OK, so Derren Brown got the lottery balls right, but how did he do it?  All will be revealed on Friday night. Some people have theories about it, including me. I’m interested in the row of red lights on the back wall. It’s hard to tell from the angles as the back wall is not straight on, but the base of the ball stand also look to be slightly angled, and in the shot above, they could easily be facing each other.

Are these red lights somehow writing on the balls via laser, or a tightly focused beam of infra red light onto IR sensitive balls? Note how he doesn’t move them or touch them at all before the end of the show. Could they be very precisely positioned for such a beam to work?

The red lights are hidden from the camera most of the time, so we can’t see what they do when the numbers are being called out…

At the moment of typing this, Google, Yahoo and Bing all lead with the Wikipedia article, followed by IMDB.

It’ll be interesting to see if they push the news items that this claim will produce high up the search listings.

Oliver at Amazon UK or Oliver at Amazon US

UPDATE: OK, it’s an hour or so later, and Google has started to bring in news results. Just the one, so far, from Miami Herald.  The story is being run by News of The World here in the UK, so you would expect the references to that newspaper to push their results onto the page, but not yet. Nothing on Yahoo and Bing first pages as of yet…

No replaced with a more ‘authoritative’ AP news item

Update about 20 minutes later: Well Google takes the prize.  The news items are now top of thelisting for searches such as mark lester, mark lester paternity, mark lester paternity claim and michael jackson paternity claim. Yahoo and Bing are still the same they were before the news broke. Well done Google and your ability to bring breaking news into the search engine.

Not having any real idea how Yahoo and Bing do things behind the scenes, solutions seem fairly simple. They have, on one side, a variety of incoming news feeds, and on the other side, the public facing search results. It doesn’t take a great deal of computing to figure out a trending story from the incoming feeds, trusted blogs, forums etc. and make a decision whether to pass it into the search listing.  Even a semi automated version that texted/emailed 20+ staff with a decision and links to the news items that have caused the decision and need a threshold %age of YES and below a certain %age of NO before pushing it though to the search listings would be possible as a solution. It’s not like Yahoo and Microsoft don’t have staff around the world willing and able to respond to a phone call at all hours.

We’ve been beavering away and have created a system that will allow us to use Twitter feeds to create tools and sites targeting specific types of users, from consumer gossip through to corporate monitoring or online reputation management.

We basically split everything into three distinct chunks of functionality:

1. Tweet Gatherer
   This desktop application maintains the Since_ID for each separate query that we carry out, so that we are only ever looking from where we were last time we checked. It executes the query using the Search API, and manages a schedule so that queries that have generated results more recently get precedence over queries that haven’t.  There is a descending scale, so that queries that have no results for more than 10 days only get checked occasionally, whereas queries with results in the last hour get checked more frequently. We can also insert new queries into the queue.
2. Tweet Publish
   The desktop client is executing the queries, and maintaining the current tweet ID position, but when a result is found, it sends it to a web service (either hosted locally for testing, or remote for pushing to the live servers) . This makes it relatively easy to have a bank of PCs running different versions of the desktop client for different applications.
3. Front end website
   The previous two steps ensure that the main website (or websites…) are relatively simple affairs. They simply query the database and process the content to do what we want, and fit into the layout.

Our first application to use this is Twit Parade ( a play on the phrase Hit Parade, NOT a slur on the people listed!), which monitors the tweets of a growing number of UK Celebrities.

Things to note: The Twitter search servers are a bit of a pain at times: it can take over 20 minutes for a tweet that you can see on a Twitter feed to appear via the search API.  I assume there is some kind of caching in place, as if you tweak the query you send in a manner that wouldn’t affect it, such as adding the same query with an +OR+ will often return the result. Not guaranteed, however… Hopefully these issues will get less of an issue as Twitter scales. Maybe.

Coming from the world of .Net, you get used to certain things being available (such as a decent IDE!) which in PHP might not be there, but the wealth of support sites for PHP is just incredible. Anytime I had a syntax issue, where something didn’t match what I expected (what me? Read a manual?), a quick Google revealed all I needed.

The result is that I have a plugin which does a number of things:

1. It allows you to store multiple records of 10 or so columns in the Options table.
2. Using a WordPress shortcode, these records can be referenced independently from a post or page template.
3. It routes the users through a four step process, any deviation routes back to the start
4. At two points in the process an XML fragment is created and appended to, based on user form entries or what links a user clicked on.
5. An email response is sent to me at the end of the process.

Now this isn’t perfect. For step 1, I want to look at creating and updating my own MySQL table, so that I don’t overload the Options table, and can have more control over things. Likewise for step 5, I might still want the email, but ideally I want to store this in a database table as well.

Overall, as a proof of concept for the project that this would be for, I’m quite pleased. When the project gets a name and a full plan behind it, then I’ll be sure to mention it here!

This has always surprised me, for a number of reasons:

• The cost of entry is pretty low.
  1. An unregistered .co.uk domain costs from only £5+VAT
  2. An unregistered .com domain costs from only £6 or so
• The ongoing costs, such as domain renewal, and hosting are minimal
• The value of domain names is generally heading upwards, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
• High quality domain names can earn money whilst you are holding them, depending on your strategy. Basic domains will cover their immediate costs of renewal and possibly hosting. High end domains will earn many thousands of pounds a month.
• High quality domain names are available to buy on the open market. Eventually, domain names cease being traded openly as they reach the perfect owner. An example of this is toys.com. This domain has bounced between owners for years, before being bought by Toys R Us for over $5 million.  Now it’s with them, it’s very unlikely that this domain will ever be available to buy again.
  1. High quality aftermarket names can be bought from a few hundred pounds to millions of dollars, it just takes a keen eye and a good budget.

