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Tailrank DOA 2007-06-30 11:02:33 One of the sites we like is Tail Rank, but it seems to be having more and more problems actually working, and we are wondering if these folks are asleep at the wheel, or is Tailrank DOA?
We popped by this morning and saw
Flipping through the channels this one seemed to be the only one active.
Let alone what we saw on our “personal” page
We are really starting to ask if Tailrank is going to keep on being funky, or if they are going to get their act together and start working on their problems. This is not the first time that we have popped our heads in to see what is up, only to find blank screens, object calls, and “some bad mojo” issues.
It seems like the site is down more than it is up, and if they really want to keep an audience, uptime is something very important to observe.
---Related Articles at TechWag:No Related Posts
Corporate Privacy Wrong Doing 2007-06-30 09:33:57 Trot on over to wired and add a company to the “Evil Corporate PrivacyWrong
doer” entry on 27Stroke6 blog. As wired puts it, as we enter into the weekend where we fought and won our freedom, what corporate entities are doing their best to totally screw up on the privacy issues. The list already is pretty impressive and the facts are there to show that yes, companies like AOL, ATT, Comcast and others have done their best to violate any sense of privacy on the internet we might have.
Heading into freedom weekend, THREAT LEVEL decided to ask readers to indulge in some free speech, whistle blowing, corporate bashing by submitting and voting on which companies have the worst privacy practices. Spammers, squealers and slimy data sellers are all fair game. Source: 27Bstroke6 Wired
This should be a piece of cake, everyone has a grudge, everyone knows some horror story, and others sadly have been caught up in it much to their detriment.
So join in, do some corporate bashing, and have
It is fun to hate Kevin Rose 2007-06-30 08:59:04 So when did Kevin
Rose “Hate Club” start up? Who knows, but right now, the wonderkid of Digg is getting to be less and less liked. Beyond the thrilling uncov article on Pownce, where the word f*ck was used liberally to describe the service, or has Kevin hit his peak as a leader in the internet business realm?
Who knows, but uncov really does not like either Kevin or the new service, Mashible even notes that the “Kevin Rose Hate Club” has an open door policy on membership. And there is not want of people getting into the action. The internet’s bad boy with Digg and AACS, might have been the high point of his career. But then, anyone worth 60 Million dollars really isn’t going to care what the heck the pundits think.
He may be laughing all the way to the bank if Pownce takes off.
Moreover, the sniping that is going on at his heels really will not matter much in the longer run either.
While Digg is ok, there are some funny things going on over there, and just about everyon
Dot worlds takes on Google 2007-06-30 08:38:52 In another thrilling lawsuit against a 3rd party, dot worlds has taken on Google
for the material that is in its index. Ok, that happens, there are three links now that show that material has been pulled from the USA index from Google in response to legal action taken by Dot Worlds.
He called the continued appearance of those criticisms “pure and utter libel,” and believes they were initially posted by business competitors. Retkin said the domain offers in question were “perfectly legitimate.” At this point, Retkin thinks Google has removed about 15,000 links from its international search engines, like Google.co.uk. On that site, a query for dotworlds scam returns notes at the bottom of Google’s search results, saying the company has removed some links in response to a legal request. Source: Web Pro News
Google insight points out that “Google Sued By Another Idiot Who Doesn’t Understand Internet Law” there are some serious issues here, and that Go
Post Iphone hype hang over 2007-06-30 07:29:25 The collective sigh as those who got their apple Iphone go home in triumph, while the disappointed might have popped by the verizon store to check out the deals, all the while still wanting an apple Iphone.
One can almost feel the collective sigh across the blogs as the boys and girls take the big box out from under the Christmas tree and find out that it really is the gigantic robot that they had dreamed of all year long, with proud parents in tow and a video camera.
Robert Scoble – “Amazing device. Amazing line”
Gigaom – “The iFever has spread the nation and the nerds are really going wild.”
Engadget – “iPhone stock update: go get ‘em”
Technorati – too many to list here, but at least the pornographers haven’t gotten to the keyword yet
People went home with their new treasure last night, and the hang over this morning has got to be pretty steep, if the collective at least 700 dollars flat was donated to charity rather than buying the Iphone, you probably
Total Rip Off 2007-06-29 20:32:54 Google Gadgets, and getting cash for your work, well only if you hit up a large number of page views that is way beyond the standard page views that most sites get. Yes, you can get cash for your Google gadget, but you have to have in excess of 250,000 page views on the gadget alone a week to get the cash.
