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The Washington region was paralyzed by a blizzard that dumped more than two feet of heavy snow on the area by late Saturday, knocking out power for hundreds of thousands of people, toppling trees and reducing many streets to pedestrian pathways.
Almost 218,000 homes and business were without power at the outages' peak, and many had no heat midday Saturday at the height of the storm. By late last night, about 140,000 were still in the dark. Pepco advised customers to seek other lodging, saying it could take days to restore power to everyone. Some residents abandoned their cold, dark houses and checked into hotels. Others were trapped on side streets as snowplows concentrated on keeping major arteries clear.
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For a company that makes no products, Acacia Research (ACTG) spends a lot of time fighting over patents in court. Acacia has filed at least 337 patent-related lawsuits in its 18 years. To make money—sales are expected to rise to $68.8 million this year, from $34.8 million in 2006—Acacia acquires patents from inventors and then seeks fees from companies that it says infringe on those patents. Because Acacia licenses technologies it doesn't design or distribute, it is known as a "nonpracticing entity."
Executives at many tech companies—and their investors—call Acacia and its peers a different name: "patent trolls."
Continue reading "links for 2010-02-07" »
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We all know Marissa Mayer is a tech nerd turned fashionista, and it looks like her taste for designer clothes is rubbing off on the search giant.
But unlike the media or mobile industries, the fashion industry appears safe from Google. Google is selling "Google-inspired" scarves and other clothing to the public that were designed by emerging designers. Last year, designers who participated in a Vogue and Council of Fashion Designer program were asked to create a one-of-a-kind item inspired by Google in some way that reflected Google's aura. Google transformed the finalists creations into iGoogle Artists themes but selected three of the designers to produce and sell their Google-inspired couture.
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Google on Thursday began offering administrators of its paid productivity applications the ability to manage iPhones, Nokia E series and Windows Mobile devices remotely, a feature that may appeal both to business users and consumers.
Google charges $50 per year for Google Apps Premier Edition accounts, which are designed for corporate needs. Google Apps Premier includes Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Sites, Google Video, and Google Groups, and comes with 25GB of e-mail storage per employee. The service is interoperable with BlackBerry and Microsoft Outlook and includes business controls like password strength checks, forced SSL connections, and a 99.9% uptime guarantee SLA.
Continue reading "links for 2010-02-06" »
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It used to be that Twitter followers were worth something, or at least people thought they were worth something, which is the same thing. It was only about a year ago when Jason Calacanis was offering $250,000 to buy a spot on Twitter's Suggested User List, which would have guaranteed him perhaps a million followers before Twitter ended up revamping the SUL to be less monolithic. He never got on the list, but if his offer would have come to roughly $0.25 per follower.
Today, you can "buy" followers on eBay for less than a penny each. Some of the Buy-It-Now listings include 5,000 followers for $20 (which comes to 0.4 penny/follower), $5,500 for $40 (0.7 penny/follower), $1,100 for $10 (0.9 penny/follower). You are not actually buying followers outright (Twitter doesn't allow people to transfer their followers), but rather services which "guarantee" getting your account up to the promised number of followers through "proven and safe methods."
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Users of Apple Inc.'s popular iPhone may now be able to save money by making Internet-based phone calls over AT&T Inc.'s cellular network.
Apple this week allowed new versions of several Voice over Internet Protocol services to begin working on the iPhone, according to those services. Previously, iPhone users needed a wireless Internet connection to make such calls, but the change will allow calls from anywhere that receives a strong enough 3G cellular signal.
By using VoIP applications to sidestep the phone's normal calling software, iPhone owners could avoid using up their monthly allocation of minutes from AT&T, potentially allowing them to choose cheaper plans.
Continue reading "links for 2010-02-02" »
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Al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden has called for the world to boycott American goods and the U.S. dollar, blaming the United States and other industrialized countries for global warming, according to a new audiotape released Friday.
In the tape, broadcast in part on Al-Jazeera television, bin Laden warned of the dangers of climate change and says that the way to stop it is to bring "the wheels of the American economy" to a halt.
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As an online retailer, Web forms are your bread and butter. There’s no use putting effort into designing great product pages and getting your customers to the checkout with bulging shopping carts only to have them bail out because your checkout process sucks.
All businesses lose a percentage of customers during the checkout process; what percentage you lose depends on how badly your forms perform. Here are several ill-conceived practices that create bad checkout experiences — and how to avoid them.
Continue reading "links for 2010-01-29" »
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For Democrats, the only good thing to come from Tuesday's loss of the Senate election in Massachusetts is this: It could wipe the grin off Robert Gibbs's face.
The Democrats' failed struggle to hold onto Ted Kennedy's seat in the liberal state showed how badly the party's brand had been damaged over the past year. But as the White House press corps challenged President Obama's press secretary on Tuesday afternoon about the anticipated loss, Gibbs answered with his usual mix of wisecracks and insults.
"Broadly speaking, can you talk about the difference between 59 and 60 votes in the Senate and what that means for the president's agenda this year?"
"Broadly, it's one," Gibbs answered.
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One of the great supposed achievements of the 2008 presidential race was that President Obama and the Democratic Party gained a formidable political weapon: the most detailed databases ever amassed on the views and voting habits of registered U.S. voters. Obama had deployed social technologies on a grand scale. And Democrats were said to be ahead of Republicans in deploying distributed volunteers to make Web-enabled phone-bank calls.
During such calls, volunteers could fill out online forms, building files on each John and Jane Doe--who they said they voted for, what issues moved them. In the two months before the 2008 elections, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) added 223 million new pieces of data on voters, giving the DNC ten times the amount of data they'd had in the 2004 campaign. (That's what Voter Activation Network, a company based in Somerville, MA that builds front-end software for DNC database, told me after Obama won.)
Continue reading "links for 2010-01-22" »
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