Now is an ideal time to get into domains as an investment, as they are still priced on the low side, and also could be seen as safer than cash at times over the last year…

In fact well known Internet entrepreneur Sahar Sarid puts it like this:

Contrary to others who are holding back, we feel much safer to invest in domains than having money in the bank. We’ve been buying lately and do not plan on stopping anytime soon. There are many deals out there, and those may never be back to those level ever again. Remember GOOG at 250$? You snooze you lose.

If any big budget holders want to discuss domain names and what possible costs are involved, then feel free to contact me.

At least I know this will allow me to make posts! The Blogger situation has been going on for ages, and never seems to get fully fixed, so I’ll leave them to it.

Please ignore the lack of decoration around here for the time being! I’ve just moved everything over, so there’s lots of things I need to do.

Well, a year later and my contract is up and I am back working from home. Some people get to this situation and feel that they MUST look for another contract. I am looking at it differently. I’m feeling that I suddenly have room to move after 12 months of following someone else’s direction.

I’ve already launched three new sites: Instant Digital Camera, Large Tents and Designer Wellies. I’m trying a few different things with them, regarding advertising and promotion, so it will be interesting to see how they get on.

I’ve also rebuilt a mail server, sorted someone’s PC out and have had a meeting that could produce more work than I’ve had for sometime (which would be nice!).

The week continues tomorrow with a morning of .NET & Ajax coding, followed by another meeting which could be a money spinner. We’ll see…

Maybe I will get to have a full day of coding on Friday!

Well these last few weeks I have been running Visual Studio 2005 in a Parallels virtual machine without a hitch. In fact I owuld say it’s even better than under my regular PC (an ageing Dell).

For a start, the screen on my iMac is the big 24″ high resolution screen, so I get much more display space than 1280×1024. Even though the PC has dual monitors, as they are different resolutions, it never really helped.

Next, the Parallels VM never seems to forget the network drives that I keep my code on. Under native windows, my PCs tend to give up and either take A G E S to opena network folder or file from the nertwork or just give up altogther.

There are some issues; the keyboard was a bit wierd at first, but you simply have to ignore what’s on the kecaps and poress the key that you would under Windows. eg. to the right of the left shift key. On the PC this is labelled as Pipe and backslash. On the Mac it is tilde and a diacritical mark. Under Parallels, it responds the same as under Windows. There are a few others like Home/End/Insert/Delete as well. But I’m getting used to them.

So I’ve only really just started on this model, but it’s great so far. I think I may carry on with Macs next time as well…

But times, they change.

The implosion of the credit markets has suddenly cut off the supply of low interest , easy to get credit that inflated these prices. And those stuck with them are suddenly seeing that they overpaid and have to deal with the consequences, whilst the banks cover their assets.

So how does this compare to domain names? Well, like any other item, domain names can be hyped up to massive value, sometimes beyond what would be acceptable. But don’t confuse this with the dot com crash, or the current houseprice crash.

Good, generic domain names are still massively undervalued, and unlike property, they actually EARN money whilst you have them. Put it this way - you buy a brand-new, never before thought of domain name for £5 or £6. That covers you for two years ownership. Before the day is out, you could have a website on the name, or point it at a parking service. Every advert click, or affiliate purchase is money in the bank.

An example. I registered GardenSofas.co.uk last month. April 13th to be precise, so actually under a month. Already it has paid for its registration fee, so the next two years are effectively free. And this is on PPC adverts only, no affiliate sales yet. But when an affiliate sale takes place, that will add massively to the pot.

This is an average domain, in a niche market. But turning a profit with no advertising, and just a little management to ensure it doesn’t get spammed out of existence is quite nice.

If you decide to buy a more expensive aftermarket domain name, then the numbers will be different, but you could make thousands of pounds per day in revenue. I bet a city centre flat doesn’t do that.

I’m not saying go out and buy a domain name for £250k - although a lot of people do, but do include the possibilities of domain names in these uncertain times. The ability to receive an income from such undervalued assets is not generally understood by traditional investors, so now is a very good time to get involved.

And a key point. If someone wants to buy a 2 bedroom flat in the middle of Manchester, they have the choice of the market. Sellers will bid themselves down to get rid of their rapidly depreciating asset. If a business wants to specialise in Garden Sofas, then there is only one generic name that will do. And it ain’t going down in value.

Fan pays record for Formula One car plates

A businessman has paid almost half a million pounds for the car registration plate “F1″ - making it the most expensive ever sold in Britain.
Afzal Kahn, a Formula One motor racing fan, has fixed the £375,000 number plate to his 200mph black McLaren SLR sports car, which itself cost £300,000.
With VAT, the total paid for the plate by Mr Kahn was £440,625.

A number plate, let’s remember is a pure vanity item. Yes it’s unique, but it doesn’t offer much in the way of return. It doesn’t allow people to contact you, it has no way of earning you money directly, and it’s only of interest to a small number of wealthy people and a small number of investors. It’s also a very local thing. A premium UK number plate may look good cruising around Sloane Square but is unlikely to be seen in Monte Carlo, Wall Street, or Silicon Valley.

Domain names are different. For a start, the prices are still well under their true value to the market (and I’ll come back to why in another post), so you don’t have to drop £1/2 million on one just yet (although there are plenty at these prices if you like..).

But there are much bigger business propositions: people can contact you with a domain name, a domain name can earn you astronomic amounts of money with little or no effort (think how many people hit mobiles, loans, even secondary product areas such firebowls every week), and your buying circle increases massively, form domain investors, individual entrepreneurs and the business and marketing world - where the big money really is. Don’t forget also, that a domain name is accessible to anyone on the planet with an Internet connection.