What Ballmer really meant to say in Moscow
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Ballmer is trying to rewrite Microhoo history
Continuing the exegesis of Steve Ballmer’s remarks on how Yahoo should be viewed as part of “a” strategy to accelerate Microsoft’s online advertising, but not “the” strategy, CNET News.com Executive Editor Jim Kerstetter and I attempt to make sense of the latest twists and turns in the Microhoo saga. Watch the video:
Markey’s legislation so far appears to be garnering bipartisan support, with co-sponsors like Lee Terry, R-Neb., Charlie Gonzalez, D-Texas, and Joe Wilson, R-S.C.
House Representative Ed Markey, D-Mass., on Saturday introduced the Radio All Digital Channel Receiver Act, which requires equipment designed to receive both satellite digital audio radio and terrestrial AM/FM radio to be equipped to receive digital radio signals transmitted by terrestrial AM/FM stations.
Legislators over the weekend introduced new legislation requiring satellite radio receivers to pick up digital signals, even though federal regulators are still seeking public comment on the issue.
Markey said his bill would help ensure the long-term competitive health of local radio, since the XM-Sirius merger “underscored the importance of ensuring consumer access to a diversity of sources for digital radio content, in particular content originating in their local communities.”
The responsibility for overseeing this new regulation would fall to the Federal Communications Commission, which would be required to act on the legislation within 180 days of its passage. The FCC, however, is still receiving public comments on the merits of this issue.
The FCC committed itself to exploring the possibility of requiring satellite radio to include digital audio broadcast when it approved the merger of Sirius Satellite Radio and XM Satellite Radio in July. It released a Notice of Inquiry (PDF) on the subject in late August, for which the comment deadline is November 10. The inquiry seeks answers to questions such as how many multifunctional radio receivers may be available in the near future without it being mandatory.
“Millions of Americans today rely on local broadcast radio for news, public safety bulletins, sports, weather, traffic, and other information,” Markey said in a press release. “As the broadcast radio industry migrates to digital broadcasting technology, this legislation will ensure that consumers are able to readily receive free service through consumer electronics systems that are otherwise receiving satellite digital audio radio and traditional AM or FM stations.”
Apple has released the latest version of
Leopard, with bug fixes and security updates accompanying the fifth update to the operating system.
In any event, let us know if you have any problems installing the new update. It’s hard to believe, but it’s getting close to a year since Leopard was first released.
The company sent over a list of improvements about 30 minutes ago, and the full list of fixes and improvements should be up on Apple’s Web site any moment with the update itself popping up in Software Update. Two notable updates from the “General” section were a fix for the video playback problems that affected some MacBook Air owners, as well as a puzzling bug “in which some Macs could unexpectedly power on at the same time each day,” which would be the first time I’ve heard that one.
Through the deal with Yelp, MapQuest will get better locally specific content, and Yelp will get more Web site traffic from beyond tech-savvy places such as Silicon Valley that currently are familiar with the site, said Christian Dwyer, MapQuest’s senior vice president and general manager.
MapQuest will begin showing business reviews from start-up Yelp on Thursday, part of a plan to expand from just a mapping site into a go-to hub of local information.
MapQuest is fleshing out its new local site. (Click to enlarge.)
In addition, the AOL site will add sports information to its MapQuest local site, said Mark Law, MapQuest’s vice president of product development. The expansion fleshes out MapQuest’s vision to reproduce what people can find in their Sunday newspaper, but in a dynamic online format.
(Credit:
CNET News)
MapQuest also is seeking to plug into the booming mobile mapping business. It’s released BlackBerry-specific applications so far, and a version of its site tuned for the
Safari Web browser on Apple’s
iPhone is due to be launched “in the next few days,” Dwyer said.
The new local site, initially launched a month ago, is growing in significance for the AOL division, too. It’s got about 3.3 million visitors a month, compared to 48 million for the entire site, Law said.
