For Friday’s offering, I bring you 3 top stories that I haven’t already covered this week. Speaking of which, after this week’s articles, I have successfully talked myself into getting a Windows Phone 7 device, practically almost fell out of my seat when I realized I might be getting rid of iPhone once and for all and learned that Nokia might be stepping back into the U.S. marketplace with new Windows phones slated for 2012. In other words, I’m done talking about all these changes for now! See you next week!!

OS X Lion

Snow Leopard has received its final update in preparation of OS X Lion coming out very soon. The new 10.6.8 update provides better support for iPv6, improved VPN reliability and addresses some known security issues including:

• Bogus Mac Defender software
• Malicious fonts embedded into documents that wreak havoc on Mac machines
• Maliciously embedded ColorSync profiles
• Ability for network admins to view wireless tranmissions

The update also modifies the operating system to allow for a direct connection to the Mac App store allowing users wishing to upgrade to Lion the ability to do so as a direct download rather than going into an Apple Store to purchase the disc. Both options are available for $29.95. OS X Snow Leopard was more of performance and reliability upgrade rather than adding new features, but Apple promises OS X Lion will be all about new features.

If updating from 10.6.7, the new update download will be 275.3MB.

Automatic Facebook Update Service

If there was ever one of those times where you can say, “Why didn’t I think of that?”, this is it! According Precreate Solutions, clients have reported more home break-ins whenever they leave Facebook status messages claiming they’ll be out of town for extended periods of time. If we didn’t already have so much to worry about this day in age, now we have to wonder who will be seeing our updates as invitations to go to my house and steal my tv. I don’t know what’s worse—that people are actually actively looking for these things on Facebook or that one of my “friends” actually wants to rob me!

Anyway, Precreate Solutions is now offering a service that will monitor and update your Facebook statuses to give the impression that, not only are you home, but that your everyday digital life is continuing without interruption. Of course this service comes with a fee. A quick look at their website doesn’t seem to offer this service outright, but it may very well be an add-on service for existing clients.

The service works by using messages from a pre-approved message list to be applied to your Facebook status. Whether or not these messages can be created by the client is not known, but one thing’s for sure: don’t start posting your own statuses when you get to your vacation spot or you’ll instantly blow your cover!

Google Antitrust Case

Although Google claims they are still “unclear exactly what the FTC’s concerns are”, Federal regulators have launched an antitrust investigation into Google’s business practices. It seems that competitors are complaining that Google uses their enormous clout to favor their own services and business operations over those of their rivals. Google stated on their blog site: “We make hundreds of changes to our algorithms every year to improve your search experience, [and] not every website can come out at the top of the page, or even appear on the first page of our search results.”

It would be hard to imagine Google playing this game considering that their main focus has always been on the user and the overall search experience. Google’s own philosophy is that if they focus on users, all else will follow. Since the complaints are coming from competitors and not users, one would think that the organic search results showing up on Google are being generated completely by the users.

Besides, if Google happens to offer a service for just about everything you can think of, wouldn’t you assume that their presence in the search results will be fairly large? I think the real complaint is that rivals are not getting the results they want and because Google handles 2 out of every 3 searches online these days, they just need someone to pin it on.

The votes are in…as of today, the heads of the Internet (as I like to call them), ICANN has voted to allow virtually an unlimited amount of new domain names to be made available for registration. To see what I mean, let’s break down a current domain name:

ledfrog.com is a 2nd-level domain registration within the .com namespace. With .com being a top-level domain (TLD) that allows unregulated registrations in the 2nd level, anyone can register a .com domain if it’s available.

Throughout the years, new TLDs or extensions were adding to the domain system to help alleviate demand for domain names. Among vanity extensions such as .travel, .info and .biz, each country in the world was assigned a 2-character country code to allow those countries to offer domains to its citizens. More recently, ICANN approved the use of .xxx specifically for adult-content sites.

This system has worked rather well consider how old DNS is! However, with the advent of new technology and masses of people jumping online each and every day, large companies have had to register handfuls of domains just to protect their brands and trademarks. With over 300 TLDs currently available, these costs can add up. Current registration costs can range from $7 to $600 per year for each domain. That’s even if they can get their brand as a domain. Dealing with cyber-squatters and other infringers have likely cost companies millions of dollars.

