The Great Geek Manual News

It’s dawn at a Los Angeles apartment overlooking the Hollywood Hills. Laura Sweet, a graphic designer in her early 40s, sits at a computer and begins to surf the Net. She searches intently, unearthing such bizarre treasures for sale as necklaces for trees and tattoo-covered pigs. As usual, she posts them on a shopping site called ThisNext.com. Asked why in the world she spends so many hours each week working for free, she answers: “It’s a labor of love.”

Later this morning, a half-hour’s drive to the west, a serial entrepreneur named Gordon Gould strolls into the Santa Monica offices of ThisNext. Gould has managed to entice an army of volunteers, including Sweet, to pour passion and intelligence into his site for free. Traffic on ThisNext is soaring, with unique visits nearly tripling in a year, to 3.5 million monthly. What’s in it for the volunteer workers? “They can build their brands,” Gould says. “In their niches, they can become mini-Oprahs.”

Here’s how it works. Entrepreneurs like Gould build meeting places that provide visitors with tools to express themselves, mingle with friends and strangers, and establish their personal “brands.” The result, when it works, is an outpouring of creativity. It has produced not only ThisNext, but also YouTube and even American Idol.

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Source: Business Week

Verizon Communications has won USD$31.15 million in damages in a cybersquatting case it brought against domain registry OnlineNIC, while Microsoft is seeking judgment against the same company and Yahoo has recently filed similar charges.

Verizon had accused OnlineNIC of registering at least 663 domain names identical or confusingly similar to Verizon trademarks. The domain names listed in the complaint, filed June 6, included verizon-cellular.com and buyverizon.net. Both of those domains are now in the hands of other companies.

OnlineNIC must now pay Verizon $31.15 million and transfer the disputed domain names to Verizon, according to the default judgment handed down by Judge Jeremy Fogel in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in San José on Dec. 19. In addition, OnlineNIC may not register or trade in further domain names containing Verizon trademarks, Fogel ruled.

The win was an easy one for Verizon — although it may have trouble collecting the sum awarded, as OnlineNIC did not oppose the company’s request for default judgment.

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Source: Network World

A new generation of designers and developers is putting the social element back into video games, using online networks such as Facebook as platforms to turn people from across the world into poker aces, boffins and the proud and sometimes obsessive owners of virtual pets.

These new games give people the ability to play with their friends rather than strangers, which has sent usage through the roof.

Facebook is already seeing over 2bn minutes of game play a month, and the longer people stay online the more chance the game’s developer and the network itself have to make money out of them, most obviously through advertising.

Investors have spotted the opportunity of social gaming and even as the economic climate turns chilly they have been putting funds into these businesses. Though most social networks have their roots, or at least owners, on the west coast of the US, one of the most successful social gaming companies is based in Britain.

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Source: The UK’s Guardian

A UFO group in Hong Kong has condemned the city’s largest university for canceling a course on ufology because, it said, of faculty objections to the subject.

The course was set to begin last September as an optional subject for University of Hong Kong students in a joint project between the university and the Hong Kong Institute of Ufology, local newspaper Apple Daily reported Monday.

The course was delayed and discussions were held on offering it at a later date after some academics expressed reservations about its content, Moon Fong, a committee member of the institute, told AFP.

“Some members of the university’s science faculty were concerned that the course would present only the views of the UFO experts,” Fong said.

“But we believed that they were just worried about the possibility of ufology becoming a mainstream discipline at the university,” she said.

Fong said her institute was disappointed to see the course dropped and said it amounted to a suppression of ufologists, which she said was a common problem at academic institutions overseas.

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Source: Phys Org

Two-thirds of online shoppers carry out internet-based research about retailers before making a purchase, yet only half of retailers actually monitor their own reputation, according to new research by 1&1 Internet.

The hosting firm surveyed over 1,500 consumers and over 400 companies and found that nearly half of UK shoppers read online reviews or recommendations about specific products before buying them.

One in three consumers are willing to publish a review online, 44 per cent of men and 34 per cent of women frequently rely on independent star ratings and rankings, and one in four actively seek customer service commitments on retailers’ web sites.

Yet online retailers seem to be ignoring the increasing importance to customers of online reviews, blogs and other information. Some 48 per cent of retailers said that they have no means to help influence or control their online reputation.

Half admitted to having never monitored the internet for comments or customer reviews posted online, and just 30 per cent said that they actively and regularly search the internet for customer comments and reviews published on consumer websites, social networks and blogs.