Another change coming is a shift in ad formats. The older MapQuest site uses a somewhat antiquated large banner ad across the top–”Secrets of the ultra wealthy revealed!” said one ad I saw Wednesday. The new site uses a more modern, squarish ad on the right, and MapQuest is moving away from the banners, Dwyer said.
The efforts come as AOL seeks to improve its financial condition so Time Warner will get a better deal selling the asset–perhaps to Yahoo. Dwyer wouldn’t comment on MapQuest’s financial performance other than to say, “We’re a healthy, growing, going concern.”
Also on Tuesday, The Dark Visitor, a site that tracks Chinese hackers, said a downloadable tool is now available for those wanting to participate in future attacks. Over the weekend, The Dark Visitor reported on the structure in place for launching attacks on Western media. The individuals, loosely calling themselves “Revenge for the Flame” and “HackCNN” feel that Western media have not presented a balanced view in reporting on the protests in Tibet and the Olympic torch runs through major world cities.
That wasn’t the case with The Sports Network. On Monday morning, the site (not affiliated with CNN) was down due to a “political entity in China.” Blogger Christine Lu has screenshots of the message and the defaced Sports Network page (scroll down). The group HackCNN has claimed responsibility for The Sports Network attack.
Although CNN escaped a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack planned for Saturday, the site has experienced either random outages or inflated response times over the last 72 hours, according to one Internet research company.
Netcraft reported Tuesday that during a three-hour period on Sunday morning, the CNN.com site was unavailable from its listening post in Pennsylvania. And on Monday, the site experienced inflated response times. CNN.com did suffer a minor DDoS last Thursday, but recovered by limiting access from certain geographic areas, mainly Asia.
For the most part, CNN appears to have avoided the brunt of the Chinese DDoS attacks.
Flagship Ventures, Advanced Technology Ventures, and Draper Fisher Jurvetson seem to agree as the three invested a total of $10 million in Series A funding, according to a Wednesday announcement from Oasys Water.
Desalination start-up Oasys Water is banking on the fact that water will shortly be the new oil.
Aaron Mandell, Oasys president and CEO, issued a statement pointing to the drought in California and its exorbitant use of the state’s electricity to produce water, as proof that water shortages are not just a developing nation issue.
Oasys (Osmotic Application Systems) Water, a Cambridge, Mass.-based company formed from a Yale University research project and seed money from GreatPoint Ventures, employs patented water treatment technology called Engineered Osmosis (EO).
Reducing the electricity needed for desalination osmosis systems, it’s no jump to conclude, brings down the overall cost of producing potable water from seawater and waste water.
The system was developed by Rob McGinnis, Oasys chief technology officer, while he was under Menachem Elimelech, the director of the environmental engineering program at Yale. EO is an osmosis system requiring 90 percent less fuel than the typical high-pressure Reverse Osmosis (RO) system employed by many desalination systems today, according to company statistics
(Credit:
Oasys Water)
Social-media analytics firms have been emerging recently as advertising turns an eye to the likes of MySpace.com and Twitter as an alternative to “traditional” Internet advertising, with the added possibility of uber-targeting along with social networks’ reputation for being where the Web’s “cool kids” currently reside. Facebook has even released its own rudimentary analytics feature, called Facebook Lexicon.
With the fresh cash, Collective Intellect said it will beef up its marketing and sales campaigns to pull in more clients and revenue. The company’s Series A round, $2.6 million in February 2006, was led by Appian Ventures.
At the same time, there’s the common knowledge that marketing campaigns on social networks aren’t exactly cash cows. Whether or not specialized analytics firms like Collective Intellect are actually any good at boosting those ad dollars–it’s really still too nascent a field to tell–there are probably more than a few nervous advertisers who want to make sure they don’t miss this bandwagon.
That whole “Facebook” thing is a pretty big deal, after all.
Collective Intellect, a Boulder, Colo.-based analytics firm that specializes in crunching the discussion on blogs, forums, and social networks, announced Wednesday that it has netted $6.6 million in Series B venture capital. The investment round was led by Grotech Capital Ventures and included funding from Crawley Hatfield Capital as well as existing investors Appian Ventures and Croghan Investments.