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Microsoft’s long courtship of Yahoo ends with a sad whimper — from Yahoo. Redmond gets a ten-year exclusive license to Sunnyvale’s search technology. Bing becomes the official search engine powering Yahoo. Yahoo is reduced to nothing but a salesforce for Bing’s search ad space. [Read more…]
Originally posted on July 29, 2009 @ 10:36 am
SpinVox was a great concept in principle: phone a number and speak your message which then gets translated and sent as SMS to your recipient.
Spin-my-Blog was based on a similar idea, except (wouldn’t you know it) it posted the resultant text to your blog.
Standards have been slipping of late, though, which led many to believe that the initial promise of highly intelligent supercomputers automagically translating your text weren’t quite as accurate as stated by the company.
That’s not to say they weren’t trying, but when you get Egyptian call center staff telling the BBC they’re hacked off with the whole deal, and then you see some of the laughable translations being sent back (after the computers have failed and the humans have had a go) you do wonder how scalable the whole thing is. [Read more…]
Originally posted on July 24, 2009 @ 7:55 am
Voting in this year’s “Top 100 DJs Poll” kicked off this morning despite a Friday night attack which took down DJMag.com’s website for the whole weekend.
Panic over, music lovers now have seven weeks to vote for their five favorite DJs, with the poll closing on 23 September. Over 350,000 voters worldwide cast their votes last year.
Every voter is entitled to a free download from TrackItDown.net, and there’s plenty to choose from in an 800,000-strong catalog from over 18,000 labels.
As an added altruistic incentive, each year the poll results are announced at an event which raises money for a charity.
You can cast your vote at top100djs.net or djmag.com/top100djs
Originally posted on August 3, 2009 @ 7:22 am
Associated Press stories have long been banned from my personal blog because of their copyright-trolling ways, but now they’ve hit a new low. Now they’re implementing DRM wrappers around their content and cracking down on anyone who so much as quotes a headline and links to an article without paying a fee.
AP CEO Tom Curley clearly does not grasp the referral economy of the Web. Hey, if he doesn’t want link love, then I sure as Hell won’t give him any. I have better things to do than give him my Google juice and get sued for it.
So do you. Don’t ever link to these copyright trolls. Don’t direct your audience’s hard-earned attention to people who will only charge you for it. If you really must talk about an AP story, Google up some alternative coverage from their many more clued-in competitors. Boycott the Associated Press.
Originally posted on July 25, 2009 @ 6:25 am
Yes, the “application store” is the latest must have accessory for every mobile phone manufacturer or OS maker.
Not-quite-so-hot-on-the-heels of Apple’s App Store, Android Market, Windows Marketplace and Nokia’s Ovi is Samsung’s attempt at a mobile application store for users of its cellphones.
With a beta version already available in the UK and the expectation to roll out to Europe in late summer, there’ll be a web portal from which developers’ software can be touted.
As Samsung’s handset run either the Windows Mobile or Symbian operating systems, that’s what will be available. As per everyone else, apps will have to be approved, and may be made available for free or a fee. [Read more…]
Originally posted on July 30, 2009 @ 7:28 am