We’ve been hearing from a lot of gadget developers that they’d like to spend more time developing if they could, and we’ve been thinking about ways to help them do that. To that end, we’re happy to announce Google Gadget Ventures, a new pilot program that will help fund third-party gadget development and gadget-related businesses. We plan to offer two types of funding: $5,000 grants for gadget developers who want to invest time making their already successful gadget even better, and $100,000 seed investments for new gadget-related businesses. For now, applications are restricted to gadget developers who have more than 250,000 pageviews per week on their gadge Read more:Total
Verizon ATT and Apple 29 June 2007 2007-06-28 20:50:44 It is going to be a glorious Friday afternoon 29 June 2007 when he Apple
IPhone launches, because the Verizon
store is also going to hold a spiffy launch party so that people can try the “most reliable network”.
BASKING RIDGE, N.J., June 28 — On June 29 Verizon Wireless stores and kiosks will be open until 9:00 p.m. in most markets to give customers plenty of time to Test Drive the leading wireless company with the most reliable voice and data network. Customers will be able to pick up the latest in hot devices including, the LG VX9400 for $99.99 after a $50 rebate with a two-year contract and receive a free Music Essentials Kit that gives them all the tools they need to take their music with them wherever they go. Packaged for immediate fun, the Music Essentials Kit includes a stereo headset, a cable for music transfer from a PC to the LG VX9400 and a 2GB memory card that can store up to 1,000 songs. Source: Fiercewireless
We will be at the Bellevue mall tomorrow to see w
L8R and GUD NITE 2007-07-04 08:24:39 Technorati takes a step and three folks call it a day over at Technorati, which makes us wonder what they are going to do next, then we want to know where Technorati is going to go, then we want to know all sorts of other lurid details that we won’t get for months until someone snaps and starts blabbing.
In the life of companies, there are moments of welcoming and there are times when one must bid a fond farewell. For Technorati, at this moment, we must say a warm goodbye to our colleagues Adam Hertz and Tantek Celik. I remember when both started here at Technorati three years ago, literally on the same day, and find it ironic, therefore, that both will leave us on the same day, even if for different reasons. Source: Technorati Blog
Three years in a technology company isn’t bad, but makes things a lot more interesting when a “mass” departure usually happens. It means in general that these folks might have had some interesting idea that they wanted to pursue. That happens and
Bill Gates is no longer the one 2007-07-04 08:12:33 Bill gates has dropped to the second richest man in the world, which is really well, ok, he is no longer the richest man in the world but he has more spending cash than we do. And we doubt that anyone is going to really have a major fit over the whoel thing.
We are also dead positive that somewhere along the line, Mini-Microsoft is going to have a field day with this one and talk about the Microsoft stock flat line as a culprit as well. But Bill G is not stupid, he diversified long ago.
Mexican telecommunications tycoon Carlos Slim has taken the crown with a net worth of $67.8 billion, according to estimates by a respected financial news site in Mexico, as reported by multiple news services. Source: Seattle PI
Got to hand it to anyone who has a 27% surge in their companies stock price, and this ought to make a lot of investors take a look south of the boarder to see what kind of good things can be picked up in Mexico and in Latin/South America as good ways to make some quick cash. Read more:Gates
, Bill Gates
Does Digg need editors 2007-07-03 09:52:42 Read Write Web asks the question “Does Digg
need Editors” and comes up with some pretty convincing reasons why they desperately need editors to handle bad or poorly worded, spell checked submissions. They use of their own articles as the showcase of a poorly dugg article.
It doesn’t need to be this way. One relatively painless enhancement digg could make to the site is to allow a badly submitted post to be edited - perhaps by a power digg user, who is given privileges to ‘fix’ bad submissions. Normal digg users can then continue to submit posts (because don’t get me wrong, I am very happy for any digg user to submit articles of ours), but at least there is some quality control over the submissions. There would only need to be a flag that the digg story has been edited, and a way for users to check the original submission wording - so that everything is transparent. Source Read Write Web
Technically yes, we agree with Read Write Web (not everyone knows tha
We all wish we had this problem 2007-07-03 09:39:59 Too much funding, we all wish we had that problem, too little funding is more like it, and probably more universal across the startup board than not.
