Business Plan

Every business needs a comprehensive business plan. It is the complete description of how you will run your business, what resources you will need to get started and the revenue you expect to generate. If you are unsure on how to write a business plan, then research the topic or take a class at your local community college.

Insurance

It is always a good idea for a company to have business liability insurance in case client property is damaged or there is a job site injury. If you will be using your personal vehicle for business purposes, then you may need to get additional auto insurance. Talk to your insurance agent about making sure that your company is completely insured before you get started, or compare premiums at competing insurance companies on websites like BusinessInsurance.org in order to ensure that you get the best rates.

Licensing

In most counties in the United States, a company needs to register with the local government in order to be able to conduct business. It is a simple and inexpensive process that makes your company official. You can get your business license in your own name or your company’s name by getting a DBA, or doing business as, certificate.

Some businesses require additional licensing steps. For example, many states require building contractors to get a general contractor’s license before they can start doing business.  Make sure that your company is completely licensed before open for business.

Location

Your location is important to the success of your business. If you  would like to start off your business in your home, but you do not have the room or the proper facilities in your home to do so, then you will need an alternate plan. Make sure that you find the ideal location that fits your budget and your business needs.

Website

No company should be in business without a website. The Internet is how people find companies these days, and many people prefer to purchase items from companies over the Internet as opposed to in person or over the phone. Your website will be the place where your customers find out information about new products, and where prospects become acquainted with your company for the first time.

Personnel

Prior to opening for business, you need to be certain that you have all of the personnel you need in place. Remember that you can outsource many of your functions to help you save money while still getting the services you need. For example, you can hire a payroll service to help you keep your payroll organized as opposed to having to hire a full-time accountant.

The checklist for starting a business is long, but once you get your company off the ground, you can start focusing on creating a successful and profitable business.

Sometimes you have to read the reviews to really, really appreciate all the uses for a product. This NUCLEAR duct tape at Amazon is just one of those products. Whether you’re sealing cracks in a reactor core or fixing your type 40 Tardis, you’ll just find these product reviews really special…

There was a time when I had no problem turning off the internet, and replying to emails a week later, if that’s when I got back to my desk after a vacation. That was 15 years ago; the world has gotten considerably faster since then. Now, if my business is offline, I can’t monitor websites–can’t really edit them offline because of all the Content-Management Systems (CMS), can’t get to email, can’t get to voicemail, can’t do much at all.

To protect myself from outages, I have backups and redundancies. My business phone is a traditional land line, sometimes called POTS as an acronym for ‘plain old telephone service’, but my personal phone line is from the local cable company, where it is half the cost, and just having it results in a discount on my internet service, so the net cost is that it reduces my bill by $8 a month to have it. OK, the business line stayed up in the outage; cordless phones failed, but there’s one corded phone on each floor of the house. The personal phone line failed, despite having built-in battery backup and being plugged into an Uninterruptible Power Supply; when the system dies at the pole, there’s nothing to do.

Internet is another matter; when power came back on, the internet and the private phone line stayed down. The cable company was able to reset the phone remotely after I called in on the land line, but Internet was still down, and they scheduled that repair for four-days out. In typical clueless-cable fashion, they neglected to find the regional outage, which was fixed some 12 hours later, but still, I had no internet, and a promised 4-day outage, on a Monday of what was going to be a very busy week.

Backups Chosen

I added a smart phone with a good data plan. That gives me options that don’t rely on any cables coming into my office, either internet or power. It’s not a fix for every problem in an outage, but it’s a start. Next: How to filter spam on a smart phone. (to be continued…)

Computers with Multiple Personalities

I have a testing computer with multiple personalities. I’ve had a few of these over the years, and have used drive racks, virtual machines, multi-boot drives, each of the usual methods more than once. Here’s what I like now:

Antec Easy SATA

The Antec Easy SATA is a hard-drive docking station with eSATA Port, under US$30.

