Category: Microsoft/RealNames,

  • RealNames

    A little bit of news. I have recently reacquired the RealNames domain name – realnames.com. This is some 30 months after we were forced to close the company. It feels good to have 100% ownership back of a thing I spent 5 years creating. To be honest I’m not yet sure what I will do…

  • Google rips off RealNames idea!

    Thanks for the pointer Dave. The new Google toolbar clearly rips off the RealNames idea. I’m flattered. Shame they didn’t give credit, after all I am one of the inventors of this patent. Maybe I’ll go and start a search engine Microsoft’s own version of the RealNames idea is overwritten by the Google toolbar. With…

  • MSN grows ad revenue by 40%

    Yusuf Mehdi has been boasting on CNet about the revenue traction MSN has been getting of late. Full article here. There are some key facts for those familiar with the RealNames story. Start with this quote from Mehdi: “For the 2002 fiscal year, which ended June 30, MSN’s online ad revenue grew $40 million, he…

  • MSN 8 has Keywords!

    Well, it’s been a while since Microsoft decided not to proceed with the RealNames Keyword product in the browser. Now …. 5 months later, MSN has announced that MSN 8 – the one with the $300m advertising campaign – will include Keywords. Suprise suprise! Danny Sullivan – on his SearchEngineWatch site says the following: “There…

  • IE – more growth!

    Kevin Werbach has commented on Microsoft’s IE market share. I left the following comment: “IE has become – defacto – a piece of infrastructure. It is no less a gateway to content and services than Windows is a gateway to applications. In the world of web services – where binding the browser to a service…

  • IE Growth

    From CNet: This is why Microsoft has to be responsible in its decisions regarding 3rd parties. IE is NOT just an application. It is, de-facto, a piece of infrastructure. Its power is such that a decision to partner or not has the power of life and death over a 3rd party. Where that 3rd party…

  • IE Monopoly

    This story on CNet echoes some of the points I have been making. Particularly this sentence: “What we’re seeing with Web sites that are viewable only with IE is the privatization of the Web,” said Mozilla’s Baker. “And that’s a dangerous setting. We’re moving toward a world where all the capabilities of the Internet are…

  • MSN “superior” user experience

    I have not had time to fully examine Microsoft’s replacement for RealNames, however, there are a few obvious points to make. Firstly, the claim that the user experience offered by RealNames was in some way inadequate, and that MSN was planning to improve on it, seems to have been clarified. Here are a few examples.…

  • Hack

    Here’s a neat tip. Every internet connected computer has a hosts file. On Windows machines this file is in C:windowssystem32driversetc. If you are running NT, Windows 2000 or XP this may be c:winntsystem32driversetc. The file is called hosts or hosts.sam. A small modification can render Keywords active again – at least for as long as…

  • Assets

    The following has been posted to the RealNames Web Site. RealNames Asset Sales RealNames Corp. has created several Executive Summaries that describe the services, including intellectual property, software and hardware, that will be sold as part of the liquidation of the corporationês assets.  These summaries describe RealNamesê: Alliance Keyword Program Contact Card Enterprise Keyword System…