BBB Reliability Report for MerchantCircle – Better Business Bureau of San Jose

Based on BBB files, this company has an unsatisfactory record with the BBB due to failure to respond to one or more complaints and or two or more otherwise unresolved complaints. However the business has resolved most complaints presented to the bureau.

The BBB processed a total of 87 complaints about this company in the last 36 months, our standard reporting period.Of the total of 87 complaints closed in 36 months, 66 were closed in the last year.

The bolds are not mine, but the sentiment is. FUD on steroids produces fear and loathing not loyal customers.

Why men never stop for directions – Julie Beun-Chown, Canwest News Service

According to a joint study by the University of Lethbridge and the University of Saskatchewan, a man’s ability to find his way out of anywhere armed only with a road map and his sense of direction is due to ancestral testosterone. During the study, which pitted men against women in a virtual water maze, researchers examined how the male hormone affects such spatial abilities as map reading, mental orientation and the ability to use north-south Euclidean directions.

“One of the big things we’ve observed is that men’s ability to use Euclidean directions seems to be innate,” says University of Saskatchewan researcher Jennifer Burkitt Hiebert.

A good example of how bad science or at least bad reporting on science leads to stereotyping and worse. I would like someone to tell Maps Guide Jen that she is bad with maps because her testosterone is too low. 🙂

Words of wisdom from Google’s CEO

Apple’s iPhone are such search fanatics that they account for the majority of queries from mobile phones on Google….He said that iPhone users search ten times more frequently than those of other phones, underscoring that the Apple device’s design and easy to find browser makes the phone particularly Internet friendly.

Worried about spending too much time at the office? Google had to create a rule to prevent it: No more can workers live at the office, the consequence of at least one employee who made it a practice to pull out a futon at night and sleep by his desk. Schmidt said that Sun Microsystems, where he once worked, had a similar policy 20 years ago.

I wonder if that employee was in the Maps division?

Paid Search on Mobile: Looking Beyond the Hype

The latest much debated topic around the mobile internet is whether mobile advertising will ever take off. Analyst company Juniper Research seem to think it will. In a report out this month they estimated that total annual advertising spend on mobile services will exceed $1 billion (£500 million) for the first time during 2008 rising to $7.6 billion (£3.8million) by 2013. Part of the reason for this growth, they believe, is the availability of higher speed networks and new generation handsets such as the Apple iPhone.

Many lessons have been learned over the last 5 years from the ‘big screen’ home/office environment in how to incorporate ads into websites in a way that is acceptable for users. But none of these principles can be applied to the ‘small screen’ world of mobile. We are starting again from scratch and this time, the challenges are much greater. Mobile ads are going to be a lot more intrusive, and if there is going to be significant growth in this area then some compelling incentives are going to need to be offered to the mobile user if they are to be tolerated or embraced.

The Mobile Web Overnights – Steve Smith, MobileInsider

In dueling reports yesterday, Quattro Wireless and Crisp Wireless drilled into the Q1 data from the premium publishers they manage on mobile….

…On campaigns requiring more than 20,000 uniques moving to a landing mobile microsite, Quattro saw an average 2.33% click-through rate….A single banner, even on the diminutive cell phone, beats the clutter of the Web any day.