About Us, About Me, About ABHUVA

I've been building web sites, applications and components since 1995. I remember being told, while selling web sites in those heady, blossom days of the dot-com boom, that the Internet was a fad, and would fade away shortly, hence there was no reason to create a web presence.

These business owners were wrong, of course.

The Internet has proven to be anything but a fad. In fact, it has become ubiquitous in our day-to-day lives. We use the web to connect with others, to purchase products, to pay bills, to entertain, educate, enliven and enrich our daily lives. Personally, it's hard for me to fathom how I got along day-by-day without email, without being able to look up whatever might be on my mind at the time, without being able to shop stores world-wide, and so on. It's quite a different life, one that I've come to embrace in it's entirety.

Yet, as with all Great Advances of Human Civilization, there's a catch. In the case of the Internet, that catch, in my opinion, is Spam.

Spam is a form of White Noise, at best, and maleficent and malicious at worst. On a good day, Spam is a pain. On a bad day it can bring your world crashing down. It comes in many forms. You see it showing up in your email, in your search results -- and if you run a website, from any of the publicly-available forms on your site.

One of the services I offer to my clients is S.E.O. consultation. My methodologies have proven very successful, and I've made many clients happy over the years, providing increased hit counts and thus an increase in potential business leads. One caveat that this success has produced -- without fail, is Bot Spam. This is Spam generated by applications designed to look for publicly-available forms, fill them with bogus data, and submit the form. As the web has advanced, so has the complexity of these applications. They have become very adept analyzing forms for security weaknesses, and exploiting those weaknesses to the fullest. The end result of this reality is that White Noise -- static -- is added to your ongoing conversations, reducing the effectiveness of those conversations.

Then along came Human User Verification. Web masters have tried many things to thwart bot spammers over the years, with limited effectiveness. One of the most effective has been a reverse Turning Test called CAPTCHA. You may have encountred one of these while filling out a form on someone's site. It's a server-generated image containing distorted text The form requires that you enter this text correctly before a successful submission occurs. While this has been an effective tool from the application standpoint, it has presented usability issues that must be over-looked or overridden to date, in order to implement this mechanism.

The Problem: It's a relatively low-tech solution that thwarts real users as well as bots, and usually leads to multiple form submission attempts. Not only does this put more pressure on your web server, it puts stress on the user filling out the form. Very often critical data, like credit card data, must be re-entered. This can be a frustrating experience for your users, and can potentially lead to fewer contacts.

The Solution: ABHUVA, or: A. B.etter H.uman U.ser V.erification A.pplication.

Like Ye Better Mousetrap of Olde, ABHUVA wants to take Human User Verification up a notch. Utilizing next generation methodologies such as AJAX and a standards-compliant, cross-browser compatible framework, ABHUVA implements a patented tiered approach that contains spam bot applications on the client side, without placing unnecessary stress on the user... or your application server.

I guess you could say it's a Win,Win,Win :)

You win because you effectively reduce the White Noise and malicious spam posted to your email or database. Your clients win because they're no longer frustrated by clunky Human User Verification programs. Your servers win because the onus of Human User Verification is distributed to the client side, and it's one less dynamic image that needs to be generated, one less form needing validation. Incidentally, real-time image generation requires significant amounts of memory, and can bog down your server, but I digress.

The point is that you want -- you need -- to have all these entities in a state of equilibrium If any one of the three is out-of-balance, your site is not operating at its most efficient level, which boils down to lost sales or less-effective conversations with your customers.

ABHUVA'S Mission is to assist you in optimizing all three. It's an affordable, secure, hosted solution that won't strap your budget, but will make your life less complicated. And in an age of increasingly-complex complications, it's refreshing to be able to know that someone has your back, that someone diligent and concerned is standing at the gateway of every form submission, acting as both ombudsman and security officer, to ensure that there is truly a real human being on the other side of your web application.

Cheers,
Kevin M. Cowan
CEO and Founder of Computer Paradigm Resolutions, Inc., and creator of ABHUVA.

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