Makes for some interesting concepts, how much money is enough to get you out the door, and into the hands of a public that at best is wildly enthusiastic, and at worst indifferent. One of the things we see crossing the Seattle startup mailing list is that beyond the standard, what bank, what logo, what testing is that many startups are really working in a vacuum.
They really have no way to gauge customer thoughts on the product unless they open their system or login to a closed or open beta.
We get involved in a lot of closed or open beta’s so that we can see how the new technology is going to work, or what value the system would have in the longer run. Some technology works great in beta others do not. Those responses, risks, and challenges of open or closed beta can also influence funding.
You can bet that a AV or angel fund is go
Turning the Tables on Scammers 2007-07-02 10:50:58 The NY Times is running a great article on scam baiters this morning about turning the tables on scammers from the dark continent Africa. While a dangerous proposition if someone decides that they actually want to meet them (we do not recommend this as a course of action), the message boards make for some funny shoot soda out your nose reading.
“My reason for scam-baiting is to waste the time and resources of the scammer,” said a scam-baiter with the Web name of Scam Patroller, who declined to provide any identification beyond an e-mail address. “Each minute a scammer spends on my bait cannot be used to scam a real victim.”
Their motives may seem altruistic, but not all law enforcement officials approve of their tactics, which can include entrapment and public humiliation. Many of the scam-baiters succeed in getting embarrassing photographs of their targets posted on the Internet. Source: NY Times
Some of the forums mentioned in the article are about funny as all get out. Wh Read more:Tables
Yasvs 2007-07-02 10:40:59 With all the whining, we did about how stories are buried in Digg, and the general things we found out about the influence of social networks on driving people to various blogs around the planet. We decided that since this is web 2.0 to build our own Digg like clone over at Yasvs.
We are running open beta on the system right now and have maybe 25 users and everyone is welcome to join in.
The concept behind doing something like this is not to take Digg on directly, but offer an alternative for smaller bloggers and smaller web sites to just dive in, post their posts in a friendly Digg style, and see where that takes them.
Anyone who can figure out the Yasvs anagram gets a 10 dollar starbucks card by the way. The first one wins on this one.
Otherwise, we invite people to check out our newest system, and have designs on making other systems that cater more to smaller bloggers and non-a-list personalities. We think that C through Z list bloggers have some interesting things to say, and th
Google On Heath Care part 2 2007-07-01 18:01:54 Lauren Turner has issued a statement on her blog catching people up on what she really intended to do. This is a good thing, no one got a lawyers message as a take down, the original post didn’t disappear, and the statement from lauren is well done clearing up some of the issues raised by everyone who blogs.
The original Techwag post is here
Laurens comments are:
Well, I’ve learned a few things since I posted on Friday. For one thing, even though this is a new blog, we have readers! That’s a good thing. Not so good is that some readers thought the opinion I expressed about the movie Sicko was actually Google
’s opinion. It’s easy to understand why it might have seemed that way, because after all, this is a corporate blog. So that was my mistake — I understand why it caused some confusion. Source Google Health Advertising Blog
Thank you Lauren for a great comment back, and thanks for not sending lawyers anyone’s way.
---Related Articles at TechWag:No Read more:Heath
New IPhone development Kit 2007-07-06 23:46:59 Just in case you are bored this weekend, IPhone hackers have developed a new IPhone kit that will take care of most major functions and add-ons that anyone would ever want to see.
It took about 72 hours for the IPhone to be hacked, and that was on the 3rd of July, now two days later you have your own DIY kits for doing things to your IPhone to unlock its potential, or get away from ATT even.
