Posts filed under 'Making Money'
What is a trademark?
Today’s post covers trademarks. Obviously.
Trademarks start with that little TM symbol that all of your clients seem to place on every bright idea they have whether they actually have bothered to file a trademark or not. We often find it is the later - but tend to not open our mouths too much concerning client’s legal matters.
When a Trademark is all grown up (filed & approved) - it gets to sport that little “R” symbol - meaning that the mark is registered with the USPTO.
The ® symbol means that a particular mark is actually registered with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). Marks followed by a TM or SM symbol - then althought the indiviudal or company may be using the mark - it is probably not yet registered with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
.. or.. as we like to say - they are probably “faking it”.
So, in short, a trademark is merely: Any “mark” consisting of words, graphics, icons, shading, coloring, stipling, symbols or other items that identify goods or services from a company or individual. Further, a mark distinguishes the company or individual from other companies or individuals.
Trademark law deals with the registration, recognition and enforcement of these intelluctal property rights. If you have a registered trademark - then no one else can use that mark in conjunction with any good or service so it doesn’t appear to use your goodwill or make it look like you endorse, support or otherwise have anything to do with the mark. When a company or individual is displaying your mark or a confusingly simular mark in conjunction with a particlular good or service - they are attempting to trade on your “goodwill” for their own benefit.
This is why trademark law exists. To stop such non-sense.
What is a Mark?
Marks can be either a “Word Mark” - in which you are trademarking a particular word, phrase or combination of words and styles. Note - this is the more difficulat trademark to get. You just cannot submnit a word you are using or even one you made up - or else it may be ruled [insert]/
Getting a trademark on the actual mark or logo or stylistic experssion of the idea is easier.
Having registered a dozen or more trademarks for ourselves and clients, here’s our thoughts on the process.
- Your trademark will take around 8 months if you get it 100% right the first time and haven;t caught a trademark exanimer on a bad day.
- You will probably get an “Office Action” you have to respond to; essentially these are correctionsto you application, classification of goods and services and so forth.
- We find it kind of strange - that the logo or wordmark of the USPTO is not, in fact trademarked - interesting. {Not even the entire spelled out word or the mark itself.} I actually asked several IP Lawyers and them mumbled something about it is “probably” simply descriptive and unable to qualify. At $450/hour - I REALLY hate hearing the word “probably” from laywers.
What is a Service Mark?
Think “slogan”. Technically, it is a mark used to identify and set apart a Company’s services from other comapnies or individuals. “Start your next project half-finished.” is our service mark for TemplateKit.com.
What is Trade Dress?
Trade Dress is another aspect of trademark protection where a particular aspect of a good or service is recognizable in the marketplace. Think of it as the “total package”.
Examples may include:
- That unique red shade Coke uses.
- The shape of Microsoft’s X-Box.
- The layout and arrangement of a particular restaraunt
- The color scheme Starbucks Coffee uses
- The shape of a sports drink bottle
What can I possible trademark?
Words
Marks (Designs w/ Words)
Slogans
Trade Dress
Packaging
Audio Identifiers or Sounds (often called an audible mark)
Scents & Smells (Oh, yes…you can do this.)
What are Trademark rights?
An owner of a trademark/service mark has the right to use that trademark/service mark and to prevent others from benefiting from the trademark/service mark’s good reputation and recognition in the marketplace.
How do I get started?
Go to http://www.uspto.gov and first search to see if your mark is already registered or owned. Just because you think you came up with the idea doesn’t mean someone didn’t beat you to it first.
After that you have two choices.
1) File the Trademark application yourself.
2) Use a lawyer, service or other vendor to do it for you.
Filing trademarks is not terrible hard once you get the hang of it. However, it can be an expenseive learning curve and time consuming if you get even the slighest thing wrong on your application. The average amount of time it takes to get a registered trademark seems to be 1.5 years. We’ve gotten them in 6 months start to finish - however - that was after a few dozen of more applications for our various marks.
That’s it for tonight, good luck and .. apparently .. good night.
August 11th, 2007
It’s 3:00pm PST as I write and I just got another “tip” from some ambiguous article archive I apparently opt-in on about starting a home business.
This is probably the 100th or so of these I have gotten recently and it’s time to spill the beans.
Most of these so-called author’s do nothing else except send out articles on how to run a home-based business. Kind of funny in a way, because they do nothing else except send small paragraph-length emails that are horribly devoid of any real useful information about small business, starting a home-based business or anything else along the lines of this topic.
