Bonfire of the Vanities. When I was in my 20’s, I was taught the relationship between marketing and sales over a bonfire. Over thirty years ago, before the arrival of the personal computer, there were desktop computers called office workstations. Designed around the first generation of microprocessors, these computers ran business applications like word processing, spreadsheets, and accounting. They were an improvement over the dumb terminals hanging off of mainframes and minicomputers, but ran proprietary operating systems and software. My third startup, Convergent Technologies (extra credit for identifying the photo on page 2) was in the business of making these workstations. The OEM BusinessConvergent’s computers were bought and then resold by other computer manufacturers – all of them long gone: Burroughs, Prime, Monroe Data Systems, ADP, Mohawk, Gould, NCR, 4-Phase, AT&T.
As the company’s revenues skyrocketed, Convergent started a new division to make a multi-processor Unix-based mini-computer. The Adoption Lifecycle of Social Networks [Infographic] - TNW Social Media. Vincenzo Cosenza, an Italian digital strategist, has just finished his latest research on Social Networks Adoption Lifecycle. Cosenza has applied the Innovation Adoption Model, a model that shows the stages in the adoption process for a new product by a consumer, to social networks diffusion to plot their actual state and, hopefully, understand their future trajectories. He made a very cool infographic and gave us the first look. In the innovators area you’ll Friendfeed, which unfortunately stopped innovating after its acquisition by Facebook; Foursquare, the most famous location based social network with 10 million users; and Google+ with its explosive adoption rate (20 million users in 3 weeks).In the early adoption stage we find professional social networks like Viadeo and LinkedIn, or generalist ones like Orkut (owned by Google), VKontakte (leader in Russian territories), Bebo.
Badoo is the only service specifically designed for dating purposes. Why ISPs are hijacking your search traffic & how they profit from it. A handful of Internet service providers (ISPs) in the U.S. are redirecting search traffic around specific keywords to brands’ websites, presumably for affiliate marketing revenue. A study released today by a UC Berkeley research group revealed that for some Internet users on some ISPs, using a search engine and typing in a word such as “apple” or “bloomingdales” would redirect the user to websites for Apple or Bloomingdale’s rather than to a page or search results about the keyword in question. The Berkeley project, called Netalyzr, was created to measure DNS behavior. However, over the past few months, the Netalyzr team noticed some unexplained and unexpected redirections across at least 12 ISPs in the United States.
In a blog post on the findings, the team wrote, “The affected ISPs use services provided by a company called Paxfire to monetize certain web search requests. Following the money The Electronic Frontier Foundation helped the Netalyzr team investigate the matter. Extending our Reach: Many Layers of User Sovereignty | Mitchell. Today we access the Internet in many ways, with phones and tablets and new devices becoming more prevalent. These devices have new operating systems, new business models, and new opportunities. They also bring new challenges to interoperability and user-sovereignty. How should Mozilla respond? Should Firefox and Gecko be our only tools?
Or should we develop other tools? I believe it is imperative we develop additional offerings. Where is the open source, standards-based platform for universally accessible, decentralized, customized identity on the web? Where is the open source, standards-based engine for universally accessible, decentralized, customized, user-controlled management of personal information I create about myself? Today many Mozilla contributors don’t think of these things as “engines” or “platforms” of Internet life.
Will additional offerings reduce our impact? The discussion about iOS and systems like it remind me of discussions we used to have about Linux vs. Beware the hackers who take over your Gmail account | Money. Here at Guardian Money we've seen pretty much every scam email going. There are the "phishing" ones that purport to come from your bank; the ones saying you're due a tax refund; the "you've won the lottery" ones; and, of course, the ones from wealthy foreigners in Africa who need help moving squillions of dollars out of the country.
