11th April 2007
From Official Agloco Blog
http://blog.agloco.com ----------------------------------
I have just got word from our Shanghai based tech team with an update on the Viewbar status. Most of the QA tests are going well with the exception of the ad servers. The team is currently integrating the Viewbar with the ad servers so that the Viewbar will have ads (and revenue) ready to go when it launches (it would not make too much sense to release a Viewbar that was not making any money). So, while the Viewbar is still on track for release this month, making the April 2nd to 16th window is getting more difficult – and, yes, the Shanghai team has been working seven days a week for quite a while now and will continue to do so until the Viewbar is released.
There is some good Viewbar news for most of you. As I mentioned in my last post, we are initially releasing about 50,000 Viewbars to those Members that signed up first. Our current plan is to release another 50,000 Viewbars every day until every pre-launch Member has a Viewbar (which means all Members should have their Viewbar within the first 10 – 11 days). This should alleviate some of the fears Members have expressed that they might have to wait weeks or months for their Viewbar. We recognize that there have been delays on the front end of the release, so we are trying to tighten up the back end of the release as much as possible.
Also, as some Members have correctly pointed out, AGLOCO’s early revenue will not immediately translate into cash distributions to Members. While we do not know how large our initial revenue will be, we do know that AGLOCO has operating costs to pay. It is important to remember that AGLOCO is not a “get rich quick scheme”, and we maintain that the most prudent way to build AGLOCO as a sustainable company is to calibrate Member distributions to company earnings. As such, the cash payouts will not begin until there is a comfortable balance between AGLOCO’s free cash flow and AGLOCO’s expenses. It is important to add that all Members will begin to accumulate hours from when they first start using the Viewbar (and referral hours will also be earned). Those hours will not be wasted. Both overall hours and monthly hours will be used in determining distributions to Members.
I’ll keep you posted as relevant updates continue to come up. Brian Greenwald
AGLOCO Development Team Interesting site of the day: Well, this morning I read the most interesting site of the day for me. It was two comments on my last post written by David North. I have put them at the bottom of this post for easy access, but I also wanted to add that while some of the ‘chatter’ that gets in the comment section of this blog is not meaningful, many of the thoughts expressed there do register and do help shape the priorities and progress of AGLOCO. With hundereds of thousands of AGLOCO Members thinking about how to improve the company, AGLOCO should avoid the trap some companies hit when only ‘insiders’ do the thinking. And this should only grow stronger with time when the Viewbar is released and the number of AGLOCO Members moves into the millions. Here are David’s posts: David North said,
April 11, 2007 @ 5:56 am Hi Saket,
Don’t forget that you ARE putting something into AGLOCO, it just doesn’t happen to be cash. You are providing AGLOCO a free billboard on your computer screen and helping AGLOCO locate other free billboards on others’ computer screens. You are essentially a service provider to AGLOCO, supplying space in front of eyes. In that regard, you are no different than Google’s service providers, webmasters that give Google free space in their web sites to display ads. Google in turn monetizes that space in front of eyes (similarly to what AGLOCO will do) and pays the webmaster a portion of the money. In fact, Google pays many millions of dollars to webmasters every month, and makes a nice profit doing so.
There is another similarity between Google and AGLOCO that is worth noting. Google’s naysayers are many. Many of Google’s naysayers are smart people who have very valid concerns about Google’s ability to sustain its momentum, among other things. The presence of Google naysayers, and some of what they had to say, helped me decide how much risk I was willing to take investing in Google, as both a service provider to - and stockholder of Google. David North said,
April 11, 2007 @ 6:29 am Hi Volin,
With opportunity generally comes risk. The 2005 hurricane season was the most costly ever for big insurance companies, who racked up many billions of dollars in underwriting losses. What’s more, scientists, global warming activists and others were predicting it would only get worse. Nearly all insurance companies reduced their exposure to hurricane-prone regions, but Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway increased its exposure to hurricane prone regions. Many analysts (none of whom have amassed $40 billion personal net worth) thought Buffett (who has amassed $40 billion personal net worth) was nuts. And when the 2006 hurricane season was unusually mild, Berkshire Hathaway posted the largest annual book value increase of any company ever, thanks to record insurance underwriting profits. You can find Berkshire Hathaway’s annual reports for 2005 and 2006 at www.berkshirehathaway.com to see for yourself that Buffett did weigh seriously the predictions of scientists and others regarding future hurricane risks. Then he made a rational decision about the risk and reward potential of insuring hurricane-related damages. What does Warren Buffett and insurance have to do with AGLOCO? AGLOCO represents an opportunity that comes with risks. Make an honest effort to understand both the opportunity and the risks, THEN make your decision about how much or how little effort to invest in AGLOCO, and you’ll be doing just what one of the world’s wealthiest people has done all his life to get to where he is.
