Definitely seems like there was some creative liberty in the submission title.
I suppose a "refusal" could be inferred by the lack of their acceptance on the initial buyout offer and their (apparent) rebuttal of a $2.5bil valuation.
For instance, if I offered you a million dollars cash for your house and you came back to me with an appraisal saying it was valued at $20mil... I think it would be clear (or at least strongly insinuated) that you refused my offer of a million dollars.
Thinking that's kinda what happened here? Seems like Elon didn't take to their method of countering and called the whole thing off.
Just my $0.02 and I'm not privy to all the inside-details. Could've gone down entirely different than any of us know.
Plus, it seems like there's a LOT of infighting among the co-founders and previous team. Will be curious to see if more information emerges.
Finding this piece really interesting though for other reasons. Had a similar idea for a project based in that area a couple years back. Imperial Valley (in general) strikes me as a HUGELY under-capitalized opportunity at the moment.
As a San Diego native, grew up familiar with it as the cesspool and stink-puddle that it is... but, if you look into the history of Imperial Valley and Salton Sea (and the abundance of mineral-rich 'dust' and other waste) it's actually an extremely fascinating tale.
Anyone want to put a few million into helping establish a similar project? Seems like there's way more than just Lithium to be monetized out there.
I'm pretty sure his wife had it, last I spoke with her shortly after his death. Nowadays, it's likely his daughter might have it.
Have a lot of great memories thoroughly enjoying that book as a kid. Used to flip through it and test him through-out our sessions. Loved every minute of it.
Please email me traffic details and more info. Would be very interested in taking over, or working with you, on this project to grow it to that next level.
Out of all the altcoins, seems like this one has strong real-world application and brings a lot of value to these Indian tribes. Similar to what Bitcoin has done in other nations that lack a strong national currency.
MazaCoin is also the "official national currency" of a Sovereign Nation, so it can't "technically" be outlawed. Huge step forward for crypto currencies? Outright scam? What do you guys think?
Thoughts on this coin in specific? Altcoins/cryptocurrency in general?
What did anyone really expect? Sounds like a typical government contract.
I can only imagine how these conversations go...
"We need more QA! STAT! It's going to take at least $50 million to test this system... it's awfully broken!" chuckle
face/palm
That said, I think there should be a lot more concern about the security of this site if there's been such a mishandling of the basic functions and operational flow.
Seems only reasonable to suspect this will be leading to a horrible leak of many people's private records at some near point in the future.
As someone who's spent several years researching and working within the online advertising industry, I can attest to this being quite common on a lot of the larger Alexa-ranked sites and traffic sources.
There are many highly ranked sources that will simply burn through your ad spends as quickly as you can deposit funds to the account. People often times spend thousands throwing away money on "testing" these sources, only to usually find they don't pan out.
That's why one of the most important things in online advertising is constant optimization and watching the conversion rates from different sources and adjusting bids as necessary. Drop the sources that don't pan out.
It's similar to stock trading, mitigate your losses quickly and don't bleed your ROI or throw away excess money on "testing" what works. Prune the sources that aren't doing anything for you, and watch your ad spends become much more productive.
The only thing the traffic described in this article is good for is vanity metrics and pumping up numbers like it sounds several of these large brand sites are doing.
If you're looking to inflate your numbers, sure... waste a bunch of money on a ton of bot hits, it's still 1999 right? Just don't expect any sales or conversions from that type of traffic... ever. It just simply won't happen.
This comment was completely tongue in cheek; in all seriousness it was great to see them fix this so quickly.
Tell me that blog post didn't read like a security exploit announcement...
Anyways, as discussed, it never should've happened in the first place, but it sounds like from the comment threads that it was likely Framework related, so.... yeah, still prettty bad.
Yeah, either way it's spun... seems like a pretty good arrangement for their platform, and should work out well for all involved. Seems to solve the problem of ad exchanges having heavily-manual interfaces, or having to setup a 3rd party tracking system for helping optimize spends.
The system sounds pretty slick, and if does what it says it will, I think their UI will go a long way towards helping them gain traction with the smaller firms.
If it truly makes things as easy as it wants/claims to, it should find a pretty solid base of users fairly quick.
I've contacted them about starting some campaigns for both myself and clients, and looking forward to seeing how the system delivers on its promises.
Like kposehn said, if it is really that good I'll be moving a lot more of my budget to it. Would really take a lot of the time and effort out of large-scale media buying.