Compass Design: Many readers of this blog are one of two types of business, customization/design of Joomla websites or downloadable digital products. Prompted by a chat among some of my colleagues, I'd thought I'd see what people think about an important part an online business - your refund policy.

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BusinessWeek: There's been no shortage of opinions on the failed takeover as bloggers offer plenty of advice for CEOs Yang and Ballmer—plus a few laughs.

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Finally, some real news about the fate of Thunderbird. David Ascher, Mozilla Messaging CEO, discusses the details in his blog:

Today we’ve announced the launch of Mozilla Messaging, the new name for the entity I’ve been calling MailCo on this blog. As promised, it’s a new subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation, focused on email and internet communications. We’ve put up the essential information about the organization on the website, but I have more room for background here.

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The November 1st issue of the Wall Street Journal has an interesting article regarding Netlog.com (formerly Facebox). The article is titled, "How Netlog Leaps Language Barriers".

The article focuses on the diversity challenges that social networking sites have in Europe with Europeans speaking more than a dozen languages. Netlog appears to have stepped up to the cultural diversity challenge and is doing so at a much lower investment cost than its rivals. Netlog's secret weapons: the use of open source tools (apparently the site runs on PHP, MySQL, Ajax, etc.) as well as an army of foreign students at a nearby Belgian university.

By relying on some clever technology and a ready supply of foreign students at a nearby university, Netlog has become a veritable Tower of Babel. It counts 28 million members and has versions in 13 different languages, including French, German and Italian, as well less common tongues like Romanian and Norwegian. Polish and Russian versions are nearly finished and another dozen languages, including Catalan, Estonian and Arabic, are on the way.

That is a notable achievement, because outside of North America, many Internet start-ups are hemmed in by linguistic barriers that limit their ability to attract users and generate revenue.

I applaud Netlog's forward-thinking to build from the ground-up a multi-language content/social management system. More interesting is that while Netlog's developers understood what was at stake, the much larger U.S. social networking sites have been hampered by not thinking on more global terms.

"Doubt about the direction the economy is taking could force corporate executives to reevaluate their cost management strategies. A practive approach can save companies dollars and their executives a lot of distress."

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Is there anyone else disappointed that Linux.com and NewsForge.com now mirror each other in content?  In the past I've called this the CMS déjà vu phenomenon.  I'm not sure what to think about it.  No wait, I do know what I think about the two sites basically merging into one...I don't like it.  I really do miss the diversity in stories the two separate sites once offered.


Am I am the only not liking the change?  Yea, yea, I know...Linux.com and NewsForge.com have every right to do what they do.  That's not my point...this time it's about me...

"But what if the business demand is uncertain, as in the case of a startup idea? Strategy would dictate a race to prototype, spending less time and money in the initial process.

So how do you speed up and price down that race? I’ll tell you…"

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"MySQL, purveyor of the open-source database of the same name, is on the road to becoming a publicly traded company, bolstered by $50 million in revenue in 2006."

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