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Source: iT News

Hulu hosts more than 1,000 shows, from Family Guy to Saturday Night Live. There are more than 130 content providers, not only NBC and Fox, but Sony Pictures Television, MGM Studios, Lionsgate, Paramount Pictures and PBS. The site’s database of full-length films also has grown. ComScore pegged its monthly visitors for October at 24 million.

In the Wild West that is online video, Hulu.com has proven to be a trailblazing answer to how professional content can thrive on the Web.

It’s this year’s pick for Web site of the year.

“This is period of great experimentation in regard to media, in regard to online video,” said Hulu chief executive officer Jason Kilar in a recent interview. “You’ve seen a lot, you’re probably going to see even more in terms of various business models, various interface designs. I personally love to operate in moments of time like that.”

Hulu officially launched March 12, a result of the unlikely collaboration between News Corp. and NBC Universal. Normally, such corporate fusion in new mediums doesn’t pan out.

The blogosphere was, to say the least, doubtful. Before its name was announced, bloggers derided the project as “Clown Co.”

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Source: News Factor

In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, Andy Burnham says he believes that new standards of decency need to be applied to the web. He is planning to negotiate with Barack Obama’s incoming American administration to draw up new international rules for English language websites.

The Cabinet minister describes the internet as “quite a dangerous place” and says he wants internet-service providers (ISPs) to offer parents “child-safe” web services.

Giving film-style ratings to individual websites is one of the options being considered, he confirms. When asked directly whether age ratings could be introduced, Mr Burnham replies: “Yes, that would be an option. This is an area that is really now coming into full focus.”

ISPs, such as BT, Tiscali, AOL or Sky could also be forced to offer internet services where the only websites accessible are those deemed suitable for children.

Mr Burnham also uses the interview to indicate that he will allocate money raised from the BBC’s commercial activities to fund other public-service broadcasting such as Channel Four. He effectively rules out sharing the BBC licence fee between broadcasters as others have recommended.

His plans to rein in the internet, and censor some websites, are likely to trigger a major row with online advocates who ferociously guard the freedom of the world wide web.

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Source: The UK Telegraph

Remember the ill-fated Google-killer Cuil? Named ‘Cuill’ and very much in stealth mode for the first part of the year, they finally emerged end of July 2008 with a ‘massive’ search engine that would rival the most popular search engines of our time with an enormous index, an innovative interface and some nifty features.

Rival, it never did. The launch of the search engine was nothing but a classic PR trainwreck, with much hype and little to show for. Cuil failed to deliver good enough results to drive anyone to change their search behavior, and quickly became the subject of backlash and criticism because of their poor performance and indexing methods that actually took websites down in the process. Last time we reported about Cuil, was when their VP of Products (and AltaVista founder) Louis Monier quietly resigned from the startup.

With the end of the year approaching, I took a peek at how they’re doing traffic-wise out of sheer curiosity. After all, with no less than $33 million in funding and a founding management team consisting of ex-Google search experts, something had to give, right?

Well, no. Cuil isn’t performing well any way you look at it, and I can only imagine how nervous the startup’s management team and investors must be by now. Based on the numbers and graphs we gather from Google Trends, Alexa, Compete and Quantcast, you could even say search engine traffic is nearing rock bottom. Apart from that, a Cuil search for ‘TechCrunch’ still displays a Gmail logo rather than our own.

Source: Tech Crunch

For retailers, the holiday shopping season was the worst in decades. Even so, Amazon.com said Friday that it had its “best ever” holiday.

On Amazon’s peak day, Dec. 15, customers ordered a record 6.3 million items, or almost 73 items each second, the company said. Last year, the peak day was Dec. 10, when customers ordered 5.4 million items.

Amazon’s press release has all sorts of entertaining factoids: the weight of all GPS devices it sold from Black Friday through December equals the combined weight of 151 Mini Coopers; it sold enough “Breaking Dawn” books that, if stacked end to end, they would reach the summit of Mount Everest eight times; and its top sellers in electronics included a 52-inch Samsung LCD HDTV and the eight-gigabyte Apple iPod Touch.

But the numbers do little to tell us how good (or bad) Amazon’s season really was. The company didn’t disclose whether shoppers bought more or fewer high-priced items than in previous years or whether discounts ate into profit margins. It didn’t disclose revenue or even the total volume of products it shipped throughout the holiday season.

What’s more, as consumers do more and more of their shopping online, where Amazon is the leading retailer, a “record” season at Amazon is hardly surprising. Amazon has claimed that its holidays were the “best ever” or “busiest ever” every year since at least 2002.

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Source: The New York Times

Todd Pierce recently put his job on the line.