However, the email we received recently from Ned Beale, a solicitor who wrote a series of articles for Money two years ago, stopped us in our tracks. It said Beale had been robbed during a trip to Athens – all his belongings were stolen at gunpoint, and he was desperate for help. "It's a terrible experience for me. Our immediate reaction was: poor Ned – what a nightmare. You will have realised by now this was a scam – albeit one of the most convincing we have encountered.
Beale wasn't the only victim of this hi-tech hacking attack. Beale, of course, hadn't been to Athens and hadn't been robbed. It doesn't sound as if Google was much help. Why Facebook and Google's Concept of 'Real Names' Is Revolutionary - Alexis Madrigal - Technology. The primary version of identity online is a radical departure from what we expect in real life Should you have to use your real name online?
It's an issue that's long simmered among social media critics and supporters alike. On one end of the spectrum, there's 4chan, where everything is anonymous. On the other, there are Facebook and Google Plus. Both have drawn fire from for categorically preventing people from using pseudonyms. This week, a new site, My Name Is Me, launched to make the case to allow anyone to use any name they choose. This has seemed like a niche battle to me: a tiny group of activists complaining about some edge cases while the real-name policies benefited most people by raising the civility of online discourse. But this week's discussions have made me rethink my intuition about names on social networks. I've changed my mind. I want to walk you through how I've come to this understanding.
Online, Google and Facebook require an inversion of this assumed norm. Google Researcher Exposes Flaws In Sophos Software, Slams Antivirus Industry - Andy Greenberg - The Firewall. The Problem With Virtual Goods - Betable. Broken Lotteries | Wired Science Billy’s Beer and Wine sold exactly $47 worth of lottery tickets the day before Marjorie Selbee arrived, just another sleepy day for the liquor store in this tiny Western Massachusetts town. But from the moment the 70-something woman from Michigan entered the store early July 12, Billy’s wasn’t sleepy anymore. Over the next three days, Selbee bought $307,000 worth of $2 tickets for a relatively obscure game called Cash WinFall, tying up the machine that spits out the pink tickets for hours at a time. Down the road at Jerry’s Place, a coffee shop in South Deerfield, Selbee’s husband, Gerald, was also spending $307,000 on Cash WinFall.
Together, the couple bought more than 300,000 tickets for a game whose biggest prize - about $2 million - has been claimed exactly once in the game’s seven-year history. “Cash WinFall isn’t being played as a game of chance. High Frequency Trading Tech Finds Other Uses - Tech Europe. AFP/Getty Images Real-time data could save $100,000 a vessel in wasted fuel Executing stock trades in milliseconds has become a feature of modern exchanges, but the ability to handle vast quantities of data in real time—known as complex event processing (CEP)—is going to be one of the key technologies that will impact a wide range of industries. It is an area that Mr. Giles Nelson, deputy chief technology officer of Progress Software Corp has been investigating since researching it in Cambridge in 1999. “We were looking at data from the stock market, from futures, derivatives, foreign exchange, examining those looking for patterns. Mr. “So instead of taking our data and indexing it and ask questions about it, we say we know pretty much what patterns we are looking for—so it may be a stock price movement of X percent followed by another stock price moving by Y percent—and you take that pattern and you stream all the data past it until you get a match.
Saving millions in shipping Mr. Judge says domain name loss is not a "substantial hardship" A federal judge has rejected a petition by the Spanish company Puerto 80 for the return of the domain names Rojadirecta.com and Rojadirecta.org. The US federal government seized the domains earlier this year, arguing that they were primarily used to provide links to infringing sporting content. Puerto 80 says that after weeks of playing phone tag with federal officials, it was told that it could only have the domain names back if it agreed not to "link to any U.S. content anywhere on its sites anywhere in the world. " Since this demand clearly exceeded what was required of it under copyright law (and arguably violated the First Amendment), Puerto sued for the return of the domain names.
Under federal law, the owner of seized property can seek its return if the government's continuing to hold it would cause a "substantial hardship" to its owner. Puerto 80 pointed not only to the loss of traffic since the seizure, but also to the infringement of its First Amendment rights.