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3rd April 2007
From Official Agloco Blog
http://blog.agloco.com ----------------------------------
April is upon us, and as we have mentioned previously on this blog, the Viewbar is slated for release this month. We will be sending an email directly to each Member when their account is authorized for Viewbar download with more detailed information regarding the software release. Here are a few initial details:
The Download Process: As we have discussed, we will be releasing the Viewbar first to Members who joined first. Currently, the plan is to have the Viewbar first be available to Members with ID#s beginning in BBBB to BBBF (as well as Members with an ID# beginning in “AGLO”). This is about 50,000 Members. We will then continue releasing the Viewbar to more and more Members in the order in which they signed up (again, all Members will be notified by email when their account is authorized for Viewbar download).
Multiple Users on One Viewbar: As stated previously, multiple Members may use the same Viewbar on the same computer. Only one Viewbar download will be necessary as the Viewbar software will enable each Member to log in and log out using their AGLOCO Member ID# and password (obviously, only one Member ID# can be accumulating Viewbar hours at any one time).
Initial Launch for Windows: The initial Viewbar release will be for Windows Vista, XP, and 2000. Later, we will release Mac and Linux versions of the Viewbar. Until that occurs, Mac/Linux users can still log onto any supported Windows computer and accumulate their five hours. Hopefully, five hours a month (about 10 minutes a day on average) on a Windows-based computer can be manageable until the Mac version can be released.
Seamless Updates: The v1.0 Viewbar is purposely simplistic and minimalist, but it also comes equipped with an automatic self-updating feature. Once you download the Viewbar for the first time, your Viewbar will be seamlessly updated with new additions and features as they become available.
Revenue and Ad Deals: As a member of the revenue team, I am happy to report that we now have agreements with 17 ad networks. These agreements plus some direct advertising deals provide AGLOCO with thousands of advertisers with thousands of ads for the Viewbar software.
Also, AGLOCO had a record day of new Member signups yesterday – just wanted to thank all for you who have been supporting AGLOCO with your continued recruiting efforts.
We’re about to launch! I am very excited, I hope you are too. Brian Greenwald
AGLOCO Development Team |
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28st March 2007
From Official Agloco Blog
http://blog.agloco.com ---------------------------------- Every now and then on this blog we will have another Member of the AGLOCO team share something from their point of view. This time, we have Ray Everett-Church, AGLOCO’s Chief Privacy Officer, talking about our anti-spam policy. - - - - - - - - - - I’ve been asked to put together a blog entry about the things I’m working on here at AGLOCO. Given that we’re such a small team right now, many of us are wearing many different hats, and one of the hats I wear says “spam patrol.” Like all communities, AGLOCO has rules that help to keep our global community a comfortable and productive place. As everyone knows, one of the ways we grow our community is to encourage our current members to refer their family, friends, and acquaintances to sign up. Because we create incentives around the referral process, it’s no surprise that some people get the idea that they can take short cuts and play games to get more incentives than they may be entitled to. One of the ways that some people try to manipulate our referral system is to “spam,” which we define generally as sending out unsolicited messages to unknown people. Spam is always a problem with any online community, even from the earliest days of the Internet. I first started working on the problems created by spam as a consultant back in 1994 with a small but growing online community called America Online. At the time we felt like we were breaking new ground and facing new issues almost every day. But in doing a little research back then I discovered that even in 1994, the problem of unsolicited messages online were an old issue. Much to my surprise, I found an early reference document written by Jon Postel, one of the creators of today’s Internet, called “On the Junk Mail Problem“. It was written in November of 1975! I should note that, technically speaking, Postel’s piece wasn’t about “spam” as we know it today, rather it was about unwanted data flying around the early Internet, back in the days when only a handful of companies and universities were “online.” But it shows that, even then, people were concerned about the negative effects of unwanted data being shoved their way. Fast forward to today, and AGLOCO too must deal with the occasional problems created by members of the community who don’t want to play by the rules and think they can get ahead by taking unfair shortcuts. AGLOCO deals with these issues in a couple of ways. First, we have a strong anti-spam policy which every member agrees to as part of the member agreements during the sign up process. That policy puts everybody on notice that we will not tolerate abusive practices in promoting AGLOCO. While email spam is one of the most common forms, we’re also seeing message board and blog spam, instant message spam, and even spamming in the form of inappropriate entries in Wikipedia! Our anti-spam policy is written very broadly so that it can cover a wide array of abuses, even ones we haven’t though of yet. Second, we have an email address –
