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Category: Blogging (page 39 of 84)

September 29, 2007

You can view or download mirrored copies of ActiveRain’s complaint and Move, Inc.’s response at BloodhoundBlog

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The PDF files of ActiveRain’s complaint against Move, Inc., and Move’s response, both attested to be linked from ActiveRain, are no longer there. (See comment below from Jonathan Washburn; the disappearance was apparently inadvertent.)

I am fairly reliably paranoid about crap like this, so I took copies of the two files while they were still available.

Here is ActiveRain’s petition of complaint.

And here is Move, Inc.’s response to that petition.

As someone pointed out the other day, these documents are public records in the State of California, available for inspection by anyone in the jurisdiction where they were filed.

On the other hand, these particular scanned PDF representations of those documents are presumably the work product of ActiveRain.

Whether the added labor of scanning the documents and rendering them as PDF files grants ActiveRain (or anyone) copyright protection is a colorable argument.

However: I will happily remove them upon receipt of a Cease and Desist Order from either party’s attorneys, replacing the documents with a scanned copy of that Cease and Desist Order.

Welcome to the wide-open world of weblogging…
< ?PHP include("ActiveRainMoveSaga.php"); ?>

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September 29, 2007

The voices of bitter experience: ActiveRain’s petition against Move, Inc., is a heart-breaking sob story with no legal merit

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’ve read ActiveRain’s lawsuit against Move, Inc., twice now. I had thought that I might parse the document, to show its fundamental weaknesses, but this isn’t necessary. It’s so weak that we can knock the whole thing down in a few paragraphs.

The gist of the document is an extended sob story of how ActiveRain wuz done wrong. This might seem meaningful in a newspaper story or a dinner party anecdote, but it don’t mean squat to a judge. In a courtroom, every story is a sob story. Everyone, it turns out, is ‘left in a maimed and disadvantaged position’ — doomed to a grubby, grungy, loveless life in a wheelchair, begging for quarters down at the bus station.

Here’s a summary of the thing. People so much want to judge issues of fact by their emotions, but this is a fair — if comical — run down of the actual facts, take them for what you will.

Notable omissions

AR petitioned for a jury trial, but their best possible outcome would be either a bench ruling or a directed verdict. Legal pleadings are written for judges, not casual readers, newspaper reporters or dinner party conversants. In fact, many lawsuit petitions take this form, just enough to get to court with the case to come later. But if AR really had a slam dunk case against Move, I would expect to see some evidence of it. The attorneys do, however, try to hold Move accountable for violations of a Washington State statute in paragraphs 67 through 74. I think the actual purpose of this is well-poisoning, to make a number of smarmy assertions about the behavior of past Move, Inc., executives.*

The complaint itself

This is the essence of the complaint:

  • Upon verbal overtures from Move, ActiveRain agreed to sell all its assets to Move
  • Move and ActiveRain executed a Non-Disclosure Agreement, in consideration for which AR revealed confidential business information so that Move could do its due diligence on the acquisition
  • Subsequently, Move provided AR with a Letter of Intent to purchase the company, specifying the price and detailing other terms and conditions
  • The NDA and the Letter of Intent Read more
September 28, 2007

ActiveRain.com v. Move.com: Where’s Caleb?

by

Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
Structured Debt and Equity
Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL

Author website

Caleb Mardini was one of the founders of Active Rain. He played a significant role in the expansion of the network, offering weblogging tips and serving as one of the “community cops”. I’ve always been a Caleb fan because he was a sales guy; he sold real estate and originated loans before his tenure with Active Rain. He was the pivotal link between the tekkie-type owners and sales-type users.

Here’s Caleb swelling with pride about the sales profession:

Sales people should be celebrated. There are bad sales people I know. But they don’t represent what I did when selling. They shouldn’t be able to ruin the profession for me, or any other honest hard working professional out there. There are a whole lot of sales people who are making a difference in this world. They are doing a lot to assist people making important and life impacting decisions. In my recent past I took great pride in telling people I was a sales person. Sales is terrific and it makes the world go around. I have to say that as a sales person I took great pride telling people that I was in sales

How does a founding partner quit, in the midst of an obvious windfall, a mere week after he represented the Network in Louisiana?