We have successfully written a tool named iPhoneInterface allowing for some basic manipulation of things on the phone, and are releasing it tonight. We are including source code so you can understand the techniques we have used so far. We will be expanding the functionality of this tool significantly tomorrow. The best news is that we have prototype code that allows the ability to: Source: Unlocked IPhone for Sale
They have plans on getting more functionality into the package, the idea of not having to have ITunes involved in the IPhone is a good thing. The interesting part is that it will allo
The Pirate Bay now listed as child porn 2007-07-06 23:14:01 The Swedish police and others are trying to shut down the pirate bay by classifying it is child
porn. One of the best things about Bittorrent is that it is near impossible to find child porn on the network (at least we have never seen any) unlike the internet or many of the peer to peer networks.
The problem is that the pirate bay is not child porn, nor do they support, condone, or otherwise allow it on to their network. Most Bittorrent sites do the same thing, making the whole thing a farce and possibly a misuse of police powers. The pirate party in a press release states:
“This is a devastatingly ignorant abuse of the trust relationship between the Internet world and the Police that was created in order to stop child pornography”, says Rick Falkvinge, leader of the Pirate
Party. “Once given the means to shut down unwanted sites, the Police uses the filter to shut down the Pirate Bay after the failed attempt last year. And just like last year, through abuse of proc Read more:listed
Mr Wong 2007-07-06 22:48:39 Mr. Wong is in a closed beta, and invited techwag to take a look at what they are up to. So we took them up on it, and coming up with the idea of not quite ready for prime time, but looks cool.
The problems started early in the process, and while it is a closed beta, there were just some things that really stood out. Even in a beta, some things should just work.
The problem started with a pile of Java scripting errors on calls like the one below, every page had some form of Java Scripting issue with IE 7.0
Line: 605
Char: 3
Error: Object Required
Code: 0
So it looks like in the java script that there are a number of function calls that are not as complete as they could be.
When attempting to download the Mr. Wong tool bar, the site redirected me back to the login screen so there was no point in using that route directly. When we got to the point of being able to download the toolbar, they did not have anything for IE on the /stuff directory. While they offer the IE toolbar, it was i
RIAA shakes down small business for money 2007-07-09 01:22:23 Not just any company could have a public relations image this low, and still manage to make it even lower. Nevertheless, here you go, a small bar down in Florida is being shaken down for 400 dollars to license music, music that is played by bands they have hired, and those bands do cover tunes of other artists.
Six months later, other music copyright companies began calling the Halls and demanding money. Most days there would be three or four phone calls from each company, Hall said. Finally, unable to afford the fees, she had to call most of her musicians — those who did not play original music — and tell them they would not be allowed to continue performing. Source: Florida Today
Not that RIAA or other royalty holders would go after the individual musicians, no they went after the venue. No one can tell us that people start off in bands with their own original cover tunes either. The art of cover music, and playing anyone’s music is a source of experience in style an
We knew this was going to happen 2007-07-09 01:07:44 Even amidst all the denials that there would not be a price cut for Sony’s PS3, we finally get news that there is going to be one. Not like everyone has not been offering advice to Sony that this needs to happen to speed sales and adoption of the PS3, and not that Sony has not been denying it all over the place as well.
Not that bloggers and popular press have all been saying its going to happen.
While we welcome the price drop, we have to wonder just how stupid Sony thinks people are, the continual stream of denials from the company that “we won’t do this” to end up doing it is nutty behavior.
How stupid does Sony think people are?
While the price drop is a good idea, and in general a good thing, the whole Sony PS3 saga has been a disaster from the start, and while they may have sales, it is in 3rd place in worldwide sales. Sony’s sales mouthpiece down in Australia where the PS3 is supposedly number one is to be debated, and verified by independent sources.
We are tired
One more blogger goes full time 2007-07-09 00:44:35 It is always good to see bloggers who end up being able to make a living from blogging, and the news this morning is all about the owner of Read Write Web who has been able to say good bye to his day job, and end up blogging full time. More fodder for folks who are thinking of doing the same thing, and it makes a great read.
The words of advice for aspiring bloggers out there from Read Write Web owner Tim MacManus is the same as just about everyone else’s. Keep on blogging, be obviously interested in what you are writing about, and keep plugging away at the whole thing. The other thing to realize is that Read Write Web has been around for 2 years as well, the key to that is do not give up on the dream.
