A Microsoft lawsuit, unsealed earlier today, is responsible for causing government raids last Wednesday that lead to the downfall of the world’s biggest spam network, Rustock.
Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit used information gained in its 2010 takedown of the Waledac botnet to work with the U.S. Marshals Service in locating and obtaining evidence from five hosting companies in seven U.S. cities.
“DCU researchers watched a single Rustock-infected computer send 7,500 spam emails in just 45 minutes – a rate of 240,000 spam mails per day,” said Richard Boscovich, Senior Attorney at the Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit, in a blog post. With approximately one million computers worldwide infected by Rustock, the botnet was able to send 240 billion spam messages in a single day.
Symantec revealed in August last year that botnets were responsible for 95% of the Internet’s spam, and that 41% of botnet spam came from the Rustock botnet. This means the dismantling of the Rustock botnet could mean a reduction in global spam by 39%–at least for a little while.Image Credit
In the summer of 2009, LinkedIn approached widget maker Widgetbox with an idea. The professional social network, already jimmy-rigging Widgetbox widgets to create dynamic ads on its site, was anxious to create its own independent ad platform and turned to Widgetbox for help.
The conversation continued and eventually, with LinkedIn’s guidance, Widgetbox released a cloud-based ad platform to allow publishers to sell their own compelling and dynamic ad units. 18 months later, Widgetbox officially rebranded as Flite to focus on the ad platform, securing $12 million in Series C funding led by General Catalyst Partners in the process.
Mashable spoke with Flite CEO Will Price on how the company is now building the banner ads of tomorrow.
Banner Ads of Tomorrow
Google CEO Eric Schmidt predicts that the online display advertising business, now a $17 billion industry, can grow to become a $200 billion business. The rise of online advertisements that update in real-time are part of the reason he projects such a big spike in online display ad spend.
While Google owns DoubleClick Studio and plans to push aggressively in the real-time ad direction, Flite believes it can carve out a thick slice of this potential $200 billion pie.
Price calls the startup’s ad units “miniaturized websites” and believes them to be the banner ads of tomorrow.
The startup’s dynamic units can incorporate combinations of video, polls, forms and a brand’s social media content from Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. These ads are elastic in nature and can be shared out to social networks. The units can also live on web, mobile or inside Facebook. An ad shared with Facebook keeps its original form, and they look more like widgets than ads, a sign of Flite’s Widgetbox roots.
Price says Flite tracks ad impressions as usual, but also measures ad shares and the reach of the individuals who share the units. He suggests that Flite customers see eight to 20 times improvement in ROI over traditional flash-based units.
Fight or Flite
Flite owes its existence to LinkedIn’s pain point as a publisher. The social network wanted to go the independent ad route, but to skip the middle man ad network it needed to develop ad units that would give brands a compelling reason to work with the company directory. Enter Flite’s cloud-based ads.
The publisher problem is not unique to LinkedIn; Flite customers now include IDG, Digg, MTV, Yelp, Yahoo and even Federated Media. Flite customers then sell its ad units to their direct brand buyers — Google, Sony, Microsoft, Cisco, Intel, IBM and FedEx, to name a few.
More recently, Flite has also started to sell directly to brands and is currently running campaigns for L’Oreal and Microsoft Kinect, Price says.
Onward and Upward
Flite believes it can ride its latest $12 million round of funding to profitability by 2012. The startup was anxious to raise funds and attack the market right now, says Price. The current 60 person team will double in size this year, he says, with new hires split evenly between sales, marketing and engineering.
Flite ad unit activity is also trending upwards. In December 2010, it saw just under 150 million ad impressions, up from 100 million in November and 40 million in October.
With Google as a competitor, though, the startup may encounter a few potholes and flat tires on its road to profitability.
How bad are things at the once-mighty Digg these days? Not so good. It’s been months since Digg relaunched in August in a quest for relevance. They had 18 million unique worldwide visitors that month according to Comscore. That dropped to just under 12 million in January, a 33% drop in just five months.
Everything official coming out of Digg says things are great and that a the company will find a way to success. But everyone knows how unlikely that is. Even, it seems, founder Kevin Rose.
He’s barely even using the service anymore. There was one 22 day period in December that he didn’t submit, comment on or even “digg” a single story.
Over the last 30 days, he’s only had seven actions on Digg, less than one action every 4 days. He hasn’t submitted a story in over a month, on February 13. You can see his account here. It’s not much better with CEO Matt Williams, although he manages to Digg, comment or submit a story about once a day on average.
In stark contrast, Rose is very active on Twitter, running up 181 tweets in the last month. He’s 26x more active on Twitter than the company he founded.
There isn’t much chance for Digg to ever turn things around if the senior team, particularly Rose, aren’t even using the service any more. A sad fate for a once mighty startup.
Well this is getting a little repetitive, but it’s always nice to add another voice to the (growing) crowd of people, who recognize that execution is much more important than the idea. We’ve discussed this many times and have pointed out people, such as Scott Adams, who have made similar points. The latest such example comes to us courtesy of the Capitalist Lion Tamer, who highlights a brief excerpt from Maxim and The Week creator Felix Dennis’ new book, in which he makes the identical point about ideas and execution. He notes that an idea is not enough. It may be important, but ideas are more “like Nike sports shoes,” in that they can be a tool that can be used by someone to accomplish great things, but in the end it’s the actual execution that matters:
I have lost count of the number of men and women who have approached me with their “great idea,” as if this, in and of itself, was their passport to instant wealth. The idea is not a passport. At most, it is the means of obtaining one. In some instances, a fixation on a great idea can prove hazardous, distracting your attention from the perils and pitfalls
you will inevitably encounter on the narrow road.
If you never have a single great idea in your life, but become skilled in executing the great ideas of others, you can succeed beyond your wildest dreams. They do not have to be your ideas — execution is all. When confronted with a great idea, your reaction should be to scrupulously analyze its commercial potential in the context of your own ability to transform that potential into triumph.
Ideas don’t make you rich. The correct execution of ideas does.
Doesn’t it seem odd that so many people (and very, very successful people at that) recognize this basic concept… and yet our entire public policy around innovation focuses solely on rewarding the idea, at the expense of the execution?
How bad are things at the once-mighty 
In stark contrast, Rose is very active on Twitter, running up 181 tweets in the last month. He’s 26x more active on Twitter than the company he founded. 