Is Jon pulling a Michael Corleone ? Did Caleb throw in the towel because he recognized a no win situation?

If the former supposition is true, that a pretty crappy thing to do. If it’s the latter, then this trial is over before it got started.

Greg Swann raised the stakes by pointing out that Active Rain has thrown this lawsuit into the court of public opinion. Elevating its membership to advocates is risky. Public support and misplaced outrage has divided the community. Members are questioning whether the commitment they’ve made to the network was really worth it.

I’ve pointed out that Dustin’s existence at Move.com compromises its claim of innocence; Caleb’s sudden departure from Active Rain equally undermines the court of public opinion’s confidence in the veracity of the Network’s claim.

One thing Read more

September 28, 2007

An open letter to the owners of ActiveRain: Show us the contracts

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Messrs. Heaton and Washburn, owners of ActiveRain,

My take on your having released your lawsuit against Move, Inc., and their response is that you know with a high degree of confidence that you cannot prevail in court. I read your original lawsuit as an attempt to extract something from Move, Inc., even though there is no chance they will proceed with the planned acquisition of ActiveRain. When that initial foray failed, my thinking is that you released your petition and their response because you hope to pressure Move, Inc., in the court of public opinion.

All that’s as may be. Those two documents don’t interest me nearly as much as whatever acquisition agreements were executed between ActiveRain and Move, Inc. Those documents will detail specifically what information you had agreed to disclose, and what Move, Inc., had pledged to do — and not do — in its turn.

Attorney’s briefs are full of bluster and bravado, but, in fact, it is these acquisition agreements that will be dispositive in any formal hearing of your allegations.

Ergo, I ask that you release those documents for public scrutiny. When we have had an opportunity to determine what was actually agreed to, in writing, we can better judge the validity of your complaints.

I know that your knee jerk response will be to insist that those documents are too vital to your court case to be disclosed. But, if that were true, the corollary proposition would be that the documents you have made public — your initial petition and Move, Inc.’s response — are not vital to your court case — are not actually of any importance at all. This I am completely prepared to believe.

In fact, it’s one or the other. Keeping one’s private business to oneself is everyone’s right, but partial transparency is necessarily deception. If your goal is to proclaim to the world that you have been badly used, you must show us the violated terms of the contracts by which you were so cruelly violated.

If you will not do this, I will regard your having released your petition and Move, Inc.’s response as nothing but Read more

September 27, 2007

ActiveRain.com v. Move.com: The Nagging Question

by

Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
Structured Debt and Equity
Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL

Author website

I can’t seem to get this out of my head. Call it the Dustin effect.

If Dustin was hired by Move.com as the Director of Interactive Marketing, and was teaching Realtors how to blog way back in early 2007, why are the Active Rain boys surprised that Move.com was developing a blog platform? What made them think that Move.com wouldn’t proceed with that product if they didn’t purchase Active Rain?

and yet…

Dustin was openly critical of Active Rain when he first joined (December, 2006) . Why would Move.com make an offer for Active Rain when its Director of Interactive Marketing had little good to say about the platform?
< ?PHP include("ActiveRainMoveSaga.php"); ?>

September 27, 2007

Active Rain Wuz Robbed

by

Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
Structured Debt and Equity
Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL

Author website

There are so many ways to play the puns here.  Who Moved my Rain?  Move before you get Rained Upon.  It’s Rainin’ Moves.  All pretty goofy.

In the interest of full disclosure, I’m biased but so is Greg Swann.  Greg calls Active Rain stoopid technology, I call it useful,  Again, my interest in Active Rain’s success is financial; I write to and market to the Realtor channel.

Move’s shuck and jive play for Active Rain is indefensible.  If Move were a home buyer, they would be entitled to material information in the interest of full disclosure.  Real estate agents call this the inspection or contingency period.  In the corporate finance/M&A world, it is referred to as the due diligence period.  Move had every right to reverse it’s offer to purchase Active Rain if it discovered something during the due diligence period.