Mr MacManus says a successful blogger has to be knowledgeable and passionate about their topic, update their blog several times a day and engage with others in the blogging community – e-mailing other bloggers and posting comments on their sites. Source: stuff.co.nz
At this poin
Do Not Diss your Angel 2007-07-15 10:38:58 In the “I need money for my killer idea” the last thing that anyone should be doing is dissing or pissing off the angel fund community. Let alone trying to kill them off. Ricks Rant’s though has coverage of just such a conversation, and it does not bode well for the angel community and that particular VC.
I recently had a conversation with two ‘grand old men’ of the VC community regarding an investment they had just completed. It was a small start up which had taken angel money to get going. The terms of that original deal were a simple debt instrument that converted (at a discount) upon the next round.
These two guys were all high five like because they had killed the discount upon conversion. The phase that bugged me the most was: “We made the angels blink and understand the real money had arrived.” Source: Rick Segal
Angels are probably the only friends that any company is going to have early on in the game. These are the people who believed first
Changing world of Web Site statistics 2007-07-15 10:19:13 Time on site is getting more popular press over the last couple of days since Nielsen said that this was how it was going to start augmenting stats over the traditional page view and hits versus unique IP address. Beths blog has a great summary of the general responses to the concept.
In the web 2.0 world, the time on site metric is critical in determining the quantity of time that someone spends on the site, versus what they do when they are there. When we did our research on which social networking leads to the longest time on site. If you are watching a video, then the duration on site is a good thing.
The other component to this though is the idea of quality, many sites have no idea of what the quality of the user is on their web site. This also feeds into the idea of advertising, and how on line advertising costs a lot, but the advertisers really don’t know if the users are quality, those people more inclined to actually purchase something.
While the ad campaign that leads to Read more:Changing
, Web Site
Firefox winning the browser battle 2007-07-15 08:52:31 IT Wire is reporting that a poll of web sites indicates that Firefox
has seriously eroded the market leadership of Internet Explorer. Just to sink this one home for folks, at techwag, these are the browser
s over the last 30 days.
1. Firefox 1,648 44.81%
2. Internet Explorer 1,563 42.50%
3. Safari 207 5.63%
4. Netscape 129 3.51%
Not a bad showing for a browser that works just fine, and a near miraculous recovery for the competition when it comes to who is going to own the browser of choice in the longer run.
A study of nearly 96,000 websites carried out during the week of July 2 to July 8 found that FF had 27.8% market share across Eastern and Western Europe, IE had 66.5%, with other browsers including Safari and Opera making up the remaining 5.7%. The July market share represents a massive 3.7% rise since a similar survey in March. Source: IT Wire
In the longer run though, what does this actually mean to Microsoft? With the inroads that Apple is making, and the inroads that Linu
Googles blogger in draft 2007-07-15 08:10:55 If you just have to know what is happening in the world of Blogger, then the blogger in draft system is for you. The blogger in draft system is a way to check out all the new things that Google is doing to blogger before they show up on the main blogger system. We took a tour, and not too bad, most of it is not alpha software, most of it is ready for prime time, and a lot of it is interesting.
Blogger Polls – one of the things about other blogging systems is that they will let you do polls, and blogger polls is available and is just a good clean fun way of getting some kind of response from readers. Information on the polling system can be found here.
Blogger Enclosures – if anyone has tried to load your own video or other remote YouTube like link into Blogger you know that it can be a hit or miss proposition. It will not work every time, nor will it render right in the screen at times. This leads to unhappy visitors, meaning they will not come back. Bring on Blogger enclosures. Read more:Googles
Pity the poor VC 2007-07-14 09:25:39 If you only had to pay 15% tax on your investments today, but knew that on the next presidential election you might start paying 35% tax on your investments, you might want to vote republican in 2008. Three major democratic hopefuls have come out in favor of raising taxes on Venture Capital companies from 15 to 35 percent if they get into office. We now know where the investment firms will be spending their political donation dollars.
VC Kate Mitchell has argued that VCs are putting their money at risk along with the entrepreneur, citing her own example: She has invested her own savings into start-ups, and then waits many years for returns that may or may not come. The shortcoming to this argument, of course, is that alongside her own money, she is also investing money her firm gets from institutional investors. She partakes of profits returned on both her own savings and on this other institutional money that is not hers. Source: Venture Beat
The article at venture beat is being up
Killer Silverlight App LiveStation 2007-07-14 08:55:37 LiveStation is the new streaming TV to your PC application built on Silverlight, and provided by Microsoft in a closed beta. Hopefully we will get an account so that we can bring more info out on how the system works, and what cool things can be done with it. Although the content providers might have a couple of issues on this one as streaming TV to your PC has become quite the business, both legitimate and licensed and DIY copies off the internet.