This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it
– where complaints about spam may be reported. We encourage members of AGLOCO, and members of the public generally, to send us examples of any spam they receive. (If you do send us email spam, please make sure you include the full headers of the email message; it’s vital for our investigation that we be able to trace the origins of those messages.) While we can’t respond individually to every complaint, we do review them all and when we see things that appear to be violations of our anti-spam policy, we take steps to investigate the incident and, if necessary, enforce our policy. While I don’t want to discuss the specifics of how we investigate and enforce our policy (I don’t want to give the spammers ideas about how to evade our techniques), I will say that so far we have only had to terminate a few dozen member accounts. We have also issued a number of warnings to members whose behavior, while serious, may not have risen to a level that requires the ultimate punishment of account termination. I don’t want anybody to get the wrong idea: Our anti-spam policy is strong and gives us the ability to punish abuses. And from an enforcement perspective, the integrity of our community requires that we have a very low tolerance for abuse. But we also attempt to enforce it with a certain level of understanding. We realize that not everyone is an expert in Internet community behavior and that well-intentioned people may sometimes step out of line. As a result, we spend far more time educating members about responsible promotional practices than we do setting up firing squads. I’m pleased to say that I’m pretty encouraged by the way AGLOCO members have been able to grow the community without resorting to tactics like spam. I think it’s an indication not only of how great our members are, but of how seriously they take our anti-spam policy. Because I’ve been involved with anti-spam issues for a very long time, I consulted a number of my colleagues in the field as we were setting up AGLOCO. A few of them were skeptical and predicted that AGLOCO would turn into a swamp of spam and abuse. I’m very proud to say that those predictions have thus far been inaccurate. We have a strong, vibrant, and growing community in which the spam problem has been fairly minimal. We will continue to maintain vigilance, and act strongly to root out abuse whenever it occurs. But with your help, AGLOCO can keep spam to a minimum while we continue our current path of growth. Ray Everett-Church
AGLOCO Development Team |
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21st March 2007
From Official Agloco Blog
http://blog.agloco.com ---------------------------------- Note: Click on "Download Viewbar" on the menu to download Agloco Viewbar In my last post, I mentioned a couple of ways you might get ‘noticed’ to be the interesting site of the day at the end of this blog. I was pleased with the response I got, as I had a chance to check out a couple of blogs and posts I hadn’t seen before. One Member at AGLOCO Fiction wrote an interesting post describing a “pitch” one can use to recruit others to AGLOCO, and how he came up with it. The ending “pitch” is as follows: Share in advertising revenue by being a potential customer, at no cost and without obligations. When a company advertises its business, it is done through an adverting medium that serves as a middleman for the company and you. Instead of the advertising medium collecting all of the money, Agloco pays you by the hour to run a piece of software at the bottom of your Internet browser, called the Viewbar. The Viewbar collects data about your surfing behavior and displays related advertisements accordingly. If you make a purchase through a Viewbar advertisement, part of your expenditure will be returned to you as a discount. Nothing is more important to Agloco than its members, because companies that advertise their businesses are in search of a large audience.
For this reason you are rewarded for signing up new members, with a 5 level network structure. It means that you will receive a percentage of the activity from people that you refer, and from people that they refer, and so on. This is not a negative pyramid construction, because every member is directly funded by Agloco itself, and not by other members at the bottom. You are not obligated to refer anyone.”