Here’s where Move screwed up; they started a competing business while fleecing the boys of their member roster and competitive points system plan.  That is referred to in the lawsuit as the “confidential information”.  They placed contingencies upon the purchase:  Active Rain was instructed to cease all merger and acquisition opportunities, revenue opportunities, and financing plans.  Those very actions, combined with a simultaneous push to present a competing product, suggest that Move perceived  Active Rain as a competitive threat.  It used the carrot of its deep pockets as a tool to paralyze the industry leader while developing a competing product.

Are the boys at Active Rain insane to think that the platform is worth $33 million?  I think so but I’m no investment banker (and I clearly have no experience in valuations of tech start-ups).  The figure, however, was set by the perpetrator of this scheme.  Move played the old Nigerian e-mail scam on Active Rain.  Naivete doesn’t make the victim any less injured nor does it make the scam artist any less culpable.  That means you can’t say “What are they stupid to think we’d pay them that much? ” as your defense.

A jury trial will be a nightmare for Move, especially if that jury is in California.  Twelve reasonably hard-working men and Read more

September 27, 2007

ActiveRain discovers that the Code of Web 2.0 is the Code of the West: Do unto others before them others do it unto you

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The Code of the West ain’t some words on a page
You just naturally know it when you come of age
You eat when you’re hungry, you drink when you’re dry
You look every man in the eye

In the nineteenth century, rogue investors like Jay Gould and Big Jim Fisk would buy up parcels of land parallel to a successful railroad. They would lay some track and invite reporters in, regaling them with tales of the new railroad they planned to build in direct competition with the going concern. The owners of the competing railroad would panic, racing to put together a buy-out package that would get the rogues to sell out — at many multiples of their initial outlay. Did they ever intend to build anything? No one ever put them to the test.

It’s the Code of the West when the boys talk of women
The Code of the West what you know you don’t tell
The Code of the West a man soaps his own saddle
Brands his own cattle and some of his neighbor’s as well

A century later on Wall Street, greenmailers like T. Boone Pickens would put together minor stakes in bloated corporations, then announce with great fanfare their intention to incite a proxy battle, thus to sell the company off piecemeal. The bloated boards of directors of the bloated corporations would race off to find a white knight investor, who would buy out the rogue investors at a handsome profit.

If you’re buildin’ fences then I ain’t for hire
You get me for nothin’ and I’ll bring the wire
You patch up my windows, I’ll plumb up your doors
If you scratch my back I’ll scratch yours

In the world of Web 2.0, we have a similar scam, only by now the entrenched interest has the game figured out.

Let’s say you and two college buddies have built a Web 2.0 “platform” — which is to say something stoopid, goofy and — at least temporarily — viral and sticky.

Why did you do this? To build a business? To set an example? To leave a legacy in the world of hi-tech commerce?

No.

You built it to sell it to Google Read more

September 26, 2007

Advertising to Ashley

by

Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
Structured Debt and Equity
Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL

Author website

Guy Kawasaki moderated a panel of college students in a combination panel/ focus group about marketing to the Wired generation. The results are predictably astounding.

See the one hour video here.

Conversations are electronic– two users sent over 4000 text messages each month. From texting, they progress to mobile voice communication; nobody uses landlines anymore. Very few actually use the camera function of the mobile phone; they prefer digital cameras.

They use e-mail serially. Every panelist said that they can be reached via e-mail throughout the day.

Here’s the interesting part- they all use MySpace and Facebook and consider that to be the primary communication tool. When asked to explain the fascination, they all pointed to communication as the primary reason.

They read but don’t write blogs. Most read celebrity blogs and don’t comment (no surprise there). None of them knew what a RSS feed is. They rely on wikis to obtain information but are somewhat skeptical about the veracity of the information there. If they see a disclaimer from a moderator, they tune out immediately.

They rarely watch television and when they do, they use TiVo to block ads.. They watch YouTube and read magazines. Wired Magazine is on everyone’s reading list. When asked how they receive marketing communications, they pointed to celebrity users. Endorsements of a product, by a celebrity, hold a tremendous amount of value with them.

