Marketing

The Associated Press: Microsoft to let PC users turn off IE Web browser

Windows 7, the successor to the much-maligned Vista, isn’t expected to reach consumers until next year, but more than a million people are already testing early versions. A pair of bloggers tinkering with settings stumbled upon one they hadn’t seen before: The ability [...]

This week, Michael Phelps signed a deal worth more than $1 million to advertise Mazda in China. Jerry Seinfeld earned a reported $10 million to appear in Microsoft’s recent television campaign. But the person who may be the biggest celebrity pitchman in the world is not earning a penny for his work.  For BlackBerry, Obama’s [...]

“It requires neither imagination nor acumen to predict that our current conglomerating, lowest-common-denominator, demographically targeted publishing industry will soon achieve its streamlined apotheosis—a single, worldwide, Exxon Mobil–owned literary empire offering up seven books twice per year.  …”  If Books Could Kill

I was lusting after a 3G, but now… I dunno.
One of the original partners in the Open Handset Alliance behind the open-source mobile OS, Motorola already has 50 people on its Android team and is growing that to 350, according to an Android developer approached by a headhunter to join the team. That is a [...]

Thanks to Fred Langa’s blog.
Crowd mobs Taco Bell opening: Rutland Herald Online
Rain fell through the Wednesday afternoon lunch hour, but that didn’t stop hundreds of local chalupa-starved residents from lining up for the grand opening of the new Taco Bell on Route 7 in Rutland Town.

I received the following from Zoho this morning.  We hear a lot about Google, and it’s nice to see the competition doing well.
We are delighted that Swisscom (incumbent telco in Switzerland) has chosen Zoho for a six month pilot for its Zoho Business Suite which is now available on their Software-as-a-Service portal Teamnet.
Zoho and Swisscom [...]

I want a phone with no external buttons. If you have to put external buttons on it, at least recess the bloody things! Perhaps two: one to shut the alarm clock off, and one to snooze it. The same two could answer the speakerphone and reject it.
Other than that, forget [...]

Nokia Throws Open Mobile Software
The Finnish company announced a plan to buy the 52.1% of shares it doesn’t already own in London-based Symbian, the leading maker of operating system software for advanced mobile phones. In an industry-shifting move, Nokia will merge the company with parts of its own organization and then create an open-source foundation [...]

Alas, even as the floodtides of rectitude threaten to give us all a cleansing soak, the Culture War’s most dogged mercenaries grow increasingly desperate to sound notes of alarm. The Parents Television Council is so eager to characterize your flat-screen as the portal to Satan’s eternal multiplex that it actually characterizes the plastic surgeries on [...]

I ended up at Best Buy, and got a 22″ LCD (with zero dead/stuck pixels) for $229. Picture’s bright and gorgeous, excellent text clarity, good contrast (1000+/1) so photos look good, etc.
The big surprise to me was the brand: Fred Langa: What comes next?: an old brand returns to high tech

Get yourself an XP system while you still can - WindowsSecrets.com
With Windows XP scheduled to disappear from store shelves on June 30, time is running out to buy a computer with that venerable OS preinstalled.

The company will use the name Atom in marketing a new microprocessor line that has two variants. One chip, previously known by the code name Silverthorne, is designed to be the calculating engine for pocket-sized gadgets that Intel calls MIDs, for mobile Internet devices. The other chip to carry the Atom brand, code-named Diamondville, is [...]

On Jan. 22, Apple reported that it sold 3.7 million units of its smartphones worldwide through the end of 2007. But AT&T, the exclusive U.S. iPhone reseller and by far the largest buyer of the devices, reported that its subscribers activated fewer than 2 million units last year. The big question on the minds of [...]

Tech Beat FCC’s Auction: Not Going According to Plan? - BusinessWeek
Right now, bidders don’t seem to be overly excited about chunks of spectrum with the FCC-mandated open provisions. Networks built on this spectrum would have to allow all software and devices to connect to them.

TechCrunch informs us of a dirty little trick NS has come up with to revive its flagging domains sales.  [Opinion: it sucks]
As of Tuesday, if a user does a search on the site for a domain name,Network Solution immediately registers the domain in their own name. Ifthe user then goes to a discount registrar to [...]

Fred Vogelstein at Wired brings us the inside poop on the iPhone’s development, and explains — succinctly — how it has managed to change the wireless industry.
“This 4.8-ounce sliver of glass and aluminum is an explosive device that
has forever changed the mobile-phone business, wresting power from
carriers and giving it to manufacturers, developers, and consumers.
The Untold [...]

 NEW YORK (AP) — Your cell phone is a potential gold mine for marketers: It can reveal where you are, whom you call and even what music you like.
Considering the phone is usually no more than a few feet away, these are powerful clues for figuring out just the right moment to deliver the right [...]

The Sony Corporation is now selling a futuristic TV in Japan that is only about one-eighth of an inch thick — that’s one notch on a tailor’s tape measure.
The new televisions, which began arriving in Japanese stores this month , have an 11-inch screen and cost 200,000 yen (almost $1,800), said Jon Reilly, a product [...]

Researchers from Google have documented serious vulnerabilities in
Adobe Flash content which leave tens of thousands of websites
susceptible to attacks that steal the personal details of visitors. …
One reason for the sheer volume of vulnerable applets: SWF files generated by six of the more popular content development tools automatically contain the bugs, according to the book. [...]

Security researchers have identified a Trojan that hijacks Google text advertisements, replacing them with “ads” from a different provider that are likely to be laced with spyware.
The Qhost-WU modifies an infected computer’s hosts file, thereby poisoning systems with bogus DNS lookup records. The hosts file matches domain names of websites with corresponding IP addresses. By [...]