The future of domains appears to be the availability of new, custom registrations of top-level domains. Imagine Apple Inc. being able to own .apple or .iphone!

To be honest, when I first heard this news, I was worried. I feel like part of the domain system is the uniqueness of it—the rarity of it. Of course, this could just be me looking at it from a business standpoint, but I’m under the impression that offering these unlimited domains will essentially devalue domains as a whole.

That was until I found out about the registration costs! ICANN has announced that each application will carry a fee of $185,000 while annual renewal of the domain will cost $25,000. This should stop 99% of the spammers out there for sure!

It’s clear that these domains will be somewhat of a luxury for large coporations and/or the rich individual who might want to register some generic domain name like .car or .games which makes me feel better about not letting another million useless websites appear online overnight from people looking to make money off selling a domain name.

While this new plan seems like a good idea on the surface, another concern I have is how the public will accept this. Anyone who follows the domain industry knows how hard it has been to promote any domain other than .com, so how will this be any different? The Internet world is so used to typing in something and then following it with .com or another known extension, but this is just confusing. Typing in .apple just doesn’t make sense, but I guess that’s what people said 30 years ago when people were just learning about the Internet.

I’ve been on the Internet since 1997 and I’ve seen a lot of changes in the domain industry and this is by far the largest of them all. But one thing has remained true throughout all of it—nobody remembers a domain extension as well as a .com domain. In this case, only time will tell if this will change.

Anyone who’s my age probably remembers spending a late night or two watching a funny little man on tv telling us how he was able to make $50,000 a week “placing tiny classified ads in newspapers” from his “one-bedroom apartment”. Right in those two quotes, you have the makings of a very successful infomercial—mention how lots of money can be made with seemingly little work and cater to others who might be living in a one-bedroom apartment as these people are likely to want an opportunity that will change their lives.

If you have no idea who I’m talking about, check out this video…it’s exactly what I remember when I was younger:

First of all, this guy is good and there’s no doubt about it. As a firm believer that hard work pays off and there’s no easy way of making lots of money, I never “fell” for one his claims, but I will admit that there were a few times when it seemed like the plan would work. More importantly, there are many other people out there that are worse off than me financially and just might jump at the chance to make even 100 more dollars a week.

The indictment

Don Lapre has been running infomercials like these for the last 8 years or so selling all sorts of money-making packages that are guaranteed to turn your life around. The two most prominent ones include the one above and another selling the The Greatest Vitamin in the World. This is the one that’s garnered the attention of the Feds and the United States Postal Service.

According to the case, Don Lapre is being indicted on 41 counts of conspiracy, mail fraud, wire fraud and promotional money laundering. It’s being claimed that he bilked over $52 million from some 200,000 unsuspecting consumers. Essentially, he’s being accused of running a nationwide scheme to sell worthless internet businesses.

The program

I don’t want to get into all the details here because the case file says it all in a 28-page PDF document available from Casewatch.org, but I do want to briefly explain what it is that Don Lapre does. Using The Greatest Vitamin in the World program as an example, this is how the program works.

1. Watch Don’s infomercial and get excited about the potential of making lots of money.
2. Call the 800 number to order the start-up package and personal website for $35.00 plus $13.65 shipping.
3. Don’s reps would then call back consumers telling them that there were more fees in running the personal website including a $295 setup fee and $9.95 per month hosting fees.
4. Don’s reps would try to upsell customers into buying web traffic for their new site guaranteeing them that people would come to the site and buy products or signup as new “investors”.
5. Customers buy traffic packages ranging in price from $500-2000.
6. Customers are offered sales incentives: Get 20 new people to sign up for the program and get $1000. Get 100 new vitamin customers in a month and get $10,000. For every 5 $1000 bonuses you earn, you get a 7-day paid vacation for 2.

My two cents

First of all, the vitamins are worthless. To Don, getting new sales people all dropping about $3000 to start their own business is where the money really is. Unfortunately, this is nothing more than a pyramid scheme. The ones at the top who are able to get to everyone who hasn’t joined yet will make all the referral fees. The ones at the bottom will have nobody to recruit because they’ve all been recruited…after some time, the pyramid crumbles because there’s nothing left to do but sell worthless vitamins and the guys at the top take their money and run.

