I had been specifically promised was still listed as missing the UPC code and 2) the other two rebates had never been received. I found this very hard to believe. After insisting on speaking with a manager, I let him know that I was not going to quietly accept this and that I had photocopies of all the UPC codes. He then allowed me to fax them in. I have since received two of the rebates. So I leave it up to my "jury" of readers: do you believe that somehow, of all the hundreds of letters I have mailed, it is a coincidence that the only two that were lost were the rebates to Circuit City and that by another strange coincidence, the one rebate that did arrive was somehow illegible and that by another coincidence, even after promising to send it out, it still sat for another 8 weeks waiting for an angry phone call? Or is it Circuit City's new policy to hold rebates and hope that the customer forgets, but only send it out if the customer is persistent?

I had a similar experience with Acer and Pacific Page, who didn't send the rebate until I called them 12 weeks later. At least they readilly admitted receiving it. Later I discovered that other folks to whom I had recommended these deals never received their rebates. So before you rush to grab a "great deal" that includes a rebate, take into account the probability that you will actually get it, keep copies of all the documentation and the number to call if your don't get it unless the deal is good even without the rebate.

Search Engine Smarts by Irving Weiss

Part VI - More on Link Popularity

Most popular search engines are increasing the value of link popularity as a measure to find pages that are both important and relevant to a search. Google openly claims that their Page Rank technology is primarily based on link popularity.

This month we will offer some more suggestions on increasing your link popularity. Search your favorite search engine on your main keywords, contact the sites that appear first and ask to trade links. It's a fair bet that they are attracting a decent amount of traffic if they are first on the list. If you add them to your site before you ask for a reciprocal link, it will increase your chances of success.

Go one step further and create a whole page or even a section dedicated to the other site in order to assure a link back. This is of course only really worthwhile if you are targeting a high traffic site for your reciprocal link or have permission to display their content for free.

Discover the link popularity of your competition by doing the following. Try typing link:www.domain.com works on most of the search engines. You can test meta search engines like www.queryserver.com and www.linkpopularity.com. Also, if you download the Google Toolbar from the Google homepage, it will show you who links to the site currently being viewed. Select "Page Info" on the Googlebar, and choose the option "Backwards Links". The Google toolbar has many other features as well including the pagerank of whatever page you happen to be looking at. A list of its featues can be found here. Perhaps some of these sites should be listing you as well. Email the webmaster.

If links to other sites seem inappropriate to your main pages, then create a "friends" or "alliances" page to list them on. List the page on their site that includes your link. When the search engines crawl through your site they will not only index you, but also index your allied sites. The more people who see these pages with your link on it, the more will click on your link and visit you. Remember: It is always best to have the keywords in the link and not just the site name.

Need help with the Search Engines? Optimization or advice. Feel free to contact me.
Irving Weiss searchenginesmarts@hotmail.com 718-337-6907

Just For Laughs

Funny site but not child appropriate: computer accessories.

Useful sites and freeware

Mailwasher has got to be the best anti-spam tool I have found. Before I got my own domain name, folks emailed me to my ID at my ISP. Once I started using my ccs@ygoodman.com ID, the only thing coming in to my previous ID was a few of the newsletters to which I had subscribed and a whole ton of spam, about 50 emails a day of it. I have been using mailwasher for only a few weeks and have watched that spam disappear. It's easy. You enter your email accounts. The program retrieves the headers of all your email messages. You can then mark messages for retrieval, deletion and/or bouncing. If marked for bounce, the sender gets a message that your email ID is invalid. This should take you off many spam lists. In addition, the sender's email ID is now blacklisted from sending you email again, so future emails will be deleted immediately. Those 50 spams a day have been reduced to under 15 in just two weeks.

Tiny Apps Site - contains a collection of applications that are 1.44 megs or less. Some of these apps are amazing, considering how small they are. Despite this age of bloatware, some programmers still remember how to code efficiently.

Winpulse shows you lots of useful information about your system's current configuration, including how much memory, swap space, cpu power and disk space is being used. Download Winpulse.

Ever send someone email and not get an answer for days or weeks? You sit there wondering if the emails are getting "lost in the ozone" or if the person is deliberately ignoring you. Here's a nifty way to know. Go to itraceyou.com and register for a free account. Now you can send mail one of two ways. You can send it directly from the itraceyou site or you can send it from your regular email but change the TO field just slightly. Itraceyou will send you a confirmation email when your email has been delivered to the recipient's mailbox and then a second email when it has been read. The recipient isn't notified of the trace. Next time you get that "Sorry for not responding but I've been away for a few weeks" reply, you'll have some idea if it's true. A free account at Itraceyou is limited to 15 secretly traced messages a day. After that, Itraceyou places a banner on the email saying something to the effect of "This email was traced using Itraceyou.com."
Another service that does a similar job is Confirm.to. No need to register for an account. Just add .confirm.to to the end of the email ID it is being sent to, as in: izzy@ygoodman.com.confirm.to. This will send the email and send you a confirmation when it has been read. Confirm.to limits you to 30 messages a month.

Do your drive letters come up differently depending on which computer you use or which removable drives you plug in? I use a removable drive and while I love it, there is one annoying feature and that is that if I plug it in, it becomes my D: drive and my D: becomes E:. This interferes with all the other programs I have set up. Outlook prompts me for a new PST file and applications can no longer find the files I last worked on. I just recently learned of a free program that will let you assign just about any device to any letter. letter assigner.

Here's one you can do yourself. Create a file in notepad with the following two lines:

[InternetShortcut]
URL=javascript:alert(document.lastModified)

Save the file as: last_modified.url in the favorites directory of your machine (usually c:\windows\favorites but it might be c:\winnt40\profiles\favorites). Now whenever you are on a web site, you can go to your favorits and click this URL to see the date that site was last changed.

Here's a useful one for folks who are very exacting or find their PC clock inacrruate. It's a utility that can sync your PC's clock with the atomic time. You can run it manually or set it to run automatically in your start up. Atomic Time.

Co_citer - this free utility lets you grab info from a web page into a mini database. It also stores relevant information like the URL, date grabbed, etc.

CDR identifier - this free utility will read a CD and tell you the manufacturer and some other information.

the Langa Letter tips and tricks on using your PC, emailed to you absolutely free. I have included some of his tips in my previous letters.

I hope this letter contained useful information. Please email ccs@ygoodman.com with any comments.