Because I became intrigued

[ssl]

I went a-huntin!

Found out:

auctionmentor.com (one of the sites that is linked in the affilate programs that I recently signed up, through a link Reckless posted in the 'do you know anyone that works from home' thread in the GenDisc section) is most likely owned by Kowabunga (kowabunga.com), based on telephone numbers and addresses. Checking their website lead to some familiar product names (<something muttered>Fuel is what I heard over the phone when calling a number without knowing about kowa), and their website has a 'product' called BidFuel, which lead me to the conclusion of Kowabunga being an owner of auctionmentor.com.

The next level is interesting.

A WhoIs on the kowa domain yeilded interesting results. It was registered by a company called Think Partnership, Inc; the Think Partnership name has been subsequently changed to Kowabunga!.

They had a few names prior (I cannot dig it out again after seeing the different forms, I'll look later), but more importantly, I found the Pres/CMO: Richard K Howe.

So.

Now I know who to "chat" with if I have an issue with auctionmentor.com.

-----

He poses as an interesting individual, to say the least, but more importantly, is the company he used to work for: Acxiom

A direct quote from a PBS transcript:

DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF: But where did all this information come from? How did political parties and advocacy groups know whom to reach with what message? The answer to that question begins here. The Acxiom Corporation of Little Rock, Arkansas, is one of the biggest companies you've never heard of.
Somewhere in these acres of blinking computers is carefully guarded data about you, not just your name, address and phone number, but probably also the catalogs you get, the cars you've bought, and maybe even what shoes you wear and whether you like dogs or cats. Acxiom's information is culled from census data and tax records, those product surveys you answered and customer records supplied by corporations and credit card companies that are Acxiom clients. Acxiom sifts all this data to produce lists of target consumers for their clients.


PETER SWIRE: If you're a company, a bank, a retailer, what you would do is say you want left-handed people of a certain ethnic group, and they're going to be able to do a list for you. You can get marketing lists of Hispanics who make between $20,000 and $40,000 who are U.S. citizens. You can get marketing lists of people who suffer from incontinence and have bought those kinds of products in the pharmacy. You can get all sorts of things that can be very narrow.


DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF: Acxiom divides all consumers into one of 70 different types they call "lifestage segments," encompassing everything from what hobbies you have to what products you buy, where you live to what you believe in. According to Acxiom, I am a "shooting star": 36 to 45, married, wake up early and go for runs, watch Seinfeld reruns, travel abroad and no kids yet.
We're working on the kids part, but Acxiom probably already knows that. Their computers are programmed not only to figure out who we are now, but where we are going and when we will get there. What Acxiom is promising is nothing less than the solution to clutter: Send us ads only for products we really want, and anticipate just when we will want them.


RICHARD HOWE, Chief Marketing Officer, Acxiom: You can't just now take an ad and put it on TV and hope for the best. You have to get smarter about your consumers. You need to understand their purchasing predisposition. You need to understand how they're changing. You need to understand more about them. And that's technology.

The underlined portion is funny and worrying, to a point. The next few sentences are what caught my eye:

We're working on the kids part, but Acxiom probably already knows that. Their computers are programmed not only to figure out who we are now, but where we are going and when we will get there.

I guess Sarah Connor's (nerd, get over it!) gravestone was wrong: No fate but what we make.