-
Competition on Facebook was fierce late Friday night, as scores of users scrambled to personalize their Facebook pages in what many have likened to a virtual land rush.
It’s a land rush Friday night for personal domain names.
At exactly 12:01 a.m. ET Saturday, on a first-come, first-served basis, the vast social networking site gave users the green light to claim variations of their names or other nicknames of their choosing.
Within three minutes, 200,000 usernames were registered, according to the social media blog Mashable, which covered the registration process live from Facebook’s headquarters Friday night. -
Anyone worried that AT&T (NYSE: T) was going to charge a price premium for the ability to send picture and/or video messages can breath easy. AT&T recently noted that it won’t charge more to add the feature.
As far as I am concerned, AT&T had zero wiggle room here. Every other carrier offers unlimited messaging — which typically includes text, picture, video and instant messaging — for $20 per month. iPhone users who have unlimited messaging plans today are already paying $20 per month — just for text messages.
Author: stevewoda Page 8 of 13
-
I am a genius. I'm charismatic, kind and understanding. I'm also a Disney princess named Aurora and the reincarnation of Marilyn Monroe.
But I'm not crazy (at least, not completely). I've just been taking a lot of online quizzes lately — you know, the ones all over the Web promising to reveal your IQ, personality traits or celebrity resemblances. Aside from discovering my inner Sleeping Beauty, I've also learned something important: These quizzes are about far more than providing users with enlightening or entertaining information. -
Apple Inc. announced a new version of its popular iPhone on Monday, upping the stakes in the fast-growing market for smart phone devices.
The new iPhone was the highlight of Apple's annual gathering of developers in San Francisco, in which company also cut the price of its current iPhone 3G to $99 and debuted a revamped line of MacBook Pro notebook PCs. Also, Apple showcased major software updates that include new operating systems for both its computer line as well as existing iPhones.
Shares of Apple /quotes/comstock/15*!aapl/quotes/nls/aapl (AAPL 136.79, -0.18, -0.13%) ended the day down by 82 cents to close at $143.85. The stock has surged by more than 60% over the last three months.
I live and work in Arlington, Virginia, and as this hilarious video points out, it is the toughest town West of the Potomac and East of the Beltway.
The funniest part of the video for me was that I was sitting in a Starbucks wearing my brown flip flops when I first watched it. Check out this video if you want to understand the inside humor here. 🙂
-
If you like to search for “music lyrics” or “free” things, you are engaging in risky cyber behavior. And “free music downloads” puts 20 percent of Web surfers in harm’s way of malicious software, known as “malware.”
A new research report by U.S.-based antivirus software company McAfee has identified the most dangerous Internet search words that place users on pages with a higher likelihood of cyber attacks.
The study examined 2,600 popular keywords on five major search engines — Google, Yahoo, Live, AOL and Ask — and analyzed 413,000 Web pages. -
As the automobile industry sheds jobs, it comes as good news that over the last decade or so the Internet has created 1.2 million jobs, many paying higher salaries than average, a new study finds.
Internet business contributes 2.1%, or $300 billion, to the total GDP (gross domestic product) of the U.S. And IT and related online business may be faring better in this recession than they did in the dotcom bubble of 2000-2002, still growing revenue but at slower pace.
Consumers are now making 10% of their retail purchases online, with the exception of groceries, on the Internet, and Internet-based advertising has increased four-fold since 2002 to more than $20 billion, said John Deighton, a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, and one of the authors of the study along with Hamilton Consultants Inc.
-
Amazon EC2 is among the more potent items in Amazon’s web services arsenal. You’ve probably heard of many of the other services such as S3 for storage and FPS for payments. EC2 is all about the “elastic compute cloud.” In layman’s terms, it’s a server. In slightly less layman’s terms, EC2 lets you easily run and manage many instances (like servers) and given the proper software and configurations, have a scalable platform for your web application, outsource resource-intensive tasks to EC2 or for whatever you would use a server farm.
There are three different sizes of EC2 instances you can summon and they’re all probably more powerful than the server currently running your blog. Unless you’re offloading video processing or something intense to EC2, the default small instance with its 1.7GB of RAM and 160GB disk should be more than fine. It’s just nice to know that if for any reason I need a farm of machines each with 15GB of RAM, I can get that easily. -
The Obama administration is set to announce today two proposals that would empower shareholders and the Securities and Exchange Commission to have more oversight over executive compensation at all publicly traded firms, government sources said.
The measures would require legislation, which is expected to be sent to Capitol Hill soon, one of the sources said.
Under a so-called "say-on-pay" plan, shareholders would have a greater voice over what top earners at firms are paid.
A second proposal aims to provide company compensation committees more independence as they determine what executives should make.
-
According to BetaNews Motorola (NYSE: MOT) is switching a phone that was supposed to ship with Windows Mobile to Google (NSDQ: GOOG)’s Android platform. Is this a cost issue or a marketing decision?
