The Financial Times reports today that Microsoft on Sunday night ruled itself out of a white knight bid for PeopleSoft, who is fighting a $7.7 billion hostile takeover by Oracle. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told the Financial Times that PeopleSoft did not compare with SAP, the German enterprise software vendor that Microsoft considered buying last […]
Category: Web/Tech
33% of IT jobs are Microsoft-related
An IDC study commissioned by Microsoft reveals the impact of the software industry on European economies, The Register reports. In 19 countries surveyed (Austria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Russia, South Africa, Spain, Turkey and the UK) nine million people are employed in the IT […]
Apple’s blog-like website
Take a look at the start page of Apple’s updated website. Very blog like with its chronologically-ordered information and XML buttons for subscribing to RSS webfeeds. Apple | Start While it’s not a blog by the accepted definition (no commenting nor trackbacks, for instance), this is a good indicator of how the current differentiators between […]
Business models for blog technologies
David Teten and Scott Allan of Online Business Networks have written a useful article on Twelve Business Models for Blog Technologies. Some interesting ideas if you’re thinking about business or investment opportunities around blogging. Summary: Traditional businesses leveraging blogs: Individual virtual presence – the use of a blog to enhance your visibility and professional reputation. […]
UK online media body looks at blogging and P2P
The UK’s Association of Online Publishers (AOP) is forming a working group to help members address trends in web content, such as blogging and peer-to-peer networks, reports dotJournalism. AOP is an industry body formed in 2002 to present a unified voice to industry and government, representing about 130 online publishers in the UK. Its board […]
New knowledge portal for communicators launched
Communitelligence.com launched this week as the first global knowledge-sharing portal aimed at improving organizational and human communication. The site is being built and supported by global communication leaders, associations, schools and businesses linked to the common goals of elevating the profession and sharing best practices that can make all forms of communication more effective. The […]
Six Apart gets more VC funding
The future is looking rosy for Six Apart, the company behind the TypePad blog hosting service (the one I use) and the Movable Type blog publishing platform. Business 2.0 journalist Om Malik published an exclusive announcement on his blog yesterday stating that Six Apart is about to secure more venture funding in their series B […]
Flexible corporate ethics and diminished trust
In an article on 5 October, eWeek analyzes whether PeopleSoft would consider a takeover by Oracle at the right price and raises questions about PeopleSoft ex-CEO Craig Conway’s integrity. Consider this comment from the article: The [PeopleSoft] board decided to fire CEO Craig Conway because it was dismayed by his display of “situational ethics” when […]
Google: No to browser, Yes to more search
Detailed report in today’s Financial Times about Google. On whether Google is going to launch its own browser: Speaking at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco, [John Doerr, one of Google’s non-executive directors] denied recent speculation that Google was planning to launch its own internet browser, to compete with Microsoft’s dominant Internet Explorer. On […]
Business 2.0 experiments
Business 2.0 has placed the complete content of its October issue online, for free access. The magazine says this open access is an experiment as they try out a new technology. So, don’t assume the magazine will be freely online after October. I assume their tech experiment is to do with a new online delivery […]
Check your .org from your .com
Oops! Easy to mix up domain suffixes (.com, etc) in a web address and get the wrong one. Precisely what US VP Dick Cheney did in a televised debate with his Democratic challenger, John Edwards. BBC News reports that, when answering accusations by Mr Edwards, Mr Cheney told viewers to visit factcheck.com. But rather than […]
BBC World radio broadcasts about blogs
Robert Scoble comments about a radio broadcast on the BBC World Service yesterday about blogging which features him and his blog. The broadcast, by Dow Jones journalist Jeremy Wagstaff, gives an overview of what blogs are, how they’ve grown in the past few years and why companies should get involved with them. He uses Scoble […]
RSS: Three ways it can make your web life better
Excellent ‘easy as 1-2-3’ concise guide to getting more out of RSS, written for CNET Reviews by Chris Pirillo of Lockergnome: Get a more up-to-date search engine: New search engines such as Feedster scrape results from RSS feeds, giving you up-to-the-minute results. There’s no easier way to keep an eye on the indexing of your […]
Get Firefox, but you still need Internet Explorer
I switched to Firefox a few months ago. Since then, I’ve not had a single case of browser hijacking that seemed to happen all the time with Internet Explorer. Every time I ran Ad-Aware (and I do that once a week), it would inevitably find a registry key, helper object or some such that had […]
iPod US marketshare rises to 82 percent
After clothes, money and a car, an iPod is what US teenagers want most this holiday season. A survey of 600 high school students by Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster found Apple‘s digital player No. 4 on their wish list. And the iPod wasn’t even among the items Munster suggested – the kids wrote it […]
Podcasting defined
Scoble’s linkblog points to a good definition of podcasting from Wikipedia: Podcasting is the creation and aggregation of discrete, downloadable media files. Typically, audio files are created on a computer and then uploaded to a web server on the Internet. An RSS 2.0 feed with enclosure tags is then amended each time a new media […]
Windows your way
If you want your Windows without things like Windows Messenger, Internet Explorer or Outlook Express, here’s your opportunity. Dino Nuhagic, a programmer in Croatia, has written nLite Windows Installation Customizer that lets you install Windows 2000, XP or 2003 without including such components. The program’s still in beta and the usual caveats apply if you […]
A lot of Skype
I just logged into Skype and noticed that there are 944,402 users online. That’s the most I’ve seen in one go. An awful lot of people! While the peer-to-peer concept spreads network load, I wonder what would happen if all those people made a Skype call at the same time. Ultra unlikely, I know, but […]
Portable Firefox for your USB drive
Early last month, I posted info on how to run a normal Firefox installation from a USB flash drive. There’s now an even better solution – install a version of Firefox that’s been created specifically for running on a flash drive. John Haller, CEO of Rare Ideas LLC, has repackaged Firefox 0.9.3 and 1.0PR as […]
Wall Street Journal on Denton and Six Apart
The Wall Street Journal has had a close focus on blogging in the past 48 hours. Yesterday, the paper published an interview with Nick Denton, founder of the Gawker Media range of web properties especially popular with US audiences. Denton – an expat Brit – has made a big impact that has rattled the traditional […]