So, here’s Tom’s tips for the home-based or start up business. It doesn’t matter if you are large or small - here’s the straight talk you need:
1) Don’t be stupid.
This is key. This may be unavoidable for some.
2) Don’t “try” different marketing approaches without quantifying the results.
That means if you spend $125 on a yellow page ad, you better be asking your clients where they heard of you when they do call so you can tell if it’s a good investment. That goes double for keyword advertising like: Google, Overture, Sprinks, etc.
3) Your idea may totally “suck”.
Don’t be afraid to revise your idea. Columbus was looking for quicker route to India, but things worked out for him pretty well. Just because you have “and idea” doesn’t mean it is a good idea.
4) Don’t copy someone else’s plan.
That means avoid MLM, quick-turning real estate or home-based franchises that do not have a corporate office, UNLESS you’re really good at conning and recruiting other people.
5) Don’t believe the “pay yourself first hype”
If you’re building an enterprise that has employees, facilities, etc.. you should probably pay them first… it’s bad karma otherwise.
6) If you do have a successful run, you’re next is more likely to fail on your next idea.
See #3 above. Hubris & pride are killers. Ask the dot-com folks or as we see here in Redmond, WA - Former Microsoft millionaires who cannot start a successful venture on their own. Funny stuff. I started buying up the expired domain names of some of these companies who failed miserably, but still turned moi down when interviewing for them back in 98′ - 99′ when I was a young buck.
7) You don’t always have to “spend money to make money”, but quit being such a damn tightwad.
You rarely succeed on cheap hosting, programming, design or PayPal-only ecommerce sites. It costs you more in the long run when you’re cheap.
8) There is no 8th thing.
9) It’s not quick. You cannot get rich quick unless you play the lottery. You should focus on building a solid business slowly over time. We’re in year 4 and doing well using this principal. That goes doubly for the web. The web should be a channel for your business, nothing more. If you have no experience running an online store… find someone who does. You can’t expect to jump or transition an existing business into ecommerce without finding good help.
10) 60% of all business’s fail within the first four years, but for you we give you 11 months.
Don’t “try” to succeed. That is a half-assed approach that is bound to fail. Make a plan, write it out. Distill your offering down to 1-2 sentences that describe your service, product or whatever it is that you are doing to make money. Darn, now I have to split this one off into #11:
11) Don’t use ambiguous language.
You’re not the best. You’re not fooling anyone. Your brand new company that has an Alexa ranking of 5,000,000+ (not good) and no visitors isn’t “The World’s Premier Provider of Technology-based Solutions for the Proactive Development and Deployment of Widgets.”
Look it’s easy:
Proposal Kit.com – Get the client, close the deal. Make more money from the jobs you take with easy to use contract, proposal and estimating templates.
Template Kit.com – Start your next project half-finished. Get a jump on development with our immediately downloadable source code templates.
Proposal Packs – Upgrade your image and your bottom line. Deploy proposals ranging from 3 – 32 pages in length. Our Wizard gets you up and running in minutes.
July 18th, 2007
Securing your servers & applications is always at the forefront of any “good” development group’s conscience.
If it is not, then heck, you are amateurs and your company deserves to whither and die because this is not a business where the”Fisher Price - My First Web Company” type of stuff cuts it.
This applies to the following people or companies:
- Web Freelancers who deploy open source or use community-grown contributions and freeware code for their clients.
- Companies & Developers who deploy or base customer-applications or tools off of open source or other frameworks.
- Companies and Freelancers who DO NOT watch to see if what they are deploying for their clients and customers later develops security flaws, exploits or other nasties.
- Web Hosts who run VPS or Dedicated Servers for their clients.
- Probably YOU - if you are still reading this.
Bottom line is that it is often a “company-ending” event when a server gets hacked and you are not prepared both legally (read that as you have strong contracts in place to protect you from these events) - and defensively to limit the damage.
IMPORTANT - If you are hosting web sites for your clients and letting them install any number of applications like Bulletin Boards (PHPBB), CMS’s (Mambo / Joomla), Shopping Carts (OSCommerce, Zen-Cart) or even Blogs like this one - AND - you do not understand any of what we are about to list off - then you should call us TODAY (877-239-3083) because you definitely need some quick and inexpensive help to secure your business.
For anyone who has even watched a company, client or server burn because a “guestbook” compromised their entire server - this is for you.
For anyone who lets their clients install applications via Fantastico or PLESK Application Vault - then this is for you.
For anyone who does not know what scripts & applications their clients are currently running on servers you are responsible for - then this is for you.
