Co.Lab

Expect Regulation, Policing and Taxes on The Net

Increased levels of regulation, policing and taxes are inevitable on The Internet. Whilst The Internet was used by cutting edge technophiles, it was like the wild-west, a new area to be explored free from the encumbrances of regulation.  But once everyone gets on board then we get two groups joining in:
1. criminals
2. children and vulnerable citizens

If we have criminals then we need policing, identification and the authority to shut them down.  Email spamming, identity theft and fraud can't be allowed to go unchallenged. All the designs from one of our sites were recently copied.  The copyright infringer was based in America and we had to personally chase them down, using several agencies. There was no standard process to apply to have their server disconnected by their ISP.  Clearly any such process would need to be carefully monitored and controlled, but it should exist.

With vulnerable people using The Internet this changes the game too.  Whilst as a savvy user you may say "I will recognize a scam or phishing attempt; don't erode my freedom of speech with regulations, controls and identity tracking", can you be sure your parents and grandparents would be safe?  Whilst a mature user may say, "I'll choose what pornography to view", do you want your children to have the same choice?

And finally, as more commercial transactions go through the web, governments will be attracted to levy VAT taxes. Why should online transactions not be taxed whilst off-line ones are?

It will all have to happen; tax, regulation and policing.  Better to be involved with a debate about how to do it, than arguing against it.  The same rules and regulations we need to run a civil offline society, will also be needed online to protect everyone from criminals and safeguard the vulnerable and young.

How many estate agents per village?

How many estate agents would be appropriate for a village with a few hundred inhabitants? When searching for houses I saw villages with 2 or 3 and I saw town high streets sporting 3 or 4!

Apparently estate agents in the UK are closing at a rate of 150 per week in 2009.

The village of Chew Magna near our office recently lost one of its two estate agents. The shop has now started to be fitted out as a men's Barbers.  I think this is a better balance of services and look forward to having a barbers available near the office.

Photo Gallery for New Personal Account

The next two Tonsho releases are planned.  Coming up on 16th June is a release which introduces a new Personal Account as a lower cost premium account. All paid accounts will include photo galleries and the ability to create a zip archive in addition to the individual files for convenient downloading.

We're also working on the marketing materials for the Photographer account with Photo Checkout.

I've now linked this blog to my new twitter account EdRoss_Tonsho.

Excellent Customer Service

We have a Delonghi Magnifca in our office and it makes great coffee.  Recently, the coffee has been a bit cold when it comes out and then there was a fault during a de-scaling cycle.  I called the Delonghi tech support number, the phone was answered quickly.  I was asked roughly when I bought the machine (it comes with a 2 year guarantee) - I wasn't forced to search through tons of receipts for the exact day I bought it.  They immediately arranged a courier to collect the machine and returned it within two days!

I can thoroughly recommend this coffee maker as a result.

Open Coffee Meet

A recent Open Coffee Bristol meet included presentations of products.  There were very interesting presentations about outsourced software testing and social media monitoring, I also presented Tonsho. Outsourcing testing struck me as useful when resources aren't available for a full time tester, but the difficulty would be in setting up the test system and communicating what the sytem should do for complicated projects. Detailed social media monitoring to see what is being posted on forums and blogs about your company product seems like an important service, particularly as a product grows in popularity and really gets discussed. Detailed write up is on the Open Coffee Blog.

Missing Features Helpful

It strikes me that the success of the iRobot Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner comes largely from what they cleverly left out of the spec.  Many people question these missing features even after seeing the robot working and hearing of its commercial success. The two missing features are:
1. No knowledge or map of the room layout
2. No large dust bag

Why do these help?  Forming a model such as a 2D map of the room to be cleaned is a complicated task, which would need power hungry processors and more accurate sensors. The model would be prone to errors, resulting in parts of the room being missed. Worst, the model would cope badly with changes like chairs or other objects being moved, either by the robot, poeple or pets.  It turns out a set of simple behaviours, similar to those displayed by insects, are sufficient to give good and reasonably efficient coverage. The primary behaviour is cross the room then bounce at a random angle off the wall or object.

The other standard assumption, that the robot needs a sizable dust bag, like a standard vacuum cleaner, is also critical.  With large storage the robot would need to be much bigger, leading to several problems.  A large size would drain the battery quickly when moving around. A large, heavy robot would be in danger of damaging things it knocked into.  And perhaps most importantly it couldn't get into small spaces and under low furniture.

Another design, with a striking 'missing' feature is the Internet Protocol, aka the IP in TCP/IP.  The Internet Procotol delivers a single packet of data to the specified address. But with no guarantee it will get there! The advantage is the protocol can perform its stated function very well indeed.  Meaning protocols built on top can rely on it.  This works well with the stacked protocol approach used in networking.

What features could you drop from the specs in your projects to give increased success?

New email features

Today we deployed many new features to Tonsho including:
- Files can be sent through the web interface (particularly useful for webmail users like hotmail, gmail)
- Tracking the views and downloads of your files (Professional Accounts)
- Out-of-office auto-responder (Professional Accounts)
- There are now adverts on the free Personal Account file download pages (Pro accounts have no ads and you can add your own company's logo to the download page)
- Hybrid spam filtering, meaning that only mails above a certain spam threshold are challenged (Professional Accounts)

Enjoy!

Top File Sending Tools

The email expert Heinz Tschabitscher has included Tonsho in his list of top file sending services. In his review Tschabitscher correctly notes Tonsho's 100Mb limit for free accounts, I want to mention that upgrading to a Tonsho Professional account removes this limit. Tonsho is also featured on the about.com email spotlight Travelling Samurai.

In other news, the video from my Tonsho pitch is up.  It was a good experience to practice pitching Tonsho, I was quite nervous so hopefully when/if the time comes to do it for real I'll be better prepared. But for now we're happy growing the service organically without the extra investment.

Tonsho Flyer in the News

A Tonsho flyer was spotted in this news article. It happens to be placed on the table in front of me. Also, Tonsho will be presented at Bristol Design Festival : ThePitch. The event will be filmed and a link to my pitch will appear on this blog, provided it doesn't all go too embarrassingly wrong.

Tonsho Feature: Multiple email addresses

We've added a new Tonsho feature for professional accounts.  It's now possible to add multiple email addresses to your Tonsho account.  This means that you can send out emails from any of the email addresses listed.  You can also fetch mail from any of the sub accounts and use the spam filtering. This uses the same allowed contacts lists for all the accounts.

For example consider a user called Bob, who has three addresses: bob@mycompany.com, info@mycompany.com and bob@personaladdress.com.  Lets say Bob signed up for Tonsho with the address bob@mycompany.com, so this is the master email address for Bob's Tonsho account.  Initially Bob can only send email originating from bob@mycompany.com.  By adding the email addresses info@mycompany.com and bob@personaladdress.com Bob will also be able to send outbound mail from these addresses.

Now lets consider the spam filtering. Imagine that Bob adds a new email address to his allowed contact list from a new correspondent alice@widgets_r_us.com (this could happen when Bob send an email to Alice or when Alice sends one to Bob and responds to the challenge mail). Because all of the sub email addresses share the same allowed contacts list, this means that Alice is now allowed to send to info@mycompany.com and bob@personaladdress.com (as well as bob@mycompany.com) without receiving any further challenge emails.