People do not want to buy copies that cost that much as original. The same is true for the web. There are plenty of copywriting sites, and each year it is easier and easier to create another copy of website and try to get some market share.
For example blogging. 10 or so years ago there was livejournal – a wonderful blogging for all platform with paid accounts where one had to beg for invite to get a free limited one. People could skin them a little – change some colors, at some point layout as well. Then came wordpress, blogger, etc. Now anyone can get blog in 5 minutes, skinned to their likes. There are hundreds of thousands skins to choose from. And blog on itself is no longer special.
Same goes for more generic CMS’es. Before that, programmers would code a news portal for month. After that you just install drupal or joomla, configure them a bit and you got a new news site with lots of plugin choices. And a hundred or so similar sites doing the same. The technology improves, it value deflates over time.
This is the true with copywriting as well. You can write the best copy in the world, but the question is how it will stand out? How it will be different from others, that will copy same source, or maybe you? Can you offer something better?
This is the most critical question for successful site : individuality, originality, the brand. You have to answer for yourself and your readers how you are the best. And the answer should be good enough to convince yourself and your staff. Noone else knows everything so in depth as you and the guys in the same room. And if you do not believe in your site, no one else will.
By the way, cheating yourself does not work that well in a long term. You have to get a good understanding what you can do differently from competitors. Counting on being older, having better SEO or Social Marketing skills do not count- most of this do not matter or is achievable. There is always a chance that competitors would hire someone that knows better than your employees do. Heck, they can hire someone better than you to do things that you do now. And you will have to improve, find new things.
Shouldn’t you do same things as competition does ? Absolutely, but you should do them better. Using rewritten copies? Write better ones, gather more information. Presenting news? Get a person that can add unique and useful touch to them. Reviewing something? Think what customer wants to see in a review that is not at your competitors webpage. In terms of business management, raise the cost of entering this market. This will help you in the future.
And yes, I had to do that in the past, and I will have to do this again with one of my projects. I can’t tell if I do everything the best way. But I am trying to do it better.

I was pleasantly surprised by seeing Android phones in stock at Lithuanian Omnitel store last week. They weren’t marked as Android phones, and their capabilities were unlisted. However, I am really happy that they have started selling more modern Smartphone’s than Iphone. However, there is no sign for paid applications in locally accessible Android Market yet.

This issue made me wonder how widely spread Android phones are in Lithuania. There are couple sources of data that can provide some insight.

Admob statistics does not show Lithuania in country list. Also, to get a statistically relevant insight some conditions should be met. That is, there should be enough users to run Admob enabled programs, which are not the ones that are pre-installed. The whole East Europe is responsible for 2.2% Admob clicks, which means that Admob is not strong in these markets yet.

Infusecreative.com data is not accurate enough. The pages lithuanians visit might not have clicky web analytics installed. This is seen from very spiky curves of both iphone and android usage. However, it is seen that iphone has some real market share, as there is a clear difference between Iphone and Android usage.

The main information source is App Aware – an application that lists software installed nearby and the phones used. This show couple of phones that use both App Aware and are in Lithuania, in its capital mostly. There are some older models here as well (Hero, for example), which were never sold through mobile networks here. Sure, not all of Android users have App Aware installed.

Conclusion? Putting together information, gathered from clicky and App Aware, I would say that Androids are not widely spread here yet, and exact numbers are hard to come by. Judging by clicky, Androids are 1/10 of iphone market, but I would expect an significant growth once more Android smartphones are sold in Lithuanian directly rather than through foreign eshops.

I am firm believer that knowing about places of common speed traps is a good thing. Thus I relied on trapster application on my android phone to report for the stationary and mobile traps in area I am driving. Sadly, it had far for complete speed camera map for Lithuania. Vilnius is marked quite well, Kaunas has little traps (one was missing), and the west part of Lithuania was not mapped at all. My NDRIVE had way less traps than trapster.

