Amtivo Nabs ISO9001.com, Wants to Replicate Tekno Comix

Back in the 1990s, millionaires Mitch Rubenstein and Laurie Silvers got the idea to strongarm their way into the comic book industry and unseat Marvel and DC, even though they had no idea about anything whatsoever to do with comics and nobody ever heard of them. They got some VC money together and formed Tekno Comix, the cringey name of which was the least of their problems.

Low-Tek Tekno

Based on the ideology that raw money can buy success, they threw their cash around to grab people with “big names” and then had ghostwriters produce scripts for them. Leonard Nimoy, Gene Roddenberry, John Jakes and Neil Gaiman were some of the industry celebs they planned to claim were in their stable of writers, as well as a few dead guys like Isaac Asimov and Mickey Spillane. Gaiman may have been the only one remotely putting pen to paper for Tekno publications.

The mistakes didn’t end there. Rubenstein fancied himself a bigshot, so he located his company in the middle of Boca Raton, one of the ritziest places in Florida. His office was a huge monstrosity of a thing, and it took 20 minutes to walk from the door to his desk. The lobby had a live piano player. Just a few years too late, the Tekno Comix people thought that “CD-ROMs” were the wave of the future, so they marketed their comic books as not only being available in traditional paper format but also on the now-dead Prodigy internet service and CD-ROM disks, which no one has a reader for anymore. AOL had already killed the credibility of the CD-ROM — who’s old enough to remember how they handed those things out at the cash register? — but Tekno was going to bring it back to life, I guess?

For what it’s worth, the CD-ROM was about the most high-tek tekiness that Tekno would ever muster.

They then hired staff at insultingly low wages, which made no sense since they were located in — did I mention? — Boca Raton. So the few staffers they could get to work for them had to live miles away since the salary was about $18,000. The lobby piano player was making more money than the editors. They pulled the old trick of promising noobs fame and fortune if they’d just agree to work for nothing for a few years.

To no one’s surprise, they shut down less than two years later. The comics were hot garbage, the CD-ROMs never really materialized, Prodigy was eclipsed by AOL, and Tekno’s money disappeared under the weight of the company’s lavish expenses and near-zero sales.

Think about this: they hired Neil Gaiman, creator of Sandman, while he was at the top of his game, and they still bungled it. In the 1990s, if you couldn’t sell a Neil Gaiman title, you had no reason being in the business.

The lesson? It doesn’t matter how much money you have, you can’t buy your way into an industry if you don’t have a clue about what you’re actually making.

Tekno 2.0: Amtivo

Now we meet Amtivo. As I have written, Amtivo got some money from a VC and thinks it can buy its way into becoming a top-tier ISO certification body while not knowing anything about being a certification body. They gobbled up nearly a dozen small certification bodies to obtain, through sheer force of will, a stable of clients in a relatively short time. Like Tekno, they took on a stupid name that sounds like a Norwegian dog food brand, and then bullied their way into the industry through a series of press releases that no one cares about.

Next, they spent about thirty seconds on lazy logo design, never bothering to do a simple reverse image search to learn that exactly 40 billion companies already have nearly identical branding. Imagine being so financially irresponsible that you burn up all your branding budget only to have it humiliated after some dummy from Oxebridge spends 30 seconds on Google:

Now they are doing the next-most-stupid-thing-ever, and — like Tekno’s CD-ROMS — relying on a technological angle that is all but dead: search engine optimization (SEO). They bought the domain ISO9001.domain and immediately populated it with hopelessly lame bullshit that every other CB already has: ISO 9001 readiness checklists, consultant registry, “free” training materials. Amtivo thinks that by buying a domain name, they are going to jump to the front of the line in Google searches and, therefore, put the big guns like BSI and Intertek out of business.

An aside: they are apparently so embarrassed by their own Amtivo logo, they left it off the rebranded ISO9001.com site:

Oh, and they are already overtly violating ISO 17021-1 by selling “Activ Certify,” a software solution that helps you “create an ISO-compliant management system,” the very thing a CB is prohibited from doing. (Don’t worry; I have a complaint cooking in the oven for that one.)

Traditional SEO is Dead

There’s so much wrong with Amtivo’s strategy here, I don’t even know where to start.

First, the idea that a domain name alone would ensure a high ranking in search is an idea that has been dead for at least ten years. The only search engine that still remotely responds to this trickery is Yandex, so I guess Amtivo has a bright future selling certifications in Russia. Consider that the domain “voice.com” was sold for $30 million in 2019, and now the site is a dead page with no links.

For the past decade, content has been king in place of keywords and domain name gimmicks. Google searches rely on the content within a page and its widespread sharing and referencing.

At least, they did. In 2025, searches on Google and Bing and Yahoo result in AI-generated summaries at the top of the page, followed by numerous paid ads. Content creators are competing against that and nearly nothing else. SEO as we knew it is dead, a whole new creature is being born, and the so-called SEO experts are struggling to figure it out. You can buy all the domains in the world you want, and it will not put you above the AI slop or the ads.  Even DuckDuckGo prioritizes ads over organic results, even if they haven’t jumped into the AI maelstrom (yet).

Now, some underqualified and overcaffeinated sales shithead at Amtivo is reading this right now and thinking, “Hell, bro, we just get our VC to give us money for ads!” So I can expect Amtivo to hamfist their way into search results by populating the ad space that falls under the AI slop. That’s not going to help them.

So far, I’m hearing Amtivo can’t manage the basics. They don’t have enough auditors and can’t manage audits, so clients are dropping them because they risk losing their certificates while waiting for some Amtivo drone to actually show up. Customer support is a trash fire, the rebranding has been rolled out with all the delicacy of a Schwarzenegger Rhino, and clients lost — nearly overnight — long-standing relationships they had built with their CBs.

Worse, if they think they are going to take a run at BSI, they have another thing coming. BSI dominates this market because it cheats like a motherfucker, and has the support of corrupt officials in the UK government to prop them up. BSI and UKAS are an evil conjoined twin, like that thing from Hellraiser, and they dominate the ISO space due to their overwhelming control of ISO itself. Not only do they nearly single-handedly craft ISO standards, but they then dominate ISO CASCO and steer the rules governing both CBs and ABs in their direction. I am betting Amtivo doesn’t even have a rep on CASCO, nevermind the kind of backroom influence that BSI and UKAS have.

BSI can cheat and issue certificates in violation of international law, all with the blessing of the criminally corrupt UKAS chief Matt Gantley, and there is nothing anyone can do about it. (Well, the UK trade ministry could step in, but they have lacked the leadership chutzpah to do so, largely due to the “patriotic” sense the UK government has over UKAS.) Amtivo doesn’t have friends like that in governments, nor are they likely to ever get them.

Maybe this piece will be looked back on as a wildly inaccurate prediction, and we’ll all have a laugh as the coffee we drink and the chicken sandwiches we eat all have the Amtivo logo on them. But I doubt it. Amtivo seems to be a bunch of amateurs who met a wildly misguided, uninformed venture capitalist and took his money so they could immediately lose it all.

Someone go visit the Amtivo HQ and tell me if they have a piano player in the lobby.