Categoria: Blog

An open letter to Steve Ballmer  —  Hi, this is François, from Mandriva.  —  I’m sure we’re way too small for you to know me.  You know, we’re one of these tiny Linux company working hard for our place on the market.  We produce a Linux Distro, Mandriva Linux.

Source:   Mandriva Blog

Author:   François Bancilhon

Link:   http://blog.mandriva.com/2007/10/31/an-open-letter-to…

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Web Bubble 2.0  —  Well, maybe it is a bubble.  But out in Silicon Valley, they don’t think of that as a bad thing at all.  —  T  —  he Silicon Valley venture capitalist Michael Moritz is kinda-sorta the West Coast version of New York’s own Steve Rattner.

Source:   New York Magazine

Author:   John Heilemann

Link:   http://nymag.com/news/politics/powergrid/39954/

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AdBrite puts spotlight on Facebook application ads  —  Online advertising firm AdBrite is set to announce on Tuesday a new program to serve ads for third-party Facebook applications.  Considering it a niche “channel” alongside existing AdBrite verticals, the company has launched …

Source:   CNET News.com

Author:   Caroline McCarthy

Link:   http://www.news.com/8301-13577_3-9807263-36.html

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Plentyoffish: 1-Man Company May Be Worth $1Billion  —  We’ve written before about PlentyOfFish, a leading online dating site that is run by a single person and is raking in money.  Markus Frind is the singular force behind PlentyOfFish.  At the time of our last review, June 2006 …

Source:   Read/WriteWeb

Author:   Richard MacManus

Link:   http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives…

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Gmail’s New Version Is Now Available  —  The new version of Gmail I was talking about the other day is already available in some Gmail accounts.  If you see a link to a “newer version” at the top of the page, click on it and enjoy the new features: mail prefetching, updated contact manager and other small updates.

Source:   Google Operating System

Author:   Ionut Alex Chitu

Link:   http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/10/gmails-new…

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The Web 2.0 World is Skunk Drunk on Its Own Kool-Aid  —  This is a sad time for the web.  It’s as almost somber as the time just before the last bubble burst in 2000.  I was working in PR with dot-com startups at the time and the way I feel now is how I did back then.  I wish I didn’t, but I do.

Source:   Micro Persuasion

Author:   Steve Rubel

Link:   http://www.micropersuasion.com/2007/10/the-web-20…

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The FBI recently released government documents that technology and privacy analysts are now beginning to digest and comment on pertaining to the domestic wiretapping issues here in the United States. AT&T has been using a technology entitled “communities of interest.”

Anyone can read the documentation first hand, but the layman’s explanation seems to be that by use of several seemingly simple data-mining algorithms, they scan through call logs made on AT&T’s network that scan the connections between phone numbers. The process seems to work like a game of “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” game, where folks are judged by what the paper calls “guilt by association.”

Essentially, if you talk to someone who talks to terrorists, your phone records could be in scrutiny. The research for this technology was done pre-2000, in an effort by AT&T to curtail those who made fraudulent credit-card calls, but has since been re-applied by the FBI to discern new people of interest.  Gone are the days of the McCarthy era, when folks were solicited to name names – your phone company now (at no extra cost to you!) provides this service for you.

[via Freedom to Tinker]

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The Republican debate is back on for YouTube and CNN’s joint efforts to engage the video-sharing crowd with an online syndication for user participation. After the Democrats held their online debate on YouTube a few months back, the Republicans, especially Mitt Romney, seemed even less inclined to participate in the debate, which allowed viewers to post questions in video format.

So with few supporters and an apparent scheduling conflict, it looked like the Republican debate on YouTube would never happen. But candidates John McCain, Ron Paul, Mike Huckabee, Fred Thompson and Tom Tancredo have signed on to appear at Mahaffey Theatre in St. Petersburg, FL. for the debate, which will be held on Wed. November 28.

Only a handful of the Republican presidential hopefuls have leveraged the Internet to its fullest extent, and in general seem less likely to reach out to younger demographics on many fronts. Will the YouTube debate help Republicans appeal to a younger crowd, and will the debate even pull in a large crowd without all the heavy hitters, as Romney won’t be present?

In other news, the Democrats continue to see more acivity with online social networks, with Obama gearing up for his dialogue which will be syndicated today on MySpace and various channels

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VMIX, which powers social networking communities for a number of leading media brands, has raised $16.5 million in Series B funding. VMIX offers is own online community where users can upload videos and create their own channels, but also partners with popular sites including the Independent Film Channel and Media General.

This round of funding comes from ATA Ventures, JK&B Capital, Mission Ventures, and Enterprise Partners.

Vitrue, which also offers private label video services, announced a $10 million round of funding earlier today.

[via PEHub]

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Reimagining the Automobile Industry by Selling the Electricity  —  Shai Agassi, a Silicon Valley technologist who was in competition to become chief executive of SAP, one of the world’s largest software companies, has re-emerged with a grand plan to reinvent the world’s automobile industry around battery-powered all-electric cars.

Source:   New York Times

Author:   John Markoff

Link:   http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/29/technology/29agassi…

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