Second, if you really think about it, why would Don Lapre (or any tv pitchman) want to tell you his money-making secrets if what he’s doing already makes him so much money? Do you really believe he’s out there trying to help the community? Do you really think he cares about helping you make more money in life? The answer is no. It’s the tell-tale sign of a scam and it’s no different than all those bloggers out there selling you $47 money-making plans that tell you all the secrets of Internet marketing. Trust me, if I discovered a way to make $50,000 a week, I wouldn’t tell anyone! Not because I’m selfish, but because I wouldn’t want to create thousands of competitors out there. If there’s only $50,000 to be made, that means I’d have to share it with everyone else who copies me. That’s not a good business plan!

I’ll tell you a secret. There are no secret ways to make money! There are however innovative ideas that will make someone millions one day, but those aren’t secrets—sometimes those are flukes or fads or streaks of luck. Facebook is a perfect example—sheer luck. The point is to make real money, you have to put in real work. If you think you’re going to make $50,000 a week with only a few minutes of work, you’re either delusional or you’re the one sitting on top of the pyramid because in any other situation, you’re not going to make anything close to that.

Ok, I’m done venting…the last thing I want to say is that I hope Don Lapre goes away forever! He’s a con artist and a thief. At the same time, I hope none of those people get their money back so maybe they’ll learn from their mistakes.

This fall is going to be a big deal for Apple. Not only will they likely be releasing the iPhone 5, but they are officially launching iOS 5 and another nifty little software suite called iCloud. That’s right folks, MobileMe is out and iCloud is in! Cloud computing has been taking off in the last year or so with what seems to be Facebook leading the pack when it comes to networking your social media presence.

Using Facebook as an example, anyone who has an account can see just how easy it is to connect EVERYTHING about our personal lives to just about almost anything on the Internet. Remember the days when you used to have to create new user accounts at every site you wanted to sign up for? Now, it seems just about every website allows you to sign in using your Facebook account. This is a slight example of cloud computing—being able to connect to everything wherever you’re located. However, even the almighty Facebook has its limitations.

Cloud computing as a whole is much more than connecting your wall to Twitter. It involves the centralized storage of your documents, emails, pictures, videos, etc. while connecting (or syncing) these items to all of your devices. In the old days, you had a computer at home and some sort of sync software that you would use to send documents to each one of your devices one at a time. The problem was that whenever you wanted to update something or make other changes, you had to wait until you got home to re-sync everything again.

While Apple iCloud does not purport itself to be an all-inclusive solution to address everything cloud computing can offer, it does provide a very simple and intuitive way for iOS users to wirelessly sync information to smartphones, laptops, computers and Internet storage. I’m hesitant to use the term “sync” because iCloud actually performs this process live, which means you don’t actually have to do anything for your stuff to appear across all of your toys—except to provide a wi-fi connection to the Internet.

iCloud Features

Likely the biggest feature of iCloud will be the free 5GB of online storage you have alongside the free iCloud software itself. However, this is a far cry from the two MobileMe plans that were available: a 20GB individual plan and a 40GB family plan. But as with any online storage service, this is just the basic offering and we can be sure that for some money, you can add more features and storage to your account.

• Photo Stream – Photo Stream is probably the second biggest feature to come from iCloud. To explain it simply, I’ll quote Apple: “With iCloud, when you take a photo on one device, it automatically appears on all your other devices. No syncing. No sending. Your photos are just there. Everywhere you want them.” The best part is that all of this works with PCs as well! If you add an AppleTV to the mix, you can create visual slideshows to display on your tv for all to enjoy!
• iTunes – iTunes in iCloud allows you to purchase anything you want from the store and have them appear on all registered devices. So imagine you’re at work and you buy a new song on your iPad. This song gets stored on iCloud and then gets synced automatically to your iPhone, which will come in hand for your ride home when you want to plug the phone into your car.
• Wi Fi Backup – Now you don’t even have to connect your device to a computer to do your backups! When you go to sleep at night, your device will automatically back itself up over your home wireless network.

My two cents

I love the concept of cloud computing because it’s less hardware for me to own and that means less trouble when it comes to connecting devices and making sure that every computer has all of my updated files. I’m happy to know that iCloud still has many of the features I wanted to use when MobileMe came out, but didn’t want to pay for. We have yet to see what kind of “premium” services iCloud will bring to the table, but as it stands now, I think the free, basic service will be just enough for my usage.