Software Channels

Tomorrow I will leave for London to visit the Pubcon on Saturday. In the past few weeks, Google has changed some parts of their search results behavior and I am looking forward to discuss the latest movements with fellow webmasters from all over the world.

The summer started quite OK for us and after the stress with the office relocation and the massive fraud attacks is over, I think some days in London with search engine specialists might help to focus on new things to develop and kick-start tradebit version 5.0 which should come out soon!

The spanish version is currently under development and I think we should go live with the beta in August already. Until then the new layout will be live, too!

If you are in London over the coming weekend and want to meet up, drop me a note!

After we have been bombed with fraud attempts last week, we finally are making progress with the new layout. The member area is now finished (here on the development machine) and we have started to modify the user frontend as well.

We estimate that a new version will go live until the 17th of July. Until the end of next month we will also release more languages and fix some minor bugs in the administration area. Some merchants have requested changes that will go live with the new layout. Please stay tuned.

This will be our own “summer of code” and I am excited about the changes ahead! Wish it would happen faster, though!

In the last 2 weeks a lot of hacking attempts and massive credit card fraud attempts took place on tradebit. We worked like maniacs to find, prevent and refund the affected sales. We also created a multi-step fraud protection system within tradebit, which should now identify and filter most of the common scams. It was a horrible amount of work, but necessary to be done.

I hope we have been smart enough to put some real good filters in place, ranging from IP checks to cross-referencing fraudulent sales down to name and checksum tests of potential copyright infrindgements.

These systems are very complex, have been expensive to built and are now in place. Finally we can concentrate back on the platform itself and gather more quality content, faster servers and nicer frontends for you.

It could be, that in some circumstances the new system is too harsh and blocks you, even if you are a legit seller and want to sign-up. Just email me and I will take care of your account!

We are currently preparing the new version of Tradebit and as it looks, we will be able to roll out the new release right before Pubcon in London on the 4th of July.

While working on the templates of tradebit to incorporate german and english in one resource list, I was thinking about the spanish (italian, french, scandinavian, etc.) versions as well.

Maybe someone reads this: We consider to team up with a language partner for

• spanish
• french
• italian

as soon as the new version is out. We are looking for small internet companies, who would be interested to maintain the language version and provide 1st Level Support in that language. The partnership would be based on a revenue-sharing model. If you are basically interested, shoot me an email for details to puzzler(at)tradebit.com.

Partners would be able to create their own language version on the regarding top-level domain and market the platform in their language region. We are also able to provide massive content right from the start.

Last week we have rolled out the “easy admin” on Tradebit. If you sign up now, you only see a fraction of what is possible with tradebit. We consider the functionality we offer you in the “easy admin” section the basic functionality. You may switch over to the “power admin” any time, by clicking on the grey text in the header of the page. The new section is supposed to make the handling easier for new merchants signing up.

Yet we have 2 more weeks to go for the brand new layout as well. In these 2 weeks we will also tighten our security. There have been repeating credit card fraud attempts on the platform and we see some patterns in these transactions. By end of June we should be much more secure, easier to handle and more pleasant to look at. I also want to open tradebit more to the community of trusted merchants and active affiliates.

There are a lot of things to finish and we are on it!

It is a holiday in Germany - So in that quite time I have some free room to crawl the web and look at new stuff. The message of the last hours is the new search engine Bing: There has been a lot of chatter about the Redmond company and the topic “search” in the past years. Nobody really liked Live.com as a search engine. The amount of traffic was just LOW. Yet the new site Bing looks promising. At least it really loads fast and the results are quite OK.

I have tested a few queries and the whole thing looks good to me. The quality of results might not be as good as Google shows it, but the technology looks at least responding quickly and there are no major flaws on the first look.

When they rolled out Live I have complained about the speed - this time I have to say: So far, so good!