Posted by Mark Blei in : Uncategorized , Posted by Mark Blei in : Uncategorized , HELSINKI – The world’s top cellphone maker Nokia said on Monday it has agreed to buy social networking start-up Plazes as part of its major push into offering Internet services.
Plazes (http://www.plazes.com/) provides location-aware services that people can use to plan, record, and share their social activities.
Nokia did not disclose the value of the deal.
Read The Rest Here—> Nokia buys social networking site Plazes
Posted by Mark Blei in : Uncategorized , WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Yahoo Inc’s deal to put some Google Inc ads on its searches may hurt the industry, and warrants monitoring by the U.S. Justice Department even if the agency eventually approves the deal, according to the top lawmaker on the Senate’s antitrust panel.
Sen. Herb Kohl, a Wisconsin Democrat and chair of the antitrust subcommittee, did not urge that the deal be blocked, saying on Thursday his panel was not privy to “confidential business information supplied by the companies to the department.”
But he added that “should the amount of advertising outsourced by Yahoo to Google grow significantly, we believe the threat to competition will also increase.”
READ THE REST HERESen. Kohl asks for continued Google, Yahoo monitoring | Technology | Reuters
Posted by Mark Blei in : Uncategorized , ..
Jun 29 – A man who put his life up for sale on online auction site eBay found it wasn’t worth quite as much as he thought.
Ian Usher who lives the Australian city of Perth decided to sell his life after the break up of his five-year marriage.
Bids as high as 2.2 million Australian dollars were placed when a glitch on the system allowed bogus bidders to participate in the auction.
Michelle Carlile-Alkhouri reports.
HAVE A GREAT WEEKEND ALL! AND SEE YOU MONDAY – THE DL MAD BLOGGER
Posted by Mark Blei in : Uncategorized , ..
Jun. 30 – Microsoft is announcing new services intended to reflect the social phenomenon taking place on the internet.
MSN Reporter which allows users to rate and share articles is set for European rollout over the summer. MSN Toolbar is billed as a way for consumers to access their favourite MSN content and information anywhere on the web.
Reuters Technology Correspondent Matt Cowan reports the efforts to reposition MSN as a ’social portal.’
Posted by Mark Blei in : Uncategorized , SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – An Internet analyst for a major Wall Street firm argues in a new report that Google Inc and Amazon.com Inc will be long-term winners, while Yahoo and IAC InterActiveCorp fall by the wayside and eBay Inc becomes a merger target.
Sanford C. Bernstein analyst Jeffrey Lindsay argues in a 310-page report entitled “U.S. Internet: The End of the Beginning” to be published on Tuesday that Google and Amazon are best placed to withstand the current economic downturn.
“We expect two players to continue to perform strongly, Google and Amazon,” Lindsay writes. “Both Google and Amazon.com are still racking up annual growth rates in the 30-40 percent range, with only a relatively modest slowdown in sight.”
Lindsay reiterates his previous positions that Yahoo eventually will be sold to Microsoft Corp and that Barry Diller’s IAC e-commerce conglomerate will go ahead in August with its five-way split-up, as planned.
“Arguably the weakest players have strayed furthest from their original competences and have been operating largely as conglomerates,” the Bernstein analyst says of Yahoo and IAC.
In the short-run, however, Lindsay believes Yahoo will see gains if it reaches a deal to turn over some part of its search advertising sales to Google to run or if Microsoft resumes acquisition negotiations.
He argues that eBay “could potentially attract a Microsoft-like suitor in the future,” especially if growth in its core auctions business fails to resume and because eBay could spin off its PayPal or Skype units to make a deal work.
Even the strongest companies have weakness, Lindsay argues. Google has yet to articulate a compelling strategy to achieve the same level of strength on the emerging mobile Internet that it has on the computer-based Web.
Amazon and eBay are likely to be forced eventually to pay state sales taxes. Ironically, he notes, this may work to their advantage as large companies, because they have more resources than smaller e-commerce players to collect such taxes.
(Reporting by Eric Auchard; Editing by Kim Coghill)
Posted by Mark Blei in : Uncategorized , Moustache madness sweeps Germany
Apr. 19 – German beard and moustache championship draws more than 100 men from various countries to compete for most extravagant look.
Organised by the Eastern Bavarian Beard and Moustache Club, the event drew competitors from many countries including Britain, Germany and Switzerland.
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Posted by Mark Blei in : Uncategorized , Odd candidates spice up Japanese national election
By Takanori Isshiki
TOKYO (Reuters) – A fixed smile on his face, a middle-aged Japanese man dances to blaring ’80s dance tunes on top of a van in Tokyo’s bustling Shibuya district.
Passers-by look on quizzically.
But for Mac Akasaka, 58, a former businessman running in an election for parliament’s upper house Sunday without the backing of any major political party, the dancing is no joke.
“Low-profile candidates like me need some kind of twist to get attention from the public, otherwise nobody would listen to my speech no matter how hard I try,” Akasaka told Reuters.
“So I started dancing before the speech.”
Resorting to wacky campaigns is not uncommon in Japan, where lesser-known candidates say a 50-year-old election law hampers efforts to get their messages across to the masses.
The law prohibits candidates from using visual images that can reach a large, unspecified number of people, and has been interpreted to ban campaigning on TV and on the Internet
Akasaka has also grabbed voters’ attention with his quirky “smile therapy” exercises, in which he massages the edges of his mouth higher with sweeping hands.
He advocates “smile power” to revive the Japanese people’s hearts, and calls his one-man organization the “Smile Party.”
Another independent candidate is managing to win grins from voters, if not necessarily ballots, with his offbeat campaign.
Yoshiro Nakamatsu, the self-proclaimed inventor of the floppy disc and more than 3,000 other gadgets, is back campaigning after a failed bid for the Tokyo governorship in March.
In his campaign pledge, the 79-year-old Nakamatsu — who calls himself “Dr NakaMats” — boasts that his newly invented “HOD” technology for converting water into fuel for cars can help fight global warming.
His Web site says his aphrodisiac “Love Jet” perfume is guaranteed to turn around Japan’s rock-bottom birth rate.
For most voters, such offbeat candidates are fun to watch, but not to put in office.
“Though their efforts should be respected, I don’t think just blaring their names helps to boost their campaign,” said Kiyokazu Anbiru, 42, who heads a charity.
Posted by Mark Blei in : Uncategorized , Nigerian pupils browse porn on donated laptops
Thu 19 Jul 2007, 15:34 GMT
ABUJA, July 19 (Reuters Life!) – Nigerian schoolchildren who received laptops from a U.S. aid organisation have used them to explore pornographic sites on the Internet, the official News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reported on Thursday.
NAN said its reporter had seen pornographic images stored on several of the children’s laptops.
“Efforts to promote learning with laptops in a primary school in Abuja have gone awry as the pupils freely browse adult sites with explicit sexual materials,” NAN said.
A representative of the One Laptop Per Child aid group was quoted as saying that the computers, part of a pilot scheme, would now be fitted with filters.
Police excuse angry computer user for Outburst
BERLIN (Reuters) – A German man who startled his neighbors when he hurled his computer out of the window in the middle of the night, was let off for disturbing the peace by police who sympathized with his technical frustrations.
Police in the northern city of Hanover said they would not press charges after responding to calls made by residents in an apartment block who were woken by a loud crash in the early hours of Saturday.
Officers found the street and pavement covered in electronic parts and discovered who the culprit was.
Asked what had driven him to the night-time outburst, the 51-year-old man said he had simply got annoyed with his computer.
“Who hasn’t felt like doing that?” said a police spokesman.
While escaping any official sanction the man was made to clear up the debris.
