Home > Tech Circuit > Archives > 2006 > October > 29
Sunday, October 29, 2006
Why is MostChoice in the headlines now?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
MostChoice.com CEO Martin Fleischmann is a man on the move these days. The company he co-founded with friend Michael Levy is being named to lists of fast-growing tech companies left and right, and now he’s getting headlines as a click fraud-fighting executive in the Oct. 2 edition of BusinessWeek magazine.
Click fraud is the practice of building Web sites filled with nothing but lists of pay-per-click advertisements under affiliate agreements with major search sites, then using automated programs or low-paid workers to click on the links to generate revenue.
MostChoice’s paid ads have ended up on such sites, costing the company tens of thousands of dollars because paid search results are one of the avenues through which it develops the leads it sells to insurance and other financial services agents across the country, Fleischmann said.
Still, the company is doing exceedingly well, being named earlier this month as Georgia’s fastest-growing technology company, and last month to the Inc. 500 list of fast-growing companies nationwide.
The company started as an online insurance agency in 1999 and survived the dot-com bust of 2001, primarily because it hadn’t raised the kind of venture capital that other companies brought in. That forced Fleischmann and Levy to maintain their frugal ways until they hit on a better business model —- which was selling leads and leaving the insurance writing to others.
“Everything we tried to do to be like the dot-coms didn’t work out and everything we did to build a correct business model did,” he said.
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Would you try farming by remote control?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Roswell and agricultural technology seem to have a long history. After all, it wasn’t farming that gave rise to the city, but the cotton mills.
Now, a Roswell company that specializes in bringing broadband to the boonies has partnered with a Lilburn company to commercialize methods of using technology to automate farm work.
Camvera Networks recently demonstrated an early version of the tools at the Sunbelt Agricultural Exposition in Moultrie. This incarnation allows workers at three testing facilities and one working farm to measure the moisture content and temperature of their soils, key indicators for farmers, said Camvera co-founder John Overly.
Eventually, the company’s technology partner, Presoft Ag Solutions, hopes to offer tools that will allow farmers to start and stop irrigation systems from anywhere in the world using a Web-enabled desktop, laptop or even PDA. They would also be able to use video cameras to monitor activity in fields, and deploy tractor-mounted tools to precisely plant crop rows and harvest crops more efficiently.
Such tools could help farmers reduce water and energy usage, among other things, Overly said.
Camvera’s primary role is in developing the infrastructure to tie the technologies together and make remote data access possible, Overly said.
Demonstration projects are ongoing at the USDA National Research Peanut Lab in Dawson, the Agricultural Innovation Center in Tifton and a private farm.
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Meet Rupak Ganguly, big picture guy and gadgetophile
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
You might figure Rupak Ganguly, our featured gadgetophile of the week, is a man of diverse interests by taking a peek at his favorite movie list. It begins with “Forrest Gump,” takes a detour through “Nemo” and ends up at “Dil Chahata Hai,” a 2001 Indian film that focuses on the “lives and loves of three close friends,” according to 1-World Festival of Foreign Films.com.
But a peek at the Cumming tech worker’s technology blog will seal the conclusion. Just below his latest entry dissecting Microsoft’s Zune media player, you’ll find Ganguly enthusing about “ClipCode DSL Tool for GOF Patterns.”
We don’t know what that means, but Ganguly —- a software solutions architect (fancy words for Big Picture Guy) assures us it’s really, really cool.
Ganguly’s diverse interests reflect his professional life, where he spans the worlds of technology and business, taking what the folks in the suits say they want and translating that into terminology the techies understand.
In his blog, Developer’s Shelf, he tries not to just gush over technology he finds cool, but take a technologist’s perspective on it, examining not just the wow factor, but also the things that make the technology work —- or not.
He’s currently working on a series about how Microsoft’s Media Center capabilities built into the upcoming release of the Vista operating system will begin to change the way in which people receive and use digital entertainment at home.
Not all that many people read the blog, he says, but that’s not really the point.
“It’s just an expression. It’s just how people write poems or paint,” he said.
You can find Ganguly’s blog at developershelf.blogspot.com.
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Gadgets: Do you need this LCD TV?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Tech Circuit is taking a look today at the Samsung LN-S4695D 1080p 46” LCD TV
Who’s gotta have it?
Rupak Ganguly, who just bought a new house in Cumming and needs lots of new electronics to fill it up. He’s going for an LCD over a plasma, the other high-definition system, because plasmas don’t offer the highest resolutions available. So what if television signals aren’t going out in that higher resolution? “I am a videophile/audiophile,” he says.
Why you gotta have it
Well let’s see. Um, it’s big. It’s got such a wide viewing angle you might be able to watch “South Park” standing behind the danged thing, and it’s so fast at drawing images that you could hook your XBox up to it and forget you’re not really on the football field when you play Madden ‘07. At around three grand, let’s hope so.
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