When questioned about their dream gadget, all of them requested a device that integrated an iPod, a cell phone, and a personal computer that had data safety if lost.

What does that mean to us, real estate marketers, in the next five years? These young adults will be the first time home buyers of 2010-2020. Certainly, their habits will change as they age but their commitment to communications technology and social networking will not.

Does this mean that the real estate weblog of the future will be written by Paris Hilton on Facebook? If you sell a home to Matt Leinart, you’ll want to make sure your Facebook profile publishes his video endorsement Read more

September 24, 2007

The Odysseus Medal: Getting ARMs back up on their own two feet

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

If you didn’t look at this week’s nominees for The Odysseus Medal, you should. We had 20 posts on the short-list, but 24 more that were also very good.

Here are this week’s winners:

This week’s Odysseus Medal goes to Peter Coy at BusinessWeek for Believe it or not, the ‘optimal’ mortgage is an option ARM:

If you had to name the most toxic, dangerous, foolhardy kind of mortgage loan that exists, you’d very likely pick a pay-option ARM, which lets borrowers get deeper into debt by paying less than the minimum interest they owe each month and adding the unpaid interest to the loan principal. Worse yet, you might say, would be a pay-option ARM with a very high penalty for prepayment so borrowers can’t get out of it easily once they’re in it. There’s a move afoot to ban these worst-of-the-worst loans.

Guess what? The worst is actually the best.

Yes, according to a new study by professors from Columbia and New York universities, the “optimal” mortgage in a perfect world is precisely that kind of loan—an adjustable-rate mortgage with an option for negative amortization and a ban (or at least severe restriction) on prepayment.

Crazy? Not as crazy as you might think. The key, according to professors Tomasz Piskorski of Columbia Business School and Alexei Tchistyi of New York University’s Stern School of Business, is that this kind of mortgage is optimal only in a perfect world—namely, one in which borrowers are fully rational and always do what’s in their own best interest.

ARMs are like the miracle drug that can’t get over its tabloid reputation. This post won’t rehabilitate them, either, but it’s a start.

The Black Pearl Award become the Snow Pea Award this week. The winner is another testament to the epicentricity of the epicenter of real estate weblogging, Tucson’s Dave Smith, who graces us with Growing Peas in a Day! Here’s the Black Pearl:

Stop ripping your blog apart.

  • Pick a good theme
  • Activate good plug-ins
  • Use productive functional widgets
  • Add content regularly
  • Weed out the Spam and Eye Candy
    Now give it time to grow. It takes time to grow and be found and produce fruit.

You can’t be Read more

September 23, 2007

Voting for The People Choice Award: The long and short of short-listing Odysseus Medal nominations

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Week by week, I’m seeing more and more great Odysseus Medal nominations. To get to a short-list of twenty posts — which still may be too long — I’m having to cut some very good weblog entries. In consequence, this week I’m showing the rest of the long-list as well as the short-list of People’s Choice candidates.

In both lists, the posts are shown in random order. People will tend to favor the top or bottom of a list, so I’m trying flatten the curve of outbound clicks so everyone gets the exposure.

Vote for the People’s Choice Award here. You can use the voting interface to see each nominated post, so comparison is easy.

Voting runs through to 12 Noon PDT/MST Monday. I’ll announce the winners of this week’s awards soon thereafter.

Here is this week’s short-list of Odysseus Medal nominees:

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Deadline for next week’s competition is Sunday at 12 Noon PDT/MST. You can nominate your own weblog entry or any post you admire here.

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September 18, 2007

World Cup Real Estate

by

Rust Belt Realtor

Author website

Time for blogging is often hard to find. Most posts are begun on one day and finished some other, and usually it’s for the best. I started this post yesterday, and it got a bit gummed up. Nineteen hours and one Kris Berg post later, and I’m good to go. And there are important things happening in real estate, but sorry Greg, there are no big thoughts in this post. This is simply my entry for the Dumbest Post of the Week category. 

Kris uses chicken soup, my unlikely source of inspiration and motivation comes from rugby. Yes rugby. That is the sport of kings, isn’t it? Well then, it’s the sport of titans.

