As the high point of China’s messages during the Olympics fade away in our memories, and the onset of a global slump begin to effect us all. I can’t see many examples of China truly improving on a business front.

Their energetic portrail  of rich culture mixed with engineering excellence and booming economy were encouraging to see, as were talks with the China trade delegation in the UK about how Chinese regional judges etc were becoming better informed with intellectual property enforcement, and a push on quality control in their industrial heartlands.

Yet as I help a client of mine trying to source metal product fabrication and heating elements, I am constantly reminded of the shoddy workmanship on offfer, lack of structure and professionalism displayed by huge swathes of firms out in Szhenzen and Guangdong, let alone their eagerness to pull the wool over the eyes of westerners leaves me feeling that China is getting worse!!

The amount of spam being sent out is certainly on the rise as China’s economy worsens, they are even resorting to blatent attempts at mass cold calling through Voip services such as Skype.  A company calling itself Green Masterpiece International tried passing itself off as a manufacturer / seller of solar panel products today via a Skype chat making out that they had been given contact details at a show.   After a few specific questions about the silicon wafers of the solar panels, I got the response:
“we have a few suppliers about this in CHINA…But I really don’t know what you need to confirm?”

Trying to sell goods, where they do not know the true specifications, probably that will fail within 12 months…  and in this case where they clearly know nothing about the varying performance of solar panels supplied from different manufacturers quickly undermines their credibility !!!

“… don’t know why I need to check on the quality of solar panel manufacturer ???”  That’s because firms like who they represent -  buy cheap rubbish which starts failing very quickly, selling to the West - just to make quick cash, uses up important resources in the world that should be better controlled and used responsibly!

The only reason I gave the call a chance was that I am actively involved in sourcing thinfilm solar PV.  Its people like that and who they represent, which gives China such a bad name in the world.

Today was the official launch of the brand new top level domain (TLD) tipped to become the 21st century version of the old telephone directory!

The new .TEL domains are as global as the .COM or the .ORG  but are totally different in that they have no hosting requirement.  The whole system is built directly into the fabric of the internets DNS structure, and as such, needs no web programming skills and is lightening fast at displaying the .TEL domains content!

Its nearly childs play to add directory style information into the domain through a standard console provided by TELNIC who control all of the .TEL network.  After including the .TEL domain purchasing facility into my own domain registry site for others to buy domains at fair prices, I proceeded to buy my first .TEL domain (asylum.tel) and watched one of TELNIC’s help videos and had my new site working in a matter of minutes - Fabulous!

Now here’s the real important bit to do with .TEL domains : The way they work and nature of their content means that they are naturally optimised for search engines like Google and Yahoo.  Keyword density in .TEL domains is perfectly easy to adjust and I have a feeling that Google will have to adjust its ranking algorithm in the near future to tone down the advantages the .TEL domains probably have.  I’m running a test to see how quickly Google picks up these new domains and set up an SEO directory called seo-services.tel for all of you to see the benefits of advertising in such a domain with full contacts; facts and awesome “dofollow” weblinks for each of you!!!. Head on over to the site…. I’ve even set the yearly advertising fee to only £20 UK per year / $30 US.  Bargain!  At this rate, it allows me to employ the latest methods of promoting the domain and I’ll regular be reporting back in here to the outcome of .TEL’s

I was reading Anatole Kaletsky’s comments in the Timesonline.co.uk this morning entitled “Bank Stability is the key to recovery from recesssion” and couldn’t disagree more !!

After having my say at the bottom of Anatole’s opinion, I felt like there’s a little more to say about the fact that governments have missed an easier and more instant route to stimulating their economies!  I would go so far as to say that during an economic collapse its always the big industry players who get their begging bowls out to government in attempt to use their influence to receive easy money, which regularly takes a long time to filter back into the economy.

During economic slow downs the larger companies in general are often the businesses which go to the wall.  If they survive, they often survive by holding onto their cash and not paying their suppliers - invariably smaller SME type businesses which puts an unusually high strain on them - causing many to run out of cash reserves in their businesses and go to the wall.