From a licensing perspective, Android is free whereas Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) charges for each phone that Windows Mobile is put on. Motorola’s handset division has been in financial straits for some time now so this could be a cost cutting maneuver.
It may also be that Motorola is trying to get the device out the door as soon as possible with a more modern OS. Windows Mobile 6.1 is a bit long in the tooth since it is visually almost indistinguishable from WinMo 5, a platform that shipped nearly 4 years ago. WinMo 6.5, which is substantially updated, was just completed this month, but it will be three months or more before the first devices start showing up. -
Sprint (NYSE: S) threw a cold bucket of reality on the pipe dreams of AT&T (NYSE: T)’s Randall Stephenson and Verizon (NYSE: VZ) Wireless’s Lowell McAdam. It verified that it will be the sole distributor of the Palm Pre “through 2009.”
Sprint spokesperson James Fisher spoke in no uncertain terms. He said, “We have the Pre through 2009.”
That means AT&T and Verizon Wireless will have to wait at least six months before they can sell the device, which won’t put the Pre on their shelves until very close to the December holidays, if not into January.
This statement comes after AT&T’s Randall Stephenson and Verizon Wireless’s Lowell McAdam both indicated they’d be offering the Palm Pre at some point in the future. Verizon’s McAdams went so far as to say, “Over the next six months or so you will see devices like Palm Pre and a second generation Storm.”
-
I get it. You want a dream team, a devoted group of employees who would move mountains, face their fears, and work tirelessly to help you meet your entrepreneurial goals. I hate to break it to you bucko, but they ain’t you. They may love you and their job, but nobody will ever be as determined as you to make your business a success. And if you think money will make the difference, you are fatally wrong.
Money does NOT motivate. In fact, money is the world’s greatest anti-motivator. If you pay people too little, they will right that wrong by under performing, coming in late, or even engaging in a little sabotage. If you pay people too much, they will work hard, but they will not work harder. No one can put in more than 100% effort, even if they try.
-
The progress of e-commerce in Germany—home to Europe’s largest Internet population—was relatively slow, retarded by many of the same issues seen earlier in other countries, such as the UK and the US. Heightened security concerns and adherence to traditional payment habits on the part of many Germans hindered the development of online selling.
But the situation has changed.
By the end of 2008, the GfK Group reported that retail e-commerce sales—excluding event tickets, financial products and travel—reached €13.6 billion ($20 billion), up €2.2 billion ($3.2 billion) from 2007. -
Cloud computing lets companies move data and applications from their own servers to those managed by someone else. The dream is to forget all about managing infrastructure, but in reality, applications are still deeply tied to surrounding software, such as a specific operating system or database, so it’s not so easy to move them.
A company based in Raleigh, NC, called rPath is winning admirers among IT experts by selling technology that addresses this problem. The company won top honors last week in the “cloud and infrastructure” category at a competition held at the 2009 Venture Summit East conference in Boston.
-
The global market for carbon emissions trading doubled in value last year, but actual realized emissions cuts fell as the global economic slowdown dented clean energy financing, according to the World Bank.
Dear Friends,
Please excuse the impersonal nature of this note, but I wanted to make sure that each of you had my new contact information.
After
almost nine years of building buySAFE, I’ve wrapped up my time at the
company that I founded while in grad school at Wharton. I am leaving
buySAFE in very capable hands, with fresh funding, and the brightest
future that the company has ever had. It has been a quite a ride, and
I am pleased with what we accomplished. We made the Internet safer for
tens of millions of shoppers and more profitable for thousands of
ecommerce merchants; we developed new products and technologies now
licensed and utilized by some of the largest safety and security
companies in the world; and we had a lot of fun in the process. Here
is our official announcement… http://www.stevewoda.com/2009/03/thank-you-buysafe.html
It
has been a few weeks since my last day in the office, and the rest of
the buySAFE team has continued and will continue to do great work for
our customers and investors. I am confident that they will perform at
the same high level that buySAFE is known for. If you need to contact
anyone at buySAFE in the future, I suggest you touch base with Jeff
Grass, buySAFE’s CEO, at jgrass@buysafe.com or Tim Woda, buySAFE’s VP
of Biz Dev and Sales, at twoda@buysafe.com. I am quite sure they can
either assist you directly or point you to the person that will.
As
for me, I am stepping back, spreading my wings a bit, and looking for
new challenges. I am thinking about new venture ideas, consulting and
advising for a number of companies, and considering interesting
executive leadership opportunities. Of course, drop me a note if you
think I might be helpful with anything you are working on. I am always
willing to assist if I can.
My buySAFE email address and phone
are no longer actively monitored, so in the future, please use my new
contact information below (You can also download my updated Vcard). I
look forward to catching-up with you soon, and of course, I will keep
you up to date on my future adventures as well.
Best regards,
Steve
****************************
Steven L. Woda
202-321-5482
steve@swoda.com
http://www.stevewoda.com
http://www.linkedin.com/in/stevewoda
http://twitter.com/stevewoda