This is a drive holder for a computer, but unlike most holders, it allows sliding in a bare drive, with no carrier. You can have a hard drive for each operating system, and a few for testing. I have a drive for Vista, Windows 2000 Pro, Linux Mint, a few others. It’s also handy for when I have to test a hard drive quickly and don’t want to open a computer, or need to run a security erasure program on a drive.

There’s also an eSATA (external SATA) port on the front for running backups, if you have an eSATA external drive (see below). The eSATA setup requires a second SATA cable inside the computer. That’s a lot of options for the price; an external eSATA adapter usually costs around $15 to $20 all by itself. No, it’s not hot-swappable, but it’s still very useful.

Malware Rescue Kit

OK, computer programmers always get asked to fix their friends’ computers. And it’s usually a malware infection, and it’s been lingering a while, so it’s really, really bad. So the first thing you do is load up some cleanup software onto a USB flash drive and take it and plug it into the infected computer. Oops. Really bad move. Some malware will infect flash drives and add nasty stuff as autoplay files in the root folder, so that it can send badness to other computers–it’s the computer version of coals in a stocking. What you need is a small drive with a write protect switch. I’ve checked–none of the name-brand manufacturers of flash drives have a product with a write switch anymore. Must have been too expensive to include a little slide switch.

SD Card Reader, under $5.

Yes, it’s just a small SD card reader. Why? Well, SD cards have write-protect slide switches on each card. Load the card up with cleanup utilities, then slide the switch on the card, load it back into the reader and take it to an infected machine, and know you aren’t carrying souvenirs back to your office for your work systems to share.

These mini card readers tend to be a little larger than a flash drive, and may not fit in some computers without moving surrounding cables, so take the shortest possible USB extension cable with you on repair trips. Startech has a 6” cable for around $4, model USBEXTAA6IN. For other brands, look for the ends to be one each of type A male and type A female.

Multiple-Access Method Backup Drives

External hard drives are everywhere. I’ve had at least six of my own, going back as far as a parallel-connected IDE case that held a 40 Mb hard drive. It weighed around nine pounds. Found it at a hamfest back around 1988, and never could get it to work in Windows 95… (sigh)

Macally T-S350SU, under $30.
Why pick this case? There are thousands of the things to pick from. Well, it’s the best value (cheap, for these features), it doesn’t stand on an edge (and then fall over), it’s stackable, it accepts SATA II drives, can be very quickly opened for drive swaps or drive forensics and recovery, and it has built-in eSATA as well as USB 2.0. One negative–the bundled software is obsolete.

This is vastly better than a sealed unit, which can’t run drive diagnostics software, as those are mostly USB-only, unless you want to break the case to hook up a SATA cable.

Solar Power

Want to be truly mobile? How about a computer bag that recharges your toys? Well, it doesn’t exist yet. Soon, though.

Traveler’s Choice Solar Messenger Bag ET0120K ECO, around $150.

Yes, that’s a solar panel. No, it won’t charge your notebook, but it will charge cell phones and other gadgets of a similar size. There’s a whole line of these by Eco Traveler, in messenger bags, backpacks, soft-sided coolers, and they’re in multiple colors. Some are Checkpoint Friendly, so they can go through USA-based airport scanning laid unfolded and flat on the XRAY belt with a notebook still inside.
I think I’m waiting for the version that can charge my notebook, but that’s probably a few years off yet.

Show-Off’s Computer Case

Finally, nothing beats a neat computer case as a geek gadget. Well, not this one, anyway.