Don Dodge looks like he has had a preview of the system, and has good things to say about it. What is interesting is that like Joost and others, the same underlying P2P technology, with a Silverlight interface, he notes that the quality is very good, and that the process is very easy to use. The Linux folks with Moonlight might be able to cross it over easily once the code has been released or reverse engineered to bring this to the other platforms out there.
LiveStation is built on two research technologies, Pastry and SplitStream, from M Read more:Killer
Get invited to private betas 2007-07-13 08:15:05 Private Betas are the bane of all of us early adopters, and something that can in the longer run be quite frustrating for folks as well. There are the continual needs to test new sites and new systems for tech bloggers. There is the fancy and vanity of some early adopters who just have to be first to try something out no matter what the cost. (If you think we are kidding, look at the lines for Xbox 360, Wii, PS3, and the Iphone.) Then there are those folks who are the true believers, and think that the private beta is something that they just have to be part of like Joost.
Bring on Invite Share, a beta testing system that lets people share their beta invites for just about every system on the planet. The web site offers an exchange of invites, say you have five Joost invites, but really want a Mr. Wong invite, you can trade or share your invites for someone’s Mr. Wong invite, and go beta testing to your happy contentedness.
This is a fairly simple service, but it does the job perf
Will Facebook end up an IPO 2007-07-17 20:02:54 With all the hoopla about Microsoft offering 6 Billion dollars for Facebook
, and the eventual pressure to sell, some folks think that Facebook will hold out and do the IPO thing in the next couple of years. That is as soon as they have stable numbers, and an as good or better rate of signup’s than MySpace.
It depends on which one makes a better payday for Facebook and the folks who own it. If a merger or sale to another company will yield more money in the longer run, then they should go the M&A route. If the IPO makes more sense, and provides a bigger payday, then that would be the smarter route to take. Because in the end this kind of activity is all going to be about making money, and the sale of cool cars sold to a pile of newly minted millionaires.
While the blogging world, and business world is going to put ever increasing pressure on Facebook to sell in one form or another, A VC comes up with a good point, all the folks at Facebook have to do is wait.
But selling the C
Peter Moore of Xbox calls it a day 2007-07-17 19:36:04 Reports are all over the internet that the head of Xbox
is leaving to go to electronic arts sports, leaving a major leadership vacuum at Microsoft Games. With all the recent high level and technical VP defections at Microsoft, this is a hit on the company, and we will have to see how well the replacement Don Mattrick does. He has a big job, the biggest one is to rescue the Xbox 360, and try not to spend the billion-dollar kitty that Microsoft has put aside to take care of the red ring of death syndrome that is affecting Xbox 360 systems.
Microsoft said Moore
was leaving the company out of a desire to return to the San Francisco Bay area, citing “personal reasons” as the driving factor. Still, industry watchers are speculating that Microsoft’s struggles in the gaming market and the incredible pressure facing Moore specifically were partly to blame for his departure. Source: beta news
Beyond the desire to go back to California, Peter
Moore was a dynamic leader who ha Read more:calls
ActiveWords 2007-07-17 18:59:43 ActiveWords is a working functional shortcut system on steroids is going to save people time in the longer run, and has some of the coolest functionality we have seen. So of course, we had to download it and give it a shot.
The biggest key to this is that you set up your own active word to application mapping. Once there, the system monitors the things you are typing in looking for the keyword like “WinWord” and then launches the application if you hit F8 (if you hit F8 the word in the file is backspaced or removed from the document). However this can be turned off in the Active Word Options under menu, as well as turning off auto startup, as well as a number of other options depending on how the user has configured their computer.
Activewords supports Windows, and Tablet PC (if you have ever used a tablet, any kind of shortcut is handy), and tablet PC supports generally hard to come by on the productivity side of the fence. We think the only killer addition to this would be to h
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