I discovered rugby last Sunday and now that I know the truth, and I’ll step up and say it- rugby is the greatest sport invented. I don’t know the rules. I don’t know the terminology. I don’t know the teams or the players, but sitting in front of the big plasma TV, none of that matters one bit. Here’s what I see: Two teams of grown men completely driven to play a sport that is both brutal and strategic, physical and mental, dependent on both teamwork and individual skills, and requiring both tactical knowledge and gut instincts. And it is beautiful to watch.

There is a ball, of sorts. It’s thrown, kicked, pitched, or carried toward a goal. Players get tackled and men often pile on top of the ball. In a football game that would be where the play ends. In rugby? I don’t know what happens. Sometimes the play ends but often, just when you think it’s over, you are waiting to hear a whistle. You wait for a referee. You wait for the players to unpile themselves and…It doesn’t happen. Seconds pass. What is going on in that pile? Where’s the whistle? Where’s the ball? You are waiting, willing something to happen. Then, from the bottom of the mound of players, the ball comes flying forth to be kicked or pitched or carried forward once more! It’s such thrilling madness! Who would play such a sport? What would motivate grown men to participate in such an intense spectacle of sheer Read more

September 17, 2007

The Odysseus Medal: Propagating better ideas in real estate by celebrating better ideas in real estate

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is probably not much of a secret, but I really love ideas. I think the argument that smart people can improve the NAR cartel from the inside is absurd, but the instant form of the claim — that I could advance Realtors’ use of technology by wasting my time at committee meetings — is especially specious. It’s no goal of mine to change any life but my own, but, even so, the best technological benefit I can bring to Realtors, lenders, investors and thoughtful consumers is right here: Explicating our own new ideas and and drawing attention to other peoples’ innovations. Ideas are an attribute of active minds, and minds and meetings are sets with the tiniest of intersections.

Among all the other virtues I might claim for it, The Odysseus Medal competition is a celebration of great ideas in real estate. Here are this week’s winners:

This week’s Odysseus Medal goes to Dan Melson for Should Lenders Be Permitted to Sell Real Estate?:

Let us ask about real estate which has become owned by the lender. Why should lenders lack an ability shared by every other citizen, resident, illegal alien, and even people who have never set foot in the country – the ability to sell their own property? There’s no requirement for anyone else to use an agent. It may be smart to use an agent, but everyone else has the legal right to go it on their own. Why not lenders?

I’ll tell you why. Because not only would lenders being able to get into the business threaten the interests of the major chains that control most real estate, but this requires lenders to pay those same firms money if they want to get the property from their bad loans sold – and they need to get the property sold.

I have to admit, I’m not exactly eager to compete with yet more big corporations with huge advertising budgets. It remains the right thing to do. Right for the industry, and right for the consumers. As I’ve said many times before, rent-seeking is repugnant, and that’s what NAR is doing – seeking Read more

September 16, 2007

The Odysseus Medal: Voting for the People’s Choice Award is open

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

We had a ton of very strong entries this week. I had to eliminate more than half to get to a short list of twenty nominees. If you didn’t make the cut, don’t despair. You’ll come back even stronger next week. Everything was terrific, a real treat for me going through them. These twenty survivors are must-reading.

Vote for the People’s Choice Award here. You can use the voting interface to see each nominated post, so comparison is easy.

Voting runs through to 12 Noon PDT/MST Monday. I’ll announce the winners of this week’s awards soon thereafter.

Here is this week’s short list of Odysseus Medal nominees:

Deadline for next week’s competition is Sunday at 12 Noon PDT/MST. You can nominate your own weblog entry or any post you admire here or, more easily, here.

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September 15, 2007

BlogRush: Viral weblog widget promotes for added traffic

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I added a viral blog widget called BlogRush to the sidebar. In principal, it should draw attention to BloodhoundBlog posts at weblogs were folks might not know about us. It’s a rebuttable proposition, but one I’m willing to test. If it works, it should work for the entire RE.net. It’s a quasi-MLM, so if you click through from our link, we get brownie points.

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