Antec Skeleton

I saw this monster running at a trade show. That top fan is 250mm across, nearly 10”.
I can’t begin to describe this construction, so here’s the official scoop:
The Skeleton open-air, easy access case is a revolutionary step forward in enclosure design, perfect for the gamer enthusiast or constant hardware tinkerer. This enclosure features four internal drive bays and seven expansion slots with four optional 3.5" device external mounts for a truly unique aesthetic. Internal components mount on a removable, dual level component tray in a reinforced, durable plastic frame with rackmount quality side rails. This uniquely designed tray is capable of supporting up to three 11" graphics cards in SLI configuration and a standard ATX size motherboard for maximum power and versatility. In addition, the overhead "Super Big Boy" customizable 250mm multi-LED fan keeps the motherboard, graphics card and memory chipsets cool, while a dedicated 92mm fan cools your hard drives. The Skeleton also offers a versatile array of front ports, including USB, Firewire, eSATA, and high definition audio functionality. 0.8mm cold rolled steel component tray and high density ABS frame reinforced with with 0.8mm cold rolled steel for durability.


Jerry Stern is the editor of ASPects, the ASP’s Coordinator of Anti-Spyware Operations, and is online at www.pc410.com.

Here’s the subtitle: Create, Deploy, distribute, Sell, and Market Software and More on the Internet at Little or No Cost to You. That’s a strength and a weakness–that subtitle would take several thousand pages to cover properly, and at 546 pages, the book is nowhere near that heavy–this is a good introduction, but hardly all that’s needed. There are five parts:

Part I: Create a Program. Godtland chose Java as a sample language to create a classic ‘Hello, World’ program or Java applet. There are details on where to get tools, source code examples (also downloadable from the book’s website link), and all the steps needed to write a program, but this section is not a programming manual; it’s enough to get started, before looking for more elsewhere. Most programmers looking to sell software online are already programmers, and will just skim these four chapters.

Part II: Deploy a Program. That’s creating a help file, a program icon, wrappers for Java applets, piracy protection (but see below), trial versions, an installer, and testing. That’s 10 chapters, and a lot of information. The Install chapter is a better tutorial on Inno Setup than is easily found online.

Part III: Create a Web Site, Distribute a Program. Covers web site creation, hosting, HTML standards. Four chapters, and again, basically an introduction.

Part IV: Sell a Product. Covers taking check orders, credit cards, PayPal, creating keys, filling orders, adding a shopping cart in Paypal, but doesn’t cover using ecommerce partners other than Paypal.

Part V: Market a Product. Search engines, shareware versus freeware, marketing, and web statistics and logs. The definition of shareware is interesting, taken from an online dictionary, but it’s something out of the 1980’s.

This is a good book for new software publishers. It’s like the notes that a first-time attendee to the Software Industry Conference (ISVcon.org) would make–pages and pages of information that’s hard to find all in one place, and information overload is possible. There’s lots of information, and good coverage on the technical topics. The writing is clear, the code samples are formatted nicely, and opinions are generally labeled as opinions, not as absolutes.

However, there are gaps here. The ‘Piracy Prevention’ section recommends code obfuscation, with no methods for encryption or self-checking a distributed executable file for alteration. Code-signing is mentioned, but dismissed as too expensive. And the legal issues of copyright are just plain wrong–there’s a statement that “Nothing need be registered anywhere” and no mention of how to go about registering a program at www.copyright.gov. The marketing section matches the typical microISV pattern–it’s weak.

All that said, this is a very large topic for a book of any size. The gaps are best filled-in by a membership in the Association of Software Professionals and a trip to the ASP newsgroups and archives, and the book will provide a very good starting point on dozens of topics important for launching a software product online.

Jerry Stern is the editor of ASPects, the ASP’s Coordinator of Anti-Spyware Operations, and is online at www.pc410.com.

OK, great program. Now, what’s next?

There are some basic differences between a program and a product. Most software developers understand many of these instinctually. As a program becomes a product, on-screen messages are made more specific. Screen layouts are more polished. Errors are trapped and result in plain-text messages that help resolve problems, or even-better, are user-proofed so that incorrect procedures still create great results.

But that’s mostly programming code and artwork. The biggest difference between programs and products is the documentation. Specifically:

• Sales pages and advertising.
• The user manuals.
• The instruction books.
• Help files.
• Screen shots, slide shows, and videos.