Now I have looked for solutions. GPS.lt has a nice list of current and forthcomming speed camera maps in Lithuania, however they target different, more mainstream navigation applications like Tomtom or Garmin. Thus I took some time to convert the list of coordinates listed there to KML file. This format is understood by Google earth and NDRIVE. The locations are not 100% accurate, but in most cases the trap locations are good. I have marked planed Lithuanian traps as (FUTURE) under their names. They can be deleted from KML file, but I would suggest not to – they are already in planning and should open quite soon.

To add Camera list to NDRIVE, upload the file to your phones SD card under directory NDRIVE/speedcameras . Then choose import from Ndrive. Thats all. It should work the same on other NDRIVE platforms.
If have any additions to speed camera list, or any suggestions, please drop me a mail. The list will be modified in the future, as not everything is done already. I am planning on fixing camera orientation properly.

The Lithuanian speed cameras KML file can be downloaded here. (Link fixed)

Lietuviškai :

Lietuvos greičio kamerų sąrašas KML formatu. Tinka google Earth ir NDRIVE navigacijoms. Ačiu GPS.lt.

Yesterday there was a change made in Apple’s developers terms and conditions prohibiting cross-compiling Iphone and Ipad applications. This addition is related to announcement of Adobe CS5, which should be able to convert Flash to Iphone application and open Iphone application development to Flash developers. This is not a huge step for Apple, however it enforces animosity between Apple and Adobe.

Some think that killing Flash is a good thing. HTML5 would be adopted faster if there were no flash. Computers are safer and more stable when they do not need to rely on third party plugins to display web pages. And all technologies are bound to die or evolve to something else.

However, this is not a question of technology only. This is question about keeping users and money. Adobe has two important and related technologies that compete directly with Apple. That is flash and Adobe Air. Flash allows implementing rich internet applications that are not dependant on Apple Itunes store. Air allows content delivery that can not be controlled easily. That will not be allowed by Jobs.

Frankly, I do not see why Adobe should fight for Iphone and Ipad market now. There is a lot of room for Adobe elsewhere: PCs, Macs, other mobile platforms. As long as Adobe focuses on Iphones, they will do crappy job elsewhere. Forget them for a while – do a superb job on Androids, on PC’s and later you might come back to Iphones as well. You will be forgotten if you will focus on this defeat. For now, Adobe can not gloat that it has way to develop fully cross-platform applications anymore. The biggest advantage is killed and might never return.

There is a lot of things that has to be done by Adobe to change and adapt to new world. Still no official Flash in Android Market. Adobe Air or mobile Air applications should be made available for Android and other mobile platforms. Make it easy for developers to monetarize flash applications as well and you will get a share of the gaming market money. I see very little movement to this direction. Can you make a cross-compiler from Cocoa to Flash as well?

The problem is that if Adobe waits, nothing of this will be possible. No one will believe that Flash is better than HTML5, no one will believe that Air is something better than other platforms. And it will be harder to return. Maybe even impossible.

Update

I have read this article by John Gruber recently. It has very good arguments why Apple will not allow Flash – based (or other intermediate layer) application development in the future. Adobe needs to move on. It is time to focus on other things to do, and work in other markets.

One of the most important drawbacks of my Nexus One is the limited choice of applications if you are outside US and couple other countries. Android Market sells for couple countries only, and native free Turn by turn navigation application is available in USA only. That is a shame, as I need navigation in my country as well sometimes.

There are some paid alternatives. For example, CoPilot by ALK Technologies is quite good and reasonable application for android. The single drawback is that it is not available in my country.

However, recently I found a free solution for this problem. The application is called Nav Launcher . Apparently, Google maps do not work in Canada as well, so some people there created a version that uses modified google maps. It works worldwide. It does 2 things. First, it creates a nice launcher for custom google maps in navigation mode. Second, it allows choosing which maps to launch : native or modified. Native maps provide navigation in USA only.

To enable installation of Non-USA navigation, you will have to enable installing from third-party sources. To do so, go into settings->Applications and mark Unknown sources checkbox. This will allow nav launcher to download and install Brute Maps, which are based on Google Maps 4.0.

There is another small issue. I am still running Google Maps 3.4 on my Nexus one, as maps 4.1 is available in USA only (maybe in some other countries). This is quite depressing, as I see no reason for Google to limit availability of free applications that should be the same worldwide. I am quite sure that I would be able to install it through VPN if I really wanted that. Though question remains… why such artificial limitation?