I’d be interested in hearing what you all think of this pitch, and if it works for you. Another interesting and zippy comment came from a Member with ‘only’ 20 referrals (which still places him well into ‘founder’ status). He says: Yeah my total network thus far is only 20, but let me tell you why I’m supporting this program over many others…
I’m sick of money making programs that only end up taking money from everyone. And I’m tired of joining an MLM because some top recruiter pretends he wants to make you money when in reality he wants to take yours. For once I don’t have to be in somebody’s face asking them for money because somebody was in mine. For once I can ask people to join a program because it’s free and they truly will make money. So 20 for me is good. In time my 20 will grow because the majority of them won’t leave. I’m taking it slow and steady because it’s going to be a nice long ride with Agloco for me.
No financial cost, no obligation, and a lot of potential upside. This Member sees the value proposition AGLOCO is proposing to the ‘regular’ Member. Viewbar Update: The engineers have informed me that the Viewbar release is currently scheduled for between Monday April 2 and Monday, April 16 (between 12 and 26 days from now.) I will keep you posted as I continue to hear word from them on progress. As they continually remind me, this is all dependent on the results of QA testing. Thanks again for all your recruiting efforts. AGLOCO continues to grow faster and faster, as every new week that passes brings a new record week for signups (and last week was no exception). Brian Greenwald
AGLOCO Development Team Interesting Site of the Day: http://www.aglomerate.com/ - Nice site with frequent postings and interesting thoughts. |
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8st March 2007
From Official Agloco Blog
http://blog.agloco.com
------------------------------------- I have blogged a lot lately about Members being AGLOCO founders and how the ‘Members who stick their necks out’ will benefit from AGLOCO’s success. And we must recognize the importance of these efforts. But EVERY Member needs to be able to share in the advantages AGLOCO has to offer. Without delivering on that promise, AGLOCO would fail. I have seen talk about this for some time now, and I addressed one aspect of this in a previous blog post. Still, the overall value proposition for the “average” Member without any referrals goes back to what I had written before: “You have Viewbar on screen, we pay you for it.” So, if a Member just wants to be a Member and not recruit new Members (and frankly, 80% to 90% will not), why should they join AGLOCO? As some Members have also pointed out, I believe the answer to is that AGLOCO’s Membership benefits need to far outweigh any costs. The key benefits a regular Member will get are a modest but steady financial payout and a functional toolbar that will be useful while browsing the Internet. Compared to what a Member with 2,000 referrals will get if AGLOCO succeeds, this may not seem like much. Some financial payout is still ‘infinitely’ more than these Members get with a Google or Yahoo toolbar, and over time the Viewbar and the AGLOCO website will become a community building forum with useful functionally. Since AGLOCO Membership and Viewbar software is free, what cost is there? Signing up takes less than two minutes, the Viewbar download is a one-time install process (updates will be processed automatically … more on that later), the Viewbar uses a small section of space at the bottom of the screen and the current limit of 5 hours of browsing each month is accrued passively while the Viewbar is active on the desktop. AGLOCO only has once a month Member update emails, so overall the ‘cost’ of AGLOCO has been kept very low. Are there risks? AGLOCO could fail and this small effort could be wasted. But Member privacy is absolutely secure, and there is little else the Member is putting out there to be ‘risked’. Thus, I’d have to say that the risk is also small. At AGLOCO, we are constantly thinking of the ‘regular’ Member. While we count on the incentives we provide to builders in order to grow the network, without a sound value proposition to ALL Members, surely the company will fail. Viewbar Update: Our lead tech development engineer is still in Shanghai with the Viewbar team (now seven engineers). Cutting to the point, the current release date is now between 18 and 39 days from today (between Monday March 26th and Monday April 16th). I am told this is all a function of the QA testing results. There has been a lot of blog discussion related to the technical specifications of the website, and the ‘comments’ section to the last post has acted as a forum for us to hear, respond to, and learn from Member feedback. Thanks to all those who shared their thoughts, both positive and constructive. Brian Greenwald
AGLOCO Development Team Interesting site of the day: http://shawn.ocia.net/agloco-being-a-founding-member/ - Nice brief article on why one might want to consider becoming a “Founding Member” and builder of the AGLOCO network. |
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1st March 2007
From Official Agloco Blog
http://blog.agloco.com