If these are missing or are incomplete, the product won’t sell like it could, or at all.

There are several basic and common errors in documentation for modern software that aren’t quite product-ready:

• Not writing documentation. (You know who you are…)
• Or combining the various types of documentation, and skipping over a basic need. There are five types of documentation. A real product must have all five types, and while they can have minimal overlap, all basic types should exist for nearly any software product.

Five Types of Writing

Before writing any of the documents below, stop and choose a writing style that will work through that entire
task. Changing style isn’t about formality or slang–it’s about the basic reason for writing. The basic writing styles are:

• Exposition: Writing to inform, to explain a process or an event or an object. Your main help file should be mostly expository writing.
• Persuasion: Writing to persuade. Frequently includes classical rhetorical techniques to bring the reader to your point of view. Applies to press releases and other sales-related documentation. Classical rhetoric is the most difficult writing style; use it with caution and a light touch.
• Descriptive: Writing to describe and define what a product looks like and how it behaves.
• Narrative: This writing is common in fiction, for telling about a sequence of events, but it can also apply to a wizard-style product interface.
• Creative: Novels, plays, poetry, stories. I’ve seen these used well in product documentation, but only once in a utility program. Needed in many games, but avoid them in most other products.

The majority of your product documentation should be exposition or descriptive writing, and your sales documents should be persuasion with a little rhetoric. Overlap them more than just a little, and your document will lose focus and effectiveness.

Five Types of Documents

Here too, try not to overlap the types of documents below.Breaking these into separate projects makes them easier to write, easier to understand, and more effective. (Or, for the software types among us: Less likely to result in a tech-support contact.)

Motivation

These are sales documents, your web site, press releases, your advertisements, promotional emails, logos, artwork. These include the sales pitch, the classic AIDA steps of Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action. In short:

• Attention: Something not routine. Something that stands out. Unique. Maybe bizarre, if your product isn’t a
  business application. Anything to get potential purchasers to look.
• Interest: These are the product descriptions, written as benefits, not a feature list. It’s about what the user can create, and not about the tools and instructions.
• Desire: Why they want it. Or will. This is where the “Ooooh-Ahhhh” goes. The excitement should be building.
• Action: Call for action, go for the closing, ask for the sale. Buy now!

There’s a reason that sales letters from the very largest product sales companies are four pages long–they’ve tested the letters, included every step for attention, interest, desire, and action, and they know it works. But that format is best on paper or television. Adapting a non-sequential web or software version will take more work. A video or demonstration may be a better approach to building the AIDA steps.

Instruction

Getting-Started Guides: These are the most-left-out documents in modern software, and the most likely to prevent a technical support call. These describe basic screen layout, functions, what always must be done first, and what the words on the screen mean in the context of just this product. Instructions are meant to be read by new users, not word-searched, and must be organized in a logical progression:

• What does the product do?
• What can my final project or result be?
• How do I get started?
• What’s the basic navigation through the program?
• What’s in every use of the program, or what steps are in every project?
• And finally: A description of where the rest of the help is, in the tutorials, demonstrations, and references.

This documentation should always be included in the product installation. It can be duplicated online for sales and Search Optimization purposes, but it’s so basic to using the product that it should always be included in the product in some form.

Tutorials

This is how to work through a series of introductory steps and learn the basic operations of a product. Tutorials are for new users. These may be slideshow format, or help files, or videos. These will frequently include building a project of some complexity, by starting small and working though many continuous steps to add options to the project. These are typically numbered, and build on each other to bring the user to a level of mastery, step-by-step.

There’s a trick to tutorials: keep every step strictly in the sequence that the user will take them on-screen. It’s “Go to the File menu and click on Print” and never “Click Print in the File menu.”

Tutorials can be included directly in the product, or online. Frequently, the best approach is to include basic tutorials on program layout and project steps within the help file or a ‘Getting Started’ popup, and include a link to bigger and newer tutorials online.

