The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘traditional’

Making clocks out of hard drives isn’t anything new. The hard drive platters make nice shiny backgrounds for your traditional analog clock, and provides just a little geek panache to an ordinary timepiece.

The rest is here:
The coolest clock you’re going to see today: strobing LED hard drive digital clock

Apparently with a bit of geek know-how, a 1984 Macintosh can run OS X Snow Leopard. Who knew?

Excerpt from: 
DIY: Convert a 1984 Mac into a Snow Leopard machine

RightSide Capital Management is about to change the funding landscape. Led by David Lambert, Kevin Dick and John Lee, RightSide Capital believes that seed-stage capital needs a complete overhaul. RightSide will make 100-200 investments per year, and literally manufacture companies in a way that no firm has ever done. The fund, announced at TheFunded.com’s Future of Funding event last Thursday, will debut in the second half of 2010 and may give the angel funding market a much-deserved shakeup.

Partner Kevin Dick went on stage during a panel on alternative funding methods and laid out what he believes to be the future of funding. Quantity, not quality, is king in the seed stage. Entrepreneurs looking for funding won’t have to go the traditional route of begging for a meeting and then having a second meeting and then waiting 3 months for traction until finally closing a deal. Instead, they will fill out an application - similar to applying to College - and receive a response in 2 weeks.

Speaking as someone who lives in a glass house, the confession by InfoWorld that one of their writers was using a false identity and sometimes misrepresenting himself is great, along with the deletion of all his content. But it’s less great when it comes after you’ve been caught.

This is exactly the type of situation we wanted to avoid, and it’s the reason why we published the facts about the Daniel Brusilovsky situation as soon as we fully understood them. We didn’t publish the name of the writer because of his age until he admitted to the situation himself. And we didn’t publish the names of the companies involved because, frankly, they were the victims of the whole thing. But everything else was disclosed as soon as we were sure of the facts.

A lot of people criticized us for “throwing Daniel under the bus” and for otherwise handling the situation poorly. But anyone who runs a news organization knows that the truth tends to come out eventually. It’s best to just air everything out in the open right from the start. And hopefully our readers will know that there’s no funny stuff going on at TechCrunch. If there was, we’d be the first to write about it.

In this case InfoWorld may not have known what was happening until they read about it on a competing website. In fact, they probably would have terminated him as soon as they discovered what he was up to. But it’s not clear that they would have publicly acknowledged it afterwards. And since the story broke before they were able to tell their readers what happened themselves, we’ll never know.

The Local Wine Events website may be ugly as sin, but if you’re a wine lover, you’ve probably already got it bookmarked. This is a small ten year old business being run out of Pennsylvania with about a million page views a month.

It’s a pretty straightforward business. You go there to find local wine events. People who are having wine events pay to list them there, and there is lots of other advertising as well. 1,500 new events are posted each week.

Despite their size the site has gotten some big attention. Gary Vaynerchuck had owner Eric Orange on his show last year, and Apple has made their mobile site a staff pick and a Featured Web App for the iPhone.

And this small business is profitable. Last year the company, with four employees, had $250,000 in gross profits.

I’ve got a feeling something interesting is happening to the way real estate operates online in the UK. Anecqdotal evidence is emerging that social networks like Facebook and less conventional startups are perhaps starting to find the chink in the armour of the traditional property listing market here.

In particular, Facebook Marketplace is starting to be used by niche poperty agencies like Pimlico Flats, more successfully than the usual online suspects like Craigslist and Gumtree. That latter site has had problems with other aspects of its site like, having to dump dating because of spam and scams. The same problems are plaguing Craigslist in the UK, and this is something that Pimlico Flats picks up on in a blog post on the subject. The ability to verify Facebook users turns out to weed out the scammers.

At the same time, although findaproperty and rightmove remain strong, less conventional sites like Globrix, Nestoria, Zoopla (see below) and even niche social networks like Asmallworld are being used.

Everyone is familiar with the traditional EKG – you lie in the hospital bed, the leads connected to your body, as a machine is recording your heart rate and other vital statistics. But what if it was all wireless?

See the rest here:
Wireless EKG becoming a reality

If you’ve ever tried to listen in on a Google earnings call on the web, it’s kind of a pain. That’s especially true if you use a Mac because Google insist that you use either Real Player (which is awful on the Mac) or Windows Media Player (which doesn’t work on a Mac). Of course, you could always call into an actual phone number, but who does that anymore? Thankfully, for its Q4 2009 earnings being announced this afternoon, Google has made things easier.

Gone are the options to listen via Real Player or Windows Media Player. Instead, you have one option: Webcast on YouTube. Google has set up a YouTube account, GoogleIR (investor relations) that will host the earnings call and the follow-up Q&A session. All you need is a web browser with Flash installed to listen in. Currently, you’ll heard the traditional classical music that plays while everyone waits for the call to start.

And while it won’t be clear until it actually starts, it looks like Google could be taking advantage of the video aspect of this webcast as well. Google always releases slides alongside its earnings numbers to better illustrate results. It looks as if Google may run these slides during the call for a more interactive experience. Again, it’s not yet clear if that will actually happen, but that would be a good way to better illustrate what they are discussing — and a good use of YouTube for this type of thing.

Google’s earnings will be announced at 1:30 PM PT today. We’ll be listening in and following up with analysis. Most accounts have Google beating estimates relatively easily, despite the latest situations surrounding China and possibly their growing rivalry with Apple.

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.

Cool guys don’t look at explosions Ladies and gentlemen, I have a conundrum. As many of you know, Mass Effect 2 comes out on January 26.

See the original post: 
BioWare tries to balance the BioWare way with the attraction of new fans with Mass Effect 2