Marketing

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 […]

It seems improbable, even at this early stage, that 21-year-old Rin (a nom de plume) might one day be granted a place alongside Fyodor Dostoevsky in the pantheon of literary giants.
The nursery school teacher from Kokura, in Japan’s south, is celebrated for her skill with stichomythia and crude colloquialisms but not, like the great […]

In the year ahead, a long-heralded revolution in wireless communications will finally come to pass. It may throw handset makers and service providers into turmoil, but over time it should be great for consumers. Fast, wireless data will become more widely available, the choice of data devices and mobile handsets will expand, and service just […]

The growing confrontation between Google and Microsoft promises to be an epic business battle. It is likely to shape the prosperity and progress of both companies, and also inform how consumers and corporations work, shop, communicate and go about their digital lives. Google sees all of this happening on remote servers in faraway data centers, […]

Amazon.com may not offer free delivery on books in France, the high court in Versailles has ruled.
The action, brought in January 2004 by the French Booksellers’ Union, accused Amazon of offering illegal discounts on books and even of selling some books below cost.
Amazon Ordered to End Free Delivery on Books in France - New York […]