With respect to API implementation, the first objective that I asked Jeremiah and Chris to achieve was to implement the API for our term4sale.com website, with the view that would be a way to ensure that ALL the quoting functions are working properly before we let it loose on our first group of customers we have affectionately nicknamed "Guinea Pigs". Work continues on the term4sale.com implementation. As they have worked on that they have run into some issues that have turned up during that implementation. That's not unusual and we are working though those. It's always a challenge to find ways to make complicated things simple.

The good news is that this should make implementation for other customers much easier.

The other reason I want to get the API working at term4sale.com is that I want to go back to displaying many more results within any quote. At one point we were quoting 50 results in a quote, we are now showing closer to 20. That was done to made it harder for third parties to benefit from using internet robots to "scrape" our site without permission or authorization.

I think the reduction in results may have hurt our website traffic which has dropped. I am fairly certain it is the agent traffic that has diminished due to the reduction in product results in a quote. By contrast, we continue to see about the same level of consumer email requests going to listed agents. I think consumer are happy with the site, and the FREE-ROLL agents who use it are less happy. We still want the traffic because it helps boost us for search engines.

As a side note, it is deeply frustrating to me that the law appears to be completely ineffective in stopping theft of information on the internet. Even when you have a clear case demonstrating that the theft has occurred, it appears the courts don't care and that the laws currently in place are unenforceable. Given that environment we have had to turn much more attention to building in security measures which means it takes time away from building things that our subscribers want and need for their web site quoting. We will eventually get there, it just takes longer.

We had also reduced the number of results because of the "scraping" that had continued after the trial of our lawsuit (same bunch). In addition to reducing the number of results, we responded with some additional counter measures that made it harder to scrape successfully and made it easier for us to monitor. For the most part that seems to be working but the API should put a fork in it.

The API will also give us a much better handle on unusual spikes in volume of requests for quotes. Each request for a quote will be recorded in our database which will serve as a way to count volume and allow us to invoice properly. Unusual bursts of activity will generate email alerts to us advising us of the activity and which customer (in this case term4sale) is getting hit hard. It will allow us to immediately see what's going on.

Further, there will be additional security that will not permit scraping to occur. Posting warnings and user agreements did not seem to deter the previous activity, and so we are building in additional measures that will make it very difficult to request a quote unless the legitimate user is passing the correct authorizations. That authorization information will not be visible to third parties unless a customer discloses that information to a third party. Once again, any unusual spikes in volume will be automatically detected and if we think your volume is unusual, we will contact the customer to ask about it. If necessary, we can issue new authorization data that the customer would then need to use.

Once that is all working for term4sale.com, we will kick up the volume of results for any quote to probably 75. We hope this will bring back some of the previous traffic.