No Panacea

After recently visiting dell.com, I noticed that the titles of products (e.g, Panasonic SC-P960 Home Theatre System) have been converted from vanilla text to images. The images, I speculate, prevent automated programs from automatically reading prices of products that feed into search comparison sites (e.g., pricegrabber). Thus, somewhat limiting direct price comparisons. Dell does include the “Manufacturer Part” on the product page, which could be used to for price comparison.

The use of “image text” in place of regular text has been used to fight spam for a while, but this is a relatively new application.

Heinz news blurp

oDesk provides some interesting charts on what technologies and skills are being contracted out. From a cursory look, these skills/technologies are in demand: Amazon services/API, Zend, Content Management (Joomla, Drupal), SEO, iPhone, XML, SAP, Project Management, Windows Administration, Adobe AIR, 3D Design; moderate/stagnant demand: ColdFusion, Facebook, OsCommerce, Perl, SQL, PostgreSQL, Zillow, Flash, Photoshop, Crystal Reports and sliding demand: hi5, Lotus Notes, Mambo, PalmOS.