Verizon Wireless and Research in Motion should be thanking one particular customer service rep for stopping at least one customer–me–from defecting to AT&T and the iPhone this week. I had called in to find out about altering my existing family plan and porting my phone over to AT&T when she asked me if I’d heard of the Blackberry Storm.
Blu-ray is in a death spiral. Twelve months from now, Blu-ray will be a videophile niche, not a mass market product. With only a four percent share of U.S. movie disc sales and HD download capability arriving, the Blu-ray disc Association is still smoking dope. Even $150 Blu-ray players won’t save it.
In August, Pandora founder Tim Westergren told the Washington Post that the future could be bleak for the Internet radio station due to high percentage of its revenue being forced to go to royalty fees.
One of the delightful things about creating a new Web application or service is the way in which end users find unintended ways of utilizing said service. That’s a common story we hear from those who’ve created cutting-edge and disruptive products on the Web and something that has become an aspiration of web start-ups.
Google is pondering a floating data center that could be powered and cooled by the ocean. These offshore data centers could sit three to seven miles offshore and reside in about 50 to 70 meters of water.
“You’re fat!” screams the ad. But in an online world of supposedly hyper-targeted advertising it’s hard not to take offense. And offense the Washington Post’s Rachel Beckman takes.
2008 hasn’t been the best year for CAPTCHA-based anti-spam systems; Google’s Gmail CAPTCHA was broken in February, followed by that of Hotmail in April. Researchers have fought back by incorporating images into CAPTCHAs, but this is only effective against bot-driven CAPTCHA crackers.
In my last article I described what it feels like to have your house struck by lightning. Luckily there were no injuries or structural damage (thanks for your kind words in the comments), but our gadgets and other electronics inside the house weren’t so lucky. This is their tale.
Okay, sky-is-falling fans and network neutrality proponents: We’re about to find out whether the Internet can–or will–break down under the strain of mass consumption of streaming video.
I’m not sure whether to call this data portability or just making it easier for social-networking services to spam a user’s contacts. But either way, Microsoft has announced partnerships with LinkedIn, Tagged, Hi5, Bebo and Facebook, to enable Windows Live Messenger users to look for contacts on either of the five social-networking sites and vice versa.
New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s prostitute scandal is all the big news here in New York, but the lesser known tale is how an information system–the U.S. Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network–played a role in his downfall. On the surface, Spitzer’s downfall is a New York tabloid’s dream. Headlines like “Ho No!” scream on the New York Post. Wall Street is downright gleeful about Spitzer’s downfall. But what really snared Spitzer was a money-laundering investigation that was flagged by SARs (suspicious activity reports) that banks have to file with the Treasury to surface everything from money laundering to terrorist activity.
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