Author: stevewoda Page 7 of 13

• Administration Considers Bailout Funds for Small Businesses
  The Obama administration is developing an initiative to take money from the $700 billion program for the banking system and make it available to millions of small businesses, which officials say are essential to any economic recovery because they employ so many people, according to sources familiar with the plan.
  The new effort — which would represent a striking shift from the rescue program’s original mandate — would direct billions of bailout dollars toward a program that aims more at saving jobs than righting the financial system.
  (tags: Politics Economics)
• VC in DC: The 5 Things People Pitching VC’s Don’t Usually Know
  Here they are:
  1. We see a lot of ideas, all the time, week in and week out. Most say, if you make an investment in our company, we’ll really be able to make progress on all fronts. Some say, we haven’t had much money to date, but look at what we have been able to achieve with little money in a small amount of time. People that can make progress without money tend to be the ones who make the most progress when they have money.
  (tags: vc Entrepreneurship grotech)

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• 33 Tips & Tactics for Generating Names
  Over the last decade we have generated new names for hundreds of companies, products and services. Here are some of the shortcuts, thought-starters and mental prods we’ve observed along the way.
  (tags: Brands naming)
• Court: IP Addresses Are Not ‘Personally Identifiable’ Information
  In a ruling that could fuel debate about online privacy, a federal judge in Seattle has held that IP addresses are not personal information.
  “In order for ‘personally identifiable information’ to be personally identifiable, it must identify a person. But an IP address identifies a computer,” U.S. District Court Judge Richard Jones said in a written decision.
  (tags: security)

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• TheFind Displays VeriSign in Search Results
  t Internet Retailer 2009 in Boston, TheFind announced that it is integrating the VeriSign Secured Seal into their search results. TheFind – who delivers a comprehensive shopping search engine with over 350 million products from more than 500,000 stores – is the first search engine to address online shoppers’ need to trust merchants by incorporating the VeriSign seal directly into its search results.
  (tags: security buysafe verisign thefind ecommerce)
• Judge to acquit mom in MySpace suicide
  A federal judge on Thursday tentatively threw out the convictions of a Missouri mother for her role in a MySpace hoax directed at a 13-year-old neighbor girl who ended up committing suicide.
  U.S. District Judge George Wu said he was tentatively acquitting Lori Drew of misdemeanor counts of accessing computers without authorization.
  Drew was convicted in November, but the judge said that if she is to be found guilty of illegally accessing computers, anyone who has ever violated the social networking site’s terms of service would be guilty of a misdemeanor.
  (tags: security MySpace crime)

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• Google Voice: 5 Reasons to Use It, 5 Reasons to Think Twice
  After weeks of anticipation, Google is finally accepting a limited number of new users into its Google Voice phone system. Google Voice allows you to unite all of your phones under a single number and then use a powerful set of controls to determine how calls are handled. It packs plenty of other impressive functionality, too, including voicemail-to-text transcribing and advanced call-screening.
  (Check out PC World's review of Google Voice)
  At the same time, though, adopting Google Voice as your communications commander introduces some potential negatives, ranging from privacy-related concerns to questions about reliability. Here's a breakdown of five pros and five cons to help you determine whether the service is right for you.
  (tags: google voice)

• Icann Hires Former Cybersecurity Chief as New C.E.O. – NYTimes.com
  The Internet agency with key oversight of the monikers behind every Web site, e-mail address and Twitter post named former U.S. cybersecurity chief Rod Beckstrom Friday as its next chief executive.
  The board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers approved his hiring in a voice vote Friday as ICANN capped weeklong meetings in Sydney, Australia. Beckstrom becomes CEO next Wednesday.
  Beckstrom, who had resigned after less than a year as cybersecurity director amid persistent turf battles, brings credentials in industry, government and diplomacy — but little direct experience with domain names and broader Internet addressing issues, ICANN’s chief mission.
  (tags: domains icann)
• Corporate Creation Myths, and Why We Need Them
  Why do Americans need to attach creation myths to everything, including the origins of our most visible business ventures? We idealize the lone inventor over the company man, the garage over the office space. We tell the story of Apple Computer not as that of two former Atari and Hewlett-Packard employees launching their own product, but two starry-eyed inventors in a garage, building a dream from scratch.
  (tags: PR Entrepreneurship myths)

