Online domain name marketplace Sedo has acquired RevenueDirect, a domain parking and monetization service, from its parent company and registrar Dotster. Sedo, itself owned by the German internet marketing and media company AdLINK Group, is pushing for a bigger foothold inside the United States as it does in the rest of the world.
As DomainNameWire points out, the deal makes sense because Sedo is a significant Google advertising partner across the globe, while RevenueDirect has a similarly strong relationship with the search and online advertising giant in the U.S. Sedo also closed a strategic partnership with Dotster to further integrate its services into their registration and inventory management solutions. → Read More
Olympus today unveiled a new entry-level DSLR, which will go on sale in the US in May (Japan gets the E-620 with 12.3MP in March, Europe one month later but for a higher price). Olympus tried to incorporate the main features of the E-30 and E-520 in a small and light body. → Read More
Samsung wants to make waves in the high-end mobile market that’s filled with dreams of extreme mark-up and high profits. Burried deep in an interview with the president of Samsung Electronics’ Taiwin, there is a brief mention of a Giorgio Armani phone powered by Windows Mobile which is enough to get our imagination crank’n. → Read More
It’s bad enough for Google that businesses and consumers across the globe are being left without web access to Gmail for hours, but to add insult to injury someone hacked the created a Google Groups page on Gmail (link NSFW) at the worst possible time, adding images that leave nothing to the imagination as well links to adult content elsewhere on the net on top of the page.
Update: per comments, this is not an official Google group but a user-generated one most likely deliberately set up now to take advantage of the fact Google has other things on its mind right now than checking up and moderating new groups on the subject of Gmail. Title edited.
Update 2: someone at the Googleplex just did and deleted the group, which was up for at least 25 minutes.
Update 3: weird, it dissappeared for a while but now you’re able to access it anyway after a warning message. → Read More
Thousands of Twitter messages carrying the words “gmail” or “gfail” will teach you that Google’s free web-based e-mail platform is currently down around the world. A Google spokesperson told Pocket Lint that their engineers are working on it but have no clue why the errors are turning up.
Meanwhile, a Google representative posted this on a its help pages:
We’re aware of a problem with Gmail affecting a small subset of users. The affected users are unable to access Gmail. We will provide an update by February 24, 2009 6:30 AM PST detailing when we expect to resolve the problem. Please note that this resolution time is an estimate and may change.
Update: Gmail is supposed to be coming back now, at least for some.
Update 2: there’s a status box on the Gmail Help homepage that says the outage started at 1:30 AM PST, which means the problems have been occurring for nearly 2 hours and a half at the time of this update. → Read More
Latino-targeting online entertainment and communication services provider Mio.tv has acquired Spanish social network Wamba for approximately €4 million euros with earn-outs according to various Spanish and Latin-American media.
Considering the fact that the startup had raised €3 million from early Skype investor and serial entrepreneur Morten Lund back in 2007, this isn’t exactly a home run for the Spanish company. → Read More
In 2007 Jessica Livingston, a founding partner at Y Combinator, released a book called Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days in which she transcribed over thirty extensive interviews with some of Silicon Valleys most notable successes. Included in the book was an interview with Hotmail co-founder Sabeer Bhatia, who detailed the experiences he had raising money for the webmail startup and its subsequent acquisition by Microsoft for a tidy sum of $400 million.
In the interview, Bhatia made some strong accusations regarding early-stage venture fund Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ), stating that DFJ had actively tried to dissuade other VCs from investing in the company (so that they could be the only ones to invest in Hotmail’s funding rounds). He also denied that DFJ’s Tim Draper had come up with the idea of including ‘viral’ taglines at the end of each message inviting new users to join Hotmail, instead attributing the idea to Hotmail co-founder Jack Smith. Today Livingston has written a blog post asserting that some of the statements made by Bhatia are incorrect:
I received evidence yesterday that some of the things Sabeer Bhatia said in his interview in Founders at Work were false. The evidence indicates that (a) Tim Draper rather than Jack Smith had the idea of putting a Hotmail ad at the bottom of emails sent by the service, and (b) that DFJ didn’t disparage Hotmail to other VCs interested in investing.
