Desirable Roasted Coffee puts Mobitype on double-secret probation

It's been a busy week, not least because of a swarm of emails & phone calls surrounding the mysterious Mobitype scraping of Desirable Roasted Coffee.

As I said, I wrote Löic Le Meur, who was listed as a board member of Tekora, the parent company of Mobitype, asking what on earth he was doing with a scraping outfit.

Löic quickly replied:

I don't sit on their board and only invested small bucks in it a few years ago, clearly I am not happy with what they do either, I will contact them immediately.

And followed up with: just asked them to remove me [i.e. his name from the board of directors list].

I also wrote and voice-mailed Philippe Coup-Jambet, CEO of Tekora. His reply was this:

Loic is not in our board and has no legal responsabilites in our company.
For more details, the story is:  Tekora (the old one with Loic) was sold
some years ago to Access Commerce. Our company iPCJ was renamed Tekora last
year. We bought this trademark. There is no legal link between "Tekora-old"
and the "Tekora-NewCo". Tekora-NewCo is not a Loic's venture.

Well, how that explains why Löic's name was at the top of the board list until last Monday morning escapes me. 

What concerns me more than the arcana of board seats on a start-up is arcana of how my blog managed to be teleported to their service:

We did not refered your blog by ourself. Somebody who knows your blog is
using Mobitype as a mobile blog reader (like feedburner or bloglines) and
want to read it from the mobile Internet media. The idea of Mobitype is to
accrue your visibility through the mobile internet only. We just show your
public RSS feed in the format suitable for mobile and handheld devices. We
try to do not alter your content. 98 % of our traffic comes from mobiles and
mainly from i-mode mobile terminals in Europe.We are doing this as the same
manner than our competitors does like Google Mobile or others. Try Google
Mobile.
We attribute, we link and credit you about you. See the following link:
http://mobitype.com/app?service=external/ViewFeedProfile&sp=Sfeeds243
We do not use your content for a commercial gain. Mobitype is new, free and
beta...

Our laywers did not mentionned this problem when we decided to start
Mobitype project. May be they are wrong. I have to check again with them.
Of course, we would appreciate very much to learn more about Creative
Commons license from you if you confirm we are wrong. My positive proposal
is to follow this discussion with in a constructive way.
If however you confirm you want us to cease and desist immediatly, we are
ready and we commit to stop diffusing your blog via Mobitype in next 48
hours.

Philippe invited me to call him, which I did. I had a long chat with him and CTO Oleg Sidko.

I believe, after the conversation, that Tekora honestly want its Mobitype service to be just that, a service to both readers and bloggers.  I pointed out several reasons why I believe bloggers might not see the immediate benefits:

1. By naming the Mobitype feed allanjenkins.mobitype.com, Mobitype begins to play with my brand. The implication is that I have something to do with the site, when I don't.  Oleg indicated, however, that the naming system could be corrected.
2. Bloggers cannot opt out of the service short of chasing down Philippe or Oleg (not an easy task; the office is not manned all the time).
3. There's no guarantee that your blog won't end up back on the service -- even if you have asked for its removal once.
4. The comment system begs for abuse by spammers -- in fact, it routes around any "captcha" or security service you may have on your blog. Oleg and Philippe claimed to be shocked that this hole had not been fixed, and promised to do so this week.
5. The links back to the original blog are weak. I am not sure a reader of the mobile RSS would even know how to get back to my blog via the Web. Hardly a service to me.

Oleg and Philippe seemed to take these criticisms to heart. In all cases they said they would either fix the problem or try to find ways to improve. They stated several times that they would like my further input and that of other bloggers.

So I am going to put Mobitype on double-secret probation. And let's hope they can move the service out of diapers.

Posted by Allan Jenkins on March 23, 2006 at 11:44 PM | Permalink

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