Men Free Blog

The honchos at VW decided that Park Assist (PA) wasn’t enough. That’s where the car parallel parks itself while you twiddle your thumbs behind the wheel, and when the Fasten Seat Belt sign is extinguished you can get out and go on about your business. The latest development from VW is called Park Assist Vision (PAV), and it will park the car for you in any kind of spot — parallel or perpendicular — and you don’t even need to be in the car.

A PAV-equipped car is ringed with cameras and ultrasonic sensors, and when you find a spot you want, you select it on a touchscreen. You place the car in “P” and get out if you have that much faith in technology not to scratch your paint. Your remote control keyfob tells the car what to do from then on, and the car parks itself, shuts down and locks itself up, as any happy android car should.

PAV is still in development, but it’s a neat idea. It could especially come in handy when trying to slip into one of those ever-shrinking “compact” parking spaces, since it’s so hard to get out of the car once you get in the space. Now if they could develop a feature that actually locates available parking spaces for you, we’d be in business.

[Source: Autocar]

Written by Michael Gilmour , Monday, 31 March 2008 
I think that there should be a saying, “Parking, damned if you don’t, damned if you do….”. This is definitely the cast for domain parking companies that are under pressure from multiple directions and now most recently standards and transparency.

My experience has shown that parking companies have either embraced, been silent or have actively worked against the introduction to standards. The reasons for these reactions are sound and are typically self serving (which is not wrong!). Let me share with you a story about a friend of mine and his experience with one particular parking company.
For the past 12 months he had been faithfully adding a lot of domains to his parking account at “Park X” (I won’t say who it is to protect my friend). A strange thing happened, the more domains he added and the more traffic that they accrued the lower his Earnings Per Click fell. This was obviously not a good outcome.

Through a Park X disaffected employee he found out that during this time his revenue share had been reduced by 10%. When he queried his account representative no reasons were given and the length of time it had been reduced was not known.

This simple experience clearly illustrates that due to a lack of transparency a parking company was able to do whatever they liked to a domainers account and the only recourse that the domain owner has is to leave.

This brings me to a point that I raised in an earlier article. There are a number of parking companies that are trying to implement a level of transparency. It is a difficult process and but more importantly what are they being transparent about? The nice thing about these companies is that they are trying to head down the road towards transparency and standards as they are viewing the lack of movement by other companies as a potential competitive advantage. All power to these guys!

Source: Posted on WhizzBangsBlog by Michael Gilmore – Reprinted with Permission – March 31, 2008
 

So what does a parking company need to do in order to be classified as “clean” and above reproach? The first thing that needs to be done is the adoption of standards:

Uniques - a proposed definition was outlined in Part 3 and Part 4 of the series.
Clicks - see part 5 of the series.
Part 6 - Do parking companies swallow clicks?
Part 8 - What is the definition of a click?

The fundamental issue for domain parking is there needs to be standards adopted for each of the key metrics and then far more extensive reporting of each stage in the revenue generation value chain back to the domain owner.
For example, the complete traffic to a domain (including graphics and other request) should be reported to the domain owner. This could be updated every 30 minutes as it is a known quantity that every parking company has up to the minute information for.

The traffic forwarded onto Google or Yahoo should be reported as the next step. In other words the traffic that the Parking company’s filtering systems removed from the traffic stream. This also could be updated every 30 minutes.

Any clicks made by viewers could be reported by the parking company within the 30 minute window. These are the clicks that are forwarded onto Google or Yahoo.

The data from Google or Yahoo can be reported 36 hours later. This includes what they count as a view and a click plus the final magic number called revenue. In many cases due to the lack of reporting by Google and Yahoo the revenue figure will be created in conjunction with the parking company’s own systems.

Each stage can be broken down and reported upon and at no point has anyone revealed secret intellectual property that may or may not jeopardize the fight against click fraud. In many cases this information could be invaluable in calculating the true worth of a domain name and dramatically impact sales values.

Once standards are in place and an open reporting system is displaying the results then what’s next? There are a number of things that need to happen but they all hinge around the word “audit”. Each company must be held accountable that they are upholding the standards.

Source: Posted on WhizzBangsBlog by Michael Gilmore – Reprinted with Permission – March 31, 2008
 

An audit should be conducted on the processes a parking company adopts and not on the intellectual property. This could be from being relatively simple to immensely complex. What should NOT be happening is an audit of the contractual relationships between domain owners and the parking company. This would be far beyond the scope of this type of audit and would fall into the domain of a public company audit.

A first stage audit could commence by the audit company collecting statistics on each parking company in secret for randomly selected domain names with a sufficiently large enough volume of traffic to be statistically meaningful. 

This traffic could then be compared against the standards and the results openly published and announced at TRAFFIC with a score rating for each parking company for each level of the standards.

All parking companies would be audited in this manner and for a fee (to assist in supporting the endeavour) any parking company could use the data as a part of their promotional literature. An additional fee could be applied to parking companies that wish to receive information on their competitor’s performance. This is similar to the approach used to secretly rate restaurants. Domain name owners could also subscribe to the data so that they can make more informed decisions on which parking company is more likely to provide value for their traffic.

To gain additional credit and kudos parking companies could request an internal audit where an auditor would spend several days checking systems to ensure that they are of a higher standard. A “gold seal” could be then applied to these companies.

The audit would include things such as hosting environment, back-procedures, payment policies, payment reality, support processes and procedures etc. In my view this is likely to be an extremely positive process for most parking companies and could lead to the establishment of a “world’s best practice for parking”. To retain this elite status and all of the rights to go with it a parking company would need to go through this process on a bi-annual basis.

Prior to embarking on this great crusade there are a number of questions about this process that would need to be explored.:
Who would do the audit?
Would this be beneficial to parking companies?
What would the impact of this for domainers?
Would domain owners change their parking behaviour on the basis of such an audit?
Would the economic incentives warp the reporting of the audit so that the parking companies would receive a clean bill of health because they are ultimately paying the bill?
Would domain name owners pay for access to more detailed information in the audit?
Would the stage one audit be believed by the domaining community?
Would the stage two audit be sufficiently detailed to make it meaningful?

These questions will be discussed and the various options explored in future articles.

Source: Posted on WhizzBangsBlog by Michael Gilmour — Reprinted with permission — April 2, 2008