It’s an improvement worthy of the greatest trick of all time, the 9800 Pro pencil mod — and probably just as boneheaded of an idea to try. This little hack enables the latent fourth core on certain Phenom processors, assuming you’ve got a certain type of Biostar mobo. Of course, there’s probably a little more to it than that, so I’d hold off on this unless you’re feeling really adventurous. → Read More
Fabrik.com offers cloud storage for a number of hard drive manufacturers including a few we’ve reviewed in the past. They’ve just been bought by Hitachi who is adding the service as well as Fabrik’s own hard drives to their mix of goodies. As a 20 year storage veteran, Mike Cordano, Fabrik CEO and co-founder, will join Hitachi GST as a key member of the executive management team. Mr. Cordano has an extensive background in the data storage industry, having previously served as executive vice president of Worldwide Sales and Marketing for Maxtor Corporation. While there, he was instrumental in building the Branded Products Group, which successfully launched the industry’s first “OneTouch” external storage and backup solution, which ultimately defined the category and broke the technology barrier for mass consumer adoption. → Read More
Nvidia, not known for being forthcoming (but perhaps no more than any other tech company), is apparently doing a few sites pretty dirty in relation to its upcoming line of graphics cards. Evidence has been published that shows Nvidia is rebranding some seriously old cards for new sales, which is pretty disingenuous. Unfortunately, sites who have made a stink about it are finding themselves SOL for getting review units. → Read More
There’s a bit of a flurry going on about a DTV converter box that supposedly has a camera and microphone hidden inside it. The usual conspiracy theories have come up, which probably should come up if a camera is found in something like this — but a hot truth injection should quiet things down. Like if, for instance, the camera isn’t a camera and the mic isn’t a mic. As you will see. → Read More
It’s about time; we’ve had Creative sound cards in our PCs for decades. It was only natural they should move to cars. JC Hyun Systems has developed the RUNZ CI-700, the first automobile infotainment system to use Creative’s X-Fi technology. The RUNZ CI-7100 features a MMSP2 MPEG video hardware engine, SiRF III GPS chipset, and Creative’s X-Fi audio processor, all which are operated by an Intel Dual-core 360/300 MHz processor.
Consider your ride PMPed. → Read More
It’s been a matter of speculation for some time whether Quicktime Pro would be included with Snow Leopard, and now it appears to be a solid yes. This has been a long time coming, especially with the video editing push by Apple over the last couple years. Other UI changes are minor, but it’s always been said that Snow Leopard is an under-the-hood update.
I’m really pumped for this one. Leopard was a sham update compared with this. → Read More
Revolution Medical has just won FDA approval to market their Rev Vac Safety Syringe and Phelobotomy (blood drawing) device. What’s unique about this syringe is its vacuum-like functionality. The needle is retracted directly from the patient into the barrel of the of the syringe. → Read More
It was only a matter of time. The controversial, and idiotic, iPhone app now has a brother from another mother on Android. That is to say, from a different developer looking for a little notoriety. The “I am Richer” app is now available, with a more reasonable price tag (a paltry $200) and a slightly Zelda-ish blue crystal. → Read More
An Irish ISP has apparently buckled under the pressure of The Man, and will now block access to any and every site The Man asks it to. Think The Pirate Bay and related sites. Let’s put on our outrage hats, everyone. → Read More
If you’ve ever worried that you waste too much time on the internet, let me put those fears to rest with the following factoid: Did you know that Select Comfort makes a Sleep Number bed for your dog? For your DOG. It costs $132.99 (on sale, down from $189.99). → Read More
Dpreview has just posted a batch of sample images from a pre-production and production F200EXR. They certainly look better than this original batch, but we’ll need more time to sift through them.
My initial impression is that picture quality is very sharp, but it gets a bit noisy at higher ISO settings. What do you photogs think?
Update: Here’s a little commentary from my brother based on comparisons to the F30. → Read More
On Saturday we published a letter sent out to some recently laid-off Microsoft employees explaining that they had been overpaid in severance – and that Microsoft wanted some of its money back. Something had clearly gone wrong during Microsoft’s first mass layoffs, as we began to receive more reports that ex-employees had gotten similar letters, and that some had actually been underpaid. One original tipster has detailed how he felt when he initially got the notice:
Right away I was angry because when I got my severance check, I immediately created a budget to stretch this out as long as possible. I know we’re in a recession now and I don’t know how long I’ll be unemployed. And now here comes this letter totally destroying the budget and on top of that, there’s no detailed information on how the error occurred, no details breaking down the severance pay.
Microsoft initially refused to provide any details on the incident, instead stating that it was a “private matter between the company and the affected people”. And then the news began to spread.
Since Saturday, well over 300 news outlets have covered the story. Many of them have deemed this to be a huge PR misstep, but it’s likely that Microsoft PR never even knew about the letter in the first place, and were only alerted to it after the fact. In any case, it’s clear that nobody ever considered how people would react if the letter leaked to the public. → Read More
