OzWebMasters

This is a pretty amazing way of understanding the user experience of your site - it records the pages they visit, the movements of their mouse, and how they fill in a form. This would be of special use to anyone using those mile-long sales pitches with lots of testimonials and benefits (and the price buried within a paragraph near the bottom). You’d soon learn if people just skip to the bottom and search for the price… RobotReplay is presently free!

BTW, it also records key clicks, and there are paid alternatives:

TapeFailure - $8 - $98/month (with a one week free trial).

ClickTale - Free - $99/month

That’s revenue, not profit, because they are a not-for-profit entity. Their financial statement shows what a sensible, conservative operation they are, and I look forward to seeing what they will do with the tens of millions of dollars and convertible assets they now have.
This is a great example of how to create a successful business via giving away a product - FireFox. The revenue is mostly from Google, who pay them search royalties from when users search using the default search function. So to help FireFox stay popular, and force IE to keep improving, use that search box! Or buy a t-shirt.
Just because your business is non-profit, doesn’t mean you can’t pay yourself a good salary - although Mozilla don’t seem to be paying a fortune to any of their 90 programmers - they average $200K each, which is probably about right.

And remember, if you are non-profit, and do good not evil, many people will choose to use you over Microsoft et al

I’ve never minded entering those CAPTCHA numbers & letters if it means my accounts & data will be more secure, although some versions of it are too difficult, with lines running through them that make the correct answer too ambiguous.

Now it appears that spammers have developed software that can crack CAPTCHA more easily than you or I can work out what to type in. The good news (fingers-crossed) is that new methods will be developed that are not only easier for us to use, but harder (impossible?) for software to crack. Or to put it another way, if the software does crack it, spammers could make more money developing AI stuff.

A simple example is offering a picture of an animal, and asking us to choose what type of animal it is. Computers find it harder to recognise what a picture is than characters.

Here’s an interesting quote from the inventor of CAPTCHA:

“I heard that 60 million captchas are solved every day around the world, which first made me quite happy for myself but then quite sad,” he said. “It takes about 10 seconds to solve a captcha, so that means humanity is wasting thousands of hours solving them. I wanted to do something good for humanity in that time.”

The few companies that dare make their basic product free, but sell the best version of it, are doing very well. Companies like NetworkMagic, ZoneAlarm and AVG.
Following on from selling a reduced function version of Photoshop, Adobe are now planning to launch a free, online, ad-supported version of it. This a win for users, a win for Adobe, but only if it works fast… I can’t help but think it will crawl & crash.