Demonstrations

These are step-by-step guides, frequently done as animated slideshows, for a single and specific product task. Demonstrations are for users already familiar with the basic operation of the product. These show how to do processes or projects, and leave out no steps. These can be used as needed, in isolation, and should not build on other demonstrations.

Demonstrations, like tutorials, can be within the program, or online, or split, with the advanced topics online. But tutorials are sequential and introductory, while demonstrations are standalone and project-based.

Reference

This is what programmers want. It’s the notes for the advanced features, the guide to doing complex items, and the ever-growing tips and tricks list. This works well in a Wiki format, or a searchable knowledge base. It’s not the material that most users of the product would memorize, or must know to use the most basic functions of the product.

Knowledge bases and Frequently-Asked-Question lists are mostly online. Basic FAQ topics should move into the
Instruction guide during revisions to the product. Advanced topics should usually remain in the knowledge base.

Hiring a Professional Writer

Can documentation be outsourced? Some can, but not all. If the programmers have started the reference documentation, and created a basic tutorial that a writer can follow (in any form, including a one-on-one lesson), then a writer can convert that tutorial into a form ready for a general audience, and start building the tutorials and possibly some of the basic demonstrations.

More mistakes:

Using marketing documentation as an instruction book. Selling is not teaching.

Using a feature list as a press release. Features don’t sell, and bullet lists don’t read well. Selling requires sentences that promote benefits. If your press release is made of lists, it’s not a news story, and won’t be published by any media companies.

Interviewing yourself for press releases or product sales. No, wait–are you Steve Jobs? This rule may not apply, then. Everyone else–don’t quote yourself in your press releases or on your web site.

Mixing tutorials with demonstrations: A guided tour is not a step-by-step procedure; combinations will become
large and overly complex. Again, tutorials are sequential, and demonstrations are for single tasks.

Using an online Knowledge Base or a Wiki as a help manual. These are for problem solving, and can’t replace an introductory set of lessons, which should include a tour, terminology, and getting started with some basic projects.

Consistency

Finally, use the same terminology everywhere. A folder is a folder, and not a directory. A picture is a picture, not an image. Both may be correct, but pick only one, and then stick with it.

It’s great to have a glossary that includes mentions of “This is also known as …”; that helps the search function of your help (or Google, for online help) to find entries when users look for help on topics that you don’t have listed in the menus or the help contents. But overall, be consistent-–this is more about clear communication, and normal writing rules that say not to overuse single words do not apply here.

Keep parallel sections of the documentation similar. Maybe they should all start with a definition, or a screen shot, or an image of a finished project. Pick one style, and stay with it.

Finally, read it all out loud. Well, everything except the reference materials, anyway. You’ll hear errors in your writing far more easily than if you see the words on-screen. And you’ll notice that sections of your text belong somewhere else, and that leads to better organization and betterproduct documentation.

Growing businesses will find uses for servers to fill needs they didn’t even know they had. Servers can be used to host a company’s web site, Active Directory infrastructure for user organization and security, SQL and Oracle database applications for efficient data organization, file servers to track and maintain important spreadsheets, letters and other business documents, and more. Worried about price, growing businesses might be hesitant to take the leap from standalone desktops to servers. Contrary to what some business owners may think, servers can be actually be quite affordable.

The best manufacturers stay in business through their flexibility and ability to offer custom solutions, so it’s no wonder the major server hardware companies offer products for smaller scale setups and the largest corporations. Dell servers are available for businesses of any size and budget, making them a good place to start your shopping research.  If a growing business actually needs multiple servers to truly expand, another affordable option is virtualization.

Virtualization applications run on a physical server and allow this one computer to “host” several virtual servers. These virtual servers are actually just user environments, but they appear as separate harware components. With their own computer names, full-fledged operating systems, and file systems, these virtual machines are functionally impossible to differentiate from independent servers. Users can log into them remotely, client applications can interface with them, and their data can be backed up, just like a normal server. A business owner can buy one affordable piece of hardware with some extra disc space, processing power, and memory and create several virtual servers. Leveraging the abilities of virtual servers stretches an expanding business’s budget very effectively.

