The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘north-america’

We MUST stop this.

Excerpt from:
Smallville can’t be allowed to break Stargate SG-1’s world record

Wha? Apparently the Energizer DUO USB battery charger contains a bit of malware, Arucer.dll, which allows remote system access on port 7777. CERT warns : An attacker is able to remotely control a system, including the ability to list directories, send and receive files, and execute programs

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Energizer battery charger contains a trojan

Who doesn’t like Bigfoot .

Read the original:
Mattel’s clever Bigfoot Robot

Another day, another airport full-body scanner story . It has emerged that the scanners are in violation of Islamic law .

Originally posted here:
Outrage: Those airport full-body scanners violate Islamic law

A school district in Arizona has outfitted one of its school buses with a $200 mobile 3G Wi-Fi router and $60-per-month access. And guess what? Instead of punching each other and yelling all the way to school, the kids quietly tap, tap, tap away on their laptops

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Wi-Fi school bus keeps kids quiet

In less than six months, online restaurant reservation site OpenTable has seated an additional one million diners via its mobile apps. In late October, OpenTable had reached the milestone of seating one million diners via its mobile offerings, a year after its iPhone app launched. It took only four and a half months to seat another million diners. Additionally, the site says that based on an estimation of a $50 average check per diner, OpenTable claims that diners using its mobile applications have generated more than $100 million in revenue for its restaurant partners.

OpenTable allows diners to find and book reservations at more than 11,000 different restaurants in multiple countries via mobile applications for the iPhone, Palm, Blackberry and Android. Other smartphone users can book reservations through OpenTable’s mobile-optimized Web site.

The company also reported strong earnings this afternoon, with Q4 2009 revenue coming in at $19.2 million, representing a a 32% increase over Q4 2008 revenue, which was $14.5 million. OpenTable’s total revenues for 2009 were $68.6 million, up 23% over 2008 revenues of $55.8 million. In 2009, OpenTable increased its number of participating restaurants in North America by 17%, with a total of 10,850 partners by the end of 2009. The number of international partners also increased, rising by 44% to 1501 participating establishments. Total number of diners in North American were 11.8 million, a 39% increase from Q4 2008.

Last year, OpenTable filed for a healthy IPO, despite recessionary conditions in the markets. OpenTable is a solid internet company that has a viable business model. On the restaurant side, OpenTable delivers reservation management software to establishments through a Web browser and collects monthly subscription revenues, similar in theory to the offerings that software companies like Salesforce sell to clients.

We wrote about the power of brand buzz on social media sites yesterday, and one contributing aspect to buzz are individuals who are “influencers,” similar in some ways to the trend that Malcolm Gladwell highlighted in The Tipping Point. But how do companies find and then leverage the power of these influencers on the web? Israeli startup Pursway (formerly known as Datanetis), aims to help companies identify the influencers and followers for each product or offer within their customer database.

The startup has just raised $6 million in Series A funding from Battery Ventures. Pursway will use the funding to expand its operations in Europe and North America and hire more engineers to contribute to product development.

Pursway’s technology helps companies not only identify “everyday influencers” on Twitter and Facebook, but also searches blogs and other web portals to find social influencers who are writing about particular brands or products. The technology then identifies, measures, and shows exactly how opinion leaders shape their followers’ purchasing decisions, giving clients marketing intelligence.

And Pursway has several big-name clients who are using the startup’s technology. Vodafone Group, Orange and other companies are employing Pursway’s offerings to find the social influencers for products. Pursway faces competition from Media6.

Flickr’d How long until this is announced for North America? Microsoft plans to release a 250GB add-on hard drive for the Xbox 360. The thing is, so far, it’s only been officially announced for Japan.

Original post: 
250GB Xbox 360 add-on hard drive en route to Japan: March 11, $170

Ruggedized computers are typically pretty ugly, and the Juniper Systems handheld is no exception. Designed to withstand extreme temperatures, and drops onto concrete from a height of up to 5ft without damage, it’d be the ideal thing for the construction site or roadworks project

Read more here:
Juniper Systems rugged handheld is rugged

Integrated marketing services provider Alterian today released the results of their seventh annual survey on social media marketing adoption.

The survey covered 1068 marketing professionals worldwide (actually, it was 98% North America and Europe and only 2% Asia Pacific and other regions).

Alterian found that 66 percent of respondents will be investing in social media marketing (SMM) in 2010. Of those, 40 percent said they would be shifting more than a fifth of their traditional direct marketing budget towards funding their SMM activities.

The survey also found more than a third (36 percent) of respondents are investing in social media monitoring and analysis tools.

Nearly half of respondents (42 percent), however, said they don’t currently incorporate clickstream and web analytics data into their customer and e-mail database.

The research also found that over half of respondents (51 percent) are placing a ‘fair’ or ‘significant’ amount of effort on moving from a campaign-centric direct marketing model towards multichannel customer engagement – in fact only 7 percent make no effort at all.

To get a copy of the full report of the Alterian Annual Survey results, sign up here.