Kevin Huisman, our Development Manager and “server watchdog” recently posted the following:
For everyone interested in server security stuff, we thought we’d pass on a bit of info.
We had been using some home-grown rules to combat hack attempts, and decided to really do some research into finding a more comprehensive rule set. Sort-of a “why reinvent the wheel”…
There is a great site to become familiar with — http://www.gotroot.com that has a really comprehensive set of rules for multiple issues - IP and proxy black lists, known bad useragents, comment spam, etc.
Some of the rule sets make sense to use verbatim:
- Rule Exclusions
- Comment spam blacklist
- Compromised/Hacker boxes blacklist
- Anti-Proxy protection
- Bad UserAgents blocking
- Anti-Proxy protection
- “Google Hacks” signatures
- Known rootkits/worms
And so on…
There’s also a badips.conf file found in the “All in one” downloads that isn’t directly linked to from their list. It’s another set of IPs to ban, and it’s specifically for Apache 1.x / ModSecurity 1.9x, which usually fits the bill on most older versions. They retired it in Mod Security 2.x. rules, since there seems to be a better way of doing it in that version.
You should also look at what they call “Just in Time” protection, a set of rules that combat known vulnerabilities in specific open source web apps.
They have rules for squirrel mail, phpbb, formmail.cgi/pl, Coppermine, and a whole host of others.. You may not really need the bulk of the rules if you do not specifically run those web apps. You can just use those you need on each server.
It is recommended that rather than a wholesale deployment of all possible rules - you merely go through and whittle the list of rules down and remove those that do not apply to the web app versions you are using. Many times you simply find that even with these rulesets some of them maye .conf files are actually behind the versions of the web apps you’re using such as when specific files with specific known vulnerabilities that have been fixed since the rules were created. This is a bit of a lower priority at this time, since it probably doesn’t save much in the way of speed or processor.
As far as processing/speed goes, it’s a fairly big set of rules when you combine them all together, and we noticed that it takes a few beats longer to restart apache, but once it’s running, we haven’t seen any significant slowdowns.
Individual results may vary based on how many domains and traffic each of your servers or VPSs have.
July 13th, 2007
Most designers and developers do not know how much they should be charging for any given project. Oh, sure - they usually charge what “seems” like a high enough fee to generally cover what the project entails - however - this kind of guesswork leads to two equally painful problems.
- You underbid the project because you did not account for each and every task.
- You overbid the project - which hurts you in the long run with any given client.
Underbidding includes such overlooked items as: The time spent FTP files and synching with their current website or server; moving applications or components that require extensive testing and permissions; “face time” and other required meetings with the client, or even training and documentation requirements. Training and Documentation should not be thought as a trivial matter. Most developers and designers miss this one requirement and when the client wants to be trained on the software, open source or application you just built - they find themselves forced with either providing a hastily put together document - or spending unbilled time providing screenshots, walkthroughs and other documentation.
I do not know about you - but any time we need to travel to a client for training will wipe a minimum of 1/2 to 1 full day just getting to them and back again. You should set these expectations in the proposal and contracting process with your clients. We specify a $500 1/2 day and $800 full-day rate for onsite training and custom documentation. It encourages the right kind of clients and discourages the ones who do not understand the value of training and documentation.
Overbidding is equally dangerous. Sure, you may get more money from a client who doesn’t question your estimates - however - you are doing a great disservice to them by not accurately knowing how much to charge them for web development and design. We’ve forged a trust relationship with our clients that allows us to:
- Estimate the project.
- Propose a budget.
- Identify items that can be estimated as fixed costs to the client.
- Identify the items that may need a range, such as complicated programming tasks or research items we do not feel comfortable doing a fixed bid on.
- Billing against these estimates with real accounts of the tasks & hours taken to accomplish them.
Often the projects wil come under budget (because we are good at what we do) - and the billing comes out less for our clients. That is 100% win-win from our perspective.
Some developers and designers see that as an opportunity to make some extra cash.
We see that as an opportunity to show our value to our clients. That is usually the difference between a “Professional” and “Moonlighter”.
If you have accurate estimating - such as using the Web Design & Development Estimating Spreadsheets from Proposal Kit - then you should always know how much to charge for any given job you do.
If you have Web Design Job Costing - meaning you are tracking expenses and hourly time per project and actually comparing it to your quote - then you should always know when you are making or losing money as a web developer, designer, artist and so forth.
A professional makes money every time because of accuate pricing, tracking and contracts that do not hurt them. If you have need of such - you should take a good look at Proposal Kit Pro 11.0 for Web Developers and Designers.