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Here are a couple of AGLOCO updates in response to the questions Members have been asking: Website Changes: As some of you have noted, the AGLOCO website has made a few changes this week based on Member suggestions. For instance, on each Member’s referral signup page, the “Blogs Around the World” have been eliminated to reduce the possibility that a referral might be lost to an external site. Clicking on each language in “Blogs Around the World” now brings you to the relevant section of the Member blog page, instead of to a single pre-determined blog in that language. Additional changes are being considered as well, and I will keep you posted on those changes as they occur. Communication: One recurring request is ‘better network communication between Members’. I have commented more than once that AGLOCO will add many forms of communication between Members (including an opt-in approach for Members to reach people in their referral networks that they may not know). This website feature will not be worked on until after the Viewbar software release. Viewbar release: A few weeks ago, I said on this blog, “The Viewbar is currently slated for a March release”, and March 1st is now upon us (a couple of you were optimistic and hoped for a release on the first of the month). I know that the Viewbar will not be released in the first half of March. Our tech lead flew to Shanghai this morning to work directly with our six engineers there. I’ll give you more of an update when I hear back from him. Regarding your comments about giving an exact date for the Viewbar release: I cannot give an exact date. Again, a few weeks ago I posted about our plan for a March release, and we have also posted various notes including ‘scheduled for a Spring release’ and ‘coming in a few weeks’ (that last one has been up for a few weeks). The March target, and all the dates we have projected for the Viewbar release, have been based solely upon our Engineers’ best estimates. I have asked our head techie for a firmer date, but he hasn’t given one to me. If I press him, he can give me an estimate, but he cannot be sure. Anyone who has worked with software engineers knows that they don’t like giving estimates because they know problems come up all the time in software development. For instance, we could give you an exact date only to get a bug in the last day of QA that would blow up that date. When we started the Viewbar software we had one engineer working on it. We now have six. We have incentive - we know that the Viewbar release is the real launch of AGLOCO. Big companies usually leave lots of time to develop software and they miss their own goals all the time. Apple just missed its goal for release of the Apple TV box. Yahoo missed the launch date of its Panama software project by almost a year (and it was the most important software project the company has undertaken in ten years). And let’s not talk about Microsoft’s track record. What we hope to do at AGLOCO is to keep giving you the best information we have. AGLOCO is a startup. We are pushing our dates to the edge knowing that, yes, if a delay occurs we do not have as much cushion as a large company would. Moreover, if there is a problem in development, we don’t have 50 engineers we can just throw on it to fix it fast. This is why you almost never see this software development process in a startup (they just stay in ‘stealth’ mode until the software is finished). However, due to AGLOCO’s unique concept focusing on the Member, we decided to involve the Members as founders, right from the start. We knew full well this would open us up to more scrutiny and leave us more vulnerable than other Internet startups. But, we thought it was well worth the effort to gain the kind of community that AGLOCO needs to be successful. Believe me, there is nobody who wants a firm release date for the Viewbar more than me, but that’s just not possible right now. If I had known about these issues in getting software out, I might have stayed in the biopharmaceutical industry, where a single product takes 5 to 10 years to be developed and released (and the dates are subject to many, many factors). There is uncertainty here and I don’t expect you to necessarily be ‘happy’ with any delay or lack of an exact release date. Still, the question remains: Are you a customer or are you a founder? If you’re a customer who just wants to collect his monthly check from AGLOCO, then I would expect you just want us to ‘get it done’ fast, not caring how or why, so that you can begin collecting that monthly check. However, if you are a founder, you have invested (if not your money, then your time and effort) into the business and want it to succeed by doing things well. You are living both the high points and the low points of the company, the troubles and the uncertainty, and your reward for this is that you get some of the financial upside a startup company has to offer as well. Meanwhile, we are in the midst of our fastest week of Member growth ever. Our daily Member signup rate has grown steadily and is now over 400% (4 times) higher now than it was in the first half of January. This is an exciting time for AGLOCO. I will try to give steady updates in almost every post regarding Viewbar progress. Ultimately, a brief period of uncertainty shouldn’t hurt the company nor you, the founding Members. We will continue to communicate the best information we have to keep an essential element of your trust intact. Brian Greenwald
AGLOCO Development Team
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