Every company hits that period of growing pains where they have outgrown their old systems, but seem too small for a full fledged upgrade to the next tier. However, this infrastructure expansion is most likely necessary. Adding servers to a business’s technology will assist with growth, creating efficiency and saving time and money. Servers can help automate tasks, organize data, and improve security. Business owners who make the leap to server technology usually find themselves wondering how they got along without it.

• Hardware: Usually, that’s not as common as it sounds. Most PCs can stay usable into a seventh year of service. Yes, SEVEN years, IF the software that must run is reasonable and not hardware intensive. Ask a local tech if your processor and memory and hard drive are still OK for the programs you run. It is always a good idea to use a top online backup service or a back up drive to keep copies of your data.
• Fragmentation: Make sure you’re defragmenting the C: drive at least four times per year, and after any big software upgrades. I frequently see old XP computers that have important settings files or the mail storage file broken into several hundred pieces–that costs time, and speed suffers.
• Software Age: Follow my rule of hardware/software matchups: The software you run, other than security products and browsers and browser plugins, should be of a similar age to your hardware. This year’s big office productivity suite won’t run fast on a five-year-old computer, but the same product from the year you bought the computer will be quite usable, and there are faster, smaller programs available for most tasks. Big software means slow, and software ‘suites’ means big, slow, and expensive. So moving backwards a few years to an older version of a big program will generally improve speed; consider the option if you don’t need every hot new feature in the new versions.
• Security Suites: For security products, suites are more than just slow; they’re evil. They do everything under the sun, and take all the processing power your computer has got to keep them going. Dump every security program that uses ‘suite’ or ‘internet security’ in the name. Switch to a simple antivirus program that doesn’t attempt to interfere with Windows’ built-in firewall, built-in parental controls, or communications in general. Just scanning; that’s all you want. Keeping a computer safe is done by keeping all patches up-to-date, and running a good antivirus program. Suites are not useful; they move spam filtering onto your computer instead of keeping it safely at the professionally-managed server run by the mail service, they tamper with Windows security settings, they interfere with the local network and VPN configuration, and they shut down mail and internet access with no notice. Go small. Avoid security suites.
• Toolbars: Uninstall every toolbar. These are known by other names–technicians refer to them as ‘browser helper objects’. There was a time when these were useful, and added features that browsers did not have, back around the year 2000, like popup blockers and on-page search features. Those features are built into every modern browser, and browser toolbars are a major slowdown, and having multiple toolbars is a major drain on a PC. This is the most important system change you can make for speed–remove all the toolbars. Use Control Panel, Add/Remove programs to take out all toolbars except anything that’s part of the installed antivirus product, and then turn off the antivirus toolbar by going into Internet Explorer’s View menu, choose Toolbars, and uncheck the remaining toolbar item there.
• Search programs: Windows 7 has a good built-in search program–it’s the box at the top-right corner of every ‘Computer’ window. Uninstall all others. These especially include Nero’s built-in search program and Microsoft’s Search 4.0 add-in program, but slower machines also don’t do well with Google Desktop, and as of now, Copernic does not run properly in any 64-bit version of Windows. In general, remove every search program that you can’t live without.
     If you find one search program that you really must have, and there’s only one, OK, but be sure to set it to never index the computer during hours you’ll work on it–don’t rely on the defaults, which will set it to build indexes ‘during inactivity’ which means ‘as soon as I start typing, GO’.

Those are the most likely and the largest computer slowdowns on Windows systems. If the hardware remains in good shape, and you keep the installed software simple and small, most modern PCs can last seven years for internet surfing and email. And that’s what I always here from home users. It’s all they run. That, and Freecell, Picassa, and Hoyle Casino….
  