To meet the computing needs of 16,300 employees and contractors at Genentech Inc., Pierce took a chance and decided not to rely entirely on business software from Microsoft Relevant Products/Services, IBM or another long-established supplier that would have let Genentech own the technology. Instead, Pierce decided to rent these indispensable products from Google Inc.

The Internet search and advertising leader will run Genentech’s e-mail, as well as some word processing, spreadsheet and calendar applications, and it will do it over an online connection — an unconventional approach called “cloud computing.”

The decision has turned Genentech, a biotechnology pioneer, into a lab rat for Google and other alternative software services trying to convince skeptical corporate decision makers that cloud computing is more than a pie-in-the-sky concept.

In the process, Google Inc. hopes to bleed revenue from Microsoft Corp. and surpass its biggest rival in the race to control the gears of computing.

Genentech’s chief executive, Arthur Levinson, sits on Google’s board of directors, but Pierce insists those ties didn’t propel his leap of faith.

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Source: News Factor

The light from an MP3 player saved two lost tourists from a chilly night stuck out in the snowy Swiss mountains.

The pair - a skier and snowboarder, both from France - had got lost late in the day Friday outside marked runs near the resort of Savognin in southeast Switzerland, according to Gery Baumann, spokesman for mountain rescue service Rega.

They were able to alert authorities using a mobile phone, but it then ran out of battery power, Baumann claims.

“The two winter sports enthusiasts were found by the crew of the Rega helicopter shortly after midnight - thanks to the faint light of their MP3 player,” he says.

The two men had only mild hypothermia.

Source: PC Pro

Lead kernel developer Linus Torvalds announced the official release of Linux 2.6.28 on Wednesday. The new version introduces some noteworthy changes that will put the kernel in a strong position for growth and advancement in the coming year. This latest release follows a few months after version 2.6.27, which was released in October.

“It doesn’t really matter what day it is, or what holiday (if any) you’re celebrating, because even if you sit at home, alone in your dank basement, without any holidays or friends, I bring you a tiding of great cheer: you can now download Linux-2.6.28, and compile it to your hearts content,” wrote kernel chieftain Torvalds in a message to the kernel mailing list. “In fact, even _if_ you have friends or family, leave them to their endless toil over that christmas ham or turkey, and during the night, when they’re asleep, you can give them that magical present of a newly updated computer. When they wake up tomorrow morning, tell them how you saw Santa crawl down the chimney with his USB stick in hand, updating the OS of all good boys and girls.”

One of the most significant additions in 2.6.28 is the Graphics Execution Manager (GEM), a new GPU memory manager that was developed primarily by Keith Packard and Eric Anholt of Intel. In some early benchmarks that Intel conducted back in May, GEM was said to boost framerates by between 50 and 60 percent for Intel 915 graphics hardware. GEM represents a significant and much-needed step towards modernization for the Linux graphics stack.

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Source: Ars Technica

Apple’s true believers are being put to the test. Late Tuesday the company announced that Steve Jobs will not be giving the keynote address at the annual Macworld Conference and Expo. Apple also said that Phil Schiller, its top marketing guy, will be giving the keynote this coming year, and that this will be the last Macworld in which Apple will participate.

Jobs has battled pancreatic cancer and has been looking exceptionally thin since the summer. Rumors that he’d be skipping the event had circulated for days. Still, the announcement itself was about as shocking as hearing that Barack Obama would be skipping the Inauguration and sending Joe Biden in his stead. (See pictures of Steve Jobs on the job.)

Steve Dowling, an Apple spokesman, deflected any questions about Jobs’ health. When asked if Jobs canceled because of illness, Dowling said, “Phil is giving the keynote because this is Apple’s last year in the show, and it doesn’t make sense for us to make a major investment in a trade show we will no longer be attending.” Asked again about Jobs’ health, Dowling gave a similar answer, never using the word Jobs or anything related to his condition.

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Source: Time

Some of the biggest names in film and TV have called on the government to prevent internet piracy. Kenneth Branagh and Richard Curtis are among the directors and producers who have signed a letter demanding action be taken on illegal file sharing.

Published in the Times, the letter says TV and film-makers are “very concerned” that their work is being “undermined”.

They want the government to force internet providers to stop customers from downloading films and TV shows.

“We are very concerned that the successes of the creative industries in the UK are being undermined by the illegal online file-sharing of film and TV content,” the group of more than 100 signatories said.

‘Untold impact’

“At a time when so many jobs are being lost in the wider economy, it is especially important that this issue be taken seriously by the government and that it devotes the resources necessary to enforce the law.”

It adds that if internet service providers “are not prepared to act responsibly, they should be compelled to do so”.

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Source: The BBC