Sproose has launched a web search beta tool that enables users to vote for the quality of web search items.  The system is simple enough to understand.  A user goes to Sproose, establishes an account with an email address, performs searches anytime in the future, and can vote on any individual search result giving it a rating on a scale of 1 to 5.

This Social Search Engine takes the voting results and immediately adjusts its search engine ranking accordingly.  The concept and design is simple enough to be immediately understandable and potentially useful if the user base grows past the critical mass necessary to avoid skewed results.  Other social media sites like Digg.com have felt the impact of ‘digg’ gangs that attempt to manipulate results.  That has not caused a serious problem for Digg and I suspect it will ultimately not cause a serious problem for Sproose either.

You can try the tool at the Sproose home page.

The key to the success of this system will likely be a two fold combination consisting of 1.  Simplicity in design which they have and 2. General Awareness of their tool, which they are working on already in small part through their sponsorship of this article and Maven Mapper’s Information.

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The results of the internal Apple investigation have been released.  The end result is that Apple will incur an $84m loss resulting from improperly recorded options from 1997 through 2002.  There were a total of 6,428 options granted inappropriately over 42 different dates.

Steve Jobs did recommend or know about several of the options that were recommended to maximize gains for other individuals but not himself.  The option that has raised eyebrows that was incorrectly recorded was reviewed initially by the board in October of 2001, but terms were not finalized until two months later in December at which time someone (undisclosed) backdated the option to the original date in October.

Questions Remaining

The total amount found would not appear to be material if $84m is the correct amount.  This leaves questions as to whom if anyone the SEC may pursue in this affair.  As the report indicates that Steve Jobs did recommend several of the dates for others, this may make him culpable if its found that those individuals reciprocated in some manner.  The board has indicated that they are willing to look beyond this possible fiduciary indiscretion and will continue to support Jobs to the relief of investors.  Then there is finally the question of whether or not the SEC or external investigators that is will trust the findings of internal investigators or perform their own search.  Will these findings by Apple open the door on this scandal or lock it up tight?

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PayPerPost has announced their acquisition of key Performancing.com assets including Performancing Metrics and the Performancing Exchange.  Last month Performancing announced that it would be putting up for sale its servers that run Performancing Metrics for many bloggers. 

Shortly after that announcement PayPerPost started looking closely at Performancing and how a possible acquisition of assets or of the company itself might create a useful synergy for the companies.  Performancing.com’s metrics could prove valuable for PayPerPost as it attempts to assign greater value to the blogs in its marketplace.

Performancing has also provided the Performancing Exchange Marketplace where businesses and website owners can hire Professional Bloggers to work directly for their sites or on a freelance basis.  I have worked with both services.

Maven Mapper’s and several of our related sites sources approximately 35% of our sponsored advertisements from PayPerPost.  Similarly I myself have signed on as a Professional blogger with a few different websites to collaborate on various blogs covering Personal Finance at the Credit Cave and Poker at The Poker Blog.

This acquisition will bring together a very experienced professional blogging community with a well funded Web Marketing 2.0 company that provides marketing solutions to advertisers through blogs.  I look forward to seeing how the potential may materialize.  I have previously provided my suggestions to people close to the transaction on how they might benefit from this synergy and look forward to helping the outcome materialize.

It should be noted that this acquisition is involves the acquisition of Performancing assets previously mentioned but does not include Performancing’s new Ad Network program nor does it include the very popular FireFox add in PFF from Performancing.  Those items are supposed to be re-branded by the Performancing owners according to PayPerPost, which suggests that PayPerPost might be receiving some or all rights to the Performancing brand? (Don’t know for sure but we will see . . . )

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Retailers have long experienced the pains of high demand during the holidays for their products.  They do everything in their power to stock up and provide just enough product to sell to every single buying consumer that walks through the door.

Apple’s iTunes Store however experienced a different type of stockout problem over Christmas.  They stocked out of bandwidth as they experienced a surge of download requests from new iPod users that have recently converted to the the iPod players.

For these new converts their out of the box experience may have been somewhat diminished by the surge in downloaders visiting the site coupled with the poor state of the internet following the communications disruptions in Asia that resulted in a significant amount of rerouting of internet surfers as people and companies attempted to run backup plans to maintain their world wide access to the web.

Not to mention Apple has been distracted this fall by an SEC probe into alleged stock options backdating that could result in a criminal prosecution of the company or of individuals in the ranks at Apple.  This stockout of bandwidth may have occurred in something less than a perfect storm of problems for Apple, but at the end of the day it will prove to be an area that should be improved in the future regardless of the excuse and cause.

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Steve Jobs may have led Apple out of a near death experience.  He may have even delivered the goods this last holiday season as many new iPod converts flooded Apple Stores creating long lines and increasing the bandwidth demands creating download delays.  However, if the forms were not followed to meet the ethical requirements demanded by the SEC and investors seeking to place their trust in a company in the form of investment dollars, Jobs might end up out of a job even after he proved he could get the job done.

Investors have a love love relationship with Jobs and the price reflects their trust that he can continue to deliver.  However, today the stock was battered down by 2% after disclosures that a stock option granted to Steve Jobs himself was not approved by the board of directors and that papers were doctored to indicate that the board had provided approval for the options.

This revelation seems to have pushed Jobs towards retaining his own counsel for an investigation that might turn its focus on him personally.  In October an internal Apple investigation concluded that Jobs may have been aware of a few backdating situations but had not himself been the beneficiary of financial benefits resulting from backdating.  This new revelation might prove to be a wink link in Jobs’ armor or it might prove to be a red herring to distract investors and regulators away from the question that probably should be more important. 

Why was Jobs not aware of the backdating and why did he not institute controls, oversight and mechanism to prevent abuse?

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