DOW JONES NEWSWIRES A group of investment banks are ready to agree a plan to sell much of the GBP9 billion debt in Alliance Boots PLC, the private equity-owned pharmacy chain, The Financial Times reported on its Web site Tuesday. If banks proceed with the sale, they’re apt to take more writedowns, according to the FT report. This is […] For more visit Source:www.investment-blog.net
Archive for May 13th, 2008
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05
2008
 
Facebook pulls ’stalker list’ tool after Gawker exposes itPosted by: admin in General News A post on Gawker yielded a moderate wave of panic across the Web when it asserted that by typing the “down” arrow into Facebook’s search box, you could see a list of the five people who view your profile the most: Not quite. It was more likely a list of five people whose profiles a user visits frequently, or at least something along those lines. Some users promptly nicknamed it the “stalker list.” Even more curious: Facebook pulled the feature within hours of the Gawker post going up. “Facebook tries to surface the people we think are most important to users to make it easier and faster for them to navigate the site and find what they’re looking for,” a statement from Facebook issued on Tuesday read. “The search drop down isn’t a list of those that have searched for the user. It is also not a list of people whose profile the user has viewed the most or who have viewed the user’s profile the most. To avoid any confusion, this will no longer appear.” Whatever the algorithm behind it, the tool was pretty accurate. My “stalker list” consisted of two close friends, two people I’d dated relatively recently, and my younger brother, whose profile I occasionally check up on to make sure he’s staying out of trouble–I know, I know, I’m such a good sister. According to Nick O’Neill at AllFacebook, I was one of the people he “stalked.” I’m, uh…flattered?
For EcoGeeks who want their computers to be both personal productivity tools and high-end gaming rigs, there haven’t been very many green options. It’s true that having one machine do the job of two (if you can manage not to purchase the XBox) is, in itself, a green choice. But gaming Personal computers (and XBox 360s) are very power-hungry devices. But now MSI has created a high-end graphics card with EcoGeeks in mind. The N9600 GT “Hybrid Freezer” boasts a 65nm G94 GPU and includes 64 stream processors and DDR memory on 256-bit memory interface. It has no problem providing the user with a pure HD experience while churning through real-time 3D renders. The card gets green mostly because it has two modes in which it functions. During normal use, while you’re online or word processing, the card enters low-energy mode. Instead of having its own fan that cools the card, the small amount of heat that is generated is removed from the chip via “heat pipes” which basically act like a tiny radiator. The card monitors its own temperature and only moves into active cooling mode when it’s being used for gaming applications. So, instead of having an efficient computer for word processing and a gaming rig that churns through power, you can have both in the same machine. MSI hasn’t provided numbers on how much power a user can anticipate to save, which is a bit frustrating. But it is nice to finally see graphics cards that think about the environment. Via GoodCleanTech 
A jar of Google hot sauce and a few dishes from the 'Food 2.0' cookbook by former Google chef Charlie Ayers. (Credit: David Karp)  (Credit: Amazon)I was lost somewhere in the labyrinthine corridors of a sprawling Whole Foods supermarket, looking for foods I’d never known …  Photobucket, the photo-sharing site that was acquired by News Corp.’s Fox Interactive Media last year, is expected to launch a “group albums” feature on Wednesday. “Group Albums are designed to offer a easy way for colleagues, friends, and families to collaborate on creating pics and video collections where the …
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05
2008
Report: Rumored Google, News Corp. bids make Blinkx shares soarPosted by: admin in Social Media and TechReuters is reporting that shares of Blinkx, a publicly traded video search site based in the U.K., climbed 50 percent on Friday following rumors that corporate giants Google and News Corp. may be vying for an acquisition.  On Friday morning, Blinkx shares were trading at 36.75 pence, their …  I’m at the Where 2.0 conference, looking forward to the Launchpad session tonight where I hope to see several cool new geo companies. Ahead of that I had a chance to meet with some other firms building new geo services: Plazes and Praized. Plazes: Location reporting
Plazes has been around for a while. It’s a service that helps you report your location so your friends and followers can see it. The latest updates revolve around new input and output methods for the service, according to Plazes’ co-founder, Felix Petersen. On the input side, an iPhone app is coming (when the new iPhone app store goes public in a few weeks). It will let you update your location just by pressing a “locate me” button on your phone. This method will join the PC, Mac, and Linux software app that locates you based on the very special fingerprint of the Wi-Fi access point you’re connected to (if you’re not connected to an access point, you’ve to locate yourself manually, by entering a place name or address). Plazes is for recording your location intentionally and episodically. It’s not like Whrrl (story), which is designed to track you passively. The idea is that when you land at a location you want people to know about, or get set up at a location where you want people to find you, you click the huge “locate me” button on whatever device you’ve handy, and then your location goes out to the people you want to see it. Who sees it? That’s part 2 of the changes in Plazes. Right now, your location is updated on Plazes.com and in your widget, if you’ve embedded one on your site. In a few weeks, Plazes will also update Twitter when you want, as well as sending your data to Fire Eagle, and to Plazes’ own API, which other apps can use to grab your location from. See also: Brightkite (review). Praized: Local reviews
Praized's Digg-like ratings and reviews are local to the site they run on. After talking with Plazes’ Petersen, I caught up with Sylvain Carle, co-founder of a brand-new geo company, Praized. This firm is building a database of locations and a rating system for them. It’s designed so that Wordpress and Movable Type site managers can plug the system into their blog, giving their reader communities a Digg-like rating system for the locations mentioned on the site. While the Praized database content is hosted, Praized itself isn’t a destination site. Web managers put some code in their blogs, and the Praized content will then appear locally on the site and adopt the site’s native styles. Furthermore, the ratings that people leave for locations and businesses will be specific to the site where Praized is installed. So if the users on a ballet blog leave reviews for a restaurant near a concert hall mentioned in a post, those reviews and ratings won’t get blended in with reviews for the same restaurant left by readers of a site for wrestling fans. Good thing. See also: Yelp (location ratings, but not private). Both Plazes and Praized are based on leveraging their own proprietary databases. Plazes is collecting the data of Wi-Fi access point locations (based on coordinating MAC addresses with user reports of location) as well as matching location coordinates with the places that users hang out at (for example, the Starbucks at SFO). Praized’s database is one of physical location and associated reviews. Both look like useful infrastructure plays for emerging on the web geo businesses, but it’s unlikely either will (or should) remain an independent company for very long. SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — E-Trade Financial Corp. stated it decided in April to exit the retail mortgage origination business, its last remaining loan origination channel, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing late Friday. The company stated it will partner with a third party company to provide customers access to real estate loans after it exits the business. E-Trade […] For more visit Source:www.investment-blog.net
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05
2008
Report: Rumored Google, News Corp. bids make Blinkx shares soarPosted by: admin in Social Media and TechReuters is reporting that shares of Blinkx, a publicly traded video search site based in the U.K., climbed 50 percent on Friday following rumors that corporate giants Google and News Corp. may be vying for an acquisition. On Friday morning, Blinkx shares were trading at 36.75 pence, their … |
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