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• Just Another Online Fad–or the Biggest Revolution Since the Internet?
  According to its advocates, cloud computing is poised to succeed where so many other attempts to deliver on-demand computing to anyone with a network connection have failed. Some skepticism is warranted. The history of the computer industry is littered with the remains of previous aspirants to this holy grail, from the time-sharing utilities envisioned in the 1960s and 1970s to the network computers of the 1990s (simple computers acting as graphical clients for software running on central servers) to the commercial grid systems of more recent years (aimed at turning clusters of servers into high-­performance computers). But cloud computing draws strength from forces that could propel it beyond the ranks of the also-rans.
  (tags: Cloud)
• Is America Losing The Social Networking War?
  While Twitter and YouTube have proven strategic for election protesters in Iran, the US Defense Department is “way behind the power curve” on social networking, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said last week. Military leaders need to get on Facebook and other social networking sites themselves, to learn how they’re used firsthand.
  “How do we communicate better with [young people]?” Gates asked. “How do we get reactions from them to things that we’re doing? How do we get better plugged in with what they’re thinking?”
  The answer to those questions, in Gates’ view, is to harness social media to enable DOD reach out to the world.
  (tags: social networking government)

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• Free Microsoft Antivirus, Security Suite Arrives Tomorrow
  Tuesday is the day for release of the free public beta of Microsoft Security Essentials, Microsoft's security and anti-virus suite. The price is certainly right. Question is, will the program change the security landscape? Bigger questions is whether or not it provides the security your business needs.
  The new security and anti-virus suite, Microsoft Security Essentials, formerly known as Morro will be available for public download tomorrow.
  Assuming Microsoft's servers survive the demand, this beta, which replaces Microsoft OneCare (which wasn't free), should answer questions about the program's anti-virus and general security viability pretty quickly. It's hard to imagine that that this won't be one of the largest beta tests ever, with plenty of the testers being small and midsized businesses and their employees.
  (tags: microsoft Security)

• Do Venture Capitalists and Angel Investors Who Use Twitter Invest More in Startups?
  Being the technology-savvy group that they are, it is not surprising to find that many venture capitalists and angel investors are on Twitter. In fact, many of them are quite active and have attracted fairly large followings putting them in the upper echelons of Twitter users. So we wondered whether all activity on Twitter by venture capitalists and angel investors translates into or at the very least correlates with them making more investments in startups?
  As our analysis below reveals, we applied many tests to see if there was any pattern/correlation, but the end result, perhaps not surprisingly, is that one doesn’t exist. Irrespective of the test, there was no correlation between any metric measuring Twitter activity and investment levels by VCs and angels. But in our examination, we did uncover a select group of investors on Twitter who we’d classify as Rockstars (9 firms) or Unsung Heroes (14 firms) based on their 2009 startup funding and Twitter activity.
  (tags: vc)

• T-Mobile Soon Launching Second Android Phone
  T-Mobile is prepping to announce its second Android handset next week, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal that cites unnamed sources.
  The fourth-largest U.S. carrier did not confirm the report, but has already said it would have Android-related announcements over the summer. The report said the next Android smartphone will be the HTC Magic, but it will be rebranded as the myTouch 3G. The handset is expected to go on sale this summer.
  (tags: google Android tmobile mobile)
• 22 contestants text while running and blindfolded for cash
  Next time you ask your teen to “stop texting,” you may want to think twice. Your teenager may be gearing up for the National Texting Championship – and the fat check that’s bestowed upon the winner.
  In New York yesterday, 22 contestants, 22 years old or younger, stretched their thumbs and prepared to test their texting dexterity at the third LG US National Texting Championship. The contest was sponsored by the mobile-phones division of LG Electronics, based in Seoul, South Korea. The 22 finalists, plucked from 250,000 eager texters, competed against each other over two days. Some of the challenges consisted of texting while blindfolded (a Harris Interactive Study reported that 42 percent of teens say they can text blindfolded) and texting while walking on a treadmill.
  (tags: mobile texting)

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