Fox: Now you can e-pay to watch our flops
If
you didn't want to watch Fox's "Playing it Straight" when it was
available for free, will you really want to pay for it? Fox
will
soon find out.
After canceling the reality show "Straight"
last March, the network is selling views of
the program online. Users
can download each of the eight episodes at Fox.com for $1.99 on a
pay-per-view basis or the entire series for $9.99. The show was about a
female college
student who must pick a potential mate from 14 suitors on a Nevada Ranch,
where
some
of the guys are gay. If she picked a
straight man, the couple split $1 million. If she picked a
gay man, he gets the money, and she
got
nothing.
This
is the first time a network has attempted to sell entire episodes of a
series on the internet and not just segments for promotional purposes. But
there
apparently are some flops not even worth paying for --
five episodes of "My Big Fat Obnoxious Boss" that didn’t make
it to TV are being offered online for free.
At eBay, a huge fee hike for online sellers
For
small-time retailers online auction house eBay has been a godsend. Now the
company wants them to send more money. It sent an email Wednesday to all
buyers and sellers saying it would be raising fees for sellers by 60
percent. The monthly
subscription fee for people who operate Basic eBay Stores will increase
from $9.95 to $15.95 a month starting Feb. 18. Not surprisingly, that has
many loyal users upset.
The fee for a standard listing of 10 days will double, from 20 cents to 40
cents. The changes brought on other skepticism given eBay's dominance in
the auction and online payment arenas. Some members have questioned via
chat room whether the government or a fair-business group such as the
Better Business Bureau should regulate fee structures so small business
owners aren’t swindled.
Texas files case against supposed spammer
Texas
is going fishing for one of the world's most prolific spammers. The state
has filed a multi-million dollar federal lawsuit against a University of
Texas at Austin student and a California man accused of running one
of the top five spam operations in the world. Ryan Samuel Pitylak and Mark
Stephen Trotter run PayPerAction, Leadplex and Leadplex, companies that allegedly sent millions of spam messages pitching
fraudulent services. Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott said the spammers
have violated federal and Texas laws on spam and Texas trade practices.
The civil suit was filed under the CAN-SPAM
Act of 2003,
but no criminal charges were filed. The operation allegedly used
misleading subject lines of e-mail, wrote deceptive messages about
mortgage refinancing services and solicited personal information, which it
sold to marketing firms for $28 each. Abbott said Texas officials worked with
Microsoft to set up spam traps, which collected 24,000 e-mails from the
spammers.
Google
introduces new small business tool
Yesterday
Google introduced a new tool intended to help small and medium-sized
businesses reach into the corporate world. The Google Mini searches data
stored behind a company's intranet or acts as the search engine for a
public web site. The Mini searches up to 50,000 documents and supports
more than 220 file types. Google claims the Mini is easy to install and
requires minimal upkeep. It comes with one year of support and product
replacement and sells for a starting price of $4,995 at Google’s online
store.
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