Overall, I am unhappy that Google does not want dollars from many world countries though their app store. This limits developers as well, because there is a huge market for local apps outside USA and UK as well. These applications will have different specific country-related needs.

Yesterday I tweeked my blog’s feeds and looked for a plugin to integrate feedburner seemlesly. This appeared a bit more tricky than thought: Upgrade to wordpress 2.7 made some feedburner plugins inoperable. This includes most popular FeedSmith plugin. Some other Wordpres feed plugins are not working too. I am not sure if it is wordpress api change or some different problem.

The solution is either using .htaccess hack for redirecting feeds to your feedburner account (If the request is not from feedburner itself) or using different plugins. I am now testing FD feedburner plugin. Apparently it uses api differently and has no problem with integration with WP.

This brings up annother issue: why wordpress is not downward-compatible. It is nice seeing software updated periodically, however it is a nightmare to search for new plugins when old ones stop working.

By the way, WordPress updater is quite nice. I loved that i had so little work to update my blog software.

So, you lost your domain. Maybe due to credit card fail during renewal, maybe the mail address of domain got hacked. Or maybe you lost a case on domain to competition. Happened to our rivals once.

After lots of screaming and slapping yourself the question comes what to do next. So, a quick check list:

1. Fix the reason you lost the domain. Update your credit card details, change the email for all of the domains to the one you actually read. 
2. Evaluate and start using what remains from domain. Launch the site under new name or decide what you want to do with all the content. If you feel better, make an excuse that this was a strategy all along and the former name sucks no longer reflect what you are or do.
3. In case that the domain still points to your server, make 301 redirect to new website. The best way is to use .htacces and point old content to new content directly and not just to the new domain. This is a very likely scenario in case of court order. Also, it helps with double content problem later on.
4. Do the link search for your old domain. In some cases you might be able to update address to the new one. In some cases it is not possible. But you have to try. 
5. Check ALL your sites for the links to the old site and update it to new one. Doublecheck the site again. Many people forget this issue and they might give a backlink or two to the people who stole their precious name.
6. If the competition lauches a site on the lost domain, check with your legal departament. In some cases it is illegal to do so, in some dont. This was a case when poker site bodog lost their domain due to a court order in brand name case. Make life for competition as difficult as possible.
7. Promote, promote, promote. 

You will not regain popularity easily. But there is a hope for comeback.

Any other ideas what to do?

This post was inspired by very careless actions of some of our competitors.

April is the season when you have to fill your tax information and, in my case, pay the taxes for the year before. Overall, it was not a bad year once I have calculated everything. Some things could be better. As a true geek, I wrote a wp plugin for calculating my taxes, though it is useful only for specific cases.

Anyway, I am happy that calculations are (almost) done, and i need to fix one or 2 numbers, and file the info to the tax office. Had a lots of headaches.

Today took time to upgrade wordpress to version 2.3.3. It was not seamless process, as somehow new tables were not created and thus lost all the categories. Had to re-create missing tables by hand and same goes for categories. At the moment everything is working, but will have to check the logs later on.

Although Facebook.com is not popular in Lithuania, there are still Lithuanians that use it. Not many, though, but even I got an account and couple of friends there. So, whats the problem….

Recently I got an email to another box that friend is looking for me on facebook. The name is even Lithuanian, however… I do not know that person. And even if I log in into my account and use the link, there is no results. And it is not the first fake letter I get in my mailbox from Facebook to convince me joining them, though previous ones were for some people with foreign names. Perhaps they are trying to become better at targeting the people.

I can say I am unhappy with such turn of events. I do not think that ANY internet service should cheat you into joining them, as it is lame. I even consider quiting my other account.

Have just upgraded to the version 2.0 of wordpress. Some new nice features aded, like TinyMCE, for example. The web software is getting close to the common office software.

Recently my friend Jedas, who is interested in Embeded harware, microcontrolers and electronics launched a blog related to these subjects : GotArmed.com. He wants to show the world his weird experiments with embeded processors, mostly arms and a place to keep record about them. Take a look!