March 1st, 2007
Proposal Kit just released a new contract and agreement pack that deals specifically with Photography & Photograper contracts and proposals. It is no surprise since the owner of Cyber-Sea, Inc - the creators of Proposal Kit - is a world-class adventure, outdor and underwater photographer.
See the Photography Contract Template Pack
January 5th, 2007
It is the best of times and the worst of times. Life as a web or graphic arts freelancer can be both rewarding and tough. On one hand is the indescribable pleasure of be able to charge what your worth; on the other is the often frustrating task of getting paid what you’re owed.
Your time is money. That is why you went into this business in the first place. Learn it. Live it. Love it. This is the Golden Rule and you should chant it like a mantra because we’ll be coming back to it in this article; I promise.
The reality of any design business, or service business in general, is that you must pay as much attention to the business end of your efforts as you do to the service end. Failure to do so exposes you to liability issues, profit loss, headaches, dry mouth, wasted projects and more. While you may be a creative design god, a visionary, genius-it doesn’t mean you are running your business as effectively as you can. If you’ve ever watched a profitable project slip away because the edits just wouldn’t end; if you’ve ever let a client push you around and make you feel uncomfortable; if you’ve ever found yourself wishing you had more legal protection for the work that you do, then this article is for you.
This list of steps will separate your design business from the amateurs:
1) Spend time interviewing the client about the job. Not only will this help you determine first hand what the client’s needs are, but also it will help the client view you as a professional. A good first impression will help you later on when it comes time for payment.
2) Put together a work order based on what was discussed in the interview. This will be your proposal to the client to begin working on their project. You will need to spell out all of the terms, delivery dates, number of pages, editing guidelines, deposits and payment terms. You also need to include all of the options discussed in your interview with the client. A formal proposal says that you are a professional.
Your proposal should contain no less than the following:
-
Cover letter
-
Site Specifications and layout
-
Development Guidelines
(include milestones and number of drafts)
-
Payment terms and conditions
-
Storyboards, diagrams, or examples
-
The contract
In considering each of these elements I cannot stress enough the following point: Leave nothing open-ended! Even if “open-ended” is a vital part of the contract, as in the case of an ongoing relationship for maintenance and updates, you need to spell it out!
3) Never work without a deposit. Go look at the Golden Rule again in case you forgot. A deposit does two things for you.
- It helps separate the serious clients from those who are not. A client is less likely to pull out of a project if they’ve made a financial commitment.
- See the Golden Rule.
4) Have a pricing strategy. Know what your time is worth, how long it takes you to do certain tasks, and the value of those tasks in the marketplace. Communicate them effectively to the client, impress on them which tasks are time consuming, and how this will impact pricing. Your client is likely to be a professional, and they will understand that time is money. They understand that their own time is money. They should understand the Golden Rule and so should you.
Developing a spreadsheet or other form which allows you to track changes to a project as you go helps in the long run. It will not matter whether you charge per page, per project, or a combination of both, because you will know how to price what you are doing for the client.
5) Test early and often - don’t let your credibility erode by forgetting little Q/A issues such as Browser Compatibility (read: Netscape), plug-in issues, load times, and screen resolution. Do as much of this before the client sees it. If the first impression of your creation is a good one, then it will be easier to get paid than if the client could not view the site correctly the first time around.
6) Have a final invoice - make sure it reflects the work order to the letter. Any agreed upon changes must be billed with the approval method clearly outlined. Attach any copies of emails, faxes, or other communications regarding changes to your site. Your contract should outline the terms of payment, and definitely detail a “late payment” policy. Just slap a statement on your invoice which reads “18% APR for accounts more than 15 days past due” and see what happens. You should always have a plan to enforce non-payments
Whether you are a freelance web designer, graphic artist, desktop publisher, or programmer you take on a great deal of responsibility every time you accept a new contract. Having ironclad contracts, invoices, and work orders can go along way in protecting your interests early and often, before trouble starts.
Putting these steps in place takes time and a little money, but you don’t need to hire an attorney, an accountant or a business manager to increase your sales and efficiency. Just remember the Golden Rule. Your time is valuable; don’t let the client take that from you.
A good resource for many of the things I’ve mentioned above is a company called Proposal Kit; you can find the product here. I purchased their “Professional” package originally for our business and we’ve been extremely pleased with the results. So much, in fact - we still to this day help advise and shape the documents that Ian & Cyber-Sea, Inc produce with each update.
November 5th, 2006