Still slow? It may be time to get expert help from a local computer tech. If you’re near Westminster, Maryland, call me. Elsewhere, take a look at ComputerRepairLocator.com to find a local repair shop.

Dear Friend–

I’ve received your latest forwarded message about the virus that is going to destroy the internet as we know it if we open that email with the urgent-sounding title. Please don’t forward these to anyone–they create FUD. That’s Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. They do nothing positive.

The message was, to begin with, old. When it was new, it had a few almost-true near-facts in it, like the name of a real email subject line. Everything beyond that was like listening to technology news on my local television news stations–it’s last week’s news, or last year’s news, with the important parts left out.

What you need to remember about forwarded messages that arrive in your mailbox is that they’ve generally been out and about being forwarded, for years. Decades, even–I’ve received forwarded jokes and cartoons that also showed up on my desk by fax in the 1990′s, and by interoffice photocopy-of-a-photocopy in the 1980′s. Forwarded emails are old, old, old.

And security news is meaningless after five days. All good antivirus software blocks every known threat that’s more than three days old. The bad guys know this, and they change their approaches to getting your system infected constantly, sometimes twice a day on some of the big families of rogue malware. Now, while there are bad emails going around that will infect your computer if you haven’t patched it, or that contain evil infectious links, the bad guys change the subject lines daily to keep their messages from being caught by SPAM filters, so trying to block them by not opening an email with a specific subject line isn’t remotely practical or safe.

So by forwarding this old message, you’re scaring people, and encouraging them to get their security news by watching for it to fall into their mailboxes from the sky. There are valid sources of security news, and forwarded email isn’t on the list.

Several points to keep in mind–every one of these tells you this is either a hoax or badly-reported ancient history:

• Microsoft and Norton don’t need your help to report news. For that matter, neither do CNN, Neiman Marcus, or Homeland Security.
• The message is undated.
• It asks you to forward the message.
• It claims knowledge from a credible source, but it’s a generic source that can’t be reached, like ‘Microsoft’ or ‘NBC’.

The best thing to do with these forwarded messages is to delete them. Don’t spread the FUD.

The REAL Microsoft security news is here:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/default.aspx

The REAL security news from the US Department of Homeland Security is here:
http://www.us-cert.gov

And here’s an article by Rob Rosenberger on ‘False Authority Syndrome’, to help you recognize hoax emails:
http://vmyths.com/fas/

Hello, We want to place an order for 500 units new Western Digital Caviar Blue 500GB SATA/600 (WD5000AAKX) 7200RPM 16MB Hard Drive (OEM).
Do get back to us with your price quote which should include FedEx next day A.M shipping to our I.T location in Deerfield Beach, FL ____.
Method of Payment would be net 10 terms. We look forward to your immediate response.
Thanks,
Kevin Douglas
Puchase Manager
The Twister Group
________
Glenview, IL 60025
Phone: 855-_________ext 374 Fax: 877._______
Email: _______

Yeah, right. 500 hard drives, net 10 terms, shipped to Florida by early-day overnight delivery–hot rush, but billed to Illinois on credit terms to an unknown company, when your web site looks like this:

The fax number provided goes to a real electronics distributor in Indiana, no relation.

So I’m just wondering…. Are there companies stupid enough to ship this order?

For anyone selling computer hardware on the internet, expect orders for hardware to fall from the ‘net, and expect them to be fake. I had one last year that needed 6 notebook computers and 3 network routers with VPN support, drop-shipped to Florida, with a credit-card billing address in Georgia, and would you please bill it to these three credit cards in equal amounts? What? The numbers are consecutive? Really?

I called the bank on that one, after looking up the first 4 digits of the card numbers to identify them, and had a chat with their fraud department. They told me, short version, “Unbelievable. Impossible. Felons.” Words to that effect.

Fraud on the Internet goes both ways. It’s not just shady Internet vendors–every possible opportunity to have a transaction is being attacked.