Yet its proven time and time again, that SME and small entrepreneurial businesses have more success in adapting to changing economics if given the chance and are certainly more dynamic.  Most of the working populations in countries are employed by smaller SME size businesses and this is the section of industry which is bullied the hardest by Banks during recessions !  So WHY do Governements fail to focus properly on this jewel in their economies?

As many entrepreneurs point out - Bankers play safe (usually when dealing with their clients) and are adverse to risk. (again, not so when they play in their own money markets).  Yet its regularly the case that entrepreneurs who understand their own businesses and take calculated risks do very well in ecomic downturns.  Whilst big business shed employees and close, smaller businesses tend to grow when supported with suitable liquidity.

Pushing cash into banks comes with huge problems and is a very slow process to getting cash into the public where it is needed.  Worst of all, the government loses most of the control over that cash when it enters the vaults of banks !!!!!

Regional Trade and Industry government departments responsible for stimulating their local economies are perfectly positioned to support the smaller local businesses during economic downturns - and already organise grant projects etc for business.

These government bodies could easily supply low interest cash loans out into the local business environments. This is where the smaller business leaders need it most to develop the widest opportunities and employ the largest number of the population.   This is where the true engine of recovery is, and yet they are the hardest hit by banks during recessions.

They are left to sink or swim by themselves as governments around the world miss the golden opportunities to recovery beneath their feet !!!!

I read an article at TechCrunch today which got me thinking about the power of individuals as a source themselves of relevant and high performing links to web sites.  Regular forum contributors have been used to adding Tag signatures of websites as back links for a long time now, BUT after trying out the raw search power of pipl.com I am starting to think that we are all missing lots of opportunities to add relevant back links to our important websites.

Try it out yourselves with your own names! its amazing what this vertical search engine comes up with and how many items in the results can you identify as a missed opportunity to have a back link to your most dearest of websites ???

Read the original article here:
Pipl.com: People Search Engine So Good, It Will Scare Your Pants Off

So here I am, developing new web applications to perform specifically well in Google and at the same time improve the client management back end options of a site and I notice a problem after upgrading Visual Fox Pro & Studio 8 !!  My IIS default web site is “Stopped” and when I try to start it I continually get one of Microsoft’s highly informative errors - ie, no information whatsoever - other than a code Error 0×8ffe2740 which means a visit to Google and Microsoft’s website to find out what this is.  Its a problem with another local application using the port 80 - thus Microsoft has written an error catch into IIS so that no other service can share port 80 !!

After looking around, I see quite a few developers seem to opt for port 80 as their default communication channel, Skype being one! however - on my machine the culprit was BBC’s iPlayer because they use the dreaded Kontiki P2P program to help share the load of video downloads.  Previously I had to uninstall Sky Broadbands’ service because they’d quietly used Kontiki and I noticed from my router logs that most of my broadband bandwidth was continually being used by Sky even though I wasn’t using their service much.  What’s even worse is after removing Sky - the uninstall routine left Kontiki functioning on purpose to allow continued use of my machine as a Peer-to-Peer host !!! Not funny and a clear indication of malware in my book.

Anyhow, the iPlayer uses the same underhand techniques of p2p with Kontiki to reduce the BBC’s own bandwidth usage <see here> which directly interferes with IIS, so developers beware. . . its probably not a good idea to catch a re-run from BBC’s website of your favourite show as its probably going to screw up your developer tools if they are on the same machine !!!

I used the perfect guide to removing Kontiki <here> from my system and thus save me from having to change my IIS default site port.I actually like the concept of Peer-to-Peer file sharing for legitimate use - however, there’s clearly some way to go yet before big companies inform their public openly of such use in their services, even further before firms like Kontiki realize that users should have “easily available options” to tune the settings of such p2p modules to fit into their web usage and any budget influenced by excessive hidden bandwidth usage !

Btw - IIS worked fine once I killed the sneaky Kontiki